CHAPTER EIGHT
Two Polarities of Spiritual Life - 3
The path of the Avatar, the hero and the creative genius leads those who tread it in a direction which actually is that of the evolutionary mainstream; but in most cases these men act against the inertia of this mainstream — an inertia which manifests in the institutions, the unquestioned paradigms, the standardized patterns of feeling and behavior and the intellectual stereotypes of a particular society built at a particular time, in a particular locality, and for a particular evolutionary purpose. These men are transformers and, if not destroyers, at least relentless critics and reformers of sclerotic social organisms. Yet, though they are considered "movers and shakers" of self-complacent and over-ritualized societies, they nevertheless are themselves moved by cosmic Powers and perhaps superpersonal Beings who not only inspire but "in-spirit" them. They are agents of destiny. Around them and through them everything begins to move and to change, seemingly perhaps of its own accord, yet impelled by a contagion of change, a will whose fire burns until the physical organism itself is totally consume the energy that flows through it and often leaves the personality shaken and empty. These men essentially belong to the line of the Promethean spirits. They are the manifestations of those great karma yogins who had to assume much of the almost unavoidable consequences of their gift of fire to human beings who were not ready, not willing, and therefore not able to act as cocreators with these divine "Flames."
The Avatars come to a race, a country, or a nation in which a poignant need has arisen for the experience of death-rebirth, because the old structures have become empty of vital and compelling meaning, and a combination of inertia at one level and chaos at the other dominates everything. They come when the time is ready. They are creatures of time (Kala in Sanskrit), because time is the structural aspect of change, and these men are haunted by the will to change and the urge to transform all they touch.
This will, this unquenchable, relentless urge is not "theirs" as individual persons. Their will to destiny is the only will they really know — the will to perform the acts that must be done, regardless of consequences to their earthly personal vehicles. That Will to Destiny is the very power that moves them, often toward a tragic consummation. It essentially operates beyond what ordinary men name good and evil, because death polarizes rebirth, and tragedy is the dark brother of every release of new potentiality.
These Promethean beings should not be considered mystics, though the source of their activity is in a realm that transcends the personal and the merely human. The source is in that realm, and to that source we may give a more or less glamorous name: higher Self, Master, Lord of Karma, God — and in some cases their negative counterparts on the path of total disintegration beyond the possibility of rebirth in this world-scheme, for there are also avatars of Evil. The source may be personified and the avataric personage may feel himself identified with it and those who follow him may proclaim him as a "divine Incarnation"; yet a more accurate term would be a transcarnation. The fire of transformation burns through the flesh (carne) until its work is done or at least until the disciples attracted to the flame have exhausted their capacity to respond to the fire and the light it radiates.
The mystic characteristically is an individual Who has reached a phase in his Soul-unfoldment permitting him to experience, in the light of an intense desire for union with the Divine and of a love that accepts no limits, the unitive state. The Soul of a being manifesting as an avataric personage may have reached such a unitive state in a past existence or he may be on the way to reach it in a future life, but his life as an avatar (or a creative genius and a cultural hero) is polarized by a totally different purpose. This life is, I repeat, a performance, a ritual of transforming activity — and creativity implies the power to transform that upon which one concentrates one's attention. This activity is an answer to a collective need. It is a particular answer conditioned by a particular need, a particular place and time.
In a sense, therefore, the deeds being performed, or the creative work being produced, when considered in themselves, can be called "personal." They are determined by what occurs in the realm of human personalities, even though the occurrence follows a cosmic cyclic rhythm far beyond merely human personalities, as such. Because the results of the avatar's work refer to the transformation of a collective group of persons, and (in the case of great Avatars) of humanity and the planet as a whole, they inevitably are conditioned by the type of consciousness and the possibility of feeling-responses relevant to the basic level at which, at the time, mankind or a community is operating. The avatar accepts what is at the time of his appearance; he uses it in order to be able to transform it. One can transform only that to which one either belongs or has belonged — that is, from the inside. One has therefore to have experienced this inside and to some extent to act as if one belongs to it — thus as if one were merely a human personality.
The avataric being can be considered as the earth terminal of a line of transmission of power. He is a magical instrumentality, a mask used in a collective ritual. This metamorphic ritual may deal only with a narrowly defined racial-cultural situation at the very close of a small cycle of which the avataric being is the mutating seed; or it may refer to a large evolutionary cycle. Thus there are avataric beings of several levels. The difficulty in determining the level of any one of them is that the beginning of even a small cycle may coincide with that of one or several larger ones. The line of transmission of power may reach much farther toward the galactic center, symbol of our cosmic God or Logos, than would seem to be in the case considering the character of the mask — the personal instrumentality, the ritualistic officiant.
What it is essential to understand is that the true character of the avataric being resides not in himself as an individual person, but in the quality of his acts or his creations. He actually is the enactment of a quality. He lives in the act he performs, in the message he reveals. He was born for that purpose, and in many cases his life is a sacrifice, simply because it is not really "his" life. This does not mean that he should be considered a medium in the usual sense of the term. One could perhaps speak of him as a "mediator." He performs "trans-actions" between a cosmic or divine Source of power and those who need the release of that power to be able to become more than they are. He is as much conscious of the purpose of the performance as his personal biopsychic organism is capable of clearly responding to the consciousness and intent of the source and the nature of the power released through him; and the higher the evolved condition of his biological ancestry and of the collectivity to which he has to address himself according to the pattern of his destiny, the greater and more precise his consciousness of the purpose he is fulfilling. Yet if there is consciousness it is consciousness revealed in the act and through the performance.
The terms clairvoyance and clairaudience today are commonly used. One should also speak of "clairthinking" and "clairacting" when one refers to a quality of thinking and acting which implies far more than what is usually meant by thinking and acting. In clairthinking there is very little, if any, cogitative activity; and therefore an occultist like Sri Aurobindo, or an inspired philosopher-scientist like Teilhard de Chardin, have stressed the superiority of a certain kind of internal "seeing" over the rationalizing processes of analytical and conceptual brain-thinking. What appears to be a "seeing" is rather an immediate identification of the mind with an idea of a cosmic principle upon which a spotlight of certainty is focused. Likewise "clairacting" refers to a performance the inevitability of which is evident as the will-to-act mobilizes the required organs of action. What we call instinct in the animal kingdom is clairacting at the level of a generic, nonself-conscious consciousness. But in the avataric personage consciousness pervades the act; even if it does not precede it. A truly avataric action is not deliberative. It is spontaneous; but the source of the act is beyond the personality and its ego-consciousness. The act is transpersonal because the power it releases uses the person as a lens to focus the release.
By permission of Leyla Rudhyar Hill
Copyright © 1975 by Dane Rudhyar
All Rights Reserved.
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