Guardians of the Threshold

OUR OWN FEARS GUARD THE THRESHOLD TO SPIRIT AND OUR ENTRY

I love Rudolph Steiner's story about the Guardians of the Threshold, who guard our entry into spiritual awareness, until we understand that one Guardian is the golden part of us who's beauty is too blinding and we must look away (or accept our self worth) and the other Guardian is our dark nature that holds the archetypes of the thief, whore, and all other undesirable natures that we look away from and cannot own up.  Until we do, we cannot cross the threshold.  Once we do, the guardians vanish, because they ARE us. 

I think it is worth noting, that according to the Steiner teaching, once the threshold is crossed, the experience of the seeker changes to one who's experience does not contain direct violence and chaos - because duality is transcended, harmony can rule the day.  It does not mean that duality no longer exists, only that it is no longer the experience of the seeker who has crossed the threshold. 

You cannot cross the threshold into integration until you know that you can illuminate darkness yourself.  The first Guardian contains all of our fears in aspects of good and evil. These fears prohibit our crossing the Threshold until we reconcile all good and evil within and see them interwoven into our whole being.  The unseen then becomes seen. 

The second Guardian, our golden shadow, is a sublime, luminous beauty impossible to describe.  It holds our highest potential, and our low self image and our perceived limits keep us from embracing this Guardian and crossing the Threshold.  To embrace the second Guardian we must realize that our highest possibilities (unseen) within ourselves creates our character and that our world of sense is a seed ground for the higher world.  By embracing the second Guardian, everyone is redeemed and all are connected.  We cannot cross the threshold in separation.

Excerpted from All About Living by Molly Brogan
Artwork by Alejandro Silveira Bruno.  Many thanks.

Forsaking All Others Brings Us to Unity

WE ARE REALIZED BY BEING THE GOD WITHIN

Most of us feel that there is a source or creator or God or ultimate order to life.  Connecting to this for some of us, is fleeting, takes effort and may even be something we think very little about.  How do YOU connect with the spirit within you?  How often do you connect?  How does this connection effect your life?

Do we have to have a God?  I believe God is.  God is within us all. Not all of us recognize or understand that it is this God within us that creates our experience according to our own filters of belief and viewpoint.  Our experience is created whether we recognize this aspect of it or not.  I believe that the quality of our experience improves with peace, harmony and love, if we do.  Does this mean that folks who don't believe in God are doomed or suffer more or are wrong?  No.  It simply means that some of us believe in God and some don't.  I believe that everyone is living to express who they are and moving into their potentiality that will be included in their expression.  This is change.  I can feel the harmony and completion of the entirety.

We all live a different experience.  Our relationship to our experience creates it.  This includes our relationship to ourselves, others, God, the earth etc.  That is the many.  There is that part of life where we are all one.  Some say this is the God within us or Christ consciousness.  Paradoxically, the oneness doesn't negate our individuality, it empowers it. 

My viewpoint is that nothing is external to God, and God is not external to me.  God is an essential part of who I am.  God is I AM in me.  The paradox is that I am both differentiated (individual), and undifferentiated (God).  I am God (Father), myself (Son), and my experience (Holy Spirit), expressed in states and stages and dimensions of consciousness.

All material copyrighted 2010: excerpt, All About Living, Molly Brogan
 Artwork by Ron Isom.  Many thanks.

Free Will Is and Is Not

ALL POSSIBILITY EXISTS ALWAYS.  OUR FREE WILL ALLOWS OUR AWARENESS OF POSSIBILITY WITH A CHANGE IN VIEWPOINT

I think the notion of free will is simple. God is the realm of infinite possibility. We choose possibility (free will) to create our individual experience. At some point in the journey, the two are integrated - the one and the many. Some people argue that free will is not the same as choice.

I think that all possibility is the realm of God, and we choose possibility, according to our viewpoint in the moment. Yet, if we are coexisting in an infinite number of possible realms, we are, in the same moment, living all different possibilities, each from a different viewpoint. As space time opens and all possibility is reached, each one limited viewpoint is simultaneously one in the all possibility. Everything you can imagine, you are. As you are experiencing yourself in separation from others, you are choosing, with free will, which possibility to include in your viewpoint to shape your experience. You can change by choosing again. As long as you are separate and limited, the choice remains. There is a state of being where all possibility and all viewpoints are realized. Here, the choice is all of everything. This is the God within us.

We cannot change what is, which is everything possible. But we choose our state of consciousness, our viewpoint, and in this, exercise our free will. By doing this, we change our experience of who we are and live our potentiality of all that is. This is how we, as some say, co create. We do by making the possible real. We don’t really change what is possible, we change our experience by changing our viewpoint, and that changes what is possible within our experience.

We generate meaningful connections in our experience of consciousness, not the intellectual speculation of consciousness. States like cosmic consciousness (experience of all time and all others and all that is) can and are experienced in sleep and deep meditation or contemplation. Also, the undifferentiated, ineffable, omniscient, realm of all possibility can be experienced in sleep or deep meditation and contemplation. Once accessed, these states are in our awareness like a background programs, running though all our experience. Like this, they become a part of our complete experience. We all have the potentiality for this. We recognize and then experience when a change in viewpoint allows the possibility to manifest as real in our experience. Intellectual speculation may lead us to a change in viewpoint, or it may not. Our viewpoint manifests the experience. Our free will allows our choice.

All material copyrighted 2010: excerpt, All About Living, Molly Brogan
 Artwork by Beth Nash.  Many thanks.

Love as Becoming

Anonymous said...
A beautiful expression of love as emanation.

I would like to thank this anonymous viewer for this comment on my poem. It got me to thinking about emanation, or the unfolding principle, the outflowing from the source of creation. To me, this statement speaks to love as becoming in ways that completely connect us to all of creation. How wonderful.

The expression of primal urge into an emanation is also conveyed in one of my favorite James Russell Lowell poems, The Vision of Sir Launfall:

“And what is so rare as a day in June?

Then, if ever, come perfect days;

Then Heaven tries Earth if she be in tune,

And over her softly her warm ear lays:

Whether we look or whether we listen,

Every clod feels a stir of might,

An instinct within it that reaches and towers,

And groping blindly above it for light,

Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.”

Beauty as the Path to Inspiration

Sioban said...
This is an interesting post. In your books, do you connect beauty and inspiration?

Thank you, for the wonderful question, Sioban. I do think that when we allow ourselves to contemplate the beautiful, we are taking ourselves to the state of connection with spirit. This is a sure and easy path to allow ourselves to feel connected to everything and all that is, which is our God nature. Sustaining this state of awareness puts us in a place to receive inspiration, starts the creative juices flowing. When we are connected to all of creation, we become creation and are moved to express creatively.

I think that usually my poems express a state where everything is coming together into such a flow. My trilogy of novels also, follows the main character as she is able to appreciate and express this more and more until finally, she is living from it. Byron’s “she walks in beauty like the night” is the perfect example of a character that learns to live as the creative force, in a state of inspiration. My third novel, Shadow Dancing, portrays the main character moving beyond her own shadow to fully embrace her own beauty and live from it. Seen from the broad pallet of the trilogy of novels, this character has come a long way from allowing life to happen to her, to creating a life expressed as her own highest potential.

Writing About Essential Being

Ulysses said...

"energy that moves through the matrix of our being that we can FEEL." Interesting. What do you mean by "being?" I know this is a topic of discussion on your other blog, but I'd like to know what your idea of being is, and how it applies to your books.

The Essene’s think that being is consciousness, and consciousness is everything. Like that, I think being is that part of us that is connected to spirit, and as such, is all of us. Even those parts of us that feel separate from spirit, devoid of spirit, opposed to spirit, are those parts of us that eventually lead us back to spirit, and so, are of spirit. Like the notions of Lucifer being God’s favorite angel, or Judas the favorite apostle of Jesus, or Brahman – being is all pervasive.

That said, I do believe that there is an essential part of being that we can give to our attention. It is that part of us that is the witness to our life, the one that observes before we assign meaning or belief. I think that the more we can move through life posited in this essential part of our being, the more our lives will become what we can conceive is our highest potential. When I say highest potential I mean the best life that we can dream - and better, because spirit is leading the witness always.

I construct my poems from the position of the witness, although I will say, that in order to reach the reader I find that I must include not only observation but interpretation to bring feeling to the experience. I suppose this may be poetic license.

My play, Without a Word, is an examination of being from all aspects of character. It was written to be an exercise in consciousness raising while giving the audience a more holographic than linear experience.

My three novels, when looked at in succession, are one journey to this realm of essential being. On the way, like all humans, the characters make mistakes and self discoveries that create the stories. And they learn, in the end, that we write our own stories. We are the writers, and the readers and the stories and the Logos.

Thanks so much for posing this great question.

Heroes, Villains and Rudolph Steiner

Linda said...
Can you tell me about "the Opposing Spiritual Powers," and how they are like anti-heros?

Thanks for the question, Linda. I should preface the answer by saying that I have read the Rudolph Steiner teachings for several years now and find them to be mythical and complicated. I feel that whatever organization there is to life is much, much simpler, but I do admire some of his concepts. One of my favorite is his idea that humanity has a soul that influences and evolves along with our individual souls, much like CG Jung’s collective unconsciousness. Another is that our awareness unfolds, and humanity evolves due largely to the interplay of opposing forces (the tree of knowledge or good and evil.) The Steiner teachings tell us that in the course of human history, three specific opposing forces have provided our common soul and individual souls with opposition to our perfect nature (the Christ impulse) or the God within us. The dynamic of these forces are such that either we transcend the opposition and realize freedom by reconciling the forces (transcending duality) or we continue to battle.

Lucifer was the first, providing our natural, darker side. He is closely linked to nature and the mechanics of human nature so that the opposition he presents are storms or plagues or the fall of an civilization or the domination of our ego nature. His gift to humanity was free will, obtained in the choice to realize the Christ impulse and to transcend.

Ahriman was the second. His influence was first felt about 4M years ago and is still present today. He is associated with technology and materialism and prevents us from not seeing through the material to the spirit. He is also closely linked to the laws of karma, and keeps us from understanding the process of our freedom from karmic debt. But once the Ahrimanic forces have been reconciled, and we are free from karmic debt, we enter the age of Azuras. The Steiner teachings tell us that humanity is just beginning to enter this age but is still primarily ruled by Ahriman.

Not much is written on the Azuras and to research, I joined the Steiner library in New York, and read several of his books and lectures that hadn’t been taken out of the library in decades. I also joined Steiner discussion groups all over the world, talking to folks who had their own ideas about where Steiner was going with this. The forces of Azuras distract us into looking away from spirituality and convince us that our material experience is reality, not a reflection of our conscious awareness. It tricks us out of taking our objective into the subjective and becoming the creator with it, and believing the reverse is true. The Azuras has both the natural quality of Lucifer and the Ahrimanic qualities of technology and materialism. There is a bit written and much discussed about Steiner’s notion that once we give any part of ourselves to the Azuras, it can never be recovered. My (controversial) belief was that Steiner understood that once we transcend duality, mind and soul (karma), our lives and the formation of our experience is more immediately effected by universal laws. Once we consciously understand how to reconcile the opposition and realize our connection with all of life, we are distracted less easily even though the distractions become more dramatic. Ken Wilber would say it hurts more but we suffer less after the One Taste.

It’s easy to see how these opposing forces can be used as the hero/anti hero of a novel. I develop the characters of the three anti heros in my trilogy to reflect the nature of Steiner’s opposing forces. This allows me to develop the character of the heroine along a natural line of spiritual development, learning to release her karmic debt and move into a more harmonious storyline. And who doesn’t love a happy ending?

Discussion of Gregg Braden's Seven Mirrors and divine will

Ken said...
I like Gregg Braden's formula that thought and feeling creates prayer (not reality.) Your idea doesn't seem to leave room for God's will.

Hi Ken,

I liked your post so much. I thought it could stand alone as a new discussion. You're right, of course. Divine Will is the integral aspect to our human experience. Most religions recognize a power greater than us. Consider, for a moment, the God in us as the source of all creation. Then we would create our reality not by what we DO, but by what we recognize, respect or allow as divine will moves through us. Divine will is the God in us in motion.

If we can position ourselves to live life like this, another of Gregg Braden's presentations comes into play: The Seven Mirrors in the Essene Mystery of Relationship. These mirrors are:

1)who we are in the moment;

2)What we judge in the moment;

3)what has been lost, given away or taken away;

4)our most forgotten love;

5)our relationship with God;

6)our dark night of the soul;

7)our perfection.

According to this belief, our experience becomes a vibrational mirror that reflects one or some combination of mirrored patterns in others. Recognizing the wisdom of the mirror accelerates our evolution of emotion and understanding. God speaks to us and guides us through the universal law of vibration and our experience unfolds according to divine will.

Many thanks for your post. Molly Brogan