In the last presentation, we talked about laying the foundation of good character and intelligent activity and promised to reveal what the higher processes are that must occur for the monads to move their game to the next level.
You can have intelligent activity but what comes next? Knowledge and wisdom must be superseded by intuitive understanding. Let us remind ourselves that knowledge by itself amounts to nothing until it is activated by experience. It is from here that the monad gains wisdom. Reading a textbook about childbirth is one thing, experiencing it is a completely different matter. Intuition is a process by which causal ideas are made manifest in mental substance and from here brought into activity. It is not the bright ideas of humanity that are made manifest. The monad seeks to participate, inclusively, in the creative activity of the governing forces that guide all of the evolution on our planet. Some would call this force divinity. Talking about the Divine Plan enacted through the Hierarchy is how this Divinity expresses itself. The Plan is an idea and it has to become a comprehended ideal, which must then be unfolded and manifest into substance upon the physical plane. The term “unfolded” is appropriate if you think of a causal idea as a geometric shape. This shape is folded upon itself and has to be unravelled to produce a linear stream of data that is capable of being interpreted by the mental envelope. All this activity is linked to the Creative Thread, which is now slowly becoming active and functional.
Following the theme of successive petals, spiralling around a causal lotus, the next set of petals link to desire and love. Remember the designation of World 46 as one to Unity. So, desire-love in its higher aspect is one of divine attraction. Achieving this involves the right use, or even misuse, of energies and forces. This process of evolution puts the disciple in touch with ever greater circles of group consciousness. Some would call this the magnetic development of the monad’s nature. Another way of thinking of magnetism is “consciousness”. Where does this all lead? It leads to intuition, realisation and identification, which just happen to be the three stages of initiation.
Those three threads we have been talking about, the Consciousness Thread, the Creative Thread and the Life Thread, slowly become fully aware and participate in the Divine Plan. The two motivating factors of this plan are love, which is intelligently carried into activity.
We now come to the Will petal of the causal lotus. Here we speak of Will and Direction. You do not get to this point unless you understand and activate knowledge-wisdom and desire-love, first. This orientates the persona towards the soul, blends these two envelopes into one structure and now focuses the monad’s gaze upon the Spirit (3rd) triad. This orientation achieved, these three energies can be used to build the Antahkarana upon the Mental Plane. The monad finally has control of the substance that builds the connection.
In achieving this, the monad goes from being a probationer, where it is aspiring and is devoted to achieving its goal, to being a disciple that has focused its will and is now walking the Path. A major change that the disciple’s focus in life is from one of perceiving life through desire and its quality to one of force and energy. The use of spiritual will is something that needs to be focused upon more by disciples today.
We have been discussing The Science of the Antahkarana. It has a lower correspondence, which is the Science of Social Evolution. This lower correspondence can be thought of as the united Antahkarana of the whole of Humanity. This in turn will come to be known as the Science of Invocation and Evocation. To clarify, invocation involves summoning energies from without. Evocation involves generating energies from within and projecting them out. Esoterics also refers to this process as the Science of Magnetic Rapport, in which the right relationship between people and ideas, is brought about by mutual invocation. This leads to a responsive process, which is one of evocation. Think of all the Light Workers meditating for world peace. There you see this process in action. This activity should not be overlooked, as it is what lies behind the conscious awakening of all the centres in a disciple and the relationships between them. Magnetic rapport is the relationship between one monad to another and from one group to another. This eventually leads to relationships between whole nations. The bottom line is that invocation, leading to subsequent evocation allows the persona to relate to the soul and the soul to the monad. This is what we are here to achieve and we do this by appealing to the higher levels of consciousness that watch over us, whether it be the Hierarchy, the Planetary Government or the Cosmos beyond. If we, as Humanity, send out a call through invocation, it will be answered. The science behind this invocative process is one of sound. This is why through millennia, people have chanted the “OM”. The knowledge of this process is beyond the Science of the Antahkarana and is not discussed further.
In esoteric teachings, the term “alignment” is used a lot. The Antahkarana is an agent of this alignment. The first thing an aspirant comes to realise is that alignment is only the first stage. We start by thinking of ourselves simply as a persona. This is all we think we are. Gradually, we come to realise that we have a soul as well. We then see life as being dual in nature. There are stages a monad goes through, the first is triplicity. This is how you recognise the aspirant, divided between their three envelopes on the 1st triad. This can be represented by three dots. The disciple, by comparison, recognises duality and this is represented by a circle with a vertical line drawn through it,⦶. The initiate is represented by a circle with no line, as unity has been achieved, ⃝. Initially, when the aspirant comes to realise the duality of the persona and the soul, it is repented as a circle with a horizontal line, ⦵. This is because the higher and lower natures are separated at the moment. It is the disciple that is depicted as a circle with a vertical line, ⦶. The line here represents the path across the divide, also known as the “razor-sharp path”. It is the path between the pairs of opposites, which goes on to form the Antahkarana. Now you know when you see these symbols in exoteric treatises, what they are getting at.
The divisions we are speaking about here, the duality found in life, only applies as far as the Mental Plane. Beyond that, when the (i3) is taken, the pairs of opposites are no longer felt. In fact, they do not exist. This newfound unrestricted awareness only extends as far as the mental body of the Planetary Logos, in whom we dwell. This is a ring-pass-not that gives us the freedom to move within it, but not past it. Think about this the next time you get on a spaceship bound for Saturn. The symbol of a circle with a vertical line, ⦶, is the true symbol of alignment. It shows duality but shows there is a way through the “walls of limitation”.
It is useful for a student of esoterics to think about the Science of the Antahkarana, as an extension of consciousness. It is just the start of a long journey on the Path to bring about monadic influence and finally direct monadic contact. This direct connection with the monad on the 43:1 plane is analogous to an inflow of forces that started to occur at the beginning of the 20th Century when Shamballa turned on the 1st Ray and things started to “heat up” more than usual. There is now a direct link between the highest energy centre of our planet and Humanity as a whole. This connection is not going through the Hierarchy. It is direct. This has benefits when it comes to constructing the Antahkarana. Tenuous threads of living energy start to connect the threefold persona, with the 3rd triad. As a result, there is an inflow of Will-energy. Is this a good thing? Only if this energy is balanced by love energy flowing in from the soul. I think we can agree this balance was not met at all in the 20th Century and it shows no sign of improvement, at present, for Humanity in general.
In the next presentation, we will go on to look at how the Hierarchy is struggling to offset the powerful influences unleashed by the premature arrival of 1st Ray energy on our planet.