Easter's Unday

(Warning: don't try to make sense of this post, or you might miss its absence of a point. I certainly did.)

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That's a coincidence. As you might recoil, yesternow we were in the mist of discussing the secret religionship between trauma and spiritual opening, and 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 know the one. Around Eve, it was. We wouldn't have needed the resurrection if it hadn't a' been for that insurrection in paradise, now would we?

Now that I think about it for the first and possibly last time, Christianity is the only religion that is actually rooted in trauma, for no one -- not even the principle actor -- could know that the "D'oh!" of Good Friday would end in the "Woo hoo!" of Resurrection Sunday.

Or, as I shouted out last year at about this time, "Hooray! Surrection!" In the bread and the brew of life, it's a Hoppy Yeaster to you ale! That ought to get a rise out of you, since he is accompliced by all his adoptees and other sacrificial blood relativities.

But siriusly, speaking of bright stars and fixed lights in the night time sky of history, in order to uppereciate the significance of this day, one must oppreciate the trauma that preceded it -- the utter loss and abandonment. Could this be an uber-metaphor for all spiritual openings?

Boris Mouravieff writes that "When man goes in search of the Way, it generally signifies that something within him has collapsed. Apart from exceptional cases, this collapse is preceded by a reassessment of moral values, which in the searcher's eyes lose the value he had previously given to them. This reassessment itself has been provoked by the accumulation of more or less violent shocks which have given birth to violent emotions."

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 you 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. For when we fall, we only fall to the ground. And for those who believe themselves to be high above the ground, the height is only in their imagination anyway. Nevertheless, their inevitable fall will feel much more catastrophic when it comes, even if the distance from up there to down here was only in their heart.

Mouravieff writes that unless one is unusually saintly, one will not be able to travel the path of the Way "without first passing through an interior bankruptcy; a moral collapse." Furthermore, "Interior collapse leads to certain consequences." For the person who does not accept the reality of the situation, he turns his back "on the path of Access, and thrust[s] himself further into the wilderness." One form of "wilderness" is most assuredly psycho-spiritual leftism, which constitutes a bogus cure for mankind's collective trauma. It leads nowhere -- certainly not vertically. Rather, it ends up being a further elaboration of, and justification for, man's Fall.

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. In so doing, one no longer takes "mirages for reality." It can also leave one feeling painfully isolated from one's fellows -- from the world, even. Mouravieff reminds us of the following words:

If the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world... therefore the world hates you (John 15:18-19. But hey, don't worry about it -- don't get retraumatized all over again -- because I have overcome the world (John 16:33).

Come again?

It seems that in some form or fashion, the world itself -- or worldly existence -- is a trauma. In fact, I am reminded of Bion's theory of thinking, which he believed was foisted upon the mind in order to deal with the catastrophic absence of the breast (literally understood metaphorically). If you try to imagine it from the infant's point of view, there is no reason to think so long as he and the breast, the beatific and bountiful source of all life, are at one.

But eventually we make the painful discovery that we are separate from the source. There is a "rent" in the smooth surface of being, as thinking is forced upon the mind, in that infinite gap between mouth and breast. For the liberal, this gap is not tolerated, and is even resented; thus their characteristic absence of thought and the perpetual attempt to resurrect the bountiful breast in the form of the mommy state. Every day is anti-Easter.

Back to the world's hostility. Why is the left so hostile to religion? Perhaps because, as Mouravieff suggests, "if he who lives in the wilderness -- and is satisfied to be there, were he to approve of the attitude of one who walks on the path, it would be equivalent to recognizing his own bankruptcy. The more he progresses with his work, the more he becomes an object of hate."

Therefore, why wouldn't the world crucify Jesus? At the time, 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 bounds. But like everything else in the world, Rome had a beginning and an end. Only the one they put to death had an end and a beginning.

For horizontal man, there truly is 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 physical death.

But physical 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 this spiraling Jesus who escaped the circle? In manifesting the celestial nature on earth, he 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 mean? What could it possibly mean?

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

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 engage reality and to reconcile its ultimate terms. For if your powers of deception were cleansed, nothing would appear as it isn't.

But... Could you shed a little less bobscurity on that?

The Catholic theologian 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 Carnation."

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

I don't know if any of this is making nonsense. I'll just stop now.

Ascent you a son, amen for a child's job. Telos when it's over. Now. It is accomplished. The circle unbroken, by and by. A godsend for a new beginning, a touch of infanity, a bloomin' yes on a rosy cross.