“It was expected that Christ would return within the octave, eight days, and put an end to the cyclic nature of life. The eighth day is Sunday, and so Christians celebrate Sunday as their holy day. When we celebrate on Sunday, we celebrate the ushering into the kingdom, and we relocate ourselves outside of time and in eternity. Since it’s the eighth day of the week, the expectation was that there was only going to be one of them. If we want to be logical, we could say that it didn’t work, because Monday turns up. But symbolically, in the depths of our unconscious, there is only one day of the Second Coming of Christ. There is only one Mass and one day of worship. It is not a process. Christianity puts an end to process and to the cyclic nature of man’s sojourn on earth.
If you deal with numbers in your dreams or in mythology, you’ll get lost if you take them literally. Numbers have their own symbolism, and at this level of comprehension they are about quality, not quantity. A delightful Chinese story illustrates this. The Chinese army was in a desperate, beleaguered situation, and so the general met with his advisors to decide what to do. Should they retreat and save what they could, or make a desperate effort and try to break out? They stayed up all night discussing the pros and the cons, and at dawn they took a vote. Six said retreat, and four wanted to fight it out. So they fought, because four is so much better a number than six. This is a non-literal way of thinking. Of course they won. The story wouldn’t have survived if they hadn’t.
The Heavenly Jerusalem
Envision the Second Coming of Christ as an inner reality that takes place on the eighth day of the week. Eight is a symbol of infinity, as you can see when you turn the numeral eight (8) on its side. A baptismal font has eight sides to indicate that when a child is baptized, he’s initiated into the eight-sided consciousness, eternity. On this symbolic level, there is nothing past the number eight. You’ve annihilated the cyclic nature and completed life.
A Brahman friend in India told me, “ Robert, you know all about wrnycC— the Indian concept that the world is illusory, a construct. “Let me tell you about mahamaya” Mahameans great. “ Mahamaya is the ultimate reality. It means looking at maya with intelligence.” Looking at illusion in a fresh way is the heavenly Jerusalem. This is not a promise, but a fact, right now. If you can jump out of time, which we are capable of doing, we can see any given moment as eternity. We don’t have to travel anywhere or even to wait in line. This is not a new fact. It’s a fresh way of looking.
As mentioned, the Second Coming of Christ is available to us as individuals when we are ready, or perhaps even when we choose. This is the Christian way of speaking about enlightenment, heightened consciousness, the experience that relocates your spiritual center of gravity. We are not bound to history. The Second Coming of Christ is available to us as individuals, and it will wait for us until we are able to remain steady in its presence.
This intersection of levels happens to people more than we might realize. They don’t understand the structure of it, so they just walk off and leave it. But sainthood is more common than we think.
The Church and the Muss
In the medieval world there was a proverb that the Mass, the communion service, a point in which we shift from time-bound to eternal consciousness, is the interim carrier of Christ. Mass can happen only once, but it can also happen again and again. The Church was touching on a non-literal fact and teaching it in the abstruse symbolism of the Second Coming of Christ. If you have the kind of mind that can think non-literally, there are jewels like this throughout Christianity.
Excerpt from: "Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection" by Arnie Kotler.
Read this book on Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/book/257708562
SPECIES
Fish
Rampant insect life
No comments:
Post a Comment