Years ago I wrote a book: “The Art of God – an actual theory of Everything” In it I took religions ideas, cast them into theories, and set those theories against the ideas of the Big Bang and Neo-Darwinian Evolution, … as a better explanation of the meaning of human existence on the Earth.
The central truth discovered, via a phenomenological examination of the social and political life of humanity, was that the object of Cosmic Love was the individual biography – the rest of what worries us, wars, disease, and which religion or science was the most true, was basically background noise to the core meaning of human biographical existence. The following material is a joining together of three essays, where I worked out the details of the above observation.
Event and Aftermath – the Creation of Love through Crisis
An individual life is an ongoing puzzle. The surrounding world is an ongoing meta-puzzle, in which we are a “piece”, in a world that is not only not flat, but has an infinite invisible interior to which we are directly connected.
Aspects of this complex reality sometimes require a nebulous word, which hints yet fails: the Mystery. All the same, our time is our time … and, what are we going to do with it?
If we are to appreciate the current “Plague”, it is essential to pay attention to the phenomena. For example, the first major psychological (soul-lawful) effect was to amp up our fear of death. The second was the lock-down. Again a psychological trial, lonesomeness, or maybe – or maybe not – worse, forced to live with someone not harmonious – imagine two cholerics, or two melancholics, …
Our ideas of the future turn sour. Hopeless perhaps. A job is lost. We wear masks, fear touch, wait in long long long lines for tests and medicine.
And people are dying everywhere. Medical and educational resources are stretched beyond capacity. Meanwhile, in America some of the young (twenties), still party to the dismay of epidemiologists. Another black man is murdered by the police. Bottled up from fears of the Plague, people go to the streets anyway.
The level of crucial choices increase exponentially. Not just about how and when to follow the rules, but what do you do with the empty time. The momentum of our lives grinds to a near stop. This loss of order (go to work, eat, play, raise kids etc.), unites with our inertia … our habits, our unquestioned assumptions.
The riddle of the meaning of life comes to the fore. We have, prior to the Plague, been too much force of habit … this often without much thought. We have been flirting with darkness, and inattentive to our own shade.
If one were to examine the lore of various deep spiritual paths, looking for common trials and practices, these Plague events in our individual biography mirror such a Rite – although individualized.
Consider what happened to the elderly. Most deaths were old people. Many lived in minimal circumstances. They were seriously ill with cancers and heart disease, and perhaps suffering some dementia (mind gone walk-about – anchoring the true spirit to the matter). Fever dreams bring us nearer the threshold of death, and while materialistic science sez otherwise, they are met there with the Love of the Holy Mother.
If they are self-aware enough to choose, choice is offered. If not, mercy prevails.
Several years ago I had a conversation with Her, about what did They do in response to all our horrible deeds, where certainly They must feel the confusion of both victim and perpetrator. She said: “We turn it into love”.
Eventually I came to see the How of This, as Event and Aftermath. She, who has the whole world in His Hands, through us – we are part of We, who turn matters into love that heals the effects of dire circumstances of crisis, whether through war, or other Acts of Nature.
We are part of that Nature. At the same time, the loss of the ancient knowing that all of Nature had an interior self-aware sentient consciousness, just as do we, means we are too often blind to the sacrifices of All Our Relations.
As a consequence we look upon the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, plague, death, famine, and conquest, as also empty of spiritual inwardness. When earthquakes wreak nuclear facilities, or floods displace millions, or everywhere people are migrating through artificial borders, we don’t see that there are Cosmic Beings, with us, creating art.
We know through Rogue Weather, and what is lamely called: Climate Change, that we can barely predict what’s next, much less succeed at controlling it. We have a religion we call natural science, that doesn’t see reality, by choice more or less. All is matter, and there is no room – in that land of Grand Theories – for spirit.
The Collective Imagination is not unaware of the riddle, and the ironies. A beautiful artistic vision of this process is captured in the last episode of “Stranger Things” – below there will be a view spoilers.
The setting is 80’s small town America. Our heroes are mostly adolescents. There is a boys club that likes to play “Dungeons and Dragons”. As the story evolves, it becomes full of the paranormal. The main character is a young girl named “Eleven”, which is the only name she knows, as it is tattooed on her arm. She is and has been being tortured by human beings – corporate and military – when they can get their hands on her. The goal is to force paranormal abilities to appear, which they can then control.
These young people soon find what they call “the Upside down”. They discover large burrows underground their town, filled with writhing dangerous roots. Through trickery, Eleven made a hole in our world, between our reality, and a secondary reality, which greatly effects the lives of everyone.
TV being what it is today, the show had to have truly gross monsters, occasionally copious amounts of blood, and it being the 80’s, Russians were one of the villains of choice.
After four seasons, we get a Final Episode. A few of the heroes fall and die. Other’s seem to win a battle, that takes place in the Upside-down, yet that “win” is followed by an earthquake that nearly destroys the town. Visually this is realized by the release, from the Upside-down, of fiery forces that make a kind of cross across the town, and thus we have our Event.
In this episode there is a short set of scenes where in the Aftermath, some people flee the area, and others stick around to pick up the pieces. One group of shots takes place in a School Gym, where people are everywhere helping others, … providing food, places to sleep, fresh clothes … helpers and those needed help.
All over our planet, individual people are in one or another state of crisis, and this Eucharist of Love – the giving and accepting of the care of others, is everywhere.
Yet, the tale does not end there. The surviving heroes, who have various unusual abilities. see the lurking presence of the Upside-down is still there, and the image in the film is of a huge darkness in the sky, reaching down and leaving chaos.
Our heroes all had a journey, individually and together. This included visits with an aspect of reality they had not known existed.
Among aboriginal and indigenous peoples there is known to be such an Underworld. It has many names, such as the Lost Cities, or Faerie. We go there when we sleep and dream. If the right teaching is given, the encounter with the Beings of these Realms (plague, conquest, famine, and death) can be done consciously, and They are then experienced in a more real way.
It may be helpful to consider that the prime social-political phenomena is the human biography. Every self-generating and evolving spark is born into matter, and then leaves it behind. We all have associations that raise us. Family, village, religion, school, war lords, and lovers.
Through the arts of Fate and Fortune (karma and divine providence), we are aided in our journey of trials and choices, … a school of hard knocks and shared pain. The Mystery is that each living human being is unique. Each is a microcosm surrounded by a Macrocosm. The heart’s mind finds in these adventures the need to create the true and the good, out of their own sense of matters. These crises are a co-orchestrated act of love, with the addition that each journey dances to its own music.
The World of the Mother is caring for over 8 Billion sparks, each needing individual attention, from the Cosmic Authors, who exist and act from the outside of space and time.
The flowering of all of the heart’s minds, all over the world, often requires terrifying experiences. For freedom to be real, all choices must be possible. I have been calling “human freedom” the Beast from the Abyss of the uncreated and yet to be formed.
The future is a set of nows that have not happened yet. Still, each primary locus of Love’s influence is the needs of single biographies.
Event and Aftermath: the Creation of Love through Crisis
What goes on in the individual soul during these Events?
A Song of the Entombment, … in the Key of Lent.
Whether we know this – or not – our biographies share common trials and experiences. In the wider cultures of the world there are different maps to the same territory. Here, I will use Christian Iconography, which is based on the Seven Stages of the Passion of Christ: 1) Washing the Feet; 2) the Scourging; 3) the Crowning with Thorns; 4) the Carrying of the Cross; 5) the Crucifixion; 6) the Entombment; and 7) the Resurrection.
These are discussed in detail, in Tomberg’s “Inner Development”(1), written while he was still working within the School of Spiritual Science, and the Anthroposophical Movement. Theses seven lectures were given in Rotterdam, on 15-22 August 1938.
1. The New Michael Community and its Significance for the Future. 2. Meditation – Its Being and its Effect. 3. Indian Yoga in Relation to the Christian-Rosicrucian Path. 4. Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition. 5. The Two Guardians of the Threshold. 6. The Occult Trials. 7. Rudolf Steiner’s Life-Path as the Way of the Christian Initiate.
I have made some personal observations over the years, of these trial aspects of Christian Initiation: see “Cowboy Bebop and the Physics of Thought as Moral Art”(2). Self observation, coupled with the intuitions of artists, revealed that we all go through these trials, and within any given biography they do not have to happen in the above order, or only once. We can experience “a Crowning with Thorns“ in our personal lives, and then later a “Scourging”.
A Crowning with Thorns happens when intimates deny the value of our thoughts. Scourging is the judgmental stones that are thrown at us in words, by these same intimates. It is called Karma … this power. Intimates are not just family, but also bosses, co-workers, jailers, and lovers.
For a shared trial within this crisis of civilization, we have the Plague. To conceive the world as a school of hard knocks and shared pain, allows us to also notice many opportunities to “wash the feet” aka: “Event and Aftermath – the Creation of Love Through Crisis”(3).
This potential practice of Stage 1 is always present. A Sign of coming Resurrection – a dying and becoming of “Western” civilization – is the everywhere cross-cultural experience of Entombment – so much going on all over, not just in the whole world, but as regards our intimates – we become aware of just how powerless we are to “save” them, and sometimes ourselves as well.
Entombment and depression are neighbors in the soul. In each case the will is paralyzed. The former can be dealt with, in a way quite different from the latter. (4) From this Plague Rite, we are in preparation for the 6th Epoch, engendering a soul capacity of waking up through pain. Not just ours, but other’s pain as well.
Yesterday I had a two hour phone call with my eldest daughter (age 56). We’ve had many such over the years. She lives now month to month, and needs serious and costly dental work. Her personal experience of the plague-illness was quite difficult, and she presently lives alone. The most I can do is lend an ear, hopefully seasoned with sage advice – yet still a limiting effect and sign of our own powerlessness (Entombment).
I know her voice, which these days does not so much despair, as revealing a courage and refusal to succumb. Today she is better at coping with life’s chaos, than when she spent 15 years teaching school in Los Angeles. She had dental back then, yet trying to educate children, in an environment that opposes creativity (lesson plans have to be approved and so forth), … it was eating her soul.
Today she teaches individual kids, whose families she met that had a child with special needs, none of which were being met by the “L.A. School District”.
All of us can tell such stories of family and friends. Meanwhile the News floods us with horror, yet if we think about it, 99.999% of the billions of humans on the planet, are not in war zones, or digging through rubble searching for signs of life.
The oddity of Entombment is that it is the Gate of Surrender. In recovery, the idea is: “Let go, let God”. Christ, the human being, also surrendered – at the ripe moment – to implacable circumstances.
Carrying the Cross happens when we act in life as a moral human being. The Crucifixion is when we are nailed to the demands of others, for the expression of our own heart’s mind.
The death of possibilities can be an experience of the soul, when we give up some aspects of self, in order to follow the Will of Fortune (Divine Providence) and Fate (the Artist of Karma). Yet, … it is curious is it not, that our prayer is “Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven”. St. Paul allegedly wrote or said: “Not I, but Christ in me”.
I don’t think he understood … what was his idea of Christ? Something we already are, or some Ideal by which we should measure ourselves, … and others? Paul was not a disciple – a fisher of men, but a zealot who just changed the object of his religious passions. Many are the folk who have had their own Damascus Event, … the Roman Catholic Church called them saints, and confined them to holy orders. Which suggests Paul was not all that unique.
When we accept (surrender to) the biographical reality of the Seven Stages, we will then see we all are already sons and daughters of Mystery. The hard to bare moods of the trials are often longer than we wish, for growth of this sort requires time. Yet, if we just step back a bit, and see the Whole as it is, – we might get the idea of John the Baptist, about the One coming after him, who will baptize us all in Fire and Holy Breath.
(2)
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/CowboyBebop.html
(3)
(4)
A Song of Entombment … in the Key of Lent
By what Mystery does the Individual learn to trust their own judgement?
The Mood of Easter, in the Light of Our Individual Logos Nature
The Mood of Easter, in the Light of Our Individual Logos Nature
Over the course of my adult life, I began to notice a remarkable inner phenomena.
As the Season of Easter came and went there arose a kind of dying and becoming in my soul. Aspects of my soul life seemed no longer necessary, and this death in the soul was – in the beginning – painful, perhaps even depressing. The basic mood of soul was a kind of dread.
Then around Good Friday, the dying passed, and by Sunday, and the Resurrection, new and hopeful aspects of soul emerged. Over time I learned to notice which aspects wanted to be let go, and this meant I could name them, and participate in their dying and becoming.
Over these few decades, I was simultaneously making an empirical study of “thinking, where I would write something like: “the logical (Logos Nature) of thought is …. “
One of the ways this appears is when we ponder or muse about life, and then make and experience connections. This own logos logic is felt, more than pictured. We might wonder whether or not other’s should or have to make the same connections. Not an easy moral riddle, given the demands of others to see the world the Way they see it.
In our life, we might muse on an experience we call: common sense. “It makes sense (meaning) to me”. That each of us might have different results, the inner felt experience remains the same and we are right to trust it.
In terms of human experience, each spirit-spark is the center of a universe. I am here, and out there is … what?
Over the biography we create an inner understanding of this “what?” We make personal inner art, … which is meaning. Emerson wrote of what he called (I paraphrase) “a ray of relation connecting our self, and all the objects of experience.“
If we look at the spiritual-meaning of human history, we soon find everywhere-when that our story once included the experience of connectiveness of all to all. Did this feeling disappear from how we conceive today, and were we led this way to a shared abyss – ruled by the religions of unnatural science and free market capitalism?
The science of the ancients knew the mystery directly. Modern life – the third shaking of the world, as known to those native peoples still connected – is a crisis of meaning. Are we the generated and nurtured love creation of the mystery, or a random accident in an uncaring cosmos?
To the Romantic poets a great loss. Us and Nature somehow disconnected. That is changing, one individual heart’s mind at a time … by conscious choice, we are traveling home, to become connected to the Garden once more.
For these decades I have become connected to the logos nature of the works of Rudolf Steiner. Among those works, and followed by his followers, is the idea of Evil and Good. He speaks of great powers, such as Lucifer, Ahriman, Sorat, and the Asuras, as capable of great Evil.
My logos nature asked: If these bad guys could win, should not it already be over – so what is going on given that they have not? After all, we are still here.
Clearly then there had to be power in the realm of mystery that ruled them – the alleged bad guys. The question was answered easily for me: the Holy Mother – Earth Mother.
I often share this idea these days, by writing of “She who has the whole world in His Hands”. I also write of the ancient’s great idea of the Macrocosm and the microcosm. As Above, so Below, and As Below, so Above … for the Miracle of the One.
The One has aspects. These are qualitative realities. One aspect is the act of fathering or generation. Its mirror is the act of mothering or nurturing. As these qualities never lose wholeness or connection, their union aspect is love. Not just the idea of love, but deeds of real caring.
One does not have to believe, for there to be experiences that are themselves knowing. We are blessed this way, regardless of our view of the world.
Each of us are created this way – generation and nurturing and loving are all potential. Still, we are a universe, living and bumping into other universes. The Trinity latent in the One, aka: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit … these are within the reach of our wills, … we are essentially Them … as above so below.
Trust your common sense logos nature logical musings … nobody but you knows the complexity of your biographical story as well as you do … nobody.
{first draft) written while intoxicated with the Mother’s medicine that grows like a weed, and listening – via Alexa – to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra}.
The above is connected to two other discoveries. These are elaborated here: https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2022/12/26/event-and-aftermath-the-creation-of-love-through-crisis/ and here: https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2023/02/20/a-song-of-the-entombment-in-the-key-of-lent/
Fake Ancient Alien Theorist Foolishly Visits the Collective Imagination 
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On Wed, May 17, 2023 at 11:04 AM Fake Ancient Alien Theorist Foolishly Visits the Collective Imaginati
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