Beyond Soul Growth. Lynn Sparrow Christy
rarest levels it is said to be “formless” so far as the existence of what the physical senses know as form is concerned.56
These higher levels of the spectrum of manifestation may not be easily apparent even to those who have experienced advanced meditative states of consciousness, which may at least partially explain why there is virtually no mention of them in the discussions and literature of contemporary evolutionary spirituality. Yet the esteemed Sri Aurobindo admits that “I had experience of Nirvana and Silence in Brahman long before I had any knowledge of the overhead spiritual planes.”57 Spiritual though these planes may be, the very fact that they are layered expressions of spirit makes them, by definition, part of form rather than formlessness. By analogy, the formless ground of being would be that from which and in which the entire spectrum has its being. It would lead us into a digression far outside our field of concern in this book to go into descriptions of the many planes of non-material and yet manifest existence described in the esoteric literature. For our purposes, let's just say that these unseen worlds are said to exist the same way that frequencies of light or sound exist beyond the range of human eyes and ears. They form an orderly progression, with those just beyond the material plane being its progressively less dense replicas.
It is on these planes that souls' earliest entanglements began and on these planes the earliest threads of so-called ancient wisdom began as well. (As a refinement to the simple manifest/unmanifest scheme depicted in Figure 2, please refer to Figure 3 for a graphic, albeit limited, depiction of this point.) For the path of evolution is only part of the story. As told in the Cayce readings and much of the esoteric tradition, before we can have evolution, involution first must take place—that is, a descent of spirit through a graded spectrum of ever-more-dense levels of manifestation (involution) precedes that process wherein that spirit awakens to itself in matter (evolution). The beginnings of ancient wisdom can be traced to knowledge held before spirit became completely engulfed in matter. It is quite a story.
Multi-DImensional Form and Formlessness
Please note again that this model attempts to put into visual form that which is beyond all depiction. With that in mind, imagine that the page on which this is printed represents timeless, spaceless, unlimited reality and that not only the 3-dimensional world of form, but every dimension beyond the 3rd as well, is just another aspect of the Absolute's manifestation in form.
Figure 3
Involution Precedes Evolution
The cosmology of the Cayce readings is amazingly in accord with the scientific theory of the Big Bang, even though these readings predate that theory by decades. They describe God moving and bringing the Spirit into activity, which brought light and then chaos. Then the physical cosmos, including this Earth, arose out of the light-and-chaos movement of the Spirit. Materiality was born through spirit pushing itself into matter. Then, “…Spirit was individualized, and then became what we recognize in one another as individual entities…”58 This is a description of two distinct aspects of the creative act: the inception of the material realm and spirit giving rise to facets of itself in the form of individual entities. Therefore we now have three factors at play: 1) the all-encompassing, formless Ground of Being; 2) its manifestation in the world of form, and 3) individual spirit-entities.
For our understanding of involution, it is important to note that we had our origin as individual projections of God beyond time and space. From there, according to the readings, the point was for us, as spirit-beings, to “use matter” and everything in the earth's environment for the glory of the Creative Forces.59 From this we get that we were always intended to be a part of that creative unfoldment. In fact, we seem to have a starring role: “…For the universe was brought into being for the purpose of being the dwelling place of the souls of God's children—of which birthright this entity is a part.”60 Yet long before taking on the role of earthlings, we showed an inclination to disregard our stage directions.
When the earth became a dwelling place for matter, when gases formed into those things that man sees in nature and in activity about him, then matter began its ascent in the various forms of physical evolution—in the mind of God! The spirit chose to enter (celestial, not an earth spirit—he hadn't come into the earth yet!), chose to put on, to become a part of that which was as a command not to be done!61
Let's pause here for a moment to unbundle that. Notice that this reading is describing conditions at the time when gases were first coalescing into the bodies of the physical cosmos. Based on current scientific dating, that could have been anywhere from about from 200 million years after the Big Bang until our sun and its planets formed around five billion years ago. (Note again that in this passing reference to gases forming Cayce is in step with modern scientific thinking concerning the origins of the cosmos.) During that time, the beginnings of the evolutionary ascent of matter is described in this reading and others (#s 262–78, 900–227, for example) as occurring in the mind of God.
Once again, we find essential agreement with this idea from a most unexpected source, the Christian writings of Henry Drummond:
The lines of the Spiritual existed first, and it was natural to expect that when the “Intelligence resident in the ‘Unseen’” proceeded to frame the material universe He should go upon the lines already laid down. He would, in short, simply project the higher Laws downward, so that the Natural World would become an incarnation, a visible representation, a working model of the spiritual.62
To today's reader, this may smack of an anthropomorphic God executing an “Intelligent Design” version of evolution, a position that is held in disdain by most modern evolutionaries. Indeed, anyone who looks deeply at the dead ends and backtracks—as well as the carnage and destruction—inherent in the natural world, past and present, would find it hard to imagine that it is all part of a perfect, pre-set plan. As Ken Wilber points out, if this universe was engineered by a designer, “that Engineer is an idiot.”63 So let me be clear that, whatever Drummond's underlying theology may have been, in this excerpt he is talking about the scaffolding of laws upon which the evolutionary advance is built. He is describing the involutionary process whereby the evolutionary drive within all matter is taking form at the less dense level of the divine mind. According to Cayce, this is happening even as a physical cosmos is first beginning to form out of the coalescing gases of the primordial past. Think of the gradations of the spectrum. Events can be occurring simultaneously at different levels.
As these events are taking place, we find spirit-entities at a celestial level involving themselves in a way that is not aligned with the divine intention. The Cayce readings tell us that their intrusion was into “…fields of thought that pertain to a developing or evolving world of matter…”64 Thus, this was not a coming into flesh, but an interference with the creative unfoldment then taking place at the level of thought. Picture this, if you will: Creative Force has pushed itself out into matter, birthing a physical cosmos. An evolutionary ascent of consciousness through matter is formulating in the mind of this Creative Force/ God. Remember, in the involutionary trajectory, creations at the level of mind precede three-dimensional manifestation. Then, in blind or willful disregard of the process still unfolding, the entities Creative Force has spun off begin to involve* themselves in it. In so doing, they take upon themselves involutionary descent.
It's not that souls were not intended to have a role in the manifest realm. Rather it seems to have been a matter of jumping the gun by prematurely interfering while the great evolution was still unfolding in the mind of the Creator. For, as we'll be seeing, when the earth plane reached the stage capable of sustaining souls' experience here, humankind appeared as “…Lord over all that was created…”65 Elsewhere in the readings we are told that this unfolding world of form had been created “in all its splendor