Preston Harold now confronts some of the strangest, and some of my personal favorite, sayings of Jesus.
Jesus saw that the destructive potential in man can be dealt with only as it is set against itself: i.e., as it becomes a house divided; thus, “I” come not to bring peace, but the sword, to set the household against itself; yet, “he who does not gather with me scatters” – the expanding and limiting frequencies are set to provide a boundary for expression. Jesus said, “This is an evil generation,” but He also said that life is being leavened, transformed through the working in and of the realm of God. It is from this generation – this bringing into being – that man prays to be delivered into life eternal, which must also mean into matter of his own under his own dominion.
That life is in the process in being set against itself even above and beyond mankind’s own conscious doing is shown by the wisdom inherent in biological forms. In his “The Harmony of the Human Body: Musical Principles in Human Physiology,” Dr. Armin Husemann expands on Jesus’ saying of setting a household against itself:
If we learn to walk with the legs and their earth rhythm this drama of the divided soul’s struggle for freedom on earth, we learn to comprehend the expression of the middle human being:
“Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division; for henceforth in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three” (Luke 12:51).
Thus speaks the cosmic master builder who enters his house so that the human being can achieve freedom, can realize his true nature. In Luke’s gospel the Word turned flesh of the lungs speaks the physical rhythm of the fifth. In the lung the Word separates the physical unity which is created by the blood so that the ‘I’ can take the place of the blood and recreate the unity anew.
We will explore this statement of Jesus concerning the proportion of 2:3 in much greater depth when we come to the next chapter, but for now Preston Harold once again reminds us that to live is to deal with the reality of evil:
Jesus prays, “Deliver us from evil,” but this is not to say OF evil… Jesus’ teaching indicates that one cannot exclude or dispense with evil itself – man cannot be delivered OF it. Consider this parable:
When an unclean spirit leaves a man, it roams through dry places in search of ease. As it finds none, then it says, “I will go back to the house I left”; and when it comes it finds the house clean and all in order. Then off it goes to fetch seven other spirits worse than itself; they go in and dwell there, and the last state of that man is worse than the first.
For 43 years, Hank had successfully stuffed every feeling he’d ever had, until,of course, the morning when Fred asked if he could borrow a paper clip.
The concept of repressions greatly empowered in latency and their strange return to the “house” of consciousness is presented here. Also presented is a psychic parallel to the theory of relativity, wherein coming to rest has no meaning: “A decrease of velocity relative to one frame is an increase relative to another frame.” But most important, Jesus presents the concept that evil cannot be cast out and thereby obliterated; therefore, it must be regenerated, recast – from its destructive potential man must pray to be delivered. Thus, Jesus’ prayer might be paraphrased: “Deliver us from evil: from the matter we are in, from flesh expressed by partial consciousness – deliver us to death that we may be reborn into eternal life in such flesh as complete consciousness will express and have dominion over, that true riches may be committed to our trust.” As for that in each man’s dominion which is spurious, wicked, it shall be recast as it is cast into “the furnace of fire” – into matter which is an “ever-burning” manifestation, but which is also a delight to man’s soul.
“Deliver us to death that we may be reborn into eternal life” is an apt meditation for us heading into this Good Friday and Easter Sunday. May we understand better and more fully commit to live and die the way that Jesus taught and showed. Until next time, peace.
Have you ever heard of the FitzGerald Contraction? I never had until I read The Shining Stranger. Albert Einstein worked it into his theory of relativity. Sir Arthur Eddington explains it:
“Suppose that you have a rod moving at very high speed. Let it first be pointing transverse to its line of motion. Now turn it through a right angle so that it is along the line of motion. The rod contracts. It is shorter when it is along the line of motion than when it is across the line of motion. This contraction, known as the FitzGerald Contraction, is exceedingly small in all ordinary circumstances. It does not depend at all on the material of the rod but only on the speed. For example, if the speed is 19 miles a second – the speed of the earth around the sun – the contraction of length is 1 part in 200,000,000, or 2-1/2 inches in the diameter of the earth.”
Preston Harold interprets this for us:
The FitzGerald Contraction is a property of matter, of evil’s, or the Serpent’s domain. As one draws a poetic parallel, one must consider that by resisting, one is apt to turn evil transverse to its line of motion, thereby elongating or elaborating it.
Jesus said, “resist not evil…Love your enemies…pray for them which despitefully use you…” In effect, only by taking a line transverse to evil’s line will you outmeasure it.
Eddington says the FitzGerald Contraction is “the same for a rod of steel and for a rod of india-rubber; the rigidity and the compressing stress are bound up with the constitution in such a way that if one is large so also is the other.” Jesus states the psychic parallel – “Wherefore I say unto you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little.” If the one aspect is large so is the other.
Evil is symbolized by the serpent whose line of motion is along the line of earth’s, horizontal. But man, the only true biped, posed himself uprightly- alone in all the world, threw himself transverse the “natural” line, became a vertical being, in truth measuring more than he was and more than evil measures, As he moves along evil’s path, the natural path, he also moves transverse to it, creating within himself, poetically speaking, a sphere that is independent of either line of motion because it is at once both and neither, as is the point where the vertical crosses the horizontal: +.
It is at this point that we must step aside and look more into the world of the serpent. We will do that in our next installment. Until then, peace.
By the process of “sowing our oats” we find there is no permanent value in self-seeking behavior:
Each man has now a capacity to expend and to receive violence, but he has a mechanism available to alter his mental images that define this capacity – thus, the law does not make man a slave to his past nor to the untried…Using imagination and reasoning power, man may try evil-doing in his mind, both sowing and reaping it upon himself, having done with it if he will follow through in his envisioning to the final harvest, not stopping at the point of momentary gratification in the act. That is, he may exhaust the possibilities and bore himself with evil’s final, empty reward.
But even if we find ourselves bored with evil, it’s a built in part of the deal of life:
But since good and evil interfuse each act, as do the two frequencies of a light wave-group, even if a man could always live by the Golden Rule he would still do evil. Because this is so, however, he may spend his life acting upon the voices of conscience and love, knowing that he expends his quota of evil, which must be expended in order that he be delivered from it – and since every person is a field in which both good seed and tares are sown, his life’s harvest will be of good and evil. The measure he has meted out during this experience, however, constitutes the sowing of a new field, provides a future working capital of memory-images, and the evil that comes back to him in kind will be in attenuated form. The sum of his memory-images both today and tomorrow ad infinitum spell out his empathy and they also spell out his lust: his need to experience, to know.
With each step in experience throughout life, we are building up more empathy:
Eddington says, “Progress of time introduces more and more of the random element into the constitution of the world.” The psychological parallel would read: there will be more empathy in the world tomorrow than there is today – and the question arises, can empathy be complete? Can thermodynamical equilibrium be achieved?
It is these questions we will look at in our next installment. Until then, peace.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son… -John 3:16
Through his death on the cross, Jesus saves mankind from their sin. How is this to be understood? If empathy is putting ourselves in another’s place, what might be the ultimate act of empathy? Could it be experiencing the death of the other? Every human being has to die, and in Jesus God enters into this inevitable human fate, experiencing death Himself. Preston Harold says that with total empathy comes an end to sin:
When through experience all mankind has evolved complete empathy, sin will no longer be possible, for man’s empathy will cause him to instinctively withdraw his mind and hand from abuse of another – his understanding will not permit him to err, for he will pay sin’s wage in his own being before he commits it.
Just as Jesus payed sin’s wage in his own being, we are called to do the same. We must experience the sorrow we would bring to another in our own being before we offend against them.
Empathy in man brings its joy or sorrow – enriches or takes its toll of him now, as now flowers into the present and plants the field of the future in reaping the harvest of past planting. Love’s eternal reward and punishment is given before it is grasped – now. Upon that infinitely small point between the past and the future that cannot be captured or measured eternity rests, for both now and eternity are beyond the grasp of consciousness. Eternal punishment of sin rests with empathy, which makes a man recoil with horror at the evil he has done when he comes to an understand it in his being, and thereafter he forever recoils with the pain at the prospect of repeating this evil, recoils now as it arises in the mind to do this evil again.
And here we grasp the meaning of “eternal punishment,” the “now” moment we truly realize and experience through empathy the hell of the horror of realizing the evil that we do to one another. Yet empathy has another face:
Empathy is saving grace to man – it frees his past, frees his future. It is acting now in his midst. Homo sapiens is an empathetic “animal.” He is no mistake on the part of evolution. Jesus’ words say to the belabored man of the twentieth century who has come to doubt nature’s wisdom in evolving his species: there is the living voice of truth, life and love within you, and as you begin to express its power, glory, and empathy, it will say unto you, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
Why does our knowledge of love’s fullness have to be so painful to obtain? Why doesn’t God completely reveal to us our full nature?
By giving His power, the power of the word, to man, God destroyed His absolute power to reveal Himself and the secrets of creation. But before man appeared on the scene, the secrets had been told in mammon – in the temporal – which reflects them oppositely and truly, as though in a mirror, itself material, a form that is real is seen, albeit its “mirror-image” is not its reality in being. Thus, truth-bearer must make unto himself a friend of mammon, “unrighteous” as mammon is, and he must reveal the working of the flesh, offensive and error-provoking though his words may be.
Being part of the material realm limits us in coming to full knowledge of the reality and fullness of God. If we want LIFE, we must deal with the limitations and consequences thereof. The Apostle Paul says as much in his letter to the Romans:
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits in eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Rom. 8:18-21)
According to Paul here, we were not created by God already perfect, then fell, and now are in the process of regaining paradise. Rather, we have been subjected to futility from the beginning by our creator! Why? In hope that we will come to know the freedom of being children of God (being set free from slavery to mere mammon). It is the only way we can know love for ourselves. In other words, the Eden story isn’t a time-based story; it is rather an eternal happening, goading and guiding us into a better future. The story is a “trap” God sets for us, striving for the “beginning,” which in eternity is also our “completion.”
And here Preston Harold sounds like a modern day Paul:
Mammon is the mirror, and perforce the mirror lies – for it, itself, is not what it reflects in its being or as its being. God, First Cause, love, life itself, is not matter as revealed in mammon; God…is revealed through mammon’s examination to be “spirit,” or a type of “energy” unknown and unknowable in physical terms…. The reality underlying the world of appearances cannot be reduced to physical terms, it is only indirectly knowable as reflected in mammon’s mirror, and as it is intuitively experienced by man…. But in mammon’s mirror, in evil, or in pure matter, or in life’s temporal history with all its evil-doing, the image of good and its working may be beheld. This is to say, there is evidence that life is building into man a factor that will in time deliver him from evil without robbing him of its desirable aspects, and that this factor is in truth the saving grace of life.
Why must evil be resurrected along with righteousness? What purpose does it serve?
…Lucifer, the devil, means “light-bringer,” and light is primordial energy – but Lucifer is not himself the light he brings. It must be that if “your father, the devil” is resurrected in man causing him to express evil, this expression brings in its wake a necessary enlightenment. If man’s evil is wed to his very being, his good, life must be recasting his evil into a measure of “something” indispensable to him, and this “something” must be flesh over which consciousness has full dominion: flesh man can in truth call his own and keep. To have it, man must have knowledge of evil, of matter itself, and he must have dominion over evil. That is, he must learn to live without corrupting his flesh and abusing life itself in evil doing; he must complete the task begun in Eden, which is to acquire knowledge of good and evil.
Ah, a necessary enlightenment! Many people, including great philosophers and theologians throughout the ages have looked into and considered the possibility of redemption not just for human beings, but for Old Scratch himself. Origen said that nothing is beyond being healed by its maker. Rudolf Steiner postulates that through resisting and balancing the extreme forces of spirit (Lucifer) and matter (Satan) we redeem evil. In his early lectures on the Bible, Valentin Tomberg says that Lucifer experienced an inner metamorphosis through the Mystery of Golgotha, and that at the crucifixion he recognized the nature of the sacrifice of Christ. Gregory of Nyssa said that the originator of evil WILL be healed. At the heart of these interpretations seems to be a deep intuition that there is a reason for the existence of evil, that it is serving a greater purpose which could not be accomplished without it’s resistance. Preston Harold would say that reason is “flesh man can in truth call his own and keep.”
One here must also consider here the role that Judas played in Christ’s drama. In his “Cipher of Genesis,” Carlo Suares reminds us that the Gospel of John has Judas following Jesus’ instructions to the letter.
I speak not of you all: I know whom I have chosen: but that the scripture may be fulfulled. He that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me. Now I tell you before it comes that when it is come to pass ye may believe that I am he. Verily, verily I say unto you: He that receiveth whomsoever I send receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me… Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall HAND ME OVER (OR, DELIVER ME)…He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon. And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly.
So Satan enters Judas, Jesus then sends Judas. In essence, Jesus has sent Satan. So it must follow, according to Jesus’ own words, that he who receives Satan receives Jesus, therefore in the process receiving God. Once again we must ask ourselves, “Does this offend us?”
The lesson in all of this? Suares tells us:
In terms of gnosis it is the statement of a simple fact: there is only One energy, only One life, only One movement. All is one and one is in all. The One is the one game of life and existence, of energy as energy and of energy as its own physical support, which is its own resistance to itself, without which nothing would be.
The devil is associated always with the “serpent power.” Jesus’ offensive words, “your father, the devil,” indicate that a “serpent power” fathers the flesh of man and its lusts, which is to say, man is involved with a powerful material factor that is resurrected in him generation after generation. (In 1928, scientists learned that a certain “coil” could be resurrected: when a batch of dead “S” bacteria were added to living “R” bacteria, the DNA of the dead “S” type somehow took over the “R” bacteria converting them to the living “S” type.) Jung observed that the devil is seen to be lord of matter. Evil is said to be of Satan’s domain which is represented as eternally burning; in this regard evil coincides with matter’s oxidizing. Satan is somehow a discrete play of energy, and so is matter. God has cast Satan, evil, out of His realm; God, good, remains as spirit only, spirit with dominion over evil, matter.
So there it is: Spirit/God = Good; Matter/Satan = Evil. Nice and tidy, wrapped up with a pretty bow. Isn’t it nice when we can have simple, straight-ahead black and white answers? That way we don’t have to think, challenge ourselves, or wonder about God at all! But hold on. Maybe it’s not so simple. Preston Harold continues:
Although Jesus saw that life itself is spirit, He saw that spirit is wedded to material being…by definition the word good is also deeply if not completely involved in the material realm. Good and evil are so intermingled in creation they appear to be that which the Creator has joined, both necessary to life in manifestation.
Remember the parable of the wheat and the tares?…
Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.
The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’
‘An enemy did this,’ he replied.
The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’
‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’” -Matt. 13:24-30
And Jesus’ words from the Gospel of John?…
“Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voiceand come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned.” -John 5:28-29
Jesus says that God is love. Love does not, apparently will not or cannot, do away with evil. Evil too, is resurrected. Why?
Good question! We’ll look for an answer in our next post. Until then, peace…
“So if the Son sets you free, you shall be free indeed!” – John 8:36
Jesus came to set humanity free. How is that possible? Harold elaborates for us:
Jesus saw that man is not chained to the sin of the past or present, prone or doomed to repeat his sins because he is bound to the wheel of rebirth; He saw that what a man has gained in knowing, in knowledge of good and evil, he has gained for eternity. In the words of the Psalmist, the Lord “will not suffer thy foot to be moved…” and he “shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.” (Psalm 121:8) This is to say, Jesus saw that man is committed to life everlasting and thus he cannot escape it. But He saw, too, that life is becoming an ever more conscious state of being and that in time the swinging of the pendulum between life and death will move as evenly as breathing, with no loss of consciousness or sense of dying attendant upon it, that death and rebirth will be accomplished with the ease of laying down and picking up one’s life again in sleep and waking.
This brings us back to our friend Valentin Tomberg, and his assessment of forgetting, sleep, and death and their antitheses, remembering, waking, and life. While Plato is the one who taught us remembrance and Guatama Buddha is the one who showed us how to permanently awaken, it is Jesus who unveils to us the way death is overcome. Thank you for sharing your insights with us, Mr. Tomberg! And what is this way of Jesus?
THANKS, GUYS!
Jesus says God is love. In the unconscious, the kingdom of God within, love enfolds both the tried and the true, the untried and the untrue, enfolds ALL that man is and ALL that life is. “Ye” of the conscious domain express the unattenuated lusts of prime evil which leads men to abuse themselves even as they abuse their brothers. In effect, Jesus says to the men confronting Him that only love can draw one man to another and give understanding, each of the other, and that love is not parent of the consciousness they are expressing. Evil fathers it. But His words – ‘your father, the devil” – indicate that man’s quota of evil is part of his very-being…
And when that quota has been spent, death shall be no more. Until next time, peace…
The Shining Stranger 