Coryn H.A.W. - Consciousness

Most Theosophists have attained to the conception of nature as a great unit consciousness, the world-soul, Mâhat or Brahmâ. Since there is no existence but itself, and since therefore nothing could be put into it from outside, whatever elements emerge from it in the course of evolution must have lain in it from the first, potentially, as undeveloped seeds. Before the cycle opens they exist as the Unmanifested Logos, the prefiguring Ideal; when it closes, the Idea has become one with its realisation. On a smaller scale the Unmanifested Logos is comparable to a man’s ideal of himself, and the subsequent evolution of the world-soul we can picture as the man realising or becoming his ideal. And in the spring of every lifetime he fashions a new ideal, higher than any before, and in his old age he has moved up into the realised fulfilment. So passes the world-soul in successive dramas of the universe on to higher and higher ranges of life and consciousness, realising always its Ideals. Shall we regard this world-soul as consciousness or matter? If we say that it is consciousness, then in passing from its first unmanifested Ideal through the lower kingdoms of nature, up to the divine trans-human realisation at the close, in making this circuit it is at every point up to the last, hindered, though decreasingly, from full manifestation of itself. Thus, while in the mineral stage, it cannot manifest in vegetable life. What prevents it? We see it prevented, and the prevention we call matter. Ascending the scale, we see it decreasingly prevented from full manifestation, and the increasing manifestation from the mineral to the spiritual kingdoms we call increasing plasticity or diminished grossness of matter. Matter is the most abstract of our ideas; it is an idea which we throw out upon nature to account to ourselves for the limits which we perceive to be set to the manifestations of Mâhat, the One Life and Consciousness and Motion which shines more or less completely through more or less completely plastic matter. Shining through mineral matter as the forces of science, through the infinitely more plastic matter of brain it is enabled to exhibit itself as thought. Matter is our preception of the Law that limits the manifestation of the world-soul to fixed grades. But viewing matter after the unthinking fashion of the materialist, we must suppose it as either conscious or not conscious. It is usual to regard it as not conscious in the lower kingdoms, but as conscious in the upper animal and human kingdoms. In this case it must at a certain point have evolved consciousness from itself; or the consciousness must have descended upon it, which latter supposition implies the denied deduction that consciousness did previously and therefore can exist apart from matter. 126 There remains the alternative that matter produced consciousness. Then there must have been previously a rudiment of consciousness, or seed, which is our contention; but this being denied, it follows that matter, having no rudiment or seed of consciousnsss, nevertheless produced it. This, besides involving the doctrine of special creation with the additional absurdity ot unconscious matter instead of God as the creator, is also without meaning. It is verbiage clean of idea. For to suppose consciousness arising in matter where formerly it was not, because of, and out of the mere complexity of material structure, is evidence of as low an intellectual level as to debate how many angels can stand on the point of a pin. But without going back to origins, we must accept one of two alternatives: that matter and consciousness both exist, or that matter is an illusion. If matter is an illusion, then we have no longer need to ask concerning it whether consciousness can exist apart from it, but whether consciousness can exist apart from or above that illusion. To forestall the argument we may say that according to Theosophic Philosophy the whole end of evolution is to raise consciousness above the illusion of matter, an illusion which before the commencement of evolution the world-soul had not yet produced. Mind is that form of consciousness that deals with the illusions of matter; Spirit is that higher consciousness which is above the illusion.

Suppose a chemist is asked, What is Chlorine? Answering strictly he would say, that when he turns his attention to Chlorine there arises in him the idea yellow, the ideas represented by the term gas, the idea of a bad smell, and some other ideas, and that when all these ideas arise in his consciousness vividly, he is conscious of a collective idea. This causes him to say that Chlorine is before him. Knowledge, then, arises from the process of putting ideas together in consciousness, and the particular synthesis in the example is all that the chemist knows of Chlorine. If vivid, he says Chlorine is before him. If faint, he regards it as the memory of Chlorine. And vividity and faintness is the only difference between the admittedly subjective memory, and the supposedly objective gas. Even this distinction disappears in the real hypnotic state, for subjective and illusionary ideas have then all the vividity that they have when due to what we call an objective source. It remains therefore to enquire whether there can be among the potentialities of man a plane of consciousness upon which the term objective has no meaning.

When we speak of matter, we speak really of our ideas concerning it. Whether there be an abstract “It” which produces and prompts the ideas is an old problem in philosophy, but it is plain that this “It”, if postulated, is an idea in our own consciousness. And all similar postulations of “ultimate reality” are strictly within the sphere of our ideation. We know an orange by the ideas, yellow, smell, weight, roughness. It will not do to say that an orange is abstract matter possessing those qualities, and that the qualities excite the ideas. For “abstract matter” is an idea, 127 equally with the qualities, the whole thing being within the sphere of our ideation. It is said that “matter-in-itself” is not knowable by us. But “matter-in-itself” is an idea we have formed, and to suppose it as existing without ourselves ideating is to suppose the grin without the cat. We can neither know, suppose nor hypothecate anything except ideas. Directly we suppose anything not idea, the thing supposed marks only the birth of a new idea.

As Theosophists we therefore hold to our philosophy, that one vast consciousness pervades everything or is everything, a consciousness of which men are the self-cognisant foci. The ascending kingdoms of nature are its ideas, evolving each upon each. It is the Oversoul of Emerson, Jiva, Mâhat, the One Life stream, the stream being a stream of ideas. In man it has attained its highest idea, but through man it has an infinite further ascent before it. In the mineral kingdoms the idea is that which in our consciousness is the idea of force; in the next kingdom it is the richer idea of vegetable life; in animals it is the idea present in us as desire; in man this one consciousness moves as mind: mind in its ideal state is the Higher Ego; whilst Buddhi and Âtmâ are conditions of consciousness awaiting that Ego when its ray has detached itself from Kâma.

The time-dishonoured hypothesis of the antagonism of consciousness and matter is outworn for us. The forces of nature, the changes in vegetable life, the complexer activities of animals, the movements of mind, are known in no other way than as changes in our consciousness, nor are they any other thing than the universal consciousness in the advancing steps of its manifestation. “I”, says Krishna, “am the Ego which is seated in the heart of all beings”, or, if one might reverently amplify, the ultimate ideal possibility as also the source of the individual minds of men, Kshetrajna. For he also says,

“I am the seed of all existing things. In my body now behold the whole universe, animate and inanimate. I am Time matured.”

And, regarding him as the Higher Ego and Arjuna as the Lower, the latter, when in the 11th chapter he is initiated into the full knowledge and vision of the former, says,

“Thou art the first of Gods, the most ancient Spirit; thou art the final supreme receptacle of this universe; thou art the knower and that which is to be known, and by thee is this universe caused to emanate”.

Man therefore is so far the highest attainment of the immanent all-consciousness. He may rightly say in his deepest and clearest meditation, when he has forgotten his local environment, his limited personality, his earth-self,

“Truly, as the universal consciousness of Space with all its self-produced containments, I am the universal and eternal cogniser. That which happens is change in me; I produce and I know the changes, and I am that which is changed.”

This “I” is the all, outside of it there is nothing, for that thing which we think of as outside is only a thought which is inside. This is the great illusion, to suppose as outside that which took rise and remains inside. To surmount it is the task of those who would know.

H. A. W. Coryn, F.T.S.

Footnotes