The Spiritual or Transpersonal World.

Spirituality is Transpersonality

In this excerpt from The ABBA Tradition, we look at the third world: Beriah. The third world is the Transpersonal World, where we become aware that we are a part of a community and an interconnected universe.

In this, spiritual, World, we become aware of relationships between us and all that is around us and these relationships are a vital part of what creates meaning in life.

At the spiritual level we are all connected; this is where we discover that we are our brother’s keeper, and our sister’s too.

The Spiritual World is the non-physical reality that is over and above the individual body and the external physical world and is therefore metaphysical — beyond the physical.

This reality is also beyond the personal soul. My psyche lives in my body but I am more than my body and soul. The discovery that I have a transpersonal dimension is the beginning awareness of the spiritual World, where “I” becomes “we”.

The word Spirit is a translation from the Greek pneuma and the Hebrew ruah, both of which mean breath. So, metaphorically, the spiritual World is the World of Breath, of Air, in contrast to the psychological World’s Water and the physical World’s Earth. Tradition calls the spiritual World the World of the Heavens or the World of the Seven Heavens. The Heavens are where there is spirituality, where spiritual beings dwell. To discover who we are, become who we are, we must realize that we are spiritual beings,  aware of the spiritual World, of the Heavens.

The answers to the perennial questions: What does this mean? What does anything mean? What is the meaning of Life?  can only be found in the transpersonal World.

Take this book. It exists before you physically whether in print or e-book format and as you read it you form images of words and ideas and pictures in your psyche. Do those words and images mean anything to you? If they do it is because you learned those meanings from someone or something beyond yourself. The meanings come not from your personal world, nor from the physical World but from this third transpersonal World..

Meaning is something that seems intensely personal but it is essentially transpersonal. Things have meaning to you because they are related to other things. Indeed, more specifically they have meaning because they are related to transpersonal or spiritual realities. Even physical things receive their meaning from the transpersonal World. We give them their meaning by giving them a name and the meaning of names, indeed of all words, comes from the transpersonal World. Spiritual development is the process of growing in awareness of and integration with our transpersonal nature.

The spiritual World is also called Beriah and the World of Creation, from the second Hebrew word of Genesis 1:1, Bereshit Bara, translated ‘In the beginning created’. The first created thing is “the Heavens”. Platonic ideas and archetypes are found in this world. These are transpersonal realities rather than the imaginable and sensible realities of the lower two worlds

They include ideas, such as democracy, freedom, justice, or the Pythagorean Theorem. They also include transpersonal realities named Socrates, Charlemagne, Buddha and Archangel Gabriel. When we give a transpersonal entity a name, we personify it. We then can call it a transpersonal Being, or an inhabitant of Heaven.

Personification here does not refer to the persona of the Greek theater or the persona of the soul World. Rather, person in the transpersonal and divine worlds refers to the Greek word hupostasis, the word used for ‘person’ in the Creeds of the Church and for the three ‘persons’ of the Trinity, One in Essence. Hupostasis, “denotes that which exists by itself and in its own consistency, from which meaning it comes that it denotes the individual, differing numerically from every other.”^[1] When a transpersonal entity appears to our reason, intuition or understanding, we are touched by such a Hupostasis, such a Person, one of the inhabitants of Heaven.

Platonic ideas and archetypes are concepts or understandings which underlie images or forms, for example the Idea of a chair can take many different forms in the mind as well as in physicality. Archetypes (from Greek archē, ‘original’ and types, ‘model’) are original transpersonal realities that can be experienced by individuals but are not unique to any one individual. The spiritual World has also been called the Mind of God and numbers, names and platonic forms described as ideas in the Mind of God.

Platonic ideas, archetypes and other transpersonal realities are grasped by the intellect, so this World is also the Intelligible World. Intelligible realities are grasped by the mind’s eye and the mind’s ear, by reason or intuition, and not by the physical senses. To see or hear only with the physical eye or ear is to fail to see or hear these higher realities. “Seeing, they do not see, and hearing, they do not hear or understand.”^[2]

·      We perceive the physical World with our senses.

·      We experience our psychological World as a flow of images.

·      We perceive the transpersonal World with our intellect.

Beyond the transpersonal World is the Transcendant and Ineffable Reality we call Divinity. So the four Worlds are, respectively, Sensible, Imaginable, Intelligible and Ineffable.

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^[1]. Lossky, Vladimir; The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.1944, p50ff.

^[2]. Matt. 13:13, Mark 4:12, Luke 8:10, Deut. 29:4, Jer. 5:21, Ezek. 12:2.

Where the story begins...

In this excerpt from The ABBA Tradition, we look at the early days of Genesis.

ABBA’s story begins when Adam and Eve were sent down from the upper Worlds, out of the Garden of Eden, the World of Formation, into the World of Physicality, the World of physical birth, life and death.

Prior to the expulsion Adam and Eve could talk and walk directly with God. After the expulsion they were separated from God. Their mistakes, their disobedience, their sins, made a separation between them and God.

Tradition says that, after their expulsion, Adam and Eve forgot much about the upper three Worlds and, in particular, they forgot the way back. But the Holy One took what Adam and Eve forgot and wrote it in a book called the Book of Raziel, the Book of the Secrets of God, guarded by the Archangel Raziel. So nothing was lost.

The line of descent from Adam and Eve continues for seven generations without direct contact with the Holy One. These seven generations are those of Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalelel, Jared and then Enoch. Genesis tells us that Enoch lived 365 years, a year of years.^[1] The first six patriarchs died but Genesis does not say that Enoch died. Rather Enoch walked with God and was no more. Tradition tells us that this means that Enoch ascended to the upper Worlds, Paradise and Heaven, and received the teaching that had been preserved in the Book of Raziel. The name Enoch means ‘Initiated’ and this story tells us that there is a way to walk once again with God. This way is the way of return and it begins at the beginning, with Initiation, with Enoch.

Whether there were others who walked with God in those days, as did Enoch, we are not told. Rather we are told that most men turned toward evil and not toward God. So God sent water, a Flood to cleanse the Earth, saving only righteous Noah and his family. Not knowing the correct way to return to the Holy One, after the flood mankind sought to ascend to Heaven using physical means, by building the Tower of Babel. This attempt to use physical means to reach a spiritual goal was, and is, a mistake for Heaven is not a physical location but a spiritual reality. The temptation and attempt to use physical means to force our way into higher Worlds won’t work. It mistakes the purpose of life on Earth and is a recurring theme in the story of the four Worlds.^[2]

The purpose of life on Earth is to make the Worlds below reflect the Worlds above. Trying to return to God prematurely defeats that purpose. Lest we waste our lives in trying to do so, God has scattered us over all the Earth and confused the language of the whole world.

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^[1]. Gen. 5:24.

^[2]. This mistake did not end with the Tower of Babel. See Matt. 11:12 “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force.”

The Four Worlds: Body, Soul, Spirit, Divinity.

In this excerpt from The ABBA Tradition, we look at the 'Four Worlds Tradition.'

The tradition teaches that not only do we live in four Worlds but that we are four Worlds. Human

beings are composed of body, soul, spirit and the potential for divinity. In the modern scientific world some speak as though there were no reality beyond the physical, as though all of our consciousness were only an accidental epi-phenomenon produced by our body. But this is not the case. We are more

 than just our bodies. We are at very least body AND soul.

But neither are we just embodied souls, a consciousness coexisting within a body. We have a body and a soul but we are more than body and soul. We are part of a larger whole, a transpersonal reality which includes parents, family, society, culture and the whole worldwide community of other human beings. Our personal spirit links us to a transpersonal spiritual community. It is this transpersonal reality that gives meaning to our lives.

This three-level understanding of who we are is basic to the New Testament. We are not just bodies, nor are we just bodies and souls. We are body, soul and spirit. So in the first written book of the New Testament, the Christian Apostle Paul sums up his teaching saying “May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” ^[1]

The tradition says more. It reminds us that we are more than body, soul and spirit. We are also children of the Holy One, sparks from the fire of Divinity, and we have the potential of rediscovering that relationship, of reclaiming our son- and daughter-ship, our relationship with Divinity. We are called to be temples of Divinity, to live with the Holy One within. This process is called Theosis, or Deification, and it is central to the Mystical Christian Tradition.

Over time our awareness of the four Worlds has decreased. The history of the Western world appears to be a story of forgetfulness, a story of forgetting the truth that we live in four Worlds. This forgetting begins with forgetting the highest World, so that we are aware only of our body, soul, and spirit. This first forgetfulness is due, in part, to the difficulty of talking about the highest World. The third Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord Thy God in vain,’ is a reflection of this difficulty and has led the Jewish Tradition to avoid speaking directly about God.

This Jewish reticence to speak of the Holy One is paralleled in the Western Christian tradition by reluctance to talk of Deification. A consequence is loss of our awareness of the mystical dimension of our life and of our direct connection with the Holy One.

As the forgetfulness continues, we lose our awareness of the Spiritual World. We come to see ourselves as Body and Soul only, mere individuals. The organic connection of me to my neighbor is overlooked and we see ourselves as separate individuals, composed of body and soul, outer and inner parts, forgetting that we are also part of a transpersonal reality.

And then finally we forget that we have a soul and come to see ourselves as merely a physical body, forgetting or trying to explain away consciousness, meaning, purpose and all the other phenomena of the higher Worlds. The Four World Tradition is an antidote to this reductionist process that forgets and then dismisses the full reality of the four Worlds.

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^[1]. 1 Thessalonians 5:23.

The Four Worlds: Physical, Psychological, Transpersonal, Mystical.

In this excerpt from The ABBA Tradition, we look at the Four Worlds.

The first and most obvious of the four Worlds in which we live is the physical World. This is the world which we experience around us with our physical senses. It is the world of the physicist and the physician, words which are rooted in the Greek word phusis which means ‘nature.’ It is the natural world, the world of nature. We get information about this world from our five senses or from extensions of our senses such as the telescopes, microscopes and other sensors we use to probe into outer and inner space. To the physicist this is the world of matter and energy and their interaction. To the physician it is the world of the body, its anatomy, physiology, function and dysfunction. But the physical world is only one of the four Worlds in which we live.

The second World in which we live is the personal inner world of the individual, the psychological World. Psyche is the Greek word for soul and, therefore, this World is also appropriately called the Soul World. It has a reality and a structure very different from the physical World but that structure can be easily experienced, described and studied. We experience this inner world continuously, although we are not always consciously aware of it. This is the inner world of our thoughts, images and feelings. To experience it directly we need only to close our eyes and see, with our mind’s eye, the images that we have in this inner world. These images are the stuff, the ‘matter’, of the psychological World which is a World of images, imagery and forms. Psychology is one scientific approach to this World. We also learn about this World through the study of literature, history, movies and television but most of all by our individual experiences. We are as much in contact with the psychological as with the physical World and in many ways this World is more important to us than the physical because, although we share the outside physical World, each of us lives in his or her own unique psychological reality.

The third World in which we live is the transpersonal World. In this World we are in a non-physical but shared reality. Although we share this reality with others, it has no physical existence. Like the physical and unlike the uniquely individual psychological World, this reality exists ‘outside.’ Here in the third World are the shared ideas, or archetypes, that lie behind and give meaning to the forms and images of the psychological World. This World is the place of the meanings of our images. As images are to sensations, so meaning is to image. Here we become aware again of truths we may have forgotten as we learned to live in the physical and psychological Worlds. In this World we discover we are not alone. We are part of a larger whole, members of a shared humanity, a society, a culture, a commonality. This commonality is in fact a common unity, a community, a wholeness and therefore a holiness. So this shared transpersonal reality is a spiritual reality and it is appropriately called the World of the Spirit, of Spirituality. This is the World of the Seven Heavens, the World in which we can find the Kingdom of Heaven. It is also the World of creativity, the place in which creation occurs, the World of Creation. Here ideas come into being which are the source of the forms we experience in the psyche and can be transformed into physical objects in the World of physicality.

The highest of the four Worlds is the transcendent World of the mystic. This is the World of awareness of divinity, of being in the presence of God, of experiencing the Holy One. This World, mystics tell us, lies above, beyond, beneath and behind the World of Spirituality. It transcends all three of the lower Worlds. It also lies beyond the ability of mere language to describe. This ineffability makes talking about this World difficult and leads to the language of mysticism, paradox and mystery. Although language can only point to this reality, we each have the ability to experience this World inherent in our being human, our human being. The combination of ineffability and yet accessibility of this World is sometimes called the open secret. Experience of this World is the source, for each individual, of his or her purpose in life. For it is in this World that one hears the Word of the Living God, that one discovers the purpose of one’s life. As meaning is to image, so purpose is to meaning. Tradition says that this World is the source of all the other Worlds. Tradition also says that the Bible is both an expression of this World, the very Word of God, and a guide to our reconnection with the Holy One.

As human beings, we live in these four Worlds no matter what our system of faith. There is a Hindu axiom that says that every human lives in a house with four rooms — physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Most people live in just one or two rooms for most of their lives but, unless they go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, they cannot become a complete person.

Take a minute now to experience the difference and the reality of the lower two Worlds, which are the ones where humanity spends most of its time. Look around you at the physical World. Experience it with each of your senses. See with your eyes and sense with your other senses the earthly World around you, your external World in which you live. What you see and sense is the physical World. Now close your eyes and see an image of the World around you. This image is experienced in your psyche, in your soul World. You alone, and only you, can experience your soul World. It is your personal image of reality. You have just experienced moving from one reality to another, from the first to the second World and back again. In the rest of this book we explore all four Worlds and look at ways we can move from World to World, rediscovering and re-experiencing who we are.