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The Inner Path To Christ 13

The Healing

Love can come from a child reaching its hand to us. Love can flow between two lovers, skin to skin, wet with their own exuberance. A dog’s shining eyes call out love to us if only we listened. A flower casting its perfume on the air – an author giving himself to us in his words – an artist, a musician – all creators, shower us with their love in their own reproductive acts. A husband who stands and irons, or holds the baby for us, is giving us as much love in his way as the one who caresses the breast. The teacher loves us by being there day after day. In fact, the thousands of government and civil service workers who tirelessly work without recognition and who are the blood and muscles of what makes our society work are giving themselves.

All that is a form of healing, but the Christ spirit shows us how to open our being to Love as it exists in all its phases. It ‘preaches deliverance to the captives’; for are we all not captives of social rules, fears, environment, education and the many other prisons? The inner Light sets at liberty those that ‘are bruised’, for the events of our life, and the pain, or even agony, we may have experienced, often imprison us. When Christ is born in us it tends to start working to heal these pains, releasing us from the influence of them.

The first act of Christ is written as the healing of a blind man. The ‘blind are healed’, for we may be blind to the fact that Life constantly upholds us. We may not be able to see the wonder of our birthright, and our destiny as God’s children.

Sightless, we will deny that a great love and life are behind all the visible universe. Blind, we may treat people and animals like ‘things’, ‘objects’, denying they have the same Life in them as we have in ourselves; denying they have the same feelings, destiny, awareness and need for love and encouragement as we have ourselves, in whatever degree they now show it.

What of the great healings? Are we all to be healed of leprosy fever, as was Peter’s mother-in-law; paralysis; palsy; a withered hand; an issue of blood; deafness and dumbness; or to have demons cast out and be raised from the dead? Yes, we are.

Leprosy is our unclean lusts and desires; our thoughts are often full of dirt. Such dirt and lusts are only misplaced life energies. Earth from which wholesome food grows, is called dirt when it gets in a wound. So, our emotions and thoughts, when used in the wrong way, or out of harmony, can give us an inner uncleanness. The Christ in us heals by denying nothing but giving each its place.

A fever is our emotions when we live at ‘fever pitch’. It is the inner heat of passion and feelings when these are self-centred rather than self-giving; when we are impatient and judging.  They are the great burning emotions we have blown into a furnace from an ember by nursing our wrath; grieving an injury; magnifying a slight. These are healed by bringing a wider view to our life and showing us the result of our actions.

To be paralysed is to be unable to act or move in life because we have a guilt, shame or conscience which paralyses. Not realising or wanting to accept how we relate to the Life force, our actions against others, in word or deed, literally wound ourselves.  The attitude of mind we use to hurt or speak ill of someone acts as a block to the flow of our own life stream, paralysing many of our functions. ‘For whatsoever ye do unto one of these, ye do unto me!’ The emotion we wield to injure another, turns in on our own life-giving stream and likewise wounds it. Thus, we are healed by saying, ‘Your sins are forgiven you – or – take up thy bed and walk,’ from the inner Christ. Life itself is the only thing that can forgive us the injury we have done it – and such forgiveness in us is the mouthpiece for its love and forgiveness of others.

Palsy is a symbol for a disturbance of the natural function of the life stream in us. Such movements occur sometimes when a past event has shocked or hurt our nervous system; or when we have held on to a grievance from being deeply hurt or shocked physically and emotionally. The act of holding on to our hate, malice, or judgement of someone who has caused the injury or was not there to comfort us when we needed them, cause the pain itself to become built into our soul. This pain disturbs the action of the life stream in its normal expression as love, sensation of wellbeing, physical strength, creativeness and spontaneous inner wisdom. Similarly, with a withered hand, for this represents our inability to act creatively, or to give and share ourselves with others – to give others a ‘hand’ that supports,

encourages or carries their load. Maybe our physical hands are fine, but how are the hands of our soul?

The damage such in-turned or negative emotions can do is enormous. Many years ago, a woman who could hardly walk came to stay with my wife and I. She hobbled along using two sticks. Within a week, without any treatment, she could walk normally. She told us with great enthusiasm that she now knew what had caused her illness. Three years previously her son had married and had asked if he and his new wife could lodge in his parent’s house for a few weeks while they looked for a house of their own. His mother felt resentful that he and his wife had stayed for years and made no effort to move out. But being a Christian woman, she kept her feelings to herself. She ended the story by saying, “Being on holiday away from the situation has allowed me to be free of the resentment, and this has healed my legs. So, I know what I am going to do when I get home. I am going to tell my son and his wife to pack their things and move out.”

Many of us may also have, within our soul, an issue of blood. To bleed is to lose our life fluid, our physical energy. To bleed from our soul is to lose our life force, in this case from the genitals, through misuse of sexual feelings, or of the creative function of childbirth. To give ourselves sexually when our inner feelings tell us to refrain; or to use a means of killing Life in us, is to wound our soul and cause it to bleed. But Christ comes, as he says, not to condemn but to redeem. Not for the saved, but the sinners.

Most of us too, are deaf and dumb. For though Life speaks to us in our dreams, through our sense of beauty, through our love, the seasons, plants, and all visible creation; and if we are unwilling to hear it calling us through these, it yet speaks to us through men who witness its presence in their own experience; through books, music, poetry and all our devices, yet we shut our ears. And if we do hear, we often choose not to act as yet another voice through which Life can sing and talk.

A woman, told that God speaks to us through our moments of uplift or beauty said, ‘But I never feel that way.’ When streams of living laughter, wisdom, beauty and creativeness flow through us, our soul is alive. Lacking these, our soul is indeed dead, and Christ can raise it from this death even as was done with Lazarus.

Even if your inner voice shouts within you that Love, Light and Life can transform and heal your being you may prefer to believe otherwise. Yet you do so despite the failure which the worldly life demonstrates every day with its criminality, wars, dissatisfaction, meaninglessness and destruction. You are truly, like so many of us, deaf, dumb and blind to the proof Life gives us every day. As soon as you allow the inner Light to illuminate you, all this can be changed, sometimes in the twinkling of an eye.

Starr Daily, a convict who discovered this for himself, the hard way, says. “I recall a time when I was being held in jail on suspicion of burglary. For two days and nights I had been subjected to ‘third degree’ police methods to torture a confession out of me. My head had been beaten with a rubber hose until it resembled a huge stone bruise, swollen beyond human shape, my face black from the congealed blood beneath the surface. Lighted cigars had been pressed against my flesh. I had hung for three hours with my wrists handcuffed over a hot steam pipe. My arms had been twisted behind me and my elbows beaten with black jacks until the bones felt crunchy. Heavy heels had ground my bare feet against a concrete floor.

On the third night of this I was at the end of my endurance.  “Again, I was dragged into the torture room and sat down within the semi-circle of twelve big detectives. My previous sustaining energy of hate and anger had dwindled into a dull sense of indifference. I was alarmed at this new state of affairs. For I had learned that pain could easily be assimilated if sufficient hatred could be thrown against it. I did not want to weaken. Death was preferable. But could I stand the pain without the sustaining force of hate?

‘You’d better open up and come clean,’ the Chief informed me. ‘If you don’t you’re gonna get the works. Y’understand?’

“I continued to sit in stoic silence, expecting the worst, and wondering if I would be able to take it. It was the show-down. Unless I broke, my life was not worth a dime. I knew this as two of the detectives stepped toward me. Then a strange thing took place in my consciousness. All hate and anger were gone. The vague sense of indifference vanished. And in an unbidden instant, there welled up within me an overwhelming compassion for these men, for their pathetic ignorance, their undeveloped souls, for the pitiful condition of their minds and hearts. And as this strange sentiment reached a high peak of intensity within me the Chief spoke, and what he said constituted a minor miracle.

‘Don’t hit him again’, he barked, ‘take him back.’ I was returned to my cell, and for the remainder of the night was under the care of a doctor. The next morning, I was transferred to a private hospital, where I lived for three weeks. Every day a number of women came to see me, bringing flowers and other gifts. It was all quite mystifying, and the nurses’ guarded explanations did not clarify the mystery. These women were the wives of city detectives. I could not figure the thing out. I was only a friendless, unprotected criminal. They had no reason to placate me with gifts and attention because they feared what I might reveal. I was told not to worry about anything, that all bills would be paid. Nor was I returned to jail on being discharged from the hospital. Instead I was given an envelope and told that I was free to go. In the envelope was no word of explanation. Only five crisp, ten-dollar bills.

“It was not until twenty years later, twenty years filled with crime and punishment, that I was able to see through this mystery, and to know the power, because of which my life had been spared and this odd consideration shown me.”

What was it that finally showed Starr Daily the power of Love? It was Jesus! He says: “I re-entered prison for the third time with sinister ideas. Three times I tried to fight my way to freedom. The first two times were of the ‘Lone wolf’ variety; the third involved group action, destruction and physical violence. Our plan was to cause a mob riot and during its height to seize the deputy warden as a shield and hostage, then under threats of death force him to give the order that would open the gates.

“The plot was discovered, and I was sentenced to the dungeon. The average time for a strong man in ‘the hole’ is fifteen days, at the end of which time the doctor ends the sentence. This time came and went. Finally, I collapsed. I seemed to be sustained by hate alone as I lay inured in the lowest hell earth had to offer.

“Yet as I lay near death on the icy floor of the cell, a strange new thought came to me. I realised that I had been a dynamo of energy in everything I had done. I began to wonder what would have happened if I had used my powers for something other than destruction. It was to me a completely revolutionary thought!

“What then followed is difficult to describe. I first began to dream disconnected dreams, then they took on meaning. These dreams were the same I had as a child – beautiful dreams of Jesus Christ, the man I had tried to avoid for many years. He paused near my side and looked down deep into my eyes as though he were trying to penetrate my soul. In all my life I had never seen or felt such love.

“Then I seemed to see all the people I had ever injured directly or indirectly, or who had injured me. I poured out love to them which seemed to heal their hurts. Then we were in a great auditorium and I spoke of love to all the people. I seemed to be assuring myself while I was awake and that I would never forget these words flowing over my lips.

“When I consciously returned to my dungeon environment, the state of my mind had completely changed. The cell was illuminated with a new kind of light – the light of my own redeemed eye. Before that experience, I was a callused criminal; after it I was completely healed of my criminal tendencies! As a result, the prison doors swung open five years in advance of the time set for my release.” (8)

“This Light, Life and Love that heals us, is everything that sentimentalism is not. In its practical application love is as precise and scientific as mathematics. Without it there could be no universe, no cellular structure, no organisation of any kind. Because love is the only integrating power in existence. It is all that can establish order out of chaos – or maintain order in chaos.

Love is to grow into oneness with God. “With the light of Love to guide us, the idea of seeking God fades on the film of our consciousness, and we know, then, that this idea, long held and fostered by men, is as false as the beard of Hercules. It is God who is doing the seeking. It is God who stands at our door and knocks. When we consciously and deliberately set out to seek God, we are simply being annoyed by God’s seeking us. His incessant pounding on our door irritates us, we try to escape from this friction and annoyance, and we call this ‘seeking God.’ We go to church or a lecture hall, or we drop a coin in the hand of a beggar, or we join a charitable organisation. And the more we seek the further we drift from the real consciousness of God’s presence, for we stifle His voice and dull the sound of His knocking. God is the Supreme Shepherd and it must forever be the logical procedure for the shepherd to seek his lost sheep, and not for his lost sheep to seek him.” (7)

Besides starting the process of healing in us; besides leading us beyond national prejudices, beyond any one religion or viewpoint, the Light leads us now beyond the limitations of our own individual consciousness. Gradually, and in a meaningful way, God shares with us the souls of others, when we are in a position to help. In our times of quiet, we are shown the inner thoughts or conditions of those we are in contact with, but only when helpful to us or to them. Or else our presence or consciousness travels to them to support, comfort, heal or teach.

Talking of his wife, who was dying of cancer, a man told me: “I had risen several times that night to watch over my wife and attend to her needs. I did so again, and saw to my astonishment, the form of a friend, kneeling beside the bed. Gradually it faded; but later I learnt that this woman had been kneeling at prayer, just at that time, asking God’s help for my wife.”

Another man says, “In my periods of quiet, when I sit silently, not reaching out or trying to get anywhere, but simply being open to anything God may wish to have me know or experience, there occasionally arise distinct impressions. Sometimes these are symbolic images, such as when I saw a friend mending an undergarment, and knew it meant she was mending an inner injury to her emotion. Or when I saw an acquaintance banging on a brick wall of her house, when a little to the left was a doorway she could walk through, and knew a difficulty had arisen in her life, but before her was an open way to walk through this problem. Other times there comes a feeling of being in contact with the person and his mood. Then God and I take up the person’s burden and help him. In other words, I do with another’s burden what I do with my own, I hold it out to my Father who strengthens me and tells me what is best to be done.”

Occasionally we may be blessed with a visit from visitor not of this earth, as this man describes – “Suddenly there were two beings with me in my room. I could not see them with my eyes, but they were standing in my awareness, to my left, suspended above the bed where I lay musing. Surprising, because I had not sought them. Frightening, because they were the living dead. Radiant, because they were angels. Inspiring, because they shone with wonderful life. Uplifting, because of the gift they brought.

The living dead! Yes. That I knew of them. It was everywhere about them, communicating itself to me, telling me the majesty of death. Speaking to me without words they led knowing in me, as you might lead a friend through your new house, revealing its secrets. Thereby I knew, all that I considered human, in them had died. Desire, longing to possess, sex, ambition, all had melted away.

And I understood in their presence, if I surrendered to the Highest, this was my path. My own person would melt away, my desires fade like shadows in the sun. Fear – Yes – in the loss of myself. In the sense of my own futility. In the knowledge of my littleness. In the confrontation of majesty. At the loss of what I thought my wisdom.

n them I saw beyond myself. Through their emptiness of all that I so valued. I saw shimmering light, cosmic in its vastness. Their death allowed, shining through them, dimensions of a life beyond the very best of all my mind, or love, or art. Radiant they were with all the mystery of life itself. Suns shone through them; not just with light, but with ungrasped joy and love. Inspiring me by showing me the possibility of my life, and all the lives of those myriads around me.

Uplifting too, by unveiling to me the meaning of the story He told, where, having lost one’s cloak, you offer your coat also. Not, as I had thought, an act of selfless generosity. They said it was a statement. “How strange. You want this old coat, when you could have the life unbounded?”

That was their promise. If I dared lose my self, let that coat be taken from me, my being too would shine as theirs shone on me that day.”

And to add to that, here is a report in Dr. Morse’s book Closer to the Light.

 “Let me give you an example of medicine and faith working together. I don’t quite know what to make of this story, which was told to me by a doctor who wit­nessed it from beginning to end in the small Idaho hospital where it happened.

A woman was having severe complications during the delivery of her child. Not only was the placenta separating from the lining of the uterus (a pediatric emergency), but the obtuse angle of the child’s head in the birth canal was making delivery very difficult. When the child was finally delivered, he was found to have a severe brain hemorrhage.

The child spent several months in the intensive care unit of this small town because the mother did not want to transfer him to a large city where she would not be allowed to spend full time with him. Doctors decided not to encourage her to move the child since they felt the injuries were so massive that no treatment would be possible.

The child had severe cerebral palsy secondary to brain damage and a seizure disorder that had shown up on an abnormal EEG. These are afflictions from which children simply don’t recover. If they survive infancy, they spend their lives severely retarded.

The doctors told her their prognosis, but still the mother stayed with her child. By all accounts she was with the boy almost twenty-four hours a day for sev­eral months. Perhaps it was the strain of the ordeal or sleep deprivation that led to what happened next.

Late one night, she said, a Being of Light came into her hospital room. Later she described it as having the shape of a person, but not the features of either a male or a female. It glowed with a cold, gray light as though light were being beamed through an ice cube.

“Your son will be all right,” the being said.

The woman said that she felt as though love were being poured into her body. “It was marvelous.”

The next day she shared this vision with her medical team. She was especially excited because the being had assured her that her son was going to be normal. Could they please do another EEG to see if anything had happened? They repeated the brain-wave test and came up with the startling results: normal. The child had made a full recovery.”

At times we can receive the gift of insight, like Jesus at the well, we are given an understanding of a person’s whole life, in order to help them more fully. But none of this comes through attempting to force its development, nor does it come to him who has not learnt how to use it wisely.

For apart from knowing the soul of another, each of us in some measure has contact with the mind of God, which holds in it memory of all things. Thus, it is that Jesus talks with Moses and Elias on the Mountain, for they represent all that has been learnt and accomplished by the soul of man in the past, in all ages. In this way, such men as Cayce and Steiner were able to diagnose sickness in people they never met – from afar. Or unravel their past. Or tell of previous sojourns in the body. Or talk of history through seeing it in the Universal mind of God.

No baby can reach adulthood by seeking it, only by going along with the inner processes of growth, in patience and harmony. So too – we cannot claim these abilities harmoniously except by going along with Life’s activity upon us and growing in spiritual stature. Then there is no seeking, there is only becoming. There is no grasping, only having. For this thing is grasped only with open hands.

Then “I saw before me a low mountain overlooking the plains of Syria. Shepherds were herding their flocks on its slopes. Near the summit, Christ stood with His disciples gathered around him. As He spoke, I listened as intently as did they. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ The meaning suddenly became obvious for the first time. The sad, depressed, and despondent would, in their misery, seek God; urged on by sorrow within themselves, they would continue seeking Him until their lives were indeed made rich and their souls filled with joy; thus would theirs be the kingdom of heaven within, where Christ had repeatedly told us it would be found.

“Now He was saying, ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.’ I realised that He was not referring to milk-sops or self-imposed martyrs or masochists, but that the only way one could be truly meek was by first accepting oneself as a marvellous part of God. Once the God-self was recognised and appreciated, all need for arrogance and egotism was gone. It was the necessary acceptance of our God-selves which allowed both meekness and inheritance of the earth, meaning the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven within ourselves while we are still on earth.

“As Christ continued speaking, I realised that in one way or another we were all blessed, and many times blessed, and that if we failed to recognise our blessedness, the problem lay in our selves. When I looked up again, Christ was saying, ‘Ye are the salt of the earth . . . . Ye are the light of the world.’ It seemed to me that Christ was saying a part of God was in each of us.” (9)

I want to say to you that even if you consider yourself to be a weak person or someone who is not clever and could never be a healer or could speak wisdom, you have misunderstood the message of what has been written. How can you be weak or ignorant when you open yourself to that Mystery that created you? You are only weak and ignorant when you keep depending on your own little self. For goodness sake open to the MORE that you have within you, for in it is wisdom and strength beyond measure.

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The Inner Path To Christ 12

What is born this day?

When you open to the Mystery that is the foundation of your existence something happens within you. An influence starts to work in you, and this is often depicted as conception. It takes time for this gentle influence to grow, and this is why pregnancy is such an apt symbol of it.

Evelyn Underhill, ever explicit about the growth of Christ in us, says:

The long strange months of our expectation are over: that hidden certain trust of ours, that joyous consciousness of crescent spirit, ‘our own yet not our own,’ is justified at last. It is justified in the actual outbirth and appearance of that most real and mystic Life; which is so profound just because it is so simple, so far above us just because it is divinely near. Welcome all wonders in one sight, Eternity shut in a span, summer in winter, day in night, Heaven in earth and God in man, great little one, whose all-embracing birth lifts earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth.

In terms of its symbolism the New Testament is again a wonderful statement of what happens when the divine is born in your life.  Although the newborn Jesus is recognised as a special child, there are still shown to be surrounding doubts, objections and oppositions.  This is the way it will be for most of us.  Because the wonderful thing has happened to us, it doesn’t mean we are without doubts or that we can now see our way clearly.  The growth and maturity of this new path still faces the passage of time and the complications of growth.  There will be times when the light opens and shines in your life, but there will equally be times when the darkness returns and you lose sight of the wonder that is emerging in you.  These are represented by the child Jesus talking to the teachers in the temple, (Mark 2:46), and the doubts of those around him.

Writing about this inner change, Maurice Nicoll, in his book The New Man, says: [i]

The Gospels are from beginning to end all about this possible self-evolution. They are psychological documents. They are about the psychology of this possible inner development – that is, about what a person must think, feel, and do in order to reach a new level of understanding. The Gospels are not about the affairs of life, save indirectly, but about this central idea – namely, that Man internally is a seed capable of a definite growth. Man is compared with a seed capable of a definite evolution. As he is, Man is incomplete, unfinished. A person can bring about his or her own evolution, their own completion, individually. If he does not wish to do this he need not. He is then called grass – that is, burned up as useless. This is the teaching of the Gospels.

Nicoll also reminds us that what we are dealing with here is not the rational organised realm of thought. We are dealing with the Mystery, that which stands beyond what we understand. Therefore we cannot neatly organise it and control it. We must open to it and be fertilised by it or reject it. This is why Mary is shown with Joseph, an old man who cannot understand her condition, but nevertheless supports her.

Here it is summed up on everyday language:

Perhaps I can explain that through a conversation I witnessed. A man said to a woman he was confronting, “Religion; that’s surely a direction for failures and people who can’t really cope with facing reality.”

And the woman he is accusing of this inability to face reality said, “You poor man!  Is your mind or awareness so tiny that you have never realised the forces and processes of your own body are beyond anything you understand?  Can’t you see that your very existence is brought about by things so far beyond your knowledge that it is only a statement of your impoverishment to suggest an awareness of God is an expression of some sort of smallness and failure.  Have you never understood that?  Have you not seen that religion is not only an acknowledgement of what we fail to understand and yet depend upon, but it is also an opening to it, a willingness to relate to it?  It can also be something far more even than that.  It can be an active loving relationship what gives you life.  And such love is an exchange, a sharing, a way of merging one with another. It is an exchange –the very substance of life.

Imagine that; a glorious love affair with the very spirit of life! A love affair with the invisible and forever indefinable. Is that something you are afraid of?”

[i] This refers to http://www.gurdjieff.org/hunter1.htm

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The Inner Path To Christ 11

The prayer of the virgin soul

The symbolism of the Virgin Mary, and the many other virgin mothers in the world’s sacred literature, show how universal a realisation this is. But if you wish to practise it, you have to make it an inner reality. In doing so you have to realise that by “inner change” is meant an inner condition, an inner state of being. It is also helpful to understand why you attempt this. It is because, until you clear at least part of your consciousness of preconceived ideas, biases, convictions, rigid emotions, unconscious habits, and so on, you cannot conceive new realisations from your own inner possibilities, you cannot give birth to the awareness of that Mystery that you are, to God. Basically, this is very practical. In trying to remember someone’s name you may fail utterly because you are certain it begins with ‘S’ – when in fact it begins with ‘B’. You will never remember the name until you drop your preconception.

So the virgin posture of the soul is an attempt to bring about an inner state, an inner feeling of fertility and love towards your invisible and unknown potential – purity from preconceived ideas – the offering of your whole being as material for your potential to use in creating a new self – the act of supplication in which you let go of your thoughts, emotions and body, so they can be played upon as a piano or organ by Life. There should arise a feeling of warmth toward and desire for the unseen Life, openness to any possibility Life may have in store for you, good or bad, allied with trust. If you have a temperament capable of this, then make it an act of love, a real devotion, approaching ones darling.

When you manage to let go of what you think God or Life is, what you believe yourself to be, or what you are convinced is so about yourself and the world, then you are ready to receive something new.  Then, that divine conception can take place in you that enables the spiritual (that which exists beyond the barriers and boundaries of your own ego) to gain a foothold in you.  Then you become pregnant with new life and eventually give birth to the More of yourself in the way you live and act. This conception and the following birth will become known to you in some way.  It will be felt, or maybe shown to you in a dream.  The following is the dream of a man who for some time had been practising the way of Mary.

I dreamt I was lying in a cellar. I was myself, yet at the same time, I was my wife and another woman I loved. I was in labour, and after a time the baby was born. It was a boy, a wonderful child. A membrane covered part of its face and I pulled it away. The baby then began to breathe, and looked about, fully conscious and very alert. Then, to my wonder, it spoke the name of Jesus, and said, ‘It is gone’.

When asked what was gone, the beautiful baby replied, “The other ego, where has it gone?” I seemed to know exactly what it meant. The baby had been part of the cosmic awareness, of universal consciousness, and was now but a babe; and I said, “The cosmic still exists within you, to become known as you grow, but being in a body has closed that door for a while.” I then carried the baby from the cellar upstairs and knew it to be a holy and wonderful child.

Deep within us, when we have opened to God as a virgin, in the cellar or cave of our unconscious, among the beasts of our instincts, and physical energies, the New Life tentatively begins its growth to consciousness, to birth. The star and the stable are the highest and the lowest in us uniting in this wonderful task. Joseph, our intellect and outer creativeness, difficult though he finds it to believe in this miracle, listens to his intuitions and dreams, and protects and cares for the childlike mother.

This new life of the spirit emerging in you, as the story of the Gospels suggest, is just a baby.  It is vulnerable.  It needs caring for and nurturing.  It needs protection against the Herod’s of the world.  It also needs recognition that the Christian drama takes place in your own life, as the following quote suggests.

Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born, but not within thyself, thy soul will be forlorn: the cross of Golgotha thou lookest to in vain, unless within thyself it be set up again. (A German mystic, quoted from Angeluus Silesius) [i]

Some helpful pointers to this inner posture of the soul are as follows:

• Try to shift the condition of your inner feelings to one of a young and loving girl who is opening herself to the mysterious spirit of Life. In this way you are opening not to the known, but to what is an eternal mystery.
• Remember that you are an expression of that Mystery, so it is not far off or unattainable; it just needs an open doorway into your conscious life. Open that doorway with some sense of wonder. See Opening to Life

[i] This should be searched for in Wikipedia

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The Inner Path To Christ 10

How do we enter on the Way?

There are steps or stages in the discipline of discipleship. The very first of these steps apart from christening, is what might be called The Turning Point. It arises from an unmistakable awareness that something is missing from your life; or it comes because of a feeling arising from an inner sense of emptiness or isolation. You may feel cut off from something you know you should be a part of. Sometimes it arises because you are faced by a great tragedy, a loss or illness confronting you with death.

In terms of the Christian story, this first step can be symbolised by the experience of Mary’s mother Anna.  A description of Mary’s parents is not given in the New Testament as it stands but is found in the Apocryphal New Testament (Apocryphal New Testament. Protevangelion. Hone edition).  There we find the following description:

There was in Israel a man and wife known as Joachim and Anna. Although elderly, wealthy, and giving of their wealth to the Temple, they became ashamed, for they had no child. Therefore, with his unhappiness upon him, ‘Joachim retired into the wilderness, and fixed his tent there, and fasted forty days and forty nights, saying to himself, “I will not go down either to eat or drink, till the Lord my God shall look down upon me, but prayer shall be my meat and drink.” In the meantime his wife Anna was distressed and perplexed twofold, and said, “I will mourn, both for my widowhood and my barrenness”.’

When Joachim had been in the wilderness some time, ‘on a certain day when he was alone, the angel of the Lord stood by him with a prodigious light’ and said, “When God shuts the womb of any person, he does it for this reason, that he may in a more wonderful manner open it again, and that which is born appears to be not the product of lust, but the gift of God. Therefore, Anna your wife shall bring you a daughter, and you shall call her name Mary.” Afterwards the angel appeared to Anna his wife saying, “Fear not, neither think that which you see is a spirit: For I am that angel who hath offered up your prayers and alms before God, and am now sent to you, that I may inform, that a daughter will be born unto you, who shall be called Mary, and shall be blessed above all women.”

This story is not being presented as history, but as a parable describing the barrenness you may feel in your life, and the longing and searching that may lead to that first touch, that first encounter with something beyond yourself. This first meeting, this first brush with something living that is beyond the narrow confines of your own personality, may be very small, or very deeply felt.  But as with the story of Joachim and Anna, usually there comes with it an assurance, a sense of meeting something good, something More.  Victor Gollancz describes his own first encounter as follows:

For an hour past I have been the prey of a vague anxiety; I recognise my old enemy – – – It is a sense of void and anguish; a sense of something lacking: what? Love, peace, God perhaps? The essence of my hell was outlawry. By the sin which, as I felt, I had committed, I had broken the links that united me with universal living: I was separate, alone, without lot or part in the everything. I had deprived myself, treacherously, of it: I had deprived it, quite as treacherously, of me.

One forenoon, when my terror and despair seemed to be at their height, and after a total insomnia that had lasted for twenty-two days, and every muscle and nerve ached, I set out for a walk with my wife. We went very slowly along a country lane… About half an hour later we turned, sharply left, into a dark and narrow path that descended: and soon came out into a great open space – a sort of water meadow, with herds grazing, and a high inland cliff just in front of us. There was dappled sunlight everywhere, and a slight breeze. I felt suddenly very still: and then I heard the inland cliff, and the grass and water and sky, say very distinctly to me, ‘A humble and a contrite heart He will not despise.’ When I say I heard them say it, I mean, quite literally, that I heard them say it; a voice came from them: but they were also themselves the voice, and the voice was also within me. I said to my wife ‘The trouble is over’, and that night I slept a little. (Quoted from Darkness to Light, ed. by Victor Gollancz. Published by Gollancz).

This contact, this meeting, comes to us because there has been an inner shift, an inner change of heart.  It is a change from believing there is nothing but your own will, your own opinions, your own power, to that of perhaps uncertainty, or towards an opening, a longing.  If this change has not happened in your life and you wish to practise discipleship, then you need to cultivate the change.  Consider whether your inner condition is one that shuts out the possibility of the human spirit and love. To take the first step, take time each day meditating upon this change of heart. See if you can feel or create this within you.

Some thoughts to ponder that might help this inner shift are as follows.

• Ask yourself what power you have in the world, and how much control you have over your life. For instance, you may be able to decide many of the things you do, but can you make your heart beat and digest your food? What actual independence do you have, considering that you need others to make your clothes, grow your food, build the house you live in, and so on?
• Do you actually know who you are and from what you emerged? Giving a name to your parents and grandparents is not an answer.
• Whatever attitude you have to the process of life in creatures and the universe, does it explain all the phenomena that surrounds you? Are you that wise?
• Practise recognising that your thoughts and emotions never ever reflect reality. At these times remember that if you think of a person you know, your thoughts or feelings are never ever that person.  Also, what you feel and think about yourself can never ever be anything more than a tiny fragment of information.  That tiny fragment, if taken seriously, gives a totally distorted view.  To understand and to judge who you really are you would need to be completely aware of all the factors in history, and in the lives of your forebears, and in fact in the development of the cosmos, that led to your existence and to your present situation.  Likewise, when you think about events, people, political situations, always realise that you are considering with a tiny fraction of the information you really need to be wise.
• Therefore, stand with some humility before the fact of your own existence and before the world.  That humility may act as a leader to open your heart and mind to something more than you have experienced so far. 

The second step of Discipleship is the way of Mary

Virgin Mary is an image of your own human situation and represents the possibility of a virginal mind and feelings. Put simply this means that we drop preconceptions, we melt away fixed opinions, rigid attitudes, perhaps through prayer, meditation or perseverance. So, the birth of the Virgin Mary symbolises this change of heart, and the life of Mary shows what can come of it.

The story of Mary beautifully illustrates step.  She is a young girl who has just started menstruation.  She is therefore fertile, open and loving.  How much more we can receive from that mysterious spirit of life that is around us and within us if we have an open and loving heart, a love that has unfolded like a beautiful flower toward the unknown mystery that we have given the name of Life or God?

Evelyn Underhill, writing under the name John Cordelier in her book The Spiral Way, has this to say about Mary:

So many had gone up the mountain to that one desired encounter; only to be thwarted by the cloud that broods upon the summit and hides from human eyes the Shining Light within. The great prophets, poets, and philosophers of the antique world – all these had gone up, all had marked classic moments in the ascent of the race. Then came a little girl, pure, meek, and receptive: and ran easily to her destiny and the destiny of the universe because she was ‘full of grace.’ She held out her heart to the Invisible and in this act flung a bridge across the chasm that separates Illusion from Reality. Mary becomes by this circumstance the type and pattern of each human soul. Consciously or unconsciously, all are candidates for her high office. All, truly can become the mothers of God. (Published by Watkins – See http://www.evelynunderhill.org ).

The life of prayer is often spoken of as part of the Christian path.  But prayer can so easily be the mechanical mouthing of certain words, repeated over and over. We may make the movements of our mouth, we may repeat the words, but do we really experience them – do we make them an outflow of a real inner feeling? The great saints of East and West have gone beyond words and ego-directed movements, to the real changing of self. Some of the changes they made within themselves are almost universal.  This is true of the Prayer of the Virgin Soul.

Here is a person’s experience as they begin to take that path:

‘I was in a huge cathedral, the mother church. I wanted to go to the toilet/gents. As I held my penis to urinate it became a snake and it reached down to the urinal to drink. It was thirsty. I struggled with it, pulling it away from the unclean liquid. Still holding it I walked to a basin and gave it pure water to drink.’

It is not just his penis he is struggling with, it is the direction his sexual urges take him that he is struggling with. Out of his sense of love and connection with Life – the cathedral – he wants to lift his drive toward something that will not leave him with a sense of uncleanness. In this sense it might be something one wrestled with, depicting the wrestle one has with one’s inner drives and hungers, especially sexuality or anger.

He felt that the Mother Church was his human experience of meeting the divine principle within him, free from all dogmatism or sectarianism, free of all groups, and is something new for each person. It is the source, when met, of all religions, for it is the source of ourselves.

Put simply it is to drop preconceptions, to melt away fixed opinions, and rigid attitudes and by doing so become ready to give birth to the greater Life – the Christ Child within us.

Example: Was in a basement where my wife and a woman I loved was giving birth to a baby, but I was somehow the one who gave birth to it without a doctor being there. It was a lovely boy. Its lower face was covered by a tight caul, but I pulled this off and it began to breathe. It opened its eyes and looked about, fully conscious. Then said something about Jesus, and, “It is gone!” I asked what had gone, and it replied, “The other ego; where has it gone?” I explained that the spirit self it knew before birth was now gone so it could live in the body. The baby was then taken upstairs, and I felt it was a holy and wonderful baby. I was going to rest from the rigours of the birth, but on looking around saw how dusty and dirty the basement was. I began to clean it, and felt I would go upstairs and rest afterwards.

The holy child dream occurs usually when the person is attempting to transform their life and clean out their basement – their unconscious hurts and psychological, social and family debris. This divine child shows how a new being linking with the eternal spirit of Life can emerge out of our ordinary and often malformed self.

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The Inner Path To Christ 9

You are the divine – expressed or repressed

With this in mind, God, Christ, the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary become definable forces with which we can consciously relate, in and through discipleship.  For instance, when Christ says, ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I” – He is describing the force of collective human love and caring. In other words, Christ is saying, “I am the force generated by people when they unite in goodwill.” It is this transcendental force (it transcends individual human action) that creates human souls by naming them, treating babies as loveable valid beings, and accepting them as welcome parts of our community.  Without that action of love and care, human identity does not properly mature, or take its place in society. In fact without it a person may never develop an awareness of the living process in nature and other people as it extends beyond the narrow boundaries of their own personality and sense impressions. They never develop a spiritual life. So here the word spiritual refers to that which exists as a reality beyond the limitations of one’s own personal awareness and body.  Priestley’s dream of the birds was a spiritual experience because he was helped to look beyond the individual life and death of the birds.

But returning to the action of family and society on the growing mind and soul of the child, we can see clearly enough when we look around, that children reared in violent or abusive environments have been twisted or injured. It is therefore evident that the opposite is true. In a loving and supportive environment, a child can grow as a soul until the eternal in it shines through.

So when, as a group we approach the mystery of our own existence, we are the God who creates or destroys human souls. In this light, Christ is the personification of collective human self-giving and supportive love, the shepherd of individual souls. But of course, Christ is both immanent and transcendent.

This is the very foundation of discipleship; that we recognise our responsibility as a group and as individuals, for the creation of the massive amount of ill formed identities we find in modern society; that we attempt to move toward a more caring and humanitarian world; that as parents or adults, we recognise the part we play in transforming tiny human animals into human souls, under the guidance of Christ, which is collective human love, suffering and experience.  And out of this collective human love and suffering, we create the means of healing the deficiencies we find in ourselves, and in the care and humanity we give to each other.

Therefore, christening as a ritual is an enactment of a baby being given a name and taken into collective human care, that it may be nurtured into a healthy identity.  Christening as a psychological fact rather than a ritual, is our own recognition of that baby as a loveable being, who we agree to treat as a valid individual.  It is recognition of each person’s own unique ideas and experiences. It is an introduction to oneself as a being with a personal will. It is the respect we give to the children and people we relate to. Perhaps even more than that is a recognition that within the little baby is the potential lying behind all creation. Our work is to recognise that and nurture it.

The path of discipleship is both a path of helping others move toward transformation and personal growth, it is also a path that is one of facing our own fears, hurts and lack of love as we move toward our own transformation.

Considering what was said above about ‘the action of family and society on the growing mind and soul of the child, we can see clearly enough when we look around, that children reared in violent or abusive environments have been twisted or injured.’

It is evident that many of us have been raised creating trauma in ourselves and those we meet. An obvious one is that enormous numbers of us have a tremendous need to be loved by others, because they themselves feel they are not loved. So, a start for our work as disciples is not so much to give others love, though that is important, but to help them see the importance of loving themselves.

For we do own love, we can never possess it, for love is not ours, it is a power, a wonder, that flows through us if we let it. But we block it with undealt with childhood pains, by misunderstanding it, thinking it is just sexual pleasure, for it flows into and through us from the Highest.

“As I experienced this, I realised that everything that exists is a part of that wondrous being. There is nothing that is not of its love. So that whatever arises in the universe arises out of, and as, THAT. The human sense of God is a realisation of the very substance of our own existence. The awe we might feel is from an intuition of what has been given us as our own being.

Its very last impulse was for those new beings that might arise from the seeds we all are. The impulse that flashed out we call love. It flashed through the universe permeating its every particle, in a way that we cannot yet perceive, but which is like a touch upon the pulsating chaotic movements of particles and lives.”

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The Inner Path To Christ 8

First Steps on the Way

To grasp the first steps of discipleship you need to remember that Christ frequently taught in parables.  Such teaching by the use of analogy and symbols was not limited to the stories told, but was also given via the very events and actions of his life.  In the ancient world, much more than in the world of today, teachings were given in the form of rituals or mystery plays, stories and analogies.

If we look at the path of the discipleship, it starts with birth. In the Bible story, this is the birth of Jesus. That event in the mystery play into which Jesus is born, is also true for each of us.  For discipleship is concerned with the arrival of our individual identity or soul amidst the forces of the cosmos, not with its nirvana or blinking out and melting back into the ocean of being.  So unless there is the coming into being of a living feeling person, an identity that can make conscious choices, there is nothing to work with.  For this reason, whether as a ceremony or as a psychological fact, Christening has always been an important first step in the Christian mysteries or inner teachings.  Particularly in some denominations of Christianity it is felt to be of great importance if a baby is ill, to have it named before, or in case, it dies.  If this were not done, it is believed that its ‘soul/individuality might be lost.’

Studies of human babies who were lost at an early age and reared by animals, show that even when physically adult, the lost baby never developed a sense of identity or selfhood.  What we call ‘self’ or ‘I’ or the ‘soul’ is not innate.  It does not develop by itself.  In fact it is given to us by other human beings who have attained it.  It is a precious gift, a flame passed on to us by our parents and the society in which we are reared.  Being given a name, taught to speak, and looked upon and related to as a person, enable us to achieve identity. (See Animal Children).

The life of Helen Keller throws an enormous light into such children’s ability to learn. Helen was struck dumb and blind at an early age when she had only learnt one word. She lived like an animal without self-awareness until the age of eleven. Then she was taught by a deaf and dumb teacher and remembered the first word and quickly began the climb to become a human person. See Helen Keller

Then, perhaps because she had learned one word prior to her illness, meaning flooded her darkness. She tells us that “Nothingness was blotted out.” Through language she became a person and developed a sense of self, whereas before there had been – nothing.

This ‘nothingness’ described by Helen Keller is difficult for most of us to imagine, having all our life been exposed to other human beings through behaviour and speech. Helen describes it as having no awareness of personal pain or events. She says that perhaps things happened to her, perhaps they were painful, but as she had no personal self to appreciate this, they were merely passing tactile sensations. She was not personally disturbed by them because she had no ‘person’ to be disturbed. Her story tells us that it is not our DNA that is the cause of our personality with its traits, it is a blend of so many things, including the learning of language, our cultural influence and our upbringing.

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The Inner Path To Christ 7

The Meeting that Transforms

The following personal experience happened while fully awake, but it did have powerful inner imagery with it. A group of us were meeting each week in ‘an upper room’ to surrender to the action of the spirit. The week prior to this experience something had deeply impressed me. I had felt that I had blood on my hands, and in some way I had killed someone.

I was standing with others by the side of a dusty unpaved road. People were excitedly waiting for someone, and I was curious to see who it was.

It was a man, and as he walked the road, he saw me and came toward me.

The man was ordinary in appearance, but as he got near to me it seemed as if a great force surrounded him that penetrated me completely. The force was love, buffeting me like waves I could barely tolerate. The man stood before me and took my hands and said, “You are my disciple.”

At this, love so immense touched me that I fell backwards, the contact too painful for me to bear, and the man walked on.

I knew who he was. I also knew, because it was welling up from within me, as sure knowledge, that he was the man I had killed. It was his blood I had on my hands. It was his death I felt guilty of. But he, in some strange paradoxical way, was myself. He was the cosmic mystery I have been born as. He was the very best of myself I had killed, murdered. He was my youthful sexuality I had suffocated to death, helped by the tenets of a religion that was supposed to be teaching his way, the way of life, the way of recognising one’s cosmic link. (See Meetings With Christ and Waking Lucid Dreaming). [i]

Not only is there a changed perspective of life when we meet the I Am – the centre of your being – not only do we feel a radiant happiness, we also meet love.

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The Inner Path To Christ 6

Meeting Your Eternal Self

So, what is it like to meet this conviction of eternal existence, and what is the value of it? Why have people sacrificed so much for it?

It is easy to see that while you are convinced that your real identity is your body; while you are convinced that your emotions and thoughts are your only reality, you are incredibly vulnerable to uncertainties, fears, dashed hopes, feelings of failure, the emptiness of success and painful betrayals. These can toss you around like a scrap of paper in a gale. They can be the stress that is at the root of illness. Discovering yourself as anchored beyond change is enormously healing.

Although the I AM is beyond thought, beyond emotion and physical sense impressions, and at first appears to be an empty void – the Cloud of Unknowing [i]as an early Christian mystic described it – it is like a spring from which can emerge healing of body and mind, creativity, intuitive perceptions, and all the gifts of the spirit described in the New Testament. (1 Corinthians 12:06-13).

The following dream and waking experience give an impression of what it is like to meet this essence of human life. The dream is taken from the writings of J. B. Priestley from his book Rain Upon Godshill:

‘Just before I went to America, during the exhausting weeks when I was busy with my Time Plays, I had a dream, and I think it left a greater impression on my mind than any experience I had ever known before, awake or in dreams, and said more to me about this life than any book I have ever read. The setting of the dream was quite simple and owed something to the fact that not long before, my wife had visited the lighthouse here at St Catherine’s to do some bird ringing.

I dreamt I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon myriads of birds all flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble sight, this vast aerial river of birds. But now in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed, and time speeded up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter and die. Wings grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek, and then, in a flash bled and shrivelled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, this hurried mating, this flight and surge, all this gigantic meaningless effort?

 As I stared down, seeming to see every creature’s ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if not one of them, if not one of us, had been born, if the struggle ceased forever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy. But now the gear was changed again, and the time went faster still, and it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any movement, but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; and as soon as I saw it I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; and then it came to me, in a rocket burst of ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing else was real but this quivering and hurrying lambency of being. Birds, men and creatures not yet shaped and coloured, all were of no account except so far as this flame of life travelled through them. It left nothing to mourn over behind it; what I had thought was tragedy was mere emptiness or a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught and purified and danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I had never before felt such deep happiness as I knew at the end of my dream of the tower and the birds.’

Priestly tells us that not only did his meeting with Life itself change his whole perspective, but he knew deep happiness. What he describes is what the Christians called Spirit.

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The Inner Path To Christ 5

Meeting the I AM

If you say to yourself, “I am tired.  I am hungry.  I am depressed.  I am happy,” you are describing the changing conditions of your body and your mind.  But if you say – “I am” – you are describing the fundamental part of you that experiences the changes.  The ‘I AM’ is there all the time isn’t it, behind all changes?  But it is as slippery as an eel to catch hold of.  That is why the discipleship is needed. Instead of realising your naked ‘I AM’ you tend to see only your thoughts and emotions, your changing body again.

his – I AM – survives sleep.  It survives the shifting world of your sensory impressions, your thoughts and emotions.  It is the ever-present awareness behind the experience of your life. It doesn’t change with the tides and calamities of events.  This is the rock upon which Jesus suggested building your house, your dwelling place – with your sensory impressions, your thoughts and emotions are the shifting sands he warned against. It is within the awareness of this I AM that the conviction, not belief, in eternal existence lies. It is to the meeting with the I AM that discipleship leads. When you experienced your ‘I AM’ in its nakedness, you KNOW you have existed throughout eternity.  It is not a question of belief, or of being told.  You experience yourself as an eternal being, standing beyond all the shifting winding paths of your body, your mind and feelings.

Perhaps think of it like a mirror or your memory, a mirror or memory reflects the ever moving world of your experience, whatever it is exposed to. Yet the mirror of your awareness or memory is ever there, unchanged.

So, discipleship does not lead to a set of rules, or to certain beliefs, but to an experience.  When you meet that experience you can decide for yourself whether it is valid or not.

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The Inner Path To Christ 4

Meeting the I AM

If you say to yourself, “I am tired.  I am hungry.  I am depressed.  I am happy,” you are describing the changing conditions of your body and your mind.  But if you say – “I am” – you are describing the fundamental part of you that experiences the changes.  The ‘I AM’ is there all the time isn’t it, behind all changes?  But it is as slippery as an eel to catch hold of.  That is why the discipleship is needed. Instead of realising your naked ‘I AM’ you tend to see only your thoughts and emotions, your changing body again.

This – I AM – survives sleep.  It survives the shifting world of your sensory impressions, your thoughts and emotions.  It is the ever-present awareness behind the experience of your life. It doesn’t change with the tides and calamities of events.  This is the rock upon which Jesus suggested building your house, your dwelling place – with your sensory impressions, your thoughts and emotions are the shifting sands he warned against. It is within the awareness of this I AM that the conviction, not belief, in eternal existence lies. It is to the meeting with the I AM that discipleship leads. When you experienced your ‘I AM’ in its nakedness, you KNOW you have existed throughout eternity.  It is not a question of belief, or of being told.  You experience yourself as an eternal being, standing beyond all the shifting winding paths of your body, your mind and feelings.

Perhaps think of it like a mirror or your memory, a mirror or memory reflects the ever moving world of your experience, whatever it is exposed to. Yet the mirror of your awareness or memory is ever there, unchanged.

So, discipleship does not lead to a set of rules, or to certain beliefs, but to an experience.  When you meet that experience you can decide for yourself whether it is valid or not.

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The Inner Path To Christ 3

Who are you really?

For most agnostics any talk about the eternal in our obviously short spanned life is a sign of mental weakness. They perhaps say, “Point it out to me.” The strange thing is that it is easy to see, but it is usually discounted. For instance, what is it you most closely identify as yourself? Is it your body?  Is your body you?

People can lose an arm, both legs, even mobility, but they still have a clear sense of themselves, of being a person.  Perhaps it is not as easy or as comfortable not having legs, but there is still a strong sense of being a person.

Or maybe you identify with the way you look, your face, your hair or the shape of your body.  But this changes with age, sometimes radically, and old people often say, “Although I look in the mirror and the person I see appears incredibly different to how I looked years ago, inside I still feel as if I am about 20 or 30 years old.”

If you identify your body as yourself, then you are faced by the tragedy of enormous change and the certainty of death, because the body dies.  Even so, up until the moment of your death your body has been eternal.  Think on it.  Your body is the result of two living cells merging and subdividing, and subdividing, over and over to form the mature body.  But those two original cells have an unbroken line of subdivision right way back to the beginning of life.

A single cell, which is a seed from which all life forms evolved from, doesn’t become old or die because it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it does so it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. We all started from the original one cell, and we, you and I, are the result of gathered experience.

So, no plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life, you developed a new brain, and the memories, education and programming you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self.

In that sense you personally have a connection with eternity.  Even the material your body uses in its growth was formed in the beginning of the universe, is from the stars, and is uncountable billions of years old.  So, there is another connection you have with eternity. In fact, what is there around you and within you that does not involve eternal existence? However, what we focus on most of the time is the changes taking place in our body and within this background of eternity.

Again, this is like identifying your hair, your limbs, or your looks as being you.  What discipleship is suggesting is the discovery of the part of you that does not undergo change.

But let us explore this question of what you identify with a little further. Maybe you identify with the way you feel, your emotions, or perhaps your thoughts.  But from one moment to the next those are not the same.  They are constantly shifting and moving and undergo more variation than your body.  If you identify with your thoughts and emotions, you can become lost in their swirling and shifting storm.  Believing you are your thoughts or emotions can be at the root of depression and confusion.

Losing an arm or leg, losing your physical beauty in age, may affect your thoughts and feelings, but those things do not in any way deplete your sense of existing.  So if your body, your thoughts and emotions are not YOU, then what or who are you?  What is it you can most securely identify with?  What is it that is not shifting and changing and capable of being lost?

R. D. Laing, in his long poem The Bird of Paradise, [i] said that, “The truth I am trying to grasp is the grasp that is trying to grasp it with.”

The problem with recognising your fundamental, and perhaps eternal self, is that you are so immersed in it, like a fish in water, that it is difficult for you to recognise. In the Old Testament the following conversation is reported between Moses and God:

And Moses said unto God, “Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, ‘What is his name? What shall I say unto them?’”

And God said unto Moses, “I AM THAT I AM”: and he said, “Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” (Exodus Book 2 3:13-14)

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The Inner Path To Christ 2

Is this all there is?

How many of us have at some time reached a point in life where we ask, “Is this all there is – this depression, this labouring on and on, this struggle, this emptiness at the end of even a rich life? Do we do everything that we do only to have all wiped out in death?”

The early Christians said they had found the doorway to eternal life.  They also demonstrated extraordinary healings of body and mind.  Having talked this over with a number of my peers, it has become obvious that there are a few set responses to this in the modern mind.  A few people believe, for instance, that perhaps those things happened 2000 years ago, but those were extraordinary people, and they can’t happen in today’s world.  Others believe that those stories are a sort of folklore or mythology and must be seen in that light.  Many believe the statements are pure exaggeration made by people who were religious zealots.

Most of us have heard of Albert Schweitzer who went to the Belgian Congo in Africa to start a hospital.  The native people who came to him for help at first were very resistant to his ‘magic’ as they thought of it.  One of his first patients was a tribesman suffering from appendicitis.  Schweitzer anaesthetised the man, cut him open, took out his appendix, sewed him up again and revived him.  All this was done in an old converted chicken house that Schweitzer was using as his operating theatre.  Other tribes people and the man’s relatives were watching the operation through doors and holes in the roof. They carried the news far and wide that Schweitzer had killed the man, cut him open and removed his innards, then sewed him up and brought him back to life.  He was seen as a miracle worker.

I tell this story because it illustrates the enormous difference in perspective of those tribes people and of our own.  Describing the event as a miracle and as a resurrection does not in any way change the fact of Schweitzer’s operation on that man.  Neither do the gospel descriptions mean those events did not happen simply because we would not describe them in that way. It is only in very recent years that the medical profession as a whole has acknowledged the link between the mind, emotions, and physical illness.  At one time illness was never seen as emerging from stress or grief. Dealing with these torturous emotions can bring about remarkable physical change.  Although I have quoted this elsewhere, the following story is worth repeating because it illustrates this so well:

Taking the path of this discipleship can lead to healing of the mind and body.  But perhaps even more important than that, it can lead to the discovery of what at the moment is only a potential within you.  Also, it promises a spiritual life in which you transcend death.

Those are heady claims, and therefore need to be looked at in terms of modern language.

In Christian terminology the word Spirit is used to describe the source of healing and the spring from which the sense of eternal life arises. It is therefore helpful to have some grasp of what this word means in a way we might be able to observe in our daily life. This is said because discipleship is not about things we cannot see or experience in our ordinary everyday life. We do not need to believe in the strange or occult, or even to accept things on someone else’s say so.

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The Inner Path To Christ 1

Discipleship in the West

 

In early Christianity women played an important role, even though none were listed as apostles. In Acts 1:13-15 this is made plain. It says:

When they had come in, they went up into the upper chamber, where they were staying; that is Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas the son of James. All these with one accord continued steadfastly in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers. In these days, Peter stood up in the midst of the disciples (and there was a multitude of persons gathered together, about one hundred twenty) …

This passage clearly states that apart from Mary, the mother of Jesus, there was other women, and with Jesus’ brothers the gathering numbered about one hundred and twenty. It must be remembered that in this earliest group of Christians there was no organised religion, no creed, and no denominations. They were a hundred and twenty people trying to live in a certain way and trying to let something very wonderful into their lives. In fact, that original meeting was to allow what, in the gospels, was called the Spirit or Holy Ghost to enter their experience. This influence is at the heart of the Discipleship. The words Spirit and Holy Ghost are of course terms used by these ancient people. They may mean very little to a person educated in today’s world unless that person has direct experience. But these words will be examined as we proceed.

Also, beneath the watchtower of the Megiddo Prison in modern Israel an archaeological excavation has revealed the site of the headquarters of the Roman army of the Sixth (Ferrata) and Second (Traiana). Excavators discovered courtyards, and most important, a Christian meeting hall that may be the earliest Christian church discovered in the Holy Land.  Archaeologists date the site to circa 230AD. On what would have been the back side of the altar (south side) the rectangle contains two inscriptions which face each other.  The first inscription is a memorial inscription naming four women, an indication of the importance of women in the early Church.

It is an unfortunate tendency in virtually all the world religions that they become very insular and possessive. When people began to organise Christianity, they placed dogmas and rigid rules around it; Christianity had the misfortune to be scarred with battles between sects, intolerance of other races and culture, and male authoritarianism.  Nevertheless, I believe there is a real Christian Path that stands beyond that and talks about universal principles. When Newton discovered the process of gravity, he did not tell people they could only receive instruction in it if they belonged to a certain society or group. It was a principle universal in nature. Likewise, what the earliest Christians found, is in a similar category.

You do not have to believe in and apply a lot of rules and dogmatic regulations described by organising bodies of people to use the principles of electricity.  But many of us see Christianity as needing to live by rigid rules and regulations laid down by the organised church. But the underlying principles are about universal processes. Even if we believe the idea of a personal God, it is strange that a being that is said to have created the universe limits any approach to itself to a particular organisation or sect; strange also that the three great religions who have as their central belief a personal God, and are therefore monotheistic, are often at loggerheads. If I say hello to you, and someone else says hola, and yet another person say buongiorno – we are surely all greeting each other, but speaking different languages. It seems that Allah, God and Jehovah are surely the same thing in different languages and cultures. Also strange is the idea that God is a male.

The discipleship being described here is about universal processes of life, of your mind and heart. If you use these principles certain results arise that you can understand and test. They do not rely on beliefs in standards set by other human beings. The only thing required of you is a sense that underlying your existence is something you do not fully understand. You perhaps need to feel that life itself is a grand mystery that you want to experience or explore more fully. The aim is to open to and explore that Mystery.

In considering discipleship I see it as a discipline leading to a meeting with Christ. Remember that Jesus became the Christ at baptism. It was something that overshadowed him and was not him. The Christ is a universal principle of nature and is of every racial type, and of Female and Male. Christ in this inner view of the subject is the potential you hold within you that has not been allowed to flower. It is the very best of what you are, not some distant possibility that you have to get from outside yourself.

There are many saviour heroes from other cultures such as Anansi in Africa, Cúchulainn in Eire, Osiris in Egypt and Hercules in Greece, and Krishna. Apollonius of Tyana is also recorded as living a sacred life. Depending upon the culture we were raised in, we will unconsciously put an image to the power of change and transformation that we experience. People in all ages, all cultures and all social circumstances have experienced what is often felt to be a divine influence touching them in some way. To be clear about this, the power that is found within us is a release of our own potential emerging from our core self. So in this sense the image of Christ is a graphic presentation of our own innate wonder. The patterns of love and strength are behaviours lived by past individuals that remain in collective memory, offer keys or clues as to how to release this innate potential. That such keys, as well as ones innate potential, are often clothed in symbols and traditional imagery, is simply because we have not made such parts of our potential or heritage clearly conscious. They thus emerge from our unconscious clothed in whatever imagery or ideas we can accept or allow, as in dreams.

So, what does Christ the Redeemer and Good Shepherd mean in this sense?

Here is a man’s personal account of an experience that explains much of what was said above. It makes clear what it is like to confront the power of transformation within.

In the previous week I had met a feeling I could not account for, which had left me wondering what was happening. I had the very strong impression that I had killed a man and now had the guilt of blood on my hands. This time in the group, when I surrendered, something I could never have suspected happened. I was standing with my eyes closed, but it seemed I could see, because the spontaneous mental imagery was so clear. I was standing under a clear night sky, with the stars brilliant above. But there was a star more brilliant than the others that fell to Earth, and I knew it was something wonderful and special so hurried to see what it was. Others had also seen it, simple rural people like myself. What we found was a baby. But the wonder of it was so much I fell on my knees and couldn’t stop myself crying out again and again – A baby! A baby!

The tears and the cries were because I had the clear feeling or knowledge, a direct knowing, that all of the heavens, all of life’s mystery, had come to life in this baby. And to actually know this, to feel the impact of it, was almost more than I could bear. But part of the amazement was that this was every baby born. It wasn’t just one special baby. It was my own birth too! All the mystery of life was born in me. I sobbed with the pain and wonder of it.

The Christ is the essence of all human life, and expresses as every age, from baby to death, so it is with us at every part of our journey through life. In the west we have been exposed to a male dominated view so long we call Christ Him. But the experience of what came to Jesus and made him a Christ is open to any man or woman who seeks it.

 Discipleship is an ancient path

The discipline of meeting this inner Christ has been known for centuries and practised by individuals and groups who were frequently persecuted by the organised church. In fact, the power and love that touched the early Christians has been innate in men and women from the beginning and is lying dormant in each of us. We can think of this inner potential as the Mother Church, not built with bricks, not connected with any form of organised religion. We enter it and are transformed by following the Christian pathway.

In this incredible universe there are possibilities that we only vaguely understand – or have not been understand at all. In my own lifetime I have seen the emergence of radio, television, and mobile phones into becoming an everyday part of most people’s lives. They arose from the use of natural principles that were previously obscure or unrealised. There are also things about the human body, the human mind and soul that remain obscure or unknown for many of us, despite the enormous amount of research undertaken in the realm of physics and psychology.

Discipleship is about unfolding some of these wonderful possibilities still latent in you. It is about possibilities so amazing that many early Christians were willing to die in support of keeping a doorway open for other people to claim them. So, what are those possibilities, and how can we claim them?

But what is the Christ? Well in one sense he is an Extra Terrestrial having no physical body and yet is a living being that interacts with many.

My personal feelings are that just as many people can become Buddhas also many people can become Christs. That is because just as Jesus became the Christ, so can we too by evolving to the level where we can touch a universal awareness, in which all human experience is synthesised and apparent.

Carl Jung says – Such a myth of Christ, however, consists of symbols that have not been invented consciously. They have happened. It was not the man Jesus who created the myth of the god-man. It existed for many centuries before his birth. He himself was seized by this symbolic idea, which, as St. Mark tells us, lifted him out of the narrow life of the Nazarene carpenter.” Quoted from Man and His Symbols

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The Inner Path to Christ Intro

Contents

Introduction

Discipleship in the West

Discipleship is an ancient path

Is this all there is?

Who are you really?

Meeting the I AM

Meeting Your Eternal Self

The Meeting that Transforms

First Steps on the Way

You are the divine – expressed or repressed

How do we enter on the Way?

The second step of Discipleship is the way of Mary

The prayer of the virgin soul

What is born this day?

The Healings

The next step of the path is baptism

The ancient mystery of baptism

The Wilderness Years

The Third Step

Bathing in the ocean of Life

The Goodness and Badness of Things

The Mystical Marriage

Crucifixion

Pentecost

Ascension

Also See Genesis 

INTRODUCTION

YES, THIS IS THE NEXT STEP IN OUR EVOLUTION – IT STARTED THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO – BUT THERE HAS BEEN A WAR AGAINST KNOWING IT AND SO IT WAS SUPPRESSED BY FORCES AGAINST IT

Some of the force used was by the Christian church. “The early Christian Church used every means possible to conceal the pagan origin of their symbols, doctrines, and rituals,” Manly Hall says. “They either destroyed the sacred books of other peoples among whom they settled or made them inaccessible to students of comparative philosophy, apparently believing that in this way they could stamp out all record of the pre-Christian origin of their doctrines.”

“This is called the second library of Alexandria, the former having been destroyed under Julius Caesar. The nucleus of this one was the gift of Antony to Cleopatra, who added to it and improved it immensely, till it contained all the existing literature of the world; and–why, they are deliberately concocting Christianity out of the books there! and, so far as I can see, the Gospels are little better than Ovid’s Metamorphoses (historically, I mean),–so deliberately are they making up the new religion by replanting the old on the Jewish system.

 If they could be recovered we should have absolute proof of its concoction from Hindû, Persian, and other originals;–the interpolations, extracts, and alterations proving this. They show, too, that the name first adopted for the typical man was more like Krishna, and that Jesus was a later choice, adopted at Jewish suggestion, in order to suit a Jewish hero. 2 Every detail of the Gospel history is invented, the number of the apostles, and all the rest. Nothing is historical in the sense supposed. I see the Serapeum destroyed; –not only the library but the temple, so fearful were they of leaving any trace of the concoction. It was destroyed by Christians at the instigation especially of Theodosius, Ambrosius, and Theophilus. Their motive was a mixed one, each of the leaders having a different aim. The object of the concoctors themselves was to sustain and continue the ancient faith by transplanting it to a new soil, and engrafting it on Judaism. And they accordingly fixed and accumulated upon Jesus all that had been told of previous Christs,–Mithras, Osiris, Krishna, Buddha, and others,–the original draft containing the doctrine of the transmigration of souls most explicitly and distinctly. The concoction was undertaken in order to save religion itself from extinction through the prevalence of materialism — for the times corresponded in this respect exactly to the present.”

 Quoted from Kingsford, Anna. Clothed With The Sun

Anna Kingsford was a remarkable woman and doctor, who was also a great Seer.

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The teachings on the inner path to Christ that follow are not uniquely my ideas. I followed clues left by disciples from the long past. Here and there in the world’s literature there are fragments and sentences referring to this path. So, I pursued this trail as it led into the jungle of ideas surrounding Christianity. I hacked a way through, and gradually, with loving persistence uncovered the ancient landmarks of this way. It is a path leading to the Mother Church the central core of human experience, as old as time, preceding any external religion. 

Looking back over the journey, something about it has deeply impressed me. The early Christians discovered something extraordinary. It completely changed lives, healed sickness, made people want to go out and tell others, and in some cases was worth dying for. And that has been true for me too as I took this path of discipleship.

 Those early Christians expressed what they found in language, and in imagery, that was understandable to them. What they found was something that worked. Just as, in a more recent age, the use of electricity was discovered and applied; and this discovery of electricity was the application of previously unknown natural processes. So. the Christian discovery was one of natural processes of the mind and emotions too. Unfortunately, as time has passed, the language in which those findings were expressed has come to mean less and less to many people. In fact, we may view their statements as perhaps referring to the realm of ‘beliefs’ or dogma rather than of practical principles.

 When the unfortunate tendency in humans began to organise Christianity, to place dogmas and rigid rules around it, Christianity had the misfortune to be scarred with battles between sects, intolerance of other races and cultures, and ruled by male authoritarianism.  Nevertheless, I believe there is something real in the sense defined above.  Through it an individual can arrive at a greater personal peace, and harmonise with their own nature, without having to join any sect or give themselves to a rigid set of beliefs.  They can also meet and converse with the Master and receive the teachings at first hand. This path has been known for centuries and practised by individuals and groups who were frequently persecuted by the organised church. In fact, the power and love that touched the early Christians has been innate in men and women from the beginning, and is lying dormant in each of us. This inner power is the Mother Church, not build with bricks. We enter it and are transformed by following the Christian pathway, the Christian discipline.

 What I aim to do in the following paragraphs is to remind you of the original gospel statements, and then try to define them in terms of today’s view of the world, and today’s information about the mind and emotions. For I believe the original teachings refer to an extraordinary possibility in you.

 Just as the process of electricity is open to verification with the right equipment, so the extraordinary possibility described by the early Christians is open to verification if you apply yourself in the right way. It doesn’t take belief in a lot of statements, but it does take your effort to try an experiment. It is a path leading to the Mother Church the central core of human experience, as old as time.

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Youth

The first part of this entry applies to both girls and boys but a separate section for girls is given here – Teenage Girls

Yourself at that age, so the attitudes and responses developed at that age. If you are younger than the dream youth it indicates your potential of growth and change; the part of you growing toward that age. See: Boy; Girl.

It is a time if quite enormous and often dramatic changes, for you are preparing to become a woman or man. This means you are starting to feel the urgent pressure of sexual desire and forming a way of dealing with it.

Adolescence is the time of your greatest sexual growth, and development of new ranges of emotion, intellect, and sensitivity. So any adolescent in your dream often points to yourself at that age, and the things you faced – or if you are not yet a teenager, then the things you feel about moving toward adolescence.

During adolescence we move from youth to becoming a mature adult. This means learning to become more independent of the work energy, the money and time given by parents. It means making your own decisions, moving toward learning how to survive live without your parents support and establishing yourself in the community and the world. Sometimes the break from parents is made by establishing a relationship with someone. However the shift needs a level of heroism in many ways, and if you succeed the difficulties change and deepen you.

This journey of becoming an individual is not only that of becoming a person, but also expanding the boundaries of what we can allow ourselves to experience as an ego. As we can see from an observation of our dreams, but mostly from an extensive exploration of their feeling content, our ego is conscious of only a small area of experience. The fundamental life processes in our being may be barely felt. In many contemporary women, the reproductive drive is talked about as something that has few connections with their personality. Few people have a living feeling contact with their early childhood; in fact many people doubt that such can exist. Because of these factors the ego can be said to exist as an encapsulated small area of consciousness, surrounded by huge areas of experience it is unaware of. These unconscious areas of their being direct their life to an extraordinary degree. Individuation means to emerge from unconscious dependence on this hidden side of self. It means to become functionally independent of the archetypes that dominate human life. In many ways it is similar to, and includes, becoming functionally independent of ones mother and father. See The Story of a Premature Baby

At such a time you may unconsciously use certain strategies to become independent. One is to become angry, defensive or down right obnoxious. What this does is to give strength to break away – even if it means feeling your parents are a heap of shit.

Another way is to become a mother’s boy and cling – but this doesn’t mean you become independent emotionally, but it might make you feel safe.

On one site about teenage behavior it list such things as:

Does your child often:

• lose his temper
• argue with adults
• refuse to comply with rules and requests
• deliberately annoy people
• blame others for his mistakes and misbehavior

Or is your child often:

• touchy and easily annoyed by others
• angry and resentful
• spiteful and vindictive

These are all ways to become yourself, after all, all your life you have had to be dependent on parents or carers. And it is quite something to emerge from it. But if you understand what happening it can become an easier journey.

The dream world of the adolescent shows very big shifts from that of the child. One of the major themes here is illustrated in this dream from Natalie, a thirteen year old:

I have this recurring nightmare. I see my mother standing by my bedroom door, blocking it as if I am being trapped and stopped from getting out. I often call to her, “Let me out Mum” but she just stands there staring with no expression on her face at all. I end up getting out of bed and switching my bedroom light on and then she disappears. Sometimes I will see her standing by my wardrobe. It seems as if she is always standing by a door and trying to trap me.

The dream shows how a teenager is trying to find a way out of her dependence on mother. The dependence is felt as if it is the power of the mother over the child, a sort of restrictive force. This theme of moving toward independence physically and psychologically is a huge step to take, and many dreams in this period explore how this can be achieved, and the various paths one could take to attain it.

Example: Back with my lover I felt, still young, inexperienced and a bit clumsy, but laughing and happy, the flow of pleasure to my lover, leading to a kiss. The deep internal pleasure of kissing gradually widened until it led to genital feeling. I realised so many things as this lovely gentle growth of feeling and flowing occurred. I realised that I and most teenagers have too much technical sex instruction, so it is portrayed as an erect penis entering the vagina.

But I was seeing it wasn’t like that at all. First of all came the gradual relationship with my lover and as that deepened it led to touching, being happy together and kissing. The kiss, oral pleasure, was our first area of loving with our mother through the breast. From that original centre of pleasure, it grows into anal and genital pleasure. This was what was happening. Then gently the body began to move. But there was still no erection. The movement was the forerunner of the inner pleasurable urge to thrust and penetrate. So there was a slow and internal growth through escalating feelings, and not an outwardly ordained set of movements that led to “sex”!

The following dream shows a particular facet of this. It is from Eric Fromm’s book on dreams, The Forgotten Language. The dreamer was a young man, an only child, who had been cosseted by over protective parents, and was finding it difficult to face life without their support.

He dreamed that he was about five or six years old and was faced by a river he must cross. He looked for a bridge but found none. He thought of swimming but then realized he could not swim. (In the waking state he actually could swim). He then sees a tall, dark man who indicates he will carry him across the river in his arms. He is greatly relieved and allows the stranger to pick him up and begin. But then he is seized with panic. He suddenly realizes that if he does not escape from this man he will die!

They are already in the river, he in the man’s arms, when he gathers his courage and makes a desperate leap into the river. He is sure he will drown but suddenly finds that he can swim and soon reaches the other side. The frightening man disappears.

Each of us is immersed in a ‘river’ of constant change. If you think about it you have been carried, pushed, impelled by this current as you were moved through babyhood, childhood, teenage and adulthood, and there are more stages of growth beyond adulthood. And as we passed through these changes we died to our old self in order to change to the new. It is the current of Life. This current then carries us on through old age and through the gates of death. All the time we are faced by decisions, and each decision directs us on a different path, helping to create our future. And this is a force of growth and change.

How do I leave home?

Dr. Fromm describes crossing the river as the need, and the difficulty, of moving from childhood toward adult independence. The man represents all the support he gets from parents and other people such as teachers and friends – excellent while he was a child, but something he must learn to do without if he is to develop his own innate strengths. When the dreamer takes the risk of daring the river, he finds he has the ability to survive.

In many teenage dreams a darker note arises as the emerging independence starts to make a dramatic break with parental authority and with the dependence upon the succouring received. Because the break is difficult it sometimes needs anger or a form of violence. This is not because the parents are necessarily holding on to the child, but because the need of the child is so strong, that to cut those ties a form of violence is used. We then find a dream such as the following:

I dreamed I dared not move from home as I had murdered my father and hid the body in the rubbish tip at the end of the garden.

If it is not murder, then the dreamer sees the parent or parents die. In either case, the child still faces life without them, and this seems to be the point of such dreams. In waking life there may at such times also be some anger or aggressiveness toward the parents – once again a means of making the break. After all, how could you move away if you were still tied emotionally? The next dream illustrates the quieter form of getting rid of a parent.

For the past year I have had recurring dreams about fairground rides. Occasionally members of my family, including my father have died on the rides. When I’m on the ride I’ve survived, but I can sense danger all around me. This dream is beginning to bother me. I am 15 years old.

Sexual development is of course of prime importance at this time.  So dreams explore the facets of this in a variety of ways.

Example: As I considered teenage I had a series of wonderful scenes occur. They were so lovely I laughed with pleasure. I felt the explosion of energy which occurs in adolescence, and I saw teenagers, running, dancing, loving, fighting, and exploring relationships. They were life exploding into the new, into experiment, into growth. If we held them back too firmly it would be like my stuck record, and my vision of the cosmos had shown me life never repeats itself, never stops. It always moves on, changes, dances.

Many things we face while young are never resolved, or remain as potentials, and are frequently confronted later in life. So the dream teenager can depict these unresolved issues or potential still to discover and work through them by keeping in touch with their dreams and attempting to understand them. 

Teenage girls experience these years similarly, but there are also marked differences.

If you are a teenage girl, you will be experiencing the changes brought about by puberty. Looking at your dreams can help you understand these changes as you develop from a child into a woman. The physical and emotional issues which are part of adolescence will often emerge in your dreams.

There are three major themes you may notice in your dreams. One of the most important is the emergence of your sexual abilities as a woman. In all warm blooded animals sex is not just the urge to join two bodies genitally. It also involves desires to attract and bond to a mate; the urge to have a child, and the strength to care for and protect your children. Your dreams are a safe place where you practice or unfold these emerging facets of yourself. Dreams allow you to work out any difficulties in letting these qualities flower. It is quite normal to worry that you may not be attractive enough to attract a partner, or that if you do you may not know what to do. So you will probably dream of a boy you find attractive, and enjoy the pleasure of touching and loving. You will also encounter the fears or pains standing in the way of such a meeting.

At this level of your development you are in a huge flood of hormones that drive you toward enormous desires for a man. It is actually the sex instinct, but you might not recognise it as that. It may probably be felt as a tremendous attraction to a star singer or actor – sometimes a desire to improve your appearance – it could even show as ambition to achieve something to become a mature person. Sometimes it is even a firm sense that you do not want anything to do with a man. It can express in many ways, but it is your life energy, and is diverted or directed according to you inner world – the world of your beliefs, convictions, educational ideas, your programming from parents and society. See Programmed

The courtship and mating behaviours in reproduction and the sexual drive that urges you toward the opposite sex or toward mating in some way, is often accepted in its naked power, to find a mate and to have sex in order to procreate. Unfortunately most of us have no real awareness of how we are instinctive creatures and so are driven largely by ‘nature’ in us. After all we are mammals, for us as we evolved as humans, had lived in the state for millions of years, where we never had to make decisions but were directed by our instincts. And being conscious and able to look back upon oneself and ask, “What am I?” – We were suddenly naked of this background of support given by instincts and felt exposed and unprotected.

Most people explain it by the idea of romance and soul mates, and so often end up deeply hurt. Other instinctive drives are the desire to have standing and recognition in one’s social group; the drive for dominance – or the resulting depression or sickness if no recognition or place in the group is found. This is most likely an influence form the reptilian brain we all have that is a basic prompt. It developed about 200 million years ago and is still an underpinning part of what influences your behaviour today. See Animals in your Brain

Your dreams can guide you as you flower into the unique woman you potentially already are. No matter what you look like, no matter what your skin colour, you have an innate beauty. As you look around you, you may recognise the beauty in everyone, and realise that no one is too fat or thin, too ugly or too beautiful, too white or too dark, too wrinkly or too spotty to love and be loved. As the secret processes of life are transforming you into a woman, you may realise that being female is something you share with women of every race throughout history – yet YOU are unique.

Example: I dreamt of being with a woman who was desperately seeking a man. I was also with my own female companion. I believe the woman had been suddenly dropped by her man, and I and my partner were close and with her.

Still in the semi-awake state I tried ‘being’ the woman, and had a very clear response. I experienced being her, but was also me with experience of seeing into myself in some degree. I saw that the woman, like most of us, was a female creature whose instinctive drive was to find a mate. But she was not aware of this as an instinctive drive but as a personal feeling. As such she had become, like many women and men, lost in a huge web of personal ideas about whether they were attractive, sexy, with many complications about love, gender mixed with childhood unconscious traumas and the heartbreak all that brings. See Being the Person or Thing

Being pregnant

In some dreams you may also experience being pregnant, and even having a baby. These are very positive signs that you are meeting your physical and emotional changes well.

Example: I’m 14 and had a dream of having a baby boy. I don’t know who my husband was. I am sitting in a house with no roof and all my family come to see my baby and said it was special. It was night time. When I looked into the sky there were 3 moons. Two of them were shaped like a lady with a baby in her arms. Sam – Teletext.

Sam’s dream shows a great sense of beauty and ease about her ability to have a baby.

 

The Inner Path To Christ

This is not another book about dogmatic Christianity, it is about the discipline given to us through the hidden message of the New Testament. It is a path that has been hidden because it was lived and not spoken. The early Christians discovered something extraordinary. It completely changed lives, healed sickness, made people want to go out and tell others, and in some cases was worth dying for. And that has been true for me too as I took this path of discipleship.Those early Christians expressed what they found in language, and in imagery, that was understandable to them. What they found was something that worked. Just as, in a more recent age, the use of electricity was discovered and applied; and this discovery of electricity was the application of previously unknown natural processes. So. the Christian discovery was one of natural processes of the mind and emotions too. Unfortunately, as time has passed, the language in which those findings were expressed has come to mean less and less to many people. In fact, we may view their statements as perhaps referring to the realm of ‘beliefs’ or dogma rather than of practical principles.

Chapters

Introduction

Discipleship in the West

Discipleship is an ancient path

Is this all there is?

Who are you really?

Meeting the I AM

Meeting Your Eternal Self

The Meeting that Transforms

First Steps on the Way

You are the divine – expressed or repressed

How do we enter on the Way?

The second step of Discipleship is the way of Mary

The prayer of the virgin soul

What is born this day?

The Healings

The next step of the path is baptism

The ancient mystery of baptism

Who will you be?

            The choice to make

The Third Step

The Wilderness Years

Bathing in the ocean of Life

The Mystical Marriage

Crucifixion

Pentecost

Ascension

INTRODUCTION

YES, THIS IS THE NEXT STEP IN OUR EVOLUTION – IT STARTED THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO – BUT THERE HAS BEEN A WAR AGAINST KNOWING IT AND SO IT WAS SUPPRESSED BY FORCES AGAINST IT

Some of the force used was by the Christian church. “The early Christians used every means possible to conceal the pagan origin of their symbols, doctrines, and rituals,” Manly Hall says. “They either destroyed the sacred books of other peoples among whom they settled or made them inaccessible to students of comparative philosophy, apparently believing that in this way they could stamp out all record of the pre-Christian origin of their doctrines.”

“This is called the second library of Alexandria, the former having been destroyed under Julius Caesar. The nucleus of this one was the gift of Antony to Cleopatra, who added to it and improved it immensely, till it contained all the existing literature of the world; and–why, they are deliberately concocting Christianity out of the books there! and, so far as I can see, the Gospels are little better than Ovid’s Metamorphoses (historically, I mean),–so deliberately are they making up the new religion by replanting the old on the Jewish system.

 If they could be recovered we should have absolute proof of its concoction from Hindû, Persian, and other originals;–the interpolations, extracts, and alterations proving this. They show, too, that the name first adopted for the typical man was more like Krishna, and that Jesus was a later choice, 3 adopted at Jewish suggestion, in order to suit a Jewish hero. 2 Every detail of the Gospel history is invented, the number of the apostles, and all the rest. Nothing is historical in the sense supposed. I see the Serapeum destroyed; –not only the library but the temple, so fearful were they of leaving any trace of the concoction. It was destroyed by Christians at the instigation especially of Theodosius, Ambrosius, and Theophilus. 3 Their motive was a mixed one, each of the leaders having a different aim. The object of the concoctors themselves was to sustain and continue the ancient faith by transplanting it to a new soil, and engrafting it on Judaism. And they accordingly fixed and accumulated upon Jesus all that had been told of previous Christs,–Mithras, Osiris, Krishna, Buddha, and others,–the original draft containing the doctrine of the transmigration of souls most explicitly and distinctly. 4 The concoction was undertaken in order to save religion itself from extinction through the prevalence of materialism — for the times corresponded in this respect exactly to the present.”

 Quoted from Kingsford, Anna. Clothed With The Sun

Anna Kingsford was a remarkable woman and doctor, who was also a great Seer.

Dorin H – Five Stars – August 25, 2014 – Verified Purchase. “Wonderful, wonderful Spirit-Filled and inspired book. Much to learn about our Spirituality here.”

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