Book Club Post

The Cosmic Doctrine: The Evolution of the Divine Sparks

This week we continue a monthly discussion of The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune, which I consider the most important work of 20th century occult philosophy. Climb in and fasten your seat belts; it’s turning out to be as wild a ride as I expected. If you’re just joining us now, please go back and read the previous commentaries, which are listed here; the material covered in these earlier posts is essential to making sense of what follows.

As noted in earlier posts, there are two widely available editions of The Cosmic Doctrine, the revised edition first published in 1956 and the Millennium Edition first published in 1995, which reprints the original privately printed edition of 1949. You can use either one for the discussions that follow. The text varies somewhat between the two editions, but the concepts and images are the same, and I’ll be referring to both.

Assigned Reading:

Revised Edition:  Chapter 13, “The Evolution of the Divine Sparks,” pp. 59-64.

Millennium Edition: Chapter 14, “The Seed Atom Building a Seventh Plane Body,” pp. 82-89.

Commentary:

In the last several chapters, Fortune has discussed the emergence of the raw materials of a solar system and their organization into a swarm of individual beings, each of them composed of three parts: a seed-atom that began as one of the traveling atoms of the solar system, a shell of seventh-plane atoms that gather around the seed-atom and form the first and simplest kind of body, and a set of tracks in space marked out by the rhythms of the Solar Logos, which form the first and simplest kind of mind.

There are also vast numbers of atoms not yet organized into individual beings, circling the Solar Logos like clouds of dust around a newborn sun. That’s the image Fortune wants you to think of. because her grand metaphor draws extensively on the astrophysics of her time. If you keep in mind accounts of the solar system’s origin from popular scientific literature, you’ll have an easier time following along with the material in this chapter.

The individual beings, though, are the ones who matter just now. The seed-atom and its shell of seventh-plane atoms go through their various changes and gradually settle down into a stable rhythm. The tracks in space are another matter. From here on, Fortune calls these the Divine Sparks, as they are reflections of the Solar Logos’ own consciousness—in terms of the metaphor, patterns of movement that echo the movements of the Logos. The Divine Sparks don’t settle down to a stable rhythm, because they’re constantly being influenced by three sets of movements from outside themselves. First, each Divine Spark is pulled this way and that by the movements of the seed-atom to which it is connected; second, each Divine Spark is jostled by all the other Divine Sparks in its swarm; third, each Divine Spark is constantly influenced by the Solar Logos itself.

So the Divine Sparks remain nimble and capable of learning, and what starts out as a random jostling of one Divine Spark by another gradually settles into something far more complex: a reflection of the Solar Logos made up of all the individual beings that have come into existence, held in balance by their Divine Sparks. Think of it as a spherical mass of atoms—a planet—orbiting the Solar Logos in the seventh plane. As the Divine Sparks and their atoms interact, they establish a rhythm and form a set of tracks in space, which—since movement is consciousness—becomes the collective consciousness of the newborn planet.

Dion Fortune engages in another bit of trickery here, and those readers who know their way around geometry, sacred or otherwise, will doubtless have caught it already. The symbol of the Solar Logos is a sphere, she notes, and the number of primary manifestation is three; therefore the symbol of the first satellite is a three-sided pyramid in a sphere. She might as well have said a three-sided pentagram or a three-sided sphere, since there are of course no three-sided pyramids; the pyramidal figure with the smallest number of sides is a tetrahedron, which has four sides. (Did you forget to count the bottom?)

Again, as long as you remember that all this is metaphor, you’re fine. For practical purposes, the symbol of the first satellite is a circle surrounding a triangle; just keep in mind that the circle represents a sphere, and the triangle represents a threefold pattern in space. There’s a hint here for those who are ready to take it, since the triangle, the number three, and all other ternary symbols are traditionally linked to the planet Saturn, the Lord of Form, and in the Rosicrucian philosophy that forms the usually unstated basis for the Cosmic Doctrine, the first great cycle of the creative process, and the first of the seven globes in each cycle, corresponds in a symbolic sense to Saturn.

So we have the first satellite orbiting the Solar Logos. The Solar Logos is aware of it, and each of the Divine Sparks is aware, in a much more limited degree, of the Solar Logos. The collective consciousness of the planet—the Planetary Spirit, as Fortune will call it in the next chapter*—is not aware of the Solar Logos, but it is aware that the Divine Sparks are aware of something that it cannot perceive itself. It knows itself and the conditions of its existence, and it knows the atoms whose motions in space have brought it into being; as the Divine Sparks are influenced by the Solar Logos and change accordingly, it learns indirectly of the Solar Logos that conditions them.

(*Fortune had trouble making up her mind about what to call this entity. In the first published version, and thus in the Millennium Edition, it was the Planetary Spirit; in the revised version, it was the Planetary Being. I prefer Planetary Spirit, as this is the term used in other occult literature, and so that’s the label we’ll be using here.)

As the consciousness of the Divine Sparks becomes more and more coordinated, the Planetary Spirit gets a clearer and clearer understanding of the Logos as reflected through the minds of the Sparks, and so it achieves an awareness of the Solar Logos. Meanwhile, the Solar Logos has something new to think about; the experiences of the atoms and Divine Sparks on the first satellite are new to the Logos, and it turns inward, contemplating these, until it has absorbed those experiences and integrated them into its understanding of things. While that happens, the Divine Sparks keep doing what they were doing, and the Planetary Spirit keeps doing what it was doing, and the resulting repeated movements build up tracks in space that form an enduring template for the first satellite.

Then the Solar Logos finishes its contemplations and turns its attention back to the solar system. Its dance has changed, the dances of the Divine Sparks change accordingly, the pattern of balanced stresses that holds the first satellite together breaks up, and so does the first satellite. All the individuals that composed it go spinning away into the great dust cloud of atomic matter that surrounds the Solar Logos, and a cycle of involution comes to its end.

Two things happen thereafter, though. The first is that the individual beings, having absorbed the possibility of integrating themselves as a planet, do the same thing again. Since they’ve worked through all the possibilities of their seventh plane bodies, they have enough (metaphoric) mass to attract atoms of the sixth plane, and so they add a shell of sixth plane atoms to the seventh plane body they already have. They proceed to form a new satellite on the sixth plane, and work through all the changes there that they worked through on the seventh, gradually evolving a collective consciousness that becomes a new Planetary Spirit.

At the same time, the Planetary Spirit of the first satellite didn’t go anywhere; it remains, an intricate pattern of tracks in space just waiting for atoms to fill it. There are plenty of seventh plane atoms drifting around aimlessly, and over time enough of them get drawn into the tracks in space of the Planetary Spirit that a new planet is born.

These atoms, though, have a conditioning influence the first swarm of traveling atoms didn’t have. The Planetary Spirit absorbed all the influences of the traveling atoms, was conscious of their consciousness, and gradually reached the point at which it could contemplate the Solar Logos as it was reflected in the Divine Sparks. Its rhythmic dance thus includes all the capacities of the first swarm of seed-atoms, including their ability to gather a seventh-plane body and the pattern of tracks in space that linked them to the Solar Logos. The atoms gathered by the Planetary Spirit accordingly pick up all these capacities, and become individual beings with Divine Sparks and seventh-plane bodies. Thus the traveling atoms of the first swarm are the makers of the Planetary Spirit, but the Planetary Spirit is the mother of each of the subsequent swarms.

The whole process then repeats. The Divine Sparks of the first swarm, on the new planet of the sixth plane, integrate themselves to the point that the new Planetary Spirit can experience the Solar Logos through them; the Divine Sparks of the second swarm go through their own changes on the first planet under the guidance of its Planetary Spirit; the Solar Logos retreats into contemplation, absorbing all the new experiences of the atoms of the first two swarms; then it turns its attention outward again, and the two planets dissolve.

The first swarm then moves out to the fifth plane, and begins building a new planet there.  The second swarm moves to the sixth plane, becomes part of a planet there, and gets to work building its own sixth plane bodies under the guidance of the second Planetary Spirit.  Meanwhile, another batch of seventh plane atoms gets swept up into the embrace of the first Planetary Spirit, which teaches them to build seventh plane bodies and endows them with Divine Sparks.

The process continues, until there are seven planets revolving around the Solar Logos, each one with its own Planetary Spirit, each one inhabited by individual beings who have a number of bodies appropriate to the plane they have reached. The process doesn’t end there, but what happens when all seven planets are in existence will be the subject of a later chapter.

(It’s probably worth putting in a caution here, because many readers who reach this chapter jump to the conclusion that since the Earth is the third planet from the Sun in our solar system, it must be the third planet to be created in the process we’re discussing, and thus exists on the fifth plane. Not so; as will be explained later on, the Earth, being a planet of physical matter, exists on the first or material plane, like all the other planets we see with telescopes. How does that work? Ahem. “These images are not descriptive but symbolic, and are designed to train the mind, not to inform it.” The easiest way to misunderstand the Cos.Doc. is to take it too literally.)

Something else has been going on all this time, though, while the swarms have been taking shape and proceeding down the planets. Remember that the Solar Logos is aware of the Divine Sparks, just as they are (in a much more limited way) aware of the Logos. Every time a swarm of individual beings finishes its evolution on a planet, and the Solar Logos turns inward to contemplate the new experiences of that evolution, it integrates all those experiences into its consciousness—in the metaphor, it expresses them in the motions of its dance. As each swarm of atoms in the first planet acquires a Divine Spark, that Divine Spark moves in harmony with the dance of the Solar Logos at the time when it is formed.

As a result, each swarm of individual beings comes into existence on the seventh plane with all the lessons of its predecessors embodied in abstract form in its Divine Spark. The first swarm, composed of the traveling atoms of the solar system, does the heaviest of the heavy lifting in creating the planets; each of the next two swarms, as we’ll see, also has a particular task to take care of in the genesis of the solar system. The beings of these three swarms have names in each of the religious traditions Dion Fortune drew on in shaping her great metaphor. In the language of Jewish Cabala and Christian theology; they are identified with the hierarchies of the angels; in the language of traditional Pagan religion, they are called gods and goddesses. In the Rosicrucian philosophy that underlies the Cosmic Doctrine, they are called the Lords of Flame, the Lords of Form, and the Lords of Mind. We’ll be discussing them in much more detail in chapters to come.

Notes for Study:

As already noted, The Cosmic Doctrine is heavy going, especially for those who don’t have any previous exposure to occult philosophy. It’s useful to read through the assigned chapter once or twice, trying to get an overview, but after that take it a bit at a time. The best option for most people seems to be to set aside five or ten minutes a day during the month you spend on this chapter. During that daily session, take one short paragraph or half of a long one, read it closely, and think about what you’ve read, while picturing in your mind’s eye the image you’ve been given for that passage of text.

As you proceed through the chapter and its images, you’re likely to find yourself facing questions that the text doesn’t answer. Some of those are questions Fortune wants you to ask yourself, either because they’ll be answered later in the book or because they will encourage you to think in ways that will help you learn what the text has to say. It can be helpful to keep a notebook in which to write down such questions, as well as whatever thoughts and insights might come to you as you study the text.

Questions and comments can also be posted here for discussion. (I’d like to ask that only questions and comments relevant to The Cosmic Doctrine be posted here, to help keep things on topic.) We’ll go on to the next piece of the text on August 14.  Until then, have at it!

40 Comments

  1. John–

    I’m still working my way through the Theosophical literature (Ocean of Theosophy and The Divine Plan to start with–I haven’t even gotten to The Secret Doctrine yet), but the structure here seems reflective of the seven rounds and seven globes discussed by Judge and Barborka. I suppose this is not unexpected, given your discussion of DF’s theosophical background.

  2. David BTL, that sevenfold structure was standard all through late 19th and 20th century occultism, so you’re quite right — it’s not unexpected! Fortune had her original training in Theosophy — her Golden Dawn days were later — and her teacher Thomas Moriarty was very strongly influenced by Rosicrucian literature from America, especially The Secret Doctrine of the Rosicrucians by “Magus Incognito” and the writings of Max Heindel, all of which had a lot of secondhand Theosophy in it. As for Judge and Barborka, everyone read Judge, and Barborka’s The Divine Plan is the book that Theosophists in Seattle were recommending as an introduction back when I lived there, so they’re pretty much in the mainstream of the tradition.

    Whispers, you’re most welcome.

  3. In the first paragraph you lay out the 3 components of the individual beings, but a bit later you refer to the divine spark. What is the divine spark? Is it the same as the seed atom?

  4. After reading the most recent Magic Monday questions and answers, it was quite interesting to reach the end of the chapter and find Fortune saying “This is what is meant by involution.” It is also interesting to see how the turning of the ring cosmos and how it brings change by its revolutions is echoed in the periods of inward contemplation followed by new outward attention of the solar logos.

    Two other thoughts struck me on this first read through of the chapter. The first is how much further away from the origin of the cosmos each new entity or set of entities is, or looking another way, how when we contemplate or attempt to connect with other beings (say, the archangels in the cabala), how it brings us closer and closer as we trace our way back to the unmanifest, and that “first movement in space” (which I am still using as a meditation seed from time to time). The other thought balancing that, though, is even these divine sparks and the solar logos are seeing the unmanifest through a remove, and through their own particular experiences through the planes and their own contemplation and understanding. Each is a new manifestation of the original potential, and their own experiences and contemplation influence those that came before and those that will come after.

    Like the solar logos, we can contemplate these new ideas and then incorporate them as we re-engage with the world. We ourselves influence those already here as well as those who will come after us, while acknowledging those who have come before us and therefore prepared the way for us to understand this in our own limited way.

  5. Circumambulation has taken on a new meaning for me over the past few weeks. I have been contemplating the movement as creating a consciousness around a ritual and then dissolving it or sending it off somewhere by moving in the opposite direction after the work is complete. Now I am going to have a difficult time not envisioning multiple dimensions with little angels moving back and forth now and then to help out their little brothers. My concern at this point is not as much about taking the metaphor literally as much as modifying it into my own less helpful version. So many questions come to mind that I really want to skip ahead, but moving too fast would probably mean less of it would stick.

  6. Onething, no, as noted in the first few paragraphs, the tracks in space that form the first and simplest form of mind are what Fortune calls the Divine Sparks. “The tracks in space are another matter. From here on, Fortune calls these the Divine Sparks, as they are reflections of the Solar Logos’ own consciousness…”

    Cat, excellent. Exactly.

    Aloysius, just wait until we get a little further!

  7. “Ten is the Number of forces in manifestation for our universe…”

    When the number ten pops up in an esoteric context, the Tree of Life comes to mind. In Dion’s metaphor, if I understand it correctly, the Tree of Life seems to have been expressed as a series of nested spheres, or concentric circles. I’m sure I’ve seen somewhere a diagram of the Tree that looks like that, rather than the traditional more familiar shape with three pillars. Since each successive plane is symbolized by a figure of increasing facets, then each plane or sphere takes on an additional layer of complexity. It incorporates the ideas, rules or laws (archetypes – original forms or models) of all the planes above it, plus one more. At the very center of the nested spheres we would find Malkuth, the last of the Sephirah, the material world of the senses. Malkuth is the most complex, the end result of all the work or involution on the previous planes. So Malkuth is contained within Kether, and all the rest of the Sephiroth. An implication of this is that the material world is not somehow separate or set apart from the spiritual worlds but is in fact contained within it and derived from it. For us – we are not only material beings as we appear to the senses but are contained within a larger spiritual reality.

  8. Well now I see why JMG said over on Dreamwidth that Meher Baba sounds Rosicrucian! p.s. I was the one whom sent in the various quotes but forgot to log back into Dreamwidth so that post shows up as Anonymous.

    I now think everyone participating in the Cosmic Doctrine posts would very much enjoy Meher Baba’s God Speaks. Fortune lived from 1890 to 1946. Baba lived from 1894 to 1969. So I’m not surprised God Speaks sounds like a more dense, companion volume to The Cosmic Doctrine. There are differences between them of course but many similarities as well. The only difference I would mention is that since Baba’s students were primarily Hindus and Muslims so he uses terms familiar to those two groups but would most likely be unknown to most of JMGs readers. All terms used in the book are defined in the glossary in the back.

    BTW, I found a site that shows ALL of the various (some huge) fold-out charts and graphics that are plastered throughout Baba’s God Speaks

    Check out this: http://www.meherbabalibrary.com/babalist/list_v/list-v-session-notes-4g15.html

    Somebody took the time to scan and upload all of them to the web. I’m still busy reading the book and it’s very dense. Believe me…those fold-out charts and fold-out graphics are a huge help in trying to come to terms with what Baba is teaching. In fact, the final fold-out is actually a huge removable *poster* sitting in a pocket glued to the inside back cover with a separate booklet in it as well on the history of the making of God Speaks. It’s in the above weblink if you scroll down. It’s the one titled

    Mystic, Sufi and Vedantic Terms Related to the Planes of Consciousness as Used in God Speaks and it takes 5 scans to get the entire poster onto that webpage (not to mention all the other charts and graphics taken from the book).

    A lot of Fortune’s Cosmic Doctrine sounds like it’s right at home with what Baba is talking about although she goes into the subject in a (to me) far more accessible way.

    I for one will be eagerly awaiting JMG’s published companion book to Fortune’s Cosmic Doctrine and it’ll sit on my home library shelf next to God Speaks.

  9. Stefania, got it in one! Yes, exactly — the Tree of Life diagram with the ten circles in three pillars is only one way of conceptualizing the relation between the ten principles. Fortune is using another: the Solar Logos, which is threefold (like the Cosmos, it’s built along the plan of the Three Rings), and the seven planes, each with its planet.

    Happypandatao, that’s fascinating — thank you for this. Yes, those charts seem very familiar; it’s clear that spiritual teachers from the late 19th through the mid-20th century had a common vision that guided their work. You might be interested in comparing some of Meher Baba’s concepts to the Rosicrucian teachings in Rosicrucian Fundamentals by George Winslow Plummer or The Secret Doctrines of the Rosicrucians by the pseudonymous “Magus Incognito”; you can download the first of those as a free PDF here and the second is available online here.

  10. I suspect this has already been said, but I’ll say it anyway: Put into the context of Christianity, the seed-atom is God the Father, the shell is God the Son, and the tracks in space are the Holy Spirit. The Logos is the Word of God. God has seven archangels that relate to days of the week: Michael (Sunday), Gabriel (Monday), Raphael (Tuesday), Uriel (Wednesday), Selaphiel (Thursday), Raguel or Jegudiel (Friday), and Barachiel (Saturday).

  11. JMG
    Talking of tradition, I turned last night to Vaughan Hart’s ‘Art & Magic in the Court of the Stuarts’. An Inigo Jones’ drawing for a West Front of St Paul’s, London is represented within a circle containing an equilateral triangle. This and other examples are discussed within the hermetic tradition; citing Roy Strong and Rene Taylor, and discussion extends to (differing) versions of the design, including Philip II’s earlier Escorial monastery/palace in Spain and to traditions of Solomon’s Temple. (As I understand it Philip wanted to flag himself up as a latter-day King Solomon.) Which all, as I understand it, ties in with Masonic traditions.
    best
    Phil H

  12. A fascinating post as always John. I’m only lightly following the analysis as I don’t want to confuse matters with my progress on the OBOD course. It does occur to me, especially after reading Happypandatao’s comment, that in addition to doing a companion to the Cosmic Doctrine, there could be merit in producing a new occult work that is based on similar theory but is presented in terms and metaphors that are more accessible to the modern mind. Having said that, it’s possible that exactly what you have in mind with underlying purpose this blog!

  13. This book is so out there. If it weren’t for some clarity provided from these posts, I’d definitely have stopped reading. I’m still thoroughly confused. I thought us earth dwellers were hanging out in a solar system on the seventh plane within this framework of rings, planes, and rays that all began with pure movement in space. Now on that seventh plane, after some give and take between divine sparks, or tracks in space, there’s a satellite that corresponds to Saturn symbology, but the earth symbology is on the first plane. How did earth go from the seventh to the first? Or is that just the symbology and the seventh plane is reflected in the first?
    I’m also confused how the divine spark is the track itself. I was envisioning these tracks being form by seed atoms and that, through repetitive experiences, those tracks deepened, forming deep grooves. If the grooves are the tracks, and the tracks are the divine sparks, how do those divine sparks/grooves interact to form this stable satellite? What’s so divine about a track?

  14. Kimberly, yep. Remember that Dion Fortune was a devout if eccentric Christian; her book Mystical Meditations on the Collects presents her vision of esoteric Christianity in the context of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and her (still mostly unpublished) writings for the Guild of the Master Jesus, the specifically Christian end of her magical order, are very solidly based on Christian tradition and symbolism.

    Phil H, that’s a wonderful book! Yes, exactly; the roots of Freemasonry are all tangled up in that end of Renaissance occult thought, with the application of sacred geometry to architecture only one of the more obvious dimensions of that.

    Averagejoe, that’s a possibility I’ve been considering. It would be a helluva lot of work, but something of the sort needs to happen sooner or later.

    Mike, okay, first, it’s important to remember the difference between the Cosmic planes and the planes within a solar system. The traveling atom that became our Solar Logos settled down on the seventh Cosmic plane to create its solar system, and that solar system mirrors the Cosmos, so it also has seven planes — all of which are sub-planes of the seventh Cosmic plane. It’s like this:
    Seven Planes
    As for the Divine Sparks, what makes them divine is that they’re being influenced all the time by the Solar Logos, who is the god of this solar system. Remember that everything is a track in space — all that exists, as Fortune says in the first chapter, is space and motion — but there’s a difference between those tracks that have settled down into fixed patterns and those that can still be shaped by outside forces; we call the fixed tracks “matter” and the still flexible tracks “mind.”

  15. As I meditate through the Cos. Doc. (I’m finishing up with Chapter 7 now, so it should be at least a few months before I catch up to you), I keep coming back to the metaphor of movement in space, and to the idea of metaphor itself as training the mind rather than informing it.

    Regarding the former, in my continuing engagement with color breathing, within the past couple of weeks, as I have been re-reading Grade 2 of the DA, I have realized I made things harder than they had to be by the metaphor of the inside of my body that I chose. When I first started doing meditation in the AODA, I would imagine the inside of my body as having all its organs and such in it and that I was trying to push the color into it. Needless to say this did not work too well, but all the scientific training I’ve gone through had my mind pretty firmly trained into a metaphor of the human body that looked that way. After far too long of this, I then imagined the inside of my body as black and brought the color in a black space. Since I have specialized training in spectroscopy, black means no color so it should have been easier to bring the color in this way. Not really, as it turned out. It wasn’t till I re-read the lesson on color in Grade 2 that I remembered that in the DA metaphorical cosmos, black is a color too. *faceplant* Then the metaphor of space moving from the Cos. Doc. suggested envisioning the inside of myself as space, with the color outside as colored space, and breathing that colored space inside and out. Now that I can do! In other words, which metaphor I used determined what I could do with color breathing.

    In my last comment on the preceding Cos. Doc. post, I mentioned that modern science is just another metaphor: it trains our minds rather than informing them. If we didn’t think it was actually informing us, meaning we think it’s “true,” we’d probably be in less trouble than we are. When I train my mind to use the scientific metaphor, I can do certain things – but not everything. Using Fortune’s metaphors to train my mind, I can do certain things that I can’t do by science, and vice versa. Both train my mind – to different ends. Which metaphor is most helpful depends on what I am trying to accomplish, just as it does with color breathing.

  16. So in this framework, if I pray to, say, Aphrodite, am I interacting with the consciousness that’s made it all the way out to the first plane? Or am I interacting with the memory of that consciousness that’s stored within the Planetary Spirit? Or is something else going on that I have no concept of yet?

  17. To further help participants whom have been following The Cosmic Doctrine posts may I add some further commentary from some of my other teachers.

    One of those teachers is Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev. He said that as time and space curve inward everything moves toward the non-physical. This is where Science’s understanding breaks down because all instruments we’ve used to study black holes and all logic used to understand them are only extensions of our 5 senses – 6 senses actually when you include Mind itself as the sense that governs the other 5. As things move toward the non-physical Logic itself breaks down. Science, he said, has come to a place where it now recognizes the logic-using mind is hitting limits in its ability to explain things but due to strong societal taboos in STEM fields against being “illogical” they have resorted to calling it “Fuzzy Logic”. Sadhguru, “If something is fuzzy that means it’s no longer logical.”

    Certain places, objects and highly-evolved spiritual people have a much stronger connection to higher, non-physical planes of bliss, wisdom and power. If you circumnabulate those places or objects or people you are *literally riding the curve of Space-Time into subtler planes*. Hence why so many different spiritual traditions around the world have their adherents circumnabulating say…Tibetan Buddhist Stuppas, or Muslims circumnabulating the Kaaba (the Cube) in Mecca, or as some Hindus do…circumnabulating highly spiritually evolved beings like the Buddha’s students would do with him. It has to do with Physics.

    On a similar subject Sadhguru mentioned the Linga (notice how a Linga looks oddly similar to things discussed in The Cosmic Doctrine?).

    Western university professors have equated the Hindu linga with male genitalia but he say in Tantra that’s not what a linga means.

    It’s actually about Physics. Specifically that *any* form when it *first* becomes on the physical plane is shaped like an oval. When it moves toward the grossest level of the first non-physical plane the *last* shape it takes on the physical plane is once again an oval. Our physical plane likes curves – that’s what Time *is*. We only have time, Sadhguru said, because everything in Creation is cyclical. If this whole universe moved in a straight line there would be no such thing as Time and no such thing as memory. Everything would be completely brand new every moment (including ourselves). And the only reason there is Space is because of Time. And Time is…because of cycles.

    [Note: I include the following for Cosmic Doctrine readers but I leave it up to JMG for him to ok or not. I mention it because it discusses Time and human physical embodiment on the physical plane. If JMG deems it gone too far off-topic then I’ll resubmit it without the following.]

    One of Sadhguru’s students asked about Kalabhairava. Kala is Sanskrit for Time. Side note: Whenever Sadhguru talks about Shiva I’ve learned he’s *always* talking about the ineffible. Over and over and over he keeps reminding his audience that the sanskrit word Shi-va literally translates into english as “that which is not”. He’s NOT talking about a deity. I repeat, he’s not talking about a deity. It’s in reference to a dimension that is so far beyond anything ordinary humans can possibly know that the only way mystics, saints and yogis have ever been able to talk about it is by saying it is “that which is NOT”.

    Sadhguru replied: “Khalabhairava means The Dark One – the most fearsome form of Shiva (“that which is NOT”). Khalabhairava is a deadly form of Shiva. When he went into a destroying mode. Not of destroying this, destroying that. It’s about destroying Time. All physical realities exist within a span of time. If I destroy your Time – everything is over. Right now something in you is ticking – lub-dub-lub-dub. Everything is ticking. Suppose I fast forward everything. It’s all over. Most people don’t live in a great manner. But they at least want to die in a great manner. All these lousy people doing lousy things to each other. So Shiva took the form of a check. It’s called Bhairavi Yatna. That means when the moment of Death comes, for all that you have been, your whole many, multiple lifetimes plays out in a single moment with *great intensity* and whatever pleasures, sufferings and pains that need to happen to you will all happen right then. All of it will happen to you in a microsecond but with the kind of intensity which you can not hold.

    This is called Bhairavi Yatna. Yatna means ultimate suffering. It’s the kind of suffering you experience in Hell. He (that which is not) will make it happen to you here. When you have to do that kind of job you have to do it with the right kind of costume. So he dresses up terrifying. If he looked nice that would be evil. If you have to do something terrible to somebody while looking nice that would be very evil. So at least he looks right for the part. So that-which-is-not put on the right costume and became Khalabhairav to create Bhairavi Yatna for you. To create such phenomenal pain that you would not have imagined such suffering could be possible. But just for a moment – so that after that – nothing of the past remains in you. He is undoing all your software. All of it – he unravels in a moment. This happens at the moment of true death (ie. the kind of death you won’t come back from no matter what medical science attempts), you have no choice, you can’t run. But he makes it as brief as possible. Suffering has to end very quickly so he makes it super intense – only then will it end quickly. If he did the unraveling mildly the suffering would go on and on and on.

  18. SLClaire, excellent! Yes, exactly; our brains are six inches long, the universe is trillions of light years across, and so the best we can do is choose metaphors that enable us to do things we want to do.

    Cliff, we’ll get to that in a few more chapters!

    Happypandatao, fair enough. I think, though, that that’s a good amount of this material for this month; I want to make sure not to dilute the focus of this discussion too much.

  19. The Seven Archangels seem to correlate (to me, anyway) to the Seven Deadly Sins. The Ring Cosmos of each angel has an opposing force, a Ring Chaos, that I see as a sort of Christian qlippoth, or “evil” opposite shell. Since the seven angels correspond to the seven days of the week, here are some of the things I have come up with to denote their “good” and “evil” characteristics.

    Sunday: The Sun. Good side: cheerfulness, determination, happiness. Deadly Sin side: Pride. Egomania and bombastic proselytizing.

    Monday: Gabriel. The Moon. Good side: meditation, assessment, tranquility. Deadly Sin side: Envy. Lunacy and vanity.

    Tuesday: Raphael. Mars. Good side: bravery, valor, virility. Deadly Sin side: Wrath. Aggression and recklessness.

    Wednesday: Mercury. Good side: communication, swiftness, innovation. Deadly Sin side: Sloth. Prosthetic self-handicapping with technology.

    Thursday: Jupiter. Good side: generosity, joy, magnanimity. Deadly Sin side: Greed. Unlimited hunger and parsimony.

    Friday: Venus. Good side: romantic love, comfort, sweetness. Deadly Sin side: Lust. Sex and porn addiction, puerile obsessions.

    Saturday: Saturn. Good side: limits, grace, acceptance. Deadly Sin side: Gluttony. Consumer culture and hoarding.

  20. Just a mundane note. In my Millennial Edition, pages 82 to 89 are chapter 14, not chapter 13 as stated in this months commentary. Do I have the correct edition?

  21. It is interesting to apply these concepts of satellite evolution to our own personal cycles of reincarnation. Each cycle of incarnation I have passed through has left behind an archetypal form that gets reborn each reincarnation (repopulated with swarms of atoms). These reborn archetypal forms of my past lives would contain the consciousness of all my cycles of reincarnation, since “The new evolving atoms thus start where the old ended.”

    Since it seems we have not reached the point in the book where matter is added to the satellites, I am not sure if there are separate versions of me that will materialize on each plane I have incarnated on, or are all the individual archetypal forms of each of my past incarnations contained within my being (maybe both are true)?

    So if I, for example, am on my 4th cycle of incarnation, the person typing this could be only the reborn archetypal form of the 3rd incarnation living on the 5th plane. Thus, there would also exist two versions of me living on the 7th and 6th planes that feel what I feel, and a 4th plane version of me who’s past archetypal forms I am just following without being conscious of it. I may be too literal here, but it is fun to ponder how our many lives may be interacting in ways I have not thought of till given this new model of creation in the Cosmic Doctrine.

  22. This is a comment and question concerning your commentary on last month’s chapter, that I’ve been thinking about since then.

    You warned of the trap of thinking that atoms, and their tracks in space (making up e.g. minds and memories), are two different things. To avoid the trap:

    “Movement and space, between them, are all there is. Thus the distinction between objects and tracks in space is more apparent than real. Objects are tracks in space that, through repetition, have settled down into a stable condition. The tracks in space that still look like pure movement apart from objects are those that haven’t yet gone through all their changes.”

    No problem. Analogously, energy locked into repeating cycles, we call matter.

    “One important implication is that what is spirit, mind, consciousness today, if it sustains itself over time, becomes matter, substance, manifestation tomorrow. We explored that same point earlier in a different context, when talking about the difference between the Individuality (the part of the self that endures from life to life) and the personality evolved in each life. The point applies more generally, though. Understand it in its fullness and you grasp the necessity of repetition and rhythm in operative occultism.”

    All right. When a GM warns you of a trap, it usually means there’s another one right next to it. No one last month pushed back on this, probably sensing the trap and staying clear of it, but I’ve been trying to confront it. The push-back you might have been expecting would be something like this: no amount of repetition and rhythm in operative occultism, nor any human spirit, mind, or consciousness can, as far as we know, bring a single material atom into manifestation. (A lot of energy [in the material physics sense] can, in a particle accelerator or supernova, but that’s not the point; and of course the energy too must already exist.)

    By the repetitive action of stacking one brick upon another, I can bring a wall into existence, but you know (and you teach more clearly than anyone) that those bricks and the substance within them come from already existing matter. The laws of Limits, Cause and Effect, and the Planes concur.

    But, ah, planes… that’s talking, of course, about the material plane. Matter, substance, and manifestation on higher planes are a different story. Occult practice, making use of rhythm and repetition, becoming manifestation on the etheric, astral, mental, and higher planes—which then feeds back via our consciousness to affect our mental and possibly our material situations… that sounds like magic as DF and you define and practice it.

    This is typically understood as a kind of mutually influential resonance between patterns in time and space on the material plane, whether natural ones or ones we create through our actions, and the substance or entities of those higher planes. But there’s another metaphor (this is all metaphor; it’s really all One, all movements in space as it were) that seems to fit just as well: patterns in time and space on the material plane are the substance and entities of those higher planes.

    Does that make sense? Are my heartbeat and circadian rhythms and the Krebs cycles of chemical respiration in my cells, the planets’ orbits and tides and seasons and life cycles of living things, themselves matter on the etheric plane? Are our daily routines, the memories we accumulate, the stories we tell, themselves matter on the astral plane? Are the words and concepts we share, the models of the world we derive from experience, themselves matter on the mental plane? (This might seem limiting, “confining” the higher planes to coexist where there’s also material. But the vast variety of patterns we can perceive, from quantum fields to Mandelbrot fractals to the grain in stone to the intergalactic foam, points toward an infinity of other patterns beyond our perception or comprehension. And one can’t really make size comparisons between infinities.)

    This seems to work for me as an approach to visualizing, even if it’s just one of many. But is there some trap there?

  23. So by the time we show up on the 7th plane, there have been at least six rounds of divine sparks before us, the first three of which are gods who have gone on to form the rest of the six “planets”, since they’re all already in existence when we arrive? If so, are those other three groups after the gods and before us entities that have evolved past simple material bodies, maybe not having mental bodies on gwynfydd or something similar?

    I also notice that the original group of gods is first only indirectly aware of the solar logos through its effects on them and the planet. In that sense, it seems that we are only dimly aware (if at al) of a solar logos and the gods through what we see in the material world, and as we evolve, we begin to gain more immediate awareness on the other planes–astral, mental, eventually spiritual?

  24. The existence of multiple archetypal forms on the various planes while incarnated may explain where doppelgangers come from. -☺

  25. Are the Divine Sparks here still the not-quite-as-great Cosmic Atoms that traveled along with the Great Entity to the 7th Circle from the Cosmic perspective as mentioned back in Chapter 10? Or are these Divine Sparks different in that they are more of a mirrored-image of sorts contained within the Solar System perspective…, although the Solar equivalent of a Cosmic Divine Spark sounds more like a traveling seed-atom in this case… still trying to properly grok.

  26. Hi John Michael,

    Is it my imagination or am I detecting Dion Fortune’s Christian roots when you write that her metaphor suggests that: “Remember that the Solar Logos is aware of the Divine Sparks, just as they are (in a much more limited way) aware of the Logos”?

    I’m curious as to how such a metaphor works with the precepts of a series of aware but unconcerned entities?

    Fascinating stuff.

    Cheers

    Chris

  27. Now I’ve read your commentary to Chapter 8 (revised edition) and made a first reading of the chapter itself. Your commentary caused me to bring several threads together that I didn’t see mentioned in the Chapter 8 comments and that I would like to present for your comments.

    You have stated in a number of places in this and your other blog that you perceive people to be acting in some very strange ways, which is also my perception. You’ve suggested also that there might well be things going on at the level of the gods (or really any level above the level of humans) that have nothing whatsoever to do with humans but affect us nonetheless. Sort of like when I step on a bug I don’t even see; I didn’t know the bug existed and had no quarrel with it at all, but it’s just as dead as if I did.

    This same idea comes up in books 4 and 5 of the Weird of Hali, in which an ancient quarrel among the gods is at the root of Cthulhu’s current predicament and also contributes in part to the ability of the Radiance to commit their act of desecration and to its staying power. Humans had no part in the quarrel (they weren’t even being noticed at the time) and the Radiance’s hold has to do with human choice as well as the straits that Cthulhu’s plight puts the Old Ones into, but without the plight, the act of desecration could have been stopped. (Assuming I remember what I read correctly.)

    In your commentary on Chapter 8 you talk about positive evil as being something that happens when one of the Great Entities on a different plane blocks some of the influence of the Central Stillness that our solar system and thus the Earth would normally feel. When this happens discordant stresses are set up that cause atoms to flow either toward the blocking Great Entity (if they are of the same keynote as that Entity) or away from it (other atoms). As Fortune said earlier, this sort of thing can check evolution in a system; here she gives it a label, positive evil.

    You’ve also implied, if not stated directly (or if nothing else, I’ve inferred from all of this), that the strange things going on among us humans at this time might be in part related to a Great Entity blockage like this.

    I started to wonder if there is a way to tell if this kind of blockage is contributing to the strange things, and if so, on which plane it is occurring. It would seem to need to be something that can persist for many hundreds or thousands of years but that does have a beginning and an end within human history if it’s to be perceived. So I mulled over what kinds of things fit that definition. It seemed to me that one thing that might fit that definition would be the religious sensibility you wrote about in After Progress. In this work you alluded to three different religious sensibilities that are reflected in historical documents, one of which being the sensibility behind the religion of progress that had a beginning and is ongoing (and speculated on the possibility of a new religious sensibility beginning). The sensibility behind the religion of progress is based on the rejection of nature, history, and the human condition. It seems to me that by rejecting nature, history, and the human condition we are basically rejecting ourselves, which makes a good candidate for a kind of strange thing that could result from this sort of blockage. So I wondered if that could tell me something about the plane on which the Great Entity is (if it’s legitimate for me to push the metaphor this far).

    Then you wrote in the Chapter 8 commentary: “Positive evil thus takes its most extreme forms in the early phases of any evolutionary process, when the patterns of force that will eventually bring the whole system into balance haven’t yet become habituated.” I thought of a candidate for that which you have also discussed from time to time: the rational mind, which you’ve said is in its early evolutionary phase. You’ve described it as a rickety superstructure perched on top of older well-evolved strata such as what the DA course terms the nwyd and the bywyd. You’ve also said that continuing human evolution will work out the current kinks in the rational mind.

    So this idea of rejection of nature, history, and the human condition (a sin, in Fortune’s term) suggests that the plane on which mental processes exist could be affected by a mirror Cosmic plane with a blocking Great Entity on it. This suggests either the 3rd or the 4th Cosmic plane, with the latter being more likely since it’s metaphorically closer. The sensibility itself is emotional/intuitional in nature, but it gets worked on and expressed by the rickety rational mind, which is why I’m considering the blockage as being on one of the mental planes rather than on one of the astral planes which are closer still. But I could easily be persuaded otherwise since I’m still trying to understand how the planes manifest in our mental processes and emotions.

    Finally I get to the questions. First, do you see a possibility that a Great Entity blockage could be contributing to our strange thoughts/behavior? At first I wondered if it would matter, but then I realized that if so, the strangeness will have an end, because the blockage eventually ends. That’s a comfort even if it doesn’t end till long after I’m dead. If you do see this as a possibility, do you have an idea of what plane the Great Entity might be on and how it’s affecting us, whether or not it’s similar to the suggestion I made? And finally, does my analysis make any sense, or did I go wrong somewhere, and if so, where?

    Thanks for taking the time to thoughtfully read through and respond to all of the comments!

  28. In 1978 I was a freshman; I was going to be a physics major and an astronomer. I ended up taking a different path than this, but this journey through the Cosmic Doctrine and discussion of updating the metaphor for a new audience made me revisit the current big bang theory and think about ways it might diverge from the metaphor of the Cosmic Doctrine. I was struck by two things: first, that the Cosmic Doctrine still resonates so well as a metaphor, and secondly, despite much ballyhoo about how far we have advanced in our understanding, that the big bang theory and the evidence for it stands much as it did when I studied it in 1978; at best we have filled in a few gaps in understanding. I have spent time this week meditating on the implications if the big bang theory is correct in its assumptions and whether this contradicts the Cosmic Doctrine metaphor. This is just some of what has popped up.

    At the heart of the big bang is the “singularity”–the single point that we cannot go back beyond. Scientists admit we don’t know why it was there or the context in which it is embedded, because all the universe we see is contained within the original singularity that expanded; no instrument we have can see back to the singularity, and as we approach that moment, “physics as we know it does not apply” so we do not have the means to currently know it or what lies beyond it (Ring Pass Not). Discussions I’ve seen of the veils of negative existence bear an eerie resemblance to speaking of what is behind the singularity. At best quantum physics is trying to understand what made the singularity expand rather than what caused the singularity. So currently the best answer to why the singularity came into existence is “It was there”–or from the view of the singularity, “I am”. Even physics is looking at reflections of that event (the temperature of space, whether galaxies are speeding away from us, etc.) just as in this chapter there is talk about how there is something that we don’t see directly but we see evidence of it (such as the planetary spirit seeing evidence of the solar logos through the divine sparks).

    What really struck me is how emphatic some who accept the theory are that this singularity came from nothing and there is nothing behind it, when there is no direct evidence that this is true. The best scientists I read admit the shortfall of what they can explain with the theory while admitting that although it currently explains more observations they make and scientists have been able to make good predictions with the theory, there is a possibility that someday it still might someday be overturned.

    Which brings me to the contemplation of nothing. When I was young, I ended up needing emergency surgery so that I would not bleed to death. I remember them putting the anesthesia mask on me and the next memory I have is waking up in the hospital. It was as if the day between never happened for me. Just before the surgery, I had almost become a Benedictine nun, and decided not to just before this happened. That missing time in my mind made me eventually question my faith; I had trouble explaining to others that I felt I had touched non-existence, had touched nothingness, and I had a fear afterwards of contemplating nothing.

    One of the things the journey through the Cosmic Doctrine has made me realize is that I have to remember that I existed through that whole experience. Although my mind did not make any “tracks in space” that I can access for that time of surgery, at no time did I die or come close to dying. And while the experience made me contemplate atheism and agnosticism, in time I had to admit that the reflections all around me spoke of something bigger than me. And this journey through the Cosmic Doctrine reminds me that although there are many things I may never understand (is there non-existence? is there nothing?), I can contemplate them, acknowledge my lack of understanding, and release the fear I have of them.

  29. Kimberly, a classic analysis.

    Kay, you’re correct and the bit in the commentary is a typo. Thanks for catching it!

    Dan, your higher self or Individuality remembers all that you’ve learned in your previous incarnations; your lower self or Personality has the character you’ve acquired over the course of your previous incarnations, but not the memories. Does that clarify things a little?

    Walt, excellent! The term that’s used in occult writings is typically “substance” rather than “matter;” “matter” is the substance of the material realm, ether the substance of the etheric realm, the astral light the substance of the astral realm, and so on. Other than that, yes, exactly.

    Kyle, the swarms that followed the three primary swarms, but are ahead of us, are now rising back up the planes ahead of us. Occult lore gives them various names, but the point to keep in mind is that they’re intermediary between us and the three primary swarms. More about this as we proceed!

    Dan, that’s certainly one possibility.

    Matt, at this point everything we’re talking about is within the solar system, and the Cosmic atoms have faded from view. The Divine Sparks we’re talking about here are the patterns of movement that affect the seed atoms; the seed atoms themselves were created as patterns of movement by the Cosmic atoms.

    Chris, no doubt! Still, saying that the Solar Logos is aware of the Divine Sparks is not the same as saying that the Solar Logos is emotionally invested in the moment-by-moment behavior of the Divine Sparks…

    SLClaire, wow. That hadn’t occurred to me, but you know, you may very well be right. If there is such a blockage, caused by a Great Entity on another plane above ours, it would be on the third plane, the plane of the divine spirit. When a Great Entity comes between our solar system and the Central Stillness, as noted in Ch. 8, the atoms that belong to the plane of the intervening Great Entity are attracted toward that Great Entity, while the atoms of other planes tend to fly outward toward the Ring-Pass-Not. Look at the last 2000-odd years of religion and culture, and what you see is a mysticism that fixates on the spiritual essence of the individual (esoterically, the divine spirit) abandoning the world and flying up to some higher realm, while the life spirit (4th plane), the intellect (5th plane), the emotions and passions (6th plane) and the etheric and physical bodies (7th plane) have been constantly pulled toward wild disorganized extremes. We’ll know it’s passing off when the kind of mysticism that fixates on fleeing the world fades out in favor of one that sees being in the world as holy, and when the vehicles below the divine spirit become noticeably better behaved…

    Cat, fascinating. I don’t know enough about cosmology to have an informed opinion about the Big Bang, though it’s never passed the sniff test for me. As for the rest, glad to hear that this course of study is proving to be useful to you.

  30. Hi John Michael,

    That claim regarding emotional investment has always seemed a bit far fetched for my tastes.

    A lovely commenter on my blog (Hi Lewis!) provided a link to a thoughtful article, which more or less describes how climate scientists are going through the Kübler-Ross phases of grief. Viewed from that perspective the article is fascinating.

    The thing is, as divine sparks (as understood in the context that you’ve introduced to me in your essay), the people could forge a new path away from the grief, if only so that others can follow. It is there within them. But the earlier phases of denial, anger, bargaining and depression (which are all there to see in the article) seek solace in the comfortable and familiar, and also avoid the pain involved in introspection upon past decisions (and future desires too, for that matter).

    It comes back I feel to exercising the limited free will that you can muster up, or am I mistaken?

    The distinct burden of being a climate scientist

    Thanks again for prodding our thoughts!

    Cheers

    Chris

  31. @ SLClaire and JMG:

    Wow is right.

    The discussion about the possibility of a blockage by a Great Entity and it’s strange effects on the human race is fascinating and has some disturbing implications. If true, it would explain some things. I am reminded a little of CS Lewis’ Space Trilogy, in which the Earth is described as having come under the power of a demented Great Entity the Malacandrans call the Bent Oyarsa.

  32. Modern cosmology is quintessentially Faustian. First, there was nothing. Then, it began to expand. Then, the world happened. Then, it keeps on expanding, forever!

  33. @Chris at Fernglade: Anything I could write about that article would be wildly off topic, but it’s a fascinating read. Thanks for posting it.

  34. @ Just the usual Baboonery (and JMG) – I got chills when I read the response. The metaphor is more apt than I’d imagined, given the list of effects.

    I also had another thought concerning the possible blockage that is related to your comment. In the book A Wrinkle in Time and the other two books in that trilogy, the earth is shadowed by darkness, as if it’s being eclipsed, explaining the disturbing happenings in these books. That got me to thinking about the uneasiness that is associated with solar eclipses in the cultures I’ve heard about. In the spirit of Chapter 8, in which we are asked to imagine the consciousness of the Cosmos as it forms, I imagined how a blockage would look from the viewpoint of our solar system’s Great Entity. It would look like an eclipse of the Central Stillness. When this eclipse happens our Great Entity becomes conscious of a change in its background conditions, as Chapter 8 discusses. Atoms moves in weird ways; there are stretches and tensions that weren’t there before. I’d expect it to feel uncomfortable and uneasy, metaphorically. Though I haven’t read farther than Chapter 8, I’ll guess based on what I’ve read so far that because of correspondence, if the Great Entity is feeling uneasy when it’s eclipsed, we’re likely to feel uncomfortable when the part of the earth that we are on is eclipsed by the sun.

    I wonder if we can use the Cos Doc to learn ways to respond to a blockage that could ease its effects, if that’s what is happening.

  35. Chris, that’s correct. When fate and destiny are more or less balanced — or at least not pulling in the same direction — will plays the deciding role. Thanks for the article on climate scientists — I was pleased to note that there was at least a brief mention of lifestyle change, though driving a Prius and telecommuting is not an especially impressive shift…

    Baboonery, the difference is that there’s no malice involved in the Cosmic Doctrine scenario. Lewis’ “bent oyarsa” is his stand-in for Satan, while the Great Entity on the third plane who’s causing chaos here on the seventh has no intention of doing so, and is simply following the laws of its own orbital motion. What’s more, the influences of Great Entitles on higher planes are among the things causing our Solar Logos to grow and learn, and thus at second hand inspiring us to do the same thing. It’s just that the experience can suck…

    Will J, yes, and that’s one of the reasons that I suspect the Big Bang theory will be discarded as soon as Faustian civilization finishes losing its momentum. It’s too obviously a cultural artifact.

    SLClaire, that’s a powerful metaphor, and yes, it makes sense. As for using the Cos.Doc. as a guide to corrective action, yes, although there are limits to how much a few incarnate Divine Sparks can do in terms of the whole solar system and its Logos.

  36. All right (although this is very late in the comment cycle, and likely no one will read it):

    The Mother Jones article reminds me of the Cosmic Days and Nights in CosDoc. I feel like the US hit the completion of a “day cycle” in the 90s, with the fall of the USSR and a decade or so of stability. This is also when Fukuyama’s book The End of History got big, if I understand correctly. Everything was groovy, it was just going to be neoliberalism and MTV and suburban life from here on out.

    Then 9/11 hit and kicked off the start of a “night cycle,” with ramping chaos on all fronts. I feel like the climate scientists are struggling to adjust to the start of this new phase. The article begins, for instance, with a climate scientist growing depressed at Trump’s election because she knew America wouldn’t be tackling climate change. That means she wasn’t paying attention – Obama certainly didn’t do anything substantial, and Clinton wasn’t going to step up, beyond a lot of happy talk.

    So the unwary, who thought themselves the lords of Earth, are right now enjoying a huge rush of unpleasant new stimuli, forcing evolution. I feel like there’s a large contingent that are trying to actively resist this evolution, thus introducing positive evil into the system. (Getting a Prius is a rather pitiful change; I’d rather see some of them start to ponder the culpability of materialist culture in creating this whole mess. I’m not holding my breath, though.)

  37. This is even later in the comment cycle, and I don’t expect anyone to read it either, but I was struck with an idea I had to put somewhere where someone might understand it.

    It occurred to me today that one representation of the first – sixth cosmic planes (the ones we can’t see) may actually be in the concept of dark matter – the stuff that the equations tell the physicists have to be there, but can’t be seen, or even produced with an expensive fancy atom-smasher underneath the Swiss-France border.

    Of course, that isn’t what dark matter is, but it’s one way of conceptualising the first-sixth cosmic planes within the context of what we can see – which is the seventh plane, with all its great entities/stars.

  38. Hey JMG,
    I wanted to ask if you have any updates on your dolmen arch? Haven’t heard anything in quite a few months.
    Excited to hear!
    David

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