CHAPTER II

CONSCIOUSNESS.

1. THE MEANING OF THE WORD.

LET us now consider what we mean by consciousness, and see if this considera­tion will build for us the much longed -for “bridge”, which is the despair of modern thought, between consciousness and matter, will span for us the “gulf” alleged to exist for ever between them.

To begin with a definition of terms consciousness and life are identical, two names for one thing as regarded from within and from without. There is no life without consciousness; there is no consciousness without life. When we vaguely separate them in thought and analyse what we have done, we find that we have called consciousness turned inward by the name of life, and life [32] turned outwards by the name of con­sciousness. When our attention is fixed on unity we say life; when it is fixed upon multiplicity we say consciousness; and we forget that the multiplicity is due to, is the essence of, matter, the reflecting surface in which the One becomes the Many. When it is said that life is “more or less conscious”, it is not the abstraction life that is thought of, but “a living thing” more or less aware of its surroundings. The more or less awareness depends on the thickness, the density, of the enwrapping veil which makes it a living thing, separate from its fellows. Annihilate in thought that veil and you annihilate in thought also life, and are in THAT into which all opposites are resolved, the ALL.

This leads us to our next point: the existence of consciousness implies a separa­tion into two aspects of the fundamental all-underlying UNITY. The modern name of consciousness, “awareness”, equally implies this. For you cannot hang up awareness in the void; awareness [33] implies something of which it is aware, a duality at the least. Otherwise it exists not. In the highest abstraction of consciousness, of awareness, this duality is implied; consciousness ceases if the sense of limitation be withdrawn, is dependent on limitation for existence. Awareness is essentially awareness of limitation, and only secondarily awareness of others. Awareness of others comes into being with what we call Self-­consciousness, Self-awareness. This abstract Twain-in-One, consciousness ­- limitation, spirit - matter, life - form, are ever inseparable, they appear and dis­appear together; they exist only in relation to each other; they resolve into a necessarily unmanifest Unity, the supreme synthesis.

“As above, so below.” Again let the “below” help us; let us look at conscious­ness as it appears when considered from the side of form, as we see it in a universe of conscious things. Electricity manifests only as positive and negative; when these neutralise each other, electricity vanishes. In all things electricity [34] exists, neutral, unmanifest; from all things it can appear, but not as positive only, or as negative only; always as balancing amounts of both, over against each other, and these ever tending to re-enter together into apparent nothingness, which is not nothingness but the source equally of both.

But if this be so, what becomes of the “gulf “? what need of the “bridge”? Consciousness and matter affect each other because they are the two constit­uents of one whole, both appearing as they draw apart, both disappearing as they unite, and as they draw apart a relation exists ever between them.[19] There is no such thing as a conscious unit which does not consist of this inseparate duality, a magnet with two poles ever in relation to each other. We think of a separate something we call conscious­ness, and ask how it works on another [35] separate something we call matter. There are no such two separate somethings, but only two drawn-apart but inseparate aspects of THAT which, without both, is unmanifest, which cannot manifest in the one or the other alone, and is equally in both. There are no fronts without backs, no aboves without belows, no outsides without insides, no spirit without matter. They affect each other because inseparable parts of a unity, manifesting as a duality in space and time. The “gulf” appears when we think of a “spirit” wholly immaterial, and a “body” wholly material - i.e., of two things neither of which exists. There is no spirit which is not matter-enveloped: there is no matter which is not spirit-ensouled. The highest separated Self has its film of matter, and though such a Self is called “a spirit” because the consciousness ­aspect is so predominant, none the less is it true that it has its vibrating sheath of matter, and that from this sheath all impulses come forth, which affect all other denser material sheaths in succession. To say this is not to materialise consciousness, [36] but only to recognise the fact that the two primary opposites, consciousness and matter, are straitly bound together, are never apart, not even in the highest Being. Matter is limitation, and without limitation consciousness is not. So far from materialising consciousness, it puts it as a concept in sharp antithesis to matter, but it recognises the fact that in an entity the one is not found with­out the other. The densest matter, the physical, has its core of consciousness; the gas, the stone, the metal, is living, conscious, aware. Thus oxygen becomes aware of hydrogen at a certain tempera­ture, and rushes into combination with it.

Let us now look out of consciousness from within, and see the meaning of the phrase: “Matter is limitation”. Conscious­ness is the one Reality, in the fullest sense of that much-used phrase; it follows from this that any reality found anywhere is drawn from consciousness. Hence, everything which is thought, is. That consciousness in which everything is, everything literally, “possible” as well as “actual” - actual being that which is [37] thought of as existent by a separated consciousness in time and space, and possible all that which is not so being thought of at any period in time and any point in space - we call Absolute Con­sciousness. It is the ALL, the ETERNAL, the INFINITE, the CHANGELESS. Consciousness, thinking time and space, and of all forms as existing in them in succession and in places, is the Universal Conscious­ness, the ONE, called by the Hindu the Saguna BRAHMAN - the ETERNAL with attributes - the PRATYAG-ATMA - the INNER SELF; - by the Christian, God; by the Parsi, HORMUZD; by the Mussulman, ALLAH. Consciousness dealing with a definite time, however long or short, with a definite space, however vast or restricted, is individual, that of a concrete Being, a Lord of many universes, or some universes, or a universe, or of any so-called portion of a universe, his portion and to him therefore a universe - these terms varying as to extent with the power of the con­sciousness; so much of the universal thought as a separate consciousness can completely think, i.e., on which he can [38] impose his own reality, can think of as existing like himself, is his universe. To each universe, the Being who is its Lord gives a share of his own indefeasible Reality; but is ever himself limited and controlled by the thought of his superior, the Lord of the universe in which he exists as a form. Thus we, who are human beings, existing in a solar system, are surrounded by innumerable forms which are the thought-forms of the LORD of our system, our ISHVARA, or RULER; the “divine measure” and the “axes of growth”, thought by the Third Logos, govern the forms of our atoms, and the surface thought of by Him as the limit of the atom and resistant, offers resistance to all similar atoms. Thus we receive our matter, and cannot alter it, save by the employment of methods also made by His thought; only so long as His thought continues can the atoms, with all composed of them, continue to exist, since they have no Reality save that given by His thought. So long as He retains them as His body by declaring: “I am this; these atoms are My body; they share My life”; so [39] long they will impose themselves as real on all the beings in this solar system, whose consciousnesses are clothed in similar garments. When at the end of the Day of Manifestation He declares: “I am not this; these atoms are no longer My body; they no longer share My life”; then shall they vanish as the dream they are, and only that shall remain which is the thought-form of the Monarch of a vaster system.

Thus, as Spirits, we are inherently, indefensibly divine, with all the splendour and freedom implied in that word. But we are clothed in matter which is not ours, which is the thought-forms of the RULER of our system - controlled again by the RULERS of vaster systems in which ours is included - and we are only slowly learning to master and use it. When we realise our oneness with our RULER, then the matter shall have no longer power over us, and we shall see it as the unreality it is, dependent on His will, which then we shall know as also ours. Then we can “play” with it, as we cannot while it blinds us with its borrowed Reality. [40]

Looking thus out of consciousness from within, we see even more plainly than we saw looking at it from the world of forms, that there is no “gulf”, and no need for a “bridge”. Consciousness changes, and each change appears in the matter sur­rounding it as a vibration, because the LOGOS has thought vibrations of matter as the invariable concomitant of changes in consciousness; and as the matter is but the resultant of consciousness and its attributes are imposed upon it by active thought, any change in the Logic Con­sciousness would change the attributes of the matter of the system, and any change in a consciousness derived from Him shows itself in that matter as a change; this change in matter is a vibration, a rhythmical movement within the limits set by Him for the mobility of masses of matter in that relation. “Change in con­sciousness and vibration of the matter limiting it” is a “pair”, imposed by the thought of the Locos on all embodied consciousnesses in His universe. That such a constant relation exists is shown by the fact that a vibration in a material [41] sheath accompanying a change in the ensouling consciousness, and causing a similar vibration in the sheath ensouled by another consciousness, is found to be accompanied by a change in that second consciousness similar to the change in the first.

In matter far subtler than the physical - ­as mind-stuff - the creative power of consciousness is more readily seen than in the dense material of the physical plane. Matter becomes dense or rare, and changes its combinations and forms, according to the thoughts of a consciousness active therein. While the fundamental atoms­ - due to the Logic thought - remain un­changed, they can be combined or disso­ciated at will. Such experiences open the mind to the metaphysical conception of matter, and enable it to realise at once the borrowed reality and the nonentity of matter.

A word of warning may be useful with regard to the often repeated phrases of “Consciousness in a body”, “Conscious­ness ensouling a body”, and the like. The student is a little apt to figure consciousness [42] as a kind of rarefied gas enclosed in a material receptacle, a kind of bottle. If he will think carefully he will realise that the resistant surface of the body is but a Logic thought-form, and it is there because thought there. Consciousness appears as conscious entities, because the LOGOS thinks such separations, thinks the enclosing walls, makes such thought limitations. And these thoughts of the LOGOS are due to His unity with the Universal SELF, and are but a repetition within the area of a particular universe of the Will to multiply.

A careful dwelling in mind on the distinctions above traced between Absolute Consciousness, Universal Consciousness, and Individual Consciousness, will prevent the student from asking the question so often heard: Why is there any universe? Why does All-Consciousness limit itself? Why should the Perfect become the imperfect, All-Power become the power­less, God become the mineral, the brute, the man? In this form the question is unanswerable, for it is founded on false premises. The Perfect is the All, the Totality, the Sum of Being. Within [43] its infinity, as above said, is everything contained, every potentiality, as well as actuality, of existence. All that has been, is, will be, can be, ever is in that Fulness, that ETERNAL. Only Itself knows Itself in its infinite unimaginable wealth of Being. Because it contains all pairs of opposites, and each pair, in affirming itself, to the eye of reason annihilates itself and vanishes, It seems a Void. But endless universes arising in It proclaim It a Plenum. This Perfect never becomes the imperfect; it becomes nothing; It as all Spirit and Matter, Strength and Weakness, Knowledge and Ignorance, Peace and Strife, Bliss and Pain, Power and Impotence; the innumerable opposites of manifestation merge into each other and vanish in non-manifestation. The All includes manifestation and non-manifes­tation, the diastole and systole of the Heart which is Being. The one no more requires explanation than the other; the one cannot be without the other. The puzzle arises because men assert separately one of the inseparate pair of opposites - Spirit, Strength, Knowledge, [44] Peace, Bliss, Power - and then ask: “Why should these become their opposites?” They do not. No attribute exists without its opposite; a pair only can manifest; every front has a back, spirit and matter arise together; it is not that spirit exists, and then miraculously produces matter to limit and blind itself, but that spirit and matter arise in the ETERNAL simultaneously as a mode of Its Being, a form of Self-expression of the All, Pratyagatma and Mulaprakriti, express­ing in time and space the Timeless and Spaceless.

2. THE MONADS.

We have seen that by the action of the Third Logos a five-fold field has been provided for the development of Units of Consciousness, and that a Unit of Consciousness is a fragment, a portion of the Universal Consciousness, thought into separation as an individual entity veiled in matter, a Unit of the substance of the First Logos, to be sent forth on the second plane as a separate Being. [45] Such Units are called technically Monads. These are the Sons, abiding from ever­lasting, from the beginning of a creative age, in the Bosom of the Father, who have not yet been “made perfect through sufferings”;[20] each of them is truly “equal to the Father as touching his Godhead, but inferior to the Father as touching his manhood”[21], and each of them is to go forth into matter in order to render all things subject to himself[22]; he is to be “sown in weakness” that he may be “raised in power”[23]; from a static Logos enfolding all divine potentialities, he is to become a dynamic Logos unfolding all divine powers; omniscient, omnipresent, on his own second plane, but unconscious, “senseless”, on all the others,[24] he is to veil his glory in matter that blinds him, in order that he may become omniscient, omni­present, on all planes, able to answer to all divine vibrations in the universe instead of to those on the highest only. [46]

The meaning of this feeble description of a great truth may be glimpsed by the student by a consideration of the facts of embryonic life and birth. When an Ego is re-incarnating, he broods over the human mother in whom his future body is a building, the vehicle he will one day inhabit. That body is slowly built up of the substance of the mother, and the Ego can do little as to its shaping: it is an embryo, unconscious of its future, dimly conscious only of the flow of the maternal life, impressed by maternal hopes and fears, thoughts and desires; nothing from the Ego affects it, save a feeble influence coming through the permanent physical atom, and it does not share, because it cannot answer to, the wide-reaching thoughts, the aspiring emotions of the Ego, as expressed by him in his causal body. That embryo must develop, must gradually assume a human form, must enter on an independent life, separate from that of his mother, must pass through seven years - as men count time - of such inde­pendent life, ere the Ego can fully ensoul it. But during that slow evolution, with [47] its infantile helplessness, its childish follies, pleasures and pains, the Ego to whom it belongs is carrying on his own wider, richer, life, and is gradually coming into nearer and nearer touch with this body, in which alone he can work in the physical world, his touch being manifested as the growth of the brain-consciousness.

The condition of the Monad in relation to the evolution of his consciousness in a universe resembles that of the Ego in relation to his new physical body. His own world is that of the second, the anupadaka, plane, and there he is fully conscious with the all-embracing SELF-­consciousness of his world, but not at first of selves, among whom he is separate, of “others”. Let us try to see the stages through which he passes. He is first a spark in a flame: “I sense one Flame, O Gurudeva; I see countless undetached sparks shining in it”[25]. The Flame is the First Logos, the undetached sparks the Monads. His Will to manifest is also theirs, for they are the germ-cells in His [48] body, that will presently have a separate life in His coming universe. Moved by this Will, the sparks share the change called “the begetting of the Son”, and pass into the Second Logos and dwell in Him. Then, with the “proceeding” of the Third, there comes to them from Him the “spiritual individuality”, that H. P. Blavatsky speaks of, the dawning separateness. But still there is no sense of “others”, needed to re-act as the sense of “I”. The three aspects of consciousness, theirs as sharing the Logic life, are still, to use a figure of speech, “turned inwards”, playing on each other, asleep, unaware of a “without”, sharing the all-SELF-consciousness. The great Beings, called the Creative Orders,[26] arouse them to “outer” life; Will, Wis­dom, Activity awake to awareness of the “without”; a dim sense of “others” arises, so far as “others” may be in a world where all “‘forms’ intermingle and inter­penetrate,” and each becomes “an indivi­dual Dhyan Chohan, distinct from others”.[27] [49] At the first stage, spoken of above, when the Monads are, in the fullest sense[28] of the term, undetached, as “germ-cells in His body”, the Will, Wisdom, and Activity in them are latent, not potent. His Will to manifest is also their will, but theirs un­consciously; He, Self-conscious, knows His object and His path; they, not yet Self-conscious, have in them, as parts of His body, the moving energy of His Will, which will presently be their own indivi­dual Will to Live, and which impels them into the conditions wherein a separate­-Self-conscious, instead of an all-Self-con­scious, life is possible. This leads them to the second stage in the life of the Second Logos, and to the Third. Then, comparatively separate, the awakening by the Creative Orders brings with it the “dim sense of ‘others’” and of “I”, and with this a thrill of longing for a more clearly-defined sense of “I” and of “others”; and this is the “individual Will to Live”, and this leads them forth [50] into the denser worlds, wherein such sharper definition alone becomes possible.

It is important to understand that the evolution of the individual “I” is a Self-chosen activity. We are here because we Will to Live; “none else compels”. This aspect of consciousness, the Will, is dealt with in later chapters of this book, and here we need only emphasise the fact that the Monads are Self-moved, Self-determined, in their entry into the lower planes of matter, the field of manifestation, the five-fold universe. To their vehicles in it, they remain as the Ego to his physical body, with their radiant divine life in loftier spheres, but brooding over their lower vehicles and manifesting more and more in them as they become more plastic. H. P. Blavatsky speaks of this, as the “Monad is cycling on downwards into matter”.[29]

Everywhere in nature we see this same striving after fuller manifestation of life, this constant Will to Live. The seed, buried in the ground, pushes its growing [51] point upwards to the light. The bud fettered in its sheathing calyx bursts its prison and expands in the sunshine. The chick within the egg splits its confining shell in twain. Everywhere life seeks expression, powers press to exercise them­selves. See the painter, the sculptor, the poet, with creative genius struggling within him; to create yields the subtlest pleasure, the keenest savour of exquisite delight. Therein is but another instance of the omnipresent nature of life, whether in the LOGOS, the genius, or in the ephemeral creature of a day; all joy in the bliss of living, and feel most alive when they multiply themselves by creation. To feel life expressing itself, flowing forth, expand­ing, increasing, this is at once the result of the Will to Live, and its fruition in the Bliss of living.

Some of the Monads, willing to live through the toils of the five-fold universe, in order to master matter and in turn to create a universe therein, enter into it to become a developed God therein, a Tree of Life, another Fount of Being. The shaping of a universe is the Day of [52] Forth-going; living is becoming; life knows itself by change. Those who will not to become masters of matter, creators, remain in their static bliss, excluded from the five-fold universe, unconscious of its activities. For it must be remembered that all the seven planes are interpene­trating, and that Consciousness on any plane means the power of answering to the vibrations of that particular plane. Just as a man may be conscious on the physical plane because his physical body is organised to receive and transmit to him its vibrations, but be totally unconscious of the higher planes though their vibra­tions are playing on him, because he has not yet organised sufficiently his higher bodies to receive and transmit to him their vibrations; so is the Monad, the Unit of Consciousness, able to be con­scious on the second plane, but totally unconscious on the lower five.

He will evolve his consciousness on these by taking from each plane some of its matter, veiling himself in this matter and forming it into a sheath by which he can come into contact with [53] that plane, gradually organising this sheath of matter into a body capable of functioning on its own plane as an expression of himself, receiving vibrations from the plane and transmitting them to him, receiving vibrations from him and transmitting them to the plane. As he veils himself in the matter of each successive plane he shuts away some of his consciousness, that of it which is too subtle for receiving or setting up vibrations in the matter of that plane. He has within him seven typical vibratory powers - each capable of producing an indefinite number of sub-vibrations of its own type - and these are shut off one by one as he endues veil after veil of grosser matter. The powers in con­sciousness of expressing itself in certain typical ways - using the word power in the mathematical sense, consciousness “to the third”, consciousness “to the fourth”, etc.- are seen in matter as what we call dimensions. The physical power of consciousness has its expression in “three-dimensional matter”, while the astral, mental, and other powers of [54] con­sciousness need for their expression other dimensions of matter.

Speaking thus of Monads, we may feel as if we were dealing with something far away. Yet is the Monad very near to us, our SELF, the very root of our being, the innermost source of our life, the one Reality. Hidden, unmanifest, wrapt in silence and darkness is our Self, but our consciousness is the limited manifestation of that Self, the manifested God in the kosmos of our bodies, which are His garments. As the Unmanifest is partially manifest in the LOGOS, as Divine Consciousness, and in the universe as the Body of the LOGOS[30], so is our unmanifest Self partially manifest in our conscious­ness, as the Logos of our individual system, and in our body as the kosmos which clothes the consciousness. As above, so below.

This hidden SELF it is which is called the Monad, being verily the One. It is this which gives the subtle sense of unity [55] that ever persists in us amid all changes; the sense of identity has here its source, for this is the ETERNAL in us. The three out-streaming rays which come from the Monad - to be dealt with presently - are his three aspects, or modes of being, or hypostases, reproducing the Logoi of a universe, the Will, Wisdom, and Activity which are the three essential expressions of embodied consciousness, the familiar Atma-Buddhi-Manas of the Theosophist.

This consciousness ever works as a unit on the various planes, but shows out its triplicity on each. When we study con­sciousness working on the mental plane, we see Will appearing as choice, Wisdom as discrimination, Activity as cognition. On the astral plane we see Will appearing as desire, Wisdom as love, Activity as sen­sation. On the physical plane, Will has for its instruments the motor organs (karmen­driyas), Wisdom the cerebral hemispheres, Activity the organs of sense (jnanen­driyas).[31] [56]

The full manifestation of these three aspects of consciousness in their highest forms takes place in man in the same order as the manifestation of the triple LOGOS in the universe. The third aspect, Activity, revealed as the creative mind, as the gatherer of knowledge, is the first to perfect its vehicles, and show forth its full energies. The second aspect, Wisdom, revealed as the Pure and Compassionate Reason, is the second to shine forth, the Krishna, the Buddha, the Christ, in man. The third aspect, Will, is the last to reveal itself, the divine Power of the Self, that which in its impregnable fulness is Beatitude, is Peace. [57]