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

Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG
http://www.esonet.ORG
Prelude to a New Interpretation of Reality - 6
Elsewhere I have spoken at length of the "process of individualization." 7 It is a necessary
phase in human evolution, but human evolution itself should be considered merely a
phase in a cosmic and metacosmic process which, as I try to formulate it, is all-inclusive. It
is the cycle of being as well as the Movement of Wholeness. Within this cycle mankind
occupies a specific place and fulfills a definable function; but there is no reason why the
state of being an individual should be considered the end of the process of human
evolution. As the great French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery once wrote: "The
individual is but a path: Man only matters who takes that path." 8 But if the state of being
an individual is a means to an end, what then is the end? How can we give that state its
true value if we cannot at least imagine what the end is or what it means? Is it only an end
in a distant future of the evolution of our planet, or can it be reached by individuals even
now?
This book attempts to speak to such questions understandably and consistently. The
answers it offers will be based on facts of common human experience rather than on
unusual and rarified subjective experiences reached only after arduous practices by
persons of apparently special temperaments or through extreme psychological or social
pressures. The central answer places in perspective the present-day state of human
evolution, which features the realization of "being I" as a separate person independent
from birth-conditions, with sovereign rights and an autonomous will jealous of its
exclusive characteristics and mostly intent on individual development. This stage
represents only a period of transition between two fundamental levels of being — the
biological level given characteristically human features through series of local and
exclusivistic cultures, and the level of what I call the Pleroma. To me, the Pleroma is a
state of being whose participants have passed successfully through the condition of
individualized and (at least relatively) separate selfhood. They then operate together as a
planetary whole in a state of mental interpenetration and spiritual integration, a state
which allows the safe actualization of powers and faculties latent in present-day human
beings.
As far as the average person is concerned, the Pleroma state is still in the future. Yet it
is a possibility inherent in Man considered as an archetype of being, and it can be
actualized even now through a process of transmutation of energies and transfiguration of
consciousness. An individualized person has to be the actualizer; but the result of the
7 What I mean by the "process of individualization" is very different from what Jung, especially in his later
writings, meant by the "process of individuation," by which he referred to the conscious assimilation of the
contents of the collective unconscious. My meaning is expressed in my book Beyond Individualism: The
Psychology of Transformation (Quest Books, Theosophical Publishing House, Wheaton, Illinois, 1979) and
will be restated from a different perspective later in this volume.
8 Flight to Arras (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1969).
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