The Divine Androgyne

I received the following interesting question in a comment on the Same Sex Marriage post. (See here.) It strikes me as worth exploring in rather more detail than a comment at the end of a thread allows so I include my response with the question that prompted it here.

Q. Rabbinical literature contains a belief that Adam was first an androgyne made in God's image. Only later when God realised that Adam was lonely, did he split Adam in two; the 'rib' was in fact the female half of the androgyne Adam.

The phrase used to describe woman’s creation from man’s rib – mi-tzalotav – actually means an entire side of his body because the word “tsela`” in it is used in the book of Exodus to refer to one side of the holy Tabernacle.

Young's Literal Translation of Genesis 5:2 reads,

"a male and a female He hath prepared them, and He blesseth them, and calleth their name Man [or Adam - the word for the forename, and human being are the same] in the day of their being prepared."

If the first human was originally androgyne, and made in God's image, then God contains both male and female. That which was created first, is surely a higher expression of creation, nearer to God the creator, and something human beings are attempting to regain. Part of that might be the loss of separate maleness and femaleness in the post-mortal state - a return to the divine androgyne spiritually.

Young's Literal Translation of Matthew 22:30 says,

"for in the rising again they do not marry, nor are they given in marriage, but are as messengers of God in heaven."

There seems to be no need for sex in heaven.

Might it not be that homosexuals contain both male and female qualities within the one body, and that they may be spiritually advanced? This is not to say that therefore gay marriage is correct. It may be possible that gay people are ignoring their advanced spiritual natures when they turn to other gay people for sexual expression, and that their true role is to use their combined male/female soul (or even spirit) to teach others the way back to God.

In native American culture, there is the concept of the two-spirits people. These are individuals who we would recognise as gay. The two spirits refers to the belief that these people have a male and a female spirit within, and they often have a special spiritual role within the tribe, that we would call priest.

Perhaps the native American people are recognising what rabbinical literature recognises, and that I have outlined?

A. I have heard this theory before and can see the attraction of it.  There’s a similar story in Plato, though it’s not meant to be taken literally there. However it has several problems for me. If homosexuality reflected some state of divine perfection, as in the archetypal androgynous being, we would expect the majority of gay people to be strongly spiritual, and, though certainly some homosexuals are drawn to spirituality, that isn't the case for most.  We would also expect the divine ideal as manifested in Jesus to be like that, and there is no indication that he was. He may have had certain traditionally feminine characteristics, gentleness, compassion and such like, but these were spiritually expressed not physically or emotionally, and they were within the overall context of strong masculinity.  It's the same with all highly advanced spiritual people, saints and mystics.  They are not androgynous, which if this theory were correct they would be. They are definitely male or female.

To me homosexuality is best explained by the theory of reincarnation, though there may be psychological reasons in many cases as well. But I believe all souls are male or female, created in pairs, and if a feminine soul is born in a male body for whatever reason, karma, lessons to be learned etc, homosexuality may be the result. But this does not make them prototypes of androgyny nor does it legitimise the physical expression of homosexuality. The lesson might be to turn away from sexuality not embrace or explore it, just the opposite to what is happening nowadays. You suggest that yourself.

I see the divine androgyne theory as relating to uncreated spirit but not to the world of creation. It is a symbol expressing an inner spiritual truth in an outer materialised form. God created the two sexes so that love, one being fulfilled by the other, could be known and expressed. He contains everything within himself, of course, though as Creator He is masculine with the whole of creation as His Bride. That may even be a reason for him creating. Outwardly projecting a feminine, receptive side in order to get a wife!

So the two sexes can complete each other in love. That could not possibly be the case with two androgynous beings who would not need this completion and so could not know this love. It’s clear that marriage and sex only make sense in the context of two sexes. A true androgyne, by definition, would have no need of either. They would be meaningless, and so the love and creativity they provide could not be experienced.

So basically androgyny relates to inner consciousness not the expression of a being in form. Spirit not soul. It’s a confusion of levels to think it applies to created beings in their outer expression. We are spirit, soul and body. Spirit, which is our being, may well be androgynous. Soul and body which is our individuality and its outer expression have sexual qualities being either male or female, not both except when things have gone amiss which in a fallen world is always possible.

I believe that some people are born homosexual to push them into spirituality. That is why you find quite a few homosexuals at early and intermediate stages of developing spiritual awareness, but not so many at the latter stages in which all aspects of one's inner being have been brought into balance.

And from personal experience I can confirm that the beings I spoke to were all male except on one memorable occasion when the person who spoke was definitely female, even though this was through a male medium. These beings were fully developed spiritually but they were still men and women or the spiritual equivalents thereof.

So I have to say that I believe homosexuality to be the result of living in a fallen world and not an indicator of future evolutionary attainment. That is why it plays out primarily on a sexual level. If it indicated an advanced spiritual state, homosexuals would be completely self-sufficient sexually and not require any outer completion. But that is clearly not the case.

If you are born homosexual by all means seek a companion but know that love should be pure which means, hard as it may sound, its physical expression should be limited to male and female and the creation of a family. It should, at least, have this potential to be in line with spiritual truth and God’s will for humanity.

To sum up, my feeling is that you should not project spiritual realities pertaining to the uncreated world onto the material plane of creation, which is one of the interaction between polarities. And even on the inner spiritual planes the same rules apply as long as you are talking about conditions in which any kind of expressed duality exists. 

A final point. You say human beings are attempting to regain the androgynous state, but surely the reason for creation was to introduce multiplicity into oneness so that love and beauty and goodness could all be positively expressed? To go back to a pre-creation state of oneness on all levels (though there could be no levels in such a state, of course) takes away the whole point and purpose of creation. We have to see the androgyne as a symbol of undifferentiated spiritual being and not an actually real thing once creation has occurred. Nor is it a suitable symbol for the end point. For the end is like the beginning in some respects, in that oneness is realized, but not like it in others in that differentiation is preserved. That’s why creation and evolution make things better than they were in the uncreated or pre-creation state. We are not aiming to go back to what we were but to advance to something new and higher. There is a purpose to creation, and that is to bring difference into undifferentiated being. Yes, we return to  inner oneness but a oneness which is expressed in multiple ways, through countless individual beings who manifest either masculinity or femininity (as even the Sun and the Moon do) which, in a universe based on polarity, they must. The androgynous state only exists in terms of unmanifested being, but in that state no actual qualities are expressed at all.

Paganism Christianised

I've put a post on this subject on Albion Awakening basing it on an excerpt from The Wind in the Willows.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/the-piper-at-gates-of-dawn.html

What is Love?

Continuing with the theme of a previous post, I would like to talk a little about love and what it might really be. I would say that, in the spiritual sense, it is an act of recognition. Love can only be love of the good and the true because that is all that is worth love and therefore it is all that can draw forth love as a genuine response. Therefore to know love as a spiritual reality, and not merely a human emotion or personal subjective response to something we happen to like, we must have some idea of the good and the true. Love orientates itself to the good and rejects the anti-good. It must. You cannot love truth and lies at the same time. Love is love of the truth which is the real, and the real is God. And that means love must start with a proper recognition of the reality of God.

I would go so far as to say that if you do not recognise the reality of God, you do not have the knowledge of love within you. For, as I said in that earlier post, God is love and love is God. You may have human feelings but these are not real love. The difference is that one has an opposite but the other does not. Proper spiritual love, which is the source of the feeling we know, that being spiritual love stepped down to a merely human level, cannot be separated from God because he is both its origin and its object. From him it then radiates out to all creation but, to be real, it must be directed to him first. Creator before creation as in the two commandments given by Jesus.

Love can only be love of the good, the beautiful and the true. That is what it is. It is nothing else. If you think about it, it cannot be anything else. For love has its proper object. It is not random or arbitrary or directed to anything regardless of its ability to reflect God and not distort his light. Love is a real thing and a response to the recognition of God or, at the very least, spiritual truth. If you don't recognise spiritual truth then you don't know love though you may imagine you do because you respond to the thought of it or else mistake an emotional response for love. But love is only truly to be found in God. It is love of the real good and therefore it categorically rejects all that is anti-good. 

If you don't see and reject the anti-good in the world today then you have not yet awoken to the reality of love within you. You may think you have because you know what you know and what you feel. But you don't know what you don't know nor do you know what you don't feel, and that is why you mistake the lower for the higher and the imitation for the reality.

When Jesus told us that God is love he was also pointing out that we cannot know love until our hearts are orientated towards God. To say God is love means love is God but that is not the earthly love we are familiar with which is but a shadow of the real thing, a shadow caused by the blockage of the spiritual ignorance of the separate self. Only when we start to remove ourselves from identification with the ego and turn to the divine reality can we really begin to know love, and then we will find it is not so much a feeling as a state of being or, perhaps, a feeling that is part and parcel of being and therefore not subject to change.

Feminism and Power

If the foundation on which it rests, namely the idea of equality, is based on a metaphysical mistake, what is the justification for feminism? 

A piece on Albion Awakening.

Psychologising the Spiritual

I was recently talking to someone who was very taken with a spiritual movement that combined the insights of traditional Eastern mysticism with modern Western depth psychology. As he saw it, this provided the best of both worlds. This person is intelligent, sensitive and fully able to see the emptiness of materialism, and such an approach seemed to him to be just what the modern world needs. It was serious, and promised no instant enlightenment but required hard work and dedication.

But is this really what the modern world needs or is it an approach to the religious question that is largely based on an intellectual attitude and effectively 'psychologises' spirituality, treating it as a kind of therapy designed to make you feel better or a technique to open up your consciousness? When all is said and done, is it actually a spirituality for personal advancement of some kind, a spirituality of the self?

What I mean is that adherents of this kind of path often pursue it for themselves and their own spiritual ends not out of love of God. This is always the problem when immanence is emphasised and the transcendent Creator explained away or treated as a symbol of inner wholeness; and in these pseudo-Eastern paths, by which I mean paths that take the philosophical aspects and mystical techniques but strip out the religion, he always is. There is plenty of talk of love, and people practise their idea of love, but the real love of God as a Person, which is the only love that can be called spiritual, is not present.  God is not central as he must be in any genuine form of spirituality. 

Why is that? For two very simple reasons. Firstly, because only this centrality of God can really take us beyond self, and, secondly, because God is real. It's as straightforward as that. In fact, God the Creator is the root of all reality and to reckon without him in your spiritual search is to try to build a house without a foundation. The forms of spirituality that don't acknowledge this never go beyond the merely human even if the merely human is a lot more than the materialists would concede.

Here again we see the risks of spirituality without religion.  It has a tendency to reduce the spiritual to the psychological and the transcendent to the immanent. Even if the transcendent is considered, it is as a vague abstraction and not a real Person. As I never tire of saying, Reality is Personal. God is life, certainly, but he is also alive. Imagine that God breathes because he does. Not, of course, as we do but he breathes and his breath is life. Our spirit is God's breath.

When people take to this kind of abstract spirituality with no personal focus on God or his Logos, that being the creative principle of order which is Christ, they almost invariably fall into an imitation of spirituality. They understand that goodness and love are the basis of right spiritual behaviour but if they do not respond to these as manifested in Christ, and therefore seek to acquire them through aligning themselves with him, they will start to self-consciously practice these as they understand them to be in their own earthly minds. This means they are responding dualistically, at one or several removes from the thing itself, and that means that instead of naturally and innocently actually being good and loving, they will make a system of goodness and love and act according to that. This is extremely common in spiritual circles. 

For they have intellectually defined goodness and love, and then try to enact their image of these things but they are not in touch with the reality behind the mental image because they deny the personal nature of reality. They may be well-meaning but, although it might sound cruel to say so, they are actually fakes because they seek to behave in a way that has gone beyond the ego or separate self from within the ego or separate self. The only solution is to acknowledge the personal nature of reality, embodied for us by Christ, and incline their hearts and minds to that.

I'm never quite sure if Jung performed a service by reintroducing the spiritual to a materialistic world or a disservice by reducing the true spiritual to a psychological level. Unfortunately the latter is very common these days.

Evolving Consciousness and its Results

I have put a post on Albion Awakening that follows on from my previous one there. Essentially it is about how we have reached a fork in the road and whether we will take the right turning that leads upwards or the left that leads further down.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/evolving-consciousness-and-its-results.html

Do You Believe in Life after Death?

It recently occurred to me that a good answer to questions like this, that is to say, questions which assume there are two possible and reasonable answers when really there is only one, is simply to say as follows. I believe in life. Very frequently the way we frame a question has a bearing on the answers it may have, but if you just cut past the false assumptions that have come up with the question in the first place then maybe you are answering it as it should best be answered by revealing its fundamental invalidity.

Likewise, do you believe in God? What do you mean? God exists. Would you ask do you believe in yourself? Well, some people do, but it's not a serious question. We only think this might be a serious question because our minds have been so knocked out of their natural orbit by wrong thinking and bad education that we can't think straight.

When you think about it, birth and death are events that take place in time but consciousness itself exists always in the now. That is a truism which has become a cliché. But it leads to the thought that, while the form consciousness takes might change, the thing itself remains. So death then appears more like the changing from one state of consciousness to another rather than the termination of consciousness. For it seems improbable that an event that takes place in time can have a permanent effect on the existence or otherwise of something that is essentially timeless.

Therefore to ask if you believe in life after death is a question based on a miscomprehension. If there is life before death, physical death, then there must be life after it too. The real question is what sort of life is this? And the answer to that surely depends on  the quality of the consciousness.