Disorientation and Idolatry

If, as we have seen (in the previous post, “The Soul of Suffering and the Human Condition”), disorientation is a part of the human condition, making our human life on earth “the most difficult task there is,” then what happens to us in this state, other than our obvious confusion?

Tom Cheetham goes on to explain that the human soul, in this state of isolation and confusion, clings desperately to whatever promises simple, clear, stable answers to the intractable problems we repeatedly experience in life on the plane of space-time. “We fear falling into nothingness and grasp at whatever pseudo-certainties we can,” he says (25). But these certainties that we cling to are all idols—including, and perhaps most rigidly, our idols of religious certainty, our rigidly held beliefs that things must be a certain way, or because others become spiritually lost, we must save them in the way we see as “certain.” It is easy to see how, then, that religious certainties (orthodoxies) easily develop into idols that ultimately will not help us, but only trap us further in painful narrowness and limitations, cutting us off from the flow of divine life.

But it is precisely this state of poverty and even a sense of abandonment by God when our certainties fail, that is the first step on the path toward reorientation and Return. Yeshua himself reminds us, “Whoever of you does not renounce all cannot become my student.” As Cheetham says, we are all fragments of God, “little embryonic persons, in whose hearts lie the absolute mystery of the divine abyss” (25). But because we are finite, we feel this inner darkness and disorientation more keenly as both mysterious and yet filled with terror.

What calls us to live free of both confusion and fear is something more beautiful, more desperate, and more divine than we have ever imagined—it is to live reoriented to the Celestial Hierarchy. We shall explore this further.