HUMAN UNFOLDMENT

The Process of Integration underlies the evolutionary drive forward.

Integration is the fusion of two or more components into one functioning whole. Human unfoldment has proceeded down the ages through a series of internal fusions which are geared towards expansion of consciousness, and ever involve a sense of duality culminating in points of crises.

It is these naturally occurring points of crisis which push us forward towards expansion. Some of these major integrations lie far behind us in the distant past, others are proceeding at this time, while others still lie ahead in the future.

Man is essentially dual, consisting of soul and body, of intelligent life and form, of a spiritual entity and the apparatus of contact – the body nature whereby that entity can become aware of worlds of phenomena and states of consciousness of a nature different to those on its own level of awareness.

It is important to understand that we are, in essence, spirit expressing itself in, and through, matter. Our body nature is four-fold, consisting of the physical outer form, the body of vitality (the etheric), the sensitive emotional desire body, and the mind. Spirit contacts external phenomena through the instrumentality of these forms.

Through the physical body contact is made with the tangible world; through the vital body the impulses come which produce direction and activity upon the physical plane; through the desire body, the emotional nature originates the bulk of those desires which direct the undeveloped or average man, and which can be called desire-impulses or the wish-life of the individual; through the mind comes eventually intelligent understanding and a life directed by purpose and planning instead of desire. Thus speak the Wise.

It has been given that integration between the physical body and the vital (etheric) body in present humanity has already proceeded, as also integration between these two and the emotional body; they now lie below the threshold of conscious activity for all. Integration for many is now proceeding in varying degrees between these three and the mind. At the present point on the evolutionary arc a coordinated integration is proceeding apace between these four aspects, which in time and through due process, produces the coordinated or ‘integrated personality’. Future integration will secure (as is the case in some even today) the coordination between the personality and soul.

The difficulty today is that we have on every hand people at all different stages in the integrative process; all are in a ‘state of crisis’ and all providing the problems of modern psychology.