In Asian schools of faith, there are ancient disciplines and practices by which to lift the Circle of Light upwards through the chakras, which coincide with the rungs of Jacob’s Ladder. Abram was called out of Chaldean Ur not because those beliefs and their schools were of no value, but because they had been instrumental in preparing him for life as Abraham, his next level of revelation.

When beginning meditations, the initiate locates the base energy center within his physical body, then works on moving the energy upwards along the spine. If distractions interfere, they are grist for meditation; for other matters in life may need attention before yoga can again be pursued with success. There’s a maxim: yoga is not strained. It comes when it arrives. This calls to mind the saying, “If you bring a gift for the altar and remember that your brother has something against you, go: be reconciled to your brother, then return with your gift.” The spiritual pearl of great price requires that irritants be wrapped with prayer upon prayers.

There are many levels of discipline within the practice of yoga, a fact that is congruent with the implications of the messages to the Churches of Asia in the book of Revelation, which is acknowledged in the West as a holy book. The key difference, of course, is that the Eastern system has no particular messiah, and the student is on his own in the astral, where many influences await recognition. To the pure all things are pure.

The title page for this chapter illustrates the paths of the seven spirits of la as they fall on the chakras— upon the sephirot, the “brightnesses.” These are seats of awakening that feed the spiritual eye. None of us is ever alone. Each of us walks in the Projection of HaShem. The book Revelation charges us to rededicate focus within the chakra at Ephesus. The voice of messiah convinces us of the validity of the message, but we are at a loss on how to proceed, because carelessness made us forgetful of our first love.

ImmanuAL knocks on the doors to our hearts and invites us to take up his yoke, so that we can work together in Yahushua as we make preparation for ascension by way of Smyrna. Beyond lie more complex choices: should we go forward or back when we leave? right or left? Yes, to all, but not as we might choose if left to our own devices; for it is not ours to direct our steps. We accept, wait, and follow as we are led when we are led. Smyrna is the Yesod of Jewish mysticism and Swadhisthana to those of the East.

In Pergamos, we encounter the confusing crosscurrents of right and left. We’ve a limited ability to track life on the paths that veer to the side. Either way is imbalancing. We are free to choose to go one way or the other; but the center path is the way to go, if our spirits will allow it. If not, old habits will steer us within the currents of the cross.

It’s allowed. Peter fell short when he led the disciples back to fishing boats after the resurrection. But then again, he stood strong on the center path when he agreed to the baptism of the “offenders” who had no place in the traditions of the fathers. What we choose will be accepted to teach the way we should go. If old habits again swallow us, causing us to forget what we learned in the footsteps of messiah as we abandon the way, we’ll face punishing headwinds until we again seek truth.

Pitfalls can be expected; but we misunderstand if we choose a path because we perceive it to be “good.” We can’t keep ourselves clean: from our youth, the imagination of our hearts is only evil, continually. Even if we cling to the right-hand path, we’ll be righted before the great feast, as it’s written, “Come, inherit…” The King is centered, and to join him we must also move to the center. It’s not for man to direct his steps.

Once, I realized that an activity in which I had become involved with was wrong and very wrong and had to be abandoned as quickly as possible. When that resolution was fixed in my mind, I was met with the challenge, “What good are you?!”

I haven’t always made best use of the lesson, but I realized that I was being told that it’s not what we do, but why we do it. We all are thieves on the hillside of Golgotha. It wasn’t the good thief who complained. Was I to be that bad one, a bad-tempered dog returning to its vomit? Or could I redeem myself as a good thief: a good Samaritan ready to steal captive brethren from the ditches into which they have fallen?

In my life, I had interacted with many souls on the left-hand path, rarely thinking about my impact on their spiritual welfare; and I had run up a debt 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, but I hadn’t considered that I might have debts that would require the outlay of real spiritual coin.

Themselves wallowing in one ditch or another, many believers offer sympathetic help, not love. Their approach telegraphs that they’re exercising a standardized routine. They offere concern from a superior standing—as if they’re better than the miscreants to whom they offer their charity, which typically starts with counseling and culminats in the ritual called the “laying on of hands,” as though sinners are mechanisms requiring the attention of technicians. It is never necessary to accost or in any way to assault brethren in order to convince them of their need for help.

When a believer simply stops by to chat, he touches with “spiritual hands” by his very presence. Physical hands are good for doing physical things, but the transfer of spiritual energy through touch requires authorization of the holy spirit. Real damage can be done by turning a sacrament into a mockery by practicing it as a routine.

I found myself on the center path, after being shifted from the path on the right by baptisms not answerable to man. My sinful life had provided me with useful insights I could share effectively with others looking for a way up. Experience within the right- and left-hand lanes prepared me for pointing others, mostly to the right. I knew I was on the center path so long as I monitored concerns of left or right but did not bow to either. We are one, or we are not. The spiritual man should know the difference.

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. He knows what he’s doing. If prayer life sent the priest, he will know whether to stand above the ditch and reach down, or to get down into the ditch and help the brother up. It’s a question for the author and finisher of faith that occupants of pews rarely ask.

Non-believers have responsibility when they reject the counsel of a believer, regardless of the believer’s performance. Not having faith is a problem only God can fix; for he’s the beginning and the end of faith, its author and finisher. Most non-believers are painfully aware of that. God is reminding me of these things as I type, so that I would remember to add that HaMashiyach is within everybody at all times, whatever the condition of their soul. I’m the only stranger I ever met.

Non-believers learn the pattern of hypocrites, and they are quick to pick up on it. It’s hypocrisy to ask miscreants to leave the ditch behind and step into a brightly-lit room where everyone feels sorry for them: judging them, preaching that they should control themselves by unlearning bad patterns and learning new ones that don’t cause saints discomfort. A believer’s pride should not become a stumbling block for non-believers; for to the degree piety is indulged, it speaks of accusation, not brotherhood; and there may be one sitting on the back pew, quietly writing in the dust with his finger.

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

All of us need help. It is best, and it is enough, that we talk as equals, allowing God to quicken conversations, so that brethren can listen to each other and grow in faith. It’s not for man to direct his steps. I’m puzzled how I ever thought that we could!

I had always interpreted that saying to mean that choosing your own way as you think best is inappropriate. That, it is. More to the point, it may not be possible! There are wheels within wheels, and a man can see just so far along the linear path he thinks he walks; for while he plots and plans strategies to win his way forward in life, wheels revolve about him and turn within him. The parable 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 every thought travels by means of its firmament from the expanse within our physical faculties to the expanse of consciousness.

The forward steps we take under the influence of a firmament define the expanses that are in play. Existence is one thing, but living is a complicated ordeal. By observing expanses by means of the firmaments that connect them, we build understanding. The choices we make in life are merely gestures that express things for which we have no words. They are as prayers written in sign language by one not knowing how to sign.

Each of us walks within a vortex; and as the wheels of heaven and earth churn out immense spirals that separate us from each other and bring us together again, we blindly travel what we imagine to be “our” paths. When age or crisis, or coincidence require us to change directions, we are left with questions as our plans slip away, taking our goals with them. We’re marooned. We’ve taken a short cut within depression.

We are imperishable worms of fire aglow in this 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 caterpillars in their cocoons, are hidden in messiah. Death will claim some part of us, but only as the girth we have gained in messiah bursts 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 within us, 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 with words whose shapes that were embedded within the branches of the Tree, all along.

The Crown Diamond proves that the alphabets of man are among the Tree’s fruits, and the living waters within the Tree’s sap allow 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 whirling swords at the gates of Eden are the vocabularies operative within our minds. To the degree we read scripture as literal truth, the swords will decapitate us, cutting short the momentum of our thoughts; however, when we accept that scriptures are the record of spiritual utterances—that they are lively oracles—we come to understand that the words, “Behold, I create all things new,” do not speak exclusively of some future time, but also of this present time. The 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 lies in perception. We are allowed to read their 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.

Our souls will certainly die if error is found in them; but we endure and will come to perfection as living souls: not for our own sake, but because of the sacrifice of HaMashiyach and unto 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 precepts within us, and as line builds upon lines. Sentences are firmaments. Paragraphs are expanses.

We are taught to hold the single-eyed focus until perfection overtakes the maelstrom within which we walk. That focus demands faith. It is the straight-and-narrow way preached by Y’shua, and its logic will be commemorated and affirmed by the father as he awards the forehead seal to those who overcome.

The father’s seal is a spiritual reality that doesn’t come by works, but by faith. The perfect walk is the walk in faith. Earth is a parable crafted to teach us of the hidden things of la. If we should attempt to achieve the mind that was in Y’shua by the exercise of “enlightened” willpower, we will fail because it attempts to build spiritual reality atop a foundation based upon and buried in the material realm.

In us all, Ephesus is a reservoir of power that surrounds the spiritual seat of ImmanuAL. This seat of godly power is the fulcrum sages of the East call the kundalini essence, as noted earlier. The pool of God’s spirit in us, it is the hiding place of the Breath of Life. We breathe in the father’s life mindlessly, until the day we are called to come closer. The energy field in which the blind, unbiased, single eye slumbers, Ephesus is the first of the Churches of Asia. The 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, and to all that I have inadvertently overlooked. All are one.

The bowls of spirit within the first three Churches of Asia are reminiscent of Golgotha, in that they point to the problems and potentials of the body as chariot of the angel it clothes. Ephesus is theMalkuth of Jewish mysticism. It is both the place from which to begin and the destination, once the journey has begun. It sits in its wholeness within every individual and is also held, collectively, within all people, ready to supply every Son of Man those things that will serve to hasten everlasting life. Ephesus is the beloved within each of us because it expresses the glory of la.

In the East, Ephesus is called Muladhara, the lake upon which the four-petaled Lotus sits, 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 to ascend, is Life itself, the Breath of God, and it ascends, arising as Yahushua HaMashiyach. By and within spiritual Ephesus we are one, because God is without scale. HaShem can be fully active in one of us and in all of us, singly or together, at every instant.

To overcome in Ephesus is to prioritize, reaching decisions about important issues. It’s not that 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 the history of error; for nothing happens apart from the will of la, whose “enemies” are his servants.

Overcoming at Ephesus begins with recognition of error and raises the issue of what subsequent errors are developing in the struggle with unrecognized errors. It is good and necessary that we confess our sins—our errors; but confession doesn’t free us of the need for diligence in addressing consequences, both in our lives and in the lives of others. All error requires repentance, and the angel walking among the candlesticks at Ephesus is ready to assist us in our way forward. “Turn us and we shall be turned.”

God is great; for there is no God but la, whose name is hwhy. Yahushua owcwhy is the name of God as Savior, the King Messiah who sits on the throne of the third heaven. He instructed Moses on Sinai; and he sent his anointed one, Y’shua ocwhy, to deliver the gospel and to demonstrate the way, the truth, the life that is in him.

Followers of Moses had lost their way. They had not understood the voice of the prophets, which was HaShem’s voice. He sent Mohamed to proclaim his unending mercy and to restore proper focus to the gospels after they were commandeered by Charlemagne. He sent me because I know nothing and can testify only of myself. 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 build the Tabernacle of David as we worship the spirit of HaShem in the Temple Made without Hands.