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THE FULLNESS
OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
by Dane Rudhyar, 1985




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CONTENTS


About the Author

1. Prelude and Basic Themes

2. Wholeness and the Experience of Periodic Change
• The dynamism of Wholeness
• The experience of time
• Living in the now
• Objective time, causality, and the measure of time

3. The Cyclic Structure of the Movement of Wholeness
• Abstract patterns and experienced symbols
• The meaning of symmetry
• Human free will and the process of readjustment

4. The Human Situation
• The Movement of Wholeness as a cyclic series of situations
   Page A
   Page B
• A holontological view of human experience

5. The Three Factors in Experience and Their Cyclic Transformation
• Subjectivity and desire
• The expenditure and repotentializing of energy
• Mind: intermediary, interpreter and technician

6. The Formative and Separative Operations of Mind
• Mind and form
• Mind as an omnipresent formative factor
• The discursive and argumentative mind

7. A New Frame of Reference: The Earth-being and the Function of Humanity within It
• The development of frames of reference
• The planetary spheres
• The relation of culture to continent

8. Crises of Transition
• Life, culture and personhood
• From fetus to person: birth as initiation into personhood
• Potentiality and actuality
• The process of individualization
• The Path of Discipleship
• How to deal with changes of level

9. The "Dangerous Forties" in the Life-Cycle of Humanity
• The speed of change
• Crises of social and personal transformation
• The Hindu stages of life
• Service versus profit

EPILOGUE









CHAPTER FOUR
The Human Situation - 2

In a subsequent chapter I shall consider more fully the meaning of the Supreme Person and the influence It has upon the evolution of personhood and of humanity as a whole. I should nevertheless state here that the effectiveness of the prototype of any instrumentality intended to bring about the large-scale transformation of whatever it is to replace can only be demonstrated when this prototype is reproduced in a large number of specimens of the same type. The Godhead's Solution proves adequate and successful to the extent that the personhood of the Supreme Person will be replicated in many human persons as yet to evolve. These beings, now ready or karmically impelled to experience the human state, had known varying degrees of failure in the past — or from another point of view, are the heirs to the "karmic residua" (or skandhas) of ancient failures. Replication here, however, is a complex process, because just as failure can take an immense variety of forms, so the "redemptive" process of Compassion and karma must be adjusted to each category of persons and events. The Supreme Person, therefore, has potentially to embody an extremely complex Solution.
       The human situation implied in the concrete application of this multilevel Solution to a myriad of specific types of failure must also be immensely complex and differentiated. Moreover, it has to be worked out at the various sublevels of a strictly human kind of substantiality — thus, in terms of the actual experience of human beings operating at different stages of the evolutionary process. The process of karmic redemption or neutralization requires the development in earth-time of a long series of cultures, in some cases operating simultaneously on different continents. Each culture presents a limited collective kind of solution befitting the basic needs of persons born in the society, or even more specifically in one of its particular classes or religions. Each group has its own collective desires and expectations through which it has to face its karma and work its "redemption." A culture is inspired at the core of its collective being (its "psychism") by one of the basic aspects of the immensely complex Supreme Person. This one particular aspect becomes the spiritual source of the culture. It embodies itself in a secondary kind of Avatar. Such a limited avataric personage is also a prototype, but a prototype of only one particular culture. The specific quality of his or her emanation, the symbolic life-events and teachings of the Avatar, serve as a model to the persons evolving through their participation in that culture.
       The replication of the achievements of the avataric person or seminal group can, however, occur in two different ways — or rather, at two levels of transmission of a new principle of organization. One may call this transmission esoteric or exoteric; but it is more realistic and significant to speak of a private and public transfer. At first, up to a certain point in human evolution, a private and personal (yet in another sense transpersonal) transmission is the only possible one. A person who has succeeded in achieving his or her radical metamorphosis selects, privately instructs, and transmits to a chosen disciple of his or her "Ray" (or characteristic line of "redemption") the Solution he or she had also received in privacy and secrecy. But the procedure may also be public, at least to a large extent In the latter case, basic concepts and procedures are formulated in a verbal, actional or illustrative and ethical manner. Great avataric beings like Gautama and Jesus made public what they had either at least partially been taught in ancient sanctuaries and through traditional practices, or had gained through intuitive, suprasensible and metalogical contacts with their already developed higher mind, or with Pleroma beings who helped them to understand the deeper objective meaning of their experiences while on the Path.
       I shall return to the meaning which can be given to the polarization of the symbolic Midnight/Noon phases of the Movement of Wholeness and its relation to the Supreme Person. I should nevertheless state here that this polarization constitutes a situation in which the most extreme values of the polar trends toward Unity and Multiplicity can be integrated. Their integration is the supreme manifestation of Wholeness because in it the tension between Unity and Multiplicity reaches a degree of maximum intensity. The stresses this tension produces in the Movement of being are the greatest possible. This maximum of tension and stress characterizes the human situation. It is the foundation required for the development of what is ambiguously called human "free will" — the capacity to choose between alternatives.
       Several possibilities of action or thought may be possible, yet ultimately there are two basic alternatives: on the one hand, the way that is attuned to the increasing power of the principle of Unity after the Noon point of the cycle; and on the other, the way which resists that increase and clings to the desire for an ideal of individual or group power. The first alternative leads to what may be termed spiritual "success" during the human period of the great cycle of being; the second, to at least partial failure.
       In most cases, failure means not having been able fully to apply, in terms of concrete existential events and decisions, the particular solution envisioned by the Godhead and formulated by the celestial Hierarchies with reference to a specific set or collection of karmic deposits when a period of choice in the person's (or humanity as a whole's) life-cycle comes to an end. In a planetary sense, this crucial moment after which no fundamental choice is possible has been symbolized as the separation of the sheep from the goats. This process of separation does not refer to a final "Judgement," since many superficial improvements may still occur. But a no-longer-modifiable limit is nevertheless established, which defines what is possible to whatever has evolved so far.
       When one tries to understand and to accept or reject — partially if not totally — any situation, the possibility of transformation is the basic factor to consider. The subject ("I," the individual who assumedly has the capacity to choose) may desire a radical transformation, and mind may present various procedures or a specific and formalized technique to achieve what "seems" to be the "heart's desire"; but neither desire nor technique can become concretely and substantially actualized unless a third factor adequately operates. This factor is potency. The power to perform the action which has been chosen has to be latent in the situation. It is not latent only in the subject considered as an entity in itself, or in the mental processes formulating a possible method of achievement; yet it is potentially related to both the subject and the mental factors. The three factors are interrelated in the new experience.
       To assert that an individual meets a situation and exists apart from it in a mysteriously subjective yet conscious manner is confusing and unrealistic. A subject does not "have" an experience which the particular situation elicits. The subject is an integral component of the situation, and does not essentially exist outside the experiencing. Each new or old situation, each experience implies a subjective factor which belongs to it, just as it implies the operation of mind-processes and the release of kinetic energy — i.e. of the power to act. Every experience is triune. The Movement of Wholeness is a cyclic series of situations giving rise to experiences to which the subjective factor of desire gives a particular purpose, and the operation of mind a particular meaning. But these experiences must, first of all, be possible. Purpose and meaning require the possibility of fully experiencing the situation — any situation.
       fifth (more specifically mental) are related to all radical transformation and personal metamorphosis.






By permission of Leyla Rudhyar Hill
Copyright © 1986 by Leyla Rudhyar Hill
All Rights Reserved.



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