Core Truths: Living Wisdom for Today

12.  JOY

1. LOVE IS

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.¹

Many great civilisations of antiquity were founded on a deep sense of the sacred nature of life and the environment, and an innate understanding of energy and consciousness. They either shared the idea that the universe, seen and unseen, was a harmonious creation designed by the ultimate and original Architect, whether you call that Architect God, Yahweh, Béal, Allah, Brahman, Swayambhouva, or any other name; or else that it simply is, endlessly flowing into existence as a ‘stream’ or movement—an everlasting ‘becoming’—without cause or ‘self’ but nevertheless containing Truth, the laws and cosmic order of the universe. As Juliet succinctly puts it to Romeo, in Shakespeare’s play:

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other word would smell as sweet.²

Giving a name to something that we do not know and maybe cannot know is fraught with difficulty; but nevertheless we require words in order to describe to ourselves and others what we are referring to.

We all exist; the universe exists. How? Why? Where did we come from? Where does life come from? What created the universe? Why can its energy take form as matter, and vice versa? Why are there any laws of the universe? How did they come into existence? What designed them? These are all relevant questions, to which we don’t know the answers; but the fact that we do not know the answers does not make the questions any less relevant, nor that we should not ask the questions and hope one day to be able to answer them satisfactorily.

Mankind has probably been asking these questions for as long as it has been able to contemplate its own existence and the mystery of the universe. Over the many millennia of our existence there have been multitudes of philosophers and philosophies, some mystical, some scientific and some a mixture of both, that have provided answers of some kind. There have also been many great sages, enlightened beings, who have had much fuller answers and who have tried to communicate those answers to the rest of us.

The one common denominator of all the answers from the greatest sages is love: that the perfect life is a perfect expression of love. Love is the principle underlying and motivating all existence. It is the movement or energy of the universe. It is the essential nature of all the forms that energy assumes. It is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. It fills the universe and is the universe. It is the Cause of causes, itself without cause.

This is not a spurious hit-or-miss guess but a profound realisation obtained by the great sages from thousands of years of human observation, insight and experience—and, above all, divine grace and revelation. Love is basic to survival—to existence from its most imminent and personal form to its most absolute and universal form—for nothing can successfully exist, let alone be happy, unless it loves itself sufficiently to want to exist. Moreover, in the development of partnerships, families and societies there has to be love and care in order for there to be any hope of nurture and development, or even survival.

But what is love? To most people it is clear that there are many types and levels of love, and many forms that it can take, both selfish and unselfish. Love is life itself, whereas hate or anything unloving is detrimental to life. The great sages, the illumined ones who are true manifesters of love, describe the realisation of love in its highest form, which is that of undifferentiated unity, as being a light-filled experience of pure bliss. But even such ecstatic words are insufficient to describe something that is indescribable in any language. It has to be experienced for oneself, and in that experience all consciousness of self, and therefore of individual thought or language, disappears.

How do we live a life of love? How do we reach illumination or enlightenment? There have been a plethora of wisdom traditions, philosophies, religions and mystery schools that have researched into, practised, taught and passed on the ever-growing perennial wisdom concerning these matters—of life, death, consciousness, origins and purpose of life, material and spiritual existence, and the organisation of the universe. In this book is presented the basics of a philosophy, called Zoence, which is a synthesis of the core truths of the various Western wisdom traditions, plus new insights and discoveries—especially concerning the landscape and our relationship with it and the wider cosmos.

¹   I John iv, 7.

²   Romeo and Juliet, II, ii, 43-44.

2. PRINCIPLES OF LIFE

I have become in the becoming of I become.³

I am all that has been, and that is, and that shall be.⁴

Energy is eternal delight.⁵

The illumined sages, wisdom traditions and modern science all agree that the universe is filled with energy and is indeed energy. Energy is movement, and it is this movement that is called love, the divine emotion or desire to be manifest and hence known and enjoyed. In other words, all is a becoming—a movement towards further and further expression of the divine. In terms of eternity, the beginning, the end and all that lies between has instantly happened and this instant happening is continuing to happen throughout all time. The Alpha, Middle and Omega are one.

However, it is difficult for us to conceive of eternity except in the sense of movement, wherein, for instance, if you were to move at an infinitely fast speed you would be everywhere all at the same time, all the time. Within this eternity of movement there is time, which we can comprehend, and various speeds of movement. Some of this energy takes form as matter, building up, evolving and transforming all the various life forms of the universe, whilst the rest of the energy vitalises, inspires and illuminates those life forms. But for all this to happen, although there is but one Love, one universe of energy, one universal Being or Becoming, the unity of the universe must have polarity.

Polarity of Life

Besides love, the concept of polarity is crucial to an understanding of life. Without polarity, in fact, nothing can exist. As sacred tradition tells us, existence itself began with the two poles of potential existence, heaven and earth—the darkness and the deep: In the beginning God created heaven and earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness lay upon the face of the deep.⁶ When heaven became active as the ‘spirit’ of God, and earth passive and responsive as the ‘waters’ moved by the movement of the spirit, then existence became manifest and creative.

The heavenly polarity is known as ‘spirit’ or ‘breath’, and the earthly polarity as the ‘waters’ of matter. They are the two poles or ‘faces’ of God—the two poles of Love—which enable love to be expressed: so that God might love God, or Love might love Love. When there is no desire, no movement and no response, then there is Nothing—No Thing: only the potential of polarity, expressed poetically and lovingly in the Scriptures as the darkness which lay upon the face of the deep. But as soon as there is the desire to be manifest, then the two poles of that desire appear, one in an active state of movement and the other passive but responsive.

This is essentially a love-making, which the Scriptures describe poetically as "the spirit of God (i.e. the spirit of Love) moving upon the face of the waters."⁷ In this love-making the darkness has become the spirit or breath of life, which is creative energy or movement, whilst the deep has become manifested as the waters of life. The waters symbolise pure formless matter, initially in a state of inertia or rest, but which is nevertheless utterly receptive, malleable and responsive to the spirit. The love-making expresses the love relationship of the two poles of Love, and creates all forms of life as its ‘children’.

This basic polarity, of initiating energy and responsiveness to that energy, continues to manifest in everything it creates. All life forms have polarity. For instance, in our human form we have our inner breath or spirit (echoed by the physical breath) and our outer form within which the spirit acts and which is responsive to that spirit. Our bodies themselves have polarity—four different sets of polarity in fact: top and bottom, left and right, front and back, inside and outside. It is impossible to imagine ourselves without any of these polarities. (See Fig. 1.)

Figure 1. Polarity

Without polarity, nothing exists. Try to imagine yourself without a top or a bottom, or without a left or right-hand side, or without a front or a back, or without an inside or an outside. These are the polarities of your being. Where would you be without them?

Three-fold Nature of Life

Just as nothing can exist without polarity, no two poles can exist without the relationship between them. For instance, you or I do not consist of just a top and bottom, or right and left, but also everything that lies between. Together the three form a trinity which, when in perfect harmony, is the expression of love.

The two polarities of spirit and matter are two aspects of the one Existence. Out of their relationship and interaction all forms of life are created, expressing the love and divinity of Being. Spirit and matter create the soul, the conscious life form which manifests the divine Being. Spirit and matter are our divine parents, our soul is their child.

It is in the soul that spirit manifests itself as ‘light’. Energy takes form through its interaction with matter; or, one could say, energy builds form out of matter —or out of itself, depending on one’s viewpoint. As divine emotion or movement, energy moves at the fastest speed possible (i.e. infinitely fast) and manifests itself in matter as spiritual light: hence the word ‘soul’, which comes from the Latin Sol, meaning ‘Sun’, but in this instance referring to the spiritual sun that is the soul.

The soul is a metaphysical form of light, which in its highest or most perfect manifestation is omnipresent and immortal. However, it can also manifest in various degrees of imperfection, each one entailing a restriction of the speed of light and hence of form. In each case the more perfect is said to lie within the less perfect, although it could be seen the other way round (i.e. with the less perfect and more restricted lying within the more perfect and unrestricted). The physical form and universe is the least perfect and most restricted, and provides the outer ‘clothing’ in which the metaphysical aspects of the soul can be incarnate.

Physical light, in which the energy of the physical universe is moving at its fastest speed possible (i.e. the speed of physical light), is a slower, less perfect version of the spiritual light which, in its sublimest manifestation, moves infinitely fast and is therefore everywhere all at the same moment (i.e. omnipresent), eternally. Such spiritual light is the perfect form and expression of love. From this light is created the cosmos and all its individual forms of life. This light or soul, which has perfect harmony and beauty, is the third aspect of the Trinity—the child of the parents. But the three are not separate; they are inseparable.

In human terms this creative principle of the trinity is expressed, for instance, when two people make a relationship of any kind. The emotional link between them is the living expression of that relationship. A good friendship, partnership or marriage helps that energy link to develop into one of true harmony and love, which forms a metaphysical entity or expression of light and joy far greater than that of each partner alone. In contrast to this, an unloving relationship characterised by fear, hatred, jealousy or selfishness, forms a correspondingly dark entity. The same principle can be seen working within families, communities and nations, and between ourselves and our environment.

An important thing to realise in this is that it takes two to make a relationship, each giving and each receiving. If one person gives and the other refuses to receive, then the relationship—and thus the relationship entity—cannot be created. This is important to know not only for successfully creating a relationship entity of light and joy, but also for refusing to create a dark entity. That is to say, the importance of loving and forgiving those that might hate us and seek to harm us, instead of responding to that hate with our own hate, is vital, otherwise we will be co-creators of a dark entity that will simply grow in its power whilst we empower it in this way.

Energy is emotion. Creative energy, which is life, is inseparable from love. However, because we have free will, it is possible for us to have desires which are not pure or perfect; then, unless we are loving, the energy we release will not be so creatively good. Energy always flows between neighbours, whether human beings, animals, plants, hills, trees or rivers. To develop to our full potential it is our task to be friends, not just neighbours, so that the energy which flows between us is the energy of pure love. We can develop the ability to transform that love into joy and beauty by making it conscious, and by sharing the flow of loving energy with others and the world about us in our friendship and service to each other.

Related to this matter of human potential is another polarity or trinity of great importance—strife and friendship, whose loving and balanced relationship produces harmony. Mystery schools of the past allegorised this as Mars and Venus, whose love affair resulted in the birth of Harmonia. When entering a classical temple, the pilgrim would pass between two pillars representing this polarity, with the reminder that the aim of the pilgrim was to become the true child of this love relationship—the shining, joyful, beautiful soul, Harmony. To accomplish this both strife and friendship are needed, for we release our divine potential and attain our greatest achievements by striving always for the best, but we can only truly do this in friendship, with the help of each other and all life.

Difficulties and challenges against which we strive are a great gift: without them life would be immensely boring and we would never know our own strengths or develop our inherent talents. Likewise friendship is a wonderful blessing: without friends we would be so lonely, having none to love or be loved by, to help or to help us in our striving, or with whom to share the joy of achievement. The perverse opposite of this divine polarity, which we can bring about by means of our own desires or will, is war and enmity, wherein nothing good flourishes and nothing worthwhile is ever achieved.

Radiant and Spiral Energy

Energy itself has polarity. In the soul it exists as two types of energy, radiant and spiral. Radiant energy moves directly out from its centre or source, in a straight line. It can move as fast as it wants without restriction. At its fastest or most perfect speed, the energy (or emotion) manifests as radiant light, or radiance.

Spiral energy spirals outwards from a centre. It is also unlimited in its motion, and can gather speed until it reaches the speed of spiritual light. So spiral energy, at perfection, can manifest as light in all its degrees from physical to spiritual light. (See Fig. 2.)

However, spiral energy can also spiral inwards, coiling in on itself until it ultimately ties itself up into a knot and cannot move. It then becomes potential energy, or power, locked in on itself. In this unmoving state of inertia it is no longer light but dark and invisible. This state of inert potential is associated with the darkness of pure matter; indeed, it is matter, but it is the means by which the soul can experience material forms of existence and difficulties, which in turn enable the soul to grow in self-knowledge.

For the soul to evolve in consciousness and self-knowledge, part of it has to become involved with matter. This aspect of the soul incarnates in a material body of its own making. Its energies spiral inwards, trapping some of the radiance within the heart of the dark form. The soul’s purpose then is to unravel its potential and release its imprisoned light and beauty, thus gaining self-knowledge and finding its joy.

Radiant energy is the polarity to spiral energy; thus the two are in a constant state of interrelationship. The two together build the form of the soul and all the different types of soul-body. At the same time they evolve the soul’s consciousness or intelligence. Radiant energy, which is associated with the heavenly pole of our being, constantly interacts with the inert spirals of potential energy associated with the earthly pole of our being. Radiant energy has the power to unlock the spirals, turning them around so that they can spiral outwards, freeing themselves from their inertia and enabling them to become light. In this way material life-forms evolve and gradually become spiritualised.

Figure 2. Radiant and Spiral Energy

In the Indian Vedic tradition the radiant energy is associated with the three primary gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, and the spiral energy with their shakti or consorts, the three goddesses Saraswati, Lakshmi and Kali. The goddesses are also known under the name of Kundalini, the dragon energy. Western tradition has a similar symbology with the Triple Goddess, under the name of the three Maries, who are the three consorts of the male Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The Triple Goddess is known in Celtic tradition as Guinevere, ‘the white or pure dragon’.

The mythological stories of St George and the Dragon, and the Archangel Michael and Satan, contain all this in allegorical form, but somewhat twisted from the original courtship and love-making story that it should be. When we can balance the confrontational and aggressive ‘Mars’ perspective of life with more friendly and affectionate ‘Venus’ perspective, we should be able to rid ourselves of any warped perceptions and discover the true and harmonious secret of life.

Evolution of the Soul

The effect of the radiant energy shining into the darkness of matter and releasing its power is symbolised in the stories of St. George and the Dragon and St Margaret and the Dragon. These two complimentary myths, which are humanised versions of the archetypal myth of the androgynous Archangel Michael and the Dragon Satan, contain the secret of creation and transformation, as well as of the evolution of the soul.

Like the coiled-up dragon, every human soul has the potential to evolve from a starting point of virtual ignorance, or pure potential, into a complex and exquisitely beautiful being possessed of all knowledge. In order to evolve, the soul needs to learn how to master matter by experiencing it and working with it, so that the darkness of matter can be transformed into light.

The spear of the saint represents the spiritual ray of light piercing the dragon of matter—the sleeping, coiled-up vortex of power. Disturbed and awoken by the touch of this radiant spear, the dragon energy starts to uncoil, taking form as the dragon emerging from its lair of material darkness. As it unwinds it gradually moves faster and faster, changing form as it does so until ultimately it is transmuted into a soular form of light, the beautiful princess of the myth.

In the vertical polarity of the human body and psyche, the radiant energy is associated with the crown of the head, from whence it shines down the spine, awakening the dragon-energy stored in the base of the spine (and in the Earth itself). The dragon energy then naturally rises up the spine towards the crown. When it successfully reaches its goal, illumination of the mind and body is produced, transforming the nature of the person and bringing both harmony and joy.

The mythical description of the dragon, which can crawl on the earth, swim in water, fly in the air and breathe fire, refers to the physical and psychological constitution of both nature and the human being—the earthiness referring to the physical body and consciousness, and the water, air and fire natures of the dragon referring to the more subtle psychological aspects. These elements (of earth, water, air and fire) also refer to the natural process of life and to the successive transformations of consciousness brought about by the life-process.