Dweller of the Threshold
Ours is a world where each moment offers the potential for ecstasy or despair. Humans are not the only inhabitants of Earth who savor the bliss of a beautiful spring day, after a long winter, when the sun is warm, and the breeze is cool. We are not the only ones who mourn.
Among the wealthy and the poor, among the religious of every stripe, and the irreligious, of every race, most of us fall through life in a cloud of unknowing. Many reasons for this have been offered: meaninglessness , the consequences of free choice, the mischief of Loki, Pandora’s curiosity, the snake in Eden, the remnants of the bodies of the Titans baked into our bodies by the lightning of Zeus. Freud theorized about thanatos, the death instinct. Jung pondered the shadow. Wilhelm Reich blamed orgasm denial. Marx thought it was all about economics.
In the Chinese classic The Secret of the Golden Flower not only human ignorance, but also cruelty, are caused by the lower soul, the part of our souls that becomes entangled with matter. Longing for freedom, uneasy in the body, unaware of its own higher dimensions, the lower soul longs for the freedom that death brings. The lower soul consumes images of destruction in games and movies, searches the feed for the latest doom and gloom, obsessed with the details of mortality. But if we can awaken to the higher soul, we fall in love with life, as a collaborative creative process, like a miraculous dream orchestrated by the living.
What prevents remembering the true dimensions of the soul? Some have personified this barrier as the Dweller of the Threshold, also called the Guardian of the Threshold. The Dweller of the Threshold received that name in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Zanoni. Here is the first appearance, from chapter four:
Amidst the dwellers of the threshold is ONE, too, surpassing in malignity and hatred all her tribe, — one whose eyes have paralyzed the bravest, and whose power increases over the spirit precisely in proportion to its fear. Does thy courage falter?”
Bulwer-Lytton gives a dramatic characterization to the Dweller:
All fancies, the most grotesque, of Monk or Painter in the early North, would have failed to give to the visage of imp or fiend that aspect of deadly malignity which spoke to the shuddering nature in those eyes alone. All else so dark- shrouded- veiled and larva-like. But that burning glare so intense, so livid, yet so living, had in it something that was almost human, in its passion of hate and mockery- something that served to show that the shadowy Horror was not all a spirit, but partook of matter enough, a least to make it more deadly and fearful an enemy to material forms. As, clinging with the grasp of agony to the wall- his hair erect- his eyeballs starting, he still gazed back upon that appalling gaze- the Image spoke to him- his soul rather than his ear comprehended the words it said.
“Thou hast entered the immeasurable region. I am the Dweller of the Threshold. What wouldst thou with me? Silent? Does thou fear me? Am I not thy beloved? Is it not for me that thou has rendered up the delights of thy race? Wouldst thou be wise? Mine is the wisdom of the countless ages. Kiss me, my mortal lover.” And the Horror crawled near and nearer to him; it crept to his side, its breath breathed upon his cheek!
This Dweller later crawls into bed with the seeker offering him answers to the mysteries of life. Horror and revulsion overcome the man but he surrenders to her amorous promises. Many literature professors consider the Dweller of the Threshold a symbol of the fear humans suffer when we face the raw reality of the unknown. The otherness that can make deep forest, or even night, terrifying to the lonely, the silence of space, the anonymity of disaster.
Blavatsky took up the theme:
Our Dweller is about us all the time. Everything which conflicts with good is an operation of that dweller. Everything which prevents us from taking those steps which we can see would be the better ones for us to take is a dweller…the greatest Dweller we have is doubt, suspicion, fear, lack of faith.
She writes that the Dweller is an amalgam of the residue of past lives, the karmic consequences of past actions, the momentum of the sum total of all misdeeds of a particular soul in myriad bodies including lives as animals and insects. It’s all floating around like the satellites bumping into each other in the junkyard of orbit. And each of us is a magnet attracting what is ours.
Alice Bailey elaborated on Blavatsky’s theme:
Each life sees some progress made; some personality defects straightened out, and some real advance effected. But the unconquered residue, and the ancient liabilities are numerous, and excessively potent, and — when the soul contact’s adequately established — there eventuates a life wherein the highly developed and powerful personality becomes, in itself, the Dweller on the Threshold. Then the Angel of the Presence and the Dweller on the Threshold stand face to face, and then something must be done. Eventually the light of the personal self fades out and wanes in the blaze of glory which emanates from the Angel. Then the greater glory obliterates the lesser.”
Influential feminist and Theosophist Annie Besant also wrote on this subject. In Introduction to Yoga, she wrote about various classes of Dwellers, including elementals that guard the astral plane, persistent evil thought-forms we create during our lives, and the astral and mental remnants of our previous incarnations which attach to, and influence us.
Occult writer and Theosophist Franz Hartmann authored a book called The Dweller of the Threshold in which he wrote:
This Dweller of the Threshold meets us in many shapes. It is the Cerberus guarding the entrance to Hades; the Dragon which St. Michael (spiritual will-power) is going to kill; the Snake which tempted Eve, and whose head will be crushed by the heel of the woman; the Hobgoblin watching the place where the treasure is buried, etc. He is the king of evil, who will not permit that within his kingdom a child should grow up, which might surpass him in power; the Herod before whose wrath the divine child Christ has to flee into a foreign country, and is not permitted to return to his home (the soul) until the king (Ambition, Pride, Vanity, Self-righteousness, etc.) is dethroned or dead.
Hartmann concluded:
To practice Alchemy and to exercise spiritual power, one must be spiritually developed. The first step to this development is the conquering of the Dweller of the Threshold, and the key to the position is the displacement of the love of self by the love of eternal Good, which finds its expression in the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity
Theosophical writer T. Subba Row wrote on the subject as well:
Philosophically it is the great battle in which the human Spirit has to fight against the lower passions in the physical body. Many of our readers have probably heard about the so-called ‘Dweller on the Threshold,’ so vividly described in Lytton’s novel, Zanoni. According to this author’s description, the Dweller on the Threshold seems to be some elemental, or other monster of mysterious form, appearing before the neophyte just as he is about to enter the mysterious land, and attempting to shake his resolution with menaces of unknown dangers if he is not fully prepared.
In Rudolf Steiner’s mystery play, “The Guardian of the Threshold,” the threshold between life and death is crossed by the spiritual aspiriant. We must confront not only the misdeeds we have committed, and the omissions, but also the complications inherent in the families, nations, and races we represent. Until now we had access to this perspective only at death. Now we see clearly what we are, where we are, who we are. To this perfected vision the Guardian admits only the fearless.
Is the Dweller of the Threshold nothing more than a personification of a law of physics? Whenever we change direction we must confront either inertia or contrary momentum. This inherent difficulty in the structure of life can feel like a supernatural creature that opposes our actions. The Demiurge, a divine spirit jealous of its power, fights every human effort to gain wisdom, the Gnostics believed.
Why do so many human beings create, and tolerate, misery? What does a person gain by hating life? When we have wonderful moments, we hate to think that they will end. To truly love another, deeply, constantly and completely, is to wrestle with the terror of mortality. Consciousness, accustomed to timelessness can never quite grasp the temporary nature of human existence. Fear of absence, grief of loss, whisper constantly in our ears, as dangerous to ignore as to obsess upon.
Life lived with an awareness of its frail temporal nature can be a highly meditative state where joy and poignancy together create something greater than existential terror, a spiritual awareness that illuminates every crossroad, the awakening to a reverence for the sacredness of life, to be treasured for it’s delicate transformations.
To hate one’s life, to hate work, to hate those we pretend to love, to hate ourselves, can also, in the extremes of depression and melancholy, become a meditative detachment, an awareness of the futility of the play of everyday life .
But for most people anger and depression, sadism and masochism, obstruct suchness and compassion. Envy replaces wonder. They relieve fear of mortality by welcoming the end of the farce. They deny loss by longing for it. They refuse to know the deep happiness possible here so they will not have to face the doom that must accompany it.
What awe inspiring efforts humans have made to avoid awareness of the threshold. We lose ourselves in jobs, celebrity gossip, politics, war, all the officially important things that must be done, and every variety of compulsion and obsession, including addictions. People fill their lives with drama, with worries, with collections, and trivia, to forget. If we remember, how different will our decisions be? Can we cherish even the ennui and agony of life? What if we love all creatures of each moment as fellow travelers in a fleeting world?
This is the mystery that Buddha wandered and starved to understand. To learn the lessons of death before we must die. To live deeply every moment with who and what we love. To make decisions knowing time is not as predictable as a clock.
One of my teachers used to allow me to sit in a wooden chair by a slightly cracked open door so I could listen to his conversations with people who relied on him for wisdom. One poignant occasion an old Mason, who had long studied with our teacher, sat before him sharing cookies and tea. Sensing death nearing, the student wanted to know if he had learned enough to stay conscious, to hold on to his sense of self as he crossed to the other side. The student didn’t feel he had. He expected some extra sensory perception or other new radical awareness to accompany his readiness. Our teacher reassured him that indeed he had. To die is simple. The habit of consciousness persists.
Excerpt from Spiritual Mysteries, a book in progress.
Photo by Tamra Lucid.
