ABRAHAM
One-on-One
In the Mayan holy book, the Popul Vuh, twin brothers, secretly relieving each other, look like one player, and beat Death in the sacred one-on-one basketball game. What’s the meaning of the myth? The secret identity of parent and child is twins, identical in the multiply paradoxical life of the primordial Milk Ocean underlying forms and their generation, twins of Being and Becoming, and of all the complements comprising One Life. In one guise, they Appear As this balancing act of parent-giving-way-to-child, the child in turn becoming parent-giving-way-to-child, so the two endlessly alternate. So we achieve this mortal life. Then rejoining the hidden reality of one Life eternal, death evaporates, we find that we’re spiraling out immortally into greater Love, not supplanting but everchanging. This is Isaac’s revelation.
Isaac and Abraham
When Abraham brings his son to be slaughtered, Isaac is 37 years old according to the genealogies. No child, and versed in meditation, he acts so quietly and unassumingly that we don’t notice his role.
God seems to be just circular Being, yet it’s also subtly Becoming. In this episode, Abraham is “tempted” (Genesis 22) to operate under the mistaken belief that we must balance the books, literally pay back the debt we 0we for the vision of a world in the midst of nothingness, so that things equal out at zero. This isn’t some cold-blooded calculation, but rather that deep life-long feeling which is so very widespread, of guilt, obligation, indebtedness, seeking expiation for just being alive. (Complementary interpretation: his guilt also springs from having driven out his son Ishmael; falling from grace, failing in his relationship with God, feeling betrayed by his own actions, he angrily rejects the new worship and would destroy it, killing God along with his lineage in some prehistoric rite.) To this purpose he plans the ultimate sacrifice, for slaying his precious heir would terminate the human chain of being; our means of cheating death, by sneaking in our children to replace us, would be removed. So the rules would be obeyed, the ransom exacted. We think this way in first detecting our divine origin beyond form, finding the evenness of Great Peace, silence and perfection; here we take a needed step, surpassed by Isaac’s struggling, bleeding steps:
Isaac Carries Up the Firewood
The wine remembers---our blood recalls mystic things, it flows and spreads our traffic arteries (cop cars flashing are phagocytes), knitting everyone, our severed members. Praise God who lives the play-acting of our waking dreams!
Merge, submerge in body divine. Go south, young west. Eyes, sink into heart. Stroke, one limb snaking forward while the other pulls back. Swim through thick, through viscous, through warm, reddening against blind lids. Frogman. Suffering saviour: no accident, no blame. We killed and ate you, father, in Freud’s dreamworld; we bit an apple, we return a sacred heart; we stole fire, repay agnus for agni, lamb for god of fire. Parent gives way to child who turns to parent giving way to child: so we compact in timelessness. Capital I is crossed, expanded to a
tee. Flaunting jewelled necks, we’re just weighed down. Gash the throat, lips appear here, saying: Atonement is at one meant, we make the present represent this, this act reconciles. We has to dance swollen ankled in the ritual slaughter.
Then Isaac reaches the mountaintop of revelation, transmuting the agony of the climb. He feels total compassion for Abraham’s trials, for the trial runs they’re undergoing together for everyone’s sake. Lying tied on the altar, giving up his succession to the throne and his human life, Isaac receives in transcendent contact the message of Grace, that existence is the free gift We give to Ourselves through our holy love, which is boundless however much we appear to be bound. Flooding with life eternal, Isaac sees we are the God Who lives more the more It Self-sacrifices, and love rushes out to his father, a poignant soul-deep absolution staying his father’s hand, enabling Abraham to release his remorse and anger at God; they’re both bound right into God, they both are saved.
Balance is one part of our sacred nature, we expand upon it as in the arts; the facets of our nature are ours to use as needed. A simple principle: The Beyond-form opens Itself out, by playing as dynamic opposites; Being Is Becoming. Just as Isaac honors Father Abraham, forgives his faults and absorbs his knowledge, so the even aspect of Being imbeds itself within the freeing imbalance of Grace without payback, Isaac spirals beyond into ever greater Love, the glistening scimitar sweeps open. The heart learns this in great peril, rescuing love, forgiveness, sympathy, while lying there roped in the reflection of a blade. We can overturn and walk a footbridge through our heart, advance to the truth of our inevitable choosing.
This vision was first shown me one day by one of those unintended pictures in a terrazzo floor in my home. Then I found out this was the day the story of the binding of Isaac was read in the temples. Over a decade passed, and my study partner independently came up with a similar insight. Years later, the second meaning about Ishmael wove in.
The world turns on the hinge of this messianic revelation that life’s a free gift we give ourselves, it swings from focusing on the parents and past obligations, to winging forth into the child’s future, the baby in the new world. And this is yoked into a spiraling round. The children aren’t forfeited to make up for the parents’ life; in self-sacrifice, “A ram” hides already within “Abraham.” Nor are the parents taken to give their children life. Rather we give and receive a love that increases always, a liberated horn of plenty which is encompassing and non-linear, subsuming “past” and “future,” as we awaken in this Renewed World.
A meditation: I am one Life, always always Being. I am constantly being born and giving birth in countless variety, while I remain the unlimited absolute.
Numbered with the Thieves
The Messiah is numbered among the thieves, along with Prometheus, Hermes, Trickster Coyote. The thief steals salvation for us from under the nose of supposed law, a stolen article we freely give Ourselves.
Parents and Children
In worldwide myths, parents and children seem to cancel each other out, sine waves, the infinity sine, a mechanism like a vibrating cord. The macrocosm (shown above): In the East, parent ascendant, we look more to tradition; in the West, child ascendant, we look more to the future.
Balanced opposites: As parent and child, as female and male we fold the map in half and quarters , like the Tao with its dots---complexity enough to deliver worlds. With either generation or gender, Beloved, meditative self-transformation stops the competing and clambering.
Religions can involve themselves in generational or sexual politics. When some folks in Judaism saw an old man image, others eventually fashioned the messiah into a son image. On this axis the world shifted from looking to tradition to looking towards the future.
(From East to West, from parent to child: In Russia, the easternmost edge of Christendom, the cross contained a seesaw to make the switch. Stormy passage: Czar Ivan and Czar Peter each killed his only son for fear of usurpation.)
Isaac, Andromeda and Jesus, Oedipus, Osiris are telling us that as we forge ahead, we’re curved around to redeem; the world is round. We’re shedding the skin of conditioning, and wrapping our need for futurism (child religion) and pastism (parent religion) into the Now of our Renewed World, Binding the wound of this splintered mythos. In understanding, incorporating, and transmuting the world dream, we awaken.
In surrendering, in receiving grace, our heart abjures our aspiration to that temporal throne of children replacing parents to be later replaced ourselves. There’s nobody to replace, for we are One. Our entire sense of separation, of limitation drops away. The somnolent world in which we held ourselves captive, we transfigure it, along paths we have not known. Feeling the presence divine, our karma is redeemed; honoring the weight training of this world, we see through to the reality of our spiritual universe. In quietness and in confidence, we find that we live beyond time and causality, endless and free. We return and retrieve our longlost loving friends, who died to pay for us in the great dream time. Mortality is swallowed up in everflowing love, all of life wins out. Miracle melting time, uncovering our Source in the eternal moment and opening the gates of recognition, holy love floods forth, we parent our parents and they parent us, we’re aware that we father our father, we mother our mother, and we become our children’s children. A meditation: Walking our footpath through the heart, letting go into God releases us, into the sacred relationship of God to Itself, into the ways of nurturing, of forgiveness, of ever greater Love. What are these ways?
