We can undergo that urge, not so much empathize, as really feel it. That is the beginning, and then we can spontaneously give space to that limitlessness. That could be the promising beginning of the path.
But all too soon we want to give it direction and determine the route, and that can be at the expense of the space that the unlimited heart needs, through which a lot can get ‘lost from sight’ again.
The question that may then arise is: does that path exist because we want it that way and project it that way, or is there a human route accessible from within that can make us realize and ‘reclaim’ a lost unity?
Often that path is presented to us as a journey to a wedding, think of the main work of the Rosicrucians, The Alchemical Wedding of Christian Rosycross. Rudolf Steiner has traced the necessity of that wedding ceremony to the curious choice made by original man at the time:
When the primeval, undivided, dual-sexed, ever-living primordial man Adam Kadmon fell into sin in Paradise and became Adam and Eve, who degenerated beyond Paradise into single-sex, mortal, and reproducing beings, then their first sons, Cain and Abel, represented, also on a psychic level, the single-sexual element. With all its consequences. Cain became the progenitor of a psychic-masculine inclined, future-oriented and regal portion of humanity, inclined to self-authority and the working of the earth by its own strength and technical ingenuity. Abel was destined to become the progenitor of a psychic-feminine nature of humanity, past-oriented and priestly, inclined to God-binding and to life from what the earth gives raw. [1]
The wedding is about becoming a king-priest again, so ‘dressing’ the male and female forces in us with a golden wedding dress. One of the Rosicrucian songs sings about this as a luminous feast:
Feast of the new soul life, free from all human suffering,
I will be king-priest in the golden wedding garment
Then the psychicmasculine, the royal masculine soul-potential, has electromagnetically united with the priestly psychic-feminine soul-potential, a process in the soul. As king-priest, we are then a human unity, an androgynous independence. This androgynous human corresponds to the Adam Kadmon, the primordial, undivided, man-woman-in-one primordial man.
Isn’t that a tour de force? Isn’t that an impossible task, given the many pitfalls and opposing worldly forces? After all, few really king-priestly souls are known in the depths of matter, and it is also questionable whether and how they would make themselves known. What help do we have to erect this inner edifice? The power of our unlimited heart, which corresponds to unconditional love, is of course present cosmically and inter cosmically as a father-mother field. But the experiential material of the love between man and woman can also be very helpful: through the inversely proportional polarization of the energy bodies, a unityalbeit temporary, becomes tangible in their interaction. Physically, etherically, astrally and mentally, the energy-flows of woman and man can form that unity from their mutually complementary workings.
In this time of fading norms and gender uncertainty, it is important to continue to point out the possibility of a loving exchange of husband and wife as partners. That is to say, with that possibility the border crossing can be reached to promote the process towards an androgynous state of being.
The Russian philosopher Solovyov also emphatically pointed this out in his book On Love [2]. In it, he indicates that the realization of love as the highest stage to the actual life of humanity must take place not only in, but also through man.
That was at the end of the nineteenth century, and now we have entered the storms of transition to the Age of Aquarius, in which, according to several new esotericists, the possibility of becoming or returning to androgyny receives extra impulses! Precisely because that energy is neither male nor female, but is stripped of one-sided gender dynamics. At the same time, there is a certain ‘blurring’ of gender, because that too is annexed to the influence of Aquarius. And so too with the fading of the best practice-material there is.
The unlimited heart, as an unparalleled energy station in us, also works spatially according to the cosmic relationships in our galaxy and, according to some, also outside it and beyond space and time. That also gives the possibility of orientation to that greater reality, which means that the working of the unlimited heart within us encourages disobedience to the worldly systems. But there are signs that human life-waves in that larger reality of our home-universe, the Milky Way, often follow the same route back to androgynous form and content. So first falling into the sexual separation, to later – through the working of the cosmic power of the unlimited heart, which the Christ consciousness always leads – return or move upwards in the spiral of consciousness development. The person who has thus become whole again contributes to the development of the person who has not yet become whole on the planet concerned.
One wonders what has gone wrong with the male psyche that was called royal and focused on working the earth through its own strength and its own technical ingenuity. Well, a lot! And that is becoming visible in our time. For example, technology threatens to suck us into a trans-human being, who has to give up his identity as self-authority.
Fortunately, more and more people are becoming aware of this wrong turn. They are disquieted by an absolute signal from within that this world is not it after all. Indeed, that no technically perfect fantasy of the world, no utopian concept can make this world plausible for the inner sense of and lack of perfection, and for the primal awareness and pre-memory of those originally living immortal beings. Their conscience tells them that there is a deeper, fixed course that transcends time and space. They know of a unity that transcends the duality that characterizes our existence.
They realize that a complete path back to that unity implies a letting go of all the anchors that have linked our life-ship to the duality: the back and forth of our world in emotions, in ideas, in affections, in the market, in the economy, in culture, fashion. They come across the trail of music in its original tone:
Wonderful tenuous melodies melt into one tone,
and the cobra of darkness no longer dwells in me,
is how one song couplet puts it. That one tone is the higher unity, in which the apparent contradictions are bridged, or being bridged; in which the paradox between sorrow, emotion, comfort and enlightenment finds itself in a unity of contrasts.
Getting there requires the mysterious singing of the boundless heart, and the question arises: what song do we sing, what music do we make, can we make it to serve the process of a spiritual marriage? That unity is like a unity of heart and head. That is a unity that really gives us peace and enlightenment. It is important that we first learn to think with the heart, symbolically referred to as the rose that is about to bloom or the rose bud that is about to unfold.
Consider the saying that the heart has reasons that the head does not know. With that thinking and those reasons, the heart has then mastered a pure mentality. On the basis of this thinking heart, the head can then acquire for itself the rationality of the mind. The head then becomes ‘convivial’, is moved by our mind. The head has thus finally become human, reasonable in the true sense. No longer calculating, but reasonable. The two, the thinking heart and the mind-moved head, interact chemically, creatively in conjunction, propelling each other, stimulating each other into an entirely new unity.
Then real chemistry has arisen, that is to say an inexplicable unity, as only mature soul people can do, in relation to each other, but also in their own inner self.
The androgynous human being then forms in one’s own inner self, the one who has essentially allowed the masculine and the feminine to be forged together into a once again original psychic unity, and in relation to each other, it is certainly about the love that is freely given.
That is why there is a poem in praise of love towards each other in The Alchemical Wedding of Christian Rosycross. A spiritual wedding is actually not possible without love. And that is especially about the masculine and the feminine in ourselves, about which Lao Zi said:
He who knows his masculine strength and yet retains feminine meekness is in the valley of the realm. [3]
Jacob Böhme answers the question about the heavenly man/woman with the image of the ‘masculine maiden’. In this time of emancipation you could have the image of the ‘female esquire’ in mind. And even being able to speak of ewomancipation instead of emancipation. It is also known that women sing less high than before: you hear more low female voices. Which does not mean that women are singing a tone down… on the contrary, more and more signals point to a future matriarchy that can lovingly avoid the evil sides of a one-sided patriarchy.
Some astrologers indicate that atmospheric radiation conditions for people become more favorable for androgynous development, that the inner work in this sense will meet less resistance: men are already looking for the feminine in themselves and some have achieved a certain feminine gentleness – as Lao Zi named it.
The beginning of true desire does not lie in the projection of a heavenly state, as love often implies; indeed, many are beyond the romance of wishful thinking, and quite beyond the projection of a heavenly afterlife, out of discontent with our inevitable physical death as personality. It’s a waste of energy, so don’t do it.
The Australian author Bradley Trevor Greive said the following, as a brief statement of what the Alchemical Wedding already indicated:
The only theme that resonates throughout the numerous popular life theories is love. Love, in all its fragile forms, is the one powerful, enduring force that brings real meaning to our everyday lives.
Thus, the boundless heart can be given the opportunity to reveal itself, by listening to the wedding song that the heart “sings”. That revelation works chemically in us. The melody of that song gives us the chance – if we really know how to listen – to restore the royal and priestly within us.
It is now true that our lives are determined and drowned out by digitality; you can hardly imagine an expression of life without the clever use of image and sound, and that is often at the expense of authenticity. Sound reproduction in vocal music, for example, uses perfection methods that ‘cut out’ all deviations from the pure vibration pitch, the so-called audio cue. What you’re left with is a synthetically clean sound that can come acrossas a bit tinny. The perfectly pure frequency appears to have to give up the fullness of life somewhat. But the vast majority of people do not hear it and cannot distinguish it from the real thing. And it’s a beautiful paradox: the closest approximation of pitch perfection is not false, it is pure, yet fake, or at least that’s how it can come across. It is a bit reminiscent of the Chinese emperor’s artificial bird: perfect bird song, yet the emperor eventually started to miss the natural sound and wanted the living bird back from yesteryear. So it is with the wedding song that can make our boundless heart sing: we must first have enough of the counterfeit sounds, which can create a silence.
The French music philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch says:
It takes silence to listen to the melodious silence. The melodious, measured and charming sound that is called music, one should surround with silence,
and further:
It is in the silence that music rises like divine music.
We can thus resonate with the frequency of the unification of soul and spirit, the alchemical wedding-song that culminates in the awakening of the “seven spirit,” the field that can be entered by androgynous man. That field is ruled by cosmic fire, by a mild fire, which can be undergone as a purification, but ultimately leads to gnostic enlightenment.
Enlightenment then, is an opportune assembly of sublime chemical reactions in our brains, through which everything seems to fall into pattern, bringing together an unprecedented tranquillity in a new state of being as universal. This is a reverse fall: man falls into his place in the universe.
This becomes possible on the stream of love:
Let’s fall on that stream reversed!
It is the unimpeded working of our limitless heart that makes this possible as from the mathematical center of the microcosm the Gnostic forces erupt in a lovingly rejoicing fire.
References:
[1] Rudolf Steiner, Die Tempellegende und die Goldene Legende [The Temple Legend and the Golden Legend], GA93, 1904
[2] V.S. Solovyov, The Meaning of Love, The Lidisfarne Pres, 1985
[3] Lao Zi, Daodejing
