From God to God

Any metaphor a writer uses for the One runs the risk of the reader reducing the One to the object of the comparison.

If I say the One is lawless, you may immediately see a Western movie black-hat gunslinger.

How useful is that to the “knower” of the unknowable? It might trigger a realization if we’re lucky. But it’ll be hit and miss.

It isn’t the same as waiting at the bus stop for the bus, to use a metaphor.

I say the One is lawless because no law can bind the Maker of the law.

And Sri Ramakrishna reminds us: “He who has made the law can also change it.” (1) That is, the Father is above the law.  Although he is its Source, she creates, preserves, and transforms it. (2) The Father is untouched by it.

That’s why she’s “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.” He’s the wilderness in which her voice – Aum/Amen – reverberates, calling all creation into being through patterned movement and sound. (3) He’s wild and lawless – in a manner of speaking.

We tend to project our dualistic ideas onto the Father. Says Sri Ramakrishna:

“The world consists of the illusory duality of knowledge and ignorance. It contains knowledge and devotion, and also attachment to [lust and greed]; righteousness and unrighteousness; good and evil. But Brahman [Father God] is unattached to these.

“Good and evil apply to the jiva, the individual soul, as do righteousness and unrighteousness, but Brahman is not at all affected by them.” (4)

If one knew the love that exists on the higher planes, how it could be that Brahman ignores duality would be instantly seen.

Something much greater – something always-already universal and unconditional – has taken away all memory of separation and division.

Meanwhile we persist in trying to fit the One into the hopelessly-confining aspects of our Third-Dimensional mental world. However educational it may be generally, for the aspiring knower of God, who’s drilling down through the layers of illusion, it seldom seems to work.

***

For the aspiring knower of God, and I’m speculating, it’s as St. John of the Cross says: We have to approach without foothold, without benefit of the familiar.

Without a foothold you must seek Him out – no face nor form,
alone – tasting there something I dont know
that one may come on randomly. (5)

Even then we only come upon God randomly. God remains forever unfamiliar even as God is the most familiar.

In seeking God out, we’re saying that we want to see and know and accept God on God’s own terms.  The two operations – reduction and “knowledge” – are different.

One is “like this” and the other is “as is.” The one involves actively finding a comparison. The other involves passively emptying and stilling the mind.

In the course of it, we abandon, not our possessions, but our attachment to them. Whatever “possesses” us besides God we must let go of internally for now.

God, we’re told, is a jealous lover. We must love God with all our hearts, all our minds, all our souls.

It has to be complete, I’d imagine, to move Heaven and Earth. It has to be total for there to be a transition from existence with individuation to … existence.

But again, I speculate. Thank you for allowing it.

Footnotes

(1) Sri Ramakrishna in Swami Nikhilananda, trans., The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1978; c1942, 817.

(2) We do not want anything capitalized. (Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, Aug. 12, 2016.)  I treat “the One” as a proper name.

Steve: I didn’t know if I was being too familiar.

AAM: You know what? We want you to be familiar. (Ibid., Jan. 3, 2017.)

(3) Akar – creation, rajas; Ukar – preservation, sattwa; Makar – transformation, thamas.

(4) Paramahansa Ramakrishna in Swami Nikhilananda, trans., The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1978; c1942, 152.

(5) St. John of the Cross in Willis Barnstone, trans., The Poems of Saint John of the Cross. New York: New Directions, 1972; c1968, 87.