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CRISIS OF TRANSITION

 

Dane Rudhyar

 

Life, Culture, and Personhood

In order to understand in a constructive manner the general situation which humanity is facing, and to deal effectively and sanely with problems it has been creating, it seems necessary to give an uncommon interpretation to the words life and personhood, by referring them to definite periods of the great cycle of being. However, what occurs during these periods first has to be clearly understood, and to this end a very brief review of previously outlined processes now will follow.

The reader should look again at the diagram which pictures in an abstract manner the essentially circular dynamic structure of the Movement of Wholeness — a basic frame of reference for the interpretation of all humanly definable situations, be they predominantly objective or subjective, material or spiritual. This circular pattern represents the sequence of phases of the cyclic relationship between the principles of Unity and Multiplicity. This cyclic process is symbolically referred to the twenty-four-hour Day period during which the consciousness of a human being normally passes through a relatively complete gamut of experiences in states of wakeful activity in an objective material world, and in sleep — sleep with dreams and beyond dreaming.

Four great moments in the cycle of being are indicated. At the symbolic Midnight the principle of Unity is as powerfully active and the principle of Multiplicity as weak as they ever can be. At Noon the situation is reversed. Moreover Sunrise symbolizes the phase of the cycle when the two principles are of equal strength, but with the trend toward multiplicity and differentiation as a rising, aggressive power. At Sunset the two trends of the Movement of Wholeness are also of equal strength, but the principle of Unity is now the positive, ascending factor in all situations. At Sunrise what we perceive as the material universe is "born." At Sunset it dissolves into conditions of being of a predominantly subjective character.

The half-cycle extending from Midnight to Noon refers to an involutionary process. What was envisioned at Midnight in the Godhead state, as a potentially effective Solution to all the situations left by the failures of the long-ago concluded period of human activity, has to pass from a condition of subjectivity to one of objective and concrete realization duplicating the state of existence in which the failure occurred. The ideal has to become a concrete reality; it has to pass through a process of involution.

It does so in several stages: first, within the divine Mind during the period from the symbolic Midnight to Sunrise and in terms mythologized by the actions of Celestial Hierarchies, builders of archetypes; then, after Sunrise, through the differentiation of a tremendous release of potential energy (the Act of Creation) into a variety of explosive whirling motions, stabilized by the still powerful principle of Unity until it eventually becomes the matter which the human senses perceive and whose laws the human intellect discovers in order to satisfy implicit, if not at first explicit, human desires. At last a stage of differentiation is reached when a new level of differentiation and expansion becomes operative, to which the name "life" is given.

The appearance of life on a planet simply means that a further stage of the drive to multiplicity and differentiation has begun. In living cells, molecules multiply and they fulfill numerous specialized tasks. Complexity increases; the potentiality of variations which may lead to eventual failures appears. The processes of life-multiplication, however, reach their maximum of development at the symbolic Noon in the super-tropical biosphere of a planet teeming with trillions of biological variations on a relatively few basic archetypal themes. Then, a reversal of the cyclic motion of being occurs. In terms of the cyclic process as a whole, involution ends; evolution begins. The orientation of the Movement of Wholeness now points to the ultimate goal of Oneness. The tide has turned. Life is no longer the dominant factor.

At the spearhead of the forward thrust of the cosmic Movement, a new factor has appeared: personhood. The place occupied by life — the end-product of the domination of the drive toward Multiplicity — is now taken by the progressive development of personhood. This development increasingly becomes the most important factor in the half-cycle during which the evolution of composite entities is powered by integrative forces, and a drive toward a simplification of relationships eventually operates. Personhood, however, requires a formative matrix for the unfoldment of its potentialities. A culture provides such a matrix, giving a specific character to the togetherness and the interactions of a more or less large number of specimens of the homo sapiens type. The period of the great cycle between Noon and Sunset refers to the evolution of personhood from a collective stage, still dominated by biological forces, to an individualized state. In that state the personal desires and free will of a "subject" considering itself exterior to the situation it experiences are crucially important factors in the approach to karmic situations, and finally to a process of transmutation of desires and transformation of mind leading to the stage beyond personhood, the Pleroma.

Personhood requires a living organism as a basis for its operations. But this living body in turn needs the activity of material molecules as a foundation for its existence. Both matter and life belong to the involutionary hemicycle of the Movement of Wholeness, while personhood belongs to the evolutionary hemicycle. Personhood therefore develops in a direction opposed to that of life. This development either fulfills the karma-neutralizing function which the Godhead intended, or if negative, deepens the karmic tracks. It may also incite attempts to escape from the path of individual dharma into a subjective dream state, perhaps even leading to a determined and violent regressed state — a state in which the principle of Multiplicity and the energies of life it dominates actively war against the new factor, personhood.

The evolutionary development of personhood would perhaps be, if not impossible, then at least inconsistent and ineffectual, even after the reversal of the cyclic motion at the symbolic Noon, if a mysterious situation did not take place within the Earth-being. This is the concrete presence of the Supreme Person as a radiant embodiment of the Godhead's Midnight vision. The term embodiment, however, does not refer to the formation of a body of the dense kind of matter that human senses can perceive. As said before, the Supreme Person's body has substantiality at the highest etheric levels of the physical matter of the earth. But, though this substantial body may not be perceptible except in supernormal instances as human evolution progresses, its presence in the planetary field operates as a powerful catalyst It is intuitively or psychically experienced by Avatars whose human nature becomes totally pervaded by the power of the Presence, and who henceforth act as channels for its radiance. They themselves become catalysts for the coming together of a few fascinated disciples who in turn father forth a culture.

A culture is a collective way of dealing with matter and life, and of not being overwhelmed by the forces let loose within the planet's biosphere. These forces, however, are active within the biological nature of the members of the culture and they have a tremendous inertia. Even though the direction of the cyclic tide of being has been reversed, the principle of Multiplicity is still the dominant factor in human situations for a long time after the symbolic Noon hour. The set instinctual patterns of the biological level and their psychic overtones — compulsive emotional urges — resist the gradual and effective development of personhood as a means to neutralize the ancient karma. Cultures attempt to limit and focus the power of these biological factors so as to use their energy. A culture may also lead the energy into paths which, denying the natural aim of life-functions, are believed to open the way to a culture-transcending and more-than-human level of experience.

The principle of Multiplicity, though waning, is still extremely powerful until the symbolic mid-Afternoon of the cycle. After the development of human societies begins, it operates mainly in an internalized manner at the new level of the collective psychism which the culture is attempting to build as a strongly integrative force whose purpose is to repolarize the compulsive power of life-instincts. The old biological drives toward differentiation and self-multiplication are given new forms in terms of the development of the ego. While biological instinct is meant to insure survival in optimum conditions of existence in the biosphere, the ego takes form as a composite structure of thinking-feeling and behavior to provide security and the best conditions of existence possible in the family and social environment in which the human being is born and develops as a person.

The newborn and growing child is at first helpless and totally vulnerable in his or her family environment. Gradually, the situations he or she repeatedly has to meet drive him or her as a person-in-the-making to develop a type of mind increasingly able to discover ways of satisfying the desire of a subjective factor which has taken a human character. It has a human character because of the new possibilities inherent in the homo sapiens type of body-operation — particularly the development of a large brain and a sensitive nervous system. Such a type of operation makes possible the detachment of the subjective factor from the experienced situation. This externalized "subject" — I myself, with a particular name — functions as an ego; and the struggle for survival and the will to power that produced the basic law of the biosphere, eat or be eaten, are reformulated at the level of family, society, and culture in egocentric terms. Emotions are aroused and poignant suffering is experienced which is called "personal." These are the results of conflicts between egos, and between an ego and the imperatives that a culture develops and enforces, crudely or subtly, directly (by taboos or a police force) or indirectly (by a sense of guilt and the power of images impressed upon the young child by parents, siblings and teachers). Religious doctrines add their confusion to the situation the child has to face. Their essential aim is to impress upon the child's mind images of a transcendent character — God or gods and the Soul — giving to these integrative patterns the numinous power necessary to insure the stability and unquestionable value of the culture.

These religious images nevertheless appear questionable when a culture begins to disintegrate and the particular aspect of personhood which the culture was meant to develop either has not been fully operative, or has been so perverted (in spite of perhaps spectacular results for a relatively brief period of time) that a new kind of culture becomes imperative. The new culture will be based on a different aspect of the Supreme Person, an aspect which not only will be revealed by a new Avatar and/or a group of avataric personages, but also will be the objective result of social changes caused by the development of new collective powers and new resources.

This evolutionary process leading from culture to culture is not difficult to understand, especially if one accepts the broad picture of the birth and evolution of cultures (or civilizations) outlined after World War I by the English historian Arnold Toynbee. The problem with which one has to deal when speaking of the birth or formation of a culture is to establish the time at which the beginning of the process occurs, and the nature of ifs preliminary phases. These phases refer to what follows the appearance of an Avatar or avataric group — the mutant seed of a new evolutionary development. The aim of this development is the emergence and eventual stabilization of a basic type of persons, which gives concrete actuality to one of the archetypal aspects of the Supreme Person.

The development of culture and personhood, however, occurs within the biosphere. For a very long time it does not supersede the operation of life-forces. Nevertheless, the essential purpose of the new type of situation should no longer be referred to the trend toward Multiplicity effective before the symbolic Noon. A human being is a person. But when does he or she become a person, and cease to be only a living organism? This question is of the greatest importance as soon as one accepts the idea that being human does not merely mean being alive, but being a person. To be a person implies being a living organism, but it requires the possibility of operating in situations that are more than biological — human situations occurring within the field of activity of a culture.

Plants and animals are living organisms; yet in our present societies and according to the laws of our culture, their livingness is constantly destroyed to satisfy the needs or even the whims of human beings. Whenever such conditions prevail, life of itself should not be considered valuable. What is valuable is human life; and even the life of some human beings may be judged expendable under specific circumstances. These may refer to a war waged not to preserve the life of a people, but their culture, their way of life and religious institutions. Recently the issue of preserving "the life" of an unborn being whose parents were members of our human species has acquired a highly emotional intensity; but the problem is inaccurately stated. What is involved is allowing or not allowing the possibility of an embryonic life to become a person. After five months of intrauterine development a fetus is certainly alive, but can it be called a person?

People speak glibly of the "right to life"; but what they mean is the right for a person to maintain the operation of the life-function serving as a biological foundation for his or her personhood. There can be no fundamental "right" — that is, the granting of a special status according to the laws of a society and the principles of its culture — to what is only alive. Only a person has "rights"; and this person has them because he, she, or (in the case of a collective organization) it is considered a person participating in some manner in the larger system which a culture constitutes.

The issue, however, is so little understood, and what is involved in it is so inaccurately and emotionally stated, that a closer analysis of the factors in the situation seems necessary. An objective approach to the problems it poses should enable us better to realize what concerns the transition between personhood and further evolutionary states open to human beings by virtue of their humanhood.

Being a living organism whose specific type of organization and structure belongs to the species Homo sapiens, and being a person operating as part of a collective, sociocultural whole are facts that have meaning at two fundamentally different levels. A human being who is not actually able to participate in a society and its culture is not a person. Such a being may be potentially a person or no longer a person, yet still exist as a naturally or artificially sustained living organism. A human being becomes a person when able to enter into purposeful, sustained, and effective two-way relationships with other human beings within a societal group. Such a relationship implies the capacity to communicate with other members of the group, however primitive the means of communication. Language, not only through words but also in gestures and direct psychic interchange, is the means most specifically used at the level of the human association. Animals — and possibly even cells — undoubtedly have modes of communication through which vital needs and biological impulses are conveyed, but human language has not only a life-maintaining or life-enhancing function; it makes possible the development of freedom of choice between alternatives. These may lead to success or failure; they stimulate or inhibit the conscious and deliberate drive toward a transitional state of being.

A human being can be alive, but still be either not yet or no longer a person. He or she is no longer a person if the capacity to communicate in some conscious manner with other human beings is irremediably lost, as in extreme senility. The mere fact that the heart is beating or that some kind of electrical brain currents are detectable does not make a biological organism a person. In ancient cultures, even the event of physical birth was not considered sufficient to make a person of the biologically operating human child. The child emerged from the physical womb of the mother, but until about the age of seven — the "age of responsibility" according to the tradition of the Catholic Church — he or she was not an autonomous and responsible person, able to choose between good and evil. The child's feelings and mental processes were passing through a process of psychic gestation within the matrix of the family. In fact, in most societies the definite passage from the familial to the societal level occurred only at puberty. This was because the effective operation of the sexual reproductive function was considered indispensable to the state of personhood — sexual relationship being the foundation upon which characteristically sociocultural relationships could be built Sexual relationship led to marriage, and marriage conditioned, if not determined, the majority of other purely societal relationships.*

*According to the tradition of the Catholic Church, only a sexually potent human being can be a priest. Celibacy is considered meaningful only if it is the sacrifice (which means also the consecration) of a fundamental power. This consecration is deemed necessary for the effective transmission of divine energy during the Mass. Today, however, the principle seems to have been largely forgotten.

Therefore, the beginning of adolescence was celebrated and its crucial meaning dramatically impressed upon a youth's consciousness. The adolescent boy was given, or had to discover through challenging experiences, his "spiritual name," in some societies his totem, and in India his guru. Thereby he became a person — that is, able to perform a responsible function in the society and culture which had formed his mind and ability to act. The adolescent girl also was readied to fulfill her natural role as wife and mother and as the binding force within a home and family. The concept of "human rights" is extremely ambiguous. It is to a large extent the product of the eighteenth century European mentality and of its extension to the New World. It was an attempt to replace the religious belief in a God-given individual Soul by the "self-evident" concrete and objective fact of existence as a human being produced by two human parents. But such a fact is given only an abstract meaning if used mainly as the basis for the right to vote or to be counted as a unit in statistical research. A "human" right is the right to function as a person within a society of persons interrelated by a culture, a religion, or a basic way of life. A man or woman who, unknown to any other human being, is alone in a vast tropical forest filled with predators, has no human rights. He or she is not a person, but only a living organism in an extremely dangerous biological situation. Yet that living organism possesses capacities for adjustment to any biospheric situations which may give him or her the possibility to survive. A seven-month-old fetus that has been prematurely born does not have such a possibility unless it finds itself in an adequate medically supervised environment. A four-month-old fetus out of the mother' womb or of some future artificial matrix has no such potential of independent existence. Yet biological processes have already operated, revealing a potentially human form.

The emotional issue of making abortion illegal on the basis that the fetus is alive, and that the most fundamental human right is the right to life, in most instances is not given a solid and consistent foundation. Several essential questions are not asked: In what kind of human situations can one meaningfully, consistently and practically claim to have a right; and who is the holder of the right? How does the idea or feeling of "having a right" arise, and how is it related to a prevailing culture or ideology? Moreover (for the issue has very broad philosophical implications), do we have to infer that whatever is only a potentiality has the right to become actualized?

If one tries to answer the first question, one should first realize that the right to life acquires a crucial importance only where an oppressive social-political system is able, without any restraint, to eliminate persons whose beliefs or actions might cause constant difficulties. The system's right to existence is challenged by the right to life of the person who already exists as a person within the system. In the case of the abortion issue to which the 1973 Supreme Court decision has given a legal and official sanction is the almost unrestrained, egocentric individualism glorified by an increasingly influential host of twentieth-century psychologists and the all-powerful media of a society collectively experiencing the breakdown of its traditional Christian Euro-American values. According to these values, womanhood implied a fundamental subservience to the biological desire of the human race not only to perpetuate itself, but to increase and multiply in spite of the effective power of other life-species (microbes and predators) to thwart such an increase. The human male was meant to fight and overcome the enemies of homo sapiens by physical and intellectual power, while the human female's function was to produce as many human bodies as possible.

This biological situation underlay all types of socio-cultural and religious organization until the conquest of the American continent by an eminently aggressive and male-dominated race of human beings. This brutal conquest of enormous land-resources, which the native inhabitants had left nearly untouched, occurred simultaneously with the development of the scientific mentality in Europe, and with the many-pronged attempt to overcome the binding acceptance of the "divine right" of kings and bishops. These events provided the eventual set-up for the uncheckable expansion of the Industrial Revolution. The tremendous growth of industry in turn "dis-biologized" the reality, if not at first the concept and still-official ideal of the family. Women not only had to leave their homes consecrated to the propagation of life, often in order to insure the whole family-livelihood; simultaneously they had to introduce into their natural biological function certain intellect-developing male elements which could only alter their nature radically. Because these elements potentially transcend the biological level, by seeking to achieve absolute sociocultural equality between males and females, the Women's Liberation Movement disbiologized womanhood. It also disbiologized sex; it makes a personal issue of the full orgasmic experience of sexual activity.

It had never been such a decisive issue in the traditional Christian European way of life. A "good woman" married a man (most often chosen by the parents for sociocultural and financial reasons) not to enjoy sexual relations with him, and not to "grow" as an individual person outside the experiences which the relationship with the husband and her children brought, but fundamentally in order to fulfill her biological and socio-religious function as sustainer and multiplier of a racial type and of the culture based on that type's biological characteristics. Thus the frequent proscription of marriage outside one's own race and religion or culture.

The abortion issue can be approached objectively and unemotionally only if one sees how it developed out of the human situation outlined above. Another most important factor nevertheless has to be considered: the ability of the recent kind of medical science, based on the male analytical researcher's mentality, radically to alter the average length of the biological existence of a human body — a body, not a person. If more bodies are kept alive or made to survive what would have been a disastrous encounter with a predator (now, mainly bacteria and viruses), the strictly biological function of womanhood becomes less crucial. Homo sapiens may increase and multiply without many pregnancies! And because at the same time (an important point!) the socio-financial need for a woman to obtain a job — as a person and not as a biological organism — led to the development of the sociocultural and technological mind in persons born female, the disbiologizing and personalizing of sex was to be expected. It has led not only to the crucial attention given to techniques of sexual fulfillment, but to the spread of homosexuality.

Sexual fulfillment is a "personal" experience; pregnancy is a biological process. The former inevitably had to be separated from the latter and given the most important role. Sexual permissiveness and the divorcing of sexual results from the biological type of family are direct results of the Industrial and Electronic Revolutions, and of the uncontrolled development and glorification of the scientific mentality. The latter, at the medical level, also made abortion biologically safe and easy, while the egocentric individualism of modern popular psychology and of the Human Potential Movement made it acceptable to at least the surface consciousness of the personal psyche. Today it is said that at least one-fourth of pregnancies in the United States each year (nearly two million) end in abortion. What is more, international organizations for world-population control accept the medical process as a legitimate procedure to achieve an end which has become a crucial human need — the need to stop the uncontrolled proliferation of millions of human bodies kept alive by medical means. These medical procedures contradict the rule of life in the biosphere; for in the biosphere, any sudden rise in the number of bodies belonging to a particular species is soon stopped by the increase of predators feeding on or destroying them. Is generalized abortion (and other anti-biological worldwide activities featured by Western civilization as a whole) the predator necessary to reestablish the balance of the biosphere; or is the state of this biosphere to be radically altered and thoroughly "humanized"? Will wilderness everywhere be transformed into gardens to satisfy the socialized and personalized desires of human beings?

The free and generalized practice of abortion may be called a moral issue, but it is far more than ethical in a cultural-religious sense. It is a planetary issue. The validity of our Western civilization now spreading over the entire globe is an issue affecting the Earth-being as a whole. The devastation of the biosphere (and even of the sublunar regions) by a nuclear war is only one of many possibilities. Overpopulation in its extreme state, expected within the next 100 years, could be (with all its secondary results) just as disastrous. But to speak of it is not considered polite or acceptable to the religious mind, not only at the Fundamentalist or Catholic level of Christianity, but also in India, or Islamic countries, because "the will of God" is involved. But this God of theistic religions is the God of Life — who in the Bible is known as the Tetragrammaton, the fourfold JHVH who fashioned the human prototype Adam out of the red clay of the earth-surface. With Abraham he became the god of a special biological line — from seed to seed — and with Moses (or after his partial failure, Moses' successors) the god of a rigid culture and way of life. Even Jesus, who seems to have brought to Western humanity the vision of the "God within" — the God of the free and autonomous individual person — spoke of Him as "my Father." One may assume that the use of the term "Father" was intended only in a symbolic sense; but the mind of the people to whom Christianity spread undoubtedly was operating mainly in terms of biological values, and the Catholic Church could not afford to ignore this fact. It also needed to maintain and increase its power through large families whose members it would physically control from birth.

From the Christian Church's point of view, every human organism has at the center of his or her being — usually symbolized by the heart — a God-created Soul. As a biological organism a man is not a Soul: he has a Soul. This Soul was believed actually to "incarnate" (i.e. come into "the flesh," carne) in the child's body only around age seven, the age of reason and moral responsibility; only then could a child "sin." He or she does not sin as a body, but only after becoming a person. Today however, especially in America, children not only develop but are made to develop prematurely under the influence of the cultural environment (above all television) and expectations of the parents who have recently been taught by psychologists that the child must be considered "an individual" at birth and allowed to develop as such. Yet for a long time the potentiality of individualized selfhood can only actualize itself as an ego conditioned by the attempts of the infant's biological organism to adjust to the demands and expectations of its family and social environment. Does the operation of this ego already imply a full state of personhood and legitimate the application of the rights which our culture gives to all persons? Much evidently depends upon how one defines the ego, and whether one identifies this ego with the individual self, considered as the central factor in the state of personhood.

Personhood is an evolving condition of being. It may be an overshadowing potentiality with definable characteristics before it is actualized at the concrete level of everyday existence within a socio-cultural setup. And if so, there may be a time when what is still only a potentiality may have to be considered a partially determining factor in the future actuality. It may be that the religious doctrines of the "incarnating" Soul refer to this overshadowing potentiality. In a sense this Soul is the ideal person; from a different perspective it is the dharma of the future infant as yet unborn. The over-shadowing of the fetus developing in the mother's womb by this ideal form could indeed refer to the phase of the gestation process which is, and especially was, called the moment of "quickening." Today the quickening usually refers to the first feeling a pregnant woman has of movements of the fetus within her womb. However, occult traditions gave a deeper significance to the event: it marked the beginning of a contact between what the future person was meant to achieve and the developing organism within the womb. In the past, this contact was believed to occur when the heart of the fetus began to beat — the heart being considered at least a symbol of centrality of being. Today, however, modern embryologists claim that their instruments can detect halting and imprecise vibrations of the foetal heart-muscles after about one month following impregnation, although a precise, individually sustained heart-beat rhythm is likely to be a different phenomenon. It was said to occur around the midpoint of pregnancy, thus at four-and-one-half months.

If we accept such an interpretation, the midpoint of the gestation period could therefore be the decisive period when abortion would destroy not only the possibility of biological existence as a body, but that of functioning as a person within a human community in terms dictated by a collective culture. A biological organism can be "killed"; personhood may be destroyed. The two processes should be clearly differentiated. Personhood can be destroyed even if the body of the person is kept alive. Today senility means that personhood is no longer operative. If this occurs, the body kept alive no longer has any human "rights" because it is no longer truly "human."

 

Potentiality and Actuality

When considered in the broadest philosophical frame of reference, the problem of human rights thus leads to the question of what meaning one gives to the relation between potentiality and actuality. Does what is only a potentiality of existence have the "right" to conditions making its actualization possible and (what is more important) effective? Can it be treated as if it were an actual and experienceable situation? The impregnation of a human ovum by a sperm undoubtedly produces the potentiality of the birth of a living organism able to become a person and eventually to emerge as an autonomous, self-reliant, and creative individual. But there is no guarantee that this possibility will be actualized. There can be, at best, only a statistical probability. Is such a probability sufficient for a whole community to bestow upon what is only a future event the status and "rights" of the state of personhood?

The problem can be illustrated or symbolized by an example from the sociocultural field of music. A composer of serious music is inspired to produce a musical work, either by an internal, psychomental experience or by an external factor — for example, a commission to compose a symphony for a well-known orchestra. The composer's mind is thus "fecundated," and the creative process begins. It may or may not be carried to completion. Preliminary sketches must be written, then an orchestral score. But even the completed score, though paid for, may never be performed.*

*l personally had such an experience in the 1920s. A work of mine received a substantial prize but was considered "too modern" to be performed. Even recently, similar last-minute decisions by a conductor have occurred due to insufficient rehearsal time, resulting in only a partial performance of one of my works.

Should an unperformed score be considered music if no actual sound is heard by an actual public for which it was intended? At what stage of the creative process can the musical work be said actually to exist? Some composers claim to hear the entire music "in their head" before even beginning to write the score. Nevertheless, an orchestral score cannot be performed until a copyist extracts parts from it to be read by the instrumentalists of the orchestra. Indeed a number of possible happenings may mar the long process required actually to perform the music in the intended public situation. Thus the musical work can be evaluated only when it is related to a sociocultural group of people. It is only within such a group that a composer could possibly claim the right to hear the actualized sounds to which he or she had only given the potentiality of existence.

Moreover, what is potential may not be worth actualizing, at least from the point of view of the directors and the expectable conductor of the orchestra to which the potential music (the orchestral score) has been sent. If the orchestra had an infinite amount of time and resources, all potential symphonies could be actualized (i.e. performed). But in a finite musical season — and at a cosmic level, in a finite universe — all possibilities cannot be actualized. Someone, or some factor, has to choose.

According to the picture of the cycle of Wholeness I have presented, the choice is being made by the karma of the past. The ancient failures condition a dharma having the power to neutralize or balance the karma they engendered. The supreme Compassion of the Godhead at the symbolic Midnight of the cycle takes the form which, through a new set of human situations, will give the best chance of readjustment to reawakened subjective centers that once had been thrown out of the rhythm of the Movement of Wholeness by the pull of disharmonic desires and the destructive use of power.

If, however, we return to the problem of the termination of pregnancy, what is involved is certainly not the actualization of a potentiality of personhood inherent in millions of similar biological occurrences, but the relation of this situation and its equally potential results to a much more inclusive interpersonal and sociocultural situation. To say that a woman has the right to dispose of what happens to her body is quite beside the point. Does not our society interfere with a person's desire to commit suicide? Does it provide the sufficient amount of biologically wholesome food to children of all families if the parents are jobless? At the biological level, the human species is far more important than any one of its members, and the character and quality of the cultural-interpersonal organization of a society is more crucial in the spread of abortion methods than the individual reaction, dismay, or fear of an unwillingly and unexpectedly pregnant woman.

Sexual permissiveness is the symptom of a collective situation in which a culture has lost its capacity to make evident the need for the controls it previously imposed upon the unhindered play of biological impulses. As the rhythmic power of the cultural processes of human evolution fades out, as the options for superficially self-determined patterns of change multiply and none seems sufficiently compelling to produce an enduring commitment, the impulsion to depend again upon pre-cultural biological stimulation inevitably spreads. The often empty or tragic results of this adolescent protest, given psychological legitimacy as a personal attitude in terms of supposedly mature relationships, may lead to a panicky return to old, seemingly stable and secure traditions in the name of morality and monogamous commitment But remember the often quoted words of the first person to reach the summit of Mount Everest, when asked why he had done it: "Because it was there" — in other words, because he felt that what was only potential had to be actualized.

The human situation is undoubtedly characterized by the drive to actualize what is only potential. This is human greatness but also the source of human tragedies and failures. The development of the human person, and collectively of a human culture, may reveal paths open in many directions. But during the long ages which see the rise of more and more complex cultures and personalities, the most significant and valuable thrust of the Movement of Wholeness is the drive toward greater inclusiveness and concentration. It should be in actual practice a drive away from the multiplicity of surface-experiences and eventually to the attainment of a state of centrality in which all circumferential possibilities are unified in equilibrium and peace, in simplicity and harmony.

The road to that all-inclusive peace of center requires the control of many options, the refusal of many possibilities. Thus culture sets limits to biology. Personhood rises out of life, but is born of sacrifice — in the sense that it can give a "sacred" meaning to life-impulses by making them symbols of a superpersonal, planetary, cosmic, or divine reality revealing their essential function in the cyclic process of Wholeness. It can also, alas, give an anti-sacred character to these biopsychic urges by enslaving them to an imagination always eager to discover new possibilities and to make them actualities out of tune with the tide of cyclic being.

 

The Process of Individualization

What emerges from a material womb is a biological organism of the homo sapiens variety, requiring for its survival to be fed and cared for. Even though it differs in outer features, biological temperament, and molecular chemistry from other newborns having a similar genetic ancestry, it cannot be called "an individual" in the common sense of the term. Nevertheless it has the potentiality to develop individuality within the psychic matrix of family environment and culture. From the point of view already established in this book, this "individuality" is the type of personhood which has the inherent possibility of successfully meeting and neutralizing the karma (or unconscious memory) of past failures. It is the dharma for the fulfillment of which the newborn human organism was formed and is now growing in a particular milieu. This milieu is basically the very kind of environment which will make the dharma fulfillment possible. Such a possibility, however, may entail many difficulties and much suffering, through which the karma will take concrete experiential forms. As the person is born who sooner or later will have to meet and interact with the karmic residua of the past, the birth-situation brings together three basic factors:

1. A family environment and its culture, way of life, and religious beliefs focused by the character of mother, father, and other participants, animate or inanimate. This environment is structured by the collective values of the culture and the social class and wealth of the parents, but it is also affected by their biological temperament and personal character. This family environment imposes upon the growing infant's organism numerous constraints considered essential to a successful process of growth.

2. The infant organism nevertheless operates instinctively according to the biological rhythms of its functions. These rhythms in many ways conflict with the patterns which the culture and the family-group believe to be correct procedures in the baby's upbringing. "Something" in the baby develops as the result of such a conflict This something, the ego, is formed as a means to adjust as effectively as possible the biological impulses of the infant to the demands of the family environment and the culture prevailing at the time and in the circumstances of the birth.

3. This process of ego-formation is possible and takes on a special consciousness-engendering character in a human baby because it is a member of homo sapiens. Such a life-species could appear in the biosphere because the symbolic Noon phase of the great cycle of being had been transcended, and the influence of the principle of Unity was slowly ascending. It was made possible by the concrete Presence of the Supreme Person as a new factor within the Earth-being. Dimly as it is felt in the depth of human beings, this Presence catalyzes an unconscious urge to rise from the biological level to that of the Pleroma, through the trials and difficulties of the individual level of the state of personhood. Only in this state can the neutralization of past failure through the exercise of "free will" be performed.

In primitive biologically-determined animal groupings and societies, the adaptation of a living organism to the conditions prevailing in its birth-locality is apparently compulsive and unconscious; instincts rule, unchallenged. In a human being, however, the development of conscious and deliberate patterns of adjustment to family and sociocultural constraints is not only possible, but almost always occurs when a particular level of the evolution of culture is reached. Instinctual adaptation to the dictates of a tribal system based almost exclusively at first on survival and self-reproduction is replaced by conscious ego-determined behavior.

At the ego level, biological temperament becomes personal character. This character is a compromise between biology and culture. It defines a particular way of being a person in a sociocultural environment. What was at first a mostly collective type of personhood, subservient to the taboos and way of thinking-feeling and behaving of the culture, becomes an individualized type of personhood through the operation of an ego.

The formation and activity of an ego is inevitable. But the ego-forming process may be overpowered by the principles of organization, customs, and laws of the society, and by the development of a binding power, the collective psychism of the tribe. It may be over-powered by dominant and possessive parents or associates. On the other hand, the ego may develop in an atmosphere of conflict and violence when it strenuously resists the pressure of family, religion, and culture. Then, refusing to adapt and compromise, it finds specific ways of proving itself different and unique. A person controlled by a strong ego acts, thinks, and feels as an "in-dividual" because this ego is able to mobilize and control the psychic and even biological energies of human nature in an "un-divided" manner. The individualized ego-controlled person in most instances still operates within his or her native culture, but has emerged from the psychic matrix of family and culture as a relatively independent "individual self."

The basic issue, however, is the conscious purpose and the quality of this emergence. What gave it the character it has taken? How will the by-products of the separation from the family and cultural matrix, and perhaps the embittered or lonely isolation from the natural and natal environment, be handled? Where will this new feeling-realization of being radically different from the more or less rigidly organized masses lead? During a period of cultural disintegration, what will result from the alienation of the person eager for spiritual transformation from the free-for-all struggles of egos seemingly eager to destroy any natural patterns of order and relatedness so as to prove their freedom and power? Is this feeling of "being different" to be considered the means to demonstrate the superiority of a free and perhaps creative individual — the man of power, the woman star, idol of the masses, the revered genius or inventor, and in general whoever demonstrates the triumph of the human will over nature — or is this process of individualization and overcoming of bondage to both biological compulsion and socio-cultural imperatives only a transitory phase in human evolution whose aim is to produce the conditions necessary for the neutralization of karma and to lead to a still more basic kind of emergence? And, if the latter, what kind of emergence? It should be that of a karma-free being — one among thousands of other components, ready to participate in the activity and consciousness of a super-individual and super-physical whole, the Pleroma, the Soul of the Earth-being.

The process of individualization begins in the formation of the ego, but the patterns of the ego (its modus operandi) are still basically conditioned by the demands and constraints of the culture. These, however, establish a frame of reference — and symbolically speaking, a psychic womb — necessary to define the potential structure of the individual-in-the-making. A mason builds a physical structure, as it were, against gravity; individuality takes the form it needs to take against the pressure of the collectivity, because the particular collective culture in which the human being is born provides optimum conditions for the reawakening of the memories of past failures through sociocultural situations making possible the solution of the karmic problem. Personhood, I repeat, is the overall Solution envisioned by the Godhead in the Midnight phase of the cycle; but this Solution has an immense number of aspects because the components of a person's humanity had failed in an equally immense variety of ways. The family environment and the culture in which a person is born represent the person's ancient past in its essential or symbolic form insofar as this past included karma-engendering sins of omission or commission. Individuality takes form against this karmic pressure. If the mind of the individual-in-the-making can understand and accept the situation, and if his or her desires (the subjective factor in the experiences being evoked by the life-situation) do not cling to old biological patterns, the karmic darkness can be transformed into Light — the light of accepted meaning.

When the purpose of passing through the state of personhood is revealed and assimilated, a further period of the evolutionary process opens up. The principle of Unity has become more powerful, nearly equaling in intensity the principle of Multiplicity. The latter has been retreating inward, but its inertial strength is sufficient to affect weak or desperate persons. The conscious and deliberate movement toward the radiant Pleroma state may find its shadow counter-part in several ways: in an utterly weary falling by the wayside, in an escape into a subjective dream state, or in the noxious disintegration either of persons who would not dare to be individuals, or of individuals whose desires and minds could not meet crucial situations except in terms of personal fulfillment in a culture or of individual separateness.

The process of individualization is an emergence out of the state of unquestioned subservience to the paradigms and religious beliefs of the society in which one is born and where personhood has developed. While the first stage of the process is the formation of an ego, a further step leads to a contact with the dharma that defines the purpose of the birth. I have spoken so far of this dharma mostly as the means to neutralize the karma of the past. But beyond this process of neutralization, the consciousness of the individual struggling through the process of liberation may already have an intuitive sense of the place and function he or she will fulfill in the next transcendent and planetary state of the Pleroma — provided that the "spiritual Quality"* vibrating at the innermost core of his or her personhood succeeds in drawing and attaching to itself the so often vacillating desire and will of the individual on "the Path." As this occurs, the individual is not lost but operates within a new frame of reference which includes the whole of humanity and the Earth-being of which it is a part. Personhood — in the strict sense of the term — vanishes, having served its purpose as a means to solve the karmic problem. Then at "the end of time" the prototype of personhood, the Supreme Person, is released — or perhaps it is absorbed into the many individuals who have successfully passed through the often tragic rite of passage beyond personhood. The theosophical tradition speaks of that end of time as "the Great Day Be With Us." On that Day, unanimity and individuality interpenetrate and combine into the Pleroma state of being. Unity and Multiplicity are balanced, and a new level of beingness begins at which the subjectivity factor increasingly dominates the experiences which metacosmic situations now provide.

*Rhythm of Wholeness, chapter Five, page 97, for a definition of spiritual Quality.

 

The Path of Discipleship

In the process of individualization, there is an emphasis on whatever makes the would-be individual different from his or her family or peer-group, and especially from the masses that unquestioningly follow the patterns of their culture. The result is a state of at least relative isolation. Discipleship, in the broadest sense of the word, implies on the contrary a new state of relatedness. The disciple is related to his or her master or teacher, and in many if not most cases, to other disciples. Discipleship is a shared relationship; and this relationship may be to a common ideal or set of beliefs as much as to a superior personage, whose superiority may be one of physical or mental skill, or of state of being and consciousness.

Discipleship implies not only relationship to a superior being who has accepted the relationship; it requires that the disciple either ceases to be busy stressing his "difference" as an individual while learning to respond to the vibrations of a higher state of being, or is able (and perhaps inwardly directed) to use that difference, as well as he or she can, in terms of the type of purpose characterizing this higher state. At the level of social, artistic or business productivity, this second alternative would result in team work consciously pursued in terms of a clearly understandable material purpose. But, at least during the earlier stages of the spiritual Path of discipleship, the basic concern is not what the group of disciples may be able to produce objectively, but rather the use of the tensions inherent in the interpersonal relations between the disciples, in order to intensify the process of transmutation of desires and the transformation of the mind. Not only the desire for personal achievement, fame, or wealth — and perhaps for special favors from the master — but even for a strictly individual existence, has to be transcended. It should be replaced by faith and a deep sense of potential, even if not yet actual participation in a planetary Communion of beings. The mind has to open itself to concepts and quasi-visual experiences which inevitably seem paradoxical and non-rational to the culture-built intellect of the disciple.

At the level of the traditional guru-chela relationship in Asian and Near Eastern regions, the chela was expected not only unquestioningly to obey the guru in terms of behavior, but to condense and unify all the currents of his or her psychic energy (thus his or her entire emotional life) into a single stream of devotion (bhakti) to the guru. This unifying process can be related to what is expected in the practice of Kundalini Yoga, that is, the drawing of the life-energy away from the cells of the entire body, then the condensation and the rise of that energy along the central channel of the spinal column until it reaches the Ajna chakra behind the forehead. There the energy is said to unite with a descending current of transhuman power. The power of the Pleroma "descends" through the guru to transfigure the chela whose whole being has become an integrated musical instrument able to resonate to the super-cultural planetary rhythm of the Soul of the Earth-being.

When, during the sixth century B.C., the consciousness of the vanguard of mankind became ready for the development of a new level of mental activity, Gautama the Buddha, Pythagoras, and other great personages attempted to give a public formulation to the new mind. As a result, it became possible for the process of transition from the cultural and individual state to the Pleroma condition of being to take a new form. Some early theosophists spoke of a "reorganization of the White Lodge" at the time of Gautama; and according to the German philosopher-occultist Rudolf Steiner, the impregnation of the matter of the earth by the blood of Jesus at the crucifixion made possible a basic change in the process of Initiation.

Such statements may best be interpreted, I believe, as more or less symbolical indications that some twenty or twenty-five centuries ago a new level of operation of the human mind and of the psychism a culture generates was reached as a worldwide public possibility. A possibility only. The archetype of a new rite of passage having been released, a new elite of mentally mature human beings, ready to experience the transition between personhood and the Pleroma, could do so in terms of an individualized, mentally formed consciousness, rather than solely at the level of the control of biopsychic energies. As a result, karma can now be understood as a significant and symmetrical cyclic process instead of as the operation of a blind and meaningless force of Nature. Only a fully developed individual self is able to give a series of karmic developments the meaning of tests of liberation revealing the Compassion of the Godhead. This self alone may intuitively feel the great rhythm of the Movement of Wholeness, even through apparently disruptive and challenging events experienced along the Path. It has to be a self fully accepting the responsibility of the state of individuality and of the freedom it entails, rather than making a mysterious, essentially transcendent, and incomprehensible God the cause of suffering and tragedy.

A successful transition to a state of being beyond the merely human requires more than a new type of mental process. What is needed is a repolarization of the experiencing subjective self. There must be a shift from an isolated and strictly individualistic state dominated by the principle of Multiplicity to the field of attraction of the principle of Unity. And this implies the transmutation of the person's basic desires. These changes are possible because new situations and new relationships arise, releasing an at least partially supernatural surge of potency. The whole being of the traveler on the Path is gradually (and alas often very painfully) experiencing a process of deconditioning, then reorganization. Because the principle of Multiplicity is still very powerful even in predominantly subjective states of being, each person who reaches the level of mentally aware and intuitive individual selfhood is confronted with the way best fitting his or her "difference." Yet the process has an invariant foundation which has to be accepted in every case. No basic step can be missed, for its avoidance would leave a karmic shadow that might later lead to a more crucial failure.

To the religious spirit this means that God's Will must be accepted unconditionally; but on the Path of transformation, more than a passive acceptance is demanded of the individual traveler. As it has often been stated in inspirational semi-esoteric writing, he whoever treads on the Path eventually has to become the Path itself. There is no escape from what one is as an individual; only a victorious passage through. The defeat of a resurgent army of ghosts, vividly remembered as reawakened images of what one had been can alone lead to the Pleroma state; and the elation of success must always be tempered by the humility born of the realization that victory could always have been more complete.

It is futile to reduce the Pleroma state of being and its combination of unanimity and individuality to patterns operative in our sociocultural, political, and business world. It is also futile to personify seemingly individual sources of radiant power and Compassion that ignore our commonplace sentimentality. Nevertheless, even a tentative knowledge of the nature of a basic process of metamorphosis may be valuable, because the quality of livingness of human persons attempting to tune up to the oneward Movement of Wholeness often depends on the conscious understanding of what is at stake. As individualized human persons we have a right to understand — a right to meaning. This indeed is the basic human right, rather than an ambiguous right to life, happiness, and other bland achievements. The spiritual life is a series of victories; the reward is always a more inclusive understanding of what one is meant to be — a deeper, fuller, richer experience of Wholeness.

 

How to Deal with Changes of Level

The first change occurs when the newborn organism begins to participate, unconsciously though it may be, in a system of communications primarily aiming at biological survival, yet controlled by the specific behavior patterns of a culture and a particular family situation. Cries, gestures, and changes of facial expression are the original means of communication available to the baby reacting to ever-changing internal and external situations. As it is being trained as a biological organism within a somewhat rigid cultural system, the infant has to develop an ego in order to make the most of a confusing, yet (it soon realizes) repetitive series of situations to which he or she has to conform.

What begins at birth acquires an increasing complexity as the years pass. The child is being "encultured." The process is called education, yet it actually refers to a series of instructions. A set of expected correct reactions and a vast number of memorized data are "built in" (in-struc), producing an increasingly complex network of cellular interactions in the child's brain and nervous system. These interactions define the ego, the first manifestation of personhood. The function of the ego is to make the demands of the family and school environment as comfortable as possible to the biological organism. Furthermore it is to use the expectable reactions of family members, teachers, and playmates in a way which enhances the power and increases the possessions of a psychic entity asserting itself as "I," Peter or Jane. The ability to imitate patterns of behavior is the first requirement during this process of enculturation and ego-development. Imitation (or mimesis) results in organismic pleasure and in an increased acceptance by surrounding people. Memory and discrimination are needed effectively to deal with the situations being met. Important also is the ability to sense, feel, or intuitively realize what adults and even siblings and playmates will appreciate or resent. These qualities (memory, discrimination, and empathy or intuition) are not only needed in childhood; the process of instruction extends, or at least can extend, to the entire life-span. However, the process of individualization takes on a new quality whenever a factor introduced in the relation between the growing person and his or her family and culture is given a determining influence. This factor is the transformation of mimesis into revolt as a way of growth.

At the level of depth-feeling reactions, the breakdown of a quasi-instinctual devotion to parents, and of an unquestioning acceptance of the validity of assumptions and practices embodied in the family religion, inevitably produces a crisis. It is a crisis of identification rather than identity. While it has its roots in the series of reactions which resulted in the formation of the ego, what is at stake in such a crisis is not merely the convenient adjustment to a set of situations, but rather the forceful assertion of an individual identity, I myself, and all this possesses to substantiate this "me." And of such possessions none may seem as essential (at least to Descartes!) as what is now definitely considered to be "my" mind.

At first, however, the deep sense of identity operates almost exclusively as a "gut-feeling," rooted in the wholeness of the body and the organizational power of "life" keeping all its cells integrated. This feeling establishes the way the I, as a person, manages to keep alive and relatively happy in the sociocultural environment in which it has to function. But behind the obvious ego-feeling, a still deeper yet much less focused awareness of a "purpose" for being-I may occasionally surface. Mind often integrates and formalizes this awareness in answer to a usually imprecise, yet perhaps haunting desire to discover the meaning of sufferings and deprivations, and perhaps a still more basic meaning to human existence in general. As this occurs, the concept of dharma may arise (however formulated) in the consciousness. The question is then not only "Why does this happen to me?" but "Is there behind and in 'me' a power able to act in trying circumstances so that a new level of consciousness and activity may be reached?" It could be a higher, wiser level of personhood. It could also be a level of being whose roots and source of potency are beyond personhood, even though it may still operate through personhood — thus "transpersonally."

At this point what is called "the will" should be dealt with — a factor characteristically almost ignored in twentieth-century depth-psychology until Dr. Robert Assagioli devoted a whole book to the subject, The Act of Will. The will, however, can be given an exalted spiritual meaning it does not have of itself. It operates at several levels, just as the feeling of being-l and the desires it engenders do. I have defined the will as the mobilization of the energy factor in the satisfaction of a desire aroused by a particular situation. Desire itself, as noted earlier, is the expression of the subjective factor in all experiences. Any experience implies a conscious or unconscious desire for or against some expectable event, or else a condition of indifference. The more intense the desire, the more potent the mobilization of the energy it releases, provided that the mind — whether in its cultural-collective or its personal-individual aspect — either provides an effective channel for the power, or at least offers no insurmountable obstacles.

The character or quality of the will depends primarily on the level at which the desire calling for the mobilization — and therefore the subjective source of the desire — operates. The subject may have a generic and biological character — such as a whole species manifesting its desire for food and copulation in and through any one of its particular specimens. It may be a collective factor — a nation seeking territorial conquest in and through a military leader, emotionally and mentally controlled by the vision of power his environment had indelibly stamped upon his personhood since infancy. The subjective source of the desire may be an ego fighting for self-assertion at home or for a superior position in business; and in that case an ego-will is at work. This last alternative is the most frequent in our individualistic society — a society of egos, by egos and for the greater good of egos!

Ego-will may use many methods of operation in order to achieve its basic but multifarious aim: the control of natural forces for the satisfaction of human desires. Natural forces may be implicit in biological functions (as for instance the sudden tension of muscles) or they may result from alterations in the relation between external substances or beings. An instinctual arousal of such forces is transformed into ego-will when it is made to occur deliberately and according to a set series of operations (a technique) consciously worked out by the mind. The human mind is therefore a most important factor in the effective activity of the ego-will. This mind takes on an increasingly human character when the subjective factor (I, Peter or Jane) considers itself separate from the situation it experiences. But if this ego-I is external to the situation, so is its desire for making the situation develop in a particular manner.

The desire for making a situation change into another expected to bring comfort, happiness, wealth, professional prestige, or political power is a dominant factor in the process of individualization. At the collective stage of the development of personhood a human being acts much like a cell in a biological organism, fulfilling the function that he or she was born for — a function determined by the conditions of birth as a human body. The individual stage of personhood develops when the character, the unusual capacities and/or performances of a person, singles out and brings him or her to a position of eminence.

The less dependent upon strictly biological patterns of relationship and the more individualistic the society, the greater the possibility for a participant in the societal process to reach a position of dominant power. The mobilization of the person's energy, according to methods devised by the mind, assumes the character of ambition. What, in a normal happy childhood, had been the devotional will to please the parents, born of the desire to love and be loved, becomes the ambition to gain an individual position of power at one level or another of the society. It is still the same will, the same ability (or inability) to mobilize internal energy, or to control external forces and the situations they produce; but the level of operation and the quality of the subjective factor have to change if collective personhood is to evolve into individual personhood. The change, however, may be a smooth and easy process, or it may require a sharp and painful crisis of revolt and severance in order to pass from one level to another.*

*The section of the booklet Beyond Personhood entitled "Three Lines of Development of the Ego" discusses various possibilities of development of the feeling of being a "special" person within a sociocultural environment.

The relinquishment of the ambition motive usually results from experiences which reveal the inefficacy or illusive nature of situations which, a special condition of birth and education, or a tense ego-will able to control sociocultural and interpersonal processes, had produced. A buddha is shocked by the revelation of human situations he had never been allowed to know; an ardent and relatively successful leader of a political revolution is made to face the utterly disappointing results of changes his will had made possible; a man whose desires drove him to constantly repeated and ever cruder or more refined sexual experiences sees his life and the culture that spurred him on as totally empty. Faced by such a situation, a person may collapse into a state of indifference in which the exhaustion of his desires engenders a revulsion against all that mind has devised as a servant of desire and inventor of ever new procedures for the realization of ambition or more intense pleasure. The revolutionary may fall back with a more or less hidden sense of defeat to the anonymity of social and personal normality — perhaps only a temporary step to regather a new sense of potency mobilizable when a new cycle of change begins, if it ever does. But something else of a positive nature may occur. An as yet unknown or long ago dismissed type of realization may make an unexpectedly strong impact upon the consciousness of the weary person ready to disavow his or her unique individuality; and a process of reorientation and repolarization of the subjective factor may begin, which should lead to a transmutation of desire and eventually to a new will.

As a third factor inherent in experience, mind deals with procedures. It seeks to ascertain how the basic desires of a whole collectivity of people or an individual person can be satisfied. The procedures being sought evidently are based on the interpretation which the mind factor gives to the situation; but this interpretation assumes the validity of a subjective state of being. Consciousness, on the other hand, refers to the direct "prehension" (rather than comprehension) of the wholeness of the situation being faced. As I stated at the beginning of chapter four ("The Human Situation"), consciousness is an aspect of Wholeness or Beness. It operates at several levels as the emanation of the then-prevailing particular state of relatedness of the principles of Unity and Multiplicity. Thus one should not speak of the consciousness of a human person (or a plant), but rather of consciousness taking form within that person (and plant) as each meets at its own level a particular type of situation. Every situation in the vast cycle of the Movement of Wholeness implies the potentiality of a particular mode of consciousness. This type of consciousness is inherent in the subjective factor operating in the experience the situation makes possible.

Consciousness, operating directly within (or, in a sense, as) the subjective factor in a human experience, is what should be meant by the much abused and misused word intuition. Intuition is a subjective awareness of the wholeness of a situation "seen" as a concrete manifestation of the possibilities inherent in a particular relationship between the principles of Unity and Multiplicity. Intuition opens the door, as it were, to the realm of Wholeness — to the essential reality and meaning of what is, was, or will be. At the level of human situations, intuition is diffuse and imprecise revelation of the dharma of the person in whose consciousness it takes form. It reveals not only what a perhaps imminent situation may be, but also the meaning of this situation in terms of the basic evolutionary purpose of the state of personhood. Intuition suggests to the individual, perhaps vividly, the degree of acceptance or avoidance of a situation which best fits the purpose of his or her being a person; thus what the value of the desire related to it essentially is. Intuition may reveal the possible conscious use of the situation in the process of neutralization of past failures. It may also operate when the decision has to be made whether to carry further or delay awhile a series of successful moves along the Path of transformation.

Intuition is therefore a faculty particularly needed when the process of individualization leads to the possibility of making crucial choices which might increase the feeling of separateness and pride. It enables the individual whose over-defined subjectivity is functioning, as it were, outside the tide of Wholeness, to respond to the oneward thrust gaining strength as human evolution proceeds in the direction of the symbolic Sunset phase of the great cycle. Intuition, however, needs the support of two other essential factors during crises of transition: imagination and faith.

In the precise sense of the word, imagination is the faculty mind possesses in varying degrees to produce images evoking the possibilities of relations and experiences which, under the pressure of circumstances or internal factors, may be desired, but are not actualized in the present situation. These factors may have been actualized in the past and the person may desire their revivification; they may be a play of the mind seeking to help the subject escape from inner emptiness and estrangement from the state of evolution and the level of thinking-feeling his or her environment features at the time. These images may also be evoked by an imprecise and confusing feeling-awareness (or intuition) of what might have been, and perhaps could still be, if the power inherent in the human state to disassociate oneself from a situation (as if it were happening to oneself as an external experiencer) had not been used. They may be presentiments of possibilities of situations already implied in the present phase of the Movement of Wholeness, as a full-grown plant is implied in the germ seeking to pierce the crust of the soil and experience sunlight. Imagination can be, in other words, the activity of a mind having been impelled to enlist itself at the service of intuition so as to give substance and concreteness to the intuitive revelations. It performs this service if another faculty operates alongside the positive kind of image-making function: faith.

The word faith, however, is not used here in an ordinary religious sense, with reference to doctrines for which a specific divine origin is claimed. Faith rises in the consciousness which realizes that it is an aspect of Wholeness and that the whole meaning of any situation can never be revealed by the merely partial, local, and temporary interpretation the mind provides, nor by any desire which absolutely negates the value and meaning of its opposite. Faith implies an open approach to possibilities which are not included in the normal, natural response of the human organism as now developed on our planet, or which are not acceptable to the rational mind. Therefore, faith should not be considered to be mainly a product of a ritualized and/or institutionalized religious spirit. Human beings have faith in God and His revelation because, at the core of their whole being, they realize that the senses and (at a later stage of evolution) the objective, analytical, and rational mind do not — and indeed cannot — picture the wholeness of any being or any situation. The human person "intuitively" feels or realizes that the wholeness of whatever "is" includes more than he or she can be conscious of. This "more" can therefore be approached only through faith. Faith is the only possible approach not only to the non-rational and alogical, but to what the consciousness dimly feels to be beyond any sense-perceived reality.

As it performs such a function, faith should readily accept the cooperation of imagination. It must do so especially when it attempts to transform the cultural paradigms and the popular material interpretations of human experiences which the collective mind had to create in order to produce a sense of security in the satisfaction of basic desires that most people can share. A vivid faith that what is imagined can be concretely actualized is needed if the dream or Utopia is to become a fact of human existence. When a religion postulates the existence of God as a changeless absolute Being whose nature and power are beyond the capacity for transformation of any limited and conditioned but evolving being, such a God can only be imitated. He or It absolutely transcends any conceivable mode of beingness. The theologian must therefore establish two categories of Beness, in metaphysics usually called "being" and "becoming." Man as a participant in becoming can imitate and dimly reflect the divine state of timeless and immovable being, but no evolutionary process, no series of crises of transformation, can ever make Man (whether as an individual person, or as the whole of humanity) such a theologian's God. The only possibility is that of a "dialogue" between God and Man. This is a super-aristocratic type of situation: the good servant allowed to speak of his problems or doubts to the all-powerful and unfailingly wise king and master, whose voice sounds faintly through layers of veils.

The democratic image is, in contrast, that of the realizable American Dream: every newborn a potential big executive, or even the nation's President — the most powerful man in the world, it is believed. The subconscious (if not consciously admitted and entertained) faith in the validity of such a dream gives a quasi-mystical yet eminently effective power to the image of America. It has become, in the minds of billions of human beings, at least the prelude to a realizable Utopia. The continual possibility of keeping active the drive to the ideal goal, however, requires the perpetuation (through educative processes and parental suggestion) of a quality of thinking, feeling, and behavior necessary for the effective actualization of the Utopia. These requirements undoubtedly have produced an unparalleled sociopolitical and cultural situation; but collective moral restraints, already greatly weakened everywhere under the evolutionary pressure of the process of individualization, today are in a state of collapse. The traditional culture which made the unfoldment of the potentiality of individualized personhood relatively secure, through a step-by-step process with clearly defined transitions (rites of passage), has lost most of its structural and revelatory function. The only effective faith left is centered in the taken-for-granted feeling that "I" Peter or Jane can be anything I want as an ego in control of whatever situation I may personally face.

Nevertheless, in practically all cases such a situation has a social character: it involves relationships with other egos which — whether or not they admit and understand the fact — can be expected to cooperate if the situation is managed intelligently. This is the social way. It is also the way of the ego-mind because it is based on the desire for strictly individual existence, however closely life is shared and benefited by an intimate association with persons within a permissive, loosely structured sociocultural system.

The only logical possibility in that system is majority rule, and the use of statistical computations and polls. These in turn lead to the demand for ever more inclusive and more private information, to uncontrollable publicity, and more or less extreme forms of brainwashing through the forever and everywhere active media. More faith-compelling images are needed, stimulating an irrational faith in an unlimited future. According to such a faith, the proliferation of material images will in time change the level of the human consciousness. It will do so apparently through the eventually unanimous realization that the development of a wonderful structure of interpersonal and international relations can arise from the recognition, by every ego, that its own subjective desires and personal interests can best be served by communication, consultation, vocal discussion from person to person, and compromise.

Today, this possibility seems a forlorn hope, though the social and political process involved in its realization is evidently partially valid. It is valid because, in terms of the Movement of Wholeness, it should be considered inevitable in an evolutionary sense. I am nevertheless trying to evoke a type of faith based on the realization that archetypal solutions are already formed and active to some degree, in some internal ego-transcending manner. It is a faith solidly rooted in a cyclic vision, and in the affirmation of "being" in all possible modes of actualization, whether predominantly objective or subjective. It is faith in and through which Wholeness asserts itself; and there is no level or situation in which Wholeness cannot assert itself. In such an assertion, however. Wholeness does not have to reduce the many-sided yearning for the experience of "beyond" to the concept of an incomprehensible, absolute, yet miraculously intervening God. In Wholeness, every phase of the cyclic motion follows, conditions, evokes, announces, and is transformed into another phase. Nothing is alien to anything; every possibility interacts with every other. Yet there is structural order, invariant and supreme, because Compassion and karma always balance and restore order to the variations aroused by the relative freedom of human desires and will. And this freedom is one of the aspects of cyclic being.

Grounded in such a faith, empowered by a will which focuses an emergent desire for self-renewal, mind can bring to a crisis of transformation the imaginative solution that reflects the archetypal reality of the individual's dharma. Yet an archetype is only a formula of relatedness; it is a structural not an existential factor. A type of person, even more than a particular isolated individual, has to work out and make the formula explicit and concrete. This, however, demands as a prerequisite a process of severance from old solutions which have become obsolete and confining.

Severance, whether as a physical or mental process of disengagement, is nevertheless an individualized experience. It can only acquire an irrevocable character if the subject that seeks freedom has the courage totally to overcome an insistent bondage to past habits of feeling, thinking, and behavior. Disenthrallment requires courage — not only great, but sustained and persistent courage.

At the level of a relatively primitive culture, this courage is implanted in the consciousness by the Elders and the traditional behavior of the community. Had they not long ago stepped beyond the known through the hallowed if terrifying rite of passage, leading to what for them was still the yet-unknown? The candidate to Initiation could indeed find within his or her inner psychic being the faith that would sustain through the ordeal He or she would never leave the sacred field of the tribe's collective psychism: there was no question of belonging or not belonging. The only issue was how well and courageously the series of steps was being taken.

At the level of the individualized person, who has to pass seemingly alone through the varied tests of overcoming which life itself now presents, a different, perhaps greater kind of courage has to be displayed. It demands an even stronger, almost unchallengeable faith in the reality of an individual Soul. Yet our modern religions, and especially our culture, have failed to give a clear understanding of the meaning and purpose of the crucial crisis-situation. What is the potentiality implied in a successful conclusion of the crisis? Where does this individual Soul belong, and how can it be defined in a realistic sense? A superior, because more inclusive, level of reality has to be accepted and intensely believed in. The person in crisis must insistently want to operate at that level, even if he or she cannot fully understand what it implies. At that level the Communion of transhuman Pleroma beings act and have their being. It is the "Commonsoul" of humanity. It is the Soul of the Earth-being.

The individual person who has passed successfully through the radical crisis of total transformation should come to realize that, in a realistic sense, his or her "Soul" is essentially a particular place and function within the vast field of activity and consciousness of the Earth-being. There is no incomprehensible mystery in that fact, even if it has to be understood at a more-than-human level of consciousness. The victorious individual not only comes clearly to "see" what that place and function within the planetary greater whole (the Earth-being) is and has always potentially been; he or she is ready to act and live as a responsible agent for this greater whole.

As this readiness begins to overcome the force of strictly individual desires, a higher form of courage, united with understanding and wisdom, should be gradually experienced. The pull of the place and function waiting to be filled by an individual person acts as the substance and potency of that courage. This courage has to be maintained as an unquestionable state of being. It may take many existential forms, but it always is basically the will to endure and unflinchingly face the ancient karma of failure, without apologies, regrets, or feelings of guilt. It has happened. It is part of the whole. It is being redeemed, and the discord is being justified in terms of the new tone-resonance it created, bringing forth a new aspect of the undefinable reality of Wholeness.

There is no problem in Wholeness, save the belief in problems. Therefore the issue is faith — the quality and inclusiveness of the faith. It must be the faith in the meaning and value of the most extreme polarities of being, of both Unity and Multiplicity. That meaning and value are embodied in the Supreme Person, for in this realization of the archetype of personhood, the two polarities of cyclic being are as completely realized as they can ever be.

Personhood is the Solution envisioned by the Godhead, yet it is not an end in itself, for in it the seed of the Godhead state is implied. That seed will germinate in and through various levels of Pleroma being — a hierarchy of levels and transcendences, a periodic series of crises and overcomings that may mean victory or defeat — both of which have their place, value, and meaning in Wholeness. At every level of being, an experience of Wholeness is possible, but the field the experience encompasses increases at every new level. New situations arise presenting new possibilities.

The issue is always threefold, involving what is desired, what power is available, and what processes mind can discover for the transformation. The basic obstacles are inertia and fear. The enemy is within. The spiritual life is a state of war, and personhood is the battlefield. The weapons are courage and understanding, and the faith that images of victory are irrefutable realities.

 

The Fullness of Human Experience

 

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