Mighty Companions

Following some approximately parallel conversations with two friends on this topic, I just want to write this post as a wrap up about the experience of Mighty Companions.

First, I am quite sure that in the Course Jesus uses an ambiguous term like this on purpose, because he wants us to fill it in, and not limit it, since our primary problem is that our egos always want to define and limit everything.

For one thing, it does seem that our "enemies" do become "partners in forgiveness" and sometimes even without their active cooperation in form. In that fashion, I had a very profound forgiveness experience in one of my major special relationships, during a period of total unsettling in that relationship, which really shook me to my foundation and in which I totally experienced that we were completely one, as I shifted from wanting to push her off the figurative edge of the cliff, before she did it to me, and into an experience of total forgiveness. This was shortly before we parted ways, and though we've never communicated since then, for me that was a total healing of that relationship, and an experience that stayed with me as a comfort in moments of doubt.

Another issue concerned the experience of a friend who was talking to a person who was completely focused on and obsessed with communicating with the dead, which seems to be a way of continuing special relationships beyond the grave, and making a big deal about the difference between life and death, and therefore very much serves as a corroboration of the ego system. I connected this to a conversation with another friend about the author Jan Willem Kaiser and his dislike for any personality cult, to which my friend observed that this was in effect the difference between right minded hearing and wrong minded hearing. So that the wrong minded hearing is about communicating with "the dead" all of which remains within the ego system,
because it makes life and death in this manifest world very real, whereas in the right minded sense all our relationships in the end become the Holy Relationship, and the persona can thus become a loving reminder, and, if you will, a compromise to us who are still in the dream (the real world is still part of the dream), and can be our Mighty Companions, Angels, or Messengers of Heaven, conduits for the voice of the Holy Spirit, and our partners in forgiveness.

I also relate this to the story of the apparent experience of Ms. Hofmans in the development of her channeling a former spiritual teacher after he died. My intuition tells me it was Kaiser who clarified for her that she was not channeling the teacher, who had been a poultry farmer in life, but Jesus, and that her teacher in the flesh (at one time) was just a comfortable symbol to her, and so lateron (when I knew her, starting at ca. 4 yrs of age), she was speaking in strictly generic terms of "the Help," or "God's Help," which I realized is simply the meaning of the name
Jeshua. It is for this reason that J. W. Kaiser labels the channeled messages which came through Ms. Hofmans as "Logia." To him they were Jesus sayings just as much as the Thomas Logia, or any other sayings of Jesus. In this same sense as students of ACIM we have clearly accepted the entire Course as a direct message from Jesus.

There is also the statement at the end of the temptations in the desert in Mt. 4:1-11 where it states how "Angels" (Gr. Angeloi) were serving him, after he decided against the ego -- i.e. the ego "tempts" us with all it has to offer, which are always "baubles" or seeming power, glory, self-will etc. and our only function is to keep denying the denial of truth (the "Devil"), and to choose
"not this," just as Jesus does not fall for any of those "offers you can't refuse" which the ego extends to him in that episode - and so demonstrates the truth that will set us free.

Finally I do also think that the experience of "Mighty Companions" is in that unspeakable knowledge of having firm ground underfoot, even while it looks like s-h-i-t in worldly terms, but which inside we know is a 180-degree difference from the feeling of slip-sliding around in the quicksand of the ego. In that form the sense of "Mighty Companions" is more abstract, and has the ring of "God's Help," in a way we do not tend to personalize, but still know in our hearts.

Alongside all this I think Kaiser's discussion of Angels is extremely important, including his clarity that the whole Angelology of early and medieval Christianity (and we could extend this to its modern counterparts such as Doreen Virtue, et al.), are nothing but another attempt for the ego to manage and understand, and catalogue a phenomenon which then risks getting in the way of the actual experience, because now our intellect (and the ego) gets its hands on it again. It is along those lines that Jesus uses the deliberately vague terminology of Mighty Companions.


Copyright, © 2008 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.