Christopher Mark Hanson
As soon as one of God’s children begins earnestly to seek Him, the Path opens before that devotee in a most mysterious and divine way. As if from nowhere, the most appropriate information and people begin to manifest before him and lead him to the goal he so desires. This has been the experience of every sincere seeker throughout all time and many there are who will attest to this Truth.
Not long after an Enlightened Teacher has departed, and sometimes even before he has done so, the tendency for his unenlightened followers to externalise the sublime Truths of the saint’s message becomes apparent. In due course of time, the Universal Truth that the particular Master brought to the world takes on a new image: orthodox, dogma-bound, externalised and almost unrecognisable from its original form.
The end result of such a process is that instead of taking the eminently tougher road to the Inner Jerusalem, his followers begin to make pilgrimages to the outer Jerusalem. Instead of mourning tears of separation at the inner psychological barrier, the Wailing Wall situated at the Single Eye, waiting in anguish for God to open the door to his ‘Zion’ of Cosmic Consciousness, mankind begins to yearn or weep at a physical Wailing Wall that is merely a symbol of the internal experience. Similarly, the highest spiritual centres in the mountains and hills of the human head become geographic phenomena and the Star of the East is transformed into an astrological miracle. Christianity is by no means the only victim of this unfortunate trend.
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Enlightened Ones commonly identify the ‘geography’ of the body by means of the four Cardinal or Magnetic Points: North (the head), South (the feet), West (the rear) and East (the front). The Single Eye lies in the front of the body (the east) and within it can be found the bright star of Cosmic Consciousness. For these reasons the centre of Cosmic Consciousness in the Single Eye is sometimes identified as the ‘Star of the East’. Quite clearly the wise men, coming from the east to visit the baby Jesus lying in his crib in Bethlehem, could not have been following a star in the eastern sky as this would have been behind them. They were in fact following intuitive guidance coming from the ‘inner star’ at the seat of Cosmic Consciousness.
It is by means of this Cardinal Point system that Genesis records the Lord creating mankind by planting a ‘garden’ of spiritual centres in the body of man through the medium of the Single Eye (eastward in Eden):
And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
(Genesis 2: 8)
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Genesis records that when God made man, the archetypal Adam, he ‘breathed’ His own life into each human body as an individualised soul.
And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
(Genesis 2: 7)
The Perennial Philosophy however, provides much more detail. It points out that when man is fully relaxed and breathing naturally, his breath makes the sound So-hum which means ‘I AM HE’. Thus approximately 20 times a minute throughout his life, man is affirming his real nature: ‘I Am God’. Through this affirmation in the breath, we are God’s witnesses to the fact that He exists as the all-powerful Creator and that He resides within us.
An alternative expression of the Ultimate Reality, which appears frequently in the Bible, is ‘I am That’ or ‘I am’. This declaration, which appears in all the world’s scriptures, is expressed in the Indian Vedas as Tat twam asi: ‘That Thou Art’.
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.
(Exodus 3: 14)
