[st u's community] [st uriel's] On the Soul

[Jamie Thomas]

Hi all

I was chatting to a friend about the service and our discussions about the
Soul and its relationship to the divine.
My friend in question is a big fan of Rudolph Steiner, and in response to
our discussion she sent me an excerpt from Steiner's book Steiner's book,
"Christianity As Mystical Fact".


"The soul is the mother who is able to conceive the god by nature.If the
soul allows herself to be impregnated by nature, she will give birth to the
divine. God is born from the marriage of the soul with nature, - no longer a
"hidden", but a manifest God. He has life, a perceptible life, wandering
amongst men."

Now if you replace Nature with Logos we have a fit.

Through the nurturing properties of the inward Soul and its marriage to
the Logos, our Soul becomes a conduit for Spirit and the we are able to give
birth to our "God like" or higher self. This rebirth occurring from the
inside out.

I wish I was with you all for this weeks episode.

"The Hymn of the Pearl" is such a wonderful myth/analogy of remembering and
homecoming.

I'll give it a read on Sunday night and think of you all.

Blessings to you

Jamie

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 6:29 PM, Fr Tim Mansfield <tim at saint-uriels.org>wrote:

> On Sunday a half-dozen of us gathered at the Unitarian Centre to talk about
> the Soul led by the beautiful, troubling Gnostic text "The Exegesis on the
> Soul".
>
> http://www.piney.com/GnosExegesisSoul.html
>
> The text uses the allegory of a woman who leaves her family to go into the
> world and becomes beguiled by wily men who take her to their beds, promising
> her love, fidelity and riches but leaving her penniless, forlorn and alone.
> She is taken in again and again and always left abandoned.
>
> Finally she cries out to her father for aid and undergoes a transformation,
> turning in on herself she enters the peace of her bed chamber and tingling
> with expectation begins to await, not yet another lover, but her Bridegroom.
> He eventually arrives and they are united, become one and return to the
> house of the father.
>
> My fairytale summary leaves out a great deal of bizarre detail which I'll
> leave you to discover yourself when you read the text.
>
> The story is old, it's taught in Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities
> and it points, I think, to a simple aspect of our experience.
>
> Before we begin to set our feet upon the path, many of us find it hard to
> even notice what is referred to in this story as the Soul. Our attention and
> awareness is so drawn by the phenomena of the material world, by other
> people, by television and relationships, McDonald's and birdsong that it's
> hard to even be aware that there's an interior experience to be attending
> to.
>
> It took me a long time to begin to really notice my interior, my
> judgements, my meaning-making, my thoughts, my feelings and to tease out
> those interior experiences from what and who I was looking at and hearing.
>
> At some point, for some reason, some of us resolve to make a change, to
> change how we're thinking and experiencing our lives. The traditional term
> for this is "metanoia" - to transform the mind, a word that gets translated
> as "repentance". The first step is to turn the attention inward and to start
> noticing our Soul.
>
> "Soul" means many things for different people, but in the terms of the text
> we can take it to mean the aggregate of those interior experiences -
> feelings, thoughts, judgements, intentions and so on. In modern terms,
> perhaps we could use the shorthand that the Ego is the confused Soul,
> unaware of herself and turned outward.
>
> As we begin to attend to all that interior activity, a spaciousness can
> start to open around the Soul and an older, wiser aspect begins to be
> evident. My Spirit - that wider, wiser me-but-not-me - takes my Soul by her
> hand and leads her to the bridal chamber and to Union, rendering whole that
> which has been broken.
>
> Our Tradition suggests that our Spirit is ever-present with us, acting as
> our connection to the majestic grace and love we crave. I am so often so
> caught in my Ego's bluff and bluster, his pretended certainty that he can
> make it on his own, that he needs no help, that opening myself to anything
> else seems foolish and impossible.
>
> The Exegesis suggests that when we truly realise how badly we have been
> used and how "penniless" we are and simply cry out for help - for Mercy -
> then the bedchamber of our heart opens to admit the Bridegroom. It's a
> beautiful story and so clearly mirrored in so many personal experiences I've
> heard.
>
> Next week we meet to share the Divine Liturgy of the Eucharist in order to
> give thanks for the lives of All Gnostic Saints - all those blessed teachers
> who have gone before us and shared their sight with us.
>
> I hope you can join us.
>
> Divine Liturgy
> 6pm Sunday 23 Nov
> Unitarian Centre
> 15 Francis St
> Darlinghurst
>
> Father Tim+
> http://www.saint-uriels.org
>
>
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-- 
Jamie Thomas
Authorised Representative
Financial Wisdom
PO Box 8
181 Ballina Road,
LismoreN.S.W.2480
phone: (02)66213096
fax: (02)66221330
email: jamie.edwin.thomas at gmail.com
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