The Four Corners of Kosmos – 3 of 8

Dear Souls,

This is the Third of a series of eight blogs (4 blogs with 2 parts each blog that will be presented one per week) where I present the basics of the book my late Father-In-Law Dennis Milner, completed just before his ascension – Kosmos.

 2a – An Evolutionary-Wholistic View of Creation

The theoretical physicist Paul Daniels¹ has reviewed phenomena that show a creative power and self-organising ability in Nature and concludes that it is not possible to explain this in terms of molecules and inter-atomic forces and that there must be ‘something going on behind it all’. We thought that the mystic’s explanation of life/etheric, soul/feeling and spirit/thinking activities lying behind Nature might resolve these problems but the mystic’s explanations were vague. The most comprehensible account we found was by Rudolf Steiner².  This was of a hierarchy of spiritual beings working in a ‘cosmic ether’, to implement the plan of a remote, awe-inspiring Godhead, in which a  key feature is that all forms come about as the result of four ‘etheric forces’.  But to determine whether our experimental results could be explained in these terms we needed a better understanding of these forces.  While struggling to understand Steiner’s ideas, as conveyed by his accolyte Wachsmuth³, we came across an expanded consciousness technique with which we experimented to see if we could perceive these forces for ourselves.

Working with an expanded consciousness technique

We found it comparatively easy to achieve an expanded consciousness state in which we got insights by images, feelings or words⁴.   These conveyed information that could be comparatively mundane, or seemingly from a source of great wisdom, depending on the nature and quality of our questing and/or what the ‘source’ seemed to think we needed to know.    In these expanded consciousness experiences (ECEs) the other members of the group entered into an expanded consciousness state while I acted as a guide to try and understand and control what was going on.  At first the insights were concerned with the inner problems and development of the group members but then we found we could ask questions about the etheric force activity in our experiments and it seemed we had established contact with intelligencies that could in some way perceive the workings of these forces and had a much larger and deeper vision of the workings of the Universe, so that, although we did not uncritically accept the viewpoint put forward in the ECEs, we ‘consulted’ them to see if they could help us.   However, despite pursuing this ‘ECE dialogue’ for many months we could not get a satisfactory explanation for our results.  Then an image that purported to be Steiner appeared saying that we needed to bring the Christ force into our work.

Harry:  I have an image of Steiner.  The link is very strong between him, or them, and us.  But there’s something we’ve got to do.   We have to open ourselves up and bring the Christ force into our own resources.

None of us had any religious convictions nor, at this stage of our work, any understanding of the Christ force, but the ECEs gave us information on the nature of the Christ force and the Christ path, as with the following selections from Harry:

Harry:  If one mentions the Christ force and the Christ path one imagines all sorts of spiritual, mystical, holy sort of feelings but it’s not like that.  It’s a very practical down-to-earth sort of thing.  The Christ path is a very patient path: it just waits for people to join it.  I get the picture that the Christ force doesn’t assert itself.  It’s there but it fades into the background. 

At first the ECEs had pursued Steiner’s viewpoint that everything happened according to the plan of a remote Godhead but after this our ECEs portrayed an all-embracing Godhead who evolves through His Creation.

Brian:  We’ve thought about the Godhead being something untouchable, incomprehensible, unapproachable.  But we don’t need to.  We are tiny but the principles embodied in us are part of the Godhead, we are part of him, we contain all we need to know. It’s not that you go up and up and reach the top.  He’s in evolution himself.  He doesn’t know what is going to go on, in that he is as much involved in it as we are because we are him.   All that goes on in this world goes on inside the Godhead.  This is not chaotic, there is order, a specific way of things.

We found this idea of everything consisting of an all-embracing, evolving Godhead difficult to grasp, (even though we were given ECEs conveying various  governing principles about how this worked – which we could not properly comprehend), so that we made little progress in our understanding until the idea of a creator Godhead was replaced by an ’Absolute’.

The nature and workings of the Absolute

 Brian:  I have an image of the Absolute and the Absolute is All, Everything.  It is the Beginning and the End.  The Absolute shakes itself, centres itself and creates Soul.  Soul is desire – desire for perfection.  Soul experiences desire because it is empty.  Soul desires to know and be known, to love and be loved.  One’s soul lies within waiting to be nurtured, fed, brought up and developed in the same way that the Universal soul within the body of the Absolute is developing and realising itself.

We could relate to these soul qualities of desire and love etc. but the problem was, on this basis how do all the physical phenomena of the universe come about?  Then Ted had an ECE that portrayed the beginning of ‘physical activity’ by the Absolute.

Ted:  I’m drawn back to the stage when all is one – a vast quiet nothingness.  Then parts of it begin to move, parts of it arise and collapse.  Then somewhere else a centre arises – for a brief moment the part that is outside witnesses the turmoil and with this comes the appreciation of the raw potential.  It’s not a case of thinking about what can be made and then assembling the materials to do it.  This happens the other way round.  The Absolute gets to know itself and then it recognises what it can do.  This is something that develops as it goes along.

According to this viewpoint everything is part of an ‘Absolute/Energy’ which starts in a dormant unconscious state that experiences a succession of impulses which cause eruptions’ of activity to take place in it (in much the same way that a baby experiences unconscious impulses that cause it to erupt into activity).   In each eruption it activates, and gets some experience of, a part of itself.   As the Absolute develops, becomes aware of, and learns to control, its eruptions these become a coherent rhythm of activity, as portrayed in one of Andy’s ECEs:

Andy:  I saw a pair of strong hands and I held these.  They were Christ’s hands and they were offering strength and support.  I feel myself moving towards a vantage point where you see everything – a still centre.  Then I saw a gateway into a garden.  Christ led me through the gate and I left a part of me behind.  This was the collection of prejudices, fears and weaknesses that would get in the way – Christ and I are sitting on benches facing each other.  What do you wish to know? He says.

Guide:  In recent months we’ve been led to a Godhead and given a variety of images. Were these steps along the way that we can now discard and concentrate on the Absolute?

Andy:  I saw a revisualisation of these images.  This seemed to mean that we dealt with each thing as it appeared under our noses. At the end of the sequence Christ stepped aside to reveal a powerful blaze of golden light so that I was face to face with the Absolute.

 I see the Absolute with a great cloak of his creation spread out around him, and he takes everything in and fingers it all and I feel some kind of dissatisfaction, tension, impatience, the sense of something unresolved.  He’s picking out all the unresolved things he wants to work on.  Once he’s picked these out and identified them he lets everything go out again.  I see the things to be worked on as little golden rods and they glow while everything else is grey.  The Absolute finds these gold bars not as a few areas to be tidied up in a sea of perfection but according to what has gone before the next phase automatically presents itself, so that when the Absolute has dealt with these gold bars then another set of things will become prominent  — Just then the central figure looked up and said, ‘Don’t talk about the stages ahead.  I’ve got enough on my hands with this lot’.  Then he began to swing round and the cloak slowly pulls after him and then he stops and the cloak continues to turn and it winds itself around him.  Then he turns the other way and the cloak swings up and out and he stops again and it winds itself up the other way.  He does a dance turning and swinging this cloak around him, and he goes on and on.  The cloak gets larger as it works out from him, it gets more differentiated, breaking down into finer detail.  And I heard him say, ‘I breathe into my creation’, and I saw that as he breathed a ring of beads appeared extending it out further.  So by repeated impulses the Absolute is perfecting the creation that’s already there as well as advancing new creation.   It’s an endless process.  As fast as the Absolute is able to reach out and make a perfect creation there’s always more further out which is growing in a disharmonious way.

Guide:  And just one of these turns is our Universe, everything that we know?

Andy:  The age of our Universe is but the twinkling of an eye of this figure.

According to this ECE our Universe is one of a succession of Universes each of which develops out of, and realises new potentials in, the previous one, by which the totality (the Absolute) evolves.  The idea of everything being part of a ‘total system’ of evolution is in accord with the findings of science, in the sense that during the last century Darwin showed that life on Earth has evolved and astronomers showed that the Universe as a whole has evolved so that everything can be considered to be part of an evolving system.   If the fundamental feature of the Absolute/God/Creation, is that it is evolving, then any basic understanding has to be in terms of the principles of evolution and how these work, which we have tried to sketch out⁵.  It will not be achieved by breaking atoms down into smaller and smaller particles.

To be continued…..