CHAPTER FOURTEEN
At the Thresehold of Occult Knowledge - 2

When one speaks of Mind one should refer to a universal principle of formation. Wherever we witness form, there Mind is at work. Many progressive scientists today insist that what science ultimately deals with is form rather than matter or even energy-matter. The German physicist Schrodinger, in his well-known little book What is Life?, pointed out that in modern physics the stuff of what is observed tends to vanish, the only essential factor being its structure (or gestalt), and he ends by evoking a universe that is Mind rather than matter. Other physicists with holistic leanings have stressed the overwhelming importance of the concept of form;(2) and form implies relatedness. It is by the intermediary of form that potentiality becomes actuality. There can be no actual existence without some kind of form. Out of form consciousness arises, because consciousness at any level is the product of relationship, the relationship between what we call spirit and matter, or what the Chinese call Yang and Yin, being the ultimate cosmic relationship.

Because the process of actualization of potentiality necessitates forms, the quality of this process depends upon the adequacy, purity, and perfection of the forms it uses. It is this fact which gives its true significance to the concept of "the Beautiful," in the purest and universal sense of the word; because whatever perfectly serves the purpose of actualizing a new potentiality is by this very fact beautiful. If the mathematician speaks of the "elegant solution" of a problem, and the German philosopher Count Keyserling stresses that the value and impact of an idea depends essentially upon its formulation, it is because form is first of all a product of the activity of the Mind. However, what is meant here by Mind is the creative Mind, mind in its involutionary aspect. It must be differentiated from the classifying, interpreting, generalizing cogitative mind which operates in response to the forces active in terms of the evolutionary development of living organisms.

Unfortunately the word form in the past has most often referred to the external shape of an object; and modern writers on esoteric matters still use it in that sense while they should speak of "particular shapes," the shape of a body. A mathematical equation has form. The shape of a living organism is a projection and concretization of a form by a creative Mind. At planetary or cosmic levels, forms in what we call the Divine Mind may be spoken of as "archetypes."

The paradigms and symbolic images of any culture reflect these archetypes. They are projections upon the collective consciousness of a human collectivity of archetypal forms which, by "defining" the release of biopsychic energies determine the character of the culture. Likewise, it is the material end result — or the concretization and actualization — of this defining process at the level of the life-force which biologists see at work in the "genetic code" impressed at the core of all the cells of a living organism. In all cases, we are dealing with a process of "information," to use a currently fashionable term. The involutionary creative Mind gives form to currents of energy; the evolutionary organic mind "informs" every component part of an organism with its function in the whole.

The great images, forms, and paradigms of a culture succumb to the entropy operating in whatever becomes involved in the frictions and clashes experienced by material bodies. They lose the sharpness of the defining outlines; the original information becomes blurred by loss of magnetic tension between the material units which carry this information (as we see in magnetic recording tapes) or perverted and confused by external interferences and statics.

Cultural decadence sets in; and, in individual bodies, organic decay. Fascism or Neo-classicism in a culture corresponds to sclerosis in a living organism and sclerosis is the desperate attempt to counteract the gradual loss of the cell's ability to adequately respond to the genetic "information" and to substitute rigidity (congestive processes and impairment in the circulation of the prana and blood) for flexible response and the capacity for self-recuperation through the free absorption of biopsychic energy.

Once we truly think in terms of formative principles in mental activity and of information processes, we have to accept a holistic approach to existence, thus to man, to the universe, and to the relationship between them. This does not mean that there is no longer any place for analysis and an atomistic approach to objective material entities, which, being material, are, according to the definition of the word, matter, almost infinitely divisible. It means that "the new image of man" has to include more than that which can be divided, analyzed in its operation, and dealt with as an isolated entity. It means that in the case of ill-health no organ of the human body can be significantly treated except in terms of its functional relationship to the whole organism and no disease should be seen as an entity in itself, for it involves the whole man and not merely local symptoms.

Man is not merely material substance within an organized system of functional activities, but also the activity itself (and the energy making it possible), and whatever organizes the system: the formative-creative Mind. What has definitely to be overcome and eradicated from the scientific mind is the "reductionism" which has dominated many basic concepts in our Western society. Baconian empiricism and the abstract equalitarianism of the eighteenth century political theorists and leaders are products of the same reductionist trend according to which everything must be reduced to what can be seen and touched; thought could be explained only in terms of "secretions" (now electric currents) from the brain and no concept could be valid unless its rationally logical corollaries could be proved by facts revealing laboratory experiments. The same type of attitude made us proclaim at the political level that all human beings are equal, because somehow they have a similar bodily form and similar bodily functions that can be seen, touched, analyzed, and reduced to abstract voting units — mere numbers in statistics.

Both the Baconian methodology and political equalitarianism have an uncontrovertible validity and practical usefulness; nevertheless they are materializations or intellectualizations of what is true, but true only at a holistic or spiritual level. It is evidently true that theories should be justified by relevant facts; but not only one kind of facts artificially produced and analyzed in laboratories and purified by the Aristotelian logic of a sense-built three dimensional universe postulated to be "nothing but" matter, as we know matter to be in our earth-bound human experience. It is also true that spiritually all men are equal and brothers, in the sense in which all the cells of a living organism contain at the core of their nuclei the same genetic code because the had their origin in only one fecundated ovum. But every cell (or at least group of cells) has a different function, and these functions are not of equal importance in the development, maintenance, expansion, and multiplication (or self-transcendence) of the organism-as-a-whole.

Scientists know that the cells of a human body all originated in the subdivision of the one original cell, yet they so fanatically believe in the exclusive materiality of the universes materiality now modified by the realization that matter and energy may be interchangeable according to Einstein's equation — that of course the universe must have begun in an explosive release of this energy-matter at terrific heat. If modern scientists thought along the lines of a cosmic vitalism regarding the whole cosmos as an immense, but finite, organism (or we might say today energy field) they might rather picture the birth of the universe in the form of a cosmic egg emerging from an infinite ocean of potential energy. What would follow is the expansion of this egg or force-field with its primordial cosmic substance differentiating into galaxies and various star systems, each with its own potential of functional activity according to a pattern defined by a metacosmic Mind, a "Logos," to use the term so strongly featured in Greek influenced Gnosticism.

Here we have two cosmic theories, or let us say hypotheses, and there is absolutely no absolute or logical reason for the first to be superior to the second. Yet most Western scientists have postulated that the "vitalistic" theory is absurd, and that life can only be the result of the chance confluence and coactivity of chemical molecules having cooled down. Actually there is no proof for the validity of such a postulate because man with his brief life-span has no way of experiencing the "heart beats" of the sun. (H. P. B. relates the 11-year sun-spots cycle to a cosmic, or rather heliocosmic, rhythm which may be analogical and relatively as rapid as man's heartbeats.) How can man with his short period of observation perceive any significant indication of the function of a galaxy in the cosmos; or rather, how could he possibly know it has no function and the cosmos is not a living organism? Must terrestrial forms of life be the only conceivable life-forms and life as we know it in our biosphere the only manifestation of what can be called in a broader sense Life? We have just discovered that the matter of our ancestors believed to be so dense, solid, and essentially indestructible in its molecular or even atomic form can be dematerialized into energy. Why can we not at least imagine that life too may be a condensation of some cosmic element which might simply be in its ultimate essence pure, eternal motion? Can we not metaphysically conceive of this motion as the whirling of Yin and Yang within the forever contracting and expanding circle of Tao — Tao that at the limit could be conceived as both infinite Space and mathematical point, yet never is either one of the two, neither being nor not-being, but the cyclically active rhythm of their interplay?

In saying this I had no intention of introducing a system of metaphysics — indeed a very ancient system. I wanted only to state that by ruling out the possibility of such a world-picture, which is based on our experience of life processes rather than on our premise that nothing but matter-energy exists, the science that was born in Europe some five hundred years ago is the result of only one of various possibilities of approach to knowledge. To speak of it as SCIENCE is as much the sign of a culture-bound European mentality and intellectual blindness as to regard Renaissance art as the one and only manifestation of true ART.

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2. cf Lancelot L. Whyte's book Accent on Form, p. 28 (Harper: N. Y. 19S4). "The normal states of physical systems display definite spatial patterns, such as the linear arrays of atoms and molecules in a crystal, the chain of atoms in fibers and the still obscure but highly significant arrangements in genes, viruses and all working parts of organisms. Here it is the pattern or arrangement which counts for most purposes. The individual particles are indistinguishable and may come and go at random. Indeed apparently the only function of the particles is to build up the patterns, for it is the latter which we actually observe . . . The 'form", in the new sense of underlying structural pattern, is more important than its material components, which lack individuality. " Also "structure is a name for the effective pattern of relationship in any situation . . . This idea, structure . . . is the creation of this century as far as human understanding is concerned."  Return