Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Spiritual States

I have always written and talked about the subject of Light because spiritual states are equated with Radiant Light. The human goal is to become enlightened. Those of us who experience mystical visions understand the significance and power of Light. What many people do not realize is that Light, including our individual spirit, was created by sound. The light of divine creation that we love so much was first initiated by sound. The speech of God, according to Genesis, was the source of the spiritual light to which sincere souls aspire.

Looking at the New Testament Gospel of John, which was written thousands of years after Genesis, opens with the verse, "In the beginning was the Word..." The beginning was not light; it was sound in the form of the divine speech. Light is called the angelic language. The Supreme Intelligence thought, desired and spoke. The result was Light. I have always seen God's Light as the glue, thread, substance or blueprint holding every manifested things together. First there was the Word. Out of the Word came Light. Out of Light came manifestation. The primary mechanism of creation is sound. In many Eastern texts, this power, the Word, is called the Feminine. God desired to be many. Will was expressed through subtle speech. The Supreme united with the Feminine and the Feminine gave birth to all beings...the sons. Doesn't this sound similar to the idea of creation expressed in Genesis and the opening text of the Gospel of John?

The universe is a conceived as a divine idea. Mind is not static. Desire and Will causes the Masculine (Father Principle) to call upon his power...Feminine Principle to create. In the Vedic tradition, the Word or Power is understood as She, Feminine.
The process of creation goes like this: First, God as Being...From Being comes Mind...From Mind comes Desire...From Desire comes Will...From Will comes the Word...From the Word comes everything else. Other Eastern texts express the same idea. Isn't Kuan Yin in Chinese Buddhism the "divine voice?" The Vedas speak of the divine sound-current Shabda Brahma, which permeates all and is a key to creation. We have the sound of trumpets bringing down the walls of Jericho. In the East, the trumpet sound is a symbol of great spiritual power associated with insight and elevated consciousness. The mystic Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan has written, "Divine sound is the cause of all manifestation. The knower of the mystery of sound knows the mystery of the whole universe." H.P. Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, wrote in The Secret Doctrine, "Sound is a tremendous hidden power."

Mystics and scientists' views are similar. For this reason, I am revisiting this ancient subject in the days ahead. The sixteenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote, "God was master of cosmic sound, causing the planets to leave their entirely circular orbits and to adopt consciously complicated elliptical orbits in order to produce ever more beautiful music." In other words, Kepler viewed the orbits of the planets as vibrations, the Music of the Spheres.