LIGHT

The angels of peace weep bitterly. The roads are ruined,
and no one travels the Way. The covenant is made void.
Isaiah 33: 7-8


The Light of Life
Love and Light
In the New Testament loving God never means bowing to a powerful personality simply because he is more powerful and important than we are. God does not support arrogance in anyone. If God really were egotistical and lorded his strength over the weak, as he seems to in Job, he would contradict his own being, which is the Good (Lk 18:19) and the True, making him an affront to his own justice. (Job 34: 10-12,17) John’s first epistle says instead that “God is Love” (1 Jn 4:8,16), love being the root and substance of all good. This replaces the idea of a vengeful, arrogant tribal god, with the divinely caring Father of Jesus; who is a Father to all men. In the same epistle John also says, “God is Light” (1 Jn 1:5), light being that which illumines what is true. That isn’t mentioned as often, perhaps because Light is less familiar than Love. We must ask though what these words mean, if we want to know what to worship, and what it means to worship. These words Love and Light define what God is, according to the Bible, and they are the indicators there of the nature of what we call God. Most other descriptions are of powers, attributes or actions. There is one other defining statement, however, given by himself: that he is “I am”- as if essence or being were life and existence - and he was the “I” position, or conscious awareness, of existence itself. (Ex 3:14)

What then does it mean to love God with our whole heart, mind and soul, as the first of Jesus’ Two Great Commandments asks? It means to love Light and Love and Life, as these are the Real, and are how the Whole, which God is, expresses itself. But what does it mean to love Light, Life and Love? It can only mean to value them, and valuing means using, being and expressing them. This is what keeping the Lord’s Word would have to mean, as his Word is not the words in a book, but the Light and Love behind them, which are Life. (Jn 14:23; Jn 15:10; Jn 6:63) This is the same Light and Love by which the worlds were made, and upon which we live. (Jn 1:1-4; Mat 4:4) It is this Word which will never pass away, or be changed by the changing translations and opinions of men. To keep that Word is Life, and the Life of God is eternal.

The Lord’s Word is real love and living light, experienced within you where God’s Kingdom actually is. (Lk 17:21) Light is what enables us to understand. It is intelligence itself, and is what illumines our understanding. According to John, the Logos in Whom “was life, which life was the light of men” is “the true Light which enlightens all who come into the world.” (Jn 1:4, 9) God is conscious intelligence, or in other words, light and truth. Love, on the other hand, which John also says God is, is an expression of the unity of all existence. That which seems separated by bodies, like hearts and minds, is not separate in him. God is conscious of, and is conscious as, the oneness of all Being. Therefore Love is his commandment to us: to acknowledge our deep relatedness to others and share our being with them. This is the harmony working beyond and behind all forms. When these two, intelligence and love, express directly in your relations, not as beliefs or concepts, but as active powers, you will then have, as the Bible puts it, life in you and life more abundantly. (Jn 10:10) John’s epistle makes clear that simple acceptance of a doctrine or dogma is not what is meant by this, for he says plainly that if you do not dwell in love toward others, you do not love God; nor do you know God; nor, despite whatever you believe or have been told, have you been born again. (1 Jn 4:20-21; 1 Jn 4:7-8; 1 Jn 2:9-11)

To love your neighbor as yourself, the second of the Two Great Commandments, does not mean loving only your spouse, relatives, and friends; or just those who are nice to you; or who believe or think like you. Spiritual publicans do that much (Mat 5:41-48); and such love does not form Christ, or the love of all in you, nor give access to the Light. Dwelling in Love has nothing to do with converting your neighbor to your doctrinal views, using every means necessary to make them agree with you. (Heb 8:10-11) Legalistic wrangling over scripture and dogma marked the sects of Paul’s time too, but Paul repeatedly teaches that Love is what is real to him, not the Law. (Rom 13:8) He himself will eat meat, or not eat meat; set aside circumcision; become a Greek to a Greek, or a Jew to a Jew, because the external trappings of convention and culture that divide men are as nothing to him. He seeks to reach the love and light in another and wake those, not simply make their views mirror his (2 Tim 5-6, 14). Love sees what is real in others, and everything else through that. As Martin Buber puts it, “Love is a cosmic force. For those who stand in it and behold in it, men emerge from their entanglement in busy-ness, and the good and the evil, the clever and the foolish, the beautiful and the ugly, one after another become actual and a You for them.” - from I and Thou (and consider 1 Jn 4:12). This is the Name under which when two or more are gathered God is present. (Mat 18-20)

What is Light?
In his first epistle John relates what anointing by Light means: “The anointing which you have received of him abides in you, and you need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teaches you of all things, and is truth... even as it teaches you, so you will abide in him.” (1 Jn 2:27) As the Light shows you internally what is true, you abide in him by comprehending, and then acting on what the Light shows you. The Light that enlightens everyone will show you what things are, because it is truth, and is present in you. Light is living clarity that reveals, experienced as inspiration, insight and knowledge, when you think to know or understand. The source is hidden from you, but responds when you ask, seek, or wonder - when you truthfully want to know. It responds to your internal questions when focused with desire. Thinking is an internal asking which tries to see or understand. If instead your “asking” is just telling the Light what you want according to your preferences or prejudice, desiring to see what you already think, or get what you want, rather than caring what the Light which illumines all things will show an honest question, then the Light will allow you to believe any delusion you desire. At least within your own mind and until your actions, which affect others, require a correction through reaping what you sow. Fairness gives no one the right to affect another against their will, unless that will is itself unfair, or delusional. If instead you allow the sense of what is real intuited in honesty and genuineness to win over imagination the Light, which establishes objectivity internally and externally, will relate what is inside to what is outside, because it dwells in both.

This is the Light you use in thoroughly honest thinking and in all creative thinking. It is available to all men through simple honestness (ask, seek and knock Mat 7: 7-12). There is no real genius, ultimately; just a more conscious and intelligent use of the Light. Anyone at any time can remove the impediments they have created to using it in their own form of asking. The Light does not require belief, as its use and development are direct and responsive to sincerity, desire, honesty, and focus. It is God’s omniscience put at your disposal, but you must want the answers. The Light always preserves the freedom of the individual; it will not interfere with free choice, desiring that men grow through the law of their own thinking and asking. The Light is available to show the truth about anything if the truth is wanted. When the mind understands this and uses Light appropriately, recognizing its real nature, the mind grows in reality, strength, creativity and wisdom. The Light itself is unattached to and unaffected by what is done with it. Yet it affects what uses it.

This Light, the Life of the Logos, teaches you of all things, because it is truth, as John says. It shows all things as they are- that is its function. The Light of Truth is what illumines every mind that comes into the world, according to its asking. Truth is not a concept of any sort. Truth is the living Light that shows you what is true. That is what Truth does. It is not a single startling fact to which all things conform. It is the Divine Light of consciousness. Truth connects what is real in you to what is real outside you. The proof is that this is what any focused thinking which leads to understanding already does. Focusing the light of awareness through interest and honesty is how we discover the truth about the world and ourselves. Mind is the functioning of spiritual matter. It is the only thing in existence that can use Light. When you develop the mind and then true it, the Light leads to seeing and hearing without illusions.

Thinking is inner seeing, as understanding is inner, or spiritual, hearing. When you think, you know because of previous experience that if you strongly desire to understand something, the focus of something internal provides you answers by means of a light, or clarity. This comes in response to your effort. This increased clarity is experienced in thinking, or focused awareness that is asking, not in passive everyday awareness that simply meanders in unfocused light. You know and have experienced the psychological reality of all this. You just need to look when you are really thinking to see the action of the Light. Everyone thinks about something. It doesn’t matter what it is about, as thinking, which is focusing the Light, is fundamentally the same act in all people. That itself is a remarkable fact that few have ever looked at. When you really need to know something you don’t hesitate, for you already know how to get answers. Especially when you want something badly, and have to think to get it. You must focus Light to get it.

The Light is what responds to thinking when you ask, seek or knock, but it reveals only to the degree of your actual desire to know, and only to your level of readiness. It is what you have always posed questions to internally when you have thought to know anything. The Light will reveal what things are to themselves when you honestly want to know that. Thinking is nothing more than this activity of asking questions internally, however you do that, and trying to see; focusing in a way to get answers. Focus is interest brought to a point by the desire to know.

You ask questions of yourself when you think - and it makes no difference to the process that you do so, actually making it easier - but you are who doesn’t know. You do not already have the knowledge you seek. Thinking is your act, but what is it that enlightens your mind when you do? It is not your mind. Your mind is what makes the effort to know: it is open, receptive, and asking... but asking of what? Your mind is also what understands when you receive, and it is affected, even changed in its spiritual substance by the Light it receives. Either one very superior level inside you is affecting another, or one very superior being is. As even the atheistic philosopher Nietzsche says, still faithful in this to the Spirit, “One receives. One doesn’t ask who gives.” But consider this... if it is the Logos itself you ask to show you, and the Light is pure intelligence or divine omniscience, then you have the potential for knowing the truth about anything whatsoever. Consider the implications of that faith and possibility, and what you may have given up by leaving your Father’s hearth to feed on husks, or the opinions of men.

You get answers when you think (or meditate) qualified by the form and light your mind puts the question in. Because you obtain answers through your ability to temporarily experience oneness with the Light, which is what knowing is, you do not think of the Light as different from you. You do not realize that the knowledge you obtain comes from the brief union with the Light, which illumination is, no matter how small the degree of it. Oneness occurs when you focus the Light. It takes place when you are open, real (honest and truthful), impersonal (no respecter of personalities over life, fact, or meaning) and desire to see, be and know what is true. The Light responds when you ask, which simply means desiring to know. More Light is shed on what you are trying to see when you focus your interest on the point of what you are considering, and try to see what is essential, or significant, or true about it. Focusing your inner question on the point focuses Light, and the Light opens through that point into knowledge of your subject.

The Light behind your answer comes from a level so far beyond your present level, or the level of the question, that the answer can, when the focus is clean like that described above, flood the mind with a completely new understanding or solution. It can instantaneously show everything true about it, relating to it, and developing from it. A survey of great discoverers and thinkers, cited by Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth, quoted that description, that insight would come in great mental breakthroughs, and flood the mind with understanding. Sometimes it also comes later than when the mental effort was made to see, or after sleep, or at an unexpected moment. The reason is that the depth or complexity of what is sought is so new, or different from the previous mental context of the “asker”, that one must be prepared over time to receive the answer. The desire to know beyond what is already understood, like a scientist, a thinker, or a spiritually focused person wants to know, sometimes involves carrying that desire, and developing one’s thought over weeks, months, even years, like a miniature pregnancy. The Light represents an actual potential to know all things, because it will show what is essential, true or real about anything it is asked to illumine. At the same time it exposes illusions. It gives knowledge itself. In fact enlightenment itself is a condition in which no egoic resistance is present in the relationship one has with the Light, and so knowing is direct- free of craving, prejudice, one’s conditioning or ignorance. This has also been called oneness with God.


The Sense-mind, Intelligence and Love.
Light is the intelligence of all understanding. The Light in response to interest and focus will give insight into how to make a painting beautiful as readily as how to make a gun, for even at the level of the sensory intellect it leaves you free to ask what you like. That is because people must learn to value and develop their intellect before they can learn to use it rightly. But to the real mind, that is, to the deeper intuition or understanding, the Light will also show the cataracts of preference and prejudice on the sense-mind’s eye. This sense-mind is ideally intended to be the focus faculty for the real mind- a neutral, unfeeling hand that holds steady whatever the mind wants to look upon. But most often it is the cause of the mind’s fall. It is unfeeling and only perceives the surfaces of things. It works with form and abstractions from form, with what the senses show, and with words- but not with underlying principles or ideas, unless they concern form. If it is made to do so despite its incapacity - and it is made to do so all the time - it carnalizes meanings or strips them of their living essence so that it can grasp them. Then it works with them mechanically as if they were objects. It is analytical, taking things apart to work with them, or it makes things dead to “understand” them. Its action is to isolate and separate, as if everything and every problem it considered were a form that could be fitted together or taken apart. It cannot wonder, nor synthesize its understandings through essences, but like a computer can only tabulate, and compare appearances through association (i.e. this is like that) - for it can perceive neither essences nor life. When it tries to work with ideas it substitutes mechanical logic and authorities for pure thinking, or a direct knowing with Light. This carnal mind is essentially an identification that arises when the soul identifies with the body, with the point of view of the mind of the body, and with the personality that arises from these. Then one acts for the body, the passions, for feelings and desires, and not for intelligence and love. Objects and how they feel become strangely important and substantial, as feeling fills them out, and desire hungers for them; while what causes them or what they are in themselves recedes.

The real mind is what focuses meaning and comprehends. When the mind and the sense-intellect (the shining mind and the chattering mind of Taoism) are brought together in the pursuit of knowledge conceptual intuition is born. But the ego or earthly man normally uses the carnal intellect as its prop and ally; not for knowledge but to deal with things unfeelingly. The intellect or sense-mind has this virtue, that it can view desire and emotion unmoved, allowing the real mind sufficient breathing space to see and consider; but this virtue is more often used to suppress, not to acknowledge or work with feelings, or addictions. When the intellect is used to work with issues and matters beyond itself this is how evil arises, especially if it is acting at the whim of the ego or unbalanced emotion. It then cuts off feeling, empathy and the sense of relation. In that case its focus and intent becomes fed by an intense, unconscious drive. It deals with all things as if they were mechanical and unfeeling like itself, able to slice through bodies or issues as if they were so much butcher’s meat. But it has no motive of its own, being unaware as a self. It is the soul of feeling and desire that chooses and uses the minds based on what it most wants. And the soul may identify with the sense-mind or the mind of the Spirit. The Pharisees are the Bible’s imagery for what the carnal mind regularly does with the things of the Spirit.


The Light will show what Love is, and what it is not. It gives intuitions of your real relations with things and others. Or it can bring to the surface the emotion causing a habit, and show how such a contraction of life is released. Your heart’s knowledge must include the warmth and depth of love to understand the greater dimension of what is Good. The way loving a child teaches love unselfishness. The Light that the sense-intellect accesses allows for any and all discovery, based simply on right asking, and not necessarily on right being. Honesty will solve much, and through the development of the morality fundamental to the mind that honesty and truthfulness are, will reconnect the intellect to the real mind - but without Love the mind plows a barren field. Put differently, despite the fact that the sun is brightest in winter, the earth is cold because its axis is turned away from the sun’s warmth. Nothing can grow or live then, and everything returns to the root. But come spring the hemisphere leans back into relation; light and warmth combine, and everything comes to life and grows. The light of the intellect needs the love of the heart to grow into the actual Light of Life. Similarly, love without what is true is blind, selfish, sentimental, and foolish; a psychic whirlpool of feelings and desires, and not the One who is Good. (Luke 18:19) It takes love and light for life to take root in the Real, and reach upward.

The Light of Life
“For the bread of God is he that comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world.” (Jn 6:33) and the “Kingdom of God is within you” (Lk 17:21) indicate these are psychological realties spoken of, as God is a Spirit and can only be worshiped in spirit and in truth. (Jn 4:24) When it is said that God is Light and Love what is referred to are spiritual and internal facts and states, not external ones, despite the fact these ultimately cause all external realities, and support and indwell them. The union of Light and Love within you is entry into the Kingdom of God. This is Life, and the water of Life, and Life is Spirit. (Jn 4:14) The bread, water, and wine, which are poetical emblems for light, life, and love, Christ meant to be used and absorbed by us, literally. John 4:32 and John 6:57 make clear he was not referring to an external sacrament here. In the same way that Jesus was literally fed by, and lived by his Father, he states that the use of his Light and Love will transform us, and give us eternal life. (Jn 6: 51-58) And he clarifies in this passage this eating - the most primitive form of oneness or union - is not meant physically but spiritually. For it is the spirit that quickens and changes the inner being, not what the body consumes. (Jn 6: 63) Light and Love are real food, or as he puts it, meat and drink indeed. (Jn 6:55) These are what God’s being actually is, and we are to live upon God’s being.

“Except you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life... He that eats my flesh and drinks my blood dwells in me and I in him. As the living Father has sent me, and I live by the Father, so he that eats me will live by me.” (Jn 6: 45-63) Light is the living Bread, the Body of Christ we are to absorb and use to attain eternal life, just as Love is the Wine or the Blood of Christ, and not any carnal symbols for them. This is literally true. The Life within these, in you, is the Life of the Logos, without which you can neither love nor think nor act. (Jn 15:1-5; Jn 6:33, 51 ; Jn 1: 4, 9) This is the spiritual Bread that comes down from heaven. (Jn 6:32) For even manna, or the physical bread that came down from the heaven, that the fathers ate in the desert, still they died. But whoever eats this Bread will not die. (Jn 6:50-51) This Light feeds, elevates and transforms the soul insofar as you inquire into the Real, and don’t merely use it for distracted and disconnected desire. “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” (Lk 14:15)

“Who is made, not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life.” (Heb 7:16) Despite the fact this is a description of Melchisadek, and Jesus after him, it is also the goal and promise for us of Jesus’ teaching (Heb 6:20). Paul says in Romans: “But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead will also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwells in you.” (Rom 8:11) It does not say that you must be dead, or in heaven for your body to be quickened, only that the Spirit dwell in you. The churches interpret that resurrection means something that happens to us after we die, but if sin is death as Paul says, and death is overcome by dying to sin, how is it that those in the hells they picture have eternal life there? “For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace... if you live after the flesh you will die, but if through the Spirit you will mortify the deeds of the body, you will live.” (Rom 8: 6,13)
The spirit is not born when the body is born, according to the passage “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth... when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” (Job 38:4,7). In John 10:32-36, Jesus defends himself against the charge of blasphemy by saying he is a son of God, and had not their scriptures indicated that all those unto whom the light of God came were gods? Paul also says, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God... The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.” (Rom 8:14,16) Now “You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High. But you shall die like men.” (Psalm 82:6-7) “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” (Ecc 12:7) The spirit therefore was not born at physical birth, but already existed when the foundations of the earth were laid; nor does it die at death. So continuing life after the death of the body is not what is meant by resurrection- the Son already lives forever. It is the servant, the son of a man, the earthly man, who puts on incorruption, not the spirit. ( Jn 8: 32-36; Rom 8:18-21, 23) But if the body is resurrected and given eternal life for those who are evil, then are Paul, John, Genesis (3:22, 24) and Revelations (2:7) contradicted. Redemption is of the body, after the mind and heart are reborn in Christ. (Rom 8:21, 23)

The word sleep is what the New Testament uses when it refers to someone who has died, saying they have fallen asleep, or are asleep in Christ. (Jn 11: 11-14) By contrast, to be dead or to refer to the dead means, in biblical terms, that a person’s spiritual consciousness is buried in their body. This means they are not aware as the spirit, but live as the creature, identified psychologically with the animal body that the spirit inhabits and makes human. When the spirit lives as the body, and not for intelligence and love, it is dead spiritually. It is unconscious as a Son, and is a prodigal living on husks, unaware how to re-ascend to heaven, which it came down from. It is walking in darkness at noonday. The body is necessary, and important, but it is not identity.
It is the body, and the personality of the body, what the Bible calls the old Adam, that die. These corruptibles, if they do not put on incorruption by the power of the Spirit (1 Cor 15:53-54), are the son of man unto whom it is appointed once to die, and then the judgment. (Heb 9:27) Only by the Spirit dwelling in you is death of the body overcome, is judgment overcome, and “the creature itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” (Rom 8:21; Jn 8:51) Overcoming death means overcoming physical death, which Jesus demonstrated, acquiring a Body of Light that could be touched and felt by all. [Various Notes, notes 2-4]

The resurrection of the dead means overcoming death, for “I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God.” (Lk 9:27) Nor will they will taste it after, if death is swallowed up in victory. Melchisadek lives, and is made after the power of an endless life, without beginning or end of days, capable of appearing physically like he did to Abraham. As Jesus did to his Apostles, eating fish, letting himself be touched, and afterward appearing to upwards of 500 people. If this is not true, then as Paul puts it, your faith is vain, and Christ is not risen from the dead. Nor is he the firstfruits of them that slept. Where he says this in 1 Cor 15:12-22 Paul distinguishes between the dead and those who have fallen asleep, at times treating them interchangeably. Spiritual “death” causes physical death, since in Adam, that is, in identification with the carnal man, all die. Rising from actual death as Jesus and Lazarus did only makes the point more dramatically that death does not exist for the Spirit. It is not necessary to be killed or to die physically to overcome death; only that the Spirit dwell in you. That was only a demonstration that death has no power over the Spirit. Nor must we think it robbery to be equal with Jesus. (Phil 2: 5-6) Everything Jesus did we can do, according to his own words - and Jesus overcame physical death, eating fish and being touched in the physical, not the heavenly, world. (Jn 14:12)

The Old and New Covenant
Spirituality is living as the spirit, as the “heavenly man”. (1 Cor 15:47) According to the Bible, this heavenly man is elohim, a god in the midst of whom Yave Elohim judges. (Jn 10: 34; Psalm 82:1, 6-7) What such living means is to become richly conscious, manifesting love and light, and to have abundant, even eternal life. To live as the spirit means to establish real relationships with things and others (love); and to think and act based on honesty and truthfulness (light). These two, intelligence and love, are the true and the good. They relate to each other, and perfect each other, for “whoever keeps his word [or light], in him truthfully is the love of God perfected”. (1 Jn 2: 5) “He that says he is in the light and hates his brother is in darkness even now. He that loves his brother abides in the light, and there is no occasion of stumbling in him.” (1 Jn 2:9-10)
By contrast, mainstream religion’s initial address to people is quite often about fear: fear of God, fear of the unknown, fear of the uncontrollable, and fear of the afterlife. It even calls the spirit of fear in man, wisdom. Many of religion’s teachings and beliefs are based on a negative, fearful view of God and his wrath. Much of its activities and some of its doctrines are designed to avert or overcome the fear which religion intentionally arouses to interest people in its views. This approach is really the First Covenant from the Old Testament, which Hebrews Chapter 8 criticizes, and then has God himself set aside. It’s author says, “But now hath [Jesus] obtained a more excellent ministry, by how much also he is the mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, then should no place have been sought for the second.” (Heb 8: 6-7) The old covenant was based upon fear of God, upon the Law, the Prophets, and on Commandments that proscribe and condemn. This was the covenant about which Hebrews says, “For there is truthfully an annulling of the commandment that went before, for its weakness and unprofitability. For the Law made nothing perfect; but the bringing of a better hope did, by which we draw near to God.” (Heb 7: 18-19) Paul says there is a literal veil over the mind and heart of anyone who looks backward to what has been done away with. (2 Cor 3: 6-18; also Ga 4:21-31) Fear prevents understanding of the good news of the Gospel, that Love and Light have replaced the Law, and our life is hid in Christ. You cannot love and be open to what you must placate and fear, no matter what you may force your lips to say.

Love and Light are the New Covenant Jesus brokered for us. In that Covenant, God’s laws, or eternal ideas, are written in all men’s hearts and minds. They are perceived there as the moral intuitions of Light and Love, in tablets of the heart, and not in books or on tablets of stone. He says: “Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt [which covenant is the Law, the Prophets and the Commandments]... For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts... and they shall not teach every man his neighbor, or his brother saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me from the least to the greatest.” (Heb 8:6-11; Jer 31:30-34; Heb 10: 16; 2 Cor 3:3-8; 2 Cor 3:13-18) The writer of Hebrews says plainly that the time Jeremiah was predicting is present now, and that the New Covenant Jesus established for us can perfect us, whereas the Law could not. “The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the kingdom of God is preached, and every man presses into it.” (Lk 16:15-17) He repeatedly states that the Old Covenant was ineffective, and is ended. At the end of the chapter in which he quotes Jeremiah’s words, saying they are already fulfilled, he says, “In that [God] says, a new covenant, he has made the first old. Now that which decays and waxes old, is ready to vanish away.” (Heb 8:13)

The Light as the Logos
In the writings of Plato the term logos is translated as reason or meaning. Reason was viewed as a fundamental order; as sanity, balance, and proportion; and as the comprehension of identity through essence. The Logos of Philo, Heraclitus, and the Stoics, was understood as the divine Reason, or as God, and was related to Plato’s divine Ideas:

“To say just how much of the New Testament was influenced... by Greek conceptions is difficult, but such influences are recognized readily in the doctrine of the Logos, which may be translated as Word or Reason... For Heraclitus, the Logos was a kind of cosmic order, or divine justice, that presides over the destinies of a changing world. Whenever either of two opposite forces operating in the world oversteps its bounds, the Logos ensures that a proper balance is restored. Light and darkness, heat and cold, wet and dry, male and female, like all other pairs of opposites, are thus kept in proper relation to one another. Nor is the work of the Logos confined to the physical aspect of nature, for it affects the moral order as well. Whenever the requirements of justice are violated, either by individuals or by nations, the Logos acts in a compensatory manner, punishes the evildoers, and restores the proper balance of things. Plato regarded the Logos, or Reason, as the divine element that is present in human beings. Its demand for harmony among the elements, including those in human nature, provides the key to the real meaning of the good life” - from Cliff Notes to the New Testament.

It was to these ideas that the Apostles John and Paul were referring when they explained that it was the incarnation of the Logos itself in Jesus to their Jewish and Gentile audiences. Man’s reason is the rational light of the mind. Through thinking the mind reaches in its considerations beyond the personal and the particular, to the impersonal and the universal. It can even lift it’s understanding to the World Mind and see reality through that. In philosophy, the breakthrough by thinking into the higher mind of the heavenly man is termed Pure Reason. That there was a relation between man’s reason (logos), or the light of his mind (nous), and Reason itself, was understood by the early church Fathers. Augustine, for instance, says that the image of God in man is not a corporeal image, but is the understanding itself:

“The God-image in us reveals itself through “prudence, justice, moderation, virtue, wisdom and discipline.” St. Augustine distinguishes between the God-image which is Christ and the image which is implanted in man as a means or possibility of becoming like God. The God-image is not in the corporeal man, but in the “anima rationalis” [rational mind, or soul], the possession of which distinguishes man from animals. “The God-image is within, not in the body. . . Where the understanding is, where the mind is, where the power of investigating truth is, there God has his image.” Therefore we should remind ourselves, says Augustine, that we are fashioned after the image of God nowhere save in the understanding. “But where man knows himself to be made after the image of God, there he knows there is something more in him than is given to the beasts.” From this it is clear that the God-image is, so to speak, identical with the “anima rationalis”. The latter is the higher spiritual man, the “homo coelestis” [or heavenly man] of St. Paul.” (1 Cor. 15:47) - from Aion, by Carl Jung.

The translation in the Bible of Logos as the Word tends to obscure that early Christianity’s understanding of the Logos provided a link between truth and mind. The tendency of religion to strip knowledge of its claim to connection with divinity has allowed instead the claims of feeling based, faith-only teachings of later centuries to go unchallenged. It has helped promote “...the doctrine,” as Hegel put it, “which has now become a prejudice, that it is impossible to know God.” Hegel continues,

“Following this doctrine we now contradict what the Holy Scripture commands as our highest duty, namely, not only to love but also to know God. We now categorically deny what is written, namely, that it is the spirit that leads to truth, knows all things, and penetrates even the depths of divinity. Thus, in placing Divine Being beyond our cognition and the pale of all human things, we gain the convenient license of indulging in our own fancies. We are freed from the necessity of referring our knowledge to the True and Divine. On the contrary, the vanity of knowledge and the subjectivity of sentiment now have ample justification. And pious humility, in keeping true recognition of God at arm’s length, knows very well what it gains for its arbitrary and vain striving.” - from Hegel’s lecture Reason in History .

Secular attempts to make the competing voices of different religions politically equal are not the source of relativism in our culture. Those efforts are attempts at fairness. The source of relativism lies in what denies that reason or knowledge is meaningful; that is, denies that there can be direct insight into facts by the mind, through internal asking, using the Light of God made available to thinking. This denial makes knowledge relative, by denying that the Light of God is what illumines the mind of man, and thereby asserting that truth cannot be known. But Jesus said, “Ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free.” (Jn 8:32)

Knowledge and Religion
In feeling based, faith-only religions, since there is no longer any divine source for objectivity, such religion’s “truths” are also irrational and relative. It is the Light that establishes all objectivity. Even if you claim a divine source like the Bible for your belief, it is still a set of thoughts to you. You must use your mind to understand what its expressions mean; just as anyone who explains it to you also must. If you insist that all understanding and divine experience must conform to scripture to be considered true, it is nonetheless to your reasoning about scripture that you have it conform. That reasoning is based upon your understanding of and experience of the divine. Provided you don’t simply parse the letter of scripture as the Pharisees did by the carnal intellect, building a tower of interpretation based on whatever doctrine and dogma are considered traditional. The difference between Jesus’ open, flexible and loving interpretation of scripture, and the Pharisees’ fear-based version of the same words, illustrates the difference between the sense-mind’s treatment of spiritual matters, and the Christ mind’s. One is ego-based, legalistic, and essentially negative, while the other is intuitive and based on life. Jesus always sets aside any view that is not love, treating scripture as a tool but never as the Spirit itself, even going so far as to call it “your law” more than once, and not his. (Jn 8:17; 10:34) Something given in it because of the hardness of a people or a period’s heart may be changed, or set aside, without breaking the scripture, according to Love. And some sayings are only for those who can receive or understand them rightly. (Mat 19:4-11)

The science of establishing the link to the Logos through self-knowledge and insight slipped away from the churches as the possibility of knowing God or the divine through the light of the mind was denied. If we have no access through knowledge to the divine, to what underlies, causes and supports all things, then ultimately knowledge of any sort is impossible as there is no relation to what is actual or real through understanding. Feeling alone cannot support knowledge; and faith without any knowledge is merely imagination. The capacity for mind to know truth cannot be established, including any truths belief asserts, if it has no access, no comprehension, and no conscious relation to the divine. Or, if truth is rooted in the divine, but is not itself knowable, how can anyone know that what they believe is true? How is any explanation or understanding trustworthy, if comprehension itself is untrustworthy? By doing this religion became vulnerable to atheistic science, having only faith and feeling now, without reason or knowledge, to contend against what science tangibly demonstrated it could accomplish with Light, mind and reason- irrespective of its beliefs. Simply by honest methodology and strong asking, with an idealism, at least originally, to relieve the suffering of man.

God doesn’t care what a man says he believes if in fact he worships in spirit and in truth. The Father has need of such, especially if he works and thinks to benefit his neighbor. What that man values in his heart and mind, because it is God and not a concept of God, will lead him to the knowledge that is union with God eventually - because he honors what is real. Such “worship” fulfills the requirements of the New Covenant, by closing the gap between knowing and doing, seeing essence as spiritual meaning, and treating others as equal to oneself. By contrast, the worship of a concept-idol, whether of God or man, leads to whatever the motive for that worship really is. God ponders the heart, or the essence of the man, and not the changing thoughts and opinions of men.

The modern confusion of tongues in religions that declare they are all the “same faith” and the “One Way” is unavoidable since they are based on unillumined feeling and desire, human tradition, and the carnal intellect. These are at war with the spirit, just as they were in Christ’s time. To these the Mind of the Spirit and the motive of love are foolishness. (1 Cor 2:14) Feeling and desire without the Light have no capacity for understanding in themselves. In Buddhism they are called winds, and are termed irrational because they cannot comprehend or discern- they simply feel and want. Religion based only in feeling, or in beliefs or assertions that are not understood, is not founded on using Light (thinking/unselfish prayer/meditation), on awareness (direct knowledge), on love (conscious, not instinctual union), or on the transformations of character wrought by these. Hence they are not founded on a relation with the Holy Spirit or the Logos. Instead doctrines of men are simply applied like bandages to the body of men’s thoughts.

Faith is quite often seen as the verbal or sense-mind’s acceptance of a set of assertions deemed absolute by the church, or the pastor of the church, and worse, are believed without further inquiry into any deeper meaning than the literal, intellectual examination of the letter of it. The “truth” is arrived at by textual, linguistic and historical analysis, guided by the religious tradition examining. Or the text is treated as inerrant, and as entirely complete and self contained, so that whatever the mortal mind can reason from this position is accepted as biblical. But all such efforts are the fleshly mind, and rely upon formal, not intrinsic, reasoning, on emotion, and on belief in authorities. Such faith is not a result of knowledge produced by the divine nature of man, through experience of the Light that illumines that nature’s understandings (Job 32:8), or through contact with the One who is Good itself (Mk 10:18). Instead many religionists, because the ego is based in fear, and the intellect is based in the ego, believe that God is a wrathful spirit. Their faith really amounts to believing that Jesus will save them - but from God apparently - if they only say and believe he will. There are many who say that Jesus is Lord, but for them this means a fundamentally fear-based bending-of-the-neck which is taken for piety, and such piety for spirituality. Unfortunately, there is a clear rejection by God of that view in Isaiah 58, and the whole of Jesus’ manner and approach refutes it.

The light of the mind is no longer seen as linked to God through the Good and the True. And how many Christians believe that the New Covenant that Jesus established is the discernment of the Real through the heart and mind of man? (Heb 10:16) Or that the Kingdom of God is actually and literally within? Or that we are to become perfect, or complete, as our Father in Heaven is perfect and complete? Many churches’ teachings have instead become hieratic assertions of the bigness of God, and the unworthiness of man; their dogma is the letteralism of the sense-bound intellect, rather than the spirit of divine intuition (as in Meister Eckhart’s sermons); and their worship has devolved to rote flattery of a massive ego, expressing a fundamental fear of God, and not love of the Good. The tongues of their several inspirations have become a Babel, and not a Pentecost, and every sect argues with the other the meaning of what neither understands anymore. Belief is not salvatory until it reaches the Light. You must know God in spirit and in truth to actually worship him. Otherwise you worship your own thought... a mental idol of him.

The Logos and the Holy Spirit
In John 10:34 Jesus indicates parenthetically that the scriptures were written by the “word” of God coming unto one of the prophets. This can only be interpreted as an internal communication of light and understanding that was translated into words by the mind of the prophet. It does not refer to some already written book spoken of as the Word of God. This is a higher form of inspiration, or revelation, and is accomplished through the Light of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit communicates to the heart and mind of man as the Logos does, but the Holy Spirit is more man’s experiential teacher in whatever environment he finds himself. It’s lessons concern learning through relationship to undo the ego and let go, and through love to enter the life of things. The Logos on the other hand communicates directly to, and through, the light of man’s knowing, reason and self-knowledge. Both reveal. Both are One. But one communicates to the inner thinking world of man, as the Light of insight. The other communicates to his inner feeling world as a Presence, but teaches primarily through his outer relationships. In this way man is aided in all realms (the three worlds, or heavens). However, this discussion is about the Logos as the Light. The Holy Spirit as Love is already taught by the churches, often out of profound experience, and has been for centuries. The Holy Spirit teaches feeling and desire, or the psychic soul, transformation through forgiveness and learning to love, really love, without fear. It teaches one to intuit life directly, and to engage the wholesomeness of Being, concretely, in situation after situation. It does this in terms the psychic soul can understand by constructing events experienced entirely for these learnings. The Logos on the other hand instructs the understanding of the heart and mind directly, based upon the individual effort to see, know, love and understand. Knowledge and Being are one, but the paths to them can seem very different for a while.

Early Christian teachers thought, as Greek philosophy did, that there was a link through the mind with the Logos [Various Notes, notes 1]. The Apostles would have known this when they claimed the Logos was incarnated as Jesus. That claim was an odd, and a new claim to the Jews and Gentiles of their audience, but that the link in man to the Logos was through self-knowledge, understanding itself, and rational thought, was not. Clement of Alexandria stated “He who knows himself, knows God.” Clement was echoing the saying “Know Thyself” from Greek philosophy, written over the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi, and taught by Socrates. That phrase was considered by the Greeks to be the epitome of their philosophy and wisdom, as it was by the Hindus where the teaching most likely came from, as Hindu teachers came back from India with Alexander’s armies. Even the word that Christ used for Father, Abba, sounds like the Pali word for the real Self, Atta. Both sayings are also echoed in the Gospel of Thomas, the source text of which may even predate the so-called “Q-document” used to write the Gospels: (3) “If you know yourselves you will be known, and you will know that you are Sons of the Living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, you are in poverty, and you are that poverty.” It is possible that references to self-knowledge as a path were deleted or obscured in the public texts because they did not lend themselves to institutionalization. Given Jesus’ statements about an inner teaching reserved for those prepared to receive it, such alterations would not necessarily have been looked upon as problematic. I have read that Jerome claimed he altered the Gospel of Matthew because it was too esoteric.

Religion and Spirituality
Preaching the idea that the light of one’s own heart and mind, or the individual reason of man, are what connect him to the Logos, doesn’t make control or consensus easy. That was Iraeneus’ objection, and why he insisted salvation could only come through the Catholic Church via its sacraments. The original heresy hunter, he treated any Christian system of thought based upon individual knowledge, revelation or relation with God, as Gnosticism and heresy. If every man can know God through his own heart and mind and you need not that any man teach you, then what is the role of the churches? How is agreement even possible? If men are to be guided by reason, or the Light, rather than by fear, how are people to be motivated when so few think deeply, and care little about love? These are very practical problems.

The fact is religion is not a search for truth, which search is an individual dialogue with Light, but for brotherhood. That is its real purpose. It is where the practical work of building culture can be done with other like-minded individuals. Religion’s method and purpose is to create consensus agreements that form a recognizable and moral culture, where men and women can live in the light of the understandings they receive. Its purpose is to create brotherhood, if those understandings are truly enlightened. But for this very reason, that religion seeks to establish agreement, and not insight; harmony, and not knowledge of what is Real; community, and not direct experience of God, it cannot be what, in the individual, searches for truth. The experience of truth is the intuition of God’s Ideas in one’s heart and mind, through his Light, and the experience of his Love. Religion is where what is known and experienced of these, encounters the daily world. It is conservative because it seeks to create, and then maintain, a form of culture and community in which spiritual relations can express. Insight and revelation however are always ongoing and developmental, not because God necessarily changes, but man’s understanding does. If religions cultivated an inner circle of individuals whose efforts were to bring Light and revelation to the community, a balance might be struck to raise the real knowledge of religion. What the consensus agreement chose would be integrated into the mainstream of religion, and the rest would be treated as valid but auxiliary teaching for varying temperaments. This would be practicable if direct experience were held up as the ideal, and religion’s intention was to lead the social orders to that and not away from it. Old age for many would become the time of life reserved for direct spiritual experience, and the development of the individual. A time when religion itself would fall away, like scaffolding, to enable the always individual approach to God.

The trouble is that those in authority usually seek to guide and control what the consensus is. When control is the goal it is easier to preach to people what they must believe to be saved, and make clear that deviation in thinking from consensus leads to terrible consequences. That however is not spiritual consensus. It is one person, or some small group, and the actual level of their understanding, that interprets reality, or God, or scripture to those not in authority. The claim is made, even if it remains unsaid, that it is God’s thinking, or some special authority’s, and not their own that is being put forward. As if they were simply telling you what God’s “Word” is or says. The fact is they have used their own intellect and feeling to establish and justify their views. So again, it is the Light the mind uses that discerns here. And, as ever, if it is not an open, truthful and sincere asking, then prejudice, preference, desire, and expectation color the result. The quality of one’s relation to the Light is primary, even in groups, and establishing it should be taught as far more important than any absorption of views. In other words honesty, love and truthfulness should be taught as what actually links man to the spirit, and not concepts.

Those in authority will often promote doubt and fear in whomever they wish to control; and will often censure thinking, extol faith, and deny the capacity of the mind to reach God. This is because what is to be believed can be crafted and directed with certain ends in mind, and the promotion of belief inclines people to follow, not question. Thinking is treated badly then, as if it were only carnal and intellectual, and not as linked to the divine, which the real mind is, through honesty and truthfulness. The faith one is asked to have is really faith in a minister’s personality or point of view, or the tradition he follows. It is really faith in that person’s understanding or some other authority’s interpretation of the meaning of what all truthfully can read for themselves, in a Bible most everyone agrees gives no clear exposition of reality itself. [Various Notes, note 5]

God will let any person make a mistake because you are to always be left free. There are none who are incomplete who are inerrant. Even the Apostles did not understand Jesus’ teaching, and were vacillating and fearful even after Pentecost, as when Paul upbraids Peter and Barnabas for being both (see A History of Christianity by Paul Johnson, p.5). The Light itself takes pains not to intrude on, or to interfere with your sense of self despite the fact that it is closer to you than breath, remaining invisible except to what is like itself. By trying to understand, by making mistakes, by seeking to get real knowledge through asking more sincerely and honestly, you establish a living relation to the Light. And to Love. Not to a book, an experience, or the say-so of others. Incidentally, God’s Love is his Will, in the same way that your love and your will are the same thing. What you love, secretly or openly, that you do. With God though, his love is real love, and he gives unselfishly what is true and what is good to the one loved, based on knowledge, enabling them to grow. It is not just an affection which attaches him, or which blindly seeks union.

God has said directly, in the very book being used to tell others to know the Lord, not to tell others to know the Lord, or be told by them, for his laws are written in every person’s heart and mind, and no longer in books or rituals or forms. After Jesus entered as high priest all now know God directly, from the least to the greatest. (Heb 8: 6-13; 2 Cor 3:3, 7-8) What it is that all know and believe in is some form of Love and Light internally. It may be unrecognized as God, but it is the actual yardstick of their effort nonetheless, on which they rely, and for which they seek. Everyone can find rightness matching their responsibility in the tablets of the heart. Everyone who is truthful worships God in spirit. Everyone who loves, knows God and is born of him. (1 Jn 4:7) These are the commandments of the New Covenant, the doing of which lead to the Light, and the Light to transformation. The old commandments are preparation for them, but they cannot transform you.

Jesus is the high priest of the New Covenant, and not of the ancient religious forms that are passing away. Much in present day Christianity is inappropriate. Jesus is no object for cheerleading, or for flattering his self-importance or personality, like some old pagan potentate. All such ego he overcame and let die, so that he could express and be the Light. The Light relates directly and without superiority. If the desire for acclaim died in him, what is left to respond to external praise? Love certainly doesn’t seek it. Jesus also rebuked his Apostles, who desired the authority and power of the Old Testament prophets, for thinking him a prophet like Elias to visit punishment on whoever disagreed with him, making it plain he will have nothing to do with a spirit of wrath. (Lk 9: 54-56) That he is One with Love... has this ever been believed?

The Spirit of the Commandments
If you stifle your conscience by accepting the beliefs of others out of fearfulness or doubt, you do not fulfill the first of the Two Great Commandments, to love God with your whole heart, mind, and soul, for you are not being truthful. Loving God with your mind means using it, using Light, and honoring what it shows you until through the development of honesty and truthfulness you know, and know that you know. The Spirit itself bears witness with your spirit. Instead, by allowing others to think and ask for you, you are being expedient, if not cowardly, and expediency is a cardinal value of the earthly man. An expedient man will not take up any cross for what is true, and fears to disagree or stand alone. The acceptance of a belief system, which is simply a set of thoughts that you regard as truth, does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature or original source for those beliefs. Especially if you have merely adopted them, and have not won through to them by your own efforts. Thoughts are things you can have, like a book or a vase. They do not in themselves involve you in the Light of God, not intimately like insight, intuition or revelation do. You can have the “right” thoughts, and even repeat them on demand, but remain unaffected in your heart. Hence you remain in your sins. “Whoever commits sin”, no matter what he says he believes, “is the servant of sin. And the servant abides not in the house forever. But the Son abides forever.” (Jn 8: 34-35)

Spirit is life, identity and meaningfulness. Spirit develops the greater you, called the Son, and to the Son all of the Sons of God are of importance. They are of infinite importance, else Jesus would not have made them the cornerstone of love in the Two Great Commandments that replace the Law and the Prophets for a Christian: to love God with your whole heart, mind and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself. “For how can you love God whom you cannot see, if you cannot love your fellow man, whom you can?” (1 Jn 4:20)

Spirit intends a sane and reasonable world through sane and reasonable relations. This has never been and never will be accomplished by any form of fear, control, threat, brainwashing, or coercion, whether subtle, silent, or blatant. The means are the end as far as Spirit is concerned. There cannot be an excuse for trying to force others to believe as you do. Not if you have been warned not to by the book you use for the authority to do so, and especially not if the Light itself refuses to do so with any man. Without the expression of love, which coercion of any kind negates, the Kingdom of God cannot manifest on earth. Everyone agreeing to some doctrine or other is not the Kingdom of God, nor is it even religion. Living from Light and Love is.
The Old Testament Commandments and the Scripture are fingers pointing toward the Real, but are not the Real itself. The two Great Commandments to love God and man given by Jesus and Hillel, and originally by Moses, which involve direct relation with Light and Love internally, are the “better hope” of St. Paul. This hope is based upon bringing the heavenly man forward into awareness, through the transformations love and truth work in the personality, or earthly man, “until Christ be formed in you.” (Ga 4:19) If you have faith in God and in his Light to reveal truth your awakening connection to that Light, or the Kingdom of God within you, will “teach you of all things.” Asking means the humility of admitting you don’t know something, and the truthfulness of your asking opens the door.

The Real
Knowledge, when it is considered equivalent to Being, is the capacity to know or see into something: to comprehend. It is not the memorization of facts or thoughts, or any aggregate of those, which you neither penetrate, nor integrate, but simply regurgitate. Knowledge is Union. The Light uses all of your experiences to educate you, including the ideas and writings of men and religions. They are not to replace your own connection with the Light, since the real point is to develop in you the mind of Christ. (1 Cor 2:9-16)

In Patanjali this mind is called Soul Vision and it is the aim of Yoga. In philosophy it is called Pure Reason and in Buddhism, Rigpa. The super-consciousness of the heavenly man is the view of the third heaven Paul mentions, which Plato speaks of as formless: “Without color or shape, that cannot be touched; reason alone, the soul’s pilot, can behold it, and all true knowledge is knowledge thereof.” It is the Causal plane of Shankara and the Dharmakaya of Buddhism. The Hall of Wisdom according to Mahayana, it is described as the “indestructible fount of omniscience... wherein all shadows are unknown, and where the light of truth shines with unfading glory.” - from Book of the Golden Precepts, trans by H.P.Blavatsky as The Voice of the Silence.
Reality is viewed for the first time from that level, with that mind. The doctrines, dogmas, beliefs and authoritative voices of any particular time period are a picturing of God by each race’s level of awareness, and rarely reach beyond the understandings of the first or second heaven. That is why there is such a gulf in the understanding of the different countries, centuries, and even between the books of the Bible, in how they see God.

God is Pure Intelligence and Love, and that is the Real. God is known through your inner core, expressing his Life and Kingdom through you, and is not something separate from you. You can’t separate the within of you, from you. You can bring love and light into expression, and let these transform you into what is real and eternal- as Lincoln put it, into “our better angel.”
If the Kingdom of God is within you then consciousness, or the simple fact of being conscious, prior to everything else, is a direct expression of God. You are that. You cannot be different from it if, as the Bible says, that is what you are within. Being conscious is the ground upon which everything else within you depends, prior to all thinking, feeling and experiencing, for if you are not conscious no other psychological act is possible. Becoming conscious that you are conscious then, is a clearing act. Just as seeing the conscious one in another is a way to reach toward the Divine in them, looking for that which is essential and real in them, prior to their identifications with habits, preferences and prejudices. Being conscious means “with Knowing”. What you identify yourself with or as distorts that innate ability. Consciousness is prior to life, as we now know it, and represents the highest aspect of Deity. By virtue of being conscious we share in the knowledge and being of God.

God is the Real, and the Light is that which shows you things as they are. Honesty with facts leads to substance. All facts derive from the Ground of Being, so they must eventually lead to knowledge of its nature and the means of its expression. Faith is then the intuitive extension of one’s knowing, its implications and direction, into the yet unknown, much like a hypothesis, or a prediction of the behavior of a system does, based on known laws. A little knowledge often leads away from God; but a great deal leads back. The Light will show us what we wish to know, if we will learn how to know, and honor the real nature of our minds. Honesty is the fundamental working principle of the mind, without which its basic function to see things as they are and work with them as it sees them is prevented. Truthfulness is how transformation is embodied.

Christos
Nothing real can separate us from the Life that the Light and Love of God express. Only fear can, distorting our hope and estranging our love. Fear of God, and fear of our fellow man express themselves in a contraction from life, from events, and from others. It is a contraction of the heart which causes us to be afraid of others, and not know they are terrified as well. A person believes themself vulnerable and mortal when they identify spiritually with the body, conscious as the personality of the body’s life, and not of it. The fear at the root of this idea of self, that of an earthly conditioned ego, capable of dying, is an emotional and moral collapse from the heavenly man or woman. This is our satan, and all that really opposes a Christian of the New Covenant, given that any form of evil only reaches us through that.
This collapse and inferiorization of self causes withdrawal emotionally and leads to possession by one’s own attached mind states, appetites and energy. People become mere ideas or images to you; blips on your radar, and not real relations. There is a recoil from openness, engagement, freed feeling, and radiance. A recoil from Life. Events and experience are then no longer how the living Father communicates the path of growth, but are something fear and distorted desires manipulate to pleasurable or consoling ends.

Re-cognition or identification with the Son or Daughter of God you are, through the Light and Love of God, transforms your manifested energy, just as identification with the body, and feeling and desiring as the personality of the body, lowers it. This is the Fall, and the Fall is a choice you are continually making. Choose to ascend through the Light and Love of God by being intelligence and love in relation, and you will arise. Ascension is moral and spiritual, and not a matter of space and time.
The Light shows us what it true; we need only listen and look. But we must be truthful with what we see, otherwise the Light will wait until we are asking, to show us what is actually there. Similarly, if we are authentic in our being, and open our hearts unselfishly, we will see others for the first time, and feel directly. We then discover the Love that underlies the happenings of all our lives; that enfolds the sorrowful selves who appear here as fearful caricatures of their real selves; the Love which weaves the fabric of all life’s relations. If our life expresses intelligence as sanity and love as fearlessness, in all of our relations, “then will our light break forth like morning, and our health spring forth speedily.” (Isa 58:8) We will call, and he will answer.

Daniel Drumm

Notes:

Various Notes:
1- "The greatest Church Fathers attest... there is... an ontological link or bond (sungeneia) connecting the human present with the divine future. As Zizioulas, discussing Justin Martyr, summarizes: 'The permanent sungeneia between God and man through the medium of nous leads us to take the idea of logos, employed by Justin in a christological sense, as the bond between God and the world, between truth and the mind. Christ, as the logos of God, becomes this very link between truth and the mind, and the truth of philosophy is nothing less than part of this logos."' - Edward Moore, STD, PhD
2- “Christ consciousness produces a new creature, a spiritual state of being. It is not for the purpose of patching up the old man, or producing more harmonious material conditions. Christ consciousness is the means by which God, in His-Her Principles of Being, fashions the child of Light, in which there will be no more sin, sickness, sorrow, or death. This state of being appears at the end of mortality as the fruit of Christ’s progression in Time. Christ consciousness is the identification of Christ within the organism of one suitable to function the Principles of Being. It ultimates in producing the Body of Christ, the spiritual state of being.” - from Steps in the Way, Vol. 1, by Ida Mingle
3- “The Body of Light is the supreme realization of Dzogchen. Its function is different from that of a Sambhogakaya manifestation, because a being in a Body of Light can communicate and actively help other beings. It is as if the physical body, its material substance having been absorbed into its luminous essence, continues to live as an aggregation of the elements in their subtle aspect.”- from Dzogchen: the self-perfected state, pp. 39-40, by Namkhai Norbu
4- “A mahatma may decide to keep a body- the form body of the physical- in which he can communicate with and be seen by humanity. Then he overcomes in his physical body time and death in the physical world by immortalizing the form of the physical body, not physical matter as such. He puts the body through a course of training and provides it with particular foods which he gradually diminishes in quantity. The body increases in strength and gradually throws off its physical particles, but maintains its form. This continues until all the physical particles have been thrown off and the body of form stands, the conqueror of death, in the physical world where it may be seen by men, though it lives in the form-desire world and is known as an adept, an adept of a higher order. This body is the one which has been spoken of in theosophical teachings as “nirmanakaya.” - from Adepts, Masters, and Mahatmas by Harold Percival.
5- “What man of good sense can ever persuade himself that there were a first, a second, and a third day, and that each of these days had a night when there were yet neither sun, moon, nor stars? What man can be stupid enough to believe that God, acting the part of a gardener, had planted a garden in the east, that the tree of life was a real tree, and that its fruit had the virtue of making those who eat of it live forever?” - Origen, from Thomas Paine’s answer to the Bishop of Landaff
6- “To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy, for what is is reason... To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thus to delight in the present- this rational insight brings us that reconciliation with actuality which philosophy grants those who have once been confronted by the inner demand to comprehend.” - from the preface of Philosophy of Right by Hegel
7- “...From passion comes confusion of mind, then loss of remembrance, the forgetting of duty. From this loss comes the ruin of reason, and the ruin of reason leads man to destruction. But the soul that moves in the world of the senses and yet keeps the senses in harmony, free from attraction and aversion, finds... that the God in himself is the same God in all that is... that I am the heart of all.” - from the Bhaghavad Gita, trans by Yogi Ramacharaka
8- “’Know Thyself.’ This is what Hinduism stands for. This is the quintessence of Hinduism... The Hindu religion has no specific founder. It is based primarily on the soul-stirring utterances of the rishis, the seers. A seer is one who visions the Truth, and communes with the Truth. If you want to define Hinduism, you can do so with the help of a monosyllable: Love. This Love is all-embracing and ever-growing. A staunch Hindu will say, “I can live without air, but not without God.” - from Yoga and the Spiritual Life, by Sri Chinmoy
9- “In his dialogue Phaedrus (247 BC) Plato envisions a journey by a soul to the outermost boundary of the cosmos, and then gives us a glimpse of what the soul would see if for a brief moment it were able to “look upon the regions without.” “Of that place beyond the heavens,” says Plato, none of our earthly poets has yet sung, and none shall sing worthily. But this is the manner of it, for assuredly we must be bold to speak what is true, above all when our discourse is upon truth. It is there that true being dwells, without color or shape, that cannot be touched; reason alone, the soul’s pilot, can behold it, and all true knowledge is knowledge thereof.” - from The Cosmic Mysteries of Mithras, by David Ulansey, Author of The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries (Oxford University Press, 1991)
10- “The knowledge of God... is not the knowledge of, or awareness of a great Being, but the expression through human instrumentality of the divine omniscience.” - Alice Bailey
11- “There dwells within us all this potential which allows us to awaken into buddhahood and attain omniscience.... When, at some future point, we do attain buddhahood, that subtle continuum of our awareness will awaken to a state of omniscience called dharmakaya.” - from Dzogchen, by H. H. the Dalai Lama
12- “Concerning Meditative Technique: The form of meditation that I have found effective differs substantially from that generally given in the manuals on meditation. Repeatedly I have tried stopping thought and closing out the senses, but the artificial state thus effected was barren of results. Heretofore, the rich values have come to me through or while thinking. I finally took this fact as a key and abandoned all effort to stop thought or to interfere with the reports of sensation. In any case, the distraction caused by the latter I have found to be too weak to be of real importance. Through the larger part of my life the thought-world has naturally dominated the sensation-world so that sensation had come to mean little more than small waves do to an ocean liner. The issue then lay between thought-consciousness and Transcendant-Consciousness while the rest, I found, could be neglected. Now, within a process or manifold, a given phase or aspect may be isolated for special attention without stopping the process or eliminating the balance of the manifold. This is a familiar technique in scientific and philosophic thinking. When I recalled this fact and applied it, I found at once a really effective method of meditation. In fact, I realize, I have done this for many years [Wolff had been a Professor of Mathematics at Stanford] without regarding it as a meditative technique. It was by applying this method of isolation of the essential element in the midst of a complex, without trying to restrain the other components, that [my transcendental experience] was effected.” - from Experience and Philosophy by Franklin Merrell-Wolff (State University of New York’s press)

Daniel Drumm © 2007