The Ultimate Passion of Man

Chapter 10: The Ultimate Passion of Man

Mysticism and Evolution

The earliest or most immediate effects of the stimulation
of the higher or central nervous system of Man by the
Universal Life-Current are personal, subjective, and
mystical. For this reason, this process and its various
natural phenomena have traditionally been maintained within
the exclusive province of exoteric and esoteric
religion.

However, the ultimate significance of this process is not
merely as a means of individual salvation or release via
internal or subjective experiences. Rather, the ultimate
significance and value of this process is evolutionary , or
an instrument of the growth, transformation, and
self-transcendence of Man (and thus of mankind).

The earliest and most immediate effects of this process
are subjective, internal, psychic, and mystical. Therefore,
this process has traditionally been found attractive by
those who desire release from this world via the inwardness
of the human psyche. But all such experiences are deluding,
unless properly understood, and, in any case, they represent
nothing more than limited forms of knowledge about the
experiential condition of Man.

The ultimate and long-term development of this process,
as a cultural affair of humanity as a whole, is not merely
mystical, personal, psychic, and associated with
experiential knowledge. Rather, the ultimate and long-term
development of this human cultural process is evolutionary
and physical . That is, if this process is engaged with
right understanding, and in devotion to the Paradox of the
Living Reality rather than to the vagrant possibilities of
personal and merely internal experience, knowledge, or
release, then the subjective, intellectual, and mystical
effects are transcended, and evolutionary transformations of
the broadly cultural and literal physical conditions of Man
(both individually and collectively) are increased.

In the evolutionary acculturation of mankind, the
Radiance of the Living Reality pervades the total body-mind
of Man, thus permitting growth and transformation, and, at
last, even the translation of Man into the Radiant Domain of
Love, Life, and Ecstatic Transcendental Consciousness that
transcends the self, and the mind, and the body of every
human individual and every group of human individuals.

The mystical and evolutionary processes of human
development have been practiced and transmitted by various
kinds or degrees of Adepts throughout human history. Certain
founders of religion (such as Jesus and Gautama) were
practicing Adepts of this kind. Other religious founders or
leaders, such as Mohammed and Martin Luther, were not
practicing Adepts, but they were inspired men of insight or
prophetic urgency, whose personal activity was entirely
within the domain of exoteric religion. But most
practitioners or Adepts of the mystical and evolutionary
science were active outside the realm of “Everyman,” and
they were known only within the esoteric “inner circles” of
the religious and spiritual traditions.

Lesser Adepts are individuals who have enjoyed remarkable
mystical experiences and attained a degree of Wisdom that is
helpful or useful to individuals who are less developed than
themselves. These lesser Adepts serve the awakening of
idealism and functional discipline in ordinary people, and
the level of experience to which they lead their followers
is generally limited to mystical developments of the
Life-Current in the autonomic nervous system and the central
nervous system.

However, the highest Adepts serve the awakening of
radical insight and responsibility in others, and they guide
others through and beyond personal and subjective mysticism,
into the domain of the evolutionary transformation and
ultimate self-transcendence of Man. Therefore, the Work of
the highest Adepts is fundamental to human culture as a
whole. And the process developed by practitioners in the
Company of such Adepts ultimately transcends both the
autonomic and the central nervous systems of Man through
perfect devotion to the Radiant All-Pervading Life-Current
and Transcendental Consciousness that is the Truth of Man
and the World.

Therefore, the value of the esoteric spiritual process is
not mere subjective mystical experience. Traditional and,
especially, oriental schools of mysticism tend to ascribe
independent significance and reality to internal or
subjective phenomena, so that mystical experiences become an
end in themselves. But such experiences are only symptoms
and early signs of the larger process, and they only signify
and depend upon higher physical events in the structure of
Man (particularly in the central nervous system and the
organs of the brain core). Personal experiential mysticism,
or internal self-watching, thus remains an appropriate
preoccupation of human beings only in the period of
transition or growth beyond confinement to the lower
functions of the human body-mind. The true and ultimate
value of the esoteric spiritual process is the evolutionary
physical (or total psycho-physical) and cultural adaptation
of the human body-mind (or total personality). And such
evolutionary cultural and total physical (or
psycho-physical) transformation becomes the prime interest
only after we mature beyond fascination with internal or
subjective mystical phenomena, higher or extraordinary kinds
of knowledge, and all of the lower or conventional rituals
of the ordinary physical, emotional, and mental experience
of the subhuman “Everyman.”

Once mankind has entered into the higher culture of human
adaptation, the mystical and the evolutionary mechanics will
be commonly experienced and understood. And then not only
will the culture of Man be founded in higher Wisdom, but the
Destiny of Man will be understood to be beyond Man, in the
Ecstasy of ultimate self-transcendence and even the bodily
or material Translation of Man and the material World into
the Radiant Domain of Life.

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