Sunny Meadow: The Fall Was Not a Trap
In this section, we will look at that aspect of the work that, for me, was a lifeline out of the terrible existential dread I was facing as a result of being caught up in Z’s ontology, and paranoid matrix-soul-trap thinking in general. How did I begin to shift my thinking away from the idea that we are in a fallen realm; that the gods themselves have abandoned us; that there is something broken or wrong about the very fabric of existence itself; that perhaps one insane deity has trapped us in her self-enclosed bubble realm?
Because remember, this was a simple and even elegant explanation for all the very real symbols that I was seeing everywhere. The astral body likes simple, elegant explanations because they can be both comforting and stimulating at the same time.
That lifeline for me was a book called The Lost Light by Alvin Boyd Kuhn. There were a few others. Teilhard de Chardin’s work also helped, as did some Kabbalistic literature, but in this article, I’m going to focus on The Lost Light, which was my entry gate into Theosophy, which later became the groundwork for Steiner’s Anthroposophy.
The Lost Light confirmed, again and again, that the symbols of fall, drowning, and degeneration I was seeing were real; that they have their parallels in ancient mystery language; and that the ancients were not primitive, but were actually more in touch than we are in modern times with the true esoteric workings of the cosmos. Their scriptures thus contained Fall symbols everywhere you look, whether it’s sleep, death, drowning, enchantment, forgetting, hypnosis, or being chained up. The list can go on and on.
But these symbols point, as Kuhn explains, not to what I was arriving at through Z’s lens—which was the idea that it’s all talking about the insane mother’s fall, and that whatever happens to her happens to all the souls caught up in her whirlwind—but rather, the symbols point simply to the incarnation process itself: spirit falling into matter, and then matter working its way back to spirit. It forms this parabola of spirit-matter-spirit, which can also be symbolized as fire-water-fire. The fire seems to be extinguished by the waters of physical incarnation, but in truth, it moves and enlivens our very hearts. It is the warmth of the blood.
The ancients knew that spirit descends into matter through incarnation, forgets its origin, sleeps in the body, and must awaken through evolution back to the spirit. Sleep and forgetting are the true reading of films like the dream-sims of Inception, the cryosleep of Pandorum, the comas in Black Mirror, the amnesiac child victims in Maze Runner, etc. In other words, these modern films are still drawing on the ancient mystery language, even if the authors aren’t esotericists, because these symbols never went away. They are still whirlpools of emotional meaning, of charge, within the collective astral world.
Modern writers are at least intuitive enough to sense this charge, even without a Theosophical background. But since these themes were so prevalent, I made the more simplistic assumption that they were all in cahoots together because there was a secret playbook they were drawing from in the back rooms of Hollywood.
Modern science wants to reduce everything to purely physical processes, even the warmth of the blood, and this is another kind of sleep, forgetting, and enchantment. Steiner talks about how the ancient sense for spirit—atavistic clairvoyance—had to be lost in our epoch so that the I-presence could develop through its own forces, rather than being handed down instinctually.
Kuhn did not tell me the symbols were false. He told me they were older, wider, and more lawful than the conspiracy frame. I stopped seeing matter as a trap and began seeing incarnation as a mystery drama.
Kuhn writes, “‘He drew me out of the great water,’ sings the Psalmist. Moses is water-born . . . (meaning) ‘I drew him out of the water.’ Maui, of New Zealand legend, like Moses and Sargon, was drawn out of the water at birth.” Jonah was swallowed by a whale and then spat back out. These characters represent the entire Life Wave of souls that come down into the waters of physicality together and, through Christ and I-presence, are drawn back out.
He drew me out of the waters.
In the next section, we will see how Steiner would go one step further than Kuhn: the descent-and-return motif is not only an ancient symbol. In Christ, the cosmic pattern enters history as a living deed.
