The Master's Ladder - Step One

The Master's Ladder – Step by Step.

The introduction to the Sermon on the Mount commonly called the Beatitudes was always an enigma to me. Growing up I heard many sermons on the subject, saw people scold others using this Beatitude or that, as if they were “commandments.”  It just did not make sense to me.  All of it left me feeling like there was something there, after all it was Jesus speaking, but no one I knew had the slightest idea what Jesus actually meant.  I heard many guesses and none of them rang true. 

It was so curious to me, that when I became a Methodist Minister, I started collecting all the “Beatitudes” I found in the bible and books of other faiths.  It was interesting and I'm going to include it as an addendum to this short booklet and call it "Broken Ladders." There is wisdom there, but the story is incomplete. The tradition of teaching "Blessed is the man that . . . " has a history centuries older than the Beatitudes in the New Testament. 

I had run across the concepts of repentance/purification, 
enlightenment/theophany, 
sanctification/theosis 
or as the Greeks call it, Deification, 
which was a very frightening word to me.  This was the Orthodox Christian process of healing.  And truthfully it was the first time any “salvation” theology made any sense to me. It was earthy, talking about real healing here and now, not some “miracles of divine healing magic” or waiting to get to heaven,  but deep psychological healing which included ascetic discipline, that tied the mind and body together;  Something I had discovered a shadow of in eastern religions but not really in any form of Western Christianity; certainly not in Methodism, which by the 20th century was nothing more than Christianized Masonism.  

I stopped into an Orthodox Church and heard them singing the Beatitudes. While listening intently to the singing, enjoying the subtle harmonies as much as the words, I realized I was absently looking at an IKON of Jacob's Ladder, which I had just learned the Orthodox called The Ladder of Divine Ascent.  It dawned on me in that second that the Beatitudes were placed in order by Matthew, and not randomly selected, because they were instructive of the true steps of SOZO – that is HEALING/SALVATION.  (repentance/purification, 
enlightenment/theophany, 
sanctification/theosis/ 
and there is that frightening word, Deification. 

The insight to me was blinding, and beyond my vocabulary.  I KNEW, but was unable to speak it to describe it.  I began my search for the words to say what I already knew.  It took sometime. 

The Beatitudes begin with Mystical understanding – what a surprise! Mystical understanding isn't bad you see, when it is the Holy Spirit teaching wisdom and not some compromise to Satan teaching theology to those he fears may slip from his grasp. 

Seeing the multitudes, Jesus went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him: 

Great Oriental Teachers sat to teach. 
(EIDO - SEEING) the crowd, means more than seeing an object, it means discernment, perceiving more than the eyes can see. Jesus realized that there were many in the crowd that needed to be taught and were ready to be taught.

This was not a usual crowd that followed Jesus. Most people came to see the signs, to gain healing and relief from suffering. Some came to receive relief from guilt. This day, as Mathew explains in his opening, this crowd wanted to hear what Jesus had to say. 

The Greek literally says that Jesus walked (EIS = INTO) a (OROS =mountain). That is pretty strange language until you learn that it is a phrase used to connote taking on a huge task. The word mountain used by the Mystics meant a great problem or obstacle. So here is a double meaning. Jesus stepped into a mountain, taking on a huge task. This is mocked by Francis Bacon the “inventor” of the New World Order, when he penned the line, "If the mountain won't come to Muhammad then Muhammad must go to the mountain." It has no antecedent in Mohammedianism.

(A Digression - Now do you have a better understanding of what Jesus meant when he said that tiny, tiny faith could move mountains.)

When he was set He opened his mouth and taught them saying. 
This word (KATHIZO-set) has a double meaning also, that of sitting and also of being settled for a task. 
The word (STOMA = mouth) is a real surprise. It means, simply put, just the physical, animal face. It does not mean the heart, the soul, the mind or any of the expressions we use to mean the deeper or deepest parts of someone. We “share our souls” and “expose our hearts”.  The deep meaning the Sermon on the Mount holds, was less than nothing to the Wisdom Teacher Jesus, less than potty training.  He did not have to open his (nous- heart/mind) or (psychae-soul) or (kardia-heart) or his (pneuma-spirit). The teaching that has puzzled us for two millennia, did not begin to touch the depth of his understanding. 

Step One 

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 

Feeling poorly, are we?  To some this means, a person in poor spirits, grumpy, or depressed. So it appears to us that this sentence means; if you are grumpy or depressed you can claim heaven as your property. 
Wait!  
This is so strange and  silly it must mean more. 
We have all met the permanent victims, the professional and confessionally depressed, those slogging down the road of perpetual disappointment to their heavenly reward.
“Master, there has to be some other meaning here!”  

The phone rang, and it was a friend asking me about a certain piano he was rebuilding. He had run into a problem and it looked like after many, many hours of tedious work he needed to take it apart and redo a procedure the way I had suggested weeks prior, when I consulted.  He was asking now for labor, not advice, since his mistake opened him to breach of contract lawsuit. 

I hung up wondering why Brent had not taken the extra four or five hours of labor, as I suggested, that seemed objectively obvious to me. Instead his nearly thirty hours was wasted and he had it all and more to do again. I always found it uncomfortable talking to him.  He had a habit of asking my time and advice only to ignore it.  Most times he would dismiss my advice immediately and tell me why I was wrong, with the air of a teacher dismissing a wrong answer.  I always wondered why he bothered, why he engaged in what I had come to realize was his ritual of self-assurance.  The Master said “Brent, is rich in spirit.”  

It hit me like electric shock; How being poor in spirit is the first step on the Path of TRUE Repentance, Enlightenment and Theosis!  A person who is poor in spirit has realized the poverty of his own rational thinking and personal mythology. Ideas of history, philosophy, science, piety, religion, culture, ideas gained in schools of education, all the theories of material being, even the so-called wisdom of common sense, the advice of parents, these are poverty, in the Sacred-Mystical sense. We must understand that a hierophant (one versed in sacred and spiritual understanding) realizes that his highest understanding is almost total ignorance, in the presence of Truth, the Person, The Master, Our Lord and Physician, Jesus Christ. That was the first time it came into focus, what was so very different about the teachings of Dr James A Keillor, over the teaching of the others of my childhood. He constantly talked about Jesus the Physician and never emphasized “divine healing.”  - You will understand the significance of this last sentence later. 

Richness of spirit on the other hand cannot listen.
It is so full and complete it cannot cannot absorb anything new. 
Richness of spirit is pride and arrogance, self-assurance, and certainty.  
It is most often the state of youth.  “He will not listen. What can I say?” 

Until poverty of spirit is approached by suffering or disappointment or on some rare instances by purposeful humble inquiry, nothing else may happen. 

The Church Teaches, from the beginning, although it used different words, that such a person is a psychopath, and it is not a stretch.  We are not talking about what the fake sadistic science of modern psychology calls a psychopath, some creature that even the ordinary psychopaths of the culture find odd.  No, rather psycho – path, is a transliteration of psyche - pathos, that is a soul - suffering. 

How is it that what we call “normalcy” in this culture is a psychopathic state? 
(Romans 1:18For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all the iniquity and wickedness of men who unjustly suppress the truth; Because that which may be known of God is manifested to them, for God has revealed it to them. For, from the very creation of the world, the invisible things of God have been clearly seen and understood by his creations, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. For they knew God and did not glorify Him and give thanks to him as God, but became vain in their imaginations and their hearts were darkened so that they could not understand. And while they thought within themselves that they were wise, they became fools.)
All of life is based on (to use Buddha's term) the "something invisible" in samsara. 
The samsara the Buddhist will tell you is the lively world around us of animation and beauty, yet a world compromised to sin, the world of death and decay.
Samsara is the realization of material being as both Beneficence, Harmony, Beauty but also, Malevolence, Disorder, and Ugliness. 

In the common human state of psycho-pathos, we struggle to avoid it, to understand it and in some cases we try to conquer it by utopian or other psychopathic means. 

The attractive illusions of false knowledge, and worse evil knowledge that defiles. 

Self-delusion  comes in many models, shapes and forms. The examples of talented, gifted, wealthy people living lives of foolishness and misery are myriad in our culture. Lives of every possible creature comfort most often do not bring peace and happiness. Despite possessing a suffering soul, the ego rebels at the idea that it really doesn't understand things as they are. It will cling to ideas of natural philosophy, be conceited in false knowledge, claim reality for fantasy.  The depth of the psychosis is very deep and it runs in ALL the culture and EVERY religion.  This blocks us from true models of reality, wherein healing may be discovered. It is spiritual blindness, which is the nascence or ignorant (as in “IGNOR -ance”) of the Physician Jesus Christ, "truth Who is The Person, Jesus Christ." 

Sadly most Christian religionists will say Amen to that last sentence without the slightest comprehension AS YET, what I mean.  "After all" they will say, "is not the crux of it, knowing Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior?" Yet knowing your doctor exists, is in a sense your "health savior" does not cure your cancer. Holding social conversations with him, accomplishes nothing. Even holding consultation sessions with him cannot produce health. He may even give you very good advice, but your wealth of spirit will not absorb it.  Remember my friend Brent.  He continually asked advice because he suffered fear. The exercise was to assure himself he was already doing that right thing.  Anything that challenged that was immediately rejected. 

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have Mercy on Me, a Sinner.” 

God's reality (true reality) includes phenomenal nature, and phenomenal nature is a good thing.  It is the "the primary Grace of 'Being."' 
But God's reality (truth) quickly steps outside and beyond phenomenal nature.
So then, if you hold your ideas, partial knowledge of phenomenal nature as ultimate truth, then you are unable to see anything past that flawed and insignificant knowledge. You may know everything humankind has learned of phenomenal nature and be a wealth of knowledge and spirit, but still a Psychopath – a suffering soul, devoid of the reality of True Healing and True Joy, which is the presence of God, in Therapeutic form, as Physician more than in name only. That presence BLOCKED by your own "wealth of spirit." 

To be poor in spirit, means to entertain the idea that your own knowledge is imperfect, partial and sometimes just simply wrong. 
It is also acknowledging that all of man's knowledge is only partial. 
If you can then in humility, when confronted with "greater truth" admit that you were wrong, totally or partially ignorant, even deluded into an opposite or false view, then you are recognizing the poverty of your own spirit. It is that humble poverty of spirit that creates the ground upon which seeds of truth can be planted and grow to maturity.

Jesus said, “Suffer little Children to come unto me, for such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”  And again, “Unless you become as a little child, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”   What is a child but a blank slate ready to learn, ready to hear truth, ready to grow, in fact ANXIOUS to grow, impatient to grow, ever ready to ask questions; rarely ready to express an opinion. Ask a child a question and the most common answer is, "I don't know." 

This idea is affirmed on one level, by the "pseudo-science" of psychology/psychiatry. They call actively clinging to a false paradigm "resistance." This idea is so simple it is profound. If an individual can give up their resistance to recognizing what is false and accept the truth of any situation, they are cured, or would be.  In Secular Psychology this almost never happens. If mental illness is not truly physically-based, via injury, toxicity or disease, it could be cured simply by giving up resistance and hearing and accepting the truth of any situation. Yet, the psychologists' offices are full to overflowing with people who want to talk endlessly "around" and never truly confront the truth. In fact many so-called therapists sustain their practices by teaching people how to skillfully live WITH their false paradigm, instead of confronting their false paradigm. If the therapist is honest, the patient's  “richness of spirit” stands in their way of healing. If the therapist is dishonest he has a client for life. Most mentally ill people feel offended that they cannot conform the world to their paradigm. “Why can't they . . . . “  "It ought to be . . . " are the most common opening words of psychopaths.  

As "the Human Race" we hold a similar view when asked to face the obvious magical mystery of our own Cognition. Here we are seeing and thinking and we truly do not have the slightest idea, HOW.  We try with all our waking effort to mold reality into our idea of it, we complain and experience disappointment and disillusion when we fail.  When we do wildly succeed at forming reality into our paradigm we cannot endure the “happiness” of our success, and our chances of   suicide are multiplied exponentially. Ask any lottery winner. All around us we are faced with the reminders and anomalies, the things that just won't fit the model of our little reality and we live in resistance and denial. We are psyche – pathos .. . Suffering Souls.  

What is gained by the recognition of one's spiritual poverty? 
Jesus said the kingdom of heaven i.e., the reign of God in the Center of oneself -the heart.

"Don't look to the sky or the sea for the kingdom, it is inside of you and around you." 

In the pain of life, lingering grief, grinding anxiety, numbing boredom, frantic activity, its loneliness, and our inability to make it make sense, we sometimes recognize the poverty of our reasoning and truly cry out from the depths of our beings (in spirit and truth) to our God for help.  And in that instance of sincere seeking we become aware that we are spiritual beings. For the atheist, agnostic, strict naturalist and radical materialist this is a huge step. 

When we cry out we turned God-ward. In that act we "connect with reality-truth which is a person." We turn inward trying to understand how we got to be as we are and in the process of coming to know ourselves, we come to meet and love God. I explained this process in a paper, entitled "To Know God Is To Love Him." 

THIS is why Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." 
In spiritual poverty we search for what we lack and discover the riches of the Kingdom. We can style this many ways, but this first step corresponds to “conversion”  - that is turning around – which is what conversion means; turning and facing God. "I don't know what to do God, You Do, I'm listening."   
It has an element of repentance, since to get here we have to repent of at least the things that blocked us from making this first step.

To be continued - Step Two.