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Preface
5 Planes of Existence
Introduction
Five Planes of Manifestation
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EXILE
A symbol to express the banishment, as it were,
of the manifesting God, or Self, from the higher planes which are
His real habitat, and His protracted sojourn encased in forms on the
planes of nature below.
“The God (Apollo), though by nature incorruptible and eternal, yet
through some decree of fate submitted to changes of condition, at
one time set all Nature on fire, making all things like to all; at
another time he was metamorphosed and turned into various shapes,
states, and powers in the same way as the universe now exists. The
wiser sort, cloaking their meaning from the vulgar, call the change
into Fire ‘Apollo,’ on account of the reduction to one state, and
also ‘Phoebus’ on account of its freedom from defilement, and its
purity; but the condition and change of its turning and subdivision
into airs, water, and earth, and the production of animals and
plants, they enigmatically term ‘Exile’ and ‘Dismemberment.’” —
Plutarch, On the E at Delphi, § IX.
This mythical statement describes how the manifesting Self (Apollo),
unconditional and eternal, submitted to inscrutable Law, and became
conditioned and limited in self-expression. The “change of Nature
into Fire and reduction to one state” refers to the process of
Involution, whereby at one time potential diversity or plurality of
qualities becomes merged in complete unity on the buddhic (Fire)
plane in the Archetypal Man (Phoebus Apollo), who is pure and
perfect in all his qualities. At another time following, the process
of Evolution commences by “dismemberment” of the Archetypal Man,
that is, by the separation and scattering of the qualities in the
myriad forms. There is subdivision into mental qualities (airs),
astral qualities (water) and physical qualities (earth), and the
production of desires (animals) and feelings (plants). In all the
qualities and forms the God within is in “exile” and unapparent.
“We are all making homeward, as it were, getting back to God, and
carrying with us as we go the fruits of our brief sojourn in the
foreign land of the material world. No two of us have ever had, or
ever will have, precisely the same experience of this exile.” — R.
J. Campbell, Serm., Our Quest for God.
“The presence of God in the conscience, and the sense of alienation
from God, are to Cardinal Newman the main truths of natural religion
— the notorious facts of the case in the medium of his primary
mental experiences.” — W. S. Lilly, Ancient Religion, p. 98.
“God is not external to any one. He is the root of the Soul, the
centre of the mind, and the way home to Him is within every person.
This is the heart of the mysticism of Plotinus. There is in the
universe, as he conceives it, a double movement — the way down and
the way up. The way down is the eternal process of the Divine
emanation, or outgoing of God towards the circumference. At the
centre of all is God, the One, the Good. The One is a Unity above
all difference, an Absolute who transcends all thought, who is, in
fact, even beyond being. Thought implies a contrast of knower and
known; Being implies a substance with qualities or characteristics,
and each quality limits the substance. … From the Perfect One there
flows or radiates out a succession of emanations of decreasing
splendour and reality.” — R. M. Jones, Mystical Religion, pp. 72,
73.
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