Space: The Final Frontier

The concept presented in our last installment, five “intervals” needed to completely secure or “house” one of them, and three “intervals” moving against two “intervals” as two “intervals” react against three “intervals” to accomplish this, is presented in Jesus’ equation of One. He says:

…five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three.

Preston Harold says:

To insure that these words be recognized as a mathematical formula, Jesus gives an explicit division of the household. He states it as: father against son, mother versus daughter, mother-in-law versus daughter-in-law. Only if the mother plays a dual role—that is, mother is also mother-in-law – can these six “factors” be reduced to five forces, the number of forces “at issue” in one’s household as given in the equation. And only if every family were four in number with one son married, and one daughter unmarried, could the words apply to life. Jesus spoke symbolically or poetically, but He spoke as a mathematician…

Jesus states the field formula so explicitly that His words bespeak a still “finer division” underlying the matrix. That is, he describes the forces at issue as: father versus son, and son versus father; mother versus daughter, and daughter versus mother; mother-in-law versus daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law versus mother-in-law. His words give rise to twelve signs, eight negative, four positive, thereby “elaborating” the ratio of negative to positive force, presenting the concept that a still finer division of forces underlies the “field” – a force that involves “doubly stated double negatives” giving rise to a negative effect which is of positive value in life, an effect that sustains the division of the manifestly positive factors and/or measurable dimensions of one thing.

Harold goes on to explain how both negative and positive polarities are necessary for the manifestation of life:

This negative effect that is of value in life, but can be expressed by “nothing positive,” may be described only as Lao-tzu describes Tao:

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;

But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the wheel depends…

Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the utility of what is not.

This, Tao—Holy Ghost, zero, nothing explicable—has endless descriptions which yet cannot describe the nature of it:

There is something formless yet complete

That existed before heaven and earth.

How still! How empty!

Dependent on nothing, unchanging,

All pervading, unfailing.

Is it not space? Only by paradoxical exclamation points can the fullness of it in the universe be implied, so that “Tao never does; Yet through it all things are done.” Space may be seen as pre-existent unity and multiplicity at once, as continuous creation of positive value by means of the eternal presence of “nothing manifest” in which one and all have their being.

Until next time, peace.

Reversing the Rules

Preston Harold shows us how empathy aligns with religious thought. He says:

The effect of empathy and its meaning to life may be likened to Tao: Tao is obscured when you fix your eye on little segments of existence only…” but when Tao is grasped universally, “Without law or compulsion men [will] dwell in harmony.” In individual terms, empathy is realizing on one’s own being the Golden Rule. Empathy is Jesus’ new commandment as an act in one’s own soul – love one another, love the Lord your God with your whole mind, heart, and soul, and your neighbor as yourself. Only through empathy is it possible to step into another’s shoes without displacing him or foisting oneself upon him or losing one’s own precious identity; empathy not only makes this possible, it makes it mandatory.

Mandatory?! Maybe that’s why Jesus couches empathy’s impetus as a commandment. It seems ridiculous to me to make loving someone a commandment that must be fulfilled, but through genuine non-judgmental empathy a slight crack in the door may open that invites me to walk through.

When empathy exists, one experiences in his own being what is happening to another and understands that another suffers whatever is happening to oneself. Empathy is direct, involuntary. It cannot be vicariously expressed because it is borne from out the boundless deeps of a man and, to borrow words from Alfred Lord Tennyson, rises, “too full for sound or foam, but such a tide as moving seems asleep,” and with certainty “turns again home” whatever one does or witnesses.

And here Harold will explain how empathy is born out of the interplay between good and evil:

Because empathy is begotten only of the wholeness of experiencing good and evil involved in any decision, situation, or act, it exerts an incomprehensible power – which is to say, unconsciously it is expressed and it cannot be called into action. Because it is an unconsciously made automatic response, through it man gains freedom from having to make a choice between what appears to be good and what appears to be evil, for his response is both unconsciously tempered and in accord with the reality of the situation. Huxley says: “The fullest freedom is the expression of an inner compulsion of our being, of a choice, which we have come to feel as inevitably necessary…In general, once we manage to ‘see things steadily and see them whole,’ the choice is made for us.”

And with this one can understand Jesus’ breaking of the religious “rules” in order to meet people where they are, with their immediate hopes and needs. Empathy can be summed up in one phrase of Jesus that echoes the Tao quote above and bears along with it huge implications.  Jesus grasped the Tao and stated: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

Until next time, peace.