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Preface
5 Planes of Existence
Introduction
Five Planes of Manifestation
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MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM
The Macrocosm is that aspect of the
manifest God, or Divine Monad, in which he is shown to be the
producer and container of all forms and qualities in his universe;
while the Microcosm is the individual monad, the reflection and
perfect copy of the Divine,-being itself Divine. When the One became
many, each of the many had in latency all the differentiations of
the One.
The Son, "who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of
all creation, for in him were all things created, in the heavens and
upon the earth, things visible and things invisible." - Col. i. 15,
16.
"As God contains all things in Himself, so it is in our soul; the
soul is the microcosmos in which all things are contained and are
led back to God. Therefore there is no difference between the Son of
God and the soul (Eckhart). - PFLEIDERER, Develop. of Christianity,
p. 152.
“The Universal Perfect Soul is the Macrocosm. Humanity is the
Microcosm" (Geberol). - MYER, Qabbalah, p. 156.
"The whole of the created, from its very beginning, is formed by the
Qabbalistic philosophy into one Great Ideal Man, a Makrokosmos, a
Great World, of which the terrestrial Adam was a copy, and who, with
his descendents, are as a Mikrokosmos or Little World." - Ibid., p.
225.
“Humanity is considered by the Qabbalah as one great universal
brother-hood, as a great spiritual energetic vitality called the
Mikrokosm, and in this slumbers the idea of the higher Makrokosm,
the Heavenly or Celestial Man or Adam, the primordial Perfect
Paradigm or Adam Qadmon, the Perfect Model of all Form and of the
first terrestrial Adam, who was as to it the Mikrokosm. In this
Great Paradigm, the Qabbalah asserts, are all the forms, the perfect
ideals of the emanated or created existences. It might therefore be
termed the Idealized Form, or the Form which contains all the
perfect ideas in their origination." - Ibid., p. 181.
"The teaching of the Faithful Brethren of Basra concerning Nature is
that the human soul has emanated from the World-soul; and the souls
of all individuals taken together constitute a substance which might
be denominated the Absolute Man or the Spirit of Humanity." - DE
BOER, Hist. of Philos. in Islam, p. 92.
“The saying that the First Man was co-extensive with the world is
found in various parts of the Talmud and the Midrash. The old
philosophic conception that the world is a macrocosm and man is a
microcosm is adopted by Philo and the Rabbis." - C. TAYLOR, Sayings
of the Jewish Fathers, p. 71.
It is immaterial whether the individual or the race be regarded as
the microcosm, for as all human individuals are united as one
"universal brother-hood," or soul, on the buddhic plane, the
microcosm for each is the same as for all. Every monad in every form
is potentially a microcosm in which the universe is represented. All
monads below the human tend upwards to become the human, which in
its turn progresses onward to become the Divine (see diagrams, pp.
12, 60, 473).
"The deepest root and very essence of the soul in every man is the
eternal image of God there-there without any agency of our own,
there before our per-sonal creation, and there for ever. the mirror
of the Son God sees, and we too may see, the types or patterns of
all reality; and the way to find ourselves and God and all that Is,
is to stretch forth our arms toward the Divine pattern, which is
ours: Flying from brightness to brightness, the spirit aspires with
outstretched arms to reach this immortal pattern according to which
it was created' (Ruysbrook)." - R. M. JONES, Mystical Religion, p.
310.
"As the old Tabernacle, before it was built, existed in the mind of
God, so all the unborn things of life, the things which are to make
the future, are already living in their perfect ideas in Him, and
when the future comes, its task will be to match those divine ideas
with their material realities, to translate into the visible and
tangible shapes of terrestrial life the facts which already have
existence in the perfect mind. Surely in the very statement of such
a thought of life there is something which ennobles and dignifies
our living. The things which come to pass here in the world are not
mere volunteer efforts of man's enterprise, not self-contained
ventures which responsible to nothing and to no one but themselves.
For each of them there is an idea present already in the thought of
God, a pattern of what each in its purest perfection is capable of
being. Out of the desire to realise that idea must come the highest
inspiration. In the degree to which it has realised that idea, must
be the standard of judgment of every work of man." - PHILLIPS
BROOKS, Serm., The Pattern in the Mount.
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