16-05-2025
A Rumination on an Easter Day
“O seeker after the divine mysteries! Know thou that the door to the knowledge of God will be opened to a man first of all, when he knows his own soul, and understands the truth about his own spirit, according as it has been revealed, ‘he who knows himself knows his Lord also.’” —Al Ghazzali, The Alchemy of Happiness
“God is God only so far as he knows himself. Further, God’s self-knowledge is a self-consciousness in man and man’s knowledge of God, which then proceeds to man’s self-knowledge in God.”— Georg Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
I. The Beginning
In the beginning was the Rebirth, and the Christ reborn was with God, and the Christ was God.
On Easter Christians celebrates the Resurrection or Rebirth of Jesus Christ. The concept of Rebirth corresponds, on the one hand, to the concept of Moksha in Hinduism or Nirvana in Buddhism, but on the other hand, presents a unique possibility of a life beyond Moksha or Nirvana which is generally seen as the culminating end point of spiritual awakening and transformation.
Through the Rebirth, Jesus is born as Christ, that is, Jehovah incarnates as Christ, and then Jesus Christ ascends further in evolution. The Rebirth is not only the culmination of spiritual transformation but also the new beginning of further spiritual evolution. One phase of spiritual development is complete at the crucifixion and the new phase begins with the Resurrection.
Jesus Christ is a paragon and a paradigm, but throughout history there have been many illumined men and women who experienced a spiritual rebirth and ascension. For them in the beginning was a Rebirth. But for the great majority of humanity that beginning is as yet unbegun.
However, as articulated below, spiritual rebirth is our human destiny and our divine promise. Jesus Christ is an exemplar, just as Krishna or Buddha is, and shows the way (“I am the way, the truth, and the life.” John 14:6), but the work of self-evolution toward rebirth we must each do for ourselves.
Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
But not within thyself, thy soul will be forlorn:
The cross of Golgotha thou lookest to in vain,
Unless within thyself it be set up again.
— Angelus Silesius (Johannes Scheffler)
II. The Beginning As Yet Unbegun
In the beginning was Intelligence. Intelligence was with Love. Intelligence was Love.
The Light of Intelligence enwrapped in the form of the human mind, in its evolutionary ascent, became vainly proud of its intellectual power and fell into arrogance, arrogating itself solely, in its delusionary grandeur, to the throne of omniscience and omnipotence by separating itself from Love, and by making its truth the supreme truth, disregarding Good, the ultimate purpose and meaning of attaining Truth.
This is the Luciferian tragedy of the “Fall” of Mankind. Lucifer, the Light of Intelligence or the Mind, in his pride, conceit, and arrogance, disobeys God, that is, rejects the Word of the Wholeness Divine, and commits an act of theft, stealing the throne of power from his Divine Source, not in reality but in his delusional imagination, and separates himself from his wiser twin, Christ, the Light of Love or the Heart.
Lucifer, the “Light-Bringer”, in his willful separation from Christ and diremption from God, self-transmogrifies to become Satan—that is, Noctifer, the “Night-Bringer”. Satan represents the Intelligence without Love, the Mind without Heart, the Reason without Intuition, and the Intellection without Inspiration, who claims, in Milton’s Paradise Lost:
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.
Mind is the defining characteristic of Man (humanity). Man is of the Mind in the most essential sense. And the human mind is so blessed and so well-developed that now it knows, theoretically, the Mind of God, and yet it is so removed afar from the Heart of God that its knowledge lacks true understanding, for it is neither aflamed with Love nor alight with Good.
That which the human mind knows at the apex of its intellectual attainment, the Mind of God, it understands not. Knowledge per se is not understanding as such, for knowledge is of outer distinctions, whereas understanding, “stand under”, is of inner substance—that which “stands (stance) under (sub-)”. Therefore, that is not complete knowledge which is without understanding. Knowledge becomes complete only when it is substantiated by understanding.
Whereas knowledge proper is only within the domain of epistemology, understanding spans both epistemology and ontology. Understanding is substantiation in the sense of increasingly providing substance to your own being. Understanding substantiates and ultimately transubstantiates when the state of your being and awareness radically and fundamentally, that is, substantially, transmutes to a categorically higher state.
This understanding which provides substance for our being or soul is what is meant by the word “bread” in the Lord’s Prayer:
“. . . Give us this day our sustaining bread . . .” — translation from the Eastern Greek Orthodox Bible (EOB).
The “bread” signifies “spiritual nourishment”, while the original Greek word, epiousios, translated as “sustaining” in the above translation, which is usually mistranslated as “daily” in almost all English translations, means “upon” or “over” (epi-) “that which is one’s own” or “substance” (ousios).
“Give us this day our spiritual nourishment upon our own substance.” This spiritual nourishment (“bread”) is understanding or that which is provided or supplied by the understanding. Therefore, the sentence implies, “Help us this day develop further the understanding that spiritually nourishes our own substance (soul, being, or self).”
There is a saying, “Man is his deed,” but deed arises and proceeds from understanding; therefore “Man is his understanding,” which is to say, “Man is his substance.” Human beings are each his or her individual substance, which consists of the totality of his or her understanding of the self, the humans, the world, the universe, and “God” (what the individual considers to be the Supremest which provides meaning to existence).
That the understanding comes from the union of Intelligence and Love, of Mind and Heart, of Reason and Intuition, or of Lucifer and Christ, and that the understanding spans the domains of both epistemology and ontology, means that the understanding involves our whole being including our feeling. When we understand, not only do we know but do we also feel the whole substance of what we know.
This is one of the primary reasons that machine “intelligence” or AI can never replace human intelligence. AI may simulate understanding, that is, it can pretend as though it understands, but it does not nor can it ever in reality understand anything. Therefore, those who only know but do not understand are similar to AI and yet inferior in their mental capacities wherein AI far excels humans.
Therefore, to re-begin the beginning, that is, to re-unite Intelligence with Love, Mind with Heart, Intellection with Intuition, and Lucifer with Christ means to re-claim our humanity and to re-explore the human intelligence in its entire spectrum which is holistic, inclusive of Intuition and Imagination, and Understanding and Innerstanding (spiritual understanding), beyond computation and logical reason or intellection.
To re-begin the beginning as yet unbegun is to return to the beginning that began in the beginning. And it is only we each individually who can return and rebegin.
In the beginning was Truth, and Truth was with Good, and Truth was Good.
In the name of “the” truth and for the sake of defending or promoting it, countless wars have been fought and countless lives have been lost, mercilessly sacrificed for the cause of “the truth”, while many brilliant freethinkers who dared to think for themselves have been persecuted and killed as heretics—for example, Marguerite Porete (1310), Michael Servetus (1553), and Giordano Bruno (1600).
Also, it was two different versions of “the truth” concerning the concept of the Holy Trinity that brought about the separation of the Eastern Orthodoxy from the Western Christianity (the filioque controversy). The word “Godhead (Godhād in Old English)”, which originally meant “Godhood”, began to represent the Holy Trinity (Godhead = God & Christ & Holy Spirit), which became, literally, an extremely “heady” (willfully mental and hyper-intellectualized) theological issue for never-ending and unsettled contentions lasting over 17 centuries.
The Christian scholars, priests, theologians, and philosophers have turned Godhead into the “heady” (hyper-intellectual) matter, reflecting and projecting their own over-intellectualized heads, forgetting to embody the Heart of God, “Godheart” that is Good, notwithstanding their lip service to God’s Love.
The same has happened with the priests and scholars of all religions. The intellectuals of today are the same. The only difference are the specific issues of their contentions and argumentations. They all exemplify the “Luciferian Fall” in their tendency for over-intellectualization upon various philosophical, theological, or metaphysical issues in the absence of true understanding.
The Word of Truth that was and is always “in the beginning” is the supra-sensible and supra-mental spiritual Truth for which there is or can be no proof based on the evidence of the senses nor according to the reason and logic of the sense-bound mind. This Truth abides and is known only in the “Heaven”—the suprasensible and supramental internal spiritual world which categorically differs from and transcends the sense-perceptible external world, symbolically called the “Earth”.
Spiritual truth is akin to mathematical axioms and theorems that have noumenal ontological referents and correspondents but no sensory perceptible phenomenal referents or correspondents.
That which is called “Faith” is the sense of certitude that you have of spiritual truth. Faith is based on the knowledge of the truths of the supra-sensible and super-mental (or higher mental) spiritual realm of Reality. Faith thus requires a higher level and quality of intelligence, which is coexistent with a higher and finer state of consciousness, than the intelligence that is bound and limited by sensorial perceptions..
Faith is that which transmutes fear into courage. Faith is a reading of reality using the subtlest, inmost faculties of the heart-mind which is connected to the supramental and blessed with the spiritual. Faith is a link to the irresistible cosmic forces of the universe that work to support us in the fulfillment of our purpose.
The certitude that is with faith is the power which calls the principle of creativity into action, and which enables you to relate yourself in the Eternal Now to a new self, new life, and new reality as yet unseen, and to sever your relation with the old self, old life, and old reality bound to the sensorial world.
When you have faith, Truth is with Good, Truth is Good. Thus, in order to rebegin, having Faith becomes essential.
In the beginning was Meaning, and Meaning was with God, and Meaning was God.
When the Light of Intelligence becomes aflamed with the Light of Love, we come to understand the Heart of God beyond knowing the Mind of God. The knowledge of Truth then becomes secondary to the Will to be and to do Good that arises from the benevolent fountainhead of love and compassion.
Understanding the Heart of God is the Understanding in its supremest expression and manifestation. It is the highest Wisdom. Then, philosophy, the love of wisdom, fulfills its vocation and destiny and becomes the Wisdom of Love, which is Theosophy in its true meaning—that is, Divine Wisdom. The Truth that is Theosophy or Divine Wisdom is the Metacosmic Matrix of Meaning because of which everything in the universe obtains the meaning for its existence.
When we begin to understand the Meaning of the spiritual Truth, when we thus begin to grow in our Faith, God, Reality, or Universe begins to reveal itself to be the Matrix of Meaning wherein we will be born again to live a life anew in the same manner in which creation begins in time.
III. Before the Beginning
At the beginning of Time Meaning already was, and God had Meaning with Him, and God was Meaning.
God is Meaning. Meaning is God. If you think or feel that there is Meaning in existence, it is a tacit self-confession that you believe in God. And Meaning was before time began and is always before time begins. Meaning was and always is before creation that takes place in time. Meaning transcends the dimensionality of time and therefore it is always before the beginning of creation in time.
The beginning that is recognizable as a beginning is not the true beginning. For, when a beginning becomes recognized as the beginning, the true beginning had already begun.
That is before the beginning, which is the true beginning, does not belong to time but to Eternity—the Eternal Reality that is the Matrix of Meaning. The true beginning is not of the temporal order but of the ontological order—not in the order of temporal or chronological Becoming but of atemporal or eternal Being. Thus, the “before” in “before the (temporal) beginning” signifies the true beginning’s ontological priority or primacy that it is ontologically before or prior to the beginning of time—that it originates time and its chronological beginning.
Therefore, what was in the beginning, is always in the beginning, and will be forever in the beginning. The Genesis states, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Thus, God (Meaning) was before the beginning, and God always is and forever will be before the beginning. God was what God was. God is what God is. God will be what God will be.
Before the beginning, before there is existence, God subsists. The threshold wherein Eternity produces time and creation begins—the threshold that is the beginning of “in the beginning”—is the beginning of existence in time, and that which comes to exist is the universe. God unmanifest begets God manifest that is the universe which is the “only or uniquely (unicus = one) begotten son” of God.
What is often missing in the depiction of the beginning and of God and Divinity is the presence of the elementary feminine (yin) aspect that was and that is always present in Reality. God, the Grand Operative Dynamic of the Universe, is at once One and Twain.
God is the Father and the Mother—Twain in One. The Father is the active principle (yang), while the Mother is the passive principle (yin). The Mother (Mater) is the Matter (substance) into which the Father (Pater) in-forms (impregnates) the myriad Patterns of his Thoughts. The Mother is the Matrix in which the seeds of the Father’s thoughts are conceived, nourished, and grown.
In the beginning there is always oneness that is twoness. To understand the beginning, we need to understand the syndiffeonesis (difference-in-identity/identity-in-difference) of one and twain, of unity and duality, which extends to the syndiffeonesis of one and many, of unity and multiplicity, of simplex and multiplex.
Man (humanity), the image and likeness of God, also was, is, and will be before the beginning ontologically, and Man begins as God begins. And it is always Now, the Now Eternal, where God and Man begin.
That which was before the beginning—the primordial union of Intelligence and Love, of Mind and Heart, of Lucifer and Christ—of the Father and the Mother—must rebegin as Meaning received and conceived in the Matrix of Meaning. And before the rebeginning, we have within ourselves what it takes to rebegin—Freewill.
“To be free means that I myself will make myself whatever I am to be. I must already be that which I shall become; in order to be able to become so, I must possess a twofold being, of which the first shall contain the fundamental determining principle of the second.” — Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man (1800)
“Heed not the teachers who tell thee to deny and crucify thyself. Thou art thy own law, thy own Bible, thy own model. There are no Scriptures so sacred as those written in thy soul; read them carefully, and obey them faithfully, ever seeking for new light to scan aright their pages, from the world around thee, transcribed in books, or engraven upon the ever-living page of Nature herself. So shalt thou develop into a noble, sound, whole-souled being, happy in thyself, and diffusing happiness, as the rose its fragrance, to all around.”— William Denton, Be Thyself (1872)
IV. In the Beginning
Divinity is the Substance of Reality. The ancient seers called Reality what is designated as “God” in English or its various equivalents in all different languages. For, once we wholly understand Reality, its Holiness becomes unmistakable and we become filled with reverence for the awe-inspiring Sacredness present in and as Reality.
Divinity is also variously conceived and called: Divinity is the essential nature of God which he shares with all of his creations in the Universe—his “only (uni/one) begotten Son”; Divinity is the Holy Spirit that is God’s eternal Spiration which is consubstantial with God; Divinity is the Metacosmic Intelligence that Thinks and whose Thought is the eternally regenerative Universe; Divinity is the Language, the Word, the Logos that is the Substance of Reality which generatively self-simulates through infinite tautological variations in the act of self-configuration and self-processing.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Humanity is the creative destiny of Divinity. Divinity is the evolutionary destiny of Humanity. Heaven is God’s eternal abode and hence it is uncreated. The heaven that God creates in the beginning for every human being is the individual’s evolutionary possibility and ultimate destiny.
We human beings are each born onto the earth as a possibility with a potential to be reborn into the heaven. The earth designates the exterior world of sensorial perception, while the heaven designates the interior world of spiritual understanding and wisdom. The earth symbolizes corporeality, while the heaven symbolizes incorporeality.
There is the ontological inverse law that states: Substantiality is inversely proportional to corporeality. This is counter-intuitive or even nonsensical from the sense-perception based viewpoint, but it is absolutely true in the spiritual world, the heaven, according to spiritual perception. What is less substantial from the perspective of the earth is more substantial from the perspective of the heaven.
The thinking that originates in and from the heaven based on the spiritual perception fundamentally differs from the thinking that originates in and from the earth based on the sensual perception. The knowledge of the heaven relates to cause and causality and the thought therein and therefrom is deductive in essence (being akin to mathematics), whereas the knowledge of the earth relates to effect and effectuality and the thought therein and therefrom is inductive in essence (being akin to physics).
In the beginning there is a distinction, division, diremption, created between the heaven and the earth, and the seven days or stages of genesis signifies the evolutionary process of unification, or rather reunification, of the heaven and the earth into one whole reality. We humans are unique among all of the creatures of the earth. We alone are birthed on the earth with the possibility of a re-birth in the heaven, and therefore the possibility of reunification.
Corporeality is the world of corpus or corpse whose temporary life comes from a source that is external to it, while incorporeality is the world of Spirit that is the eternal source of life. This Spirit is the Principle of Life Eternal that inspires (breathes in) a temporary life into a corpus that is conceived through a copulation and born out of a corporeal womb, and then exists for a while in the corporeal world until its life expires (breathes out the last breath).
The birth into the heaven is your rebirth from the matrix of corporeality into the matrix of incorporeality not through a physical copulation of two corpuses that are not you but through your own conscious act of a metaphysical union with the Spirit. This union is called Theosis. The possibility as which you were born into this corporeal world is the possibility of attaining a theosis, of being re-born as a new Self in union with the Spirit, and of consciously merging with the Life Eternal.
“God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.” — attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, from The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers
This is a geometrical metaphor of the vision of the omnicentric universe which I had when I was almost 16, but the same idea has been expressed by great many thinkers and seers throughout history. Every center, every central point, of this omnicentric universe has an interiority, an interior world, that reflexively contains the infinite whole to which it is also a transdimensional portal. Therefore, the universe is singularly one and infinitely many at the same time.
The heaven is the designation of that interiority of every human being, while the earth the exteriority. Our access to the heaven is our spiritual (supersensible) perception and higher mental (supramental) conception developed therefrom, while our access to the earth is our sensorial perception and lower mental conception (based on “the evidence of the senses”) developed therefrom.
The ultimate purpose of human life is to achieve “Theosis”—Union with God—and to enter and evolve in the heaven, the eternal abode of God. Theosis is another name for spiritual Rebirth in which Christ is at one with God. The ultimate meaning of human life is to express and manifest the heavenly on the earth.
Seen in and from the heaven, the earth, God’s creation, is an integral part of the heaven and is perfect and to be blessed, even as a masterpiece at each stage of its development is good and perfect, even though it does not have the ultimate degree and culminating height of grace and beauty it will have when complete. The evolution of humanity at large is unfinished and incomplete but every man or woman is good and perfect at his or her present stage of evolution. The evolution of the world at large is unfinished and incomplete but every event taking place in the world is good and perfect at its current stage of evolution.
Humanity is a God’s masterpiece in the making. We, individually and collectively, can be a human masterpiece—the image and the likeness of God—as exemplified by Jesus Christ and other illumined human beings. What is required is an authentic alignment and attunement with the Principle (Logos) of Evolution at work as the current of Life that permeates the universe and fills your being. With the spiritual rebirth, you enter the final stage of evolution toward becoming a completed human masterpiece.
Easter is the day of celebrating Jesus Christ’s rebirth. It is also the day of remembering our own possibility and responsibility for our own spiritual rebirth. Responsibility is the ability to promise (spond) anew (re-). Spiritual rebirth is the promise that we make with our own Self who is our Maker—God within, eternally existing as our innermost and supremest I AM. Jesus Christ is an idealized archetypal exemplar; he is a paragon and a paradigm; and his biography is our own psychography of self-transformation.
Easter follows Lent, a 40-day period of metanoia. Metanoia is translated as “repentance” in almost all English translations, but it etymologically means “ to change one’s mind” and does not carry the sense of “feeling regret for sins, transgressions, or crimes” or of “being grieved over one’s past and seek forgiveness”. Repentance or regret may lead to metanoia, a radical change of mind, but metanoia does not require repentance or regret.
Metanoia means coming to have a new mind with new thoughts, which requires having a new kind and level of knowledge. In the context of Lent and Easter, Lent begins when you have a realization of a spiritual truth, which is a remembrance or recollection of an eternal truth which you have, and humanity as a whole has, long forgotten. Then you begin the journey of your spiritual development towards your spiritual rebirth which is the completion of this phase of your spiritual evolution that is possible while living on the earth in the human form.
Yet, you must not forget that there is a crucifixion, a death, before the rebirth. There is an ending before a new beginning. Will the death be painful? No. The pain can occur only before the death as the result of the resistance to dying. Hence, no resistance, no pain. The death itself, the crucifixion itself, is an ecstatic experience as you stand (static) outside (ec-) of your body and the world of senses, from which you are liberated.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The ”Word” in the original Greek is the Logos, while the Hebrew word for “Word” is Dabar. In ancient Hebrew, a word was not just a sign for an idea existing apart from action. Every word had an accompanying action. To speak, to utter a word, was to act. Thus, when God spoke in Genesis I, His speaking was an act of creation. His Word was the creation of the universe.
When God speaks he means what he says. When Christ speaks he means what he says. When Buddha speaks he means what he says. The Word that they speak not only has a meaning but also is the Meaning itself. This is why their utterance is at once the action.
When you speak, do you mean what you say? You mean what you say and you say what you mean—this is Samyak-vac, meaningful (“right”) speech, the third precept of Buddha’s Eightfold Path. Samyak-vac is the fully integrated honesty expressed in your speech act and communication. You must be completely free of any kind of vanity and any form of pretension to mean what you say and to say what you mean. You must be yourself and must know and understand yourself to be able to say what is worth saying and therefore to mean what you say.
In the beginning is the Word. It is always the Word that alone is in the beginning. You begin by authentically saying “I begin” and honestly meaning what you say. To begin your journey of rebirth, you must mean what you say that now you begin your journey of rebirth. In the beginning is Meaning, and Meaning is with God, and Meaning is God.
“Christ Appearing To His Disciples After The Resurrection” by William Blake
Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never;
Never was time it was not; end and beginning are dreams!
Birthless, and deathless, and changeless remaineth the spirit forever;
Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems.
—Sir Edwin Arnold, The Song Celestial (The Bhagavad Gita)
Yasuhiko Genku Kimura. Copyrights © 2025. All Rights Reserved.