All Seven & We'll Watch Them Fall

“All seven and we'll watch them fall
They stand in the way of love
And we will smoke them all” –Prince

The work of unifying this great big unsayable love inside us with the humanity we’re meant to embody while here in this world hinges on a spiritual practice that the early Christians called Kenosis, or self-emptying love. 

Each time we can awaken, or become aware that we are trapped in one of the seven powers of the ego, we allow love to overwhelm us, so that we can then release the ego. 

The seven powers of the ego that Christ articulates in Mary’s gospel, that we all contain, later in the 6th century of Christian history became the “seven demons” that Christ expelled from Mary. 

And those “demons” according to Pope Gregory in his homily 33 indicated to him that Mary Magdalene must have been a prostitute. According to Mary’s gospel though, they are simply “powers,” not “demons.” They are powers that we all contain. And they are powers that are not meant to bring us shame. We’re not meant to transcend them, to deny, or to spiritually bypass them. We are meant to experience the fullness of our humanity. All seven.

The word for death in Aramaic, the language Christ spoke, translates as “existing elsewhere.” Ultimately the practice of self-emptying love, the path of kenosis from the earliest form of Christianity, is about being present. 

It’s about actually being present to where we are and who we are with, in each moment. Otherwise, we can spend the majority of our life “existing elsewhere,” trapped in one of the seven egoic powers. And we miss out then on the possibilities and opportunities that only exist when we are fully present to the presence of love right here within us.

It’s about cultivating the capacity to see all seven powers of what it means to be human, of what it means to feel all these hard and sometimes horrible experiences of being fully here, and then letting the ego fall, letting the ego fall, so that the love that endures, the love that remains, comes rising up to envelop it all. 

With only more love,
​M.