another credo from ao:

CREDO XVIII Consider the Obvious!
 
    In the most recent dream I had of Jung, he simply roared at me, "CONSIDER THE OBVIOUS! I DID!" and I woke up. In THE DOVE IN THE STONE, I list some of Sophia's ways of communicating with us through intuition. One on the list is etymology, the meaning of words. So I looked up the origin of 'obvious'. It comes from ob via , on the road. This in turn, led me to an alchemical quote, I once read: The Philosopher's Stone is lying on the road and wagon wheels roll over it. In other words, and let this sink in, nothing is hidden, it is we who are blind!
 
    Thus began my insight that it is feminine wisdom that is simple enough to look for enlightment from ordinary things. Masculine intellect often cries, " Oh, that's obvious, it's much more complicated than that!" And so it is, but it starts on the road, the ground of manifestation beneath our feet. We must remember that when the Church Fathers translated Hagia Sophia, the Holy Wisdom of the Old Testament, from the feminine into the masculine Spiritus Sanctus, which takes a masculine pronoun, the feminine left the Holy Trinity, and hid in fairy tales, I suspect, as the archetype of the Fairy Godmother. She is a benign character who mediates between the invisible and visible world, and always gives the little hero or heroine practical advice and the adult ones as well. The how-to of being kind and helpful to a suffering animal or a lonely beggar and so on. It is the motif of endless tales in all cultures.
 
    The interesting thing is why is she called a God-mother? Might it not be, that she gives birth to our reborn self as the connecting link between ego and our Divine Guest and thus is the instrument to our individuation process of feeling 'born again'? It is not a collective orgy but a very private process in which each individual comes to that "Vast Certainty" that there is meaning to life and an undefinable source to creation, evolution of consciousness, and the majesty of the cosmos.
 
    So here is another gift from the alchemist Petrus Bonus, a quote I found in a footnote, I think, in M-L. von Franz's edition of Aurora Consurgens. He says, "To find the Philosopher's Stone, look with the eyes and see with the heart. [The ego at the circumference looks with consciousness and the heart receives understanding from the Self or Divine Guest through the radius of Sophia's intuition.]
 
    Just a few weeks ago, I was lighting a candle and looked down at it. It was a circle and had a wick. As I lit the wick, I had an Aha! Metaphorically speaking, each of us is a separate candle with an individual wick. But the flame on every candle is the same flame!
 
    Fire comes to us from the sun; fire is the only element of the symbolic four, that leaps up, gives light, and warmth and can be shared without being diminished. So when we realize that each of us living has an inner flame and we see it with the heart, we add the mystery of Love.
 
    As Christmas and Hanukah and Diwali all take place in Capricorn, ruled by Saturn [manifestation], life begins in Aries and nine months later, we celebrate the rebirth of the sun as in the darkest night of the year in our hemisphere,  appears to move north at the solstice. As John wrote, 'the Light that lighteth every man....." is the Collect for Christians on Christmas Eve. Light in the darkness, the 'dazzling darkness', is also the Light that Jung must have had in mind when he counsels us:
 
One does not become enlightened by seeking figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.
 
lovingly,
 
ao
 

 

            To cut this short, I started my search for God when I was 4 ½ years old, inspired no doubt by my beloved grandfather, Basil King, who was for many years rector of Christ Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When I traveled to Prince Edward Island off Canada with my mother and nanny, we stayed in a camp with little wooden cabins and a communal dining hall. I got serious and asked my mother how one got in touch with God. Mother, a mite perplexed, said she supposed one called on Him. A bit later I went out in my little overalls and stood on the porch and shouted “GOD! OH GOD!!” as loud as I could. Slowly, a huge horse in the field adjoining ambled over and hung his head over the porch rail and freaked me out! Panicking, I tried to open the screen door but couldn’t reach the handle........


            A few days later, I went out and lay down in the grass and looked up through the underside of the waving daisies at the blue sky and felt a sense of wonder at the beauty of it all. I came close. Nature was manifesting something mysterious. I felt wonder and reassurance, a hint.

 

            Fast forward to 1935. I am 12, staying in a seaside hotel in Nieuport-Bains, Belgium. My father has given me a book about science and I am reading it on my bed. I come across the chapter on atoms and read that every bit of matter is made of atoms and each atom has a nucleus that is filled with energy. I have an epiphany! That energy must be God!! This hits me like a thunderbolt. My heart pounds and I want to rush out and tell the world. So I run out the door and look over the banister down on the bald head of the concierge who is busy writing up some bills or something. Would he understand? I realize that this is something so tremendous and yet there is no one around to share it with. Yet for me, it is a proof. A certainty because I have experienced it personally.

 

            Years later, I read a quote of the alchemist Agrippa von Nettesheim, which I subsequently would write on the board of every astrology class I was destined to teach: Virtutes divinae in res suffusae. Divine powers are hidden in things. 

 

            But it took 50 years, when in 1985 here in this house, for me to come across a footnote in M-L von Franz’s edition of Aurora Consurgens which quoted another alchemist, Petrus Bonus [Good Stone!] which stated “To find the Philosopher’s Stone, look with the eyes and see with the heart.” It takes only a step then to realize Jung’s wisdom in saying that the longest journey many of us have to take is from the head to the heart.

 

            The ego as the center of consciousness is the instrument necessary for looking. We have two eyes {Sun/Moon] in the front of our heads, so we only see half. The Self as Jung defines it, is the center and totality of the psyche, but it dwells in the unconscious, so we need the feminine Hagia Sophia [Holy Wisdom] to lead us to the heart and the discovery of cosmic  Life, Light, Love. This is surely the Mysterium Coniunctionis  that he writes of and, in my opinion, experienced.

 

            In sacred geometry, the cube is symbolic of the manifest world because it can be measured. Ask anyone how many sides it has, and they will respond: six. Ask how many can you see, the answer is three. So perhaps we see only ½ and need to join it to its meaning. To think sym-bolically is Greek for putting together. Thus we might change the definition of a sacrament with one word: A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inner and spiritual meaning!

 

            The Philosopher’s Stone was supposed to turn lead to gold, but the alchemists said Non aurum vulgae not material vulgar gold, Rather they said, the Stone was lying on the road and wagon wheels roll over it – ob via, obvious – as I’ve said before, nothing is hidden, it is we who are blind. The lead, Saturn, is much in the news these days. It is toxic, as is a life lived without meaning, without love. My Teacher always said, When you feel down, do something for somebody quick!”

 

            The title of this Credo is Panentheism, which differs from pantheism. Pantheism means God is all. Panentheism means Spirit [God] is within all.

 

            The manifest world is full of Spirit, but it seems we can only see with a loving eye.

 

lovingly,

 

ao

 





When I was seven, an Irish Catholic family with four children roughly my age and a grandma called Nana moved in next door. Michael, Mary Ellen, Margaret, and Suzanne all went to Holy Martyrs, the school at the back of the mysterious church I passed when I rode my bike to the store. I loved to ride by when the church doors were open and you could see the candlelight in the darkness and smell the incense, but the sure footsteps of the nuns frightened me.

Nana’s room, crowded with old-fashioned furniture, religious statues and lace, was fascinating too, as was her two-tone 1947 Buick named Darlin’, and the real player piano she provided for the rec room. But what I liked best about Nana’s things were the little figures she set out in a stable once a year to tell the Christmas story.


 
I remember how Margaret and I cut fresh straw for the manger, and Mary Ellen lit the candle hidden behind the nativity scene so that the light fell right on the baby. We weren’t allowed to touch the people and animals, but more than once we slipped into Nana’s room when she was out and played with them.

At an estate sale last summer, I found a similar nativity set. It came in a bag with some other little figures, people and animals from around the world, and I couldn’t resist it. When I set the little scene out later, the other small people and odd animals seemed to want to be part of the story, so I let them.
 
Most of this fall I’ve been transcribing Ganesh Baba’s manuscript, Crea Sadhana, a yoga manual. At the time I set up the nativity scene, I was typing a section on swabhava, the quality of unfettered consciousness and pure love that yogis aspire to. Swabhava is the essence of a thing, the quality that makes it itself, the pure awareness that radiates from newborns (and enlightened beings) but is lost as babies grow, filtered by experience, buried under layers of enculturation and belief.

On a windowsill near me as I typed was a picture of the Hindu god Krishna as a young child. Looking at Krishna, I suddenly got it: the child Krishna and the baby in the manger represented the same quality!

 


A little research led to more connections. The same quality of radiant purity is associated with Tiferet, the central sphere on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and with Avalokiteswara, the Buddhist god of compassion whose thousands of arms touch everyone. In the Pythagorean Tetraktys, it is represented by the central stone in the pyramid of ten, the only one that touches all the others without ever touching the outer edge of the triangle.

 
Avalokiteshwara

 
Spontaneously, I moved the candle to the front of the nativity set, so the light would shine on all the faces.

The nativity scene continued to unfold its symbolism to me: Mary and Joseph represent the prime polarities, yin and yang, positive and negative, which come together to create anything new. The child at the center, creativity manifest, is love.

More research revealed a traditional esoteric message in the nativity. In ancient times, the concept of Christ was symbolized by the Greek hieroglyph, the image of a flame (Rho, parallel to the Egyptian Ra, the Sun or fire god) rising from crossed sticks (Chi, paralleling the Chinese concept Qi, life energy).

                                 

The guests at the nativity are associated with the seven steps of the esoteric path to liberation, seven levels of consciousness, lower levels represented by the four animals and higher ones by the three kings. One by one, the levels of consciousness are purified by the fire of understanding, the rubbing together of the two sticks of opposing ideas until the fire springs up and burns away the evidence of the old polarity.

All the figures together reflect the same seven steps of manifestation and three of the unmanifest that form the hierarchies basic to most esoteric systems. As Joseph Campbell explains, no matter where the systems originate, they have the same basic structure because they arise from the same human body/mind complex carried by the same spinal column and nervous system.
 
The only thing that still bothered me about the interpretation was that the animals represent lower stages of enlightenment than the wise men. Surely we are moving into a time of more sophisticated understanding than that. Finally, I exchanged some of the wise men for wise women and arranged all the figures in a circle so the light would shine on all the faces with equal intensity.



Wishing you love and light in these dark times,
                       
Eve