Blessed are the poor in spirit

In the Gospel of St Matthew Chapter 5 we find what is referred to as The Beatitudes which contain profound advice if we explore beneath the surface of the translation. After he had been baptised and spent time in the wilderness being ‘tempted’, Jesus gathered disciples and began teaching and healing. Great crowds flocked to him St Matthew reports, “from Galilee and the Decap’olis and Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan.” Mt 4:18-25

In 2006-7 I wrote a series of Reflections called The Beatitudes in the Gospel of St John. I wrote about how the nine Beatitudes can be used as a path of development for our ninefold being. Let’s have a look at the meaning of the Greek words used in these beatitudes and then we will see how Jesus is giving us advice about our own spiritual development.

The first beatitude is “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Mt 5:3

Blessed, makarios from the root mak meaning large, long or expanded. Today we might say macro, big.
Poor ptochos from ptosso to crouch. It speaks of a contraction.
Spirit, pneuma, breath or wind which is invisible but we can feel the power of it.
Kingdom basileia, having the authority to rule
Heaven ouranos, the ordered universe

To make sense of these words we also need to understand that we were spiritual beings who progressively condensed into the physical bodies we have today. During this process we gradually separated from the guidance of the beings in the spiritual worlds so that we could become self reliant, creative, responsible beings. A big step in this process was taken when Jesus took into himself the Cosmic Christ. He did this for us so that we could actually take on the responsibility for our own development.

Therefore we could say that those who crouch from spirit, crouch from being guided by external spirits, will be enlarged and have the authority to rule in their own universal environment. Another way to put this would be to say that the human beings who take personal responsibility for the way the think, feel and act in the world will be the great contributors to human evolution. These are the ones who don’t look for outer guidance; they understand that everything they do creates the society that we live in. In this sense we can also say that human beings are the tenth level of the spiritual hierarchy we have been considering.

Another thought that arises from this is that since human beings have been given this responsibility then some of the work of the higher spiritual hierarchies has become redundant, or they are now occupied with other matters. This would be a similar situation to the bookkeeper who no longer writes the accounts in a cashbook but uses a computer programme to report on the financial situation of a company. Human beings who do not take responsibility for their rightful place in the universe, ouranos, are still looking for advice from the handwritten cashbook which has had no entries for years.

Enlarged are those who contract into the inner being and find the inner authority to be responsible citizens of the universe. This authority can only be experienced through our ‘I’ which I spoke about in this bLog http://bit.ly/bfqs5X. Only when we experience this inner authority will we know that we will not be blown around by all the external forces of this world that want to make us subordinate.