---

 

*

THE CYCLIC PROCESS OF SPIRITUAL EMBODIMENT

 

Dane Rudhyar

 

According to concepts formulated mythically in the Hindu Puranas and restated in H. P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, humanity in the present period of the earth's evolution was formed by two classes of "progenitors": the Barhishad Pitris or "lunar ancestors" who gave human beings their "astral forms" (or chayahs), around which the physical body concretized; and the Manasaputras or "solar ancestors." The latter also are called "Flames," "Givers of Mind," and Kumaras, or in terms related to Greek mythology, Promethean spirits. Under a great variety of names, the Manasaputras (in Sanskrit manas broadly signifies mind) are said to have brought to protohuman beings the "fire" of self-consciousness and spiritual will, thus the ability to make self-motivated choices and be responsible for them.

In the outline of the Movement of Wholeness I have presented, the final "descent" of these "Givers of Mind" to the biosphere was crowned by the polarization between the Godhead and Natural Man at the symbolic Noon of the planetary cycle. Before this turning point in planetary evolution — the point at which the overpowering principle of Multiplicity is dynamically challenged by the henceforth rising principle of Unity — beings existed with a human form yet without the principle of individualization. This principle — which is the root of the true spiritual will — can be considered a "gift" from the all-inclusive Compassion of the Godhead state.

This divine Compassion calls for a new universe because the old one ended with a large number of failures, some total, most others at least partial. All failures, as well as successes, must be included in  the Unity-dominated consciousness of the Godhead. The need of these failures — their very presence as a mostly subjective "memory" — calls for a new opportunity to reach the perfect state of Illumined Man. The Barhisad Pitris (lunar progenitors) are the partial failures of a past planetary or cosmic cycle. At least they are mythic personifications of the karma (collective and individual) left by the old cycle.

If the principles of this picture of the genesis of mankind are applied to an individual human being now living, we have to deduce that this now-living person has a previous person as his or her own lunar progenitor. The present person also is likely to be the lunar progenitor of a future human being. This does not mean that the present person is the previous person or that the future person will be the present person reborn; a child is not its parent and the mythological scenario does not say that the lunar progenitor is the new human being. The Hindu story says that the astral form of human beings was transmitted to them by lunar beings who had lived in previous cycles; what was transmitted was their karma.

We — living human beings — are "charged" (as it were) by the Compassion of the Godhead state — the highest principle in our total being — to neutralize the ancient failure of our lunar ancestors, the Barhishad Pitris, by performing (we might say sacramentally) the dharma that will neutralize these failures. These failures are now our karma. Our astral or psychic nature (body of desire) is filled with this karma, structured by it. This nature is our lunar (lower) self, our personality. Yet this personality is not merely the karma of the past; it also is the way to neutralize it — our dharma.

In this sense the lower mind and the desire-nature (kama) together constitute one side of a coin, the other side of which is the higher mind and the spiritual Quality. Karma and dharma are the same structure. Karma is the negative  aspect, yet it "expects" and longs to be "redeemed" by the action of the positive dharma. This longing is at the root of the devotional aspiration, toward a redeeming God, Avatar, or Savior, which is innate in all human beings. In an individualized person, devotion and the longing for redemption can be transmuted into the active will to rise above the conditions imposed by biological instincts and sociocultural imperatives.

When a person says, "I was such-and-such a person in a previous life," he or she actually identifies his or her present personality with the karma left by a past human being — thus with the quality of the desires this deceased person  experienced and exteriorized into objective responses, which inevitably included discordant acts or the refusal to act when action was necessary. The life of the deceased may have had good features, but the spirit oriented or spiritual aspect of the dead personality was absorbed and assimilated by the spiritual entity in that person after death. What remains is essentially the memory of the unfinished business and the failures of the past. The new person is born primarily to deal with these failures. If I say, "I was that past person from whom I inherited my personal sense of self (my lunar selfhood)," I am, I repeat, identifying myself and my desires with a set of karmic failures. What I ought to do instead is to identify the concrete mind within me with my dharma (the higher mind).

Very general knowledge about the karma one has to transmute may be valuable at a certain stage of the evolution of consciousness; but it also can give power to the negative factors in the desire-nature by rationalizing their objective manifestation and inciting one to concentrate attention upon them. In general, the same can be said about many forms of psychological introspection and many analytical psychological procedures which are fashionable now. What is needed instead is for the lunar self to attune itself to the solar being within — the archetypal dharma-mind and the spiritual will — and to allow the meeting (fleeting as it must be at first) between the spiritual Quality and the desire-free and doctrine-free ego to occur within the field of a united mind.

This field is the "body of individuality." In The Planetarization of Consciousness I called it the ideity field. A "field" should be called a "body" only when a centralizing principle can operate fully in it — as, for example, the ego operates in a physical body. The operation of the centralizing principle in the ideity field is the will. In the lunar desire-body, the ego-will is at work once the lower or concretizing mind has given a stable form to the multiplicity of desires and personal reactions to relationships with the outer world. In the body of individuality, the centralizing factor is the spiritual will — the operation of the principle of individualization, which is the lowest aspect of the triune spiritual entity. For this spiritual will to operate effectively and consistently, the higher mind must have given an archetypal form to the body of individuality. It then presumably is the karana sharira, a Sanskrit term usually translated (inadequately I believe) as "causal body." It is "causal" in the sense that an acorn is the "cause" of an oak tree. Thus I have spoken of the "God seed" at least latent in all human beings.

The difference between this God seed and an ordinary vegetable or animal seed is that in Man a psychic (or astral) entity stands between the God seed and the physical body. This psychic-astral entity is there because a human being generates karma: he or she can be existentially what he or she essentially is not. Plants and animals cannot fail to perform their dharma; they are compelled by instincts and tropisms. Human beings, on the other hand, are only impelled by desires — unless they have totally lost the human power to choose and have reached a subhuman state through constant misuse of the power of will, as, for example, through the steady practice of "black magic," eventually becoming the total failures of human evolution. However, because a human being can be a total failure, he or she also can be a total success. In religious terms, the light of a heavenly union with God predicates the fires of hell; but even the Christ-being could reach complete union only after, out of pure and all-inclusive Compassion, he experienced hell for "three days" (that is, totally).

Moreover, any individual must emerge by his or her own power from the matrix of the collective psychism of the culture in which he or she was born. This emergence is never an absolute separation, even if the individualized consciousness believes it is. As long as a human being has not passed through the Gate of Silence in full consciousness as Illumined Man, the power of the collective is still active in the psychic depths of his or her desire-nature. This power urges participation in relationships in which either pleasure and pain, enjoyable possession and tragic but often stimulating loss, can be experienced.

After death, the memory of all the relationships one has participated in  remains as a binding force, as karma — unless one has completely understood the meaning of the relationships, of their results, and of the desires that engendered them. Such an understanding — a full experience of meaning — should give rise to Compassion. Then karma, which is an unconscious instrumentality for the operation of Wholeness, dissolves into Compassion, the positive and conscious power of Wholeness.

 

Postmortem Processes

When death ends the particular combination of factors we call a person, each factor follows its own course according to its own nature. The several components of the state of personhood separate, yet they normally remain within the planetary field of existence, which has several interpenetrating spheres. 

The atomic and molecular matter of the physical body — whose cells constantly changed through the years and in old age had been progressively dying or replaced by toxic substances — returns to the soil, water, and air of the earth from which they emerged and were organized by "life." Sooner or later these material components are reabsorbed into other living organisms, and they may once more enter the bodies of other human beings as food. They are not lost; nothing is lost. Recurring cycles affect all forms of existence; all elements combine, decombine, and recombine. Moreover, although the body disintegrates, the reproductive cells it released during its life span pass from generation to generation, pursuing their own impersonal rhythm. These germ cells are, of course, altered by genetic interactions, yet their characteristics reappear in new forms over the course of development of a particular racial strain or within a combination of ancestral lines active within a particular geographic locality.

The etheric field usually (but not always) vanishes very soon after death, because physical death implies that the life force, prana, has left the body; its multifarious currents have stopped operating. Prana returns to the life field of the planet (the biosphere) from which it had been derived yet never fully separated. Indeed, prana operating within a body is only "loaned" to a particular human being, presumably at the time of conception. The loan is made, one might say, under a "contract" formulated by karma, which limits and defines the use of the life force for a broadly specified period. Once the period ends, the contract ceases to operate and the previously form-bound prana escapes back to the biosphere. During the life of the human being, however, this form-bound prana becomes closely associated with the energy of desire, kama, and if the desire for life in the human being vanishes almost entirely, the life force may become paralyzed ahead of time and unable to hold together the complex mechanisms of the biological functions. The biosphere basically operates under the law "Eat or be eaten," and the catabolic and anabolic aspects of the life force perpetually struggle for control of any biological organism.

What happens to the personality after death has long been and still is the subject of often passionate controversies. On the basis of the picture I have outlined, the following is a logical conclusion, but the actual outcome depends on many variables. One variable is the level of consciousness and activity the person had reached. At all times and in all geographic regions there are human beings whose individual state of evolution is far above or below average. The level of mankind's evolution at the time, and of society's and its culture's, also are important factors usually completely unrecognized in arguments about the after-death state. Thus statements that would apply to all individual situations (for example, the length of time between two "incarnations") can have only general validity. This validity also depends upon the expectable reactions of persons to whom such statements are made. Knowledge has validity only in terms of the knower or (in some cases) of a new generation to which it will be imparted.

Thus if a person is convinced that his or her "soul" exists primarily or essentially in terms of the desire for and the fulfillment, failure, or frustration of interpersonal relationships — and therefore is identified with the kama principle — this person is right when saying that the personal soul not only persists after death, but returns later on as a new person. This is the "personal" way of interpreting the situation that develops after death.

The interpretation based on the Movement of Wholeness defines death as the beginning of the symbolic Night of a very small sub-subcycle constituting a particular human life. Death is the "Gate of Silence" through which a human center of consciousness passes at the close of the existential Day hemicycle. At this time the principle of Unity begins to dominate the Movement of Wholeness as experienced by this particular person, "being" assumes increasingly subjective states, and the principle of Multiplicity and objectivity becomes internalized. This internalization produces memory images in the consciousness. These images constitute a subjectivized mode of relationship, they resemble the dreams that occur during the sleep of the physical body — and there are many kinds of dreams, including powerful nightmares.

Thus in the case of a person closely identified with the kama principle, the desire-body (in which kama Operates within the structures defined by the concretizing or lower mind) survives for a period after death. The length of survival depends on several factors. Among them are the intensity and character of the desires and the organizing power of the concretizing mind. Also significant is the degree to which the karma of the past has been neutralized by the performance, unconscious if not conscious, of the dharma which the higher mind and the spiritual will attempted to impress upon the personality's lower mental consciousness. Other determining factors are the extent to which this spiritual will and higher mind had been active, the degree of differentiation and concentration of the spiritual Quality, and the state of development of the ideity field as a place of meeting for the potential union of the spiritual entity and the personality. Because Western civilization today primarily and often exclusively accentuates the personal, ego-centered factors in a human being and in personal relationships to people, money, profession, and possessions (including pets!), the persistence of all these personal factors in terms of subjective memory experiences must be the norm in the period following death.But what are these "subjective memory experiences"?

Because a human center of consciousness having passed through the Gate of Silence (the "portal of death") of its own particular sub-subcycle operates in a realm in which subjectivity is the increasingly dominant factor, all experiences also must become mainly subjective. Experiences can no longer be physical because the body has vanished as a support for consciousness, feelings, and desires. Therefore they must be "psychic" if the personality is the experiencer. (We will see presently what may happen in the spiritual entity after the death of the physical body of the experiencer). But because psychism is originally and essentially collective, the character of after-death psychic experiences must be predominantly collective — unless the dead person had become strongly individualized during his or her life.

Accounts of seemingly authentic contacts with a dead person or of experiences following a temporary death and quick revival report that the person meets deceased parents, friends, and loved ones after emerging from a dark tunnel into a world of happiness and light. Such descriptions may be significant interpretations of occurrences in the predominantly subjective after-death state; the dreams remembered on awakening are also interpretations by the objectivizing lower mind of what occurred in the subjective state of sleep. What is remembered evidently has been personalized (in a sense "mythologized") by the brain-mind in terms of images and words belonging to the everyday experience of the just-awakened sleeper. The person supposed dead and then revived is in a state which is not essentially different from the one experienced by a suddenly awakened dreamer.

Similarly, when a trance-medium speaks or acts as a deceased personality, the words and images used by this personality most likely are taken from the brain-mind and psychic consciousness of the medium. This does not mean that the communication is without a "genuine" basis; it means merely that it is an interpretation, at best a fairly accurate "translation," a subjective reality that has been objectivized by the medium's concretizing mind.(1)

1. As I see it, most psychic phenomena — with exceptions belonging to a higher level of activity and consciousness — are manifestations of the subconscious power of community, that is, of a power arising from the transmutation of the compulsiveness of life into a communal-social force which also acts subconsciously, unbeknown to most members of the community. A "psychic" is a person in whom the collective psychism of the culture operates in at least partial independence from his or her personality and individual consciousness. The psychic is able to give voice or form to subconscious forces and desires in another human being and to some extent to reveal the past — as the past is still inherent in the present. To the extent the future is conditioned by forces and desires already operating unconsciously within a person (in the biological organism, etheric body, and/or body of desires), the psychic may be able to visualize or "sense" something of the person's future — or the future of the whole social collectivity in which the psychic has his or her biopsychic and cultural roots.

In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the striking imagery used to describe subjective processes — the various gods and demons, the Judgment, and so on — is symbolic. This does not mean that it is not real or that it is "pure imagination." It is an interpretation befitting the mentality of the people to whom it was addressed, and it still remains a valuable, beautiful, and meaningful interpretation. Nevertheless, Western consciousness differs from traditional Tibetan consciousness, even if the level at which many Europeans and Americans think and feel today is not too different from that of the Tibetan culture when it was being formed. This may be because a new culture is now beginning to concretize, and it calls for such - a devotional, form-worshipping consciousness. Still, this, new culture must create its own symbols and formulations. The Movement of Wholeness might provide such symbols to the consciousness of individuals who are ready to face the future as builders of a  "new order" (Novum ordo seculorum) instead of as perpetuators of dying cultures, great as these cultures were. Yet there are always many and varied dharmas!

 

The Successive Relationships Between a Spiritual Quality & a Series of Human Persons

The psychic entity surviving the death of the physical body operates in terms of collective psychism, and when communicating to living persons addresses them (via the concretizing, culture-conditioned mind of a psychically sensitive intermediary) in terms of their collective, culture-defined consciousness. However, when a person has become strongly individualized during a lifetime, the character of his or her individuality persists in the period after death. Also, the individual may have been able to reach beyond the individualistic state before dying; he or she would have performed the rite of passage at the Gate of Silence as Illumined Man, or at least as a partially illumined consciousness aware of the meaning of Wholeness, and either utterly devoted to the creative God (the One in the beginning) or self-dedicated to the service of the Pleroma, the "White Lodge" of Illumined Beings. Other possibilities more difficult to define may also occur.

A human being having become a truly autonomous, self-reliant, and responsible individual person, at least mostly free from the dictates of biology and culture, has to be more or less consciously related to the principle of individualization — to the lowest of the components of the triune spiritual entity. His or her lower mind must have at least attempted to reflect the archetypal mind and to perform the dharma formulated by the latter. The ideity field must be operative, and a link must have formed to serve as a magnetic-spiritual channel of communication between the lower and higher mind and theoretically between the principle of desire (kama) and the spiritual Quality infused with divine Compassion.

Even so, this link (presumably antakarana in Sanskrit) is not permanent. It can be broken temporarily or permanently if the power of some intense desire leads the person to indulge in violent or destructive acts dictated by anger, jealousy, hatred, ruthless ambition, or devastating lust. If, however, the link is strong and operative at death, all that was spirit-oriented, truly compassionate, and dharma-fulfilling during the life span is "taken up" by the spiritual entity along the channel of communication. What is so taken up represents the spiritual harvest of the personal life. It is absorbed and assimilated by the spiritual entity and becomes part of the contents of the permanent aspect of the ideity field (karana sharira), the definitive "body of individuality."

In most instances, however, "something" remains in the psychic world after death. These psychic remains become increasingly subjective as time goes on  — a time not measurable in objective years based on regular motions of celestial bodies (and, more recently in science, of atomic particles). This "something" is basically what is left of the energy of desire (kama). But what can desire mean in a predominantly and increasingly subjective realm in which the power of the principle of Multiplicity — the basis of relationships between diverse, objectively perceived entities — is constantly decreasing? If there are no objective relationships, there can be no objectivized forms of desire, only subjective memory experiences of desire.

These "memory experiences" are as "real" as experiences in the objective, existential world. They are the kind of experiences (imperiences?) possible in the Night period of the Movement of Wholeness — in the realm of "inistence." These subjective experiences are conditioned by the objective events of physical life which they continue, as in acoustics overtones seem to prolong the vibrations of a fundamental tone. But sooner or later the memory experiences dissipate. They cease to be the experiences of a centralized personal consciousness; kama fades away, and with it what remained of the ego, the desirer. Yet the karma of the results of kama remains, because karma can be neutralized only by the performance of dharma through an activity as actual and objective as the karma-producing acts (or feelings or thoughts) of the past had been.

When the sub-subcycle of being constituted by an individual person reaches its phase of greatest subjectivity — the equivalent of the symbolic Midnight, its own relative Godhead state — the spiritual entity that had sought to enter into at least partial relationship with the once-alive person is moved by Compassion (its highest and most universal aspect). To make possible the neutralization of the old karma, the spiritual entity seeks to contact a new human being yet to be born. Gradually, the archetypal structure of a new dharma is formed by the archetypal mind united with the principle of individualization (the spiritual will, Ichcha in Sanskrit).

From the point of view of the spiritual Quality, the new human being's task will be to perform this dharma, but the new human being is not the old human being reappeared. It is any human being ready to be born in the biosphere whose biological characteristics could be the foundation for the performance of the new dharma. This dharma "projects" an image of itself upon the virgin etheric matter of such a human body about to be conceived — upon its "fourth ether," the level of etheric substance which reflects, and focuses karma into a particular human body. As karma is only the inverted or negative aspect of dharma, this projection of dharma is reflected in matter as karma. By this projection, the genetic pattern produced by the combination of two ancestral lines of germ cells (sperm and ovum) is altered to some extent, often considerably; the more developed the spiritual entity and its spiritual will, the greater the transformation.

Only in this sense can one say that the spiritual entity "chooses" a new body; the body is selected for its possibility of adequately responding to the dharma. Because the dharma is determined by the karma of a once-living person, a cause-and-effect relationship obviously operates between the deceased person and the one being born. But to say that the former "reincarnates" in the latter is not accurate. The new person succeeds the dead one as holder of the same "office."

The relation is a succession, not only because the old karma has been transmitted to the new person, but because both persons, together with many others preceding and following them, constitute a series whose successive terms are all related. They are related through a karma-dharma linkage to one single spiritual entity, one of the immense number of Letters of the creative Word, the Logos. This one single spiritual Quality — together with its servants, the spiritual will and the archetypal mind — constitutes the pole of Unity in a dynamic process whose Multiplicity pole is represented by a series of personalities periodically succeeding one another. During this process the two polarities of being interact, and the process operates two ways: the spiritual Quality "descends" toward matter and becomes increasingly differentiated, specialized, and focused; while through an "ascending" serial evolution, the many human persons participating in (and belonging to) the process achieve an increasing degree of refinement, sensitivity, and close attunement to the vibration of the spiritual Quality.

Gradually, these persons increasingly come to reflect the archetypal Image spatializing the vibration of the spiritual Quality (the Augoeides in Greek mystical philosophy). The process is "consummated" in the "divine Marriage" of which mystical traditions speak — from the point of view of true occultism, in the "great Initiation."(2) The last person of the series is not only spiritualized, but in a special sense "immortalized" when the spiritual Quality becomes "impersoned" (rather than "impersonated"). As a concrete, pure manifestation of a spiritual Quality, the individualized but ego-transcending organization of consciousness and will gains the same degree of permanence as the Quality — that is, permanence until the close of the great planetary cycle.

2. In the great mythos of Christianity this consummation takes place in two scenes: one is the Transfiguration, when the Son of God (the Christos) becomes totally united with the Son of Man (Jesus); the other is the Crucifixion ("Consummatum est" — it is consummated). As the blood (the vital principle) of the Son of Man (the perfected, "christed" person) falls upon and impregnates the soil of the earth, a process of humanization of the planet symbolically begins. Thereafter, matter itself can become more responsive to spirit, to the power of divine Compassion. This occurrence heralds the coming of a future humanity, whose bodies will be finer instrumentalities allowing for a better attunement with spiritual Qualities. The recent process of the "dematerialization" of matter in the development of subatomic physics, Teilhard de Chardin's spiritualized vision of matter (see his beautiful Hymn to Matter), and the life-work of Sri Aurobindo and Mother Mira in Pondicherry, India, may be precursorial indications of an eventual planetary transformation. The negative aspect of the transformation would of course be a cataclysmic nuclear war destroying most of present day mankind. Yet if not total, such a destruction might leave a small number of positive human mutants out of whom a new species would grow (perhaps with cells or bodies more translucent to the light of spirit and dynamized by a higher vibration of the life force).

 

The Cycle of Man and its Pancultural Fulfillment

The process I have outlined above deals only with a single spiritual Quality — only one of a myriad of aspects of the creative Word (Logos) — and a single series of personalities magnetically drawn to this single aspect. Billions of these processes are now at work, their earliest phases having taken place in societies forgotten long ago. In most of them, a person now living is a rather narrowly circumscribed system of organization dominated by biological drives, by the assumptions and imperatives of his or her culture, and by the desires, emotions, and expectations of an insecure, constantly shifting center of gravity, the ego; and previous personalities in the series probably felt, acted, and thought in much the same way, at a similar level of consciousness in various cultures.

Instead of focusing attention upon these series of persons, each attracted (mostly unconsciously) by a particular spiritual Quality, one can as well think primarily of the gradual evolution of cultures through the millions of years mankind has been active on earth. Each culture is also a whole, a system of organization giving a particular structure and character to a collectivity of human beings, a society. This structure concretizes an archetype of interpersonal and social relatedness, according to the possibilities of a region of the biosphere and the need of the human species at a particular stage of the planet's evolution. Cultures are systems of collective living, which gradually form, mature, and disintegrate either rapidly or through a slow process of senescence and institutional sclerosis. They usually leave some kind of mental or perhaps spiritual harvest to future societies, and all these harvests contribute to the development of the earth's noosphere — that is, the planetary Mind. But even this Mind is not the ultimate reality of the planet. A planetary spiritual realm corresponds to the spiritual entity in the total organization of a human being. 

To think of the whole earth as a system of organization encompassing all levels of activity and consciousness, from the most material to the most spiritual, may be difficult for people whose conception of "being" has been limited by Western traditions. However, there is no longer any reason to remain blind to the amazingly well-organized interactions integrating every component of the planet into a single organism, able to maintain the balance of its functions, heal, and transform itself. This planetary organism has a physical-material basis of rocks, minerals, water, and soil; and a biosphere gradually develops on it. As vegetable and animal species evolve and become increasingly interrelated and interdependent, ecosystems take form and at least rudimentary forms of collective psychism evolve in them, especially as animal, and later primitive human societies, appear. 

As the contents of this psychic realm become ever more conscious and mental through the operations of human cultures and socioreligious institutions, the planetary Mind or noosphere becomes a relatively independent field for which the archetypes of many cultures provide structures relevant to the needs of human collectivities. The highest levels of this noosphere can be considered the base of operation from which planetary or cosmic forces radiate into the whole earth. They may correspond to what Sri Aurobindo called the "overmind," beyond which he envisions a "supermind" referring to the planetary dharma (or supreme "Truth") of humanity.

From such a point of view, the planetary function of humanity as a whole is to develop a network of integrated mental consciousness progressively filling the noosphere with the harvest of significant and revealing experiences left by every culture. Archetypally, Man is the being in charge of giving meaning to every activity within the planetary organism — meaning in relation to the whole; meaning which includes much more than sense-data and rationalistic interpretations. Ultimately, this meaning includes a full awareness of the original archetype structuring the various activities within the entire planet — and much more than the archetypal structure. The "omega-state" is not only a perfect realization of the "alpha-creative" release. At least in principle, it also includes a plus factor which is essentially unpredictable — the spiritual harvest of meaning produced by the magic of relatedness, by the unceasing interaction between all existents within the planetary field.

The factor of interrelatedness should never be ignored. It is ignored if one believes that a single individual alone can reach a state of being identical to the state which the Communion of co-conscious and co-active perfected human beings (the Pleroma) can attain at the close of a great planetary cycle. Inasmuch as a self-conscious individual human being is a whole, he or she can experience Wholeness and be "illumined" or "initiated" in terms of the "divine Marriage" mentioned above. But the illumination an individual can receive is always colored by the particularity of the spiritual Quality (the Letter of the creative Word) which constitutes his or her spiritual identity. At the level of any particular being, light is colored; or perhaps we should speak of luminescence rather than light. A red radiation may be extremely intense, but it does not contain the entire spectrum of solar light human beings consider "white."

Modern students of esoteric philosophy (though evidently it is no longer "esoteric"!) speak of seven "cosmic Rays" emanating from the originating release of divine power; and such a sevenfold differentiation of a primordial creative release seems almost universally accepted by esoteric philosophies (though in some instances only five streams of power are mentioned publicly). If the one creative release beginning the cycle divides at once into seven streams of power, it is logical to expect that at the close of the cycle the complex interrelatedness of seven groups of perfected human beings is needed to produce the synthesis of meanings out of which the one white Light would emerge as a supreme final realization, balancing, as it were, the primordial unity of the creative Word.

The problem implied in the preceding paragraphs is encountered at every level of existence, because at every level an organized system — an existent — is both a whole and a participant in the field of activity (and also in the consciousness) of a greater, more encompassing whole. Every whole is a manifestation of Wholeness, but only at the level at which it actually operates. The greater whole in which its activity takes place contains many other existential units that are also wholes, all of which perform only limited functions in the organism of the greater whole. As every whole is therefore at the same time whole and part, it may identify itself either with its own wholeness — with its own sense of being a complete system — or with its "partness," that is, with the function it performs not only in but also for the greater whole.

Every whole that has reached the human stage of self-consciousness theoretically can have an experience of Wholeness relative to the level at which it primarily functions. Yet the experience of Wholeness at the biological level has not the same scope and quality as the experience of Wholeness at the sociocultural or personal level. A human body may experience Wholeness as health and vitality, in terms of the quality defining yet limiting everything that is born and has matured in the earth's biosphere. At the level of personhood Wholeness is experienced in terms of sociocultural values. The experience of Wholeness is thus qualified by the dynamic character and intensity of the activity and the consciousness of the experiencing whole. In this sense it is "colored" by the place the experiencer occupies in the entire cycle of being.

If the whole reaching its cyclic climax results from the integration of a spiritual entity and an individual person perfectly attuned to it, the experience of Wholeness includes the spiritual harvest of a long series of personalities brought to a focus in the concluding "divine Marriage." The quality of the experience could be called "panpersonal" as well as spiritual. At the level of the Pleroma, it presumably is "panhuman" and planetary; all "Rays" (and sub-Rays) and the harvest of all the cultures of human evolution contribute to it. Thus one can symbolize it as perfect, all-inclusive "whiteness" — hence the symbolic appellation, "White Lodge." In the ultimate moment of planetary consummation (the symbolic "Last Day"), the whole earth should experience planetary Wholeness in its fullness. Beyond planetary Wholeness one can envision an experience of heliocosmic Wholeness in which the entire solar system (helios=sun, cosmos all-inclusive system) would fully experience both its unity and its cosmic meaning.

The human mind with its passion for reducing every possibility of experience to some quantitative value, when faced with the logical impossibility of placing an end to the series of ever more encompassing wholes, can only take cover under the negative, pseudo-idea of infinity — just as the mystic speaks of timelessness when, for a moment having paralyzed in his consciousness the operation of the principle of Multiplicity, he or she experiences an ecstasy of oneness. For the "mind of wholeness" all great experiences are both all-inclusive and qualitative. Wholeness is. At whatever level it is experienced, it is unquantitized Wholeness — neither small nor vast, because satisfied in being what it is, filled with the serenity of plenitude of being, illumined with the peace that glows with the "light" of a harmony in which all motions are balanced. Where such a plenitude and such a perfection of polarized movements exist, there is neither small nor large, neither time nor infinity — only Wholeness, undefinable because the defining mind is totally absorbed in the immeasurable peace of totally "being."

 

Rhythm of Wholeness

 

---