Paradiso

"For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ." ~2 Cor 4:6

Many critics don't really know anything about the Gnostic Paul, and how essential he is to understanding Christian mysticism. They judge him for being a child of his time and culture, but they do not understand him as a child of eternity. None was his equal at encapsulating vast realms of visionary wisdom in a single verse, like this one.

This verse should not be read as a linear sequence of thoughts, but as a ring of concentric circles, like Danté's celestial rose. The outermost circle is the light of Creation. Within that circle is the circle of Gnosis. Within that is the circle of Glory. And within the circle of Glory is the ineffable beauty of the divine Face. Now gaze into that Face. This too is a sphere that we must penetrate if we would come to the heart of the Mystery: the Personhood of God.

What does this verse of Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians tell us? It reveals that the consciousness who breathes hosts of stars, spinning the galaxies, is precisely the same power that awakens your heart from within your most intimate center, filling you with the light of love. The power that guides your meditation is the grace that created the universe.

Look more deeply at these five concentric circles in your heart:

"the light ...
of the knowledge ...
of the glory of God ...
shining in the face ...
of Christ."

1. "The Light." When we practice meditation in deep silence, with absolutely no effort, we surrender to the flow of grace, and our darkness begins to glow. This glow lures us by its charm, and we pass inward through a gentle gaze, from the mind into the heart. Because we do not cling to this glow, but rather sink through it, we pass inward to the second sphere, Gnosis.

2. "Of the Knowledge." True Gnosis is really the Unknowing of all learned knowledge, all previous knowledge, all conceptual thinking, and all belief. It is the holy dark, whose rich blackness is the color of silence, the shining of polished Nothingness. We polish this sphere, this pearl of nothingness, with the cloth of our breathing. What are we polishing? The pearl I Am. When we dive into no-thing with abandonment, we enter the third circle, the sphere of Glory. Our nothingness blossoms into great wealth.

3. "The glory of God." In Hebrew, glory is "Kavoth": the cloud of radiance that surrounded Jesus on Mt. Tabor when he appeared to his three favorite disciples "in a cloud of glory," the glory on Moses' face when he came down from the mountain of vision. This glory is hidden within the seed of darkness, for darkness is not the opposite of light, darkness is the womb of light.

Yet the radiance of Glory is different from the outward light, which is a created light. The light of Glory is uncreated. It is the light of emptiness that was here before any creator said, "Let there be light." When you have been blinded by the divine sun, all seems to be dark. Yet out of the dark appears an image of the very glory that blinded you. This is the seeing within blindness. And the image that appears in this seeing is more solid than the earth, more concrete than a star. It is the amethyst of pure Beauty: neither a beautiful object nor a creature, but Beauty itself, crystalized out of transcendence. It is the empty blue sky condensed into a jewel, a gemstone made of no-thing but pure awareness. Christall Consciousness.

4. "The Face." Gazing into this jewel, we behold an even deeper mystery. Though we have passed inward beyond form, beyond creation, we begin to discern, ever so softly in those Christall depths, a Face. So it was in the last Canto of his Paradiso that Danté beheld a human countenance emerging from the ecstasy of the formless. He journeyed beyond form into the abyss of the Trinity, only to see the human proportions of that body whose dimensions are the archetypes of creation.

 Could there be a personal God beyond-within the impersonal Godhead? Absolutely, ineluctably, Yes. Just as there is the imageless Godhead beyond every likeness that we could possibly imagine, so beyond and within this Godhead is the impossible, the unimaginable, the transcendental face of the Lord, whose countenance must be personal because it is pure love. In the catastrophic paradox of blind seeing, insolvable wonder dissolves the intellect.

5. "Of Christ." So at last, emptied of all possibility, you are fulfilled. Beyond imagination, you behold the form of the Formless. As Augustine wrote, "O Lord, our hearts are ever restless til they find their rest in Thee." You arrive at a trembling stillness, a heart-melting bell in the core of silence. Gazing at you out of the depth of your own burning heart is a radiant Other. For you are now so purified you have become a mirror. Then who do you behold in that inmost mirror of your soul?

This is your own intimate mystery, dear seeker. For you it may be Krishna. For another it may be Amitabha-Buddha. For another, the supreme Goddess. To each is revealed the Lord of Love in a secret. I can only share my own secret, for the time is late and the secret must be told.

Deeper within me than I Am, is the very Self of God. Here I Am whispering Thou Art, just as Thou Art whispering I Am. And in this intimate embrace of Self by Self, I Am the very Trinity that I mirror, yet I Am all One, alone. The One who worships, the One who is worshiped, and the Love that flows between us, are three. Yet they ceaselessly melt back into One through this interior gaze.

It happens in the glisten of a sunbeam through the wing of a dragonfly resting on a cattail in the warmth of a September afternoon. It happens at the bursting of a ripe mushroom in the midnight forest. It happens in the glance of a baby whose eyes are filled with gratitude, feasting at her mother's nipple. All sentient creatures experience relationship through this primordial space, created by the Self's cognition of itself. What is the distance between the Self who adores and the Self who is adored? This space is nothing, yet it contains all possibility.

And after all, it is only the distance between outbreath and inbreath. Yet in this dimensionless Ayin Soph, worlds are born, worlds dissolve. And on those worlds, every humble creature appears for its bubble of playtime - the dragonfly, the hummingbird, the dust mote, the supernova, the galaxy-cluster - then it bursts into the nothingness from which it arose. In the space of your heart, distance dissolves, and the small is greater than the great. Here, all is possible. This is the space of creation, the space of humility.

In my own heart, I look upon my very Self. Yet is this not very God of very God? The Father beholding the Christ, in the mirror of the mothering Spirit? Is this not an inebriating fertilizing gaze of creativity? Is the intimate space between Lover and Beloved, created by this joyous inward gaze, not a secret chamber where the whole universe becomes possible?

So the Upanishads declare that all creation is born from the infinitesimal bindhu, the tiny dot just beneath this heartbeat, in the little hollow of my sternum, where exhalation dissolves and inhalation arises. Yet this humble dot is the blazing cauldron of the stars.

Here a final secret must be unkept. Jesus called us to pray in this humble space between the falling and the rising breath. He said, "When you pray, go into your secret chamber, and shut the door, to pray in silence." Penetrate the inmost sphere of the face of God, and close the doors of created light, so that you may feast on the Uncreated. This secret chamber into which Christ calls us is the silence between the syllable "Ham" (I Am) and the syllable "Sah" (God). The effortless repetition of this name strikes the fire of creation, and the name is our very breathing. The out-breath and in-breath are the wings of the Hamsah swan, whispering again and again, "I Am God, Ham'sah, God I am, So'ham." When I am not awake, breathing is just an autonomic biological response. But when I unite the miracle of awareness with the miracle of breathing, gazing into my heart, my very inhalation recreates the earth, the moon, and stars.

Friend, you and I are so intimate with our Creator that She has become our own inhalation. The God who says, "Let there be light, shining out of darkness," has come to indwell this human body, revealing the splendor of the Gnosis of divine beauty, in the gaze of the Beloved.
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I invite you to listen to this as a guided meditation HERE.
Engraving by Gustav Doré, Danté gazing into the celestial rose.