Participatory Consciousness

Anne Baring

I would like to open my contribution to this meeting with the words of Ken Wilber that I quoted in the first Millennium Symposium:

'The secret impulse of life is towards greater consciousness. Maybe the evolutionary sequence is from matter to body, to mind, to soul, to spirit - each transcending and including, each with a greater depth and greater consciousness and wider embrace' Ken Wilber,

and with these from Rupert Sheldrake's contribution to the same meeting:

"It is possible to make quite a good case that the sun could be conscious and if the sun, then why not the stars? Why not the galaxies? Why should there not be galactic minds? And if they communicate with each other then the distances are far too great for light to be the medium of transmission. We are into inter-galactic telepathy."

After many decades of study, I know of only one diagram in all religious traditions that can adequately explain these statements; that can give us both a blue-print of the many levels of consciousness and a route-map to help us reach beyond our present level of understanding. I would like to introduce a diagram of the four worlds of Kabbalah to illustrate the theme that spirit has brought these four worlds into being and that we, living in the fourth and manifest world know nothing of the existence of the other three invisible ones. It is the clearest diagram I know of that can explain to us the multi-levelled structure of consciousness and our place in the great chain of being. We are indeed, as Wilbur suggests, evolving from matter to body, to mind, to soul, to spirit but where have we come from? It is possible that, as participants in the emanation of spirit into manifest life, we have also come from spirit to soul, to mind, to body, to matter. Everything, from the immense galactic energies to the minute forms of matter participates in one life, is generated from one creative spirit. There is nothing outside this life, this spirit.

This diagram suggests that truth is not an article of faith but the experience of participating in the undiscovered reality of what has brought us into being. We cannot know truth until we have entered into communion with that reality.