Baking & Spirit!

:hi: Hello, Everyone and a Very Happy New Year!:toast:

I'm just wondering if anyone else on ASAH discovered or rediscovered something about themselves that allowed them to connect with others in a beautiful and uplifting way?
I'm just sitting here 30 minutes past the new hour, and was grooving on what I'll be baking all day tomorrow, I mean today. I rediscovered the love of baking this past month, and know I should post this in the Cooking & Baking Forum. But it's more than just baking. In my quasi hermetic life, I'd been searching (just a little) for a way to connect with the world at large, and I realized the connection started without any real conscious effort after I baked a crazy delicious (as my sister put it) strawberry cake for my step-daughter's 15 birthday mid December. I've bake 6 cakes and 4 lasagnas since for family and friends of family who after a taste requested one of their own. What a joyfully delicious month it's been.

I can't resist telling you that I'm baking, of course, chocolate chip cookies, double chocolate peppermint cookies, dulce de la Leche cheescake squares, lemon whoopie pies, and snickerdoodles! I'm floating just thinking about him O8)

And how lucky your friends and family are....

I haven't experienced anything like this, but can relate anyway, especially because I am salivating when I read your post.

When we bake something with delicious ingredients like love and joy, how can it miss?
What a wonderful, generous gift.
And may all our creations this New Year be as tasty!


P.S. - I do hope you'll share some of those recipes in the Cooking Forum!
Also love your new 'signature' picture. And meant to ask before about your female icon.
Who is she and what's the story?

It really is a blessing.
Hmm, I wonder where I got that signature? :) Thank you. I tell you, when I saw it, it was like a quickening and I had to have it. Just wish I could have kept it in color :grr:

Thanks for asking about the picture. Her tentative name is The Starmaker and she's not finished yet. I started the painting in Jan. '08 after I had a vision of this goddess within a nebula creating stars and placing them just so within the heavens. At one point, she stopped and looked at her handiwork, as if considering whether it was worthy enough. She had a halo of stars and I think moons in different phases circling her head. But there was this one sun between her eyes that was almost blinding.

About the same time last year, I started learning about Gnosis and direct experience with the divine as a path to enlightenment. And then learned of the Pistis Sophia (or power-wisdom intrinsic in all of us), a story about creation that Christ told his disciples, his mom, and Martha. Sophia, an Aeon, the highest of deities, who is also light but had a long struggle through chaos and darkness during her search for the Light of Lights. I knew that I was being connected to Sophia in the vision before ever knowing of her, and stopped drawing to learn more. Amazing, all those years of Catholicism and never a hint of any such esoteric mysteries.

Blessed be, may this new year reveal the answers to more mysteries on our individual paths to the divine.

creative journey is leading you on!

Thanks for showing the whole frame. There's so much more to it than that
little icon can reveal. What medium are you using?
Black and white or color? If it IS in color I'd love to see it and also larger some time if you
ever feel so inclined.
And one more request -
I wonder if you would share some more
about your discovery of Gnosis and the Pistis Sophia some time?
The mysteries seem to live within us until they magically
surface right on schedule. Perhaps memories...?

Have you seen this web library of Gnostic writings?
http://www.gnosis.org/library/psoph.htm

The piece is in graphite. There was very little color in the vision, just light and dark.

Yes! http://www.gnosis.org/library/psoph.htm is where I downloaded the Pistis Sophia but it is gnosticweb.com's free courses that has helped me with meditating this past year. But I found gnosticweb's Pistis Sophia, with insights by Samael Aun Weor, too daunting. Gnosis.org's plain text is easier for me to read.

Your question of sharing more of Gnosis and the Pistis Sophia is, indeed, a heady one. Every time I've sat to write I'm faced with my inner battle. Where is this knowledge taking me? Into Christian paganism? Female Theology delivered by Christ himself? The Pistis Sophia is dissolving my views of Catholicism even more and makes me resent the religion even more. Now, even more stuff to work through. Ugh!

The discovery came about through the many discussions my husband and I have had about Catholicism over the years and our mutual love of St. Thomas, in his very doubt, that led us to research Thomas beyond what we know. We found out about his gospel, then The Magdalene's gospel, and finally the Pistis Sophia. I guess, in general Gnosis, there before the Christian era, found in all religions that seeks to celebrate the divinity of Wo-Man; a Wo-Man-God partnership, a pathway of seeking divine experience through knowledge.

The Christ figure, according to the Pistis Sophia, returns after the resurrection to teach his disciples, both male and female, how they all share equally in the secrets of the Kingdom, and the narrative is the female soul, Sophia, she who is the holy wisdom, represents each of us in the struggle through the worlds of darkness within the body, the psychic depth, and the spiritual voyage. The road map for activating the divine feminine, as spoken by Sophia, are the petitions from the release of the elements of imbalance.

In the Pistis Sophia, Jesus explains even after merging in divine unity, we will face overcoming the Archons, intelligent forces in the universe that seek to inhibit the human race (we, considered an experiment) from finding divine destiny. After this, we qualify to become cosmic citizens, co-participating in the greater universe.

So to me, the Pistis Sophia is Jesus saying that you can be Christed through the soul of the feminine, and not finding the feminine within leads to torment by a judgmental God or a system of beliefs that suppresses the psyche.

This post will become way to long, so I will OP the beginning of her story, so far as best I can understand it. I'm only in the 35th chapter of over 300 chapters. But there is also much that I want to share about Mary Magdalene's gospel, it's just too beautiful and I'll end this post with this that so satisfying to me.

Mary said of the Pistis Sophia, “She has seen the End-Of-Days and the Beginning-Of-Life, and she is ancient, yet she is ever young. She is the understanding of wisdom, and knowledge of truth, the perfection of awareness. All is in her sight, yet she desires nothing. She is the fruition of womanhood having given birth to Divine Illumination.”

about that also allows you to connect with the world.

Feeding the body with things made with love also feeds the soul.

Thanks for sharing this with us, tcdq. :)

I haven't had any similar discovery, but it would be wonderful if it were to happen.

:hug:

much as a kid are bubbling up. It was there all along, just wanting an out.

Meditation through cooking..wonderful stuff!!
You better post that strawberry cake recipe sometime.
Keep us posted on further revelations, I'd enjoy seeing where this journey takes you!

solitary but leads back out again.
I will definitely start checking out the Cooking Forum, I can't imagine people so into food aren't finding a spiritual connection on many levels that makes them better people.
But for your pleasure, here is the recipe and the delightful blog that goes with it, then you'll really really drool when you see this fantastic cake! http://www.joythebaker.com/blog/archives/95

is always comforting...TLC is a special ingredient, it's sometimes the only thing that sets apart a good from a great recipe. Intention is a beautiful thing. :loveya: