The Arising of Christ-Consciousness

So from where does Christ-Consciousness arise? Preston Harold gets right to the point…

Christ-consciousness appears to be sent from the unconscious domain. Before this light can enter consciousness, something in man must be equal to its action: Jesus says the will (the energy) must be as the Father’s, as One’s. He insisted that He, the light, was sent into the world, and that He expressed the will or energy of the Father, unapparent save in man.

Harold says Christ-consciousness is SENT into “the world,” the conscious domain, from the realm of the unconscious, the “kingdom of heaven.” Harold then quotes Eddington in explaining how light comes into the physical world:

…the individual wave-systems in the sub-aether are composed of oscillations too rapid to affect our gross senses; but their beats are sometimes slow enough to come within the octave covered by the eye. These beats are the source of the light coming from the hydrogen atom, and mathematical calculations show that their frequencies are precisely those of the observed light from hydrogen. Heterodyning of the radio carrier waves produces sound: heterodyning of the sub-aetheral waves produces light. Not only does this theory give the periods of the different lines in the spectra, but it also produces their intensities – a problem which the older quantum theory had no means of tackling. It should, however, be understood that the beats are not themselves to be identified with light-waves; they are in the sub-aether whereas light-waves are in the aether. They provide the oscillating source which in some way not yet traced sends out light-waves of its own period.

Harold comments on the difference between the beats and the light-waves being identical to Jesus’ understanding of His relationship to the Father:

An ancient who referred to himself as Light – and of the same “period” as the Father of all manifestation, God – might try to make clear that the “beats” in the “sub-aether” (or that unapparent source) are not to be identified with Himself, and that it is their action that produces the phenomenon, by saying: “I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.”

Perfect! Jesus’ awareness of himself as “light” shows the dwelling of Christ-consciousness within Him. Just as physical light is sent into the world from the aether, so Jesus’ awareness of Himself as light makes Him aware of being “sent” from the Father, or the beats in the sub-aether. We will continue to explore Jesus’ mission as “light of the world” in our next post. Until then, peace.

Chapter 7: One, Itself, Is Teacher

One (adj): Being a single unit or thing – Merriam Webster Dictionary

In his Essays in Science, Albert Einstein writes, “evolution has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to all the rest…The important point for us to observe is that all these constructions and the laws connecting them can be arrived at by the principle of looking for the mathematically simples concepts and the link between them. In the limited nature of the mathematically existent simple fields and the simple equations possible between them, lies the theorist’s hope of grasping the real in all its depths.”

Could Jesus have been the theorist who grasped the real in all it’s depths? Preston Harold writes:

The ancient, then would have had to employ the simplest number: one. One is adjective, capable of adding to or being added to, yet itself unity, a complete whole, indestructible, a coherence that regardless of how often it is self-divided or self-multiplied is no more and no less than it was. The ancient’s every expression about one must be made in the simplest possible way, and he must also convey the full significance of the mathematically simplest link between the mathematically simplest concept: one and one, choosing a symbol that would in time come to express the significance of organization – as Eddington says, the significant of and. Thus, he must choose the cross +.

Here’s a view of the cross I’ve never before entertained. As a symbol for “and.” Of course taking it out of a religious context expands the view considerably.  Why hadn’t I ever thought of this before?

Jesus chose the cross, and He based His teaching upon the number one. He said, “Why call me ‘good’…? one alone is good…” He said that one is teacher, leader, Father. His message points to the absolutely superior concept of one itself. If one and its nature and working could be understood, in time understanding of all else must follow. Jesus saw that each One drawn into expression as “I” must contain the quality and quantity inherent in one: ”

…as the Father has life in himself, so too he has granted the Son to have life in himself…it is not the will of your Father in heaven that a single one of these little ones should be lost.

Can the will of one be thwarted – even by one itself? So wondrous are one’s ways, so unlimited are its possibilities, that man calls it “God.”

In our next post we’ll look at the nature of an elemental unit of energy, delving at length into the work of Sir Arthur Eddington. Until then, peace.

Not Funny, Jesus

“Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease for pain.” – Charlie Chaplin

Webster’s Dictionary defines “laugh” as:

intransitive verb

1a :  to show emotion (as mirth, joy, or scorn) with a chuckle or explosive vocal sound

b :  to find amusement or pleasure in something <laughed at his own clumsiness>

c :  to become amused or derisive <a very skeptical public laughed at our early efforts — Graenum Berger>

2a :  to produce the sound or appearance of laughter <a laughing brook>

b :  to be of a kind that inspires joy

Preston Harold observes…

Out of man’s struggle to describe life’s good and evil has come this reward, this divinely human attribute: laughter, which Meister Eckhart projected to be the impetus that brought man into being: “When God laughs at the soul and the soul laughs back at God, the persons of the Trinity are begotten.” There is no deeper mystery than laughter. Is it lust innocently expressed? Is it passion so sublimely warm that tears must cool it, do cool it? In the view of this study, laughter is an expression of empathy. Laughter comes as saving grace in a host of situations.

Yet if laughter is a saving grace to us, why don’t the Gospels ever record a situation in which Jesus laughed? Sure, many people (including myself) can’t imagine Jesus not laughing and enjoying life to the full. Many artists have even depicted a “laughing Jesus.” We know Jesus wept, but we do not have an account of Jesus even smiling, much less laughing. Why is this?

Jesus did not laugh – did not smile so far as the record is concerned. The Gospel of St. John states that Jesus knew “what was in man.” Thus, he would have known what prompts laughter and the mystery of why He did not laugh is resolved… Jesus could not laugh; He could not risk that a fragment of the profound paradoxes He posed would be taken in jest.

So any laughing that Jesus did was “off the record.” But although Jesus didn’t officially laugh, he did offer up…

…that which has come to be identified with humor: salt. He said, “Salt is good…” and “Let there be salt between you…” Jesus calls God love and good; He calls salt good; it must follow that aggression gentled through humor constitutes an essential ingredient of love, and that hostility will in time lose itself in laughter…Jesus said, “every one shall be salted with fire, and every sacrifice shall be salted with salt.” These words give promise that man shall become immune to that which corrupts and that humor is playing a redeeming role in life.

Salt is also a preservative. I like to think that our laughter is what preserves our divine humanity. Until next time, peace…

Learning Experiences

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.

Amen! Until next time, peace.

Spirit and the Serpent

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 voice and 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…

Jesus the Biochemist, Pt. 1

Preston Harold sees Jesus’ life as a parable of two scientific concepts: biochemistry and light. We will look at how Jesus’ story reveals the scientific theories of light later in the The Shining Stranger but for now we will explore how His story uncovers biochemistry.

As symbol of primordial life, giving voice to that which all things were made, Jesus’ strange words appear to enfold what is today called biochemical information – and from this point of view, the whole story of the Son of man as Jesus depicted it may be seen as a parable revealing the life of the cell. To reveal life’s deepest secrets is incumbent upon truth bearer:

“That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.” –Matt 13:35

In other words, Jesus’ parables run DEEP, going much further than what we may have even imagined or been able to understand of them up to this point. Many excellent and enlightening volumes have been written on Jesus’ parables, but none have ever gone, or even considered going, down to the microscopic levels of biological life. But why not? As Harold says, truth resides at ALL levels of our lived experience. Why then leave out biochemistry or any of the sciences for that matter?

The psychic operation between Father, Son, and the world of man as Jesus described and depicted it parallels the biochemists’ description of DNA and messenger-RNA operating in a cell. The biochemical operation may reflect the psychic operation and vice versa… One may see the cell’s DNA as Father, and the cell’s messenger-RNA as Son of man, which has partaken of the “life” of the Father, DNA, and is sent into the world of the cytoplasm to reveal the Father’s, or DNA’s, message.

Very good. Now Harold will tell us how the world of the cytoplasm mirrors the subconscious, ego-group, and superego:

This world is a complex system containing thousands of small bodies of various sizes, shapes, and functions; these bodies are called Mitochondria and are the “powerhouses” of the cell; they may be compared to the ego-group, “Israel.” But these ‘bodies” are not the ones messenger-RNA must impress with the Father’s, DNA’s, doctrine if the cell is to have life or the know-how to produce the substance it must have. In the cell, there are smaller “particulates” containing RNA; these are called Microsomes and they are the protein factories; they may be likened to the subconscious. In addition, there are tiny particles densely distributed on the network of membranes associated with the microsomal fraction in the cell; they are known as Ribosomes and may be likened to the superego or the disciples because they contain just about all of the RNA, which may be likened to “truth.”But the ribosomal-RNA does not carry the genetic code; ribosomal-RNA is something like a “key-blank” which can be ground to fit any lock. Upon this “key-blank” the messenger-RNA, sometimes called template-RNA, impress DNA’s message, giving ribosomal-RNA the “keys,” the secrets, of the “kingdom within,” the nucleus, seat of DNA, Father.

We will continue with this line of thought in our next post, Until then, peace.

Two Sides of the Coin of Authority

Every coin has two sides, yet it remains one. What are the two sides of the “coin of authority?”

Jesus saw that a man who plays the role of absolute authority, or God, a priori, plays the same role as the man who plays Satan, for both roles veil a grasp for power. When accused by the Pharisees of casting out devils by the prince of devils, He does not deny this, but answers, “And if I by Be-el-ze-bub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out?” Then, having spoken of the house divided if Satan casts out Satan, He adds, “But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you.” Jesus says if. He will not admit to playing either the role of the devil or of God, saying on another occasion, “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.”

We as humans cannot condone anyone who makes a claim to Godhood; to absolute authority. Preston Harold continues…

Jesus recognized that both the Satanic and Messianic concepts conceal the will to express absolute power, and that the truth bearer who loses himself in his own revelation, believing himself to be or allowing himself to become deity, poses such threat as the sanity or logic associated with Satan could never pose. He showed in his drama that the man who allows himself to be called the Son of God, God in the flesh, or Messiah, will not be tolerated, that Judaism would not in truth tolerate any man’s fulfillment of prophecies regarding the Christ as these are set forth in the Scriptures. Judaism could not in Jesus’ day, nor can it now, tolerate its own Messianic concept, if actualized, any more than Christianity can tolerate the Pauline elaboration of it.

Yet Jesus revealed that we are all endowed with the very being of God, and that that being never allows us to truly be lost from sight:

Jesus refused to play either the role of God or of the devil. He was divinely human, and so must have been that first “gigantic one” who could not extricate himself from the role of God, intolerable, and thus was murdered only to return again and again, a promise and reminder in man’s mind, as parent truth in Homo sapiens led others to speak the same words, “Ani hu.”

Until next time, peace…

Eternal Gain

“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…

Society’s Pushback

Preston Harold tells us the bottom line concerning our growing into adulthood:

Man will have done with parasitic behavior when he recognizes that the one authority over him is God expressed not as Diety apart, but as the infallible law of full, free possession: what a man possesses in truth is what he holds in perfect understanding and has worked to produce. If anything be handed to him on a platter, he is beholden to the host. Therefore, each must work his way into his own kingdom.

But society puts up barriers to this happening:

Whatever the social system… man is confronted by civilization’s ever widening pattern of failure to meet his real and deepest needs. He suffers a growing awareness of his actual insecurity and senses that he is becoming a faceless creature in servitude to organized human frailty – society becomes his enemy and his compulsion to identify himself as an independent being is strongly reasserted.

But we all live within the framework of a society and we have to come to terms with that fact. How are we able to do this? This will be the focus of our next installment. Until then, peace…

Breaking Bonds

The Shining Stranger sees the essential messages of all humanity’s “beginning” legends as 1) the parent-child relationship as one of mutual adoption, and 2) the parents ultimate duty of casting out the child from the parent’s hosting role into the life that awaits them. Preston Harold says of this casting out:

Because the fetus is a parasite, albeit symbiotic, each child expresses parasitic will. His problem is to have done with it, for it leads to an attempt to possess and feed upon another human being – mentally, emotionally, economically, and long ago, literally.

Parent must break the parasitic bond. The mental, as well as the physical, umbilical cord must be cut. The process begins as the child is weaned and must be complete before he becomes responsible as an adult in the eyes of society, his body sufficiently mature that he may be parent himself. At best, this operation is painful for the parent, but more so for the child…. Life demands this.

Yet today we have a record number of young people between the ages of 18-30 living at home. Modern economic factors are the main contributor. Since the great recession of 2008, many jobs have been lost and those that are available pay on average a good deal less. College graduates are saddled with ridiculous amounts of tuition loan debt. Even those graduates who have found jobs can’t afford to leave the nest. Well-adjusted young adults want to leave the nest. It is psychologically important for both them and the parents that they do so. From the parental perspective, Preston Harold tells us:

The exposure myths symbolize the conscious or unconscious parent-sense that recognizes the need to drive the child out of his infantile paradise – just as God, eternal parent, drives man out when the time has come that he wants to exercise his God-given intelligence and know or experience life.

From the child’s perspective:

The Eden legend says that man’s curiosity cannot be irresponsibly expressed and idly satisfied without his doing evil, that one cannot feed upon truth irresponsibly because truth places responsibility for himself and for his acts upon him, that knowledge of life cannot be acquired within the parasitic state secured by paternalistic bonds.

So will there be a price to pay for this contemporary societal “failure to launch?” One must keep in mind that not all cultures hold hard and fast to this rule of leaving the nest, but it certainly dominates Western culture. That being said, we will explore more of what it means to enter the world of adulthood in our next entry. Until then, peace…