THE COMPLETE COSMOS
THE COMPLETE COSMOS
Peter Ouspensky observed that Man is an incomplete being. How is this possible? We’re born with a complete instinctive center. Give or take between five and eight years, the moving center is well past rudimentary development. The intellect requires a little longer, but eventually it develops into a tool that allows us to discern. The emotional center is also active at birth. I know from my own experience with my son that children are, if not more so than many adults, emotionally perceptive from a very young age.
From the perspective of the evolution of consciousness however, ‘incomplete’ is an exact description of our being. As well as the four lower centers, there are two higher centers that, although innate, are undeveloped. Almost all mankind (think eight billion) lives benighted in relation to their higher centers which, Ouspensky rightly calls, our birthright. The Stoic Epictetus bluntly states “You carry a God within you, poor wretch, and know nothing of it.” Rainer Maria Rilke, a twentieth century poet, poignantly observed how individuals possess the opportunity to realize their highest possibilities, but miss it with tragic ignorance. “Those who live this secret falsely and badly….lose it only for themselves and still hand it on unconsciously like a closed letter.”
We each are a microcosmos, albeit incomplete, that contains the coarsest and finest materiality. Self-remembering is the beginning of bringing this fine materiality, or in Fourth Way nomenclature, fine hydrogens, into our being. This is possible because, as Epictetus observed, within us, we already possess some of the hydrogens needed for conscious evolution. As well as attracting more of them, we also need to stop these hydrogens leaking by refraining from expressing negative emotions, not indulging in imagination, and so on and so forth.
For the individual who consistently practices the non-expression of negative emotions, self-remembering and transformation of suffering, higher emotional and higher intellectual centers lock permanently together in the mystical marriage of crystallization.
Looking more deeply into Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, we see a man encapsulated by a circle and a square. These two geometric shapes occur in many esoteric traditions, and almost always, represent higher centers. It is therefore entirely possible that we may interpret this image as the permanent crystallization of higher centers within an individual. He has become a complete immortal cosmos in accordance with the principles of the Divine.
Ones’s Self I sing—a simple, separate Person….form’d, under the laws divine.
~Walt Whitman
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