Exploring Revelation: Dispel Your Dragon to Find Your SELF
by Rev. Cory Coberforward
Readings
Revelation 12
A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.
Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
“Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.
They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.
Therefore rejoice, you heavens
and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
because he knows that his time is short.”
When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the wilderness, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out of the serpent’s reach. Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent. But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth. Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.
Psalm 104:1b-4 (responsive reading for live service)
LORD my God, you are very great;
you are clothed with splendor and majesty.
The LORD wraps himself in light as with a garment;
he stretches out the heavens like a tent
and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot
and rides on the wings of the wind.
He makes winds his messengers,
flames of fire his servants.
Read the written message below with music videos
There’s a reason that the book of Revelation is often associated with a mushroom or hallucinogenic trip, because the images found throughout Revelation seem to come straight out of one. What’s further interesting about the book written by John when he was “in the spirit,” is that the images of the book of Revelation are all references to other moments of the Bible but blended into a psychedelic mixture. Our reading from Revelation 12 today is one of the most iconic images from that trippy book, describing a woman clothed in the sun who is set upon by a seven-headed red dragon. And like many images in Revelation, although it resembles a crazy dream, the parable that it expresses invites us to overcome our personal dominating, distracted, destructive demons to allow our creative, heavenly Self and God to shine through.
If I had to associate one thing in my life to a red dragon, it would have to be my egotism and in general, my mind when empowered with personal identity. What’s funny is that it took me a while to realize how destructive, or at least unpleasant for me, my mind is under the power of my concocted personal self-image. Far more obvious was the hurtful nature of what is often termed egotism, and even that took years to uncover. I always thought that I was relatively harmless and good, at least compared to this narcissist or that one, ignoring how nefarious and subtle personal selfishness can be.
I remember specific moments in my life when I truly awoke to some level of my egotism and defensiveness, leading me to strive to change. For example, when I was a middle-schooler, someone told me that they overheard one of my teachers crying and complaining about my behaviour to a friend in the grocery store! For my 11-year-old mind, heavy-handed teachers weren’t people impacted by their jobs but figures of authority meant to be usurped. This revelation opened my eyes to how my behaviour could impact even them, and I became determined not to be a burden on their lives. As you can imagine, from there the list of revelations goes on and on!
Now, in Revelation 12 I think we have a similar kind of unveiling. Like our own egos, our dragon today has many heads, and also like our egos, these heads all carry crowns and horns meant to represent how much value, authority, and power we’ve given to them. One of the key problems is that we tend to enjoy and empower our egos due to a false identification with them and due to our false ideas of who and what we are. We can think of this dragon as the serpent from the Garden of Eden, but all grown up! And like that serpent, it is from our identification with our base natures and our investment in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (instead of the tree of life) that brings us out of the garden.
Like in our story, our attention should instead start to turn to empower the woman clothed in the sun at our core. “The church” in its universal sense is often depicted as a woman in scripture, and clearly, here clothed in the sun, she is meant to represent the church in its perfection or the divine aspects of each of us. This representation goes beyond what religion we claim to be a part of, but speaks to that loving, beautiful, abundant, and wise aspect in all beings. It is that part of us that is outcast and in hiding from the dragon that is our ego.
More specifically, divine sages such as Jesus Christ told us often what makes the church, even if Christendom tends to ignore it. He said it was becoming again like children, turning to the part of us full of wonder, openness, deep love, simplicity, and its own type of profound wisdom. He preached, “Repent [meaning turn], for the realm of God is near.” Or in other words, he was telling people that heaven is nearer than near, so turn to it, drop the pretense and the attachments, and turn to God in the very light of awareness and being itself.
Swedenborg believed that figuratively, God is like the sun, full of the light and heat (truth and love) that makes life possible. He even thought that in the spiritual realm, God appears as the sun in heaven (among other things), and that the higher angels (who were once humans) always faced this sun even as they turned to work and connect with each other. Thankfully, this brings us back to the trippiness of Revelation and the importance of the sun in Biblical and other spiritual imagery!
You see, Swedenborg believed that the source of deeply meaningful visions like Revelation was the same source as hallucinogenic and dreamlike visions, as well as the archetypes we find in literature around the world and the shared imagery used throughout indigenous spirituality. This source is the symbolic nature of the human mind, which is the same as saying that it is the symbolic nature of the spiritual realm itself (since heaven and hell are embodiments of spiritual-mental states).
To be clothed in the sun is to be entirely immersed in the light of consciousness itself, the light we all receive but often misuse to empower our dragon. When we actively turn to this light within, turning to the awareness of life itself, turning to God, we start to disempower our projection as an ego. This false personal identity feels like us, but in reality, we are but the observers of it. We observe our false sense of ourselves arise, but often (because we identify with these feelings and thoughts) we empower them instead of turning to the light of love and true wisdom within, which is not bounded by the passing thoughts we have about ourselves but is the very thing that perceives them. We are so used to jumping on the next thing and our projections, that we miss the very beingness that’s always with us (and is us!) underlying every perception. We truly miss the forest for the trees!
But let’s not get it twisted, to notice our beingness doesn’t require that we force away non-beingness or our thoughts and ideas about ourselves. It only requires that we start to take the time to notice beingness! Divesting from our attachments and feelings of neediness and limitation will help, but the only way to truly know love and truth is to turn to it, this light is beyond a concept and beyond words and must be turned to in our experience and not just understood. This is why Jesus is called the light of the world, and the Bible says that it is only through him that we find God – meaning that in the Bible, Jesus represents and is awareness and beingness itself, and it is only through him, through our unity with him, that we can enter heaven, because our very nature as awareness is heaven itself! Even for those who don’t believe in Christ, it is their very light of consciousness that is the light of God, they need not believe in a historical figure like Jesus to turn to it.
And so, the story of Revelation 12 is the story of how our dragons keep us from knowing the woman clothed in the sun within and her offspring, keeping the truly divine aspect of ourselves from shining through very much. But as we start to nurture our inner lady-in-light, our inner church so to speak, we’ll come to be amazed by the freedom we start to find in the light of inner truth and love, as our dragon is eventually cast away. There were many more revelations in my life after the one with my teacher, and probably more to come, but each realization was only fruitful to the extent I allowed that light to awaken some compassion and openness in me, some sense of unity with something greater than my sense of self. May we all allow Revelation today to awaken us to our natural compassion and sense of unity, found in the space beyond words within, in the very light and spaciousness that allows all other thoughts their day in the sun.
From you shines peace, love, and wisdom,
Rev. Cory