Dimensions and Love
“Love! We’ve said nothing about Love in this conversation,” I suddenly realized. “Where does this come in? In this context, what does it mean, ‘The energy which attaches you to life' as you once described it? How does that relate to dimensions and dimensioning?”
“Ah! There is the key.”
“It has, of course, been present here all along, every time I’ve spoken of the spiritual posture; ‘offering up the gift in true humility and love.’
“What does it mean, you ask, that love is the energy that attaches you to life?
"The answer is that it is absolutely everywhere in this process. It is in the ‘divine spark’ in the germ of the seed. It is Eros, the longing to reach out and touch, therefore requiring, groping toward sentience. An ever-increasing surface of sentience. It is the force, then, of dimensioning itself. Think of the peaks of human consciousness when the poets speak of their longing to behold the Loved One or the mystic, speaking of the longing for God. The fundamental and ultimate Eros is the love out of which the Creator ‘others’, ‘dimensions’ and out of which the Created reaches back through the dimensions of human experience—including the ups and downs of human love--to touch God. That is, to experience the Whole, the divinity of Creation. So love is the living energy of the entire field of creation. That pulsating light you once experienced, so like the pulsating heart which, in a sense, it is. The heart of Quetzalcoatl that becomes one with the Heart of Heaven. There are many words in many languages to express this. And there is the utter silence of it. And there is its music.
“But love is also, and very deeply so, essential to the attachment to form as the germ of life I have described breaks forth out of the seed into a new surface of sentience or dimension. Here, it is the ‘stewardship’: the love of the form for the life and the light; the love of the life and the light for the form. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.’ Gave his Son TO the world which expresses a much higher engagement of the Creator with Creation through his love for it than the fashioning of it. This is beautiful religious language for the dimensioning of the Creator; of divinity. This itself is a higher dimension reached only after a certain focus of reflexion is attained by human consciousness.
“Remember that if the form loses this function of stewardship—this feeling, this sentience—it dies, like the leaf. If this happens before the stewardship is completed, un-naturally as it were, it can jeopardize the whole plant. The whole organism. Human beings, likewise, cut off from a sense of usefulness and of love, can wither away and die. This is why depression is so dangerous. It is a disconnection from the vital energy. But this is also why joy and happiness, a sense of usefulness and significance, can be so potent in healing; why spiritual guidance can enter so constructively; religious counseling or sacred music.”
“But the greatest ‘particularlized’ form of love comes with the sacrifice—leaf for plant, flower for seed, the body for the soul, the ego for the spirit.
"I know that ‘sacrifice’ suggests something willful to you that doesn’t fit with leaves and petals. But you have to understand that in some simpler dimensional level it is still there as a precursor. It isn’t some entirely new creation of the human. You find it all the time in animal life between a mother and her babies. It is the human, yes, who can bring this to a high pitch of intentionality and nobility. This is a very powerful form of love that is always deferring to a ‘higher dimensional value’.”
“I remember now,” I interrupted, “that Rick Tarnas has said that every major era begins with a sacrifice. Socrates, Jesus, Galileo...”
“Exactly. And it occurs in every dimension from the seed on upward. This means that the human, with such an evolved consciousness and moral sense could greet his or her own death in just this way.”
“Here is where I get the pronouns mixed up,” I commented. “Which ‘you’ does what? Which ‘me’ sacrifices and which me passes through?”
“And I told you in the first conversation that you could trust yourself to know the difference. There is a reality prior to the pronouns or even the differentiation and that is something which you must just ‘sense’ without getting lost in the thicket of artificial distinctions. But here is another way of looking at this.
“You have often reminded yourself and others of Allan Anderson’s counsel that you can never solve a problem on the same level that it exists. Yet to move to a new level always seems to involve or require a sacrifice; a bitter loss. Worse yet, there’s no sense of what is at the next level; if it is really better or even if there is a next level at all. Anderson’s example was a blind man offered surgery to cure his blindness.
“'Show me first,' he says, 'what it’s like to see.' But that, of course, is impossible. There’s simply this leap into an abyss. Something is always sacrificed. Something Here for an unknown There.
“The trick is that once the sacrifice is made, when you move to the new level you discover that nothing has been sacrificed at all. Something has been gained! When you sacrifice the Here for the There, you discover that Here and There are both illusions."
“A very beautiful example of that, as you know, is in C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle where passing ‘through the stable door’ meant entering into a ferocious battle in darkness with the fiercest creatures in the land and almost sure death. But when the children actually passed through the threshold, through the stable door and beyond the experience of darkness, they found themselves in a beautiful sunlit field. Looking back, they saw only the empty frame of the doorway in the middle of the same field. No stable. No monsters. No battle. It was all an illusion. But had they not been willing to sacrifice themselves in the passage, they would never know; just as your experience in the dark tunnel without an opening was followed by your passing through it and having the tunnel disappear altogether. In the end, the sacrifice led only to the loss of illusion.
“How powerful that even Jesus—sacrificing a kingdom and a life under the circumstances of utmost humiliation, failure and pain, cries on the cross, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' This is very important to the point I made before that the posture of death is not to be mistaken for the ‘last moments’ which can indeed be terrible.
"The potent message of Christianity is not the illumination of his last moments, but what continued through the passage. The disciples themselves had to go through the tragic experience of his death as pure loss, only to find Him among them on the road to Emmaeus. All along, Jesus had been teaching the spiritual posture and the eternal life of the divine self that survives the passage through death. But that did not free him or the disciples from fear, loss, betrayal, pain. That is the greatest mystery of the Passion. And of all life.
“This shows too that Time itself is only a dimension. Where is the stable? Where is the battle? Where is the cross? Where is the moment before? When the adolescent looks back at his childhood, where is it? Where is the child? The adolescent has had to sacrifice his childhood for his adolescence. The wife will have to sacrifice her maidenhood to become a mother. Yet there is nothing ‘back there’, all is ‘right here’. In the memory of the mother. Something which, itself, is constantly taking new forms. Memory is an extraordinary power of dimensioning. One that coheres and solidifies a reality in much the way matter accomplishes this in the physical world. But as you see, Time and Memory are themselves inter-lacing dimensions that are part of the compound dimension of human consciousness.
“As in this scene from C.S. Lewis’s book, the only remaining thing beyond the passage of death is the ‘threshold’. That is what is so extraordinary. A perfect touch there. The threshold is what remains because it is the only thing which every dimension has in common. In that sense, ‘you’ are real and abiding as the threshold and all the rest passes through you. A stream of illusions but each of the illusions precious, creative, leading to the next, expanding sentience, consciousness, dimension... And then breathing the whole of it back in to nourish the inward, invisible, fertile dark.”
“Brian Swimme’s ‘all-nourishing abyss’! David Bohm’s ‘implicate order’!” I added, noting the similarities.
“Fine. Or the Buddhist sunyata or the alaya or the Darkness of God Unmanifest as I once described it to you. All of these expressions represent the rich work of dimensioning through words which, like numbers, in the right combination act as gateways. But you must never let them block you off from the fertile darkness or exist for their own sake. This will simply trap you in a dimension and disconnect you from the vital force of the seed which is meant to keep on moving.
“Neither must you dismiss any phases of the passage carelessly as false or insignificant. You must love each thing, not discard it as illusion. Devalue it as unimportant. This is the difference between ‘rejection’ and ‘sacrifice’.
“Your love gives a thing form and presence. Your grieving for its loss—not just dismissing it as illusion—preserves its value. This value is the essence of the ‘creating’ of the universe. Unlike the children in The Last Battle, Jesus does not look back, after passing through the door of death, and see only emptiness beyond the threshold. He lingers in the threshold and turns back to comfort Mary Magdalene and the disciples. To bring evidence of the Life beyond ‘if ye love one another as I have loved you’.
“So you see the object is not to reject the illusion or the creative experience; not to look back and say ‘that life, that relationship, that experience, that person was flawed’ or ‘that world is imperfect’, ‘not real’ or ‘inferior’. The bodhisattva, like Jesus, turns back in the threshold to comfort, care, love, rescue and redeem.”
“Do you remember your dream of the cheetah? It came up from behind you—so powerful, so dangerous that when it reached your side, as in any nightmare, you began to awaken. Instead, however, you chose to hold the dream space—that place of maximum danger—praying over and over ‘Lord, Please let this place not be a killing ground.’ That is what it is like, holding the space in the threshold. Your waking mind told you that it was a dream, an illusion. But inexplicably you chose to remain in that space, between the danger of the creature and imminent death, holding open the threshold with a prayer.”
“THAT is the work of the Bodhisattva. THAT is the work of Christ and the meaning of the words ‘I am the way’—the threshold—‘the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father but through me.’ He was holding open the door. Not founding a doctrine or institution. This was the work of the apostles who followed and tried to enshrine the value in the culture, as generations of Buddhists did with what the Buddha had shown them.
“I have said to you so many times that the human has miraculous gifts and possibilities. The great souls have shown what any individual may do in any moment; open up gateway after gateway with his or her own heart. This is the secret of the new dimension.”
--from Listening: Voices at the Edge - Sheri Ritchlin copyright 1999
“Love! We’ve said nothing about Love in this conversation,” I suddenly realized. “Where does this come in? In this context, what does it mean, ‘The energy which attaches you to life' as you once described it? How does that relate to dimensions and dimensioning?”
“Ah! There is the key.”
“It has, of course, been present here all along, every time I’ve spoken of the spiritual posture; ‘offering up the gift in true humility and love.’
“What does it mean, you ask, that love is the energy that attaches you to life?
"The answer is that it is absolutely everywhere in this process. It is in the ‘divine spark’ in the germ of the seed. It is Eros, the longing to reach out and touch, therefore requiring, groping toward sentience. An ever-increasing surface of sentience. It is the force, then, of dimensioning itself. Think of the peaks of human consciousness when the poets speak of their longing to behold the Loved One or the mystic, speaking of the longing for God. The fundamental and ultimate Eros is the love out of which the Creator ‘others’, ‘dimensions’ and out of which the Created reaches back through the dimensions of human experience—including the ups and downs of human love--to touch God. That is, to experience the Whole, the divinity of Creation. So love is the living energy of the entire field of creation. That pulsating light you once experienced, so like the pulsating heart which, in a sense, it is. The heart of Quetzalcoatl that becomes one with the Heart of Heaven. There are many words in many languages to express this. And there is the utter silence of it. And there is its music.
“But love is also, and very deeply so, essential to the attachment to form as the germ of life I have described breaks forth out of the seed into a new surface of sentience or dimension. Here, it is the ‘stewardship’: the love of the form for the life and the light; the love of the life and the light for the form. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.’ Gave his Son TO the world which expresses a much higher engagement of the Creator with Creation through his love for it than the fashioning of it. This is beautiful religious language for the dimensioning of the Creator; of divinity. This itself is a higher dimension reached only after a certain focus of reflexion is attained by human consciousness.
“Remember that if the form loses this function of stewardship—this feeling, this sentience—it dies, like the leaf. If this happens before the stewardship is completed, un-naturally as it were, it can jeopardize the whole plant. The whole organism. Human beings, likewise, cut off from a sense of usefulness and of love, can wither away and die. This is why depression is so dangerous. It is a disconnection from the vital energy. But this is also why joy and happiness, a sense of usefulness and significance, can be so potent in healing; why spiritual guidance can enter so constructively; religious counseling or sacred music.”
“But the greatest ‘particularlized’ form of love comes with the sacrifice—leaf for plant, flower for seed, the body for the soul, the ego for the spirit.
"I know that ‘sacrifice’ suggests something willful to you that doesn’t fit with leaves and petals. But you have to understand that in some simpler dimensional level it is still there as a precursor. It isn’t some entirely new creation of the human. You find it all the time in animal life between a mother and her babies. It is the human, yes, who can bring this to a high pitch of intentionality and nobility. This is a very powerful form of love that is always deferring to a ‘higher dimensional value’.”
“I remember now,” I interrupted, “that Rick Tarnas has said that every major era begins with a sacrifice. Socrates, Jesus, Galileo...”
“Exactly. And it occurs in every dimension from the seed on upward. This means that the human, with such an evolved consciousness and moral sense could greet his or her own death in just this way.”
“Here is where I get the pronouns mixed up,” I commented. “Which ‘you’ does what? Which ‘me’ sacrifices and which me passes through?”
“And I told you in the first conversation that you could trust yourself to know the difference. There is a reality prior to the pronouns or even the differentiation and that is something which you must just ‘sense’ without getting lost in the thicket of artificial distinctions. But here is another way of looking at this.
“You have often reminded yourself and others of Allan Anderson’s counsel that you can never solve a problem on the same level that it exists. Yet to move to a new level always seems to involve or require a sacrifice; a bitter loss. Worse yet, there’s no sense of what is at the next level; if it is really better or even if there is a next level at all. Anderson’s example was a blind man offered surgery to cure his blindness.
“'Show me first,' he says, 'what it’s like to see.' But that, of course, is impossible. There’s simply this leap into an abyss. Something is always sacrificed. Something Here for an unknown There.
“The trick is that once the sacrifice is made, when you move to the new level you discover that nothing has been sacrificed at all. Something has been gained! When you sacrifice the Here for the There, you discover that Here and There are both illusions."
“A very beautiful example of that, as you know, is in C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle where passing ‘through the stable door’ meant entering into a ferocious battle in darkness with the fiercest creatures in the land and almost sure death. But when the children actually passed through the threshold, through the stable door and beyond the experience of darkness, they found themselves in a beautiful sunlit field. Looking back, they saw only the empty frame of the doorway in the middle of the same field. No stable. No monsters. No battle. It was all an illusion. But had they not been willing to sacrifice themselves in the passage, they would never know; just as your experience in the dark tunnel without an opening was followed by your passing through it and having the tunnel disappear altogether. In the end, the sacrifice led only to the loss of illusion.
“How powerful that even Jesus—sacrificing a kingdom and a life under the circumstances of utmost humiliation, failure and pain, cries on the cross, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' This is very important to the point I made before that the posture of death is not to be mistaken for the ‘last moments’ which can indeed be terrible.
"The potent message of Christianity is not the illumination of his last moments, but what continued through the passage. The disciples themselves had to go through the tragic experience of his death as pure loss, only to find Him among them on the road to Emmaeus. All along, Jesus had been teaching the spiritual posture and the eternal life of the divine self that survives the passage through death. But that did not free him or the disciples from fear, loss, betrayal, pain. That is the greatest mystery of the Passion. And of all life.
“This shows too that Time itself is only a dimension. Where is the stable? Where is the battle? Where is the cross? Where is the moment before? When the adolescent looks back at his childhood, where is it? Where is the child? The adolescent has had to sacrifice his childhood for his adolescence. The wife will have to sacrifice her maidenhood to become a mother. Yet there is nothing ‘back there’, all is ‘right here’. In the memory of the mother. Something which, itself, is constantly taking new forms. Memory is an extraordinary power of dimensioning. One that coheres and solidifies a reality in much the way matter accomplishes this in the physical world. But as you see, Time and Memory are themselves inter-lacing dimensions that are part of the compound dimension of human consciousness.
“As in this scene from C.S. Lewis’s book, the only remaining thing beyond the passage of death is the ‘threshold’. That is what is so extraordinary. A perfect touch there. The threshold is what remains because it is the only thing which every dimension has in common. In that sense, ‘you’ are real and abiding as the threshold and all the rest passes through you. A stream of illusions but each of the illusions precious, creative, leading to the next, expanding sentience, consciousness, dimension... And then breathing the whole of it back in to nourish the inward, invisible, fertile dark.”
“Brian Swimme’s ‘all-nourishing abyss’! David Bohm’s ‘implicate order’!” I added, noting the similarities.
“Fine. Or the Buddhist sunyata or the alaya or the Darkness of God Unmanifest as I once described it to you. All of these expressions represent the rich work of dimensioning through words which, like numbers, in the right combination act as gateways. But you must never let them block you off from the fertile darkness or exist for their own sake. This will simply trap you in a dimension and disconnect you from the vital force of the seed which is meant to keep on moving.
“Neither must you dismiss any phases of the passage carelessly as false or insignificant. You must love each thing, not discard it as illusion. Devalue it as unimportant. This is the difference between ‘rejection’ and ‘sacrifice’.
“Your love gives a thing form and presence. Your grieving for its loss—not just dismissing it as illusion—preserves its value. This value is the essence of the ‘creating’ of the universe. Unlike the children in The Last Battle, Jesus does not look back, after passing through the door of death, and see only emptiness beyond the threshold. He lingers in the threshold and turns back to comfort Mary Magdalene and the disciples. To bring evidence of the Life beyond ‘if ye love one another as I have loved you’.
“So you see the object is not to reject the illusion or the creative experience; not to look back and say ‘that life, that relationship, that experience, that person was flawed’ or ‘that world is imperfect’, ‘not real’ or ‘inferior’. The bodhisattva, like Jesus, turns back in the threshold to comfort, care, love, rescue and redeem.”
“Do you remember your dream of the cheetah? It came up from behind you—so powerful, so dangerous that when it reached your side, as in any nightmare, you began to awaken. Instead, however, you chose to hold the dream space—that place of maximum danger—praying over and over ‘Lord, Please let this place not be a killing ground.’ That is what it is like, holding the space in the threshold. Your waking mind told you that it was a dream, an illusion. But inexplicably you chose to remain in that space, between the danger of the creature and imminent death, holding open the threshold with a prayer.”
“THAT is the work of the Bodhisattva. THAT is the work of Christ and the meaning of the words ‘I am the way’—the threshold—‘the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father but through me.’ He was holding open the door. Not founding a doctrine or institution. This was the work of the apostles who followed and tried to enshrine the value in the culture, as generations of Buddhists did with what the Buddha had shown them.
“I have said to you so many times that the human has miraculous gifts and possibilities. The great souls have shown what any individual may do in any moment; open up gateway after gateway with his or her own heart. This is the secret of the new dimension.”
--from Listening: Voices at the Edge - Sheri Ritchlin copyright 1999