It tells a tale that predates the advent of humanity as we know it and that begins at non-material levels of manifestation. Even today, a thread of that wisdom as passed on in the esoteric traditions stretches back to earlier human civilizations. But for the mass of humanity the evolutionary trajectory has led upwards from the most primitive of human states. More important still, no matter how great the ancient wisdom may be, there is an even deeper realization that lies in our present and future planetary history.
The point of the foregoing is not to convince the non-Cayce-oriented evolutionary that the readings' story is true. Rather, it is to convince the reader who is steeped in the Cayce readings' version of history that the evolutionary path does, indeed, call us to plow new ground rather than simply return to an earlier golden era and do it right this time. Contemporary evolutionaries may still consider the fantastic stories of advanced civilizations to be mythic thinking. That's okay. We've already seen that there is a distinction between the purely materialist evolutionary and the spiritually oriented evolutionary. Yet both can work together at the leading edge of evolution, for they agree that consciousness and an ethic informed by that consciousness is their field of operation. So too can those who believe the ancient stories join evolutionary forces with those who see such stories as mythic carryovers.
Ancient Wisdom, Modern Breakthrough
The current evolutionary opportunity is not a mere turn of the wheel back to knowledge gained and then lost in the dim past, for never before have souls indwelling the human form been at the particular threshold we now face. “…our modern souls see and feel today a world such as (in size, interconnections and potentialities) escaped all the great men of antiquity,” declared Teilhard de Chardin.78 How could it be otherwise? Mysteries of the cosmos once addressed only in myth that spoke the language of the soul but did little to elucidate the three-dimensional universe are now also unveiled with the Hubble Telescope, the electron microscope, and the Hadron Collider. Old hierarchies of tribe and temple are rapidly collapsing in an information age that makes the collective knowledge of humankind readily available to average people. A global communications network gives spiritual seekers a bird's-eye view of the world's religious systems, giving those with eyes to see an opportunity to recognize what their religion has in common with that of people whom previous generations tended to loathe and fear as “heathen,” “pagan,” or “infidels” (This is not to make the naïve claim that such prejudice is anywhere near eradicated, but for the first time in human history the means of such eradication is at hand.) The sciences of biochemistry and genetics are rapidly accelerating our understanding of the control systems of the amazing piece of biological equipment we've been issued to navigate our way through this world.
It seems that on every front, knowledge is growing and the world is getting smaller. Meanwhile we struggle to solve the age-old problems of greed and aggression and our blindness to our own shadow. The very limitations of our knowledge, information, and technology force us to turn to awakened consciousness as the hope of our age. All of this makes for unprecedented evolutionary opportunity, and it will call for a new application of spiritual truth, beyond what was called for in days of spear and chariot.
Spiritual truth, if it really be truth, is timeless. We can expect to find it in every human epoch. But to give that truth flesh-and-blood expression is a growing thing. It requires consciousness to keep pace with both our knowledge and the challenges of a changing world. On the foundations of ancient wisdom, we need modern breakthrough to new levels of spiritual realization. What really matters in the end is how many of us are truly ready and willing to accept the evolutionary call.
*Rogers, Elementary Theosophy, 7.
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51Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 78
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56Rogers, Elementary Theosophy, 45.
57Sri Aurobindo, On Yoga II, Tome One (Pondercherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1958),
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62Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 32.
63Wilber, Integral Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 2006), 241-2n.
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*Note that involve is to involution as evolve is to evolution.
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68Leadbeater, A Textbook of Theosophy, 77.
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73Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 185.
74Psalm 139:14
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78Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 286n.
Chapter 5:
Responding to the Call
Then, the entity finds himself as a co-creator with the divine that is manifested in self. Thus, if the choice leads the entity into the exalting of self, it becomes as naught in the end. If the choice is that self is to be used in whatever manner—as in the talents, the attributes, the associations with its fellowmen—to glorify the Creative Force, then the body, the mind, finds that peace, that harmony, that purpose for which it chose to enter a material experience.
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Selfish occupation with one's own salvation, when the world is burning, is not a sign of spiritual regeneration.
Gopi Krishna, Kundalini: Empowering Human Evolution*
Probably everyone has had the experience of lying in bed, half I asleep, after the alarm clock has gone off. You know it's time to wake up and get on with the day's responsibilities, but in that moment, nothing seems more desirable than to stay in bed and drift off to sleep. Maybe you hit the snooze button and fall asleep again, only to awaken yet again when the next alarm sounds. The need to get up is stronger now; there's less time to do the necessary rituals of the morning, and still the desire to drift back to sleep is overwhelming. And so it goes, the battle between wakefulness and sleep, until the will to wake up and get on with the day overcomes the will to sleep.
It's much like that with humanity's sleeping consciousness. We have seen how evolution has come to a critical juncture and landed us on the transition point between unconscious and conscious evolution. It's time now for us to wake up and get on with the work of conscious evolution. Some of us are so soundly asleep that much time will pass before the struggle to awaken even begins. Others are already up and about, and the bustling sounds of their activity in the world call to those of us who still inhabit that twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness. It remains for each of us to choose whether to arouse ourselves from our passive slumber or succumb to it and hit the snooze button; but the call is nonetheless upon us. As one man was told in his Cayce reading, “…To make the will one with the Creative Energy should be the desire of every being…”79
The