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protomatter more precisely in the next chapter, let us say for now that it refers to a state of
nearly total fragmentation, nonrelatedness, and inertia produced by the failures of the
preceding cycle — or, symbolically, that it corresponds to the chemicals and wasteproducts
released in the soil year after year by the decay of leaves and other materials.
After the symbolic Sunrise, what I have spoken of in previous writings as a "two-way
evolution" coordinates the involution of spiritual forces animating archetypal forms with
the evolution of the protomatter of "chaos" (the "dark waters of space"). At first the
archetypally defined forms into which protomatter is whirled are very simple; they
become progressively more complex as galaxies, star-systems, planets, and various kinds
of atoms and molecules.
Eventually cells develop in which the integrative potency of "life" begins to operate. A
biosphere (a life-field) is set in operation the moment molecules evolve into living cells.
Life animates the entire planet, not merely the cells themselves. When archetypes
belonging to the systems of organization we call "life" begin to interact with the molecules
of the matter of the planet, the whole planet becomes alive. Living matter is still matter. It
is constituted by atoms and molecules, but these are controlled by a more evolved and
more differentiated type of structural organization characterized by its capacity to
reproduce and multiply itself in a myriad of facsimiles. 22
In this type of organization, the principle of Multiplicity, which has continued to wax
after equaling the principle of Unity at the symbolic Sunrise, is nearly over- powering. The
principle of Unity can only maintain a power of integration able to some extent to control
and contain the process of expansion, self-multiplication, and differentiation. From
Sunrise to Noon, the principle of Unity operates at several levels; two of its manifestations
are gravitation and the "binding force" holding subatomic particles in a stable state of
relatedness. Another of its modes of operation during the symbolic Day-half of the cycle is
the life-force (prana in Sanskrit, chi in Chinese), which keeps the myriad of cells of a living
organism functionally active according to specific (archetypal) patterns of behavior.
(During the second part of this Day hemicycle, from Noon to Sunset, the principle of
Unity, then rising in strength, also operates as the power of psychism which maintains
tribal and societal integration.)
22 No rational basis exists for the modern scientific mentality's refusal to accept, even as a working
hypothesis, the existence of spiritual energies mobilizing archetypal forms and "projecting" them on
evolving earth-matter. According to the assumptions and paradigms of Western civilization, we should not
have to have recourse to the "unnecessary" belief in archetypal forms if we can explain the evolution of
inorganic into organic matter (a very big if indeed), because the latter explanation would be "simpler." This
is a specious idea. It rests on the assumption that nothing is "proven" unless we can discover how the
process operates in terms the human intellect and its machines can measure. Knowledge is thus limited to
measurability — a limitation which is as much a "belief" as the belief in God, as the belief that mankind as
we know it represents the highest system of organization of activity and consciousness on earth, or the belief
that the earth is only a mass of matter.
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