Becoming Aware of the Logos – Book Review
Mar 9th, 2013 by admin
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him;
and without him was not any thing made that was made.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
[Max Heindel recommended that the beginning verses of Saint John’s Gospel be used for the Rosicrucian students’ morning concentration exercise. The following book review appeared in a 2002 Rays from the Rose Cross magazine.]
Becoming Aware of the Logos — Book Review
According to the Gospel of John, the Word already was at the beginning. At the beginning of what? Of anything and everything, made or not made, in any place, at any time. The Word that is all-creating and all-signifying, that is creation and creativity, significance and signifier, already was in God as that which God before time willed in superabundant love to “speak” out from Himself as God the Son, the Logos. Before He spoke forth from darkness brighter than all created light, the Alone-Begotten was in dialogue with the Father, and the Father with Him.
This Word is the foundation for all and any meaning. Physical forms, their etheric matrices, astral structures, mental archetypes, and the languages that convey their meaning and their reason for being—all originate in and by the Word. The mind that conceives and even the identity that carries on conceptual activity and knows itself purely as I, even this, and especially this, is rooted in the Word, for the I AM is the Word, and each human Spirit was in the beginning in and with the Cosmic I AM, the Logos—but knew it not.
Meditation on St. John’s Gospel, especially the first eighteen verses, is the subject of George Kühlewind’s Becoming Aware of the Logos (Lindesfarne Press, 1985). In the book’s preface the author writes that our everyday consciousness may find the text of the John’s Prologue “incomprehensible, even contradictory,” unless our understanding can be illuminated by “experiences on the plane of consciousness corresponding to” this text. Which is why Max Heindel and other spiritually evolved persons recommend concentration on this passage as particularly favoring both the search for higher knowledge and the awakening of faculties for acquiring that knowledge first-hand.
Three words serve as nuclei around which Kühlewind’s meditative exposition centers and from which his insights emanate: the central term Logos and what the Logos makes possible—grace (Greek, cháris) and truth (Greek, alétheia). For grace and truth came with the Word incarnate.
While academic philology may be seen, with some justification, as largely an exercise in pedantry, etymologically and actually the “love of words” is the response of a call in the heart to know the soul of things, their life, their meaning. It is a yearning for the original ever-sounding Word, evinced in a study of the Word’s “fall” into things, Its fissioning into innumerable orphaned syllables that carry a resonance of their supernal home.
Alétheia means “not to forget” (a, not + lethe, forget), which suggests, as Plato teaches, that prior to embodiment the human spirit is irradiated by the presence of universal forms or Ideas. When the spirit takes on a physical body, it forgets the Truth, it suffers amnesia and must make an effort to remember, for which Plato employed the term anamnesis (literally, to bring again to mind, mens), and others the Latin cognate reminiscence. Since the science of spirit describes Ideas or Archetypes as living spirit beings whose lowest “body” consists of thought substance, we can appreciate the conception of artists who depict the aura of divinity as composed of countless celestial beings. In other words, the Idea of all ideas, the Word comprising all possible words, is the Logos Who was in the beginning, the Alpha and Omega of all alphabets.
Greek mythology describes the river Lethe in the underworld whose water induces forgetfulness. This is an effective symbol for the human inability to remember former incarnations, which nescience gives “one-life” advocates what they think is lethal “proof” for their contention. The point is that in becoming aware of the Logos we are unforgetting, we re-member truth, alétheia, into our conscious being. When we are ignorant of the truth, we are in a state of spiritual lethargy. Then the invisible light shines into the darkness of our material minds and we do not comprehend it, we cannot see it, we do not re-cognize the Christ, the Word, living in creation and, most fully, in human beings.
Christ came not to teach the way of truth. Rather, being its embodiment, he came to show it, to demonstrate that truth is here (Emmanuel, God with us). Before Christ lived in Jesus, eye had not seen nor ear heard what God had planned for those that love him—that Christ abides and speaks His Word in individual human being. John’s Gospel states that no man has seen God at any time, but the Son declares him. In response to Philip’s request to “show us the Father,” Christ is more positive: “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” Christianity announces the revelation of God in man; through Christ humans are called to know their Logos-bearing nature, as it has ever been known by God in Whose image He created them.
Christ affirms, I in thou and thou in me. Yet, he comes unto his own, who have been His from the beginning, and His own know him not. When as Jesus He was face to face with them, His was simply the face of the son of Mary and Joseph; at most, He was the Messiah, the emancipator of the Jewish people, esoterically, the liberator of the Spirit in man from the domination of race-consciousness and the bondage to things. The seeing that discovers Christ is not physical sight. It is based on a prior Self-seeing, prior Self-conceiving. Knowing the Word does come from coupling a percept with a concept, sense data with its defining thought. To know spirit we must know that flesh and blood are, at most, media of understanding, not its message. Mortal flesh is the glass through which we see, darkly. If we see true, we see in spite of the flesh. It does not obscure the spirit because other eyes, eyes of the spirit, are open. John the Baptist had attained to a certain level of supersensible vision. His preaching of repentance was actually a charge to change thinking, in Paul’s words, to be not conformed to the world. But John says of the Lamb of God, “I knew him not.” John could see the Spirit that alighted like a dove on Jesus. He had attained to an apprehension of the region of abstract thought, the domain of the Human Spirit, whose cosmic counterpart is the Holy Spirit; but the Logos, the Son of God, typically has His lowest manifestation in the World of Life Spirit.
The witnessing given by the author of John’s Gospel is of a higher order. For it is primarily he who speaks of the Logos. It is John the Beloved who listened at the heart of his Master. John’s testimony is given by the Greek word martyría. It implies such an understanding of what is encountered that the witness’ report compels belief. Such testimony is often given in the face of opposition to its content, as in the phrase “martyrs for the Word.” The individual human spirit is the martyría, the inner witness that seeks to bring truth to the too often skeptical or scorning lower mind that is in and of the world and would not be unseated.
Christ’s words of truth are also words of grace (cháris), which signify discourse that has the power to convince, power over “unclean spirits,” and power to bring about “signs and miracles.” The word of cháris is always a doing, a doing that gives above what is asked, or above what is merited. Cháris comes from above. It is full of grace. It issues from love and “unconditioned intuition.” Grace, as used by John, pertains to what ultimately issues from the world of Life Spirit, the realm of seminal reality. From here love precipitates into human affairs from the future, as truth or alétheia refers to the living present, and “this world” refers to the past, the dying present, to what we think we know and prefer to perpetuate as forms through which the new is experienced as the familiar.
The student can meditate on John’s Gospel without having recourse to any aid or commentary. Kühlewind’s book shows how fruitful such meditation can be, thus strengthening one’s desire and resolve to become more aware of the Logos.
—C.W.
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