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THE HUMAN SITUATION
The Movement of Wholeness as a Cyclic Series of Situations
In this book the word situation is given a very broad meaning which includes yet transcends its ordinary use. A situation is one of the many possible ways in which a phase of the Movement of Wholeness is actualized. The character and inherent quality of that phase refers to a particular relationship between the dynamic polarities of being. Unity and Multiplicity. I speak of a "situation" whether the principle of Unity or the principle of Multiplicity is dominant; thus, whether that situation occurs in a physically objective universe or in a mostly subjective realm of being that may be called "divine." The Godhead state is a situation; so is the life-span of a biological organism. And the activity of Celestial Hierarchies (the various aspects of the divine Mind) produces a multitude of situations, just as does the organization of human beings into tribal communities or large cities.
Any situation, when apprehended and given meaning in terms of the structural relationship of the forever interacting two polarities of Wholeness, should be considered threefold. The two principles of Unity and Multiplicity operate in it respectively as an integrative and whole-making, and as a fragmenting and differentiating, trend. But their dynamic relatedness assumes the character of a whole in the situation. Unity and Multiplicity operate always and everywhere as interrelated and interdependent "presences"; and Wholeness — which also means relatedness — is an implied "third." Furthermore, Wholeness implies consciousness.
Consciousness is inherent in any whole because the word consciousness is another symbolic way of referring to the relatedness of the Unity and Multiplicity factors in any phase of the Movement of Wholeness. Every phase represents a level of being; and consciousness at that level assumes a characteristic quality. This quality is inherent in the type of situations activated and made to operate at that level of Unity-to-Multiplicity relatedness — thus, of Wholeness. There may be many situations of that type, but they all refer to and make explicit the potentiality of development of this specific quality of consciousness.
Thus, the operation of an elementary kind of consciousness has to be assumed even in the condition of existence which the human senses perceive and mind interprets as matter; and the biological and functional activity of cells within living organisms reveals consciousness at work at a higher level of complexity. A still more inclusive type of consciousness finds expression in the symbols, the capacity for interpersonal cooperation and co-conscious transmission of information characterizing all full-grown human cultures.
As levels of organization and activity are reached which transcend personhood and local cultures, and as one acknowledges the existence of spiritual and predominantly subjective communities (Pleromas of quasi-divine beings), the possibility of a type of consciousness that surpasses human understanding also has to be accepted. The immensely inclusive and radiant quality of such a consciousness presupposes states of being of which stars and galaxies may be the material representation, because the modern mind is no longer willing to think of celestial gods. Human consciousness may be able to reflect such transcendent states of being, as the calm surface of a lake may reflect the full moon. But it is a symptom of a rather naive hubris to believe that the consciousness of a person operating strictly at the human level of body-materiality and of biological, sociocultural organization can do more than reflect "divine" modes of consciousness. At the root of such pride one can readily find a deep sense of insecurity.
The nature of this insecurity which characterizes the human condition can easily be understood. One has only to realize that, while at the biological level of sentiency and compulsive instinctual reactions, consciousness had been operating in situations in which the species-as-a-whole was the subjective factor, this factor begins to assume a personal character with the appearance of truly human beings and human situations. A process of individualization begins which leads to increasing difficulties and to the rise of anxiety in the consciousness of whomever it affects — and I eventually this means every human being.
The first stage of the process is the development of particular cultures in and through which a group of human beings gives organized and ritualized forms to their togetherness and cooperation. But out of this collective and hardly more than biological type of organization, the intense desire in human beings to emerge as "individuals" who are able to demonstrate free will becomes a driving factor in human evolution. The process of individualization generates strong tension, emotional stresses, interpersonal conflicts, and therefore insecurity. Religion and philosophy are called upon to heal this insecurity and to lead to numinous experiences of Wholeness. Different doctrines are made to fit the specific needs of various types of insecure human beings, and in the process what had been the subjective factor in a whole biological species becomes condensed and particularized in a human subject whose consciousness, as a result, takes an individualized form.
During the prehuman phases of the Movement of Wholeness, mind acts in situations developing in the earth's biosphere for the purpose of focusing into the concrete shapes of physical bodies archetypes created by the celestial Hierarchies — each archetype having a specific function in the operation of the planet as a whole. When the "bottom" of the great cycle of being is reached (the symbolic Noon) the principle of Multiplicity is as compelling as it ever can be. A reversal of the Movement of Wholeness occurs, and a new type of living beings (homo sapiens) appears. The beginning of a truly "human" evolution is made possible by the gradual rise to power of the principle of Unity; but besides the activation of a new archetype another factor is also implied. The ideal or celestial form of MAN-Anthropos manifests in the field of activity and consciousness of the earth as a Being. I refer to such a Being as the Supreme Person, because when concretely actualized in a "body" of earth-substance, the archetype assumes characteristics which, in their totality, constitute the state of personhood — provided we use the term in its most essential meaning.
The Supreme Person is the prototype of personhood. In Rhythm of Wholeness I referred to "It" (as such a state of being transcends gender) as the original or great Avatar. Under whatever name, It is the "Solution" which had been envisioned by the Godhead in the symbolic Midnight as an "Idea" or a formula of relationship, now concretized in material objectivity. The idea is no longer only a form, but a "Presence"; and this Presence has power, for in It the sublime Compassion of the Godhead is pulsating. It is Wholeness operating in "substance." However, the kind of substance which could be an adequate substratum for the concrete actualization of the supreme vision of the almost totally subjective Godhead state inevitably has to be a substance of a quasi-spiritual kind. The substance of the "body" of the Supreme Person can only be the subtlest, most unified matter available within the earth-field. The normally developed human senses cannot perceive such matter; and the energy latent in such a "body" is so intense that it would destroy all natural human organisms. Esoteric students assume that this kind of matter-energy appertains only to the highest "etheric" sub-planes (sixth and seventh) of the physical world, while what we perceive as solid, liquid and gaseous matter refers to the first, second and third sub-planes — the fourth (fire) and perhaps the fifth (more specifically mental) are related to all radical transformation and personal metamorphosis.
In a subsequent chapter I shall consider more fully the meaning of the Supreme Person and the influence It has upon the evolution of personhood and of humanity as a whole. I should nevertheless state here that the effectiveness of the prototype of any instrumentality intended to bring about the large-scale transformation of whatever it is to replace can only be demonstrated when this prototype is reproduced in a large number of specimens of the same type. The Godhead's Solution proves adequate and successful to the extent that the personhood of the Supreme Person will be replicated in many human persons as yet to evolve. These beings, now ready or karmically impelled to experience the human state, had known varying degrees of failure in the past — or from another point of view, are the heirs to the "karmic residua" (or skandhas) of ancient failures. Replication here, however, is a complex process, because just as failure can take an immense variety of forms, so the "redemptive" process of Compassion and karma must be adjusted to each category of persons and events. The Supreme Person, therefore, has potentially to embody an extremely complex Solution.
The human situation implied in the concrete application of this multilevel Solution to a myriad of specific types of failure must also be immensely complex and differentiated. Moreover, it has to be worked out at the various sublevels of a strictly human kind of substantiality — thus, in terms of the actual experience of human beings operating at different stages of the evolutionary process. The process of karmic redemption or neutralization requires the development in earth-time of a long series of cultures, in some cases operating simultaneously on different continents. Each culture presents a limited collective kind of solution befitting the basic needs of persons born in the society, or even more specifically in one of its particular classes or religions. Each group has its own collective desires and expectations through which it has to face its karma and work its "redemption." A culture is inspired at the core of its collective being (its "psychism") by one of the basic aspects of the immensely complex Supreme Person. This one particular aspect becomes the spiritual source of the culture. It embodies itself in a secondary kind of Avatar. Such a limited avataric personage is also a prototype, but a prototype of only one particular culture. The specific quality of his or her emanation, the symbolic life-events and teachings of the Avatar, serve as a model to the persons evolving through their participation in that culture.
The replication of the achievements of the avataric person or seminal group can, however, occur in two different ways — or rather, at two levels of transmission of a new principle of organization. One may call this transmission esoteric or exoteric; but it is more realistic and significant to speak of a private and public transfer. At first, up to a certain point in human evolution, a private and personal (yet in another sense transpersonal) transmission is the only possible one. A person who has succeeded in achieving his or her radical metamorphosis selects, privately instructs, and transmits to a chosen disciple of his or her "Ray" (or characteristic line of "redemption") the Solution he or she had also received in privacy and secrecy. But the procedure may also be public, at least to a large extent In the latter case, basic concepts and procedures are formulated in a verbal, actional or illustrative and ethical manner. Great avataric beings like Gautama and Jesus made public what they had either at least partially been taught in ancient sanctuaries and through traditional practices, or had gained through intuitive, suprasensible and metalogical contacts with their already developed higher mind, or with Pleroma beings who helped them to understand the deeper objective meaning of their experiences while on the Path.
I shall return to the meaning which can be given to the polarization of the symbolic Midnight/Noon phases of the Movement of Wholeness and its relation to the Supreme Person. I should nevertheless state here that this polarization constitutes a situation in which the most extreme values of the polar trends toward Unity and Multiplicity can be integrated. Their integration is the supreme manifestation of Wholeness because in it the tension between Unity and Multiplicity reaches a degree of maximum intensity. The stresses this tension produces in the Movement of being are the greatest possible. This maximum of tension and stress characterizes the human situation. It is the foundation required for the development of what is ambiguously called human "free will" — the capacity to choose between alternatives.
Several possibilities of action or thought may be possible, yet ultimately there are two basic alternatives: on the one hand, the way that is attuned to the increasing power of the principle of Unity after the Noon point of the cycle; and on the other, the way which resists that increase and clings to the desire for an ideal of individual or group power. The first alternative leads to what may be termed spiritual "success" during the human period of the great cycle of being; the second, to at least partial failure.
In most cases, failure means not having been able fully to apply, in terms of concrete existential events and decisions, the particular solution envisioned by the Godhead and formulated by the celestial Hierarchies with reference to a specific set or collection of karmic deposits when a period of choice in the person's (or humanity as a whole's) life-cycle comes to an end. In a planetary sense, this crucial moment after which no fundamental choice is possible has been symbolized as the separation of the sheep from the goats. This process of separation does not refer to a final "Judgement," since many superficial improvements may still occur. But a no-longer-modifiable limit is nevertheless established, which defines what is possible to whatever has evolved so far.
When one tries to understand and to accept or reject — partially if not totally — any situation, the possibility of transformation is the basic factor to consider. The subject ("I," the individual who assumedly has the capacity to choose) may desire a radical transformation, and mind may present various procedures or a specific and formalized technique to achieve what "seems" to be the "heart's desire"; but neither desire nor technique can become concretely and substantially actualized unless a third factor adequately operates. This factor is potency. The power to perform the action which has been chosen has to be latent in the situation. It is not latent only in the subject considered as an entity in itself, or in the mental processes formulating a possible method of achievement; yet it is potentially related to both the subject and the mental factors. The three factors are interrelated in the new experience.
To assert that an individual meets a situation and exists apart from it in a mysteriously subjective yet conscious manner is confusing and unrealistic. A subject does not "have" an experience which the particular situation elicits. The subject is an integral component of the situation, and does not essentially exist outside the experiencing. Each new or old situation, each experience implies a subjective factor which belongs to it, just as it implies the operation of mind-processes and the release of kinetic energy — i.e. of the power to act. Every experience is triune. The Movement of Wholeness is a cyclic series of situations giving rise to experiences to which the subjective factor of desire gives a particular purpose, and the operation of mind a particular meaning. But these experiences must, first of all, be possible. Purpose and meaning require the possibility of fully experiencing the situation — any situation.
A Holontological View of Human Experience
In ordinary use, the word experience, whether as a noun ("My wife had a wonderful experience") or as a verb ("I experienced much pain"), implies an experiencer. "Someone" in a particular situation "had" an experience. The situation gave rise to or produced an experience affecting the consciousness and the state of wholeness of a being. This being existed as an organismic whole before the situation occurred which affected him or her as experiencer. Though he or she may be affected by what took place, the experiencer is believed to retain his or her identity outside the situation which gave rise to the experience. What is considered "the same" situation may be experienced differently by several entities, each reacting to it in a particular manner according to his or her nature and character. Likewise, the same person may be assumed to have different experiences arising from different situations. In all cases the fact that an experiencer considers an experience as "his or her own" implies the seemingly incontrovertible feeling of existing outside the experience, even if the latter deeply modifies the state of being with which the experiencer had until then identified himself or herself — his or her self-image.
From the point of view of the philosophy of Operative Wholeness, and also according to the anatma doctrine constituting the foundation of Buddhist thought (at least in its public aspect), no situation is ever the same. There is likewise no experiencing subject having a separate permanent being as an atman outside the situation he or she experiences. Situations always change, and so does the subjective factor inherent in them. In ancient Greece, before Parmenides apparently introduced the dualistic notion of being and becoming — a notion which has plagued Western civilization ever since — Heraclitus had asserted that no one crossing a river at different times experiences the same water. But in the same century, the Buddha taught in India that the person who at different times enters the ever-flowing stream is also not the same person. All situations, understood as successive phases of the Movement of Wholeness, are different. Each phase of the relationship between the principles of Unity and Multiplicity makes a different type of situation possible. But because the principle of Multiplicity is active, one type of situation may produce a great diversity of experiences in a variety of environmental conditions — each environment or ecosystem containing numerous living organisms able to experience the situation. However, in order for an organism to experience, the wholeness of the whole has to focus itself. It has to become at-tentive (i.e. to develop a state of "tension toward" an imminent or already unfolding situation). The consciousness aspect of wholeness must condense itself into a subjective factor in the experience.
This subject may either accept or refuse the experience. The refusal of an experience, however, engenders a negative situation which in many instances eventually has to be harmonized by the operation of karmic "tensions" needed to compensate for or neutralize the previous lack of "attention." The deepest roots of karma are indeed the result of what is not done, rather than of a disruptive action. The most basic failures are the failures to act when a situation presents itself as the new phase of the cycle of being which demands that an unfamiliar step be taken.
The refusal to act and to experience may have one of two fundamental causes: the memory of a similar experience which had been oppressive, painful or frightening, or a feeling of impotency producing an expectation of failure. In the first case the memory factor has its source in mind. This may be the mind of the individual person faced by the situation and remembering one or more similar events, or the collective mind of a culture, a particular religion, or social class that impressed forcibly upon the personal mind a doctrine or a particular way of life which excludes numerous possible responses to rigidly defined situations. In the second case, the lack of attention (or even more, the sense of not being able to rise to the occasion) has its roots in some organismic lack — thus in an ineffective presence of Wholeness, and (at the biological level) the absence of vital energy.
Consciousness, as an operative aspect of Wholeness, condenses itself into a subject when an organized whole accepts to experience the confronting situation. Acceptance may be based on the memory of a similar experience which gave pleasure and enhanced the power of expansion and self- multiplication inherent in the biological and psychic whole. Acceptance may also be motivated by an exuberance of power, whether at the biological level or that of sociocultural relationship with other persons or with a social environment.
At the prehuman and strictly biological level of evolution, the possibility of acceptance or refusal does not exist insofar as a particular plant or animal is concerned. The subjective factor resides in the whole species rather than in any of its specimens. Any specimen is indeed expendable. The survival, welfare and expansion of the species as a whole is the only important (or at least the essential) motive. If an evolutionary mutation is required, it takes place in the seed. The seed belongs to the species, not to any particular specimen. It is a genetic factor, even if the mutation is induced in the species-as-a-whole by the experiences of some particular specimen (or a group of them) having been confronted with and successfully meeting a radically altered life-situation. Only at the level of truly "human" situations is a basic choice possible on an individual basis. Even at that level, for a long period of human evolution, the individual character of the choice is only a latent possibility. It is latent within the collective structure of beliefs and ways of behavior which any culture imposes upon a child from birth, and which he or she has to unquestioningly accept. Indeed, for years the child has to operate within the collective matrix of the culture and the societal way of life almost as compulsively as a foetus within the biological womb of the mother. His or her individuality is only a potentiality.
In order to operate as an "individual" in relative freedom, the child (or in traditional societies, the adolescent) has to detach his or her subjectivity from the collective subject which had for many years dominated and in most cases still largely dominates the latent subjectivity factor in his or her experiences. The detachable character of the subjective factor in the experiencing of a situation is indeed the fundamental feature of the human situation. There must be detachment not only from the containment and limitations of the cultural and family matrix (operating in terms of the collective psychism of the society and its particular cults, religion, and integrated group-behavior) but also from the usually even more compulsive power of biological instincts. Both types of "liberation" are essential if true individual selfhood is to develop, and its desires and will are able to become controlling factors in human experience.
A third kind of liberation is necessary at the end of, as well as throughout the process of transformation called "the Path," if the super-individual state of Pleroma is to be reached. It is a liberation from the desire to retain a consciousness of separateness as an individual, where separateness means the desire to act according to "my own pleasure" rather than as the evolution of the whole of humanity demands. Acting in terms of the evolutionary need, not only of humanity but the whole planet considered as the Earth-being within which mankind fulfills a definite function, is not what is usually called "altruism." Altruism is a horizontal kind of relationship. The relation of the narrowly focused and individualistically defined person to the "greater whole" represented by the Earth-being and particularly by the Pleroma constitutes a vertical type of relation.
I have dealt with the distinction between horizontal and vertical relationships in Rhythm of Wholeness (Part Four, chapter twelve). I shall return to it briefly in chapter six when more fully explaining the meaning I give to the term Earth-being, indicating in broad terms the quality of subjective desires which impels an individual person to accept the long and arduous process of metamorphosis leading to the humanhood-transcending Pleroma state.
At this point the basic fact which must be stressed in the approach to experience I am presenting is that three factors operate in all experiences. The subjectivity factor is only one of the three. The subjective realization of selfhood — even the subtlest I-feeling — not essentially external to the experience which a particular situation engenders; yet at the human level of existence, what comes to believe itself the experiencer of the experience has had the power to detach itself from the wholeness of the experience. The experience as a whole is triune. It affects and to some extent changes a whole of being; and for this reason I speak of the "holontological" way of understanding experience (from holos, whole and ontos, being). In every phase of the Movement of Wholeness, "being" can experience its fullness. But the level of the experience and the scope and quality of the consciousness of fullness of being differ at every stage of the cyclic process. As the factor of subjectivity changes, so also does the manner in which the formative mind operates and the nature of the power whose release makes the experience possible.
In current usage, the word experience is in most cases restricted to the level of activity and the consciousness of human beings. The experiencer is a "person," Peter or Jane; and the experience involves the three above- mentioned factors: a subject, a mind, and a body able to release power through biological processes. Yet usually, and even in a philosophical and religious sense, the subjective factor in the series of daily experiences a person calls his or her life is somehow singled out and identified with the whole person. This person knows himself or herself as "I." But can there be an "I" without an experience, if we give the word experience its largest meaning? Nevertheless, we are accustomed to give to experience a narrow significance. We reduce it to the human level at which personhood develops; we identify the subjective factor in "our" experiences with the whole person of which we assume "I" is the independent and at least essentially transcendent subject — in religious terms, the individual Soul. The result is, I believe, a fundamental kind of psychological confusion, unavoidable as it may be in a period of transition between two levels of being.
In the next chapter I shall attempt to show how the operations of the three basic factors in experience can be at least broadly or abstractly envisioned throughout the entire cycle of Wholeness. We shall then be better able to give to personhood its fullest and most essential meaning. It has such a meaning in the Supreme Person whose appearance in the field of existence of the Earth-being occurs at the symbolic Noon of the Movement of Wholeness when the rise of the principle of Unity begins. Yet this prototypal meaning will only be realized in the fullness of human nature on a transformed earth, when the human cycle ends and the Pleroma of the Perfect — the seed remnants of our humanity — pursue their evolution in a realm of being in which the drive toward a state of all-inclusive Oneness increasingly yet never absolutely overpowers the trend toward Multiplicity.
The Fullness of Human Experience
