Tao.” Verbal attempts to describe that which gives rise to the world of form often use such words as “unmanifest,” “ground of being,” “formless,” “emptiness,” “the void,” or the “implicate order.” While all of these in various ways communicate some of the unqualified, non-tangible, and ultimately incomprehensible nature of this all-encompassing Something that is no thing, they seem to fall short of conveying the wonder and magnitude of this ultimate Reality. No wonder people gave it a name and just called it God! But let us always be careful, when we use that convenient handle for the Absolute that encompasses both form and formlessness, that we do not reduce it to anything less than its incomprehensible majesty. As eighteenth century German reformed Christian writer Gerhard Tersteegen said, “A comprehended God is no God at all.”
From the standpoint of evolutionary spirituality our existence, like that of the Absolute, is both unmanifest and manifest. And because our unmanifest existence is pure formlessness, there is nothing to evolve “there” (recognizing that “there” is no place). But that's not the whole story. As the formless ground gives rise to manifestation of the cosmos, we also have existence in that place—which is a place, real and concrete, within the limitless field of the unmanifest. Even as the use of words that are time bound and space conditioned impairs our ability to describe these things, diagrams limit us because we attempt to show in two-dimensional form that which is multi-dimensional and beyond all dimensions. Nonetheless, the diagram shown in Figure 2 may help clarify these points, as long as its limitations are kept in mind.
In the words of Sri Aurobindo:
Thus the eternal paradox and eternal truth of a divine life in an animal body, an immortal aspiration or reality inhabiting a mortal tenement, a single and universal consciousness representing itself in limited minds and divided egos, a transcendent, indefinable timeless and spaceless Being who alone renders time and space and cosmos possible.51
Form and Formlessness
Please note that just as descriptive words place limits on a reality that is, in fact, limitless, 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 the 3-dimensional world of form is one small aspect of ultimate, limitless Reality.
Figure 2
We find the same idea expressed in the language that is so characteristic of the Cayce readings:
…For as the entity finds, we are body, we are mind, we are soul. The soul is in the image of God, thus eternal, everlasting. Life in its expression, then, in a mental and in a material world, is only a mental and material manifestation of the soul-entity; that which was brought into being as a part of Creative Forces. Thus it is eternal.52
The same paradox of form and formlessness is expressed in the Cayce material in terms of a God who grows and yet is changeless:
If there be any virtue or truth in those things given in the spiritual or Christian or Jehovah-God faith, His laws are immutable. What laws are immutable, if truth and God Himself is a growing thing—yet an ever changeable, and yet ever the same, yesterday and today and forever? These things, these words, to many minds become contradictory, but they are in their inception not contradictory; for Truth, Life, Light, Immortality, are only words that give expression to or convey a concept of one and the same thing.53
Thus far, then, we can see that there is no real contradiction between the position that consciousness is increasing with evolution of the world and the Cayce story of conscious souls preceding the world. What becomes more sticky, however, is how this awakening of spirit in matter correlates with the Cayce story of the history of our planet and the human race.
Evolution and Ancient Civilizations
On the surface, we have an enormous problem. Contemporary evolutionary spirituality heralds the arrival of self-reflective awareness a few thousand years ago at most, while the Cayce readings—like much New Age thought as well as the theosophical traditions—speak of advanced civilizations in the past which held deep spiritual knowledge that has since been lost to the masses. Atlantis and Egypt figure heavily in such lore. Take, for example, this very representative reading which suggests that the pyramids of Egypt hold the records of ancient wisdom:
…The entity also aided in the laying of, and should be an interpreter of that given to the world as a lasting memorial of the relationships between man and man, man and the Creative Forces; and that [which] it brings through being at an at-oneness with, instead of at an at-variance with, Creative Energy in a material world.54
Another reading (part of which is quoted as an epigraph to this chapter) states that during this same period “there were many who sought to bring to man a better understanding of the close relationship between the Creative Forces and that created, between man and man, and man and his Maker.”
Notice particularly how prominent is the theme of “Creative Forces” and “Creative Energy” when the Cayce source speaks of ancient wisdom. If Cayce is correct, earlier civilizations did indeed understand that our role is a co-creative one. In accordance with much esoteric tradition, the Cayce readings tell us that this ancient knowledge was carefully preserved so that it could be passed on to future generations. In speaking of lost civilizations such as Atlantis, the readings suggest that much of the record-keeping in ancient Egypt was centered upon preserving the history and knowledge of a civilization already submerged in both time and the ocean, knowledge that was to be “…manifested again and again in the earth as that manner or way for the gods of the high heavens to make themselves felt and known among the children of the earth plane.”55
To the modern evolutionary, whose views are formed by both science and post-mythic spirituality, such claims may well sound preposterous. It is understandable if they are cast aside as mythic beliefs carried over from more naïve, less scientifically informed times. Seen in that light, they create an enormous gulf between the evolutionary path described in the Cayce legacy and that of the contemporary evolutionary. Yet there is meeting ground. If we are to understand how these assertions of ancient sagacity may in fact be compatible with modern evolutionary thinking, we must step back, re-consider that paradox of manifest/unmanifest reality, and realize that it is even more finely shaded than we have yet acknowledged.
The Many Levels of Manifestation
So far, we have considered only a broad and rather crude dividing point between what is manifest and what is non-manifest, what is form and what is formlessness. But of course dividing lines are human inventions, something that makes the oneness of all graspable to a human mind. On the color spectrum we go from red to orange to yellow, for example, while in reality there is an unbroken gradation between what we call red and what we call orange and again between what we call orange and what we call yellow. At what point has the color stopped being red and started being orange? Where along the spectrum do we leave orange and first meet yellow? We can divide sound frequencies into musical notes, but what about the infinitesimal stages of slowing or speeding up that fall between every note? Furthermore, beyond the infinite gradations in every type of spectrum we can perceive, there are those ranges above and below what our human senses are equipped to pick up. More amazing still, who, from the evidence of their senses, would have guessed that color and sound are segments of one continuous spectrum?
When we realize how artificial are the lines we draw, it becomes less likely that what we perceive in three-dimensional matter is the whole of manifestation. It is far more likely that all of manifestation is a graded spectrum from the most dense to the most ephemeral. As theosophist C.W. Rogers explains it,
The mental world, or sphere, or plane, of theosophy, is a world of matter, not merely thought. It is matter, however, of such