Cosmic Thought, Cosmic Memory, Cosmic Dream
An occult perspective on human and Earthly evolution
My 2006 book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl has just been reprinted by Waterside Press in a beautiful new edition, with a new title: Quetzalcoatl Returns. Please pick up a copy here. An audio book, produced by Jordan Albert and performed by Paradox, is available here.
What follows is an excerpt from Quetzalcoatl Returns. This section explores aspects of occult philosophy and its relation to contemporary physics. We will consider this in greater depth in my upcoming seminar, Secret Histories and Spiritual Revolutions, on the Western hermetic tradition. (30% off until April 15)
In The Self-Aware Universe, physicist Amit Goswami shifted from a materialist orientation to one based upon the essentiality of “mind-stuff.” “I had vainly been seeking a description of consciousness within science; instead, what I and others have to look for is a description of science within consciousness,” he realized. “We must develop a science compatible with consciousness, our primary experience.” In a later work, The Physics of the Soul (2001), he puts forth a scientific hypothesis, based on his understanding of the quantum nature of consciousness, for the mechanisms of reincarnation, and the existence of the “subtle bodies” and chakra system described by many esoteric traditions.
Neither current Christian doctrine nor the secular thought of the modern West supports the idea of reincarnation, which is a basic element in many spiritual traditions, including Hinduism and Buddhism. Ian Stevenson, former professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, spent forty years studying young children who spontaneously recall past lives, compiling the data from over 2,600 case studies in his massive book, Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. He has found numerous incidences in which children recall specific details of their last life, and has documented, in some instances, startling physiological evidence—birthmarks and birth defects—that seem to carry over from their former existence. In a number of cases, especially ones in which the past life ended in violent death, Stevenson has found, and photographed, highly unusual birthmarks on the children that perfectly match the placement of the mortal wounds that ended their remembered past life.
“Most of the children speak about the previous life with an intensity, even with strong emotion, that surprises the adults around them,” writes Stevenson, who has documented past-life memories among the Tlingit in Alaska, the Druze in Southern Lebanon, across India, and other regions. “Many of them do not at first distinguish past from present, and they may use the present tense in referring to the previous life. They may say, for example, ‘I have a wife and two sons. I live in Agra.’ Although some children make fifty or more different statements, others make only a few but repeat these many times, often tediously.” The recollection usually commences when the child is very young—between two and four—and ends within the next five years. Stevenson has accompanied some of these children to meet the families, corroborating their specific memories. “The birthmarks and birth defects in these cases do not lend themselves easily to explanations other than reincarnation,” he notes. In the cases he has studied, the average period between death and rebirth is fifteen months.
Goswami hypothesizes that conditioned and habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action create what he terms the “quantum monad,” an aggregate of probabilistic patterns, and it is this aggregate that returns in life after life. Demonstrated quantum effects such as “action at a distance” and “non-local correspondence” prove that quantum objects possess a “memory”—although that memory is not recorded physically, like a photograph or a tape, but only activated when consciousness causes the wave- collapse. “Objects obey quantum laws—they spread in possibility following the equation discovered by Erwin Schrödinger—but the equation is not codified in the objects. Likewise, appropriate nonlinear equations govern the dynamical response of bodies that have gone through the conditioning of quantum memory, although this memory is not recorded in them. Whereas classical memory is recorded in objects like a tape, quantum memory is truly the analog of what the ancients call Akashic memory, memory written in akasha, emptiness—nowhere.” According to Eastern traditions, it is the accumulation of karma—the word literally means “action”—that induces reincarnation, and Goswami’s thesis supports this idea. “Certain incarnate individuals are correlated via quantum nonlocality,” he writes. “They have privileged access to each other’s lives through nonlocal information transfer.” He defines the “quantum monad” as an intermediate level of individuality between the ego and the “quantum self,” which is equivalent to the transcendent consciousness.
The distinct patterns of conditioned thought, feeling, and action can also be considered the “subtle bodies” defined by mysticism. The “mental body” represents the individual pattern of thought, and the “vital body” is the individual pattern of energy and feeling. The individual “quantum monad” develops vital and mental memories of past contexts over its successive lives. Beyond these habitual tendencies, worn like grooves in an old record, Goswami posits a “supramental intellect” or “theme body,” “the body of archetypal themes that shapes the movement of the physical, mental, and vital” bodies—what Jung called the self. According to Steiner, the theme body does not express itself through thoughts, but “acts through deeds, processes, and events.” The self “leads the soul through its life destiny and evokes its capacities, tendencies, and talents.”
The subtle bodies and esoteric organs defined by different esoteric traditions—chi, prana, the nadis, Carlos Castaneda’s “assemblage point,” the chakras, and so on—do not possess physical substance, but have a real existence as quantum phenomena, “the possibility waves of an undulating in finite medium.” Consciousness determines their manifestation. In Goswami’s scheme, consciousness is fundamental, hence these subtle energy streams are integral aspects of our existence. He suspects the chakras may provide “blueprints” through which the vital body maps itself onto the physical, representing itself in the health and function of our organs.
He presents physical evolution as a process through which the preexistent transcendent consciousness remembers itself—self-organizing through increasingly complex levels of light and matter, life and mind—until it regains its original and unconditional state of freedom. Through the gradual process of natural selection, as well as the sudden jumps into new contexts abundantly suggested by the fossil record, organic life developed in phases of “punctuated equilibria,” from amoeba to dinosaur to mammal, until the human species emerged into prominence, its capacity for language and culture and thought creating the tools to undertake the “hominization” of the planet. At first gradually and then with increasing speed, humanity assimilated and learned to utilize the stored resources of energy within the biosphere to construct civilization. At that point, the organic evolution of the biosphere went into entropic decline, and the cutting edge of future evolution moved to the mind—Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, the thought-envelope around the Earth.
Goswami argues that major changes in complexity, such as the transition from reptiles to birds or primates to humans, cannot be explained by Darwinian mechanisms of natural selection. “Instead, they show the quantum leap of a creative consciousness choosing among many simultaneous potential variations.” The transcendent consciousness “employs matter, as we employ a computer, to make software representations, which we call life in the living cell and conglomerates, of vital functions.” At the stage of human evolution, “software representations of the mind” can be programmed into the brain’s hardware.
According to linguist Noam Chomsky, the development of human language could not have occurred as a straightforward step from animal communication. “There seems to be no substance to the view that human language is simply a more complex instance of something to be found elsewhere in the animal world,” he writes. “This poses a problem for the biologist, since, if true, it is an example of true ‘emergence’—the appearance of a qualitatively different phenomenon at a specific stage of complexity of organization.” Humans possess an innate or inherent capacity for language development, for grammar and syntax, that no current model for the acquisition of traits seems to fit. “In fact, the processes by which the human mind achieved its present stage of complexity and its particular form of innate organization are a total mystery. . . . It is perfectly safe to attribute this development to ‘natural selection,’ so long as we realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena.” The sudden emergence of language as a cognitive structure seems to support Goswami’s thesis of the “quantum leap of a creative consciousness,” operating from a transcendent domain. Such a perspective leaves open the possibility of future “quantum leaps” of cognitive complexity.
“Any attempt to dismiss a phenomenon that is not understood merely by explaining it as hallucination becomes irrelevant when a coherent scientific theory can be applied,” Goswami notes. He believes that his model of evolution points to a future phase of human development when we will be able to map the “supramental intellect” or “theme body” onto the physical body, as with the vital and mental bodies—this would be a massive phase-shift in human potential, to a condition beyond the constraints of mortality, as it is now experienced. If possible, it would be a state foreshadowed by the “resurrection body” of Christ, the sambogakaya (body of pure luminosity) of Buddhism, and similar ideas from various sacred traditions. He draws inspiration from Sri Aurobindo, a twentieth-century Indian philosopher who theorized an evolution into a “supramental” condition, a point at which the “upward causation” of evolution would meet the “downward causation” of a self-empowered and self-directed consciousness, able to transform matter, the body, and the world out of a direct engagement with the “inner creativity” of the quantum self.
“But what after all, behind appearance, is the seeming mystery?” Aurobindo asked. “We can see that it is the Consciousness which had lost itself, returning to itself, emerging out of its giant self-forgetfulness, slowly, painfully, as a life that is would-be sentient, to be more than sentient, to be again divinely self-conscious, free, infinite, immortal.”
GOSWAMI’S “SCIENCE WITHIN CONSCIOUSNESS” fits the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, who also saw mind as the basis of reality, describing the workings of our distinct “subtle bodies” and the chakra system, as well as supersensible entities evolving on other planes. Steiner said that the specific mission of his life on Earth was to bring the knowledge of reincarnation back to the West. In his cosmology, not only do individualities return again and again, but the Earth itself reincarnates, and this is the fourth incarnation of the Earth. I doubt that Steiner knew of the Hopi cosmology when he formulated this, but it correlates with their idea of the Fourth World, on the verge of phase-shifting into the Fifth—similar, also, to the waning Fifth Sun of the Aztecs.
In their remote mountain kingdom, Tibetan Buddhists developed, over centuries, a highly evolved spiritual science of reincarnation. They recognize the return of certain individualities, tulkus, who are reinstated in their previous role as lamas, or lineage-holders. The current Dalai Lama, for instance, was identified, as a young child, as the reincarnation of the previous one, through oracles and foretellings. He passed a series of tests in which he was asked to choose from a variety of objects the ones that belonged to his predecessor. Modern Westerners generally consider this a symbolic process, a culture-specific practice rooted in tradition, rather than an empirically verifiable method. Steiner believed that reincarnation has continued over the course of human development, not only in Eastern cultures that believe in the transmigration of souls, but, unbeknownst to us, in the West as well. He wrote a series of books, titled Karmic Relationships, in which he used his supersensible faculties to follow certain individualities— Goethe, Garibaldi, Voltaire, Eliphas Levi—as they evolved over successive incarnations. The supramental intellect, or theme body in Goswami’s model, chooses the hereditary factors and cultural circumstances that will allow it to unfold particular talents and character traits.
“We return to Earth again and again, whenever the fruit of one physical life has ripened in the land of spirits,” Steiner wrote in An Outline of Esoteric Science. “Yet this repetition does not go on without beginning or end. At one point we left different forms of existence for ones that run their course as described here, and in future we will leave these and move on to others.” His esoteric philosophy was thoroughly evolutionary. He proposed that everything in the cosmos perpetually transforms—not only human beings and the planets and the higher “spiritual beings” who, he believed, advanced themselves further through sacrifice, but even basic laws of the cosmos are in flux. Of his difficulties in translating scenes from the Akashic Record into language, he wrote: “One must be completely clear about the fact that the evolutionary forms of the distant past as well as of the future are so entirely different from those of today that our present appellations can only serve as makeshifts, and really lose all meaning in relation to these remote epochs.” Time and space, matter and mind, body and soul take on different characteristics in each new phase of our development.
A number of contemporary scientists are currently exploring the hypothesis that everything, even the seemingly immutable laws governing mineral processes or the cosmological constants underlying space and time, change and evolve. According to the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, “the assumption that the laws of nature are eternal” is a vestige of the Christian belief system that informed the early postulates of modern science in the seventeenth century. “Perhaps the laws of nature have actually evolved along with nature itself, and perhaps they are still evolving? Or perhaps they are not laws at all, or more like habits?” Sheldrake writes in The Presence of the Past (1988), proposing the existence of “morphogenetic fields,” functioning like quantum memory, shaping patterns of formation and development on every level, from atom to crystal to cell to organism to social organization and beyond.
In The Life of the Cosmos (1997), physicist Lee Smolin suggests “the idea that the laws of nature are immutable and absolute . . . might be as much the result of contingent and historical circumstances as they are reflections of some eternal, transcendent logic.” He offers a hypothesis of “cosmological natural selection” in which black holes open onto new regions of the universe, where the cosmological constants are slightly altered. “In each birth of a new universe the parameters change by a small random step,” Smolin theorizes, analogous to the “small random change” between the genes of a child and its parents.
Such postulates resemble the macrocosmic mindscape elaborated by Steiner, who saw the universe as a staging ground for infinite transformations and permutations of consciousness, taking multidimensional forms. In his vision of the solar system, “the planets are not hunks of stuff out there but nodes of vibration that resonate in multiple dimensions that enfold themselves into one another in patterns of complex recursiveness in which Sun, Moon, and Saturn are also modalities of Earth,” wrote William Irwin Thompson, who suggested that such a view was not a violation of rationality, but an expansion of our cosmological framing. Like Goswami, Steiner offers a nondualistic vision, perceiving the human being as integrated, embedded, within a universe that is psychophysical in its essence, where there is no “out there” opposed to “in here,” where our thoughts and imaginings are extensions of the natural processes of the world.
Studying the occult, I absorbed the ideas of Dion Fortune, G. I. Gurdjieff, Julius Evola, Aleister Crowley, Steiner, and so on, finding similarities among them but also significant differences that confused me. Over time, I realized that apprehending the pattern of occult thought was more important than adhering to the details of any particular system. The occult vision offers a way of conceiving reality that is closer to art—or the theme- and-variations of music—than science. “What if at the higher levels of meaning consciousness is like a hyperspace in which each point is equidistant from the other and where ‘the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere’?” Thompson proposed, in Passages about Earth. “The mythologies of the occult seem like baroque music: there is an overall similar quality of sound and movement, but, upon examination, each piece of music is unique; Vivaldi and Scarlatti are similar and different.” The movement away from the linear and dualistic thought of “one-dimensional man” opens on multivalent meanings and mythopoetical modalities, requiring equanimity and a firm grounding in reality—a difficult balance to strike.
In his lectures, Steiner proposed that humans were “inverted plants;” that the Buddha reincarnated on Mars after he left Earth; that birds, butterflies, and bats were “cosmic thought, cosmic memory, cosmic dream”; that the beehive represents a higher-dimensional consciousness and is a gift from Venus; that the blood spilled by Christ transmuted the inner nature of the Earth, altering human evolution; that we would have conscious control over the rhythms and pulsations of the heart in our next phase of evolution. Yet he established enduring institutions such as Waldorf Schools, the Anthroposophic movement, biodynamic agriculture, techniques of holistic and homeopathic medicine, and Camphill Villages that develop skills in the mentally retarded, all of which continue to benefit the world, eighty years after his death. He said that the purpose of human existence was to “transform the Earth,” insisting that the only way to oppose nihilism and degraded institutions is to build what is good and pragmatic for human evolution—and he made good on his word.
“If we can simply distinguish between the different successive stages of evolution, it is possible to see primeval events within the earthly events of the present,” Steiner wrote. Describing macrocosmic stages of evolution, he denoted past and future incarnations of the Earth according to the names of the planets—as if the various planets in their current embodiments represent husks of past stages of consciousness, or symbolic indications of future levels that we are still incubating. In his philosophy, the planets in our solar system are like resonant frequencies attuned to different levels of mind, alternate realms in which supersensible entities unlike ourselves are working out their fate. “The interrelationships of spiritual beings inhabiting celestial bodies are a cause of these bodies’ movement,” Steiner wrote. “Causes that are soul-like and spiritual in character move these celestial bodies into position and set them in motion in ways that allow spiritual circumstances to be played out in the physical realm.”
According to Steiner, rudimentary humanity developed during the “Saturn” and “Sun” incarnations of the Earth—in those early phases we were plant-like, deeply unconscious—followed by the “Old Moon” incarnation, where we attained a dream-like awareness. Steiner describes the “Old Moon” as the “planet of longing,” where we apprehended our future forms in dream-like flickers, but could not yet embody them. Consequently, the Earth is “the planet of fulfillment,” where we reached the stage of individual self-consciousness. From the current Earth, our evolutionary stream flows toward the Jupiter phase—identical, perhaps, with the Fifth World of the Hopi. According to Steiner, we will, eventually, become self- created entities of cosmic wisdom, as he described in one of his lectures:
The Jupiter Beings are unlike the men of Earth. When a man of Earth wants to grow wise, he must undergo inner development, he must struggle, battle inwardly and overcome; through periods that are filled with active development the human being struggles to acquire an unpretentious form of wisdom. Not so the Jupiter Beings. They are not “born” as earthly beings are born, they form themselves out of the Cosmos. Just as you can see a cloud taking shape, so do the Jupiter Beings form themselves in the etheric and astral worlds, out of the Cosmos. Neither do they die. They interpenetrate one another, do not, as it were compete with each other for space. These Beings are, so to speak, wisdom that has become real and actual. Wisdom is innate in them; they cannot be other than wise. Just as we have circulating blood, so have the Jupiter Beings wisdom. It is their very nature.
Each successive interval represents an upgrade into higher consciousness, with a concomitant shift in our physical body as well as our various subtle energy systems—but also, at every evolutionary threshold, there are many who are not ready to advance. Restrained by past karma—conditioned patterns of thought, feeling, and action—they undergo an alternate process of development, passing through lower worlds.
In Steiner’s view, everything possesses awareness, at its own level, and continually develops new depths, or degrades into flightier forms, of consciousness. “To supersensible perception, there is no such thing as ‘unconsciousness,’ only various degrees of consciousness. Everything in the world is conscious,” he wrote. In the approaching Jupiter state, plants will attain a higher level of consciousness—shifting from their current slumbering form which he equates with “dreamless sleep,” to a level of sentience similar to what humans now experience in dreams. Minerals, as well as animals, will also attain a new level of consciousness, as humanity splits into several “human kingdoms” diverging into different evolutionary streams. The organ of reproduction will move from the genitals to the throat chakra—we will sing, or enunciate, other beings like ourselves into existence.
From previous, less tangible incarnations of the Earth, we inherited the current “cosmos of wisdom,” symphonically orchestrated by higher echelons of spiritual hierarchies. It is the ultimate purpose of human development, according to Steiner, to transform this cosmos of wisdom into a freely determined “cosmos of love.” In the present phase of Earth evolution, humanity received the perfected physical body, and, through our historical development, attained self-consciousness, identifying ourselves as singular beings denoted through our usage of the “I.” “The actual essential nature of the I is independent of anything external; therefore, nothing outside of it can call it by its name,” he wrote. “Religious denominations that have consciously maintained their connection to the supersensible call the term I the ‘ineffable name of God.’” Because we only attained this individuated ego-based awareness in our recent development, the “I” is still weaker than the other bodies we possess—which he calls the physical body, the astral body, and the ether body. Cravings and desires are constantly pouring into us through the astral body, and the goal of our present phase of evolution is to master those cravings, and the astral body itself, through the strengthening of the I, transmuting lower passions into higher energies. “Fundamentally, all of our cultural activity and spiritual endeavors consist of work that aims for this mastery by the I. All human beings who are alive at present are involved in this work, whether or not they are conscious of it.”
As we transform the astral body through painstaking conscious labor, we slowly create a fifth body, which Steiner calls the spirit self. “The spirit self constitutes a higher element of our human makeup, one that is present in it in embryonic form, as it were, and emerges more and more in the course of working on ourselves.” In the Jupiter phase, or Fifth World, the spirit self will experience its full unfolding. In future stages, we will also learn to transform the ethereal body (the “vital body” of energy and feeling), and eventually the physical body itself. What Steiner describes of our future state seems essentially identical to Aurobindo’s vision of the “supra mental” condition—what Goswami termed the “theme body.”
But what could it mean to transform the astral body, and how would this occur?
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