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A Cosmic Initiation: Theoricus

According to Paul Foster Case, in his THE TRUE AND INVISIBLE ROSICRUCIAN ORDER, the doctrine taught the Theoricus is that all forces (including physical) are essentially spiritual. It declares that the forces of the Cosmos are under the control of the attentive, watchful, vigilant self-consciousness of man. And Case submits that it is through the agency of the unconscious that "the Life Power continually reproduces itself in a series of living forms."

What this suggests to me is that the patterns of the process of the Spirit are seeded within our unconscious. Similar to Jesus' parable of the sower and the seeds, the potentiality of these patterns becoming living forms depends upon our (inner) self-awareness and ultimate outer action. This potentially not only presents itself at the individual level but eventually will also evolve to the species level.

I suspect, too, that this is what Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT is really all about. His history of consciousness-- sensory, understanding, mastery, servant onto ethical, legal, and spiritual--remind me of the different psychologies of modern human and spiritual development theories.

However--before specifically delving into Hegel, I think we need to understand *how* we move from various levels of conscious awareness and action. From my own experience, I definitely know that a few of us go through this inner process--but most don't!

Yet--how do you deal with the archetypal, that realm within the unconscious, which is arrayed in primitive and mystical images? Especially how do you decipher such--how do you come to understand this mystical dream symbolism, which is a kind of universal but archaic language within the inner mind?

Decoding is of the essence. I believe that most people cannot even reach first base in this task. Alas, so many are trained to "bosh" myth and the mystical.

As "common-sense" people, they ignore their unconscious--and precisely because of this, as so many psychologists have observed--so many individuals, cultures, nations eventually succumb to these extremely powerful archetypal forces who wield power in the depths of our minds.

In a nutshell, so often people are ruled by these inner forces--rather than learning to understand and appropriately translating these inner archetypal forces to outer living forms. So--how can Reason, alone, do the job? Rather, does not Reason have to come to understand the mystical in order to eventually do a reasonably good job when dealing with the unconscious mind?

Now Case answers, "That objective may be attained because what we now term subconscious is actually the substance of every form in all the kingdoms of nature below man. The Life Power, working at various levels or in various octives of subconsciousness, is all there to anything that lies with the range of human experience."

Now not an exact fit, but Hegel refers to the "Whole." I think of the Whole as the All of the Cosmos, all the different levels of Nature--including us. Now Case notes that the Life Power is working, present at all these different levels.

Hegel says "The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself."

It seems the unconscious is "popped" into consciousness via the process of thinking, of reasoning. I would agree with this. And evidently, so does Hegel--who goes on to say "Though the embryo is indeed in itself a human being, it is not so far itself; this it only is as cultivated Reason, which has made itself into what it is in itself."

Perhaps we should not dwell too long, becoming locked in our unconscious. This may be where it all starts, where we first come to a kind of inner awareness of who we really are. But it cannot stop there. If we wallow forever in our inner world, tangling with the imago language, we do not follow the light of Reason--which is "purposive activity, self-moving."

The way I am reading this, thus far, is that we need to move this inner awareness of Spirit outward where this continued awareness can systematically unfold as a dialectic process in the world.

Hegel says that "the Spirit that, so developed, knows itself as Spirit, is *Science;* Science is its actuality and the realm which it builds for itself in its own element."

Hegel proceeds in that "this coming-to-be of Science--the Phenomenology of Spirit Knowledge in its first phase, or immediate Spirit, is the non-spiritual, i.e. *sense consciousness.* In order to become genuine knowledge...it must travel a long way and work its passage."

Thus the passage walks it way through all the different levels of consciousness, according to Hegel's spiritual development theory. But back to my being a beginner at the beginning--I *still* do not grasp the reality of the primordial in our minds, in our religious development. Why?

We can point back to mental evolution, to the need of religion for spiritual development. But why? If Reason is the real tool for evolution, why is Nature so perverse as to keep Mind locked in religion?

It seems that religion eventually transforms into Reason. But to move from the inner/outer confines of "religio" to Reason seems such a wrench, an almost un-natural experience. Yet, looking at humanity's cultural history-- civilizations (bath patronal and matronal) were first built on religio. It appears necessary! Will religion eventually be absorbed by Reason?

Some observations about this: Hegel as well as Freud, Jung, and Wilber have in their writings referred to the progression of religion in the mind and of its overt expressions by humanity.

Hegel moves from natural religion to religion as art to revealed religion where Spirit not only grasps itself outwardly but inwardly.

Freud uses the analogy of Ancient Rome, with its sub-terrainean foundations, to the Republic to the Empire, to the Rome we know today.

Jung, in his dreams, used the same analogy--moving from primordial pits and caves to rooms reflecting progressive historical periods to the present.

Ken Wilber, the Transpersonalist, talks of the "deep structures" in the building of our personality.

I suppose there are lots of similar studies that reflect the progression of cultures and civilizations via these evolving religious structures in our minds and institutions. It seems obvious that religion must be some kind of *information system*--or the vehicle for such. And perhaps it is possible that our grasp of such information comes in small doses, hence the evolution of religious concepts. Such information for Hegel, of course, would be the "Self-Consciousness of the Spirit"--first at individual levels but eventually for the whole.

*Religio* is a mode by which we come to kow. It's imperative that we learn to decipher these swirling images in our inner world and the great symbologies and mythologies of our outer realm. We need to understand these images and symbols not only as aspects of or projections coming from ourselves, but as coming from Spirit.

Now Hegel, in his PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT, certainly accepts religion as an "information system"--a vehicle for the Spirit. However, Hegel moves on towards the great jump from religion to Reason, but he does *not* ignore the past--rather his procedure is to *incorporate* it.

Using Hegel, plus our own inclinations, where do we head from here? Do we ever put the vestiages of religion aside--more gently, rather than abruptly? Where does our "heart" go, if Reason is totally perverted by the domination by the "head?" How do we come to consciousness with our feeling along with our thinking, in tandem, for a more balanced sense of Spirit?

Now--having drunk deep from the wells of the inner mind, the pondering Theoricus peers out slowly from inside his human habitat. Now what does he see *out there*? He sees complexity, all sorts of shapes and forms--from amoeba to animals, from stones to stars!

Most of us see this complexity as different, perhaps something fearful. But, mainly, we see it as *separate* from Spirit. We dichotomize!

Matter is just stuff, something to escape through asceticism, through dissolution, to Spirit. Our religions--and some philosophies--have declared this! Some declare we are *nothing but* matter--doomed to dust, no more and no less.

Not so, so says Case in his THE TRUE AND INVISIBLE ROSICRUCIAN ORDER. He notes that "It is erroneous to speak of material forces as being opposed to spiritual ones. On the contrary, as science abundantly proves, there is no separate entity called *matter.*" Rather, for Case, the Theoricus must come to know that "Matter is merely the way spiritual energy behaves within the range of the human senses and of the instruments man has invented to supplement these senses."

Hegel moves along this track as well. Matter is the medium in which the Spirit acts! He proceeds: "Life in the universal fluid medium, a passive separating-out of the shapes becomes, just by so doing, a movement of those shapes or becomes Life as a process."

The simple universal fluid medium is the *in-itself,* and the difference of shapes is the *Other.* In ceaseless movement, Hegel declares that Life becomes a living thing. It splits itself up into shapes. It dissolves itself into "existent differences." And "it is the whole round of this activity that constitutes Life."

I can agree with this--from the perspective of modern scientific cosmologies. There are scientists who use almost the same wording, such as a Holomovement, the Whole ceaselessly grasping itself, groping into complexity, evolving itself via this process.

Thus for the Theoricus--according to Case--the "liberating truth is that physical forces, and all other forces are essentially spiritual, because their root is the Divine Life behind all things."

Hegel explains it further, "the Notion [world soul] displays itself in the form of thinghood, yet they are actually one. Now this one is not 'Notion' and is not 'Thinghood' but is a harmonious synthesis of both, without preferring one over the other." Hegel proceeds more deeply into the issue, saying that the "organism appears to the observing consciousness as a relation of two fixed movements in the form of immediate being-of an antithesis whose two sides" are a given. Hegel explains that "we see the Notion taken to mean roughly the inner, and actuality the outer, and their relation produces the law that *the outer is the expression of the inner.*"

To repeat: Hegel is talking of a Law that emphatically states that "the outer is the expression of the inner."

Taken down to a specific organism, such as a human being, Hegel states that "the fact is that each aspect of the organism is in its own self just this: to be a simple universality in which all determinations are dissolved, and to be the movement of this process."

Hegel declares that the inner world, or supersensible beyond, has "come into being: it has come from the world of appearance which mediated it...the supersensible is therefore *appearance qua appearance."

The above--the talk of an observing consciousness, a meditating upon the supersensible, sounds almost like collapsing a wave, observing a particle in terms of quantum physics. Indeed what Case and Hegel seem to be pointing towards is an observer/ participant Universe that is the mind of Mind.

Case delares that "the Universe is rational. It is composed according to a pattern intelligible to the mind of Man. That pattern may be seen, provided we train ourselves to look for it. Its characteristics are written by the mechanism of Nature, and we may read them."

Hegel says that this pattern "is preserved as something that *recollects* itself, whose existence is self-knowledge, and whose self-knowledge is just as immediately existence."

The Theoricus--having peered for a good long time, intuits that there is a Pattern, an Order, a Foundation to things!

 

 
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