Constitution of Man - The Physical & Psychic Bodies

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CONSTITUTION OF MAN — THE PHYSICAL & PSYCHIC BODIES

Dane Rudhyar

While Part Two dealt with the pattern of the cycle of being, the Movement of Wholeness, in terms of essentially abstract principles which can be applied universally. Part Three focuses attention upon the cycle of being of a particular entity experienced as a man or woman. The biologist and the psychologist consider such an entity primarily a physical organism whose life span extends between birth (or conception) and death. But from the perspective of the mental attitude outlined in Parts One and Two, the life span of a man or woman constitutes only one half of a whole cycle of being — its symbolic Day period of predominantly objective activity and consciousness. The person called Peter or Jane refers to this Day hemicycle. A full understanding of such a person requires the consideration of the other half of the cycle — a Night period of predominantly subjective activity and consciousness.

The difficulty encountered when attempting to deal with this Night half-cycle is that it does not refer to the human being known as Peter or Jane, a being whose physicality — one comes to realize — is only the external appearance assumed by a combination of factors which in their togetherness constitute a whole of being. After death, this combination ceases to exist as the Peter or Jane we knew as a living person, yet the component factors in this physically experienced person do not disappear. As I have repeatedly stated, there is no place for non-being in the concept of wholeness of being I am presenting. There is only being — being in a perpetual and rhythmic (or cyclic) state of transformation in which a continual combining and recombining of elements occur. Being implies a multiplicity of elements, because "to be" is to be a whole — one among the seemingly infinite (because indefinable) number of concretizations of Wholeness.

When I speak of Peter or Jane, I have in mind a temporary combination of factors constituting a human being in the state of physical existence. This combination breaks down at death, but the Wholeness of which this being was but one phase retains its identity of being in new conditions. The physically experienceable Peter or Jane is not a whole of being. He or she represents — I repeat — only a half-cycle of being. Each of the diverse elements combined to constitute a particular person during this hemicycle follows its own course during the other half of the cycle, the symbolic Night period. A new combination occurs when the entire cycle ends, because the end of one cycle is also the beginning of a new one. The continuum of being has no end; the Movement of Wholeness never stops.

The new is the progeny of the old. In a sense it is the old reborn; but not all the elements of the old combination, Peter or Jane, will be parts of the new combination, John or Barbara. This must be so because the cycle of being of a particular human whole is an open cycle. It has to be open because it is actually only a very small sub-subcycle within the cycle of humanity, the planet earth, the solar system, and the galaxy. During the period between the birth of the old combination and the birth of the new combination, the entire universe — particularly the whole planet and human societies and their cultures — changes, perhaps considerably. Yet the new can be called the progeny of the old because the accomplishments and the failures of the old leave a legacy of karma to the new. Karma compels (or in a relatively few cases, Compassion impels) the formation of a new human being, John, because Peter could not fulfill during his physical life the Wholeness of being of which he was a fleeting manifestation.

So stated, the concept of "reincarnation" is far more complex than its popular formulation. The latter is not only unsound and philosophically unsatisfying, but based on a narrow and inhibiting psychological attitude. It arises from the spiritual materialism of a culture whose exclusivistic scientific empiricism and worship of personal values makes it nearly impossible for a man or woman to envision the wholeness of his or her being. The word "reincarnation" recently has become a catchword — often financial bait — conveniently used to attract people whose lives seem banal, confined, and empty. Evidently it implies that a mysterious entity, the soul, is incarnated in a human organism; that in some manner this soul survives the death of the physical organism and after a period "re-incarnates" in an embryo developing in a woman's womb.

The basic problem is how to identify this soul, define its origin and nature, and outline what can be understood and expected of its future. To solve this problem satisfactorily requires explaining not only the relationship between the soul and the body in which it is said to have incarnated, but also the relationship between the soul and the psychic and mental components of the person as a whole. The solution requires going beyond the particular person to the relationship between the soul, the person, and the culture and society which have formed the person's character and basic approach to life experiences and learned knowledge.

Religious and philosophical traditions of all cultures — and today Western science — provide either general approaches or dogmatic answers to this problem. Neither the traditional Christian-European approach nor that of the new psychology (in its various forms purported to be founded on empirical and "scientific" research) provides truly satisfying and wholesome foundations for today's much advertised "new age" consciousness. What follows here is an alternative approach, not only to the problems involved in the concept of reincarnation, but also to the still more basic one of what constitutes, in the largest sense of the term, Man. In Part Two, the term was given an abstract and universal meaning in terms of the whole cycle of being. Now I shall attempt, first, to outline a picture of the basic factors entering into the total life-situation we call a human being — body, psyche, mind, spirit — then, to suggest what happens to each of these factors after death, during the symbolic Night period of the entire human cycle, and what is involved in the recombination of these factors into a new being.

I shall begin the study of the constitution of Man with the physical body, because whatever we come to consider as Man in our existential world rests upon the foundation of biology. Even if we believe in a divine revelation concerning the nature of Man, such a revelation has to take a form determined by what human beings, as physical organisms, can perceive, understand, and assimilate. Therefore it seems appropriate in the accompanying diagram to place the physical components at the top of the list, for these are the first lines a reader will read. The reverse order, which is nearly always given elsewhere, implies that the whole series of components is seen in one act of perception, thus spatially; above and below are taken as a scale of values. This is not the approach presented in this book, which deals with being as a process unfolding, phase by phase, in the consciousness of a human being.

Though the physical body is the objective foundation of human existence and of all knowledge deriving from the measurement of forms, it possesses, as it were, two "natures." First, it is the product of biological forces active in the earth's biosphere, which reach a high level of complexity and organization in the life-species homo sapiens.

But the body is more than a generic biological organism. Having been subjected to a great variety of stresses and disformations by (1) a particular culture and (2) a particular personality, this product of impersonal, planetary "life" assumes a complex set of characteristics giving it a more or less individual character. Therefore, the natural biological body should be distinguished from what results from the pressures giving it relatively individual characteristics. These pressures are existential manifestations of both the karma of the particular person whose body it is and the collective karma of a particular culture and special community.

In terms of the cyclic pattern of the Movement of Wholeness, "life" represents the general type of structural organization taken by the balance of forces within the Movement during a particular phase of the development of a planet whose material and chemical conditions are conducive to this kind of organization. During the period preceding the symbolic Noon, life takes a series of forms of increasing complexity. As the Noon point is reached (greatly simplifying the process), the form of the human body stabilizes and reaches a truly human type of biological organization. Being a manifestation of planetary life, this human body is ruled not only by instincts, as is every form of life within the biosphere; it also is intimately related to, because the product of, a particular region of the biosphere. The structure of the human body is, like a musical theme, susceptible of numerous variations. In different regions of the biosphere, life produces bodies of different colors and races, and each type has a special role to perform in the total rhythm of the biosphere.

At first, however, these types of physical bodies do not have cultural, personal, or individual characteristics. These develop gradually as relatively superficial modifications of racial types, which nevertheless retain their basic nature and biodynamic rhythms. What we today see, touch, and think of as "my body" is a biological formation of a certain type that has been partially differentiated — and in some cases distorted — by the super-biological pressures of culture, personal character, and individuality. Such pressures can be defined as the results of past karma; but this karma is both collective and individual. The super-biological modifications of a body's basic racial nature are also (and in some instances even more) the inevitable results of strenuous efforts the person may have made to neutralize past karma by performing a difficult dharma.

In the esoteric traditions and popular mythologies of many cultures, the term physical body includes, in addition to the dense material body, a concentric series of subtler material formations. Though these are usually given the rather misleading name of etheric body, they rather constitute surrounding as well as pervading sheaths of a subtler kind of matter which has a variety of characteristics and functions. To speak of an etheric "body" is probably inadequate. It operates more as a "field of forces" or guiding field. It can be regarded as the "vehicle" for the life-energy which it focuses as well as distributes among the cells of the physical body. It is, in any case, constituted of matter existing at several levels of tenuity and vibratory energy.(1)

1. While the null results of the famous Michelson-Moreley experiments of the 1880s caused most scientists to abandon the concept of the ether entirely, recent findings in astrophysics have raised the necessity of reconsidering the early and probably premature assertions which failed to consider all the factors in the experiment. These findings suggest that space is not "empty" after all, but "filled" with "an energy-rich subquantic medium composed of extremely small neutral particles called neutrinos, pervading all space and interpenetrating all matter." See "The Rediscovery of the Ether" by H. C. Dudley in Future Science, John White and Stanley Krippner, eds. (Doubleday & Co., New York, 1977) pp. 184-190.

As the matter of the dense physical body exists in several states (solid, liquid, and gaseous), the matter of the subtle etheric vehicles is said to exist in four states. The lowest one (the "fourth ether") is, as it were, the lens through which karma is precipitated.(2) The higher three are essentially impersonal; they give a generically human form to the energy of life that operates in and through the planet's biosphere. The highest state (the seventh) seems to be directly — even if rather mysteriously — related to the most unified condition of subjective being. Avataric manifestations may have their focus at that level of "spiritual" materiality. Each of the main human Races (by which I mean particular stages in the evolutionary process) is a variation on the basic planetary theme, Man. These variations have been mythically personified under the name Manu. In one aspect, a Manu is the prototype of the basic type of human beings during a particular Race-period; in another, "he" symbolizes the totality of all the beings constituting a Race, or rather the essential spiritual vibration and role the Race has to play in the building of the earth's noosphere — the planetary Mind.

2. In The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, Max Heindl speaks of the "fourth ether" as the "Chemical Ether" through which "the forces which cause assimilation and excretion work." In other esoteric doctrines, these forces are related to the solar plexus nerve center (or chakra) connected not only with the assimilation of foodstuff sustaining the operations of the physical body, but with a subtler type of psychic assimilation. It is said that "the gods" speak to men through the solar plexus — that is, this center is the gate through which various psychic currents, including the great Images of a people's collective psychism, enter the consciousness of as yet unindividualized persons. Karmic processes work in the physical body largely through the various functions involved in the metabolism of food — stomach, liver, pancreas, intestines. Eating is a mode of relationship with the food (vegetable and animal) one eats. The desire for food and the desire for sexual partnership or possession are two most fundamental aspects of desire. The desire for air to breathe is another even more imperative but also more "spiritual", desire. By breathing air which has entered the lungs and blood-stream of all living bodies in the biosphere — for air circulates rapidly around the globe - the unity of all living beings is prefigured and to some degree substantiated, unconscious though we are of the fact.

A physical body is a composite entity in which the planetary life force operates within a collection of trillions of cells, molecules, and atoms organized by its integrative power. When this power ceases to operate, the etheric substances of the body are reabsorbed into the life-field of the earth, just as the elements of the decaying dense physical body return to the solid, liquid, and gaseous layers of the globe.

Being an organized whole of activity, a physical body has a consciousness of its own — what has often been called an "elemental" consciousness. Every cell of the body has consciousness — a consciousness related to and an integrated manifestation of its total activity Within the field defined by its form. In most instances this form is determined by karma operating particularly through the etheric field. As human beings exist during the hemicycle characterized by the dominance of the principle of Multiplicity, the nature of human consciousness is predominantly objective. It is thus, at first, mainly determined by the condition of the physical body, which is the most objective aspect of the human type of organization. Yet the principle of Unity rises after the Noon point of the great planetary cycle, and the attractive power of material existence and bodily satisfaction slowly diminishes.

The subjective polarity of being in the human body never is and never has been inoperative. Indeed it is the impersonal and generic power of "life" itself — life as a power which integrates the multiple elements constituting the entire body. This power is primarily focused at the etheric levels of the physical body, because these constitute the field in which structural factors mainly work. These factors — and through them the formless energy of life (as an agent of the principle of Unity) — need periodic strengthening. They regularly have to recuperate from the demands made on them by the principle of Multiplicity during daily activity, when energy is scattered and the human structure is subject to forces of at least relative "disformation." This recuperation occurs during sleep.

In sleep, objective consciousness ceases except for the mostly, yet not entirely, subjective activity we call dreams. In sleep and the dream state, the ratio between the objective power of the principle of Multiplicity and the subjective power of the principle of Unity shifts away from the ratio manifesting as the state of waking consciousness. The new ratio varies during sleep; hence Hindu psychologist-philosophers distinguish the state of dreaming from that of dreamless sleep. From a practical psychological standpoint, however, what the awakening consciousness retains as dreams usually are representations of activities incited by happenings in the sleeping body, of confused remembrances of events of the preceding days, or symbolic dramatizations (often distorted) of real activities having occurred at the more "spiritual" levels of a mind controlled by the principle of Unity.

A dream is the reflection upon the mind of a periodic and only temporary condition of increased subjectivity that belongs to the realm of objective existence. The death of the physical body, on the other hand, refers to an alteration of the balance between Unity and Multiplicity which, though similar to the dream state, is seemingly irreversible. We say that a person in deep sleep is "dead to the world." But this person awakens, because the principle of Multiplicity predominates in the world of existence to which the person belongs as an embodied system of biological organization. When the strength of the principle of Unity exceeds that of the principle of Multiplicity, the physical body of a human being not only passes into the state of sleep — it dies. The principle of Unity becomes too strong to make life in the biosphere possible. Objective existence is "killed" by too much subjectivity.

The balance between subjectivity and objectivity in a living person is very delicate; it can differ only slightly from the norm of mankind's evolution at the time the person lives. Similarly, the temperature of the human body can deviate from the norm of 98.6 degrees Farenheit (or nearly 37 degrees Centigrade) only plus or minus a very few degrees without death ensuing. Thus a human being can neither sleep too deeply nor be awake too objectively. He or she cannot operate too far away from the prevailing normal balance of subjectivity and objectivity and remain alive in a physical body. The question is, however, whether during physical life a human being may not have another "body" in which normally the factor of subjectivity would be stronger (in relation to that of objectivity) than it is in a physical body. In such a body, the balance between Unity and Multiplicity would differ from that prevailing in the world of physical organisms (that is, in the biosphere).

In a biological organism, the dynamism inherent in the Movement of Wholeness assumes the character and modes of operation of the life force because the ratio between the strengths of the two principles falls within certain limits. As a result a variety of electrical and chemical phenomena occur. If the ratio is altered too greatly, these phenomena cease and we say that life has ended. But the dynamism of the Movement of Wholeness is not altered; it simply operates in another mode. It is a mode of operation which, while still having a well defined objective foundation, is more subjective than the life force operating in the biosphere. I already have spoken of this foundation as the psychism that develops out of the constant interrelatedness human beings experience in the state of culture — that is, as a result of having been born into and conditioned by a culture to which they have become attached.

Psychism is a binding, integrative force that represents a new aspect or mode of operation of the energy of the Movement of Wholeness. While the principle of Unity wanes between the symbolic Midnight and Midday, Noon represents a turning point at which the direction of motion reverses; the principle of Unity begins to rise and to challenge the principle of Multiplicity. A polarization occurs between the Midnight and Noon states. The power of the Godhead (divine Compassion) "projects" itself into the realm of life, and Avatars, in and through whom this "Ray" of compassionate power operates, embody successive "revelations." Through the process of human evolution (presumably over millions of years) each revelation becomes the spiritual foundation of a particular culture-whole and its religion. Each culture-whole provides archetypal forms on which interpersonal and sociocultural relationships are based. Psychism is the collective energy built up by these relationships through centuries.

While the subjective principle is relatively ineffectual in atomic or biological fields of integration, in psychism it is in dynamic ascendance, though still weak. The power of psychism may not be as strong as the binding force in atoms or the power of life in a living organism, but it assumes increasing importance in human evolution and in these terms is as significant as life. The power of psychism integrates persons just as the life force integrates the cells of the body; but psychic integration is more subjective and more subtle. It is, nevertheless, just as binding at its own level of operation; exile from the primitive family circle and tribal community is tantamount to psychic death.

With the assistance of what I presently shall call the concretizing mind, psychism "precipitates" as a psychic structure. The latter is a field of forces rather than a "body," yet it operates somewhat as a body. It can be called a body of desires.

The term desire should be understood in its basic sense. All desires are desires for relationship with other entities, be they persons, objects or the kind of power that makes possible the possession of persons or objects (for example, money, fame, authority, and so on). In Sanskrit, desire is kama, a word with many meanings; but the English word desire also has many meanings, some positive, some negative. It can refer to love or hatred, possessiveness or repudiation. Desire also can apply to devotion and faith. In its most sublime aspect, desire is the Compassion emanating from the Godhead state; and religious cosmologies speak of the motive for the creation of the universe as God's "desire" for manifestation. The psychism experienced by the members of a tribe (and even by members of a more complex, less homogenous culture-whole) results from a powerful desire for interpersonal relatedness. This yearning is kama at work — just as the mating urge that compels male and female to embrace is life at work. Mating unites biological structures; psychic love unites the psychic "bodies" of persons.

The psychic or desire body also has been called the "astral body" — a rather confusing term. Its original meaning may be understood by thinking of the sky as ancient Chinese philosophers did. The basic aim of Chinese culture was to make society ("the State") a reflection of the majestic order revealed by the sky. Chinese familial, social, and cultural life was highly ritualized; every relationship was part of a ritual that was meant to reflect the celestial order of the stars and planets as they moved across the sky. The sky was thus the "astral body" of the Chinese state, and the emperor and his astrologers tried to make sure that the complex interplay of family and social relationships would reflect celestial order. They used "music, rites, and chastisements" to accomplish this end. Similar means traditionally have been used in the West: the deliberate arousal of religious faith, observances of various kinds, and moral or sociocultural sanctions, including excommunication and (under the Inquisition) torture — all of which were intended for the sake of the soul.

What was meant by "soul" in this case was none other than the astral body or psychic self — the body of desires. Culture and religion were meant to transmute the desires of the person — the sociocultural unit — from selfish and biologically impelled desires to the desire for salvation through faith, altruism, and neighborly love. The purpose of devotion to Christ or to the Church, in India to a guru, was the transformation of the many desires for possessive and satisfying relationships into one single stream with a spiritual object. At the lower level of psychic desire, the soul was called the "animal soul" or less pejoratively, the "living soul"; its highest level was termed the "divine soul." In most human beings the soul was torn by a crucial conflict between the animal and the divine; the results of such a conflict during a person's life span determined, after a symbolic "Judgment," what the state of being after death would be. In Christian tradition, three possibilities were dramatized as heaven, purgatory, and hell.

Yet neither philosophers nor theologians have made clear that the whole realm of desire inevitably develops out of the human state of sociocultural living. While this state is rooted in biology, it nevertheless transcends "life." While a physical body is an organism of cells, a strongly integrated society and culture is an organization of persons. As a result the basic energies at work differ at each level of organization. Relationships operating at the biological level differ qualitatively from the relationships of the sociocultural level of psychism. As long as a human being operates as a physical body, his or her psychic energy is deeply related to and dependent upon life energy; but when the physical body disintegrates, the psychic body of desire operates alone.

A psychic body is the product of interpersonal, sociocultural relationships. If a human being were born alone and could live without any relationships with other human beings, he or she would have no psychic body. He or she would be a protohuman animal, not a human being. Protohuman manifestations of life become at least potentially human at the Noon of the cycle, when they are gathered together in tribal groups, by the descent of the power of the Godhead through the primordial Avatar. Avatars periodically appearing among men-in-the-making give them potent Images which become the foundation of sociocultural living and therefore of development at the level of psychism, which at that phase of the cycle refers to the collective soul of the tribe.

Human beings have desires insofar as they are "human," insofar as they are "persons," that is, members of a society and culture. Animals have instincts. Men and women acting as biological organisms also can act compulsively in an instinctual way, but such actions are animal rather than human. To the extent a human being is a person, personalized desires operate, and these desires are conditioned, and often totally predetermined, by the sociocultural patterns of the person's tribe, social class, and particular religion. Even today, the drive for wealth and personal comfort experienced by human beings born and trained in the United States is a collective desire characterizing the national psychism. Each person gives this collective psychic drive a more or less particularized coloring or form according to his or her temperament and circumstances of birth and education. Today, however, these collective desires can become individualized, because the process of individualization has begun to operate at the planetary level, making at least some impression on the collective psychism of all peoples.

This process has begun because at the planetary level of mankind-as-a-whole the Movement of Wholeness has reached a phase at which the principle of Unity is gaining greater power — yet not sufficient power to balance the principle of Multiplicity. Symbolically speaking, mankind may have reached a point just past the midpoint between Noon and Sunset. The process of individualization implies the increasing possibility for human beings to develop what might be called a "body of individuality," as distinct from the psychic body of desire as the latter is distinct from the living physical body.

What then is this "body of individuality?" Essentially it is a "mental" structure, using the term mental in the complex sense in which mind was defined in the preceding chapter. As a formative agent, mind can operate either as the servant of a spiritual Quality (one of the many Letters of the creative Word) endeavoring to establish a one-to-one relationship with an individual person — or as the servant of the "desire nature" dominated by vitalistic drives and the imperatives of a particular culture and collective tradition.

Rhythm of Wholeness