Theos-Talk Archives (October 2001 Message tt00352)

Jerry:

Some further thoughts on our discussion ...

When we talk about our seven principles, we need to specify
which set of them. Being the basic ingredients of fully manifest
being, representing the full spectrum of consciousness, they are
all required for us to fully exist in any particular
objective world.

Many things are intercorrelated, like the principles and
the globes, or the principles and the planes. There's a
relationship, but not an identity between them.

Speaking of our existence, of our coming into being and
clothing ourselves in the seven principles, we need to
specify a particular world or scheme of existence. Each
has its own quality of space and time in which the monadic
ray descends into the evolutionary experience.

As a particular being undergoing evolution, each of us is
such a monadic ray that has issued forth from its respective
Monad. From the context of space and time as we know it,
in a particular scheme -- say that of the rounds and races
of a particular planetary chain -- we look for our ultimate
Self or our ultimate nature. We look within for that part of
us that is beyond things as we know it, above all that is
or ever shall be.

Within that scheme, looking at the highest sense of Self
that persists, we find it rooted in Atma-Buddhi. That is
"eternal" in the sense that it exists from the beginning
to the end of time. (That is time, as given birth to within
the context of the world as we know it, say a Mahamanvantara.)
Outside that world, "time was naught," because we would be
in the context now of a yet greater scheme of things.

We can keep our focus within the current scheme of existence
as we know it. Looking upwards to its top, there is an
external Self, a unique self-nature (Swabhava), and an
ever-changing stream of consciousness (the Monadic Essence).
But that is what is at the horizon of existence in this
scheme of things. It's the uppermost tip of the attributes
of the monadic ray that we know ourselves as.

The Monad itself is above all things we might ever know,
beyond Self (Paramatman) and beyond the time that we know
that arises out of unconditioned Duration. It is neither
Grand Self nor Ever-Changing Stream of Awareness. Either
attribute of existence only talks of aspects of the monadic
ray, and not of the Monad itself.

How do we understand it? Not by extrapolation from things
we know from existence. Not within a mind suited to
judging and understanding things that exist. Not with
senses that respond to physical things that continually
appear, move about, then disappear from the game of life.
We understand it in its own nature, of its own right. And
it isn't "we" that understand it, nor "understand" that we
do, nor an "it" that we understand. It's something else,
yet there, right before us.

-- Eldon