readoldthings

Let's close out Matthew Chapter 11 today, with verses 25-30:

25 At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.

26 Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight.

27 All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.

28 Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.

30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Yuan Shen

Yesterday, we talked a bit bout the nature of egregores, the collective minds in which all human beings participate during our sojourn here on Earth. Egregores, as we explained, are natural and unavoidable, but sometimes grow toxic. Even when they are not toxic, however, egregores are not human beings.

Every egregore includes patterns of thought, communication, emotion, interaction, and behavior. If you carefully watch people around you, you will find you see the same types of interactions over and over again. One person receives Great News, and everyone knows what to say to them. Another gets into a fight with her boyfriend, and it looks like every other fight between every other couple you've ever seen. One person overcomes adversity, and everyone knows just how to think and feel about it; another relapses into addictive behavior, with all the usual consequences. Two coworkers fall in love, and the affair plays out with the inevitability of a train wreck; two estranged siblings have to spend a family holiday together, and

It's not that the people in your life are faking it. Their emotions, their thoughts, and their actions are real, and they mean them. It's just that they aren't really their emotions, their thoughts, their actions. They are scripted patterns, which are themselves the components of a larger egregore-- that of a human culture.

Again, there's nothing wrong with this as such. As human beings, we can't live without culture. We are born more or less helpless into a world which is set up to kill us. The first few years especially, but really the entire first half of our lives, are spent learning the cultural patterns and scripted behaviors which allow us to live on the Earth and have a reasonable chance of not dying.

But the work of spiritual practice-- and really, the work of the second half of every human life-- is to un-learn all of these scripts and uncover the real person underneath. In this way our thoughts, our actions, and all of our choices become our own. We begin to resemble Divinity, which acts through choice, and not contingency. And we also begin to resemble newborn babes, who have not yet become entangled in the web of human culture.

In Taoist practice, the human nature that is revealed once the mind is disentangled from the web of human culture is called yuan shen, or original spirit. This is who we are before we put on the costumes of our culture, our nation, our time, and even our selves.

Know the Son

Jesus reminds us here that he is the visible image of the Father, who abides eternally in Heaven. Since he brought it up, let's talk about the Holy Trinity. What are the Three Persons of the Trinity, and what is their relationship to one another?

It's important not to misunderstand this, and given some of the sources that we are using here in interpreting these texts, it is easy to do so. In later Platonist thought, every God has three aspects, sometimes called the essence, power, and energy. The energy of the God is its activity, its power is the sphere in which it is active, and its essence is its absolute being. Now, the essence of a God is not knowable, but we knowGods through their power and their energy.

It is possible to interpret the Christian Trinity this way, so that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are different aspects of a single God. In Catholic terms, however, this is incorrect. Divinity is the property that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost each shares; each of them is God in the same way that you and I are both human beings, and so share in the quality "human." Now, it is the nature of "human" that we are each separate individuals, but the nature of divinity is Oneness itself. If three persons share divinity, they are One, eternally united, all-powerful, all-knowing, and ever-present.

Saint Patrick famously explained the relationship between the three persons of the Trinity by way of the shamrock.

How many leaves are there on the shamrock? Three. But how many shamrocks are there? Just one. In the same way, the Holy Trinity are three persons, and only one God. Each person is a person, just as each leaf of the shamrock is a leaf; the shamrock really has three leaves, and not one leaf viewed from three perspectives, or one leaf doing three different things.

In his commentary on Plato's Timaeus, Proclus tells us the following, about the nature of the gods:

Should we wish to examine what makes a god an intelligible god, or an intellective or supercelestial or encosmic one, we would find it is nothing other than the Good. For what makes each body ensouled other than... Soul? What makes the intellective souls such if not the intellect in them, which is an irradiation of Intellect as a whole? And what in that case is it that gives divinity to Intellect and intelligible being other than participation in the First and the radiation from it?

In other words: Souls are souls by the action of Soul Itself. Intellects (nous) are similarly formed by the action of Intellect Itself. And gods? Gods are gods because of their union with and in the Good. The Good, remember, is the same as the One; in Christianity as well as Platonism we refer to it as God. And so Gods have God in the same way that human beings have souls!

From this perspective, it becomes clear that, on Platonic terms, Christians worship not one God but three. I am more than aware of how controversial that statement is, which is why I qualified it. On Christian terms, the One is divinity itself, and the gods are the persons of the Trinity. This is often another source of confusion, as late Platonists used the term "personae" to refer to the aspects of a single divinity, as I described above-- but in Christian theology, seeing the persons of the Trinity as different aspects or activities of a single individual is a heresy known as modalism.

My Burden is Light

Jesus's final words in this chapter remind us that spiritual practice should-- ultimately-- make our lives better, not worse. I once read a blog by a Catholic traditionalist who had spent years as a New Ager. One of the things he mentioned was that, since committing himself to Traditional Catholicism, he had become more neurotic.

Now, the spiritual life is not easy and not for the faint of heart; "the way is narrow." At the same time, its ultimate fruit should be lightness of spirit and an easier way in the world-- "my burden is light." If you find that, after decades practicing a particular religion, you've become crazier, it would be better to find another one.

I tried to do some work at the Astrology Blog yesterday, but Dreamwidth apparently didn't like it, and so every attempted post came out mangled in some way. So let's return our attention to The Gospel of Matthew, and deal with a passage I've been trying to avoid. Matthew 11:11-15 reads:

11 Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

12 And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.

13 For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John.

14 And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.

15 He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

The Least In the Kingdom of Heaven

The first, and most obvious question is: Why is John the least in the Kingdom of Heaven?

The answer seems to be provided by the rest of the sentence. "Among those born of women" there is no one greater than John. Among the immortal spirits created by God-- that is to say, the Bodiless Powers or Angels-- all are greater...

...At least for the time being. After he quits his earthly form, John will ascend to quite an exalted place in the Heavens, as demonstrated by his invocation in the Confiteor, or the traditional Confession, of the Tridentine Rite:

I confess to Almighty God, to Blessed Mary, ever Virgin, to Blessed Michael the Archangel, to Blessed John the Baptist, to the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and to all the Saints, that I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word and deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.

To sojourn upon the material Earth is always to be less than those who have achieved the Higher Life, beyond the body. But by our deeds on Earth we can rise very far indeed. Note that John is named right after St. Michael the Archangel, Prince of the Heavenly Host himself!

This Is Elias

In the fourteenth verse, Jesus explicitly calls John Elias-- that is, Elijah. It's hard to misread this, and yet Christians of every denomination have done their best to do so over the course of two millennia. Most of the commentaries that I've found on it tell us that what Jesus means is that John is "like" Elijah. I prefer to take the Man at his word; John is Elijah, returned.

Reincarnation

That the doctrine of the transmigration of the souls was taught by many in the early church is demonstrated by the fact that so many church fathers and later commenters felt the need to condemn it. Certainly it's taught in many other traditions as well. Plato discusses it explicitly in many of his dialogs, including Meno, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Republic and Timaeus, and later Platonists discussed it regularly. (For example, Sallust offers the very interesting suggestion that atheism may be a punishment for impiety in a prior lifetime. We all know people who cannot accept the existence of God or spirits, no matter how clearly the evidence is presented to them. Sallust's explanation accounts for that phenomenon nicely, as we're emerging from an era of grave impiety.) It's a central theme in Buddhist and Hindu texts, and discussed in Taoist writings as well. It's also found in certain esoteric and heretical Jewish and Muslim sects, and in tribal religions the world over. In more recent times Professor Ian Stevenson and his successors have compiled quite robust evidence for its reality. I've read that 51% of the world's population believes in reincarnation, including 25% of American Christians.

It's my view that reincarnation completes the Christian religion-- indeed, that it saves it. Where it fits into the traditional afterlife scheme is fairly straightforward.

In Catholic tradition, the possible afterlives are these:

1. Heaven -- Needs no comment
2. Purgatory -- A place in which sinners are purified before entrance into Heaven
3. Limbo -- A middle world, whose inhabitants experience every possible natural joy while being deprived of the supreme and supernatural joy that is only possible in the presence of God
4. Hell -- Also needs no comment

In the Phaedo, Plato gives us the following possibilities:

1. Heaven -- Beyond the physical world; here the gods dwell truly in their temples. The jewels that one finds so rarely upon the earth are ordinary stones in the heavenly realm.
2. The Underworld -- A pleasant place, in which the souls of those who have done well in life are rewarded
3. Tartaros, Possibility 1 -- A place of torment and punishment for the wicked, especially murderers. However, the souls in this part of Tartaros can be freed from punishment once their victims forgive them
4. Tartaros, Possibility 2 -- For those who commit grave impieties or mass murder. This part of Tartaros is the habitation of demonic beings; you get here by becoming like them; there is no return.

Every person in categories 2 and 3 will return to life in the material world in an appropriate form. That isn't always human-- the violent will return in the form of hawks or wolves, the promiscuous as rabbits, and so on.

It's worth noting that Plato gives different accounts of reincarnation in his other dialogs; we should look at the commonalities to extract a common principle, rather than seeing one or the other as a literal description of events in the after-death state.

The traditional Christian account is enriched by the possibility of reincarnation, which allows those who have endured suffering in Hell or purgatory or the liminal state of Limbo to return and try again-- at least sometimes. Jesus tells us later in the Gospel of Matthew that for those who blaspheme the Holy Spirit, no forgiveness is possible; this agrees with Plato's account of impiety. It seems that there are degrees of impiety, as there are of murder-- some may be forgiven, as Jesus tells us. What of the others? These are, I think, those who have set their will totally and inexorably against the Divine; their proper place in the universe is the realm of the demons. No, it isn't pleasant to think about.

Evolutionary Reincarnation

As a final note, I want to briefly mention the doctrine, popular in Occult circles, of evolutionary reincarnation. This holds that every being without exception comes into incarnation on the material plane as a stone or material substance. By slow degrees, the stone takes on greater capacities on the etheric plane, becoming a crystal-- a substance capable of manifesting effects at the energetic level, not just the material level. The crystal moves on to become a plant: A being with a fully developed material body and a fully developed energetic body, but no life at the astral level. After long ages, the plant takes on life as a tree, which is a plant that has begun to awaken to life on the Astral Plane. The tree dies, and in time the tree is reborn as an animal: a being with fully developed material, etheric, and astral bodies. Again, long ages pass, and the animal souls proceeds through varying levels of complexity, dwelling for a time (perhaps) as an insect, and then a fish or reptile, before finally ascending to the higher life of a mammal or intelligent bird. At last the day comes when the animal graduates to life as a human being-- an animal which has begun to awaken to the life of the Noetic Plane of being. Again, many lifetimes pass. At last the human develops a fully-functional noetic body, and inarnates as a spirit like an angel.

I have to tell you, I don't personally believe this doctrine, and I don't like it very much.

I'm not willing to outright reject it, because there is certainly some truth here. But I have found that attempting to put it into practice by living it as a truth turns the world very dull. I discovered this a few years ago. I had just been reading something on this subject, and I went into the woods to harvest herbs. I came upon a patch of mugwort, and sat beside it, as I sometimes do, to get to know it. I found that if I tried to see it through this point of view, it stopped being a mugwort, and became just a kind of stunted tree. It was growing (as mugworts do) in the shade of a large sycamore tree. And now the sycamore tree was nothing but a young animal, somehow less than a kitten, or a baby rat. And the very gods themselves were nothing but old men and women, mere human beings. I find that idea, frankly, blasphemous.

Now, I don't deny that something like evolutionary reincarnation actually is true. For whatever it's worth, I feel the same about the theory of biological evolution-- it's clearly untrue, but something like it is probably true. But I don't believe that the angels were once human beings; I think that they were always angels. I do believe that we, as human beings, are working our way back to a heavenly home from which we descended into matter. But how far did we descend? I don't know, but I don't believe that I was ever a plant. Moreover, I don't believe that a plant will ever become a human being, and-- this is critical-- if it did, I don't think that this would be any achievement, much less a reward!

One of our cats died recently. He was a fine old cat, absolutely loyal, kind to the children. Years ago, when I was going through one of the hardest times of my life, he made sure to sleep next to my head on my pillow every night. The night before he died, he made sure to sleep next to me again. He hadn't done it in years, because our female cat had claimed that spot and the two of them never got along. But he came back on his last night. He also made sure to go outside, even though it was cold, and he demanded a cooked fish for his dinner, which I allowed. And then he died. To be reborn as a human being would be, in my view, a very poor reward for such a fine creature! Let him rather become to living cats as saints are to living men.

Spiritual reading is an important part of Lenten practice, so let's resume our journey through the Gospel of Matthew. When we left off, Jesus had given the major body of his teaching that fills the 5th through the 10th chapters of the Gospel. Matthew 11 begins thusly:

1 And it came to pass, when Jesus had made an end of commanding his twelve disciples, he departed thence to teach and to preach in their cities.

2 Now when John had heard in the prison the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples,

3 And said unto him, Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?

4 Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see:

5 The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.

6 And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.

7 And as they departed, Jesus began to say unto the multitudes concerning John, What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind?

8 But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? behold, they that wear soft clothing are in kings' houses.

9 But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet.

10 For this is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.

John, Again

In this chapter we see the return of that very strange figure, John the Baptist. If you remember, John made his first appearance in Matthew 3. It's always seemed strange to me that whenever John turns up in the Gospels, he does so with relatively little introduction. Mathew 3 reads:

1 In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea,

2 And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

The Gospel of Mark opens with a discussion of John:

2 As it is written in Isaiah the prophet,

“Behold, I send my messenger before thy face,

who shall prepare thy way;

3 the voice of one crying in the wilderness:

Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight—”

4 John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 And there went out to him all the country of Judea, and all the people of Jerusalem; and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 6 Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, and had a leather girdle around his waist, and ate locusts and wild honey. 7 And he preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. 8 I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

This is a longer discussion than you find in Matthew, but you still get the impression that John could have had a whole book all of his own. Matthew almost seems to assume you already know who John is; it's like reading a Superman comic book and someone references Batman. It's not Batman's story, so he only puts in a brief appearance, but you know that he has a whole series of his own.

There is a link between John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, and Johannine sects revering either or both of the Johns have endured from ancient times down to the present day. Both Saints John are celebrated by freemasons; the Sethian Gnostic school revered Saint John the Evangelist, and attributed one of their most important books to him; a tradition of Johannine or Johannite Christianity has many modern expressions, of which the best known is probably the Apostolic Johannite Church; and the ancient Mandaean sect continues to exist to this day, seeing themselves as the true followers of John the Baptist. What the truth in all these traditions is, I don't claim to know. I think it's clear, though, that both Johns were possessed of Gnosis, the unique experiential knowledge of the Divine.

Signs of a Prophet

Notice what Jesus tells us about John-- he's not a reed shaken by the wind; he does not wear soft clothing like those who live in king's houses. John lived in the desert; he wore a shirt of camel's hair and ate that wild food that was most readily available. The type of John the Baptist in modern times is the mountain man or woodsman, of which the American tradition has been blessed with many examples-- far more so than the wealthy pastor, or bishop.

A Story

Some years ago, I spent 5 weeks in the back country, working for a trail crew. Prior to this my life had reached a low ebb. I'd spent the previous year working as an AmeriCorps volunteer at a small nonprofit in Oregon, a job for which I was uniquely unqualified. Out of desperation, I'd googled "conservation corps pacific northwest" and discovered an organization in Eugene which was looking for members. The experience was miserable-- initially. We were sent to a wilderness area outside of Tucson, Arizona. Because I knew that Arizona was a desert, I packed no coat and only a light sleeping bag. But it turns out that there are mountains in Arizona, and the tops of the mountains are covered in snow, as are mountains everywhere in the northern hemisphere February. While our intended campsite was over the mountaintop and down into the high desert, the first day we failed to reach our camp before nightfall, and had to sleep on the snow. That night was the coldest I have ever been in my entire life, and I spent it shivering in my sleeping bag and wondering how I could possibly get out of this.

But something changed over the course of the weeks that followed. I'd spent the previous several years drunk most of the time and glued to a computer much of the rest; I won't tell you how I spent the remainder of my time, but I'll note that in the AmeriCorps organizations I worked for the gender-balance was skewed heavily in my favor. I was, in other words, a creature driven entirely by passion and vice. Now I find myself sleeping on the ground on a mountainside, working 9-10 hours a day digging trails. I had no access to bars or booze or even coffee, or to any computer or even a cell phone. (This took place during those last glorious years before smartphones became ubiquitous; my cell phone's battery died on the first day and I had no opportunity to charge it for a month and a half.)

And in that time, I found that I was slowly stitching myself back together. I reconnected to my body, which I'd become totally detached from during the preceding years. And I reconnected to my spirituality, which had always been nature-oriented-- I grew up in a rural area and spent my childhood roaming the woods, nor did I ever believe the absurdity that the Sun, the sky, the winds and the waters were dead and lifeless. Finally, at the end of 5 weeks, I spent 24 hours alone in the wilderness with just a small bag of food, a book of matches, a pen and a notebook.

The place I found to make my camp was in a dried creek bed in a canyon between two mountains. The first thing I did was to draw a circle in the sand and pray to the spirits of the four directions, explaining that my purpose was to learn from the place and to do no harm, and asking permission to be there. (I had yet made no formal study of magic or spirituality of any kind, but it seemed like a good idea.) Then I felt the need to climb the mountain. I started running up, and as the way became steeper I fell onto all fours, climbing. As I climbed I began to speak, not to anyone else yet, but to myself-- I talked to my body, and I gave thanks to my legs for carrying me up the mountain, my heart for beating, my lungs for breathing. Then I found myself sitting on a walk waving a reed about, shouting a wild, rambling sermon to the trees and the rocks and the mountain goats. Then I got up and ran back down the side of the mountain, paying no heed whatever to where I was going but arriving nevertheless exactly back at my camp.

I grabbed my pen and my notebook, and wrote down everything I had thought and said and all the words of my mountainside sermon. The mountain said, "Write down these words on the book of your heart," and I wanted to make sure I remembered it all. What did I write? Why, I won't tell you, of course; the sermon was for me and the message was for me, as I was, at that time. I am nothing resembling a prophet and it wouldn't help you anything. I will tell you, though, that my life changed after that, dramatically in every way. Where I'd been pale and hunched and depressed, now I was straight and tall and fearless. And, far more importantly, he more important thing was that I had stitched my soul back together-- or begun to. After that I didn't go about afraid anymore, and everything interesting that has ever happened in my life happened after then.

But why do I tell you about all this?

For this reason--

The Gnosis of John the Baptist is still available to everyone who is willing to go into the wilderness, wear a camel hair shirt and eat locusts and honey and cry out "Make straight the way of the Lord!"

Try it some time.

Lent and the Wilderness Within

But what if you don't have a spare 4 days to go wandering about the desert? Well, neither do I, because I have a wife two kids a job and a mortgage and all the things that I didn't have when I was 25. But we aren't meant to go to the wilderness to stay there, but to learn its lessons and bring them back with us. But more than that-- Consider that this is what Lent is for. If you can't go to the wilderness, you can bring the wilderness to you. You do this by consciously disconnecting from the distractions of society and technology and reconnecting to the world as it was created by God. That includes the little world of your own body and soul.

Just remember that when we encounter John in this chapter, he is imprisoned; the Herods of this world don't like anything they can't control.

And remember, too, that John is the forerunner: the messenger, meant to prepare the way, not the Way itself.