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Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG
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or Community. This Community — transhuman even more than human (in the present
sense of the word) — is gradually forming even now. I call it the Pleroma. It is forming
through the periodic addition of individuals who consciously become avatars of their
individual spiritual Quality.
At the close of a great planetary cycle (the symbolic Last Day), the Pleroma is the
consummation of human history. In theosophical symbolism it is the "Seed Manu,
Savarna." The Pleroma is the polar opposite of Elohim — the Omega answering to the
Alpha of the half-cycle during which the principle of Multiplicity is stronger than the
principle of Unity. Every human being reaching the state of Illumined Man "reflects" or
actualizes one aspect of Elohim, one Letter of the Creative Word. Within this Letter (or
spiritual Quality) pulsates, as it were, the immense Compassion of the Godhead, the state
of maximum Unity toward which "Pleroma beings" unanimously evolve through the
increasingly subjective states between the symbolic Sunset and Midnight.
From one point of view or another in all of my previous writings on philosophy,
psychology, culture, and the arts, I have discussed the many-sided developments
occurring between Noon and Sunset: the formation and gradual complexification of
cultures and religions; the process of individualization; the development of mental
faculties and of separative egos; and the transcendence of biological and cultural forces.
Human history is the progressive rise of human consciousness through many cyclic ups
and downs. Collective human needs for security and well-being have to be answered.
Then human consciousness has to become individualized — that is, the collectively
determined consciousness of persons, products of greatly varied cultures, has to reach a
focus in the clearly formed minds of autonomous and responsible individuals. Such
individuals are able to choose between the constructive and destructive use of the energies
generated by the Movement of Wholeness and by the tension between the two great
principles of Unity and Multiplicity.
Generally speaking, what occurs between Noon and Sunset polarizes what occurred
during the opposite Midnight-to-Sunrise period. During the latter, activity was primarily
subjective; it operated within the "divine Mind" (as I shall define this term in Chapter 7),
through the work of creative Hierarchies gradually more removed from the Godhead
state. Their activity manifested through the building of archetypal forms through which
the purpose of the Godhead eventually could be actualized in a material universe. During
the period of strictly human evolution (from Noon to Sunset), what develops is the human
mind and a series of cultures able to give conscious meaning to the immensely varied
formations and relationships which in their togetherness constitute "nature" — and
eventually to the entire universe accessible to human perceptions and interpretations.
Thus conscious meaning polarizes archetypal form.
The activity producing archetypal form, however, is rooted in unity and subjectivity;
the bestowal of meaning is conditioned by an immense multiplicity of objective,
apparently separate human beings or groups of human beings. According to their states of
consciousness these beings may bestow a meaning which reflects either a separative and
divisive ("atomistic") or a unifying and integrative ("holistic") approach. Besides these two
approaches, a third may gradually emerge if the holistic-integrative approach already has
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