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

The Inevitability of Success and Failure - 3
Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG
http://www.esonet.ORG
The manifestation of a great Avatar as the spiritual seed from which a new culture sooner
or later germinates is also a repetitive process. As explained, each manifestation has its
own quality; each stresses one specific aspect of archetypal Man — or in a religious sense,
one of the "Names" of God — which it is the culture's dharma (truth of being) to actualize.
Each Avatar "grafts" a spiritual-mental Quality upon evolving human nature, which at
first is a strictly biological system of organization. Human nature, however, resists change,
and this resistance is the basic cause of existential evil.
In this sense, the refusal to follow "the way, the truth, and the life" exemplified by the
Avatar, or more accurately, to accept his power as a driving force in one's outer and inner
life, is at the root of human failure, be it an individual failure or the failure of an entire
culture. Yet individual and collective failures are not easy to distinguish from one another,
because individuals build and develop collective religious and social institutions, which in
turn structure and dominate the collective psychism of whole cultures — which in turn
condition individuals. Collective psychism is the binding energy integrating the members
of a culture, somewhat as life energy (prana or chi) integrates the cells of a biological
organism. 26 Social and religious institutions structure the collective psychism of a culture;
they derive their spiritual power from the energy generated in the culture's collective
psychism by the "descent" of the new avataric manifestation. But all too often, social and
religious leaders use the energy embodied in the institutions to gain power over people
they should (and perhaps at first do) serve. Thus the culture's institutions and the drive
toward unity become unduly limited, rigid, and even perverted. Eventually, the culture
must break down.
When the time comes for the process of individualization to develop in earnest,
religions and cultures sanction it in the name of Avatars who projected into the human
world the particular spiritual Quality of autonomous and centralized selfhood, the "I am"
which the members of the culture are intended to embody. But the power of the divine
release is always used to build collective institutions, while individual human beings react
to it by developing ever more blatant and aggressive egos obscuring or even negating their
spiritual individuality. In most instances, humanity proceeds from failure to failure
(partial though they be) toward only relative success. Perhaps the biblical "two thirds" do
so, perhaps more, because in the "remnant" that is tested, many may not pass the test.
Nevertheless, human failures must occur as long as the principle of Multiplicity dominates
the world-stage before the symbolic Sunset — before the omega of the world of existence.
Atoms, plants, and animals cannot fail. They may, however, reflect the karma of
failure of the planet as a whole or — for example in the case of cancerous cells — of
26 The term psychism will be defined in more detail in Chapter 8. Also, see my book Beyond Individualism:
The Psychology of Transformation (Wheaton, II.: Theosophical Publishing House, 1979)
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