CHAPTER ELEVEN

Cosmos and Soul

You could not discover the limits of the soul, even if you travelled by every path in order to do so; so profound is its meaning.

                                                                                                   — Heraclitus

The seat of the soul is there, where the outer and the inner worlds meet.
                                                   
                                                                                                    — Novalis

From the beginning of recorded history and long before that, the most gifted poets, shamans, visionaries, artists, musicians and mystics of all cultures have connected us to the deep ground of Soul. They have connected the seen to the unseen, the time-bound world to the eternal, the waking mind to the dreaming soul. They have sensed the hidden dimension of Soul reflected in the imagery of unexplored territory, the inviolate nature of the deep forest or the high mountains; the depth and vast expanse of the sea, the mystery of the cosmos and its countless billions of stars. From century to century, as links in a great golden chain, they have kept alive the true values of the Soul—the values that honor and celebrate the wonder, beauty and awesome mystery of life.
           While I was gathering sayings for The Mystic Vision. I came across a book called The Story of My Heart by a man called Richard Jefferies (1848-1887), who lived in the Dorset countryside in the late nineteenth century. To me there has never been a more beautiful or more precious hymn to the Soul which, at the same time, is a hymn to the beauty and marvel of the earth. I was amazed and moved to read these words in his diary: “There is an Entity, a Soul-Entity, as yet unrecognised…It is in addition to the existence of the soul; in addition to immortality; and beyond the idea of the deity...There is an immense ocean over which the mind can sail, upon which the vessel of thought has not yet been launched. There is so much beyond all that has ever yet been imagined.”(1)
           In another passage, he expressed his longing for relationship with this Soul-Entity:

I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight. I thought of the earth’s firmness— I felt it bear me up; through the grassy couch there came an influence as if I could feel the great earth speaking to me…Touching the crumble of earth, the blade of grass, the thyme flower, breathing the earth-encircling air, thinking of the sea and the sky, holding out my hand for the sunbeams to touch it, prone on the sward in token of deep reverence, thus I prayed that I might touch to the unutterable existence infinitely higher than deity. (2)

           These beautiful words reveal two concepts of soul: the personal one, traditionally carrying a feminine quality and resonance, which carries the deepest feelings and longings of the heart, the core of our being, and connects us to a deeper ground. But also a wider cosmic one that Jefferies calls a Soul-entity and compares to an immense ocean. I think most people will recognize the first but what of the second – the cosmic dimension of soul? Richard Jefferies was yearning for something that people once felt they belonged to, in whose life they lived. Over the centuries and millennia of the solar era, this feeling of belonging to an invisible entity beyond the community of tribe or nation, something experienced as numinous, immeasurable and all-embracing, filled with agents of the divine, was gradually lost and with it the sense of participation in a sacred, living universe — a vast inter-connecting web of life where every single creature and element of life was connected to every other. It was this that D.H. Lawrence was lamenting when he wrote “We have lost the cosmos.”(3)
           Not long after Richard Jefferies, Richard Bucke wrote a book called Cosmic Consciousness in which he described the lives of individuals who have had an awakening experience, an epiphany, which revealed to them dimensions of consciousness still unimagined by most of us. He believed that the whole human race might one day experience this state. (4)
           Like Richard Bucke, I believe that this expanded state of knowing and experiencing, this capacity for a deeper relationship with life can be developed in all of us. And this different quality of knowing could enable us to experience a dimension of reality in which we are unknowingly embedded, a dimension that, millennia ago, was known and named as the soul of the cosmos. Our own consciousness, which includes the whole spectrum of experience between instinct and the rational intellect as well as the furthest reaches of the imagination, could participate once again in this greater planetary and cosmic soul of which our culture has lost all awareness. This breakthrough to a state of conscious participation could help us to formulate a new worldview or paradigm of reality – a new meta-narrative - that might draw together all the fragmented peoples and fragmented aspects of our world in a shared vision, helping us to address the very serious problems we now face.
           Here is a different vision of our potential future described by one of that group of people whom I call astronauts of the soul. For many years, Christopher Bache has been Professor of Religious Studies at an American University and, briefly, Director of Studies at the Noetic Institute in California. Over these years, he recorded his experience of non-ordinary states of consciousness. Here is a striking passage from his book, Dark Night, Early Dawn:

Just when Western culture had convinced itself that the entire universe was a machine, that it moves with a machine’s precision and a machine’s blindness, the ability to experience the inner life of the universe is being given back to us…The entire human endeavor has been emptied of existential purpose and significance because it has been judged to be a product of blind chance. When one gains access to the inner experience of the universe, however, one learns that, far from being an accident, our conscious presence here is the result of a supreme and heroic effort. Far from living our lives unnoticed in a distant corner of an insentient universe, we are everywhere surrounded by orders of intelligence beyond reckoning. (5)

           What his experience suggests is that the entire universe, visible and invisible is, in his words, “a unified organism of extraordinary design reflecting a massive Creative Intelligence.” As he describes his own experience,

The unified field underlying physical existence completely dissolved all boundaries. As I moved deeper into it, all borders fell away, all appearances of division were ultimately illusory. No boundaries between incarnations, between human beings, between species, even between matter and spirit. The world of individuated existence was not collapsing into an amorphous mass, as it might sound, but rather was revealing itself to be an exquisitely diversified manifestation of a single entity. (6)

           From this experience it seems that the unimagineable vastness of the creative process — the visible universe and the invisible cosmic ground or “soul” of the cosmos — are inseparable. The implications of this statement for long-established beliefs in a God outside or transcendent to creation, distinct and separate from planetary life and ourselves, are enormous and for some, may be disturbing. Instead of being created by God, it seems that we might be living within God, even that we are atoms participating in the “dance” of an immeasurable cosmic entity.
           Long ago, in the Palaeolithic era, the rituals in the cave and the handprint on its walls put men and women in “touch” with an unseen source of life of which the darkness of the cave was the symbol. Now, 20,000 years later, at a new turn of the spiral of evolution, it may be that many of us are beginning to reconnect with the soul, spirit or ground of the cosmos, the invisible fabric into which our lives are woven.
           The consciousness of the universe waits for us to be able to respond to its longing to communicate with us, to recognize the fact that it animates and supports the whole of our existence. Our human consciousness is integral to that greater consciousness, even though it is still partially developed or immature or blocked by attitudes and beliefs which deny us access to it. The soul in its universal sense is a word that describes a vast and complex web of relationships which connect the phenomenal world with this unseen ground.
           Imagine that we could see through the physical forms, including our own bodies which we experience as opaque and solid and were able to see myriad patterns of energy interacting with each other and connecting us with the life around us. Imagine light irradiating every cell of our bodies and everything we perceive. Imagine seeing billions of atoms dancing in this light and interacting with each other. Imagine seeing how the electro-magnetic field extending from our heart connects us with our environment and that in turn with the field of the planet. We would experience the dance and the rhythm and creative flow of life as something we are part of. We experience ourselves as distinct entities, but if the whole universe is one integrated, living organism, one flowing, undivided energy, one symphony of cosmic sound, then we are part of this whole. We could perhaps imagine the soul as a living cosmic entity —a web of shining filaments of light flowing through the starry galaxies of space as well as through our bodies and the forms of the animals, plants, trees and the landscape we see around us. How did we ever come to believe that the universe and matter are inanimate and dead?
           I believe that we are re-awakening to awareness that we and the phenomenal world that we call nature are woven into a cosmic tapestry whose threads connect us not only with each other at the deepest level but with the creative ground of life. Beyond our present time-bound sight a limitless or infinite field of consciousness interacts with our own, asking to be recognized by us, embraced by us. The realization that we participate in a level of reality that is the source and ground of our own being may eventually shatter the belief that this material reality is all there is; that we exist on a tiny planet in a lifeless universe and that there is no life beyond death. It may be that this invisible cosmic field of consciousness has waited aeons for us to reach the point where more than a handful of individuals could awaken to this awareness.
           Just as it dawned on the early Portuguese explorers that the world was not flat but round so, incredulously, the realization is dawning that the universe may not consist of dead, insentient matter but is conscious in every part of itself. It seems that we may be immersed in a sea or field or web of energy so fine that no instrument can as yet detect it, although it may tentatively be connected with the mysterious invisible “dark matter” that is the ground of the universe we see. This web of living energy embraces our universe, perhaps many universes. It is paradoxically at once “greater than the great” and “smaller than the small,” co-inherent with the immensity of the known universe and the most minute particles of matter. It is the ground or invisible field that connects us to each other and to every aspect of life.
           This greater dimension or matrix of the soul is the secret, hidden dimension that is the goal of the hero’s quest in myth and legend. It is the ultimate destination of all exploration — the unknown, mysterious, fabulous land. In the language of mythology and fairy-tale, it is the kingdom of faerie, the realm of the gods. In the language of visionary revelation, it is the kingdom of heaven that is spread out before our unseeing eyes, the sacred ground of the visible world and our own being. It is the source of everything we are, everything we perceive. It is both creator and creation. If the soul is all this, it is not surprising that it transcends our present level of consciousness, that we cannot comprehend it after a few hours or years of search and study. Yet, paradoxically, we are both that which seeks to comprehend and the object of our comprehension. We are both part and whole.
           In this sense what we call our consciousness is infinite, yet as small as the tiny part of itself, the lens through which we try to fathom that immeasurable greatness. How recent a development is our present consciousness in comparison with the age of the universe, even with the age of our planet. How difficult then for us to encompass the meaning of the soul. If I were to ask the question, “Who am I?” the answer would be “I am the life of the cosmos discovering itself through its own creation.”
           As explained in earlier chapters, in lunar culture soul in this wider cosmic sense was imagined as a Great Mother — a web of unimaginable extent and complexity connecting each one of us at the deepest level to all others and to the ground of life. In later solar culture, presided over by the Great Father, spirit takes precedence over soul and soul comes to be imagined in a personal sense, although still retaining the feminine imagery of the earlier era. Woman herself was often portrayed by poets and playwrights — as in Dante’s great work — as the carrier of man’s soul. Whether we use the word “spirit” or “soul” it seems that each, in its widest sense, describes the deep ground or source of being that is the foundation of our own consciousness. Spirit has a more active, dynamic quality; soul a more containing, relational, embracing one. We live on the surface of life and know nothing of its depths.
           The idea that our world rests on the ground of an invisible “Other” survived in the mystical traditions of the solar age which transmitted the lunar idea of the divinity of nature and the co-inherence of matter and spirit. It also survived in some of the close-knit indigenous communities of the world where the traditions which respected the sacredness of the earth and the cosmos were kept alive and transmitted from generation to generation — even to the present day. It was this palpable sense of the aliveness of soul that so impressed me when I traveled through India and further East in the 1950’s. The presence of an intangible ground seemed to pervade the numinous beauty of the landscape but it also emanated from the people themselves whose close bond with the land they worked endowed them with timeless dignity, grace and serenity notwithstanding the desperate poverty in which they lived.
           Chapters Five and Six explored the difference between lunar and solar culture and showed how the perception of the cosmos as a living being was lost during the solar era, and how our conscious self-reflective rational mind which was more and more controlled and directed by the left hemisphere of the brain gradually became separated from the deeper instinctive ground out of which it had emerged as well as from the life of nature on which our lives depend.
           Chapter Seven showed how, through the great meta-narrative of the Fall of Man, nature and this world became desacralized. The powerful influence of St. Augustine and the Doctrine of Original Sin severed humanity from its deeper ground by imposing on the Christian community the belief that the world was fundamentally flawed and man contaminated by sin and separated from God — from which state only those who were predestined would be rescued by the grace of God. Although there were many others factors over a time-span of several thousand years contributing to the loss of soul, this doctrine drastically undermined the older lunar participatory experience of life and led, ultimately, to the current loneliness and alienation of man in an indifferent and inanimate cosmos.
           With the Renaissance and the translation of Plato’s works and Hermetic texts by the Florentine Marsilio Ficino, the idea of a World-Soul and the divinity of man was revived in Europe. Within a small circle of individuals, nature was again perceived as ensouled. Yet these ideas could not take root and flourish. The young Pico della Mirandola gave his great Oration on the Dignity of Man but was murdered before he could accomplish his dream of bringing together the teaching of Kabbalah with that of Christianity. Giordano Bruno, one of the most innovative and creative philosophers of his time, was sent to the stake in Rome in 1600 for declaring that nature was ensouled and that the World-Soul illuminated the universe.
           As late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, soul comes to life once more in the work of the great poets of the Romantic Movement who reconnected their culture to nature and to the imagination: Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Blake, Tennyson, Goethe. Blake could write: “Everything that lives is Holy”. A century earlier soul shines through the words of the visionary poet, Thomas Traherne (1637-1674) in his Centuries of Meditations: “The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God”. And in two other visionary passages which I quote here because I love them so much:

You will never enjoy the World aright, till the sea itself floweth in your Veins, till you are Clothed with the Heavens, and Crowned with the Stars and perceive yourself to be the Sole Heir of the whole World: and more…because Men are in it who are every one Sole Heirs, as well as you…Till your Spirit fills the whole World, and the Stars are your jewels.

The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. The gates were at first the end of the world, the green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things.

           Go further back and soul comes to life in Dante’s great visionary poem and in the medieval quest for the Holy Grail — image of the boundless realm of the eternal pouring forth its light and love for the nourishment of humanity. Even further, in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus speaks of this realm when he says that the kingdom of heaven is spread out upon the earth but men do not see it. Still further back we hear Parmenides describing his journey into the immortal realm of the goddess, driving in a chariot drawn by mares and steered by women through immense gates that stretched from earth to heaven. (7)
           So many fragments from different cultures describing the ancient cosmic idea of soul have mysteriously survived. However, without my vision of the goddess, I would never have come to know that the soul is not in us: we are in the soul. Thanks to this vision, my work has been devoted to the recognition that we live in an ensouled world, to the recovery of our connection to a living cosmos, and to the restoration of the lost sense of communion between us and the “body” of the earth, and between us and the invisible ground—whether described as soul or spirit—that is the source of both.

The Garden as a Metaphor of the Soul
           Music and poetry feed the soul, and beauty entrances and inspires it. There is the man-made beauty of places like Chartres Cathedral. But there is also the beauty of nature — the beauty of flowers and the different varieties of trees. From earliest recorded times in every civilization, people have been drawn to design and create gardens as a place of calm and order, a sanctuary for contemplation, prayer and communion, and for repose, enjoyment and delight. It is difficult to say when the garden first became a metaphor for the soul but it is certainly found in the Taoist, Zen Buddhist, Christian and Islamic traditions. In medieval times, Mary was imagined and addressed as the garden of the soul and many paintings show her sitting in a garden or beneath a rose arbor holding her infant son on her lap.
           In the Islamic section of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Persian Ardabil Carpet—a priceless treasure preserved from the past—shows a garden representing paradise with a verse from a poem by the poet Hafiz woven into it: “Except for thy haven, there is no refuge for me in this world. Other than here, there is no place for my head.”
           People sometimes say of a special landscape or a beautiful building, “this place has soul”. They mean that it has a certain quality of being, a specific resonance which, intuitively, they recognize as precious to them. They might say of that place: “It touches my heart”. And if they are asked where they feel things most deeply, they will often point to their heart.
           They are right to do so for the heart is the key to connection with the soul. The heart has its own kind of consciousness, its own deeply instinctive way of knowing just as the mind has its own way of knowing. The heart functions like an umbilical cord which connects us to the life of the soul, the greater life of the ground of our being. The heart generates all our quests, all our hopes and longings and will ultimately reunite us with the source from which we have come. Without the heart — without the instinct and the passion to feel, to imagine, to hope and to love — life is meaningless, sterile. When we are in touch with our heart, open to our deepest instincts, feelings and longings, able to live and express them, it comes alive, it vibrates, it sings. Remarkable discoveries are being made about the relationship of the heart to the right hemisphere of the brain and about the electro-magnetic field of the heart. (www.heartmath.org) Rudolf Steiner said that the great challenge of coming ages would be to allow the heart to teach us to think in a new way.
           The image of the garden reminds me of a book called The Secret Garden which I loved as a child. (8) As you read this chapter, imagine, as a child would, that there is a secret garden in each one of us. It is hidden behind a high wall, The wall itself is overgrown with brambles, thorns and ivy, a little like the hedge of thorns in the story of the Sleeping Beauty. Imagine yourselves as the girl in the story of the Secret Garden, running towards the hidden wall, following a robin who has befriended her that seems to be showing her the way. It scratches in the earth, looking for a worm. Suddenly she catches sight of a rusty key half-buried in the soil. Picking it up, she asks the robin to show her the door of the garden that she is now sure exists behind the wall. He sings a song from the top of the wall and, as he does so, a gust of wind blows aside the thick trails of ivy that cover it. She catches sight of a door-knob. She has found the door. She fits the key into the lock and, with great effort – for it is very rusty - turns it. The door opens slowly. She slips through it, shutting it behind her and stands with her back against it, looking about her and breathing fast with excitement and wonder and delight. She is inside the secret garden.
           So might we, each one of us, find his or her way into the neglected garden of the soul if we can allow stories like this one to come to life in us; if we can listen once again as we did when we were children, to the myths, legends and fairy-tales which can lead us into this hidden realm we know so little about.

The Sea as an Image of Cosmic Soul
           From my dreams and from Jung's invaluable discoveries I know that the sea is one of the primary images of the soul. In the epic sea journeys of our time that have captured the imagination and admiration of millions, I could recognize the inspiration of the heroic quest but it seemed to me that this is one way of living the quest. There is also the journey into the invisible sea of the soul, that mysterious sea so difficult to find, so incomprehensible to the mind conditioned to believe that there is only physical reality.
           The sea has always been associated with the image of the goddess – with Kwan Yin in China and the Virgin Mary in the Christian West; for millennia sailors invoked their protection when they set out in their frail vessels across its dark and terrifying immensity. But transpose the image of the sea to the measureless sea of the soul. And imagine the small vessel of our individual consciousness sailing on the surface of an infinite sea of energy which is continually surging, dancing, flowing into being.
           This brings to mind the “immense ocean of energy” described by physicist David Bohm in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order where he writes that what we perceive with our senses as empty space is actually the plenum, which is the ground of all existence, including ourselves. “The entire universe of matter as we generally observe it is to be treated as a comparatively small pattern of excitation” on this invisible sea of energy which he names the Implicate Order. (9)
           Fritjof Capra in his Tao of Physics, published some years ago, describes his experience of the dance of this eternal ground:

I ‘saw’ cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I ‘saw’ the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I ‘felt’ its rhythm and I ‘heard’ its sound, and at the moment I knew that this was the dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers, worshipped by the Hindus. (10)

           Imagine this limitless sea as an incredible matrix of invisible relationships or connections that underlies and permeates our visible world. Imagine it as an inconceivably complex, multi-levelled network of dimensions nested within dimensions, with information continually being exchanged between these dimensions at the molecular level, at the level of our own telepathic communication with each other, at the level of planetary life, and at the level of galaxies and perhaps any number of parallel universes or dimensions of reality of which, as yet, we know nothing. In this invisible “fabric” of the universe is encoded the experience of all orders of life over billions of years as we measure time but the potential for limitless creation is also there and we participate in that process of creation.
           In our modern culture, we are usually so completely absorbed in external reality that it may never occur to us that the longing we may experience to set out on journeys to explore foreign lands might reflect the soul’s own longing to be explored, its longing to reveal to us in the evocative words of an Old Testament prophet “the treasures of darkness and the hidden riches of secret places” (Isaiah 45:3). The soul may be calling to us for recognition and relationship but we may unknowingly ignore the foundation on which the whole edifice of life rests. It is this neglect of the foundation of ourselves that causes so many people to fall into depression and deep distress, the feeling that they are not fully alive. Neglect of the soul drives us into endless pursuit of material things as a compensation for what, unknowingly, we have lost.

The Stranger in Whose House We Live
           People sometimes dream of being in a house with rooms they had no idea existed, or find themselves going through a door into an unknown part of it. The soul can be thought of as a stranger in whose house we live but whom we have never met. This stranger has been the witness of everything experienced since the beginning of our evolution as well as carrying everything that is still latent as a potential within us. This stranger, this greater consciousness of which our own consciousness is a part - though still unware of its parentage - is the basic energy of life which creates, destroys and perpetually transforms its own essential being. It has brought forth the universe, the galaxies, our planet, the life that has given us physical form, our nervous system, our extraordinary imagination and our power of reflection and passionate urge to explore.
           The idea of meeting this stranger may seem faintly ridiculous at first, even somewhat terrifying. The soul speaks an unfamiliar language, like the language of hieroglyphs, whose symbols have to be painstakingly learned before we can understand their meaning. An understanding of the symbolic language of the soul can help to make communication possible. As the capacity develops to notice what it is trying to communicate, to divine its intention and guidance, it begins to come alive as a living presence.  
          An awareness and understanding of the symbolic imagery of dreams can be of help in this creative work as later chapters will suggest. But there are also the insights and the sense of connection that have become available to us through the painstaking work of others who have opened up for us this unexplored dimension of human experience. Jung developed the method that he called Active Imagination to enter into dialogue with the soul. Meditation can help to separate the underlying ground from the continual stream of thoughts and anxieties which can distract us from communion with it.
           When I enter the great temples and cathedrals reared by our human aspiration towards the infinite, I become aware that I am entering consecrated ground, whether that ground is the Palaeolithic cave, Neolithic passage grave, temple, cathedral, walled city or sacred grove. I know that all these represent the greater dimension of my being. I enter these places to marvel at the genius of men who were able to bring forth these magnificent expressions of human genius but I also now see them as the earthly embodiment of the unseen temple in which I live.

The Greater Self, Spirit, Presence and Guide
           All religious traditions speak of the spirit guide, the hidden presence, the angelic messenger, the revelatory voice. The tradition of the spirit guide, the angel, the daemon, is very ancient, going back to Egyptian, Cretan and Greek civilization, as well as Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, Persian and all shamanic cultures. The great dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita gives us the image of the profound relationship between the divine ground and the individual self that may be constellated once there is recognition of its constant presence. Arjuna cries out to Krishna, “Thou are the Knower within me and the One to be known. By Thee alone this universe is pervaded. Overjoyed am I to see what I have never seen before.” (11)
           There has always been a strong tradition of messages and guidance from angels in Christian culture. One has only to look at the great angels portrayed in the medieval sculptures or stained glass of the Gothic cathedrals and the paintings of the early Renaissance to see how alive that tradition still was for the people of Europe at that time. It has been lost because we have grown so out of touch with the soul. The role of music was to open the heart to the awareness of spirit. The great cathedrals and basilicas were filled with the beauty and harmony of sound which flowed from the pen of great composers — opening the hearts of those listening to their music to ecstatic communion with the divine. Mantras and chants surviving from ancient cultures offer the same communion.
           The teaching of the spirit guide is equally strong in Islamic culture, particularly in the mystical stream known as Sufism. Henri Corbin, the great student of Sufism, writes that

Some souls have learned everything from invisible guides, known only to themselves…The ancient sages…taught that for each individual soul, or perhaps a number of souls with the same nature and affinity, there is a being of the spiritual world, who, throughout their existence, adopts a special solicitude and tenderness toward that soul or group of souls; it is he who initiates them into knowledge, protects, guides, defends, comforts them. (12)

           My own life experience has taught me that we can receive continual help and guidance from the ground of our own consciousness that has brought our consciousness into being over aeons of time and contains all of us within its embrace. Although there are periods of intense darkness and depression that the alchemists called the “nigredo”, with patient work and in moments of sudden illumination, we can open ourselves to awareness of that presence, that ground of spirit. What is it in us that urges us to grow beyond ourselves? Who is it who guides us step by step towards the discovery of some truth that we intuitively sense is there, or towards the realization of a potential we feel we have? Who is it who knows the end when we can only see the beginning? What helps us when it seems there is no help to be found? Who leads us to the creative work that is right for us, work that helps us to grow, that leads us to discover things we knew nothing about and that might be of some help and encouragement to others? Is this all our own doing? Or is there a presence greater than our own limited consciousness? Neale Donald Walsch in his books Conversations with God, brilliantly describes how the connection with this guiding presence can be cultivated and developed.
            The poet Yeats wonderfully describes this presence in his autobiography, The Trembling of the Veil: “I know that revelation is from the self, but from that age-long memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb, and that teaches the birds to make their nest; and I know that genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our trivial daily mind.”
           All religious traditions have recorded the words of the great teachers of humanity whose teaching comes through them from that source-ground. In Christianity, the connection with this ground is mediated by the figure of Jesus; in Buddhism by the Buddha; in Hinduism by Krishna; in Taoism by Lao Tzu; and in mystical Islam by the figure of El Khidr, known as the “Green One.” The divine ground itself has been described as the Tao, as Brahman, as God or Allah, as the Void, as the Holy One and His Shekinah. It has been seen in vision and described variously as Light and as a cosmic androgynous Being of Light, holding all creation within itself.
           It seemed to me that two thousand years ago, at the beginning of the Piscean Age, Jesus attempted to heal the fragmentation of the soul by returning men and women to its deeper instinctual wisdom, through which they might discover the kingdom and the treasure of relationship with it, enshrined in the words “I and my Father are one.”
           As a messenger of the divine ground, a true son of God, Jesus was opening our awareness to the possibility of relationship with that ground. Why did he ask us to love one another and to be reconciled with our enemies? Was it because, aware of both his divinity and his humanity, he recognized both the oneness and the sacred nature of the whole manifest order? Why did he say, “Ye are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you”? (John 10:34) Perhaps because he knew that all men and women had the potential of bringing forth the divinity latent within them through a direct and growing relationship with the divine source-ground that he called “The Father”. Why, in the enigmatic saying in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (logion 77) did he say, “Cleave the wood and I am there; lift up a stone and you will find Me there” if not to point to the fact that nature and matter rest on the ground of spirit, that in their essence, they are spirit.
           The revelation that he brought and that his disciples at first found so hard to comprehend was of opening the heart to awareness of the unity and divinity of life, and therefore, to love and compassion for all. Jesus himself lived his life from the values and wisdom intrinsic to that perception of reality. This astonishing revelation, this seeing truly into the hidden reality behind the forms of life, participating fully in it while living in this earthly dimension, is the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field, the grain of mustard seed which, tiny at the beginning when it is first planted in the soil of the soul, can grow into a mighty tree, hung with the fruit of insight, wisdom and compassion. These beautiful words recorded in the Gnostic Acts of John spoken by Jesus on the eve of his Passion often come back to me and I have often silently spoken them to myself in moments of need:

I am a lamp to you who behold Me;
I am a mirror to you who perceive Me;
I am a door to you who knock at Me;
I am a way to you a wayfarer.
You have me for a bed; rest then upon Me. (13)

           There are many passages in The Mystic Vision which bear witness to the guidance or presence of the greater self but I particularly love these words of Bede Griffiths:

Each man must discover this Centre in himself, this Ground of his being, this Law of his life. It is hidden in the depths of every soul, waiting to be discovered. It is the treasure hidden in a field, the pearl of great price. It is the one thing which is necessary, which can satisfy all our desires and answer all our needs. But it is hidden now under deep layers of habit and convention. The world builds up a great protective barrier round it. (14)

           Sri Aurobindo, a great Indian teacher of the last century, has described the process of awakening to the presence and guidance of spirit in these words:

As the crust of our outer nature cracks, as the walls of inner separation break down, the inner light gets through, the inner fire burns in the heart, the substance of the nature and stuff of consciousness refines to a greater subtlety and purity and the deeper psychic experiences become possible in this subtler, purer, finer substance; the soul begins to unveil itself, the psychic personality reaches its full stature. The soul then manifests itself as the central being which upholds mind and life and body...It takes up its greater function as the guide and ruler of our nature. (15)

           To bring the latent spirit into consciousness involves becoming aware of the many habits of belief and behavior that stand between the outer personality and the deeper ground. The possibility of communion with it is latent in us as a potential. To bring this hidden potential into manifestation is the work of a lifetime, even of many lifetimes. As the relationship between the surface personality and the ground of spirit grows stronger, we become more aware of its voice, its presence and its subtle guidance. A deepening relationship with this ground can become the inner fabric and focus of our lives. It is something that we can weave into being with our attention, developing insight through our longing for understanding and guided to methods and discoveries which help us to awaken to its presence. I believe the Maharishi said that meditation is like being dipped into a vat filled with golden dye. Eventually, after many dippings, one begins to take a rich, deep golden hue.
           The growing relationship of the conscious mind with the eternal ground can change the quality of our lives, giving them a deeper resonance, a different focus. Relationship with the spirit brings us into closer relationship with the whole of life. Anxiety and depression, for which we seek treatment through so many drugs, diminish. Dysfunctional ways of behaving — addiction to alcohol, drugs and casual sexual relationships — fall away. A different approach to personal relationships, letting go of the need for control, helps us to resolve many difficult problems in our individual lives and in the wider world. Through this transformation, so gradual and subtle that it is almost imperceptible, our perception of the world is transformed.
           Ultimately, what in the beginning was perceived as separate — inner and outer — myself and other, begins to fuse and become one: one life, one consciousness, one whole. It used to be thought that we could not become “spiritual” without sacrificing the life of the body, renouncing sexuality, embracing an ascetic life. This is now understood to be a false attitude derived from the split between mind and body which was so deeply imprinted on the dualistic mind-set of the solar age. The body is to be loved and respected because it is an expression and vehicle of the soul's life in this dimension of reality.
           On the diagram of the Tree of Life in the tradition of Kabbalah, the meeting place of the surface and the depths of our being lies at the intersection of the World of Formation and the World of Manifestation (the visible world). To receive the influx of guidance flowing from these deeper dimensions of consciousness, we need to prepare a vessel, to learn to hear and see and understand in a different way. We need to develop different values from the ones that currently govern the world. This is extraordinarily difficult because the spell of those values is so powerful and we are caught in it like flies in honey.
           This transformation of values cannot be done all at once (or only very rarely). Adherence to a specific religious beliefs does not necessarily accomplish this transformation. For many years, it may feel as if one is doing the splits, with one foot in each set of values. The movement from one to the other must at every stage be grounded in everyday reality, in close relationships, in performing with care, skill and love all the routine jobs of daily life. Above all, time and space need to be set aside for reflection, meditation and contemplation and the delight of discovery.
           Mystics and teachers from every tradition say that at the core of our being we are, in our essence, one with the divine. We are one with the immensity we contemplate. And it teaches that the eye of the heart can slowly be opened to awareness of this divine reality. But the ground has to be well prepared to hold the tension of this awareness and this preparation requires much time for contemplation as well as grounding in the world and some kind of work that expresses a growing respect and love for life. Each person can find his or her path with the help of others who have gone before, or through connection with awakened people who are teaching methods of reconnection. Deep soul friendships can be formed. One of the greatest rewards is finding friends through the mysterious connecting and attracting power of the web of the soul as well as, very recently, the web of the Internet. But who or what arranges all these meetings, these connections, if not Cosmic Intelligence, or the Holy Spirit, or Sacred Mind, or the Implicate Order — whichever image you prefer — working through centuries and millennia and the souls of countless individuals to awaken our slumbering consciousnessness to awareness of its ground.
           Because we have not been taught how to recognize and interpret the communications coming to us from this greater dimension, the voice of the soul or the call of the spirit may go unheeded. Only the outer aspect of life is experienced. Even that aspect, which may seem so rich and exciting to begin with, may lose its fascination because we do not look deeper. We may have no access to the ground of our being because we do not understand its language or the ways in which it is trying to communicate with us. Yet, there exists in us a faculty that might be compared to an unused icon on our computers that can be activated. If the path into the depths of ourselves is discovered and gently followed, greater understanding of life develops so that it is no longer lived unconsciously, responding blindly to events as they happen. As we tread it we begin to comprehend and relate to the greater entity of Cosmic Soul and to the intelligent spirit that informs the whole, we begin to align ourselves with that greater life, like a planet orbiting the sun.

Notes:

1. Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart, Constable & Co.Ltd., London, 1947, p. 46-7
2. ibid, p. 20-21
3. D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and other Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1931, p. 78
4. Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1923
5. Christopher Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn, State University of New York Press, 2000, p. 4
6. ibid, p. 74
7. Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom, Golden Sufi Press and Element Books,
8. Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
9. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1980, p. 91-2
10. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, Wildwood House, UK, 1979, p. 9
11. Bhagavad Gita, 11:38, 45
12. Henri Corbin, Creative imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, Abu'l Baraha
13. The Gnostic Acts of John, G.R.S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, p. 431
14. Bede Griffiths, Return to the Centre, Collins, St. James's Place, London, 1976 and
Templegate, Springfield, Ill. 1977
15. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Lotus Light Publications, Wilmot, WI, 1990

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