Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. It was that Mary who anointed the Lord with fragrant oil and wiped His feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick. Therefore the sisters sent to Him, saying, “Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick.” When Jesus heard that, He said, “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when He heard that he was sick, He stayed two more days in the place where He was. Then after this He said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” The disciples said to Him, “Rabbi, lately the Jews sought to stone You, and are You going there again?” (John 11: 1-8)
We’re going to be dealing with verse 8 today, but I’m going to begin with reading verses 8 to 10 because what we cover off today has a direct bearing on the next two verses.
8 The disciples are then saying to Him, “Rabbi, at the present time the Jews (= leaders of the Jewish religion) have been seeking to stone You – and You are proceeding to go there again?” 9 Jesus decidedly replied, “Are there not twelve hours [in] the day (= of daylight)? If anyone may habitually walk around (= live his life) within the Day, he does not constantly stumble (cut toward or strike against [something]), because he continually sees (looks at; observes) the Light of this world (of this cosmos; this system’s light; or: = because he progressively perceives the light and understanding that guides this System and secular society). 1 10 “Yet, if anyone should habitually walk around within the Night, he constantly stumbles (strikes against [things]), because the Light is not (does not exist) within him.” (Jonathan Mitchell New Testament)
So all changes in our habitual patterns of affection and thought initiated by the operation of the Logos within the human mind that touches on what is core to our felt sense of self – is met with resistance. So essentially, that sense of self drawn from external life exists in a state that resists the processes involved in the regeneration of the human mind. In a word, it stands opposed to the influx of the Lord’s life. This opposition, for those who perhaps have a sympathetic stance towards spiritual and religious modes of life, can be deeply hidden behind a persona that has been adopted to prevent one’s evils coming into conscious awareness. However, it is the case that once genuine spiritual work begins, subtle indications also begin to arise that see suppressed aspects of one’s interior states breaking into consciousness. And this happens as truths from the Word highlight the contradictions that exist between what we might inwardly think and feel, and the self image which we project out for others in external life.
Now the identity we acquire by virtue of being born and living in the external world, develops as a means to protect our felt sense of self. This psychic system, or cosmos, expends incredible amounts of energy to maintain its stability. And all regenerative work, by definition, involves the extraction of our sense of self from the habitual patterns of behaving, thinking, and feeling that are grounded in the loves of self in the world, to which we have become attached and mistake for our self. What we tend to forget is that this sense of self is a composite and not a single entity. But for all intensive purposes we experience it as a single entity by attributing the pronouns me or I etc to it. When we understand the composite nature of the self we can perhaps see the magnitude of the forces that are involved in holding it together to maintain its integrity as a single stable psychic system. There are numerous examples illustrating the composite nature of the self in Scripture, where people are possessed by multiple entities. And perhaps the most graphic illustration of this can be found in the story of the man possessed by Legion in chapter 5 of Mark’s Gospel. And of course this multiplicity of the self is dealt with in great detail in the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity.
The point here is that every self is made up of an incredibly complex nested network of spiritual associates who are invested in maintaining the stability of the psychic structure on pain of the disintegration of their identity. This is why changes involved in the regeneration of the human mind can only occur incrementally for it involves the reformation of a whole inner cosmos or psychic system. And this becomes even more complex due to the fact that every single pattern of behaviour, every pattern of thought, every pattern of feeling that makes up the habitual sense of ‘our self’, involves incalculable numbers of spirits all working together in concert.
So perhaps we can see why spiritual transformation and rebirth is difficult. All significant changes to human psychic structures have to be navigated at the risk of the loss of not just our own identity, but every other identity involved in this inner cosmos or psychic system. Is it any wonder then that inner work involves periods in which difficult emotional states manifest? In many instances, we have no idea what the source of these emotional states are. And that’s understandable, for we really are only conscious of what lies on the surface, which takes the form of an appearance of a single emotion.
All this is to say that with real change comes resistance due to how things are psychically organised. Change, as we have said, involves a shift from a relatively stable state through a series of less stable intermediary states before a reformation of things back into a stable psychic system, or cosmos and within that, a new form of self. It is the incremental nature of the shifts that enables our sense of self to be maintained at a fundamental level as something stable across these transitions.
So what has this to do with the verse we’re looking at today? Well, having tarried for two days, the state of preparation and alignment of the mind to bring about a change of mental state, the Logos is now received in a form that initiates a change of state within. And this was indicated as we saw last time by verse 7, where it says
He is saying to the disciples, We should be proceeding going into Judea again.
It needs to be understood that this statement isn’t a suggestion, at least when it’s looked at from a spiritual perspective. It’s what now must come to pass and it describes the influx of the Lord’s life into the mind to initiate a series of changes in its mental structures. That influx is received into what are termed disciples, which collectively represent a developing understanding of the Word, drawn from the Word. To proceed going into Judea again is to have our attention turn toward the inner work of self examination, in particular, toward what is of the affectional or motivational side of life. It is a focus on having evils brought into consciousness where they can be shunned as sins against the Word, or Lord
We see that immediately there is resistance. In verse 8 it reads,
The disciples are then saying to Him, “Rabbi, at the present time the Jews (= leaders of the Jewish religion) have been seeking to stone You – and You are proceeding to go there again?”
At the level of the literal meaning, this presents a concern for Jesus‘s safety. Interiorly, though, it illustrates a state of psychological resistance to having deeper motivations associated with the loves of self and the world exposed to consciousness. From a Logopraxis perspective, it reflects states of reluctance, or lack of motivation to work with the Word, due to the difficulties we experience when we do this. For it is just a fact of spiritual life that as truths are applied to the life of the mind, what opposes them is made manifest. It is our attachment to evils and falsities that are the cause of mental or spiritual distress.
So it is helpful to remember that states of distress that arise when truths are used for the purposes of self-examination and repentance is what temptations are. And that temptations are the only means by which goods and truths from the Word can be integrated into our life. Seen in this light, the arising of forms of resistance and being willing to work to follow through on what the Word is asking of us can be seen as the means by which a new will, that is the basis for a new sense of self, can begin to form within our understanding of truths when that understanding is applied to soul work.
The disciples response here illustrates a level of understanding existing that has been born from the experience of working with truths from the Word. There is a recognition of the nature of evils belonging to the old will that constitute the infernal proprium represented by the Judeans. And that when we work from truths, falsities are produced that stand to protect the infernal proprium from being exposed. This is represented by the desire to stone the Lord or kill off the impact of truths on our life through producing all manner of falsities represented by stones. And all this so that the infernal proprium can maintain its hold on our life, on our sense of self. There is an example of a subtle form of this in this very statement associated with the disciples. It describes a response to the Word that calls into question its wisdom and by extension its authority. The subtle aspect is that it is clothed in a semblance of good, a concern for the Jesus’s welfare.
But everything the Lord does is as one who is fully conscious. The Logos or Word is never caught unaware. So for us, within our own resistance to the leading of the Word to bring the evils that have a hold on our life to consciousness, the same dynamic will play out. Such resistance has to be justified of course. But if we will make the effort to reflect a little on how this dynamic plays out for us, we will find that things are easily twisted in a way that convinces us that we know better than the Word so far as what’s needed for our spiritual development. When difficult states arise in some form or another we will often convince ourselves that what we arrive at to avoid inner work is for the best.
So we can leave it there for today and I look forward to exploring the rest of the reading with you next time.
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