Lucifer and Pride

Lucifer and Pride

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

6:45 a.m. You began on pride, and separation, and the story of Lucifer refusing to serve.

We did and – we’re smiling, here – you don’t need to work quite so hard to be sure we stay on point. In this, we do know where we’re going, although you do not. We will not lose ourselves in endless associations.

Lucifer is an intricate myth, or fable, or explanation; that is not the same as saying Lucifer did not – does not – exist. What it does say is that like all myths and fables, the Lucifer of the story is a translation.

A way of explaining to us, I got that. But I’m getting that there is more to it than that.

Should you imagine Lucifer to be human? Or human with wings or horns or a tail? Do you suppose Lucifer was born and grew up and plans on retiring someday? We’re trying to stretch the idea to the point of the ridiculous to help you see that your idea of Lucifer probably is mostly left over from your childhood ideas.

Obviously Lucifer isn’t human, with human characteristics. You aren’t exactly human with human characteristics, except insofar as you’re playing the human role, so how could Lucifer be, or the Recording Angel, so to speak? You see? Lucifer and other unitary beings are a different order of being than compound beings; if you do not keep that in mind, you will blur important clarifying characteristics. Yes there are points of connection between unitary and compound beings, but that’s just repeating that there are no absolute separations in the universe. There are points of connections between humans and reptiles, or mammals and avians, but that doesn’t make them interchangeable.

So, recognize that Lucifer’s reality is not the same as a compound being’s.

However, having said that, obviously Lucifer’s reality and human reality interact, or there would be no myth about it. And clearly there is human awareness of the force that is Lucifer, or there would be no myth. How could a myth arise about something never sensed?

This is said to assist you to take seriously what decades of mental habit may have consigned to the scrapheap. Just because something is not what you thought it, that does not mean it is nothing, or is just anything.

So, Lucifer’s rebellion as a way of looking at the sin of Pride, as it is experienced in 3D life, remember. This is not meant to dissolve into theory and unreality.

In the absence of a sense of separation, there can be no sin of Pride. There can be the quality of being proud of this or that, but this is only including different things under the same word. This pitfall, by the way, is almost exclusively associated with pride. No one would think of positive characteristics to do with lust, envy, gluttony, covetousness, anger or sloth. Pride is not only chief of sins; it is, you might say, a transition from one state to the other, in a way that no other is.

Does that mean that –? No, go on.

So, to be clear, in the case of pride we are looking at a characteristic that may express well or may express for ill. That really cannot be said of the others.

So, Pride as sin, as “missing the mark.” How could it not be integrally connected with a sense of separation? It proceeds from a sense of separation, and it fosters a sense of separation. And, since separation is a 3D perception rather than an All-D reality, how can it not be leading you in the wrong direction?

Now – we shouldn’t have to say this, but for clarity – the word “separation” itself has many nuances; the one we are intending is a sense as if things were only separate and not also all a part of the whole. A perception of the separation, the differentiation, of things is appropriate while in 3D, or why do you not eat fire hydrants or sleep on cinder blocks. But a perception that everything is a jumble of unconnected things is not only meaningless but fosters (and proceeds from) a sense that life itself is meaningless.

So, pride becomes a missing of the mark when it fosters or expresses the idea that things may be used rather than related to.

That was a surprising thought; took me a second to catch up.

If you are a part of a whole, you have a proper place, and that place comes with duties and responsibilities, perquisites and privileges. No, you aren’t the king, but neither are you dirt under the king’s feet. No, you don’t get to run roughshod over others, but nor do they you. When things are seen whole, they function in a naturally coordinated fashion.

But. If you see the separation aspect and not the interconnection aspect, then you go wrong, and all the remaining sins become possible, in fact, become likely. And all this, you see, proceeds from eating from the tree of Perceiving Things As If They Were Good or Evil.

That’s a connection I hadn’t made. If we didn’t see things as separate, we wouldn’t be prone to consider only ourselves.

That’s right, and if you didn’t consider only yourselves, the other sins would scarcely be possible.

However, remember, the 3D experience was crafted; it wasn’t somebody’s mistake. The fact that you are here in perception of separation is not your fault, it is your situation. The fact that those conditions may lead you into sin is merely, you might say, an occupational hazard.

We might look at the seven sins as warning signs, I suppose, rather than as personal failings.

You might indeed, but better still would be to regard them as both, for you are never disconnected from your non-3D selves, which are not constrained or blinded (one might say) by 3D conditions.

In other words, we know better.

You do when you allow the knowledge to penetrate, yes.

To return to Lucifer. Lucifer, you see, in refusing to serve was saying, “I know better than the universe.”

I doubt he thought of it that way.

You might be better to say “it” than “he.” We have been avoiding pronouns because we don’t want to subconsciously reinforce the idea that a unitary being has gender, even if (or should we say especially because) the use of a pronoun will imply gender only as a stylistic convention. Only, “it” implies lifelessness – again, subconsciously – and we don’t want to encourage that either. So we were constrained to use the name given to that vast impersonal force.

Lucifer a vast impersonal force?

It’s intricate, but we will try to give you just a sense of it. Lucifer is a force expressing through a structure, but not a 3D structure such as you. What are called spiritual forces do not have 3D bodies, but they do have structure. If they did not, you would be unable to conceptualize them. But this tends toward the theoretical, and we should prefer to continue on the path we have begun.

To sum up for the morning, Lucifer erred in thinking his- her- it- self separate and therefore having his / her / its own destiny that Lucifer rather than the overall scheme of things would decide.

I see your point about gender. Can we agree upon some kind of shorthand to avoid the his-her-its thing?

Perhaps you will find it before our next session. But here is your hour.

And a very interesting one. Thank you.

9 thoughts on “Lucifer and Pride

  1. This particular content was very clarifying, and all the preparation before today seems part of that. Thanks for bringing all this forth, Frank!

    I am noticing that the continued checking of perceptions (Is this comment 3D, non-3D, or all-D?) is becoming more of a discipline or habit for me.

    This was good (“and there was good”).

  2. “Rudolf Steiner’s writings, which formed the basis for Anthroposophy, characterised Lucifer as a spiritual opposite to Ahriman, with Christ between the two forces, mediating a balanced path for humanity. Lucifer represents an intellectual, imaginative, delusional, otherworldly force which might be associated with visions, subjectivity, psychosis and fantasy. He associated Lucifer with the religious/philosophical cultures of Egypt, Rome and Greece. Steiner believed that Lucifer, as a supersensible Being, had incarnated in China about 3000 years before the birth of Christ.” Found this in Wikipedia, under Lucifer. Interesting Steiner describes Lucifer as a force.

    1. I believe that’s a name from Zoroastrism, the religion of the Persian empire, which had a strong influence on the Hebrew people around 520 BC. The Persians helped the Jewish people rebuild Jerusalem after the Persians conquered the Babylonians, who held the Jews captive. Google ‘Zoroastrianism’ for more details, Wikipedia being a good source.
      Up to that time, the Hebrew people didn’t have a strong satan figure. God could do both good and evil. It was just the lot of being God’s chosen. The Persians suggested that the Jews hadn’t really done anything wrong. There was this evil twin of God’s son who was causing mischief. The Greeks also had an evil god, and they influenced the Jews when they conquered Judaea around 325 BC. Some scholars believe this is why there was a strong satan figure around Jesus’ time, which carried over into Christianity, but never really had much traction in the Jewish religion.
      Christianity has mushed Lucifer and Satan together, but I believe that might be sloppy theology. The satan, in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), is an accuser, like a district attorney, who shows up in God’s court and challenges the goodness of Job. “Satan” isn’t even a proper noun, but is more of a title for one of God’s angels.
      Just saying.

  3. So, Lucifer/expressing through Pride is the birth of/transition into duality? We look for pride of winning in some way over something/someone to consider ourselves then whole/perfect? Pride is our choice of how to participate in 3D on 3D’s terms? Not expecting answers, just working it through.
    I have to admit I’ve found it useful to try to stay open to useful things being expressed through the structure of religious myths and realities.

    1. Well, that’s not my take on it, but who knows? I’d say they were saying that pride is the only one of the seven sins that has a positive manifestation (which of course is not a sin) as well as a negative one. And I get that Lucifer is an example, not necessarily the motivating force behind pride.

  4. I Googled gender neutral pronouns. Someone’s devised some, but they will take a while before they are commonly used. Nathaniel’s use of the name in lieu of the pronoun was common practice when I was getting my degree in theology. Rather than referring to God as ‘He’ or ‘Himself,’ we’d just say ‘God’ or ‘Godself.’ That allowed for folks to embrace the feminine aspect as well. That’s probably a bit less clunky than using ‘he/she’ and the variations there in.

    I find it interesting that Lucifer, a unitary being, could even consider the concept of separation. I’d think a unitary being wouldn’t be able to do that, as unitary beings aren’t plagued with forgetfulness like compound beings. I guess that’s the myth part of the story.

    Another interesting point was that Lucifer didn’t want to serve compound beings. I thought Lucifer didn’t want to serve God, wishing rather to rein in hell than serve in heaven. Being one of the angels, or messengers as the Greek word translates, angels do God’s bidding and are God’s emissaries to humankind.

    This is, indeed, a good discussion! It’s giving me lots of food for thought. I hold my religious background very loosely, letting it be a resource rather than a rule book. I’m interested in seeing where Nathaniel takes us.

    1. In terms of pronouns, what I chiefly miss is a pronoun that would be gender-neutral without implying non-animation. I mean, you read “it,” you’re going to think “thing,” right? I wonder if we could twist the word “alive” or “life” into some acceptable form of pronoun that would imply closer to a both-and, or a neither-nor, than an either-or.

  5. “What then is myth, and what do l mean by the term? Myth is not a distortion of fact, but the womb through which fact must come. Myth involves an intrinsic understanding of the nature of reality, couched in imaginative terms, carrying a power as strong as nature itself.”

    ~ Seth (Jane Roberts), ‘The Individual And The Nature Of Mass Events’, Session 815.

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