The 29th Path, Qoph, The Moon

The Corporeal Intelligence

Visualize yourself sleeping soundly in the soft sand next to a pool of deep blue water that ripples in gentle waves near your body. A full noon passes in and out of the clouds intermittently shining its light upon your sleeping self. As you watch this scene, you feel pulled into your body and become the one sleeping.

You hear the rain before you sense it on your skin, a soft tapping on the ground all around you. Then its rhythm intensifies; what feels like the cool touch of fingertips running up and down your body brings you to consciousness. Still in a dreamy state, you sit up and raise your face to the sky and breathe in the scent of the newly washed earth.

You have the profound impression that you are waking from having touched something of the eternal in the deepest part of your sleep. You wonder if you are now in a dream, but your arms and then your legs fell real and substantial. You are convinced, though, that this quiet evening beside this sapphire pool is something you created from your encounter with Divine Darkness.

You turn toward the pool and wash your face, hands and feet. As you do, the rain stops and the sky becomes clear. The sand, stones and the trees behind you shimmer with white lace. You are at peace and feel no hurry to leave, even if you knew where to go, so you sit watching the water reflect the moon’s face and then break it apart upon its gentle ripples.

The moon in the water changes before your eyes, shrinking to a half moon. A large fish rises, with scales so bright they must have caught all the light expelled as the moon grew smaller. The fish balances on the water with its back fin and then transforms into an angel, with scaly wings instead of feathers shining with incandescence.

You must leave here now, the fish-angel says in a voice made more for water than for air. Here the womb surrounds you. Give birth to yourself and follow the path that lifetimes have crated to find the truth of your existence.

Where is the path? you ask, but wings become fins once more as the avatar of this pond blends again with the rippling water.

There is a rustling behind you. When you turn to look, a sheepdog stands on a path that starts just where you are kneeling. You laugh, as you have been on the path all along. You call the dog to you, instinctually knowing that it has come to guide and to protect, but instead of heeding, the dog barks once and disappears over a rise. You take a small stone from the edge of the pool to remember this place, put it in your pocket and follow.

The path winds through some tall grass, and though your mind tells you that the rain stopped a long, long time ago, judging that the moon has now waned from half to a quarter, the grass is still wet and the smell of rain lingers.

You walk to the top of the rise and acres of carefully cultivated fields roll out before you. Even in the orderly nature of these fields, you sense a numinous quality to them, as though they are at once very old but also newly created.

The sheepdog leads you past poppy fields and hibiscus, both magically flowering at night, rows of wheat and barley, and vineyards with plump grapes on the vines so ready for harvest you become slightly intoxicated from their bouquet.

You wander through these fields, following your guide, until you feel another significant amount of time has passed. Has it been days, or weeks, or years? You don’t know, so pause and look at the sky once again.

The moon has now changed to crescent and the shadows that lay just off the path have grown darker. When you take your eyes from the sky, you find you are not alone. A young woman dressed in a gown fashioned from black feathers stands in front of you. She hands you a chalice filled with wine and a piece of bread. Her voice is gentle but you hear her authority all the same

Drink and eat these for the next part of your journey. I am the Divine Mother, the Queen of Heaven, who links Heaven and Earth, Father and Son by my Love. I am the mother of the Living God within you. Drink this for the path will be darker from this point on. Let this Wine kindle the light within. Eat the bread so you will be sustained by my Son’s own body, knowing that His Divinity resides in you.

You thank her for her gifts. As you sip and eat, you feel the bread and wine become one with your body and blood, sense a new life entering and renewing you. The same mystery that you brought with you from sleeping by the pool, but could not then bring to consciousness, now transforms the consciousness of your cells. You are becoming a new creation, even on a lonely road in the midst of a dark night, Christ-consciousness is lighting the path within.

You hand the cup back to her. She places it by her heart and then lifts from the earth, metamorphosing into a black swan whose body blends into space and the stars above.

The sheepdog is still there, its white coat brighter than even the moon. You follow this light through two gray towers from where you hear voices of men and women: some arguing, some crying, a few praying to be released from their stone imprisonment. You sense that you once lived in one of these towers, that your voice has fallen discontentedly from it before you were awakened by the rain by the pool.

As you stand there and look to what is beyond, the sheepdog finally joins you and sits at your feet. The moon has disappeared all together and you no longer see the way to go. The sky, though, is not longer black, but crimson, and the smell of roses surrounds you. The unknown offers you this aroma as comfort, one familiar thing along with the faithful sheepdog, before you step into what has yet to be manifested.

The dog places a paw on your pocket reminding you of the stone you brought from the pond. In your hand, the stone is now a translucent pearl that shines with the same light as the loving guide who waits patiently at your feet. You hold the pearl in front of you and take the first step beyond the towers, into the infinite and possible, knowing that love is there and will never leave.