Analogue 63

Analogue 63 

The Sacred Quaternity

In this world crops are cultivated and gathered into barns using four elements: soil, water, wind and light. Likewise God also cultivates the world through the elements of trust, hope, love and enlightenment. Our soil is the heart where trust takes root. Hope is the water through which we are nourished. Love is the wind by which we grow, and enlightenment is the Light which causes us to ripen.

It is grace, then, which has caused the humble of the earth to reign over heaven. These have been received into the Realm of the Blessed where the Logos has uplifted their souls. For it is Yeshua, the Anointed One, who has seduced and beguiled us all, and yet he has never coerced or oppressed anyone, and because of this the Blessed Ones become fully realized human beings as well as the Logos. If you should ask us about such beings, any attempt to correctly portray their grandeur would be difficult.

SYNOPSIS

• The quaternity of the four sacred elements (earth, water, wind and fire) are seen as the four graces (or virtues) which allow human beings to mature and prosper using the elementals of both heaven and earth. 
• Earth, water, wind and fire/light (and their correlates necessary for biological growth in the natural world), are paired with analogical virtues in the spiritual world.
• Their spiritual counterparts are: trust, hope, love and knowledge-enlightenment. 
• Knowledge (gnosis) is of the particular kind that is “light filled” (known as enlightenment). This is the best analogue to understand this singular word which has been used throughout the text. It is clearly a form of direct knowledge that changes consciousness flooding it with light.
• Trust, at the level of the heart, is the ground from which everything else grows spiritually. It is the bedrock or the fertile soil of spirituality. The virtue is an earth-like trust which is the stabilizing force of the soul. 
• Hope is a form of living water—the deep, flowing water that only a transcendent-immanence can give. Hope is, therefore, a life-giving element that flows from another world but nourishing spiritual life in this one. 
• Love is a different kind of flowing through the air of Spirit. Deep living water and the high winds of Spirit bring nourishment from below and breathable air from above. Acts of love are respiratory—a breathing in of the spiritual air so we do not suffocate, and expelling another kind of air as gift. Love, then, is akin to the climate, the atmospherics, or the weather patterns allowing spiritual growth. 
• Light, as a form of direct knowing, is the enlightening energy emanating from above that so that we not only grow but ripen and mature, becoming fully ourselves. It is the knowledge that touches and brings us to readiness. 
• Direct-knowing is what ripens into enlightenment and is understood to be a developmental process. 
• The description of becoming transcendent (and the elements from the divine realm necessary for it to occur), is what can be thought of as spiritual alchemy. 
• How the humble of earth become sovereign in the heavens, from being subjects of space time to becoming rulers (or sovereigns) in the realm of transcendence is the outcome of this process.
• Grace is a divine self-donation (a self-giving) which is the creative force enabling all becoming. 
• Spiritual elementals as forms of grace, and the manifestations of Logos, are made available to create a new structure of being and the condition for their transmission. 
• The role of Yeshua is that of an attractive and beguiling force. The power of the Anointed One who can beguile us, becomes for us an attractive, but never a coercive, force. This is the way that the restoration of all things proceeds. 
• The Blessed Ones are human beings who, in transition, become Logos — templates (and and the passing on of that template) through praxis involving words and action. They realize their full potential as “Logothetes” (Logo-centric beings). 
• These exchanges are taking place often beyond thought and description, but are nonetheless real. 

COMMENTARY

The Four Fundamental Elements

We might call this analogue a meditation on the four fundamental elements—those realities that are necessary both for existence (life on this planet), as well as their analogues in the world of spirit. There are certain basic essentials that make life possible along both axes of being—the horizontal world of space and time, and the vertical dimensions that constitute spiritual transcendence and immanence. The latter is spelled out here in a focused discourse that uses biological and agricultural metaphors on earth. However, in an analogical way, they express the belief that the divine Reality cultivates (one might even be willing to say, “farms”) the world of humankind with the intent of producing a great and bountiful harvest. Such metaphors appear over and over again in the early sacred writings, coming from that region of the world we call the “cradle of civilization” (the Levant in the Middle East) where agriculture was said to have first appeared. 

The ancients concluded that the fundamental forces governing all life on the planet were earth itself, water, wind, and fire (or light). Because light for them was always a constituent feature of fire, it also symbolized both the blaze of the Sun and the warmth of fire. These four elements were universally acknowledged across the planet as essentials for life, and from which everything else was formed. Look around you in the natural world, and you will see their presence: the earth beneath your feet supporting all life as its foundational principle (but in itself a complexity made up of many other constituent elements). Water, the ubiquitous ingredient that makes all life possible, taking many forms, without which nothing can live. Wind, breath, air, atmosphere, climate and weather. How can we exist without the slow build-up of gases that blow across the planet and sustain living things. In its global flow it supports, breathes into and through all living creatures. Fire and light, streaming first from the Sun as source, but is gathered and stored as energy. Light lifts everything else into existence as, perhaps, the foundational energetic element, without which we would perish and cease to be. Working together these form what we call the living Web of Life. 

In the physical world, we are totally dependent upon each of these. In the spiritual world, the divine Mind and Heart cultivates the world of humankind through the spiritual ecology of a different set of elements with analogues to the fundamental four. They are trust, hope, love and enlightenment. These are the essential elements without which a spiritual life cannot even exist. They are the “organics” (necessary, living ingredients) for all life in the Spirit, making divine life, growth and maturation possible. 

Spiritual Fundamentals

The author likens the heart to the fundamental ground of our spiritual being. Think of the heart as “spiritual earth.” It is there that seeds from the world of Spirit fall and take root. It is from that ground that they begin to grow in a soil type called trust. Psychologically, in the human world, we cannot grow, flourish or mature without a sense of fundamental trust in our parents or in the familiar world around us. If that is missing or disturbed, the overall development of a child is troubled. When trust is broken (or is missing) we feel rootless and disoriented, often experiencing developmental arrest. Conversely, when a sense of trust nurtures our early growth, we become established and grounded, growing from that rootedness. 

Conventional teachings have typically equated faith or trust with a belief system. This is particular true in western Christianity, where believing the right doctrines (about who or what Jesus was, for example) is considered to be true faith, orthodoxy, or right belief. This understanding, however, is not the basis for the trust or faith being spoken about here. Instead, it is an inward condition of trust in certain realities that stabilize us in the ground of our spiritual being. We plant our feet on (or root our being in) that firm reality (not a belief system about it). Beginning to live it because we trust it, we come to find it trustworthy as a sustainer of life, though we may not entirely understand it.  

Like water, hope is an elemental flowing that nourishes spiritual life and keeps it growing. It is often difficult to express hope because we may burden ourselves with false hopes based upon our own egoic desires that eventually fail us. These specious hopes are for things that can only self-satisfy, not at depth, but at the surface level of our lives. It is difficult (if not impossible), however, for a person to go through life and it’s vicissitudes without some sense of hope (which we sometimes call dreams), though our imaginings may inevitably disappoint us. It is crucial, therefore, that we have the inner watering of hope coming from some place other than ourselves, for example, from the imaginal world, Mundas Imaginalis. There exists a world of meanings, symbols and metaphors which, like water, when it reaches us, keeps us alive by deeply nurturing our roots with vision and insight. We are always thirsty for and drinking from this well-spring of meanings, which creates hope for larger possibilities in us—quenching our thirst and drowning our fears. Water has so many other properties and associations, all of which have analogues in the spiritual realms that this Gospel is revealing. 

Love blows across the world on the breath of the unseen Spirit, donating its life-giving properties and energies to makes things thrive and grow. Imagine the opposite: a lack of oxygen suffocating all life including earth’s creatures and humankind. When we say that someone is oxygen starved or deprived, we can understand the analogy much better using the element of love. We can begin to understand its free-flowing and life-giving nature and its necessity in the spiritual environment by which we either do or do not flourish. Love circulates invisibly through the inner ecology of our world; through the societies, cultures, and religions of humankind even in diminished forms. More fundamentally, we may say that the whole universe is a loving expression of the Divine which would not exist if love were not at the heart of everything. Loving-desire (eros), longing for relationship and belonging, are built into everything. Without it we cannot exist and would cease to flourish. 

Finally, in this series, there is light, which equates to an enlightened consciousness. Being filled with light as the “fire of consciousness” is the ground of all human knowing and awareness. Without the light of consciousness self awareness, there would be nothing that we could call human. With this light we know ourselves to be at least “relatively real” in our own awareness and self-understanding. From this awakening, we begin to explore the realities around us, and come to know their characteristic features. Without the light of consciousness, there would be no knowing, only an unconscious darkness. (Interestingly, however, in mysterious ways, knowing darkness even in this Gospel is said to be its own form of wisdom). More importantly, perhaps, ripening into greater maturity (or completion), is expressed as the gift of Light shining upon us until we are fully real and radiating Light. When this light increases within, we begin to see beyond ourselves and, finally, we become a source of light within ourselves. This is the deeper meaning of Enlightenment which is understood to be the final state of all humankind. These four elementals of spiritual life, then, without which spirituality itself cannot truly exist, allow us to move inexorably toward that ultimate destiny.

The author likens the heart 

to the fundamental ground of our spiritual being.

The author then introduces the word grace understood as the divine largesse. It is the compassionate self-giving which is the loving kindness of the divine energies. It is also this same grace that allows those who are humble on earth to reach sovereignty in the realms of transcendence (the heavens). In this analogue,  ascension toward sovereignty is described as the gift of the Logos which raises the station and consciousness of human beings into realms of blessedness (or bliss). Such a state is not only an ecstatic event, it is a permanent station of lived reality, lifting creatures of earth out of the darkness and from their normal boundaries into the transcendent realms of the heavens. This is perhaps how best to understand the term ascension—Yeshua’s and ours. 

The Divine Attractor

The Logos, taken to be the mind and manifestation of divine Consciousness itself (working on behalf of everything in existence), may be seen the creation’s and humankind’s most basic catalyst. There is nothing like the Logos because it plays the role of the divine attractor who also arrived and was radically present in the Anoint One. Like a magnet, this divine Agent-as-catalyst was able to draw humankind into his orbit of influence. Perhaps it would be better to say, the Logos, manifesting through Yeshua, was able to attract humankind  like a lover. Fulfilling the will and mind of the Creator expressed through the divine Word, it drew and continues to draw all beings into blessedness. It is our willingness to be attracted (but not coerced), which lifts us from one level of being into another. 

This expression of the divine energies working through the Logos, also describes the pure potentiality of humankind. The true nature of human beings is fully realized when what was originally planted and then tended in time becomes manifest, allowing the design of the Logos within the seed (its entelechy) to burst its own boundaries (its shell) to be fully revealed. The energies that draw human beings out of themselves (bursting the shell of the egoic seed) are the basic four spiritual elements under the aegis of the Logos. Who can say what the final realization of humanity will be or what it will ultimately mean for any of us? Who knows now how our destiny will appear to us? We are called upon, however, to trust the process grounded in ours experience on earth growing toward heaven. What we learn, however, is that all of this describes the work and mission of the Messiah as the Anointed One who is said never to have coerced us (but only attracted us) into these relationships and encounters with divine Reality. Growth must never be coercive but attractive, inexorably drawing us towards higher levels of consciousness and being into that final relationship of Oneness which is our destiny. There we know the same state that belongs to all the Blessed Ones. 

 

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. If you were to imagine the four elements used in this analogue as necessities for a vibrant life along both axes, how might you draw or diagram these? You could, for example, see them as a three dimensional medicine wheel, or as a tree (the Tree of Life). 
2. Although the mixture of all four: earth, water, wind and fire, make up the realities of our living world, traditionally understood, is there a predominance of one more than the other? If you also describe these as essential characteristics for life along the vertical axis, how would you apply them to your own spiritual life?
3. Of the four (describing the fundamental building blocks of spiritual reality), which one is most important to you at this moment? What might you be needing from it and why? 
4. Although ascending and descending are always principle movements along the vertical axis, this passage seems to describe ascension in a new way. What do you notice about it? How have you experienced this form of ascension? What about its opposite: descent into intimacy and immanence?
5. Perhaps only dimly perceived, do you have the sense in your own life that there is a divine attractor moving you toward some destiny? Is this attraction associated with a sacred being or person like Yeshua? From  sacred traditions themselves, what has been drawing you forward? Have you ever felt coerced in any way? Where has coercion in religion come from? What has its opposite felt like for you?  

NOTES FOR FURTHER STUDY 

AND REFERENCE

1. It has been repeatedly noted in this commentary that Enlightenment is a form of knowing which brings insight and understanding to a soul lacking light. True knowing (the light of expanded awareness and conscious understanding), are the final and perhaps highest elements available to the soul. As in plant-life, they cause it to grow from out of the earth into the atmosphere of love where light, as its first formative element, might then awaken it further into growth, flowering and fruiting. Each of these four traditional elements are highly symbolic and have been so across many eastern and western traditions. Here, of course, they are expressed as fundamental forces understood to possess divine qualities which add energy to the process, directing the human soul’s trajectory toward the Messianic goal. Through their unique characteristics, these divine elements move human consciousness toward an ultimate expression. As the last words in this analogue expresses, this passages describes the realized state in a way which is almost beyond imagining. Words have difficulty articulating these realities, and yet they must try in order to encourage us.  
2. The fundamental difference between faith as a belief system and the process of learning to trust as a spiritual practice, is always at the heart of the meaning of the word faith or belief (however it may be translated). In theological thought, these terms have been turned in the direction of creeds and religious systems of beliefs, whereas the original writers of these ancient texts saw it quite differently. Faith and trust are qualities and capacities (not simply beliefs) within the human soul. Rooted in the heart, they allow individuals to develop confidence in a relationship that sustains itself through the vicissitudes of life over time. Much of this same thought is contained in the later writings of Jean Pierre de-Caussade who taught how this fundamental principle is practiced on a daily basis of fundamental trust. This was written in an 18th century treatise whose title is often translated as Abandonment to Divine Providence (Tan Books, 2010). 
3. The ultimate realization of what it means to experience the human pilgrimage is being described in these last analogues of the Gospel of Philip. Each one adds to the final picture. As has been discussed earlier, the term theosis (the complete transformation of a human into God’s own life-form, substance, and conscious mind) has been the divine purpose, end state, and goal for humankind all along. The metaphor of aiming an arrow at a target and reaching it with the active thrust of the bow, is an apt one describing God’s aim. The work of Yeshua was to move humanity toward the deification or divinization of the soul. In these and the final analogues (in a burst of extraordinary vision), that goal, the movement toward it, and the ultimate outcomes from it, are described by this Gospel. Each analogue fills in further details necessary for our understanding.  
4. Ascension and resurrection are traditional terms that describe the movement of the soul along the vertical axis from out of the horizontal plane. Again, the goal is theosis. We often describe ascension and resurrection in terms of space and time as physical realities (and they may be), but they most certainly refer to dimensions outside space and time that equate to inner states of being and consciousness while also living in time. 

Notes on the Translation 

• The use of the word “enlightenment” is an attempt to express a deeper meaning for the term gnosis which is used throughout this text than simply knowing about something, or the accumulation of facts. We feel that the use of the term enlightenment is justified because the ancient designation of gnosis signifies the knowledge which gives light (understanding and insight) through direct-experience.
• In the second paragraph that speaks of Logos, there is an ambiguity. At that place in the text there is a gap with a letter that indicates perhaps the term “the Logos” as traditionally understood. However the text speaks of it as “his logos” so it could be referring to the logos of the soul itself which has been created or made to live within the greater Logos which actually created and uplifts it.
• The words “seduced” or “beguiled” translate a Greek term which indicates that Yeshua has had to use a ploy or a ruse to bring us to this point much in the same way that a parent often employs such devices to get a child to pay attention in order to do something new or different. Yet whatever Yeshua has done has never been to bully or coerce anyone. Likewise, the words coerced or oppressed translate a Greek term which carries exactly those meanings.