Andrew Cort's Blog, page 5

Something to Hold Onto

Sam: In the end it’s only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it’ll shine out the clearer…. I know now folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?

Sam: That there’s some good in the world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.

The Sacred Feminine in the Bible: THE SAMARITAN WOMAN (Part 2)

At this point, the disciples appear. John tells us they were “astonished that he was speaking with a woman”, but they wisely kept their mouths shut. The Samaritan woman then left and went back to her village, where she told everyone about Jesus and asked them whether they thought he could be the Messiah. We’re told that “many believed in him because of the woman’s testimony.” Then they “left the city” and went to meet him.

Meanwhile, the text says that Jesus’ own disciples had gone “to the city” in search of food – in other words, they had gone off in the opposite direction, away from Christ, seeking sustenance in the lower realm, in Samaria, while the residents of Samaria were ironically coming upward, searching for sustenance in Christ. Now the disciples have returned and they urge Jesus to eat. But he says he has other food, food they know nothing about. Like the Samaritan woman, they take this literally and ask each other, ‘who gave him food?’ Jesus patiently tries to explain, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.” He then tells them not to think that someday ‘in the future’ the harvest will be ready. The harvest of this food is here now. Open your ‘eyes’, he says, “and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting.”

At this point the Samaritans arrive and ask him to spend time with them, and Jesus “stayed there two days”. After this experience they said to the woman, “it is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

This is a major point that the Bible often makes but no one seems to hear it! Faith is not ‘believing what someone else tells us’. Belief is simply adhering to one conviction or another on thoughtless and inadequate grounds: perhaps because someone told us to believe it, perhaps because believing it makes us happy or comfortable, perhaps because it spares us the effort of thinking for ourselves. Faith, on the other hand, is the result of one’s own authentic experience of the reality of God. Faith is knowing, with absolute certainty, for oneself, from one’s own inner efforts and experience.

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You can read all my work on the Women in the Bible in “The Sacred Chalice”

The Sacred Feminine in the Bible: THE SAMARITAN WOMAN (Part 1)

In the Gospel of John, Jesus comes to ‘Jacob’s Well’ where Jacob had met Rachel. But this time a high representative of the Feminine doesn’t appear. Instead, a lower representative appears, a Samaritan woman who doesn’t recognize Christ (though she’s heard he’s coming and hopes to see him). She draws some water and Jesus asks for a drink. She’s surprised, since Jews did not share things with Samaritans. Jesus says, “If you knew who is saying, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

But this is the lower Feminine principle, and she gives herself away with a literal and superficial question: “Sir, you have no bucket and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” Jesus answers “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water I give them will never be thirsty.”

She still doesn’t understand, and responds somewhat comically, “Sir, give me this water, so I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” Jesus, perhaps a bit exasperated, tells her to “Go, call your husband, and come back.” At first, this seems an odd bit of chauvinism, but he’s speaking symbolically and what this means is that her consciousness is completely attuned to her lower physical nature, which is why she understands everything literally, and he wants her to turn to her higher Mind, her proper ‘husband’. But she says, “I have no husband.” “You’re right”, he says, “for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.” The five husbands are her five senses, none of which is appropriate. In other words, she is ‘wed’ – attached – to the material world.

Slowly, she begins to get a little clearer. She still can’t ‘see’ very well, but she wants to — and this means she eventually will. “I know the Messiah is coming”, she says. And Jesus says, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

(Come back tomorrow and read Part 2)

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You can read all my work on the Women in the Bible in “The Sacred Chalice”

The Sacred Feminine in the Bible: RAHAB (Part 2)

Like the Greek Gaia, Rahab is the ancient archetype that underlies the power of the Sacred Feminine. The Feminine power in the scriptures is not some soft, sweet, gentle child, representing all the ‘nice’ qualities that are missing in men. She is the Shechinah, the ‘Presence’ of God in the Creation, the force that hovers over the Ark of the Covenant, the ‘Mother of All Living’ who pours forth all the forms and qualities in the infinite universe. She is Chaos, the turbulent passions. She is the Beauty of Rachel and the Wisdom of Leah. She is Miriam’s prophetic power. She embodies the mysteries of blood, sex, birth, and death. She is the Sea, the boundless power of the Unconscious. She is the Mother and the Whore and the Wife and the Destroyer. In Jericho, she lives in a great tower, high above the city. Rahab was said to be the most beautiful woman in the world, a theme we have seen before when a woman in the story represents the Sacred Feminine.

As always, the Masculine needs her protection, so when the king of Jericho heard rumors of spies, Rahab hid the two men on her roof and convinced the king to take his soldiers out of the city and search for them in the nearby hills. Then she made a deal with the men that when the day of Jericho’s destruction came, they would first come and rescue her and her family. The spies of course agreed.

This is the end of the story in the Hebrew Bible, so now, as the soul begins its final battle and ascends to Enlightenment, Rahab, the Sacred Feminine, must reunite with Joshua, the Sacred Masculine, so that together they can merge back into Oneness and return home to God. The Shechinah was present at the beginning of Creation, she imbues all levels of Creation from the lowest to the highest, and she is still present here at the end of the story waiting for the Masculine to return. Just before the final destruction of Jericho, Rahab, the rescuer who saved the spies, is rescued in return, and she returns to Israel where the Bible says, “she continues to dwell to this very day.”

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You can read all my work on the Women in the Bible in “The Sacred Chalice”

The Sacred Feminine in the Bible: RAHAB (Part 1)

Not long after Miriam’s death, Aaron passed away. Moses soon named Joshua as his successor, and then he, too, passed away.

The soul’s journey to Enlightenment, symbolized as the long ‘Return to the Promised Land’, is coming to an end. Just before Joshua and the Israelites enter the Promised Land, Joshua sends two spies on a reconnaissance mission. The spies set out for Jericho, according to the Bible, “and they came to the house of a harlot named Rahab and lodged there.”

Now why, of all places, would Joshua’s spies go to the house of a harlot? Doesn’t the Bible say that God hates harlots?

God does not hate anyone. A ‘harlot’ symbolizes the seductive sensations and desires that inflame our lower nature but leave the soul unsatisfied.

The name ‘Rahab’ means proud or arrogant, and it is a term that is sometimes used to signify the material domain of ‘Egypt’. Jericho, Rahab’s city, means Moon – which is another symbol for the illusory level of life that ‘Egypt’ also represents. The soul’s first mission in the Promised Land will be to once and for all completely destroy ‘Jericho’, so that no illusions or attachments remain and the soul can reach enlightenment.

But ‘Rahab’ means something else as well. Rahab symbolizes the primordial Chaos that was ‘vanquished by the Creator’ in Hebrew legends. For example, Isaiah will later say: “It was You that hacked Rahab in pieces, That pierced the Dragon. It was You that dried up the Sea, The waters of the great deep.” And Job will say: “By His power He stilled the sea; By His skill He struck down Rahab”. The Greeks will later tell the same story. In their version, the first goddess, Gaia, the transcendent Mother-principle, is Chaos. The first god, Uranos, who represents the Light of Reason, stills the turbulent waters and brings Order to Chaos.

According to another legend from the oral tradition in the Talmud and Kabbalah, Joshua was swallowed by a ‘sea-monster’ in his infancy, but at a distant point of the sea-coast the monster spewed him forth unharmed. So on a deep psychological level, we can see that Rahab was the sea-monster who spewed forth Joshua – in mythical terms, his ‘mother’. Later on, according to the legends, Joshua will marry Rahab (in her current incarnation as the ‘harlot of Jericho’), so she is also his ‘wife’. This is a recurrent theme in scripture and mythology. Eve was Adam’s wife, but she was also his Mother – since he calls her ‘the Mother of all Living’. In Greek mythology, some stories have Gaia as Uranos’ wife, while in other stories she’s his mother. The Sacred Masculine and the Sacred Feminine are wed in the ‘Above’ (prior to separation into the sexes). But for the Masculine to enter this world ‘Below’, he must come to birth through the Feminine and thereby become her son.

(Come back for Part 2 of Rahab’s story tomorrow)

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You can read all my work on the Women in the Bible in “The Sacred Chalice”

The Beauty and Nobility of Life

I did a radio interview the other day with Mike Schwager on his ‘Enrichment Hour’. He titled the show the same as the name of my upcoming book: “The Beauty and Nobility of Life: The Restoration of Meaning in a World Overwhelmed by Commercialism, Scientism, and Fundamentalism”.

We talked during the hour about a ton of things, from the repercussions of meaninglessness, to the wonderful diversity and concurrent underlying Unity of all our traditions and cultures (the Oneness of Life), to the Sacred Feminine and why it must be regained, to the Middle East, and even a bit about Nutrition.

Have a listen here! [there are 4 segments in 4 audios at the bottom of the page]. http://wsradio.com/091414-beauty-nobility-life-restoration-meaning-world-overwhelmed-commercialism-scientism-fundamentalism/

September 11, 2014 — And EVERY Day

A good day to pour out into the world as many prayers for peace and as much positive meditative power as possible.

Rumi once wrote:

“You’re always asking what time it is.

It’s time to pray”

September 11, 2014

A good day to pour out into the world as many prayers for peace and as much positive meditative power as possible.

Mind -v- Body

We are the heirs of ‘Logical Positivism’, a philosophical endeavor that seeks to impose scientific thinking into every aspect of our lives by suggesting that all forms of human knowledge should aspire to the same sort of rigorous rationality as science. According to the canons of logical positivism a statement is meaningful only if it can be determined, through sensory observations or scientific experimentation, to be either true or false: anything that cannot be analyzed in this simple manner is considered meaningless, unworthy of the concern of serious people. Thus do we attempt to reject all the wonder and mystery of life, which means, on the one hand, that we are lying to ourselves (under the guise of being rational and intellectually sophisticated), and on the other hand, that our constricted minds have seceded from our emotions and intuitions, shattering the soul into fragments.

This viewpoint separates the visible world of matter (which we can supposedly analyze objectively and which therefore is considered exclusively ‘real’), from the invisible world of mind (which cannot be analyzed objectively and is therefore considered ‘not real’). The ‘real world’ portrayed by this positivist science has quantities but no qualities, and is without significance. Quantities are objective characteristics which can be measured, weighed, or counted. These are not matters of opinion. But qualities can be debated: a person coming in from a snowstorm into a sixty degree room might say ‘it feels warm’, while a person coming out of a sauna into the very same room might say ‘it feels cold’. These and other subjective qualities impart meaning and color and significance to our experience, but meaning disintegrates in a world where everything * even our thoughts, emotions, inspirations, etc. * are believed to be nothing more than measurable quantities.

Of course, none of us live in such a world, dense with numerical calculations but devoid of meaning. Our arms do not rise up due to mere laws of mechanics: we raise them deliberately because we desire to take hold of something. Even a lost dog seeking its home is not moving its four limbs aimlessly. A sharp division between consciousness and the physical world is annulled by these fundamental observations, and a rigid obsession with such distinctions only serves to distort the truth of our actual experience.

The Mythic Imagination

“I believe that the mythic revival that is now under way is no mere fad. In modern times myths have been thought of as illusions, but if so, they are the kind that still retain the power, as Joseph Campbell put it, ‘to carry the human spirit forward.’ Psychologist Jean Houston identified myth as the cognitive and emotional DNA of the psyche – somehow ever new, always generative, yet as old as the hills that hide the ancient secrets of our race.

“The fresh and open mind of the child creates and understands myth intuitively, whereas the psychotherapist, the creative writer, and the scholar labor long to mine myth’s rich veins of wisdom and creative inspiration. Yet even now, myth emerges as the legacy of the whole planet. To understand other people and other cultures and the images we share – and fail to share – with our fellows, we must learn an aboriginal language: the universal tongue of the human imagination. With its inexhaustible vocabulary of symbol and story, it is at once our ancestral birthright and the ever-brimming well of dreams into which we look to find our future. I call this innate resource of ours ‘the mythic imagination.’”

– Stephen Larsen. Ph.D

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