"Then, rejoicing in each other's vision, and being fully satisfied in the promise of a child, they gave due thanks to the Lord, who exalts the humble.

After having praised the Lord, they returned home, and lived in a cheerful and assured expectation of the promise of God.

So Anna conceived, and brought forth a daughter, and, according to the angel's command, the parents did call her Mary." (1)

In my attempt to discover who I was, not just the known and visible parts of myself, but the as yet unrealised possibilities, the spring or source of myself, I became impatient of teachings and teachers. All the different sects and isms, the religions and negativists, all claimed they knew the secret of existence. Yet although I had studied them and practised what I could understand, I still had not made that contact with a powerful reality underlying my existence that I felt was the only proof of the many claims. And I became bitter at their purported wisdom, seeing it as millions of lifeless words; dried out leaves and flowers in which Life had at one time lived and moved and had its being, but was now an empty tomb - a fond remembrance - a dead form.

Even so, Life leaves its mark upon all it touches, and there were indications, hints, traces of direction which I tried to follow. First of all the fact that thought and emotion, intellect and passion, in themselves, although expressions of Life, were not satisfying, and gave few answers to the riddle of existence. Intellect might explain everything - so it thought; emotion might accept or reject; but neither of them gave conviction of being Life itself. And any night, even after reading the most profound of books on man's nature and destiny, if I cared to stand in the darkness looking at the stars, the book and its thoughts or sentiments would fade into insignificance. What thoughts or feeling could really encompass or explain This?

Thought, I saw, however great, still remained fragments of the ALL. The ALL seemed infinite, and thus beyond any set of thoughts, or stilted human response. Yet some said they had directly experienced the ALL. But they often spoke from a plateau of behaviour, of morality, or self-denial, religious fervour, discipline and intensity of which I was incapable. I felt sure there must be a way for a person such as I; a way that led onwards from this very spot in existence at which I stood.

It is easy to look back and see how things developed, but at the time I felt little or no hope. But a sentence stuck with me - As Above - So Below - and it seemed at the time to offer a way of testing philosophy, and of analysing things by thought, a habit which I could not stop. I had noticed that throughout the philosophies, the idea of negative and positive was one of the universal threads. I began therefore to look at this in the world, in an attempt to understand it. The positive polarity of anything was said to be projective and dynamic; the negative receptive and nurturing; and where the two met was said to be a third point where creation took place.

I began by looking at seeds, trying to understand how this polarity is expressed in them. I planted a pea in a jar, visible through the glass, and watched to see what happened. First the pea was in a receptive state, taking in the water. But then something dynamic took hold of it, or was released, and the form and nature of the seed changed under its impact. At this point the earth was a receptive, negative womb, which gave of its substance. Rooting into this the pea took the substance of the earth and turned it into living matter. This was all positive, dynamic activity, a tremendous release of energy. But then it formed leaves, and while yet continuing its positive activity in turning earth into living matter, it suddenly opened itself, through its leaves, to a higher power, the Sun. The Sun and the Earth, in fact, were the great Negative and Positive, Father and Mother, which had given rise to this tiny life - the pea. The pea was the third point, a mixture of Earth and Sun, Mother and Father. The ritual of procreation growth, and death, worked out the strange dance between the Mother and Father's drama of loving intercourse. For the Earth was a womb to the penetrating power of the Sun, and brought forth out of her body, life.

Then I could see this drama taking place everywhere. A woman is an incarnation of Earth. The shape of her body is that of the receptive nurturing Mother who brings forth living beings out of her own substance when fructified by the Father. Her sex organs are negative, receptive, swallowing. It is the male organ that projects and gives forth of its substance, the male dying a little to give his very being to his progeny. Like the Sun, whose light projects across the universe, his organ extends through space to enter the womb of Mother. But Mother does not project, she receives and absorbs. She brings forth a child of form and formless, issuing forth, yet at the same time clinging to her children. And part of the problem of mankind is how to achieve the maturity which enables men and women to break free of the influence of the Mother, and become true individuals, no longer tied to substance but lifting it up, transmuting it into individuality and freedom.

All this took a long time to see and gradually understand. But it then came to me that just as husband and wife enact the cosmic drama, so it also took place within my own being. My body was my Earth. Over millions of years it had been formed and made capable of being receptive in a special way to the invisible Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. This invisible Light I realised was another way of looking at God. God was my Sun, so to speak. This Sun, penetrating my body, brought forth life, which was the functions of my being, but in particular, my consciousness, truly, the light of consciousness. God and Matter, or really, Spirit and Matter, are the real Cosmic Mother and Father. Between them they have created all life. We might call them energy and inertia, or give them any one of a host of other names, but they are all the same thing. The ritual of their mating had slowly brought forth the various universes - as expressions of their innate qualities. Thus each universe had a positive centre, or Sun, and planets as a material periphery.

On our Earth, life forms gradually arose expressing more and more of the innate qualities of the Mother and Father. Consciousness pre-existed any animal or man. Each form was a fertile Earth receiving just a tiny part of the infinite and universal consciousness of the Father. Herein lies the mystery of Genesis, a parable of this tremendous enactment of Cosmic Creation. The separation of darkness from light is the original polarity of Energy and Matter - or Consciousness and Unconsciousness. For the Father and Mother are only opposites of a single central fact - the void or "Ain Soph", the unknown God. All religions of any depth speak of an inactive and ever unmoved God, and an active and creative God. The void, or space, as compared with the Sun and Earth, are similar to the difference between Brahm, the unmanifest, and Brahman, the manifest. Or in the American Indian terminology, there is the Grandfather, the unmanifest, and the Father and Mother, the manifest.

This may sound rather confusing, but it was the winding path my journey of discovery was taking me. It explained some of the mysteries of the Bible, such as why all the animals were brought to Adam to name. What it is saying is that Adam is but a name for a potential existing in the Father. Man always potentially existed, but it took evolution long aeons to form a body capable of receiving the Father in the right way. Before this, each new creature was another step to God becoming conscious as individual man - called Adam. Each creature expressed something of this possibility of self-realisation - self-consciousness - and thus received a name, a quality from Adam, but was not a helpmeet, or anything which was a real reflection of the potential man in God.

Also, matter and energy, or Sun and Earth, are but extreme polarities of each other. Matter is Sun turned inside out. That is, the energy is potential rather than released. The Sun is released energy rather than potential. An atom bomb releasing potential matter becomes a tiny sun. Sunlight, becoming involved in Earth, becomes coal, or wood, or a seed. Thus when the seed opens up, the dynamic activity is an expression of its stored sunlight. The human being, as he or she grows from fertilised ovum to adulthood does so by the stored power of the Father in him or her. Like the plant, however, human beings also reach a point where if they are to continue their growth, they must open leaves to the Sun, their Father in Heaven.

This much, over several years, I saw and wondered at, and it prepared me for the next development, which was personal involvement, for I then began to attempt to trace what was visible as direct experience, of man's nature, in a way similar to my analysis of the pea. I wanted to find those things in myself which I could experience rather than just think about. God, I felt sure, when discovered was an integral part of one's own experience, of one's total self. Through the years that followed, and with the help of the great men and women of the past and present; through struggling with thought and doubt and wonder; through being willing to experience the good and bad of myself and life; through my dreams and above all, I now see, with God's help, I began to define my own nature. Starting from the outside, I gradually worked inwards, entering the cave of myself. I became a hermit. Not in an outer sense, for I had a family to support and love, but in an inner sense, by looking within myself.

Yield Chapter Three