Monday, March 3, 2014

What Enlightenment Feels Like



The Sefirot

My dear friend Peter has taught me that what I call the Christ energy, the Power of God’s divine Love, can be called the sefirot in the Jewish traditions of Kabbalah.  For reasons beyond me (which I usually describe to my wife as “the Spirit moved me”) I looked up sefirot on the Internet yesterday.  What I found supports my recent assertions that I must be insane because perspectives and interrelations came flooding into my head as I read about the sefirot, and it became impossible for me to absorb what I was actually reading, that information being constantly overwritten in my consciousness through Da’ath, guided by Ima (Mother) whom I usually refer to as Sophia the Holy Spirit, the female aspect of God.

I read that in the Kabbalah, Da’ath is defined as being a kind of non-existence, a nothingness.  “Da’ath is the crown of the Ruach, the Intellect.”  “Da’ath has a dual aspect; on the one hand it is our knowledge of the world of appearance, the body of facts which constitute our beliefs and prop up the illusion of identity and ego and separateness.  On the other hand it is revelation, objective knowledge, what is often referred to as gnosis.”

Even as I read these words they were being redefined in my mind, which is really an odd thing to try to describe.  What the Spirit ended up showing me was that those seeking Da’ath were going to have a difficult time finding it or experiencing it, for in order to touch upon the Intellect – the DIVINE Intellect – one must first discard illusions, the greatest of which is the individual ego, surrender one’s free will, which means surrendering one’s earthly understanding of all things, and stepping into the non-(ego)existence, the nothingness (in a physical sense) of enlightenment (being able to see with God’s eyes). 

It is only this complete surrender which can lead one to True revelation. 

The Catch-22 quality of this process is that anyone who tries, by their own actions, to ATTAIN enlightenment and gnosis is going to be impeded in their desire of attaining True enlightenment because the very act of CONSCIOUSLY SEEKING reinforces the illusional strength of the ego, and is contrary to complete surrender to the Will and Presence of God.

Enlightenment is a gift stumbled upon through surrender, and cannot be tracked down or achieved through intention or action. 

It’s sort of like the Harry Potter conundrum of no one who seeks the philosopher’s stone in order to USE it being able to find it. 

Actions are the opposite of surrender.

I tried to read about the ten spheres and what they supposedly represent, but I kept getting distracted by other relationships appearing in my head.  I was reading about how there were three groups of three and what they meant, but the “mentoring” in my head showed me other relationships, not mentioned in the essays.  Instead of seeing a group of ten, I kept seeing two groups of five, one pyramid formation ascending and one descending, and then they overlapped and turned from two three-dimensional objects (two four-sided pyramids) into two two-dimensional objects (pyramids seen from the side) – the Star of David. 

I searched the Internet to see if this interconnected relationship of the Star of David and the Kabbalah Tree of Life was generally known and found nothing of value.

The Star of David and the Tree of Life, at least in my mind now, embody one and the same thing.  They physically represent the process of spiritual separation, descent, evolution, ascension and completion, which we are all engaged in.  In my mind’s eye I could see the four aspects of God (Hod [Splendor], Rahamin [Glory], Yesod [Foundation] and Netzah [Might]) combining and descending to the physical world (Malkut [Kingdom]), to become incarnate and seemingly separate from God.  This is the descending pyramid or triangle.  While incarnate, the soul yearns to grow, learn and reunite with that which is greater than itself (ideally).  It learns to appreciate and embody Binah (Intelligence), Din (Justice), Hesed (Kindness) and Hochmah (Wisdom), ascends and ultimately reunites as a completed consciousness with Kether (The Crown), after many lifetimes (but reincarnation’s a discussion for another time).

I respect what other people have learned about the sefirot and I’m not suggesting that my interpretations or delusions are any more important than anyone else’s.  I embrace the fact that God can create structures that represent a myriad of different and related Truths at the same time – wheels within wheels. 

I share this merely to suggest that a complete surrendering to God might be a wonderful choice, and lead to understanding things in ways not previously suspected (which is a thinly-veiled plea to increase the crazy club which seems to have few card-carrying members beyond my wife and myself).

And now that I’ve been faithful and typed this all up, perhaps the Spirit will allow me to dump this from the forefront of my mind so I can get back to the less meaningful stuff my physical world employer would like me to attend to in order to get paid.

Just a thought – and not necessarily my own.
       

Why There is Dis-ease and Evil in the World?


              These days, it is not at all unusual to overhear “How could God allow this to happen?” or something similar, blurted out at some point during a conversation with a group of people.  When the Twin Towers fell before our eyes it was a common utterance.  It wouldn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that it was uttered with tears and desperation in the Nazi prison camps as they watched the smoke rise from the incinerator chimneys.  It was no doubt on the minds and lips of the prisoners of the Inquisition, and could be reasonably and logically traced back to seconds before Cain succeeded in killing Abel, with only one possible exception coming to mind. 
There is only one clear instance of a person subjected to evil who did not blurt out “How can God allow this to happen?” and that was when Jesus was on the cross, because he knew full well what was happening and why.  Although some might suggest that his statement of “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” might muddy up the clarity of Jesus’ prescience, his utterance was about God withdrawing from him as his soul became the living repository of all of the sin that would ever be created throughout all of time in that instance, but that’s a different topic and a different tale.  Suffice it to say, it was not an utterance concerning the how and the why of his specific situation.  He did not question God’s “how.” 
Jesus, as the only 100% physical manifestation of the Christ energy, was the only soul who ever knew the workings of the physical world from God’s side of the veil, which is exactly why he admonished us in Luke 6:37: “Judge not and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive and ye shall be forgiven.”  We have been commanded never to judge and never to condemn because nothing in God’s universe is really what we believe it to be, and we, in our arrogance and ignorance, command, judge, and pray for many things that are completely contrary to the mercy and Grace of God, and that includes prayers concerning our own life challenges and illnesses.
What I shall now reveal here is written down nowhere in particular, it is wholeheartedly believed by no one outside of Heaven, and it is not specifically illuminated in the Bible, but that doesn’t make it any less the Truth.  Those taught by men shall be outraged by my assertions, but this knowledge comes from the Comforter, as Jesus said it would be in John 14:26:  “But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”
In order to understand why dis-ease and evil exist, one must realize that there are certain common beliefs in the world that are old, deep-seated, incomplete, and inaccurate.  The largest challenge for Christians will be to consider that reincarnation is a fact and not a flight of fancy meant only for other religions.  There is only one major verse in the New Testament that seems to point to only one lifetime, and it is Hebrews 9:27:  “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment”, but this verse doesn’t mean what mankind commonly believes it to mean, which has all been according to God’s plan - until now.  The verse means that every soul that wishes to learn to be like God will begin a spiritual/physical journey that includes death, but they can only sign up for this journey once.  Once they have agreed to this path, they must continue on until the end of their personal journey, or until the Judgment, no matter how long or how many lifetimes it takes. 
Can one learn all of God’s perspectives in one lifetime?  It’s possible, but extremely unlikely (according to the Holy Spirit, only 79 souls have graduated thus far since the beginning of time), which is why God allows test retakes (reincarnation).  How else can one explain how God would deal with the soul of a premature baby who lived only one minute?  The baby certainly never accepted Jesus by name, and so, according to limited and befuddled traditional ministry, it is doomed to hell, which would make sense to no one who has a true connection to God. 
God does not grant one chance to avoid hell and ten thousand ways to find it, but rather ten thousand chances to avoid it, and only one way to be condemned to it – through our own selfishness, which, in its ultimate manifestation, is pure evil. 
And the reason God doesn’t make reincarnation clear? 
It is because even with the tradition that there is only one life set aside to find God, almost every living soul spends more time trying to embrace selfishness over true Christ-like Love, which is why there are so painfully few graduates of incarnation/reincarnation school to date.  If a Christian who believes that they have only one lifetime to serve Christ still ends up doing such a poor job of spreading God’s Love (often spreading more worldly condemnation and worldly judgment and God’s Love), imagine how spiritually under-evolved that same soul would be if they thought that they had nearly infinite retakes!     
            Before I get to the three specific reasons why there is dis-ease and evil in the world, please allow me to suggest a number of other Truths to ponder.
            First, although God has indeed made free will the most powerful force in the universe, a force so strong that the demands of a selfish soul can actually stay God’s hand in the giving of blessings, God also knows us intimately and there are very few instances where we wander off of God’s suggested path for our lives.  Before we are born, we’re informed of the life challenges we will face, and we’re shown a sort of brief movie of the probably life we will lead.  We are given the choice to accept that life, along with its challenges, or to wait for another assignment.  There are billions of souls desiring incarnation and so many accept what they are offered when it is offered.  If you live your life in alignment with the brief movie that you viewed beforehand, then you will experience many instances of déjà vu.  If you decided to use your free will to strike out on your own, then you won’t have instances of déjà vu, but your basic life challenges, if not the specifics of what you were shown, will remain the same.  If God says that you’re going to experience the loss of a loved one, that loss will occur, one way or another.
            Every challenge that you will ever face in life, whether it be in relationships, career, or health, can be classified into three categories, and they are:
1.      Life challenges that everyone is destined to experience.
2.      Balancing past karmic mistakes.
3.      Bringing God’s Love into the darkness.

Life Challenges

If one is so poor that they have to search through garbage bins in order to survive, then they might believe, as they look around them at others who have abundance, that God is indeed a cruel taskmaster, but that is not true.  What we don’t collectively realize is that each person, each unique soul, is at a different place on their journey back to reuniting with God.  We think everyone is the same and should have access to the same opportunities, but that is not what is actually in play, from a spiritual perspective. 
As I said before, we have been told not to judge because we have no idea what is happening, from God’s point of view.  A loving family huddled eight to a room and barely subsisting is much closer, spiritually, to God than a wealthy couple that married for power, possessions, or position, even though superficial wisdom would have us believe that one circumstance is desirable and the other is not.
In Heaven, Love is the coin of the realm, and until we realize that, we cannot progress in our journey back to God.
Each and every soul that incarnates will experience: a life of abundance, and a life of poverty; a life of importance, and a life of insignificance; a life of friendships, and a life of loneliness; a life filled with love, and a life filled with loss; a life filled with physical accomplishments, and a life of physical disability.  There are only two possible reactions to these challenging lives, and they are anger and frustration, eventually replaced by acceptance and faith, or anger and frustration that festers and brings further dis-ease, complicating all of the other problems and concerns of that lifetime. 
No life challenge is passed until one reaches a state of acceptance and faith.  Until that happens, the life challenges will repeat over and over again, through innumerable lifetimes. 
You have no idea, as you read this, just how many lifetimes you’ve lived and where you are on the road back to God. 
A poor man curses God for his lot in life and has to be born again into lack.
A mother loses her children and curses God for his cruelty and has to be born again into a life of loss.
A man is given a fortune, only to be cheated, to lose everything, and to become completely embittered, and he has to be born into another life of injustice.
A life of challenges is a common explanation for the life we lead, but it is not the most common energy that we must deal with each day, for dovetailed into our list of necessary life experiences is our karmic balance, which comes from the transgressions we’ve ignorantly committed against others during our previous life challenges.

Karma Balancing 

The violence and evil in the world is, for the most part, the escalation of our present selves meeting up with our past selves to balance karma.
God does not punish – ever!  However, God does allow us to meet previous versions of ourselves on our road back to Him.
A man lives a lifetime where he enjoyed dominating, hurting, raping, and killing women.  Karmic law indicates that he has committed a grievous sin against another soul because he didn’t value them, their feelings, or even their life, in the least.  This soul flaw cannot be tolerated and must be removed.  This is what the Old Testament reference to “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is really about.  Put out someone’s eye callously and you shall live a lifetime where someone, who is just like the person you used to be, will transgress against you and put your eye out.  The male rapist/killer is destined to incarnate as a weak and vulnerable woman, where s/he will be confronted by a male rapist/killer and be abused.  When her/his soul realizes the terror and the injustice of the attack and says to itself “I would NEVER consider attacking, raping, or killing another person ever again” then the lesson is learned and the karma balancing is over.  If they are a slow and self-centered learner, as most souls are, they will be exposed to this scenario over several lifetimes.  It is by the Grace of God that we are allowed to carry a karmic balance, like a credit card balance, for if He vested upon our heads the full weight of our accumulated karmic debt, we would be immediately and utterly destroyed.
A KKK member hates all blacks and lives a life of aggression against them, either through the violence within his soul towards them, or in carrying out physical acts of violence in the “real” world.  The KKK member has no choice (after a lost soul period, which is a discussion for another time) other than to be reborn as a type of person that he once loathed, and the cycle will continue until the hatred ceases, or until God’s clock proclaims that Judgment Day has come.  Until then, for every white that hates blacks and for every Palestinian that hates Jews there will be a reversal and an accounting, either until they are spiritually healed, or until they are publicly rejected from the spiritual body of God. 
Karma balancing also applies to dis-ease, which is, more often than not, self-inflected.  Harbor secret hates and resentments and your physical body will begin to rot and decay from within – a condition more commonly known as cancer. 
Your soul is a minute piece of God’s omnipotence, and that power misused, even as small as it is, is a sobering thing indeed.  Just as the collective power of sincere prayer can positively affect others, so too can the force of selfish evils turn that power inwards towards self destruction.  Even in this, the Hand of God can frequently be seen, if one takes the time to look.  A man who once bullied and demeaned everyone in his life is stricken with emphysema, and so he dies a long and protracted death, at the mercy of those he previously bullied and demeaned. 
God is in control of the universe and there is a just symmetry to His actions.

Representing God’s Love in the Darkness

Very few souls will ever be asked to live a life specifically for others, assigned to the darkest corners of human existence, but there are those who agree to bring God’s Light and Love even to those considered hopeless.  The only real difference between an angelic soul and a regular soul is how much one would agree to suffer for another, with most souls concentrating only upon the evolution of their own being.  Incarnated angels seldom complete their missions without being tortuously killed, but they are souls honored for their loyalty.  No soul, no matter how evil, will ever be able to claim that they never knew God’s Light and Love as manifested through another person on Earth.  The angels know that these are necessary, but generally undesirable missions.
On a less tortuous scale, there are those who agree to additional lifelong difficulties in order to bring other people together.  A boy is born with diabetes, not because he himself needs that lesson or has unbalanced karma, but rather because his parents are, by nature, self-absorbed, and his condition will make them better people, better parents, and move them closer to God.  Many people have taken on additional challenges, in addition to their own obligations, and these are much like angels-in-training. 

These three reasons are why our world seems to be full of dis-ease and evil.

We are learning to be like God at an excruciatingly slow pace, but each day, more souls are at least pointed in the right direction.