Happy Feast Day of St. Hildegard!
In the spare hours I get to write a book, I am progressing nicely with the clarity that this year's trials have brought me for what has happened to the Earth and where we need to go. Enjoy the following excerpt, and may you find sustenance in the rich meal that is your daily balance of creation's energies!
love,
Carl
Chapter 5: Surviving the Lovacalypse
The apocalypse of love - the “lovacalypse” - will rend open your sacred heart, turn inside out your mind, and anchor your immortal soul in your human body, which you will realize in new ways is both eternal and divine. Your own life will become both achingly familiar and startlingly new; you will be faced with what you always sensed might actually be true. This will make you extremely sensitive to what is safe and harmful the world, and what is true and false, thus compelling you to work for Heaven on the Earth beginning with what you have deep in you to do. To survive this total transformation, you will require more support and assistance than you may be accustomed to acknowledging was available to you in this life and world, but then that would be the point, wouldn’t it?!
The nature of eternal life must be discovered in the world today. We are experiencing the destruction of the old structures that were not built to last, while the infinite Spirit calls us deeper still and onward to the future that was always real and true. Sustainability is more than an ecological concept after all, it is most dearly spiritual. Just as we can hold in our hands the lovely fragrant blossom which will soon go to the seed from which the whole plant will rise again, so too we can embrace our divine essential self to be the flower of creation which contains both the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, the miraculous eternity which conceives of itself ever anew. To be forever means to be the energetic pattern which sustains and reflects the whole, by caring for the balance of all-benefit which nurtures universal growth.
The glory of the infinite in eternal balance is elegantly depicted in the ancient metaphor known as the net of Indra. In third century Buddhist scripture, the Vedic god Indra drapes an amazing endless net at the cosmic center which connects heaven and earth; it is the web of life itself. At each intersection point of the net is strung a precious pearl, so finely polished that in it may be seen reflected every other pearl and the whole of the net itself. So too each refined perfected individual may contain and sustain the structure of all creation.
Cosmic metaphors are not merely invented by human imagination, they exist objectively as well. Modern science has given us the hologram. Holography is a startling photographic technique for recording the light scattered by an object into a material in such a way that the material’s surface does not by itself contain any recognizable pattern, but when light interacts with the hologram then the original three dimensional view is visible again. We can actually move our head back and forth to see the object appear to move with us, because multiple viewpoints have been stored in the structure. What’s most remarkable and unexpected about the hologram is that every fragment contains the whole; cut a hologram in two, and you have two smaller windows on the entire original scene. This is totally unlike a flat photograph, which with each cut is reduced to separate pieces of a puzzle. The property of a hologram to contain the whole in each piece demonstrates by light that each and every soul can retain the entire perspective of the universe, and thus have God inside.
From the pure realm of mathematics we can further grasp eternity by contemplating the fractal, a surprisingly simple equation that gives rise to infinite complexity. Fractals are a rather recent discovery that require easy repetitive calculations to view, thus computers are well suited to make them visible. Computer graphics make good use of fractals to generate landscapes that appear natural with lots of nooks and crannies, waves and clouds and trees, because nature also develops by locally simple rules that give rise to endless global detail. So the classic fractal image may be tunneled into from any point like a spaceship on a journey, whose view explodes into unending related intricate patterns, hauntingly familiar but with twists and turns that never quite repeat. This too shows how every human soul is a unique entry point into the infinite creativity of God. We are each given a unique path to follow, one that evokes the whole while offering a richly personal experience of that which never ends.
Eternity thus begins in the here and now, and the infinite is held most beautifully in the heart of the finite ideal. Earth is absolutely capable of sustaining heaven, and the body is eternal and divine. There is no reason to assume that the material world is not as holy and divine as the most immortal pure conception of God, only thinking has made it so. Our planet is as sacred or profane as you treat it to be. Dualistic philosophies which proclaimed that the flesh is a sinful place are really exposing the mind that is trying to purge itself of a problem by the problem itself, thus throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
In fact the brain is glorious, capable of stretching for a wider view outside of space and time, while the body anchors us in the sequence of its steady growth, so it takes the sacred heart to bridge the two and carry on. Those who believe in the power of love by opening to its transformative experience can feel that the relationships of loving are eternal and infinite in consequence. Thus they do not fear the changes of the body but become fond for the signatures of each passing season, in the full confidence and benefit that the best moments to practice each form of love again will always return. Earth is precisely the place where endless love can show itself and share.
Thus there is the ancient view of time as cyclical, with seasons ever coming round again. This may seem quaint today in a world that has made so very much progress by measuring time more by the differences of each passing age than by the similarities. We’ve straightened time into a line for the purpose of hurtling ourselves forward to a bigger change that we can even comprehend; could that too be a cycle?
We have felt superior to our yesterdays, preened ourselves with increasing God-like manifested powers, even as the toxicities accumulate from our unsustainable lifestyles, however well-intended they may have been to improve ourselves and benefit one another. Now as we stand on the brink of far more loss than gain, as we fear that apocalypse could spell the end of life on Earth by man-made or natural disaster. We do well to reach for cycles again, and reacquaint ourselves with ourselves in the past and future of a deeper sacred nature.
Human dreams have not changed; we have always chiefly longed for the security to love, to make our lives more beautiful and full of grace, to be the gifts to one another. And the source most secure for a more perfect creation is that which we call divine: the eternal good and true, wise and just, immortal and pure. Such ways and places surely do exist, for they motivate us far more starkly than the passing of a suffering, to love one another and confess that we can live no other way, than to know that our love is forever here, on an Earth as in the Heaven we can yet attain.
