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Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG
http://www.esonet.ORG
experiences. If clear-cut, descriptive statements are made concerning the supernal pole of
the relationship, what is said should be based on holarchic principles. Such statements
should not be based merely on the transposition of characteristics and events belonging to
the level of personhood and culture to an only ambiguously transcendent level of being. If
a cell of Michelangelo's hand imagines the painter's hands and body as huge spheroids
containing the same kind of molecular constructs as itself, and the same type of
relationships between them, such an image evidently is unrealistic. Yet this is what many
theologians and "esotericists" constantly do.
Because the concept of holarchy rests on the principle of containment — of the lesser
by the greater — if the lesser operates in terms of matter, the greater also must have a
material aspect; but, to the greater consciousness, matter may appear different from the
way it does to the lesser mind fed only with sense data. For instance, when a modern
esotericist speaks of a meeting of the White Lodge in terms reminiscent of the board of
directors of a multi-national corporation, such a personalized social interpretation cannot
give a true picture of the situation at the Pleroma level. Nevertheless, though the Pleroma
level of planetary being transcends the level of personhood and culture, it also must
include the lower level in a transformed or transubstantiated aspect. A Pleroma being
probably retains something of the structural character and quality he or she had when, as
the last of a series of persons, he or she experienced the "divine Marriage" of person and
spiritual Quality; but the substantial aspect of such a being must be matter of a type
ordinary human beings find almost impossible to perceive — etheric matter of a high
order. Matter is energy stabilized in a structure or field; and at the level of personhood on
this planet, this stabilization assumes a particular character attuned to the possibility of
human perception and response. When the level of individual personhood is transcended,
another mode of formation of energy undoubtedly operates.
Unfortunately, the contemporary ego-mind usually is unready and unwilling to think
of itself as a participant in a greater planetary whole at a level less than the highest
possible on this earth. At the same time it is afraid to let go of the limitations defining our
present personal state of consciousness, feeling, and behaving — a state which a Pleroma
being (at the level at which he or It essentially operates) obviously has transcended. Our
human minds usually cling to their personal, emotional, and biological limitations.
Therefore, consciously or not, we interpret the hierarchical concept of structural
organization in terms of familiar hierarchies of command — religious, sociopolitical, and
military groups, which operate in terms of levels of governing power. The men on top of
the system demand to be obeyed or served by persons operating at the lower levels; and
in one way or another they can enforce such demands, often ruthlessly.
Yet heads of state with enormous power as individual persons can be far less mature
and spiritually developed than the people from whom they exact often senseless service —
for example, in war. The individuals at the controls of sociocultural "greater wholes" have,
it is true, usually won their powerful offices by sustained, arduous efforts which would
have been beyond the capacities of average citizens or religionists; nevertheless, while in
power they remain most of the time as personally and egocentrically human as the people
they command. The secret agent sent by army headquarters (or an equivalent of the CIA)
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