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  • Wisdom for practice
  • Wisdom is applied knowledge
  • Wisdom spreads itself

Wisdom for practice

Wisdom is for practice, not for continuous speaking. If we keep on speaking about the Masters, the Rays, and the Hierarchies, we are only missing our duties for the present.

Wisdom is applied knowledge

Knowledge, when applied becomes wisdom. We gain a lot of knowledge, but it has to be applied in daily life, then it transforms itself into wisdom. Through wisdom we will experience the existence.

Wisdom spreads itself

We need not be anxious to spread the wisdom without working it with ourselves. It is a wrong understanding if one thinks that he can spread wisdom. Wisdom knows how to spread itself. It only needs channels.

Purusha

The Cosmic Person

The Mother Principle and the Descent in 10 Steps into Creation

The Vedas declare that Yoga is the establishment of correspondence between the macro and micro systems of creation. Since earliest times, the essence or basic substance of the universe is worshipped as the cosmic person. Even though the dimension of our physical form seems to be small, we are in essence the same as the cosmic person, like a wave has the same substance as the ocean. We therefore are a microcosm in which the universe can be visualised and experienced.

The cosmic person is the original form in whose image and likeness we have been created. He is the origin and we are copies of this prototype; from him, all human forms were made. The cosmic person is called with many names and is described in various ways. In the West he is referred to as the Cosmic Christ or Adam Kadmon, in the East as Vishnu or Purusha.

Pura means city and Purusha means “the One who has entered the city”. Purusha is the universal soul which has entered into the many forms and permeates them. Of all forms in creation the human form is the most perfect one. Many Devas also work in us. The cosmic person came down of his own free will and has individualised himself. He has entered the “city of nine gates”, the body with nine orifices (two eyes, two ears and two nostrils, mouth and the two excretory organs; the female body, which represents nature, has the tenth orifice for the emergence of the child). The cosmic person lives in us as our essence.

Purusha is the potential of the space in every form and surrounds it. The forms circumscribe the space and create a space inside and outside. The individualised soul is bound by time and gains qualities which it did not have in the unlimited state. The cosmic person is the source of the physical body but he seems to dissolve himself and get lost due to the dominance of the physical. Through our ignorance and egoism we develop many bonds and get stuck. The Purusha should again be released and made to shine.

The spiritual anatomy by the ancient seers explains the existence of three planes of the Purusha: the Kshara Purusha, the Akshara Purusha and Purushotama. Kshara Purusha is the mortal, outer man who serves us as a vehicle for experiencing objectivity. It undergoes change; in each life we have different personalities. Akshara Purusha is the immortal part, the indestructible form of light. He is related to the sun, whereas the Kshara Purusha is related to the planet. Purushotama is the God centre, the cosmic aspect. We can connect with it only via the Akshara Purusha, not from the mundane personality. Purushotama corresponds to Atma, Akshara Purusha to Buddhi and Kshara Purusha to Manas. The 15th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita explains this in detail.

The Thumb Sized Being

The Akshara Purusha is the subtle body of golden light, from out of which the body of diamantine light is later formed. In order to bring out again the Akshara Purusha, who has dissolved into the physical body, a process of inner heating called Agni Prachodana or Kundalini Prachodana is used. The fire of Kundalini slowly constructs in us the body of light. First it is born as a thumb sized human form in the heart centre. This form resembles our outer form, for it is in fact the source of the outer form. Its birth in the heart is the birth into light or the second birth called Dwijatva. To accelerate this birth is the purpose of the initiation of the children into Gayatri at the age of 7 years called Upanayanam.

The thumb-sized form tries to detach itself from the body of flesh and blood like a peanut disassociates with the peanut shell during ripening. At the beginning the figure glows with a faint light. Later the light grows brighter and eventually a being develops with a very bright light. In the advanced stages the initially thumb sized being can expand and grow very big or very small at will. It can move out of the body and move through the air or appear to others in their dreams and give them advice. Thus, we can leave our bodies to help others.

The thumb-sized being is the essence of Purushotama. When it detaches from the outer form it connects more with the super-soul. The outer man is centred in the solar plexus, the thumb-sized form of the inner man in the heart and the cosmic centre of Purusha in the Sahasrara, the head centre. Sahasra is also the mantra of the Sahasrara, by which the presence of the cosmic person is invoked into us. When the Lord enters into an individual, He takes to the form of the human being who thus becomes a Son of God. This process of the descent of the divine grace is called Purushakara; the human becomes one with Purusha. High souls like Moses, Jesus and Ramanuja have demonstrated this. Such a human knows exactly that it is the Lord who expresses through him in order to serve, to inspire and to enlighten the people.

The Crucifixion in Space

The Purusha Sukta is a hymn of the Rig Veda which sings the formation and the glory of the cosmic person. It is the most important of the 11,600 hymns of the Rig Veda and is considered the king of the suktas.

The Purusha Sukta begins with the sound “Sahasra Sirsha Purushaha.” The Lord is described as thousand-headed, thousand-eyed and thousand-footed. This means that the one cosmic person exists as the many people. The heads of the different people are to be meditated as the head of the single Person who exists in the various bodies. Head means a vortex of His manifestation. The space-globe, the sun-globe and the various planetary globes as well as the atoms are all his heads.

The Purusha Sukta describes the ritual of how the cosmic person volunteers to come down as unit of consciousness into the many units. It is also called the ritual of All Sacrifice or Man Sacrifice:

From out of the absolute God the cosmic person comes down as God in creation. He forms himself to an egg-form, the cosmic egg. Thus, from out of the background the auric egg or the sphere is formed into which the creation can happen. This auric egg is called Virat and the indweller the Purusha.

From out of this egg the Devas of the cosmic plane prepared the cosmic person. They fixed him in space by crucifying him on a four-armed cross. They tied his radiant bright form up to a vertical pole and made him the sacrificial being to form out of him the 7 planes of creation. Thus, from his flesh and blood they brought out the quintessence of the beings of the entire universe. Through this crucifixion Purusha sacrificed himself into the cosmos. This means that a part of the boundless space became seemingly bound and limited.

In the egg-form the 27 pre-cosmic principles floated in space without relation to each other; they could not function collectively by themselves, just like a body remains lifeless without the soul. It is only the descent of the divine essence through the crucifixion of the Purusha that brought about the integrated activity through the indwelling consciousness.

The cosmic person is the most complete form and is like the human form but he has four arms. The four arms symbolise the four aspects or stages of creation, of which three quarters is invisible and immortal and only one quarter is visible. Thus, Purusha as well as every human have four dimensions: the existence, the awareness of existence, thought and action. Only the field of action is visible and manifest; it is the fourth step, with which the cosmic man has stepped fourth into the entire world of objectivity. “One-fourth forms the manifestation as all the created beings of the Lord, while three-fourths exists in eternity”, says the Purusha Sukta.

Symbolism and Visualisation

The circle with a central point is also a symbol for Purusha which stands for the number 1 – the circle is the background and the point is the consciousness which emerges out of it. In the Purusha Sukta it says that in ten steps He comes down into creation. He has manifested into the creation in multiples of 10 which is represented by a 1 with a number of zeros, like 10 times 10 times 10 or 1000. It also says that he has 10 fingers. The 10 aspects of the four dimensions of Purusha are also represented by the symbol of Dattatreya or the Pythagorean decad.

We can visualise Purusha as the Master of the fourfold existence and imagine him in us as a beautiful human form with a radiant blue light. In this, we can sing the Purusha Sukta. Master EK said that if we regularly sing the hymns we will find access to the ashram of the second ray. The sound, even more than the meaning, brings about the transformations. It was his express wish that all groups that follow the Hierarchy should learn and utter the Purusha Sukta and also the Sri Sukta, because they do immense good. The more we engage ourselves with them the more our Buddhic body matures and the cosmic person forms in us.

Sources: K.P. Kumar: OM Namo Narayanaya / notes from seminars. E. Krishnamacharya: Lessons on Purusha Sooktam. The World Teacher Trust - Dhanishta, Visakhapatnam, India.