*
THE SUBSTAGES OF DOMINION
We now propose to describe the stages through which man as an individual monad evolves. Such evolution does not concern his physique, which is, an inheritance from the animal, nor is it concerned only with intelligence. It is, rather, a combination of all his human faculties: intelligence, emotion, intuition, will, and, above all, the integration of all his talents into a single whole.
Moreover, man's environment, as becomes evident with increase in population, is of a different nature from that of the animal's. Animal evolution consists primarily in developing a physical organism that through its mobility can obtain food and by its internal organization can transform food into available energy. Man begins his evolution with the animal vehicle already perfected. Food supply and other problems must be solved, but even with primitive people man's focus of attention directs itself to another kind of effort than that of direct interaction with nature. He becomes a member of a tribal society and occupies his time with ritual in a variety of forms.
This brings out the importance of civilization, or of the social state, in man's evolution. In what follows we must necessarily acknowledge man as a social animal. However, as we will endeavor to show, it is the self, and not the state, that is evolving. The state or the civilization in which man finds himself is as necessary to his evolution as is nature to the animal's evolution. Nevertheless, what is evolving is not the state, but man as an individual being.
This might seem to imply that we are backing the individual versus the state, but that too would be a misrepresentation, for, as we will further endeavor to show, individuation is itself but one part of a more comprehensive process in which a transcendent goal is attained. The goal is to reach a higher development than present man, whether we call this superman or to become "wise as gods." The process by which that goal is reached requires the interaction of persons with one another, and of persons with the state, but neither the centrality of personality nor the communality of the state is its final resting point.
Before proceeding with our subject, the substages of dominion, we should caution against too literal an interpretation of the division of process into stages. Stages (or substages) are not different things, but different phases in the development of the same thing. Perhaps we should say different vehicles for the development of the same monad. As with beads, they may conceal the thread that holds them together.
So when we refer to different periods of history (early man, the Greeks, modern man) as stages of dominion, we mean that in these periods a preponderance of persons were at a certain stage - not that "civilization" was at this stage, because, as we said, civilization is the vehicle, not the end product.
First substage
The obvious instance of first-substage man is the primitive hunter, before agriculture introduced the tribal community with its division of labor, its priesthood, its dependence on the seasons and need to determine the correct time for crop planting. But I'm not too sure that this is the answer; most early peoples describe themselves as having been taught by the gods, who showed them how to plant crops and weave, and brought them music, writing, and the other arts. There is also the theosophical approach, according to which the earliest man was not yet in a physical body, as if to emphasize that man had a quite different origin from that of the animals. Finally, there is an account which describes the "lords of Venus" first preparing the higher apes for take-over by human souls. As the story goes, some of the souls refused to inhabit the ape bodies - a tragedy because of its effect on the apes. I'm rather taken by this account, particularly when I look at the expressions on the faces of apes.
Second substage
The general name for the power at this stage is binding. In terms of dominion, and in terms of human evolution as distinct from animal evolution, this would be the stage before the emergence of man as a self-conscious and self-determined individual. It would be man functioning as a member of a tribe or civilization in which his actions were completely prescribed by tribal customs, or by king or leader. To some extent, all groups partake of this behavior, but we must remember that the later stages, by virtue of the cumulative principle, always retain the powers that have evolved before. So that where modern man may still retain group behavior, he can also be self-determined. He may change his allegiance, and this allegiance, even if not completely voluntary, is not the unconscious and implicit allegiance of the collective society of substage two. Seen in this light, the political philosophy of communism is a reversion to this earlier stage of development, and we would read the changes that have occurred in communism, which carry it ever further from its original aims, as due to the fact that the present stage of human development has passed beyond that of simple collectivism.
Again, the "organization man" as a contemporary phenomenon is not so much an instance of collectivism as it is a basis or backdrop, a prior condition, for self-determination. The individual is able to find himself only by questioning the ethos or mores of the group, by disobedience, as Genesis puts it. Again, the organization man of today is a far more complex and self-conscious entity than is apparent at first blush. The term refers not to a child-like zombie who lives entirely according to a sacred ritual, as we may suppose primitive man to have done, but to a member of an intensely competitive society who employs a uniform codified behavior to better himself or to obtain status, only to shift into another garb when the occasion presents itself.
All of these conflicting considerations vanish when we go back in time and consider a primitive civilization in which collectivism was unalloyed with elements of individualism. Take, for example, the Inca civilization which Pizarro encountered in the conquest of Peru. Contemporary accounts describe a civilization of some twelve million peons who cultivated their terraced gardens, chanting as they worked, devoted to their king with a complete and unquestioned faith. Everything was regulated and set forth in prescribed ritual; there was no need and no occasion for initiative. Yet this very perfection rendered the civilization extremely vulnerable to attack, for how else can we explain how Pizarro, with his band of some one hundred eighty soldiers, conquered a race of twelve million? For when Pizarro captured their king, the collective entity collapsed.
We could liken such a civilization to the termite colonies studied by Eugene Marais, to which we referred in our discussion of the group soul in Chapter XI. He found that when the queen was removed, the whole coordinated activity of the colony broke down: the soldier termites ran about confusedly, the workers stopped repairing, the colony disintegrated.
The reasons for the breakdown cannot in either case be fully explained. The point that is important is that the level of development of the individual units-the peons of the Inca collective society, or the termites in the colony-was not sufficiently advanced for them to take command and resist intrusion when the leader was removed. In a more advanced civilization there would be enough self-determination at the level of the common man to organize resistance. We have many illustrations of this phenomenon in modern history: the American and French revolutions, the underground resistance in the countries overrun by Hitler, the organized resistance encountered by Mao in China in the 1960's, the warfare in Southeast Asia.
Other interesting implications can be drawn from the evidence. In the case of the Incas, there appeared to be no sense of the importance of individual survival. Once their leader was seized, resistance collapsed. This suggests that morale is involved, and such morale has its source for the collective man not in himself, but in someone or something beyond himself and his own sphere. Here we may cite another source of evidence. In many instances, excavations of the graves of ancient kings have revealed that when a king was buried, members of his court were put to death to accompany him to the next world and that the persons sacrificed submitted voluntarily and with equanimity to their fate.
This is difficult for the modern mind to grasp. We think of human sacrifice as brutal murder, yet to primitive people it may not have had this implication. In the first place, the prize we have won, the discovery of self and the development of self-determination, implies also a loss, the loss of a sense of the reality of the divine, and of divinity operating through appointed leaders. When this sense operated, as it must have in earlier times-for we have from Egyptian, American Indian, and in fact all early traditions, that their civilizations were inaugurated by gods who taught them to plant by the seasons, to spin silk, to play flutes, etc. when such implicit trust in their leaders operated, there was no conflict of interests between the individual self and the group self because there was no consciousness of an individual self. If the leader died, the self, being a creature of the leader, died too.
We may go even further and speculate on an actual consciousness of deathlessness, a sense of immortality in primitive man at the collective stage. While this sense, again, is foreign to the modern way of thinking, we must keep in mind that primitive people, by their continual consultation of the gods through oracles and sacrifice, and their dependence on such consultations for the conduct of affairs, must have lived with a sense of the continual presence of the divine. They would thus have an altogether different attitude toward self-sacrifice on such important occasions as the death of a king.
We advance this last point not only because it helps make sense of the facts of primitive life, but because it lends confirmation to the suggestion we advanced earlier, that the first two stages of process are indestructible, that is, immortal. Finite existence in time, like finite existence in space, can come about only at the third and fourth levels, when forms and formed substance come into existence. Such forms are destructible, while the basic ingredients of which they are composed, substance and function, are not destructible.
Gautama Buddha touched on this subject in his last words, "Brethren, I remind you this (death) is the end of all compounded things."*
*In Hindu religion the doctrine of Karma is one of the important primary principles. Can we not read this principle, which states the indestructibility of desire energy, as a generalization of the conservation of energy?
Third substage
Before man is capable of discovering and handling laws by which things are combined (the laws of science and society) , he must be conscious of himself as different from other persons. This is something of which an animal is not capable. I recall an incident with our dogs. The recently acquired puppy had perpetrated a mistake on the carpet. He was being punished, yet he showed no evidence of guilt or sorrow. He simply wagged his tail in the most genial fashion. The older dog knew what it was about; he cringed and looked very miserable indeed. He was conscious of guilt, undoubtedly, but could not distinguish the puppy's mistake from one of his own.
Man learns the laws of things by observing the results of what he does to things. Even as witness to the action of a play, he must identify himself with one of the characters if he is to be moved by it, even to feel the tragedy or be interested in the plot. The ego, the mouth through which self draws the substance of experience on which knowledge is built, has its roots in self-identification.
We would be inclined to interpret Greek civilization as third-substage, a time when people began to question authority and think for themselves. Indeed, the rational mind, which demands a reason for everything, is itself a typically third-stage phenomenon. The third-stage power of identity being acquired by creating a center of its own breaks away from totality and becomes a world to itself. Its world is small, it is but a fragment of the whole, but it is rational and self-governed.
Of course, we know little of early civilizations, but from what we do know, it is clear that the modern mind emerged with the Greeks. The Greeks pioneered in the making of abstract concepts and in distinguishing concepts from physical objects. They were the first to question the authority of the gods. They asked questions and learned to reason. Man became responsible for his mistakes. Prior to this, misfortunes were the punishment inflicted by the gods. (On the whole, the earlier reliance on authority worked pretty well, as the Egyptian kingdom survived for four thousand years.) By their bringing gods down to a human level, the Greeks made man self-determined. Their questions led to science.
The mistakes of self-conscious behavior bring on the fourth substage, the necessity for correcting first guesses by reference to fact. But in the third we are concerned with the origin of error, which requires consciousness, a ring of light that illuminates the self and its immediate vicinity.
In the growth of the individual we can detect this third substage as the self's break with authority, first with that of the mother and father, and later with that of its own group. This is what psychologists call individualism, the discovery of identity. It is the beginning of self-determination. It is only because of such self-determination that the self can now profit by its interaction with others and learn the lessons possible in the fourth substage.
A difficulty is that we cannot tell to what degree Greek life also partook of the fourth stage. There were laws and disputes between people, to be sure. But there was not that all-out belief in objectivity, in research, that now prevails. The very widespread dependence on science which distinguishes the present time from all others brings with it a special emphasis on the secular - the mundane - that makes it seem as though the present were lost to all else.
However, our task is not the assignment of civilizations to different substages, but the describing and illustrating of the substages of the individual's development, because in the seventh kingdom, especially, it is the individual that is evolving.
Fourth substage
This is a more advanced state than the collectivity of substage two, in which the units are undifferentiated and without identity. It is also a state that presupposes the self-determination and self-consciousness of substage three. But it has not yet mastered the principle of combination as has substage five, for modern man is at best still immersed in the problem of finding his own boundaries, of meeting the consequences of his own acts, of learning the law of cause and effect.
This is the fourth stage in any process, the stage to which we assigned the power of combination, but by implication it is also separation, and its task is to learn the law so that it may then use this law and move on to the fifth, with its power of growth and generation of seed.
The emphasis on science, the knowledge of natural law, which characterizes modern times is a particularly appropriate indication that modern man is at the fourth substage. Moreover, since science does not limit itself to practical applications, but puts it down as a credo that laws are omnipresent and rule all phenomena, we may conclude that man's dependence on religion caused him to translate science into a belief system.
Science, then, is one symptom by which we diagnose modern man as fourth-substage. But there are other symptoms. The task of combination is a fundamental preoccupation of modern man. For one thing, he is occupied with combining material substances in construction of buildings, ships, railroads, and the host of devices which encrust our civilization. Combinations of people are also involved: marriages, partnerships, corporations, the combination of capital and labor, of man and machine, of money and goods. Such combinations undergo incessant activity, with constant struggle to achieve working solutions: man against man, man against machine, always searching out a law. When the law is discovered and established, focus shifts and the struggle moves to a new issue. At one time it is property rights, at another the right to vote, now the right to strike, now the right to work. But always there is an increasing body of law - social law, moral law, corporation law, scientific law - a striving to have everything be determined by law, leaving nothing arbitrary and lawless. (Eighty percent of American presidents have been lawyers.)
The automobile, which gives the owner independence but makes him responsible for his own and others' safety, is a major contribution to the fourth-stage nature of contemporary life, and I would hazard a guess that the evolution of man has been definitely speeded up by the control learned through its use.
There is one further symptom, one that currently has become acute, that places modern man not only in the fourth substage, but in the middle of it, at that critical point we call the "turn." This symptom is that the very devices that man has invented for the control of nature now appear to have gotten out of hand and pose a threat to his survival more serious than those of nature. Pollution of the environment, the atmosphere, and the ocean, overpopulation, the possibility of atomic warfare, are threats that are a consequence of man's own actions and have created new problems he must solve. The answers, whatever they may be, require that he take action of a different kind from the actions that have heretofore characterized the "progress" of civilization. To a great extent, what he has already learned with regard to putting the forces of nature to his service has been by trial and error, by observing cause and effect, but each step in this conquest has been followed by an extension into a wider sphere, which in turn brings new challenges.
This outward expansion has only recently run into trouble, which has developed because the space available is not unlimited. The planet is a finite globe; its surface curves back into itself. The poisons we throw away return. Even the improvements have unfortunate side effects: medication preserves the unfit, fertilizers disturb the ecology, insecticides kill the birds, spending for prosperity creates inflation. It becomes evident that the laws of addition invert when applied on a scale which exceeds the limits of the available space, and that man must exercise vision and take into account his limited ability to assume the responsibilities that nature has hitherto borne and whose extent and subtlety we are only beginning to appreciate.
The word that covers this new awareness is self-limitation. It is a word that suggests coldness, confinement, restraint, but, by the paradoxical nature of the vital principle, its consequence is inner growth. Our paradigm is the life cycle of the obelia (see Chapter 9). This animal having attained a form and the ability to move about in its blastular, or third, stage, fastens itself to the ocean floor at its fourth stage. This self-limitation, which surrenders the freedom of random exploration, becomes the basis for its true expansion, which occurs through its growth into a large plant-like organism (fifth stage). This analogy may seem arbitrary, but it will be recalled that the obelia is the example chosen by biologists to represent the life cycle of all organisms,* and that its life cycle correlates step for step with that of the human embryo, in which the fertilized egg, having become a free-swimming multicellular organism (blastocyst), attaches itself to the wall of the womb, then to grow into the form which it has at birth, when it begins to function as an animal (sixth stage).
*Even the much simpler alga, a primitive plant, has a stage in its life cycle when what is called the holdfast cell attaches to the ocean floor, then to grow into the multicellular plant (seaweed).
Whatever the degree to which we draw on the obelia (which we offer as illustrative), and whether we are guided by empirical examples or deductive principles, we must see the promise of a future for man as dependent on an inward, self-generated reformation, like the drunkard who himself decides what are his own best interests, or the prodigal son who returns. This inner resolve is not done for man either by nature or by the state. It is, rather, a point in man's own drama to which all nature is spectator, in which man is the lonely protagonist.
What makes this decision most difficult is that man today has lost faith in his spiritual origins, a conviction brought about by the very nature of the fourth stage with its belief in determinism and in objective laws which supposedly are alone able to cause effects. Thus we find man, having created science - the tool of all tools, whose every discovery is an extension of man's will - denying in the name of science the very power by which he created science.
Fifth substage
Because the scheme we are constructing deals with people - or rather with the growth or evolution of the monad (and we may just as well get used to this term) - the fifth substage is quite clear because we can assign to it outstanding people - Galileo, Goethe, Napoleon, Mozart, Shakespeare, Beethoven - the great of history. But the selection of such persons should be based on objective considerations.
In the interests of objectivity, let us see what theoretical criterion we can establish for the fifth substage of this kingdom. Recalling that the fourth substage is "learning the law," we could expect the fifth to begin when the law was learned; when the entity could, like the cell which begins life, manufacture out of itself ingredients it needs to organize something much larger than it starts with. This is not just learning the law; it is mastery of the law. The implication is that persons at the fifth substage would show outstanding competence which might even be evident early in life.
There are many examples of the early appearance of exceptional ability in the great. We have Mozart writing symphonies at the age of seven. Newton, not considered precocious, as a small boy made mechanical toys, including a mill propelled by a mouse that ground flour, and a clock that kept time. Pascal at the age of sixteen proved an important theorem upon which the whole of projective geometry depends. Galois, before he died at the age of twenty-one, had made a contribution which anticipated fifty years of mathematical progress.
The emergence of exceptional ability at an early age is not necessary to genius, nor is it a criterion for the fifth substage. The examples of early emergence are cited rather to emphasize the nature of the problem. How are we to account for exceptional abilities except as a heritage of the evolution of the monad and not as genetic inheritance or environmental training? Bell,* describing the life of the mathematician Gauss, tells of an incident that occurred before the age of three. The father was making out the weekly payroll for workers under his charge. Coming to the end of his long computations, he was startled to hear the young boy pipe up, "Father, the reckoning is wrong; it should be. . . ." A check showed the boy correct. The abilities of Gauss were phenomenal throughout his life, but like other infant prodigies, they did not start at zero; they were manifest as soon as he could talk.
*Bell, E. T. Men of Mathematics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1937.
The problem of human evolution: genius
The problem that we are dealing with throughout the seventh kingdom, and even throughout the grid, presents itself with greatest impact here at this fifth substage, when we come to consider the great creators, the great leaders. How did this greatness come about? To attribute this greatness - whether to the infinite capacity for taking pains (as did Carlyle in his Biography of Frederick the Great), to inspired genius, to a determination to overcome difficulties, or to a surpassing ability to influence people - is not to explain it.
But the fact that it is great men, the exceptions to the general run, that bring the problem into focus is itself significant. Is it possible that we are overlooking something to which ordinary life is heir? At the risk of possible repetition, let me remined the reader of what he himself consists. There are:
Every
one of us is such a hierarchy, an organization of some 
atoms all
carrying out their appointed tasks, in order that we may read a book, hoe
a garden, drive a car.*
*This argument applies also to animals, but that does not weaken its force, because man is even more complex.
Seen in this light, the human being is already fantastic in the complexity of his organization. Yet we seem to need the example of genius to force us to raise questions about how it can be possible for an entity to be composing music at four, and writing symphonies at seven.
In the case of the genius - the mathematical, the artistic prodigy - we cannot trace genius to ancestry. The ancestry of great men is in many cases quite ordinary and in no case accounts for genius. Again, great men do not have remarkable children. In short, we must find something other than ancestry to account for greatness.
As we said before, the group soul concept, which we have evoked to account for the elaborate instincts of animals, does not apply to man. Here we are dealing with the individual, and we can see no way in which individual competence or greatness can emerge without many lifetimes of development. Once we recognize that greatness requires such development, it becomes evident that even normal human capabilities require it to some extent. This, in fact, is the implication of all stages and substages of the grid: in each we can see the need for the inheritance of the accumulated abilities and powers that have gone before.
The grid is in this sense a table of debits and assets, of investments and expenditures, of accounts payable and accounts receivable, of the entities of nature. It is a scheme of accounting because it endeavors to trace all acquisitions to their source and hence to reduce undefined terms to a minimum. It is the principle of least action.* applied to the process of evolution. In other words, it shows the shortest path by which the complex can evolve from the simple. To deny a heritage to the complex would be to assert that the complex emerges spontaneously.
*The principle of least action states that natural process occurs with a minimum of "action" (action is change of inertia with respect to time) (see Chapter 2).
We have insisted on the necessity of a continuously operating principle of spontaneity at the core of life, but we have not invoked this principle to supplant cause and effect. If it may seem otherwise, it is largely because other accounts have overlooked the difficulties, have ignored rather than explained the problem.
To continue, at the fifth substage we are to expect the emergence of an ability corresponding to that of plants (fifth stage) not only to grow to large stature, but to create seeds which have a life of their own. The power of reproduction lies as much in the letting go of authority (permitting uncertainty) as in the transmission of a pattern (enforcing certainty) .
This becomes the criterion for fifth-stage persons, whether writers, painters, composers, mathematicians, physicists, statesmen, or political leaders: if their works, like the seeds of plants, have a life of their own and outlive their creators, they could qualify as fifth-stage. Contemporary success, since it arises from the person himself, is not enough.
The difficulty that confronts us in the seventh kingdom is that since we ourselves are in it, we do not have, as we do in the first six, the benefit of a perspective which permits viewing its creatures objectively; nor do we have the benefit of scientific classifications. We have not only to define the classifications, but to assign entities to them.
We cannot use the classifications ordinarily employed, as, for instance, authors, statesmen, composers, scientists, etc. These are horizontal classifications which need have nothing to do with competence per se. We must view all professions as equally qualified. Again, we must discount contemporary figures, and let time be the judge of the factor we have made crucial, namely, vitality of works. Let us therefore select a few typical examples from history and from various callings.
Painters: A number of great Renaissance painters, for example, Giotto, Leonardo, Raphael, Tintoretto, Titian, and many more; Rembrandt, Rubens, Vandyke; also recent painters, the Impressionists. (Modern painters are omitted because we still do not have the testimony of time.)
Composers: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Haydn, Mozart, Wagner.
Statesmen: Bismarck, Alexander the Great, Elizabeth I, Garibaldi, Napoleon, Washington. (Note that each of these has supplied the initial impulse - the seed - for a new nation or a new regime.)
Authors: Blake, Dickens, Goethe, Shakespeare, Moliere, Yeats.
Scientists: Euclid, Clerk-Maxwell, Galileo, Kepler, Leibniz, Newton.
(Again note the contribution to the later development of science: these men were creators, founders of new concepts.)
Such a list is made only to supply examples of what we mean by persons who have produced the seed, the creative impetus, for new developments, for what could be called cultural advances.
Individual ego still the vehicle
We should now make it unmistakably clear, that our position with regard to the evolution of man does not imply that man is, as it were, a cell in the social body. Man in our view is not at this stage evolving toward a collective superorganism. Teilhard de Chardin has been so interpreted, and there is a general disposition to envisage that which is beyond man as a kind of social or racial entity of which individual men are cells. That is not what our theory of process indicates. What we believe to be implied by the theory is that the seventh stage involves evolution through individuals, at least up to the end of the fifth substage. We believe that great creative individuals provide concrete evidence of the fifth substage of the dominion kingdom. The fact that some men have achieved this level of competence or power is evidence that it is an evolutionary stage and hence to be traveled by all monads in their development.
Even with the aid of the theory we have set up, we find it difficult to express what Genesis states quite simply: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good from evil.
"Your eyes shall be opened" - this is what we have referred to as the "turn." We have already stressed the importance of the turn as the basis for the higher stages of process. It is the point at which the entity, having expended its initial endowment of free energy, "wises up to itself" and starts to control itself. An analogous control of energy made possible the complex molecules of cellular life and hence the plants.
We could liken the power of plants to convert sunlight into order to the power of genius to convert the divine outpouring into works. Nor need we question this "outpouring," for whether we call it divine or natural, we are aware of its presence, though it is only the genius who is able to capture it in works.
If this argument fails to convince, we can still point out the logical necessity for a stage of competence in the evolution of the human monad that corresponds to the power of plants to grow and reproduce. Such competence is equivalent to the creative ability of the great ones of history. It is often insisted that spiritual growth can forego this worldly competence, a position to which religious persons incline, but I would urge that however noble the surrender of personality, like the sacrifice of worldly goods, this sacrifice can only be authentic after personality has been fully achieved.
In other words, I insist that merging into a super-organism, if it occurs at all, can occur only after the individuation has been completed, at the end of the fifth substage. For just as the third substage sees the separation of the self from the group, or the start of individuation, so the fifth substage would see the end of individuation and the reunion of the self with the group, bringing to it the value learned from the experience it gained as an individual.
Such are our reasons for rejecting the interpretation of the stage beyond present man as a super-organism, related to its component cells as an army to its soldiers. Even this image misconstrues the nature of the army, since the army is only as good as its component members, be they generals, officers, or soldiers. Organizations like the army are in this view training ground for the self, which must reach an overall competence in its sphere equivalent to the general's in his before its graduation from the fifth.
So we must realize that the higher substages of evolution (beyond the fifth) can occur only after the fifth has accomplished its particular task of self-growth. We can, however, view the propagation of the seed, which is a kind of surrender of self, as the beginning of dedication to something far greater than the individual self.
So we assign to the fifth substage a considerable task. It sees the development of superhuman competence and the creation of works, either works of art, new concepts or creations of nations, which outlive their creator. While such acts are essential in the development of civilization, and may thus lead to the notion that civilization has a kind of life of its own, we reiterate that it is not an end in itself. It is rather the theatre or playing field in which the monad finds facilities for practice.
Kundalini, a fifth-stage phenomenon
We have so far dealt with rather intangible aspects of man's evolution by using the criterion of works, of effects rather than causes. We can describe the plays of Shakespeare as having a life of their own, but we know nothing of the genius who produced them. This is to be expected, for our method does not pretend to reduce the powers to something other than, or simpler than, themselves. Thus we must continuously refer to examples in our account, whose justification rests in sorting out the unknowns and reducing their number, rather than explaining them.
So cautioned, let us consider a piece of evidence described by the Hindu tradition. This is the serpent power* or Kundalini of Yoga teachings.
*Woodroofe, Sir John George (Arthur Avalon). The Serpent Power. 6th ed. Madras: Ganesh & Co., Ltd., 1958.
Kundalini is a "force".** which, according to advanced practitioners of Yoga, is evoked by meditation. This force is said to arise at the base of the spine and to flow up through the spinal column, linking the various nerve centers. These centers are the Root Chakra, Spleen Chakra, Navel Chakra,*** Heart Chakra, Throat Chakra, Brow Chakra, and Crown Chakra. The chakras are not recognized as such in Western science, but correspond to the ganglia or centers of the autonomic nervous system and possibly to the endocrine glands (located approximately in the same areas). However this may be, the Kundalini force would constitute a linking up of a series of centers which control the human organism.
**Shakti, in the original writings.
*** Below the heart, chakras are given several variant listings, which do not affect the present argument.
Assuming that the power of dominion, however intangible it may be, must have some physical or quasi-physical embodiment, and recalling also that the average man has little or no conscious control over autonomic functions, whether these be sexual energies, digestive functions, circulation, etc., nor over such glandular functions as control of growth and other regulations of the body, we might expect there to be some linking together of these sub-hierarchies in the evolution of the dominion principle.
Kundalini meets the requirements of such a linking-up, and if awakened, not prematurely, and under adequate self-control, it subordinates the energies of the sexual and other centers to the self's command. Such a linking is distinctly fifth-stage, which we have often likened to a chain, the chain of cells of which vegetation basically consists, the chain of generations in propagation, the chain of command in hierarchy. We also have the fifth substage of other kingdoms, the polymers (chain molecules), calamites (segmented vascular tissue), and metamers (animals composed of a chain of segments).
Therefore we believe that Kundalini fills the chain role that we could expect at the fifth substage of the seventh kingdom or domain. We could further suppose that these great men and women, with their superhuman endowment of creative force under conscious control, already employ this "force" by making it available to the central command of self.
Transcendence of the personality
We have described the fifth substage as beginning when the monad achieves the ability to create works that live, an ability analogous to that of plants to create seed that has its own life. How are we to mark its end?
Since powers are cumulative, we would not expect any termination of this ability. So we must look for a new power - which transcends by changing or transforming. But we need other guidelines. What is the task of the fifth?
Here it is pertinent to refer to the levels. The stages from 3 to 5 carry the monad through the two lower levels.
1 Purpose 7 Goal
2 Substance
6 Mobility3 Form
5 Organization4 Objects
Stage 3 introduces the possibility of form. For the monad, this is an ego, or an individual vehicle, a limitation necessary to its early evolution, but this limitation later becomes a handicap. At the third stage, the centeredness it provides makes knowing possible. Genesis refers to this as eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and affirms that the use of this diet for a period of time will make men "wise as gods, knowing good from evil."
We have indicated that the genius has mastered the law - how to do things, how to create, to paint, to write, to compose, to govern, to act - in short, power. But the knowledge of good and evil implies more. It implies not letting this competence become an end in itself - not becoming corrupted by power. We had implications of this in the growth principle, which must learn to create seed which drains off this power - a power which would, without this outlet, destroy the vehicle.
This inability to handle absolute power is due to the finite limits of the ego, the very property that made learning possible. So if evolution is to go further, it has to transcend the ego - the personality. I suspect this would eventually lead to no longer needing a physical body, since even without self-aggrandizement, the energy involved would put more strain on a body than it could take, just as too much voltage will blow out a light bulb.
Transcending personality is thus the task of the fifth stage, perhaps its midpoint, and its upper limit would be that point in the monad's further evolution when it learned all it needed from a selfless dedication to great tasks without the inducement of personal aggrandizement. In a survey of human history, it is not hard to distinguish between the more conspicuous personalities - Byron, Queen Elizabeth, Paganini, etc. and the less conspicuous men of even greater power - Goethe, Frederick the Great, Bacon, and others such as the remarkable artists of the Renaissance: Titian, Giorgione, Leonardo - of whom, compared with those with charisma, we know very little besides their works. Certainly there are lesser and greater geniuses, and if giving up personality is the task of the fifth substage, we can make this sacrifice its pivot.
Sidelights on genius
Modern life suffers from its efforts to pull everything down to its own level, to debunk - and it is worthwhile, if only for our own entertainment, to take a fresh look at genius. George Washington may not have thrown a shilling across the Potomac, but Willoughby, a conscientious compiler of records of athletes,* states that one of the first records in the running broad jump made in the United States was one of twenty-three feet, said to have been made by George Washington when he was eighteen, and that this record stood for over a hundred years. Washington was also a first-class wrestler, as was Abe Lincoln.
*Willoughby, David P. The Super Athletes. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1970.
Willoughby also states of Leonardo da Vinci that "one of his feats, with which he used to astonish his visitors, was to jump upside down to the ceiling and kick the bells of a glass chandelier." Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., according to Willoughby again, could, in one step, jump with both feet onto a platform five feet above the floor. In my own reading of the lives of some who must by their other abilities have been high in the genius range, I found with both Benvenuto Cellini and Cheiro (the palmist) that people who had aroused their ire fell down before them without having been touched. Cellini in his autobiography relates a number of incidents that imply superhuman physical abilities which would be unbelievable were it not that his works of art equally surpass the limits of what one can believe.
I do not mean that athletic prowess has anything to do with genius. It is their works that earn for them this designation, but I am trying by these references to physical prowess to direct attention back to the source, the monad - to reawaken a sense of the marvelous strength of a monad.
The point, I believe, is that the works of genius, however great, are inert and can be adjusted to, whereas the monad behind the works is vital and creates each time anew. It is thus more elusive, more universal, more to be admired than are its works - and, one should realize, that the monad, whatever it is, not only can paint, invent, etc., but it enlivens and animates the body.
Another sidelight that brings out this point is the tenacity for life exhibited by some historical figures. Sir Thomas Overbury, murdered by his political enemies, withstood enough poison to kill twenty men. Rasputin, the "Mad Monk of Russia," resisted poison, knife wounds, and gunshot enough to kill an ordinary person many times over. Swami Rama, the practitioner of Yoga tested at the Menninger Foundation, not only stopped his heart at will, but ate potassium cyanide to demonstrate the power of mind over body. These feats, which in isolation are mere wonders, acquire valuable significance in the present context, for together with works of art, power to influence others, etc., they give evidence of the increasing evolutionary stature of the monad. This will be even more important when we come to the sixth substage.
End of the fifth substage: indications of what is to come
How are we to characterize the end of the fifth substage? We can at least establish its lower limit as that point in the evolution of the monad when it had acquired all that incarnation as an ego required; when, to anticipate our next chapter, it had accomplished the "labors of Hercules"; when it had eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and discovered the tree of life. Substage six is beyond personality.
The end of the fifth is a point where we can begin to fit moral principles into place along with evolutionary ones. What Christian tradition refers to as the "fall of man" is the descent of the life spark, itself of divine origin, into a mortal existence. Why? So that it might know good from evil, or in terms of process, learn the law and use it.
How may it do so? It must first acquire an ego, a center from which to initiate acts and from which to view the consequence of these acts. Thus, and only thus, can the monad learn, for the moral consequence of an act has significance only to the one who initiates it. One must "own" a thing to learn responsibility.
If A intentionally injures B, B suffers, but the moral consequences rebound or flow back on A, creating the need to right the wrong, an adjustment that may require time, or even another lifetime (the basis for the Hindu doctrine of Karma).
Thus Karma, which is the law of cause and effect manifesting at the psychic level, leads to the knowledge of good and evil, and becomes the basis for the monad's growth, its conquest of matter. At the end of the fifth substage, it has learned this lesson. It no longer needs the center it required for self-determination and the experience of the consequences of its acts.* We can assume that it can now become what Joan Grant calls the integral, the synthesis of all its previous existences.**
*This may give a clue to the loss by Horus of the eye, that curious detail in the battle of Horus with Set. As will be recounted in the next chapter, the god Set traps Osiris in the jewel-encrusted casket (the compulsive desire that precipitates the fall). The casket floats down the Nile (the fall). Osiris is dismembered and reborn as Horus, who eventually conquers Set. But Horus is deprived of his eye. My hunch is that this may be a reference to no longer having an ego.
**Joan Grant, author of Winged Pharaoh, The Eye of Horus, and other books on her past lifetimes, uses this term to describe the higher or "total" self.
What the monad has achieved through its long evolution is not lost. If we use the difference between animal and vegetable as an analogy of the difference between the sixth and the fifth substages, the sixth is concerned with animation. Form as such is transcended and can now be freely varied and used. Emphasis shifts to the dynamic or energy aspect.
The battle here is to conquer, or overcome the compulsive nature of the desire that at the second stage precipitated the fall. (Desire is dynamic as opposed to form, which is static.) But this phrasing is scarcely adequate for an appreciation of the sixth substage. Let us look deeper.
Beyond genius
A clue is the quality of the work of the great painters. I will have to run the risk of making value judgments about art. My premise is that some of the Renaissance masters - Titian, Correggio, Veronese, Leonardo, and other very great painters - exhibit skill of a higher caliber than, say, that of the Impressionists, whose paintings may be judged more beautiful, but which still do not show the degree of technical mastery that is evident in the earlier painters, and this ability is a clue to the sixth substage.
What I refer to especially is texture, the extraordinary living-ness of the flesh in Titian, or the hypnotic expressions in Leonardo's paintings. What this suggests to me is the observation of substance (in nature) and its execution in paint, as compared with painters who are dealing with finite composition. The achievement of the Impressionists was quite sensory, but it is still more a question of composition analogous to musical composition. It deals with only a finite number of elements, like the notes of the musical scale, whereas Titian deals with a continuum, and the emphasis shifts to vitality itself. We feel that if we look through the microscope at the flesh of Titian, we would see cells, nor is there sacrifice of large-scale vitality. It is, rather, that the painter has a greater range. In the case of Leonardo, this range exceeds limits of paint. In a sense, if his paintings are not beautiful, it is because he is trying to force more from paint than it can yield.
This search for superhuman goals is not religious or conceptual as in the painting of El Greco or Blake, which I admit is ecstatic, passionate.
It is a discontent with drama and with finiteness, with anything artificial, whether it be an artifice of imagination or an artifice of intellect. It is an effort to plumb so deep that the very molecules resonate.
This, I think, is the shift in emphasis that points to the sixth substage, because, like the examples available from the sixth column of the grid, it is a shift from organized form to animated fluidity, from "growth" to "mobility." Note too the attention to substance in these great painters.
Fascinating how we go from intellect to emotion, from nonphysical to physical, on our way up to spirit; one would have thought intellect nearer to spirit, but it is not nearer in the steps of development. Substance is higher than form. Castaneda's quest to convert the threatening animals into allies is this step.
The magical: transcendence of reason
Now in calling attention to this emphasis on substance in the great painters and in psychometry, I do not know for certain whether this is sixth-substage. I am, rather, trying to indicate this power (which the highest type of genius exhibits) as a clue to sixth-substage, a clue which points in the direction of what now becomes a theoretical possibility, the magical.
Here we are in direct conflict with reason, which would rule out magic at any level on the grounds that the laws of matter forbid it, but we have grounds for predicting magic here. Magic is the control or manipulation of illusion, and is expected here because sixth is an inversion of second, which was being caught up in illusion. Magic is also suggested by the two degrees of freedom at the second level, which allows content to change from one form to another.
Form, we repeat, is here transcended and subject to manipulation by motive. Motive is the only constraint. This is the "magician" formula. The magician of fairy tales transforms himself into a seed; his rival transforms himself into a hen; then the first one into a fox, etc. We are saved from complete unconnectedness by the fact that the chase goes on. The participants are still rivals. Such duality, of course, is characteristic of second-level.
We have assigned Christ and Buddha to this state in the grid. Other historical figures, such as Zoroaster, Dionysus, Krishna, and Orpheus, might be included. Such assignment is not intended as an evaluation of these beings as much as it is a way of giving a place in the scheme of things to the existences that legend and religion have described as gods. Almost all early civilizations credit their origins to gods who came down and taught man the cultivation of the silkworm, how to weave, the cultivation of corn, the arts of music, etc. Beings of this order, according to the evolutionary scheme we are setting forth, must have existed and must still exist, modern thought to the contrary.
We might call attention to the Biblical account of the genealogy of the ancestors of Noah, Genesis, chapter 5. With the exception of Enoch (whom God took at the age of 365 years), Noah's ancestors lived an average of 900 years, including his grandfather, Methuselah (969 years).
Genesis, chapter 6, verse 4, follows with the provocative passage:
There were giants in the earth in those days and also after that when the sons of God came unto the daughters of men and they bore children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
The modern mind, having no scientific evidence for persons living 900 years, or for "sons of God," would presumably dismiss such accounts as the distortion of myth.* When, however, we have a theory that anticipates transcendence of mortality, accounts describing it are seen in a different light. They may refer to what we are calling sixth-substage beings, whom we would expect to have conquered mortality.
*Or of time scale, as some scholars have surmised. However, if we change years to months, which would give Methuselah the age of 73, Enoch would have been 5 years old when he begat Methuselah.
In this context, the Babylonian King List, also dealing with the period before the Flood, gives still longer periods for the reigns of the early kings.
In any case, rather than reject all such references as absurd, if we purport to be scientific we should try to find ways to overcome our mental blocks in this direction, not to become gullible, but to constructively speculate about what lies beyond our immediate environment and our present status.
To illustrate the manner in which rationality tries to set limits on things, to put a roof over our heads, let us consider astronomy.
The astronomers have been repeatedly forced to expand their concepts of the universe. This enforced conceptual growth began with the telescope, through which Galileo purported to see markings on the moon, moons revolving around Jupiter, and such.
Many of his contemporaries refused to look. But as the years passed, others made telescopes. Newton solved the problem of planetary motion, and the heliocentric concept of a solar universe came to stay.
Instrumental techniques followed, and it became possible to measure stellar distances which exceeded that of the sun's distance by a factor of a million or more. It became evident that the stars were suns, inconceivably remote by earth standards of distance.
Then came the discovery of cloudy patches in the sky, which were first believed to be clouds of gas and were called nebulae. These, as the reader of course knows, turned out to be distant universes, billions of them.
Now I am not subjecting the reader to this recitation to ask him to engage in astronomical one-upmanship, since the very remoteness of the subject leads to excessive speculation. My point is that reason, with its compulsion to set limits, tends to block out truth.
The new-found facts formed a mind-expanding sequence - the solar universe, the galactic universe, the universe of galaxies - which, like the continued use of a drug, caused a sort of immunity to magnitude. Astronomers speak of distance in terms of light years, or exponents of 10, and cosmologists put the universe in its place and console their egos by what is called the cosmological hypothesis: the universe, except for local irregularities, is the same for all observers. A solar system is thus "a local irregularity." So too is a galaxy. This insistence on symmetry has a medieval flavor. It treats the universe as if it were an ideal gas or the grains of sand in a desert. Once again, intellect attempted to close the wound in the skin of the self-conscious ego. As in the Beatles' song, we are continually fixing holes in the roof to keep our minds from wandering.
Then came the stellar probes. Automated rockets operating outside the earth's atmosphere detected ultraviolet light sources* that put out energy at a rate billions of times that of the sun. Such existences not only taxed beyond credibility the concept of "local irregularities," but they violated well-established theories that stars could not exceed the size of the sun by a factor of more than 100. Other recent findings, pulsars, quasars, etc., indicate the utter inadequacy of existing theories, but I have no doubt the boys will soon catch up.
*Since ultraviolet light cannot penetrate the earth's atmosphere, the fantastic energy output of these objects had not been apparent to observers on the earth's surface.
I will not carry my brief account further, but cosmology remains awe-inspiring despite efforts to wrap it up, and the moral is: don't trust the limited boundaries which the rational mind uses to protect itself. Don't permit statistical law to give the illusion that there is nothing here but us chickens. In other words, don't conceal evidence, even the evidence for the potential divinity of man. According to Psalm 82 (chapter 6), God said:
Ye are gods and all of you are children of the most high.
Postscript
I am sometimes asked why I do not include in my theory the evolution of stars and galaxies. The grandeur of stellar processes, of galactic evolution, is indeed wonderful, mind-boggling, the discoveries of astronomers fascinating, but I cannot see that the subject has relevance except as having a correspondence, on a much larger scale, to the planetary evolution we have discussed. Other than that, we have no evidence (such as we had from the kingdoms of nature) that could carry our study into galactic dimensions. Through telescopes the stars can be discovered as points of light, by spectroscope analysis and other methods, temperature, velocity, density, magnitude, etc., of stellar bodies can be established, but these data give no clue as to the life, the consciousness of the stars, and as we noted above, they constitute a one-sided and possibly misleading kind of evidence. (Why did it not give us evidence earlier of stars billions of times more powerful than our sun?)
It would be better just to look at the stars on a clear night and be invigorated by the sense of wonder.