|
THE
GRYPHON MYSTERY |
Back to Portal |
|
THE ENCOUNTER WITH CHRIST
Philip Matthews
It is a truism that as a mountain seems highest and hardest to climb when closest to it so it is in spiritual endeavour that what is easily accepted when read in a book becomes incredible when it appears to one as a reality.
The experiences I wish to relate here began at a time when a path of spiritual pursuit seemed to end in utter failure and doubt. I had experienced a long and complex sequence of alchemical development over a period of years beginning in late 1991. At the very end I had answered a real impulse and had sacrificed myself and had witnessed my flesh cook in a hot spring until it fell away from my bones and sank to the bottom of the pool. Then, two days later, I saw a terrible truth: a situation where one has contrition but cannot even so discharge the debt – because one cannot understand the nature of the profit from the transgression that one must renounce. The truth was terrible here because I knew that I could not or would not acknowledge the failing in me – in my karma – that had sought this profit. The pain of this experience was so great that I wrote a plea in capital letters in my notes: LET THIS BE THE LAST TIME. Nonetheless, the process I was undergoing required one last step. In alchemy, the athanor is a vessel in which transformative processes can be performed under controlled conditions. Such a vessel is an essential instrument in the material alchemist’s laboratory, but it is also a requirement of spiritual alchemy. In fact it is the creation of the athanor that permits the inner transformation that constitutes Rosicrucian alchemy to begin. Now, the final act in the process involves the opening of one’s athanor and bringing to light, like a child from the womb, the product of transformative activity. But when I opened my athanor I found only a white plant. I was deeply disappointed by this. I did not know what to expect, but my wish was for some kind of final thing that would signal the completion of what had become an exhausting experience. I had been guided during the long process by the spirit of the Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius (see note at end of the essay). He had been a strange guide – at least in terms of my notion of how a guide should behave – most of the time he seemed motivated by curiosity about what I was doing rather than advising me out of his greater knowledge. Now I appealed directly to him for help, the first time I had done so. He promptly told me to return the plant to the athanor because it was immature. This judgement only deepened my sense of loss. I pressed Michael Sendivogius for help and he was obliged to admit that he could no longer help me because his understanding had reached its limit. I felt utterly helpless then, alone and slipping towards a frightening despair. I prayed for a new guide. Tycho Brahe came. I asked in astonishment how an astronomer could help me. He told me to seek Christ as my guide. I promptly asked for Christ. My immediate impulse then was to dedicate each part of me to Christ after the manner of the prayer known as St Patrick’s Breastplate. Then I was numb with doubt and despair: I had reached the limit of my own understanding.
These events occurred in early April 1994 while I was living in Brighton in Sussex. During the following fortnight I had a series of dreams, the burden of which indicated sloughing off a body or sheath characterised as female and the acceptance of a condition called Kingship. Then came the insight into my condition (I quote from my notes): ‘Approach always engenders a failure of faith because perception expands so that experience becomes more important than idea, and the experience is that of a NOTHING.’ This means that with the failure of understanding, our experiences are like experiences of nothingness. However, this nothingness is not necessarily dark, it seemed then to me to be bright, ‘like cool water in the sense of volume (not space but something entered into, as into a pool of clear water).’ Here I entered my SELF, which I described as ‘sudden, dry, empty, one because so powerful and all-embracing of our faculties: feeling, will, intellect; beyond the sublime.’ This being, I realised, is within each one of us at all times. Then, finally, on 19 April 1994, I broke through and could report a ‘vision so clear that nothing can be seen at last.’
The first encounter with Christ occurred at about 10.00pm on 6 May 1994. It happened without any deliberate preparation, though I had lain down as though to think. This is a transcription of my note of the occasion:
I was perplexed after this event. While I had dreams that were obviously portentous, I also had bouts of extreme dejection and loss of faith, culminating on 23 May with the recognition that ‘Belief grows less possible: a concomitant of an entrance upon reality.’ And though the alchemical process, which had begun in October 1991, had ended with the discovery of the immature plant in my athanor, the imagery derived from alchemy continued to pervade my dreams in the form of an association of a male-female polarity with water. On 27 June I finally grasped something of what was occurring. The effect of the Christ merger was like a weak power of restraint. What confused me initially was my failure to understand that two processes were occurring simultaneously. On one hand, the spiritual experience left me prey to more worldly temptations, witnessed in the dreams as various female figures who sought to draw me back by (1) inciting my vanity, (2) by entangling me in possessions, (3) by buying my commitment. The other process appeared as a preoccupation with two lights. These I came to understand were the two waters of alchemy, the fixed water and the mobile water. Here Christ is the fixed light, which rises steadily towards the soul – the mobile light – in order to unite with it to produce the one light, known as ‘The Child.’ You can readily understand how a soul threatened by spiritual restraint on one side might be tempted to flee to a spurious material freedom, which would prove in time to be a greater entrapment. There is usually a break in my spiritual activity during July, and so in that year only a few short entries mark the period between my insight into my situation and the next stage of my encounter with Christ, which occurred on 3 August 1994. This time I initiated the encounter by deliberately entering into a phantasy state. I would not usually do this, I do not trust free-form phantasy, but in this case it must have been a matter of feeling drawn to do it. This is the phantasy as I recorded it immediately afterwards:
At this point I realised two things. One, I had been deeply preoccupied since the initial Christ-encounter with the fact that Christ had appeared to me as a shadow, and two, that this shadow-like being had to do with a kind of death for me. This lay at the root of my perplexity and was the cause of a profound unease in me I was hardly aware of before that moment. Now I called on Christ to ask him about the shadow. I asked Christ to show himself to me. I was frightened of what was coming, but I declared my love for Him and willingly embraced the dark presence. Then I saw yellow eyes. I was startled, then shocked to the core. I realised now that his appearance really would terrify me. Then I saw his head, yellow eyes, nose like that of a gryphon-eagle, very pronounced, but noble, beloved, incomprehensible. Then a moon-like orb rises from the horizon beyond, then brilliant white light peeks over the edge of the horizon. I go towards it, but what looks like vegetation blocks the light, so that only a lustrous glow remains. I push on, sometimes seeing a bright yellow complex structure, but I cannot get to the light, no matter how far or how fast I travel. Between the time of this experience and my departure from Brighton in early September 1994, I slowly came to see that the elements of the phantasy – the lions, the flying pole and key, the eagle, the old man and the serpent – when combined with the features Christ had revealed to me suggested an ancient composite figure, the GRYPHON, as the unifying image-expression of the whole experience. As well as this, while preparing this account I have come to see that the images shown to me during the first encounter – the two animals (horses), the cat and bird, the flower – were themselves simply an early attempt to communicate this symbolic form. The Gryphon (also spelled Griffin or Grifon) is first attested in ancient Persia, though it might be older than this. Later the Greeks and contemporaneous Middle East civilisations placed the Gryphon in the company of the Sphinx in their temples. No reason for this grouping has ever been found, nor do we know what the ancients understood or believed about the figure. The Assyrian name of the Gryphon, k’rub, is also the source of the Hebrew Cherub. The only piece of specific lore that has survived tells us that the Gryphon guarded the treasure of the Hyperboreans, and for this reason they are now considered as guardians of treasure and of secret things. Under the inspiration of Dante, the Gryphon came to symbolise Jesus Christ as a being both divine and human. The Gryphon has a lion’s body, either winged or wingless, and a bird’s head, usually an eagle’s. I model it as follows: Lion’s body, These pictures will give you a good idea of what the Gryphon looks like.
I will leave these disclosures to speak for themselves, only pointing out that much lies below the surface of what is apparent here. The immediate aftermath of the Christ encounters was the beginning of a new process of complex meditations and rituals, which moved me deeper into more and more arcane aspects of the Christ-encounter. I had brought some beech-nuts with me from a particularly fine tree in Preston Park in Brighton. Once settled in Dublin I was moved to undertake a spiritual planting of one of the nuts in October 1994. The tree grew to full height in four days, but led on swiftly within two days to a new crisis of vision, where I found myself crying votive tears before the ‘veil’, lamenting the continuing restriction upon me. Then began a long series of meditations, lasting into the following summer. These meditations are still a mystery to me, but I can indicate a number of experiences that are relevant here. The first was the realisation that Christ and I are close in the way that brothers can be. This implies a consanguinity and a karmic relationship. The second came shortly after Christmas in 1994, when, calling upon Christ in a start of frightful loneliness during a very deep meditation, I saw his ‘light lustrous on his shoulders and arms, his face all a-glow’ – I knew this was the case even though I could not see it – ‘it is the means by which I see at all’. Then I added in my notes: ‘this means that the shoulders and arms I see are? MYSELF?’ You can see from this that the Mystery of Christ is the Mystery of Man, that the Mystery of Christ is the Mystery of me, the Mystery of you, the Mystery of all mankind individually. To begin to know Christ is to begin to know yourself. If it is a long and arduous process, that is because we are a profound Mystery, a Mystery hardly at all plumbed yet. It is a task that still awaits us in the future: to know Christ, to know ourselves individually. Before I conclude I would like to address a question that will surely arise: Why must we rest content at this stage with only a symbol of Christ? After all, did the Christ not incarnate in a man? While it is true that Christ did incarnate in a man, He did not incarnate as a man. Thus Christ even now remains at a remove from the human plane of experience, the physical-sensuous plane. It would therefore be impossible for us to comprehend Christ with our senses or by means of knowledge derived directly from our senses. Christ appeared directly to me as a shadow-like presence, for that is how an etheric being would appear to us. The imagery presented on three occasions, during the two encounters and in the intervening phantasy, are intended as a kind of plan or map of the nature of Christ. The fact that an existing ancient form – the Gryphon - answers very exactly to this map both assures us of the validity of the imagery and indicates that it was previously experienced by mankind at a time when direct vision of the etheric was still possible. The vision is becoming available to us now as we rise again towards that etheric vision: what Rudolf Steiner meant when he said that the encounter with Christ would become a increasingly frequent experience of mankind.
NOTE: 6 November 2000 |
| Back to Portal | Source: homepage.eircom.net/~gryphon |
to take: then asked if he would come too: he merged SHADOW-LIKE
into me (v[ery] surprising): mast of the boat like cross-beam of pentagram
; a significance I don’t understand. Underway: shown some
images 1) of two horses 2) cat chasing bird 3) flower: asked for explanation of
one, and was merely shown image in more detail: didn’t understand any of
them (recording them here, as with the rest of this journal, in case I
understand them better in the future). 3) the flower was in monochrome rather
then simply white + black, though centre proved to be a hole in a saucer-like
piece of white metal. Felt irritable after merger; so impatient and perhaps
less attentive than I ought to images than I should[sic]. But the merger caps
the faint worry I feel that Christ should be my guide. Perhaps Christ is a
symbol, label etc for a power in each of us, or like [a] guardian angel.
Anyway, Christ is now within.
The cross-like pole is inserted here and
turned, so that a way opens and lets me in. At once I am whooshed up in the
air, either borne by an eagle or possessing wings myself. I find I can direct
the flight – as I strive to control all the activities in the phantasy. I
rise up to a kind of corner where sits an old man. I approach him and he
becomes a serpent. I go up to the serpent – I am not afraid of it –
and enter it. Entering it is like entering a yellow flower.
