The Philosophy of Operative Wholeness

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PRELUDE TO A NEW INTERPRETATION OF REALITY

Dane Rudhyar

Any systematic interpretation of correlated facts of existence — be it a primitive, magical interpretation of natural events, a "great religion," a philosophical or cosmological system, or the application of the "scientific method" — is undertaken to fulfill a collective human need. I use the term need in its broadest sense here, and it includes what is usually considered play:children and animals play to satisfy biological needs. For adult human beings, play satisfies not only physical but, more especially, psychological and sociocultural needs; collective games and sports strengthen the community spirit. The Hindu interpretation of the totality of world events as the Play (lila) of Brahma in turn can be interpreted as a theistic symbolization of the cyclic fulfillment of an ever-repeated cosmogenic need. As we shall see throughout this book, the actual appearance and existence of the objective universe also meets a fundamental need which takes a multitude of forms and which can be metaphysically interpreted: the need of Wholeness.

The primary need of any form of existence is survival as a whole, that is, as an integral system of activities. The basic imperative for all biological species is to survive in the harsh, competitive conditions of the biosphere. At the human level, this need can be met only through cooperation — in acts and thinking — thus through social organization and culture. As mankind has evolved from a primitive, unselfconscious, and compulsive state of quasi-animal, instinctual group activity and awareness, and has reached its present condition of highly technological and intellectualized existence in complex social and multi- national systems of organization, a great variety of psychic, emotional, personal, and intellectual needs have taken ever-changing forms. Especially today new ones are emerging, engendered by the extremely rapid transformation of the way of life of most human groups and individuals. This transformation has been occurring under the pressure of the industrial and electronic revolutions, which in turn both resulted from and intensified the development of a historically new kind of consciousness — the personalized and mentalized consciousness of "individuals" intent on asserting a centralized and autonomous type of activity.

A descriptive, personalistic psychology such as Abraham Maslow's speaks of a hierarchy of human needs. This is practical and valuable when dealing with the results of the frustration of these needs. But all psychological systems are based on a philosophical and ontological approach to the total set of human experiences called reality. We may speak here of metaphysics, but this term is unfortunate and today rather meaningless, for it has been used in several ways. The basic question is not how to interpret what is beyond (meta) the physical world, but to define the approach one takes to the fact of being — thus to what is.

What is called knowledge is, at any stage of human evolution and cultural development, a set of images and concepts (or symbols and principles of organization) according to which the collectivity of human beings interprets what all its "sane" and mature members accept as "facts." This includes facts of perception and of individual and collective responses to perceptions which come either through the senses or through internal changes of feeling (including what is imprecisely called intuition).

Human knowledge constantly changes. New facts arise which require new interpretations. These, in turn, must be formulated in new symbols, images, artistic forms, and words. Even principles of interpretation gradually evolve, because the fundamental values of the interpreting consciousness and the frame of reference giving the interpretation consistency and meaning periodically alter. Each culture, or rather culture-whole, develops its own set of symbols and bases for interpretation.

The word culture has both a subjective and an objective meaning, One speaks of a cultured person, referring to his or her manners, erudition, and interest in the arts; but one also speaks of a culture. By this is meant a complex system of behavior, feeling, and thinking that unites a collectivity of human beings who unquestioningly accept (because they have been trained to do so since birth) a well-defined set of beliefs, values, and laws. I have used the term culture-whole to indicate clearly that I am referring to a particular culture as an objective, collective social phenomenon.(1)

1. See my books Culture, Crisis and Creativity (The Theosophical Publishing House, 1977) and Beyond Individualism: The Psychology of Transformation (The Theosophical Publishing House, 1979).

Culture-wholes are collective psychosocial organisms — that is, they are organized systems of collective psychic and social activities. At the core of a culture-whole's psychism is its dominant religion and the set of symbols, images, myths, rites, values, attitudes, and beliefs which constitute its collectively accepted interpretations of reality and approach to existence. As these evolve and change, the culture-whole matures. Eventually, when the integrity and consistency of its psychic core breaks down under the introduction of facts or factors it cannot assimilate, it disintegrates.

Although each culture-whole develops according to its own rhythms, a common pattern underlies the development of all cultures. Three periods of development may be distinguished, even though they usually cannot be precisely separated from one another. Each new development surpasses yet incorporates the preceding ones. The new has to be sustained by the root-energy operating at the primordial level of biology and most often by collective psychism. This is necessary at least until a completely new mode of being takes control, powered by a radically different type of energy.

The animistic approach: At this stage of the evolution of human consciousness, the level of interpretation on which knowledge is based is almost exclusively biological. The interpretation is dominated by the basic need for survival. Also included is the need for biological expansion in order to increase a sense of security and relaxation, which is particularly valuable for the education of progeny requiring a relatively long time to mature. To survive means to deal successfully with the unceasing challenges presented by an inimical biosphere. Many of these challenges recur; repetition reveals their distinct characters and quasi-permanent features. Primitive peoples infer that these recurring, recognizable challenges are produced by "entities." Being distinct, the entities are given names derived from the experiences with which they are identified. These entities are "spirits"; they have to be overcome or controlled by force or cunning, or they have to be propitiated by gifts they are believed to enjoy, i.e. sacrifices.(2) Primitive man designates as a spirit every entity that periodically or even unpredictably changes while nevertheless retaining its form or characteristic features. Other human beings are also spirits as long as they move and, especially, breathe. Death occurs when the spirit leaves the material body, which then decays.

2. In much the same manner, an infant makes entities of repetitive groups of sensations and feelings — not only parents, siblings, nurse, dog, but also cradle, table, and the light- or darkness-producing objects which eventually acquire permanent characters through being named.

Animistic cults regulate the relationships human beings should have with the many spirits operating in their environment, which includes visible and invisible factors, aspects that can be defined ("named") and manipulated, and more imprecise ones that cannot. Relationships with spirits are formalized into rituals and, magical operations. Some human beings, both men and women, demonstrate special abilities to deal with spirits. They are shamans and medicine men. At this stage of human evolution, one should speak of cults rather than religions; but the transition from the former to the latter is never clearly marked. Neither is the transition from the evident pluralism of primitive cults to the dualism of the new type of systems of interpretation called vitalism.

The pluralism of the animistic stage of consciousness and activity is grounded, as it were, in the awareness — implicit if not clearly explicit and formulated — of the specific quality of the environment in which human beings meet these many spirits. An at least rudimentary ecological consciousness provides a limiting background for dealing with these spirits. However, this background acquires a basically new character when a vitalistic approach is formulated and codified in symbols and myths. The local environment — the forest, the pampas, the mountain valley — is then universalized into a measureless "ocean of life," the "One Life," or a vast cosmic organism, "the Whole."

The vitalistic approach: A vitalistic approach to repetitive events with a clearly periodical and seasonal character develops when agriculture and animal husbandry come to dominate the lives of at least the most advanced groups of human beings. Such groups operate in increasingly large tribes which are almost totally dominated by biological activities and a symbolic kind of consciousness. Agriculture and animal husbandry are based upon the collectively experienced power of multiplication inherent in certain kinds of natural entities. This capacity for multiplication is called life. It is a potency added to the ability to move and change form, the ability which characterizes spirits. In plants this life potency can be assisted and to some extent controlled by human beings through cultivation — and in the case of animals, through domestication and supervised breeding. Life's multiplication operates through the union of two kinds of specialized genital organs — phallus and yoni and their equivalents in nonhuman species. Therefore, the realization of a basic dualism at work in most types of living entities becomes the fundamental answer to the need of the group.

This dualism is, however, functional. The condition of life is not merely a background for the interaction of two kinds of entities; life itself acts in and through the polarization of its energy in sexually differentiated entities. Life is the substratum of all there is. It is present everywhere in one mode of operation or another. In its most mysterious form it is the process of multiplication.

This mystery is still at the root of the Catholic tradition. It is expressed in the Gospel story of the multiplication of loaves of bread and fish to feed the multitude, raised to a "higher" level of understanding by Jesus' teachings. In a more transcendent (metabiological and mystical) form it occurs in the great mythos of the Eucharist — the quasi-infinite, ritualistic multiplication of the "divine seed" — Christ. When consecrated and transubstantiated, the white circular Host symbolizes the "God seed," the potentiality inherent in every newborn infant to actualize the archetype Man, which is considered a reflection of the one God, the Divine Person.

The biological foundation of the vitalistic approach is spiritualized (that is, universalized) and transformed in this great mythos. The purpose (unconscious if not conscious) of its originators must have been to catalyze this transformation. The sacramental transubstantiation of the Host links the biological level of strictly physical bodily existence with a "higher" state of evolution interpreted as God's reign on earth, which seemingly will develop only in the future.

I call this state the Pleroma level of evolution, and I shall define its essential character in terms of a relatively new model of evolution. According to this model, the individualism dominating human consciousness and activities today constitutes an intermediary stage of evolution between the vitalistic approach to reality and a higher mode of being (that is, of consciousness and activity), the Pleroma state.(3) So does the concurrently developing, equally dominant quantitative mind, which operates on the basis of measurements and through the discovery and manipulation of "laws" establishing precisely defined relationships between entities believed to be inherently separate.

3. In widely read and highly praised books. Ken Wilber apparently follows the example of the Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann, and has used the word pleroma to characterize an undifferentiated and preconscious condition of being — the primordial "ground" out of which human consciousness arises at the beginning of its evolution. This is not the true meaning of this ancient Greek term, which always has referred to a state of fullness and fulfillment, usually in a spiritual and divine sense. It is not the meaning the word had among the Gnostic groups of the first centuries. Webster's New International Dictionary (Second Edition) defines pleroma as "the fullness of divine excellences and powers (see Ephesians III, 19; Col. I, 19, II, 9) and in Gnosticism the fullness of being of the divine life, comprising the aeons as well as the uncreated monad (or, according to some, dyad) from which they have proceeded." A footnote in C. G. Jung's Aion (Princeton University Press, 1959, p. 41n) reads:

Irenaeus (Adversus haersus, II, 5, 1) records the Gnostic teaching that when Christ, as the demiurgic Logos, created his mother's being, he "cast her out of the Pleroma — that is, he cut her off from knowledge." For creation took place outside the pleroma, in the shadow and the void. According to Valentinus (Adv. haer., I, II, 1), Christ did not spring from the Aeons of the pleroma, but from the mother who was outside it. She bore him, he says, "not without a kind of shadow." But he, "being masculine," cast off the shadow from himself and returned to the Pleroma..., while his mother, "being left behind in the shadow, and deprived of spiritual substance, there gave birth to the real "Demiurge and Pantokrator of the lower world." But the shadow which lies over the world is, as we know from the Gospels, the princeps huius mundi, the devil. Cf. The Writings of Irenaeus, I, pp. 45f.

Mankind as a whole is now passing through this intermediary stage. However, the consciousness, the desires, and the dominant type of activity of the vast majority of human beings are still rooted in and usually controlled by biological processes or by movements and beliefs which translate these processes to the level of psychic activity and social feeling-responses. In other words, in extremely diverse ways most people are experiencing the process of individualization of their vitalistic nature. This process leads to a mentalization of consciousness in which "reason" takes the place of "life" as a determining (or at least conditioning) factor. Mentalization, in turn, gives a definite form and power to the drive toward asserting and even glorifying individual selfhood; but the substance or energy condensed, concentrated, and given a precise form and name by the concretizing mind usually remains the substance-energy of "life," even though it may be translated in terms "of the cultural paradigms and the "classical" scientific spirit of Western civilization.

The individualistic approach: When a member of a primitive tribe fills an "office" — for instance, by participating in a ritual dance, wearing the mask of a vitalistic god, and feeling pervaded by the god's power — this experience does not permanently change the consciousness of the person, who afterwards assumes his or her usual life. But the possibility of wanting to retain the feeling of the experience and to build on it a "special" status is present in human nature. The person may seek to maintain his or her subjective identification with the power of the office, and this desire sets him or her apart from all other members of the tribe. Feelings of separateness and superiority develop, especially if the performance brought the performer into contact with a new or deeper level of power which produced unusual or spectacular results. The tribesman then may claim this power as characteristically and permanently "his own." He, as a "subject," possesses a unique power. He may claim this possession publicly, and the claim may be accepted by admiring members of the tribe. He is then "the one" person having such a power. But being still strongly conditioned by biological drives, he is likely to want to extend the scope of the power and to pass it to his progeny. Hereditary claim is laid, not only to the power itself, but to its possession as a social factor.

More generally speaking, the feeling of being a unique individual, set apart from other persons (who are not so distinguished and do not possess the power) gives rise to the dualism of subject and object. The person as subject possesses objective, demonstrable powers; they are "his" and he can use them as he pleases. "This is my pleasure," says the chieftain, who rules "his" people and land. Soon the minds of philosophers or religious leaders feel the need to justify such a situation with the image of a personal God who possesses all imaginable powers and uses them as a "Play" (lila) to create the universe, His universe. Mind always works two ways: it interprets the results of activity, and these interpretations facilitate the spread of the activity by giving it the "sanction" of a coherent rationale. The mind performs this service by analyzing new situations to "discover" structural or essential factors ("laws"), then by deducing from these factors new ways of maximizing their power (technology).

The moment a human being performs a new kind of action, feels elated by a new sense of power, and adds to the feeling of elation the thought, "This is mine, uniquely mine," the mental image of "I" arises — "I," a subject possessing a power to alter an objective world; "I," a subject owning objects that can be used, transformed, and destroyed. This realization is highly intoxicating. It is also the origin of the vast variety of conflicts inherent in most, if not all, of the systems of social organization human beings have devised, from the most capricious tyranny to the most benign democracy. It has led to the glorification of the subjective factor and devaluation of the objective world (nature). This in turn has inspired many systems of metaphysics and monotheistic religions, particularly in medieval India and Europe. These systems had to develop because they were needed to provide a foundation and justification for the slow and inherently stressful individualistic transition between the biologically dominated vitalistic type of consciousness and activity and the new (and mostly future) level of evolution which I call the Pleroma state.

In India the philosophical glorification of the subjective state took various forms, some purely metaphysical (as in the Upanishads and the Advaita type of Vedanta evoked by Sri Sankaracharya), others more religious and theistic. The latter emphasizes the ubiquitous and absolute power of a God who periodically manifests in and through an objective universe, yet who also has an unmanifest and purely subjective aspect. According to the Bhagavad Gita, this God remains untouched and undiminished by his creations, but he also can intervene in the evolution of the objective universe. As (or through) an Avatar, he acts to realign the universe with its original archetypal model when centrifugal (overly individualistic) developments destructure it — that is, when the original dharma is forgotten and has to be restated and reenergized.

The more strictly metaphysical systems found expression in the grand mystical statement of the Upanishads, Tat twam asi (That thou art), which proclaims the identity of the self within man (atman) and the universal Self (Brahman). But in order to understand the psychological and evolutionary function of this statement, we should consider the historical and philosophical context in which it was made. It was proclaimed by "forest philosophers," men nearing the end of lives that had been totally dominated and ritualized by the rigid imperatives of the Laws of Manu. These laws enjoined these men to prepare for death by giving up all attachments to village and kin and even to their own biological organisms. In that essentially vitalistic era, human beings considered their existence in terms of the quasi-seasonal cycle of birth-death-rebirth. The "last thought in death" (the seed-like condensation of an ending cycle of human experience) logically was believed to be the foundation out of which a future cycle of personal experience would unfold. Because yearly cycles of objective natural living follow one another endlessly, human beings too seemed forever bound to this repetitive pattern of existence. The forest philosophers, however, came to realize that a subjective center is present in human consciousness. By concentrating on this center, a person could "disobjectivize" himself and become a pure, free subject, unconditioned by nature (the gunas) and cyclic time.

This was liberation (moksha) not only from biological desires and the play of the gunas in the world of nature; it also meant, at least potentially, reaching a state of inner freedom from bondage to the outer patterns imposed by Hindu society and its cults. This freedom was possible for anyone sufficiently eager to experience it through the disciplined use of meditation — that is, an inward-directed state of concentrated attention — and in general through yoga. Over the course of centuries yoga took many forms, but it aims at producing a state called kaivalya, which often is translated rather inadequately as isolation but which refers to a liberation of the individual self from the collective power of society, religion, and culture. In this sense, yoga is a way of becoming individualized. However, individualization can be achieved by fighting against the power of the collective (and of generic human nature and its impulses) or by transcending the level of being at which this power has full control of all activities and responses.

This is the great issue which mankind has had to face and which it still faces today in a new and crucial way: the problem of how to become an individual free from generic nature and the collective patterns imposed by society and culture upon every newborn human being. But this "how" — the procedures and techniques used — ultimately depends upon the mental picture one makes (or is taught and impelled to make) of the state to which the process of liberation leads. The person who feels bound at first may struggle against his or her bonds, even though he or she has neither a clear picture of what produced and originally imposed such a bondage nor a positive vision of liberation. Such a struggle remains blind and totally emotional until one realizes (or is made to realize) what it is that binds and what can be expected if one wins the struggle and becomes free. To lead one to such a realization and to help the struggler imagine what will be at the end of the struggle: this is the task of the philosopher, mystic, or theologian.

The mystic philosophers of the Upanishad type perhaps were dealing essentially with the universal realization, common to all human beings, of the inevitability of death. Death is not a tragedy when seen by the mind of a person belonging strictly to the vitalistic era. For such a person, birth and death are merely events inherent in all life processes. The person is such a process; he does not separate himself from it. He begins to suffer from it only when he experiences himself as a "subject" to which death happens. By proclaiming the identity of atman and Brahman, the formulation of the Upanishads simply restated the nonseparateness of a living being from the One Life, from the continuum of being and changes filling all space. Nevertheless, the restatement had to be made in different terms, because the "living being" had become the "individual self" — that is, "I" as the experiencer of the continuum of changes. Brahman, however, was not merely universal "life;" It was life beyond birth and death, a transcendent Essence.

For Gautama Buddha, the tragedy in human existence was not merely death (or the birth-death syndrome, for his realization coincided with the birth of his son); it was the experience of "suffering" — or rather dukka. Dukka is not mere suffering but the devastating sense of being isolated as an individualized center of consciousness and of not belonging to one's society and culture — today we would say, of being alienated. The Buddha's intent in building his sangha was, I believe, to create an ideal community within which there would be no experience of isolation and in principle no suffering. All its members would have totally accepted the doctrine (the dharma) according to which the cycle of birth-suffering-death was caused by "ignorance" and could be transcended by the "knowledge" of the cycle of individual causes-effects-causes.

Here again the key concept is transcendence; and it applied not merely to the sufferings of individual persons, but to social conditions like the caste-system, which produced dukka both for individuals and for entire classes of persons. Gautama was perhaps the first in historical times to think of social transformation not only in terms of the individual but in terms of humanity as a whole. However, this transformation was to be accomplished not by fighting against the social order (for instance, the caste-system) but by transcending it, by laying the foundations for a new type of community prefigured by the sangha. Presumably Jesus had a similar attitude. The ecclesia of the early Christians was a kind of sangha, perhaps inspired by Buddhist communities that had been established on the shore of the Dead Sea during the reign of the Buddhist emperor Asoka (273-232 B.C.). But while the essential commandment of Jesus was "Love ye one another as I have loved you," Gautama's doctrine, by explaining in causal terms the operations of change and the origin of dukka, was intended to make possible the overcoming of this suffering. The emphasis was upon the mind, but a mind no longer at the service of the individual self (especially in its aspect as the ego). Rather, mind became an instrumentality for transcending bondage to particular conditions of existence which, being particular and limited, engendered the dukka-producing feeling of tragic isolation.

A great many human beings conceive of the events of their lives as if they happened by chance or at least with no significant relation to or within their lives as a whole. In a narrow, superficial sense, one action may be seen to lead to another, but this character of mere succession is fundamentally different from the Buddhist concept of karma — which the scientific term causality interprets only inadequately. Karma implies the cyclic nature of existence. Two events are not merely related as cause and effect; this relation acquires its full meaning as karma only when it is perceived and interpreted as affecting the whole of a life, and in a larger sense the whole of mankind. In Buddha's time, such an interpretation implied the development of a new mind — a truly objective mind; a mind not so much detached from existence as able to deal with wholes of existence, with patterns of changes in which every event tends to become its opposite; a mind able to perceive the entire sequence as a cyclic series assuming the symbolic form of a wheel (samsara). The poor and the rich, the weak and the powerful, represented opposite states; but those now poor would be rich at another time in the cycle, the slave would be a king — all according to the one universal principle of polarization and karma.

Such an approach did not negate the mystic vision of the sages of preceding ages. It became necessary because the idealistic feeling of the identity of atman and Brahman becomes a tragic farce and a cause of acute dukka if an ego takes the place of atman. When this occurs, the process of individualization goes awry; it is deviated by being placed at the service of the emotions, the biological impulses, and an ego that gives these a particular cohesion. Such a cohesion increases and intensifies the sense of uniqueness and isolation. The vision of old sages preparing for death after a fully lived existence within a rigidly planned community can indeed turn sour when youngsters, filled with ambition and passion, try to experience such a vision through socially "prestigious" yoga exercises and spectacular deprivations.

At the close of the twentieth century, we should be able to understand what happened two thousand five hundred years ago, because we have to deal with the far more complex and dukka-producing results of centuries of uncontrolled and one-pointed individualism combined with a materialistic, aggressive, and acquisitive approach to social togetherness and interpersonal relationships. Most significantly, Buddhism, in its various aspects is now openly accepted by a myriad of young people who in the late 1960s and early 70s either sought to rebel against society by stressing "their own" individual way of doing things, or sought freedom from collective patterns of interpersonal relationships and thinking by using psychedelic drugs. Buddhism offers them a traditional discipline which allows their restless, ego-centered individualism to gain some kind of collective support. Just as important, it offers a sense of security derived from beliefs and practices which have subsisted through social changes, political revolutions, and the pressures imposed by alien cultures and religions.

Whether Gautama Buddha would approve of present-day Buddhism and its many schools, or Jesus of the multiplicity of Christian churches, is another matter. Basic principles retain their validity; but they lose their original impact of transformative newness. The rationalistic, clearly defined, and numbered precepts in Gautama's sutras — which were mostly secondhand restatements of remembered words he had uttered many years before — were as important in his psychotherapeutic and ethical approach as was the insistence of his contemporary, Pythagoras, on precise measurements of the lengths of the string of his monochord when producing a succession of sounds.(4) The sixth century B.C. was the century when the measuring mind — the mind of reason, the analytical mind — began to give clearly defined forms to man's awareness of reality and his creative activities. But this new development was perhaps premature; it backfired into the absolute subjectivism of Sankaracharya(5) and the emotional bhakti movement of the Radha-Krishna cults, just as the rationalism of the classical age of Greece led to the irrationalism and devotionalism of Christianity and the famous pronouncement of Tertullian, Credo quid absurdum (I believe because it is absurd).

4. See my book The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music (Shambhala Publications, 1982).
5. In spite of what Orientalists may think, the original Sankaracharya was born some thirty-three years after the death of Gautama. Clear proofs are given in an article by the southern Indian Brahmin, T. Subba Row, which first appeared between 1882 and 1889, and later was published in the book, A Collection of Esoteric Writings of T. Subba Row (Bombay, 1917). (A complete edition of this great man's writings and letters is now being compiled.) The Sankaracharya who lived between 788-820 or 850 A.D. revived a long tradition kept in mathas (monasteries): all the men who headed this school successively took the name of Sankaracharya, as they still do today — hence the confusion.

The European Renaissance revived something of the classical Greek spirit that had flourished two thousand years before. Unfortunately the revival came as a rather passionate reaction against the theological dogmatism of the Catholic Church, which was still very strong and armed with the power of the Inquisition. Because the Church considered the human soul and spiritual experiences as its exclusive domain, the scientific spirit of research and analysis had to concentrate upon the objective material world and the multiplicity of physical entities it could reduce to ever simpler elementary units. For nearly four centuries, empiricism (Francis Bacon), intellectual rationalism and mechanism (Descartes, Newton, et al.), and tremendous technological achievements came to dominate the West. Yet the latter derive from an exclusivistic scientific methodology, a materialistic individualism driven by the desire for physical comfort and personal independence at all costs, and an egocentric passion for profit, power, and expansion. Western civilization has spread its individualism all over the globe, and as a result the whole of mankind has reached a critical, potentially disastrous turning point. Individualism itself has to be transformed.

Individualism was given a universalistic and absolute meaning and interpretation by the sages of the Upanishad era and a rationalistic and ethical character by Gautama and the great minds of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, it acquired an empirical, materialistic, and political basis which led to the triumph of an ego-glorifying Western society. Christianity attempted to reinterpret individualism through divine love (agape); so did Mahayana Buddhism through the superhuman compassion (karuna) of the Boddhisattva ideal. Both attempts have led to many outstanding results, but both have become mired in dogmatism and a rigidly procedural, formula-worshipping mentality, which (at least in the past) has been misused to acquire political power. Now this individualism has once more to be reinterpreted and transfigured. A relatively new philosophical mind must be developed, free from both scientific and religious prejudice. The deification of "the Individual" and the supreme One, isolated in His super-rational absoluteness, must go, as well as the irrational randomness of an infinitely extended material universe reducible to infinitely small and incomprehensible units. I speak of this new mind as the "mind of Wholeness."

The trend toward the development of such a mind has been noticeable since the last decades of the nineteenth century, and especially since the first world war. Philosophically, this trend is centered around the persistent use of the terms whole and holistic, terms which keep recurring years after the publication of the now largely forgotten book Holism and Evolution (1926) by the South African statesman-philosopher Jan Smuts.(6) Since the term holism became fashionable in "progressive" circles, however, it has been used so carelessly that it has lost much of its meaning and correct impact. Moreover, Smut's concept of holism was so limited that it led to a typically Western glorification of what he (and C. G. Jung) called personality — to him the supreme achievement of evolution.(7) Therefore, the concept of whole has to be broadened and universalized — more so indeed than recent philsopher- scientists interpreting the universe as a hierarchy of wholes (or systems) are able and willing to do. What is needed is to transfer the mind's attention and power of concentration from the image-concept of "the One" to that of "the Whole" and, even more, to Wholeness.

6. Smuts was influential in formulating the ideals which President Wilson and a few other visionaries tried to embody in the League of Nations (1920). His total repudiation by the South African nation was as tragic as Wilson's repudiation by the American people.

7. By personality Smuts and Jung meant something entirely different from the meaning the word has in theosophic and "esoteric" teachings. More recent writers speaking of the full development of the human potential have used the word personhood to avoid ambiguity. In medieval theology, God alone had "personality." For Smuts and Jung, no evolutionary stages stood between the fully developed human person (personality) and God.

Such a transfer implies a fundamental change in metaphysical outlook and in the value given to religious movements and institutions. During the last four millennia, metaphysics has glorified the process of individualization and given it a quasi-absolute, often divine meaning by referring it to "the One." Religions have presented images of an utterly transcendent God, indeed one who is external to a universe He created "out of nothing" for no humanly conceivable reasons — or for such an obviously anthropomorphic purpose as "self-expression." The value of these ideas and formulations is in no way denied in this book; it is, however, seen as relative.

Elsewhere I have spoken at length of the "process of individualization."(8) It is a necessary phase in human evolution, but human evolution itself should be considered merely a phase in a cosmic and metacosmic process which, as I try to formulate it, is all-inclusive. It is the cycle of being as well as the Movement of Wholeness. Within this cycle mankind occupies a specific place and fulfills a definable function; but there is no reason why the state of being an individual should be considered the end of the process of human evolution. As the great French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery once wrote: "The individual is but a path: Man only matters who takes that path."(9) But if the state of being an individual is a means to an end, what then is the end? How can we give that state its true value if we cannot at least imagine what the end is or what it means? Is it only an end in a distant future of the evolution of our planet, or can it be reached by individuals even now?

8. What I mean by the "process of individualization" is very different from what Jung, especially in his later writings, meant by the "process of individuation," by which he referred to the conscious assimilation of the contents of the collective unconscious. My meaning is expressed in my book Beyond Individualism: The Psychology of Transformation (Quest Books, Theosophical Publishing House, Wheaton, Illinois, 1979) and will be restated from a different perspective later in this volume.

9. Flight to Arras (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1969).

This book attempts to speak to such questions understandably and consistently. The answers it offers will be based on facts of common human experience rather than on unusual and rarified subjective experiences reached only after arduous practices by persons of apparently special temperaments or through extreme psychological or social pressures. The central answer places in perspective the present-day state of human evolution, which features the realization of "being I" as a separate person independent from birth-conditions, with sovereign rights and an autonomous will jealous of its exclusive characteristics and mostly intent on individual development. This stage represents only a period of transition between two fundamental levels of being — the biological level given characteristically human features through series of local and exclusivistic cultures, and the level of what I call the Pleroma. To me, the Pleroma is a state of being whose participants have passed successfully through the condition of individualized and (at least relatively) separate selfhood. They then operate together as a planetary whole in a state of mental interpenetration and spiritual integration, a state which allows the safe actualization of powers and faculties latent in present-day human beings.

As far as the average person is concerned, the Pleroma state is still in the future. Yet it is a possibility inherent in Man considered as an archetype of being, and it can be actualized even now through a process of transmutation of energies and transfiguration of consciousness. An individualized person has to be the actualizer; but the result of the actualization transcends the status of individual selfhood. It confers a planetary status. Beings who have reached such a status constitute, as it were, the soul of the planet Earth. In their togetherness they constitute the progressive, far from completed actualization of the archetype Man in interrelated and interpenetrating fields of consciousness and activity. They represent humanity in the condition of planetary wholeness.

The one purpose for which this book Rhythm of Wholeness is written is to provide an abstract yet experienceable foundation for the realization that such a state exists, and to show that even now it is affecting human evolution, to the extent that a vanguard of human beings is beginning to respond (at least partially and confusedly) to the call for radical transformation. The book is written because a need for it exists — the need for a fundamental philosophical and cosmological reformulation of universal and abstract principles at a level transcending the pluralistic and atomistic nature of the individualism which has dominated Western civilization and has spread all over the globe.

In Part One of this book I shall present the general concepts of wholeness, cyclic activity, and the place of Man as an archetype of being in the cycle of being. The cycle in its cosmic and human aspects has, of course, an immensity of subcycles and sub-subcycles. Yet the basic structure of any cycle — one might say, the concept of cyclicity — has permanent features because of the symmetrical and dynamic interplay of two fundamental principles of operation and consciousness, the principle of Unity and the principle of Multiplicity. These principles constantly and symmetrically interact, one waxing as the other wanes, neither ever attaining total control.

In Part Two I shall outline the structure of the total constitution of archetypal Man and Man's function and destiny on this planet. I shall consider Man's entire cycle of objective-physical and subjective-spiritual states of activity and consciousness, and therefore I will also discuss the postmortem state and reincarnation (which through recent popularization has been mostly misunderstood).

In Part Three I shall broadly consider some of the more practical issues implied in the cosmological concepts and the approach to human existence and personal growth outlined in the preceding Parts. I shall deal with the types of relationships that occur between wholes and parts (or rather subwholes) and also the interactions between different levels of consciousness and activity. I shall stress the difference between a positive approach to such interactions — the substance of transpersonal and truly creative living — and the passive attitude which in its most negative form leads to mediumship. Finally I shall discuss a constructive way of meeting periods of transition between levels of personal growth and the importance of "rites of passage."

The reaction of many readers to all I state in this book may well be that, interesting as it is, it is only my interpretation. Undoubtedly it is an interpretation of the facts of human experience. But whether or not it is "mine" is of no great significance. The only valid question is whether or not today's humanity, or even, a particular section of it whose responses may directly or indirectly influence the course of events, needs the approach I am presenting in order to deal more serenely and constructively with the crucial problems we now face. These problems must be faced positively, in a spirit of transformation, if we are to survive in a significant manner, either as individuals or collectively.

Especially in times of transition, every solution to a human need is an interpretation of the contemporary situation. It comes at a particular time to particular people who at first may or may not consider it the solution for which they yearn. All systems of philosophy, all religious "revelations," all forms of social organization are interpretations. Even if, as religious and occult doctrines state, a "divine revelation" is the source of human knowledge, the revelation is still an interpretation by a "divine" Being (or Beings) operating at a level transcending the present human state.(10) It is an interpretation which at a certain time fills the need of mankind as a functional aspect of the all-inclusive activity and wholeness of the Earth — which is a spiritual and mental as well as physical being.

10. Moreover, the "divine" interpretation must be interpreted by the human beings who believe in its existence. Such "revealed knowledge" (sruti in Sanskrit) is more like an integral series of interrelated and abstract formulas establishing principles of organization and structural relationships which apply to all levels of being. They may take the form of a series of geometrical symbols which can be, and indeed must be, reinterpreted periodically at different levels, according to mankind's capacity to translate them into solutions for its collective needs.

To be a valid answer (or to form part of a valid answer) to a personal or collective need, an interpretation should take into consideration the direction of human evolution. It also should be consistent and applicable even during the process of transition. It should have value as a significant factor during the rite of passage that mankind, in whole or in part, is experiencing.

Whether this book will fill a significant and transformative need of humanity today and in years to come — the need for a basic reinterpretation of human evolution and all aspects of being — is a question I certainly cannot answer. Neither can anyone else a priori. It may only bring more clarity and a more inclusive and dynamic sense of meaning to a relatively few people whose minds resonate to the quality embodied in the writer's mind. Yet no effort is valueless or lost that aims at extending the scope of human consciousness by presenting a wider, more inclusive picture of reality.

Rhythm of Wholeness