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THE INEVITABILITY OF SUCCESS & FAILURE
The world-picture of the Movement of Wholeness is essentially esthetic. It is, in the deepest sense of the word, a poem — the Poem of Being. The Movement of Wholeness has form and symmetry, and the relation between the principles of Unity and Multiplicity develops in a cyclic counterpoint; Wholeness is the great Harmony of Being. Harmony, though implying contrast, transcends the realm of conflict — for in situations of conflict human beings too often see themselves as antagonists seeking to destroy one another's right to be. Wholeness requires that opposites be seen as "co-being" in a state of perpetual meaningfulness.
Nevertheless, at any particular phase or moment of the cyclic process, an ethical situation can be readily perceived, which at the human level involves a "moral" choice. Every human being to some extent can, and therefore must, choose between flowing with the movement or resisting it. Whether in full consciousness or in a mostly unconscious state, the individual either orients his or her being (or at least the central component of it) in the direction of the next evolutionary phase of the cycle of Man, or stubbornly (even if unconsciously) clings to the values and way of life the present phase of evolution has already left behind.
Evolutionary "success" simply means conscious attunement to the Movement of Wholeness and the deliberate attempt to actualize in one's consciousness and activity the potential realizations and values Inherent in the next evolutionary step. Failure, on the other hand, results from the inability to let go of the past because the mind, the ego-will, and the physical habits refuse to change radically enough, or at least to be used in the service of emergent new ideals and concepts. Nevertheless, a few principles of conduct remain basic throughout the whole period of human evolution. They persist because they are essential characteristics of the direction in which the evolutionary cycle moves after the symbolic Noon is reached. At such a time (as we already have seen) the "descent" of the power of the Godhead state occurs by means of a series of Avatars, in and through whom the archetypal Image of Man acquires existential and objective form. The period of the Movement of Wholeness between Noon and Sunset is primarily the period of actualization of the potential inherent in this archetypal human Image. Therefore, the one essential dharma of all human beings is to pass from the condition of Natural Man to that of Illumined Man by allowing the rising power of the principle of Unity to become focused into their total being.
However, although all human beings potentially can reach Illumination, they will not all do so. This must be accepted unemotionally and, above all, be understood: there must be failures as well as successes. Once the possibility to move ahead and take the next evolutionary step presents itself to an individual, he or she must respond to this possibility deliberately. At the same time, resistance inevitably takes form, if not in the whole person at least in some of the components inherent in generic human nature (that is, in the nature shared by all human beings). Motion always develops inertia in whatever has form.
From a slightly different perspective, this also means that whenever a new mode of energy is released, the inertia inherent in the forms given to the old, familiar mode inevitably manifests as the negative or more or less destructive use of the energy newly released. Since the Industrial Revolution began to release new forms of power at a tremendously accelerated pace more than a hundred and fifty years ago, and since the more recent release of potentially devastating nuclear energy, mankind has had squarely to face this fact. Even the Bible alludes to the inevitability of failures when the "Lord God" states that in a particular situation he will set apart and test for their ability to survive one third of human beings, while the other two-thirds will perish.(1) "God" does not seem to care which human beings will be saved but is only intent on having "one third" given the special chance. Whether the ratio is basic or refers only to a particular historical or symbolic situation is not important here. In the Gospel (Matthew 18:7) Jesus is also made to say, "It needs must be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh."
1. Revelation 9:18
Failures must occur, because if there were none, the universe as a whole would reach perfection and, in the Godhead, absolute oneness. Thus there would be no cause for divine Compassion and no Idea of a new universe. But absolute Unity is impossible, because if the principle of Multiplicity were absolutely defeated, there could be no world of existence. It makes little sense to say that a new universe periodically emerges from an absolute One who desires it. If a "desire for manifestation" is inherent in this absolute One, then obviously He or It is not absolutely One — only relatively so. No "desire" for multiplicity could operate in a state of absolute, timeless unity and omnipotence.
To speak of a sublime mystery in this connection is as meaningless as to say that the world is ruled by chance. An element of chance must operate in the universe, otherwise order, if unchallenged, would lead to absolute repetitiveness, to a Nietzschean Eternal Return. On the other hand, the total absence of a principle of order would render impossible any process with a definite character and goal. Although the same structural principles operate in every cycle of being, events are not repeated exactly, because the factor of relatedness enters at every step of cyclic evolution. As Wholeness is indefinable, so are the possibilities of relationships. Moreover, an element of unpredictability is involved in all existence, because during the half-cycle of existence the principle of Multiplicity dominates the world stage, creating a sense of infinity — that is, the feeling that anything and everything is possible.
The principle of Multiplicity manifests as the desire for existence as a separate being. Even in the postmortem state of inistence, this desire retains some of its strength. In another sense, the principle of Multiplicity manifests in "ghosts" — many kinds of ghosts at many levels of being. All memories of experiences of relationship are, in the broadest sense of the term, ghosts. There are ghosts — memories of the failures of the past — even in the nearly total oneness of the supreme consciousness of the Godhead. They arouse divine Compassion, which is the realization by oneness that multiplicity cannot be dismissed.
The past cannot be dismissed; it inheres in the present — in any present moment. Failure cannot be dismissed; it is a ghostly presence in any success. Not only does the death of any relationship lurk in its birth — however ecstatic this birthing may be — but the failures of relatedness, small or large, are potential in the moment of greatest happiness and experienced oneness. These facts must be accepted, but accepted in the vivid and enduring consciousness of the meaning they can reveal to an open mind — to the mind of wholeness. In that mind, failures and successes move eternally in a steady and unemotional counterpoint that constitutes the supreme antiphony of being.
The Two Basic Causes of Failure
The deepest roots of failure are formed at the two great turning points of the Movement of Wholeness — the symbolic Midnight (when the principle of Unity reaches its climax) and the Noon-hour (when the principle of Multiplicity is nearly all-powerful). At these two points, a reversal of the dynamic character and the duality of the motion must occur. The ever-changing relationship between the principles of Unity and Multiplicity had become either interiorized or exteriorized in and through forms. These forms have by then acquired inertia, and inertia inevitably presents an obstacle to the necessary repolarization and redirection of the motion. Whatever expresses or identifies itself with this inertia generates the seeds of failure.
At the level of ethical judgment, failure manifests as the direct or indirect source of "evil." But evil and failure are fundamentally the result of not taking the new evolutionary step. The original sins are actually "sins of omission." What is not done when the dharma demands that it should be done inevitably leads, sooner or later, to inherently destructive acts, to "sins of commission." Individuals (or collectivities of individuals) who do not go ahead with the Movement of Wholeness fall behind, to some extent blocking the path for those who come after them; they may even induce a contagious movement of retreat.
Because two great moments of repolarization occur in the Movement, two kinds of resistance are possible: resistance belonging to the Night hemicycle of subjective being and resistance belonging to the Day hemicycle human consciousness interprets as the objective, existential world. Metaphysicians and occultists thus have alluded to two basic kinds of failure and evil; "cosmic evil" and "existential evil."
Cosmic evil is rooted in the subjective resistance of centers of consciousness who refuse, as it were, to accept the crucial change at the symbolic Midnight, when the trend toward what seems to be the possibility of absolute oneness must be reversed by the outflow of Compassion calling for a new world dominated by the principle of Multiplicity. The "resisters" are so powerfully drawn toward what seems to them the goal of absolute oneness that they refuse to identify themselves with the Compassion of the Godhead state. In Mahayana Buddhism these resisters are called Pratyeka Buddhas, Buddhas of spiritual selfishness. The one-pointed, utterly concentrated will of these beings — the will to reach Nirvana (the state of oneness) — makes it impossible for them to "remember" the failures of the world in which they were able to reach a limited kind of Illumination — perhaps even in some cases using human beings who had a tendency to fail as means to reach their own spiritual goal.
Compassion in the Godhead state demands that all the failures, partial or total, of the half-cycle that began with the advent of Natural Man be collectively remembered. Condensed into an all-inclusive "memory," all the negative reactions to evolutionary change that had occurred during the human period of the cycle have to be faced. Out of this confrontation total Compassion emerges. This gives rise to the subjective, supramental Idea of a new universe in which all that partially or totally failed in the old universe is to be given a "second chance" to reach perfect Illumination and the Pleroma condition of unanimous consciousness. Yet even as the Godhead state is reached and the direction of the Movement of Wholeness is reversed by a new rise of the principle of Multiplicity, some components of the Whole are so entranced by the ideal of absolute oneness that they do not allow Compassion to move them. They resist change in the direction of the new motion.
Thus are the seeds of "cosmic evil" planted. They affect the very foundations of the future universe, because they influence the divine Mind's formulation of the many archetypes that give form to the creative Word, the Logos. Many mythological narratives speak of "wars in Heaven." These symbolize various phases of the subjective process of formulation of archetypes during the period preceding the symbolic Dawn, before the Creation of the objective world. Because of "cosmic evil," the potentiality of failure is inherent in the Creation. It is actualized as human failure and human evil throughout the period of human evolution that follows Noon. It inheres in human nature as a mainly unconscious and compulsive subjective factor.
Existential evil, on the other hand, results from the objective resistance of biologically controlled human organisms and (later on) of individualized, self-conscious persons against whatever is inspired by and a release for the energy of the increasingly powerful drive toward Unity. The resistance is objective because it is rooted in the inertia of stable structures, be they biological, psychological, or socio-cultural. The spiritual origin of existential evil can be traced to a negative reaction to the descent of the power of the Godhead and the concrete actualization of the archetype Man at and after the symbolic Noon, the turning point and "bottom" of the cycle. Man's refusal to accept the reversal and repolarization of the Movement of Wholeness is the refusal to become attuned to the energy of love and union. Similarly, esoteric traditions speak of the refusal of spiritual entities who had attained a relatively high state of consciousness (but not the Pleroma state) to incarnate in the animal-like bodies of beings which are protohuman until these spiritual entities incarnate in them.
As every Avatar represents a particular aspect of the archetype Man and is thus an Exemplar to which a particular race or culture (or even mankind as a whole) should become attuned, the resistance of a whole culture and of individual persons to the new essential Quality released by the Avatar is a source of existential evil. This resistance usually is focused by the inertial behavior of a particular social class of people, and it calls forth compensatory and usually violent revolutions. The situation is complex because the process of individualization is ambiguous. This process is a particularly tense and difficult stage of the relation between Unity and Multiplicity. At this stage of human evolution, serious problems are presented by the necessity to pass from cultures based on biological drives or the exclusivism of a religious and socio-political tradition believed to be superior to any other to a state of global civilization including all human beings and operating at the level of all-inclusiveness. This new level requires the integrated activity and (in a transcendent sense) the psychospiritual unification of truly autonomous, self- reliant individuals; but the development of such mature individuals at first involves the development of a separative ego-consciousness in which the principle of Multiplicity, which is waning yet still powerful, wages a relentless battle for supremacy with the waxing power of Unity. Any individual in whom the battle is lost finds himself or herself sliding into a dark abyss where great pride, anger, and lust gradually disconnect his or her struggling center of consciousness and will from the rest of the tide of all-human evolution and unification. The eventual end is the utter repudiation of the power of love and of any divine manifestation, and after ages of preying upon weak psyches in an attempt to regain ever-waning energies, a state of nearly absolute isolation.
This end — the end of what is traditionally called the "black" path because it is rooted in a negative response to the "light" of the Godhead — constitutes a state of total failure of human evolution. Yet it, too, represents a state of nearly absolute unity — the unity of a center without a circle, thus without substance and consciousness. Such a state is the opposite of the all-inclusive oneness of the Godhead state, which is an utterly condensed condition of nearly total unification of all the substance, power, and consciousness of a vast universal cycle of being. The state of nearly absolute darkness is one of nearly absolute indifference, because where there is no longer energy and substance, even hatred or conscious denial can no longer exist. It is the state of nearly absolute materiality, the ultimate of decay. Yet it is only nearly absolute, just as the Godhead is only a nearly absolute condition of all-encompassing oneness of being; for any absolute, by definition, denies the possibility of any relative state ever existing.
Even in the deepest darkness of "pure" matter and seemingly total indifference to being, an immensely dim longing for substantial existence must be and is present. Without it, there could be no reaction to the release of creative power at the symbolic Sunrise of a new cycle. This creative release has, however, repeatedly to "churn" the almost totally indifferent matter of the space it encompasses, because this matter initially almost totally resists the rhythmic movement of the creative energy of the divine Builders of the nascent cosmos. This need for constantly repetitive, rhythmic activity is reflected in the magic rituals of primitive societies; it also is apparent in the methods of modern commercial and political advertising and even in today's "meditation" or "minimal" music.
The manifestation of a great Avatar as the spiritual seed from which a new culture sooner or later germinates is also a repetitive process. As explained, each manifestation has its own quality; each stresses one specific aspect of archetypal Man — or in a religious sense, one of the "Names" of God — which it is the culture's dharma (truth of being) to actualize. Each Avatar "grafts" a spiritual-mental Quality upon evolving human nature, which at first is a strictly biological system of organization. Human nature, however, resists change, and this resistance is the basic cause of existential evil.
In this sense, the refusal to follow "the way, the truth, and the life" exemplified by the Avatar, or more accurately, to accept his power as a driving force in one's outer and inner life, is at the root of human failure, be it an individual failure or the failure of an entire culture. Yet individual and collective failures are not easy to distinguish from one another, because individuals build and develop collective religious and social institutions, which in turn structure and dominate the collective psychism of whole cultures — which in turn condition individuals. Collective psychism is the binding energy integrating the members of a culture, somewhat as life energy (prana or chi) integrates the cells of a biological organism.(2) Social and religious institutions structure the collective psychism of a culture; they derive their spiritual power from the energy generated in the culture's collective psychism by the "descent" of the new avataric manifestation. But all too often, social and religious leaders use the energy embodied in the institutions to gain power over people they should (and perhaps at first do) serve. Thus the culture's institutions and the drive toward unity become unduly limited, rigid, and even perverted. Eventually, the culture must break down.
2. The term psychism will be defined in more detail in Chapter 8. Also, see my book Beyond Individualism: The Psychology of Transformation (Wheaton, Illinois. Theosophical Publishing House, 1979).
When the time comes for the process of individualization to develop in earnest, religions and cultures sanction it in the name of Avatars who projected into the human world the particular spiritual Quality of autonomous and centralized selfhood, the "I am" which the members of the culture are intended to embody. But the power of the divine release is always used to build collective institutions, while individual human beings react to it by developing ever more blatant and aggressive egos obscuring or even negating their spiritual individuality. In most instances, humanity proceeds from failure to failure (partial though they be) toward only relative success. Perhaps the biblical "two thirds" do so, perhaps more, because in the "remnant" that is tested, many may not pass the test. Nevertheless, human failures must occur as long as the principle of Multiplicity dominates the world-stage before the symbolic Sunset — before the omega of the world of existence.
Atoms, plants, and animals cannot fail. They may, however, reflect the karma of failure of the planet as a whole or — for example in the case of cancerous cells — of mankind as a whole. Any human being can fail; and this is Man's greatness as well as his responsibility. The fact of failure must be accepted unemotionally, with the realization that by failing, Man arouses Compassion in the Godhead state. Nevertheless, one must not take one's own failure lightly and dismiss its existential results, which can be drastic and ultimately devastating indeed; nor should one succumb to the attraction of forces in one's nature or in society which glamorize the past, recycle its obsolete features in seemingly new symbols and collective institutions, and thereby incite failure.
Collective institutions presumably will be needed by human beings of average consciousness for many millennia to come; yet, though they condition the behavior of growing human beings and set limits to the forms creativity may take, they need not blind the consciousness of determined and mentally open individuals. One must render unto the collective what belongs to the collective, and to the individual what belongs to the individual. For any human being who is ready and able to become truly an individual, failure occurs only when, under pressures seemingly too heavy to bear, the would-be individual surrenders his or her consciousness and will — the sense of individual power and selfhood — to the collective norm.
The individual must be able to stand alone, even amidst the collectivity in which he or she was born and educated. He or she must find security in a vivid, repeated, and clear realization of individual selfhood rather than "take refuge" in an institution and its collective dharma, however beautiful and calming this dharma may be. Illumined Man must reach Illumination as an individual. Even though transfigured by the Meaning of Wholeness and sustained by the invisible Companions whose sublime Communion he or she is about to join, the individual is essentially alone — and free to fail if traces of pride or longing for the past remain in his or her personality.
In the supreme equinoctial moment in human evolution, when the strength of the principles of Unity and Multiplicity are equal and Alpha polarizes Omega, whether we think of individuals having far outdistanced the masses of mankind or of the spiritualized humanity of the Last Day, Man passes through the Gate of Silence into a world of ever-increasing subjectivity. Passing through this awe-inspiring threshold, the mind becomes the mirror in which God the Creator radiates the Light of the rising Sun of the universal dharma that once aroused Chaos into space-time and motion. In Illumined Man resonates this creative Word, which is Sound and Light; and in this resonance the Wholeness of every whole that is, has been, and ever will be sings the supreme Meaning of all-encompassing being.
