Demonic monads have also not lost their ability to create. But divine co- creation evokes nothing in them but extreme hostility. Every demon creates for its own sake and in its own name only.
People's creative work becomes divine co-creation from the moment and to the extent that their irresistible creative impulse is guided by their will and faith not toward the attainment of one or another egoistic goal-fame, pleasure, riches, the service of a cruel and base teaching-but toward the service of the God of Love.
Freedom, love, and divine co-creation are the three words that sum up the Rose of the World's perspective on art, science, education, marriage, family, nature, and even on those aspects of modern life ignored by all religions: social justice and harmony.
Being and Consciousness
What I have said supplies us with a new point of view on the centuries- long debate over the primacy of being or consciousness.
"Consciousness determines being," was the formula of the idealistic schools. During the next, secular stage of culture, the formula was turned on its head, but its content remained untouched. It was the same juxtaposition of two components, and so the new formula inherited the simplism of its predecessor. The question is much more complex than those formulas. At the same time, it is simpler than the ungainly edifices of premises and
conclusions constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the extraction of such modest gains.
«Being determines consciousness.» "Consciousness determines being." Whose being? Whose consciousness? Of a specific individual? Of humanity? Of the world? Of living, conscious matter? Everything is so jumbled, so imprecise.
The consciousness of specific individuals (for simplicity's sake we will speak only of humans) is not determined by any one consciousness or by being in general but by a set of factors. These factors are
the individual's own physical being;
the being of the individual's natural and cultural environment;
the consciousness of a large number of people, both living and dead, for by their efforts these consciousnesses determine, to a significant extent, the cultural milieu in which the individuals live and that affect their being and consciousness;
the consciousness of xnumber of other beings who influence the natural environment and transform it;
the being and consciousness of the hierarchies that create worlds;
the superconscious individuality inherent in the monad of the individual;
the being-consciousness of the One God, in Whom being and consciousness are one, rather than different, conflicting categories.
If the question refers not to individuals and their being and consciousness but to the Universe (or to be more exact, the emergence of consciousness in the organic matter of worlds in the Universe), then clearly, since the Universe is determined by the nature of the One God, the conflict between being and
consciousness vanishes, for the above-mentioned reason. Since the Universe is determined by the work of God-created monads, the question concerning the emergence of consciousness after some period of unconscious existence becomes irrelevant. For if there were no God-created monads with their consciousness and being, then no matter, neither organic nor inorganic, could come into being either.
We could today afford to chuckle over the simplism of the classical formulas if one of them had not become the philosophical dogma of political despotism and caused untold harm, stifling the independent thought of a host of people and barring spirituality from access to their consciousness. The other formula, just as flawed, is nevertheless not as dangerous for the very reason that it is more spiritual. But that does not at all excuse the older religions and their philosophizing, their waste of so many centuries on intellectual speculation without coming a step closer to understanding the relationship between being and consciousness.
The Variomaterial Composition of Humans
Among the numerous planes of Shadanakar, there is a multidimensional world where human monads-indivisible and immortal spiritual entities, the higher selves of humans-abide. Created by God and God alone, with some (a very few) mysteriously born of Him, they enter Shadanakar, coating themselves in rarefied matter, or rather, energy. This is a substance that permeates all of Shadanakar; every individual spirit, in entering our bramfatura, must coat itself in it. The world where our monads abide is called Iroln.
Creative work toward the eventual enlightenment of the Universe is the task of every monad, except demonic ones. There are no demonic human monads. Human monads carry out that enlightening work in lower worlds assigned to them, creating material coatings for themselves there and acting on the environment of those planes by means of the coatings.
The monad first creates a shelt from five-dimensional materiality, then an astral body from four-dimensional materiality. We often group these two coatings together under the word soul. A shelt is the material vessel of the monad with all its divine properties and capacities. It is not the monad, which remains in fivedimensional Iroln, but the shelt that begins the journey on the lower planes. The shelt is created by the monad alone.
Mother Earth, the great elemental, takes part in the creation of the astral body. She takes part in the creation of astral bodies for all beings of Shadanakar: humans, angels, daemons, animals, elementals, demons, and even the great hierarchies, when the latter descend to planes where an astral body is required. The astral body is the higher instrument of the shelt. Concentrated within it are the gifts of spiritual sight, spiritual hearing, spiritual smell, deep memory, the ability to levitate, to communicate with the Synclites, daemons, elementals, and angels, and to perceive cosmic panoramas and perspectives.
Mother Earth, fertilized by the spirit of the Sun, next creates an ether body for the incarnating monad. No life in three and four dimensional worlds is possible without it. When the shelt with all its coatings, including the ether body, abandons the physical body-the last, outermost, and shortest-lived of its vessels- nothing but a corpse remains in Enrof. Our physical body is created for us by the angelic hierarchies-they create the matter- and by Lilith, the great elemental of humanity, who forges the family chain from three- dimensional materiality. The monad itself, through the shelt, contributes to the process by bestowing individuality on a given link in the chain.
Once the process of descent has concluded, the process of ascent begins. A monad can assume a physical body either just one time or over and over again. An ether body is created anew only if the bearer, in falling afoul of the law of retribution, is forced to embark on a journey through the great planes of torment. As for the path of ascent, the ether body accompanies the bearer through all the worlds of Enlightenment, all the way up to the zatomis-the abodes of enlightened humankind, the celestial cities of the metacultures. The ether body is composed of a living substance that is not everywhere uniform, differing as it does in all three and four dimensional worlds. It would be proper to call it, in recalling the ancient revelation given to humanity, arungvilta-prana.
The astral body accompanies the bearer higher, up to and including the sakwala of Higher Purpose. Higher than that, only the shelt is left to achieve final enlightenment and merge with the monad. Then the monad departs from Iroln and, coated with an extremely rarefied shelt, rises up the stairway to the highest worlds of Shadanakar.
All these planes will be discussed in later parts of the book; many of them will be described in as much detail as possible. But I am, unfortunately, incapable of throwing more light on the interaction between the various coatings of the monad and on their functions and structure.
Metacultures
The structure of Shadanakar (a vast area of investigation that we shall soon enter) will remain unintelligible at the most basic of levels if the meaning of the words suprapeople, metaculture, and transmyth is not firmly grasped beforehand.