Progress:
A Step Back Floods the Expanse

The firmament of earth is vast and varied, from locale to locale, as are the firmaments within man. Within the creation parable, every firmament provides a nexus, a link, an invisible string that ties related but different expanses together. Much like highways, they facilitate exchanges between mirrored entities.

At both ends, expanses pool those things firmaments convey. The compounds that are formed within expanses are dynamic at every scale, from the spiritual, through the atomic, and beyond even galactic realms.

With so much happening at every scale all at once, expanses develop clusters of intertwined firmaments. Every cluster is a salient expanse with its own firmaments, all of which coalesce into entangled knots.

When confusion crowds out thought, nonsensical expanses can erupt with even more firmamentation, fomenting a drunken disorder that overwhelms the mind as concepts give way to unprofitable, speculative leaching between numerous expanses. Chaotic accretion is the glue of creation.

This was an unusual way to broach the concept, but I intended to express my wonder at the miracle of creation. Despite the likelihood of chaos (given the multitude of variables within expanses), firmaments behave much like thread passing through numerous layers of material to baste disorder into the highly ordered fasbrics of creation’s material realm.

Allow me a non sequitur without judging it to be facetious: prayer miraculously accomplishes just that. Prayer builds a spiritual firmament that allows us to escape the limitations of the natural mind by renewing the connections that unite man and his creator.

Prayer honors the spiritual envelope within which our angels ascend and descend in communion with qodesh qodeshim. As we gauge the holy spirit’s presence within the temple of our bodies, our angels analyze the expanses of our lives and ascend to the father, bearing our concerns.

If the door to the heavenly expanse opens to us, we are free to go in and out, seeking guidance. When that door begins to close, our angels descend again, conveying the father’s counsel. This Western concept of prayer is not greatly different from the Eastern practice of utilizing the kundalini essence during meditation.

We become distracted when the firmament of prayer is subjected to pressure from unexpected expanses, such as a thought that, in a different context, raises similar issues; but the change in perspective demands reconsideration of presumptions.

There are many plausible explanations for prayer that seems to have become ineffective. The sense of dissonance may be intended to rivet attention on someone we have offended, consciously or not.

Then again, it may be that a friend’s angel is reaching out to gain our attention for assistance, not because of offense. Again, distraction sometimes comes as a gentle rebuke— not for the subject or substance of the prayer, but for its manner.

Whatever the explanation, the fact that distraction occurred during prayer is a sign that we should leave our concerns on the altar and go our way, trusting HaShem to sort it all out in his time. It is not for man to direct his steps; for wheels turn within wheels.

Like Marta, the sister of Lazarus in the gospels, we can go about doing this and that for all the right reasons, performing well. Even if our labors do not become a source of inappropriate pride, the many cares and obligations they impose will drain our strength throughout the day and over the years.

Somewhat forgetful of our first love as we labor in sincerity under mounting pressure, we may begin to build upon our own understandings. Impatience will tempt us to emit trial firmaments, into which we can funnel frustration, exhaustion, resentment.

Blowing past all warning signs, we can fall prey to piety. Zeal may be the underlying culprit; but if we persist in arrogance, dark outbursts can trigger backlash behavior of epic proportions. In harboring the notion that we haven’t received sufficient credit for our labors, we defile our garments and risk our crowns.

Marta’s companion sister, Miryam, embodies the bitterness that builds within us when we don’t know how to support a firmament that’s become overburdened with the day’s demands. Rather than act rashly, Miryam chooses to do nothing.

The responsible sister, Marta, labors to satisfy perceived needs. Impractical Miryam bides her time by focusing her thoughts in preparation for greeting one who can bring real relief; and when he appears, she will scrub his feet with her hair, which are as firmaments of the expanses that fill her heart as she meditates on questions she doesn’t know how to ask.

Casual observers of the house of Lazarus might judge Marta to be the sensible sister because she’s realistic and dependable; and she is those things, but she has not ceased from her own works.

It’s not easy for bitter Marta to accept an unexpected firmament that will impose change in her routines. She is aware of the need and might discuss it, within reason, but she can’t embrace it; and she won’t implement the change without help from a strong hand.

Miryam’s prayerful tears help keep her mind open. They are a reservoir into which she can admit new firmaments from unexpected quarters. She simply includes them with the firmaments of thought her mind generates.

Miryam experiences release because she expects to receive answers to her prayers. Emotion dominating reason, her prayers are robust firmaments that surge from her earthly expanse to her heavenly expanses in the second and third heavens. “Prayer without ceasing” is not a matter of saying words, but of remaining open.

My initial interest in such firmaments began with an attempt to account for the rise of iniquity within the Light Bearer. As covering cherub, he had oversight over both firmament and expanse, yet he was susceptible to intrusion by iniquity.

It’s puzzling that we are expected to withstand the influence of iniquity as it arises within our hearts. Born into the world of sin, we are called to a perfection that outshines that enjoyed by the Morning Star. Or are we? Perhaps the prevailing notion of human perfection is mistaken.

Perception is a matter of focus within grace. Any competent counselor will agree that the single-eyed focus is best. When we read the swineherd’s confession, we understood that his mind darted about, restlessly. He was barely sane. With his heart and mind under constant duress, he was a powerless victim of spiritual conflict.

By comparison, Goliath had been on a better track, with his singular point of view; but he squandered his disciplined focus in preparation for warfare, only to be undone by the spontaneity of a godly shepherd. If the stone selected from David’s sling was Devarim, the book of Deuteronomy, the giant was undone not by a slingshot, but by the ministry of a priest. Firmaments exist between parables and their expansive interpretations.

We’ll not discover the reason iniquity gained foothold in Lucifer through speculation or by study. Every school or discipline has its tools and its methods. Honest probes into the mystery of iniquity should not be hamstrung by such bias. To discover iniquity’s origins and, perhaps, its purpose, we will need to address the earliest moments of creation.

In making the attempt, it behooves us to remember that the inexperienced child is on equal footing with foolish old men. The child is on better footing, as a matter of fact, because his memories are not far from his origins.

As we question the realities, meanings, and implications of these things, we are like fishermen. We may cast the net the whole night long, catching nothing; but in the morning, a man calls from the shore, advising us to cast the net on the other side of the boat. We doubt, but we do it, nonetheless; and our net becomes full to the breaking point.

Once the net is emptied, its expanses twist into the concept of “the catch.” The fish became commodities when they left the expanse of the net to land on the expanse of the boat’s deck. As they are removed from the boat and hauled to shore, the series of changes they must undergo accelerates.

The metaphor is clumsy and inept, but it tugs at masks that hide the spiritual realities that peek through latticed expanses by the artifice of firmaments.

To say that God creates the fruit of the lips is to agree that HaShem is the source of all thought. The implication is that our words are the bodies of his thoughts, as secured the resting places of hearts and minds. To receive hearing, words must be raised by HaShem from burial in our bodies, enabling them to find release through the open tomb of the mouth.

When thought slips the hook, the mind’s faculties reassert themselves, attempting to reel concepts of the thought back in again before they become lost to memory, even as dumb thought searches out the compounds of the heart, making sparks fly.

For me to indulge this interplay of concepts is acknowledgment that the narrative has become one long on adventure, but short on edification. The intellectual zenith reached awhile back seemed like epiphany, but it was vanity: a striving after the wind.

Children of the h Name mc, we search as though looking outwardly, in denial of God’s bounty and care for our core beings; and we constrain infinite Wisdom c according to its correlations within the finite capacities and expectations of wisdom’s attributes m.

In a small way, the mystery of iniquity is at work. Abandoning Wisdom c, we settle for diversion m because we are driven by the dark medium of natural intellect.

Competing firmaments struggle, one with another, like twins struggling within the womb. They war against each other within the expanses that hide what we are becoming in the mind of HaShem.

Should one twin annihilate the other? I don’t think so. Fratricide is murder.If the mind dwells on the Tree of Life as though it were a manifestation hidden in a remote location, we will find ourselves grinding our teeth on the shell of the nut.

The Life Tree hides in the members of our bodies; and the inward reality lies in the functions of those members. As our physical members participate in heaven’s work, we partake of the Tree’s nutrition.

If we would eat, our minds must hunger after heaven’s work; for a spiritual vine graces the branches of the Life Tree, binding them together as One. Both draw Living Waters from the root they share; and they fill their branches with its mineral strength,
saturating the air with the sweet fragrances of its seasons.

The expanses within our hearts reach out, emboldened by gentle
probings of spirit, whose essence arises within us, racing along our spines to bless our minds with clarity: exploring, aligning, and bringing congruence with thought that will move understanding forward.

We attribute such visceral sensations to enthusiasm, but they manifest the kundalini essence. “Rise up, O King.” As physical members participate in heaven’s work, our souls partake of the Tree’s nutrition through our spirits.

Just as Nehushtan arose on the desert pole of the wilderness, so that all who saw him would live, even so Messiah must climb the sacred pole of our bodies as his spirit ministers to our spirits, lifting them to the father, in affirmation of the words, “If one prevails against him, two will withstand that one: and a threefold cord is not easily broken.”

The mind is a symphony, not a recital; and the single- eyed focus may not always be expedient for sufficient edification. To insist upon any focus is to pursue an agenda. Such aids to thought as meditation, mantras, fasting, and rituals— if mistakenly practiced by will power and not in answer to spirit— can turn spiritual life into a parlor game. HaShem will knock us off the board if we so offend, which we may do.

No regimen we map out for ourselves will long succeed. Those who are born of the spirit are moved by the spirit. Voyeurs judge those caught doing one thing today after being seen doing another thing entirely, the day before.

Today and yesterday, both prepare for tomorrow. Promise is the focus of Sons of Man, all along; for, in fact, they work at the same thing at all times and before any who observe. They do their best to serve HaShem’s spirit as it unfolds from within their hearts at every moment.

The single-eyed focus is the spiritual reality of those prepared for the forehead seal; but that seal is not gained by acumen— by esoteric muscle building, whose foundation is the material realm. The third eye is the gift of the father to the Sons of Man.

Within each of us, ImmanuAL is a reservoir of spiritual power that vacillates between the known and the unknown. The Breath of God awaits close by, sitting atop the casing of Jacob’s well. The sages of the East call its Living Waters the “kundalini essence.” The cistern of the waters that turn into sacred wine belongs to Yahushua, who wants to share. physical members participate in heaven’s work, we partake of the Tree’s nutrition. The Living Waters of the eternal require the interface of the Breath of Life, the presence that rests between the inhale and the exhale. We gain congruence with its rhythms in prayer-closet meditations. None is an offender because of a word, but the Breath is of God is also the Shout of God: namely, Yahushua, the Projection, the Son of God. United with the Breath in the kundalini, we can do anything. More than conquerors, the Shout of God’s Breath makes us Sons of Man.