Analogue 27: Becoming Real

ANALOGUE 27

It is not possible for a person to see the higher realities of existence unless that person has become as real as they are. Not so, however, with individuals in this world. A person can see the sun without becoming the sun, or the heavens and earth without becoming them. Matters of truth, however, are different. What you see from beyond comes because you yourself are transcending towards them. You’ve seen the Spirit because you are becoming Spirit. You’ve seen the Anointed One because you yourself are becoming anointed. You’ve seen the Father because you are becoming fatherly. However, in this world though you see everything, still you do not see yourself. Should you come to see yourself in that realm beyond this world, you would become what you see.

• This analogue concerns both visionary seeing—seeing beyond the normal spectrum of ordinary sight—involving matters of spiritual or sacred truth, and about the ontological or transformational change introduced by the last analogue.
• Entirely new metaphysical perspectives are presented based on the processes of becoming real. To become real is to move toward Transcendent Reality. 
• This introduces divine destiny as the end goal, the future of those who are baptized into the divine qualities or colors. 
• The process is not passive, but an activity turning something into that which it was not before. 
• Theosis: becoming divine—divinization—is to be a permanent feature of humankind.
• Human beings are not yet transcendent, but they shall be, they were made for this destiny.
• When they become fully transcendent they will see in a transcendent way—and the realities of transcendence will be their reality and therefore their seeing—their way of perceiving. 
• The instrument of seeing has changed. The Philippian Trinity suggests levels of seeing (different modes in the spectrum of seeing): Realities from the Source, from the dynamics of sacred Spirit, from the human perspective but now possessing anointed consciousness. 
• Seeing ourselves, not from the temporal perspective but from the viewpoint of transcendence and Eternity, effects greater and faster evolution. 

COMMENTARY

Being is Knowing

In this analogue we are moving even more deeply into the mysteries of immersion into the waters of life introduced in the previous analogue. In order to understand what the heart of the matter (and what the meaning of permanence) actually is, the Gospel elaborates further with new understanding and deeper insight. If this analogue comes to us from the original wisdom teaching’s of Yeshua, then we can see how profound his perception of the human condition actually was, and what was required in order to change it. He knew that the lens of knowing (the perception of insight) was not simply the addition of ideas acquired intellectually from some domain of knowledge (or told to us as a teaching or a thought process), but that true knowledge came through changes in the very instrument of one’s own being. True knowledge (or the knowledge of truth) is determined by being, and being determines the truth of what one knows and can perceive. 

This teaching clarifies that in the normal world, you can know “about” many things, and even experience many things without actually experiencing or becoming them or being changed by them. You can know light and its warmth from the sun and enjoy it, but that does not mean that you can become radiant and full of light—a light source yourself. The divine Agenda, however, is to turn humankind into the very qualities of transcendence that they perceive. So many principles of Perennial Wisdom are expressed in this surprisingly complex analogue, especially the meaning of divinization or deification. 

Divinization

What divinization or deification means is that we are subjectively transformed into the very substance of our desiring and destiny. If our destiny is to move toward the Source and to know it, and if it we are to have relationship with it as a fully realized Human Being, then something must profoundly change in us. If, for example, we are to see and know Spirit (to see spiritually), then fundamentally our own nature has to be transformed or transmuted into the essence of the thing seen. This is far beyond simply having a knowledge about them as a kind of “object lesson.” It involves becoming, a process that goes well beyond the mind per se and includes the total evolution of human nature itself. 

From our vantage point, perhaps, this definition of human destiny appears to be impossible—a mere fantasy. But one would have to say the same thing about a caterpillar on its way to becoming a butterfly if you had not actually seen the reality of it yourself. To imagine that a worm could fly, shedding it earth-bound state for one that transcends the weight of gravity in order to soar into the air around it, also sound like pure fantasy, unless of course, you have actually witnessed the process. Seeing, in this case, is believing.  

These understandings define a term which will be used later in the tradition (in the Patristic period following the writing of the Gospels) describing the radical transformation or metamorphosis of a human being. In the early tradition, theosis is the word used for the divinization or deification of humanity (becoming God-like). It means turning our species into a metamorphic form fully and permanently manifesting its divinity. It asserts that one is meant to become like the Source. Divine energies are required to make that happen. To become as real as these higher realities are, requires a kind of synergy brought on by the immersion process of the previous analogue—baptism into the water of Zoe—the divine Life that begins to catalyze the process. 

Spiritual Evolution through Praxis

To perceive anything that is transcendent to the horizontal axis and to become what one perceives, requires that we evolve toward them—toward a destiny in a realm beyond this world. The greater the evolution, the more profound is the possibility of seeing its possibility. The process is catalytic and synergistic. The greater our own growth now, the greater is the possibility we will begin to perceive ourselves as we shall be in the great Age beyond (but including) this one. Becoming what you see as you evolve toward it means that the perception itself becomes catalytic to the process as an act of exchange between the destiny itself and the process which produces these effects. This possibility, of course, lies at the very heart of the mysteries Yeshua is teaching through this Gospel. We know by analogy, however, that for individuals to develop great feats of skill (let us imagine in gymnastics), they have to be able to witness for themselves its possibility and then begin to envision it as they train and move toward that actuality. Seeing, envisioning and training is the accomplishment requiring the practice of that skill. It needs to be shown to be possible, and then the becoming begins as part of the practice.  

Theosis, therefore, is not simply a new state of being, it is also the result of a contemplative praxis in which we hold our destiny in the heart’s eye (or more precisely, see it through vision in the eye of the heart), giving the process a catalytic boost. As the author says, Should you come to see yourself in that realm beyond this world, you would become what you see. This indeed is a state of visionary seeing creating a very mysterious form of being, requiring what the next analogue suggests, both faith and love. 

One can begin to see the sweep of thought that begins in Analogue Twenty when we are instructed to ask questions of the Mother—existential ones perhaps—about existence and our own lives within space and time. Questions are about death and its meaning, the nature of evil, our beginnings, and the relationships that we have to each other and the world around us. These questions, of course, all arise within the context of living. Answers and responses to our questions are coming from the Mother of Wisdom, and these are being given to us all along the way. Though some are perhaps strange or new to us, nevertheless, they open doors to fresh ways of thinking and perceiving offered by the Mother (Sophia Perennis). As Sacred Spirit, she begins to to act upon creation to bring it ultimately to the point of transformative deification—to the perfected form of human-being full of the nobility and the divine life. We are led across (baptized into) a fierce landscape back to Paradise and to our eternal home, through territory that is full of distortion and loss, and yet the land of our re-making. This theme continues to develop across the narrative of this Gospel as its visionary base. 

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. This analogue unveils a very mysterious teaching concerning the spiritual evolution of human-beings through processes of perception and practice that bring us to the contemplative heart of the Journey of Eternal Return towards our Source. Can you sketch out these processes in your own words? Take time to think about and then journal them as if you were explaining it to someone who had never heard about these deeper “mysteries.” 
2. The term theosis requires us to accept a destiny beyond the normal conceptions of what it means to be human. If a caterpillar was explaining the theosis of butterflies to other caterpillars, what would it say? How might its fellow creatures react? Have you ever experienced trying to express a visionary possibility that seemed impossible to other?
3. What does it mean to become fatherly? What is the experience and practice of being anointed? What might it mean to become Spirit? Is that the same thing as “spiritual,” or is it different?
4. Have you ever seen a possible image (picture or glimpse) of your future self? How would you describe that? If you have the opportunity, listen to  and watch some descriptions of Near Death Experience on YouTube where individuals have seen themselves in a future state, as well as those of their loved ones. What do you learn from their descriptions?
5. What do Yeshua’s resurrection appearances in the early stories of Christianity teach us concerning his own evolutionary process? 

Notes for Reference and Further Study

1. The subject, teaching and doctrine of divinization (theosis) is not new to the Christian world, in fact it is ancient, rooted into early tradition. However, for the most part, in the West it has been lost as a teaching (though the Orthodox world) carries the teaching of it into the Twenty-first century. A summary statement expressing this teaching from the patristic period of Christian history is: God became human in order that humans might become God. As radical (even heretical) as this sounds to our ears, this was a fundamental teaching of early Christianity. Perhaps its very audacity made it suspect in later centuries, but it was clearly expressed in the first four hundred years. In order to understand this teaching fully, it would be good to read about and become familiar with its ancient sources through the writings of Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism (2013, second edition). What is clear from the Gospel of Philip is that the truth of theosis was not a later summary of the Christian tradition, but was grounded in the very mysteries that Yeshua knew and was teaching. If the premise holds that this Gospel contains Yeshua’s visionary seeing and wisdom (the teaching of the musterion of Yeshua), then this inner wisdom of the mysteries, was shared with a few, but not with all perhaps at the time of his ministry as the Gospel narratives explain (Matthew 13:11, Thomas 62).
2. Eye of the heart and kardial perception is a fundamental aspect which we possess secretly at the depths of our own being. It is true, however, that this Eye may be shut, blind or occluded. Sacred traditions (including Christianity) are fairly clear that humans live blindly leaving that part of themselves inactive (in the way a radio is said to be dead when it has no contact with a power source or is turned on to a radio signal). The activation of this aspect of us is a kind of awakening that is said to come through the power of Spirit and at a critical point in our spiritual evolution—when we are ready for that awakening (in the same way that a baby is born when it is ready to be born). This eye, however, perceives things that our normal eyes (our physical and sense perceptions are not capable of receiving). Acting analogously perhaps to an electron microscope or a gamma ray telescope, the heart works in frequencies beyond normal light—along wavelengths (or levels of consciousness) that are unique to themselves. 
3. Near Death Experience (NDE) is a phenomenon that is not unique to this century, but is now experienced more frequently because of advanced medical technologies that can resuscitate individuals who are clinically dead. Individuals would be (or are pronounced to be) dead, but then after some time they are resuscitated and brought back to life using these technologies. When they return from these events, many speak of out-of-body experiences involving realms beyond space and time. They often describe traveling into transcendent spaces and meeting individuals, entities and beings there who greet and guide them. The corpus of this material is now quite large. Many studies have been done, and there is much available for the ordinary person to read or listen to online. Raymond Moody’s Life After Life (2015, special edition) was one of the first texts to explore this new territory in the modern world. YouTube has multiple episodes available for exploration. 

Notes from the Translation

1. The phrase “realities of existence” translates a comparable phrase in the original text which suggests that one perceives those things in that place where they are grounded or established.
2. In the final sentences there is a missing piece which may suggest that one sees both into this world and into the realm of spirit beyond our world.