Back to the Garden Part 8: The New Age of the Divine Lovers

by Curtis Lang		print version
		print version (graphics)

Our task in the New Age is to return to the Garden of Eden within us and to restore the Garden of Eden planet around us.

The Fall in the Garden of Eden that precipitated the creation of the illusory Self, dominated by body, ego and emotional and mental attachments, is responsible for the tragic state of today's world, engulfed in pain and suffering.

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The tragic fall in the Garden was also part of God's plan. This mystery is known among Christians as the “felix culpa”, which means the “fortunate fall”. Fortunate according to theologians because only this fall could trigger the decision on the part of God to send Jesus Christ into the world, to redeem human beings and put them on the path back to the Garden. Christ's sacrifice would enable human beings to rise to a new level of consciousness, Christ consciousness, and earn them entry into heaven.

The esoteric meaning of the “felix culpa” is this. God's original intent for human beings was that we learn, as individuals exercising free will, to choose co-operation with the Divine plan. Through the fall and humanity's subsequent countless reincarnations men and women were to learn to consciously attune their individual wills to the Divine will.

Then human beings were to re-enter the Garden of Eden. This return can only be accomplished by surrendering the ego's control of our being, connecting to the Higher Self, attaining Christ Consciousness, and thus demonstrating unconditional love and expressing Divine wisdom.

According to spiritual science, to re-enter the Garden, human beings must raise their common level of consciousness from the third chakra, in the stomach, which governs fear and power relations to the fourth chakra, which is the heart center governing love, and unite that heart center with the fifth chakra center in the throat governing peace and bliss and the sixth chakra center where the third eye is located, between the eyebrows, which governs wisdom and is the seat of Christ Consciousness.

In this way, humans connect the lower physical, etheric, astral and mental bodies, and the ego, to Higher Self, Higher Mind and Higher Purpose, and through the Higher Self, to the Divine Father-Mother Source.

This state of mystical unity does not necessarily represent a total loss of individual identity, as that paragon of yogic wisdom, Paramahansa Yogananda, points out in his commentaries on The Baghavad Gita: Royal Science of God-Realization.

". . .An accomplished yogi is not only one with the Absolute, merging his identity in God; he can also separate himself, recapturing his individuality with no loss of God-perception, and in this state, with his heart full of supreme devotion, enjoy the bliss of Brahman," explains Yogananda, in his discourse on Chapter XVIII, verse 54 of the Gita. "To paraphrase a well-known allegory, he is then comparable to an idol made of sugar that sought to measure the depth of the Ocean of Divine Nectar. On entering the Sea, it found itself melting. The idol retreated hurriedly to the shore, thinking: 'Why lose my identity in order to determine the depth of divine sweetness? I already know that the Ocean is indeed very deep, and Its nectar exceedingly sweet.' Thus the sugar idol chose to perceive the Ocean of Sweetness through the isolated consciousness of individuality. Similarly, a devotee may love to be one with the Infinite, yet love even more the enjoyment of God experienced by retaining his individual existence. The latter is the state of supreme devotion." 

According to the Divine Plan, once they have re-entered the Garden within them, once they have achieved this state of supreme devotion, human beings would restore the Garden of Eden physically on Earth by restoring an ecological balance and bringing peace to the world.

On a spiritual level, human beings would become conscious instruments of the Divine plan for evolution of all the beings on the planet, and further the evolution of Mother Earth as well. By uniting love and wisdom within themselves and bringing the energy of spiritual realms into the physical plane, human beings would engage in compassionate activities to spiritualize this physical, material world, infusing every sentient and non-sentient being and all the elements of planet Earth with the energy of Christ Consciousness.

Photo by Jane Sherry

Doing this would further Mother Earth's spiritual evolution. Earth would then truly be the planet of Loving Wisdom, radiating the energy of Christ Consciousness throughout the Universe. Earth would, in a sense, become a new Sun, a vibrant spiritual Star shining in the firmament, and providing a new energy of individualized God consciousness to the great mosaic of creation.

Most other planetary civilizations that have evolved into the light have done so on the path of collective consciousness, not individualized consciousness, and that is what will make Earth unique.

In this way, human beings would prove that even individualized life forms, cut off mentally from Divine Source, willingly choose to evolve according to God's plan, and to further the evolution of other greater and lesser life forms as part of their own evolution.

This would be an unprecedented occurrence in Creation, and indeed would arguably render human beings greater than the angelic beings inhabiting spiritual worlds.

Thus would the Divine plan of love and light and wisdom work out. Then the Fall in the Garden would be a fortunate Fall indeed.