The Year of Jubilee

Introduction:

Preparing a Way

“Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”  Isaiah 40:4-5

Among the sacred traditions of mankind, none is as universal and persistent as the coming of the “Aeon”, the ultimate event of Time, which both consummates and transcends it.  We do not propose in this writing to prove that such an event is either imminent or foreseeable in terms of what we call the “real world” of everyday experience.  Instead, we proceed from the premise (which we will justify and develop as we progress in our argument) that the “normal” experience of contemporary Man is incomplete.  This incompleteness is the ultimate source of Man’s chronic unhappiness and self-destructive compulsions.

It has been said that Man is a rational animal, and that his intelligence sets him apart from the lower creatures.  Yet, if Man has any claim at all to a special status in the order of Creation, it is not solely because he thinks.  A beast can do as much, and a machine (such as the one into which I am now typing these words) can do so more efficiently.  No, we are not the paragon of animals because we think.  Rather it is because we — alone of any creature in the manifest Universe — are aware of our thinking, aware of ourselves.  Indeed, if modern-day healers of the psyche agree on little else, virtually all acknowledge that our happiness increases in proportion to our Self-awareness.

All of which calls attention to what is certainly the most spectacular failure of the prevailing rationalism of our times.  For all the gadgets it has placed at our fingertips, for all the appetites it has appeased, for the great mountains of information it has compiled and classified, the cult of Reason has not made Man happy.  Not at all!  In fact, there has perhaps never been an era of more intense human misery than our own.  Evidently, Man is now less aware of himself than at any previous time in his history, and his loss of Self-knowledge explains his increasing wretchedness, even in the midst of unprecedented material plenty.

As we become estranged from entire areas of our own Soul, our being is diminished, progressively less complete, progressively more mutilated and disfigured.  Some of us — a dwindling breed — still cherish within our hearts the memory of an anointed Man, in whom we can again become whole and perfect, as He is.  We may call him Messiah or Christ, the God-Man or the Son of Man, but, above all, we must understand that we are not talking about someone external to ourselves.  While the Son of Man towers above our petty egos (which we amnesiacs regard as the entire domain of our sentience), He is ever-present as our true and greater Self, our one and eternal Body.

When we speak of the coming of the Messiah, therefore, we must not anticipate an event such as one might view on the evening news report, but rather a phenomenon that unfolds within the “Inner Space” which all humans share.  But how does the God-Man come to us from the Sanctuary within us, if we have forgotten where that Sanctuary is ...  forgotten, in fact, that It even exists as part of ourselves?  It is simply not enough to await His arrival passively: we must, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, “prepare a way for the Lord”.

Crying in the Wilderness

In light of what we have just been saying, it strikes us as quite natural that John the Baptist would have defined his own mission in the prophetic words of Isaiah,

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.^[1]

We know that, in the symbolic landscape of the Old Testament, the “wilderness” is the archetypal place of purification.  We also know that Baptism is a ritual of purification, as attested by the descent of the Dove when John baptized his cousin Jesus.  Shortly we will speak further about the meaning of the Dove, but for now let us explore more deeply the “wilderness” whence the prophetic voice beckons us.

In the book of Exodus we read of Israel’s wandering in the wilderness of Sinai for 40 years, which parallels the 40 days of Jesus’ fasting in the desert of Judea after his Baptism.  Whenever we see a number repeated — as is the number 40 here — in the same Scriptural context, we must conclude that the number itself has a significance that is part of the divine message.  Unfortunately, one of the most pernicious effects of the narrowing of Consciousness in the modern era has been to reduce numbers to mere indicia of quantity.  This was not the case, however, in the ancient world.  The Hebrews, like their neighbors the Egyptians, Greeks, and Chaldeans, had a veritable obsession with the sacred connotations of numbers.  In fact, they used the same set of characters for both letters and numbers, so that every word and phrase of their written language had a numerical equivalent, and, conversely, every number could represent a word or expression.

Accordingly, when we read in Exodus that God’s people wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, we should recognize that Moses was composing sacred writ, not mundane history.  It follows that we are to look to the metaphysical import of the number 40.  In the Hebrew alphabet, the character that represents the number 40 is Mem מ.  Not surprisingly, we find that Mem is one of the three most important letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the three so-called “Mothers”:  Aleph א, Mem מ, and Shin ש.  These three letters are styled “Mothers” because they contain the mystical formula of Understanding, after the Proverb: “You shall call Understanding your Mother”.^[2]   “Understanding”, therefore, would seem to hold the key to the first stage of our wilderness initiation.

As used in the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for Understanding, Binah, represents the Female aspect of the Godhead.  Since God created humans in “His” image, it follows that God is not androgynous, but rather “He” encompasses both the Male and the Female principles.  Indeed, in Genesis we find the Creator described by the title Elohim, which is a feminine plural noun, suggesting that it is the collective Female principle — God as the Supernal Mother — who gives birth to the Universe.  This obviously connects with the feminine imagery of the Dove who broods upon the face of the formless Waters during the Six Days of Creation and takes Her Sabbath rest on the Seventh Day.  The Dove’s symbolic association with the element Water also runs through the story of Noah and the Deluge of 40 days and nights.  Here again, we see the number 40 standing for the Hebrew letter Mem, which signifies Water.

In a manner of speaking, then, we begin our journey into the metaphysical wilderness by following the Dove — the same Dove of Understanding that led Christ into the desolate hinterland of the Dead Sea.  Although we are traversing a spiritual landscape, we begin to notice many similarities to an actual desert.  Among the most daunting attributes of this wasteland is its lack of discernable paths, its want of direction.  Unlike the familiar terrain in which we live our everyday lives, the desert is without landmarks, such as hills, valleys, and streams, by which we may orient ourselves.  Useless here are our “normal” reference-frames, the rectilinear grids by which we locate things is Space and thoughts in our Mind.  We are reminded of the plaintive words of Job:

There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vultures eye hath not seen:  The lion’s whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it. ...                 But where shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding?^[3]

Job speaks here of Wisdom, Chochmah in Hebrew, as something distinct from Understanding.  Likewise, that prototypical wise man of Jewish Scripture, King Solomon, describes Understanding as the way that leads to Wisdom:

Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom: I am understanding ... I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was ... When he prepared the heavens, I was there ... Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight ... Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at my gates ... For whoso findeth me findeth life ... But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul ...^[4]

From this we learn that the feminine Binah, who is Understanding, is (and has been from the Beginning) the “delight” — that is, the Beloved — of the masculine Chochmah, who is Wisdom.  It follows that the Male and the Female are inseparably and eternally joined on High.  This Union, in turn, forms the divine pattern for the cleansing of the Temple of Consciousness here below — the rite of purification which sets the stage for the Advent of the Messiah.  And, indeed, Chochmah and Binah, Wisdom and Understanding, may properly be viewed as the two pillars of the Temple, the two poles of a great spiritual magnet drawing us toward the eternal embrace of a loving God.

If we were the complete beings which God created in Eden, we would be irresistibly drawn by this supernal magnet, our Male and Female natures aligning perfectly with the transcendent polarity of Wisdom and Understanding.  Moreover, just as metal objects in contact with a magnet will themselves become magnetized, our alignment with the sexual polarity of the Godhead would “divinize” our being.  It would so “magnetize” our Souls that we might lift all of Creation with us into Eternity!

Since we can look around us and see that Eden is not restored, however, we can infer that the relationship of the Male and Female principles here below does not mirror the conjugal bliss of the Supernal Father and Mother in Heaven.  A separation of the two “magnetic poles” of Consciousness has obviously taken place, and the causes and consequences of that division will occupy much of our attention in the course of this book.  We intuitively regard this separation as a “fall from Grace”, which leads us to believe that Grace is a manifestation of the Female principle, and that the Fall involves our withdrawal from Her.

While we descendants of Adam have turned our back on Grace, She has remained nonetheless faithful to us and has followed us into our Exile from Eden.  Which is to say that the Female principle in captivity here in the material World has retained a link, through Grace, to the Supreme Mother, Binah.  But for that link, moreover, the Fall would be irreversible, because the Male principle here below has lapsed into a condition of complete dissociation from it divine counterpart, Wisdom/Chochmah.

Uninformed by Wisdom and unguided by Understanding, our Consciousness becomes increasingly fragmented and divisive, and we descend into the condition of spiritual chaos which preceded Creation.  As we proceed in our inquiry, we shall delve at some length into the legacy of that primeval Universe of Chaos and the inferior reality in which its malign remnants yet subsist.  The part of that legacy which bears mentioning at this juncture, however, involves the state of “captivity”.  Inexorably, the Fall from Grace entails not only our separation from God, but our captivity in a spiritual condition of forgetfulness of God — a spiritual condition which we describe as Sin.

Up from Slavery

What we’ve been saying so far is that our relationship with God unavoidably determines our completeness of Mind and Soul.  To the extent that we break away from God, pieces of ourselves also begin to break away from each other, even to clash with one another, so that our own Selfhood becomes a “house divided against itself”.  Indeed, this is the central lesson we are meant to derive from the Scriptural histories of God’s people, the children of Israel.  The more heedless of His  Will they became, the more did the Twelve Tribes fall to fighting among themselves, until finally their divisiveness made them easy prey for the Empires of Nineveh and Babylon, which swept them away into captivity.  In exactly the same way, the atomization of our psyche, as it withdraws from Grace, must lead to its captivity and to the ultimate loss of true freedom of the will.

How does this captivity come to pass?  Actually, it unfolds on two levels: individual and social.  Let us deal with the individual first.  In our fallen condition, each of us sees him/herself as an island, surrounded by an “ocean” of exterior objects and beings.  We are each aware, to a greater or lesser degree, of an Interior world of our own thoughts, dreams, and fantasies, but we seldom, if ever, establish contact with the Interior lives of others.  Even when we think we are “in love” with another person, we often discover (quite painfully for both parties) that what we really “love” is an illusion, the projection of an image we have formed within our own Mind, and not the inner being of our supposed beloved.

Such illusions arise because our multiple centers of Self-awareness, our manifold “gates” of Understanding, have been stripped away, until all we have left of our Self is its lowest denominator, the “selfish” ego.  In place of the divine Will, which is the Crown (Keter in Hebrew) of the perfect Union of the Supernal Mother and Father, we are reduced to a narrow “individual” will.  Since this diminished will is the only part of our Self of which we remain conscious, our fallen condition is truly a state of amnesia.  The whittling down of our Consciousness to the bare nub of ego is akin to forgetting everything about our lives except for what has happened since we woke up this morning!

What of the parts of our Self about which we have forgotten?  Since all Consciousness ultimately derives from God, it partakes of His Eternity — which is to say that it can never be annihilated.  Therefore, what we have excluded from the cognition of our ego is preserved in that part of our Self which is said to be “unconscious”.  For example, the entire domain of what we have been calling Wisdom lies within the Unconscious, i.e. in that area of the psyche which the ego regards as alien to itself.  Wisdom is the repository of the collective experience of mankind, and so, in its enormous breadth, it cannot be grasped by the narrow pincers of our “one-dimensional” individual thinking.  As we shall presently discuss, to access Wisdom we must break out of the ego’s constricted ambit of thought through the “50 Gates of Understanding”.

But, alas, Understanding is another portion of our Self that is excluded from the ego.  In fact, the ego enshrines the absolute dominance of the atomized Male principle that it represents.  The ultimate effect is to relegate our entire Female nature to the darkness of the Unconscious.  Consequently, the Female principle dominates the Unconscious, the total contents of which takes on a feminine character.  This explains why we typically personify this forgotten portion of our Self as a Woman (or apply to it distinctly feminine symbols, such as the Sea or the Moon).  The more isolated our ego becomes from our other centers of Consciousness, the more threatening and dangerous does this Woman appear to us.  Instead of the Mother-Bride-Sister, who she is in union with the divine Male, the archetypal Female undergoes a hideous metamorphosis into the Witch-Harlot-Crone, the Medusa whose baleful eye petrifies her beholder.

From being our Goddess of Liberty, our Lady of Peace, the Female side of our Self becomes the “dangerous woman”, who enslaves, betrays, and ultimately destroys her lover.  She is Babylon, the Great Whore, sitting astride the Waters of the Unconscious, a shameful parody of the sublime Dove.  This is the meaning of Solomon’s allegory of the young man “void of Understanding” and the “strange woman”:

Say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister; and call understanding thy kinswoman: That they might keep thee from the strange woman, ... Let not thine heart decline to her ways, go not astray in her paths.  For she hath cast down many wounded: ... Her house is the way to hell, going down into the chambers of death.^[5]

The same motif of the “dangerous woman”, the goddess of Death, is repeated countless times in the myths of the pagan world.  In her many avatars, this dread goddess presides over the kingdom of the Dead, or what we would call Hell.  In the Christian rendering of the same theme, Jesus confronts Hell’s dark ruler during his 40-day fast in the wilderness of Judea, and, following his death on the Cross, he descends into the Underworld to free the captives there.  Somewhat paradoxically, then, it would appear that our path “up from slavery” now takes a turn downward through the realm of infernal shadows.

Harrowing Hell

When Dante wrote his visionary tale of the Inferno, he described many of its denizens in terms of Greco-Roman mythology — not because he was himself a pagan, but rather because mythology is the symbolic language of our “unconscious” Self.  From the perspective of ancient religion, these symbols are viewed as gods and goddesses because they represent parts of our Self which have broken away from our diminished will and appear to our ego as external, autonomous beings.  The modern science of the psyche has coined the term “projection” to describe this type of delusion, in which aspects of the Mind’s inner workings are perceived as extrinsic personalities or circumstances.

A major consequence of this “inverted” take on reality is the captivity of the will, the loss of true freedom of action.  As more elements of our Inner world slip out of the ego’s grasp and become “unconscious”, they appear to act with increasing independence of our volition.  Indeed, in proportion to the degree of their exclusion from cognition, these psychic elements become actively hostile to our will, actually seeking to thwart the designs of our “conscious” mind.  Like a neglected child, this part of us seeks to draw attention to itself by engaging in wanton, spiteful behavior.  Which of us had not had the maddening experience of rushing out the door late for an appointment, only to find that we have misplaced our car keys (or purse, glasses, etc.)?  It is as if some intruder had slipped into our mind when we weren’t paying attention and had hidden the missing object somewhere it knew we’d be unlikely to look!  To a greater or lesser extent, each of us is a “Siamese twin”, sharing the same body with an “anti-ego”, the antagonistic Shadow of what we perceive ourselves to be.

Even though the Shadow is part of our own psyche, we “project” its malicious actions onto other people or “uncontrollable” events.  For example, we might blame the mislaid keys on our spouse, because he/she had recently driven the car, or we might believe that the hand of “Fate” had intervened to keep us from our appointment.  Ultimately, in the manner of our pagan ancestors, we carry our psychic projection to its logical conclusion by shaping our Shadow into a malignant deity — the “Devil” — who appears capable of overcoming our will.  It is this false idol which enslaves us and becomes the jailer of our Soul.  Hence, it is to his infernal domain that we must travel to reclaim our Liberty.

Since that domain lies within the “unconscious” precinct of our Self, mythology employs feminine symbolism in describing the passage there as the crossing of a “sea” or “river”.  Thus, Dante was ferried by Charon across the River Acheron into Hades, just as Odysseus sailed to the remotest reaches of the Ocean to visit the shades of the Dead in Tartarus.  The name Tartarus derives from the Greek root Tar, which signifies the far West — associated with Death because it is the direction of the setting Sun.

From Homer’s epic, we may recall that Odysseus visited Tartarus to ask the dead prophet Teiresias what dangers lay ahead of him on his homeward voyage.  The shade of the prophet urged him to control the crew of his ship at their next landfall, lest they steal the sacred cattle of the Sun.  Despite this warning, Odysseus did lose control of his famished men, who slaughtered several of the sacred cows.  Soon afterward, they paid with their lives when the outraged gods raised a tempest in which their ship foundered, drowning all aboard save Odysseus himself.  Though he escaped drowning, the hero was washed ashore on the far western island of Ogygia, where he was held captive for seven years by a nymph named Kalypso.

Kalypso, whose name means “hidden”, was a daughter of the Titan Atlas.  She was one of the “Seven Sisters” collectively known as the Pleiades, or “Doves”.  In her we readily recognize the mythic motif of the “dangerous woman”, the Female principle in exile from the shrunken consciousness of the ego.  The condition of forcible separation between humanity’s Male and Female natures is metaphorically reflected in the burden of her father Atlas, who holds the masculine Sky apart from the feminine Earth.  In this fallen state, the Dove of Understanding remains concealed from us, as Kalypso’s name implies, and instead we perceive the Female as a merciless captor whose embrace is Death.

As illustrated by the fate of Odysseus’ crew, the inversion of Consciousness that generates this false perception is portrayed in mythic terms as “drowning”.  Since the hero is on an inner voyage, his “shipmates” are obviously elements of his own psyche — elements that have broken away from the control of his will and take on the semblance of autonomous beings.  As long as these portions of our Self appear to be external to us, we cannot be submerged in the purifying Water of Wisdom without suffocating.^[6]

If, indeed, we are to “breathe” while immersed in the Sea of higher Consciousness, must we not become as the Fish, which is the mystical emblem of the Messiah?  Just as Mem מ signifies “Water”, the next letter in the Hebrew alphabet, Nun נ, represents “Fish”.  Thus, the Old Testament warrior who prefigures Jesus and shares his name^[7] — meaning “Savior” — is Joshua, the son of Nun.  Like all other Hebrew letters, Nun has a numerical equivalent: 50, the number of the mystical “Gates of Understanding” and, as we shall soon see, the number of years in the Jubilee Cycle.  It begins to appear, therefore, that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet “spell out” the path of Man’s redemption, a path strikingly similar to the one we have been following.  This is the Way that leads from a purifying plunge into the Water of Mem ( the number 40), toward a veritable rebirth in the Fish of Nun (the number 50).

Interestingly, we find this same numerical “code” mirrored in the sequence of Christ’s Resurrection, his Ascension 40 days later, and the Pentecost of the Holy Spirit 50 days after Easter.  When challenged to reveal a “sign” of his Messianic mission, Jesus likened his impending death and descent into Hell to Jonah’s ordeal in the belly of the great Fish for three days and nights.  Jesus then denounced the failure of “this generation” to respond to his call for repentance, just as the men of Nineveh had initially spurned Jonah.^[8]  Christ was referring, of course, to the familiar tale in which Jonah is summoned by God to warn the Ninevites that their wicked city would be destroyed in 40 days if they did not repent.  Fearful of confronting evil so directly, the prophet flees aboard a vessel bound for Tarshish, but when the ship encounters a furious tempest, Jonah’s terrified shipmates toss him into the heaving waves.  There the drowning man is miraculously saved when he is swallowed into the belly of the whale.

When we go back now and compare Jonah’s story with the fabled shipwreck of Odysseus, we see a number of startling parallels.  Both men embark on a voyage to a far-western land — the Land of the Dead.  Jonah’s destination, the Phoenician colony of Tartessus in Spain (near modern Cadiz), was the westernmost port city in the ancient Mediterranean and a prime site of child sacrifice to the infernal Punic idol Moloch.  Hence, Jonah’s voyage, like that of Odysseus, represents the “harrowing of Hell”.  Jonah and his Greek counterpart are both the objects of divine wrath.  Their conflict with the higher Will generates a conflict within the their own Souls, a division within their psyches, for which the raging tempest and the unruly shipmates are but metaphors. Consequently, both the Hebrew prophet and the Greek hero find themselves “drowning”, helpless and overwhelmed in a Sea which responds only to a Will superior to their own.

But the drowning ceases for Jonah when he is eaten by the Fish, the symbol of the larger, complete Self into which his ego needs to merge.  This sacramental meal prefigures the Eucharistic feast, in which the communicant partakes of him whose sign is the Fish — and in so doing is assimilated into his transcendent Body. 

Living Water

The letter Mem מ  is associated with Chochmah, or Wisdom, because Wisdom has the nature of a fluid.  Like a fluid, Wisdom transcends all boundaries, all categories and distinctions.  It is pure, undifferentiated Consciousness, the matrix of all possibilities, the universal Mind in which all potentialities are realized without distinction.  In Wisdom, there is no Time or Space, only the Infinite “here” and the Eternal “now”.  While we might compare Wisdom to a holographic recording of all of human experience, this analogy would fall far short of the mark, because no record, howsoever sophisticated, can replicate the immediacy of Life.  Instead, we must say that Wisdom is the living experience of Mankind — the living Water from which each of us may draw what is needed to complete her/his true Self.

Jesus speaks of this living Water in his famous dialogue with the Samaritan woman at the well:

But whosover drinketh of the water that I give him shall never thirst; but the water that I give him shall be in him a well of water springing up to everlasting life.^[9]

Later, on the final day of the vintage Feast of Tabernacles, he identifies the source of the living Water:

If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.  He that believeth in me, ... out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.^[10]

The Greek word rendered in the King James Bible translation as “belly” also means “heart” or “womb”.  It signifies a cavity that gives form and origin to what is enclosed within it.  Not surprisingly, Jewish mystical tradition associates the “belly” with the “Mother” letter Mem  מ .  In this context it stands for the Covenant of Circumcision, a Covenant intended to sanctify the act of sexual intercourse.  As we know, Mem also represents the number 40, with its connotation of Israel’s 40 years of wandering in the desert before entering the Promised Land.

The book of Joshua, the son of Nun, describes the first crossing of the Jordan River by the 40 thousand warriors of the Twelve Tribes.  Ahead of the armed men, the priests carried the Ark of the Covenant, while the river parted in front of them, as had the Red Sea during the Exodus from Egypt.  God instructed the people during the crossing to take twelve stones from the exposed river bed and set them up in a circle on the opposite bank.  At the site of this monument, called Gilgal, Israel established its first camp in the Promised Land, and here all of the males of the Twelve Tribes were circumcised.^[11]

The Hebrew word Gilgal has several layers of meaning, all of which are relevant to our discussion of the source of “living Water”.  On the mundane level, Gilgal can signify a sphere or circle, as in the case of the monument of twelve stones on the west bank of the Jordan.  But it can have a celestial meaning as well, with reference to the sphere of the Heavens and the twelve signs of the Zodiac.  In the latter sense, Gilgal symbolizes Time as a Cycle — a sacred spiral in which initial conditions are periodically reconstituted on a higher level.

This is a radically different conception of Time from that which dominates the diminished consciousness of modern culture.  For us, Time is not the not the sacred Cycle Gilgal, but a straight line stretching out indefinitely toward past and future.  Although Einstein long ago proved that Space-Time closes back upon itself in spherical fashion, we remain fixated on the notion of “flat Time”, just as our ancestors once clung to the idea of a flat Earth.  And here we begin to get into the social manifestations of our captivity, to which we alluded earlier.

Freedom is the opportunity to transcend one’s current state of affairs, to ascend to a higher level of being.  Our society, on the other hand, defines “freedom” as a condition in which the individual can make a multitude of meaningless choices, all of which reinforce his/her dependency on the status quo.  In effect, our culture denies the transcendent impetus of Time.  Instead of a great Tree thrusting its branches upward toward the Heavens, we prefer a one-dimensional arrow into the future.  But, alas, the vital forces of Gilgal are not so easily denied, and the blockage of genuine temporal renewal only engenders spasmodic, violent upheavals — revolution, war, and escalating social chaos.

Simply put, then, we do not have a choice in human history between the upward spiral toward fully integrated Consciousness and the plateau of spiritual complacency which our society seems to prefer.  Our only alternative to the upward spiral is the downward spiral.  All of us whose eyes are even partially open can see how far we have descended into the downward spiral already, and how quickly the pace of our decline is accelerating.  Popular culture’s fascination with disaster themes, like the wreck of the Titanic, simply reflects the widespread feeling that we are all on a sinking ship without lifeboats.

Nonetheless, there is an alternative to “going down with the ship”, at least for those who are willing to listen and understand.  As the Hindus teach in their tale of the goddess Kali, Time is the frightful Destroyer of men only if we choose to live within the narrow confines of our ego-selves.  But if we are attuned to the broader Selfhood that abides in the redeeming Cycle, we can experience Time as endless bliss.  India’s sacred art depicts Kali wearing a necklace bearing 50 skulls of her male consorts — symbols of the inferior selves which must “die” so that the complete Man may be born.  The significance of the number 50 in this mythical motif has a parallel in Greek tale of the Danaids.  These were 50 sisters, all of whom murdered their husbands on their wedding night.  From the husbands’ 50 severed heads, which the sisters had buried in the unfathomable swamp of Lerna, arose the multi-headed Hydra.  Again, the number 50 — the number of the Fish Nun — stands for the integration of our inferior selves into a transcendent Being.  In this integrated Self, our multiple centers of Consciousness all serve one Body, just as the Hydra’s many heads are joined to a single torso. 

At this point, let’s pause and try to assemble some of these bits of insight into a coherent picture.  Looking back over the metaphysical terrain we’ve covered, we can now perhaps discern, in the flat, featureless wasteland where we began, the similitude of linear Time — the Destroyer of all that lives.  From this wilderness, we have voyaged “across the sea” to the realm of the Dead, where the Past is alive.  Here we have found that, before we can reclaim the parts of our Soul held captive in the charnel house, we must find the source of the “living Water” in which we can breathe like Fish.  And, finally, we’ve assembled some clues suggesting that this “source” is to be found in a redeemed paradigm of Time as a Cycle, as a “womb” rather than a “tomb”.

The Womb of Time

According to ancient Jewish commentaries on the books of Moses, Gilgal — aka the sacred Cycle of Time — is the “womb” from which Souls may pass from the material World to the spiritual plane of the Angels.^[12]  Among the visions of the prophet Ezekiel, one of the most remarkable involves the four “living creatures”, each accompanied by a “wheel within a wheel”, which embodies the creature’s spirit.   As he beholds the sparkling array of eyes surrounding each wheel, the prophet hears a voice calling them by the name Gilgal.^[13]   Ezekiel describes the winged creatures themselves as having four faces: a human/angelic countenance in front, a bull’s face to the left, a lion’s to the right, and the visage of an eagle in back.^[14]

There would appear to be a connection between these “living creatures”, whose spirits emanate from the wheels called Gilgal, and the “living Water” that issues from the “womb” of Gilgal, the Cycle of Time.  This nexus is made all the more emphatic by the creatures’ four faces, corresponding to the four cardinal points of the Zodiac: the spring and fall equinoxes, and the summer and winter solstices.  Due to a phenomenon known as “precession”, the apparent location of the Sun at the equinoxes and solstices makes a circuit, over a period of about 26 millennia, through the twelve constellations which define the Zodiac.  An astrological Age, or Aeon, is determined by the passage of the position where the Sun rises on the vernal equinox (the “vernal point”) from one end of a Zodiac constellation to the other.  Since, for roughly the past 2000 years, the vernal point has been traversing the constellation of the Fish, the current Aeon is known as the Age of Pisces.  Sometime within the next 100 years — there are differing opinions as to exactly when — the vernal point will cross over into the constellation of the Water Carrier, thus inaugurating the Age of Aquarius.

It’s no coincidence that the word “Zodiac” derives from the Greek for “living creatures”.  In particular, Aquarius represents a “living creature” in the form of a Cherub who is pouring forth an unending stream of water — perhaps “living Water”?  We should also note that, when the vernal point enters Aquarius, the other three cardinal points (corresponding to summer solstice, autumn equinox, and winter solstice) will fall within the constellations Taurus, Leo and Scorpio, respectively.  Taurus and Leo are the Bull and Lion, and the Eagle is an alternate symbol for Scorpio — giving us a perfect match with the four faces of Ezekiel’s “living creatures”.  Consequently, it would appear that the great temporal Cycle of Gilgal begins and ends with the Heavens aligned to these four “Cherubic” constellations!

Based on Ezekiel’s description, moreover, it is clear that the “living creatures” inhabit a plane of reality higher than that of “ordinary” experience.  How do we know this?  Well, in our everyday lives, we perceive people and objects in three dimensions of Space and one dimension of Time.  On occasion, though, it suits our purposes to reduce people and objects to two-dimensional graphic images, such as photographs.  These images belong to an inferior order of reality, insofar as they lack one of the spatial dimensions and have no temporal component, being “frozen” in Time.  In other words, in the transition from our reality to that of a photograph or a drawing, some information is lost.

We can restore this missing information, however, by generating multiple images.  For example, when an architect creates plans from which a building is to be constructed, she/he draws three different views, which together determine the structure of the edifice.  Similarly, when we wish to impart a temporal dimension to our images, we generate a sequence of them and “flash” them rapidly on and off, as we do with cinema and video.

Therefore, if we think again about Ezekiel’s “living creatures”, do they not fit this pattern of images projected from a higher to a lower order of reality?  To capture all of the information on a human face in photographic form, we would have to produce three pictures: a front view and two profiles.  This amounts to saying that, in a two-dimensional world, we would have not one face but three!  It follows, therefore, that a creature having four spatial dimensions would appear in our World with four faces, just like the prophet’s Cherubim.  Ezekiel also mentions that these creatures appeared and disappeared like flashes of lightening,^[15] exactly as would “cinematic” projections of beings subsisting in two dimensions of Time.  In other words, the flashing, four-faced creatures envisioned by the prophet are actually images of six-dimensional beings, with four spatial and two temporal dimensions.

While some fevered minds have pictured Ezekiel’s “living creatures” as extraterrestrial aliens, they are actually the image of the complete Self, of which our ego-dominated persona is but a shard.  In the rotundity of the wheels called Gilgal, we uncover the symbol of spiritual wholeness, without which we are not fit to be in the presence of God.  This wholeness reveals itself in an additional dimension of Space, an Interior dimension that our fallen consciousness fails to perceive.  Within this Inner Space, moreover, Time itself unfolds from the one-dimensional “arrow”, which we experience, into a full Circle extending in two dimensions.  While the arrow of Time can only point toward Death, the Circle opens to us the transcendent dimension of Resurrection, which presents the opportunity for Redemption and the option of Grace.  Implicit in the two axes that meet at the mystical Center of this Circle, moreover, is the Cross — the matrix through which the temporal is transformed into the Eternal.

It is within this “womb”, which is the Interior of Space and the Rotundity of Time, that we must begin our gestation to be reborn as “living creatures” into the presence of God.  In Ezekiel’s vision, the four-faced Cherubim attend the glory of the Divine Presence as it departs from the Temple Sanctuary during the Babylonian captivity.  Similarly, the figures of two Cherubim adorn the Ark of the Covenant, within which the Glory of the Divine Presence reposed.  This Presence, which the Jews called Shechinah, appears in Scripture as the guiding Spirit of God’s chosen people.  We see Her in the cloud which led the Israelites through the Sinai and ensconced their prophet Moses as he received God’s Word on Mt. Horeb.  During this Aeon, She has manifested Herself as the Blessed Virgin to the Gentiles, who, by calling Her their Mother, become children of Israel.

Symmetry and Equilibrium

Ezekiel’s vision of the “living creatures” is actually a spiritual exercise by which we may access the Gates of Understanding leading to Wisdom.  If Wisdom is akin to Water (Mem מ), then it requires a “container” to give it form and expression.  Actually, we may liken Wisdom to a word written with only consonants — until the vowels are inserted, it is unpronounceable.  Understanding furnishes the “vowels” which give expression to Wisdom.  It is the Urn in which Aquarius carries the celestial “living Water”, the vessel which holds the meaning of Wisdom.

Understanding performs its function as a metaphysical aqueduct by a process called “symmetry breaking”.  This means that Understanding takes visions that are combined and indistinguishable in the realm of Wisdom and parses them into components that the Mind can assimilate.  Accordingly, the four faces of Ezekiel’s Cherubim are actually one face, but that face can only be apprehended by the intellect after it has been broken down into four distinct “views”.  We can go back to the analogy of the blueprint, which renders the structure of a building in separate front, side and plan perspectives.  Unless one knows how the various perspectives depicted in a blueprint fit together, however, the drawings convey no concept of the three-dimensional edifice.  In exactly the same way, the discrete “views” of the contents of Wisdom which Understanding presents to our senses are meaningless if we are unacquainted with the relationship among them, the scheme by which they fuse together into one image.

At this juncture, we are going to pause and define a pair of concepts that we’ll be referring to quite frequently in the course of this book.  As my reader might be guessing, the two concepts which we are going to discuss fit into the general pattern of complementary principles that we’ve been sketching up to now, e.g. Male and Female, Wisdom and Understanding.  Without knowing it, we’ve already encountered one end of our new tandem of ideas in the guise of Gilgal, the mystical Circle of Space-Time.  The Circle (and its counterpart in three-dimensions, the Sphere) is the most symmetrical of all geometric figures.  This is because one can approach a Circle or a Sphere from any direction, and it will present the same appearance.  The Symmetry of a thing, therefore, has to do with the relationship of its parts to the whole — the same type of relationship that was at work in Ezekiel’s vision.

One of the distinguishing qualities of Symmetry is proportion.  Intriguingly, proportion is something we humans relate to with a part of our Consciousness other than our cognitive mind.  When we see certain geometric proportions, as in the shape of a Greek Temple, or hear specific tonal scales, perhaps in a Beethoven sonata, it’s not our “thinking mind” which responds.  We respond to proportion, not by agreeing or disagreeing with it, but by being moved by it.  Who can look up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel without being lifted in spirit — if for only some fleeting moments — into God’s own Presence?  Similarly, when we hear the opening strains of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, we rise in unison as if buoyed by an invisible ecstatic tide.

If we consider the “Lord God” of Genesis — Adonai Elohim in the original Hebrew — the key to Her/His “blueprint” of the Universe is Symmetry.   This Symmetry may be observed factually and expressed mathematically, as in Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.  But it may also be experienced directly and immediately, in its many manifestations, without the slightest thought on our part.  When Symmetry manifests itself as harmony, it can stir our senses in the hues of a sunset or warm our hearts in the embrace of old friends.  When it touches us as Grace, Symmetry arouses our soul like the kiss of morning dew on a blossom.  Appearing as Beauty, whether in the face of an angel or in the nobility of a selfless gesture, Symmetry carries us on wings above the sordid pettiness of our daily lives.

The Hebrew letter which means “relationship”, and hence Symmetry, is Vau ו .  Vau also signifies the number six — a reflection of the Six Days of Creation, in which supernal Symmetry was made manifest.  Instinctively, we apply multiples of six to the Circle and the Sphere (dividing them into 360 degrees) and to the cyclical patterns of clock and calendar (in 60-minute hours, 24-hour days, and 12-month years).  Thus, not surprisingly, Vau and six are also symbols of Gilgal, the great Womb of Time and Space.  Out of this Womb comes the Incarnation of God in Man, the “living Water” of Life everlasting.

Now that we’ve defined Symmetry and seen how it corresponds to the number six, let’s look at the other principle with which it’s coupled.  Just as Symmetry is the underlying source of Wisdom’s “living Water”, Equilibrium opens the channel for that Water to flow from the source to us.  We’ve said that Symmetry is the overall “blueprint”, the universal relationship which fuses our ostensibly disparate perceptions into a single experience.  Nevertheless, we may well ask:  An experience of what?  Symmetry involves envisioning all of the parts of our divine Selfhood “all at once”, for only then does our awareness cease to be fragmentary and incomplete.  When we achieve Symmetry, we become the “living creatures” of Ezekiel’s vision — the undiminished beings who abide eternally in the Divine Presence.

It follows that the integral experience that Symmetry yields is that of the Presence of God.  Because the whole Self is greater than the sum of its parts, this Presence cannot become palpable until all of the centers of Consciousness are fully activated and perfectly coordinated.  In the symbolism of Scripture, this total coordination of conscious centers is represented by the “seven eyes”, which appear on Ezekiel’s wheels, on Zechariah’s stone, and on the apocalyptic Lamb of God.^[16] 

Let’s give some thought for a moment to the imagery of the “seven eyes”.  If we consider the way our own senses function, we realize that the perception of depth demands that our two eyes interact with one another in a precisely balanced manner.  What we see is not the image produced by either eye alone, but the view from a virtual “third eye” —  a synthetic vantage point from which the left and right images are superimposed.

The metaphor of the “seven eyes” takes us a long way toward appreciating the many layers of meaning implicit in Equilibrium.  On a very basic level, we can think of it as “balance”, that is, a condition in which opposing forces are reconciled.  We employ this principle when we weigh things using scales.  The gravitational force on the left pan of the scales contends against the downward pull on the right side, until some point is reached where the motion ceases.  This “balance point” is not pegged to either of the opposing pans, but to an index attached to the center of the beam that joins them.  Exactly as the focal point of our vision floats somewhere in the gap between our two eyes, the “balance point” of our scales hovers invisibly somewhere in the Space between them.  In other words, “balance” is not manifest on either side of the scales, but rather it is immanent in the interstitial void where they interact.

Equilibrium is the synthesis of discordant states that restores the state of repose.  It’s the condition of Peace which distinguishes Eden from the World of fallen Man.  Accordingly, we begin to discern another of what will be the major themes of this work.  The forces that we regard as “evil” in this World are merely principles that have become detached from their “balancing” complements.  We may describe these unbalanced principles as unmitigated.  We can all agree that unmitigated Judgement is tyranny and terror, while unmitigated Mercy is anarchy and decadence.  When they are wedded in Equilibrium, however, Judgement and Mercy together conceive Justice.

In a parallel sense, the unmitigated Female is the La Belle Dame sans Merci, full of ruthless severity, while the unmitigated Male is Narcissus, totally absorbed in his one-dimensional self-image.  Spiritual conjugation superimposes Male and Female in the rapture of Incarnation, the “Jacob’s ladder” by which Spirit may enter into Matter and render it divine.  This, by the way, should tell us that sexual intercourse after the way of the flesh is neither bestial nor sinful, but rather is the earthly type of the sublime Union of Lover and Beloved on High. Indeed, it is our one memento of the bliss which was our Life in Eden, our one vestige of the ecstasy we once enjoyed in the Presence of God. As such, our sexual nature — far from being something we should “overcome” — is absolutely essential to our return from exile to the great Zion of the World to Come.  We’ll have cause to revisit this theme several times in the course of our argument.

For the great Hebrew mystics, Equilibrium expressed itself in the three “Mother Letters”, of which we spoke earlier.  Each of these letters — Aleph , Mem and Shin — embody one of the three Covenants.  Shin represents the Covenant of the Tongue, which is the source of Oral Tradition.  Aleph stands for the Covenant of the Heart, which is the written Torah, the source of the Law. Mem signifies the Covenant of Circumcision, the source of the River of “living Water” that flows out of Paradise.  Of these three, the highest is the Covenant of the Heart, for it is in the Heart that we receive the Will of God and experience the joy which is obedience to that Will.  The Will of God is expressed in His Breath, represented by the letter Aleph and its corresponding number one.  This transcendent Oneness is symbolically captured in the central branch of the Menorah, encompassed by the perfect Symmetry of the six subordinate branches.^[17]

Consequently, we find in the Menorah an important numerical message: the Covenant of the Heart is the seventh which is, at the same time, the One.  We are reminded of the seven eyes of the Spirit that animated Ezekiel’s wheels, and of the seven eyes of the Lamb of God in Revelation — emblems of that Conscious Equilibrium which abides in the Presence of God (aka Shechinah).  Seven, then, is the number of Equilibrium, as six is the number of Symmetry.  It follows that the seventh connotes completion and repose, which is, of course, why Adonai Elohim rested on the Seventh Day of Creation — the Sabbath Day.

Sabbath and Jubilee

Our forgetfulness of God has become so profound, my sisters and brothers, that we have even become oblivious to the true import of the Sabbath.  Yet, proper observation of the Sabbath is the very first of the gates of Understanding through which we must pass on our way to the New Jerusalem.  Most of us — and I do not exclude myself from this category — tend to view the Sabbath as merely a weekly holiday, a day on which we usually don’t have to work.  Sadly, that’s not even close to what Isaiah tells us the Sabbath is all about:

If you hold back your foot on the Sabbath from following your own pursuits; If you delight in honoring the Sabbath; If you honor it by not following your own will, seeking your own interests, or speaking your own words —

Then you shall delight your Self in the presence of the LORD, and I will make you to ride upon the high places of the Earth;^[18]

The prophet’s choice of the expression “hold back you foot” is a revealing one.  Our feet are the basis of our Equilibrium, and we have two of them.  According to St. Bonaventure, Man’s two feet represent the two faculties of his Soul: Apprehension and Affection.  Apprehension is our thinking intellect, and Affection is our feeling intellect.  Let it be noted, by the way, that no one should regard the phrase “feeling intellect” as an oxymoron, because the Heart is the seat of Understanding.  It is through our Affection that we appreciate Symmetry, which is the script of the Most High.  Yet, more often than not, we exclude Affection from participation in our will.  How often do we hear the dismissive remark, “You’re letting your emotions rule you”?

Granted, any person whose will is subject only to their Affection is in serious trouble — but the opposite proposition is equally true!  Nonetheless, we 20^th Century human beings pride ourselves on how much of our behavior is shaped by “reasoning” rather than “feeling”.  In a manner of speaking, then, we walk with a “limp”, always stepping forward with the “right” foot of Apprehension and dragging the “left” foot of Affection behind us.

In Isaiah’s proscription for the Sabbath, he simply directs us to implement a bit of Equilibrium.  For just one day of the week, God asks us  to “hold back” our Apprehension, let go of our ego-centered plans and goals, and let our Affection guide us in His/Her works.  The prophet even spells out for us what kind of works those would be: removing the yoke from those oppressed, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, comforting the widow and the orphan ... the work of compassion.

It seems, however, that we’re all too busy and much too self-important to devote one whole day of the week to easing the distress of God’s people in need.  How utterly unthinkable is it for us, then, to devote not one day, but an entire year to God’s agenda instead of our own!  Yet, the written Law unequivocally dictates the dedication of every seventh year, in its entirety.  Leviticus chapter 25 ordains a “Sabbath for the Land” — a year in which no person is to plant, cultivate or harvest their fields.  If we continue reading this passage of Scripture, we come upon another, even more quixotic feature of this divine mandate.  The 50^th year following every seventh Sabbath Year is to be consecrated as the “Year of Jubilee”, a year during which we are commanded to forgive our debtors, to release all prisoners, and restore to Liberty those in servitude.  In the Promised Land — which was, after the Conquest, divided among God’s people according to the directives of God —  the Law of the Jubilee stipulates that all real estate must revert to the families of its original owners.

This book avows, as its central premise, that the Law of the Sabbath Year and the Year of Jubilee remains, to this day, effective and binding upon Jews and Christian Gentiles alike.  Without reservation, we contend that the faithful celebration of the Sabbath and Jubilee Years, according to the Cycle (Gilgal) specified in the Books of Moses, is an absolute prerequisite for the Coming of the Son of Man.  Indeed, we hope to demonstrate that the spiritual regimen of the 50-year Jubilee Cycle informs the path of our return to the Promised Land through the “50 Gates of Understanding”.

We began this introductory phase of our discussion by asking the question: How are we to “prepare a way for the Lord”?  In search of an answer, we set out in the footsteps of Christ from his baptism in the Jordan River, to his temptation in the Dead Sea desert ... and now, finally, to the temple in Nazareth where he inaugurated his public ministry.  Perhaps we can now imagine ourselves, sitting mesmerized in the synagogue that evening as he rose to read the scroll of the prophet Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor; he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.

To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.^[19]

It is so ironic that Rabbi Jesus chose to make the Jubilee — the “acceptable year of the Lord” — the theme of his very first sermon.  Yet, the Law of the Sabbath and Jubilee Years goes totally unobserved by the religions supposedly based on his teachings.  Perhaps we find these provisions of the Law anachronistic, appropriate for the pastoral society of ancient Judea, but unsuited for the complex society in which we now live.  We might well imagine the dire consequences if the entire population of a modern nation were to take a year’s “sabbatical”, all at the same time, to perform gratuitous acts of compassion.  But, lurking behind these fears and doubts, don’t we find the unspoken belief that we can’t trust the Holy Spirit to attend to our needs, that we dare not surrender our will to the Will of God?

As long as we think this way, the gates of the New Jerusalem will remain firmly shut up against us.  So ingrained has our ego-centered mode of living become, however, that it will take considerable discipline and collective effort to break this pattern and open our hearts to the Advent of the Lord.  In the pages that follow, we will endeavor to formulate a practicable program — based upon the Sabbath/Jubilee Law — for the transition toward a Consciousness centered in God.

If we are to find our true Center, our very first task must be to detach our awareness from its present moorings.  The society in which we live worships a false idol called Progress, and like most idols, this one demands a form of ritual mutilation from us, its devotees.  Whether we are working or engaged in recreation, it is above all imperative that we remain “focused” on what we are doing.  Nowadays, we are bombarded with the message “stay focused” from nursery school to the grave.  We hear it intoned by our parents, our teachers, our doctors, our friends, our priests, our counselors.  It is a sacrosanct orthodoxy preached at us from every quarter.

Yet there is no mode of thought, no pattern of experience that is more unhealthy and alien to human beings than this “staying focused”.  Our natural contentment of Mind and Body rests upon a delicate balance of action and repose, of radiance and reception.  Therefore, prolonged periods of fixating our attention obsessively on the task at hand are bound to produce an appalling state of mental and visceral disequilibrium and vitiation.  Denied Life’s spontaneous cycles of intensity and diffusion, most of us collapse  at day’s end into a state of near catatonia, staring blankly into the flickering cathodic tube and listening to its “celebrities” remind us — lest we ever forget! — how essential it is to “remain focused”.

Our society deals with the pain and despondency that this lockstep mentality generates by “medicating” the masses on a mind-boggling scale.  Which of us does not have several relatives and acquaintances who are absolutely dysfunctional without their daily fix of Prozac or the like?  In our times, we are experiencing a pandemic of anxiety disorders which is bound to erupt, sooner or later, into a wave of mass hysteria that will make the Third Reich look like a stroll in the park.

Even more alarming than the highway to calamity we are traveling is the closure of the “exit ramps” by which we may avert it.  As we focus monomaniacally on the goals of our individual will and those of the hierarchy of egos which controls our lives, we shut, in a manner of speaking, all the windows of our Soul.   We are so intent on acting to further our own petty designs and those of our corporate masters that we never pause to receive the influx without which our Spirit withers and dies.  Small wonder, then, that our lives seem monotonous, empty, even absurd, because we never  “have the time” for truly spontaneous experience, which is the source of all novelty, all immediacy, all Life.  Indeed, only by “letting go of the wheel” may we leave this highway of Death we are on and find the exit ramp that leads to the land of the Living.

All of which begs the question:  How are we “let go of the wheel” without crashing into the guardrail and going up in flames?  God does not ask us to do self-destructive things.  She/He recognizes that we are creatures who have been culturally conditioned to organize every detail of our lives in accordance with the directives of our individual wills.  In preparing Her/His Way, therefore, we must exercise prudence and caution.  Modern life becomes so unbearable at times that all of us occasionally have the impulse to “just chuck it”.  As we have discussed earlier, such impulses arise from the “Shadow” — the part of our unconscious Self which reflexively opposes all of the aims of our ego.  The course of recent events in our world amply demonstrates that such nihilistic impulses are increasingly widespread and are being acted upon with escalating frequency.  Indeed, we are witnessing before our eyes the gathering of a terrible vortex of denial and negation of all that exists.  This violent vortex which will draw all of us down into its annihilating funnel unless we can hold fast to our spiritual anchor.

The requisite spiritual anchor is to be found in the redemptive Cycle of the Jubilee.  But, before we can hope to attune ourselves to that Cycle, we must first comprehend its origins and its evolution in history of the people of God.  Not surprisingly, such an inquiry takes us back to the very first verse of the Book of Genesis: “In the Beginning ... ”.   Let this, then, be the stepping-off point of our first chapter.

Notes