The Adam-Cell

Let’s jump train!  But in order to make sure we have a safe landing, let’s be reminded that “Harold believed that the laws and findings of the sciences are simply developments in the expression of truth that has been intuitively grasped and poetically stated in the great religions.  He believed that as Jesus studied the Scriptures he saw in them the same thing that he, Harold, saw in them and also in the records of Jesus’ drama: these writings embody a symbolical representation of the underlying laws functioning throughout nature.” (Winifred Babcock)

With this firmly under our belts we let Harold begin:

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin postulates that consciousness is the force that raised up life from matter, and that consciousness is life’s goal.  The Adam-Eve drama depicts life’s seeking an enlarged consciousness… The legend presents them first in what might be called “plant life” or “garden-being” – other legends and symbols dealing with “Cosmic Man” also indicate that he, or life, must be seen first as plant…  To examine man in his original form, one must examine animal life in its first form, in the form of a one-cell creature.  Thus, in his beginning, man must be seen as a one-cell creature, and one fold of the Eden legend tells of the Adam-cell – which is to say, Adam may be seen as a symbol of the simplest form of life, amoeba, for he follows amoeba’s path.

 It is at this point, approaching the human being beginning as amoeba, that we turn aside to briefly examine one of the 20^th century’s greatest inner archeologists, Rudolf Steiner.  The founder of the Waldorf Schools and Biodynamic agriculture among other movements, all of these outer initiatives were based on Steiner’s extensive inner digging.  He called his approach to spiritual investigation Anthroposophy, and defined it as “a path of knowledge to guide the Spiritual in the human being to the Spiritual in the universe.”  He also called Anthroposophy “spiritual science,” and unlike the Biblical writers who sought to put volumes of information in as short a communication as possible (The shape of the legend follows the shape of the brain) and who therefore used legends, Steiner left us with volumes of books and lecture cycles filled with his spiritual scientific research findings.  In his “Cosmic Memory” and “Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centers” he gives us page upon page of information on how man began as a single celled creature.   Cultural historian William Irwin Thompson has studied Steiner extensively and in his masterful “Coming Into Being” not only describes Steiner’s findings for us, but also clues us in to how the Biblical authors may have come across their “Divine Revelations:”

In his book Cosmic Memory, Rudolf Steiner claims to be able to take us to the edges of history in an archeological excavation that he calls “reading” the akashic record – the etheric image in the structure of space-time that holds the record of the past… the template for registering this crystalline structure is Steiner’s own imagination, and what Steiner “sees” is a negotiable instrument that brings forth a relationship between himself and the akashic record of the collective unconscious… For example, when Steiner talks about the ancient body of man swimming in the sea, we should not picture some comic book Aquaman swimming around in a submarine Atlantis, but the evolution of the cell.  Take this description from “Cosmic Memory:”

“Thereby the likeness of man is in a position to attract certain substances from the environment and to combine them with itself, secreting them again later by means of the repelling forces.  These substances, of course, can only be taken from the animal realm described above, and from the realm of man.  This constitutes a beginning of nutrition.  Thus these first likenesses of man were eaters of animals and men.”

When Steiner uses the word “man” here, one should think of the German word Mensch or, even more generally, of “creature.”  Steiner is describing the cell, the chemotaxis of the amoeba.  We were the cell.  The origin of life is the origin of us.  Steiner’s vision is one in which humans are deeply embedded in the whole of natural history, of the planet and the solar system.  And he’s right… Steiner is an amazing visionary, but if one becomes a fundamentalist follower of his, an Anthroposophist constantly intoning “Der Doktor hat gesagt,” then one destroys the spirit with the letter of literalism.

 

Fundamentalists everywhere!  In that last quoted paragraph, we can simply substitute “Steiner” with “the Bible” and, well, there you have it.  Thus Harold’s warning from our previous post about poetic license.

We will continue to explore Harold’s “Adam as amoeba” idea in our next post on Chapter 4.  Until then, peace…

Historical Judaic Messiah

What is the prophecy that Harold says “no man can fulfill?”  If Jesus in His person is not Messiah enough, then what else is needed?  For me, this is where THE SHINING STRANGER really started to get interesting.  Harold says:

Jesus appears to have realized that the Logos in man is man’s understanding of who and what he is, the “truth that I am” [not “the truth that I have”], and that the truth of man’s being is the truth that governs men; He appears to have understood also that if Messiah is to bear the truth of man’s being to humankind and dwell in a body among men, then words of truth must take a form of their own: Messiah could come only in the advent of a Book. By insisting that His words would not pass away, (Matt. 24:35) Jesus prepared the ground for His return in the advent of the book written of Him.  

This can certainly be a challenging statement.  Not impossible, but challenging!  Harold goes on to explain his point…

If one sees His second coming in the advent of the Gospels, the mystery of His statement, that the disciple, John, was to survive until He “came back,” (John 21:20-22) is reconciled… Jesus lived until his record was set forth – that is, John’s understanding of Jesus lived until Jesus came back and spoke again in The Gospel According to Saint John.

Well, THAT is certainly an interpretation I’ve never heard before; and I LIKE it!  What else does our insightful author have to say about the Bible?  

The Bible, as Messiah, possesses glory, grace, and reality – not as THE only expression of the Logos in man, but as an only or one whole expression of it.  The Bible was centuries in the writing, product of authors widely separated in time, but it has a marvelous unity of thought although it has also many contradictions – as many as man himself.  It continues to be the most controversial book in the Western world because, like man, it is a supreme paradox.  In sum, it contains the expression of humanity: it is Homo sapiens’ complete picture of himself, from Genesis to Revelation.  Beginning with the advent of man’s realization of God-consciousness, symbolized in Adam, it reaches it’s climax in man’s realization of God incarnate in his being, symbolized in Jesus as Son of man, Lord, with which one’s consciousness may have but brief encounter – and then it bears witness to the transformation in consciousness this encounter evokes.

What a beautiful description of the world’s most popular book!  And an effective vaccine against fundamentalism of all stripes!  

Oh yes, what about that prophecy?!  Here it is:

Thou hast no desire for sacrifice or offering;

it is a body thou hast prepared for me – 

in holocausts and sin-offerings thou takest no delight, 

So I said, “Here I come – in the roll of a book

this is written of me – 

I come to do thy will, O God.

(Psalm 40:6-8 and Hebrews 10:5-7)

We’ll finish today’s post with Harold’s understanding…

In Jesus’ time, a book was a roll – a scroll… Jesus gave this command:

“Go and learn the meaning of this word, I care for mercy, not for sacrifice.” (Matt. 9:13)

Thus, one must seek to understand His mission through the prophecy quoted above, for in the face of this command, He cannot be viewed as seeing Himself in terms of a sacrifice or sin-offering.  …if Messiah is to fulfill this Scripture, the one who filled the Messiah role could not be an atoning Lamb to ransom man, a sacrifice for man’s sin.  

Viewed in another light, the poetic words of this prophecy also say that Messiah’s advent is in the “roll of the book” written of the one who comes, a prophecy no man could fulfill.  If Messiah is to “tell us all things,” only a book encompassing the words spoken by countless truth-bearers to span the last reach of human consciousness could be Messiah to all men.

The “body…prepared for me,” for the one whose work would bring forth the book, is to be seen in the Scriptures into which Jesus wove His life and words, but it is in the volume of the book “written of me” – God, Son in man – that Messiah, the Bible, comes, comes as a roll, as a wave that surges upon the shores of the world through fulfillment of the missionary task Jesus imposed.  Through the Bible, He came back.  Through it, historical Messiah comes, fulfilling the Judaic promise to bear the whole body of truth to man: the truth embodied in man’s sacred writings in every language, in legends, for all these speak the same word and the Bible enfolds their like.

And there we have it.

At this point on our journey I’d like to step aside a bit and look further into the concept of a “book.”  We’ll do that in the next couple of posts.  Before that happens, though, I’m taking a week off for Holy Week/Spring Break.  Have a blessed Easter, and I will see you in April.  Until then, peace…