Kirsten Mustain, Author

The sky at Dragonback this morning is buttermilk colored, like the old Bob Wills tune.

Growing up in Colorado I thought that was a nonsensical description of the sky. It is always clearer in Colorado, the sky. The clouds have shape and form. The light is whiter. The sky never takes on that buttermilk hue.

Here many mornings have this golden tint and the clouds are milky, undefined, not thick but bright.

When you see a buttermilk sky you know it instinctively. Suddenly the words to a song you heard years and years ago make sense in a way they never could before.

I have been reading more Edward F. Malkowski with my rose-scented green tea this morning. The man is brilliant and I highly recommend his books.

In his latest work, The Spiritual Technology of Ancient Egypt, I have been absolutely thrilled to discover that he is saying things that need to be said about religion.

I had a teacher once who told me that in the earthly plane there are something like 372 levels of spirituality. (Forgive me, Atell.  I cannot remember the exact number and I know that number is important with respect to numerology.) At any rate, with 372 as the highest, Atell said, most people on earth are at right about three on that scale.

This explains a lot, particularly about the current plague of fundamentalist Christians ("Christianoids" as my dear friend JB calls them) and fundamentalist Muslims.

To get back to Malkowski, his latest book sets forth the scientific principals behind the energies of numbers in numerology (though he never uses the word "numerology" ? which is an excellent strategy considering the "new age" stigma attached to it).

But what I read this morning was an excellent explication of Exodus with regard to the flowering of higher consciousness, which Malkowski maintains (most astutely, as far as I'm concerned) is the real message of the Hebrew scriptures. Could it be otherwise?

I mean, if it is truly scripture, is that not the whole point?

So many humans on earth have completely misconstrued the scriptures. They have taken them in the basest most materially skewed way they can take them. Literal.

All good literature, no matter how literal, has a deeper context. If it does not it is technical writing, which may explain how to set up your DVD player, but cannot even touch  upon any actual deep truth.

Christianoids are reading the Bible like it is a technical manual.

My personal view of everything is that the world around us is archetypal. Our outer world mirrors our inner world. In other words, clues to our inner world may be gleaned by merely looking around at where we live and with whom we associate.

For instance, if I have an owl that calls in my woods every night, it exists as an owl in the woods. But it also exists as a perception of my mind which mirrors a quality inherent in my own conscious existence.

And literature is the human attempt at building an archetypal world like God's. I have said all this in previous blogs.

The thing is, the scriptures, according to Malkowski (and myself and many others) are designed to convey, in a symbolic way, truths that cannot be discerned or understood by the rational part of the brain. Archetypes speak to us on an instinctive level.

Symbols are the language of the spirit.

Stories in the Bible may or may not have been derived from historical facts (some of them most certainly were), but their spiritual significance has to do with the deeper truths that are contained within. This is the most important reason why it is important to have an accurate translation of the scriptures ? and why it is important that we have scholars who are able to read the original words.

Anyway, the point that I keep dancing around is this explication of Exodus that I read in Malkowski's book. It is actually not Malkowski's writing, but a quotation from George Robert Stow Mead's book, Fragments of Faith:

"Egypt is the body; all those who identify themselves with the body are the ignorant, the Egyptians. To 'come forth' out of Egypt is to leave the body; and to pass through the Red Sea is to cross over the ocean of generation, the animal and sensual nature, which is hidden in the blood. Yet even then they are not safe; crossing the Red Sea they enter the Desert, the intermediate state of the doubting lower mind. There they are attacked by the 'gods of destruction,' which Moses called the 'serpents of the desert,' and which plague those who seek to escape from the 'gods of generation.' To them, Moses, the teacher, shows the true serpent crucified on the cross of matter, and by its means they escape from the Desert and enter the promised land, the realm of the spiritual mind, where is the Heavenly Jordan, the World-Soul."

This strikes me particularly because it resonates with the writings of some of the great yogis. I don't know yet if Malkowski has drawn this parallel, having not finished the book, but the symbol of the serpent, which appears in Genesis and Exodus and in older Egyptian texts and architecture is suggestive of the serpent in the ancient yogic traditions as well.

That serpent represents the kundalini energy in the root spinal chakra ? the energy that makes physical reality manifest ? the sexual energy. With this in mind, the story of Adam and Eve takes on a much clearer meaning, I think.

One of the goals of the yogi, if I understand it correctly, is to take that energy, which generally flows downward, and draw it up the spine to unite it with the higher chakras and ultimately reunite it with the source instead of squandering it on physical pleasures . . . More on this later.