The Encounter with Christ

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THE ENCOUNTER WITH CHRIST

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It is a truism that as a mountain seems highest andhardest to climb when closest to it so it is in spiritual

endeavour that what is easily accepted when read in a book

becomes incredible when it appears to one as a reality.

The experiences I wish to relate here began at a time

when a path of spiritual pursuit seemed to end in utter failureand doubt. I had experienced a long and complex sequence of

alchemical development over a period of years beginning in

late 1991. At the very end I had answered a real impulse andhad sacrificed myself and had witnessed my flesh cook in a

hot spring until it fell away from my bones and sank to the

bottom of the pool. Then, two days later, I saw a terribletruth: a situation where one has contrition but cannot even so

discharge the debt – because one cannot understand the

nature of the profit from the transgression that one must

renounce. The truth was terrible here because I knew that I

could not or would not acknowledge the failing in me – in my

karma – that had sought this profit. The pain of thisexperience was so great that I wrote a plea in capital letters in

my notes: LET THIS BE THE LAST TIME.

Nonetheless, the process I was undergoing required

one last step. In alchemy, the athanor is a vessel in whichtransformative processes can be conducted under controlled

conditions. Such a vessel is an essential instrument in thematerial alchemist’s laboratory, but it is also a requirement of

spiritual alchemy. In fact it is the creation of the athanor that

permits the inner transformation that constitutes Rosicrucian

alchemy to begin. Now, the final act in the process involves

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the opening of one’s athanor and bringing to light, like a child

from the womb, the product of transformative activity. But

when I opened my athanor I found only a white plant. I was

deeply disappointed by this. I did not know what to expect,

but my wish was for some kind of final thing that wouldsignal the completion of what had become an exhaustingexperience.

I had been guided during the long process by the spirit

of the Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius (see note at end

of this essay). He had been a strange guide – at least in terms

of my notion of how a guide should behave – most of thetime he seemed motivated by curiosity about what I wasdoing rather than advising me out of his greater knowledge.

Now I appealed directly to him for help, the first time I had

done so. He promptly told me to return the plant to the

athanor because it was immature. This judgement onlydeepened my sense of loss. I pressed Michael Sendivogius for

help and he was obliged to admit that he could no longer helpme because his understanding had reached its limit.

I felt utterly helpless then, alone and slipping towards a

frightening despair. I prayed for a new guide. Tycho Brahe

came. I asked in astonishment how an astronomer could helpme. He told me to seek Christ as my guide. I promptly asked

for Christ. My immediate impulse then was to dedicate each part of me to Christ after the manner of the prayer known as

St Patrick’s Breastplate. Then I was numb with doubt and

despair: I had reached the limit of my own understanding.

These events occurred in early April 1994 while I was

living in Brighton in Sussex. During the following fortnight I

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had a series of dreams, the burden of which indicated the

sloughing off a body or sheath characterised as female and

the acceptance of a condition called Kingship. Then came the

insight into my condition (I quote from my notes): ‘Approach

always engenders a failure of faith because perceptionexpands so that experience becomes more important thanidea, and the experience is that of a NOTHING.’ This means

that with the failure of understanding, our experiences are

like experiences of nothingness. However, this nothingness is

not necessarily dark, it seemed then to me to be bright, ‘like

cool water in the sense of volume (not space but somethingentered into, as into a pool of clear water).’ Here I entered mySELF, which I described as ‘sudden, dry, empty, one because

so powerful and all-embracing of our faculties: feeling, will,

intellect; beyond the sublime.’ This being, I realised, is within

each one of us at all times.Then, finally, on 19 April 1994, I broke through and

could report a ‘vision so clear that nothing can be seen atlast.’

The first encounter with Christ occurred at about

10.00pm on 6 May 1994. It happened without any deliberate preparation, though I had lain down as though to think. This

is a transcription of my note of the occasion:Told by C[hrist] that I was on an island of

punishment: (very reticent, usu[ally] answers

with “yes”, silence for “no”; otherwise

economical with words: not thru’ impatience orcondescension): told me my suffering coming to

an end: I constructed a boat, vivid images: given

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a chalice and a host to take: then asked if he

would come too: he merged SHADOW-LIKE

into me (v[ery] surprising): mast of the boat like

cross-beam of pentagram; a significance I don’t

understand. Underway: shown some images 1)of two horses 2) cat chasing bird 3) flower:asked for xplanation of one, and was merely

shown image in more detail: didn’t understand

any of them (recording them here, as with the

rest of this journal, in case I understand them

better in the future). 3) the flower was inmonochrome rather than simply white + black,though centre proved to be a hole in a saucer-

like piece of white metal. Felt irritable after

merger; so impatient and perhaps less attentive

than I ought to images than I should[sic]. Butthe merger caps the faint worry I feel that Christ

should be my guide. Perhaps Christ is a symbol,label etc for a power in each of us, or like [a]

guardian angel. Anyway, Christ is now within.

I was perplexed after this event. While I had dreams

that were obviously portentous, I also had bouts of extreme

dejection and loss of faith, culminating on 23 May with therecognition that ‘Belief grows less possible: a concomitant of

an entrance upon reality.’ And though the alchemical process,which had begun in October 1991, had ended with the

discovery of the immature plant in my athanor, the imagery

derived from alchemy continued to pervade my dreams in the

form of an association of a male-female polarity with water.5



On 27 June I finally grasped something of what was

occurring. The effect of the Christ merger was like a weak

power of restraint. What confused me initially was my failure

to understand that two processes were occurring

simultaneously. On one hand, the spiritual experience left me prey to more worldly temptations, witnessed in the dreams asvarious female figures who sought to draw me back by (1)

inciting my vanity, (2) by entangling me in possessions, (3)

by buying my commitment. The other process appeared as a

preoccupation with two lights. These I came to understand

were the two waters of alchemy, the fixed water and themobile water. Here Christ is the fixed light, which risessteadily towards the soul – the mobile light – in order to unite

with it to produce the one light, known as ‘The Child.’ You

can readily understand how a soul threatened by spiritual

restraint on one side might be tempted to flee to a spuriousmaterial freedom, which would prove in time to be a greater

entrapment.There is usually a break in my spiritual activity during

July, and so in that year only a few short entries mark the

period between my insight into my situation and the next

stage of my encounter with Christ, which occurred on 3August 1994. This time I initiated the encounter by

deliberately entering into a phantasy state. I would notusually do this, I do not trust free-form phantasy, but in this

case it must have been a matter of feeling drawn to do it. This

is the phantasy as I recorded it immediately afterwards:

My way was blocked – I realise then that

my way has been blocked for a long time – by6



two animals that frighten me. But I go forward

in friendship and pat them. They move apart –

as though uncoiling from around each other. I

see they are two lions and that they are very

friendly towards me. They accompany me alongthe path I go, one on either side of me. Then Isuddenly fly up and lie along a pole – like a

witch’s broom, which has a small extensible

[recte: extended] cross-like structure to rest my

arms on. I sleep during the long flight. I come to

a gigantic wall or door with a cross-like holein it. The cross-like pole is inserted here

and turned, so that a way opens and lets me in.

At once I am whooshed up in the air, either

borne by an eagle or possessing wings myself. I

find I can direct the flight – as I strive to controlall the activities in the phantasy. I rise up to a

kind of corner where sits an old man. I approachhim and he becomes a serpent. I go up to the

serpent – I am not afraid of it – and enter it.

Entering it is like entering a yellow flower.

At this point I realised two things. One, I had been

deeply preoccupied since the initial Christ-encounter with thefact that Christ had appeared to me as a shadow, and two, that

this shadow-like being had to do with a kind of death for me.This lay at the root of my perplexity and was the cause of a

profound unease in me I was hardly aware of before that

moment.

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Now I called on Christ to ask him about the shadow. I

asked Christ to show himself to me. I was frightened of what

was coming, but I declared my love for Him and willingly

embraced the dark presence. Then I saw yellow eyes. I was

startled, then shocked to the core. I realised now that hisappearance really would terrify me. Then I saw his head,yellow eyes, nose like that of a gryphon-eagle, very

pronounced, but noble, beloved, incomprehensible. Then a

moon-like orb rises from the horizon beyond, then brilliant

white light peeks over the edge of the horizon. I go towards

it, but what looks like vegetation blocks the light, so that onlya lustrous glow remains. I push on, sometimes seeing a brightyellow complex structure, but I cannot get to the light, no

matter how far or how fast I travel.

Between the time of this experience and my departurefrom Brighton in early September 1994, I slowly came to see

that the elements of the phantasy – the lions, the flying poleand key, the eagle, the old man and the serpent – when

combined with the features Christ had revealed to me

suggested an ancient composite figure, the GRYPHON, as

the unifying image-expression of the whole experience. Aswell as this, while preparing this account I have come to see

that the images shown to me during the first encounter – thetwo animals (horses), the cat and bird, the flower – were

themselves simply an early attempt to communicate this

symbolic form.

The Gryphon (also spelled Griffin or Grifon) is firstattested in ancient Persia, though it might be older than this.

Later the Greeks and contemporaneous Middle East

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civilisations placed the Gryphon in the company of the

Sphinx in their temples. No reason for this grouping has ever

been found, nor do we know what the ancients understood or

believed about the figure. The Assyrian name of the

Gryphon, k’rub, is also the source of the Hebrew wordCherub. The only piece of specific lore that has survived tellsus that the Gryphon guarded the treasure of the

Hyperboreans, and for this reason they are now considered as

guardians of treasure and of secret things. Under the

inspiration of Dante, the Gryphon came to symbolise Jesus

Christ as a being both divine and human.The Gryphon has a lion’s body, either winged or

wingless, and a bird’s head, usually an eagle’s. I model it as

follows:

Lion’s body,Eagle’s head,

Eagle’s wings,Serpent tail,

A rod surmounted by an X cross in its right paw.

These pictures will give you a good idea of what the

Gryphon looks like.

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I will leave these disclosures to speak for themselves,

only pointing out that much lies below the surface of what is

apparent here. The immediate aftermath of the Christ

encounters was the beginning of a new process of complex

meditations and rituals, which moved me deeper into moreand more arcane aspects of the Christ-encounter.

I had brought some beech-nuts with me from a

particularly fine tree in Preston Park in Brighton. Once settled

in Dublin I was moved to undertake a spiritual planting of

one of the nuts in October 1994. The tree grew to full heightin four days, but led on swiftly within two days to a newcrisis of vision, where I found myself crying votive tears

before the ‘veil’, lamenting the continuing restriction upon

me. Then began a long series of meditations, lasting into the

following summer. These meditations are still a mystery to

me (they are detailed below in the essay The Seth

Meditations), but I can indicate a number of experiences thatare relevant here.

The first was the realisation that Christ and I are close

in the way that brothers can be. This implies a consanguinity

and a karmic relationship. The second came shortly after

Christmas in 1994, when, calling upon Christ in a start of

frightful loneliness during a very deep meditation, I saw his‘light lustrous on his shoulders and arms, his face all a-glow’

– I knew this was the case even though I could not see it – ‘it

is the means by which I see at all’. Then I added in my notes:

‘this means that the shoulders and arms I see are? MYSELF?’

You can see from this that the Mystery of Christ is the

Mystery of Man, that the Mystery of Christ is the Mystery of

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me, the Mystery of you, the Mystery of all mankind

individually. To begin to know Christ is to begin to know

yourself. If it is a long and arduous process, that is because

we are a profound Mystery, a Mystery hardly at all plumbed

yet. It is a task that still awaits us in the future: to knowChrist, to know ourselves individually.

Before I conclude I would like to address a question

that will surely arise: Why must we rest content at this stage

with only a symbol of Christ? After all, did the Christ not

incarnate in a man? While it is true that Christ did incarnatein a man, He did not incarnate as a man. Thus Christ evennow remains at a remove from the human plane of

experience, the physical-sensuous plane. It would therefore

be impossible for us to comprehend Christ with our senses or

by means of knowledge derived directly from our senses.Christ appeared directly to me as a shadow-like presence, for

that is how an etheric being would appear to us. The imagery presented on three occasions, during the two encounters and

in the intervening phantasy, are intended as a kind of plan or

map of the nature of Christ. The fact that an existing ancient

form – the Gryphon – answers very exactly to this map bothassures us of the validity of the imagery and indicates that it

was previously experienced by mankind at a time when directvision of the etheric was still possible. The vision is

becoming available to us now as we rise again towards that

etheric vision: what Rudolf Steiner meant when he said that

the encounter with Christ would become an increasinglyfrequent experience of mankind.

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Note:

Michael Sendivogius(1556-1636) is little known today, hisonce high reputation having been besmirched by accusations

of plagiarism and theft of the alchemical secrets of others.His best known work, A New Light ( Novum lumen

chymicum), published anonymously in 1604, went through 56

editions in all the major European languages over the

following 200 years. There is evidence that he was closelyinvolved in the group responsible for disseminating the early

Rosicrucian documents. Certainly, the simplicity of his life,

his continued anonymity despite pressures to the contrary,and his preoccupation with healing indicate a man of

Rosicrucian sensibility.

6 November 2000

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The Encounter with Christ

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