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.
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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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