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HEAVEN ON EARTH:a Different Perspective, Part 2

Joseph Mancini, Jr.

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3.  Illusion and Darkness are indispensable to the development of Human and Divine Consciousness.  I want to elaborate further on what I have said above: if the “illusions” of separation, darkness and the material body/world are an indispensable aspect of the Divine—the way the Divine becomes the Divine, that is, becomes conscious of Itself—then, when we ourselves properly use separation, darkness, and the material body/world, we, too, become conscious of who we really are:

 “You are a god living a life—being, desiring, creating,” says Seth.

“Through honoring yourself, you honor whatever it is God is, and become a conscious co-creator.”

       This is what Job found out many centuries ago.  At the beginning of the Biblical Book of Job, God and Satan establish a wager: God bets that his humble and devout servant, Job, will not curse Him if Satan is allowed to bring all manner of horrifying situations down upon the man; Satan thinks otherwise.  So, Satan brings major calamities to Job, including the brutal deaths of his children, thereby reducing him almost to despair.  In hauntingly beautiful poetry, Job laments his dire losses, especially since he cannot understand why God would allow such a thing to happen when Job has been so pious, always doing the right thing.

           In turn, three men known as “comforters” come to Job and basically tell him that he must have sinned in the conventional way because God would not otherwise do such a thing to him.  But he rejects them all and virtually demands that God show Himself and give an accounting of the matter.  To Job, the situation is becoming very grey, not black and white.  Finally, God comes out of the whirlwind and seems to put Job in his place, asking him where he was when God created the world, complete with Leviathan and other gargantuan monsters. In response, Job drops to his knees and says,

“I have heard of Thee, but now I know Thee.”

 Yet, God then mysteriously directs anger at the “comforters” who have not spoken truthfully about Him, and praises Job for speaking the truth.

           What is going on here?   If we see God and Satan not as separate beings, but rather as two aspects of the same Entity, then we see that Entity working through man to understand Itself.  As Anwan, channeled through Christine Breese in Reclaiming the Shadow Self, says,

“If you find yourself fighting with someone, realize that

God is experiencing through the other person as well.

God is fighting with himself” (p. 253).

In other words, says Anwan,

“The opposing forces are both God, not just one or the other.

God is not just the light.  The darkness is God too” (p. 247).

So, as Job struggles with the comforters and, ultimately, with God Himself, this contest reflects the challenge set by the Light and Dark sides of God.  What Job—and God Himself (in His pretense)—is not aware of at first is God’s Dark—that is, Unknown—side represented by Satan.  When Job demands that God address him and explain Himself, God is freed from being stereotyped as merely Light and is then able to claim and display His Darkness in the form of the monsters of the deep.  In his unwillingness to give in to despair and curse God, Job somehow knew that there was something more to God than the one-sided version promoted by the comforters.  At the end of the story, Satan does not appear as a separate being, for God now implicitly owns and embraces His own Darkness.  So, too, does Job; for his only sin was in not sinning, in not seeing that one-sided perfection is incompleteness and not God-like.  To be an image of God is to be both Light and Dark.  So, the Divine needed the Human to know Itself, and the Human needed to know its Divine face and essence.  Once again, we have Heaven on Earth as Job and the Divine together experience a moment of epiphany, of co-creation, of Transfiguration.

          4.  What we call Illusion and Darkness are necessary to our own and God’s exercise of free will and the recognition of Heaven on Earth.  Since All That Is is all that is (“I am that I am”), if it stayed in that state, there could be nothing outside Itself by which It could become conscious of Itself.  So, All That Is has to pretend to forget some of Itself, an aspect, as noted above, that becomes a mirror in which All That Is sees Itself.  As Suzuki notes,

“The godhead ceased to be the Godhead [in the creation of

“the ten thousand things’] in order to be himself (p. 33).”

In doing so, however, the Divine changes through expansion; for each aspect of creation, in mirroring back the Divine what It is, does so through manifesting and exploring in its unique way one or more of the infinite, seemingly latent possibilities of All That Is.  This is the central paradox of the Divine:  It is simultaneously all that It could ever be, and It is also constantly expanding/changing. So the pretense of forgetting Itself through the Creation allows All That Is to have the free will to discover Itself by in turn granting free will to Its Creation (Its camouflaged Self) to be all that It can be.  There can be no free will without “room” to maneuver.  There can be no true discovery, no real expansion, unless there is free will to examine and experience all possibilities.  Thus, when All That Is remembers Itself, It discovers more of Itself because of the exploration of Itself during the forgetting and remembering of Itself.  Through creating the world by forgetting Itself, All That Is, as the Gestaltists say, becomes more and more conscious of what It already Is.

      Since we are aspects of All That Is, we experience the same kind of forgetting of our Divinity in order to remember more of who we already are.  As Walsch’s God notes,

“… there is only one way for you to know yourself as Me,

and that is for you first to know yourself as not Me.” (p. 26).

      Walsch’s The Little Soul and the Sun illustrates this process quite well.  At the beginning of this tale, the Little Soul, imaged as a boy, wants not merely to know he is the Light, but rather to experience himself as the Light, especially that part of it called “forgiveness.”  When God tells him that the only way to do that is to experience also Darkness (“forgetting” that he is also the Light) for contrast, the Little Soul is eager to do so, but can only see Light Beings around him. Fortunately for him, the Friendly Soul, imaged as a girl, steps forward to offer her assistance.  Noting that they have already worked together to experience many complementary aspects of life, she offers to incarnate with him, become very dark and do something really nasty to him so he can experience forgiving. Immanuel’s words provide a gloss here:

“The separation from God began a journey of love.  The individuating

consciousness seeks, through the experience of Human reality, to

know itself fully and completely so that it can return to the Oneness with

a greater light and a greater understanding.  This adds to the reality of the

Oneness for all things are in a state of continual expansion and creation” (p. 39).

So the Little Soul is exuberant at the prospect of experiencing forgiveness, rather than just knowing it.  However, the Friendly Soul warns that she may create so much darkness in order to do this task that she and he may thoroughly forget who they really are and will need someone else to come along and reveal their multi-dimensional nature.   She seems to be worried about the possibility that Transfiguration and the recognition of Heaven on Earth will not occur, that the process of using darkness and illusion to reveal the Divine where it seems not to be will go awry.  Here is where Lightworkers might well intervene.

          5.  In order to fulfill their mission as powerfully as they can, Lightworkers must understand the true nature of Heaven on Earth, that is, of Transfiguration. 

Continue to Part 3