Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG http://www.esonet.ORG 1

Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG
http://www.esonet.ORG
through whom the archetypal power of formation is able to operate in a mode appropriate
to the human (personal or collective) needs that have to be met. The authority vested in a
social, political, or religious office derives from the formative potency of the archetypal
function the office is intended to perform in the larger operational system to which it
belongs. This authority becomes power when used by the office-holder, by the "officiant"
in the great ritual of society, business, or of culture — or, in a still broader sense, in the
great ritual of the development of human consciousness toward Illumination. Yet if this
power is to be used for personal profit and ego-aggrandizement, woe to the user
generating such negative karma!
While the process of human existence implies vertical and horizontal relationships
everywhere and at all times, the two types should not be confused with one another. At
least in theory, the horizontal relationships of the great variety of peer-groups dominating
our egalitarian society may seem the most common; but these are situations in which a
person should consider himself or herself an instrument for the activation of a
fundamentally vertical relationship. Nearly every man and woman acts as a channel for
the release of the biological power invested in the human species as the greater whole to
which they belong, whether they are conscious of belonging and so acting or not. That
power uses them; they do not possess it.
Whoever becomes a focusing agent for the desired or unwelcomed activity of
biological processes of embryonic formation establishes a vertical relationship to the
product of this activity — a child. The relationship is potential in the mere fact of the
production or presence of reproductive cells in one's body. However, these cells live their
own lives. Their production or cyclic release generates powerful biopsychic currents.
These currents seek to dominate the consciousness and the activity of the cell-holders —
until somehow the consciousness, mind, and will have consummated the long and
arduous rite of passage that leads to metabiological being and eventually the Pleroma
state.
Similarly, but at the level of culture and religion, a person may act as a channel for the
release of archetypal ideas. To the extent such a person acts as an agent for humanity (or
for a particular section of it) his or her activity is transpersonal. It establishes a vertical
relationship with the people who accept the validity of the formulation of the release and
are moved and aroused to action by it. When a guru transmits to chelas a current of
psychic power generated by a vast collectivity of spiritual entities — who as human beings
had found inspiration and transcendent fulfillment in a particular "lineage" — the
relationship between the disciple and the guru also is vertical (and usually devotional as
well).
At the sociocultural level, the relationship between the creative genius (or even the
formulator of a new approach revolutionizing collective behavior or business methods)
and his or her public tends to be much less focused and more taken for granted. Moreover,
as every person today is urged to be "creative" — which usually only means productive in
a more or less personality-revealing way — the relationship of student or disciple to
"master" has lost the quality it had in Medieval and Renaissance times. When "creativity"
is reduced to technical proficiency or special expertise in a field of research, relationship
144