People use language to express their thoughts and emotions, and to have conversations among themselves. We use it to exchange our feelings and experiences, to test our understanding of the world around us, to regularly redefine that world, and to continually refine ourselves and each other, with all kinds of qualities. In this way we constantly create new realities for and about ourselves and the world in the broadest sense. Everyone does this, time and again, and each in their own way.
This not only makes the multiplicity of humanity almost infinite in variation, but also in its changeability. A crowded stage, on which only a relatively small minority of “actors” are able to remain standing. Almost everyone is focused on, or relates their life to, matter, and therefore to time and space. Everything seems to originate from matter, time and space. This trinity of factors determines the boundaries of our physical domain, and so all life appears to take place bound by those constraints, being acted out on the stage that is the actual objective world.
It almost seems as if people have ended up in a “place of exile”, like a restricted fenced refugee camp, the original refugee camp for all of humanity. And this humanity feels abandoned and desperately searches for the meaning of it all, because it feels that no “fatherland” wants to welcome it in this form.
If we consider this deeply, this despair largely stems, on the one hand, from the expectation that “the gods” will eventually take pity on the people; and on the other hand, from the fear born of hard experience that this mercy will never happen. People are especially inclined to expect their salvation from something or someone outside themselves. And if that salvation does not happen to them, their accusing fingers almost always point to the ‘outside’. This can continue during many incarnations.
Whoever could have lasting peace within this swirling chaos? In that sense, the above title is absurd or at least cynical. Or maybe not?
Christ said:
My people are lost because they have no knowledge.
That is the greatest evil in this world: Because not the murmuring natural people of flesh and blood can be taken up into the “Fatherland” of the original man. It is a terribly tragic misunderstanding to believe that, or to expect it, and it is also the ultimate breeding ground for despair, derailment and degeneration.
What is it that makes all sorts of religions able to hold natural-born humanity hostage with threats of hell and damnation? It is sufficiently well-known that this practice of power over the nature-born people has brought them great wealth and influence.
Was it the stupidity of earthly mankind that made it sensitive to superstition and religion? As in the cynical maxim:
If you keep them stupid, I will keep them poor,
as reputedly an emperor once said to the pope of his time.
No, it is not stupidity, but definitely there are underlying, largely unconscious, aspirations that are nourished by deep human desires for peace and security.
The knowledge that the creation “man” is a God-child has always been present within nature-born people as long as man has existed on earth. But it is equally known that this knowledge has sunk back into oblivion and moreover, it has been systematically withheld from their “flock” by “knowing” priestly “shepherds” with earthly interests.
The divine son/daughter thus ended up in this chaotic material time-spatiality in a particularly dramatic way. Incidentally, it is important to realize that only our earth-bound perspective deludes us to call this “a drama.”
In the Corpus Hermeticum [1], in the book “Pymander”, verses 32 to 38, Pymander describes the process of the divine child’s fall into earthly spheres as follows:
The Spirit, the Father of all creatures, who is life and light, produced a man alike unto Him, whom He began to love as his own child. For Man, being the likeness of his Father, was very beautiful; God loved his own figure and gave him charge of all his works.
However, when man observed the creation the Demiurge had formed in the fire, he also wished to bring forth a piece of work, and the Father granted him this. When he then entered into the field of creation of the Demiurge, in which he was to have a free hand, he observed the works of his brother. The Rectors began to love him and each of them let him share his own rank in the hierarchy of the spheres.
Afterwards, when Man had learned to know their being and had received a share in their nature, he wished to break through the limitations of the circles and learn the power of him who rules over the fire.
Then Man, who was given power over the world of mortal beings and of the irrational beasts, bent over, and, through the cohesive power of the spheres, the envelopment of which he had broken through, showed himself to the nature below in the beautiful figure of God.
When nature saw the one who possessed the inexhaustible beauty and all the energies of the seven Rectors, united in the figure of God, it smiled with love, for it had seen the features of this wonderfully beautiful form of man reflected in the water, and had perceived his shadow upon the earth.
Concerning himself: when man observed in nature the form that so very much resembled him, because of the reflection in the water in nature, he fell in love with it and wished to live there. What he wanted, he did so immediately, and thus he inhabited the irrational form. And when nature had received her beloved unto herself, she encircled him completely and they became one, because the fire of their desire was great.
That is why, of all the creatures in nature, only man is two-fold, namely mortal as to the body, and immortal as to the essential man.
This could be the scenario of an alluring science fiction movie, complete with power men and women. Seen from that perspective, such films are perhaps less surprising than it might seem at first sight, because they unconsciously draw from the same pre-memory.
Man created by God was “a child of God” and was therefore endowed with divine powers.
One of those capabilities was the “divine will.” The quotation states:
What he wanted, he did immediately,
because, contrary to the suggestion of the paradise myth, God had imposed no restrictions on him. His creative power was unlimited, and thus His child was not just a puppet of the Creator. Though God warned him about it, he could still freely choose to “eat the fruits” from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”.
. . . And so, he began to inhabit the irrational form. And when nature had received her beloved into herself, she completely encircled him and they became one, because the fire of their desire was great.
This “fall” stripped the original man, male-female in himself, of his divine powers. In that fall he split, separating the masculine from the feminine, leaving him with an infinite number of dismantled, individually masculine or feminine envelopes (the microcosms), each holding in its centre a minimal and vague, but immortal, reflection of what once used to be.
During a very long evolutionary process according to our natural understanding, a creature emerged in the earthly nature that was found suitable for connecting with such a “masculine” or “feminine” microcosm: our nature-born form, the earthly people that we are. The purpose of that connection was and is for the human being to remember his origin through the hard school of experience of nature-born life and to find his way back to the original Fatherland.
As soon as the nature-born personality becomes aware of this “assignment”, man can start on the way back. Above all, it was the capacity for awareness that made the natural-born humans suitable for that microcosmic bond.
The total process of return is only completed if, in this way, all microcosms – completely transfigured – have returned to the unity of the divine-child state. Then this dual nature has fulfilled its purpose.
Why this “dramatic” process?
Perhaps the key to the solution of this riddle can be found in the phrase from the quote above:
For Man, being the likeness of his Father, was very beautiful; God loved his own figure and gave him charge of all his works.
God is there, where all was, is and will be. He is ubiquitous, omnipresent in the eternal now, far surpassing all space and time in all dimensions. There are no obstacles for Him: literally everything is contained in Him. And that is precisely the primordial characteristic of divine Love, totally impersonal and all-embracing, and thus offering, at the same time, the opportunity for His child, the human being, to return to the unity of the Fatherland.
It is therefore a certainty that at one time all microcosms will return to the divine unity. In doing so, they bring with them an immense treasure of experiential energy into the unity consciousness. And the unity consciousness will
receive everything, give up everything and thereby renew everything.
In this way God has come to know himself through “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”.
And God saw that it was good and “smiled.”
References:
[1] The Egyptian Arch Gnosis, part 1, J. van Rijckenborgh, Rozekruis Pers, Haarlem 2017
[2] This article first appeared in Pentagram 2019 issue 3
