The Inner Path To Christ 15
The Ancient Mystery of Baptism
The act of baptism long pre-dated the Christian community. One can find water for purification outside very ancient temples. Therefore, the tradition of baptism is older than the historical Christian church. It had its ascendance in the love a mother felt for her children, and beyond that the love she felt and gave to other children. Beyond that still, a loving woman might suckle a creature and extend her love beyond the normal boundaries. She might hold that other child, or that creature, with the same tenderness that she held her own baby. In such a moment she would know something that was beyond herself. It is something that flows through all of us. We symbolise it as the milk, the wine, or the blood. It is the flow of Love and Life that comes from beyond our own small personality.
The urge that enables us to reach out to another person who is not our own kin, or to another creature, is a small awareness of that universal life and consciousness that pervades all things. It is an expression of the Mystery that we can perhaps never understand, that is Life.
Baptism represents a conscious opening or an introduction to that Life. It is also an entrance into the recognition of the wider family; of that mysterious body we call Christ. We become brothers and sisters in a wider community. It takes some skill to recognise who these brothers and sisters are, and what part they might play in your life. Calling yourself a Christian does not necessarily mean you have been truly baptised in that spirit of life and love. In fact, you might still be imprisoned by attitudes of class, creed, skin colour or gender.
Fundamentally, baptism means a change in the stance or condition of your inner attitudes. It means relinquishing fixed opinions and having an open mind. It means opening the doors of your being to new experiences, to new possibilities, pleasurable and painful. It means learning to love without bending others to your will, without grasping them for your own needs. It also means becoming a channel for that rive of Life to flow through. For this pathway does not dangle a carrot of eternal bliss, or the resolution of all human problems. “I come”, the Christ says, “not to bring peace, but a sword…. take up your cross and follow me.” What is offered is participation in everyday life and death in a new way. We can become workers in the vineyard – that is, co-workers with the processes of growth and evolution in the worlds of nature.
Baptism means going under the water, which suggests bringing internal contents to consciousness; remembering the womb experience; letting our ego surrender a little and looking at death. Also, it shows that we, our conscious self, has entered more deeply into the enormous depths of our consciousness; we have literally dipped below the level of our conscious self. See My Body is a Moving Sea
That confronts us with the vastness of our inner world which means meeting our growth. We are all subject to the forces of growth – it is one of the main functions of life. But because growth is a push toward change, change that we maybe do not want to face, we often resist it, often without realising we are doing so. Psychiatrist say we have resistances to meeting the uncomfortable aspects of our self. A young woman who was anorexic dreamt of cutting off her breasts, suggesting trying to cut out the living process that was moving her into being a full woman. So, such resistance can also relate to how we try to dissociate from our own process of growth and ageing.
The human personality – the You that you call yourself, with a name, is only a tiny thing. It is moved and tossed around by all manner of drives, ambitions, emotions, fears, temptations, worries, love and desire with its pains and hopes; it is something we take so seriously and get carried away into awful situations; we take many sorts of pain killers to deal with ourselves. Things such as alcohol, coffee, medical drugs and street drugs, and yet we are still prone to break down, as can be seen by the number of people who need antidepressants or are totally lost in themselves. Look around at the number of people who have to take anti-depressant, or who have to use alcohol every day, or smoke or take other drugs – all means of not facing the difficulty of meeting self-awareness. See Programmed
But we have to remember that having a personality with self-awareness is a very new thing and has only existed for a short time. Before that we were like animals that lived only in the Life Will – what we usually call instincts. So the development of self-awareness was an immense step, and left us very vulnerable, and still does.
Many people as their awareness reaches beyond what they feel is their normal self, feel scared. Such resistances cause us to create awful dreams and fears as a means of avoiding our own inner world and its wonders. We feel that we will be swallowed up and we will die. It is important to say that when we meet the experience of powerlessness through becoming aware of the hugeness of your Life, which we are usually unaware if, it feels like something alien or attacking, and it is a shock.
When we begin to meet the Hugeness that we are, we often react to it in our dreams or in waking with fear or panic. So, we dream of being attacked by aliens or frightening creatures; or being swallowed by a whale or something huge, a tsunami, or even possessed by evil entities. If we realise that they are things we have created through our own fear, we will pass on. But otherwise it will continue to haunt you as something that will get you; or you feel uncertain even lost in facing it! But it is only our small self-image, our ego that reacts, because it feels powerless, even though in reality the Hugeness is part of our totality. It is the enormous potential you have within you, it is Life you are frightened of or have been ignoring. It often frightens us. We fear that our ego or personality as it is, will be lost, destroyed or overcome by the Hugeness. My experience is that nothing is ever lost, instead we are added to.
Who will you be?
What is to be your way? Is it to be a rigid and uncompromising moral and restraint imposed upon yourself from without? It cannot be this, for Mary is a living open heart surrendered to the invisible. Any rigid morals would close the door to this action upon you. To initiate upon yourself a discipline you have read or been told, even in a holy book, is to believe that you know what is best for you. It is to say, ‘I must do this work, not God. I have grown myself from the womb by my own power, not Life. I know where I am going, and by my own efforts I will get there.’ But such an attitude takes us right back to the impotent Joachim and Anna.
Obviously though, without discipline we will be lost. As Kierkegaard says: ‘To tear the will away from finite aims and conditions requires a painful effort and this effort, ceaseless repetition.’ It is this very repetition of will that enables us to follow Meister Eckhart’s message.
“I will give” he says, “a rule which is the sum of all my arguments, the key to the whole theory and practice of the truth. It very often happens that a thing seems small to us which is of greater moment in God’s sight than what looms large in ours. Wherefore it behoves us to take alike from God everything he sends us without ever thinking or looking to see which is greatest or highest or best, but following blindly God’s lead, that is to say, our own feeling, our own strongest dictates, what we are most prompted to do. Then God gives us the most in the least without fail.”
“People often shirk the least and prevent themselves getting the most in the least. They are wrong. God is everywise, the same in every guise to him who can see Him the same.”
Or as Carl Jung puts it, “Do nothing, but let things happen.”
John the Baptist is therefore a strange paradox. He is the remaining influence of the Mosaic, self-imposed law of the ten commandments imposed from without, or the Buddhist eightfold path, or the yoga self-imposed disciplines, of self-asceticism. He is also our love that impels us to heroic acts of self-denial yet is not worthy to lift the shoe latchet of Jesus; for while John may pave the way, by working from without, Jesus initiates by working from within.
Up until the point of baptism, what has been happening may be largely unconscious, but baptism represents your conscious self-dipping deeply into the experience of the wider life of the spirit – a taste of eternity and its wisdom. It also represents a transition from the body centred life to the spirit centred life. This is shown by the descent of the dove. This new life is described in the New Testament:
For as the body is one and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptised into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free, and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it, or one member be honoured, all members rejoice with it.
The choice to make
So baptism is a definite and conscious experience. A man here describes it as he met it in a dream.
The night before leaving home to fly to Australia, I dreamt I was looking at a newspaper cutting about a page in size. Near the top left was a photograph of two trees. One was down and the other upright and alive. The feature was about opening oneself to the flow of life. It was presented by an enthusiastic group of people who had a religious approach to this openness. The trees illustrated the ‘dead’ or cut off state of people who have not let the experience of this flow into them.
As I read I realised my experience and theirs was the same, but they brought to it more pleasure, more enthusiasm, more expressed sense of having something wonderful in their life. It helped me feel a greater sense of privilege about my own openness. I saw that each of us have this flow active in our body – causing our heartbeat for instance, but most people never open their ‘self’, their conscious personality to it. The group urged people to be baptised in the wonderful influence. They suggested with enthusiasm that it was worthwhile to surrender to the inner influence.
From this I renewed my ‘pledge’ to this inner life to let it vibrate or flow through me – not by my will, but by getting out of the way. It moved through me and touched other people’s lives. I felt wonderful, and this has carried through into waking.
Baptism as a symbol shows the human identity, Jesus, the Son of Man, choosing to immerse himself totally in a river. Having done that, another power enters his being – the Holy Ghost, and he is acclaimed as the Son of God; that is, he has attained Christhood. As a human person our area of choice and will is limited, and there are definite boundaries to our awareness. Although we exist as an integral part of a body, we have very little personal awareness of what is happening at a cellular, atomic, or even organic level. In most cases we are even largely unconscious of the social forces that gave birth to our sense of identity, and which continue to play upon our being. Many of us are so unaware that we may even deny the existence and influence of a spiritual force acting upon us leading us to a refinement of the qualities of our soul.
A quote from The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, by Levi H. Dowling:
“8 This washing we establish as a rite—baptism rite we call it now, and so it shall be called.
9 Your work, prophetic harbinger, is to prepare the way, and to reveal the hidden things.
10 The multitudes are ready for the words of life, and I have come to be made known by you to all the world, as prophet of the Triune God, and as the chosen one to manifest the Christ to men.
11 Then John led Jesus down into the river at the ford and he baptized him in the sacred name of him who sent him forth to manifest the Christ to men.
12 And as they came out of the stream, the Holy Breath, in form of dove, came down and sat on Jesus’ head.
13 A voice from heaven said, ‘This is the well-beloved son of God, the Christ, the love of God made manifest’.
14 John heard the voice and understood the message of the voice.
15 Now Jesus went his way, and John preached to the multitude.
16 As many as confessed their sins, and turned from evil ways to ways of right, the harbinger baptized, symbolic of the blotting out of sins by righteousness.”
Baptism means that we acknowledge how limited our choice and awareness is. We admit how little we know about our own being, and we yearn for a fuller participation with the flowing process of life – the river. We open to that flow so that it can cleanse away the dross, and we can become aware of our transcendental life within humanity and the cosmos.
In plain language, and using the Gospels as a guide, John the Baptist represents your willingness to be washed clean by the flow of divine life in you. We each live within possibilities we hardly sense. The openness of the Mary meditation allows such possibilities to become active in your life. From this arises the birth of a new awareness and relationship with these possibilities. Then comes the conscious willingness to surrender to the process and changes this is bringing about. Out of that you know your own divinity, represented by the descending dove.
The ancient people who wrote the gospels were not ignorant superstitious peasants. They had found a wonder in the realm of human possibility and experience. They had defined psychobiological processes and how to work with them. The details of this they had written in the manner of their times, in symbolic story form. The story is in fact an amazing document describing the hidden processes of your life and what potentials it has.
So baptism is experienced as a flow of energy, a process working in you that brings to the surface, to consciousness, the previously unconscious pains, resentments, traumas, habits and desires, that were blocking the flow of the divine life. This cleansing may be uncomfortable. It is like a river that starts to flow in a dry riverbed. Rubbish of generations has been dropped in the riverbed, and the flow starts to push it away. It is unmistakable when it happens to you. In the terms of today’s psychology this is called self-regulation, but in terms of the Gospels, it is the divine action upon us. And this divine action is not something that happened only to ancient people two thousand years ago. The principles the early Christians described in the gospels are universal processes of nature, open to anyone in any period of history, and from any race.
Here is an explicit description of such action in the life of a man who had experienced the birth of the holy child and had gone on to seek baptism.
For some time, I had been earnestly surrendering my life to the action of God by offering my body and mind in any way. I was feeling very ill and depressed at the time, and longed for healing, but could feel no definite change. Nevertheless, I sat every day with a ‘waiting’ or ‘open’ attitude. I deeply pondered the question of how the action of God showed itself. Maybe I wasn’t aware of it. I had noticed that while I slept my body experienced a subtle vibration, like you feel when you put your fingers on a smooth running electric motor; even my wife could feel it if she touched my body. But I could observe no changes in myself from this.
Then one night, B., my wife, got out of bed because the baby was crying. When she had settled the baby, I got up and went to the toilet. Just as I was getting into bed again, I heard a voice speaking to me. Literally a loud disembodied voice came from everywhere around me. It said, “You have asked how God touches the human soul – now watch closely.
This was an extraordinary thing to experience and waiting for sleep to overtake me again I had a mood of expectation, waiting for something to be shown me. In the morning I remembered the following dream.
I was in a huge theatre, or amphitheatre. The stage was on my right. The part of the play I observed was where the actor walked up to a mirror and looked at himself. Then somehow the activity gradually began to take place on my left. First of all an orchestra was playing on a slope facing left. Then everybody was moving to see a big event that was going to take place on the left. This was at the opposite end to the stage.
There was no immediate ‘big event’ in my life apart from the voice and the dream. But looking back I can see from my dreams and outer life that an enormous process of preparation was taking place. This culminated in the pouring up from within me of old hurts, such as childhood medical operations, and inflicted traumas. It took several months between hearing the voice and the start of these outpourings. But the result was that healing had begun, and it carried me toward a level of wholeness and a sense of the eternal life, that I had never known before.
“Then sitting with my friends one day in our experimental group I started to shake. I thought I must be cold so restrained the shaking. But at our next meeting it started again, and this time I was wearing a warm jersey, and in no way felt nervous, so pulled slightly apart from my friends and let myself really shake. That was an amazing experience, and from there on I could allow the process to continue its work on me. Gradually it ‘discharged’ the other things from childhood, and another medical operation, that had thrown my body and mind out of balance.
But it didn’t stop at clearing out difficult past experiences, its process went on to expansion of awareness and growth – it moved toward making me more than I had been. All of that came about by allowing my being to express spontaneously without my conscious intervention, by allowing spontaneous movement and sounds, by surrendering or offering my body, sexual self, me, my emotions and mind to be open to the life that had brought me forth; to the unknown of myself and trusting it.
Rita, a nurse who had been hospitalised with psychiatric problems, describes what happened to her when she let go of her ’self-control’.
“In most every part of me I have felt energy stirring or moving since I started LifeStream. I look different now. When I look in the mirror, I see I am a different shape. I am much stronger than I was. I think this is because I am not wasting energy now. I am also less afraid of my feelings. I was a very passionate person and would get into arguments about everything. Now I can be more detached. I never thought I would be like that. Somehow one’s energy gets re-organised in allowing what can be called self-regulation. You get rid of the stuff which is potentially destructive, and you are left with what is really a force for growth. The process of this seems so sensible to me. Having had a fairly good medical training the idea of homeostasis and energy being blocked, even though it may not be charted in Gray’s Anatomy, is very straightforward. It seems no more puzzling, although it’s mystical. The process is trying to do its work, whether we open to it or not in our body. It is quicker and easier if you give it the right conditions. Most of the time, almost deliberately we give it adverse conditions. All we need to do is take the concrete off, so it can grow. This force seems to be there all the time. Our society deals so much in second-hand experience. The immediacy of it really took my breath away. I am beginning to allow myself now a glimpse of what we often put down as so much religiosity. I am allowing myself now, having had almost an overdose of grieving and anguish, to open up to the other extreme which I have never experienced very much, which is the sheer joy of living. Rita, a nurse who had been hospitalised with psychiatric problems, describes what happened to her when she let go of her ’self-control’ in what at the time we called self-regulation, (SR), but now name LifeStream.
In most every part of me I have felt energy stirring or moving since I started LifeStream. I look different now. When I look in the mirror, I see I am a different shape. I am much stronger than I was. I think this is because I am not wasting energy now. I am also less afraid of my feelings. I was a very passionate person and would get into arguments about everything. Now I can be more detached. I never thought I would be like that. Somehow one’s energy gets re-organised in self-regulation. You get rid of the stuff which is potentially destructive, and you are left with what is really a force for growth. The process of LifeStream seems so sensible to me. Having had a fairly good medical training the idea of homeostasis and energy being blocked, even though it may not be charted in Gray’s Anatomy, is very straightforward. It seems no more puzzling, although it’s mystical. The process is trying to do its work, whether we open to it or not in our body. It is quicker and easier if you give it the right conditions. Most of the time, almost deliberately we give it adverse conditions. All we need to do is take the concrete off so it can grow. This force seems to be there all the time. Our society deals so much in second-hand experience. The immediacy of it really took my breath away. I am beginning to allow myself now a glimpse of what we often put down as so much religiosity. I am allowing myself now, having had almost an overdose of grieving and anguish, to open up to the other extreme which I have never experienced very much, which is the sheer joy of living.”
The Third Step
Step three is a logical outcome of the last stage. Depending upon how much you dare to allow yourself to experience what was previously rejected or unconscious, to that degree you begin to find a type of awareness and an experience you had never known before.
Overall, this inner life can best be described as a deeper acquaintance with the human condition. It is dramatically illustrated in Moody’s book ‘Life after Life’ in which many cases of apparent continuations of consciousness after clinical death are reported. Revived from their seeming death by electric shock to the heart, or other means, the subjects frequently reported meeting a being of light. This being asked them a question that might be worded as, “What harvest of experience have you brought with you?” In some cases, the being then led the person through full remembrance of every event in their life. During this they felt the impact of seeing where they had withheld love, missed opportunity, hurt others and missed expressing what was best in them.
You need not die to learn the lessons of your own life. In discipleship you meet your spiritual life because you have let go of the rigid hold you had on our own mind and heart. Then you come face to face with the universal consciousness we call Christ. In a series of deepening contacts you burst your own previous boundaries of awareness. Out of this continuing relationship you are led to see the real inner life, not only of yourself, but also of humanity. You see its triumphs and beauty; you see its poverty and suffering, and you see its fear and courage. You gradually view the enormity of change you have weathered in growing up, and how many people never manage to mature emotionally or mentally in confrontation with the world. You witness the struggle of middle age, where you see the end of life approaching, and sometimes hide from it, or attempt to resist it by holding onto the past. You see the continual war of forces and powers in human society, where people attempt to snare or farm others and enslave their will with threats, promises, fears and other goads and baits.
The changes that baptism brings are understandable rationally if you follow what has been described of the internal, psychological and physiological events that this path brings about. To make this clear I will use the analogy of a plant bulb such as a daffodil or tulip. If you have a healthy bulb that is not yet planted, the bulb can represent potential. In this case, there is the potential of healthy leaves, a large and full coloured flower, and then fertilisation and the forming of seeds. But if the bulb is planted in poor soil, if it is injured in some way as experiencing traumatic life events or attacked by parasites, that potential will not be fully expressed.
If we apply this to ourselves, we each have not only the potential of healthy physical growth, but also that the full flowering of our mental and emotional capabilities. But there are so many things that can interfere with this. It is fairly well documented now that a difficult birth can bring about a major block against full expression of the growing personality. And then there are the many possibilities of pains and traumas throughout the years of our growth. Only today I received a letter from a woman who is a professional nanny working for a wealthy family with three children. The parents decided to take a holiday in Italy without their children, leaving the nanny to care for them. The youngest child, three years old, began to sleep badly and crying often quite soon after the parents left. The older child of six was okay for two weeks but then started wetting the bed. The parents made no connection between their absence and the bed-wetting or the child crying so frequently. Many parents have no idea of how dependent their children are upon their presence. So they would never consider absence would create a trauma. But these are the possible events that together create a series of blocks against the expression of our own potential.
These blocks in fact create something like a dam behind which lies an enormous amount of mental and emotional energy. When, through beginning to melt away the emotional, mental, and attitudinal blocks through taking on the posture of the virgin, a massive flow of energy starts. This is what causes the shaking, the experience of vibration, the flushing out of past traumas reported by the people quoted above.
Having this type of living inner life is not always comfortable. Neither is adolescence, but do you wish to remain a child? The pleasure of it is the sharing of the labours of life in the garden where life grows souls. For in some degree you become a worker in that vineyard. Besides which, having the privilege of being near the Master not only breaks our heart, shattering the brittle casings we may have guarded it with, but it also fills us with the joy of that wider life that the Christ is. The following dream told by Peter expresses something of this wonder.
I was walking out of a town. It felt like the end of the world, or the end of society. I was walking through lots of churches standing empty on a hillside, surrounded by grass. There were all types, strongly built but empty now. I walked past a married couple who were walking up the hill too. As I passed, I heard them say something about a shepherd. Looking up the hill I saw the sheep, then The Shepherd. A beautiful aura of many colours surrounded The Shepherd. I looked and felt joy and exuberance rise in me, and I ran to the couple saying it was THE Shepherd. When I stood with the Shepherd, I felt love and wonder in a way I had never experienced before. I had never met anyone who, just standing near them filled me with awe, and a sense they were more than human. I fell on my knees. I couldn’t help it. Peter M.
Of course, there are hesitations and stages to meet on this journey. One of them is the decision of whether or not to give one’s whole life to this impulse. Andrew describes this in the following way:
I was searching, in meditation, to experience what was central in me. This led to the great question, “What is the life process I am? What gives me awareness?”
The feelings and images that arose as I began to explore this were of me as a person living in a world in which there is a huge organisation or ‘company’ that influences everything and everybody. My question of what was the centre led me to sense myself as someone considering whether or not to join this massive organisation. At first my feelings were that if I did, I would be another cog in the huge machinery of its massive workings – perhaps like a worker in a huge government office. I felt threatened by this, as if I would lose my identity. But the organisation would not go away simply because I tried to ignore it, so I decided I would join. What other option was there if the Company, Life, was everywhere?
Still feeling a bit threatened I met the manager – not God – but someone experienced in the place. He welcomed me and assured me that there would be no attempt to take away my identity as Andrew. In fact, it would be useful to the organisation if I continued to live and work in my accustomed manner. The only change would be that I was given a gadget like a bleeper. It represented intuition. Through intuition I could link with the Whole – the united being of the organisation of Life. This link would guide, not control, my individual activities to help me harmonise with the overall working of Life. This felt wonderful, so simple and clear. Behind the smallness of my personal being lay the immensity of Life, of which I was a linked part, living my individual life yet working with the whole.
At this point in your growing awareness of the divine in you, you might think, ‘This has arisen from myself. I am doing this.’ You are wrong.
Or you might say, ‘This is God’s work, its influence is completely beyond me.’ You are wrong. This is from your own self and its influence is completely beyond you!
People then ask, ‘Am I doing this, or is God doing this to me?’ the answer is ‘YES.’
Being Made a Disciple
Knowing you are blest happens when discipleship is bestowed upon you. I quote again the following piece:
“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, he 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.”
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