Article by Doug Esse

How do we hold the paradoxes together? Many new agers feel liberated through leaning into spirituality while rejecting religion. I sure understand the impulse. On the other hand, many religious people criticize new age spirituality as lacking a rootedness and meaningful anchors onto which we cling when life really gets hard and painful. I’d say both camps could benefit from being open-minded towards the other.

My biggest vocation right now and my greatest joy is helping people not need to throw out sacred and wonderful babies with toxic and dirty bathwater. Most people chuck both and then sometimes feel unmoored when shit hits the fan. This can lead to such existential anxiety that they become more or less ontologically borderline.  That is, like people with borderline personality disorder, anyone who goes through the unmooring and floating out there without a sense of self or foundational meaning that makes sense of some deeply painful emergence in their life, will feel such profound loss that they will cling to anything that assuages the angst. This could be addictions to substances or concepts that can lead us into rabbit holes that often lead to alienation and despair. The current cultural proclivity towards some deeply distorted conspiracy theories would be examples of this and the fruits of pervasive engagement with them can include anxiety, anger, posturing, hurt marriages, hurt families, and hurt communities.

I know because I have been there, too, and I have seen it in spades, as they say.

But my pain never lasts all that long because of the wonderful foundation that I have through Christianity’s unique and wonderful facet of the Perennial Tradition.  At its best, it is deeply mystical (meaning that one experiences and knows (gnosis) for themselves the direct heart of the Divine); and it is deeply and ultimately embodied and incarnational which can assert with complete confidence that there is nothing “up there” in any of the inner planes or higher densities, that is not fully found “down here,” now, in the immediacy of our lives. 

The fullness of God–the very plenum of One Infinite Creator–is expressed, manifested, and dwelt within, everything you see and feel.  God caresses you with reality. And it is you, as God, who receives the caress and desires to consummate this radiant and exquisite intimacy through full surrendering into gratitude and the sheer delights of being held and known in and through love. That giving, receiving, knowing, desiring, and feeling gratitude–all of it–is the Holy Spirit. Now… none of what I said above is anything but good and true Christianity.

The mystics and saints have always known this. And none of what I said is anything but the root and heart of the Law of One material. It is what Ra really wanted to convey, over and over again.

One astute, yet perplexed, Christian stated to me, “It’s the ‘needing God and believing God is not there sometimes and you can get God to come to you if you’re good’ modality that is precisely why the Christianity I know of now is nothing like the one I knew of before.” 

This is brilliant.  Yes… we cannot earn God through our behavior because how can one earn what one already houses within them and is That which they desire to earn?  That part which my friend highlighted is the part of Christianity that will have to die out.  It’s mired in meritocracy which finds its nadir in the substitutionary atonement theory.  Again, that will have to fall away in order for a future Christianity to make sense to a more emotionally aware and scientifically informed populous.  Atonement theory and quantum mechanics do not go together.

The other thing that Christianity can offer the world is learning how to bear the burdens with grace and gratitude. Indeed, mystical Christianity shows us how paradoxes don’t cancel each other out but can be held together so as to form a holism–a new gnosis–of the Divine One that is bigger than the individual beliefs or spiritual practices.  This begins with the triune nature of God which is absolutely fundamental and correct; and it’s all there in the Law of One material which is why, actually, I deigned to trust it even at the first listen.  If interested, here is the triune nature of the Creator intimated in the Law of One material: The Law of One References the Creator as Reality That Is Triune, Personal, and Ankh-Shaped. These three dynamics go like this: 1) there is always a transcendent quality to God; 2) God incarnates as the material world; 3) God indwells within all things.

Now, when we add how God “becomes” via evolution through the densities–and this, of course, is how God learns about Godself, infinitely–we have two dynamics that emerge: Image and likeness, to put it “biblically” (ref Gen 1:27).  All of creation is the “image” of God, the One Infinite Creator. But creation, as it evolves, ever increasingly develops the “likeness” over time.  That is to say, though an illusion at the absolute levels, the dynamic differences between God’s “likeness” and our “likeness” allows us to grow through seeking and finding, and then seeking and finding, again. 

You won’t find many New Age teachers talking about this nuance because they are often so focused on “we are all one and you can just drop your blockages!” but that is to the detriment of the followers, in my opinion.  There is a holiness to our “needing” God– to our longing for God–to our “yearning” for God.  AND God yearns for us, too!

What dumb Christian teaching is this which surely must have been formulated by low-level theologians entrapped in a dualistic religion which harms and stagnates people, the new ager asks? Well, it’s from the Law of One material.  Session 39.6, “[It is] the simple principle of the constant (or Creator) and the transient (or the incarnate being) and the yearning existing between the two, one for the other, in love and light amidst the distortions of free will acting upon the illusion-bound entity.“

At the level of third density especially, yearning for the Creator is just how it is. It’s good and holy and in the end, efficacious for spiritual development. Moreover, we humans need each other! Relationships and relationality engage all of our energy centers and help us polarize. See here the reflection from Ra when asked about third density experience: “The quickest way to learn is to deal with other-selves. This is a much greater catalyst than dealing with the self. Dealing with the self without other-selves is akin to living without what you would call mirrors. Thus, the self cannot see the fruits of its beingness” (session 19.13).

So as we can see here that all of the following is true at the same time: We need God, we need each other, we are God, God transcends us, God yearns for us, God is us, God dwells within us, we dwell within God, God loves us, God is love, we are love, we love God, God loves us, God is a universal spirit and is transpersonal, God is a Person with Whom we can relate, God is Trinity, God is One, we are triune, we are one, all is one, all is multiplicity, love is all there is, consciousness precedes love, God is transcendent, God is immanent, God is still waking up, and so are we. Amen.

• Christianity and the Law of One
• Cosmic Christ
• Immanent and Economic Trinity
• Trinity