Beyond Individualism

Foreword

Without a doubt, these are times of deep psychological transformations. Humanity, I claim, rushes onto yet-another quantum leap in evolutionary growth that will result in a more integrated planetary consciousness, which will be felt by humanity as a “higher level of consciousness”, for humanity is the “conscious mind” of Earth-as-a-whole. As a firm believer in free will, such a new level of consciousness—more tightly integrated not only within itself but also with the consciousnesses of the other kingdoms: animal, vegetable, fungi, and perhaps others yet to be discovered—will enable the creation of what I have called a new civilization, and for which there is no blueprint.

Even though the overall goal of a humanity consciously integrated with itself and the rest of the planet is simple to articulate, the question for each of us as co-creators of the new civilization is: What concrete initial steps can and should I take? In such a state of confusion, I came across the book of which I am about to summarize the first part. In addition to answering the question posed, many things in history and archeology suddenly made more sense.

I hope you will find the ideas presented here both intriguing and inspiring but this is just my summary and it is full of personal biases, I am sure. In addition, the book has side discussions and other nuances that enhance what I present. If the topic becomes interesting to you, I highly encourage you to get a used copy since it has been out of print for many years.

Rafael Bracho (RXB)

Introduction

In 1979, at 84 years of age, Dane Rudhyar published the book Beyond Individualism, subtitled The Psychology of Transformation, where he presents a view of how the human psyche has evolved over time, and the direction in which it should continue evolving. Dr. James Fadiman, co-founder of what is now Sofia University, says in the foreword that the many books written by Rudhyar over a variety of topics are all “gift-wrappings of the same philosophy”, which Rudhyar later called Philosophy of Wholeness in his book The Rhythm of Wholeness, published in 1983, two years before his death.

Holism in Psychology

Central to such philosophy is what can only be described as a holistic mindset pioneered by Jan Smuts in his 1926 seminal book Holism and Evolution, where he argues that ours is a universe of wholes defined as fields of activity. Writes Rudhyar: “Human experience deals with wholes and with the results of the interaction of wholes or of the disintegration of larger wholes into smaller ones. Moreover, man witnesses a hierarchy of wholes—any whole having parts which themselves are wholes with parts. Smuts considered evolution a drive toward more inclusive wholeness and called such a drive: holism.” Yet, Smuts didn’t envision a more inclusive whole than what he called a “personality”, used in the same general sense as Carl Jung and Rudhyar himself, namely, as an integrated individual. According to Rudhyar, Smuts lacked a clear concept of the inseparability of the state of existential wholeness and of consciousness, unlike his contemporary Teilhard de Chardin, who even coined the term reflexive consciousness to denote the human consciousness of being conscious.

In this day and age, everything is compartmentalized and specialized to the point of losing overall focus and direction. We speak of a holistic view when, for example, we need to take into account the overall direction of a corporation, looking at it as a whole. In Beyond Individualism, Rudhyar takes Smuts’s definition of evolution as a drive towards a more inclusive wholeness along with an all-encompassing view, indeed a holistic view, of evolution itself. By combining anthropology and the history of cultures and religions, along with theories of biological and, more importantly, psychomental evolution, the book makes a point that it is impossible to separate the individual from his environment and from the times on which he lived. Every human being must be considered as an individuality and as a collective being, a distinct member of multiple social groups which are themselves wholes formed by the interrelatedness of their members. In other words, a personality is an integrated “individual-whole” as well as a member (a “part”) of an encompassing “culture-whole” we call society.

Book Overview

First of all, as Dr. Fadiman says in the foreword, the book is a departure from the reductionism that has plagued psychology since the second half of the 20th century. He points out that, rather than presenting a theory with evidence gathered after numerous studies, the book is “a discussion of a way to think, a way to examine the life cycle. It is a formulation of a more inclusive model of human functioning.” After a prologue in which Rudhyar discusses the aforementioned ideas of holism in psychology, the book proper is composed of two parts, each referring to a particular “mode” of behavior: personal-individual or collective-social. For the first part, he relies on functional psychology, a theory that focuses on the purpose (function) of mental states and behaviors. He proposes a hierarchy of four orders of behavioral functions as we will see shortly.

In the second part, Rudhyar first discusses the move from biology to culture in human evolution, which relied on individual differentiation. He then presents four differentiating polarities of archetypal roles at various times in human evolution: the Warrior and the Ruler in ancient times, followed by the Priest and the Philosopher, the Trader and the Producer, and, most recently, the Money-Conditioned Type and the Transpersonal Individual.¹ It also includes a discussion of the ideal of social plenitude, in particular why what he calls a Plenary Society is neither a materialistic nor a spirit-oriented utopia destined to fail, and offers a critique of our current Western civilization. I may summarize this second part in another article.

Four Orders of Psychological Functions

Although the book talks about functions of the first, second, third, and fourth orders, their hierarchy is never formally defined. Presumably, they refer to evolutionary steps in humans as psychosomatic beings, in other words, living organisms composed of mind (psyche) and body (soma). Based on the type of functions included in each order, I suggest naming them: Biological, Sociocultural, Individualizing and Transpersonal. He also describes what he calls seed functions that cause humans to transition from one level to the next higher one.

First Order (Biological)

Functions of the first order are related to basic needs and instincts, such as the functions performed by the respiratory, circulatory, digestive, and immune systems, among others. Sex is a special case because it is a biological function related to procreation but also a transitional or seed function. As we will see later, sex is the foundation for processes referring to functions of the second order. First-order functions are “generic”, in the sense that they are shared by all human beings. They vary little from race to race and even less from person to person. Should they fail altogether, or be interrupted for a period of time, the individual will likely experience psychosomatic disturbances, including death.

These functions are compulsive, instinctual and generally operate at the subconscious level, although they may be controlled by a person’s mind and will operating as functions of the third order (Individualizing). The functions of the first order have overtones in the psyche, but they usually refer to the proper operation of their “instruments”, like cells and organic structures, which perform the function. Such “psychic overtones” may become so intense that they act as a fundamental tone which may negate the potentiality of their second or third-order functions, either temporarily or permanently, This may represent a progressive or a regressive state of human growth, the latter perhaps caused by ill health, although severe illnesses may be given a metamorphic meaning when interpreted from a transcendental point of view.

Second Order (Sociocultural)

The Buddha rejected the notion of inherent existence, for existence itself is based on relatedness. This simple fact is the basis of Rudhyar’s philosophy: everything that exists is a whole, a field of activities performed by the interrelatedness of its parts. But I digress. Except for breathing, early-human needs required that relationships be established, including one with whatever was eaten to survive. More obviously, sex as a reproductive function needed a partner of the opposite biological polarity. As a bonus, safety was better ensured as a group than alone, giving rise to the tribe, itself a whole held together by the interrelatedness of the individuals comprising it.

On Consciousness

Undoubtedly, the most important principle in holism is that the whole’s parts must collaborate to effect its functions. In a most rudimentary way, perhaps, they must “know” what to do, which means that every whole has consciousness due to the interrelatedness of its parts, themselves wholes. We think of the biological functions as being performed “unconsciously” and yet we marvel at their ability to operate under stressful circumstances and speak of the “wisdom of the body”. However, what we normally mean for “consciousness” develops with the social processes because it is based on the emergence and progressive ascendancy of the sense of relatedness, gradually detaching the personality from its biological base.

At a higher level, the tribe or, better yet, the culture-whole, has what we could call a collective consciousness, the result of cultivating the sense of togetherness and relatedness among its members above and beyond the fulfillment of biological needs. This sense gives the group a collective meaning, an identity represented first by the medicine-men, high priests and later by philosophers, whose social function is to give the group a sense of unity in relatedness, a religious and cultural formulation. Thus, we have the god of the tribe with numerous rituals, myths and symbols from which a culture is born.

Communication

Most of the sociocultural functions of the second order answer to the need for communication, developing various kinds of languages, from simple gestures that convey primitive emotions to the ability to describe and define actional processes through verbs, nouns, and so on. In early times, two branches of communication developed, one toward symbolic art-forms evoking intangible, subjective feelings or realizations, and the other referring to various forms of mental activities having the character of “revelation”. Life, or the god of the life processes, revealed to certain sensitive individuals the knowledge needed, not only to survive but to develop as fully as possible one or more qualities needed by the group.

These revealed types of activity are presented as unbreakable taboos or divine commandments from which sociocultural institutions develop to further concretize (and crystalize) the sense of relatedness and tribal (later social) interdependence of all members, both among them and to the collective culture-whole: a sociocultural organism with its members and institutions as organs, integrated by a deep-seated feeling of community and a commonness of traditions and basic purpose. These culture-wholes have typically been rooted in the biosphere, with a common geographical territory, climate, fauna and flora, and other resources. As such, they are based on functions of the first order but, if biology is the root, the sociocultural activity represents the foliage. Writes Rudhyar: “The tree of human collectivity eventually blossoms forth into individual persons.”

Human Societies

Like animal societies, early humans formed groups to better satisfy the collective need for security and steady growth. Unlike them, however, human societies are also intent on developing conditions of living, and a state of consciousness, that allows the peaceful transfer of information, knowledge, meaning and purpose from generation to generation. As Rudhyar points out, the value of such a transfer of culture parallels, at a non-physical level, the importance of genetic selection and of producing relatively stable lines of genetic development at the biological level.² It has been said that human beings have the capacity to “bind time”, whereas animals can “bind space”, due to locomotion, and plants “bind chemistry”, especially when we consider photosynthesis. Time-binding enables the creation of symbols that convey abstract notions and meaning from which understanding and wisdom may be obtained to guide future generations.

In animals and primitive men, mind operates exclusively at the service of the biological needs for survival, security and food. It can be said that “life” controls “mind”. However, mind can free itself from such control because mind is consciousness in a formed (structured) state.³ Writes Rudhyar (his emphasis): “[Mind] is consciousness stabilized and defined at a particular level of activity.” When a man operates at the level of “life”, his consciousness, and thus his mind, has the character and the quality of biological activity and first-order functions. However, humans have a higher potentiality of rhythmic transformation and intensification of consciousness. The essential function of a culture is to cradle the actualization of such a potentiality. The ultimate aim of human evolution is the raising of the focus of consciousness and, as a result (or at the same time), the freeing of human activity from its bondage to physicality and biology.

Third Order (Individualizing)

In the early tribes a member might have achieved personal recognition, perhaps from a discovery, invention or revelation, and others reacted positively to such individual achievement. Confused, he may initially think that some force is acting through him, but soon he will find the notoriety pleasurable. Or, conversely, a tribesman may fail at what is required of him, perhaps due to mental illness or physical malformation, and also feel special but in a negative sense. Once such distinction status within the tribe is felt, the mind has to give it meaning. The person feels apart from the group, perhaps “above” or just “outside of” the other members. The sense of isolation, detachment, and even the refusal to submit to common standards, for they don’t apply to his special status, all act as individualizing factors.

Ego and Self

Due to these and other sociological aspects, such as the development of cities where specialization is necessary, the sense of individuality develops amid societies transformed by a new mind-activity attempting to deal with new problems of relationship between persons no longer dominated by biological drives or their glorified symbolic projections. The urge to act as an individual and assert his own relatively-unique status develops as an “I am” in the background of society, religion and culture. But it also develops against the inertia of the commonality that could never be challenged in the tribal state and which may be deemed oppressive in large centralized societies. The result of such a situation is the development of the ego.

The ego develops at a very early age, when the toddler realizes his name, begins to claim certain objects as “mine”, and says “I want”. As the child begins to mature, the “I-feeling” grows in intensity and in relation to the sociocultural patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving present in his environment. That said, the ego is more than the conscious realization of being different from the others. It is important to deal with the manner in which the ego manifestation appears and develops. At the root of the feeling of “I” is the self, defined as the power that establishes the particular nature, the essential character and the vibratory frequency of a living organism.⁴ Whereas in the animal kingdom the self is generic and belongs to the species (with the notable exception of domesticated pets), in humans it is potentially individualized. There is a generic self for homo sapiens but every individual has at his core a latent self. As we saw earlier, in our discussion about holism, consciousness is the expression of the wholeness of the organic field of activity we call a human being. Self, however, is power,⁵ not consciousness.⁶

Carl Jung defined the ego as the center of the conscious mind, and also as its circumference. As center, however, the ego is not the power of the conscious mind but the reflection of such power, of which it may not be aware. The ego is less interested in the center and more in the periphery, where the personality interacts with the environment by reacting or responding to external pressures. In fact, the ego is a mechanism of adjustment to a sociocultural environment. Such a mechanism implies the existence of a sustaining power, which is the self, even when it operates at a subconscious level. The ego needs such a power to challenge biological compulsions which no animal can disobey.

Ego and Mind

The ego cares exclusively about mechanisms and techniques to adjust or control the environment. For that, it uses the power of the rational mind. Using intellectual faculties, initially manifested as cunning, it discovers ways to obtain more pleasures or comfort and to avoid pain by using other people or material things. “The ego acts as a technician, an engineer”, writes Rudhyar. But, while it uses the mind as an instrument, it becomes molded by, and prisoner of, the mind. Not only does the ego become subservient to the mind, it seldom realizes that its motives and goals are dictated by biological drives and by the social and ethical imperatives of the culture in which the ego has developed, or by an emotional and often blind rebellion against either biology or culture. Yet, behind this rebellion, or the ambition to fulfill an aspect of the culture, stands the power of the self.

The self in man is the individualizer. Because of it, the ego can develop in the mind’s field of consciousness, giving such field a particular structure. The ego is so preoccupied with the environment, in acquiring further mastery over it, that it is not even aware of the source of its power, at least not for a long while. In contrast to such restless activity of the ego, the self simply is … what it is. It is the power to fulfill the purpose (dharma) inherent in the fact that a human being was born at a particular time in a particular place. The consciousness of that individual will develop an ego shaped by the culture in which he was born and through the sociocultural functions of the second order.

Those functions centralize the collective consciousness of the culture-whole. And yet (initially) a few tribesmen felt “different” from the rest, as we saw earlier, and began to feel an internal centrality. But such feeling is attached to outer circumstances and activities so the resulting ego is concerned with what occurs at the periphery without realizing what is at the root of this “I-feeling”. Although we claim that every human being has the potentiality of individual selfhood, it wasn’t until 600 b.C.E. that our present humanity began to develop an objective, intellectual and analytical mind that is detached from biology and culture, at least theoretically. This mind manifests in various ways which are the individualizing functions of the third order.

Our Western Society

Ever since the European Renaissance, our Western society has been the first to adopt ideals and concepts of organization based on functions of the third order. A result has been the rapid growth in science and technology and the spread of democratic institutions which, theoretically, proclaim the worth and dignity of the individual person with some inalienable rights, regardless of biological (sex, color, race) or cultural (class, caste, wealth-state) qualifications. Our Western society glorifies the “rugged individualism” that espouses an uncontrolled personal ambition and freedom of operation. It has become a society of egos, created by egos, for the greater glory of egos, under the pretense of full and uninhibited self-expression and “self-actualization”. It is now a society enamored with technology and mechanisms of all types, and we know the ego is fond of mechanisms to interact with the environment, including other people. Yet all this ego-activity fills a necessary function in the evolution of humanity, namely to transform human consciousness, freeing it from biological compulsions and from attachment to a culture and its rigid traditions.

What the ego considers “freedom”, however, is just anarchy expressing the negative aspect of civilization that soon turns into a strange state of bondage to the compulsion to feel free, independent, and self-motivated at any cost. True autonomy is found in the self, for it doesn’t need to prove itself free and autonomous. It is what it is and can’t care less about other selves because true selfhood is not concerned with consciousness or relatedness. Once again, the self is power, namely the power to be what one is. However, this power does not act in isolation, it represents one precise tone (vibration) in the immense chord of mankind. The ego doesn’t function at that level, it only reflects what takes place there. A reflection, however, which brings to the conscious mind such a supernatural reality so it can be formulated and transferred. All individualizing functions, and especially the ego, try to raise human consciousness from the biological and cultural level to the “spiritual” level. But this means breaking down the exclusivity inherent in any culture-whole and opening the collective and the individual minds to a state of inclusiveness and interpenetration.

Fourth Order (Transpersonal)

The breaking-down process may take many forms but all involve some repolarization of the mind, a transmutation of biological energies and sociocultural allegiances, which is a dangerous situation when attempted in our cities. Therefore, it is best experienced at the individual level within the extended field of vibration (or aura) of human beings who have passed through at least some of the process themselves. They radiate a holistic and compassionate spirituality of total acceptance towards any human function. In those individuals operate functions of the fourth order. In due time, these functions will transform humanity, men will lose their personal ambition, their pride of achievements and their jealousies, while culture loses its focus on exclusivity. Writes Rudhyar: “In that state of existence, love, having overcome biological compulsiveness, culture-bred class distinctions, and egocentric insecurity and possessiveness, will be able to flourish in unpolluted radiance and pan-harmonic inclusiveness.”

All of it is overcome by the universal love (agape) that serves as foundation for functions of the fourth order, over which a new civilization will be co-created. Its culture emanating from integrated persons no longer needing wilderness to balance and redeem the artificiality of their ego-minds. The spiritual darkness of our current megalopolises will be long forgotten and humans will live, in much reduced numbers, in “Holy Cities”. Such a seemingly utopian picture will not be achieved any time soon but the functions of the third order have reached a peak in their development and, once more, mankind faces a planet-wide crisis produced by the inordinate glorification and dependence upon intellectual fragmentation and ego-ambition.

Pillars for Transpersonal Functions

As Rudhyar points out in the book, this crisis was predictable. It was inherent in the revolutionary approach to existence, seeds of the third-order functions, promoted around 600 b.C.E. by Gautama the Buddha in the East, and Pythagoras (and others) in the West. However, Buddha (and probably Pythagoras) implied, and should have revealed, a universal love for mankind, besides focusing and releasing the transforming power of an objective, rational and independently self-controlled mental activity that drives the process of individualization. Such implied love and compassion had to be made explicit. Initially in India, as the ideal of a Bodhisattva who renounces Nirvana until all sentient creatures have reached such a state, an ideal that spread and took root in Northern India by 100 b.C.E. A century later, this energy of supreme universal love became embodied in Jesus and released to the world under the mystic name of Christ, propelled by the powerful symbol of the Crucifixion.

This love, agape, is the feeling pillar of the foundation upon which rest the functions of the fourth order to operate in the direction of evolutionary growth. Such a foundation also needs a mental pillar, a mind that is a field of holistic activity rooted in inclusion, not exclusion. The analytical mind is constantly classifying information based on external data that can be measured somehow to make it fit in various categories, excluding what doesn’t easily fit. The holistic mind works with broad basic principles of organization which can include a vast and diverse amount of data that may not appear to be related but stem from a common creative impulse. Such an aspect of the human mind develops after what Rudhyar called the cosmogenic function.

Cosmogenic Thinking

The word, cosmogenic, has been used to mean as deriving from “cosmic rays” or as the adjective of “cosmogenesis” which refers to theories on the creation or origin of the universe. Dane Rudhyar applies a very specific meaning to the words cosmos, cosmogenic and cosmic. Cosmos means order, harmony and beauty. The cosmogenic mind is able to find cosmos in the midst of chaos, sees beauty in seeming ugliness, and can act as a catalyst of order. It operates beyond conflicts raised by the ethical and cultural concepts of “good” and “evil” because these are seen as two necessary polarities for the release of power, just like drawing requires dark lines on a light background or vice versa.

Behind universal love and the cosmogenic mind, stands the principle of interpenetration since, at the level of the fourth-order functions, all forms of existence begin to interpenetrate such that ego exclusivity, emotional possessiveness and intellectual pride lose their power and glamor. Those are temporary means to develop an inner feeling of the “I am” quality, by-products of the emergence of objective and reflexive consciousness out of biology and culture. Their work done by now, it is time for mind and ego to become translucent while they lose the opaqueness and mass that ensured stability as they rooted themselves in physicality. Although, over a hundred years ago, physics began to reveal a world that is more “trans-physical” than physical…

The Cosmic Reality

In psychology, after the spread of the reductionist methods of analysis chiefly espoused by Freud, there came the humanistic movement, which tried to show that humans are able to experience states of consciousness beyond the limits built-up by the sociocultural and intellectual functions of the third order. Carl Jung outlined a healing way out of neuroses by opening the consciousness to a vast realm of symbols and archetypes. Abraham Maslow later studied the “peak experiences” of healthy persons to reassess and redefine the components of a wholesome individualism in psychological terms. Towards the end of the last century, the so-called transpersonal psychology tried to investigate and formulate the main characteristics of consciousness states catalogued as “mystical” since they transcend both ego and intellect.

Rudhyar speaks of a cosmic mind, by which he refers to mental processes clearly differentiated from the activities of individuals biologically and culturally conditioned, who operate according to personal and emotional, ethical and rational, ego-determined imperatives. It is past due for human life and human society to be radically transformed by a cosmic meaning. But this meaning will not be given to us! It is not “natural” in a biological, sociocultural or ego-conditioned sense. Thus, it must be “implanted” into everyone’s ordinary consciousness by visionary persons, like Rudhyar himself, whose minds are able to release the power and consciousness of what is humanity’s future.

From Cosmology to Cosmosophy

Man’s perceptions have been interpreted by a “physiogenic” function that synthesizes the data provided by our senses, thoughts and some inner organismic feelings in such a way that our physical world of material bodies is produced in our minds; from atoms and cells to galaxies and human beings. A newly developing cosmogenic function is now seeking to redefine and reinterpret man’s immensely extended environment in a new manner, one that could be called transphysical, transpersonal and symbolic. A cosmos is not defined by its size in space, atom or galaxy, but by its essential characteristic of total inclusiveness within its field of activity. In that field, and at all levels of existence, all pairs of opposites should be included, even being and non-being.

What scientists call cosmology is not really cosmic as we just defined it because it takes for granted a purely-physical universe. It excludes forms of non-physical existence from what it calls reality.⁷ Moreover, it assumes an objective observer external to the observed astronomical processes. Such an “outside quality” is fundamentally incompatible with the cosmic vision of reality. Every whole is part of a greater whole and contains parts which, as wholes, themselves have parts and so on, so “outside” has no real meaning. Each existential whole has its own space-field and time-span (cycle) insofar as it acts as a whole; but it is also subjected to the rhythms of the larger whole for which it operates as a part, an operation that is structurally defined by the rhythms of that larger whole. While every living organism, including a human being, has its own biological rhythm influencing his internal organs, it also becomes influenced by the pulsating rhythms of planet Earth and the solar system.

The functions of the fourth order refer to the activities by which a whole person, not just the physical body limited by the skin or the ego-structured psyche, relates to any larger whole of which he (or she) accepts to be a part. The conscious development of such a relationship is enabled by the cosmogenic function that produces not a physicality-obsessed cosmology but an all-inclusive multi-dimensional cosmosophy. Based on such an inclusiveness, the “cosmosophist” seeks to understand the interactions in reality between potentiality and actuality so as to move along the flow of evolution. As a person, he (or she) is a whole; but it takes its essential meaning from the place occupied by the person within the larger whole of which he (or she) is a functional part.

The Greater Whole

The obvious remaining question is what is the largest whole of which an individual can consider himself a part? For millennia, no human being could conceive being a member of a larger whole than the tribe. Such a limited field of participation grew to include a city state, a kingdom and a nation. Nowadays, it is possible (and sometimes unavoidable) to learn of what happens in every corner of the world. People are, or may become, aware of the lives and sufferings of all human beings. As a result, anyone who is reasonably informed may consider both humanity and Earth as the greater wholes that can motivate and give value to his thinking, feeling and behavior. If he does so, the functions of the fourth order will begin to operate. They will operate from a position of individualized consciousness able to formulate itself with an objectivity and precision that were simply not possible before the individualizing functions of the third order were at least partially developed.

Such a sense of participation was compulsory at the biological level. At the sociocultural level, participation became collectivized, emotionally binding and rooted in the exclusion of the alien. We currently see such tribal exclusion all over the world, mostly directed to people migrating from unsustainable conditions caused by wars and climate change. The sense of participation tends to disappear from the field of consciousness when the individualizing process takes hold via the functions of the third order. Its reappearance, even if in a partial and attenuated form, indicates that functions of the fourth order begin to be operative behind all-inclusive love and the cosmogenic mind.

Humanity’s Planetary Function

Taken to its logical conclusion, the “human function”, which Rudhyar calls the archetype of Men, is to formulate in mental and cultural terms the meaning and value of every kind of activity within the Earth’s realm, which probably extends as far as the moon’s orbit, delimiting the Earth’s “aura”. Therefore, Man’s involvement goes farther than accurate observation and meaningful interpretation of existential phenomena, for humanity has the ability to radically transform planetary operations, as evidenced by the current environmental and sociocultural crises we face. This is in part the unfortunate result of believing that mankind does not belong to the Earth, a planet of “conflicts and sorrows” that, according to the Bible, was made for humanity to deal as it pleases, or which is a “school” where Man came to learn arduous lessons. Such a mindset will prevent the functions of the fourth order from taking hold.

The British philosopher of history Arnold Toynbee, famous for studying the rise and fall of civilizations, talked about a “creative minority” that, working in the background, precedes the advent of a new civilization. Today’s world crises can be met if such minority—which I believe has reached the “critical mass” needed to avoid being swept by the inertia of the current chaos—is able to overcome and transcend the concept of alienation and separateness from Earth-as-a-whole. Yet, at the same time mankind should retain the capacity to formulate the meaning it now sees emerging from nuclear physics, galactic astronomy, and international relationships; a formulation that requires a new language based on the functions of the fourth order, especially the cosmogenic function. But this function, cautions Rudhyar, must no longer work along abstract, scientific lines. It must be open to the light that universal love and compassion can bestow and, at the intellectual level, to the concept of interpenetration.

Seed or Transition Functions

At the beginning of the article, I alluded to functions, in the sense we have been using, that enable the transition from one order to the next higher one. They represent the pinnacle of the lower-order functions and serve as basis for higher-order ones. These functions seem to operate in both the lower and the higher orders. Psychologically speaking, they enable us to transform the human psyche so profoundly to be a metamorphosis.

Sex as Seed Function

When speaking about the first order functions (biological), I mentioned that sex represents a special function of transition between the first and the second orders, serving as foundation for the latter. Whereas the other first-order functions occur within the organism (breathing, digesting, fighting infections, etc), sex requires the interaction of two organisms polarized for biological reproduction. As such, sex sets in operation the principles of external relatedness. Sex allows for more diversity by mixing two lines of genes and perhaps cultures, but one must introduce the right amount of diversity so it is assimilable. There is a fine line between having at least some amount of diversity, as evidenced by the nearly-universal law against incest, and not too much, shown as the at times violent opposition to marriage between a man and a woman of different color, tribe, religion or even culture.

Marriage as a sociocultural institution depends primarily on this balance between “enough” and “not too much” difference in an interpersonal relationship, but it is also crucial when we consider sex as a transition function between the first and the second orders, in other words, between biology and culture. At the biological level, the masculine and feminine organisms are merely carriers of seed: sperm and ovum. The process of biological differentiation is uncontrolled, except that a female organism is not impregnated by a member of a very different species. In any case, sexual reproduction represents the culminating phase of strictly biological functions; prior to it, reproduction was done basically through mitosis, with the much-less diversity required for simple evolution.

Human Sexuality

Once the principle of relatedness begins to manifest in the relationship between two opposite and complementary polarities, a further development is inevitable, for duality leads to plurality or multiplicity. The many-sided relationships of the sociocultural state absorb some of the wild and at first uncontrollable intensity of bipolar sexual relationships. The “group” spreads out, controls, and puts to use the energy generated by the polarized “pairs”, relating them in larger patterns of organization. When the level of sociocultural activity is reached, the functions of the second order develop out of the raw material of sexual relatedness. Such pattern of growth only occurs in the human realm. In the vegetable kingdom, sex is passive due to the lack of motion and, indeed, many species require external assistance for pollination, such as wind, birds or insects. It is in the animal kingdom that the factor of relatedness acquires a dynamic character and, being capable of “motion”, animals can also experience “emotion”.

In the human kingdom, sex ceases to be a seasonal activity for a generic purpose. Sexual interactions may occur at any time. At the mental level, they may span several generations. They may be personal and voluntary, or impersonal, idealistic and body-transcending. Even though sex remains the foundation of human relationship, its energy becomes increasingly subservient to sociocultural processes, concepts and values. Activities like motherhood, nursing, care of the progeny, building homes or educational facilities, all extend the patterns of relationship that began with mating. In these sex-inspired activities which form the basis of social order, the female is at first the positive and directing factor. While she rules over duality and polarity, the male deals primarily with plurality—the realm of social and group organization.

Sociocultural Sexuality

As the psychic overtones of sex are being developed, biological energies are transmuted into sociocultural drives, which belong to the second order of functions. Attention shifts from sex relationship to a great variety of social overtones. Such a shift is required to develop a significant and productive culture and preserve the social order. Social attitudes towards sex, often negative, shape the relationship between biological functions and sociocultural ones. Sex represents a “critical state” in human evolution and the period of sexual development, typically puberty, is considered of much importance. It marks the transition from childhood to at least potential adulthood.

Much of what has been written about various puberty “rites of passage” emphasizes the death to the old and rebirth to a new phase of existence and consciousness. What is most important, however, is that all cultural activities (second order) were originally thought of as extensions of a sexual (bipolar) relationship. Therefore, a human being could not be a full participant of his or her community in terms of sociocultural activity unless he or she “died” to the unitary rhythm of childhood’s self-expression and was “reborn” at the level of duality and sexual relatedness. However, with sex, problems of bipolar relationship appear which, in turn, give rise to group tensions and the possibility of many-sided relationships and even violent conflicts.

Marriage

This possibility must be controlled if the human species is to survive. Built-in controls develop, both “sanctioned” by religion and “glorified” in rituals and special objects symbolizing the deeper aspect of the relationship and, perhaps, the participation of superior Beings, or God. The most common ritual is the marriage ceremony. Until very recently, marriage had little to do with personal likes and emotional feelings of two individuals wanting to unite their lives for joint self-fulfillment. Marriage had two functions: to produce children, thus perpetuating the distinctive genetic signature of a race or national combination of races; and to perpetuate the sociocultural way of life and religious tradition of a particular group.

In the Western world, the traditional marriage ceremony involves four participants: the bride, the bridegroom, society (parents, ministers, other attendants), and God. Any sexual union not including the last two was, for centuries, considered “sinful”, even when tolerated. Marriage between a man and a woman of different cultural and/or religious backgrounds was outrageous and could not be sanctioned by a religious ritual; only a civil union was allowed and not in all societies. Even at the civil level, the color barrier was often impassable, ostensibly to preserve sociocultural purity. Only when the third order, individualizing, functions took hold of the collective mentality, marriage began to be accepted as the conscious, deliberate and relatively-open union of two individuals. Since the last century, the third factor in the marriage ritual (society) has been relegated to a secondary place. As for the fourth factor (God), it is mostly ignored, or replaced by the instinctual and impersonal feeling of communion with vitalistic or even cosmic energies—which once had been personalized as gods in “pagan” religions.

Intellect as Seed Function

The process of “liberation” from the concrete and instinctual mind operating as a servant of “life”, requires the development of an analytical and discursive type of thought process to which we refer today as intellect. This intellect is a tool through which man’s consciousness is able to look at existential changes in himself and others objectively and unemotionally. It is glorified as the great liberator through rigidly-controlled analytical techniques; like the Socratic method of “discourse”. The discursive intellect represents the most advanced development of sociocultural relatedness and the “time-binding faculty” discussed earlier. The human intellect is able to deal with relations and concepts unaffected by the flow of time, instead relying on universal “constants” and deterministic “laws of nature”. In principle, this intellect is not affected by emotions arising from biological, psychic or sociocultural pressures. Moreover, the knowledge derived from intellectual processes is easily transmittable so it spans, both, generations and continents.

Intellectual Pandora’s Box

However, the development of the intellectual function releases a series of unintended consequences. Intellectual knowledge presupposes a knower that is objective to what’s being known and whose mental activity is free from the compulsions of his biological nature. Furthermore, the knower must also be free from the limiting assumptions of his culture and the sociopolitical pressures of his society. The intellect has to be relatively separate from the functions of the first (biological) and second (sociocultural) orders to be the foundation of the third-order functions. Importantly, it must become “individualized” (autonomous) so as to function in terms of pure reason. The discursive mind analyzes what the senses perceive, the entire organism feels, and the collective tradition presents as revealed truth.

To analyze is to break away from the feeling of wholeness and empathy, to ignore the forcefully-presented “reality” by a society which values personal and group security higher than objective facts. Only individuals able to stand apart from and, at least initially, against their culture and tradition may effectively perform such a task. This separative activity performed by the intellectual aspect of the mind is a necessary evolutionary phase; just as, in logic, the antithesis is an integral part of a syllogism leading from the thesis to the synthesis. But it should be only a transitory stage between the compulsive activity of the collective mind and the individually conscious, yet holistic, activity of the “supermind” (using Sri Aurobindo’s term) within which all human consciousnesses potentially interpenetrate. Similarly, the individualizing “I-feeling” should be regarded as a transitory experience on which an antithetic mentality can, and for a time should, be based.

Individualization and Divinity

Individualization is based on the ability to refer sensations, perceptions, and organismic or psychic feelings to a center. For a long time, humanity experienced changes in a haphazard manner, taking place with no rhythm, boundaries or center. When the feeling of “center” arose, it was referred to the community as a whole, having a collective character that was projected outwardly as the god of the tribe. As the field of tribal activity extended, the tribal god was superseded by a universal God Who ruled over many lesser gods and spirits, just as the deified Persian emperor, Darius, ruled over smaller nations and tribes. Jesus taught the revolutionary doctrine that the Kingdom of Heaven is within every human being, saying that the structuring power of the universe should be experienced at the core of every person’s being as the “Inner Ruler”.

In India the revelatory realization that the universal Brahman and the individual Atman are essentially one remained a central factor in all Hindu philosophies. However, in the Western world, the social manifestation of this ideal of identity was overwhelmed by traditional subservience to a central authority, a tradition that dates from the sixth century b.C.E., when Cyrus founded the Persian empire. This tradition was passed to Imperial Rome which, consciously or subconsciously, had absorbed it from the Persian and late-Egyptian models. A dualism emerged in the western mind which is symbolized by the two most powerful figures of our culture: Caesar and Christ. A division occurred between the sociopolitical and the spiritual–individual spheres. In the latter, God was worshiped as the universal center with the understanding that every human being has, as an ideal, the archetypal image of this divine centrality. Man could be “unified” but never “identified” with a God conceived to be external to the cosmos, just like an artist who remains external to his creations.

Man’s Relationship With Nature

If man is created in the image and likeness of such a God, logically, he too has to be external to this small world. For the purpose of learning some lesson, man is thought to exist on an Earth to which, as a God-created soul, he does not really belong. The Earth is not his true home, only a “school”. Yet, when involved in terrestrial activities, man becomes fascinated by and addicted to the energies and passions of “this world”. His main task is to detach his consciousness from such allurements. At an emotional level, this is called “severance” but, at the level of mind, it is “abstraction”, which comes from the Latin abstractus: drawn away; a process where the human mind must detach and separate itself from what it observes, analyzes and eventually transforms.

In a direct life-experience, the entire organism reacts to a whole situation. At the biological level, this reaction is instinctual with a generic type of consciousness which, in terms of what we consider consciousness (the reflexive kind), it is actually unconscious. At the sociocultural level, the members of the tribal society react to situations according to patterns of feeling, thinking, and behavior which have been forcibly impressed upon their minds by the language, behavior and teachings of the community, leaving out whatever is unacceptable to the tradition. Consciousness has essentially a collective character.

The “I-Center”

When the collective mentality of a culture-whole reaches a point at which the capacity for abstraction takes a significant importance, at least for a “creative minority”, the process of individualization at the feeling level has progressed to the stage at which the experience of “being I” becomes not only fully conscious but mentally understood. It transcends an organic sense that may be called semi-instinctive (“I want this”, “This is mine”, “I am different”) to be the foundation of the metaphysical principle of being. ‘I’ becomes an abstraction and individualism develops as a social principle of action, expressing the existence of a multiplicity of units of being which may be given different names, such as God-created immortal Souls.

From this line of thought follows the concept of absolute individuality, an abstraction clearly differentiated from the organic wholeness resulting from the fact that an organism is a structured field of interrelated and interdependent functional activities. It is also different from the ego which develops as a response of the organism-as-a-whole to familial and societal pressures. However, such an absolute individuality is like a center without a circumference, for speaking of a center without conceiving a circle is like talking about a mother or father without a child. While any point can theoretically be a center, it is only potentially so until its surrounding space has been filled and organized around it.

The “Now”

Similarly, making an absolute concept out of a moment of time, glorified as the ‘Now’, implies that a particular moment, any moment, is abstracted from the human experience of the ever-flowing process of change and given an absolute meaning. This is done, and a particular person is taken out (abstracted) from his environment, and from the cosmos as a whole, when it becomes important to transfer the focus of consciousness, feelings and attention from the first and second orders of functions, biology and culture, to those of the fourth order.

When the consciousness of man has to be gradually detached from biology and a local and exclusivistic culture, because such a change of focus and level is needed for continued human evolution, then the crisis of individualization and severance from the biocultural past is expressed as a glorification of the individual-in-itself and the moment-in-itself. ‘Now’ detachment becomes imperative. We must go through the transition process leading to a yet-unknown state of spiritual being, or return to the condition of undifferentiated matter.

Crisis of Individualism

This transition process makes use of the mental faculties and the innate feeling of order that biology and culture have built, but they are used in such a way that actually destroy their biocultural foundations. Indeed, biological and cultural values lose their potency and centralized meaning, transferring these to the glorified individual who, as independent and self-determined world citizen detached from family, national, and cultural influences, is theoretically free to join other individuals of different or similar backgrounds in the co-creating of a new civilization.

The entire development of culture-wholes leads toward such a period of prolonged crisis during which the functions of the third order acquire an often exaggerated importance. The process of abstraction may run wild in intellectual minds losing touch with holistic life-experiences and planetary realities. Individuals, in their emotional eagerness to become “liberated” from all that culture imposes upon them, easily forget that each one of us is but one of billions of variations on one theme: Man. Each individualized person draws out of this theme to express and realize only one of the latent potentialities available, just as every culture-whole is only one kind of social organism where independent, totally conscious, inwardly free, and emotionally unattached individuals may be developed.

Self-Consecration as Seed Function

Rudhyar states that every living organism serves a planetary, and even a cosmic, purpose. Only a few are able, through a process of self-consecration, to emerge as positive and creative factors at the level of the fourth-order functions. And yet, forty-six years ago, Rudhyar wrote: “The number of such men and women today is fast increasing, because the evolutionary crisis of mankind appears relatively imminent, and the pressure for conscious, deliberate, and courageous, if not heroic, decisions is steady and irrepressible.”

From the Self to the Whole

Cooperation in action is the foundation of the social activities but at the tribal level and in traditional families the need to cooperate is never questioned. It is based on a nearly compulsive sense of identification with the group. The unity of the whole takes precedence over the desires and opinions of the members. In more complex societies, especially in cities, the citizen acts primarily as an ego, even if not self-sufficient and self-motivated. However, it claims loudly and proudly the right to “do his own thing”, regardless of the consequences to other individuals and especially to the whole.

This is the underlying principle of democracy, says Rudhyar, by which individuals join together in order to achieve the much-publicized purposes mentioned in the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution. They join as “individual persons”, at least theoretically, whose individuality has “worth and dignity” and is given a nearly absolute value, although in practice these principles are often contradicted. Even at the highest level of ethics, people enjoin to “be good” in order to reach Heaven after death or gain good Karma for the next life, or simply because it pays to be good, in one form or another, while the opposite does not. What is optimal well-being at the biological level becomes personal happiness when “individualization has been not only operative but glorified and sanctioned by philosophers and theologists worshiping an equally personal God”, according to Rudhyar.

Living Consecrated

When cooperation and “being good” are no longer matters of free choice made by the ego, but have become an ineradicable fact of the nature of an individual, the transition to the fourth order of functions has begun. If a man decides not to do an evil act, perhaps after a pro and con argument inside his mind, this man is only “good”. The person who operates fully at the level of fourth-order functions cannot choose evil, period. He cannot be any other way, he is not “free” to be good or bad. He is unquestionably self-consecrated to the whole of which he knows himself indubitably to be an operative aspect or quality.

This kind of knowing cannot be refuted intellectually because it is an inner existential fact beyond intellectual or moral alternatives. We may call it “intuition”, just as we call “compassion” the realization through which a person feels so intimately one with other persons, or other living entities, that a transpersonal love flows through him or her toward whoever needs such a power of compassionate love. Yet, for there to be consecration of the individual to the whole, there must be first an “individual”, in the sense of a conscious, self-motivated person who has experienced the dilemmas created by freedom of choice in the past, and now has reached beyond them in the lucidity and inner certainty of transpersonal consciousness and spiritual being.

About Consecration and Self-consecration

It’s important to understand how Rudhyar uses the word “consecration”. When an officiant in a religious or magical ritual consecrates an object, it is transferred from the level of the “profane” to that of the “sacred”. It is brought ceremonially, meaning with the assent and cooperation of a group of people, into the realm of what is inherently considered sacred. In his 1957 book The Secret and the Profane, the great historian of religion Mircea Eliade shows that the quality of sacredness belonged to the actions of the gods for the archaic mentality, actions that set in motion the world as a whole, or at least a particular cycle of existence. In a real sense, the time of creation does not pass away but it is ever present. The purpose of the sacred ceremonies is to, once more, attune the community to the quality of that original moment when a god creates.

Similarly, in ancient times, a disciple could be consecrated in a ritual of initiation after having successfully navigated a path carefully chosen by the hierophant, priest or medicine-man who would perform the ritual by which the disciple is consecrated and accepted as such by the community of the already sacred. More recently, it has become possible to consecrate oneself as an individual to a consciously recognized and at least partially understood super-individual kind of existence. In the last two millennia, it has been possible for any human being to develop as a self-motivated individual to the point at which he or she is impelled, by an inner necessity of growth, to seek a Teacher or spiritual Guide who may assist in the preparatory steps for self-consecration. And self-consecration essentially implies an inner readiness and a commitment to develop the functions of the fourth order through a process of “ego surrender” or, better yet, of “ego metamorphosis”.⁸

The Pleroma State

As we saw earlier, Man is the conscious mind of the planet. As of today, Man is mind conscious of being conscious because it is centralized in the experience of “I am”. Individuality implies centrality, and centrality in turn implies a circumference. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal defined God as the circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. This refers to what Rudhyar called the Pleroma state in which every unit-center is the whole, and the whole operates totally in every center. It is a state of perfect plenitude of being. But Man is still in the making. Having reached the level of functions of the third order (which transformed those of the first and second orders), mankind is reaching a symbolic “change of life” through which it becomes possible to develop functions of the fourth order in a collective and publicly accepted manner.

But this is only a possibility. It might not be actualized at this time, for most human beings seem still unready and incapable of consciously and effectively take the step of self-consecration to the whole of humanity. That said, the crises faced by humanity present a unique opportunity for a “creative minority” to take their stand. Today it is a private concern, or at best, a group decision, provided the members are truly individualized, self-determined and responsible individuals, and not just an aggregation of fashion-influenced or emotionally distraught and egocentric personalities. At this critical point in the evolution of mankind, and of the cultures that control the masses of men, women and children, the philosophers and psychologists—and especially the religious and political leaders jealously entrenched in age-old privileges—must become aware of new possibilities, and be open to the acceptance of the super-normal, even if mixed with the abnormal.

Consecrating Our Existence

We spoke earlier about the holistic mind, able to see and encompass any situation or living organism as a whole of interdependent functional activities, and as a cosmos (as defined above). To see existence in all aspects, even the most menial, in such a cosmic way, is to make use of the cosmogenic function. It is also to consecrate all existential activities, and to transform the functions of everyday social living into sacraments. The consecration of our existence takes a new character at the level of fourth-order functions, because it is no longer referred to a divine Creation taken as the one sacred Act of God. Instead, it is the essential prerogative of mankind acting unanimously toward the planetary actualization of the pre-cosmic potential that was actualized by the divine Creation only in germ. But prior to the germ and the rootlet that gave it power was the seed. The seed is pure potentiality. The germ, from which roots and stem develop, is the beginning of the process of actualization of the seed-potentiality of existence.

The Process of Co-creation

In terms of functions of the first and second orders (biology and culture), “the sacred” occurred in the past, typically at Creation. In contrast, for the consciousness in functions of the fourth order, “the sacred” is a process leading to a future in-the-making: the Pleroma state of Man. This in-the-making is the sacred performance and the process itself is felt and visualized as a multifarious sacrament. For the individual person, the goal of such an existence is the full development of the cosmogenic function, with its twin foundations of intuition (holistic mind) and compassion (universal agape love). For a collectivity, and for mankind as a whole, the one sacred goal is to develop the Plenary Society or Pleroma of Perfected Human Beings, using Rudhyar’s terminology, which he defines in the second part of the book.

This is the ultimate goal. It may seem incredibly remote and impossible to realize, but this future is now being made. It is being co-created by all of us, starting with a “creative minority”, in every small victory over the old paradigms and the inertia of their sociocultural institutions, and of self-complacent and too often ambitious, greedy and violence-prone egos. Let us not forget that the functions of the fourth order develop on the basis of functions of the first, second, and third orders; in other words, on the basis of biology, culture and individuality.

Final Thoughts

Today, all orders of functions operate at once, or at least they can do so. In the final paragraph of the first part, Rudhyar writes (emphasis mine): “The future seed is already implied in the tender germ, even though the old seed yet remains, partially feeding the new growth. … The whole process of existence is sacred, once the holistic mind is able to perceive it as a beautiful performance. Beauty resides only in the whole. There is no integrity, no harmony, no peace except in the whole. To that wholeness, may all individuals consecrate themselves in the heroic performance of their own function, at their own pace—their unique and sacred dharma.“

Afterword

As usual, Dane Rudhyar was able to articulate something I had felt for years to be true. Those of you reading me before this blog may remember that I talked about four spheres of consciousness: biological organism, member of society, conscious individual and spiritual being. Roughly speaking, they correspond to persons in which functions of the first through fourth order are operational. Rudhyar’s incorporation of the transition functions gave a lot of clarity to my thinking.

I found of particular value the notion of the cosmogenic function, which I began to cultivate consciously upon reading the book. As a self-described recovering reductionist, I no longer understand the mechanistic view of nature with its indiscriminate forces that somehow produce the universe we observe. Rather than forces, we need to think in terms of purposeful powers, and that can only be achieved by modifying our mindset, our “personal philosophy”. When a reductionist mind considers an object, like an atom, a star or a solar system, all it perceives are moving parts, whereas a holistic mind perceives a self.

All this has profound implications in astrology, which is still preoccupied with the functions of the third order and the necessary process of individualization. In many of his astrology books, Rudhyar emphasized such a process when presenting the birth chart as a mandala with the integrated personality at its center. However, when the functions of the fourth order begin to act, the chart must be seen as a mandala without a center. In 1980, a year after the publication of Beyond Individuality, Rudhyar published its astrological companion, The Astrology of Transformation, in which he presents a transpersonal approach to astrology. But that is for another time.

The biggest gift I got from this book, however, was a direct glimpse into the avataric mind of Dane Rudhyar, a true herald of the Aquarian Age.

Always Love. 🌹🙏💖