Japanese-style Second Advent Cross PHOTO: Yukako Kawai
“As the portrait painter keeps an eye upon the king’s face as he draws, and when the king’s face is toward him, he draws the portrait easily, but when the king turns his face away, he cannot draw. In like manner, Christ, the good artist to those who believe in him and gaze continually at him, straightaway portrays after his own image a heavenly person. Out of his own spirit, out of the substance of Light itself, the ineffable Light, he paints a heavenly image. If a person does not gaze constantly at Christ, the Lord will not paint his image with His own Light. We must, therefore, gaze upon him, believing him and loving him, throwing away all else and attending to him in order that he may paint His own heavenly Image and send it into our souls, and thus, wearing Christ, we may receive eternal life, and have full assurance and be at rest.
“As the golden coin, if it does not receive the imprint of the King’s image, does not come upon the market, but is discarded, so the soul, if it has not the image of the Heavenly Spirit in Light, is not fit for the treasures above.”
It seems odd to think of Christ as a portrait painter, but this is an obvious use of metaphor and allegory.
While I’ve never been a portrait painter myself, I can understand how one would get frustrated if the subject kept turning away or changing position. That is why many portrait painters today will take photos of the subject, and then work from the photos, perhaps only asking the subject to sit for a short while at the end to complete the final details.
At first, it sounds like St. Macarius is saying that Christ is painting a portrait of us, but if you read the quote carefully, you will see that he is painting a portrait of Himself upon our Soul.
Macarius tells us we must be continuously looking at Christ for this to happen. That is impossible to do, in a literal sense, and still function in the material world. What it really means is that we must keep a mental image of Christ in our minds at all times. In Cosolargy, we are taught to keep an image of the Cosolargy Cross in our minds at all times, which is the same thing as that cross is a symbol of Christ.
Those of us who have been in Cosolargy for more than a few months know that when we talk about the Light, we don’t mean the basic light of a light bulb, or even the light of the material sun, but we seek out a greater Light that is Spiritual and comes to us through the Spiritual Sun. St. Macarius calls this “the ineffable Light, which is a good name for it. Ineffable means something so great or powerful that it can’t be described accurately in words. That is the Light we all seek.
St. Macarius tends to use Christ and God as if they mean the same thing, but we in Cosolargy know that they are not the same. Macarius is correct in saying we must believe in God and Love God if we are to receive God’s greatest gift, that Spiritual Light that awakens and develops the spirit into a conscious Soul, and makes us truly immortal.
This is another allegorical way to tell us that we must have Christ in our spirit and soul, we must have that Divine Light in our soul if we are to reach heaven when we leave the world. While it makes many people happy to believe they will get to heaven without having to do anything to earn that great privilege, it is a fantasy. The great mystery schools of the world and the founders of the major religions never taught that. They have always taught that getting to Heaven was a privilege that had to be earned.
For about 50 years, the scientific community has been grappling with a substantial problem: There isn’t enough visible matter in the universe.
All the matter we can see — stars, planets, cosmic dust and everything in between — can’t account for why the universe behaves as it does, and there must be five times as much of it around for researchers’ observations to make sense, according to NASA. Scientists call that dark matter, because it does not interact with light and is invisible.
The sun warms the Earth, making it habitable for people and animals. But that’s not all it does, and it affects a much larger area of space. The heliosphere, the area of space influenced by the sun, is over a hundred times larger than the distance from the sun to the Earth.
The sun is a star that constantly emits a steady stream of plasma – highly energized ionized gas – called the solar wind. In addition to the constant solar wind, the sun also occasionally releases eruptions of plasma called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs.
We’ve received a strange signal from across the galaxy, and astronomers are struggling to understand what it means.
They know what’s emitting the signals. It’s a neutron star named ASKAP J193505.1+214841.0 (ASKAP J1935+2148 for short), located in the plane of the Milky Way, some 15,820 light-years from Earth.
But the signals themselves are like none we’ve ever seen before. The star goes through periods of strong pulses, periods of weak pulses, and periods of no pulses at all.
“Out of the deep, slow brooding and pondering on some mystery, some incomprehensible link between himself and the Real, or the deliberate practice of loving attention to God, the contemplative—perhaps by way of a series of moods and acts which his analytic powers may cause him ‘nicely to distinguish’—glides, almost insensibly, on to a plane of perception for which human speech has few equivalents. It is a plane which is apparently characterized by an immense increase in the receptivity of the Self and by an almost complete suspension of the reflective powers. The strange silence which is the outstanding quality of this state—almost the only note in regard to it which the surface intelligence can secure—is not describable, Here, as Samuel Rutherford said of another of life’s secrets, ‘Come and see will tell you much: come nearer will say more.” Here the self passes beyond the stage at which its perceptions are capable of being dealt with by thought. It can no longer ‘take notes’: can only surrender itself to the stream of an inflowing life, and to the direction of a larger Will. Discursive would only interfere with this process: as it interferes with the vital processes of the body if it once gets them under its control.”
When Ms. Underhill says that the mystic is “pondering some mystery,” she is not talking about mysteries such as are found in Agatha Christie novels, but pondering the greater mysteries of life beyond the physical realm, or as she calls it: the “Real,” meaning the spiritual.
This is also an important part of spiritual growth. We need to pay attention to God and we need to have love for God. Without these, our spiritual progress will be limited, at best. On the other hand, the love of God alone won’t make you spiritual or fully develop your spiritual faculties, but it is a good start. You still have to practice the Solar Techniques as taught by Cosolargy.
Spiritual development will bring us to new planes of perception, which are also called higher levels of consciousness. Those who have experienced these higher planes do find human speech inadequate to describe such places as our languages are for describing the material realm, and fall short when trying to describe the spiritual. Not that it really matters because having someone describe these levels of consciousness to you is not important, experiencing them for ourselves is what matters.
It is true that at higher levels of consciousness, we become more receptive to the greater Knowledge found at those levels while at the same time, finding that we do not question and reflect on such Knowledge because we simply know that it is true. When you know that something is true, there is no need for reflection, no need to question.
We do need to surrender our ego to the greater Will of God to receive this in-flowing Life, this stream of Divine Knowledge that the Gnostics called Gnosis. Not everyone is capable of doing this when they began their spiritual practices, but it is something we must develop. We do not need to destroy the ego, as some are teaching today. The ego is useful for getting things done. But as we develop our spiritual Self, we must keep the ego under control so it doesn’t work to prevent such development.
Earth rides through our home galaxy, the Milky Way, inside a protective bubble around our sun. Scientists call this bubble the heliosphere. It’s essentially a cavity surrounding our local star, protecting our planet (and us) from the stronger radiation in the surrounding interstellar medium. But on June 10, 2024, a team of scientists said that, approximately 2 million years ago, the heliosphere might have shrunk. Earth might have been more directly exposed to the interstellar medium. These conditions might have left traces of heavier metals on Earth and could have cooled our climate for a time.
Scientists have just identified the formation processes of some of the Universe’s earliest galaxies in the turbulent era of the Cosmic Dawn.
JWST observations of the early Universe around 13.3 to 13.4 billion years ago – just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang – have revealed telltale signs of gas reservoirs being actively slurped into three newly forming and growing galaxies.
“ORIGINS OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS There is no boundary for light. It was unknown when it began. Nothing was when light was not. Nothing was when radiance was not. Nothing was when life was not. There was never a boundary for light. Nothing was when water was not.
“WATER IS PRIOR TO DARKNESS Water is prior to darkness. Prior to darkness is water. Nothing is without an end. No number is before the Uthras were. Light beings are prior to darkness. Prior to darkness are Uthras and older than their inhabitants. Goodness is prior to the malice of the place of darkness. Gentleness is prior to the bitterness of the place of darkness. Living fire is prior to the consuming fires of the place of darkness. Praise is prior to the practice of sorcery and witchcraft. Hymns and books are prior to the sorcery of Hewath, the terrible woman1.
“DARKNESS Water doesn’t mix with tar, and darkness can’t be measured by light.” -The Ginza
In the Bible, God says “Let there be Light,” and light is created. But that creation is actually the creation of the physical universe by the false god, the Demiurge. In the spiritual realm, Light is infinite. It had no beginning and no end. Time has no meaning in the spiritual realm so Light always was and always will be.
The author of the Ginza can say this because he understands that the Spiritual Light is itself a living thing. It may not be living in the same way as a physical being, but it is alive. This Spiritual Light is a part of God. Various scriptures say that God is Light, and it is this Spiritual Light they are talking about. So if God is alive, so is the Spiritual Light of Heaven.
Lakes and rivers did not come before darkness, but the spiritual “water,” which is the flow of God’s Word and God’s Grace did. Just as with the Spiritual Light, this water, being spiritual in nature, has no beginning and no end. It always was and always will be.
This statement can be misleading. It needs another word added to it. It should read “Nothing physical is without an end.” Everything in the physical realm has a beginning and an end. Some people will say that, according to the laws of science, matter, and energy cannot be destroyed, only changed. While that is true as long as the physical universe exists, when that universe ends, so will everything in it, at least from a conventional point of view. In actuality, the physical universe won’t be destroyed, it will be gradually transformed from matter back into spirit, so it will go on, but in a very different form.
Uthras is a name for Beings of Light, more commonly called Angels. They did exist before Darkness because they are part of the Spiritual Realm, and therefore, immortal. As the quote says, goodness and gentleness were also prior to Darkness. Love could be added to that list. They are aspects of God, the Beings of Light, and Heaven, or the Realm of Light. Like everything else in that realm, they existed before Darkness.
Darkness in the spiritual sense doesn’t refer to the night or to a rook with all the lights turned off. It refers to the realm of matter created by the Demiurge, or the fallen angels. This realm is inferior to the realm of Light because it is mortal and everything in it is mortal. It is the realm of death, disease, suffering, pain, and hunger. None of those unpleasant things exist in the Spiritual Realm created by the real God. Because the real of matter was created by the false god, it is defective and has all those horrors and more. So it should be obvious that Light is greater than Darkness, and at some time in the future, Darkness will end and all will be Light.
1 – I was unable to find any information on Hewath.