They've built enormous, towering walls around me

 

1. The wonderful journey of life, the long road begins with the entrance of the soul within the Walls of the earthly dimension. The enormous, towering walls of loss, namely the separation of the Soul from the divine One, rise imperceptibly, with the soul's intangible penetration into the thick energy layers.

With man's incarnation, the essence of the soul - the internal Light of the universe, the spiritual ether of cosmic Love - is confined. From then on the soul's immediate vision and perceptiveness function through the limitations imposed on the human consciousness: space, time, material body, language and perceptiveness of the senses.  

Incarnated man perceives the world only with the conscious part of his self. All the knowledge the soul possessed when in the spiritual plane, is shut in the superconscious. That is the reason man's inner faith in the eternal and the imperishable thisness of his existence is not habit, but instinct. Even though man has the feeling that from the world they shut him out, he knows instinctively that the celestine word sub-sists and is predestined to be added to life's imperfect sentence, otherwise nonsensical.

Faith is none other than man's superconscious knowledge that life exists outside the walls also, and his yearning to reunite with this Life. To arrive there is your destination: the destination of the Return and the reunion, which is fulfilled on Earth through the one-way street of Love.

The limited overview that man has of the world, which inevitably takes into consideration only what the Self perceives through its conscious, is a determinant feeling for his existence:

And now I sit here despairing.
I think of nothing else; this fate consumes my mind.



Separated from the Self, earthly man sits here now despairing, inside the Walls of fear, pain and solitude. This fate consumes his mind, as he tries to answer the riddle of Existence with a limited organ of understanding - the mind – even though the mind constitutes his higher material body. Inside the enormous, towering walls man does not know that his limitations are, at the same time, the tools with which he will dig the tunnel of his escape from Matter to the wonderful journey towards the Light, redemption and freedom. The ulterior or inner aim of the whole earthly experience towards which the universe guides man, is to build an immaterial, solid house, which destiny does not shake.  

Until, however, man acquires insight into his destiny, until he is awakened from his material dream and regains his lost cosmic Conscience, until he becomes wise, with so much experience and understands what Ithacas (the many Ithacas) mean, what he experiences is the feeling of confusion. The confusion he feels in his conscience – and which dominates throughout the largest part of his earthly course – derives from the basic structural characteristic of his nature, his duality: 

My soul is in the middle of the night,
confused and paralyzed. Outside,
outside itself its life comes into being.

And it awaits the improbable, exquisite dawn
And I await, worn down, and bored,
I, too, within it or with it.



Conscience is what guides Man's steps on this Earth. Conscience differentiates him from other beings, which have a Soul, but do not have a Conscience, that is why they function with the lower five or six energy centres. The "Crowning Touch" of Creation – Man – as a symbol means exactly this: that Man acquired the "crowning" seventh centre, the centre of Conscience, which can lead him to the assimilation with God.

The stages of evolution are exactly the ones that lead all species towards their initial form, which we can imagine as dematerialization. This state of dematerialization, namely the total recall to a plane of pure energy, is what Men know as one side of their lives: the Soul and the Spirit. On the other hand, they know Matter, the Body and everything tangible (even the senses, namely those they receive through the organs of the senses or the emotions).

This is the Nature of Man, what Jesus meant by calling them Sons of God and Sons of Man: the Conscience of the two, non homogeneous poles, of Matter and of Non Matter. This bipolarity characterizes every situation Man perceives or experiences and cannot get away from it, except only intellectually, meaning not substantially. It is only natural and expected that man cannot understand exactly the concept of the One – besides he is not asked to do so – his Conscience, though, knows that polarization is not the initial and unique state. On the contrary, it is the state subsequent to the initial unity, and the pre-stage leading back to the One.

During the larger part of his course, man is not aware of the transitory nature of his existence, as he experiences it in this earthly world; he does not realise that he will not be a "human being" forever, that his soul will not be incarnating eternally in this specific functional structure of the being called "human", but that at some point in time, he will complete the cycle of his earthly incarnations and will pass over to a next cycle of existence. That is why the dawn seems to him distant and improbable.

Man yearns, therefore, for his soul’s life not to come into being outside itself, but within it and with it. He yearns to ensure the state of being of the unity he remembers, the improbable, exquisite dawn that his soul awaits. This longing for the Return, the inclination towards the sky, is the one that will lead him to experience his real Existence.

2. Man's initially unconscious and later conscious tendency towards Union is commonly known as Love. Man expresses, in earthly life, his tendency towards re-union with the God-Self, with the desire to love and be loved.

The memory of perfect Love, as he experienced it in the ethereal planes, which is a state of "being" and not an earthly feeling, has been held, vivid in his soul:

when, my friends, I loved
it was many years ago
I lived not on the same earth
with the other mortals



It seems impossible that such ideal, divine Love has been acquired in our earthly world, yet only many years ago, when man lived not on the same earth and was not mortal. At the same time, however, divine Love is being expressed as if it were known and experienced. Indeed, it is enough for someone to take a look at a young child, in order to meet this divine Love, to see this love's spark shine in its glance; because young children belong more to the world of pure energy, where they come from, and less to the earthly world, since the process of their in-materialization has not been completed yet. This Love also emanates from the Poet, the one who re-coordinated his existence with Its frequency and united his soul with the Self, having, however, run the cycle of evolution beforehand.

Behind all intermediate desires man is to fulfill in his life, behind all the intermediate earthly-material aims he is to materialize, behind the unavoidable pain of ordeals, behind every thought, word or deed, there exists the quest for the perfect and eternal love. As he sets out on the way to Ithaca, either being on the first cycle of lessons, hence keeping its memory faint within himself, or sees the grass on the top of the rugged mountain, hence he has completely realized the truth, man seeks the lost Paradise of the Soul, where he used to live before coming down to the material planes – from which alas!, how wretchedly he fell.

In harmony and the celestial peace of love
They lived : and thriving reaped the fruits of toil.
They knew not envy, hatred nor despair;
Nor chained their minds to the dull misery
Of discontent, distrust and little faith.
Mercy and virtue, strength and hope were theirs;
Their minds in splendour shone alike the Sun. *



(* C. P. Cavafy originally wrote this poem in English.)


The fall, for the soul, is equivalent to the loss of Light, loss of its highest divine-positive qualities, which took place with its separation from the One – a situation that is called Fear. If, therefore, this "fall" of energy is the course of the soul towards condensing and polarization, in our overall passing through from the earthly dimension we travel through a converse route: the evolution towards the fine, spiritual, ethereal frequencies and the re-acquisition of our lost qualities. This, in our life, is practically equivalent to the gradual transformation of Fear into Love and this is the "other earth", where the soul used to live when it loved.

Man, in the universe, is a channel of Light, an energy transformer for himself and the others. Starting from his first incarnation as a human being, from the non-conscious flow of energy and its low, instinctive transformation, man will cover a vast course inside the walls of Matter, until he reaches the complete realisation of this universal function; or in other words, until he frees the pure soul that expresses the absolute Light from the fortress of feelings and the labyrinth of the mind.

In the fringe of Perfection he will experience the greatness of the God-Man: having completely spiritualized the earthly-material side of his existence, he will be transforming the cosmic energy into Love whereas, at the same time, he will have completed the cycle of his earthly incarnations. The improbable, exquisite dawn comes by experiencing the uninterrupted life, the unification of the conscious with the superconscious, the identification of knowledge to faith, meaning the surpassing of duality and the reduction of the self to the one Truth, the Unit, the One.