I’m struck by what Jesus said yesterday: “It has never been the learning to love; it is the acceptance, allowing and remembering of love.” (1)
Had I not been privileged to experience transformative love for an extended period of time in 2015, (2) this passage would not really make sense to me. But that experience of transformative love opens up the meaning of Jesus’ words.
Here I am, like so many others, writing reams on a single passage from Jesus. His ability to put a rich teaching in a few words is characteristic of Jesus’ teachings.
The task that faces us has never been to learn to love, as if the enterprise will prove new to us. We’ve always had the innate knowledge of love and ability to love, which has been covered up by several things.
First, it’s obscured by the natural density of the Third-Dimensional body, which makes it a relative non-conductor of things like emotions or divine states of consciousness.
Second, the stress that we generate results in bands of muscular tension which further impede the body’s non-conductivity.
Third, our inadequate concepts of Reality prevent us from knowing ourselves as love.
And I could go on.
But when we accept our love and allow it to rise from the heart and go out into the world, then we set in motion events that will reclaim for us this innate knowledge of love and ability to love.
He also put a second matter in a puzzling yet enticing manner, so characteristic of Jesus: “We invite you home to the new reality of ancient existence.” New reality… ancient home…. How can a new reality be ancient? How is it our home?
God is our home. Since God is all there is, our home becomes all there is, which is something that we’d need to realize to know.
God is love. Since that’s the case, then the new reality of overarching, universal, or transformative love that we feel at some point in our Ascension journey is both new to us in this lifetime and ancient. It’s our original home and the one we return to after all our journeying. How did T.S. Eliot phrase it?
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” (3)
Jesus is inviting us to return to our original and ancient home of love, which will appear to us to be a new reality but which is our home since endless ages, since antiquity, since the beginning of time.
When we return home, we see it newly, as if for the first time. Moreover, and equally important, the experience of transformative love is itself always new. It never tires. It never pales. It never flags. This newness of love is another way in which transformative love is a “new reality.”
Simple intellectual knowledge of this and other truths is a faint reflection of the actual truth. To be known, the truth must be realized.
This reality is “new” in the sense that it exists in a dimension of reality that is totally unknown to us in our present strait of consciousness. When we enter any higher dimension of reality, the experience is that we’ve entered a space that’s entirely “new.”
One “new” dimensional experience could be the seeing of the Light that occurs when the kundalini reaches the fourth or heart chakra. This experience is often described in terms of newness and great significance. Here are some examples:
Ralph Waldo Emerson: “No man ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which created all things new; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art.” (4)
Jacob Boehme: “A wonderful light arose within my soul. In it I recognized the nature of God and man.” (5)
Sri Ramakrishna: “Now and then man catches a glimpse of his real Self and becomes speechless with wonder. At such times he swims in an ocean of joy. It is like suddenly meeting a dear relative.” (6)
Sri Ramakrishna: “The Kundalini, when awakened, passes through the lower centres and comes to the Anahata, which is at the heart. It stays there. At that time the mind of the aspirant is withdrawn from the three lower centres. He feels the awakening of Divine Consciousness and sees Light. In mute wonder he sees that radiance and cries out: ‘What is this? What is this?'” (7)
The experience is certainly new to the aspirant, even if it restores that person to a state they knew long ago.
As we go forward, the teachers will look at higher and higher dimensions of experience and express things in ways that puzzle us. However, if we’ve ever had a transformational moment, peak experience, or enlightenment experience, we’ll know that the space we end up in is entirely new and different from the space we were in before. It cannot easily be described in words that applied to the lower and denser version of reality.
We end up trying to suggest that difference by using paradoxes and contextual flips.
One minute in a higher-dimensional space immediately makes the difficulties facing the teachers plain. Simple, plain, descriptive language is not enough to make that difficulty come alive to others or to explain what it is we’re trying to say. We end up, as Adyashanti said, failing but hopefully failing well.
Even if we don’t understand what the teacher is saying, if we begin by separating out the lower and higher-dimensional elements in their teaching, we can at least begin to tease out what they intend to communicate.
Here I go again, writing and writing on a single sentence from Jesus. His teachings are like that.
Footnotes
(1) Actually said in March 1998, but posted yesterday (April 23, 2016): “Jesus: The New Reality of Ancient Existence” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/?p=275872
(2) From March 15, 2015, when I had the heart opening and began to experience transformative love, until the love was extended and subsumed in bliss from Oct. 3, 2015 till around January 2016.
(3) From Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot; at https://www.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/wisdoms/eliot2.htm
(4) Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays. First Series. London: Routledge and Sons, 1898; c1841, 166.
(5) Jacob Boehme in Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness. A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. New York: Dutton, 1969; c1901, 183.
(6) Paramahansa Ramakrishna in Swami Nikhilananda, trans., The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1978; c1942, 392-3. [Hereafter GSR.]
(7) Paramahansa Ramakrishna in GSR, 499.
