Three Paths to the Divine

Tripartite Initiation

I have spoken liberally in the past of the three elements to the Divine, and their connection to three spiritual personages. When we speak of certain things esoterically, and especially in reference to describing the concepts which organize other elements of our thought, it is very easy to get things mixed up. What I am meaning by this is that, lets say, we try to fit in a hierarchy into three elements of a set. In one way of looking at those three elements we arrive at the conception that element A is situated on top and B and C are reliant upon A for their manifestation. But, in any kind of true esotericism, an honest one of course, we realize from another perspective that element B is actually on top, as well as element C. In Pathways Through to Space Franklin Merrell-Wolff writes about this in reference to the trinitarian Divine of the Indian mystics. He recognizes each element of Being-Consciousness-Bliss to be a part of a triangle. He sees quite clearly how other philosophies posit different perspectives than his which sees consciousness as primary. He has a logical reason for this of course. I wish to write on three general paths to the Divine as we see in Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Rudolf Steiner, and Sri Aurobindo. You can think of them as similarly enough to these three elements of the Divine, where each can be viewed as sitted atop the other, in a relative hierarchy—yet, they, together, form a greater kind of unity.

To begin with, we must come to realize a three part reality of man, as well as his more organized four part reality. Lastly, a description of the different planes of existence in which we can interact and find refuge in. Without a sound basis of generally recognized truths in esotericism, without reference to some kind of fact island, we would be set a drift in a sea of meaningful but personal revelations. So we will compare the broad strokes of initiation in Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s spiritualism, Rudolf Steiner’s approach, as well as Sri Aurobindo’s. There are books that have begun to try and do something similar to what I am positing here, such as Veda and the Living Logos, which draw together a preliminary philosophical unity between anthroposophy and the integral yoga. I am, however, not relying on this text. Primarily because I have not finished it, but also because my goal is not to showcase an academic connection between two philosophers. As we have spoken about in the article before this, I do not wish to write in reference something previous or prior to the human imagination. I simply want to use every ounce of my linguistic capabilities to try and convey the truth.

To start, we must consider the triple nature of man. In Theosophy Steiner writes that man is a being of body, soul and spirit. This is also a similar substance as Evola mentions in The Hermetic Tradition; although, the terms soul and spirit are flipped in their meaning there. In Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy there is the outer manifestation, the inner manifestation as well as the highest sense of being. So, in order to change man’s outer bodily nature he must turn inward and then upward. Ultimately, all paths to the Divine recognize in some sense that we exist as having bodies of manifestation, an inner psychic essence, as well as an unchanging spiritual unity.

As it concerns the various bodies a man has, it is usually written up as a fourfold being. In anthroposophy it is as follows: physical, formative-force (life) body, desire (astral) body, ego (“I am”) body. In the integral yoga it is: physical sheath, vital sheath, mental sheath, psychic sheath. In other paths it is similar enough that between these two maps, we can find enough connections that fit in between either of these two distinctions. Are these a one to one map? Not exactly. Included in man’s four fold nature are actually elements of a higher nature as well. In anthroposophy we see as well that the soul has it own three part nature. The soul for them exists when the ego (this a special case, not the literal ego but the “I am” essence of man) works upon the lower three bodies. This creates three souls: the sentient, mental and consciousness souls. The most controversial part of anthroposophy from a yogic standpoint, is that Steiner mentions that the soul body forms a kind of unity with the astral body. So, the body of desires is said to be the same as the body of the soul; yet in integral yoga the body of desires is precisely the “false soul”, as it isn’t the true nature of the soul-substance. Even Steiner in other texts writes how the astral body is discarded in the process of the souls assent between death and rebirth. The soul, then, appears as something different that is carried with the ego into what Steiner calls “spirit country”. This is perhaps the most difficult unity to find between the integral yoga and anthroposphy—for now, we will say, that on a technicality it should be inappropriate to designate the astral body as being the same as the soul body.

What we see mapped as the bodily existence in the integral yoga is better situated to the various planes of ether as we see in anthroposophy. That is, there is the physical plane and its life ether, the astral plane and its chemical ether, the mental plane and its light ether, and the buddhi plane and its fire ether.¹ Here we can see where in anthroposophy there was an inappropriate unity between the soul body and the astral body, there is as well an inappropriate unity in the integral yoga. For the integral yoga the etheric body is unified seamlessly with the body of desires. Anthroposophy recognizes this in the sense that the etheric body and the astral body form a kind of gradient rather than two distinct bodies; yet, we can point them out as two different substances. For all of our desires to be shuffled into the vital sheath is not completely accurate, as desires have their own plane of existence in the astral plane. When we consider the body in sleep, we see not just that the mind leaves the body, but also the desires leave the body too. Clearly, if those desires where beheld precisely to vital sheath, we would be in a constant state of duress during our sleeping hours. (Surely it is not hard to imagine, that, likewise poor sleep is precisely when the astral body cannot leave the physical body, and we suffer a kind of pleasure or pain throughout the night.) The truth is found somewhere in the middle.

Lastly, we must talk of one other issue relating to these planes and the body. That is, in anthroposophy, we are told that the “soul” is what cognizes and the mind is really the soul. As we see clearly with the distinction of the mind, sentient and consciousness soul. In Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s philosophy we see a clearer distinction here between the three kinds of knowledge: perceptions, conceptions and introceptions. We can actually broaden these distinctions to a deeper truth by connecting them to the anthroposophical ideas of sentience, mentality, and consciousness. Our sense of perception is our degree of sentience, our idea of conceptions is our mental faculty, and our sense of “knowledge by identity” is our ability to know things through consciousness itself. That is, we have thoughts in the presence of the senses, we have thoughts by themselves, and then we see ourselves in thought. I am sentient in the sense that I have thought-substance of my senses, while I cognize things because I am aware of thoughts themselves, and I grow into self-consciousness when my power of thought encompasses my sense of being (my spirit). It is appropriate now to realize that anthroposophy sees the ego body of man as his “thought body”, while the integral yoga sees his psychic being as only that which is that spark of being-consciousness-bliss.

Within every aspect of the mind there is the hidden sense of “I am”, laid in the background—that sense is awareness—which is intrinsic in the ideas of sentience, cognizance and consciousness. We can also see how both anthroposophy and integral yoga recognize this element of the self as the personal manifestation, the I am or the soul of the being. Aurobindo has gone on record for saying that he wasn’t sure why people always said that the soul cognizes or how the mental being was intrinsic to the soul—to a degree he is correct—while the I am is always there in the mental substance, the I am is separate from the mental character. Consider an animal for a moment—what makes each animal unique is their own personal desires. Anything they do receive through the mind is not due to themselves having a sense of I am, or a sense of sentience, cognizance or self-consciousness as we would consider it in humans. We could say that they have the ability to be influenced by thoughts, and they have a clear awareness of the environment, but they do not actually own those thoughts. They don’t have an individual sense of self, that they can say “I think that,” but rather their soul is shared among all members of their race. What they cognize and what they are allowed to be able to “think” is something that is intrinsic to their evolution in the world. When we consider how we have bred dogs for example, new breed are formed based upon the human “I am, or I want you to be able to do this.” The animal ego or the animal I am responds in kind. But, for it to adapt to the human commands it forms a new type of dog entirely, so that the next generation of dogs is better suited to those thoughts that relate how it responds to its environment. The animal body is not capable of meditating on memory as the human might do and take advantage of, with its mental capacities. Whatever the animal realizes and is able to remember is then transferred through the sexual organs to its offspring, which better remembers what it retained from the parents interactions in the world.

In short, to summarize, we can see the mind more-so as the thought body. However, what we see as the body of thoughts is connected to the individual sense of self, the I am or the ego. Without an I am there could be no thought, and every thought has a being attached to it. This is what the integral yoga recognizes as the Witness consciousness.

When we hear in the yogic traditions that the force of life is actually a pure thing, and not subjected to the force of death, that it has an innate immortality to it—they are not speaking of the archetypal aspect of man’s occult being, but rather the ontological essence of where we draw life from. The universal prana is easily found to be animating the whole plane of physical existence; where as in occult traditions, we are pointed more primarily to the body of formative forces we inherit, that naturally experiences and undergoes death (due to it being imperfect). This of course also demonstrates what some people have recognized as the primary difference between the East and the West. The East puts emphasis on the dissolution of the bodily Self into it’s greater existence as forces of these various planes of existence—the philosophy of the East can be said to be built off of remembering who you once where, as your primordial essence—thus the terminal root of mans problems stem seem to stem from original ignorance. This is of course and again an undeniable truth; it is necessary to confront. Juxtaposed to this is the Western philosophy that our essence is primarily the corruptible nature of the body of man. It is the active portion of your existence as an incarnation—thus it is the sum of the knowledge that your bodily existence is an expression of your higher self. Neither of these are necessarily false—they are just degrees of emphasis, and it requires maturity to be able to see how they form a comprehensive whole.

Any subsequential issues there have been between anthroposophy (insofar as it relates to theosophy), the integral yoga can be nullified. Any kind of deeper thought into the actual substance of each of these paths reveals that any kind of incongruency is merely due to how each path is related to its genesis in corporeal reality—the specific practices, methods and pedagogies inherent in each tradition. The evolution of each of these paths is the progressive working out of each the emphasis of the Divine as the Divine feels itself in reality. Anthroposophy acts as a western yoga and puts emphasis on the bodily nature through esotericism. It develops a praxis around surrounding that (even if it is not wholly subjected to it). The integral yoga (which was inseminated as an evolution of the vision of the Holy Rishis of India) finds its power in mans universal connection and foundation on these planes of power and being. It sees those as the origin and true essence of its self.

We can find the integral yoga, thus, as emancipating man to his larger “wider” universal existence, and we can then find anthroposophy as developing an acute and precise clairvoyance of man’s being and body, where does that leave the soul and the mind? If integral yoga is related to the mystery of where we were fathered from, and anthroposophy related to who the sons of the father are, then is there not a third mystery of the individual soul in general? How is it possible to doctor a new son from the father without being a repetition of the father himself? The interaction between these two bodies, of western theosophy and integral yoga was precisely what Franklin Merrell-Wolff did for the American mystical landscape. Anyone who has read his biography knows where he is indebted to Indian thought, and Sri Aurobindo just as much as he was indebted to theosophical wisdom. Although, only so far as he was a kind of interloper there, and only so far as he received his revelations in the vein of Shankara. Anyone who seeks to, nonetheless demean or encircle his transcendental revelations as merely an unfolding of previous wisdom, does not understand the exact kind spiritual path that Wolff followed.

To understand this better we need to return the first question here. If we can see a precise unfolding of the bodily nature of man in anthroposophy and a precise unfolding of the evolutionary planes in integral yoga, what is the precise evolution of the soul as it relates to the mind and our being as it relates to thoughts? We can see that the presence of thoughts when they appear within the bodily sense creates sentience, as well that the presence of thoughts within the transient ego-soul creates concepts and mental-stuff, and within that the presence of thoughts tuned to universal spirit discovers consciousness itself. The soul can be thought of as the actual thought-substance of the spirit—the spirit exists in its true essence as the “I am”, in its highest essence uncreated and eternal, while the individual soul can be thought of as the spark of this uncreated spirit. It exists as a willing-intentional thought-substance; which we perceive clairvoyantly as a constant flaming animating existence.

We can see three modes of thinking as they present themselves to this ensouled thought-flame. The gnostic sense is that all being exists as predicated upon willed-thoughts that come from God—the only exist so far as they are from and out of the essence of the Supreme Father. This is true. The psychic sense presents itself naturally, and logically, as a primordial consciousness—such that if we are thought up by means outside of ourself, and we can create new thoughts by ourselves, then, there underneath lies a supporting consciousness of all possible thoughts. This is true and what Wolff say as the consciousness that cognizes all possible Gods—the emissary of the Supreme Witness, the Holy Ghost. There is finally the esoteric sense of what we carry in bodily existence, which exists as the mirror of God in man. We discover that just as God has thought us into existence, we think ourselves into existence, and we must go through thinking and discovering new other thinking beings, and raise them up in their own existence, so they find the God within them. This path leads to the awareness of the Son of God and the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, as the leader of humanity as we are Earth citizens. Christ Jesus stands atop the mysterious summit as being both the thought of man and the thought of god.

There are many sense here where we can view the trinity from any kind of light, and one will see how quickly they interpenetrate even to clairvoyant vision, and form a cohesive mental picture that attains oneness. One can go even deeper into this revelation, however the ordering of the appearance of each of this paths depends on where one finds the origin of the Self to be. First there is God and there can be no other; this is a fact. Yet, the Father sacrificed himself to create something new, for He exists within all but still wanted to create more than himself. His first act of creation must have been the Son, for whom he gave everything, and who primarily represented a new life beyond the Father. From there, we were given the Holy Ghost for whom, now, there lied the potential for infinite creations, the foundational awareness of all new Gods. There is no single issue with whoever wants to focus on what as the element of absolute beauty: Eternal Being, Eternal Consciousness and Eternal Bliss, they exist as three parts of one singular reality, and we can only support them in their ideation as manifestations of the Transcendental, the Cosmic and the Individual Divines. Even then, we can only understand them as the other two elements shine through another. To try to understand them primarily through individual attributes as elements of a set will lead one to the central problem we encountered at the beginning of the article. They are fundamentally inseparable, and anyone who says otherwise has not seen the face of God. We still can, however, speak of them as images, and we can say, that the Father is the image of the transcendental power of God, while the Son is the image of the cosmos, such as the kingdom of God, and the Holy Ghost is the image of the glory of God in the eternal individual, the awareness of the substance of all things of God.

Anyone familiar with the Lord’s prayer will recognize these attributes, for thine is the power the kingdom and the glory amen. There does not need to be a reiteration of the majesty of the Lord’s prayer here, however, those who wish to see an exegesis of it and look in Rudolf Steiner’s work. These, however, are the three images of the Divine path, for whom, all who think are opposed to each and wrong, only cannot see their own image in the mirror.

This has been the essence of my life’s work thus far. Although there will be more to come. I write this article not to propose a final say on the thing, but rather to put forth and demonstrate the three major paths to discovery of the Divine, and the three major paths of awareness in the modern age. All other elements such as hermeticism, alchemy, voodoo, new age wisdom, can be found herein. I will eventually be turning this into a book which details these things more directly. Until then, and as time is willing, peace be upon you. May all be well.

1. The visions of the Higher Mind, Illuminated Mind, Inspirational Mind, and Overmind of the integral yoga find truth in their emancipation of the ether of light in man. Seth Miller equates these with the anthroposphical view of the imaginative, inspirational and intuitional knowledge—while the overmind is situated as the higher mysteries of the cosmos. The bhakti and self giving of the psychic fire is emanated from the central being—man’s sense of I am or the ego. Again, here we find many parallels and the imagery supported in each doctrine serves to demonstrate the truth hidden in each of these.