Hello all! Today I would like to write about what I am calling “the languages of God”. Please allow me to, first of all, put this somewhat colorful title in perspective by defining what I am calling God under this scenario. Regardless of what religious or philosophical movement one decides to follow in order to deepen one’s pursuit of God, it is undeniable that one idea is in the forefront of every single one of those movements; the concept that God is immaterial and purely spiritual.
Another concept that is almost unanimous amongst the existing religious movements is the idea of Trinity as a symbol to represent the relationship of the Creator and its creation. This Trinity being the Father, Son and Holly Ghost of the Christians; Matter, Mind and Spirit of the New Age movements; Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva of the Hindus; the three bodies of enlightenment, or Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya and Nirmanakaya, of the Buddhists; the Super-Consciousness, Sub-Consciousness and Consciousness of the psychologists, and on and on we go.
Amongst all these different nomenclatures and definitions, the consensus around the plane, or dimension, or reality, which is closer to the origin of consciousness, or sort of speak, closer to the roots of the creation, seems to be Spirit, Spirit being one of the legs of the three legged stool we decided to call Trinity. Going back now to the beginning of this post, what I am calling God for the intents and purposes of this discussion is Spirit, or Father, or Brahma, or Super-Consciousness. Again, I don’t want to dive into the discussion that by doing this I will be trying to limit the unlimited and define what can’t be defined. I get that we can't divide the indivisible, and that proposing a split of the Trinity would be a step back in trying to reach unity. What I am proposing is to use this archetype for God, just for the sake of this discussion so I can better explain the point I am trying to make.
Since I mentioned archetypes, let me use this as a hook for the next concept that we will need in order to get to the closing arguments. The psychologist Jung is the one we need to thank for the idea of archetypes. An archetype, in very high level terms, is a type of symbol. A symbol is something that carries meaning. Words, for instance, are symbols, as the concatenation of words carries a very specific meaning. Assuming two people who can read in English are presented with the same collection of words, both people will agree to the meaning carried by those symbols. Well; at least that was the intention behind the creation of writing, though politicians and lawyers seem to have an uncanny talent to read different things out of the same collection of words, based on their hidden agendas.
At any event, what Jung proposed is that the human race has created a set of archetypes, in the sub-conscious level, that are basically understood by the race. He called this the collective sub-conscious. What he proposed is that the human race sort of agreed on a group of archetypes to mean things that would be understood by our minds when functioning at this level of consciousness. This would be much like the same as a language, where every word is conventioned to carry a specific meaning that is understood by the people who can speak that language. In a sense, we can then expand this concept to say that archetype is the language spoken by the sub-conscious mind.
One might say; well, the title of the article is “The Languages of God”, and you have defined God as being the Super-Conscious mind not the sub-conscious mind. To the one who says that I respond; very well, you were paying attention and following the discussion. Let me introduce one more piece of data that comes from personal experience before I address this point.
I am a study of different religions and philosophical movements. The word religion, as I probably already mentioned in a previous post, comes from the Latin word “Religare”; which means “to reconnect”; the reconnection of our individuality with the Wholeness; or with the Creator and all creation. Our individuality seems to be in a constant and almost frantic pursuit of this reconnection. From what I have been gathering so far, it seems that the very definition of the so called “evolution” is the pursuit of this reconnection, and the closer we get to it, the more “evolved” our consciousness becomes, and consequently, the happier we become as individuals.
Religion in itself, thus, could be seen as the activity or facilitator to this reconnection between consciousness and Super-Consciousness. Each religion has a multitude of symbols, or archetypes, to define their understanding of what this reconnection is. Utilizing the metaphor I used above, the adepts of each religion and philosophical movements utilize their own language in their sub-conscious minds, when in the midst of their religious activities. One fact that would serve as reinforcement of this statement is the reported religious dreams by people from different religions. Christians seem to dream of angels with wings and heaven exactly as carried by the Christian archetypes. Buddhists seems to dream of Buddha. Hindus seem to dream via their own archetypes; and so on and so forth. One simple question that comes to mind would be; why is that so? Would it be possible that by becoming an adept of a specific religious movement those individual’ sub-conscious minds are learning to speak the language of that religion that will provide them with tools for the work of reconnection?
Another fact that I will use to make my case is the meditation upon specific archetypes. Meditation, as probably known by the reader, is the activity of silencing the conscious mind and creating a conduit from which information from our higher minds can flow through and get known by our conscious mind. This is one subject that I can throw my two cents of personal experience on. I have been meditating by utilizing different archetypes without realizing. I have been trying to improve my meditation techniques, and in order to do so, I have used the aid of different religions and philosophical currents in search of the best meditation technique. By doing that, I was training my conscious mind to better interpret the archetypes that would be associated to those religions. The thing I realized not too long ago is that, depending on the system that I was trying to use, my meditation experience would come with the symbols that would be corresponding to the system in use.
As one fresh example, I have been lately meditating by utilizing what is known as the Sephirah; from the Qabalah. Guess what; when I meditate I get imagery that is filled with archetypes that have their origins in the Qabalistic roots. This is when it finally hit me; the Super-Conscious mind would respond to me by utilizing the archetypes that I used as concentration aid to focus the conscious mind in meditation. It would be much like the Super-Conscious, or God (to make sure I provide some closure to the title of the article), would respond to me in English if I asked It questions in English, or in Spanish if I used that language for my inquiries, and so on.
Like Jung proposed, archetype is the language of the mind; and what I am starting to realize is that it is also the language of God. The main difference being that, our mind being finite, it needs an object to focus the attention in order to reach higher realms of our own consciousness. Therefore, having a specific set of archetypes is a good mechanism to provide that focus of attention. We need to be able to listen and understand what the Super-Conscious mind responds to us though. The way to listen and interpret the responses is by making ourselves consciously aware of the meaning of the archetypal set that we selected to use in this activity. This allows us to best filter what we get back from all the noise that our minds usually carry, and make sure we understand what is coming back from our higher anatomy.
In my specific case, I have been successfully utilizing the Qabalah archetypes lately; however, as this article proposes, any set of archetypes would be equally appropriate. We just need to put on the work to get familiar with their meaning so we can learn to speak the languages of God.
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