Home | Bio | Art | Music | Literature | Civilization & Culture | Philosophy of Wholeness | Theosophy & Spirituality | Astrology
Image copyright 2003 by Michael R. Meyer

THE FULLNESS
OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
by Dane Rudhyar, 1985




Previous Page / Next Page


CONTENTS


About the Author

1. Prelude and Basic Themes

2. Wholeness and the Experience of Periodic Change
• The dynamism of Wholeness
• The experience of time
• Living in the now
• Objective time, causality, and the measure of time

3. The Cyclic Structure of the Movement of Wholeness
• Abstract patterns and experienced symbols
• The meaning of symmetry
• Human free will and the process of readjustment

4. The Human Situation
• The Movement of Wholeness as a cyclic series of situations
• A holontological view of human experience

5. The Three Factors in Experience and Their Cyclic Transformation
• Subjectivity and desire
• The expenditure and repotentializing of energy
• Mind: intermediary, interpreter and technician

6. The Formative and Separative Operations of Mind
• Mind and form
• Mind as an omnipresent formative factor
   Page A
   Page B
   Page C
• The discursive and argumentative mind

7. A New Frame of Reference: The Earth-being and the Function of Humanity within It
• The development of frames of reference
• The planetary spheres
• The relation of culture to continent

8. Crises of Transition
• Life, culture and personhood
• From fetus to person: birth as initiation into personhood
• Potentiality and actuality
• The process of individualization
• The Path of Discipleship
• How to deal with changes of level

9. The "Dangerous Forties" in the Life-Cycle of Humanity
• The speed of change
• Crises of social and personal transformation
• The Hindu stages of life
• Service versus profit

EPILOGUE









CHAPTER SIX
The Formative and Separative Operations of Mind - 4

The period extending from the symbolic Sunrise to Noon is marked, in terms of the development of the mind factor, by the involution of archetypes into the initial tumult of primordial energy-substance, feverish with the desire for differentiated and self-multiplying existence. Still strongly influenced by the principle of Unity, mind works to contain the explosive expansivity of the drive toward Multiplicity within archetypal structures. It is the servant of the inertial power of relatively stable cosmic, and later on biological formations. Biological processes may have their roots in interstellar galactic space, but their active manifestation requires conditions operative only in the state of material existence provided by dense and opaque planets — the state of planethood. Energy becomes stabilized into matter within a planet, and eventually the processes characteristic of "life" develop within material aggregations through a kind of functional specialization produced by the involution of archetypes of biological organization. Life-species become increasingly differentiated, but as a result their span of existence decreases. What they experience as time is the process of biological change bounded by the markers of time: birth and death. Each species has its own time, and the rhythm of its own life-processes.
       The influence of the principle of Multiplicity increases until the symbolic Noon when, having reached the possible maximum of power, it is challenged by the rising principle of Unity. Cyclic motion reverses itself. But before it does, the planet's biosphere has become the stage of a fever of self-differentiation and self-replication of which modern biologists and paleontologists have, I believe, no conception. Fossilized remains are only partial indications of conditions existing on long-submerged land masses; and prehuman races have gradually been built, approximating the structural patterns characterizing homo sapiens. The archetype, MAN-Anthropos, is gradually being impressed upon biologically operative substance. The process leads to the manifestation at the highest level of physicality (the two higher "etheric" sublevels) of the prototype MAN. I have referred to such a manifestation as the Supreme Person, inasmuch as I see in personhood the Solution envisioned by the Godhead in order to meet the need of the failures of the ancient past It is such a Solution, however, only when through a long evolution it has reached a fully concrete and individualized state of operation which the Supreme Person had not only announced but catalyzed.
       This situation — the state of personhood — implies the possibility of freedom of choice. Such a freedom is the result of the relationship which, after the symbolic Noon, develops between the rising principle of Unity and the still dominant but largely internalized and psychically effective principle of Multiplicity. Personhood develops, as we shall see, first at a collective level — because it is dominated by the inertia of biological (cellular and organic) processes — then in individualized ways. The desire for individual existence (tanha in Sanskrit) is centered in the human person, while at the level of life it has been (and remains) centered in the species. This manifestation of the principle of Multiplicity in human persons operates both as new types of individualized desires and as new distinctive and singular ways of exteriorizing and actualizing these desires. These ways (or one might say "techniques") of fulfillment are presented by mind to the human "subject" eager for free decisions and experiences it considers "its own." However, through a long period of human evolution these are not in tune with the rhythm of the Movement of Wholeness. They create strife, confusion, and often tragedy. They engender karma.
       These results refer to the level of mental activity which characterizes the ego-mind; but they still occur when the mind is on its way to a more integrated and conflict-free state of operation, yet still insecure and apt to be misled by or to overreact to complex internal situations. Besides this insecurely individualized mental activity, formative processes of a larger scope are at work at the beginning of any enduring and stable culture. They are brought to a focus in the initiating Avatar of the culture and released into the chaos of a disintegrating social order by a few of his disciples, acting as a germinating "seed."
       The basic myths, rites, ethical principles of interpersonal and social relationship, and paradigms of the whole culture are products of the formative aspect of the mind; but this is not the ego-mind. It is mind as a formative principle and acting as a foundation for the development of personhood. Such a foundation is essentially archetypal, but as it manifests in a particular society, it is at first a collectively accepted pattern of thinking-behavior. From collective it becomes individualized through the process I have called "the process of individualization."
       The Supreme Person is a perfectly individualized person. But it is a singularity, a single prototype, whose beingness at the symbolic Noon of the cycle can only operate at the sublevel of the physical realm where perfect integration is possible because it reflects the Godhead state of almost total oneness. The singleness of the Supreme Person therefore has to become the "multi-unity" of the Pleroma state, consummation of human evolution at the symbolic Sunset phase. I speak of multi-unity, because in that phase the principles of Unity and Multiplicity are of equal strength. A Pleroma is constituted by a multiplicity of individualized selves that nevertheless are a "Communion" of co-conscious beings. In that situation, planetary in scope, the operative mind is the fully developed mind of wholeness.
       The mind of wholeness is the mind that consciously and freely accepts the karmic solution to the problems once caused by at least partial failure. All life-situations have to be accepted in the fullness of their implications, however dramatic the results may be. The transmutation of basic desires has to be achieved, but mind is always needed as the technician. Perhaps the technique has been learned "before" — in some old manifestation of personhood directly related to the present attempt. But the way to use the potential energy of one's nature (physical as well as psychic) in any case has to be mentally determined anew in each life-span. This way may be determined by the traditional models and procedures of the culture; it may also result from an involuntary and previously uncharted type of investigation, struggle and discovery.






By permission of Leyla Rudhyar Hill
Copyright © 1986 by Leyla Rudhyar Hill
All Rights Reserved.



Visit CyberWorld Khaldea

Web design and all data, text and graphics appearing on this site are protected by US and International Copyright and are not to be reproduced, distributed, circulated, offered for sale, or given away, in any form, by any means, electronic or conventional.

See Notices for full copyright statement and conditions of use.

Web design copyright © 2000-2004 by Michael R. Meyer.
All Rights Reserved.