Dear All,
This week, we considered the heavens. That is, we developed a sense for the plural of, “Our Father, who art in the heavens….” -- plural in the original Greek text.
The heavens referred to are not only of multiple kinds (angels, realms, elementals, star-beings), but of multiple depths. We are invited into the depths of experience, of reality:
For the spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deeps of God. 1Corinthians 2:10
For example, “I go to the Father,” (John 14:12) on this reading of “heavens,” also points to a hierarchy or continuum upward. It means that the I AM principle extends from its everyday form, which we all experience, all the way up to the intensity of being of the source.
Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. Emerson, Nature, 1841
Our thoughts descend into awareness from we know not whence. Our sense perceptions coalesce and die into everyday consciousness from we know not whence. Our dreams, our memories, our understandings of all kinds: where do we get this stuff? The totality: what pushes it forth at each moment?
The purpose of meditation or prayer is not so much to have new perceptions and ideas, to meet beings or worlds (the multiplicity of kinds) but directly to experience the continuity between our minds and the sources, reaching infinitely upward (or downward or inward -- you pick the -ward). And from this continuity come the inspirations, intuitions, impulses that convince us.
This mind is the Buddha. Huang Po, d.850
What was made was life in him, and the life was the light of men. John 1:3-4
Our consciousness, our mind, our “light” is continuous with the highest Buddha nature, and so with the infinitely touching life of the world that we normally only experience as dead things.
To address “Our Father, who art in the heavens,” is to call oneself into personal relationship with all this, to be accompanied by it; personally to be touched by the continuity of this world with the ever-current source from which it springs.
all blessings to all,
Michael
