When a person gets angry, it means that they are frustrated and upset at a turn of events. Failure to understand that this turn of events is orchestrated from Above is tantamount to idolatry. A true believer understands that, in the words of the Talmud, “Everything that happens is from the hands of heaven, except the fear of heaven”. Everything that happens is ordained from Above except man’s reaction to a given set of circumstances. That reaction remains the free choice of man. Isn’t that the case with emotions? And therefore idolatry? Because you worship ego above G-d. Ponder on it for a moment.

Now let’s look at the snake or serpent. In India they still worship the snake and they also did in most other religions but due to the inability to understand the texts and scrolls it became the personification of pure evil. We know the snake is curled around the tree and he tempted Eve to eat of the fruits. And Eve ignored the warning that if you eat of it you would surely die. The snake is ruled by fire, and g-d the living water.

Gnostics speak about knowledge, they practice a spirituality that is more east than the west we see today. Gnosis is the direct experience of the divine in the self, the realization of our true self and can not be discerned by intellectual dogma and doctrine, for whoever doesn’t know self knows nothing but whoever knows self has already acquired knowledge about the depth of the universe. It is the most important place to look for the divine. Where you will find what no eye has ever seen, no ear ever heard and no hand ever touched or has ever risen to the human mind.

They speak of the wisdom of the serpent, about saint Patrick who overcame the power of the serpent and so mastered it. The serpent is also linked in just about every culture with magic and is seen as the personification of wisdom and goodness and alternatively the personification of evil thus revealing the duality in its nature. Both the cure and the killer.

The fire serpent, doesn’t it remind you of the story of the dragon who’s fire killed the people and someone who slayed him and became its master? A modern version was portrayed in the movie Avatar,  so why do I bring this up? Because this serpent/dragon is nothing other than kundalini. Another story, king Solomon’s temple, how many times was it destroyed to be rebuild again? The army of Babylon destroyed  it, and we know Babylon stood for sin and therefore sin brought down the temple. The temple? Your body of course. Then there are the stories of the knight Templars. They dug deep within the temple and are said to have found the holy grail and even the head of Christ or John the Baptist, the Baphomet, linked with Mohammed and a hermaphroditic figure and the dualistic power. A divine androgyne representation of mystical perfection through a union of opposites. The cross, the symbol of balance of male and female. And Mary stands for water. The snake curled around the tree, stopping the flow of the living water.

And while it reveals it also blinds, some read such things as kundalini and find all sorts of classes and practices to raise the energy through the chakra’s, thinking that it’s a short cut, but it’s like drinking too much alcohol and asking the doctor for a cure for your failing kidney or liver so you can continue to drink. The real problem of the blockage of the flow of energy isn’t even the snake but you identifying with ego, as it causes the blockage, the attachment to the habit of drinking in this case. It’s a bit like a bad doctor who gladly describes medication  ignoring the cause.

And a raising of this energy to a level that is not purified is like putting diesel in a petrol engine, or like a seven year old being given a gun. O yes, it is as dangerous as that. When it is raised without having cleared the path it is like filling a balloon with a fire hose, it will burst.

If the character has anger or fear would you light up its fire? Or greed perhaps, lust?

Let me tell you a story about three men who were imprisoned in a dark dungeon. Two of them were intelligent but the third was not very smart. Every day, when their food was lowered into the dark dungeon, the third man would fumble with the utensils, break the plate and cut himself with the knife. One of the clever men would help him by practicing a routine  to handle the darkness, but because the food was presented in a different way each day, it always confused him. The other prisoner then said, “Let’s bore a hole in the wall and let a ray of light in, and then he will be able to see and eat without help”.

It is all about light. The message to you is that we have the power to increase the spiritual light in the world or decrease it. All our actions, words and thoughts control the dimmer switch that turns the light up or down. What is the power of light? When you turn the light on in your room it lets you see what is there. Otherwise you grope in the dark, knock things over, bang your knee and walk into walls. This is also true with spiritual light. Without it, your spiritual world is dark. Without spiritual light you can’t see love even when it is right in front of you. You knock over people who love you. You step on souls. You walk right past meaningful moments. And you have no sense of direction. A person who only has access to physical light lives in the World of Peels. Such a person only sees physical things, those which are external and superficial. The peel is only the outside of the fruit and is therefore secondary to the fruit. If you can only see the  peel, you confuse the wrapping with the true contents. You are impressed with the packaging and miss the true gift inside, the intention is to teach you the secrets of how to access the spiritual light that lets you see what’s inside. Given that what you see is what you get, when you want to receive the eternal spiritual gift wrapped in this world, you need to increase the spiritual light to see and get inside. This physical world is only the packaging, but what is the gift inside?

What is the greatest gift you could ever give or get? Presence. Not “presents” but “Presence”. When I think of my childhood, my most precious memory is of my mother sitting by my bed and reading to me. What is so great about that? My parents gave me a racing bicycle on my birthday. But it didn’t last and it means very little to me today. What I still treasure and continue to enjoy are those precious moments when I knew my mother was there for me. She wasn’t interested in the stories I wanted her to read to me. She never read those stories at any time for herself. My mother concentrated her entire being into those moments and was completely there for me. She gave me the greatest gift you could ask for – her Presence.

What is “Presence”? “Presence” is like chocolate cake. I can’t tell you what chocolate cake tastes like; you will only know how delicious it is when you taste it yourself. I could tell you what the ingredients are, but the cake is greater than the sum of the ingredients. Presence is like the color green. I can’t tell you what it looks like, but when you will see it, you will know. I could tell you that it is a combination of blue and yellow but even those are colors that you can only know experientially. And of course even after you see blue and yellow, green is greater than the sum of the parts. So I can’t tell you what Presence is. I can tell you that its ingredients are love, care, respect, honesty, meaning, beauty, kindness, wisdom and much more. To know Presence you have to experience it.

G‑d created you and I and put us into this world to give us the greatest gift possible Divine Presence. Divine Presence that  fills everything, his divine light.

But how do we turn on the light that lets the eyes of our soul see it? How do we become receptive to the ultimate gift of G‑d loving presence? By giving our loving presence to each other so that we become receptive to the Divine Presence. And the more you give, the more you receive. Yet it isn’t the giving that has conditions attached to it, and it isn’t the giving you think is free of conditions this is like the money exchangers that were sitting in front of the temple who Christ send away. To be able to give without the conditions you first need to know what causes them and how you are often times kept in the dark of them being present.

Another misunderstanding and translation I need to mention related to the beginning with Adam, and for this one needs to read the Hebrew text if you wish to check this fact. We clearly miss the point if we simply translate it. In the day when g-d created Adam in the likeness of g-d he made him. Male and female created he them, and he blessed them and he called their name Adam in the day when they were created. So are we talking a man called Adam? Not according the true story, there was no separation. In all the Semitic languages there is no it, everything is either masculine or feminine, that only happens when it is translated into Greek, Latin and then English. Now g-d was both while in Greek it could be it. So Adam is them yet g-d said it was not good that Adam was alone in the garden, I get back to that in a moment. Let’s continue, so out of the ground, the eternal g-d formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the Adam to see what he would call them. And the Adam gave names to all the cattle, to all the birds of the air and every beast of the field. Now when he said that it was not good for the Adam to be alone, he said I will make him a fitting helper, but after g-d created the beasts and birds there was not found a fitting helper. And the eternal g-d made the Adam fall into a deep sleep, and he slept… and here he took one of his ribs “cela”. But this word means side, so he took one of Adams sides and closed up the flesh in its place; and the side he had taken from the Adam he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Now this is bone of my bone flesh of my flesh and she shall be called woman because she was taken from man.  So now it could be easier to understand the myths of the hermaphrodite, a two sexed being.

Now let’s go back to what the serpent said: if you eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you’ll become like gods, and when they ate of it their eyes were opened. Clearly this tells you something about the state of consciousness prior to eating of the fruit. Although there is much more that could be clarified I want to point out one more thing that ties this article with the previous two, including the 666 and Christ.  Nachash is serpent in Hebrew and its numerical value is 50, 8 and 300 or 358.  There is one other word with the same value and that is moshiach – messiah/teacher. Its value is also 358.

Read, practice and act in accordance!

 

21-09-2018

Moshiya van den Broek