Fourth Holy Night

Holy Night Four

December 27-28 – Aries

Consciously purify the astral body: antipathy and sympathy are converted into universal love. Passions and desires keep silent.

The power of Christ penetrates with his light and his strength what is Luciferic in us.

Mystery: The work on ourselves serves the best interests of the whole. The Archangel Uriel holds up a mirror in which we see ourselves as we are.

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Who we really are - we remember our original intent... In a way that is all I have been trying to do - remember my original intent. What my purpose was supposed to be in this world as I made my way across those waters. And in a way I have completed that journey. Quite imperfectly, of course, sampling a buffet along the way, delighting and disappointing, but also seeking. Always seeking. There were times when I wanted to rent the invisible curtain. If I could have taken a pair of scissors or a blade to it, I would have. What is this about? I would shout to the implacable face of God - the thing which hid that which was real and nothing would come back. I pounded and pounded on the walls around me. Break, break break, I would scream and - nothing. Nothing broke. So I did spend a lot of time trying to discover the mind of God.

Through reading, through throwing myself into life. Sometimes I thought I would throw myself over a cliff, just to finally dare God, but I never did of course. And I traveled and journeyed and sought. I attended lectures. I did literature. I studied power. I read up on quantum mechanics. I delved into the esoteric. Studied numbers. The stars. I did nature. I did mythology, linking things, making connection and all the time, all the time asking God, where are you? Stop hiding now. Stop being a coward. 

It must have been after Class 3 when I really went to town with the Holy Grail and the perfection of number, the essence of number. It was just after Class 3 when I thought - I'm done with this. I had a few epiphanies along the way. The experience of Parsifal and the Grail myself - but was that the fevered mind, the imagination? I could not tell.

I think I have come closest to the face of God in the faces of my sons.  In their radiant faces, I have always lit up when they have entered my presence. Each time I did that, I gave them another layer, like a veil painting, of the template of love. Here is what love is like my darlings. My gift to you. It was the closest I came to service. 

What is God? This thing we call God. The numinous, the superdivine. What is God? God is the miracle of a rising and setting sun. The moon in flux. The stars that grind the cosmic grain which is time. We look up and we say - God. We in our limited understanding of things say - God. We as we became more aware of our own creativity attributed the world around us to a Creator God. There must be something beyond that veil we insisted to ourselves. So we made up - we had to create - this idea, this presence of God. There must be something beyond.

And then there is Death of course. We have always had elaborate send offs. For those whom we valued in some way or other. If the send off is too large though, that is perversion. That is a waste of time and resources. A marker in the flow of time. And we come back later? Do we? Because it is impossible to leave the Earth for too long, because for some reason even though our ancestors did not know it, ours was the most lovely of all planets in this solar system. When we could visit and see them, we only saw barren wasteland. Nothing in which a human could live on. Only our beautiful planet. And then - surely there must be a greater intelligence which organised the entire cosmos for us to live here? Surely...

I supposed after all that railing against the invisible wall - which not even Death may dismantle - there are no reports back from that place - no reliable corroborating ones at least - it is this mystery which is at the heart of the story. This story, real or simulacra - how the heck did this place, this extended metaphor for garden of Eden, this dream by Vishnu - how the heck did it come into being - where we are the only living planet, teeming with life. Teeming with the gorgeousness of living. And as science confirms daily, that if the rest of the cosmos was not so aligned, we would not exist? That I think is the craziest answer. That we can travel as far as we want from the Garden of Eden story, a metaphor for this Earth, and that question will never be answered because the orders of magnitude to take part in a conversation with the forces which arraigned and aligned the entire cosmos in the way it has - if there is a conversation to be had even - to see the origin if there is an origin, to see the purpose, if there could be a a purpose - that just cannot happen. We are too low in the food chain - a fact acknowledged by the ordering of the hierarchy of angelic beings. We are innocents. Children, playthings, even

And so this railing which I did... what is religion and mythology - it is answering this need to make sense of the perfection and the pain we see about us. And many people are happy about the system - well not happy - but accepting about - the system they are born in. It helps them to go about their daily lives. It answers the need they have in them to sense make. For them, the sense is made. They are introduced to this at a very young age, or they reject what they have seen to create a sense making story and structure for themselves. Of themselves. And thereafter they are quiet happy, having believed they have found the truth. This can be science or a certain way of doing science, which sort of puts them at the top of the Christmas tree... and this is the horrible thing about these sense making experiences - that people for some unknown reason CANNOT say to themselves this is just ONE WAY of doing this - especially the people who do the science religion - they have to say this is the best and only way and this is the truth. The one and only truth. 

Anyway, the sense making puzzle, if you look at individuals, you see that they are pinned to larger stories - like nationalism, like politics - Left or Right, like causes, like religion, clubs - but they are all part of the same tapestry, they just inhabit different bits of it. In the end, they are still about the question - the question being - what does this all mean? How does this confer meaning to my life?

Even to say there is no meaning, is meaning.

And beyond this plate, this wall of sight and sound and murmuring and war and diatribe and desperation and exultation, the face of God, remains - infuriatingly silent. Except in the wheeling of stars and rising and setting of the sun and the waxing waning moon. There is nothing.

So there are 2 explanations - well at least two - the most logical one is that there is nothing beyond the veil. This is it. The veil is the thing. Bur then we come back to this really annoying question - if there is nothing then this cosmic coincidence of this planet in a universe it would seem of nothingness - like, really? The screaming question. Like nothing all the way to beyond the Kuiper belt and beyond - like nothing, really? How come these other places do not have beings? And also the perfection in the placement for us to be here, to exist... like, how? 

So this is a monumental coincidence. Absolutely monumental. And in another 4 billion years, it will end. Our Sun will consume itself and its entire cosmos... and then another Planet Earth will emerge somewhere else in the cosmos as we blink out.

Just as the Hindus have said. And how come the Hindus know? How did they know that this was our fate - to be dreamt of by Vishnu, until the next cycle comes round and we are made extinct - and a new age is then born? And they thought in millions of years. Aeons of time. How? Civilisation is only 10,000 years old. As far as we know.

So all my querying and questioning has brought me this this wailing wall. A true metaphor for our trying to find the ineffable. We stand in front of this wall, wailing, wishing to get the answer and all we get is this...

And for me, where am I in this journey? I guess... I am no longer asking those same questions. What were those questions? I forget now. Despite trying to find a way behind the veil, I have discovered that you know what, no one knows what lies beyond the veil, the actual veil. Our clumsy attempts at ritual and ceremonies are comforting and they speak to the fabric and nature of time, and even when we work with clairvoyance and art, we may be very close, at the very last layer of the divine from whence we receive inspiration and delights, but the actual question is never answered.

So maybe the question is wrong? Maybe I have been asking the wrong question. What is the right question through? Is there anything beyond the veil? Who says there is a veil? Maybe there is no veil.

There is no mystery. There is no inner sanctum. There are no secrets. This is it and this is all. Which is exactly what our animist ancestors believed. We are the secret. The world is an open book. There is no veil. There is no great mastermind. We are all co creators. Maybe that's the thing. No veil. And all my life I have believed God was hiding - God was never hiding. Which is exactly what animists believed. Which is what I have always done - worked with spirit wherever I can and could. There is no veil to rail against. We swim in the very ether of spirit. We are spirit too. Or energy. We are all connected to everything all the time. To the furthest reaches of the universe, as I once read, the entire universe we are in is a single organism and we, the Earth, is the heart. The thriving centre of it. For the time being. As far as we know we are the only ones which have a life, and until we know otherwise, we can just hold up our own as best we can. 

And people made up this idea of an inner sanctum - for very obvious reasons - power, and because they were asking the wrong question which ended up giving them the wrong answers. It is quite interesting that the question asked was the question that generated the most busywork. But I have now decided that there is no veil. So the question now is What do we do with our lives here, at the centre of this magnificence?

I like this question. I like this story, it makes me want to be a better person. It also places me as a being not in the centre of an empty universe, but a universe which is alive and pulsing and conscious - and we are just the most obvious manifestation of that pulse. On Earth this is how we have chosen to manifest the consciousness. The Magnificat. The voices raised in Mahler's Eighth - the symphony of a thousand, only that this thousand is the entire universe, the entirety of existence exulting at its being. It's coming into being. We are the expression of the cosmos. Our planet is. And as individuals we are. And the beauty is we can choose and I choose - Beauty and Love. 

So is there a God? There is spirit and consciousness. There is connection and beauty which lives beyond expression. Which nestles in the very breath and only the breath, the resting between the heart and the pulse. The silence in between the beats of the drum. There is only that.

Today on the Fourth Holy Night - the Night of the Ram - this is what I discovered. And my heart rejoices.

Holy Night Four

December 27-28 – Aries

Consciously purify the astral body: antipathy and sympathy are converted into universal love. Passions and desires keep silent.

The power of Christ penetrates with his light and his strength what is Luciferic in us.

Mystery: The work on ourselves serves the best interests of the whole. The Archangel Uriel holds up a mirror in which we see ourselves as we are.