Escape From The Borderland

[QUOTING]

So it is true that everyone who passes through the nadir must drain the Cup of Bitterness to the last drop? No, not at all. What happens is entirely up to you. You only need to experience bitterness, misery and sorrow until you have attained insight and inner certainty from that experience, gained amid the interplay of opposites.

You will never be done with the interplay of changes. It has no beginning and no end. In keeping with natural laws, dialectics (duality) constitutes the deepest depth to which one can go. And you find yourself in the Borderland. But you do not need to go through it. You must rise out of it! In that, perhaps, lies your mistake: you want to break through the boundary of the depths. But you should rise above it. You can leave this borderland at any time, and make the journey upwards. Indeed, many people are raising themselves out of the depths with every moment that passes, but then they fall back down again with a thud. Until at last, in the end, sufficient understanding has been born as a result of experience and conflict. And if there is understanding, genuine understanding, then there will also be sufficient strength to make the upward journey successful.

That is why profound insight must first be born. And that is why the Bible says: 'My people are lost for lack of knowledge'. This does not mean intellectual knowledge, No, it concerns the knowledge of Experience, purified by Conflict. And when a person has reached this point via the Path of Bitterness, he will begin to understand these words of Hermes:

Worship these words, my son, and revere them: there is only one religion, one way to serve and worship God, namely by not being evil.

This means that we must say farewell to dialectics (duality). You must close your account with this world and leave the borderland. You must raise yourself up and liberate yourself, in an absolute sense, from all conflict in evil.

That is the meaning of the temptation in the desert. The powers of the borderland offer the candidate everything. If he cannot resist the tempter, he will become entangled in the web. Anyone who has truly awakened to insight will detach himself from all this. You will be able to do this as soon as you possess sufficient inner understanding, as soon as you know the direction in which you have to go, and that you must disengage yourself from the interplay of opposites. If you are aware of all this, you should not be content to simply know it. You must act straightaway and by gnostic science, disengage yourself firmly, directly, and absolutely:

'Today, if you hear the voice, the voice of Inner knowledge, do not harden your heart, but allow yourself to be guided into the New Land'.

From "The Sword of the Spirit" The Egyptian Arch-Gnosis, Vol. 4 - Jan van Rijckenborgh

[END QUOTING]

Persevere.

~ g
.