Building Unimagined Bridges

From Voices  Section 4 Chapter 3 

A bridge takes us from here to there. Across a river, across a social divide, across from a world based on ‘getting and spending’ to one based on love, on trust, on sharing, on giving.

“As once the winged energy of delight,
Carried you over childhood’s dark abysses,
Now beyond your own life build a great arch of unimagined bridges.”
                                 (Rainer Maria Rilke)

Whatever bridges we travel over as life’s journey takes us forward, each crossing involves a change in some way. In the past, shifts and changes have been sufficiently slow enough to be absorbed without much alarm. Today the pace of change is accelerating rapidly. The paralleled tracks of our technological evolution and the inner evolution of our consciousness are both increasing at a rapid pace. If the pace of the first trend exceeds that of our shift towards new horizons of understanding and new ways of being then it seems a crisis will occur to show that something new is being called for. If we are to hold to an inner stability through accelerating change, then we need to let go of our need for certainty. Certainties are of the past. If once upon a time they were also of the future then we now realise that the future can no longer be fully known.

All the voices in this book, express the progress of personal inner changes and the steps on the bridge that have helped  them reach the next stage. In the past the  changes came at a speed that, despite many surprises on the way, they could in fact be understood and integrated with past beliefs and world views. However, the evolutionary impulse is moving us on at a rapid pace.. Today, the time to do this is in increasingly short supply.

So it may help if this chapter explores two key gateways in the bridge to cross the chasm between our former Christian understanding and new ways that are currently challenging us to change in a way that does not leave us feeling adrift without an engine or a compass on a stormy sea.

The gateways that we are likely to encounter are those which take us from the surface or exoteric understanding of the messages in Christian teaching to the wisdom that we find hidden beneath the myths, symbols and stories of the past which reveal a deeper wisdom.We touch into the esoteric steam that has been there all along waiting our re-discovery.

One such gateway involves revisiting the orthodox teaching of the life of Jesus of Nazareth

and beginning to see greater depth in this than we have previously understood. In the orthodox understanding he has been seen as Jesus Christ, the one and only who carried the Christ light for us 2000 years ago. The gateway we pass through tells us that it was the Master Jesus, not the Christ ,who was  born and lived 2000 years ago. The one that entered into him  was the Cosmic Christ who is way beyond any human form and is  the light of God, the Son of God, he who carried the One Life of the Source of All into expression in form from the very beginning. The true Christian story has persisted since the creation of life itself and so cannot belong to one faith tradition alone, for it is truly universal.

Possibly the confusion has come about because we have understood that the Christ light descended into the prepared vehicle of the Master Jesus at his baptism in the River Jordan when he was thirty years old. As he himself said, “before Abraham was, I am”. It is understandable that the story of the Christ spirit’s descent into matter has become interwoven with that of Jesus of Nazareth, We are now beginning to  realise that he was, in fact,  Jesus the Christ, ie Christ is not his surname but the condition he attained. Jesus was a channel for the expression of the Christ from immortal realms into the realms of mortal life. What we are also now realising is that this inner light –  The Christ – also lives deep within our hearts awaiting the awakening that brings to us an inner recognition and a willingness to open to the birth of the Christ in our hearts. For we, too, are destined to be fully daughters and sons of the Source of All.

We are in the early stages of understanding that once we have passed through this huge gateway we inevitably find that other gateways  present themselves. It is our conditioned thinking that holds back our inner knowing and keeps us bound to the material, world ,This fades in the light of this new understanding. New vistas open ahead of us. We begin to see that if “consciousness is what we and the whole world are” then, the Holy Spirit dances as consciousness through every atom of created life”. This is a mystery long held in the Hindu tradition as the dancing Shiva.

We are in the early stages of understanding that life is vitally alive in every plant and created form. Life as immortal and life is continuous between lives and beyond. A second bridge that we then need to cross is to fully comprehend that there is continuity of consciousness after death. We move into a frequency of the heavenly realms and find that there is no judgement from  God upon our lives and that we ourselves are the only judges The loving atmosphere of heavenly realms is now being testified from those who have returned from a near death experience (NDE). For those who can recall past lives it is seen that it is our soul that is the thread  that carries onward as repeated experiences in this world and probably many others. Reincarnation was an assumed condition at the time of Jesus but was voted as no longer a belief by the council of Nicea in 325 CE.

Some ideas may be too big to change just by reading something so, if these ideas are new to you, then just park them on an inner shelf, ask innerly for insight and understanding and in its own time, this will come.

Buckminster Fuller, one of the American evolutionary thinkers of the 20th Century said, “Love is metaphysical gravity”.Another evolutionary thinker, Peter Russell In his book ‘Waking Up in Time’, first published in 1992 , unpacks this statement for us “Gravity is the attraction of mass for itself. It is a force that pulls the physical universe back towards its original unity. Similarly, love can be considered the attraction of life for itself – the desire for conscious union with another. It’s ultimate expression is the union with our source…with the essence of our consciousness”( )

Christ consciousness, as it was embodied and expressed in Jesus the Christ, is our bridge towards this expanded understanding. A break- through is underway. Deep within ourselves there is a collective memory of our evolutionary experience, the meanings of which are veiled within the Christian story. Taken literally many faith traditions have worshipped a savior figure and different interpretations have carried the many branches and sects of a tradition without realising that all such savior figures have been pointing us towards the potential for this discovery within ourselves. The process of transformation that can take place has always been an individual one but now that the curve of our inner spiritual development has speeded up towards this potential then all the streams of so many belief systems seem to be gradually converging towards a mighty river of awakening in the collective of humanity. It begins to dawn on us  that all is interconnected in the anima mundi, the soul of the world and, maybe, in the soul of the cosmos as well..

The bridge that takes us from an image of God that has pertained for 2000 years to one that is emerging today is a difficult one to cross. Whilst many of the religious traditions choose to adhere to an outgrown and unbalanced image of God and while a prevailing atheism rejects the whole idea of God, the pathway through is beset with challenges. . But just as the breakthrough that a small group of disciples grasped and communicated in the early days following the crucifixion has carried us forward through the ages until now ,we need to forge another way ahead as we enter a new era. We are being faced with the stark choice of transformation or annihilation. If it is to be transformation then it falls upon many of us alive today to come together to build the next bridge that will help us join a great growing stream of faith that can provide the leadership and pathways that avert the materialistic attitudes and vested interests that will be resisting the necessary changes towards a better normal..

A contemporary mystic Anne Baring in her magnum opus ‘The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul’ expresses it this way: (P.460)

“The more individuals who are able to awaken to this process of transformation and cooperate with it, the less suffering there will be for the whole body of humanity because essentially we are one life…In relation to the lives of those whose desperate concern is survival, this inner work may seem irrelevant, even absurd, yet if change in the world situation is ever to come about it can only come from an increase in the number of concerned and committed individuals engaging in the awakening and transformation of their own consciousness and giving expression to that transformation in some form of service to the world.” This service may take many forms, but “Whatever form it takes will spring from an awakened and compassionate heart”.

One compassionate heart is a friend and colleague, Colum. He was born into a family who brought through from other dimensions of being a set of teachings that offer an expansion of the Christian message for today, ( ) He has worked tirelessly all his life towards living and communicating these teachings. Spurred by a challenge to write down some of his vision for the future, he began to articulate the vison that is currently holding:

“We stand at an interesting point in history, as a whole new age breaks upon us. As a child I used to wonder, not without alarm, what the new age would look like; I suppose that now I am more inclined to ask, ‘what is it in us that has changed in order to enable us to see the world in its new form?’

I think I must begin with how I adjust. We are inclined to see change as incremental, almost imperceptible until you can look back over a period of time. But the adjustment is not to allow more of myself to be spiritual, it is absolutely to open myself to my spiritual being. If I say it is to be God, I am being neither blasphemous, nor mystical in a traditional sense; I am simply saying that my consciousness has to change all or nothing. I can’t be partly God.

Somewhere in the heart of all this is an experience that changes me, and it began for me with being a witness in meditation to John the Beloved looking into the heart of Jesus and seeing infinite light. John’s example enables us all: not just to look into Jesus and see the infinite, but to recognise that our vision is capable of this. We can all see life as infinite light. 

It is of course no good if I am the only one who can do this. The Aquarian Age is not about individuals being individual in their vision. It is about the shared experience of opening our eyes and seeing nothing but the infinite … and knowing the goodness of it.

So my vision of hope is one of ever-increasing numbers of people discovering this power within the uniqueness of their own vocabulary.  They will speak of it in a million ways, but in seeing it they become it; they radiate it.”

And thus we connect with one another. Not with a sense of limitation, of ourselves as damaged humanity picking up the pieces, but with an embrace of one another as transformed, arisen beings of light. Spirituality is not a badge; it is not a mediumistic vision; it is not a vaguely inflected awareness of something a bit more than the physical. It is a being in ourselves in such a way that we know no limitation – and no separation either.

How does this come about in us all? Probably it is best to see it as an initiation. This is where events such as the 2020 virus outbreak and lockdown are the gifts of spirit. We are collectively undergoing an  initiation, known in esoteric philosophy as “ the birth of the Christ within the heart” which leads to the awakening of the collective soul of humanity .. As we gasp at the enormity of it all, the air becomes clearer and the skies have a new blue to them;  the cars have been  fewer, and all beings seems to be moving a little more slowly. There has been more time for every individual to get to know him- or herself a little better and also to know our all neighbors as inter- connected with us.

Oh yes, we have had other initiatory events . Each one – first world war, second world war, for instance – is an attempt by spirit to break down materialism, rigidity, greed and fear. In all these moments, the human family suffers together. Right now, we know much more than in those wartimes what being part of a global community feels like. The rest of humanity is no longer remote. Those who suffer the other side of the world are us like a wound in our own sides. Whether it is the plight of so many refugees, or those facing the experience of their homes destroyed by fire or their businesses collapse in the lockdowns we feel for them and gift out time, our clothes or our money where we can.

Faced with situations such as these ,any previous differences we might have felt dissolve into the compassionate embrace of our hearts. We are no longer a world of men and women, or of normal and abnormal, of leading race and developing nation. We are each of us at much at risk from the virus as each other. There can no longer be any superiority of one sex over another, one race or one religion over another.

So, if the age that is opening before us is to have a teacher, what might this teacher be? Perhaps it  will be the teacher in our own hearts, beyond gender, beyond race, beyond all divisions. We will discover that the light and love that will be the savior of the world at this time is already in our own hearts and will shine forth as infinite light and infinite love. We are discovering that this inner light is pure consciousness ,for within each of us are that one consciousness and we are all  connected through it and each of us can be a benevolent force in the universe. Each of us is a living bridge, a point of connection between heaven and earth, between the inner and the outer and that we can learn:

“To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance”( ) 

Each of us, just by being here, is already a living bridge, a point of connection between heaven and earth, between inner and outer levels of being/ If we can remember the other world whiolst living in this one then we, too, can be a participative bridge builder of the new.

What is it to be a bridge builder of the new?
It is to live in the full awareness of every moment
As a Divine droplet of potentiality
In the ocean of eternity
It is to see every person as carrying
The Christ Light within them
And every situation as an opportunity for releasing
A little more of the shadows that keep
That Light from shining

It is to listen innerly at all times and all places
To the next step ahead
It is trusting each step as it reveals itself to us
Knowing that every need will be perfectly met
It is embracing with loving arms
Those that appear to stand in the way of our purpose
As well as those who do not seem to understand
It is knowing that where two or three are gathered
The ‘I am’ presence is there in the midst
It is embracing with our being the whole Universe
Knowing that at one and the same time
Each of us is nothing and each of us is everything’ ⁽ ) 

References

• Peter Russell Waking uo in Time
• Anne Baring The Dream of the Cosmos page 460
• White Eagle Trust whiteagle
• David Whyte, What to Remember on Waking The Essential David Whyte, Ed Gayle Karen Young Whyte, Moving Rivers Press, Washington, 2020
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