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Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG
http://www.esonet.ORG
(I must add) from which a person may fall if the pull of negative cultural or personal
forces proves overwhelming.
It seems particularly difficult for intellectuals and scientists, but also for most other
persons, to accept the idea that planetary beings might exist and operate at a level of
consciousness and activity as superior to our present-day sociocultural modes of living
and thinking-feeling as a person like Goethe or Edison is superior to a primitive biological
organism. Most human beings lack a cosmic kind of imagination. They reduce the cosmos
— the greatest whole of existence we can speak of — to a mass of matter and modes of
energy similar to those their senses perceive. What a pathetically narrow reductionism!
Yet minds still close to the compulsive level of instincts ruled by the requirements of
biological functions seem to need such a reductionism to feel secure. This need for
biological security and personal comfort and happiness still dominates the consciousness
and relationships of the immense majority of human beings, even those claiming the status
and privilege of individualized and autonomous selfhood.
Thus, before the majority of human beings can even barely begin to adequately
understand and assent to being components of the planetary greater whole in which we all
"live, move and have our being," many intermediate steps — transitional phases — are
required. Persons determined to free themselves from the binding pressures of biological
drives often avail themselves of "occult" religious disciplines such as asceticism and
certain yogic practices. Other modes of yoga and meditation are used in attempts to
control the unsteady protean activity of the mind; but the context in which they are used
often retains the sociocultural and religious limitations of the mother-culture and the
language that had formed the mind. A still more radical process of transformation
eventually has to be experienced if the Pleroma level of being — which includes not only
consciousness but also activity — is to be reached. This process has been symbolized as
"the Path." It is often called "the Path of discipleship" to indicate that successful completion
of the process requires the interaction of the individual person "walking" on the Path and
a Pleroma being — thus a linking of two fundamentally different levels. The divine must
"descend" to meet the "ascending" human being. There must be interrelationship, nay
more, an interpenetration of minds, as well as exact attunement of the centralizing powers
operating as "selfhood" — individual selfhood and pleromatic selfhood.
The process inevitably is arduous and long. At any step along the way it may backfire
or abort, even up to the last moment before the consummation of the "divine Marriage."
This consummation implies Crucifixion: the transmutation of root-power into seed-power.
The seed is set free and falls to the ground filled with the humus of the decaying failures
of past subcycles — a "three-day" descent into hell. Then the resurrection.
Symbols, of course; but all that transcends personhood and the individualized
experience of a culture-built mind must be evoked by symbols that are the harvest of
collective human experiences at the levels of culture, personhood, and life. Every step a
human being takes on his or her evolutionary journey has to be illumined by symbols,
which at the level of culture take the form of myths and rites of passage.
Our society, alas, has largely forgotten the use, or at least the deeper meanings, of rites
of passage even during normal processes of the growth, maturation, and disintegration of
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