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..:: Sacrifice ::..
By
Alan Schneider
Sacrifice may be defined as the voluntary release
of something of perceived lesser good for the sake of affirming or
securing a perceived greater good. Life is filled with minor sacrifices
– the loss of a weekend’s recreation for service to a worthy cause,
forestalling a vacation trip to work additional hours during the busy
season on the job, deferring the purchase of a desirable item to provide
for the children’s dental work – all are examples of varying degrees of
sacrifice that many of us make, or have made, along the way in life.
Of course, there are much greater degrees of sacrifice that
dedicated individuals make in response to their belief systems. We
regularly hear of those who lose life and limb in the process of saving
others in evidently selfless actions that offered them no apparent
benefit whatsoever. What motivates such individuals in their actions on
behalf of others? How is their perception of reality different from the
more self-motivated among us who would not take such great risks for
their fellow human beings?
The performance of sacrificial acts is as old as humanity
itself. Although such events have become less common with the advance of
civilization, animal sacrifice of various different varieties still
occurs in many parts of the modern world. In ancient times, people
sometimes burned a portion of their crops as an offering to the Deities
that were presumed to have an interest in such tribute. The practice of
burning also extended to animals – sheep and lambs were frequently the
objects of burnt offerings in antiquity. Let us briefly examine the
theoretical implications of such admittedly brutal, and outwardly
irrational, practices.
In the distant origins of consciousness, when even the
Neanderthal man was not yet present in the proto-human domain, our
nonetheless humanoid ancestors found themselves surrounded daily
by all manner of terrifying and perplexing phenomena. They might be
attacked and eaten by the many ferocious predators of the time. They
were subject to the continuous onslaughts of nature manifest by a planet
still covered with active volcanoes and subject to many natural
disasters. Diseases could, and did, crop up apparently out of nowhere
and took the lives slowly, or perhaps mercifully quickly, of entire
clans and kinship groups. Enemies rose up against each other with the
primitive weapons of those days – literally sticks, bones, and stones –
and caused more death and destruction. Females and their
offspring frequently died in childbirth as well. In a word, life itself
was short and brutal.
To the earliest dimly sentient primate beings on this
planet, the ability to practice and experience any extent of
causality amid the chaos of life was a supreme opportunity. The
successful hunting and gathering cultures that represent the first
economies of history – of prehistory, really – must have been
acutely interested in any causal relationships that could be determined
in the course of daily existence, because that meant increased odds of
survival for the individual and the clan. As evolution progressed, so
did the perception of causal relationships, first from simple motor
actions (throwing rocks at animals and enemies to incapacitate them),
and then onward to observations about the weather and climate (humid air
as the precursor of rain), and ultimately to generalizations about the
identities of the major elements of existence. To the primitive mind,
the animals and plants in the environment exhibited conscious
characteristics comparable to that mind itself. The dawn of mentality
was anthropomorphic – the earliest sentience saw the whole world as a
reflection of itself, and its fundamentally self-oriented motivations.
This trend in mental development eventually culminated in
suppositions about meta-causal conditions – the prospect that even
nature itself was sentient and motivated by essentially the same drives
as early hominids – food, shelter, mating, defense. The beginning of the
motivation for ritual sacrifice is found at this stage of the causal
relationship assessment – if a given natural process wanted what the
hominids wanted, and didn’t get it, this could well be the underlying
explanation of the apparently wrathful outbursts seen so frequently in
nature, and in life. At some point it occurred to early sentient
hominids to give something back to the natural world. This may
have been something as simple as tossing part of a recently killed
animal to a menacing predator that appeared on the scene, with the
result that the predator was at least temporarily placated. It is a
short, simple causal step from such an event to erecting an effigy
of the predator in question, and then offering some or all of another
kill to it as a symbolic placation of all such predators, and then
another short step to offering such placation to any presumed
natural sentience of concern. Storms, floods, wildfires, and even death
itself became objects of such practices, and sacrifice was born.
As civilization developed, sacrifice and sacrificial
practice developed. The earliest sacrificial modes were blood and burnt
offerings. It is quite probable that proto-humans saw blood and other
bodily fluids in the same light as the other elements of the world
around them – imbued with sentient presence. The general presence of
blood in the animals of the zoological continuum, amid expressions of
general diversity, must have provoked the supposition at some point that
the blood of the creature carried and expressed its essence as sentience
in the natural world, and that offering that blood in a sacrificial
context (by everything from drinking it, to bathing in it, to pouring it
on the ground – thereby offering it to all of nature in general) could
influence the behavior of all similar sentience. As genuinely human,
albeit still very primitive, beings emerged on the earth, and the
cranial capacity of those beings continued to increase, the notion that
natural entities predominated not only in the earth, but in the air and
water as well, became prevalent. How was one to placate the air
entities? By sending the sacrificial essence into the air through
burning, of course. Hence the burnt offering came into practice.
At what juncture the natural “entities” became Gods is lost
in the precession of prehistory. Early humans must have eventually
perceived the eternal and powerful nature of the conditions surrounding
them, and this in contrast to their own vulnerability and mortality, and
concluded that they were evidently subordinate beings in every respect.
Thus humbled, a fresh round of placation became the norm, and elaborate
rituals of placation took place with regularity in antiquity. All of
these were essentially sacrificial in character – actions undertaken to
achieve a causal relationship that would not otherwise have occurred.
If nothing else, a sacrifice of time and energy was involved! Included
were seasonal fertility rites associated with the crop cycle, monthly
lunar and solar rites, and endless Deific placations for every purpose
imaginable.
Ultimately, human sacrifice entered into this picture. What
greater gift of placation could be offered to one’s chosen Deity than
the fully sentient form of another human being? This pointedly barbaric
activity persisted throughout the ages once its utility as a means of
eliminating the “undesirable” elements in society was clearly recognized
by whatever power elite held sway at the moment. In relatively recent
history, the salient example of this practice is undoubtedly the story
of the Crucifixion of Christ. Although this was a clearly politically
motivated case, the spiritual ramifications of the event are more than
worthy of comment in the SEARCHLIGHT.
From the perspective of the materialist on the Physical
Plane, the Crucifixion is a matter of causal priority. Christ was
becoming very popular in the Hebrew society of the time in the Holy
Land. This popularity was a cause of minor concern for the merciless
occupying Roman presence, and a source of major concern for the
Hebrew officials entrusted by the Romans to help control the general
population. At the behest of those officials, Christ was arrested with
little or no real justification, brought before Pilot for a perfunctory
hearing, then handed over to the Hebrews for disposition of His “case”
by Herod. Herod handed down the death penalty, which was dispensed by
crucifixion. What happened thereafter is the matter of spiritual
significance. To the materialist, Christ died then and there as a result
of His injuries sustained on the Cross, but His followers continued to
advocate His teachings, eventually giving rise to Christianity, despite
the following decades of persecution at the hands of the Roman state,
among others.
From the perspective of Ascension Theory, however, the
matter is estimated very differently. The question of Christ’s literal
existence (and there are those who doubt or flatly deny that Jesus of
Nazareth ever lived at all) is less significant than the ultimate
meaning of the Crucifixion as a spiritual symbol. Let us examine
this event from the highest possible perspective – that of God.
All human beings are essentially cursed with the threat of
oblivion through mortality. This threat is the defining condition of all
existence, whether we know it, or admit to it, or not. It hangs over the
heads of believer and nonbeliever alike. It must be confronted and
assimilated somehow by the living for life to be bearable at all, let
alone productive and meaningful. It is one, if not the primary
task of spirituality, faith, and certainly all forms of organized
religion, to answer the question of death, and what may come to
consciousness thereafter. No one has ever scientifically verifiably
returned from the extended cessation of life (although there are many
accounts of short-term cessation in near-death experiences) to give us
answers to this question, psychic accounts throughout history
notwithstanding – we are asked to certify the testimony of these
individuals on faith, not evidential proof. The reader has even been
asked to at least grant serious consideration to this writer’s accounts
of his own Ascension experiences in the spirit of faith, and will be
asked to do so again now.
From the perspective of the Divine Light of Consciousness,
the Crucifixion takes on an entirely different, in fact diametrically
opposed, meaning to that of the sensory materialist. From God’s
perspective, this material life, and the physical body, are the combined
workshop of Karma, nothing more. The condition which is served and
supported on the Physical Plane is that of limitation in all
conceivable senses of the term. This includes all suffering, ignorance,
and death. The Soul requires exposure to this condition as a portion of
its ongoing spiritual development. When the requisite quantity and
quality of exposure has been completed, the Soul progresses to the next
stage of its cosmic experience on the subsequent planes of expression,
as determined by God.
The body and the senses tend to blind us to the presence of
the Soul, and God. This is also part of the experience of limitation
previously mentioned. God is aware of our plight in the material form,
and cares deeply about our Soul, and the abusive condition that it must
pass through in life while entrained in the body. This life can be
thought of as the most remote condition from that of God’s. He is
all Love and Light, and surrounded by Love and Light – we are
surrounded by suffering, limitation, and spiritual blindness. Yet,
because we experience sentient awareness, we also potentially have
experience of the Soul, and are all God’s children for that reason. At
the great existential distance from the Divine Source seen on the
material plane, one could say that God has literally become fragmented,
and we are those fragments.
Because God wants us back in His Light, he continues to call
out to us in many ways – through the words of the Prophets, through
synchronicities, through miracles, through visions, and though the voice
of the conscience – His most direct personal expression, even though a
subtle one, to be sure. And, under the most extreme conditions of
suffering on this plane, he calls out to us through the actions of the
Avatars – His embodied messengers sent to cleanse the world and
reassert the Light. Christ was one such Being of Deliverance sent by
God. He was a Contractor of Salvation, appearing in the dark times of
the Roman occupation of the known world. Here is the meaning of His
contract, offered to humanity.
To God, the Crucifixion of Jesus was necessary as the mark of
His Word made flesh in the physical form of Christ. Our circumstances
had become so negative that this was the only way to reach us in those
times. The entire world had become submerged in cruelty, sadism,
corruption, and barbarism under materialistic Roman rule. The spoken
words of Christ (known to Christianity as the Gospel of the New
Testament) were the guide book of Divine Consciousness offered to
humanity, and the Crucifixion was literally God’s signature
placed at the conclusion of that guide book! Since Jesus was God
expressed in the flesh, the blood shed on the Cross was God’s
blood – He literally signed the guide book in His own blood as an
indication of how much He cared about our suffering. The body of the
Avatar was fastened to the ancient symbol of communication – the Cross –
where two paths, in this case the Divine consciousness and the material
consciousness, intersect each other, as the Sign of the Contract being
offered to humanity. Since these events were bound to be effaced by the
passage of time in this most turbulent and chaotic plane, a weekly
ritual was given by the Avatar to His followers at the Last Supper –
Communion – the ingestion of bread and wine, the symbolic Body and
Blood of the Christ, to be taken into our physical form as our
certification – our personal signature – on the New Contract with
God.
The question of whether there actually was a physically
sustained personal consciousness known as “Jesus of Nazareth” is
incidental to the symbolic message of the New Testament – that
the body of Christ expresses God’s presence here on the material plane.
There certainly was an Avatar of Christ physically present at the time
of the origin of the New Testament who made a profound impression on the
Disciples (who clearly did exist), an impression that resulted in
four separate accounts – the Gospels – of the Life of that Avatar, and
His teachings for the human race. The complete Gospel survives as the
living embodiment of the New Contract of Salvation offered to the
collective Soul of humanity by God. If we accept the primary role of
symbols in human consciousness as the building blocks of perception, and
of archetypal symbols in particular, then the Crucifixion Archetype is
one of the most powerful counteractants to mortality in perception, and
the Blood of Christ is the essence of that statement. So it is that the
most ancient ritual of sacrifice has evolved through the eons of time to
its current manifestation seen in the Sacrifice of Christ on the
Cross. The Blood of this Sacrifice stands as one of the most, if not
the most, powerful archetypal processes at work in consciousness – a
Sacrifice of God, signed by God, for the Salvation of the
human Spirit.
- With Love, Alan -
(CR2007, Alan Schneider)
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