In the previous presentation, we completed the look at how consciousness develops in the three envelopes of humanity as it passes through the 4th Kingdom. There are two more kingdoms within the Solar System that serve as training grounds for monads before they begin their journey into the next cosmic kingdom. The next kingdom is the Cosmic Emotional Kingdom.
Unity Consciousness
When the human monad completes its journey through the 4th Kingdom of Nature, it is ready to migrate to the next plane of consciousness. To achieve this the monad has to develop what is known as Unity Consciousness. This involves the transfer of the focus of the monad from the 47:1 atom of the 2nd triad, to the 46:1 atom in the Unity body.
I mentioned earlier that a monad is able to develop subjective consciousness half a plane ahead from where it is objectively conscious. The reason for this is that this provides the impetus for the monad to evolve. To put it simply, if you can see it in your mind’s eye, you at least know where you are going. For this reason, Subjective Unity Consciousness develops at the causal stage of the monad’s development. Transferring the focus of the monad to the 46:1 atom makes that subjective consciousness, objective. The acquisition of this consciousness marks the entry of the monad into what is known as the 5th Kingdom. The Bible refers to this as the ‘New Jerusalem’. The monad is usually still present in human form, inhabiting its three envelopes of incarnation before the transfer. When this event occurs a human is said to have ‘graduated’ from the Human Kingdom.
Casual consciousness can merge its consciousness with external objects and other beings. When the monad reaches the stage of Unity consciousness, there are no external objects! Ponder that thought for a while and try to imagine what that really means and the implications that flow from it. Everything within a monads sphere of consciousness becomes part of their consciousness. This quite literally means other beings as well. This is why Unity consciousness is referred to as Group consciousness. However, I need to make a few clarifications. You may have reached this illustrious stage in your development where you merge into group consciousness. However, this does not mean you lose your individuality.
Group-Soul vs Soul-Group
We have previously talked about animals, plants and minerals having a group-soul. This is because they have not individualised yet. You, having passed through the human kingdom, have achieved that milestone. Remember though, you are a monad. That is the smallest indivisible unit of matter, motion and consciousness in the Universe. You are not going to disappear into some super-consciousness and lose yourself. What you have done is gone from a group-soul in the lower kingdoms of nature, to a soul-group. A group of individual souls that choose to pool their collective consciousnesses. This is a very different proposition from being in a group-soul.
In the eastern mystic traditions, there is a state known as Nirvana. This was reached by the mystic while their monad was still focused through their emotional atom. In fact, their consciousness had only risen as far as the 48:3 sub-plane. Through their meditative endeavours, they were able to subjectively enter the lower levels of the 5th Kingdom and experience the bliss of this soul-group consciousness. They assumed this uniting with other monads somehow dissolved them into an amorphous mass. They quite literally lost themselves in the experience and came back to report that this was the final goal of evolution. That was it! You dissolved into super-consciousness and lost your identity. As they were only polarised in their emotional bodies, they did not have the knowledge that you have now. You know there are another 45 planes of consciousness above the 46th plane. The experiences they were having may have been marvellous. They were not however at the end of the chain. I bring this to your attention so that you realise that when eastern philosophy speaks of Nirvana, this is where Hylozoics places it on the 49 planes of matter.
Individualisation
So the upshot of all of this is that you may have become part of a soul-group but you are very much still an individual. You just see the advantages of sharing your own consciousness with those of other monads that are vibrating at your own particular frequency. It is important to also stress that the monad is always an individual. I myself talk about the individualisation of the monad. This occurs when it goes from the group consciousness of the three lower kingdoms of nature, into the 4th kingdom. The truth is that the monad was always an individual, even when it was is the group-soul. What it was attempting to do while being in the protection of the group-soul, was to speed up its consciousness development. This is better done in a group and the group affords the monad a degree of safety. So, if the term ‘individualisation’ is not technically correct, what should we call the transfer from the 3rd to the 4th kingdom? The correct term is ‘causalization’, as this is what is technically happening. The monad obtains a causal sheath from a solar deva, known as an Augoeides to the Greeks. This allows it to store its memories and in this way further expand its consciousness by acquiring wisdom from the knowledge it gains. The human monad, over five phases of development, becomes truly self-aware for the first time.
Love & Wisdom
Unity consciousness is often referred to as the union of love and wisdom. Wisdom is an all-encompassing and multi-faceted perception of your environment. Love is the sense of inseparability from the collective, which is the body of monads within the ‘mind of God’. Here I am talking about the Absolute. However, esotericists usually scale this down to a more manageable scale and talk about the collective that is our planetary logos or on a larger scale, the solar logos. Remember, these two names apply to a collective of beings, not just one individual. Having said that, there is one monad that guides the collective. The Theosophical movement emphasised the individual at the expense of the collective. This may be rooted in our propensity to see deity in all its manifestations as a singularity, rather than a multiplicity. “Our Father who art in heaven” rather than “our Fathers who art in heaven”.
Cause & Effect
It is said that when you reach the plane of consciousness known as the Unity or 5th Kingdom, past, present and the future co-exist in the eternal present and as such are perceived simultaneously. You are now able to accurately see the future, as cause and effect are known. This sounds great in theory but in practice, it is a little bit more complicated than that. What happens if a variable is introduced into the equation that you were not aware of? You would not have perceived all the causes and so you are no longer able to predict the effects. So let’s just say that you may have a reasonably good idea of what is to come going forward, but you are also aware that things may not exactly turn out exactly as you expected. Our guardian angels are actually monads that have, at least, reached the level of Unity consciousness. This is why they are able to plan our incarnations. They are able to maximise the potential outcomes we may achieve in any particular visit back to material existence on the planet. However, I am sure you are well aware of our own stunning capacity to confound the best planning and intention of any entity that thinks it actually knows what we are going to do!
Spiritual Consciousness
In our discussions of the human kingdom, I said that a monad at this level of its development possessed three envelopes of incarnation. These included the physical/etheric body as one unit, then the emotional and finally the mental body. When these three bodies are placed on the 1st triad we noticed that part of the mental body was in fact located on the 2nd triad. This could lead one to assume that the causal body is not only on a higher triad but also on a higher plane. It is not. It is still on the 3rd plane of matter, it is just that it functions at a higher level of consciousness within that plane. So the mental plane is the 3rd plane. The Unity plane is the 4th plane. I wish now to talk about the 5th plane. This is known as the Spiritual plane and like the mental plane is split between two triads.
The first thing I want to say about spiritual consciousness is that it is almost impossible to comprehend. That is not a very good start to any discussion! What we can postulate is that as a monad expands its collective consciousness, its perception of its environment changes in ways we can not really understand. How does a single monad fit into a collective consciousness? One way to think of it is to imagine that members of a collectively conscious body are co-owners of that common consciousness. However, as I have said before, you are not lost in a sea of bliss. You have a special role to play within that body. You have had experiences that no other monad in the universe has had. You bring those experiences to the group consciousness. So the type of role played by the monad in question would be dependent on its interests, qualities, experiences and deficiencies. Yes even at these exalted levels there are deficiencies in monads. What is imported to note is that the role played by the monad is always directly or indirectly linked to helping other monads.
Shiva, Vishnu & Brahma
I have mentioned in a previous presentation that the universe is a training ground for potential gods and that our Absolute is the master trainer. So whatever developmental path a monad decides to tread, it is on an apprenticeship scheme. Getting back to our spiritual collective, it is not just composed of ex-humans. I have already mentioned that there are seven evolutionary streams in our Solar system, of which the human is just one. I also pointed out that we only know of one other at the present time; the devas. However, at these higher evolutionary states, knowledge of and indeed cooperation with these others stream is now the order of the day.
I have mentioned that we only know of one other stream of life other than our own. However, esoterics talks about a group of monads called the Nirmanakayas. Are they devas? Are they something completely different? I don’t know. They are said to specialise in the use of energy, in the same way, we, as humans, specialise on the development of consciousness. The devas specialise on transforming matter. We have talked about this tripartite arrangement before and called it Shiva, the Father, Vishnu, the Son and Brahma the Mother or Hoy Spirit.
5th Plane
On all 49 planes of existence, you find matter. What differs as you ascend the ladder of matter, is that the planes become more subtle. This means that the consciousness associated with this matter is also more refined. This you can see with Unity consciousness. While we were trapped in our own mental/causal envelope, matter seemed to be the most important aspect in our lives. When we transfer to the 5th kingdom we find that our consciousness need not be trapped within a single envelope but can be shared with a group of other monads. Guess what happens next? The monad migrates to the 5th plane of matter, the Spiritual Kingdom and suddenly the Will/Energy aspect, also known as motion, is liberated in a way that we can not comprehend yet. All I can say is that if the mystics were tripping out when they got to experience ‘nirvana’ on the 4th plane of matter, could you imagine what they would be reporting back if they got to the 5th plane?
Nirvana
Let’s get back to this term nirvana. You can clearly see I have an issue with it. What does this word actually mean? Well, like any Sanskrit word, too many things. I am going to equate nirvana with extinction. Using this term, the mystics assumed that you somehow extinguished yourself when you got to the 4th plane of consciousness. I am going to define nirvana as a state of blissful sleep that a monad rests in, between periods of activity. Between incarnations, humans sleep in their casual bodies. They do not go there immediately, but most end up there eventually, before starting the reassembly of their lower three bodies. This they do before they commence their next incarnation. This is the subject of another presentation. So in the causal envelope, you have a body that is capable of supporting the monad between its active phases. It can do this because the guardian angel has provided it with its own causal body to rest in. The Protogonas is our second guardian angel. I have already mentioned this illustrious being, also known as the ‘First Born’. This highly evolved deva provides a similar service to our evolving monad in a greater cycle of incarnation. I mentioned earlier that once you reach casual consciousness and the monad is centred in the 47:1 atom, you have continuity of consciousness. Technically continuity of consciousness is reached when the monad focuses its attention on the lowest molecule in the causal body. You do not now go to sleep between lives and can continue your education and service actives between incarnations. However, there are greater cycles of existence where our planet itself goes into a state of suspended animation. This it does before beginning a new cycle of growth. I do not wish to go into this process in any greater detail. I just wish to flag that it happens and it is our Protogonos that shelters our monad in its spirit body at this time.
This is as far as I wish to go with the planes of existence within our solar system and our potential evolution through them. Clearly, we have quite enough to contend with just being human. We are trying to cope with the conscious aspects of our current three bodies of incarnation. In the next presentation, I wish to look at consciousness as it pertains to our daily existence.