The Structure of the Cycle of Being

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THE STRUCTURE OF THE CYCLE OF BEING

Dane Rudhyar

When the two equal forces of Unity and Multiplicity move cyclically and symmetrically within a finite field of activity, one waxing as the other wanes, four moments mark especially significant turning points. At two points in the cycle, the forces are of equal strength; at two other points, one force reaches the maximum of power it can ever attain while the other is as weak as it will ever be. Thus two points of equilibrium and two points of maximum disequilibrium occur. The two points of equilibrium, however, differ greatly in the quality of being they represent. In one of them, the principle of Multiplicity operates in a condition of dynamic ascendancy and almost explosive expansion, while the principle of Unity is losing control of the movement and becoming internalized as a force of resistance and containment. At the other point of equilibrium, the principle of Unity is a dynamic and irresistible power of condensation and unification, while the influence of the principle of Multiplicity is waning, yet never totally overcome.

Each of these four moments in the cyclic process is the start of a definite phase of the total development of possibilities of being, but the whole cycle is most significantly divided into two hemicycles. During one of them, which can be conveniently symbolized as the Day-side of being, the power of the principle of Multiplicity predominates. During the symbolic Night-side, the principle of Unity controls the Movement of Wholeness. Nevertheless, in such a symbolism the "light" of Day is always to some degree present during the Night period as is the darkness of Night during the Day period.

This diagram is probably the simplest way to try to illustrate what I attempt to describe in this and the next chapter. But like any such diagram, it can be misleading. One can view it horizontally, that is laying the book flat on a table, in which case the diagram has no "top" or "bottom." Or one can see it vertically, with the Godhead on top and Natural Man at the bottom, in which case it would better illustrate the idea of a vertical opposition between heaven and earth, between the sky and the depths of a strictly material realm of existence.

Nevertheless, what the diagram does not reveal is a pulsation from a central core of being, where Unity has an almost totally dominant power, to a circumferential state of maximum Multiplicity. The Movement of Wholeness is therefore at some times centripetal, sometimes centrifugal. The pulsation from center to circumference and back to center is like the heartbeat of being or Wholeness. This pulsation, however, is far more difficult to illustrate in a diagram, because the moments of equilibrium at which the two forces are of equal strength would be "located" halfway between the core and the circumference. The advantage of a diagram that would picture such a pulsation is that it would picture the resemblance between the process and a mandala, which by definition requires something at its center. In another sense, the process would be likened to the spring of a watch; as the spring rhythmically contracts and expands, so does "being" or rather "beingness." These contractions and expansions operate at various levels, at which they may seem to be either immensely slow or extraordinarily rapid. The modern mind refers to them, in terms of the objective measurement of their speed, as vibrations. Being is vibratory motion. But we should be able to think of subjective motion, which our senses and instruments cannot measure, as well as objective motion — that is, of vibration carried by a material medium or an exchange of particles in which activity can be measured at least indirectly.

The Day period begins at the symbolic Sunrise, the Night at Sunset. Sunrise occurs when the principles of Unity and Multiplicity are of equal strength, with the principle of Multiplicity in dynamic ascent and the principle of Unity in retreat. During the Day all modes of consciousness are predominantly influenced by an objective approach to reality; during the Night, by a subjective approach. At the symbolic Noon of the cycle (Midday), the principle of Multiplicity reaches the maximum power possible for it to attain in the particular cycle under consideration. At Sunset the principles of Unity and Multiplicity are of equal strength, with the trend toward oneness in ascendance and the trend toward Multiplicity in retreat. At Midnight, the principle of Unity reaches the maximum of its possible strength — overpowering yet not absolute. Then the principle of Multiplicity begins once more to exert a dynamic influence, until at Sunrise its waxing strength balances that of the waning trend toward Unity.

The symbolic Sunrise refers to the beginning of the universe we perceive because we live and fulfill a function in it. Sunrise is the moment of Creation, an immense release of energy that will animate all modes and forms of existence. Energy then passes from the condition of potential energy to that of kinetic energy. The "passage," however, is not an uncontrolled explosion in all directions or dimensions of space; it is controlled by the containing power of the principle of Unity matching that of the principle of Multiplicity. Energy is kineticized, quantum after quantum, in a series of rhythmic pulsations. It is vibratory energy.

Where does this energy come from? It is the energy of the Movement of Wholeness. It is energy generated by the constant tension between the two great forces perpetually operating in the Movement. The concept of being implies a state of tension. The "peace" of perfect being is not the absence of tension, it is the experience of perfect equilibrium. Within the steady and totally stable whole, anabolic and catabolic forces are perfectly balanced. The whole is balanced, but in any part of the whole tension assumes the character of unbalanced being — being in which one force (or principle) predominates. Different results are produced depending on which of the forces is dominant. Thus we speak of kinetic and potential energy. Energy passes from the condition of potentiality to that of kinetic actuality at Sunrise, and a symmetrical polar passage from a kinetic to a potential condition occurs at the symbolic Sunset.

Kinetic energy is energy released in order to perform some objectively measurable work. We can measure the work it performs, not only because our senses and instruments react to it, but also because our minds can detach themselves sufficiently from this work to take an objective attitude toward it. From the point of view of an objective mind, potential energy refers to the possibility of eventual work, provided external acts eventually are performed — for example, if a boulder at the edge of a precipice is given a push and falls. Yet in the state of being where the principle of subjectivity dominates and objectivity is in retreat, energy does not perform objective work; it operates inwardly and centripetally, essentially being "stored up" or "disobjectivized" and condensed into quasi-absolute Oneness.

At the symbolic Midnight, this condition of near (but never absolute) immobility is reached. Being takes the character of an almost static, all-inclusive concentration of consciousness (subjective activity); and such a concentration also represents a state of nearly infinite potentiality. Yet, at the very moment when the principle of Multiplicity is the weakest it can ever be Wholeness forces it (as it were) to claim its right to existence and to challenge the nearly all-powerful experience of Oneness. Being, almost totally absorbed and condensed into a nearly all-inclusive ecstasy of unity — a nearly timeless imperience (rather than experience) of "beingness" — is compelled by the oscillatory momentum of the Movement of Wholeness to reverse its polarity. The "center" once more is moved by the idea of a "circle" it would centralize. The incredibly condensed core of subjective being, haunted by the memory of dimensionality, is not allowed by the Movement of Wholeness to reach the condition of a dimensionless mathematical point.

After Midnight, the principle of Multiplicity once more waxes in strength; energy gradually depotentializes itself. It operates in precosmic modes of mental activity. At this stage, "mental activity" refers to the creation of archetypes — that is, to formulas of being, systems (or "models") of organization that will become structural foundations for physical matter. As the waxing principle of Multiplicity reaches a condition of equal strength with the waning principle of Unity, the release of energy takes the form of the Creative Act. The latter, focused through archetypal forms which have become fully defined by then and which in their totality may be called "the Word" (or Logos), gives birth to an increasingly objective, physical universe.

This objective and measurable universe — our universe — represents only one half of the entire cycle of being. It is neither "the Whole" nor the whole of reality. Neither is it an "illusion," nor is the other half of the cycle (the symbolic Night period) Reality with a capital R. There can be neither one absolute subject nor an infinite multiplicity of absolute ("subjectivityless") objects spread through forever-extended space. Reality is the cyclic interplay of subject and object. It is wholeness being experienced, partially or completely, by conscious entities in which varying degrees of subjectivity interact with what we call a body. In a deeper sense, reality is Wholeness experiencing Itself subjectively as "One" and objectively as "Many" - simultaneously.(1)

1. This interplay of subjectivity and objectivity within our concrete physical universe eventually manifests on earth (and presumably on any planet presenting the necessary telluric conditions) as the individual person. The root-symbol of self-conscious personhood is the statement "I am," in which the "I" stands for the subjective centralizing principle and "am" refers to the state of objective existence as a living organism. In the Bible, when the "Lord God" (YHVH) declares to Moses that His name is "I AM," he presents himself as the archetype of individualized personhood. In Sanskrit, the "I" is implied in the divine name Ish (see the Isha Upanishad, remarkably commented upon by Sri Aurobindo). The complete form of this name is given as Ishvara, the Creative Being and "Lord" of the universe — the manifested aspect of Brahman. However, as we shall see in Part Three, this "I" should not be confused with the ego, which is only a mechanism of adaptation of the organism-as-a-whole to the physical, social, and psychic environment, within which a child has to develop his or her conscious mind and to operate as effectively and comfortably as possible.

Because all beings possess a degree of consciousness within the Movement of Wholeness, they might be compared to particles of water within a wave. Each particle experiences the wave in its own way, according to its particular position, from its own perspective. Human beings experience the Movement of Wholeness as the natural succession of earthly days and nights and the yearly cycle of seasonal activity. The polarities of the latter cycle manifest in the vegetable kingdom as the fully developed plant (with stem, leaves, and flowers) and the seed. The condition of being a living organism composed of billions of cells is only the objective and existential half of this cycle. But "something" in a human being should be able to experience the entire "Cycle of Man" — that is, the cycle of being as it applies to the archetypal potential of homo sapiens — including its predominantly subjective aspect during the postmortem state.

The period from the birth of the body to its death is not the complete cycle of being at the human level. The whole cycle is birth to rebirth. If one is not able to envision this entire cycle, at least in its abstract form, no experience or series of experiences one has while "alive" can have full meaning. The experience of human reality, as wholeness of being, is the experience of the full meaning of the whole cycle, not only of the hemicycle of human "existence" — the existence of a particular person bound to a physical body.

Such an experience of Man, within and by an individual person, may occur in its perfection (purna, the "perfect experience") at the moment in the cycle of Man when subjectivity and objectivity reach a state of equilibrium at the symbolic Sunset. In the cycle of the year, this corresponds to the fall equinox, when the relative lengths of day and night are equal. In the vegetable kingdom, the power of life abandons the plant and condenses itself into the seed or into the root — to the extent that repetitive cycles are possible on the basis of an enduring organism (for example, a tree). At the level of human evolution, I call this state of equilibrium Illumined Man. In that state Wholeness manifests as a sublime "light" that reveals the essential meaning of the whole cycle of being. It is the state of human perfection that has been symbolized as the "divine Marriage" — the perfectly equilibrated and interpenetrating union between spirit and matter in an individualized human being. But it is also only the beginning of a subjective, transhuman process leading to the condition of increasing "oneness" that culminates at the symbolic Midnight of the cycle of Man.

Here the term "Man" refers to a formation of being occurring on the surface of planets whose material, chemical, and biological development makes its appearance and growth possible at both a collective and an individual level. In this sense, "human history" refers to the period of the cycle between Noon and Sunset. This human period follows the period of the formation of the physical universe (from protogalaxies to planets) and the differentiation of the vast number of life-species on a planet's surface, leading to the appearance of homo sapiens or Natural Man at Noon. This human period evidently is not exclusively human, as all forms of life continue to develop within a planet's biosphere; but strictly biological life gradually vanishes (or sees its basic function fade away) somewhat in proportion to the development of characteristically "human" states of being and consciousness.

These human states eventually lead to the crucial moment of equilibrium between the principles of Unity and Multiplicity — to the symbolic Sunset and Illumined Man. Beyond this stage we have to imagine a state of being in which predominant subjectivity takes the place or function of objective materiality and corporeality. Existence fades out as inistence develops its essential characteristics. The symbolic Night follows Day.

When Western religious philosophers (and St. John quoting Jesus in Revelations 1:8) speak of alpha and omega, they refer to the beginning and the end of only the half-cycle of existence — that is, of the physical universe. Occult traditions hold that the entire alphabet symbolizes only the unfoldment of this universe.(2) This universe is the only reality most human beings, even today, actually are able to consider as a field of activity susceptible of being understood and affected by their thoughts and behavior. For the materialist, this is all there can possibly be. For religious persons who deeply feel that there must be some condition of being beyond "this" world, such a condition is mysterious and for many people frightening. Yet human consciousness has reached a stage of development at which we should no longer have to think of beginning and end, but instead of a cyclic process without beginning or end. We should be able to realize that what we call birth and death — either of a single human organism or an entire universe — are two "Gates" through which the cyclic process of being passes.

2. The letter mu ( μ ) occurs at the midpoint of the Greek alphabet which starts with alpha ( Α ) and ends with omega ( Ω ). These three letters and their sounds have a profound symbolic meaning. Zen training often uses the constant repetition of the sound Mu (or moo — see Three Pillars of Zen by Phillip Kapleau). An old tradition tells of an ancient continent called Lemuria, of which Australia, New Zealand, and some Pacific Islands are said to be the remains. Life on this continent is supposed to have marked the midpoint of the whole scheme of human evolution, which is said to encompass seven large periods. It was in Lemuria (at the midpoint of the third period) that Man began to appear in his essential character, as a being endowed with "self-consciousness" (the "Promethean gift"). In Sanskrit, the primordial mantram is the sacred word AUM — beginning, end, and middle. But in Latin the word amo means "I love" — the human form taken by the principle of Unity.

Through the "Gate of Sound" at the cosmic level, the energy that creates, "in-forms," and sustains all modes of existence issues forth. It manifests in the life-sphere of a planet (its biosphere) as vital energy (prana) and breath — the first breath of a newborn. At the "Gate of Silence," human beings who are ready experience for a brief, nearly timeless moment according to their individual stage of evolution and understanding, a degree of "Illumination." This illumination reveals the essential meaning of the realities of their life-span, which is then ending. As individual persons, they "die" into a state of increasingly subjective being; their physical-psychic nature gradually undifferentiates. The elements of which this nature had been constituted since conception are returned to the planetary fields from which they were drawn. These elements that had been combined into a whole of existence disintegrate, only to be eventually recombined into new forms of organization, according to the complex, impersonal rhythms of an immense cycle of changes and transformations. (I shall discuss the subjective aspect of the postmortem processes in Chapter II.)

Passage through the Gate of Silence takes on a different aspect, however, when we think of the human state as the embodiment of one of the four phases of the cosmic and metacosmic (Day and Night) cycle of being. This "human" phase leads to a new one, to which the term inistence refers. The human phase, however, refers to humanity-as-a-whole, or more generally and archetypally to Man (Anthropos) as a functional part (or level) of the total being of the earth. (In the next chapter I shall outline the sequence of developments marking the slow but progressive evolution of humanity-as-a -whole toward the final condition of Illumined Man and the passage through the Gate of Silence — the ultimate phase of "human history" at the planetary "end of time," "Last Day," or omega state.)

What follows this final condition of Illumined Man — and what individuals who even now constitute the far-advanced spearhead of human evolution already are experiencing — should not be considered a negation of being. From the point of view of Wholeness, the two opposite principles of Unity and Multiplicity, symmetrically waxing and waning, are equally significant.(3) Each principle should be understood as an affirmation of being, be it a subjective, contracting or an objective, expansionistic affirmation; an affirmation of the experience of unity (selfhood) in terms of consciousness or an affirmation of the feeling of space-conquest through the spreading differentiation of energy.

3. Of course metaphysicians can argue as to whether Unity and Multiplicity are two aspects of Wholeness, or if Wholeness is the result of cyclic interaction. It is like arguing about what came first, the chicken or the egg.

In the cycle of the seasons, these two types of affirmation correspond to the summer and winter solstices. They reach their most characteristic and powerful formulations at the symbolic Midday and Midnight of the entire cycle of Wholeness. Midnight symbolizes the predominance of the principle of Unity. All there is is condensed within what I call the Godhead state. Yet this Godhead is not "the Absolute." Neither is it "One without a second," nor does it transcend the Movement of Wholeness. Wholeness, being all-inclusive, has a place for the Godhead as it has for all living beings and for Man - Man considered as an archetype and as a particular phase of the all encompassing cycle of being. The Godhead is the culmination of being in terms of Unity, but it is not a Supreme Being. Natural Man (the symbolic Noon) is the culmination of being in terms of the most extreme differentiation possible during the Day hemicycle of existence. It is thus the triumph of Multiplicity and also of what we call nature. The term Natural Man therefore refers to a vast number (a multiplicity) of human beings.

When I speak of Godhead, I do not mean what some great mystics like Meister Eckart meant by the term or what Hindu philosophers named Parabrahman (the unmanifest aspect of Brahman) - to them the "Supreme Reality." The term refers to a supreme condition, but it is a condition of supreme Unity, and Unity is no more absolutely "real" than Multiplicity. The only possible "Supreme Reality" is Wholeness, the perpetual and undefinable interplay of both the principle of Unity and the principle of Multiplicity. Reality is the interrelatedness of all conceivable modes of being, be they predominantly subjective or objective.

Thus the basic structure of the cycle of changes engendered by the perpetual interaction between the principles of Unity and Multiplicity. The tension generated by this interaction is the source of all energy. As the degree and character of the tension changes with the interactions of the principles, energy operates in an immense variety of modes. Considered universally and abstractly, the cycle of change is the Cycle of Being. To a particular consciousness able to perceive, experience, or intuit the entire cycle, it is the Movement of Wholeness. Each phase of the cycle - including the consciousness perceiving it - can be interpreted as an aspect of Wholeness. It is Wholeness-in-act - a release of the energy of the Movement through a definite form. The characteristics of the form and the circumstances of and surrounding the action are essentially defined by the character of the relationship between the principles of Unity and Multiplicity in effect at the time and place the particular act occurs.

Rhythm of Wholeness