In Asian schools of faith, ancient disciplines and practices were developed to bring focus to the energy fields within the body. Physical energies are sustained by underlying spiritual energies, and disciplines that measure physical realities lead to inference about spiritual sources.

Physical energies travel within the nervous system and pool at receptive centers along the spinal column. Seven such centers were identified, which are called chakras. They occupy seven discrete nerve clusters, which are as the rungs of Jacob’s Ladder in Jewish mysticism, as illustrated on page seventy-five of this book.

From the teachings of Torah, it’s understood that seven opens unto ten, which feeds into twelve by the operations of four. From there, things become complex quite rapidly; and it isn’t the purpose of this presentation to detail things that I must, nevertheless, mention. Further generalization is presented at the crowndiamond.org website.

Methodical approaches to these mysteries exist in diverse venues, but the warning of the apostle is, “Physical exercise profits little.” This was not written with reference to push ups. Growth without blemish comes by honestly engaging the issues of the spirit by means of the spirit. To the pure of heart, all things are pure.

The book of Revelation treats of this mystery in the messages to the Churches of Asia. The setting is the prayer closet, and instructions are given for approaches to mastery at each level. Knowledge of the spiritual yoke is vital, not for the work of salvation, but for the work of perfection.

Father Abram mrba was called out of Chaldean Ur not because the beliefs and practices of its schools were of no value, but because they had been instrumental in preparing the patriarch for his life as Abraham mhrba: he would become the high mr father ba of the enlightened h.

Specific instruction comes to each of us if we remain open to the Angel of the Presence within the prayer closet. There is no categorical conflict with biblical teachings. Torah is constructed around these mysteries, and Y’shua freely admitted that he had food to eat of which his disciples had no knowledge.

In the gospels, Y’shua asks his disciples to take his yoke upon themselves and learn of him. The messages to the Churches of Asia extend that invitation: not to disciples, but to friends, co-workers in the Kingdom of Names.

The prayer closet is a metaphor for a prayer rug. It is pictured as a room with a door because the hubbub of daily routines don’t favor purposeful concentration. Even in a literal room with a literal door upon a literal prayer rug, meditations begin in the uproar of life and must be overcome.

If distractions interfere with prayer, they present opportunity; for they are grist for meditation. The quality of yoga is not strained. Most distractions will fade with relaxation. If some persist, they may point to specific avenues for remedy. These aspects of yoga are called “hatha yoga” in the East.

There are a variety of schools in the Eastern systems, each with its levels of discipline. I practice bhakti yoga, which is summarized as the yoga of devotion. This is precisely the discipline called for in the messages to the Churches of Asia. The disciple must not elevate himself by expecting that he bow to personal bias. If you see the son, you see the father, also; if not, you see only yourself.

Comparative religion has its values and its drawbacks. If we follow the way of Y’shua and are open to Truth, time spent in the closet will be rewarding. Truth is a spirit. It is not knowledge. The value of Truth is that it leads to an increase in faith, not to erudition. The just live by faith. It’s the gift of HaShem. It is Breath. It can be measured in the closet.

The quality of yoga is not strained. Do not be disturbed by the disturbances. Enter into rest; for it is of the father. The pearl of great price is a marvel. Admiring it, we do well to remember that it began in response to an irritant, which the mollusk wrapped with layers upon layers of its mucous as an end to pain.

The title page for this chapter depicts the paths of the seven spirits of la as they fall on the chakras— upon the sephirot of Jewish mysticism, and upon the seven Churches of Asia. These are seats of awakening that feed the spiritual eye.

None of us sits alone when we meditate. Each of us lives, moves, and has his being in the Projection of HaShem. To the degree we abandon ourselves to the spirit in which we sit, the throngs of humanity and the hosts of heaven share our consciousness, as we theirs.

If we are One with all we perceive as we meditate, we are truly alive. The candlesticks are lighted, and our “star”—the comprehension of our unique essence— is held in the hands of the master as he moves about within us, as within all.

The book Revelation charges us to commit to that focus, beginning with the spiritual energies inherent to the chakra at Ephesus. If we are at a loss about how to proceed, it’s because carelessness has made us forgetful of our first love because we didn’t always take care how we heard as we listened.

ImmanuAL knocks on the doors of our hearts and invites us to take up his yoke, so that we can work together in Yahushua, making preparation for ascension by way of Smyrna. The goal isn’t self-improvement, but better discipline. HaShem has need of effective servants for the harvest of earth.

As orientation improves, we’ll be fed instruction. Quite possibly, we’ll be confronted with such personal as to whether we should we press forward or regroup when we leave the closet? Should our labors be trained upon the right-hand path or on the left? Whether right or left, still we must move forward.

Prayer closets are rewarding environments for remedial prayer, but greater service is expected of us. We are to pray without ceasing: The path the master tales as his personal prayers is known in the words, “Not my will, but the father’s.”

We go where we’re led, but not as we might choose. It’s not ours to direct our steps because we’re unable to peek around the corner to see what’s coming. Nor are we able to follow the chain of events that results from our arrival. If we realize that this condition is common to man, we can accept; we wait; and we follow as we are led when we are led for so long as we are led in that direction.

The church at Smyrna is the Yesod of Jewish mysticism. In the East it is called Swadhisthana. It’s the next logical destination of our journey through Asia. Its sister church, Pergamos, lies just beyond.

In Pergamos, we will encounter the confusing crosscurrents of right and left in their strength. If we can, we should avoid taking the bit between our teeth and pulling towards one side or the other; for we’ve only a limited ability to track the effects of our lives after we turn.

Such choices threaten balance; and disorientation is not uncommon. We are free to choose to go either way. We will not be left comfortless in our freedom to choose. There will be a way of escape, a way of disarming the enemies we create through nothing more sinister than blunder.

Stumbling isn’t recommended, but it’s allowed. Peter fell short when he led the disciples back to the fishing boats after the resurrection; but not long after, he stood resolutely on the center path when he agreed to the baptism of the “offenders” mentioned in Acts Ten, who found no welcome in the traditions of the fathers.

Whatever we choose will be accepted and used to teach us more explicitly of the way we should go; and as we go, what we do doesn’t matter nearly as much as why we’re doing it.

Should we fall again to old habits, causing us to forget what we learned in the footsteps of messiah and changing us from hot to lukewarm to cold along the way, we’ll face punishing headwinds until we again commit to seeking Truth. If we can seek, we can find.

Pitfalls can be expected; but we misunderstand if we choose a path simply because it exemplifies “goodness.” Equally problematic is avoiding a path because it threatens to expose us to error. Pretense and worry: what’s the point?! We can’t claim for ourselves a single moment of perfection. The good we would do had doubtful effects at best.

From our youth and within our lives “in the spirit,” we make God a liar if we can find a single instance in which the imagination of our hearts was anything other than evil. Whoever says otherwise lies, and the truth is not in them.

If we hold our noses and doggedly plant our feet on what we perceive to be the right-hand path, we’ll be corrected before we’re admitted to the great feast. Messiah will say to those on the right, “Come, inherit…” Yes, they make it through the door, but thieves and whores made it there before them.

HaMashiyach, the King, is centered upon his throne in heaven; and as he speaks through those who hold to the center path on earth. He sits down and eats and drinks with offenders. Like the good Samaritan, we must be open to service on the center path, the middle way; for it’s not for man to direct his steps.

Decades ago, I realized that an activity with which I had become involved was wrong and very wrong. I determined that it simply had to be abandoned, as quickly as possible. With that resolution freshly fixed in my mind, a messenger brought the challenge, “What good are you?!”

I haven’t always made best use of the lesson, but I realized that I was being taught that it’s not what we do, but why we do it. All of us are thieves on the hillside of Golgotha. It wasn’t the good thief that complained.

Was I to be that bad one, the bad-tempered dog that, in piety, returns to its vomit? Or could I find redemption by becoming a good thief—by dedicating myself unto the ministry of the good Samaritan by willingness to invest my substance by stealing captive brethren from ditches into which they have fallen?

Throughout my life, I had interacted with many souls on the left-hand path, rarely thinking about my impact on their spiritual welfare. I had run up a debt I needed to repay. Salvation is free. Love is not.

It’s written, “Greater love has no man than this: that he lays down his life for his friends.” I understood that I owed service to God as an act of faith, not as compensation for a life of error. Some debts that require the outlay of real spiritual coin.

We are to feed the Father’s flock with the bread that comes down from heaven, of whom it is written, “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” We are to lift him up within ourselves. This is what the apostle meant when he expressed relief that all he preached was crucifixion.

We are not asked to share doctrines with those who hunger, but to share the Way, the Truth, and the Light we bear as members of the body of messiah. Of these, it is Truth that sets us free.

Brothers should stand shoulder to shoulder. Made free by Truth, they will be saved by the life they share together in service to that Truth. Words convey truths. If they are also to convey the Truth, they must give expression to the Life that is in messiah: not words that tell of it, but words that express it, demonstrate it, share it.

When we leave personal bias behind, we can speak without premeditation, saying whatever comes to mind. Such speech is a crucifixion. Receiving of the spirit the words the hour demands, we are justified by faith; and we relay what we hear in the moment by faith and in faith that HaShem has prepared our hearers for what we say.

Who we truly are and what we truly believe are on display, and our nakedness will bleed into our expressions. Empty of pretense, we trust HaShem to lift up messiah in the eyes of our brothers, that we can share experience of the presence..

Knowledge is not the food that comes down from heaven, but faith: the just shall live by faith. Without true faith, the clergy may recite the talking points of their agendas, but their efforts will be fruitless until they’re able to offer love. If love leads the way, the rest will take care of itself.

This failing clothes structured homilies into pious arrogance. The poverty of such ministers flashes from their eyes in unguarded moments, and their duplicity poisons the words they speak; and because of such as them, evil things are spoken of the way of truth. The priesthood is a spiritual vocation, not a profession. Real damage can be done by turning a sacrament into a mockery by practicing it as a routine.

The pattern of the priest ministering to a supplicant can be blameless, God knows; but it is HaShem, not the priest, who must heap coals upon the unbeliever’s head, moving him from his errors. If a priest knows what the father is doing, he will know whether to stand above a ditch, to reach down, or whether he should set foot into the ditch, that he might help the brother up. It’s a decision that belongs to the author of faith, not to the priest.

Non-believers share responsibility for rejecting the counsel of a believer, regardless of the believer’s motives or performance. Not having faith is a problem only God can fix, and most non-believers are aware that their welfare is entirely in God’s hands. That the priest is there is reason to give thanks, empowering faith.

A believer’s pride at his election must not become a stumbling block for non-believers; for to the degree the backward step of piety is indulged, it speaks of accusation, not brotherhood. While the plate is passed from hand to welcoming hand, there will be one sitting on the back pew, quietly writing in its dust with his finger.

Heaven is not clean in God’s sight. The apostles spoke truth when they wrote that they were all sinners, every one of them. I don’t doubt that saying in the least; because I’m guilty of sin while writing this. My name may be a smudged-out blur on the last page of the Book of Life, but I’m certain its still there. HaMashiyach told Peter not to call any unclean.

All of us need help. It is best, and it is enough, that we reason together as equals, allowing God to quicken conversations, so that, in sharing, brethren can grow in faith. It’s not for man to direct his steps. It’s puzzling that we ever thought we could! I took that saying to mean that choosing one’s own way is inappropriate. It may be impossible!

There are wheels within wheels, and a man can see just so far along the linear path he thinks he walks; for while he plans and plots his strategies to win a way forward in life, wheels revolve about him and turn within him. The adage pertains to the good man as well as to the bad: “He who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind.”

Every choice a man makes establishes a firmament, altering the balance between expanses above and expanses below. Our minds are the second heaven, and thought travels by means of its firmament from the expanse within our mortal faculties to the expanse of immortal consciousness.

The forward steps we take under the influence of a firmament give shape to the expanses that are in play. Existence is one thing, but living is a complicated ordeal. In observing expanses through the lens of the firmaments that connect them, we build understanding.

The choices we seem to make in life are gestures that express hidden things of the spirit, for which we have no words. Our actions are as prayers written in sign language by a person that doesn’t know how to sign.

Each of us walks within a vortex. The wheels of heaven and earth churn out immense spirals that separate us and bring us back together again as we blindly travel what we imagine to be our paths of choice. When we stumble, we rarely have knowledge of the reason.

When age, crisis, or coincidence require that we change directions, we pirouette in slow motion as our plans slip away, taking our goals with them. We find ourselves marooned, and we awaken quite shaken within the detour called depression.

We are imperishable worms of fire aglow in the strange land in which HaShem has chosen to finish his strange work. Our bodies, like the cocoons of caterpillars, are dead; and our lives, just like the chrysalises of the worms in their cocoons, are hidden in messiah.

We know that death will claim more of us, but what that means will remain hidden until the girth we have gained in messiah shall burst open the cocoons that bind us to our mortal souls. It does not yet appear what we shall be.

The Kingdom of Names is within each of us, and so are the Tree of Life and the goodly Vine that graces its branches. These things may not yet have reached their fullness in us, but they are there, nonetheless.

To think of the Tree of Life as an outward manifestation is to deny the gospels; and to pretend that we’ve not yet eaten of its fruit is to claim that the Tree has barren seasons, in spite of the evidence that the words of humanity have been concealed in the Tree’s foliage from antiquity.

The Crown Diamond proves that the alphabets of man are among the Tree’s fruits, and the cistern of Living Waters within us feeds the Tree’s sap, allowing words to make their way from our hearts to our tongues, so that our thoughts can be shared with others in feasts of conversation.

The swords that whirl above the gates of Eden are the words of scripture, which stir our minds with their meanings, preserving the way to the Tree of Life. Literalism decapitates us, cutting short the momentum of our thoughts, as if to say the words take us just so far, no further.

If we accept that holy writ is the record of spiritual utterances, however, its applications are greatly magnified, opening to the interpretation called Pardes, which piles meanings atop of meanings as the door to the Lively Oracles of HaShem opens within the hearts of Sons of Man.

The words, “Behold, I create all things new,” do not speak exclusively of a future time, but also of this present time. The promised magnification and glorification of Torah doesn’t happen all at once: it happens here a little, there a little, line upon line.

The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge are actually one tree. The difference between them is a matter of perception. It is acceptable to read such stories as if they are literal accounts. Truly, there is an allegorical sense in which the stories are literally true.

Eating of the trees as one tree, we do, indeed, die and live forever: that which we were before understanding what is written perishes. That which we have always been in the mind of the father lives forever.

Mortal souls will certainly die if error is found in them; but that which we truly are endures and will come to perfection as celestial souls with everlasting life: not for our own sake, but because of the sacrifice of HaMashiyach, the glory of HaShem.

 
We die, and we are made alive—here, a little; and there, a little—as precepts of the Living Word build upon the precepts written upon our hearts. As line builds upon lines, proclamations unfold. Their words the bodies of thought, sentences are firmaments, and paragraphs are expanses.

We are taught to hold the single-eyed focus until perfection quells the maelstrom within which we walk. That focus demands faith. It is the straight-and-narrow way preached by Y’shua, who walked in the father’s seals, even as it is written of him, that in his physical appearance, we beheld the fullness of the father.

The father’s seal is a spiritual reality not won by works, but through faith. The perfect walk is the walk of faith first. Earth is a parable that is crafted to teach us of the hidden things of la. Attempts to achieve the enlightenment through the exercise of will power are doomed to fail because the human will is buried in the parable that addresses the material sphere of the temporal realm.

Jacob’s Ladder provides a way of escape. In Jewish mysticism, its first rung is called Malkuth, the Kingdom. In the Churches of Asia that step, that sphere, that brightness is called Ephesus.

 The reservoir of power surrounding the seat of ImmanuAL, this seat of godly power is the fulcrum Eastern sages call the kundalini essence, as noted
earlier. The inward pool of spirit within us, it‘s the hiding place of the Life Breath we breathe mindlessly, until the day we are called to come closer because the sign of the beloved is seen on the doorposts of our hearts.

 The spiritual field in which the single eye slumbers, Ephesus is the first of the Churches of Asia. These seven “churches” of the West correspond to the seven chakras of the East, to the seven levels of Jacob’s Ladder, to the seven pillars of Islam, perhaps othersl

The bowls of spirit within the first three Churches of Asia are reminiscent of Golgotha, in that they point to problems and potentials of the body, which is the chariot of the angel it clothes. As stated, Ephesus is the Malkuth— the Kingdom— of Jewish mysticism. It is both the place from which to begin and the destination, once the journey has begun.

The congregation called the church at Ephesus sits in its wholeness within every individual and is also situated, collectively, among all people. Its rebbe is able to supply every Son of Man those things that serve everlasting life. Ephesus is the chamber of the beloved situated within each of us. It expresses the glory of la.

Called Muladhara in the East, Ephesus is the lake upon which the four-petaled Lotus rests, which is likened unto the throne of ImmanuAL, the incognito messiah seated within all who live. The spirit that pools there, waiting to be called upon for our ascent, is Life itself, the Breath of God.

ImmanuAL embraces us when it visits the heavens, arising as Yahushua. In Ephesus we are One with father hy; for HaShem is without scale. HaShem is fully active in one of us and in each of us, singly or together, at every instant.

To overcome in Ephesus is to prioritize, reaching decisions about important issues. It’s not difficult to spot the “lies” and the overreach of important figures in the fledgling religion that became Christianity at the expense of the Essenes.

What is difficult is discovering and utilizing the lessons that are drawn from its history of error; for nothing happens apart from the will of la, whose “enemies” are his servants. Nothing is as it seems to be.

Overcoming at Ephesus begins with recognition of error. This raises the question of what additional errors might have developed as we struggled with unrecognized errors.

Confession of error doesn’t free us of the need for to purchase new garments in messiah. Regret is not repentance. The angel among the candlesticks at Ephesus will help us find our way; and so we pray, “Turn us and we shall be turned.”

God is great. There is no la but hla, whose name is hwhy, he is called Yahushua owcwhy as Savior.

He sent Moses, who received Torah on Mount Sinai and left detailed instructions about the generation of the earthly messiah.

He sent judges, prophets, and kings to warn of ways we had misunderstood the writings of Moshe.

He sent Yahuchanan, to warn us we had misunderstood Moshe hcm, and to prepare the way of his anointed one, baptizing him in Yardan.

He sent Y’shua ocwhy, to deliver the gospel and to demonstrate the way, the truth, and, most importantly, the life that is in him. Followers of Moses had lost their way.

He sent the apostles as witnesses of the to the ministry of the anointed.

He sent Mohamed to proclaim his unending mercy and to restore focus to the gospel narratives.

He sent me because I agreed to testify of myself. I am a sinful Son of Man.

I pray these things I write will encourage you to examine your assumptions and to reach your own bedrock conclusions, so that, together, we can rebuild the Tabernacle of David as, true to our hearts, we worship the spirit of HaShem within the temple made without hands.