12:1 And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. 2 She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth. 3 And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems. 4 His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it. 5 She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, 6 and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which she is to be nourished for 1,260 days.
Rev 12:1:6
The seventh trumpet has sounded. The whole of our subtle body, containing the centres and the channels, has been charged with the new energy of Christ. This enormous transformation is in itself just a preparation for what is to come. And what is to come is the whole possibility of future human evolution.
The woman in the vision is the soul. She is clothed with the Sun, the etheric body. She has the Moon under her feet, the astral body is under the control of the soul. She is crowned with twelve stars, that is, she is gifted with the creative energies of the spiritual worlds.
The soul is pregnant with the I AM, the individuality.
The I AM was given first during the Atlantean period, but the divine self needed the incarnation of Christ to be born.
The birth of the I AM could not happen earlier, because the dragon, the earth forces, want to devour the Self and absorb it into the earth.
Finally, the Christ event gives birth to the I AM. This is the male child who is to rule the nations, our future incarnations. The child is caught up to God, and we have seen that our divine self remains mostly in the spiritual worlds when we come into incarnation.
The soul escapes from the dragon, she will be safe for a time. This time prepares for the greater entry of the I AM into the world. Once again, the number 1,260 is significant. From the thirteenth century the soul was able to bring more of the I AM into incarnation. One result of this is the enormous growth in the ability to think free of the restraints of the past, and the continuing growth of individuality.
In the thirteenth century the rosary was given to the world. This placed the vision of the woman and her child at the centre of Western imagination in the form of Mary and the Christ child.
In 2022, 762 years have passed since this event. There has been an enormous expression of individuality within the world, but this has been countered by a matching rise of selfishness, a tide of thinking that focuses on the physical world as the only reality. We are living in a time when our old consciousness which is essentially a mindset of domination and control must give way to a new way of thinking. This new way of thinking will have to centre on nourishment and nurture. Without care and nurture, our planet will no longer support life. We need these qualities to break the cycles of attack and war which dominate our headlines. We need the qualities of the woman with the child, we need the qualities of Mary, we need to become soul beings, not physical beings.
There is a long way to go in this journey, but each of us can make one choice: the choice to become free, individual, thinking, caring beings. This choice will not only transform our own incarnation and future lives, it will also transform the destiny of the world.
The image
Many depictions of this famous scene show the woman standing above the dragon. Blake however, has shown the woman lying prostrate under the immense power of the dragon.
The soul struggles to combat this cosmic power in order to bring to birth the I AM. Today let us give value to our soul. Let us appreciate the millennia-long struggle to bring our individuality to birth. Each time we make a decision from our desires and wants we deny the soul’s struggle, but each time we make a decision from our spiritual thinking, our spiritual consciousness, we give power to the soul. We give her the wings of the eagle.
Looking at chapter 12, the child that is born is your spiritual I AMness. It is to be particularly noted that that child is a male. Masculinity in the Bible indicates thinking powers. That is the thinking of the ‘I’. The ‘I’ has a consciousness of the Cosmos. I am not speaking of your mind. Your mind has no knowledge of the Cosmos. Your real ‘I’ (that is not sitting here) has a knowledge of the Cosmos. I do not mean cosmic consciousness, that means that the whole of the Cosmos is in me. Consciousness of the Cosmos means that I am in the totality of the Cosmos. That is different isn’t it? So our ‘I’ is a thinking being, a spiritually conscious being.
Rev Mario Schoenmaker, The Book of Revelation, 1983 Lecture Series