The Cosmic Man

Wisdom Teachings
Eternal Wisdom
Lessons on Purusha Sooktam

Wisdom is of two kinds, there is a speculative and an operative part. Many initiates have spoken about cosmic wisdom and given us great visions from sublime beings like the Kumaras, the Manus, the Seven Seers – the souls of the stars of the Great Bear. All this is called speculative wisdom. It gives us information, expands our perspective and helps us breaking the limits of our mental patterns. Thus something starts to develop within ourselves which is called the Cosmic Man. He grows into us, we merge into him and experience the cosmos. This is the purpose of contemplation on speculative wisdom.

To be able to understand and experience it depends on our receptive capacity. In this there are great graduations between people. For a better understanding a training is needed. Here begins the operative part of wisdom. In this practical aspect we deal with the fundamentals of discipleship and right relations, with the steps of the eight-fold yoga path. The application of knowledge leads us to sublime thoughts and liberates us from criticising, condemning or from strong views and opinions. This way we rise in awareness and prepare our instruments for the reception of cosmic wisdom. If we don’t lead a balanced life which is of a certain use for our fellow human beings, we easily lose ourselves with speculative wisdom in daydreaming fantasies.

The life and teaching of a master is a representation of the cosmic presence. Through a master the presence of wisdom becomes perceptible, just like electricity becomes perceptible through the light. It is the purpose of a master to connect the individual awareness with the universal awareness. That’s why each time a master comes there are a few who turn to the cosmic wisdom the master is representing. Through him they build a link to the Cosmic Man. Persons of a lesser understanding make a god out of the master, since they are unable to see beyond him. They build their world around him and say, “Nothing else is anymore important for me.” Jesus Christ has spoken a lot about cosmic wisdom, but people with a lesser understanding could not assimilate it and write it down. This is also true for other great initiates.

The wisdom relates to ourselves, we are a representation of the Cosmic Person, created in the image and likeness of God. The Bible starts with this statement, and in the Secret Doctrine we see the long story which precedes the creation of the human form on the cosmic and planetary planes. The Cosmic Man – called Adam Kadmon, Purusha or Vishnu – is the prototype reflecting in us, the microscopic man. He is the original scripture of which it is said that there is only one original. We are copies of this original manuscript.

The Cosmic Man in us is the basis of our buddhic form, and this again is the basis of the mental, vital and physical form. In the human physical form there is a smaller vital form of the same shape. In it we have a still smaller mental form, and in this one there is the buddhic miniature form, which again has the same form. This buddhic form has the size of our thumb. It exists within the buddhic body, in the heart centre, and it is called the breast jewel. We can experience this breast jewel as the presence of the Cosmic Person in its miniature form - as ourselves in our inner self. We can visualise it as a beautiful form of it, out of radiant blue light. The more we deal with it, the more our buddhic body matures. We can meditate on the light in the size of a thumb in the heart or in the ajna centre. The mantram related to it is, “OM Namo Bhagavathe Vasudevaya” – Salutations to you, Vasudeva, the indwelling Lord of the universe.

Of Vasudeva it is said that he is the Lord of the twelve-petalled lotus who sacrifices himself in order to live in the zodiac of the twelve sun signs. The signs of the zodiac can also be meditated as the cosmic-human form of Light in our human form, where Aries is our head, Taurus the face, Gemini the throat, shoulders and bronchia etc. By visualising in us the macrocosm according to the law of correspondences, the cosmic wisdom starts to unfold within ourselves.

When we are serious and regular with our contemplation, the Cosmic Person crystallises within our form. The great masters are crystallised forms of the divine energy and they fulfil the work of God through the ages. The Hierarchy wants that in the Aquarian age man consciously experiences himself as part of the indestructible Cosmic Person and thus overcomes disease, decay and death. To be consciously in contact with the Cosmic Man is yoga, the alignment of the objective man with the subjective man and then with the Cosmic Man, “I am a representation of the Cosmic One in miniature form. I am nothing else but THAT, and THAT exists as I am. I am THAT and THAT I am.”

In the Vedas the Cosmic Man is called “Purusha”, meaning “person”, and also “the indweller of the forms”. In essence we also can understand Purusha as the Cosmic Christ. The Purusha hymn of the Rig Veda describes how the cosmic Purusha, the pure existence, descends into the many units of consciousness through a process of self-sacrifice. In a ritual which he conducts with the help of the different Devas (intelligences) which have emerged from him, he sacrifices himself into the expanse of the universe. The Devas tied him to a vertical pole and crucified him in space. They sacrificed him like an animal, and from his flesh and blood they took out the essence of all beings of the entire universe. Thus the seven principles with the seven planes of existence emerged. The occult symbol of this sacrifice is “the lamb with the cross”. The pole corresponds to the axis of the space globe around which the creation is rotating. On the planetary plane it is the rotation axis of the earth and in man the spinal column with its seven centres. The crucifixion means fixing the creation in the form through four stages: From existence to awareness, to thought and finally to action on the physical plane. We perceive only the last, the objective plane of appearance. In the hymn it says, that three quarters of the world are invisible and divine and only one quarter is the visible and mortal world. Thus the manifest universe only makes one quarter of creation. The manifestation of the subtle world of light into visibility is called the realisation of the “kingdom of God on earth”, which “the masters know and serve”, as it is said in the Great Invocation.

In the Purusha hymn the Lord is described as having thousands of heads, “sahasra shirsha”. We can meditate the heads of all created beings as the heads of the Lord in different bodies, we can even visualise the space-globe, the sun-globe and the various planetary globes as well as the atoms as his heads. In this we can feel the cosmic aspect of his presence in the thousand-petalled lotus of our head centre, the sahasrara, the centre with thousand rays.

The ritual of the sacrifice of the Cosmic Man describes the emergence of creation in its involutionary process, on the way from unity to multiplicity. In the evolutionary process the man sacrifice also takes place, in which the lower self is sacrificed into the Higher Self and then the human unit of consciousness merges into cosmic consciousness and thus experiences yoga, the state of the one existence. Serving is a preliminary stage of sacrificing, finally leading to the sacrifice of one’s own self. When service is done with devotion and as an act of giving to the Cosmic Man, we begin to experience, that in the different forms we always encounter the one Cosmic Man, and this keeps us in the vibration of joy.

K.P. Kumar: Sankhya. The Sacred Doctrine / notes from seminars / E. Krishnamacharya: Lessons on Purusha Sooktam. The World Teacher Trust - Dhanishta, Visakhapatnam, India.