Harry Potter's Invitation to the World

by Vickie Ewell

 

Chapter 76 – Going Through the Trapdoor
(HP Chapter 16)

Carefully stepping over the dog’s legs, Ron pulled on the ring of the trapdoor, which swung open easily. The physical level of the Tree of Life is sometimes referred to as Adam Kadmon’s feet. Ron stepped over the dog’s legs, inferring that even though Harry started the ascension process, Ron was now fully onboard. Once onboard, the door opened easily. There was no special Key involved other than being active.

When Ron looked into the entryway, all he could see was blackness. The first half of the Path (the first four levels) prepares the kids to enter the real Black Phase, The Dark Night of the Soul, which occurs in Book 5. A form of ignorance always precedes moving to the next level of being. The Black Phase is LONG. It takes a full five levels before we have accomplished the task of giving away everything that we own, or identify with.

To reach Level Three, there was no way down except to jump. This seemed to reflect The Fool tarot card where the traveler with a dog yapping at his heels was about to step off the cliff into the mortal, physical world. The idea being presented was one of action regardless of our fear of the future.

Harry waved to get Ron’s attention before he made a move and pointed at himself. He couldn’t speak because he was still playing the flute. At the point where we move from the Etheric level to the Astral level, we do not have audible communication with our Divine Soul, but He is still in charge and attempts to get our attention by other means. This is because he’s busy raising our vibration level to equal Fluffy’s, that of the One Power.

Ron was shocked that Harry wanted to go first. He could only see Harry in terms of what he, himself, was feeling. Harry passed the flute to Hermione, so she could keep the music playing. Although Harry has the power to raise our vibration, mentally, we have to keep it going ourselves. Biblical texts speak of our creation in terms of sound: God spoke, and the One Power obeyed his request. In the few seconds it took to hand over the instrument, the dog twitched and growled, but fell right back to sleep as soon as Hermione began to play.

The music definitely has to be ongoing if we want to put our own Fluffy to sleep. We can’t just go to church on Sundays and wind up with any type of positive, lasting change. This whole scene seems to be about moving to a place of Faith. When we give up believing that physical laws will save us, we need something to replace those laws with, and the next step is moving into cosmic or Spiritual Law: living by the Spirit rather than the letter-of-the-law, eye-for-an-eye mentality.

Harry carefully climbed over the dog and peered into the hole. Both Ron and Harry had now ascended, but Hermione was only in the process of doing so. This seemed to relate to Hermione’s petrified condition in Book 2. The Astral world can be quite frightening, symbolized by Harry and Ron unable to see the bottom of the hole. They didn’t know exactly what they were getting themselves into.

This reminded me of the bottomless pit. I’m sure that is what it felt like to the kids. To do this – to move from the Etheric plane to the Astral plane – they have to have faith in themselves, faith in each other, and faith in the One Power that it will work all things to their good.

Harry climbed down into the hole as far as he could go, yet still hang on. It was the Divine Soul that was still leading the way. Christ leads, and we follow.

Harry told Ron that if anything happened to him, he was not to follow. He was to go back and send a message to Dumbledore through Hedwig. The implications here are mind-boggling. The New Soul moved us to the Astral plane, which turned out to be an act of Faith for himself, but this also clearly indicated that Harry was not afraid of death.

When Ron agreed, Harry let go…

Harry could feel cold, damp air rush past him as he fell. This falling motion made me visualize The Fall. Falling seems to be a recurring theme in Book 1, and in this instance, Harry fell before the others did. In the beginning of Book 3, Harry suffered and endured a tremendous amount of emotional abuse over the course of the summer. Hagrid’s gift to help him was a book about monsters, but it came with no instructions on how to tame it, so it bit him.

As a result, Harry’s temper got away from him when his aunt insulted his mother. Harry was able to endure the ridicule that was directed toward his self, but he didn’t know what to do with the emotions that bubbled up and spilled over when it came to someone criticizing his parents. He blew up his aunt, ran away from home, was rescued by the Knight bus, and then acquitted for his use of underage magic.

For Harry, the Fall wasn’t so bad after all. He experienced a soft landing and sat up. Not used to the dim light, he couldn’t see very well, but it felt like he was sitting on some type of plant. Plants receive their energy needs from the sun. Their life cycle is circular. A seed sprouts, grows into a plant, wilts, and then dies, but during that process, the plant sheds seeds that repeat the cycle again in later generations. The inference here was that nature played a strong role in our education at this level of being.

As Harry looked up to where he had come from, the Light was as small as a postage stamp. This made me think of Harry’s aunt being above Harry, bouncing along the ceiling. The lack of Light alerts us to the fact that Harry has traveled a great distance inside of himself to reach this point. Hermione described the drop later on as miles below the school.

In addition, the great distance between Harry and the other kids points to the ability of our consciousness to extend beyond the limits of the physical body as well as the physical world. It also suggests that our consciousness might actually exist on more than one level at the same time.

Harry yelled to the others that it was okay to follow him. “It’s a soft landing,” he said. “You can jump!” This suggests there is some type of foresight that begins to function at this level. Unlike intuition, foresight isn’t a feeling or blind action we take without knowing why. It’s the ability to use and depend on nature’s laws to always work in the same way.

We can envision the type of future we want, such as Harry envisioning himself reaching the Stone before Snape, or we can foresee that Ron and Hermione’s landing will be as soft as Harry’s was because there was no reason to believe that nature would act differently.

Ron followed first, landing next to Harry, and then Hermione followed, landing on Harry’s other side. Since Hermione tended to fear the unknown, this took a giant leap of Faith for her to listen to and follow Harry’s guidance. Hermione was generally portrayed as being rather antagonistic when others weren’t doing what she believed was right, but Level Three will teach Hermione the real-life application of her knowledge and book learning