Posted on 06 February 2019, 10:13

In the previous blog I described how Stephen invited us to choose Twelve.  As the number of people joining in our conversations with him was often about twelve, we thought we were being invited to choose twelve disciples gathered around Stephen the representative of Christ.

Our actions in trying to determine who these true disciples were to be,  soon blew up in our faces.

What happened next was that some of us experienced a number episodes of synchronistic events, which were personal experience relating to what Stephen was hoping we would learn in our search for the Twelve.  I have no idea of how they came about – The best I can say is that Spirit brought them about.  They were brought about by a higher dimension of reality, which I cannot define.

EPISODE 1 THE MOONIST.

At 9.15 pm on that cold winter’s night, I drove my car into the garage at the precise moment that a taxi pulled up alongside my house.  Out of the taxi emerged a figure, and in a moment the two of us were standing at the front door in the darkness.  I quickly opened the door and turned on the light. I recognised the pale slight young man as a member of the Sun Myung Moon group in Christchurch with whom I had shared a couple of evenings perhaps a year before.  They had given me Gin Seng tea to drink, some of their literature, and much of what they were saying was fitting in to what I believed God was teaching me. I enjoyed being with them.

The young man had just completed a long and tiring journey by train, the length of North Island from Auckland; he had crossed Cook Strait by ferry and had made the seven hour train journey from Picton, and here he was, with the intention of spending a week of fasting and prayer at my place.  He had been guided to do so, said he.

In that, I can only believe him, because from everything which followed, he initiated the synchronistic dramas which followed.

At all events, of course I invited him in, and in my study made conversation by jokingly asking him he had any coincidences for me, and I asked it while he still had his travelling bag in his hand.  But many a true word is spoken in jest. 

He was a quiet fellow, and I continued making conversation, asking him a little about his trip.  Then I pointed to the South Korean flag which my Moonist friends had previously given me, and which I had pinned above my desk. “Explain that to me”, said I.  And tired as he was, he complied, with me writing down his answers.

The South Korean flag is a symbol of (1) perfect harmony (2) which is in the New Jerusalem in the book of Revelation.  (3) It is the symbol of the different natures of man becoming one, one expression of man. (4) The inner circle is the heart of God. (5) We are all different types.  There are twelve types of man.  We have to learn to love and embrace the other eleven types.

(6) There are four rays ... they are symbolic of earth, air, fire and water.

(7) There are eight smaller rays.. the twelve represent the twelve astrological signs.  It expresses how everything in the universe is in perfect balance and harmony. Positive and negative, masculine and feminine. subject and object, internal character and external form, masculine initiative and feminine responsive.

And as time has passed, I have perceived, with some amazement, that all that has much to do with the fourteen episodes of THE SEARCH FOR THE TWELVE which are to follow,  and not only in this series, but in much of what else is to come.  The young man of course had no inkling that he was to be part of a synchronistic story. He had his own agenda. And yet he showed himself to be part of a tapestry of meaning in a wider order of consciousness.

*  *  *  *  *
Episode Two: Gilgal

The first episode occurred on July 12, 1977, and the second was to happen the next day.

If you saw Neary and Jillian in the film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” you might think you were seeing a caricature of Phillip and Miriam.  If there is something in the Inner to be found, then Phillip and Miriam (part of the Stephen group) undeviating, unremittingly seek it.  And they do find. 

On July 13, Phillip was at work driving a truck.  And as he drove he read off the “pages of this world”  as a message from the inner.  He saw this message as a parallel to an Old Testament story.  He made notes as things proceeded. One note was “Today I also went to Giles Road to see Mr Giles. Hebrew does not have vowels so GiLes + GiLes = GLGL or Gilgal. I am to think of Gilgal.”  Playful, but not meaningful thinking, one might consider.  But then again, and quite independently, Miriam at home was having the strong impression from her inner that she should look up 1 Samuel 9.17 10.8 in the Old Testament.  Now it was not until we got together a day or two later, that we noticed the name GILGAL in 10.8, and saw how in this apparently strange way, the two of them had synchronised in coming up with the name Gilgal…“You shall go down to Gilgal ahead of me, and I will come to you to sacrifice whole offerings and shared offerings” was how the passage read.

And I mentioned to them that Gilgal was an open air temple consisting of TWELVE stones.

I remember the words of Stephen that I have to find my TWELVES.  Well, twice now, twelves have arrived.  Twelve means completeness, 12 tribes, 12 disciples, 12 astrological signs, 12 months of the year.  Twelve means “together, making a whole”.  Stephen, myself and the others so far, are together making a whole.  The question was, did we require some more to take part, in order for there to be twelve of us?  We are together like the stones of the Gilgal temple, enclosing a holy place, enclosing a whole y place, where all that is different is together in harmony..where we are a spiritual temple, a temple for the whole y spirit.  Is this the kind of 12 to which Stephen was guiding towards?

EPISODE THREE: THE KING’S TEMPLE

[A dream about the Temple Above and the Temple Below. There is no separateness in the Temple Above, and we are not separate stones there.]

July 15, 1977: It was before I discovered that Phillip and Miriam had unknowingly coincided with the reference to Gilgal and I had pointed out that Gilgal was a temple consisting of twelve stones in a ring, that I myself had a dream about a temple.

I had a dream of a King’s House on the top of a hill. There is one room in it, and one piece of furniture in it, a vast altar of stone.  This is spotlighted, all else is in gloom.  On the altar is Bread.  Through a narrow door comes my Son, who takes the Bread (which He is, as He is also the Door) and throws it through the darkness beyond the “house” or “temple”, down the slope of a hill to a replica altar on the slope.  As the bright golden loaf bounces unharmed along the slope, I AM standing by this other altar, and see that it has made perfect contact with the lower altar.  I am delighted with the performance, congratulate and embrace my Son.

There is no Twelve in this dream, for I AM above polarity, for I AM focussed at the Father in me.  I AMn My Temple, at the position where My Son brings My Bread to the lower altar, where also I AM.  At the lower altar I am Michael receiving the Bread from the point where I AM the Father.  Perhaps at the lower altar I am one of the stones of the temple in which I AM.  Each of us are one of those stones.

Phillip commented, when I related to him my dream: “WITHIN we have the ability to see and to feel and to hear and to comprehend all that ever is.  OUT THERE we have the ability to see and to feel and to hear all that there is in response to that which is in us, as that which is within responds to that which is without.  The Christ consciousness is that which is BETWEEN the consciousness of that which is within and without.  It is there that it is born.  This is the most accurate way to describe that consciousness.”

This talk is much on the lines of Keble’s hymn “The mystic heaven and earth within, Plain as the sea and sky.

Michael Cocks edits the journal, The Ground of Faith.
Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr by Michael Cocks is published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.

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