CADUCEUS
While doing prayer work for the world, a tape recorder was copying a talk to play in the car, so the original wouldn’t be damaged. Eventually I heard a very faint distant siren and was meditating for that, then realized it was a teeny pulling sound from the recorder, which my mind was fantastically embellishing. So it is with the superimpositions we stamp upon the divine level: It proceeds with equanimity, issuing forth truth and peace (like the tape), while we at the human level outpicture waves of good and evil. God needs this experience As us, as each level is doing its part to create an ever greater Love.
Like Andromeda’s sea serpent, we keep undulating around the straight pole of the desireless middle path, between “good” and “bad” feedback, yet unnoticed we ascend.
The caduceus shows forth over and over. Hermes, Mercury, carries it. Hinduism has the two entwined Naga serpents and the double helix for raising kundalini. The Aztec symbol of Mexico, an eagle with a snake dangling from its talons. The snake in the Tree of Knowledge. Moses erected a brazen serpent on a staff; those who looked to it were saved from snakebites. The sign of the American economic system: $. In physics the sine waves of light, sound, energy. In biochemistry the DNA double helix. The serpent subtly arising between the opposites of the Tao. And all the spirals are its family.
In an Optometrist’s Chair
A great machine lights my inner eye rivers of blood mapleleafing all directions
the shortest way from no where out is meandering streams dividing and branching
left and right and split and descend a caduceus world veering open I see myself
From one root the river bends to good and bad.
From an airplane the rivers reveal their sinusoidal patterning. It appears in branches and in leaves, grape clusters, skip ropes. The blood vessels within my own sight show their sine waves. As the waves of the caduceus grow larger, in three dimensions this forms a spiral.
888
The “good” adhered to goes overboard, too much of a good thing, so it shifts back to be tempered with the “bad.” They say, be careful what you wish for, you might get it. Each thing is sacred when used sacredly, a treasured metaphor. Then we get attached to possessions, food, socializing, entertainment, wine, tobacco, and we fall off the beam.
Humanly sensed goods may refer indirectly to spiritual good, whose light could shine through their opaque surface like a stained glass window. In seeing through them, both good and bad have their real value in leading us on, with problems solved and blessings acknowledged, towards that ultimate good, that joyous culmination.
So a carrot and stick lead a donkey. If it eats the carrot or happens to break the Zen stick, it stops. Thy rod as well as thy staff do comfort me, as we step forward.
We’ll naturally back away from things we grade as bad, while if we think the good thing exists as a physical object, valuable only as an end in itself, and requiring us to behave according to material laws of fight or flight, then our beliefs are limiting, circumscribing the good. Resting back in attachment, we cut off our good experience from its source. “In my prosperity I said, I shall never be moved.” (Psalm 30) When such belief in the Tree of the Knowledge of good and bad (“evil” is a maltranslation) is operating, then our humanly good experience swings over to bad ones, and we can get going. So driving round the spirals, “good” and “bad” trade places.
In essence, if we desire the good in and of itself or fear the bad, crediting our visions with a separate externality cut off from God, we are varying from the Middle Way and need to be brought back.
Problems are alarm bells, set to get us up. We could seek the Presence without having to be goaded. Being spared some startling kicks in the pants actually raises the bar, when through grace we’re prepared to awaken, though we relish pleasant dreams.
Each and every element that we live with plays its part in shifting our level of awareness, so it holds spiritual goodness, whether it seems good, bad or indifferent. There is no good and evil, not because all phenomena are irrelevant, but because both the sun and rain are “revelant.”
That old Chinese farmer knew that apparently good or bad events both really have a neutral value, each nothing in itself, as well as balancing each other out on the caduceus, in this unrealized phase of ours. Yet a loom is weaving that drives us up the spiral. One good turn deserves another. Where contraries cross upon the Middle rail, they synthesize as astounding paradox, deep principles, among the way stations of joy.
We’re faced with dream pictures. Someone calls for help, or we ourselves pray because of a problem. The value in meditatively being saved from distress lies then not just in the happy relief, but finally in the demonstration of this Presence Who gently wakes us up.
In the evening shade, a swami saw a terrifying cobra uncurling, but looking closer found a rope to climb.
888
When things are “going along fine,” they’re not coasting by dumb inertia, but are supported each moment by the Everlasting Arms, and for Its purposes, not for mundane good. Troubles too are superimposed perceptions upon holy purpose, and we are just as constantly supported.
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Things are supposed to happen spontaneously in context of the perfecting framework. The “good and bad” gives feedback to correct course. Everyone in the workplace acts as a product engineer, adjusting creation.
The Limitless level self-limits by turning into the sense of humanhood. Operation Bootstrap: Human acts can’t Really harm or save us, but we develop a sense of individual doing, mistaking, reaping, which leads to surrender and grasping God’s love and compassionate absolution; we clarify each principle; and so we re-enter the Godhead enriched and enriching It.
Satan
The English word sin: “inaccuracy” of marksmanship, in Hebrew. We learn from our mistakes, the errors of our ways. Our trials are trial runs, an experimental process.
Satan, the old serpent servant, stands for our finite sense of self, snaking round the sine waves, the bedspring helix, the expanding caduceus of Nothingness, wriggling up the Tree. In Job, Satan still works as a celestial courtier. We the people come here on a mission.
The Logictree of Good and Bad Apples
Let’s recall: We embody possibilities of omnifertile Nothing. At the root, we say we can even win in the worst case scenario of forgetting Who we are; paradoxically, it’s also the best scenario for nurturing our many new traits. Our mass psyche’s a planetary biocomputer; we run through the logictree of all “good and bad” alternatives, every implication and ramification, in this problematic process of our discriminating mind, drawing lessons from each subroutine.
The Caduceus Principle drives the good and bad feedback of our mass psyche, corresponding to all our qualities, to our physical, emotional and mental aspects. These three show forth divine Substance, Love and Truth; all three are the same thing magnified; for instance, Substance is Love, Love is the Truth.
(To tease strands from the cable: Within the self, on the physical level we have health and beauty or else sickness; on the emotional level we have lovingkindness and joy touching the spiritual realm, or else hate, craving and depression; on the mental level we have understanding and wisdom, or else ignorance.)
(With the relating Other, Who stretches from our personal contacts out to the entire world: On the physical level we gain supply like Jacob and Esau, or else have lack and false appetites, accident, contagion, eco-disaster; on the emotional level we have love and peace,
or else alienation, violence and war; on the mental level we have mutual understanding, or
else the clash of beliefs.)
Our back and forth process creates the marvelous plenitude of the world.
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Our problems abundantly show that the race is not to the swift, and even if it were, our e-go cart runs quite erratically. All to get us to seek our unseen Self.
It turns out the healthy were denying their illnesses, the rich owed millions, the peaceful were doormats repressing their anger.
Our faults help us in the divine process as much as our virtues. Neither our “burdens” nor our “gifts” are our personal property. At times I’m discards in a compost heap; everything advances the salving work.
We need to try negative experiments, hit every single sidepath, only to fall back upon our greater identity. We intend this; it’s no accident. We attempt to live a life of good humanhood, we essay a highminded course as a scientist, patriot, or artist, but in this case separate and apart from our core Self. These noble experiments not only rule out such good humanhood as incomplete in itself, they discover all the virtues, the facets of splendid manifestation, that can translate us to higher levels.
888
We who suffer by entering realms of uncharted action do so both for our own salvation and for the sake of the world. The societal bell curve makes another sine wave, far out encounters on its edges create parts of the learning serpent.
The caduceus rhythm, the process of holy nurturing love, continues swinging, transmuted, when we embark on the turn in the road to spiritual awareness. Long cycles alternate, up to months or years, some honeymoons with realized Consciousness, some dragging into the valleys, where our meditations seem arid. Rude awakenings: We unbottle suppressed emotions to fully feel them, then learn the Principles that solve and dissolve them; our greatest challenges outpicture. So we dispatch the pent-up anger, pain and loss of the world. Initiation: The facade made with hands is wrecked to present a living inner Temple.
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“If he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?” says Jesus. At any moment we can sit down and surrender to God’s love through contemplative inquiry; Grace can totally separate us from the caduceus, from fear and hate and isolation, from all conditioning and supposed powers, so we can swim freely away. Such miraculous way stations find us as our Divine Consciousness and human mass psyche interact; the invisible spirit breezes gracefully upon the face of its primal living waters, endlessly rocking and whipping up ever more wondrous wave patterns, awesome displays. Through all our vicissitudes, we keep evolving into greater blessedness without closure or end, while constantly within us rides our Being secure and joyous. Each of our problems in its special way leads us back again to surrender, to opening out the shell of that sense of separation, so reborn we reunify with our Beloved anew. Atop the caduceus, rising from the waves, fly the wings, liberation for all of Being.