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“Man” and “Woman”

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The driving motivation for the writing of The Soul Comes First was a reading of the Book of Revelation as just what John said it was: a visit to the Holy Mind in which the angels revealed their relationship to and experience of Christ. The difficulty of the writing is that the insights are like the M.C. Escher drawing of hands drawing each other. Genesis makes sense only if you’ve read Revelation, which makes sense only if you’ve read Acts, which depends upon the Gospels, the chain continuing to a dependency on Genesis.

We have to grok it all at once. I’m afraid that I didn’t succeed very well with that problem.

But the insights continue to trickle in.

Genesis 2:7 says [NIV]:

Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

This has been interpreted literally as meaning that Adam was the first instance of the species homo sapiens sapiens. There are those that take a different tack: that Adam and Eve were the sole human survivors of a geological catastrophe such as a major volcanic eruption. But the continuity of the archaeological record undermines all of these interpretations.

Revelation 4 starts where Genesis starts [NIV Gen 1:2]:

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

This is the scene that John encounters: the “Spirit of God” being the corporate body of the angels united under the guidance of Unconditional Love. In John’s vision, there are twenty-four of the former – described as “elders” – gathered around the “one on the throne.” We should understand the latter to be Unconditional Love, which is warded by fearsome beasts that prevent the approach of the elders.

So this is the initial state of Heaven before the investiture of God in the Earth. What comes next in Revelation is the sequence of that investiture: a scroll with seven seals is opened, and selfishness is given dominion over the Earth. Then from among the twelve princes of heaven, twelve thousand are sent from each down to Earth. These are the masculine angels that generate change; the feminine angels are held in reserve until a measure of safety is created.

Paleontology tells us that it took approximately a billion years before that safety was attained. Finally, in homo sapiens sapiens, God recognized a species with the potential to express love.

Genesis 2 starts with God’s reflection on that process. The species “man” was created from the dust of the ground, rising up only through an enormous commitment of intention and attention to the manifestation of the potential for life to receive love. If done too early, the gift would have been wasted: it would have been corrupted by selfishness. So love was held in reserve when the 144,000 were sent down from heaven, and remained aloof for a billion years.

God having spawned homo sapiens sapiens as an animal with the potential to elaborate love, Unconditional Love then breathed itself into one such animal, Adam, making him Man. Love was joined to biology, making it possible for us to escape the brutal practices of natural selection as described by Darwin. Recognizing that Adam should not be alone, Unconditional Love then sought for a mate to share the stewardship of spreading love throughout the world. Thus was one female animal imbued with love, creating Eve – the first Woman.

This is what we celebrate when we call them “First Man” and “First Woman” – not the material superfluity of their physical forms, but the transformation that comes with becoming imbued with Unconditional Love.

How did this make Adam a “living being”? Because one of the forms of selfishness is death. Through the link with Unconditional Love, Adam was freed from that captivity. He acted with fearless generosity. It was in seeking to become God’s equal that our thralldom to selfishness was reimposed.

In reflecting on all the evil we have committed since, I have called it “the great working out through the flesh of our dependency on sin.” Each generation becomes a little stronger, and with Jesus to light our way as an exemplar, eventually love will have its way with us.

Magnificent, She

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In the Garden, God warns Adam [NIV Gen. 2:17]

[Y]ou must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.

After the serpent seduces Eve, God comes into the garden and asks [NIV Gen. 3:9]:

“Where are you?”

What heartbreak there is in these words, that the stewards of its creation should hide from Love!

Why do we hide? Is it because we perceive the dependency of flesh upon sin, and so feel shame? Is it because, if we were to fully understand, we would see the burden that God meant for us to shoulder in healing the world of sin? Is it because, knowing of evil, we are infected with thoughts that, when empowered by love, grow into weeds that choke our souls?

These are the reasons that I experience.

And given that we must hide, how do we hide? What is the mechanism of our shelter? Genesis says that Adam and Eve hid “among the trees of the garden,” but that is only figurative. No, the only means to hide from love is, as God foretold, to take refuge in death.

In healing Peter’s betrayal, the resurrected Christ asks him three times “Do you love me?” [John 21:15] This is the grace of God: to redeem with mercy, to celebrate the strength that comes with the lessons learned from mistakes made in frailty.

And so, as it was Eve that submitted first to Death, it is to WOMAN that Gabriel speaks. To a virgin, betrothed to be married, the angel announces that the child of God will come through her into the world, preceding the tidings with these words [NIV Luke 1:30]:

Do not be afraid, Mary.

For what did the Law say about a conception that Joseph, her husband to be, could interpret only as a sign of infidelity?

Death.

And yet, pierced to the core with the promises made for the salvation of her people, Mary offers herself, body and soul [Luke 1:38]:

Here am I.

O woman, O grace, O life restored! Oh, magnificent surrender to Love!

You were indeed the Christmas Eve.

The Season of Peace

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Among the seven forms of selfishness released upon the Earth when the seals were broken in heaven [Rev. 6], the prince of death is that mystical presence that divides us from those that we love and feasts on our sorrow.

In this season, we celebrate a man who submitted to death, yet still loving those that abused him [Luke 23:34]. Through his devotion, Jesus suffused death with love. He converted that impenetrable barrier into a shield that keeps warring spirits apart until they find the strength to forgive one another [Matt. 1:21 and Luke 24:47].

For those of us that in this season celebrate Christmas, this is the source of its meaning and joy.

Love Creation: Chaos

To a physicist’s eye, chaos merges two contrary tendencies:

  • The combination of smaller shapes, unbeknownst to themselves, to form larger examples by joining their mass and energy.
  • The collapse of larger shapes through donation of their energy and mass to the creation of ever-multiplying smaller shapes.

Being made in God’s image, we might pause in astonishment that we find chaos pleasing. It follows that pleasing him is not an act of discipline or grandiosity, but a surrender of ourselves to the creation of harmonious frision with the world we inhabit.

The Uses of Tyranny and The Abuses of Tyranny

Giving of Ourselves

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In Matthew 6:1, Jesus says:

Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. [NIV]

But when the poor widow imposes herself as the rich make their donations to the temple treasury, Jesus celebrates her act with [Luke 21:3]:

Truly, I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them.

Jesus justifies his opinion in financial terms: the widow’s gift was a far larger part of her wealth than were the larger contributions of the wealthy. But why does that make a difference?

I was asked one Sunday to help with the collection. When the time came to combine the plates, I found myself under a strange compulsion, and arranged matters so that the collection ended up in my hands. The deacon was a little piqued when I carried the plate up to the front of the hall. As I set it on the table, my hands hovered over it, and I felt the angel thoughts rising up out of it. On a later occasion, when I did this while the minister held the collection, I felt one wing through my chest.

In Genesis, it is said that God made us in his image. We know that the Almighty does his work in love, so one way of understanding that likeness is that we are designed so that actions taken in love are far more powerful than those done selfishly.

I think that this is why Jesus celebrates the widow. We might wonder why she made this offering: it could have been as a political statement, a reminder to the rich of why they gave. Perhaps she had longed all her life to make a contribution, and in her last days, took her wealth to the temple in gratitude for God’s provision through the Law. Or perhaps she had woken that morning with Jesus’ voice in her ears, telling her to seek under a stone for two copper coins to bring to the temple.

Whatever the reason, I believe that Jesus is recognizing that her intentions would take root in the entire collection. The rich put nothing of themselves into the treasury, because their interest was in their own image. Once the money was surrendered, they walked off with their pride. The widow, though, brought her obedience, her gratitude and her thoughts for those in greater need.  In that surrender, she invested those intentions in the entire offering. No one touching it could avoid being influenced by those impulses.

When I give money, I always give to a charitable organization. I know that many among the poor lack discipline, and so direct donations of cash can be a temptation. But when asked by a homeless person to give, I never sneer. I smile, and apologize without explanation. As I pass, my thoughts linger on them, tendering silently my hope that they will find strength and assistance that will allow them to find the security, hope and opportunity to provide for themselves.

Jobs Jobbing

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Steven Bannon is spinning his political agenda as “jobs, jobs, jobs.” His candidate, Donald Trump, is pushing three methods for creating jobs. The first is tax cuts for the wealthy and business, a replay of the failed “trickle down” economics first foisted upon us by Reagan. The second is to protect American jobs from foreigners by restructuring our trade relationships and deportation of illegal immigrants. Finally, we have infrastructure spending, long a Democratic priority frustrated by the Republican Party’s “no new taxes” policy that has locked the federal gas tax at $0.28 per gallon.

None of these proposals make much sense over the long term. Since Reagan, top-down stimulus policies have resulted in the largest income disparity in the nation’s history, with manufacturing jobs replaced by retail work. Overseas workers are themselves being displaced by automation, with electronics manufacturer Foxconn in China laying off 60,000 workers this year after installing robots, and illegal immigrants do the jobs that Americans won’t. Finally, infrastructure spending is not a permanent solution to unemployment – it will only make a significant dent now because the situation has been allowed to become so dire, with so many bridges, roads and dams in danger of collapse.

The future of employment was cast in a new light for me by a recent OECD study on computer use. In an assessment of users in advanced economies, the study revealed that only one-third of users could do more than fill out forms. This was also typical of most manufacturing jobs. As variability in sources of supply were reduced, it was less and less that the skills of the craftsman were required. Workers were trained to perform procedures.

Unfortunately, artificial intelligence and automation is assuming most of those tasks. Cortana will fill out our order forms for us. The Army is testing robot chefs that learn to cook watching videos on YouTube. In the near future, self-driving trucks will begin to erode the last great mainstay of blue-collar work, throwing 5 million drivers out of work.

From my experience as a fab tech in college, I know that it wasn’t the work that made such jobs enjoyable. People whose minds aren’t engaged by their work invest that energy in politics – whether innocent socialization or profiteering. During a year spent routing, sanding and soldering, my peers would disrupt each others concentration by squirting isopropyl alcohol on unsuspecting bums. And while I was building book cases using a wood working shop owned by one of the technicians, he took me out to a party run by a packer who had built a cinder block building behind his house stocked with goods that had “accidentally” fallen off of the forklift. I came away with stain and varnish.

While both examples sound abusive, they demonstrate an aspect of work that no machine will ever be able to replicate: building trust that allows us to have fun. Studies of laughter among apes shows that it serves primarily to indicate that aggressive behavior is regulated by empathy. Scratching, biting and hitting doesn’t progress, except accidentally, to actual injury.

One interpretation of our 24×7 political system is that this activity is being elevated as work in its own right. It is currently financed principally by mining out of the wealth held in the middle class commons. On the one hand, financial services companies no longer take a percentage of portfolio gains, they reap a service charge on each transaction, regardless of gain to the investor. Churning of retirement funds transfers wealth to the financial elite. That elite then finances the careers of politicians that vote for deregulation and lower taxes. The middle class, sensing incipient doom, then commits from its remaining wealth to fund the campaigns of revolutionaries such as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

This impulse toward social cohesion is not always driven by desperation. Regional currency systems ensure that neighbors buy from each other, conserving wealth in a form that the money-center financiers can’t access. Sustainable multi-crop farming requires ten times as many workers as monoculture. With the spread of artificial intelligence and augmented reality, the inefficiencies and environmental degradations of family farming can be overcome, and communities rebuilt around the social cohesion that historically characterized agricultural societies.

My friend Sister Gloria celebrates her resuscitation of plants that appear to be dead in their pots. She simply applies her will to their survival. The biological capacity to heal through spiritual investment is explored in more depth in Stephen Harrod Buhner’s beautiful treatise, The Lost Language of Plants (reviewed here and here). This is the skill exercised by our nurses, and expressed as nurturing by teachers. It is a skill that our captains of finance and industry, so focused on exploiting resources to capture wealth, have been hostile to for thousands of years.

It is faith in this capacity that I believe will restore our broken political and economic systems. This capacity of intuition, that guides living things into a mutually supportive future free of fear, will be supplemented and supported by information systems that analyze information and prescribe treatments. Those decisions, however, are meaningless without the fundamental benefit of nurturance: the transmission of the spark of joy that fortifies our desire to survive.

As was the industrial age, this economic transformation will be frightening to those that cannot perceive its virtues. We are seeing such a fundamental shift. I doubt that Donald Trump and Stephen Bannon understand its nature, for they attained power by trumpeting doom. What they fail to understand is that in the new era, it is exactly those social and emotional skills that cemented the cohesion of industrial teams that will be of most value. The information age will unleash the nurturing potential that was held captive by the industrial age, ushering in an age of healing and sustainability.

Power Seeks Truth Through Love

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A friend from yoga started following my blog recently, and yesterday we were chatting about it before yoga class. I was surprised by his statement that he always understood the Christian message to be that humanity was the focus of healing in the world, rather than a virus to spread corruption. I was about to ask him about the source of his understanding when a stranger interjected and began to tell me that I was wrong. He kept at it, point by point, until I got frustrated and told him, “Look, I am doing the work.”

This was the framing for Rachel Maddow’s profile of Steve Bannon’s career as a video producer. His recent work includes a metaphor on global warming – a crazed scientist locks a bunch of steamy bodies in a sauna and slowly raises the temperature, causing an unnecessary panic.

In the context of this blog, the more outrageous offering is a reality series that recasts the male protagonist of Duck Dynasty as the prophet of the Second Coming. Some would be outraged by this travesty, others would be frightened, but I see it as an opportunity.

Bannon, like many in the media industry, understands the power of dreams. Shared ideas are spiritual points of contact that link a target community. Seeding people with phrases and images allows other kinds of thoughts to be projected into their souls. This is something that I trained my sons to resist. When they complained that an unsettling thought wouldn’t leave them alone, I offered “Close your eyes, calm your thoughts, and form this question in your mind: ‘Where is this coming from?’ Now tell me whose face you see.”

Bannon has co-opted the conservative message with his alt-right media machine. People that celebrate freedom and independence now subscribe – sometimes violently – to his program that seeks to deny those rights to minorities. It appears that he now wishes to do the same to Christianity, whose political messaging is currently diffused across competing denominations.

But as one among a growing number that believes that Revelation teaches that the returned Christ is already at work among us, I must consider how much Bannon’s power play will affect that process of manifestation. I am happy to share that I have powerful reasons for believing that it will further it.

You see, people may subscribe to an illusion such as the one that Bannon is constructing, but ultimately their concern is for the actual conditions of their life. This is the huge difference between Christ and illusionists such as Bannon: Christ actually loves his community, and is invested in their strength. This means that the community builds strength through relation with Christ, rather than losing it.

But how does Christ break through the barrier of illusion spun by Bannon and others? Because his investment in truth gives him focus and strength that the illusionists cannot rival. Illusionists are lazy people, seeking to take power without giving anything in return. Christ focuses only on service to his community, and so disciplines himself to act in a way consistent with their benefit. There is no pause in his determination, no rest until he has manifested his will for service to them.

What killed him made him stronger.

So all that Bannon will succeed in doing is to create a nexus in spirit that will allow Christ to send fulfillment all the more rapidly to those that are held captive by illusion. Once that message is received, Bannon will lose his power over his captives, and be cast aside as irrelevant.

This is just a specific example of a greater principle: spiritual power is conscious and intelligent. It seeks conditions under which it can anchor and spread. That means that it must work in concert with truth, for without truth its anchor will not be firm. Truth is perceived fully only by those that love unconditionally – that is to say, without thought of personal reward. For, if we think of personal reward when seeking the truth, people will seek to protect themselves from our appropriations by hiding from us.

This then, is what makes Christ inevitably the most powerful person on earth: power seeks truth through love. As the avatar of unconditional love, eventually all power will accrue to him.

Trexit

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Given that Clinton appears to have won the popular vote by upwards of a million votes, some among the pundits are bandying about the idea of changing the allocation rules for the electoral college. These rules are established by the individual states. A multi-state pact is already evolving which will require electors from participating states to cast their votes for the winner of the popular vote. That pact will be triggered when states representing 270 electors agree to the pact.

Is it too late?

I recognize that this mirrors the attempts by Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz to reassign the allegiances of delegates to both party conventions after the delegates were won in the primaries by Clinton and Trump (respectively). Remember those arguments by the “never Trump” delegates that they were not bound by law to vote according to the primary results?

I was astonished and dismayed by those efforts, which I saw as undemocratic. Now, however, as we see how woefully unprepared Trump is to run the presidency – not least due to the fact that apparently the only smart people he knows are actually members of his family or alt-right white supremacists – is it too late for the Electoral College to reject his ascendancy to the Oval Office? Or could the greatest aberration in our electoral system actually redeem itself, and grant Clinton the honor that she so deeply deserves?