By Steve Beckow, March 18, 2021
(Golden Age of Gaia)
I go where I’m guided and this morning I’m guided to talk about … not the symbolism, because the relationship is not symbolic … but the similarities between the Nautilus shell and our journey from God to God.
That journey forms a spiritual arc, going out into the world and returning to God.
Everyone who’s heard this before may surge ahead to the next article.
I was driving my car on Friday the 13th March 1987 when, having asked a question of the universe, its response was to show me an 8-second vision of the total journey of an individual soul from its birth in God to its return and reunion with God, with many adventures in between.
If you wish to read a blow-by-blow of that experience, go here.
If this was the end of the story, then I’d have just described an arc, from God to God.
But there’s a twist to the story and to understand that, I have to give background. The whole point of the vision was to get across to me what the purpose of life is.
It turns out that the purpose of life, when viewed from our human perspective, is enlightenment. Why does that matter? Because when any one of us realizes her or his true nature as God, God meets God.
How else would the All, the Everything meet itself?
And how does this process from unconsciousness to self-consciousness to Self-Consciousness to No-Self Consciousness occur?
It occurs through a process of education in the Mother’s School of Matter (mater, Mother). In my vision, that region of the All was depicted as a hazy cloud in which individual children of God could be seen following their arc … and … what was this other thing?
A spiral. They’re following a spiralling arc, like an electric cable. Even as they follow an arc, they also follow a spiral.
Why is that?
As it turns out, we actually, under ordinary circumstances, achieve very little karmic learning in any one lifetime. So our overall history sees us returning to the same karmic situation again and again, to learn our karmic lessons, giving the arc the appearance of a spiral.
Several masters mention it. Here is Beinsa Douno:
“Why it is necessary for man to descend and sink into a world of matter? – so that he may clothe himself in all the enveloping sheaths, each successive one more dense, at which point the rising and acquiring of higher forms begins. During each period there is partial rise and descent in an oscillating curve. The final movement will be rising.” (1)
That seems like a verbal description of what i saw. It’s implicit in what Ibn Arabi says:
“Until [the individual] reaches the degree of human being he passes through many tribulations at every level of his descent; he meets with difficulties. Sometimes he rises; sometimes he goes low; and half a circle is completed till he is lodged with … mankind.” (2)
Again, extend Ibn Arabi and you have a spiral. Finally here’s Shankara with the building blocks but not the structure:
“Those deluded beings who are tied to the objects they experience by the strong cord of desire, so hard to break, remain subject to birth and death. They travel upward or downward, impelled by their own karma, that inescapable law. (3)
If I could stand in space in the middle of the spiral, whether I was looking to the past or the future, the structure it would present to me would be like the graphic of the Nautilus shell, above, or of those below.
Let each growth cell be a lifetime.
Knowing this, I’m attracted to all spirals, because they remind me of the spiral of life, so to speak.
Footnotes
(1) Beinsa Douno, “The Brother of the Smallest one,” Lecture given in Sofia, January 1917, www.beinsadouno.org., downloaded 7 March 2005.
(2) Muhyideen Ibn Arabi, Kernel of the Kernel. trans. Ismail Hakki Bursevi. Sherborne: Beshara, n.d. , 32.
(3) Shankara, Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher lsherwood, Shankara’s Crest-Jewel of Discrimination. Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1975; c1947, 43.