Читать книгу Beyond Soul Growth - Lynn Sparrow Christy - Страница 29

Most of the evolutionary spirituality movement, in presenting the big picture of cosmic evolution and humankind's place in it, suggests a progression from matter to life to mind to spirit. We might illustrate it like this:

We might think, from this diagram, that spirit is a product of mind and life is the product of matter, each simply being further developments of an earlier state. In fact, for purely scientific evolutionists, that might not be too far off. Witness the excitement over the “God gene,” a seemingly biological foundation for the capacity for spirituality and those neuroscientists who take the position that mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain. It is true that for thoroughgoing materialists matter has combined itself in such a way as to produce life in each of its successive manifestations. But for evolutionaries of a spiritual bent the developmental chain is not about the absolute beginnings of life or mind or spirit but rather their breaking through in this three-dimensional world of form. As we will be seeing, this point is crucial in our attempt to place Cayce in the context of mainstream evolutionary thought.

In its existence beyond the realm of manifest form, Spirit, God, Ground of Being, Consciousness Itself (by whatever name we call it) is complete and needs no development. But within manifestation, there is growth and evolution of spirit. In the eastern and platonic traditions, this distinction has been described as that of “Being” vs. “Becoming.” As Being, the Absolute is changeless and formless. As Becoming, it is both the world of form and the consciousness that is awakening within it. As cosmological and biological evolution provide an ever more sophisticated means by which it can manifest, Becoming becomes more conscious. The non-dual nature of the Absolute—in the language of the Cayce readings its oneness—includes both Being and Becoming. To exclude the manifest realm as “other” than the Absolute is to slip into dualism.

Of course, there is always a problem in describing the Absolute that is within yet beyond all time and space. Because it is beyond all limits, the minute we attempt to describe it with words, we limit it and therefore introduce incorrect concepts. As it is said in the Tao Te Ching, “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the everlasting Tao.” Verbal attempts to describe that which gives rise to the world of form often use such words as “unmanifest,” “ground of being,” “formless,” “emptiness,” “the void,” or the “implicate order.” While all of these in various ways communicate some of the unqualified, non-tangible, and ultimately incomprehensible nature of this all-encompassing Something that is no thing, they seem to fall short of conveying the wonder and magnitude of this ultimate Reality. No wonder people gave it a name and just called it God! But let us always be careful, when we use that convenient handle for the Absolute that encompasses both form and formlessness, that we do not reduce it to anything less than its incomprehensible majesty. As eighteenth century German reformed Christian writer Gerhard Tersteegen said, “A comprehended God is no God at all.”

From the standpoint of evolutionary spirituality our existence, like that of the Absolute, is both unmanifest and manifest. And because our unmanifest existence is pure formlessness, there is nothing to evolve “there” (recognizing that “there” is no place). But that's not the whole story. As the formless ground gives rise to manifestation of the cosmos, we also have existence in that place—which is a place, real and concrete, within the limitless field of the unmanifest. Even as the use of words that are time bound and space conditioned impairs our ability to describe these things, diagrams limit us because we attempt to show in two-dimensional form that which is multi-dimensional and beyond all dimensions. Nonetheless, the diagram shown in Figure 2 may help clarify these points, as long as its limitations are kept in mind.

In the words of Sri Aurobindo:

Thus the eternal paradox and eternal truth of a divine life in an animal body, an immortal aspiration or reality inhabiting a mortal tenement, a single and universal consciousness representing itself in limited minds and divided egos, a transcendent, indefinable timeless and spaceless Being who alone renders time and space and cosmos possible.⁵¹

Form and Formlessness

Please note that just as descriptive words place limits on a reality that is, in fact, limitless, this model attempts to put into visual form that which is beyond all depiction. With that in mind, imagine that the page on which this is printed represents timeless, spaceless, unlimited reality and that the 3-dimensional world of form is one small aspect of ultimate, limitless Reality.

Figure 2

We find the same idea expressed in the language that is so characteristic of the Cayce readings:

…For as the entity finds, we are body, we are mind, we are soul. The soul is in the image of God, thus eternal, everlasting. Life in its expression, then, in a mental and in a material world, is only a mental and material manifestation of the soul-entity; that which was brought into being as a part of Creative Forces. Thus it is eternal.⁵²

The same paradox of form and formlessness is expressed in the Cayce material in terms of a God who grows and yet is changeless:

If there be any virtue or truth in those things given in the spiritual or Christian or Jehovah-God faith, His laws are immutable. What laws are immutable, if truth and God Himself is a growing thing—yet an ever changeable, and yet ever the same, yesterday and today and forever? These things, these words, to many minds become contradictory, but they are in their inception not contradictory; for Truth, Life, Light, Immortality, are only words that give expression to or convey a concept of one and the same thing.⁵³

Thus far, then, we can see that there is no real contradiction between the position that consciousness is increasing with evolution of the world and the Cayce story of conscious souls preceding the world. What becomes more sticky, however, is how this awakening of spirit in matter correlates with the Cayce story of the history of our planet and the human race.