Everyone is getting their last-minute Christmas shopping done and my thoughts are turning to a restful time off. I hope to take a few days off after Christmas.
My heart and mind are turning towards spiritual topics at this time of year so I plan to spend the next short while among spiritual texts.
It’s very hard for us to realize that we are, at base, simply consciousness. Jesus said the other day through Fran Zepeda: “It is time to stretch yourselves and delve into your Soul even more than usual. … Let no one tell you that you are not delving very, very deeply into your Soul.” (1)
Ascension is indeed a deep delving into the soul.
But how does one delve into a soul that is pure lovelight, pure consciousness? What else would one use other than consciousness itself?
Later I’ll look more deeply at the awareness path whose proper and ultimate subject is consciousness itself. But here I’d like to look at consciousness itself.
If we keep in mind that God is consciousness, then we can appreciate the statement that only God can know God.
Ibn Arabi: “Only God sees God.” (2)
Sri Ramakrishna: “Only grandeur appreciates grandeur: and God realizes God.” (3)
Franklin Merrell-Wolff: “This space I produce that My Glory shall be revealed; yet I alone Realize that Revelation.” (4)
Only consciousness can realize consciousness. When all its illusory creations are gone, what’s left is the pure matrix of consciousness itself.
Consciousness is irreducible and omnipresent. As Krishnamurti reminds us, “consciousness is not of one particular level; it is the totality of our being.” (5)
God, the Upanishads say, “partakes of every phase of existence. He wakes with the waking man, dreams with the dreamer, and sleeps the deep sleep of the dreamless sleeper; but he transcends the three states to become himself. His true nature is pure consciousness.” (6) When Jesus said, “I and my Father are one,” (7) that Father he’s one with is consciousness.
When humans enter the picture, Paul Ferrini tells us, we go through three stages in knowing ourselves as consciousness:
“The first stage is Subconscious Knowledge. Driven by instinct and emotions, this is the stare of ancient man, or man as animal.
“The second stage is Conscious Knowledge. It is characterized by the quest for information, which builds the intellect but ultimately comes up spiritually empty. This is the state of modern man, or man as thinker.
“The third stage is Super-Conscious Knowledge. It is the state of total surrender of all intellectual solutions, all need to control or plan. It is characterized by conscious unknowing. It is the state of the divine person, or co-creator. You are living at a time when stage two is coming to closure and stage three is being born.” (8)
He reminds us that a new way of being is called for if we want superconscious knowledge.
“The entrance into stage three calls for a different way of living individually and collectively. It calls for a repudiation of the controlling mind. It calls for a thorough investigation of that mind, the fears on which it is based, and the utter futility of its creations.” (9)
Well, certainly the cleansing of root vasanas or core issues that we’ve been doing for some years now, as far as I can see, equates to a thorough investigation of the mind and the fears on which it is based.
Eradicating our vasanas is often called purifying the mind by the awakened ones. The Upanishads remind us that “by the purified mind alone is the indivisible Brahman [God] to be attained.” (10)
The Buddha reminds us that purification is a path followed by all the great teachers: “Not to commit any sin, to do good, and to purify one’s mind – that is the teaching of all the Awakened.” (11)
At the very deepest levels of the subconscious mind, I think we really do still believe that God is a person. I think that we’re conditioned to believe we’ll meet someone, objective to ourselves, when we reach enlightenment.
Apparently, we don’t. Enlightenment isn’t an objective event at all. Rather, the universal Subject lets everything else go until It Itself is revealed as alone existing. We will be, as Merrell-Wolff said, “consciousness without an object.” (12)
If after a small taste of bliss we wander after it ever more, can we imagine how we’d feel after an experience of enlightenment – which is just to say, knowledge of who we are; i.e., consciousness?
Apparently the experience is unsurpassable. Krishna hints at what that would be like when he says that “the reward of all action is to found in enlightenment.” (13) St. John of the Cross gives us a taste of it when he tells is that “such is the sweetness of deep delight of these touches of God that one of them is more than recompense for all the sufferings of this life, however great their number.” (14)
Let’s listen to Walt Whitman, old and sick, yet, on bended knee, thanking God for his one experience of Light:
“Thou O God my life has lighted,
With ray of light, steady, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee,
Light rare untellable, lighting the very light,
Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages;
For that, O God, be it my latest word, here on my knees,
Old, poor, and paralyzed, I thank Thee.” (15)
Whitman demonstrates, as Yogananda puts it, that “to know God is not the negation of all desires, but instead their complete fulfilment.” (16) “You will find that nothing is more worthwhile, more pleasant or attractive than the all-beautiful, all-satisfying, all-thirst quenching, ever-new, joyous God.” (17)
The journey from God, as a spark of divinity, through many dimensions and domains of being ends by our returning to the same place, but with superconsciousness of ourselves, of our magnificence, and of the magnificence of our Source.
Meanwhile, like the endless carousel that life is, Mother/Father God is busy creating more divine sparks to travel on the wheel of birth and rebirth from suffering to bliss, from darkness to light, and from death to immortality. That road leads out of the Third and Fourth Dimensions to the Fifth and a leaving of the wheel of karma.
Of the next phase of the journey, the Master Hilarion declared:
“When after ages of struggle and many victories the final battle is won, the final secret demanded, then you are prepared for a further path. When the final secret of this great lesson is told, in it is opened the mystery of the new way — a path which leads out of all human experience, and which is utterly beyond human perception or imagination.” (18)
Footnotes
(1) “Yeshua: “Live in Your Heart of Desires”,” channeled by Fran Zepeda, December 19, 2015, at httpss://franheal.wordpress.com/2015/12/21/yeshua-live-in-your-heart-of-desires-channeled-by-fran-zepeda-december-19-2015/
(2) Muhyideen Ibn Arabi, Kernel of the Kernel. trans. Ismail Hakki Bursevi. Sherborne: Beshara, n.d., 48.
(3) Paramahansa Ramakrishna in Anon., Life of Sri Ramakrishna. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1977; c1924, 47.
(4) Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Pathways Through to Space. A Personal Record of Transformation in Consciousness. New York: Julian Press, 1973, 18.
(5) Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living. Second Series. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1967; c1958, 166.
(6) Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester, trans., The Upanishads. Breath of the Eternal. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1957; c1948, 60. [Hereafter UPAN.]
(7) Jesus in John 10:30.
(8) Paul Ferrini, Silence of the Heart. South Deerfield, MA: Heartways Press, 1996, 23-4.
(9) Ibid, 14.
(10) UPAN, 21.
(11) Buddha in Edwin A. Burtt, ed., The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha. New York and Toronto: New American Library, 1955, 61.
(12) Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Philosophy of Consciousness without an Object. Reflections on the Nature of Transcendental Consciousness. New York: Julian Press, 1973.
(13) Sri Krishna in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, trans., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c1944 54.
(14) St. John of the Cross in Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness. A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. New York: Dutton, 1969; c1901, 149. [Hereafter CC.]
(15) Walt Whitman, in old age, in CC, 233.
(16) Paramahansa Yogananda, The Second Coming of Christ. Dallas: Amrita Foundation, 1979, I, 16.
(17) Ibid., 17.
(18) Master Hilarion, channelling through Mabel Collins, channel. Light on the Path and an Essay on Karma. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1974 , 11-2.