When I was a child I thought that the human race all shared a singular ambition. I thought that human organisms all shared the same relatively modern conditions. I thought organizations of mankind were all designed to a singular end. I dreamed we were heading out into space, preparing to build cities under the sea, laughing together on Tuesday nights watching Happy Days and eating ice cream. These where the thoughts of a child.
As I grew I learned that ambitions where conflicting as my mother battled with business clients that I would later meet as members of the congregation of my church. I learned that there was often a great divide in the way of life between myself and my best friend, Arturo. I learned that organizations tended to become self-serving engines of greed and slander. I dreamed I was falling off a cliff into a raging river, facing an abyss of annihilation as I struggled to understand why so many differences fostered animosities instead of appreciation.
These days there are great divisions taking place in the world. The rich get further away from the poor, the elected are falling out of touch with the masses, the press doesn’t even appear to recognize news any more, and food isn’t really food if you look at it closely. Now the masses who are mostly the poor, not the elected, and being ignored by the press, are not eating the crap any more.
It’s all a matter of consciousness.
To the student of the Western Mystery Tradition who uses the Qabalah, there are four worlds of existence and five parts of the soul. These models are used to express and explain what consciousness is and how it evolves. The four worlds are Atlizuth - the world of emanation, Briah - the world of creation, Yetzirah - the world of formation, and Assiah - the world of action. The five parts of the soul are Yechidah – uniqueness, Chiah - vitality, Neshamah - soul proper, Ruach - intellectual spirit, and Nephesh - vital spirit/soul.
Let me put that all another way: Atlizuth is the world where the gods dwell. It corresponds with Wands in the Tarot pack, and represents our archetypal concepts – pretty much wordless but there nonetheless. Briah, corresponding to Cups (but not to be confused as being Cups), is the world of first sparks. Where Atlizuth is the first conceptions of, Briah is the first example or total notion of (the creation of something out of nothing). Yetzirah is the world of ideas and concepts, structures that can be rationally understood, things made from other things and Assiah is the world of physical matter where all this appears to us to exist.
The five parts of the soul, or consciousness, exist in relation to the above mentioned four worlds. The more actively in touch with the parts of consciousness an individual is, the more aware that individual is of the influences of the various other consciousness in the several worlds. Nephesh is, I will simply say, like the body’s consciousness. This is the part of us that controls heart beats, breathing, and unexpected reflexive behaviors – like when our hand defends our face against a flying bug. Ruach is the conscious ego self, that part of us that identifies the with and without of our lives. Neshamah (which incorporates Chiah and Yechidah) is called above “the soul proper” but with the other two aspects within it, is also a sort of “over soul” or “higher self” and is also called “cosmic consciousness.”
Human history has evolved “upward” through these layers of consciousness leading us to the time in history we are at now, a time when we are moving beyond Rauchian consciousness into Nephesian consciousness. This is the very “shift in consciousness” that has been the mainstay of the so-called “New Age Movement” and all things like it (including the Thelemic proclamation that we entered this New Aeon in 1904).
Back in human history most people had no language. Reading and writing didn’t exist. We guessed at each other’s thoughts with gestures and odd sounds. We lived like animals. This is Nephesh consciousness, which some societies in deep jungles and islands still maintain to some degree, with some formed language but a great instinctual connection to their world.
Rauchian “intelligence” grew out of this eventually, but for a great length of time there was still a majority who depended only on the Nephesh in their awareness. Reading and writing, the retaining of philosophical concepts, was reserved for a kingly and priestly pair of peoples. This changed with the Renaissance when education came out of the dark ages, and eventually spread to everyone with the invention of the printing press. Wisdom and ancient knowledge and communication with the Divine went from the few oddly born individuals to those less few who would be taught them and taught to read and write and think ponderingly upon mysteries with insight (or to the elders who had lived long enough to develop a rational retention skill) and then finally to just about every adult who could afford a dime novel. Rauchian consciousness is the consciousness of today. It is represented by the divine representative dying on the cross, and mentions the ego sense of one’s purpose in life.
But there is no clear cut division here. There have always existed those who were ahead of the majority, our world’s geniuses and mages and shamans. And slowly the masses managed to catch up. And even when in western society there were many who understood Plato or Nietzsche (two great examples of pure Rauchian awareness), there were “worlds” apart from these advancements, still living virtually like animals or as the youngest civilizations did.
The apathy of Egypt that existed for so long is a perfect example of this. The ruling class kept education to themselves, sponsoring only a few to the level of awareness of their world that we Caucasians take for granted. The huddled masses of Cairo kept quietly to themselves, knowing no more about human history and geographic variety than an eighth grade student in California. But something changed very rapidly. College educated youth, sent to the United States for advanced training, came back to their homes and found themselves stuffed back into the animal lives they’d nearly hoped to forget. And then there was the Internet, an accident in a third world nation just waiting to lead to an explosion of awareness. And suddenly the whole world was aware when one day a young fruit vendor had had enough of the abuses of his life at the hands of elite police forces and he lit himself on fire; An act of ancient self-sacrificial defiance. Then suddenly thousands decided to honor that act, but something very unusual happened – the elite stepped down and joined them. There was no sacrifice, no death now (except by the rude few who continued to resist by driving their camels and trucks into the crowds). There was a new awareness. A “solidarity of spirit” that fueled the world to not cease watching until change was made to happen! For a few long weeks, the world felt like it was one world and it loved it!
The Renaissance did not happen overnight. It took several generations in just Europe alone before the “Age of Enlightenment” could replace it. This current renaissance is not going to happen overnight. There will be continued upheavals, continued resistance from those whose power is threatened with the idea of a world that behaves with “one body, one mind, one heart” to overthrow this Rauchian egoism that currently dominates. And there will be nightmares in all of our individual lives to get us through this time into the next illumination. But you’ve tasted it, you tasted it that one spring moment when you stared at your interwebs and cried “I AM WITH YOU.”
That is what is happening in the world right now.