Love is the Fulfilling of the Law
ON LOVE; PART CXV
ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•Α
GoodWill IS Love in Action
ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•ΑΩ•Α
“And God said , Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made. These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates. And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying , Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed” (Genesis 1:26-2:25).
We have been neglecting our Quote of the Day for the last several posts as we have left this same one run on and without any comment regarding it nor its relationship to our daily topic. While our topic has been on the Creation of ALL things and especially the dual ‘creation’ or the manifestation of man, first as a Soul and then as a Soul in form, we have and can continue to find some help and some further elucidation of our theme in this Quote of the Day. We should try to remember that the ideas presented to us in scripture are expressed according to a perspective, the perspective of the hearer of the words, the perspective of the reader such as we or, as in this saying, some combination of the two. Here, in this paraphrase from the Bhagavad~Gita, we have the perspective of God, as Krishna, speaking to a man, Arjuna, who, while being of a spiritual nature, believes that he is the man in form and that he is engaged as a man in the Battle at Kurukshetra. It is in Arjuna’s hesitancy to kill men who he KNOWS and who are even his relatives that he seeks the help of the Lord to understand what he should do and how he should act in his dilemma. The Lord Krishna goes on to tell Arjuna that the True man, the True consciousness that he IS within the form, can neither kill nor be killed in this battle and that it is ONLY the form that can die. While this is a simplistic explanation, we should try to get the gist of the whole of the Bhagavad~Gita in these words of our Quote and, as the Bhagavad~Gita goes on to teach of the relationships of the man with God and the God within and the ideas of right action, we would see much similarity to the actual teachings of the Master, the Christ.
Our point here is that the Bhagavad~Gita, through our Quote of the Day, gives us the same perspective that we are trying to show in our words on the ‘creation’ of man, that the True man IS the sublime Friend whom thou knowest not from the perspective of the man grounded in form and that this Inner Truth IS the God Within who dwells in the inner part of every man or, as we would say, within the form that he uses for his expression in this world. There is much in this paraphrase saying from the Bhagavad~Gita that is the same as the teachings of the Master and although the words are different as they are intended for a different culture in a different time, the essence of Krishna’s teaching is the same.
Continuing with our discussion, our starting points of the last several posts are:
- Next we have the creation of the woman who was, according to the text, already created with the man during the creation in the image of God. Again this is either repetition and explanation or it yet another step in the bringing forth of the spiritual man into the Earth. There is another rather obscure saying in Genesis which may go well here: “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose” (Genesis 6:1-2).
- Amended statement: First, we should rephrase this as it is technically not right and this is the first that we have actually reread this point with earnest. The woman is created in the same time as the man from the perspective of the way it is written for us when God says: “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind” (Genesis 1:24). This is the creation of ALL animal bodies and the human man and the human woman are among these. In the next verses we come to the Creation of man “in the image of God” and this we recognize as the manifestation of Spirit as Souls in the Kingdom of God where there are no sexes and this we will try to make clearer as we proceed. Our text for today is concerned with these verses which we place here again for clarity and we will say much here that is alien to the common understanding….even more so that what we have been writing.
“And the LORD God said It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man” (Genesis 2:18-22).
We have made it to the point, with the help of the Master’s teachings and the writings of His apostles and some science, where we can understand the reality that the form of man that is created “of the dust of the ground“ as a suitable vehicle for the expression of the Soul in this world. We have linked our understanding to the writing of the Apostle Paul as regards the subjection of the Souls in form to the vanity, the illusion and glamour, of the world which we see coming upon the early man as he sinks deeper and deeper into the consciousness of the personality in form and to that point where he can no longer see who and what he Truly IS. While we have no True understanding of the WHY, we do KNOW from Paul the means which he tells us as “the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:20-21). We can see here the same reality that we find in our Quote of the Day as we say above and this is that the perspective in Paul’s saying is again to the man, the disciple and the aspirant, who KNOWS somewhat of the reality of Life but is at the same time in form and living through form; it is in this tone that Paul speaks of the ‘creature’ as the Soul in form. We should understand here also that words like creature as they are translated from the Greek can be illusive and in this case can have a range of values from the whole of the creation, animate and inanimate, to the creature portrayed as we say which is the Soul in form. From our perspective, and KNOWING that the reality of the idea of vanity as illusion and glamour, we can rather safely understand this creature as the Soul expressing through form as this is the reality of the man on Earth. Going further, the idea of deliverance is not a term that the inanimate or the not thinking would qualify for, neither is “the glorious liberty of the children of God“.
So we have the ‘creature’ created in the story of the Genesis of man; the body “of the dust of the ground” becomes the vehicle of expression for the Spirit man manifest as the Soul of which we read “in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them“. We must understand here that the reality of creation from the perspective of the Soul as but a concretization of the Spirit which is EVER with God. We should try to understand in the many interpretations of this Hebrew word bara there are included the ideas of to fashion and to shape which can imply for us the reality of the changing of form from the Spirit essence to the manifest Soul. We should understand the Trinity here as well, we can then see that these two, the Spirit and the Soul, ARE ONE. Our point here is that this is ALL better understood as the changing of form and the concretization of Divine Matter and not the creation of these things from nothing and, our perspective on this IS enhanced in our realization that God IS ALL; we define Him as: HE is Boundless, Immutable, Eternal, Infinite and it can be said that there is nothing else but HIM. There can be nothing outside of God because of the attributes listed; nothing before or after and nothing beyond for in infinity there is no beyond. And, as Paul tells us, it is “in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
We have seen this idea of concretization in regard to matter as well, that there IS an energy pattern, a divine essence, upon which the physical matter is formed and this is True for both the individual atomic lives and the greater physical lives which they build. Science has an understanding of this relationship between the physical appearance and the energy that is behind it but, for the most part, does not look at it in the same way as we do; our perspective is that the mass, the physical matter, is the result of the energy while the common understanding is quite the opposite. This is much like our view of man; man IS the Life, the divine essence, the Spirit manifest as Soul and he is not the body while the common view is that man is this phenomenal appearance and he has a Soul which is not considered by the doctrinal approach as energy. Scientifically we can better understand this and when the doctrinal approaches can begin to appreciate the role of science, much can be accomplished in the looking for and understanding the subtle bodies that a man uses in addition to the physical and the ever so subtle body that IS the Soul itself as it is manifest by the Truest part of the man and of God, the Spirit.
- We have then again the Spirit, the True man, manifest as the Soul on its own plane and in the substance of that plane and in these two realms, Spirit and Soul, plus the activity of the Soul in the Kingdom of God, we have the Trinity and the reality of being “in the image of God“.
- We have at the same time the idea that this True man IS not only in His image but that He is that which we are told in the text as “in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them“. If we cannot see this as being either both male and female at the same time or neither male nor female, then we are making a claim that there are two Gods or two versions of God.
- We have also the form of the man, the male human animal body, that has evolved over the eons of its existence, along with ALL of the forms of the animal kingdom, to a capacity that allows for the Soul that IS the True man to use the form as his expression of Life on this most dense plane of existence, the Earth. This is depicted for us in the text in two ways:
- In the First Chapter we have the following: “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:24-25). A key for us here is in the generality of the saying that the Earth brings forth the living creature and in this is included the totality of the animal kingdom. This gets muddied by doctrine because of the use of the idea of man in the next chapter and in this we should realize that this is the nature of divine teachings and not just a convenient convention to show our point. Both the Master and Paul tell us of the nature of the teaching of divine things so as to protect the mystery from those who cannot understand.
- The Master does tell us “That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying , I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 13:5) and in understanding this, why would one think that these ideas expressed above are always said openly and without mystery.
- Paul also adds this in relation to what is Wisdom of God versus the Wisdom of man as it pertains to the mysteries of Life saying: “Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory“. Here we should take the idea form Paul’s words that the common understanding of a thing, the Wisdom of the world, does not give us the “wisdom of God in a mystery” but only the outer picture that hides the Truth.
- The Second Chapter brings out the story of the forming of man and, as we have said before, this is not time related in these verses but rather a repetition of the earlier creation of the animal kingdom above and here combined with the idea of the Soul taking to himself this body that is formed “of the dust of the ground“. The important part here is in the final reality that this physical body of man is formed as such and that the “man became a living soul“. This should be understood as it is offered; the body IS formed “of the dust of the ground” and the body then receives the “the breath of life“, and here we should see that this IS the Life of the True man, the Soul.
- While we do not KNOW how long this idea of Adam being alone in the garden as the True man in form lasts, we can see a time of interaction with the rest of the animal kingdom in which he gets to KNOW them which is the likely significance of his naming them. We find here the same idea of the repetition of the creative story as regards the animals and the herb and the tree for food; both of these are ‘created’ in Chapter One as we discuss above. Again, we should see no time frame for these things but acknowledgement that they are done.
- We find here also the Tree of Life and the Tree of the KNOWLEDGE of Good and Evil and while much of doctrine believes that these are actual trees in the garden, our reality is that they are symbolic of the nature of the Life of the True man in the Tree of Life and the nature of the Life of man in the world in the Tree of Knowledge. We will take up these trees in greater detail as we address the final point.
- We find next the ‘creation’ of the woman and it is here that we have been stopping in recent posts. Today we go a bit further in saying that this ‘creation’ is of the same nature as the ‘creation’ of the body of man above in Chapter Two; it is the “creation” of the form of the woman, the female human animal body, that has evolved over the eons of its existence, along with ALL of the forms of the animal kingdom, to a capacity that allows for the Soul that IS the True man to use the form as his expression of Life on this more dense plane of existence, the Earth. The fanciful story of the rib is not a necessary part of what we are trying to say here and it is a hindrance to understanding the reality as we must either believe that this is an instantaneous creation of a woman for Adam as doctrine paints it or that there are no female human animal bodies until this point. For our part, we should understand that the story of the rib may be just that, a story, and one that gives us the understanding that although these bodies are different in appearance and in nature that they are essentially the same and made in the same way and of the same materials. The bodies then are the same but they serve different roles in the Earth and from the perspective of the True man, this is the only difference, the role that one will play as a male versus the role that one will play as a female. The importance here is the effect on the Life of the Soul and not the body.
We will continue with our thoughts in the next post and try to finish this part of our discussion from the Book of Genesis and our last point below.
- Last we have the trees; “the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil“.
Aspect of God
Potency
Expressed as Fire
Aspect of Man
In Relation to the Christ
GOD, The Father
Will or Power
Electric Fire
Spirit or Life
Life
Son, The Christ
Love and Wisdom
Solar Fire
Soul or Christ Within
Truth
Holy Spirit
Light or Activity
Fire by Friction
Life Within the Form
Way
Note on the Quote of the Day
This daily blog also has a Quote of the Day which may not be in any way related to the essay. Many of these will be from the Bible and some just prayers or meditations that may have an influence on you and are in line with the subject matter of this blog. As the quote will change daily and will not store with the post, it is repeated in this section with the book reference and comment:
We repeat here again a saying that is from the Bhagavad Gita and which goes well with our topic over the last several days. Today we see the God Within us as the Christ Within and this is good in the Christian world and this is True based upon our understanding of the Christ as the manifestation of God. We should see that it matters not what we call this Inner Man as it is the same in ALL, it is the Soul.
Thou carriest within thee a sublime Friend whom thou knowest not. For God dwells in the inner part of every man, but few know how to find Him. The man who sacrifices his desires and his works to the Beings from whom the principles of everything stem, and by whom the Universe was formed, through this sacrifice attains perfection. For one who finds his happiness and joy within himself, and also his wisdom within himself is one with God. And, mark well, the soul which has found God is freed from rebirth and death, from old age and pain, and drinks the water of Immortality.—Bhagavad-Gita
It is difficult to tell just what verses of the Bhagavad Gita the above is from; whether it is a paraphrase or a combination. It is from the book “The Great Initiates” by Édouard Schuré which was originally published in French in 1889 and perhaps it is in the translation of the verses that they become hard to recognize. However, the sheer beauty of the presentation caught my attention and so I share it with you. The Path to the Kingdom is the same no matter what religion one professes.
