Introduction

On Angels’ Wings

WHY DO ANGELS have wings? It may seem like an odd question, but there is no necessity for angels to be winged. It is not as if angels were physical beings who needed wings to provide them with a lift. God could have fashioned them without wings and still endowed them with the capacity for flight. So, why do angels have wings?

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato (ca. 428–348 BCE) provides an answer in his dialogue called Phaedrus: “By their nature wings have the power to lift up heavy things and raise them aloft where the gods all dwell, and so, more than anything that pertains to the body, they are akin to the divine, which has beauty, wisdom, goodness, and everything of that sort.”1

The wings remind us of God. Angels are messengers from God (angeloi means messenger in Greek, as does the older Hebrew word for angels, malak [singular] and malakhim [plural]) and wear their wings as a sign of the divine. The wings are powerful symbols. In The Angelic Way we will extend the symbolic from the wing to the entire winged creature: for us angels themselves are symbols, metaphors not only of God reaching out to us, but of us reaching out to God.

Do we then also have to state whether or not God is “real” or, like the angels, a metaphor?

We cannot say anything about God that is not metaphoric. This does not in itself imply that God does not exist—such a question is beyond the scope of this book. But it does mean quite clearly that all our talk about God is, to borrow from the Buddhists, “a finger pointing to the moon,” and not the moon itself.

In the opening chapter of the Tao Te Ching (the eighty-one poems attributed to the sixth-century BCE Chinese sage Lao Tzu that form the foundation of philosophical Taoism) we read, “The Tao that can be named is not the Eternal Tao” (Tao Te Ching, 1:1).² The name is not the named; the map is not the land; the notes are not the music. Yet we humans forever seem driven to name, as the innumerable gods, goddesses, spirits, and demons across the ages—and all the theological talk associated with them—attest to.

The problem is not the human passion for names, but the human predilection to mistake the name for the named. Here we will do our best not to make that mistake. Let us state up front that we are examining myths, symbols, and metaphors. Yet this does not make ours a lesser venture. Myths, symbols, and metaphors are the ways in which we humans point to ultimate reality.

We imagine angels with wings because angels are metaphoric representations of the human capacity to move between levels of consciousness, opening the least inclusive level of our awareness to the most inclusive level of our awareness, where the whole world is seen as the manifestation of God, the Source and Substance of all reality. As the scholar of religion Peter Berger writes,

Everything is full of gods, exclaimed Thales of Miletus. Biblical monotheism swept away the gods in the glorification of the majesty of the One, but the fullness that overwhelmed Thales continued to live for a long time in the figures of the angels, those beings of light who are witness of the fullness of the divine glory. In the prophetic visions they surround the throne of God. Again and again, in the pages of the Old and New Testaments, they appear as messengers (angeloi) of this God, signalizing His transcendence as well as His presence in the world of man ... In the religious view of reality, all phenomena point toward that which transcends them, and this transcendence actively impinges from all sides on the empirical sphere of human existence. ³

Peter Berger’s notion that “all phenomena point toward that which transcends them” is crucial to our understanding of angels as symbols of, or metaphors for, the human capacity to transcend our least inclusive level of awareness—our ego-centered mind or consciousness—toward the most inclusive level, which is God-centered spirit or consciousness. Angels are symbolic of the ability of all human beings for self-improvement: this is our angelic capacity or faculty, our angelic potential.

We humans are more than we let on, more than we admit, more than we know. We are bodies, certainly; few if any of us deny that. For some that is all we are—material forms complex enough to generate the effervescence of consciousness. For others we are a bit more: we are bodies and minds, the latter inhabiting the former, but so reliant on it that when the body dies, the mind dies, too.

But many of us believe that we are also, and even primarily, souls—extra-physical entities that lie behind or within the ego-centered mind, a bit like matryoshka, Russian nesting dolls: the smaller soul nested in the slightly larger mind, which is itself nested in the even larger body.

In The Angelic Way, however, we invert the order, and follow the lead of William Blake, the English mystic, artist, and poet who in the 1790s wrote in his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call’ed Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.”⁴ For Blake there was but one “body,” the soul that is both material when looked at through our senses and immaterial when looked at through the imagination.

But to take Blake’s insight further, not only are we humans body, mind, and soul—we are also spirit. We are (at least) like a four-part matryoshka. Body, in our view, is not the largest doll but the smallest, being surrounded by ego-centered mind, world-centered soul, and God-centered spirit, respectively. The body in and of itself is not self-reflexive; it runs itself but does not know itself. And because it is thus limited, we will have little to say about it in this book. Our focus is on ego-centered mind, world-centered soul, and God-centered spirit, and the role the angelic potential plays in and between each of these three levels or dimensions.

The ego-centered mind is that aspect of ourselves that says “I,” “me,” and “mine.” It sees itself as separate from and alien to the world, and relates to everything and everyone in the world as “other,” as objects, a relationship that the twentieth-century Jewish philosopher Martin Buber called I-It.

The world-centered soul is that aspect of ourselves that sees us as part of the world rather than apart from it, as equal subjects. Buber called this engaging the world from the perspective of I-Thou. Here we recognize that difference is not to be feared but appreciated, and see that all things are alive with purpose, meaning, and intrinsic value. Here we “love our neighbor as our self ” because we see that each neighbor is a self equal in value to ourselves.

The God-centered spirit is the largest and most inclusive dimension of human consciousness. Where the ego-centered mind sees self and world as separate, and the world-centered soul sees self and world as part of a single whole, God-centered spirit sees itself as all-inclusive, as I-I. God is the ego-centered mind as well as the world-centered soul, and that which embraces and transcends them both. The ego-centered mind says to the other, “What are you?” The world-centered soul asks the other, “Who are you?” The God-centered spirit simply tells the other, “I am you!”

These three dimensions of consciousness are not closed to one another. Indeed, since the narrow ego-centered mind and the mutual world-centered soul are both part of the final, nondual God-centered spirit (nondual means that everything is part of the One, like all waves are part of the ocean), there is no gap between these dimensions at all. But they differ in their degree of inclusivity, the way a letter differs from the word in which it rests, and the word differs from the sentence of which it is a part. Given their interrelatedness it is possible for each dimension to connect with the others, and angels are metaphors for this connecting.

Myths of angels descending to earth are metaphors of God-centered spirit entering into ego-centered mind. Myths of angels ascending to heaven, and of humans being transformed into angels, are metaphors of world-centered soul entering into God-centered spirit. And myths of humans rising to heaven and then returning to earth are metaphors of the human capacity to awaken fully to (and not just glimpse) the nondual nature of I-I.

In the Hebrew Bible God-centered spirit speaks of itself as Ehyeh asher Ehyeh (Exodus 3:14). While most English Bibles translate the Hebrew as “I am that I am,” this static notion of God is the exact opposite of what the Hebrew itself suggests. Ehyeh is the future imperfect form of the verb “to be.” God—as the author of Exodus wants us to understand God—is not only a matter of being but of becoming. Ehyeh asher Ehyeh is better translated as “I will be whatever I will be.” Or, to be less precise and perhaps more insightful, “I am becoming whatever is becoming and there is no telling in advance what I will be except to say that whatever is happening I will be that.” God is a verb, not a noun; God is the happening of life, the living itself, the birthing, dying, crying, laughing, wild dancing of all reality perpetually surprising itself with its own creativity.

God is not other than the ego-centered mind or the world-centered soul—there is nothing other than God.

The ego-centered mind cannot, in and of itself, come to know itself as the Divine anymore than the acorn can know itself to be the tree. And yet it isn’t quite ignorant of this either. We have dreams of something more, visions of something more, myths of something more, and these dreams, visions, and myths often take the form of stories about angels. At the core of this book lies the premise that angels are truly our own angelic potential, enabling the ego-centered mind to articulate its intimations of something greater. Angels are a way for soul and spirit to speak to the mind, and the way the mind comes to make sense of its encounters with soul and spirit. And because our way of meeting angels is through the imaginative faculty of dream, vision, and myth we can say that angels are themselves symbolic creations of the imagination.

Linking the imagination to angels can be traced at least as far back as the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE). In his treatise De Anima (On the Soul) Aristotle spoke of active and passive intellects, what we might call “knowing” and “what is known.” Knowing is an action, a process, an essentially imaginative faculty by which we move from the known (the passive intellect) to the as yet unknown. From ancient times commentators on Aristotle differed as to whether the active intellect is located inside or outside the human mind. The second-century CE philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias, the most famous of the ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle, held that the active intellect was external and synonymous with God. Followers of Alexander spoke of the active intellect as an angel, a messenger from God revealing truths to humankind.

The Hebrew word malak means both “angel” and “messenger,” so the ancient Hebrews and Greeks likely shared the idea that God communicates with humanity through the imaginative faculty of the human mind—that aspect of mind that can open up to what is greater than itself. The angelic messenger is the symbolic link between the human world and the divine world; the angelic way invites us humans to connect with the wider fields of consciousness open to us as world-centered soul and God-centered spirit.

Encounters with angels are often described as meeting actual winged beings—when truly we are meeting greater and more holistic aspects of ourselves. Angels are, in other words, not physical entities but imaginative faculties.

To use a powerful example from the Bible, did an angel literally appear to Moses from within a bush that burned but was not consumed (in Exodus 3:2)? Was the angel “real”? Or is this rather the author’s way of telling us that Moses moved from ego-centered mind into the world-centered soul in order to encounter the God-centered spirit—by using his angelic potential?

In this book we interpret Moses’s encounter with the angel as a meeting of mind and soul, and then with spirit itself, the one and only “I” who knows itself to be all things. The angelic dimension of humankind, in other words, constitutes the human capacity to experience and integrate ego-centered mind, world-centered soul, and God-centered spirit.

With this premise at the core of The Angelic Way, the never-ending human fascination with God’s winged messengers is not surprising. The ego-centered mind has a subtle, almost imperceptible intuition of, and longing for, something greater than itself, and angels—our angelic potential—can lift us up to it.

One star-lit night some three thousand years ago a Hebrew poet—perhaps even King David himself—lay on his back and, gazing into the infinite depths of space, felt dwarfed by the sheer scale of the night sky:

When I peer into Your sky,
The labor of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars that You established:
What is humanity, that You remember them?
And the children of humanity, that You are mindful of them?
You have made humans a little lower than angels,
And crowned them with honor and splendor.
You gave them stewardship over the works of Your hands
And You have set all things at their feet. (Psalm 8:3–6)

For all its recognition of God, this is a first-person poem celebrating the uniqueness of humanity: “When I peer into Your sky.” No supernatural insight is claimed or offered. The poet, the psalmist, doesn’t pretend to know the mind of God, only to question it. The poet in fact does what most of us have done at some point in our lives—looked into the night sky and wondered, who am I?

The question “What is humanity?” is best asked against the background of space’s immensity and God’s infinity. It is then that all our hubris falls away, and we are left with a pristine and perhaps primordial silence. And what arises for the psalmist from that silence is a bit deeper than the standard English translation lets on.

The psalmist uses the Hebrew enush, rightly translated as “humanity.” But he does so knowing that his listeners will also hear ahnush, “incurable,” a word sharing the same spelling as enush, differing only in the way the reader or speaker vocalizes the opening letter, Aleph. There is something incurable about humankind. We are mortal, and against the black backdrop of the seemingly immortal sky our mortality is all the more poignant.

The psalmist inquires of God, “Why do you bother with these incurable creatures when the whole universe is Yours to enjoy?” The Hebrew verbs here are zachar, “to remember,” and pakad, meaning both “to be mindful” and “to visit.” God not only remembers humanity, God not only considers humanity, God visits humanity. Again, with all the worlds glittering above, why does God come to visit this one?

Why does God take an interest in us? Perhaps the answer comes in the next line, “You have made humans a little lower than angels.” The Hebrew actually says lower than elohim, the “gods,” rather than the more standard malakhim, “angels.” This confusion of God and angels, and the parallel confusion of angels and humans, will be with us throughout this book, and point us toward a deeper, more metaphoric understanding of angels as that capacity of human consciousness that can see all three realms of knowing—ego-centered mind, world-centered soul, and God-centered spirit —as part of a single system of being. Regardless of the psalmist’s choice of nouns, however, the question remains: What is it about humankind that matters?

The poet goes on to say that we are crowned with divine glory and given to rule over God’s creation, and the reader is left with the notion that this is why God cares. We work for God, and the Lord needs to supervise us now and again to make sure we are following the divine directive. But this is a weak reading of the text.

The poet’s observations about humanity’s charge to steward nature are not an answer to why God cares, but a further compounding of the original question. Why crown humanity with divine glory? Why give humans dominion over nature when the more lofty angels are better candidates for the task?

The answer is in the original question itself: What draws God to us mortals is our incurable mortality. Unlike angels, we humans die. Unlike angels, we humans change. Unlike angels, we humans are unpredictable and hence more interesting, and for these reasons alone worthy of God’s attention. God knows in advance what angels are going to do because God created them to do it. God does not know in advance what humans are going to do because God created us with an element of chaos, choice, and free will. What differentiates us from angels and makes us more intriguing to God is our ability for growth. In other words, while angels are a way, who really matters are those who choose to follow the way, or not.

The human desire to encounter the angelic is universal, regardless of the names given or details told. When a phenomenon is so indigenous to humanity as a whole it is safe to say there is something about angels—and angel-like beings—that is, loosely speaking, woven into our core existence. When we deal with angels we are dealing with archetypal forms of the human intuition of the divine—the “something more” of which we are a part.

Here we are calling that something more “God,” and by “God” we mean that nondual reality that manifests as the universe and everything in it. Humanity is a part of God like a wave is part of the ocean, but for most of our existence we are ignorant of this fact. Angels are a means for overcoming that ignorance.

However, we must be clear that when speaking about angels, and about ego-centered mind, world-centered soul, and God-centered spirit, we are speaking metaphorically. And, when we look at the tales of angels and ascended humans who become angels and messengers of God, we are dealing with myth.

If anything said here was taken literally, that is if we began to regard angels as beings separate from ourselves, and ourselves as beings separate from God, then we would miss the core premise of this book. Given the centrality of myth and metaphor in The Angelic Way, then, it is necessary to clarify these terms.

When we speak about the deepest levels of human insight and understanding we tend to speak in myth and metaphor. When myths speak of outward journeys, they are really talking about inner ones. When they speak of gods and angels as beings separate from ourselves, they are actually referring to aspects of ourselves. Myth arose at a time in human development when all inner experience was projected outward to make it accessible to human investigation.

Myth is not about outer events but inner ones; not about historical moments but timeless psycho-spiritual processes. While many people may argue to the contrary, The Angelic Way is based on the understanding that mythic encounters with angels are not records of historical encounters limited to the individuals whose names are associated with them, but rather internal meetings of ego-centered mind with world-centered soul and perhaps even God-centered spirit—all through the capacity of angelic awareness, i.e., that inner human capacity and potential to move from the least inclusive realm of consciousness, the I-It, to the most inclusive realm of consciousness, the I-I.

If we mistake these myths for scientific or historic facts we will likely misunderstand them. This misunderstanding leads some to dismiss myth and the message it carries, while it leads others to dismiss science because it seems to disprove the myth. Both the dismissal and the defense of myth mistake it for something that it isn’t—fact.

Joseph Campbell, one of the most influential twentieth-century scholars of comparative religion and mythology, reflected deeply on myth and metaphor. He wrote,

There is a beautiful saying of Novalis: “The seat of the soul is there, where the outer and the inner worlds meet.” That is the wonderland of myth. From the outer world the senses carry images of the mind, which do not become myth, however, until they’re transformed by fusion with accordant insights, awakened as imagination from the inner world of the body. The Buddhists speak of Buddha Realms. There are planes and orders of consciousness that can be brought to mind through meditations on appropriately mythologized forms. Plato tells of universal ideas, memory of which is lost at birth but through philosophy may be recalled.⁵

The Greek word mythus denotes a story or narrative that, from our perspective, originates in the encounter between ego-centered mind and its angelic capacity for self-transcendence. This is where the I-It yields to the I-Thou, and where the human being begins the journey toward God-centered spirit and the realization that all of creation is a manifestation of the one—God.

In his classic book on myth, The Hero’s Journey, Joseph Campbell said that “mythology is an organization of symbolic narrative and images that are metaphorical of the possibilities of human experience and fulfillment in a given society at a given time.”⁶ According to the Campbell scholar Mark Meadows, the function of myth as Campbell understood it is to help the individual realize his or her connection with the Ground of Being—“at once the depths of the psyche and in the transcendent aspect of the macrocosm itself ... and to thereby see the material world as a symbol of an unseen unity that undergirds and informs the phenomenal world.”⁷

Today the term “myth” is often used as a synonym for “false.” This is a modernist corruption of its meaning. Myths are not true in the sense that they are factual or historical, they are true in that they reveal in mythopoetic form psycho-spiritual truths about our lives and how best to live them. According to Joseph Campbell, “Like dreams, myths are productions of the human imagination. Their images, consequently—though derived from the material world and its supposed history—are, like dreams, revelations of the deepest hopes, desires and fears, potentialities and conflicts, of the human will—which in turn is moved by the energies of the organs of the body operating variously against each other and in concert. Every myth, that is to say, whether or not by intention, is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.”⁸

Myths are maps in the form of story that have the potential to lead us to the wakening of our most inclusive self. Like all good stories, myths have characters—gods, angels, heroes, heroines, and powers that oppose them—but these are real only in the context of the myth. If we limit ourselves to a superficial reading of myths, their meaning will be lost on us. If, on the other hand, we read myths as maps and see where they lead, we will discover that myths always point to our inner lives and our potential for God-realization.

Adolf Bastian, a nineteenth-century medical doctor who thought much about the human psyche, argued for the “psychic unity of mankind,” meaning that the human mind, regardless of race, gender, culture, etc., operates on a shared set of “elementary ideas” (Elementargedanken). Different cultures will create different flavors of these elementary ideas that Bastian called “folk ideas” (Völkergedanken). By studying the folk ideas of a given people, we gain insight into the elementary ideas of the human species, and in so doing come to understand what Bastian called the soul of the species (Gesellschaftsseele).

In The Angelic Way we will interpret specific angel stories as folk ideas of one spiritual tradition or another in the hopes of uncovering the greater elementary concepts underlying all angel stories, as well as the world soul in which those elementary concepts dwell and out of which each human mind emerges.

The angel stories in this book are mythic in nature. But they are not the same as legend, saga, fable, or fairy tale. While these may contain elements of myth, their purpose is to entertain and in some cases educate, while the purpose of myth is to bring about a transformation in the person wrestling with that myth. What happened to the hero in a myth can happen to us if we internalize the myth and recognize the hero’s journey as our own—a journey from I to Thou and beyond.

Ultimately we are discovering that God is not a Being separate from us. The revelation is coming from within us, from that deepest and most inclusive sense that realizes that I and Thou are both manifestations of the singular Source and Substance of all reality which we may call God. Angels are imaginative faculties/capacities of ourselves that can lift the I-It of our ego-centered minds into the I-Thou of world-centered soul, and then lead both toward the I-I of God-centered spirit. Our myths are calling us to realize the truth of the revelation of the sixth-century BCE Chandogya Upanishad: Tat tvam asi—“You are that; you are God.”⁹