A Healing?
Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
Margaret Mead
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Mark Twain
It is an Understanding of esoteric thought that Creations (as in Big Intelligent Bangs) may occur as a regular cyclical pattern, each one being imaginable as a Great Wheel: see below: (diagram thanks to Cait Russell).
Note: each line correlates: thus, for example line 4: primitive ‘Orders’ eventually evolve into ‘Independence’, which later perfect as ‘Collaboration.’ Similarly, ‘Ignorance’ evolves into ‘Discord’, which eventually evolves into ‘Harmony’. (Might ‘Ignorance’ be replaced by ‘Dogma’? Possibly…)
§ Please note: the word ‘Creation/s’ does NOT mean that the religious subset known as ‘Creationism’ is or is not correct/barmy.**
§ Materialists cannot accept the Big Bang as a Creation, as ‘Creation’ implies intelligence. However, they can accept chemicals with plans and agendas: ‘We are all reproduction mechanisms for genes.’ Richard Dawkins. Genes are chemicals. ‘For genes’ means ‘working on behalf of the plan or purpose that (abiotic/non-intelligent) genes possess’. A claim acceptable to ‘The Dogma’, but not to Reason.
As each Creation/Great Wheel (see diagram above) gets underway the ‘sparks’ are very closely bound and unintelligent. Gradually they move around the curve as the Wheel ‘descends’ into matter (remember the Yogic mental > astral > etheric > physical densification?), via the long processes of birth-‘death’-rebirth. As they descend they begin to individuate, gaining in intelligence via experience, and eventually, at the bottom of the physical-material mode, they individuate completely. Then, as they learn to use their free will to apply the Golden Rule (‘treat others as yourself’), they begin the path of return as billions of increasingly autonomous and cooperative beings, ascend through the etheric, astral, and mental levels, to eventually achieve yoga (‘union’/’re-ligare’) with the source from which they originated. The Wheel has turned full circle. They left as ‘sparks of light’; they return as ‘beings of light’ (as the circle in the diagram above implies).
§ NB: This scenario does NOT suggest that one person is better than another, but rather that we are all living in social conditions best suited for our personal development at a given moment. As a coarse example, a fully individuated American junkie could not reasonably be called ‘superior’ to a devoted servant of a tribal chief. He is merely experiencing challenges suitable to his personal development at that moment.
You might have some fun trying to place historical events like the Reformation or the Russian Revolution onto the most recent turning of the wheel, or maybe look at the wheel on a personal level, and plot the development of an individual, from childhood to maturity. Stuff fits, it seems to me, as long as we realise that all progress is very slow and very very patchy. Socrates did not succeed in dragging all of Greece along with him, for example, but his contribution to sanity in world culture has been inestimable. Gandhi likewise. Slowly we learn…
This process would make sense of the…
*’Downcurve’ group-minds of bees, termites, herds, bait balls, tribes, and teenage gangs; and of…
*’Bottomcurve’ nationalism replacing tribalism, and the spread of individuating democracy; and of the slowly developing…
*’Upcurve’ growth of international cooperation, creative globalisation, etc. It might even make sense of a number of puzzling moments in the Bible, eg:
‘God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’ Genesis 3:5.
(Note ‘gods’. Some translations have it as ‘God’. Which version is correct, I wonder?)
On the Great Wheel model, this would tally with Adam and Eve choosing the path of individuation and self-responsibility, thus engaging with the Law of Karma and enabling their personal physical-humanoid evolution to get under way.
‘And the Lord God said, behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.’ Genesis 3:22.
(Note ‘one of us’. One of who, exactly?)
Then:
‘The first man Adam was made a living soul. The last Adam became a quickening spirit.’ I Corinthians 15:45.
(From spark to glory, as per the diagram above?)
Whether this Great Wheel business is true or not, I have no idea. Obviously it is only a metaphor, anyway. It might, however, tie in with that Sufi poem in Chapter 17 if we think of the Wheel as rotating through a spiral… winding ever-upwards, enabling ever-greater awareness and intelligence.
I would have written this off as fanciful were it not for the fact that it seemed to make sense of a few worldly phenomena. Consider these three points in terms of the Great Wheel idea:
Which societies do we consider as ‘primitive’?
- Downcurve ones: Tribal systems, meaning societies in which devotion and obedience is owed according to accident of birth: essentially, societies which are rigid, static, dogmatic and turned in on themselves. Hence the retrograde nature of fascism.
Which societies do we regard as progressive?
- Bottomcurve ones: Democracies, in which loyalty is not owed but freely offered according to merit and not right: societies which turn more outwards and are more undogmatised, open-minded and tolerant/inclusive towards the individual.
What sort of society are present democracies stumbling towards?
- Upcurve ones: It seems to me that we are slowly and erratically moving in two senses. At home, we are edging towards a greater respect for each citizen and a need to share the wealth; and abroad, towards a sense of global responsibility for each other, and for the world itself. These movements may not be immediately apparent! Societal change is glacially slow, with many ups and downs.
In other words, we are very slowly moving, as a world, towards the path of the Golden Rule. The Yogi would here smile again and say ‘Of course… of course! The wheel of evolution… Don’t worry about it. Just do your bit by working on yourself. And please notice that you might like to apply the Alpha and Omega notions of Christianity right at the top of the wheel in your funny little diagram.’
§ One interesting point: it does suggest that Karl Marx was on the right track when he outlined the ‘inevitable’ path of history from selfish Capitalism to selfless Communism. The fact that his prognosis has been butchered by his followers is not a proof that he was wrong; merely a proof that good ideas like the Golden Rule (of religion) and Impartial Investigation (scientific method) are likely to be grossly distorted into Unquestionable Dogma by the metaphorical swine into whose trotters the pearls of wisdom fall. See Animal Farm for details.**
***
The Esoteric Philosophy claims that the Higher Mind which lies behind the universe also gently guides it along, via the ‘wheel of evolution’ as above. I wonder if this has anything to do with the Flynn Effect? And whether it is just a coincidence that Esoteric philosophy has been gradually imported into the West at a time of improving education (Understanding-based) and falling Church attendance (Belief-based)? And whether what we are seeing is indeed a gradual ‘lifting of the veil’ that hides the occult worlds, as New Agers seem to think?
We might like to consider the idea that just as the human monkey-suit is a vehicle for the individuating Being, so our religions are vehicles for evolving cultures, each tailored to suit the relative savagery/civility of the local community; and just as D+ mental-evolution means that individuated people gradually choose to come together again on the upcurve (as opposed to being forced to stay together on the downcurve), so will the ‘individuated’ religions we see today also gradually choose to come together as they recognise that they have more in common than what separates them. It seems to me that this great ecumenical movement is gently getting underway already. We’ve not had a proper ‘religious’ war in Europe for quite a while now.
*If Religion can accept that it was an arrogant and occasionally vicious Church which led to a triumphalist Science chucking out the ‘paranormal’ baby with the ‘dogmatic’ bathwater, then progress is possible.
*If Science can accept that Idealism is rational while Materialism is not, and also accept that ‘anti-Church-dogma’ is not the same as ‘anti-paranormal’, then progress is possible.
Once dogma-free, each ‘side’ can accept that the other is engaged on a compatible body of work. It will no longer be a question of ‘We’re right and therefore you are wrong’. Now it can be ‘We are both right, and are working in different but complementary fields, sharing the Understanding that Mind created Matter, and not the other way round.’ Science will continue with ‘How does it work?’, while religion works on ‘What does it mean?’ No conflict required or logically acceptable; overlap welcomed; cheerful collaboration perhaps one day inevitable.
§ Perhaps picking up where Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell and John Logie Baird left off. I understand that their inventions (radio, telephone and television) all came from an interest in spiritualism and were originally efforts to find a hot line to the ‘dead’. ‘I am convinced that discoveries of far-reaching importance remain waiting along these shadowy and discredited paths’. John Logie Baird, on spiritualism. For an overview of a modern spiritualist Understanding, try http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ian.bradley4/planes_of_existence.htm http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ian.bradley4/states_of_consciousness.htm
Of course I’m not naïve enough to believe that anybody will rush to drop a dogma! Dogmas are, among other things, comforters to people who are uncertain or afraid. But some people will see the point, and they will act.
Others will thus be encouraged, and in time will follow.
§ Jesus had a pithy comment on this matter:
‘Neither will they be persuaded, (even) if one rise from the dead.’ (Luke 16:31.)
If Flynn is right, we are steadily getting smarter and are thus likely to become ever more dissatisfied with the second-hand and irrational dogmas of Religion (and Science).
St Peter said: ‘Add to your faith… knowledge.’ (II Peter 1:5). A Yogi would say: ‘You can’t possibly have faith in something you don’t understand. So what are you going to choose to do about it?’
Pattern and Design
I am conscious that I am in an utterly hopeless muddle.
I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of design
Charles Darwin
It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring
Carl Sagan
I hope this chapter might release the reader from an existential ache that has caused millions of sane people to doubt the evidence of their own common sense, and to thus have their self-confidence seriously shaken. If we accept the rationality of Idealism/DarwinPlus, it is now acceptable to believe the evidence of our own eyes and common sense: