Riffing on "When we Met the Neighbors"

Hope you've been reading Gordon's Whisky Rant series, because if you haven't, your life is shit. You probably knew it was shit, and now you know why. You're welcome. Catch up, and then hit this.

In Part 7, Gordon discusses his theories on what happened that led to us gaining a soul, and his theory is well explained in the post. I'm not repeating it here, read it yourself.

But I'd like to add a Hermetic aspect to the mix. The spirit-entity neighbors exist in a world that we all of a sudden started interacting with, claiming heritage from, and expected to return to when our bodies burned out. Gordon's looking at this from the bottom up, what happened that brought human beings to the level of consciousness to be able to interact with a world we can't see without assistance from spirits of various flora and fungi.

But let's look at what the Corpus Hermeticum says happened when humans gained a soul:

13. ... And after that he had well-learned their essence and had become a sharer in their nature, he had a mind to break right through the Boundary of their spheres, and to subdue the might of that which pressed upon the Fire.


14. So he who hath the whole authority o’er [all] the mortals in the cosmos and o’er its lives irrational, bent his face downwards through the Harmony, breaking right through its strength, and showed to downward Nature God’s fair Form.


And when she saw that Form of beauty which can never satiate, and him who [now] possessed within himself each single energy of [all seven] Rulers as well as God’s [own] Form, she smiled with love; for ’twas as though she’d seen the image of Man’s fairest form upon her Water, his shadow on her Earth.


He in his turn beholding the form like to himself, existing in her, in her Water, loved it and willed to live in it; and with the will came act, and [so] he vivified the form devoid of reason.


And Nature took the object of her love and wound herself completely round him, and they were intermingled, for they were lovers.


15. And this is why beyond all creatures on the earth man is twofold; mortal because of body, but because of the essential Man immortal.


Though deathless and possessed of sway o’er all, yet doth he suffer as a mortal doth, subject to Fate.


Thus though above the Harmony, within the Harmony he hath become a slave. Though male-female, as from a Father male-female, and though he’s sleepless from a sleepless [Sire], yet is he overcome [by sleep].

We had finished our training in the Seven Spheres, mastered the portions of the spheres allotted to us as fellow children of God, self aware emanations of the Source, and we stepped down all empowered and took a look at the creation below. And Nature made a form for us, and we loved it so much we leaped into it and became one with it.

In the Bible, it's the same thing, pretty much. God makes the form, and breathes life into it. The Hermetic creation notes the separation between  the Form Maker, and places the act of becoming ensouled entirely in the hands of the Spiritual species of Man.

All of a sudden in the material world, as Gordon so clearly lays it out, humans become self aware entities painting pictures of the internal landscape of the human spiritual condition, burying people, and interacting with invisible spirits that, presumably, had been there all along.


Either way you look at it, something formed a shell that we liked, and when it was ready, we stepped through and started flying around creation in matter suits that were suitable for our purposes.

When you were reading the Whisky rant, did you notice the crazy sidebar? Here, let me refresh your memory:

(Crazy sidebar: Is this our ancestors encoding their email address into their terraforming spaceships? Is this how we check back in?)*

He's talking about entheogens and the built-in receptors that let us trip and see the spirit world consciously. Personally, I think this ability is there as a safeguard, a reminder in case we forget who we are, where we come from, and where we return when we leave the flesh. We knew going in that once you get tied into the flesh, it's easy to forget what we can't see. Like any prudent coder, or subsequent hacker, we made sure there was a back door safety hatch to keep in touch with our world and our family that are still over there. The entheogens are a satellite phone to the spirit world we came from.


So the neighbors that we met turn out to be the same terraforming ancestors. They were us the whole time. Our cousins and brothers and sisters from our home town. Death is a door to return there, and all this spiritual stuff about initiations and getting across the abyss, and the Book of the Dead that tells you what to do to get home are the ways back when we're done with whatever it was we came here to do. The Bhodisattva vow is taking the oath to keep working with folks who need help to get back home until we all get back in one piece, maybe.

I don't know for sure, but it's interesting to think about. It doesn't provide much in the way of "why" we're here, though. I think the hallucinogens are a good indication. We eat hallucinogens and drink and get high to experience life in different states. To the denizens of the spirit realms beyond the material, getting physical might like taking a little trip, a few years in dense matter to experience the process of manifestation, retaining the ability to influence the process, but keeping the focus primarily on experiencing the process as it unfolds. Getting into the flesh is us getting high, or rather, low. We're on a drug, and we're hallucinating.

 

If that's the case, I propose that for those of us in a position to do so, with the inclination and aptitude to make it happen, the primary aim should be making sure we have a really good trip.

 

* Read more: http://runesoup.com/2012/03/when-we-met-the-neighbours-the-whisky-rant-part-7/#ixzz1oG8zS9nf