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NINTH PHASE: THE GATE TO IMMORTALITY - THE PLUTO STATION
The experience of death must come to every individual on the Illumined Road; but, as it comes, the man who has passed successfully through the stages symbolized by the Uranian transfiguration and the Neptunian trans-substantiation of the very contents of selfhood is ready to meet this experience of death in a way impossible to the ordinary person still controlled by the power of the ego and the energies of earth nature — in a conscious way.
To die in full and lucid consciousness; to retain throughout this dying an objective awareness of the process of relinquishment of the bio-psychic structures which until then conditioned the experience of living; to enter deliberately and purposefully into what to other human beings seems to be at least temporary darkness and loss of identity — these are possibilities to which great occultists and sages have given the weight of their testimony. When these possibilities are clearly defined within a truly philosophical frame of reference unencumbered with fears, illusions or dogmatic preconceptions, they should not appear fantastic or nonsensical. They become logical necessities of human evolution which, eventually, individuals who are prepared and ready for them will experience as actual facts. Death need have no terror for anyone who understands the nature and character of the ego, its formation and its purpose. What has beginning must of necessity have an end in a universe in which all motions are cyclic. But no man has to identify his essential self with any one particular beginning; and thus no man needs to lose his identity through the corresponding end.
The understanding of death implies an equal understanding of birth. He who knows how and why any one thing begins knows likewise how and why it ends; and, thus knowing, can transform this end into a new and greater beginning. This is the secret of "personal immortality". Death, however, is not a simple or single event, because the conscious and individualized man is not only one thing. The formation of his ego is a process distinct from the generation of his physical organism; and whenever entities have different beginnings, they must likewise end differently. And "end" does not have to mean cessation and annihilation; it can signify transition and reorganization.
A physical organism, seen in the world of forces, which is by far the more "real" world, is the field of operation of various types of electro-magnetic (and other) energies differentiated for specific organic purposes. The various systems of the body (blood circulation, nerves, muscles, digestive apparatus, endocrine glands, etc.) depend upon the interaction of these energies in order to function healthily. The energies themselves are differentiated manifestations of what we might call for lack of a better word, the life-force. Throughout the process of fecundation and gestation they acquire their specialized characteristics by energizing and integrating the substance of cells and organs which are made available to the new growth within the mother's womb.
After the body is completely formed and has reached its full maturity these energies begin slowly to lose something of their intensity or precise tone, while various kinds of toxins accumulate in the cells. They tend-to give up their differentiated traits, to become unclear rhythms. Eventually they return to the undifferentiated character of the life-force; and this is the death of the body. The universal homogeneous life-force has won back to itself the differentiated heterogeneous energies which operated in the various functional systems of the organism. The many energies have been reabsorbed into the vast unity of the ocean life-force. The body which these many energies animated and operated has become disintegrated under the pressure of this life-force.
Thus it is universal life that destroys the Separated living organisms. This is no difficult paradox, for consider the fish of the ocean: they are actually a pocket of transformed sea-water separated from the ocean by skin and muscles. But, when they die, the differentiated sea-water within returns to the great sea, and the tissues of skin and flesh also decay into this sea-substance. Man's body likewise is differentiated earth-substance (including water and air), and at death this substance decomposes into the earth; while the energies animating the body return to the electro-magnetic ocean of the one life-force which permeates our whole planet, and presumably its entire orbital field.
A not too dissimilar process should be found operating in the case of the ego which is a structure of psychic and mental elements differentiated through the formative years of the life of personality. These psycho-mental elements do not come out of nothing. They are actually the results of the generic evolution of humanity and of the collective harvest of feeling-images, meanings, concepts, ideals, and purposes produced by a society, a culture, a community. This collective psychomental sea of human values is not only a vast collection of images and ideas; it is a vast reservoir of energy — human energy in a collective un-individualized state, psychic-mental energy. An individual person draws from this reservoir in order to give substance to his slowly forming and differentiating ego. The individualized consciousness giving form and substance to the realization, "I am this particular person" progressively emerges from the collectively evolving mind of humanity-as-a-whole.
Death leads, in time, to the final victory of the collective mind over the conscious ego — the reabsorption of the latter into the former — unless the ego has been able to become a prepared field for the descent and individualization of the spiritual Essence (its Star) belonging to a more encompassing cycle of being; unless man has experienced the Transfiguration, the "divine Marriage of Heaven and Earth" within his personality.
These alternatives however do not begin to present themselves only at the time of physical death. They outline themselves gradually during the last years and even decades of the life. We see the average individual person of our time and society losing little by little after maturity the expansive aggressiveness of his individuality and the sharpness of his "difference" from his fellow-men. Especially after forty, the collective power of race, tradition, and culture in most cases asserts itself ever more strongly, subduing worn out rebelliousness and the set features of the egocentric individual.
This may mean a deepening of self through the assimilation of communal values and energies which, in the heat of his youthful attempts at self-individualization and originality, he had repudiated or to which he had failed to give conscious attention and personal significance. It may mean also a surrender of the individualized attitude, born of personal experiences and inner realizations, to the collective sea of the race's past. In most cases, it means far more a progressive surrender to, than a conscious "assimilation" of, collective values; and death merely puts its final seal upon the process. Society, civilization and humanity overcome the individual ego which thereafter remains only a memory (perhaps a very potent one), a latent focus of future crystallization in the collective unconscious; or a "shade" — sometimes a very talkative one, of some extraneous stream of psychic energy is made to reanimate its patterns for a show of fictitious personality!
This is not, however, an absolutely inevitable ending to the individualizing process of ego-formation within the lifespan of a human personality. If this personality has developed clear-cut and distinct ego-structures through socially significant and personally creative behavior and thought, these structures can become the focus for the incorporation of the Star-Self (the Saturn phase of the Illumined Road); and as this occurs the power of this incorporation may overcome .the inevitable pull toward reabsorption into the psychic and mental ocean of collective humanity. The transfigured ego, filled with Neptunian spirit-released substance (the "Living Bread that descendeth from Heaven"), can withstand the pressure of the return of the energies and the chemicals of the body to universal nature. He escapes the whirlpool of disintegrating forces, and remains a focus of individual consciousness, serving now the purpose of the greater self — the "He" that has become "I". This is what has been called "personal immortality", represented, in our culture, by the risen Christ able to demonstrate his glorious immortal being in and through a "body of light", the Risen Body of Christ — known to Eastern occultists as the Nirmanakaya Body of the perfected Adept.
This condition of consciousness and being can be at least approximately understood by comparing it to what would happen to a man who, after falling asleep, would find himself still in full consciousness of his individual identity and able to operate in some trans-substantial realm of activity, beyond (or rather "through") the physical. To fall asleep is indeed, for all practical purposes of personal existence, to die temporarily as a conscious ego aware of self and of an objective world. Sleep takes place as the differentiated and individualized elements of the total personality (body and psyche) are overcome by the pressure of the collective and generic factors of human nature. Symbolically speaking, the "sea" presses so heavily upon the "fish" that the membranes separating the fish's organs from the sea collapse temporarily, and a state of suspended animation results which we call sleep.
During this period of suspended animation the individualizing energy of the organism regains strength, the strength once more to withstand the all-around pressure of the undifferentiated sea of the life-force in which we live and have our separated being. In sleep, then, the "individual" is forced to become subservient to, and to be temporarily absorbed by the "generic". Human nature operates in and through the sleeping individual without he being able to resist its rhythms and dictates. The prodigal son having returned home is once more part of the collective entity, the family.
Another illustration, easily understandable, is presented by what occurs in trees during winter. The living fluids of trees withdraw, as it were, into the roots. The sap hibernates within the great womb of the soil, from which it originally emerged under the individualizing and stem-producing power of springtime. Likewise the ego-consciousness of the individual person withdraws during sleep into its "roots" and within the vast all-human wombs of the generic unconscious (i.e., human nature) and of the collective unconscious, (the collective past and tradition of the individual's culture, religion, nation, etc.).
The ego is compelled to withdraw; he cannot maintain his individualized separate rhythms of existence against the incessant pressure of the collective. He must give up consciousness and activity in an objective world, until he regains the power to reassert himself as a separate individual entity in control of an awakened body.
This is why the Hindu yogi, whose intense struggles of will aim at the full individualization of consciousness and the retention of individuality through and beyond death, strives eagerly to overcome sleep and the need for sleep. He refuses to die everyday, as an individual, into the collective being of humanity and of his culture; and he seeks to build for his self a permanent vehicle of consciousness (an immortal organization of psycho-mental energies) which the death of the physical organism will not be able to shatter or slowly to disintegrate.
The average person of our present humanity every night dies as an individual. He lets human nature and the collective energies of his community take control of his physical and psychic instrumentalities for action. This control of the collective unconscious over the mechanisms of consciousness manifests often in what we call "dreams". The voice of the collective wisdom of the mother-race and mother-culture speaks, in the usually confused language of dream-images, to the wayward child-ego who has asserted in too eccentric, too differentiated and thus too dangerous ways his will to be a unique and original individual. It is a normative voice, that seeks to compensate for the abnormalities of individualized human existence, especially in our artificial city environment. It is the voice of the "roots" of human existence; a conservative power stressing, not the new ways of evolution, but rather the old wisdom of collective experience and of age, the secure path of long-tested tradition and wholesome living.
This "descent into the root" of humanity, performed at the close of the day'-s activity and, more conclusively, at the end of the cycle of life in an objective body of earth-substances, is expressed in the astrological symbolism of Pluto. So Pluto has been associated with the idea of death; and it should have been likewise linked with the act of falling asleep. Pluto is indeed to be understood as the power which compels all separate individualizations (egos, national entities, particular cultures, etc.) to return to their collective roots or foundations of being.
However, this return to the roots, inevitable as it is at the close of any cycle of individualized existence, can be performed in either of two ways. It can be an unconscious and compulsive collapse and a more or less final disintegration of that which had achieved individual form and differentiated consciousness; but it can also be, in some rare instances, a conscious and deliberate act of repudiation of, and liberation from, a particular layer of collective being from which the individual once emerged and to which he need no longer be attached.
In the first case, death is truly the end of the cycle of individual personal existence. What remains of this cycle is; on one hand, a spiritual harvest (the seed-essence of truly assimilated individual experiences which had spiritual value) and the "manure" of all strictly materialistic tendencies and impulses; on the other hand, the more or less persistent imprint of the person's deeds, thoughts, feelings and spiritual radiations in the collective memory of those who loved him, were touched, inspired, stimulated by him — or even forced to hate him unforgettably!
In the second case, death, experienced in full consciousness on the Illumined Road, means freedom from bondage to forms and substances no longer useful to the individualized spirit and reintegration within a greater spiritual Whole.
The first alternative refers to the destiny of most personal egos; the second is experienced by the individual who has transferred his allegiance to the Star, his celestial and permanent Identity. This individual having experienced a new sense of conscious identity (Saturn), a new release of spiritual-celestial power (Uranus) and the growth within his inner being of a new type of substantial-dynamic organization (Neptune) is ready to repudiate and relinquish utterly all that had been previously in the place of these three new factors Of being — his old sense of self, his old type of earth-conditioned energies, and the earth-born organism itself, the physical body. The individual experiencing the symbolic Crucifixion consciously and deliberately "dies" to the "common humanity" of earth-born men, as well as to the patterns, biases, greeds and purposes of a disintegrating society represented by the Jewish High-Priest bound to tribal dogmas, and by Pilate, the Roman Administrator, whose hands are tied by political expediency and intellectual confusion.
Even though the Resurrection is to follow, the Crucifixion is a Plutonian event, for it implies also a "descent into hell". The Star-transfigured individual must meet, assimilate and bless the collective evils of the race and civilization from which he once emerged as a struggling individual, because no one can completely relinquish what he has not experienced down to the deepest depths - not only in his individual nature, but in terms of the collective memory of humanity. "Hell" is the imprint of all past human evil in the collective memory of the Mind of Man. To face this and not to sink in horror or fear is the final price to pay for personal immortality. Such a confrontation is the ultimate Pluto-experience.
The meaning of this experience should be more easily understood if we consider what has been taking place this century in the realm of Western civilization, especially since the discovery of Pluto. The cycle of European Western Society is ending; the collective "ego" — structures (the culture, traditions and set values) of this Society, born some 1200 years ago, are breaking down in death. Can this death become a Crucifixion, prelude to a Resurrection?
It can only be so if the human collectivities which have emerged from the European cycle and established themselves as national entities in other lands succeed in focusing clearly within their own collective consciousness the power and light of the spirit that shone only dimly through the lifespan of the European Society. This European Society experienced a Uranian visitation in the eighteenth century and a Neptunian re-organization of its substance (the Industrial Revolution) in the nineteenth. But what did it do with them? What did we, of the United States, having emerged from mother-Europe, do with them?
The United States, as a national collectivity, is potentially the Risen Body of Europe. Our federal organization of States, peoples and faiths is potentially the embryo of this glorious Body that might be. We could become symbolically, in relation to the Europe of the Gothic age and the Renaissance, what the Risen Christ was to Jesus, the Galilean Adept. We could become a light-giving universalistic God-revealing civilization, gradually superseding or absorbing the European culture which, while nobly striving and inspired, nevertheless was still filled with conflict and bound by old tribal and feudal patterns. We could; yet, in order to fulfill this glorious future we would have in fact and not merely in theory, to become free from Europe's ancient forms of bondage, and from new ones of our own, but we would have to face the confrontation with Europe's "hells" far more intelligently and creatively than we have done so far.
The progressive decline of European culture and traditions (and before Europe of older civilizations) can only mean Crucifixion in a The Illumined Road Jesus-like sense if we of America can "descend into hell" and consciously meet, assimilate and bless the collective evils of Western civilization; and having done so, "arise on the third Day" in a Body of Glory, focal field for a global civilization that need not die, as all civilizations have so far died.
It is indeed much to ask of "these United States"; for how tragically we have failed, in so many instances, to live up to the occasion! Yet this is our potential destiny; as it was the potential destiny of the Alexandria of the first centuries B.C. and A.D. with regard to the dying Hellenized Mediterranean Society of the day. Always, as a human cycle ends, there is something born in and from this cycle which has the potentiality of becoming an immortal organism, gathering-in all that was spiritual in this cycle and re-incorporating without break of conscious identity the essence of the cycle into a larger and more universal one. The potentiality only; for in all but rare instances the Plutonian confrontation with the shock of death and with the accumulated evil of the past shatters the sense of personal identity.
Man "falls" asleep, much as he "falls" in love and "falls" into the hells he has summoned. Man dies in his ego, and the image of the Star within his soul (if at all present!) is much too weak to serve as a pulsating heart-center for the actual re-integration of self in terms of celestial vitality (Uranus) and of divine substance (Neptune). Thus Pluto means death and the loss of conscious identity. He is the ultimate Tester — not like Saturn whose tests deal with the everyday confrontations of organic ego-controlled existence, but in a far deeper sense. What Pluto tests is the capacity in every individual to transfer his sense of personal identity from the realm of earth-objectivity and bio-psychic attachments to that of "celestial" activity — the realm where, as a Star, he finds himself one in purpose and in being with his Companions, within a symbolical Constellation (a "spiritual Brotherhood").
Pluto guards the path that leads through unconscious death or conscious Crucifixion to some type of celestial re-integration. Alas, the awesome character of the confrontations he summons as necessary conditions for re-integrations in conscious Selfhood is such that only but a very few men can face them and retain their full individual consciousness and their contact with the Star. Unless one has truly experienced this Star within one's self, the Plutonian tests can only mean disintegration and unconscious dying; for, during them, the darkness of "hell" shuts out all the sky and the Stars that are above. But, if the divine Presence remains vibrant within the soul temporarily submerged by the ancient evil, then, this Presence can act as the core of the new "Body of light", the celestial body, the Christ-Body. And the Resurrection follows.
