The Origin of Manifestation

A cosmos is a manifestation mediated directly from primordial manifestation, constructed by monads who have themselves gone through the total processes of involution and evolution and, in so doing, from being unconscious have reached, through self-realization, the highest cosmic omniscience and omnipotence. From the beginning a cosmos is of small extent, relatively speaking, and is gradually expanded until it reaches the requisite size. The building material consists of monads, which are taken from the inexhaustible store of primordial manifestation as need arises. Cosmoses can vary considerably in size. There is a limit to their extension, however. This limit is set by the nature of matter. This extension must not be unsurveyable. Matter must not reach such an extent that the total number of dimensions cannot any more form an omnipresent point to the monad’s active consciousness.

The question whether each cosmos is from the beginning led by perfected monads or is wholly left to itself is still part of the esoteric. As a perfect organization, the cosmos is at any event formed by such monads. This problem is connected the ever-recurrent question how a “first” cosmos could come into being, how monads, being originally unconscious, were able to acquire actualized, active, objective self-consciousness.

It is quite conceivable that manifestation came into being by itself. Sooner or later, the will impels monads to aggregation, to mechanical association. It is quite conceivable that by being endlessly affected by other monads, the consciousness of the monad is roused to some kind of – extremely subjective, it is true – dreamlike, instinctively fumbling activity. In their continuous striving after increasingly more tangible reality, increasingly coarser matter – being instinctively perceived as necessary to the acquisition of an ever clearer apprehension of the contrast between consciousness and material reality – previously roused monads can attract still dormant ones for involvation down into the resistance requisite to objective apprehension. In endless repetition of aggregated and re-dissolved states of matter, in endless involvation and evolvation, each time in a coarser matter with a clearer objective consciousness, experience and knowledge are increasingly being gained. The possibilities of understanding and wielding power there are in cosmic consciousness – objectivity and self-consciousness having once been acquired – must finally become an omnipotent factor.