                                MYSTIC LIGHT:

                             Dying and Becoming


    In this article the writer backtracks somewhat from a blithe assumption 
of Western Wisdom Teachings and takes up a midpoint position that may be 
more accessible and encouraging to the doctrinally mainstream Christian. It 
is hoped that this mediation might also fortify the New Age believer who 
knows his own convictions but may have some difficulty in rationalizing 
them. 	When does the revelation of Christ-centered truth cease? Was it once 
and for all time delivered, and now, in the fallow, post-Golgotha aftermath, 
do the semantic shards from that glorious fallout glint in the reliquary of 
gospel scripture as the sole bequest of Christian truth? But what about the 
Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, which the Christ sends to teach us all 
things, and bring all things to our remembrance (John 14:16-17; 15:26)? 

    "I have many things to say unto you, but ye can not bear them now" (John 
16:12). Pray, when? "Now" was two thousand years ago. If, in 30 A.D. 
Jerusalem, there were more things to know than were dreamed of in the 
current philosophies, when does one awaken from the dream and know these 
"things"? I submit that one major "thing" was intimated while the Christ 
Being was still living in the body of Jesus, and this revelation has, for 
approximately one century, been threatening to unravel the synthetic garment 
of canonical Christian cloth. 

    "Whom do men say that I the Son of man am? And they said, some say that 
thou art John the Baptist; some Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the 
prophets" (Matt 16:13-14). On what assumption does the question, and, far 
more, His disciples' response, draw if not an implicit familiarization with 
the law of successive lives? Of course this text can be ingeniously 
explained as meaning other than what it truly signifies, vindicating the 
dogma that repudiates such an heretical thought. But heretical to whom? To 
the Teacher Himself? As incarnate Truth, did He not have an obligation to 
clearly dispatch such nonsense? That He could have pre-existed as one of the 
earlier prophets? He let pass their response because it was founded on an 
accepted and real metaphysical dynamic. 

    After the Baptist was imprisoned, the same occult truth is intimated: 
Who is John the Baptist? What a silly question, right? He's John the 
Baptist, a prophet. But when did he first prophesy? Hundreds of years before 
the Incarnation Ä as Elijah. "Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, 
which shall prepare thy way before thee.... And if ye will receive it, this 
is Elias, which was for to come." Elias? The individuality that later 
invested the Baptist's body? Surely this can be explained without invoking 
the dread concept of reincarnation (cf. Luke 1:17). And you may be sure many 
worthy wits have been pressed into this service. But then what is to be made 
of the deeply telling statement immediately following Christ Jesus' 
disclosure: "He that has ears to hear, let him hear" (Matt 11:7-15)? This is 
the formulaic challenge for what the listener may find obscure, offensive, 
or threatening. As it is said in another context, " This is an hard saying; 
who can hear it?" (John 6:60) 

    Coming down from the Mount of Transfiguration, His three disciples ask 
Jesus about the Baptist, who has just appeared as Elijah: "Why then say the 
scribes that Elias must first come? [Jesus:] I say unto you that Elias is 
come already, and they knew him not [naturally!], but have done unto him 
whatsoever they listed.... Then the disciples understood that he spake unto 
them of John the Baptist" (Matt 17:10-13). 

    Again, "his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, 
or his parents, that he was born blind?" (John 9:2) When had this man time 
and place to sin if he was born blind? Did he sin in his mother's womb? His 
congenital blindness was the consequence of a prior moral obliquity. In rush 
the alarmed exegetes to work interpretative wonders, seeking to obviate the 
obvious: For here is a direct allusion to an extension of the law "as ye 
sow, so shall ye reap." The field for the working out of the law of cause 
and effect now encompasses successive lives. Oh, perish the thought. 

    So do we further burden the intelligent soul already oppressed by a 
faith freighted with a mandated nescience because it is disabused of the 
opportunity to exercise its God-given power of reason. Heaven forbid that it 
might then better account for the myriad inequities of birth and 
circumstance, which apparent injustices, finding no satisfactory 
explanation, lead many persons to postulate a punishing God, or none at all. 
Is this a matter of spiritual blindness? That having eyes for the evident, 
we are prejudiced against the hidden (spiritual) truth and see not? Christ 
Jesus called the Pharisees "blind guides" (Matt 23:16). We pray with Paul 
that the eyes of our understanding may be enlightened (Eph 1:18), that our 
minds be no longer blinded, since the vail to the Holy of Holies is rent 
(Matt 27:51), done away in Christ (II Cor 3:14), and we are enabled to 
understand. (We are able to enter into the innermost sanctum, where the Holy 
Spirit speaks to "whomsoever will.") God wills to be known by His sons. He 
has given them the means to discern His ways: "God hath revealed them unto 
us by his Spirit, for the Spirit searchest all things, yea, the deep things 
of God" (II Cor 2:10). 

    Man, made in the image and likeness of his Creator, is, like Him, a 
Spirit, and becomes transformed by the renewing of his mind, which opens to 
spiritual worlds, where he lives and moves and experiences his real being. 
Our quandaries are self-imposed. Our Kingdom is not of this world. To make 
tawdry kingdoms here, in the belief that this is all we have got, is 
disheartening, dis-spiriting, and mindless. We are here to learn how not to 
be here, to use the lessons provided by material existence in order to 
transcend it. 

    Christ Jesus had a tough time among the pundits of His day. And the 
prodigious apparatus of two millenia of accumulated dogma stands no less 
opaque and implacable. Truth? What is truth? asks Pilate. No answer. "If I 
told you, you would not understand" is Christ's tacit response. But He does 
tell us. Do we understand? It does not call for faith. It calls for common 
sense. And the overcoming of a profound fear. And the dismissal of a false 
humility unbecoming a son of God. And it calls for the desire to confirm the 
Reality of a just and ineffably beneficient God. For else one faces 
inscrutable conumdrums that require the scholastic contortions of well-
meaning sophistry and a despairing capitulation to an abused faith. A 
painful irony is at work here. A primary law of physics regarded as 
inviolable in the material world becomes tentative or inapplicable in the 
superphysical domain: No cause without effect; no action without reaction. 
Such an extension would make for a wonderful demonstration of theodicy. 

    Under the law of cause and effect, extended for the duration of our 
earthly pilgrimage, life becomes scrupulously fair. Each is his own judge 
and jury. Talk about liberation theology! What could be more liberating? 
One's every thought, word and deed is its own verdict. We sow wheat or weed, 
to corruption or salvation. Actually, Scripture sets up the rules, but is 
construed as limiting their application and logical inferences: To each 
shall be rendered according to his rendering (Rom 2:6). With what measure 
you mete, so shall it be meted unto you (Matt 7:1). By thy words thou shalt 
be justified and by thy words thou shalt be condemned Ä by thy own person 
(Matt 12:36-37). A just criticism of our current penal policy is that we 
merely incarcerate, we do not rehabilitate. How about the prison of the 
physical body, the hell of an unregenerate life? Does God just jail us in 
our worldly forms and deeds or does He offer a program for rehabilitation? 
The program is called the development of Christ consciousness. Does this not 
exonerate God from an imputation of unseemly vengeance. Vengeance comes to 
us because we initiate it, and we must experience life as what we are. We 
punish ourselves with our mistakes. We also learn. Live by the sword and 
perish by it. Love without ceasing and Christ irradiates the soul with peace 
and joy. 

    Does this antiquate Grace? God forbid(s it). Rather are we no longer 
servants of the flesh but sons and heirs of God (Gall 4:7). Is Christ any 
less the Way, the Truth, and the Life now that man is more accountable for 
being what he is? More so. More approachable, emulable, liveable. We are to 
participate more consciously and concertedly in our salvation, because we 
consent to it, choose it and daily plant and reap toward the consummation of 
a mystic wedding. If we walk in the Way, then we too shall know the 
Immaculate Conception, wherein the Christed consciousness shall be born of 
the virgin soul fructified by the spiritualized mind. As Angelus Silesius 
expresses the mystic birth, "Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be 
born, And not within thyself, thy soul will be forlorn." This mystery is the 
crux of Paul's message, "The mystery which has been withheld from ages and 
from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints... which is Christ 
in you, the hope of glory... that we may present every man perfect in Christ 
Jesus" (Col 1:26-28). 

    If the Church shepherds can not lead their flocks to green pasture and 
still water, the lambs will go to the wolves (Acts 20:29), or get smart 
fast. What is it to "be renewed in the spirit of your mind" (Eph 4:23)? What 
is it to no longer have "the understanding darkened" (Eph 4:18)? "The Spirit 
itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And 
if children, then heirs; heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ" (Rom 
8:16-17). This being so, our duty is to "Put... on the Lord Jesus Christ 
(Rom 13:14) and "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus" 
(Phil 2:5). That was the mind that then said, Ye can not bear these things 
now. Can we now? Bold, treacherous, unfounded, you say? Rather arrogant not 
to. Belligerent resistance flouting demonstrable evidence and intuitive 
urging (action of the Holy Spirit). 

    Much that is oppressively obscure or overwrought in Christian theology 
reflects the insuperable difficulty of justifying God's wisdom and love in 
the absence of the twin laws of Consequence and Rebirth in which they are 
embodied. They make clear that each Ego's destiny is the product of all its 
"nows." Thoughts and deeds may assume far more purposefulness and 
effectuality with a full appreciation of their value and impact, knowing 
that there are no chances; that nothing is random; that the being and 
becoming of each of us is our own responsibility; that causality operates in 
our lives down to the last jot and tittle; that the mills of the gods grind 
slowly, and they also grind exceeding fine; that we are to be perfect, even 
as our Father in Heaven is perfect; that He has given us free will to choose 
our perfection and His Son to light the way and empower us to live like unto 
Him through the ministrations of the Holy Spirit, which, when sought, will 
guide us and illumine our minds. Most importantly, we are given time and 
occasion. Else how could we attain to such a sublime reality? 

    If we die not to the flesh before we die in the flesh, then we must be 
born again in the flesh to learn how, that we may be born in spirit and 
consciously enter the Kingdom of God (John 3:5). Physical death itself is no 
key to the Kingdom of Heaven. Christ is the key. Learning how to die in 
Christ is learning how to live Christ, to be Christ. Christ was not given to 
humanity prior to Golgotha. What then of them who preceded him? But for the 
saints resurrected between consummatum est and Easter morning, are all lost? 
And if the law was their schoolmaster, teaching them a spiritual grammar, 
don't they return to school the next year (life) to employ that grammar in 
higher lessons, eventually graduating from bondage to the flesh's letter to 
walk with their Teacher in the liberty of the Spirit? And what of those 
coming after, who fail a single lifespan's death test? What of them? Many 
Adams continue to eat of the sensual tree with abandon, oblivious to both 
the consequences of their actions and the existence of the spiritual 
antidote for the sting of death. What of them? And those righteous by the 
law, who already have their reward, such as it is. Are they lost? Surely 
not. 

    If Christ is our Elder Brother, the firstfruits of them that slept (I 
Cor 15:23); if we are heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ (Rom 8:16-
17); if we are sons and heirs of God through Christ (Gal 4:7); if the works 
that Christ did, we shall do, and greater works than these shall we do (John 
14:12); if we shall know even as we are known (I Cor 13:12); if Paul 
travails in birth until Christ be formed in us (Gal 4:6-7), until we come 
unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of 
Christ (Eph 4:13), until we may grow up into Him in all things, which is the 
head, even Christ (Eph 4:15), in Whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead 
bodily (Col 2:9); if all these sayings be true, and the Word is true, it is 
also, and must be, true that the time and opportunity are provided whereby 
this supreme prospect and promise may be realized. For God "will have all 
men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth" (I Tim 2:4). 
"For all shall know me, from the least to the greatest" (Heb 8:11), and be 
"partakers of the divine nature" (II Pet 1:4), and the day star will arise 
in our hearts (II Pet 1:l9). 

    God so loves the world, that He has given His only begotten Son to it, 
that all may come to Him through Christ Jesus. This is His will, and all 
shall, in time, sooner or later, choose Christ, repudiating all acts and 
thoughts of self-condemnation. Each, in his good time, wakes and wants to 
hear Him, learn Him, partake of Him, practice Him, become one with Him. 
Thank God for the Grace and suffering and Example and Power and Love 
enabling each soul to become wholly human, holy, complete, Christ perfected. 
Many "will not endure sound doctrine" (II Tim 4:3). Yet, thank God, will 
they live long enough to be proof of it. The murdered and the murderer, the 
idiot and the stillborn, the atheist and the zealot Ä all will be brought to 
the Light and will choose it for their being. 

    Humanity need not be stultified and baffled by a careless and causeless 
creation, by inexplicable happenings. Rather is each created in God to 
become as Him. Each immortal spirit recapitulates the entire history of 
human experience: From prelapsarian innocence to the awareness of 
separateness, to an "Egyptian" captivity to the senses, to a wandering in 
the wilderness, to a seven-fold initiation in the mysteries of the Christ 
life (The Washing of the Feet, The Scourging, The Crowning with Thorns, The 
Bearing of the Cross, The Mystic Death, The Entombment, The Resurrection). 
Ultimately, we grow into the image and likeness of our Creator. We know this 
to be true. Now shall this truth, through Christ, make us free. 

                                                             --Charles Weber 
