Hooray! Surrection!

What can one possibly say about Easter or the resurrection that hasn't been said in the past 1973 years, give or take? In particular, what can I say that hasn't been said by various church doctors, saints, popes, priests, and simple people of faith?

Well, for starters, I'd like to see the Pope come out on his balcony, pump his fist in the air, and start chanting, "Hooray! Surrection! Hooray! Surrection! Hooray! Surrection!" That's certainly what I would do. Then again, that's the difference between me and the Pope. He's God's pit bull. I like to think of myself as his rodeo clown.

As I have mentioned before, this is what is so fascinating about scripture--and personally, I am not just talking about the Gospels, but about the Torah, the Upanishads, or the Tao Te Ching--that it is so inexhaustible. This is why, despite all that has been said 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 interior world.

And yet, because of its specifically unsaturated quality, we can never really comprehend scripture, 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 to become a spiritual "expert," you are constantly rediscovering the fact that you know what amounts to nothing about the ultimate something. You are a lifetime apprentice. It is constantly instructing you.

Two of the very greatest biblical exegetes, Meister Eckart and Moses Maimonides, adopted the same scheme in interpreting scripture. They indicated that there were four main ways: the literal, the moral, the allegorical, the purely spiritual. Now, this point is subject to misunderstanding, so listen closely. I used to be one of those people who would have resented dogma, whereas now I fully understand why it must be preserved. And yet, if we adopt the approach of traditional metaphysics, there are always degrees of being, and the material is considered the lowest degree, the furthest in distance from God.

Perhaps this in itself might provide a key--for some bobbleheads, anyway--to understanding the resurrection. As we discussed yesterday, God is both pure existence beyond being and pure potential, compared to which we are but nothing. According to Frithjof Schuon, since nothingness cannot be possible within God--i.e., God is the one thing that cannot not be--"it is necessary that this 'possibility of the impossible' should be realized in an 'internal dimension' which is 'neither real nor unreal.'"

In other words, the ephemeral world of illusion--of maya--that surrounds us "represents the possibility for Being of not being." This is somewhat similar to the Jewish concept of tsimtsum, which means that, in order to create a cosmos separate from himself, God must first generate a void and then withdraw or contract from it. Otherwise, creation would be identical to God, and we would be left with simple pantheism.

This is precisely why and how God "reveils" himself through creation: it both discloses and veils God at the same time. As Schuon put it, "Reality has entered into nothingness so that nothingness might become real."

Therefore, existence itself is problematic, in that it represents an inherent separation from God. "There is none good but God," or something like that. To exist at all means to be other than God. Truly, you must grasp this existential fact: we are darkness visible and nothingness tangible. In diagnosing our own bare nothingness, we can have no disagreement with a naughty existentialist such as Sartre or Nietzsche.

But this is also where we part ways with them. Because for Sartre and his ilk, there is truly no exit. The cosmos is a closed circle with no doorway in, up, or out. Or perhaps a doorway in, but certainly no way out short of death.

But death is not so much a way out as a simple end of the line, a final closing of the circle, a period at the end of the death sentence. Period.

Who was Jesus? In manifesting his celestial nature on earth, he did not seem particularly concerned about making it fully intelligible. 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 mean? What could it possibly mean?

Rudolf Steiner wrote that "the secrets of the Mysteries became manifest in Christianity." What secret? What mysteries?

Here I don't want to dwell on the literal aspect of resurrection, but how it might pertain to consciousness. Jesus was a divine "depth charge" dropped not only into history but into consciousness as well. It is said that his atonement (at-one-ment) was a reversal or undoing of mankind's original fall. That fall, in my view, was the fall alluded to above: the fall of God within himself into the possibility of non-being and nothingness, from symmetry to asymmetry.

Clearly, knowledge played some role in the fall, for it was specifically a type of knowledge--i.e., eating from the tree of good and evil--that precipitated it.

Therefore, the "fall" into the world of asymmetrical knowledge and finite being must be reversed as well; our consciousness must be raised up, back to its source. How do we eat from the Tree of Life and return to the symmetry of the infinite One beyond being?

Today marks a transhistorical, metacosmic day, a day to meditate on timeless truth in its metaphysical transparency. 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. For the Father is the transcendent aspect of God, the Son the immanent aspect. How to reconcile them?

Perhaps they were only ever separated by the 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 think about reality and to reconcile its ultimate terms. For if your powers of deception were cleansed, nothing would appear as it isn't.

O Death, you old mahahasamadhi, show us your secret mannascrypt, your Divine Cosmodeity. Take us before and beyond this womentary maninfestation, reveal not the horizontal but our inmost upmost vertical bigending at somarise.

Insinuate! Now put down the apple and back away slowly, and nobody dies. Ascent you a son, amen for a child's job. Reset your chronescapes and preprayer for arrisall, beyond the phoenix line. And you shall never grow so old again.

A hoppy yeaster to ale. Whorise? Ourrection! For He is accompliced.

*****

Just for kicks, absolute consciousness becomes its opposite and plays at being trapped in the closed circle of manifestation.