B 4.5 What is the successful outcome of these trials?
4.5 What is the successful outcome of these trials?
In the words of the ancient, pre-Christian, Druidic and Pagan Western Mystery traditions you will have died and been reborn. In the Christian sense of this, your old self will have died to be reborn in the love of Jesus. In the terms of the Jewish Kabbalah, you will have obtained the intermediate state of mind of a benoni.
You will be an initiate who has become prepared, by enduring and triumphing over the trials of your life, for the work of developing your understanding, through experience, of the implicate links between your nature and reality. Through this work, you will come to experience that, in reality, all people and things are indivisibly intertwined and enfolded in an inexpressible unity. The function of implicate technology is to provide you with guidance, based on experience, to help you along the way.
Within the terms of implicate technology, you will have experienced a shift in consciousness, from an awareness of reality confined by the relatively illusory limitations of your personality, to a clear, serene awareness of reality, quietly rejoicing in the freedom of the transpersonal self. This will be your achievement and yours alone; the responsibility for your attaining enlightenment is yours alone; equally, if you develop unwavering* determination, in the face of reality, to endure and learn through time, there are no hindrances to enlightenment which you cannot overcome. In a psychological sense, you will have realised the unconditioned state.
It is quite clear, reading the above, that the book is describing here the process of attaining a changed level of consciousness, a lived experience.
Yet many are sufficiently self-deceiving as to believe that the book is referring merely to a change in attitude and beliefs, and willing to believe themselves to be at this level in order to dodge working with a “Beginners” Guide.
They then blame this system rather than their own arrogance when the advanced guide doesn’t work for them.
Some are assisted in this self-deception by fundamentalist religious beliefs.
“Benoni,” for instance, means “in between.” The word is further defined by Charedi Jews as meaning an ordinary person who believes in Charedi Judaism and wants to follow the laws of Hashem [God] to the best of his ability (as defined by the Rabbis of that tradition).
Here, however, benoni is used as in the Chassidic Jewish tradition. I quote from “The Way of Splendor” (see bibliography):
“…[the benoni is]… an intermediary in mental status between the lowly ‘normal’ and the true zaddik [fully enlightened man] … describing the benoni the ..[Chassidic Rabbi].. explained, ‘That is to say, the three “garments” of the animal soul, namely thought, speech, and act, originating in the kelipah [realm of impurity] do not prevail with him over the divine soul.’ ”
This clearly does not refer to lowly normal level of consciousness, but to the psychological stage of enlightenment.
Similarly, the (identical) state of consciousness known in the Christian tradition as the state of having “died to be reborn in the love of Jesus” has been appropriated by the Born-Again Christian sects.
There are many ways of misinterpreting John 3:3, despite the example of Nicodemus given therein.