Revised.
This “New Year” brings us one year closer to entering the “New Age,” and understanding the “Ancient Mystery” of life.
This New Year ushers in 2011, one year prior to 2012, in which a great number of us depart from the Third into the Fourth and the Fifth Dimension, and some even higher.
With our departure from the Third and entry into the Fifth Dimension, we leave dualistic and enter into unitive consciousness. And with our entry into unitive consciousness, our understanding of the “Mystery of life” is deepened, broadened, enhanced.
And what is that Mystery? That Mystery is separating the Real from the unreal and “real-izing” It.
There is God and then there are all the creatures, creations, dreams, or thoughts of God. There is the Real and the unreal, the One and the many, the Transcendental and the phenomenal, the Formless and the forms.
Just as “I” get up in the morning and don clothes, so God dreams existence and dons bodies. The One becomes many. The Formless dons form and becomes forms and lives lives.
Of this mystery, Krishna said:
“This entire universe is pervaded by me, in that eternal form of mine which is not manifest to the senses. Although I am not within any creature, all creatures exist within me. I do not mean that they exist within me physically. That is my divine mystery. You must try to understand its nature. My Being sustains all creatures and brings them to birth, but has no physical contact with them.” (1)
God creates and then pervades the entire universe in an eternal form not manifest to the senses. We must transcend our reliance on the senses and “real-ize” that eternal form of God.
By a series of step-down transformations, God comes to reside in the universe. The first step-down transformation is from the formless, transcendental Father to the divine flame in the heart that is the Christ, the Son of God, the Atman, Self, soul, Pearl of great Price, Treasure buried in a field.
Krishna said that God was not actually “within any creature.” Jesus said that the “Father is in me.” (2) The two are not contradictory if one remembers that, in the end, the split between Father and Son, Brahman and Atman, is illusory.
From this first illusory separation proceed other separations or step-down transformations, each typified by a new body – a causal body, mental body, astral body, etheric body, and physical body – all illusory, all like finger puppets on the Hand of God, in different dimensions of the one Reality.
How this is done is one mystery. How they exist together is another mystery. How the Divine Being sustains all creatures and brings them into being without having physical contact with them is another mystery.
But the chief mystery is a third experience, the realization (these are all only metaphorical terms) of the One who creates and brings forms into being; that is, into “life.”
As we enter the New Year of 2011, preparatory to entering the New Age in 2012 (or whenever it will be for us, individually), we encounter anew the Ancient Mystery. We draw on the ancient wisdom, our gathered experience, our senses, our super-senses, our intuition, our awareness and whatever other tools we have at our disposal and attempt again to plumb the Mystery and realize the great lesson of life.
We do so by consulting our discrimination, the development of which Krishna called “life’s only purpose.” Not “life’s” only purpose, strictly speaking, because that is the realization of God, but our “lives’” only purpose, our only purpose in living one life after another after another. We consult the discrimination we have attained and attempt once again, to use it to discern the Real from the unreal.
Many times we fail and on one occasion we succeed. It only requires that one occasion of fully succeeding to succeed overall. We have many small successes and partial realizations through untold lifetimes before having that one final success and achieving the overall object of all life and all our lives – final reunion with God – which awaits us in a future so distant and imponderable that we cannot possibly imagine it.
Each “New Year” is a time of regrouping and forming up again for a new attempt at solving the Great Mystery of life. Each “New Age” is the celebration of new progress made in solving the Great Mystery of life. Each realization is progress made in solving the Great Mystery of life. All is about solving the Great Mystery of life. And, without solving it, as Rumi said, in one very real sense, in the most real sense, we “will have done nothing.” (3)
May you prosper in this New Year. May you achieve your dreams. May you realize your Self and fulfill the purpose of life.
Footnotes
(1) Sri Krishna in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, trans., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c1944, 80. I do not recommend any other translation of the Bhagavad-Gita than this one.
(2) John 10:38.
(3) Rumi in A.J. Arberry, trans., Discourses of Rumi. New York; Samuel Weiser, 1977; c1961, 26.