Sunday, March 23, 2008

Petey's Easter Message: Hooray! Surrection!

This is just a rambling compilation of past Easter posts. Not sure if they make much sense or even nonsense. I'll let you decide.

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Here it is, the religious unday of them all, the sonny dei that commemorates the undoing of what was did way back when, on that dark and sinny day in the park. Remama? You knew the One. Around Eve, it was. It's a hiss & her story, he shed we dead, but insurrection comes to resurrection in the serpentine foulness of time, at the bar of history. So a beery Hoppy Yeaster to you ale, the whole brewed!

Aside from that, what can one possibly say about Easter that hasn't been said in the past 1975 years, give or take? Somehow, despite all that has been said and written about it for hundreds and hundreds of years, there is always more to say. It is incapable of becoming saturated. You think you're looking at it, but it is always looking through you. It is actually a means with which to look at the the world, especially the deep vertical world.

Because of its specifically "unsaturatable" quality, we can never really comprehend a divine revelation, in the literal sense of "wrapping our understanding" around it. Rather, try as we might, it is always comprehending us. Furthermore, paradoxically, the more of it we comprehend, the more it comprehends us.

How can this be? It is the reverse of becoming an "expert" at something. An expert knows everything about something that is ultimately about nothing. But spiritual growth involves the constant rediscovery that you know what amounts to nothing about the ultimate something. You are a lifetime apprentice, apophatic nonentity. It is constantly instructing you.

Mouravieff writes that unless one is unusually saintly, one will not be able to travel the path of the Way without a kind of death, "without first passing through an interior bankruptcy; a moral collapse." Paradoxically -- but not really -- Mouravieff notes that for most men, "success and joy, instead of awakening them, plunge them into mental sleep." Thus, "from the esoteric point of view, disagreeable shocks are a better base for work than happy accidents."

For one thing, these shocks will tend to ground one in the sense of humility that is demanded of anyone on the spiritual path. Best to start off broken than to fall from a much greater height later on. When we fall, we only fall back to the ground. For those who believe themselves to be high above the ground, the height is only in their imagination anyway.

A number of Coons have mentioned recently that they have been undergoing a sort of "reversal," in which worldly things that used to interest and excite them no longer do so. It is not a transformation they have consciously willed, but it is simply happening of its own accord. It seems that this is an inevitable consequence of increasingly living one's life in the light of the Real or Absolute. It is the death of one mode of being, accompanied by the birth of another.

2000 years ago, Rome certainly represented the world. It had always been and would always be, and it certainly would not tolerate someone who presumed to live -- and taught others how to live -- outside its strict boundaries. But like everything else on the horizontal plane, Rome had a beginning and an end. However, the vertical principle they attempted to extinguish proved to be only a beginning, as it always is.

For horizontal man, there truly is no exit to their absurcular existence. The cosmos is a closed circle with no doorway in, up, or out. Life is a straight line with a period at the end of the death sentence. Period.

In manifesting his celestial nature on earth, Jesus did not seem particularly concerned about making it fully intelligible, at least in words. After all, that's why we're still talking and arguing about it two thousand years later. He simply incarnated his cosmic destiny and largely left it for others to figure out. What did it all mean? What could it possibly mean?

Rudolf Steiner wrote something to the effect that "the secrets of the Mysteries became wholly manifest in Christianity."

An anonymous Greek Orthodox theologian remarked that "We do not ask whether or not the resurrection happened. It is the horizon in which we live." Dwelling within this vertical horizon is a way to contemplate reality at its deepest level -- a level that is well beyond mere discursive thought. I'm not sure if this is fully kosher, but I understand the Father as the eternally transcendent aspect of God, the Son as the immanent aspect. How to reconcile them?

Perhaps they were only ever separated by the illusory veil of death. It is said that upon Jesus’ death, the temple veil was rent vertically from top to bottom. The resurrection is reality unveiled, which is to say reveiled, for it is a mysterious new veil with which to engage reality and to reconcile its ultimate terms.

The Catholic theologian von Balthasar wrote that "truth is the unconcealment of being, while... the someone to whom being is unconcealed is God."

In a similar vein, Lucy Beckett writes that "If God does not exist, the transcendent has been wiped away, there is no longer a vertical axis for the human soul, but only a horizontal, that is, a historical, axis for the human mind. More particularly, the vertical never crossed the horizontal in the Incarnation."

Nor in us. Now that would be a real inconveyance, not to mention, folly -- to be up to Greek without any kenosis.

13 comments:

julie said...

Happy Easter to you and your family, Bob, and to all Raccoons I may have missed. May you all have a beautiful and InLightening day!

walt said...

A cloudy, rainy day here -- but as always, above the clouds, the Son rises....

Petey's Greatest Hits
"Upliftenment"

Thanks, Bob! Onward to the egg-hunt!

Anonymous said...

The ongoing discussion of vertical and the horizontal dimensions reminds me of the human heart. Recalling Christ as he was crucified, we see the intersection of the vertical and horizontal in this version of capital punishment. Head, neck torso and lower extremites in the vertical and outstretched arms in the horizonatal. Deep within the torso, the human heart is proximate to this intersection, with its four chambers, the atria and ventricles. It takes some imagination, especially without the benefit of a 2-dimensional diagram, but if you "strip away" the outer borders of the heart, what is left is the image of the cross. The septum divides the heart into left and right sides and represents the vertical axis. The valves between the atria and ventricles represents the horizonatal axis. Physiologically, the right side of the heart contains deoxygenated blood and appears more blue, while blood in the left side of the heart is oxygenated and appears red. Several posts ago, we discussed the color spectrum and how the three primary light colors(RGB) are a representation of the Holy Trinity, with each color representing a Person of the Trinity and its "summation" that of white (unity). Green represented the visible Christ between the invisible Red (Spirit) and Blue (Father). Well with the heart, a similar imagery is noted. Blue blood on the right and red blood on the left, separated by the septum (Cross, green, Christ). More notably, the image of the cross is not oriented perpendicularly; rather, it is slanted or at an angle as if it is being carried. Pick up you cross in follow me...a message from the heart. Perhaps a comment for Good Friday, but it's meaning is timeless. Happy Easter.

PCA

Anonymous said...

As we onward ever more quickly to the Parousia, it seems to me that these religious dates/observances simply resonate more deeply - our inner gongs vibrate sympathetically.

As for me, today feels, really feels like an oasis that I came upon after a long trek through the muck of liberation theology and governor sex scandals.

And as part of the deepening resonance, little validating pop-up signs: a prominent Muslim baptized by the pope, an ex-Soviet leader praying at the tomb of St Francis.

Happy, Ever-More-Profound Easter to all.

Anonymous said...

Happy Easter to the Gagdad's, julie, walt, anon, will and all other Raccoons who continue to make this a special non-place to visit and proof that He is risen indeed!

robinstarfish said...

Unto the End of the World
and on the third day
the sun went supernova
matthew 28


Thanks, Bob. A good, true, and beautiful Easter to you and your family.

Anonymous said...

I'll post about the horrible day that turned into the wonderful Easter, but the short version is that I went to mass thanks to Bob who encouraged me to go and looked after FL.

On the way home after a long and late mass, I was so filled with the Spirit and felt so lucky to be alive and married to Bob and be mother to the little varmint I could hardly stand it.

The only thing that could have made it better was that I suddenly remembered that I had Julie's CD of sacred music in my CD player and got to listen to her beautiful music all the way up the canyon.

Blessings to you guys and a meaningful and happy Easter,
Love
Mrs. G

julie said...

I look forward to your post, Leslie - I've been wondering what you thought of Mass today, and I'm really glad you like the music :)

I'm glad your day turned into something good!

Anonymous said...

For the record, here is the grace for yesterday's Easter supper that was written by this website, with some major contributions from UF:

"We join hands around this table, Oh Lord, with the full awareness that we are all winners of the cosmic lottery and are blessed to live in this time, this place, and with each other. With that in mind, we savor this moment of prayer and contemplation and consider why we are here and what this day signifies.

We understand that the tenet of the unity of all that exists precedes every act of knowledge, and that every act of knowledge presupposes the tenet of the unity of the world.

Our knowledge of the interrelationship of all there is is the product of the method of analogy. This is how we pass from the known to the unknown. How we know that we are not material beings who possess spirit but are spiritual beings who live in the material realm.

And it is the analogy of this Easter festival, the prototype of the cross that conveys to us the truth that we are fallen and that we inhabit the intersection of the horizontal, material, relative plane and the vertical, spiritual, absolute realm. And it is the mythological symbolism of the resurrection that charts the path for each one of us.

Sri Auribondo wrote: Mankind upon earth is one foremost self-expression of the universal Being in His cosmic self-unfolding; he expresses, under the conditions of the terrestrial world he inhabits, the mental power of the universal existence....

But within this general nature and general destiny of mankind each individual human being has to follow the common aim on the lines of his own nature and to arrive at his possible perfection by a growth from within....

And this is what we gather to celebrate at this table. That we are given the means to know the truth and the possibility to overcome evil, to transcend the material and dwell in your house forever. Amen."

Van Harvey said...

"Now that would be a real inconveyance, not to mention, folly -- to be up to Greek without any kenosis. "

It's the little things in life...

;-)

Anonymous said...

Christ didn't explain the entirety of his vertical mission because explanations are horizontal.

He said come follow me and his path wasn't horizontal in time. It requires revelation which is a vertical experience.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Happy belated Easter, y'all!

And Happy belated Purim to Lisa!

Anonymous said...

Orthodox church has much apology to make in Western World: protocommunist massacres by Palamite Zealotes under Hesychast hyperventilatory halucinations, Cantacuzene taxation driving farmers to embrace Turks, Komyakoviac Obshchina giving birth to soviet communism as reactionary casuistry opposing Napoleon's defeudalization, Cosmus Aitalius being patron originator of of modern genocide as seen by the massacre of Turks in Crete by Venizelos. And their hypnotic brainwashing incantations are designed to make theirf locks into terrorists. Is all masochistic because reject Original Sin.

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