Читать книгу Beyond Soul Growth - Lynn Sparrow Christy - Страница 32

The cosmology of the Cayce readings is amazingly in accord with the scientific theory of the Big Bang, even though these readings predate that theory by decades. They describe God moving and bringing the Spirit into activity, which brought light and then chaos. Then the physical cosmos, including this Earth, arose out of the light-and-chaos movement of the Spirit. Materiality was born through spirit pushing itself into matter. Then, “…Spirit was individualized, and then became what we recognize in one another as individual entities…”⁵⁸ This is a description of two distinct aspects of the creative act: the inception of the material realm and spirit giving rise to facets of itself in the form of individual entities. Therefore we now have three factors at play: 1) the all-encompassing, formless Ground of Being; 2) its manifestation in the world of form, and 3) individual spirit-entities.

For our understanding of involution, it is important to note that we had our origin as individual projections of God beyond time and space. From there, according to the readings, the point was for us, as spirit-beings, to “use matter” and everything in the earth's environment for the glory of the Creative Forces.⁵⁹ From this we get that we were always intended to be a part of that creative unfoldment. In fact, we seem to have a starring role: “…For the universe was brought into being for the purpose of being the dwelling place of the souls of God's children—of which birthright this entity is a part.”⁶⁰ Yet long before taking on the role of earthlings, we showed an inclination to disregard our stage directions.

When the earth became a dwelling place for matter, when gases formed into those things that man sees in nature and in activity about him, then matter began its ascent in the various forms of physical evolution—in the mind of God! The spirit chose to enter (celestial, not an earth spirit—he hadn't come into the earth yet!), chose to put on, to become a part of that which was as a command not to be done!⁶¹

Let's pause here for a moment to unbundle that. Notice that this reading is describing conditions at the time when gases were first coalescing into the bodies of the physical cosmos. Based on current scientific dating, that could have been anywhere from about from 200 million years after the Big Bang until our sun and its planets formed around five billion years ago. (Note again that in this passing reference to gases forming Cayce is in step with modern scientific thinking concerning the origins of the cosmos.) During that time, the beginnings of the evolutionary ascent of matter is described in this reading and others (#s 262–78, 900–227, for example) as occurring in the mind of God.

Once again, we find essential agreement with this idea from a most unexpected source, the Christian writings of Henry Drummond:

The lines of the Spiritual existed first, and it was natural to expect that when the “Intelligence resident in the ‘Unseen’” proceeded to frame the material universe He should go upon the lines already laid down. He would, in short, simply project the higher Laws downward, so that the Natural World would become an incarnation, a visible representation, a working model of the spiritual.⁶²

To today's reader, this may smack of an anthropomorphic God executing an “Intelligent Design” version of evolution, a position that is held in disdain by most modern evolutionaries. Indeed, anyone who looks deeply at the dead ends and backtracks—as well as the carnage and destruction—inherent in the natural world, past and present, would find it hard to imagine that it is all part of a perfect, pre-set plan. As Ken Wilber points out, if this universe was engineered by a designer, “that Engineer is an idiot.”⁶³ So let me be clear that, whatever Drummond's underlying theology may have been, in this excerpt he is talking about the scaffolding of laws upon which the evolutionary advance is built. He is describing the involutionary process whereby the evolutionary drive within all matter is taking form at the less dense level of the divine mind. According to Cayce, this is happening even as a physical cosmos is first beginning to form out of the coalescing gases of the primordial past. Think of the gradations of the spectrum. Events can be occurring simultaneously at different levels.

As these events are taking place, we find spirit-entities at a celestial level involving themselves in a way that is not aligned with the divine intention. The Cayce readings tell us that their intrusion was into “…fields of thought that pertain to a developing or evolving world of matter…”⁶⁴ Thus, this was not a coming into flesh, but an interference with the creative unfoldment then taking place at the level of thought. Picture this, if you will: Creative Force has pushed itself out into matter, birthing a physical cosmos. An evolutionary ascent of consciousness through matter is formulating in the mind of this Creative Force/ God. Remember, in the involutionary trajectory, creations at the level of mind precede three-dimensional manifestation. Then, in blind or willful disregard of the process still unfolding, the entities Creative Force has spun off begin to involve^* themselves in it. In so doing, they take upon themselves involutionary descent.

It's not that souls were not intended to have a role in the manifest realm. Rather it seems to have been a matter of jumping the gun by prematurely interfering while the great evolution was still unfolding in the mind of the Creator. For, as we'll be seeing, when the earth plane reached the stage capable of sustaining souls' experience here, humankind appeared as “…Lord over all that was created…”⁶⁵ Elsewhere in the readings we are told that this unfolding world of form had been created “in all its splendor to supply every want or desire” souls might have and that the cosmos had been prepared for souls' “indwelling” “…even unto the four hundred thousandth generation from the first creation…” To this very day, these same creative forces are at our disposal to use for our regeneration, our pleasure, or our undoing.⁶⁶ The choice remains open, for we're also told that for “…hundreds and thousands of years to come,” evolution will bring forth that which will meet our needs.⁶⁷ We will return to this point in Chapter 7, when we take a closer look at the value of incarnation. For now, we are only interested in the implications of this idea for the light it sheds on the puzzle of an esoteric ancient history that precedes the prehistoric period of the anthropologist.

In most esoteric thought, the involutionary process whereby spirit manifests in the world of form has been one of successive degrees, the earliest forms associated with earth-life being far less dense or concrete than we experience today. The theosophist C.W. Leadbeater describes it this way:

The forms built in the first round were very different from any of which we know anything now. Properly speaking, those which were made on our physical earth can scarcely be called forms at all, for they were constructed of etheric matter only, and resembled vague, drifting and almost shapeless clouds. In the second round they were definitely physical, but still shapeless and light enough to float about in currents of wind.⁶⁸

The Cayce story falls in with these ideas, placing most of the fantastical, mythic-sounding lore concerning Atlantis at a non-physical stage of involution, when our bodies and even our personalities did not have the fixed, human form that we see today. At this level, we had a much more immediate interaction with the laws of the universe, creating form with thought, for example, and transporting objects through the air. It was at this time, prior to the deeper stages of involution, that the spiritual knowledge still with us was put into forms that could be passed along. Subsequently, direct access to that knowledge was lost because involution was a process of “continual hardening” that resulted in less and less ability to remember our source (i.e., a loss of consciousness).⁶⁹ Thus we find reference to an esoteric tradition that over the ages has passed along knowledge forgotten by most. It complicates our story beyond what is strictly necessary here to go into detail concerning the claim that there were those souls who did not lose themselves in involution and were the preservers of spiritual knowledge in the non-material planes. Some of these eventually lost their consciousness in earthly life and some remained at levels beyond the three dimensions to serve as helpers and teachers.