A Preface & Epilogue to the History of the World
Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Rekshan
all rights reserved
Preface
There exists a place, a time before birth and after death. For those in cyclic existence, it is the apex of the wheel’s turn or, perhaps, its axle. For those who transcend the cycle, it is the doorway to the beyond.
Everyone has been there. It is the source of every individual, from the most enlightened to the greatest sufferer.
It is the space between moments, the time between dimensions. It is that which holds the contents of consciousness. It is that which is conscious.
From this place, the spirit enters its earthly vessel, vitalizing the material fetus. To this place, the individual returns, in which the illusions of this life dissolve.
The phenomenon of knowledge, the fact that we can know, occurs because the individual eternally maintains proportion to this place. Knowledge is recollection because the object is not encountered through itself, but through the displacement of spirit in that eternity, i.e., illuminated by the primal gnosis of being.
History is a type of knowledge, in which the eternal spirit encounters itself. The knower and the known share identity in the encounter. The eternal consciousness embraces itself in studying its temporal manifestation. A proportion is drawn between the eternity of the observing present, which is the eternal now, and creative progression of forms through history.
Spirit is that eternal place, the omnipresent source. It is divine, universal, beautiful, good, and knowing. It creates itself in itself for itself. We are it, it is us, we are each other, and all is divine.
True recollection is self knowledge. Any knowledge is knowledge of the self. The cosmos is spirit knowing itself. The cosmos is the self. The self is spirit. All is divine.
We get ahead of ourselves and the identities of divinity do not make sense. We do not stand at the center of the wheel, rather at its circumference. We have not recollected our true nature, rather we are recollecting it. This is not spirit approaching spirit in eternity, rather mind seeking truth in the spacetime manifold.
I do not know what the self is. I look at myself and find an aggregate of thoughts, emotions, and memories. There is no divinity in that assemblage, only humanity.
I look closer and I see the eternal looking. It is not me, but I am conscious by it. It holds the aggregate together and declares them observed, experienced. It is eternal. All time that ever is experienced passes through it. It is omnipresent, all traversed spaced comes through it. I turn from the circumference and gaze at the center. It is now.
The personality, the mind of this writing vessel, this material form has beheld the realm of spirit. This mind of a spacetime entity has transcended spacetime, has entered eternity. The recollection of divinity is a member of my aggregate of memory. Spirit encountered spirit through my earthly vessel, through this body and mind. This encounter has or will happen through every individual in cyclic existence because they are existent individuals.
I have a memory of the eternity before birth that has taken me 25 years to regain, to recollect. I have been baptized in a sea of gnosis and yet I forget the truth, the beautiful. Recollection of eternity is now in my memory aggregate, but it emerged in time. Conversely, it was not always there. The eternal encounter is a temporal occurrence.
Ignorance is a fact of my existence. I see that it is a general condition of humanity. We suffer and create the causes of suffering because we are ignorant. Why and how have we forgotten our true, divine nature?
I, with many before me, say that ignorance occurs as spirit cloths itself in matter in order to know itself. Knowledge, beauty, form, existence all are proportion. Spirit must leave itself and enter matter in order to enter into a proportion with itself.
We know that spirit entered matter and knew itself because we are aware of ourselves as individuals with a continuous consciousness holding divergent contents. Time passes, objects arise and dissolve, the aggregate of self grows and dissipates, and yet we are continuously, constantly aware of the changing.
Spirit holds matter. Through matter, spirit knows itself because it is that which endures in the changing, that which always knows the changing.
The eternal now is the spirit; its encounter with matter is experience.
Once again, we get ahead of ourselves and convolute the matter. All that must be said, all that must be understood, is that every individual spirit and Spirit itself exist outside of material spacetime and that they choose to enter the manifold. It forgets itself in the entering.
The eternity is deep. Our four dimensional manifold subsists in eternity like a piece of paper caught in the wind. All points of spacetime are accessible to one in the eternity. All occurrences in spacetime are simply convolutions of that surface, as if a lattice of clockworks were drawn on the page. Destiny is the connections between the gears, while freewill is an event at right angles to the surface.
Before birth, we inhabit the depth of eternity. It was our vessel and we were it. Desire and intention occurred. A gear was chosen, an earthly vessel, a body. The eternity passes through the single temporal point, the gear is turned, birth. In eternity, it meets itself on the other side, death.
All is eternal, yet an event occurred. Motion took place beyond all time. The spirit is different, changed, developed. Growth occurs.
For the third time, we are ahead of ourselves. We are not in eternity now, rather in the temporality of thought. We can only see movement, which is not yet true motion. The fact of the cognition of these words reveals two contrasting aspects of recollection, which are like the faces of a coin. First, recollection of eternity occurs in matter, otherwise material symbol could not be encoded into experience. Second, we are now in matter, on the wheel and turning, and not in eternity again. The spirit in the eternal now must find itself outside itself.
We have yet to see the path at right angles to all earthly motion. The enlightenment will occur and occurs in eternity, but has not yet occurred. We have yet to summon the courage to follow that path and meet ourselves. Otherwise, spirit merely enters matter and dissipates in endless convolutions.
Let us consider the spacetime in which spirit now finds itself. Remember that all points in the manifold are equidistant to eternal desire, to the moment before incarnation. Spirit chose this moment through which to meet itself. As the decision was made, ignorance occurred, and we find ourselves in the vorticies of matter. Clockwork appears to have greater reality than vitality. Physics more truth than imagination, compassion. We confuse ourselves with our vessels.
We must find the path that doesn’t exist. We must find the right angle to all material motion. If the path isn’t found, we will continue in the cycle of ignorance and suffering.
The phenomenon of history is the arena for spiritual development. Spacetime and matter meet spirit and eternity in mutual embrace through history. Their embrace is history.
Matter changes, forms emerge, and evolve. There is no stasis, only dynamic equilibrium. Mineral becomes vegetable, vegetable becomes animal, animal becomes human, and human divine.
The present is eternal. The past is forever consumed in its own transcendence, sublimation. Each moment dies in its passing in order to become something greater.
The material world is not a mere convolution of the same. It is not clockwork. The conservation laws are not destiny. Spirit enters matter and forms arise. Wholes are greater than the sum of parts.
We, as embodied spirit, rather our vessels themselves, may recognize spirit’s historical interaction with matter through the doctrine of evolution. The intellect of the body may deduce an evolution of forms. A study and participation in history enables the vessel to participate in spiritual sublimation.
Countless individuals have awakened before us and sublimated this cyclic existence. Many taught pupils, many expressed their wisdom in art or literature. While teachings are eternal and eternally beautiful and true, they somehow become insufficient.
Spirit must find spirit through a material vessel, not a spiritual vessel. The enlightenment and its expression occurs in the vessel. Spirit always finds itself at right angles to material motion. The primary experience of matter is change. While the paths of the previous enlightened eternally point to eternity, their intersection with material motion is now less than rectilinear. Matter changes and we cannot get on their paths from this here and now. We are already on a path, here and now. The spiritual vector, which points away from cyclic existence The personality, the mind of this writing vessel, this material form has beheld the realm of spirit. This mind of and towards eternity, has its beginning point in the moving vessel of body.
We are fortunate to be able to identify the material change with creative evolution. We are fortunate to have the examples of the previous enlightened. We are fortunate to be in history and to study history.
Epilogue
The greatest question now is, “why has spirit chosen now to meet itself in matter?”
The answer is found in the history of the world. History consists in the progression and evolution of forms. Matter, in its conserved convolutions, becomes arranged in unprecedented forms. These forms change and create greater and more unprecedented forms. The emergence of intelligible forms is the action of spirit in matter, rather than matter on matter.
Form occurs as the eternal spirit encounters particular matter. The form of an object is identical to its experience in the most universal instance of the eternal now, i.e., the cosmos.
Consider the formula spirit-meeting-spirit-through-matter from another perspective. Spirit passes through matter, in its action of self embrace, and impels the temporal progression of forms. The action of spirit is the difference between whole and sum of part, between predecessor and successor. Therefore, from our earthly perspective, the spiritual path may be recognized as the historical progression. Enlightened activity occurs with matter in the stream of time. The first step of spirit is taken from the present material condition. The arena of our spiritual development is in the world present to us.
The study of history and our current condition is the study of spirit. Whatever makes this world now more beautiful, just, compassionate, efficient, knowledgeable, etc., is a spiritual action. Such a creative act is a motion rectilinear to the manifold and points the way to divinity.
Spirit meets itself in matter through a recognition and production of particular manifestations of eternal forms. In such activity, the spirit in the eternal now embraces the spirit in the material form. Two divergent streams of spirit meet in a beautiful or compassionate experience: that which experiences and that which is experienced. That the object of experience is experienced as beautiful is its elevation from matter to spirit.
We find ourselves in a very unique place in history. We are in a critical moment in the exponential growth of science, technology, and population. Science and technology has grown so rapidly only where they have interfaced with corporate profit in a limited time frame. Their cancerous growth was fueled by corporations and governments, which in turn are controlled by individuals. We have so much material presence that our individual spiritual deficiencies are magnified to a global scale.
We are too many and our technology too great for us to use it without responsibility. Death by ignorance threatens. We must spiritually develop as a global organism and entity or else we will perish. Every individual must wish the benefit of every other and the all.
Perhaps it is more than coincidence that we developed the technology for global communications, i.e. coordination, just as our population and habits passed the environmental tipping point.
It is a material fact that humanity has changed, evolved. Every material individual is connected with every other. We share identity with one another through collective responsibility for the state of our environment and neighbors. We are not solely individuals anymore, we are members of a unique community. Our minds comprehend the globe, the world, the cosmos. Our bodies and minds are so entangled with each other and the planet that the spiritual vector must now be drawn rectilinear to that collective network. We are concerned with the clock now and not just the cog.
Prior to this historical moment, spiritual development occurred in an individual. The individual often created cultural echos, but primarily development began and ended in the individual. Christ declared that there will always be the poor and needy.
If humanity is to continue to be the vessel of spirit, then humanity must change itself. The individual must transform the world. We must save ourselves by saving the poor. We must transcend the world through activity in the world. The individual must become the world. We must together become a being greater than our aggregation in society or nation. Otherwise conflicting individual desires or inertia will prevent true global action.
In a catastrophe such as the consequences of the last century’s actions, should they come to fruition, we would lose our very humanity. The only way to prevent the fruition of material consequence is through spiritual development. An individual sublimates sin and death through identification with spirit and spiritual activity. Likewise, the human collective will sublimate pollution, injustice, and collapse through identification with the spirit and spiritual activity.
Art, religion, social justice, and any area of human activity that is clearly an expression of spirit must grow as exponentially as our science and population. Perhaps a greater acceleration is required.
For all history, until this moment, it has been advantageous for the individual to limit his responsibility and identification to family, community, or nation. This limitation is the direct cause of our historical crisis. Our systems, institutions, and corporations must transform themselves beginning in their most basic unit, the individual.
Quarterly profit will no longer feed our cancer of society. Rather, compassion will sustain an evolution of our institutions, culture, and nature. The only solution, only way to balance our present insanity, is for every individual to expand identity over every other individual, then to consciously and collectively act toward the spiritual development of the whole. The individual must realized that the earthly vessel is not just the body, but also the human collective and the world itself. The individual must then recollect his true nature, not as an material unit, but as an eternal creative principle.
We change the very nature of the world.
New, creative forms emerge in this historic moment.
