The Five Evolutionary States of True Man

“The Five Evolutionary States of True Man” From
Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be
Announced by the White House!

Adi Da Samra

Chapter 10: The Ultimate Passion of Man

The Five Evolutionary States of True Man

The primary cultural enterprise of the West is scientific
materialism, or the extroverted and aggressive technological
exploitation of the body and the world of Man.

The primary cultural enterprise of the East is mystical
transcendentalism, or the introverted and “other-worldly”
exploitation of the mind and soul of Man.

Until now, these separate enterprises have been granted a
kind of “holy” status-set apart from any fundamental
criticism. Thus, West and East have been conventionally
understood as irreducibly separate cultural enterprises that
must constantly be distinguished and allowed to realize
their independent destinies. But this conventional
understanding is founded on the very logic that is forcing
the present cultural and political conflicts in the
world.

In fact, the separate cultures of West and East are
products of the ancient self-divided state of Man in his
evolutionary childhood and adolescence. And there is no hope
for the evolutionary future of Man unless the self-divided
conception of Man is overcome-along with all of the ancient
cultural divisions.

If Man is understood as a whole, then he is seen in terms
of the dynamic unity of the two divisions of the autonomic
nervous system, which reflect the primal unity of the
central nervous system and the universal Life-Current (or
Light-Energy). And this understanding of Man must become the
Principle whereby we criticize the personal and cultural
divisions demonstrated by mankind.

From this point of view, we can see that the great
cultural enterprise of the West is founded on the impulses
and functional patterns of the verbal-analytical left
hemisphere of the brain and the “extroverted” or sympathetic
division of the autonomic nervous system. And the great
cultural enterprise of the East, in contrast to the West, is
founded on the symbolical and intuitive right hemisphere of
the brain and the “introverted” or parasympathetic division
of the autonomic nervous system.

The new great culture of the whole body of Man will and
must be founded on transcendence of these divisions and
their cultural limitations. Therefore, let us consider more
of the psychology and physiology of personal and cultural
self-division.

The human individual functions via a daily cycle of
dramatic changes of state. That is, the conventional pattern
of human experience involves a daily passage through three
common states of experiential consciousness. These three
states or conditions of experience are the waking state, the
dreaming state, and the sleeping state.

Everyone generally passes through these states as a
matter of necessity , or unavoidable psycho-physical
urgency, in a regular pattern, more or less coordinated with
the rhythmic daily cycle of sunlight. And yet we tend to
think of our lives exclusively in terms of the waking
state-as if dreaming and sleeping were secondary functional
patterns that serve our general health but have no ultimate
or real philosophical and personal significance. We tend to
think that to “be alive” is to be in the waking state,
whereas to dream or to sleep is to be in a state more like
death, where the “self” (as both mind and body) is passive,
threatened, vulnerable, undefinable, or even
non-existent.

If we examine the human individual in the waking state,
we discover that in this state, the urges and patterns of
the sympathetic (or extroverted) division of the autonomic
nervous system are generally dominant. And, therefore, it is
our attachment to “self” as waking consciousness that
accounts for our self-divided tendency to conceive of Man
fundamentally as an extroverted and analytically thinking
creature. Our attachment to the waking state causes an
imbalance in our functional being. And that imbalance is
demonstrated in our personal lives and in our cultural
enterprises.

Men and women of both the West and the East suffer and
react to the same self-dividing effect of attachment to the
“self” as experience in the waking state. However, the
Western or occidental individual generally tends to adapt
this self-divided and self-possessed state of being to a
different functional ideal than the Eastern or oriental
individual.

The “self” in the waking state is tending to be
self-divided, self-possessed, more or less extroverted (or
oriented toward the play of bodily experience), possessed of
a personal sense of “self” as a mortal physical being, and
possessed as well by a sense of the world as a machine of
irreducible material processes. The Western or “occidental”
mode of response to this view of existence is to adapt to it
and to try by persistent analysis and material effort to
overcome all mortal limitations. However, the Eastern or
“oriental” mode of response is to try to escape the game of
existence as it appears from the conventional point of view
of the waking state.

The “oriental” tendency is founded on a tacit sense that
the body-mind of Man and the cycle of ordinary human
experience contain an alternative experiential path to that
which is revealed in the waking state. As I have tried to
suggest, that alternative path is simply the parasympathetic
division of the autonomic nervous system.

In the waking state, the sympathetic or “extroverted”
division of the autonomic nervous system is dominant. But in
the dreaming state the parasympathetic or “introverted”
division of the autonomic nervous system is dominant. In the
waking state, the verbal-analytical functions of the left
hemisphere of the brain are dominant. But in the dreaming
state the symbolical and holistic functions of the right
hemisphere of the brain are dominant.

The conventions of the Western way of life exploit the
extroverted or body-oriented motives of the sympathetic
division of the autonomic nervous system, and the
traditional Western mind functions predominantly in the
verbal-analytical mode. Western man is Man exclusively in
the waking state, without integration of consciousness with
the dreaming and sleeping states. Just so, Eastern man is
Man seeking to be exclusively in either the dreaming or the
sleeping state, without full or even partial integration
with the waking state.

The alternative personal and cultural path that has been
developed in oriental cultures since ancient times is the
path of inwardness, or the inversion of consciousness via
the mechanisms of the parasympathetic division of the
autonomic nervous system. That is, the oriental method is
generally a matter of either mystical or intuitive
inversion-or escape from the limiting association of
consciousness with the mortal limitations of the
conventional waking state.

The method typical of oriental mysticism (and, indeed, of
all traditional mystical paths of religion, wherever they
arise) always involves the inversion of attention-turning
attention away from the bodily senses and away from the
verbal mind. The process involves various psycho-physical
techniques for switching the attention from the
psycho-physical circuit of the descending and outgoing motor
impulses that move from the brain to the bodily outlets of
the senses, directing attention instead toward the ascending
and ingoing sensory impulses that move from the sense
terminals to the brain core. When this is done successfully,
the body and the ordinary thinking mind are quieted, and the
interior mind of dream, creative imagination, and psychic
perception beyond the bodily limits of the individual tends
to awaken, producing various kinds of subjective, mystical,
and higher psychic experiences (ultimately including
telepathic association with all of the conditions in the
space-time continuum).

The goal of oriental mysticism is release from bodily
limits and projection of attention into states of mind and
psyche that are at least relatively free of conventional
physical limitations. The result is a view or understanding
of existence that is quite the opposite of the conventional
Western or occidental view. It is a magical consciousness,
driven by an impulse toward singularity, or absorption of
mind and attention in nondualistic bliss.

The oriental path itself has two primary divisions.
Oriental idealism pursues a condition of consciousness that
is either mystical (or primarily visionary) or intuitive (or
primarily associated with nondualistic absorption of mind or
attention). This division (which may also represent two
stages in a single process, ultimately leading to
nondualistic absorption) is due to the unique
psycho-physical anatomy of Man. Once attention is turned
from the sympathetic (or extroverted) circuit to the
parasympathetic (or introverted) circuit, the psychic and
higher physical phenomena of mysticism appear. However, once
attention passes fully back to the brain core, the primal
Life-Current in the central nervous system is contacted.
Therefore, mystical consciousness is ultimately followed by
transcendence of the mystical mind in the primal intuition
of the universal Life-Consciousness.

Our experience of the dreaming process is an expression
of the relaxation of outer or extroverted attention (or
relaxation of the verbal-analytical mental process in the
left hemisphere of the brain and the outgoing motor process
in the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system)
followed by the inversion of attention, primarily toward the
visually oriented mental centers of the right hemisphere of
the brain (via the sensory circuit of the parasympathetic
division of the autonomic nervous system). The process by
which mystical consciousness is developed is precisely the
same process by which everyone enters into dreams-except
that the mystic engages in a conscious exercise of this
mechanism and exploits its potential to the highest
degree.

However, just as we may pass from dreaming to sleeping,
we may also pass from mystical states of consciousness to an
apparently mindless and even bodiless state of “pure
consciousness.” This phenomenon is described in the oriental
literature of esoteric spirituality as “liberation,”
“nirvana” (or the realization of the “quenching” of the
principle of desire), “nirvikalpa samadhi” (a samadhi, or
trance state, without the conception of form), the
“realization of the Atman” (or true Self), or the
“realization of Brahman” (the Absolute Consciousness).
However, the process by which this intuitive state of
self-transcendence is attained is precisely the same process
by which everyone enters into the deep sleep state-except
that the oriental seeker of intuitive self-transcendence
enters into this state without the loss of conscious
awareness. (In ordinary sleep, the individual is bereft of
the awareness of states of mind and body, and so he feels
“unconscious,” but in the state of intuitive
self-transcendence via inward absorption, the consciousness
remains intact, free of mental and bodily associations.)

The mechanism of deep sleep is associated with the shut
down of attention in both the right and the left hemispheres
of the higher brain. In deep sleep, the brain yields into
the central Life-Current that pervades the central nervous
system. Therefore, in the oriental process of internalized
self-transcendence, it is the Life-Current in the central
nervous system that occupies and absorbs attention, and,
thus, the attention appears to have no functional locus
(except that some relationship may intuitively or tacitly be
felt to exist between the upper right side of the heart and
the Transcendental Consciousness in the Life-Current).

Thus, the oriental path is described and followed in
terms of mysticism and/or intuitive and inverted
self-transcendence. And the mechanism of this process is the
same one that everyone experiences during states of dreaming
and sleeping.

We may say, then, that oriental culture and Eastern man
are founded on the solution to the problem of the mortal
“self” by means of the exclusive exploitation of the
inverted consciousness otherwise displayed in the processes
of dreaming and sleeping. And occidental culture and Western
man are founded on the solution to the problem of the mortal
“self” by means of the exclusive exploitation of the
extroverted consciousness otherwise displayed in the
processes of the waking state itself.

The problem inherent in this whole affair is that there
are two solutions, and these are mutually exclusive.
Traditionally, you must choose (or be born into) one or the
other way of life. But, in our time of worldwide
communication and blending of cultures, we are all
confronted by both possibilities. Therefore, since both
options confront all of us, we are no longer truly capable
of the now provincial attitude of either Eastern or Western
man. Instead, we are all disturbed by the absence of
absolutes, and the paradox of our possibilities is
overwhelmingly clear. As a result, the simple pursuit of
either an Eastern or a Western program of life has a quality
of absurdity about it that no one but the most culturally
provincial individual can deny.

Therefore, we are being obliged to transcend the
exclusive Eastern and Western programs of ancient and
traditional culture. We are being obliged altogether to
transcend the self-possessed and self-divided mode of
existence-in order to realize a new and whole bodily
synthesis of ecstatic personal and collective culture.

ust as more “creative” or more fully integrated
individuals are able to function within the mental realms of
both the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and to
realize a harmony of well-being in both divisions of the
autonomic nervous system, all human individuals must be
acculturated toward more and more inclusive and insightful
levels of functioning-in the waking state and in all other
states. Every conventional state (waking, dreaming, or
sleeping) has its appropriate moment, and every part of the
body-mind must contribute to a truly human or integrated
consciousness in the waking state. The true waking state is
awake whole bodily, in a harmony, and also in every aspect
of the brain-mind and the higher psyche. And unless we thus
perfect our adaptation to the waking state, we will only
seem awake-whereas we will be asleep in our deep psychic and
intuitive being, or else at war with bodily existence via an
irrational preference for the disembodied symbols of our own
imagination.

The culture of the whole body and whole brain is
infinitely superior to the culture of aggressive
extroversion and the culture of conventional religious
inwardness. The true Man is a spiritual being, yielded in
his total body-mind to the Living Reality that contains and
pervades the World-Process. The other-worldly, body-denying,
anti-sexual, anti-intellectual mysticism of the exclusively
oriental man is a heresy in the whole body of true Man.
Likewise, the exclusively verbal and analytical mind, with
its materialistic pride of bodily power and its deep psychic
impoverishment, is the heresy of exclusively Western
man.

The whole Man lives in a fourth state, a unity with the
Transcendental Life-Consciousness that includes and also
transcends the waking, dreaming, and sleeping states. The
whole Man transcends and also includes every aspect of his
own body-mind. He lives and grows through self-transcending
adaptation (of his own functional possibilities) to the
universal Life-Current. At last, he enters into a fifth
state, in which mind and body are both Transfigured and
ultimately Dissolved in the Radiant Bliss of the
Transcendental Reality, which is expressed as the Light of
Love, projected from the heart (or the center, free “soul”
and true Self of the body-mind) and the central nervous
system (or the vehicle of the subtle “astral” body-mind at
the core of the physical body-mind). (And this Process of
true death, or bodily Transfiguration and Translation, is
the mechanism in the World-Process whereby individual
existence as Man is transcended, and individual or higher
conscious existence in more highly evolved worlds or
planets, or even in the Transcendental Realm, is begun.)

Scientific Proof – Table
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