Читать книгу Beyond Soul Growth - Lynn Sparrow Christy - Страница 34

The current evolutionary opportunity is not a mere turn of the wheel back to knowledge gained and then lost in the dim past, for never before have souls indwelling the human form been at the particular threshold we now face. “…our modern souls see and feel today a world such as (in size, interconnections and potentialities) escaped all the great men of antiquity,” declared Teilhard de Chardin.⁷⁸ How could it be otherwise? Mysteries of the cosmos once addressed only in myth that spoke the language of the soul but did little to elucidate the three-dimensional universe are now also unveiled with the Hubble Telescope, the electron microscope, and the Hadron Collider. Old hierarchies of tribe and temple are rapidly collapsing in an information age that makes the collective knowledge of humankind readily available to average people. A global communications network gives spiritual seekers a bird's-eye view of the world's religious systems, giving those with eyes to see an opportunity to recognize what their religion has in common with that of people whom previous generations tended to loathe and fear as “heathen,” “pagan,” or “infidels” (This is not to make the naïve claim that such prejudice is anywhere near eradicated, but for the first time in human history the means of such eradication is at hand.) The sciences of biochemistry and genetics are rapidly accelerating our understanding of the control systems of the amazing piece of biological equipment we've been issued to navigate our way through this world.

It seems that on every front, knowledge is growing and the world is getting smaller. Meanwhile we struggle to solve the age-old problems of greed and aggression and our blindness to our own shadow. The very limitations of our knowledge, information, and technology force us to turn to awakened consciousness as the hope of our age. All of this makes for unprecedented evolutionary opportunity, and it will call for a new application of spiritual truth, beyond what was called for in days of spear and chariot.

Spiritual truth, if it really be truth, is timeless. We can expect to find it in every human epoch. But to give that truth flesh-and-blood expression is a growing thing. It requires consciousness to keep pace with both our knowledge and the challenges of a changing world. On the foundations of ancient wisdom, we need modern breakthrough to new levels of spiritual realization. What really matters in the end is how many of us are truly ready and willing to accept the evolutionary call.

^*Rogers, Elementary Theosophy, 7.

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⁵¹Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 78

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⁵⁶Rogers, Elementary Theosophy, 45.

⁵⁷Sri Aurobindo, On Yoga II, Tome One (Pondercherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1958),

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⁶¹262-99

⁶²Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 32.

⁶³Wilber, Integral Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 2006), 241-2n.

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^*Note that involve is to involution as evolve is to evolution.

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⁶⁸Leadbeater, A Textbook of Theosophy, 77.

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⁷³Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 185.

⁷⁴Psalm 139:14

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⁷⁶900-70

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⁷⁸Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 286n.