Trumptation

You're suffering today. And you and I both know why: the world just changed. To everyone's surprise, Donald Trump just got elected president, and now you don't know how to think about anything. Nothing makes sense. Hope seems to have disappeared. But even though this is a time of grief, there's a hope for the future that wasn't there a few days ago. The world looks dark right now, but darkness only looks like darkness in contrast to light. That light - even though it's hidden - is there. And now it's set to illuminate our souls more than ever. The task now is to see it.

Let me tell you how.

Temptation

Emanuel Swedenborg was an eighteenth-century scientist, philosopher, and theologian who claimed that his mind was open to the spiritual world, which he could travel to at will. This sounds crazy, but apart from saying that he has helped me more than any other author, it isn't important to talk about his sanity. His writings are valuable right now because of what he taught about temptations. And temptations are important because those of us in despair are going through one right now.

Swedenborg said that temptations are a state of mind that threatens what matters to you. When you've made up your mind to follow the commandments and you get an impulse to drink alcohol or watch pornography, this is a temptation. Temptations happen when you're filled with impulses or thoughts that could lead you away from what you love, wedging you between the rock of your good desires and the hard place of the evil desires that lead you away from it. And it's terrifying. You've made up your mind to do what's good and believe what's true, but in the middle of a temptation, you find that you might not want to do or believe those things anymore. Good seems to retreat. Evil seems about to conquer. But this is just how it seems.

According to a beloved quote from Swedenborg,

So long as temptation continues, man supposes the Lord to be absent...Yet the Lord is then more intimately present than he can ever believe. When however temptation ceases, then he receives consolation, and then first believes the Lord to be present. (Arcana Coelestia 840)

Temptations are actually a balanced fight between good and evil, not a slaughter of good by evil. If evil took over, you wouldn't even see it as a problem. Evil and good are both ways of acting and seeing the world with their own "delights," and if good vanished, you'd rush headlong into evil's dirty pleasures without a second thought. You wouldn't even remember things like peace of conscience or the love of God. In other words, when someone feels rotten, anxious, and miserable in times like these, that anxiety is a sign that they have a lot of good inside them. In fact, anxiety is a sign that God has big plans for that person. Someone who's never felt any anxiety will maybe never reach the spiritual heights possible for one who struggles with and through it.

For this anxiety, this temptation, is how God frees us from evil impulses and false thoughts. When you're in the middle of a temptation, the tension you feel means that you have the opportunity to make a uniquely powerful choice. You can go with the temptation and keep that evil with you, but you can also fight and freely choose the good. And when this happens - when you use your God-sanctioned freedom to "choose the right" - a huge change happens. Having chosen goodness, it becomes much more present in you than it was before. Since you chose the good in you even when it was hard, the organ of your "choosing" - your heart, your will, your inmost parts - get flooded with God's love.

But there's another important aspect here. For the root of all evil is the belief that you have power from yourself. It is the sin of the Fall, since by believing that we're separate and self-sufficient beings, we "separate" ourselves from God and His love. Obviously, just as the Fall was necessary, this "love of the self" is also necessary. We would be divine robots without it. But any "love of the self" in us should be in service to a higher love, "love for the Lord," just like the body obeys the head. Since all temptation has the end of getting us to choose virtue over sin, and since all sin comes from love of the self, the ultimate purpose of temptation is to attack that evil self-love. In other words, temptation is all about death: we die to our selfishness, pride, and worship of ourselves, and we're reborn to togetherness, freedom, and love. We stop clinging to ourselves to not fall into the abyss, and find, to our amazement, that God has always been holding us safely. You thought that you were powerful enough to save yourself, but only when you realize your powerlessness do you see how safe you are

In fact, realizing your powerlessness gives you power. Swedenborg wrote that the angels in heaven are lose their power to the extent they think it belongs to them, just as acknowledging their weakness makes them powerful. In fact, perfect strength is what the world considers weakness. Think of how water can burst dams even though it passively takes the shape of the reservoir. Think of how tense muscles get hurt more easily than flexible ones. Or think of how Christ, the most powerful being of us all, submitted himself to be humiliated and executed in a moment of what seemed like utter meaninglessness. This was a temptation - nothing made sense, and the promise of the Kingdom seemed lost. To everyone there, death had won. But it was just then, as Christ trusted and loved his Father in spite of all his despair, anxiety, and confusion, that the miracle happened. The strength of weakness won, and death died.

Trumptation

We're in the middle of a temptation right now. It looks like the end of the world: Donald Trump, the bully, sleazy rapist, and xenophobe, won. But Trump's victory is a wake-up call. Nothing we do will ever make a difference - no matter how many angry protests happen or how many celebrity videos Joss Whedon makes, evil will win. But hope isn't gone. Hope might actually be here more than before, because now many of us realize that, when you only look at what we ourselves can do, the future IS literally hopeless. But the real hope for our future doesn't come from us. It comes from God, and only when we realize that we've sinned by attributing his power to ourselves will that change happen.

God wants to give us blessings beyond number. But we desperately cling to our own sense of power,  and since God will never violate our agency, He can't give us the greatest blessing of all: the peace of trusting Him. Only now, as we're being shown our utter poverty, we have the opportunity to choose something more than ourselves. We can turn away from the darkness of ourselves and toward the overpowering light of God, who is love itself, the very essence of trust, faith, and the strength of weakness

So what do we do now? That's the question, isn't it? You could resign yourself to give up to God, but then you are trying to give up, which is a disguised kind of pride.  We have to stop trying, and what's more, we have to stop trying not to try! Luckily, the temptations we're talking about are the best (and only) way we can get there. Like someone in full-lotus meditation who relaxes his muscles to stop her legs hurting, it will get easier and easier for us to give up and give in to God as we go along. That is our hope: that what becomes darker and darker to our egos is actually the dawning of light for love.

Throwing Away Your Shot

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a genius. This goes without saying: he was the the author, composer, and leading man of the Broadway musicals In the Heights and Hamilton, and he can come up with jaw-droppingly clever rhymes in the spur of the moment. Just give him a beat. But what does it mean to say that someone is a "genius?" The word comes from Latin, where it meant "an attendant spirit present at one's birth," what the Greeks called a "daimon." The genius is like the angel on your shoulder: a little ghost that whispers inspiration to you. When we say that Lin-Manuel is a genius, we mean that he has a genius. And he's no stranger to it.

On the Genius

But isn't this just a bunch of old Roman hooey? It isn't. Here's my evidence: Lin-Manuel is very talented at doing things "on the fly." Not only can you see this in the talk show episodes where he cleverly does freestyle raps with only a few seconds to prepare, but it shows up in the musicals he writes too. Most of the songs in Hamilton have rhymes, rhythms, and meanings so well woven together that they bear the character of something whole. No part of My Shot's lyrics can be separated from the other parts without the whole thing losing its meaning. This organized whole - what psychologists would call a gestalt - can't be assembled piece by piece. Its living kernel needs to come all at once, and as such it needs to have been given. The one who gives this whole is the genius. The genius is where inspiration begins.

The concept of the genius is another way of saying that works of art aren't just a collection of notes or drops of paint. Hamilton isn't a collision of billiard balls on a musical pool table. As a gestalt, it's more than the sum of its parts. If you took the parts away and considered them apart from each other, it would lose meaning and its life. And this life is the genius: what organizes these parts into something whole, something significant. Without the genius, the work is contrived, uninspired, or even dead.

The genius of Lin-Manuel is what caused a sensation in the nation, what kept "the ten-dollar founding father" on our bills. Without it, all of that would fall apart into brittle, dissociated pieces. It's time we learned more about it.

Hamilton's Shot

"You have married an Icarus. He has flown too close to the sun."

Hamilton isn't just a product of genius. It's about genius...in more ways than one. Not only is its main character a prodigy, a Mozart of letters, but its ultimate message is about what happens to genius when it pops into the world. In Hamilton, the genius announces who he is and tells us about himself. It's a tell-all, a full disclosure.

The genius comes from somewhere else. It strikes us unawares - while sitting on a park bench, walking, or reading a biography - but the genius isn't confined to the book we're reading. It only appears by means of it, as if Ron Chernow's book were a mirror the genius used to see itself. In itself, it exists beyond the bounds of things and definite ideas. It breaks through; it "bursts" into awareness.

Hamilton (the character) is a lot like that genius. Like a flash of inspiration, he comes from somewhere else (the Caribbean), and he comes here (the colonies) to shake everything up. Both Hamilton and the genius affect everything they touch. They're both a bundle of fiery energy just waiting to explode. And fire can't easily be held: he commits adultery, he gets into fights, and he spills his private secrets out into the world without any scruples, just as inspiration doesn't lend itself easily to the real-life projects that can contain it.

But I'll argue that Hamilton isn't just similar to the genius. Hamilton is genius announcing itself. He is the promise of a new idea, the openness of a gestalt and all the ways you can understand it. He is the possibility of curiosity, intuition, and ambition. In every flash of insight, Hamilton's ship is in the harbor. See if you can spot him.

But the genius often isn't received well. New ideas and fresh perspectives are all well and good, but many people are scared by the thought of any change. The inevitable resistance that rises up against social progress is a case in point. Hamilton threatens the establishment. That establishment says: "if you talk, you're gonna get shot." And he often does. Look at John Lennon or Martin Luther King Jr.: both shot at the height of their path toward change.

It goes without saying at this point that the establishment gets personified in Hamilton through Aaron Burr. He "keeps out of trouble," and "keeps his cards close to his chest": both motions of closure as opposed to Hamilton's radical openness. Hamilton is soaring freedom; Burr is enclosed restriction. Hamilton is the liberal; Burr is the conservative. Hamilton is yes; Burr is no. These are opposites, but they need each other. You can't have open without closed, after all. But neither of them see this until the very end. With Hamilton's and Burr's dueling pistols loaded and pointed at each other, the opposition that defines our culture - ambition and pessimism, idealism and realism, liberal and conservative - goes into its final showdown. Who will win? Who will lose? What actually happened, at least in the musical, surprised everyone: Hamilton threw away his shot.

Hamilton, who fought against tyranny and restriction his whole life, decides to let it have the last word. He points his pistol at the sky, like his son, knowing that he would probably die. Why? I think it's because, at that last moment when he saw the "other side," he saw the secret behind the world's deceptive appearance: that when Burr and Hamilton fight, both lose. So instead of pointing his pistol at his enemy, he points it at the sky. He sees that "whoever takes the sword perishes by the sword" and that "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." And he perishes by a twitch of Burr's finger.

But this act, where the genius points himself back at the sky instead of fighting the limitations of the earth, doesn't count for nothing. It leaves everyone dumbfounded. As the genius returns to the beyond where he came from, we - like the centurion at Christ's crucifixion - can tell that something more-than-human has just happened. The air is pregnant with unsayable meaning even as there's "wailing in the streets." And it leaves people changed.

Likewise, every time we realize that our high-flying ideals, ambitions, and insights don't belong on earth, we point its pistol at the sky and it returns home. We don't lose the insight, but we remember that it comes from something fundamentally other than me: the genius. For the genius will return home sooner or later. With the geniuses in history like John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, or Mozart, it could only ascend by killing the person. But a person - realizing that he's "only human" - puts down the burden of "being the genius" and can work with that inspiring spirit productively.

This is crucial for our culture today. As liberals fighting conservatives and conservatives fighting liberals, we don't realize that these political ideals which Hamilton and Burr show so well don't belong on earth. They come to us from somewhere else, somewhere divine and not human. By acknowledging that and realizing that they aren't our own, we point our pistol at the sky and let the conflict so bitterly played out on the national stage lose its life-or-death quality. But this is true of every ideal, every cause, or even every emotion that carries us beyond ourselves. It's not us: it's something greater than us, and only by acknowledging that can we end the cycle of pain that getting possessed by these forces inevitably causes. Let the gods be the gods; let humans be humans. Only apart can they work together.

Will you throw away your shot? Will you plant seeds in a garden you never get to see? More depends on these questions than you could ever think.

The Dumbing-Down of Truth

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle with 25 pieces. It would be pretty simple to solve, right? It might be fun for a 5-year-old, but probably not for you. Now imagine dividing each of those 25 pieces into 10 pieces, making a grand total of 250 pieces. A little more complicated, but basically still for kids. But imagine you divided each of those 250 pieces into another 10, making 2500. That’s more like it. But imagine that when you’ve finished your 2500 piece puzzle, your five-year-old cousin comes up to you and says “I could have done that, easy!” You’re confused for a bit, but then you realize that your cousin can’t see the 2500 pieces but, instead, only the outlines of the initial 25. He can’t tell that each one of those larger pieces is actually a collection of 100 smaller ones!

This is like the nature of truth. Like the meta-puzzle in my parable, each true idea implies the millions/billions/+ of other true ideas that make it up. There are nuances and new revelations to eternity; truth in itself is more complicated than a human being can ever grasp. Swedenborg said this a lot: like how a human body gets more complicated with the higher level of microscope you use, he says truth gets more and more nuanced the deeper you look. There is no bottom here.

We need truth – that isn’t up for negotiation. It’s the only thing that saves us from our ignorance and our dangerous misconceptions – “the truth will set you free.” But if we can’t grasp truth in itself, what does that mean for our salvation? Absolutely nothing; God makes up the difference, and he does this by dumbing down the truth for us.

This is a lot like teaching Sunday School lessons to young children. If you were to teach them out of the Gospel Doctrine manual, you’d get nothing but blank stares and cheerios all over the floor. It’s only by using really simplified truths – the “Sunday School” answers – that you can make an impression on their young minds. And this is, crucially, true even though those Sunday School answers are relatively untrue compared with the more advanced “meat” of the Gospel. We’re all like those little kids. Every doctrine we receive from a church (or even scripture) is a simplification that adapts truth to our ability to understand. If doctrine didn’t get simplified like this, we would be just as confused as those little Sunbeams.

What does this look like practically? Well, it means that scripture is always “clothed” in details appropriate to the time and place it was written. That’s why Genesis talks about a firmament (basically an upside-down bowl that’s also the sky) dividing the ocean from heaven: that was a commonsense belief to Semites of the time, and God would have done nothing but confuse them if he’d mentioned dinosaurs, quantum fields, and primordial ooze.

We’re just as naive as those ancient Hebrews were, and we are just as convinced that we’re not. We know just a little more than we did then, like a fourth-grader coming home and bragging to his parents how smart he is after winning his science fair. This is as true with our doctrine as it is with our science. Does it upset me that there was a doctrine prohibiting black people from receiving the Priesthood in the LDS Church for a long time? A little bit, but not much; racism was a political institution in the United States for centuries, and if God didn’t adapt himself to that racism, He wouldn’t have been received. And yes, that does mean God can consecrate immoral acts to be done to worship Him. He doesn’t like it, but He does it often to help people trapped in widespread cultural immorality to come to Him. Swedenborg said that animal sacrifice was like this: the earliest people hated killing animals, but when they developed a taste for blood, he co-opted that grossness toward a good purpose. The violence in the Old Testament done for God was like this too. If people can’t help doing bad things, God might as well “bend” it toward a good purpose. Otherwise they’d reject the good outright and dive headlong into their evil.

Something else follows from this idea: the differing doctrines of the world’s religions don’t mean that one is true and the rest are false. It just means that the same truth “put on” the different assumptions and biases of the peoples who received it. It’s not surprising that India – with its repressive caste system – developed religions preaching the eternal insignificance of an individual personality (like with reincarnation). And it also makes sense that the Judeo-Christian God was portrayed like a Persian or Babylonian Super-King: that’s what mattered at the time. This works with the Book of Mormon too: so what if it was written in King James English with New Testament idioms all over the place? That’s what people in 1800s white America thought of as sacred; they wouldn’t have accepted anything else. The Book of Mormon is weird enough as it is without the immense weirdness that a direct translation of 4th century Native American culture would have brought.

And you can think of the “planet” weirdness of Mormon teachings like Abraham 3 in this way. The worldwide spiritual mindset from the eighteenth century till the early twentieth century was “planet-crazy”: Swedenborg spoke of “the inhabitants of the planet Jupiter” (who, oddly enough, resemble humans pre-Homo-Erectus in his descriptions), Rudolf Steiner said that human souls originally lived on the Moon, and Gurdjieff taught that the Sun and the planets in our solar system are spiritual organisms we “grow out of.” So if you’re a Mormon and you’re self-conscious about your weirdness, don’t be. “Planets” were exciting at the time; God facilitated our obsession and bent it toward a good purpose.

But what does all this mean about the people who stubbornly stick to the literal meaning of Genesis or who insist, despite everything, that every General Authority is infallible? According to Swedenborg, it’s the intent that counts, and I believe him one hundred percent. If it works for them and they’re in a good place, you have no right to claim that they’re doing anything wrong. God speaks unto people “according to their language, unto their understanding” (2 Nephi 31:3), and that includes the language of concrete, literal-minded people. In the words of people who make fun of Christians for sticking with Bronze-Age nonsense, I hear nothing but pretentious intellectualism and more than a little contempt for the general mass of people. That’s why you’ll never hear me furiously raise my hand in a Sunday School lesson about Noah’s Ark: let people believe in whatever relatively untrue truths work for them, since that’s a luxury God gives to all of us.

The Play of Love

Read this post on A Sea of Glass and Fire.

Now because every single thing remains in being from the Divine, that is, is constantly coming into being from Him, and every single thing from that source is inevitably a representative of the real thing by means of which it has come into being, the whole visible universe is therefore nothing else than a theatre that is representative of the Lord's kingdom. And this in turn is a theatre representative of the Lord Himself. - Emanuel Swedenborg, "Arcana Coelestia," 3483

Have you ever noticed that things in your life happen just the way they're supposed to happen? You meet that person, you read that book, or you run into an idea at just the right time? Or maybe things don't happen so easily; your boyfriend might break up with you or maybe you fail a class. But have you still discerned the way those painful events are good for you? I have. The world is on my side; if I'm on the wrong track, it will remind me in blunt or sometimes painful ways. But if I'm going in the way I'm supposed to go, things will happen in surprisingly easy ways. I'll meet the right people, I'll find the right books, and I'll say the right things

But though the world is on my side, the world isn't what's really on my side. The world is a theater. Every person, book, website, idea, or tree is a part played by something more real than it, something spiritual. The relationship between the spiritual world and our lives is the same relationship as between an actress and the character she plays.

‘Each grain of sand,

Every stone on the land,

Each rock and each hill,

Each fountain and rill,

Each herb and each tree,

Mountain, hill, earth, and sea,

Cloud, meteor, and star,

Are men seen afar.' - William Blake, "To Thomas Butts"

In each "tender mercy" that pops up in your life, whether a smile from a stranger or a book that tells you just what you need to hear, there are "spiritual actors" doing their work in it. When that person smiled at you, they may not have known what they were doing, but you can bet that angels were subtly pushing her to help you in that way. Even chance meetings on the sidewalk are managed by those angels working together to help you. This means that you play a part in the "spiritual drama" as well. Though your conscious mind doesn't know even a tenth of what's going on, it "portrays" the purposes of angels in the actions you deliberately choose to do. Your good deeds are the deeds of higher, wiser beings than you.

And even these angels are "characters." Like a play within a play, the angelic actors that play in our skins are also "acted out" by a higher being: the divine fire of love, what some call God.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces. - Gerard Manley Hopkins, "As Kingfishers Catch Fire"

Your life is a dance. This dance shows up in each "role" you play; it is the dance between you and the fire within every being, the fire you are, but which you have forgotten you are. This fire of God is like the man who, flinging you out as the woman, separates itself from you only to see you better. This fire loves you - it delights in you, finds every part of you infinitely wonerful. And the to-and-fro movement of that dance helps each rejoice in both the ecstasy of union and the delight of the gaze that can only come when you stand apart. Both positions are needed. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a dance.

 

This dance plays out in every moment of your life. Every time you are shown a tender mercy - in each smile, each synchronicity, each inspiring word - the divine fire is revealing itself to you. The parts are becoming transparent to the love that plays them; you are remembering who you are, or, to put it in another way, who you belong to. The dance is to and from that fire: toward the ecstatic oblivion of love and from it to the consciousness of being yourself. For we can't be under any illusions: the life you are living - with all its faults, flaws, and weaknesses - is desired. The divine fire within you wanted it. But since that fire also wants what you want, and since you long for its flame wherever it shows itself, the divine shows itself to you.

 

Like two lovers meeting, the love within our heart merges with the love within the world. And in this meeting we realize that it is the same love: we are a part of the same oneness flowing into different forms and yet remaining one. Love shows us the illusion of separation and reveals the meaning of the interconnectedness that is all around us. Love can show us the patterns within life and what they mean. As love flows from form to form it leaves a trace of its source, a trace which we can see with the eye of the heart. This trace is the meaning of his love, the underlying purpose of life. When we recognize it, we become awake and directly participate in life's knowing of itself. -Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, "Spiritual Power: How it Works"

There is a love deeper than words, deeper than thought, deeper than perception. We long for it in all our desires, though we almost never realize what we want. That love is our Being, and that Being desires us as the flawed people we are. But that love isn't just in your heart. It is within everyone, in everything, but it hides itself from you both inside and outside because it doesn't want to hurt you. But if you purify yourself, making yourself a clean and bright vessel, the fire of love can show itself to you in a way you never thought possible. Your Being will become transparent to you. You will see the love in all things that loves you more than life itself. And you will realize the innocent, blissful joy that plays in everything that happens to you.

Visionary Activist Principles

Read this post on my new blog A Sea of Glass and Fire.

I regularly listen to The New School at Commonweal‘s podcast. The host Michael Lerner is one of the wisest, most sober men I have encountered, and the discussions about everything from Jung to Gurdjieff to Rudolf Steiner have illuminated me beyond measure. So I was a bit surprised when the March 20 podcast from last spring featured one Caroline Casey, a self-proclaimed visionary activist and professional astrologer. But when I actually listened to her, I was astounded. She is like a sacred comedian; she runs a website called Coyote Network News, subtitled “a mythological news service for the Trickster-Redeemer within us all,” which demonstrates a bit of her character. She is what she calls “reverently irreverent”: flippant, off-color, and hilarious in a way that brings us closer to the divine. You’d have to hear her to understand what I mean. And lucky for you, you can: she hosts a weekly radio show/podcast called The Visionary Activist Show, a discussion of current events, spirituality, and even astrology, which largely inspired my recent “Imaginal News” series of posts. Check it out.

I have come to adore Caroline so much that I decided to get her book Making the Gods Work For You on Kindle. After readin it, I’ve come to think differently of astrology than I used to, but that’s not the point of this post. Instead, I want to list her seven “visionary activist principles” that she gives at the beginning of her book and comment on them a bit. They’re profound and very needed, so I wanted to bring them to your attention.

PRINCIPLE 0 (ZERO). Believe nothing, entertain possibilities. Therefore everything hereafter is offered playfully. 

This is the crux of the matter, and it’s our culture’s redemption. I realized after reading this that I had thought this way for at least the last few years but that almost no one else does. When you think in terms of what could be in terms of what you think actually is, then the world becomes. No longer filtered through a fixed set of beliefs, you can meet things on their own terms. Life as a dance, not as an intellectual subjugation of the world.

PRINCIPLE 1. Imagination lays the tracks for the Reality Train to follow.

Imagination is the way the unseen manifests in the seen at all. As Sufi mystics explained, the imagination is a barzakh or medium through which the divine can connect with and inhabit the world of finite matter. As such, any imaginative act is an act of God, a preliminary act of creation. That’s not to say you can’t pervert this ability to your own ends; you can, and that’s what Caroline calls “black magic.” Instead of that, you should channel divine energies toward an end that works for both you and the whole. Instead of subverting an “perpendicular” impulse, you “spiral” it with your own.

PRINCIPLE 2. Better to create prophecy than to live prediction. What makes us passive is toxic. What makes us active is tonic. This is the difference between predictions, which make us passive, and prophecy, which is active co-creation with the divine.

Swedenborg once wrote that God doesn’t give us much knowledge of the future because that knowledge would make us either passive or paranoid. But you can get to the point where the divine  trusts you with prophecy, not as a guarantee that things will work out no matter what, but as a loosely guiding impulse that you can help direct. When you know the future, it’s much better to work with it than to fight it or slothfully submit to it. Again, a spiral of human and divine.

PRINCIPLE 3. The invisible world would like to help, but spiritual etiquette requires that we ask. Help is always available (operators are standing by).

The world which imagination manifests – the spiritual world, the world of divine love – cannot help us unless we ask. Helping without our asking would violate our free will, and it would also get us to shrink back from the spiritual in fear or annoyance. Prayer is a superlatively effective “asking for help” like this. When you pray, you go and ask for help from the root of all divinity, and that divinity plants a seed in you that grows into something that will work for both you and Him.

PRINCIPLE 4. The only way the gods know we’re asking for help is ritual.

When Caroline writes the word “ritual,” I take it to mean any physical action that incarnates a divine principle. Prayer is obviously a ritualistic action like this: you have to do something to pray, and the more you make it a physical action, the more powerful it becomes. But you can also use other rituals in tandem with prayer. Anything that symbolically corresponds to a divine quality can be used as a way to focus the light of that quality in your life. For instance, I do this with books: if a book symbolizes something meaningful for me at a certain moment, I’ll put it in my personal sacred space to reinforce the divinity trying to get through in that meaning. By doing that, I work with the god (the divine aspect) working in that situation.

PRINCIPLE 5. If something’s a problem, make it bigger.

This is very counter-intuitive, but it’s a true principle. If you struggle with something, there is something good in you trying to get out through that struggle. Evil is just our denial of the good that, without our help, comes out in ungainly ways. By making the problem bigger, you communicate to that goodness that you are willing to work with it. “Step out into the light,” you tell the good in your struggle. “Let’s see what you have to say.”

PRINCIPLE 6. We only possess the power of an insight when we give it expression.

Truths are great. You can read books for years and years and get lots of them, but it won’t be worth anything if it doesn’t lead to action. Swedenborg also says this. Without expression in “usefulness,” a truth is a dead, or better stillborn, thing. Only actions bring true insights to life.

PRINCIPLE 7. Creativity comes from the wedding of paradox. We aspire to be disciplined wild people who are radical traditionalists.

A huge problem today is that people can only think in extremes. And more specifically, they only identify with one of the extremes. But the issue really comes to light when you ask: “Who decided where to draw the lines in the first place? What makes it so everyone agrees on where the line is?” The reality is that we’ve all been duped. There is no ultimate liberalism or conservativism, no spiritual nor secular: conservatism wasn’t anything until liberalism came along, and neither was spiriutality until the first secularists. We rebel against these blind dichotomies by accepting elements from both sides. So doing, we can recreate the vibrant whole that existed before we divvied it up into sides.

That’s that. Practice these principles, and see the amazing things that result.

Imaginal News 7/18/2016: Flickers of Love; Self-Aware Mobs; A New "Weight"

Check out this post on my new blog, A Sea of Glass and Fire.

The imaginal world: the world which everything in our world is a symbol for. Here's what's happening there: 

There is a timbre of love that wasn't there a few days ago. I can't give specific examples, but it is there. People (those with hearts turned the right way) are being kinder. Mercy is being shown to those who need help. 

And yet this is still in the context of a larger struggle. The world remains locked in people's identification with their roles: man, woman, gay, trans, non-binary, or even a person with a single name and set of traits. But this can't happen forever. Identities are defined by their edges, and so they must struggle to keep existing. But they're now locked in their death throes. 

The world is becoming a mob. In Turkey and the Republican National Convention this is very clear, but it's also apparent in Pokemon Go.However, the mob is going to become conscious of itself; the life that flows between us, between our identities, is beginning to wiggle its fingers and toes after a long sleep. 

But mostly, the divine nature of matter or heaviness is still on its way to realizing itself in a way unlike anything that has happened yet. The dust of heaviness in the air is beginning to settle, a bit more this week than last. Divine fire is becoming incarnate in matter. 

Look for more large, violent, massive phenomena in the next bit. This is that heaviness trying to incarnate. You can help by letting it incarnate consciously and on human terms rather than with blind elemental force. Consult your own conscience for this. 

Imaginal News 7/14/2016: Descending Fire and Trapped Rage

Check out this post on my new blog, A Sea of Glass and Fire

Here’s your imaginal news report: the state of the world as seen from theimaginal world, the place where everything that is seen is real, where being is sight. Hopefully what I mean will become clear. Believe everything; doubt nothing.

The gods up on Mount Olympus are beginning to descend into the world of mortals. Or alternatively, divine fire is taking on the shape of human beings. Or more clearly, the various ways that divine love expresses itself (what Swedenborg called “heavenly communities”) are becoming conscious of themselves on earth in a new way.

This means that things are going to get really intense. Divine fire is descending to earth, and that fire figures that we have enough capacity to “hold” it. And they’re right, even though it may not seem like it at first. We’re being baptized by fire, and when we come out, we’ll realize that we can hold it safely within us

Pokemon GO is a manifestation of this fire. It’s wedding heaven and earth in an unprecedented way as love is manifesting between people of all walks of life trying to catch Pokemon. Friends are being made; people are coming out of their shells and coming into the world’s daylight. Activities before done only on the Internet are now being made in the physical world, meaning that the divine world of love in itself (which the Internet reflects) is coming into reality. More specifically, Pokemon GO is the divine reality of communication and connection coming to earth. Hermes is taking on human flesh.

But the fire also comes through in violent ways. With the shootings happening almost daily, a vengeful force from the imaginal world is trying to force her way through where there is no bridge. The truck that rammed into the crowd today in Nice manifests this literally: where there are no bridges between sides, there can only be collisions. The truck could be seen as a metaphor for the force of this extra-human archetype trying to get into our collective crowd of being.

For it is heaviness that we have yet to wed to the connection displayed in Pokemon GO and elsewhere. The divine fire is descending, but the part of that divine fire having to do with forcefulness and inertia isn’t integrated into that descent. Pokemon are bringing people together, but they are incorporeal and pass through our bodies as we see them on the screen. The violence we see in the world manifests inertia and matter’s attempt to wrest its way into our consciousness. Stuff wants to be seen and felt – the density and heaviness of dirt, flesh, and bark.

What does this look like? I’d say it’s the Devouring Mother, the force of instinctual wisdom and terrible power that we have repressed and kept captive for millennia. She is crying from the dust of our ignorance (ignore-ance), and these outbursts of violence are ways that she forces us to pay attention. She can’t do anything else; since we repress her, she is unconscious, and she cannot reason and plan like a conscious being can. She is the force of matter, the divinity of life in its rhythms and pulsation that we don’t pay attention to, what women know by instinct but is ignored by our masculine culture.

Her anger is only her shadow side, though, the side of her that shows without the light of consciousness. We only see her anger because she doesn’t have the luxury of consciously knowing her own depths. We are the mirror in which she can do that. By listening to the hum of the ground and the the blood in our veins, we can finally begin to give her the consciousness she craves. So doing, the force of matter can burst its way into the world with unprecedented force.

Donald Trump manifests a masculine force fighting from her anger. He’s what Jungians would call the “animus of the anima” a force coming out from the dark cave of the Mother’s hollow body. He’s fighting against what makes sense; he violates all our modern cultural propriety, which of course none of us really have. He, ISIS, and the policemen who shoot unarmed black men are manifesting a very primordial, unconscious rage against rationality and consciousness limited by a defensive ego. When these nonsensical things happen, the Devouring Mother shows us that we all hide an unconscious violence held captive since an earlier age. With her, these repressed unconscious energies can be acted out so we can consciously recognize them. That way the Mother can become conscious.

The Hermes figure manifesting in Pokemon GO and the odd connections happening alongside it can help with this. Maybe if we catch enough Geodudes, he can evolve into something that will help Her rise from the dust…

Anyway, that’s that for the imaginal news report. I’ll try to do these often.