Читать книгу Beyond Soul Growth - Lynn Sparrow Christy - Страница 24

We stand at a crucial point in a process that has brought matter from its most unconscious to its most conscious manifestation to date. It's not that matter is inert, with consciousness as an overlay or addition that comes only with the more advanced life forms, but rather that consciousness develops in complexity just as the forms of nature, both organic and inorganic, do. “To produce life from inert matter would result in the discovery that there is no ‘inert’ matter, because no life can be produced where life does not exist,” wrote theosophist Harold W. Percival early in the twentieth century. “The forms of manifestation of life may be infinite,” he continues, “but life is present in all forms. If life were not co-incident with matter, matter could not change in form.”²⁹

This view is consistent with that of the Cayce readings, which speak of each cell containing the essence of life in what he often calls the “cell force” or “cellular forces.” While most often the context for such comments is the human body, it is interesting to note that in at least one place it extends to a substance normally thought to be inanimate. When asked about a vision showing a loaf of bread where every cell was illuminated with an aura, the Cayce source answered that this represented “the essence of life itself” in the cell force of the bread.³⁰ Interestingly, it's not only Cayce and the theosophists who had early insights concerning the life force in all of matter. In Natural Law in the Spiritual World we find nineteenth century Christian spokesman Henry Drummond (from whom we heard in the last chapter as well) saying essentially the same thing when he writes, “There being no passage from one Kingdom to another, whether from inorganic to organic, or from organic to spiritual, the intervention of Life is a scientific necessity if a stone or a plant or an animal or a man is to pass from a lower to a higher sphere.”³¹

Cayce ups the ante when he suggests that not only life, but even mind of a sort is to be found in all of matter. This is especially true when it comes to the matter in our bodies, for at least one reading claims that each cell in the body can “know” its purpose.³² Surprisingly, he was in good company in making this assertion; Thomas Edison was quoted in an interview for Harper's Magazine as saying,

I do not believe that matter is inert, acted upon by an outside force. To me it seems that every atom is possessed by a certain amount of primitive intelligence. Look at the thousands of ways in which atoms of hydrogen combine with those of other elements, forming the most diverse substances. Do you mean to say that they do this without intelligence? Atoms in harmonious and useful relation assume beautiful or interesting shapes and colors, or in certain forms, the atoms constitute animals of the lower order. Finally they combine in man, who represents the total intelligence of all the atoms.³³

The idea that cells and even atoms can have a rudimentary form of “knowing” is commonly found in the theosophical literature of the early twentieth century. For example, Alice Bailey's 1922 publication, The Consciousness of the Atom, offers a comprehensive mapping of the development of consciousness, where beginning with the atom there is a rudimentary intelligence in the “selectivity” with which atoms are drawn to other atoms. With the combining of atoms to form a variety of minerals, a quality of “elasticity” is added to selectivity, she says. Then, with the vegetable kingdom, rudimentary sensation is added to the first two, while in the animal kingdom we find the further increment of instinct. It is in humans, she continues, that the rudimentary qualities of the lower kingdom reach more advanced form. The rudimentary elastic selectivity of the mineral kingdom manifest as intelligent activity in human beings; the sensation of the vegetable kingdom develops to emotion and ultimately love, and the instinct of the animal kingdom develops into full “mentality,” which manifests in the human species as “intelligent will.”³⁴

This same incremental building toward intelligent will is described in the Cayce material, where it is clear that each cell has the full “life principle” (rudimentary consciousness) within it and that some form of selectivity or direction from the “One Spiritual Infinite Mind” is at work when cells combine to form a body.³⁵ Eventually, the cells become “subservient” to the “will force” of the person whose body they comprise,³⁶ with countless readings mentioning the impact that the consciousness of the individual has on the functioning of the cells within his or her body. With this will force or intelligent will, humanity rises to its highest evolutionary potential.

In one particularly fascinating reading, the Cayce source frames the “projection of psychic forces into material forces” in terms of purpose, calling plant or vegetable life a “one purpose life;” the animal kingdom a “two purpose life;” and human beings a “three purpose life.” It continues then “with the entrance into the spiritual, the fourfold or purpose life.” In this progressive addition of purpose upon purpose, we see intimations of consciousness increasing toward full expression of spirit in matter. “Hence the necessity of each living, as it were, upon the other.”³⁷ Sri Aurobindo speaks similarly of a necessary ascent up through the life forms to the great potential for divinization now before the human race:

As the impulse toward Mind ranges from the more sensitive reactions of life in the metal and the plant up to its full organization in man, so in man himself there is the same ascending series, the preparation, if nothing more, of a higher and divine life.³⁸

There is something all-encompassing here—a complex, integrated, and organic view of the way in which spirit's purposes are unfolded throughout the layers and levels of the manifest world. The foundational levels of spirit's expression in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms are as necessary to our spiritual awakening as anything else in our experience. Yet with us lies the supreme responsibility of bringing self-aware spirit into matter. Just to be born human means we are participating in the “three purpose life,” but “only again in the soul development, wherein man takes on that from the creative forces as supplied by creator, do we find the fourfold life as is manifested in man.”³⁹ We, as an expression of soul development, have the distinctive potential to be the embodiment of the next purpose-level of spirit's infusion of matter. For this reason, Cayce calls man “…God's highest creation in the earth's plane…”⁴⁰ In Bailey's words, “He [man] is the deity of his own little system; he is not only conscious, but he is self-conscious.”⁴¹