Spiritual Regeneration (part 1)

Eden, Fall, Return, and Ascent

“A prophet is not a man who tells the future; he is a man who tells the truth.” -Rabbi Harold S Kushner

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In the story of Genesis, Adam eats the forbidden fruit, and in him, we all fell. The rest is history. Or, more accurately, history itself was born out of that fatal act, and we entered a state in which we could only die and die and die again — without memory or anything but haphazard progress. Reincarnation within a single timeline does not guarantee ascent. We are still living in the shadow of the aboriginal catastrophe. Exhausting our negative tendencies is like a boulder rolling down a hill and coming to a stop, but our nadir does mean that that we will get up.

Our actions are finite, and any merit we earn, we only merit for a finite time. Our ascent is made through sacrifice, through delayed gratification, and climbing against gravity. Therefore, the only sustainable progress of upward ascent is an endless road of crosses, of delayed gratification and moderation.

Fall and Expulsion from Garden of Eden, Michaelangelo

So, how do we return to Eden? Or is a return impossible? How do we repair what’s been broken?

If life is fundamentally an unmerited grace, we must still strive to meet the light of heaven with our own effort. Regeneration requires our active participation. While a plant does nothing to “merit” the light of the Sun, it must nonetheless actively receive an influx of light. Similarly, the soul is made to photosynthesize grace.

Original sin in each of us is our primal distraction from what is good, beautiful, and true. As Franz Kafka writes, “Evil is whatever distracts.”¹ I don’t mean that we should live in a Thomas Kincaid painting, but we should practice recognizing the beautiful in what is ugly, the true in what is false, the good even in what is evil. When we are more concerned merely with the aspects of divinity that are merely instrumental, that is the Fall. While there are still relatively better and worse errors, our primal fault — the absolute error — is falling away from a single-pointed focus on God. Any evil after that is only relatively milder or more severe. This doesn’t mean that they’re all equal — relative to each other one is definitely worse than another — but relative to God they are all the same. What we do in our prodigal squalor pales in comparison to that primary offense.

We can do nothing to merit life because we must be alive to do anything meritorious. As such, grace is life’s beginning, middle, and end.

What does our Great Work look like, practically speaking? First and foremost, our return (metanoia) means withdrawing our fixation from the external world, away from meaningless stimulation. We should abstain from all forms of junk food, physical and spiritual.

Eating indiscriminately is a sure way to undermine physical health. Consuming empty calories or too much hollow information turns the soul septic. Anything in this world is toxic when taken in excess—even water. In terms of bodily health and spiritual health, less is usually more.

Food reduction is a consistent theme across genuine spiritual practices: Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim — prayer and fasting play an integral role for serious practitioners. Meditation itself is a kind of fasting from sensory stimulation. Information reduction is also key to the spiritual path, for if information outpaces moral development, we become arrogant and bigoted. By letting the world darken, the subtler light of the spirit becomes visible.

In the ponderous Orthodox text Philokalia, gluttony is the chief sin from which all other sins flow. Overfeeding our human animal organism drives us in precisely the wrong direction. If we don’t want unruly mammalian impulses, we should not overeat animal products.

As is regular practice in sacramental Christianity, fasting from the previous sundown gives the Eucharist a special mood. A humble unleavened wafer, held in your mouth while meditating on the communion antiphon — refraining from giving it thoughtlessly to your stomach — imparts more than food; it imparts spiritual Life. We appreciate a special instance of what is true to a less conscious extent at every meal: that the Life in all food is everywhere, only ever Christ. But as a dull man doesn’t notice someone passing him, if we are not cognizant of this Life, it is not real to us.

In his little book on The Yoga of Nutrition, Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov suggests that the first bite of every meal be held reverently in one’s mouth. The kind of gratitude we show the Life in the Eucharist can (and should) be extended to every initial bite whenever we break bread together.

Aldous Huxley writes along similar lines in his fragile utopian novel Island:

“In Pala,” she explained, “we don’t say grace before meals. We say it with meals. Or rather we don’t say grace; we chew it.”

“Chew it?”

“Grace is the first mouthful of each course—chewed and chewed until there's nothing left of it. And all the time you’re chewing you pay attention to the flavor of the food, to its consistency and temperature, to the pressures on your teeth and the feel of the muscles in your jaws.”²

We receive far more than mere physical nourishment when we cherish food for its existential meaning and don’t merely scarf it down like an animal who has no conscious appreciation except for the taste of the food and the satiation of its hunger. There is nothing wrong with an animal eating the way they eat, but for a human being to do so is desecration. “‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’”³ In Hebrew, there is no distinct word for “thing,” but the word דָבָר (davar) performs this role, literally meaning “word.” Spiritual ideas themselves are food for the soul.

How we eat is more important than what we eat. Do we remember to eat each bite with attentive gratitude? How thoroughly do we chew our food? The more surface area our food is given by mastication, the more accessible its nourishment is to us. Widespread health benefits would quickly emerge if people simply chewed meals more thoughtfully.

There is a Catholic tradition of abstaining from meat on Fridays. This is the day that Christ is killed, but in an older sense, Friday is ruled by the planet Venus, which corresponds to the kidneys and the solar plexus chakra. When the Venusian center of the solar plexus chakra is “overcharged” with mammalian energy it becomes the source par excellence of discordant living.

In embryology, the kidneys begin in the upper organism alongside the ears and only gradually separate. Dr. Karl König says in Earth and Man, “Then came the Fall… You can feel the serpent power in them pulling the kidneys down.”⁴ We are familiar with the brain-gut axis, but there is also an oto-renal (ear-kidney) axis. Esoterically, if the kidneys are overtaxed, one might say that the soul cannot hear the symphony of the Cosmic World. “The kidney is the originator, the creator, of the inner light; what Rudolf Steiner describes to us as the so-called radiation—the Nierenstrahlung, as he calls it—is like a Northern light.”⁵ But because the natural attention of our kidney center has been dragged down into the world, it must be redirected if the “inner light” is to shine.

These Venusian organs separate impure fluids from pure fluids, removing from us the byproducts of metabolizing protein. The kidneys are also the seat of our adrenal glands — which relate intimately to our fight-or-flight reflexes. A panic attack is what Arjuna suffers in the Bhagavad Gita: he wants to flee, and he wants to fight — and so he cannot make a decision. Rudolf Steiner says cryptically, “Kidney knowledge has no spiritual quality for the human being unless we give it a spiritual quality.”⁶ Many of us are stuck in “kidney” thinking: limited to what fires us up, whether or not it is the right thing to be fired up about.

Our mammalian instincts must be curtailed if we are to become people of moral courage. But we must not forget that our aim is not at all about either eradicating nor suffocating erotic desire but rather returning our enthusiasm to its source above. Our desire should be all the more fervent. In this way, sexuality serves as a training ground for attention: there are few other things that naturally demand one’s full attention. When the single-minded focus of eros can be redirected to celestial things, a new spiritual life is born.

In his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, God Talks with Arjuna, Paramahansa Yogananda observes that the warrior Arjuna is the personification of the crisis at the solar plexus chakra. His crisis is symbolized as a great battle in which he must turn against his own kindred to fight for what is right. The battlefield of the Bhagavad Gita occurs at the solar plexus chakra, where Arjuna must choose to turn against his own familiar habits and strive for justice.

In my experience, the solar plexus center (Manipura) is oriented downward by default — sourcing its sense of meaning from the lower organism. When our consciousness is constrained to the lower energy centers, the closest we get to a working conscience is vague sympathy and familiar routines, whereby we seek to make conditions more harmonious around us not out of selfless love of our neighbors but out of loyalty to our own sense of subjective comfort.

Our inborn fixation tends to center on the lower three centers: material comfort, hedonistic sensuality, and egotistical creative expression — specifically, how all these make us feel but with little regard for sustainability, the pleasure of others, or the freedom of others. To live exclusively in those lower centers is the bestial life imprisoned in an ersatz “eternal now” of hypertrophied appetites and a dearth of meaningful human connections. That is all the Beast is: living life exclusively below the belly.

In our fallen state, the “highest” function we experience is how the lower organism stimulates feeling. Reason, assuming it is employed, is like Adam following Eve, who listens to this mortal coil’s whisperings. Hume captures this crippled state of well when he claims that “[r]eason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and to never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”⁷ Of course, if we were to seek out how what Hume says could be true (though not in a way he means it), yes, reason will follow the heart — so we should love the best. When loyalty to how the body feels is abandoned for devotion to living principles, our new source of vivid enthusiasm comes not from around (or below) us but rather from above.

“A man who is mentally negative, or neutral, or identified with sex thoughts or other sensory preoccupations, finds his consciousness operating outwardly through the three lower centers of the spine. He is said to be ‘living on the skin’s surface’ because his consciousness is bounded by the periphery of his own small body.”⁸

Reason is easily reduced to being a cuckold of the bodily’s evolutionary prejudices. In such a state, the intellect serves to bring bodily pleasure, and little else. Living this way, we can barely be described as being human. Rather, we are like Nebucchenezar, a king cursed to satisfy himself with the food of beasts — or the prodigal son who envies the empty pods he feeds to swine.

Nebuchadnezzar by William Blake

There is virtually nothing we can do to save ourselves. Reason, enslaved to bodily pleasures, cannot muster the fortitude to do the painful work of thinking. Even when there are moments when we might pause to ask ourselves what on earth we’re doing, we lack the willpower to return until we finally lose our appetite for our favorite foods.

A more accurate “homunculus” representing size based on the number of nerve endings on the human body. This is the spiritual form of the outwardly-focused sensual man — of the sense-addict suffering from hyperarousal. A gollum trapped in a closed circle, deprived of higher cognitive functions — having fallen to a state less than human and even less than animal.

We usually only operate in the lower three energy centers in the default state. Our intellect, if it is employed at all, only serves to feed the lower appetites.

The solar plexus chakra finally has the opportunity to turn (metanoia) when there is a sufficient crisis — whether born from disciplined practice or external events. The lower chakras are like a dim reflection of the upper chakras, which by birth are naturally obscured by a hardened heart. But when the solar plexus center turns upwards, this marks the beginning of sanctification, the event marked by the sacrament of Baptism.

The solar plexus chakra, rectified.

Once the solar plexus chakra orients itself heavenward, the upper chakras begin to unfold. Once life ceases to be about how things make me feel, now the heart can open. Only if I am not obsessed with pleasant feelings can I dare to suffer-with someone else. Compassion requires courageous detachment from whether what I’m experiencing is pleasant or unpleasant. If I can’t tolerate unpleasant feelings in myself, then I also can’t tolerate anyone else’s suffering or offer them genuine compassion.

Without compassion, I will either be indifferent to the plight of others or try to “fix” their suffering rather than holding their burden with them. Those who flee from discomfort invariably abandon their friends in times of greatest need. When I take on the suffering of someone else, my own experience of suffering increases, but the net result is a lessening of suffering for the world. How can it be worth it? Because a supernal joy from above descends to augment our intimate co-suffering for the sake of others. Suffering with others coexists with a luminous joy because, while agony and delight are contradictions, transcendent joy has no opposite.

Without compassion, I will either be indifferent to their plight or try to “fix” their suffering rather than hold their burden with them.

The throat chakra (Shuni Mudra) cannot express itself properly if your loyalty remains to how things make you feel because Truth is not about my own affinities. When the lower organism is too unruly, one only speaks what one feels — “my truth” — instead of uttering a spark of unqualified truth. When we speak from lower attachments, it is as if a tidal wave of yellow has flooded the throat, turning blues green: what emerges does not belong there. As long as we desire something other than truth, we will tinge our words with the unrealities we prefer. If I only utter words formed by my bodily values, my words will invariably be hyperbolic, and any promises made are abortive because they hinge not on principle but on the pleasant stimulation of the body.

We are not merely trying to regress. Even if we could visit, we cannot linger in Eden. This is forbidden to us. The Eden of the past is barred to us by an angel with a terrific flaming sword. Our aim is to ascend even higher than Adam and Eve were in their primeval paradisiacal state.⁹ Before the sundering of Adam Kadmon into two, he was androgyne — by rights, Adam Kadmon was a they. Our aspiration is towards a new kind of inner androgyny. Our soul’s beatific aspiration transforms it into the likeness of the object of its contemplation. The soul becomes like a seraph, wherein the lowest energy center of the saint expresses how devotion to the higher hierarchies makes him feel. In the actualized saint, the heart is his new root chakra, and his throat becomes a new kind of sacral chakra.

When we are committed to speaking only what is true, words become prophetic, magical — and even dangerous. They were already dangerous, but the voice of a prophet turns saying into speaking. The throat chakra becomes a new generative center by which other souls can be imbued with new life. Vapid qlipphotic words proliferate contagious and parasitic vacuousness — broken promises, insinuations, duplicity, equivocation — whereas true words heal by their mere utterance. After all, while דָבָר (davar) means word, דֶּבֶר (déver) means pestilence. A word meant in the right way is therapeutic, but the same word spoken with malignant feeling is infectious. As Rudolf Steiner suggests, a lie takes on a life of its own and proliferates harm wherever it goes. A word uttered with duplicitous motives spreads disease.

The magical symbol Abracadabra (from Aramaic, “I create as I speak”) in its best is a meditation on Thy Will Be Done, and not, as it is often used, for arbitrary magic — asserting the sociopathic refrain of “my truth.” What God speaks becomes reality. A saint speaks for God, but only by not speaking for himself. A saint emulates Mary’s fiat, which is not her own will but rather consenting to the one who wills. Whatever can be built by one’s arbitrary will has no foundation: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” Psalm 127

It is not my words or my truth that can build anything or heal anyone. It is the Cosmic Word that brings wholeness:

Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof,
but only say the word and. my soul shall be healed….

Our jaw, arms, and legs transmuted interiorly into spiritual wings. Our sensory nerve endings as eyes communicate impartially the information from the world, detached from the subjective sensation they give us. We become Witnesses of Eternity.

Transfigured inwardly, we become to others an Announcing Angel like Gabriel whom Mary encountered. By Gabriel’s mere utterance of the word — and Mary's consent — Christ was conceived.

By legend, Mary’s pregnancy occurred as conceptio per aurem, “conception through the ear.” This is a baffling concept to a modern mind, but Mary is the archetype of the perfect Christian¹⁰ whose first words include her fiat — “let it be to me according to your word”¹¹ — and her last recorded words being “Do whatever he tells you.”¹² She did not conceive through her bodily womb, but from above. When we too become “virginal” — detached from external “images” as Meister Eckhart describes — only then can the Christ be conceived within us.

I have a 4ft x 2.5ft replica of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in my room. I’ve looked at it for hours and see, rather clearly, that the doctrine of the inclined ear is the essence of this painting.

Only by inclining the ear of our souls to hear the still, small voice and conceive the Messiah within. And then we can say those efficacious and pregnant words, transmitting a grace we ourselves could never have merited.

He who has ears, let him hear. These words are speaking to your own soul:

Hail, full of grace! Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus!

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This piece is Part 1 of a 3-part series.

1. Kafka, Franz. The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka. United States: Princeton University Press, 2023, pg. 17.

2. Aldous Huxley, Island

3. Matthew 4:4, written to the Jews, has an exceptional number of Hebrew cryptograms embedded in it. But “hearing” them requires a basic familiarity with Hebrew. Here לחם (LHM) and דבר (DVR) are evoked: bread and word, respectively. In Hebrew, there is no term for “thing” but rather word is used. It is not enough to nourish the body, we must also feed on the cosmic word. This cannot be done absentmindedly.

4. Karl Konig, Earth and Man, pg. 119

5. Ibid., 125.

6. Rudolf Steiner, From Mammoths to Mediums (GA250, 28 July 1923, Dornach)

7. T 2.3. 3.4; SBN 414

8. Paramahansa Yogananda, God Talks with Arjuna, commentary on Chapter 2, verse 3

9. Rudolf Steiner speaks of how the shoulder blades will be a future skull, and, in the much more distant future, the kneecaps will be another skull. If interpreted as a poetic image of symbolic spiritual ascent (rather than historical evolution), I take this to be quite accurate, but specifically on the level of individual soul-development: the new center of thought becomes the chest, and then, later, the limbs themselves are withdrawn. The human organism becomes a luminous pillar of fire with a material form as a splendorous accent. The soul walks on the stormy waters of the world untroubled.

10. And perfect Muslim for that matter.

11. Luke 1:38

12. John 2:5