Be he Man, God, or Metaphor, Jesus is reported to have said, “"I will be with you unto the End of the Age." This being the End of the Age (of Pisces), what is meant here?  Jesus also said, "…wide is the path that leadeth to destruction; narrow is the way, and few there are who find it."

The cross, the “sacred heart,” and the fishes (Pisces) are all traditional symbols of Christianity.  Take first the cross.  Making the “sign of the cross” puts the crossing right at the mid-point of the chest, the location of the “sacred heart” – the heart chakra.

The heart is the first of the spiritual chakras.  Life in the lower chakras concerns survival (1st), bonding and sexuality (2nd), and power (3rd).  Only when energy reaches the heart chakra do we become aware that others exist in and of themselves, as expressions of spirit, and not merely in terms of how they affect us.  The heart opens.  The universe is experienced as love.

But love does not immediately “heal all wounds” or resolve all problems.  We react by thinking that it is “you,” the other, who does not understand love.  We blame.  We judge.  Then we no longer have the presence of love, but only the memory.  Conflict returns, and we suffer.  Suffering eventually brings wisdom, and the wisdom is that love is our own responsibility, not someone else’s.  We create our own experience.  Then, for a moment, the energy has passed through the heart and into the throat chakra.  Truth – we walk our talk.

The time of bouncing back and forth to heart chakra, back to lower chakras, to heart, momentarily to throat, then back down again is the time of “being on the cross.”  The heart and chest (the broadest place in the body) and all the abuses of love, from religious conflict to advertising (McDonald’s:  "I’m lovin’ it!”) are the “wide path that leadeth to destruction,” while the truth of self-responsibility is the “narrow way” (the neck and throat) found by the few who become true spiritual warriors.

The cross becomes the “Sword of Truth.”

But what is a sword?  A “sword” is an “S-WORD.”  “S” is an ikon or pictograph, a two-dimensional representation of spin or spiral.  Every time we use an “s” in language, whether in thought, spoken, or written word, we are invoking a spin or vortex.  We are collecting some surrounding reality and pulling it into tighter and tighter orbits until it passes through the apex, like a black hole or a tornado sweeping across a trailer park and twisting trees, cars, motor homes into random bits of wood and steel.  The spiral implodes and destroys.  From the constituent bits, new realities can be assembled.  The SWORD (S-WORD) destroys the old in order to create anew.

That’s the “S,” but what’s the “WORD”?

Words are castings of spells, which is why they are “spelled.”  A word takes potential and turns it actual ("I could do this – I will do that”).  In the terms of contemporary science, words “collapse the wave-form” or turn “virtual reality” (literally, that made of virtues or ideals) into something actual, that which acts in time, makes choices.

If you are caught driving while drinking (a form of life in illusion), you may be asked to “walk a line” as a test of sobriety.  In a similar way, Spirit asks us to learn to “walk a line” – the line that connects Earth and Sky.  When we are responsible for our speech and acts, when there is harmony between our inner story and our outer, the kundalini rises through the heart and throat to the Third Eye, showing us why events have occurred as they have (we have no further stories of martyrdom, or complaints against the world).  Then the top chakra can open, and the “straight and narrow” path is revealed not as a rigid insistence on some external code of behavior, but a supple and graceful response to life as we encounter it.

Yet now we also possess the “sword,” which slashes through falsehood (internal or external) and allows us to destroy illusion.  Finally, the “sword,” in turn, becomes the “magic wand” that draws in the ghosts of illusions past, and casts them out again as new creation.  We have become life artists, the “gods” of our own creation.  But no one possesses the “magic wand” who has not first turned the cross into the sword.