Love is the Fulfilling of the Law

ON LOVE; PART CXXXI

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GoodWill IS Love in Action

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Last we have the trees; “the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil“.

“Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die  And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened , and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons” (Genesis 3:1-7).

The Truth about “the tree of knowledge of good and evil” should be seen exactly as it is stated except that it is not a tree at all but the subjection of the Pure and unblemished Soul of man into the fogs and mists of the world of form where both good and evil coexist; good would require that the Soul maintain that purity while evil is his devolving into the ways of the world. As we said in a previous post, this perspective is from the inception of Life in form, it is written about the first man and woman, or what they may represent in the world, and it is peculiar to them as the progenitors of the reality of Life in the world. And hence the story as we have discussed it and hence the help in understanding that we get from the Apostle Paul.

We see above the serpent and the fruit and we have likened these to the deception of the world, the vanity into which man is subjected as characterized by the illusion and the glamour that cloud the mind and the emotional response. So the serpent of Life in the world deceives the man who comes to see the fruit as the fulfillment of his Earthly desires and causes him to forget or ignore the promptings of his own Soul which say to refrain from eating and tasting these desires which are characterized for us as good for the physical senses, pleasant for the emotions and beneficial to the mind; overwhelming to the form and personality Life of man. They take of the fruit and they taste it and in this taste of worldly pleasures they are set about on a new course and here they see the illusory reality of Life in form, that it is good for the man in form to partake and he now sees and he now KNOWS of these pleasures. This is a graphic presentation of what we have said in previous posts, that the Soul, as the consciousness in the form,  slowly and steadily loses sight of his own essential divinity and begins to live his Life in form as apart from the reality of the Kingdom. He is still in the Kingdom but by the illusion and the glamour of the world, the vanity as Paul tells us, he drifts further and further away from that reality.

This is a difficult concept to present and likely even more difficult to properly understand but there is a reality in this that we must realize and much of this is spoken of by Paul as he speaks about his own difficulties as they are expressed in him by both the flesh and the Soul. This is also depicted for us in the Gospel Life of the Apostle Peter as he steadily grows in his ability to bring the Life of the Christ Within to expression through his form. We will address these thing more deeply a bit later as here we must present the consequences of Life in form from the perspective of the first man and woman; the cause is his being “made subject to vanity” (Romans 8:20) and the effect, the consequence, is depicted by the Lord as the ways of man in the world living his incarnated Life through form. Repeating the verses that we ended with in the last post:

“And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:8-19).

We should remember here that these are True men, Souls, that have taken form for the first time by taking to themselves bodies of flesh of the human species and who are having their first experiences in these bodies. Remember also that the human animal had existed and had experienced the physical portion of these things with the instincts and appetites of the form Life but here now we have an indwelling Soul, a consciousness, and the mind and emotions that are produced through this combining of the Soul and the form. A new creature is now here on the face of the Earth and these words that we now discuss are among his first realizations as the conscious Soul in form. We may ask why they are painted in such way as to reflect punishment, the punishment of ALL for the ‘sins’ of the two, and we may never Truly KNOW the answer to this question. We can say here again however that same thing that we have said from the start, that these words are written to be understood by the superstitious, barbarous and emotionally centered man from many centuries ago and it is this story line along with the rest of the Five Books of Moses that give this ‘early’ man the ability to understand those things that are intended to lead him back to God. Let us look at some of these ideas as we find them in our verses above:

• First we have seen the reality of the fall of man in the words of the commentator regarding what happens immediately after they eat the fruit of “the tree of knowledge of good and evil“. The text tells us that: “ the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” and in this we should see the reality of vanity in the way that Paul intends it when he tells us that “the creature was made subject to vanity” (Romans 8:20). Here, within the idea of being self conscious from the perspective of KNOWING oneself to be an individual who is aware of himself and his surroundings, we have the added dynamic of being self conscious about oneself about appearance with the added emotional ideas of modesty. The first is of the Soul and is real, the second is of the form and is vanity and we should see here that this is a vanity that is built upon illusion as there is no precedent for clothing in the world and neither the human forms that they have taken nor their ancestors KNEW clothing for this purpose.
• They then find themselves in the garden which we can interpret as that rather heavenly place that or state of being that they found themselves in before they succumb to the ways of the world, a state in which they are yet conscious Souls in form and they KNOW who and what they are. However, after tasting the fruits of the world, after falling into the vanity of Life in the world of things and pleasures, they no longer see clearly; the are caught in the fogs and the mists of illusion and glamour. But they are not so far removed yet as to not KNOW the call of the reality of Life, the Soul, calling out to them and this is depicted for us as the voice of God. While many believe that there is a time frame here, that this is a saga enacted over a brief amount of time, we should note that there is no time stamp at all on these things and no requirement of there to be one; this is likely the result of much time as one does not digress from being the God-man in form to being the Earth-man in form in an instant.
• Human nature being what it is, and we speak of human here as the combination of the Soul and the form or what Paul calls the creature, we find Adam and Eve ‘hiding’ from their own realities, their own Truths, and this is much the same as this happens to men today. Faced with gaining a thing in a way that is against conscience we most often push conscience to the side and take the gain and this is no different here as Adam and Eve hide themselves from reality. They opt for the illusion and the glamour and this is both caused by and IS the vanity that Paul tells us of; their hiding is in their ignoring of the promptings of the Soul, the Christ Within. The next few comments regarding the exchange between God as the Soul and  Adam serve as the continuation of the story line as the words are unimportant until we get to the question: “Who told thee that thou wast naked?“.
• We KNOW that there are none to tell them this thing and the question is used to lead to the conclusion that they had “eaten of the tree“, that they had tasted of the pleasures of the world of things and this is what seals their fate in the world. Once they taste the forbidden fruit they are cast by this act onto and into the vanity of Life in form, the illusion and the glamour and they steadily lose their hold on the reality of Life as a True Son of God, as a Soul, and they steadily take on more and more of the ways of the world even inventing new ways as they proceed. We must remember that this dictum on the creation of man depicts for us only the beginning of the Life of man in form and our comments here are to show how this can be understood in a non literal interpretation that has meaning to us as we look back and reflect upon Life itself. We see and we KNOW that their Life is not much different than our Life save the idea of being born and growing to this perspective of KNOWLEDGE; a thing that, according to these writings, is not necessary for Adam and for Eve.
• As is still common in the world of men, few take responsibility for what they have done and in this next part we find both Adam and Eve seeking to shed any responsibility for their actions in tasting the forbidden fruit. From the general attitude of their speech we can see that they have devolved considerably from their original state of the Soul in form as their personalities have ‘hijacked’ their consciousness and now control the Life. In previous posts we have depicted the relationship between the Soul and the form as that the Souls LENDS the consciousness to the form but here in this we can see a better dynamic in the idea of the personality ‘hijacking’ the consciousness. Here we can see the same result of the conscious personality caring for itself and only itself although this caring is extended to those who are close. It is not until a man sees again the Light of the Soul that he begins to look outward toward others in brotherhood, harmony and Love. So Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the temptation that overwhelmed her, the deception found in the pleasures of the things of the world, and the rest of this will show us the result of being in the world as carnal beings instead of as Souls in form.
• We should understand here that man’s devolving into Life in form IS the Plan and his subjection to vanity is a part of that Plan as Paul tells us in our right reading of his words which we again repeat: “For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:20-21). In saying this we find that there was no choice for Adam and Eve but to do what they did as this is the natural progression for the self conscious Soul in form and the next several verses are not punishment but rather the visible result of what the first Souls in form had begun.
  • First there is the serpent which we understand as the deception of the world of things, the illusion and the glamour and the vanity of the saying by Paul above. How then should we discern the words of the Lord to the serpent as they are written for us: “And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel“. Realizing that words are necessary to continue this story of Genesis for those who would hear and read it many centuries ago, we should also try to see that these are many words and that there is a likely significance metaphorically. The Hebrew word nachash is translated as serpent and generally understood as and rendered by some as snake. This would be a physical thing while our understanding is not as illusion is a force of mind and glamour a force of emotion. Strong’s helps us in our understanding by telling us that this Hebrew word means snake, serpent; by extension: a mythological creature of chaos opposed to God ³. Can we see aught else but illusion in Strong’s interpretation of this word and we should KNOW this as snakes do not speak and they are already going through their days on their belly and eating dust. So the illusory power of the world of things deceives and beguiles Eve, and as part of the perceived punishment of the illusion, the snake is made to do as he does now and likely has always done. We should see here however that the snake, the metaphor of illusion and deception, is now become the metaphor for ALL things that are of a deceptive nature. Is there enmity between Eve and the deception that sealed her fate in the world? Is there enmity between the her children and the successive progression of illusion in the world that is ever taking new forms? The answer here would be a resounding yes as most all of Life’s problems are based upon what we think we want and need as men grounded in the world and perhaps the idea of illusion itself, deception, being bruised can be found in the eventual reawakening of the man to the reality of his True self, the Soul.

We close here for today and will pick up with these thoughts in the next post; we will try to also address our final point in the next post as well:

• “This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.  And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth: And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters: And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died” (Genesis 5:1-5) .

Aspect of God	Potency	Expressed as Fire	Aspect of Man	In Relation to the Christ
GOD, The Father	Will or Power	Electric Fire	Spirit or Life	Life
Son, The Christ	Love and Wisdom	Solar Fire	Soul or Christ Within	Truth
Holy Spirit	Light or Activity	Fire by Friction	Life Within the Form	Way

THIS IS THE LAST DAY OF 2012 AND WHILE IT MAY  SEEM THAT THINGS ARE THE WAY THAT THEY WERE AT THE END OF THE LAST YEAR, THEY ARE NOT. PROGRESS IS ALWAYS MADE AND ALWAYS IN SMALL STEPS THAT CAN NOT BE READILY DISCERNED. BUT, IF WE WERE TO LOOK AROUND THE WORLD WE ARE SURE TO SEE MANY SIGNS OF POSITIVE FORWARD PROGRESSION IN THE INTERACTIONS OF MEN AS WE GROW CLOSER TO THE AGE OF BROTHERHOOD AND UNITY. WE MAY AT THE SAME TIME SEE REGRESSION BUT THIS IS A NECESSARY PART OF PROGRESS AS THE FORCES OF THE OLD AND THE FORCES OF THE NEW STRUGGLE FOR SUPREMACY  WE SHOULD TAKE HEART IN THE KNOWLEDGE THAT IT IS ALWAYS PROGRESS THAT WINS.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Note on the Quote of the Day

This daily blog also has a Quote of the Day which may not be in any way related to the essay. Many of these will be from the Bible and some just prayers or meditations that may have an influence on you and are in line with the subject matter of this blog. As the quote will change daily and will not store with the post, it is repeated in this section with the book reference and comment:

Our Quote of the Day below can be seen in relationship to our text above as we must awake and see past the illusion and the glamour of Life in form; before we can begin to progress, we must be able to recognize that this illusion exists and that it has always existed can help us in our understanding. We should understand here as well that the master that is spoken of is one’s own True self, one’s own Soul.

If you are awake in the presence of a master
One moment will show you the way.
The fool is his own enemy.
The mischief is his undoing.
How bitterly he suffers!
Why do what you will regret?
Why bring tears upon yourself?
Do only what you do not regret,
And fill yourself with joy.
For a while the fool's mischief
Tastes sweet, sweet as honey.
Bit in the end it turns bitter.
And how bitterly he suffers!
For months the fool may fast,
Eating from the tip of a grass blade.
Still he is not worth a penny 
Beside the master whose food is the way.
Fresh milk takes time to sour.
So a fool's mischief
Takes time to catch up with him.
Like the embers of a fire
It smolders within him.
Whatever a fool learns,
It only makes him duller.
Knowledge cleaves his head.
For then he wants recognition.
A place before other people,
A place over other people.
"Let them know my work,
Let everyone look to me for direction."
Such are his desires,
Such is his swelling pride.
One way leads to wealth and fame, 
The other to the end of the way.
Look not for recognition 
But follow the awakened
And set yourself free.

The above is from the the sayings of the Buddha in the Dhammapada, from the section entitled The Fool. Fool here should be seen as reflecting the person who follows the worldly ways and this regardless of one’s intended spiritual nature or standing if this can be so expressed. This is a lesson in following one’s master who we look at as the Master, the Christ, and all those disciples of Christ that have come before us; they KNOW the way that we, being seekers, should follow. In this is a lesson on being humble and meek, the antithesis of pride.

• ³ Strongest Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible – 2001