It is a fact that mankind and our Earth represent only a part of our solar system, while our sun together with its planets represent only a infinitesimal part of the cosmic universe. We also ascertain that on our earthly sphere different worlds co-exist along with our human one. These worlds, by displaying the different life kinds – each kind with its own characteristics – make up an evolutionary ladder. At the bottom of this ladder one can find the anorganic species, that is the minerals, and – going upwards – the organic species of plants and animals appear, ending up into a more complex kind of creation, which is mankind.
No doubt, there are other life kinds along the evolutionary ladder of creation, however man has no knowledge of them, since his consciousness is restricted to the physical world. They are the kinds of upper evolution, which are found above human level, and as Angels, Archangels and Gods guide the spiritual progress of man. Their existence represents parts of cosmic life and stages of evolution through which mankind is going to pass in the future.
There are major differences among the kinds that exist on the evolutionary ladder of creation. The life kinds which are found below mankind lack intelligence and alertness of consciousness as well as expression, while passivity, instinct and inertia are dominant. At man’s level appear thinking and speech, qualities which distinguish totally human beings from the previous natural species. Meanwhile, higher than mankind there are superior Beings who possess greater consciousness; this consciousness renders them more powerful and dominant as to the powers and energies of the physical, mental and spiritual world.
Each life kind on the evolutionary ladder of creation represents an expression of the Divine Thought, a different aspect of the Divine Will. Will is the First Principle of Creation. It is the First Impulse which becomes the Law which gives the urge to a series of smaller motions; according to the density of matter that these motions are going through, they display the different life kinds within creation.
Will is the first aspect undergone by the Creative Logos when appearing within the Spacetime. It is the Law itself. It is from the Creator’s Will that the Creation Plan came up, and from Its Divine Thought that the manifested world was possible. The first reflection of Will within Space becomes Divine Ideation and corresponds to the plane of the Cosmic Soul. Meanwhile, the third reflection of the Divine Will within the Physical plane is transformed into the principle of Wish or Kama, and through this principle the evolution of mankind takes place.
Wish is the principle which sets into motion the human soul. It is the cause which urges man towards action, and consequently towards thought and experience. It begins as a need for survival in the early phase of human evolution, but it then becomes the firm motivation for gathering consecutive experiences which progressively help the individual develop his spiritual consciousness.
Man is an individuality, an infinitesimal part of Universal Consciousness, it is a sperm of Universal Life and follows the cycle of his individual evolution. He is not by himself during this journey. He is accompanied by other souls, and all together we constitute what we call mankind. Mankind is a whole of monad-souls which has already passed through certain life stages, and in the future it will go through other levels, higher than the one at which he is at this particular moment. Through each level of matter and life, the soul-monads organize mechanisms of engagement and correspondence appropriate with regards to the matter which is wrapped up around them. Thus, they pass through all levels of creation, in view of achieving direct experience and, through it, the enlargement of its individual consciousness.
Consciousness is the ability progressively achieved by the individual soul through repeated self-provoked experiences, in order to develop at maximum the divine principles which lie lethargically within its seed, so that it may respond to the stimulations of the matter which wraps it up, and finally be imposed upon them. In order for this to happen, the soul should develop the principle of will, because only through this can it manipulate new strings and change previous states, and thus undergo new experiences. Certainly, as already mentioned, at the level of mankind, the principle of will is turned into wish. However, even as wish, it sets into motion a mechanism of mental, emotional and physical powers, which ends up progressively into an organized system called human personality.
It should be mentioned, though, that human personality acts and is organized as a result of wish, but this would be impossible without the help of the mind. Man is a monad which, although still present in the world of physical powers, it has been endowed with a ray from the Universal Mind, which gradually activates its lethargic mental self-power. This mental ray transforms him into human soul and enables him to turn into a spiritual soul, in the future. This mental beam had not been projected at the previous life stages, that is the mineral, the vegetal and the animal kind.
Mankind is a distinct kind, because it possesses intelligence and therefore has the ability to think and act after having previously decided. Consequently, it possesses will. Of course, human will only concerns the things that man perceives and wishes. Thus, human will is not free, since it is restricted by the outcome caused by the individual’s wish to satisfy his own self. In order to be free, will should get rid of material limitations. That is to say, individual will should not be guided by emotional greed, but it should be able to control and organize its senses.
We should not forget that human soul is hemmed in inside the ring of emotions, and senses are the tentacles of Ego within the matter. When human soul manages to release itself from its senses and from the separatedness it feels as Ego, then it enters a superior stage of evolution and life, and becomes spiritual soul or Celestial Man. Then it materializes its archetype which is symbolically rendered by the Five-Point Star. The Five-Point is the symbol which represents the principles of wisdom, love and free will. It is the superior stage of evolution, a stage which is in store for mankind when the principles of human soul, that is wish for Ego satisfaction, will have be turned into will for the application of spiritual principles. Spiritual principles are the attributes of superior planes and are diametrically opposed to the human ones or the animal-human ones. These spiritual attributes which are in lethargy inside the human soul, are progressively activated and unfold their latent forces from the wrapping of senses, by means of temporally undetermined experiences that microcosmic man acquires through his own free-will efforts. If he succeeds, then he gets transformed into a Macrocosmic Man.
In fact, that is the aim of human life: the human being has to develop consciousness by means of self-provoked and self-controlled experiences which are provided through consecutive existences; by progresively reducing the authority of sensuous powers upon him, man should manage not only to submit them, but also to turn them into superior, that is spiritual, powers. Every existence is a series of new experiences which add new knowledge to the already existing. Thus man, through repeated learning which is steadily controlled by the impartial Law of Retribution, acquires abilities and skills, turns shortcomings into qualities and his sensual weaknesses into superior psychic and spiritual powers.
According to Secret Doctrine (Prologue, p.67), "the Divine Wisdom mentions that there is…".
Individual souls, therefore, which are sparks from the Universal One, are involved into the Cycle of Necessity which is a cyclic journey inside the space, in order to get acquainted with all the states of manifested life, and thus grow and develop their lethargic cosmic principles. This journey has many aspects and takes many shapes, but what mainly characterizes this passage is the fact that it is performed according to two arcs, a descending and an ascending one. On the descending one, which is the arc of Shades, the spiritual and mental principles are lethargic, since the material principles are dominant and prevail. Meanwhile, on the ascending arc which is the Luminous Arc, first the mental and then the spiritual principles are empowered and exceed the physical ones. At the curve point, where the stream of souls is turned upwards and enters the ascending arc of rotation, appears this specific kind of life called mankind.
This process of transformation towards more spiritual, representing the aim of manifested life, is possible only by means of the active will of the human monad. Will gives the right to decision and, consequently, the possibility of rapid or slow experience. Francis Wicks, Karl Yung’s disciple, wrote: "The art of life is, in fact, the development and transformation of the power of choice". As for Kant, he ascertained that "the greatest responsibility of man is to know what should have under control in order to be a man" and meant the power of choice. The main idea of Baghavat Ghita is the choice that Arjuna has to make by himself, after having previously become aware of the cause of his actions.
Along the path of human evolution, will takes at first the shape of wish for the perceptible, for the satisfaction of individual self, it becomes attachment to whatever satisfies sensually and emotionally the individual, it becomes desire, greed, dogma and split which divides and separates the individual from the remaining parts of his human group. At this stage, man’s will is not free, because as first cause under the shape of wish, it is entrapped by the consequences of the individual and the selfish. In this case, there exists no freedom, because there are constraints which arise from satisfying the senses.
Freedom means being without constraints. It comes etymologically from the future tense of the verb έρχομαι ("to come" in Gr.), from ελεύσομαι ("will come"), which also means ανέρχομαι ("ascend"), ανεβαίνω ("rise"), "penetrate the infinite". For man, freedom is deliverance from the constraint of senses and penetration into the plane of superior and abstract ideas. Freedom is to surpass man’s limits of personality and to penetrate the limits of the plane of spiritual soul or Buddhi. Then, individual will, released from the identifications which are the chains that drag personality and human soul into the cycle of re-incarnation, can be free. Therefore, there should exist a will such that, when -as initial cause- creates the inevitable chain of its results, these consequences should not be in position to keep will in lethargy, but on the contrary to revigorate and keep it alert continuously, for a repeated spiritual activity.
Free will means that man has managed to surpass his weaknesses; that he has transformed them into attributes of his Upper Self; that he has managed to transfer at earthly level the genuine Archetypal Ideas of the celestial world; that these archetypes have become for man himself immutable principles; that on the one hand he applies into his everyday life, and on the other he transmits exemplarily and altruistically to the rest of the world. That kind of man can possess free will.
All those human actions which leave ascendingly from the impersonal, the selfless, the right and moderation, towards the personal, the selfish, the unjust and excess, cause a block up on the principle of will, limitate it oppressively within the circle of personal wish and prevent it from reaching the spiritual aims; this happens because the actions meant to satisfy and project the Ego, concern the world of senses, of desires, of competitiveness, of arrogance and greed. Free will exists only for the man who has surpassed the weaknesses of his personality, for the one whose every action is impersonal.
Will also means to perform what one wants and to decide. Man, who is an offprint of his creator, possesses the same principles and the same abilities, but in a lethargic form. Regardless of the level of personal evolution at which he is found, man functions according to the same urges: he wants, thinks in order to achieve what he is after. Thus man acts and performs, hence he expresses himself. The term έκφραση ("expression") comes from the verb φράζω which means the ability of the conscious being to think and perform, and finally display his thought outwards.
Freedom of will, thought and expression, is something sacred, since it reflects the First Principle from which Life starts. Regardless of the level of individual evolution at which it functions, will is respectable, since it is the impulse for a series of experiences which man needs in order to evolve. Will is the motivation of life, creation and evolution. The mystery of life is based upon the First Cosmic Motion, also called Cosmic Will, and what we call Evolution is but a spiral steady motion of life atoms in a progressive ascending direction in view of the self-will handling of the inherent individual will-motion.
This is also called enlargement of consciousness and this evolution begins to be realized when the life-animal vehicle receives the beam from the Universal Mind and is ensouled by a Manasaputra. Manasaputra is the son of Mind, and so is man. But for the time being, we are the under age children of Mind, and are guided by the wish for the expansion of our personal lower self.
However, between the wish and its initial source which is will, stands intelligence. The thread of mind is the one which transfers the messages of Will to human existence and reminds it the spiritual values kept lethargic within it. The same thread is transformed into a sieve which sifts man’s wishes: by choosing the most pure, that is those resembling the Mind and Spirit ones, it transfers and records them as indelible experiences in the plane of spiritual soul. Thus Antahkarana is built, which is the ladder that unites human and spiritual soul. Each rank of it represents a transformation towards the upper, that is a degree of diversion of entrapped will towards freedom.
The aim of life is the continuous experience and learning in view of progressively surpassing the lower and the material, in order to penetrate the upper and more spiritual. A means of achieving through this attempt is the mind, which is consciousness and consequently will. It is, therefore, reasonable to use our own volition and respect and protect the other people’s will. Each of us has his own way, his own beam, his own psycho-synthesis and individual degree of awareness. Each of us has the possibility as well as the right to express his own thoughts and feelings within the limits set by his senses, his wishes and his opinions. Man’s expression is respectable, provided that he doesn’t go against God’s laws and will. Since there always exists the Superior Judgement which is the Supreme Will according to which thought, expression and finally man’s will are valued.
This is the term of comparison between the spiritual and the material, between human and divine. From the Spiritual Law and from Those who represent it upon earth, emerges the power of free will as well as the measure which determines will, thought and expression of evolutionary mankind.
The issue of the 2nd Symposium "Free Spiritual Expression in Contemporary Society" was chosen in order to honour the right to freedom of thought for all intelligent beings. As for the term "spiritual expression", it raises the right to freedom of thought and expression to even higher levels, since it concerns a creation belonging to the domain of spirituality. The spirit is the first gust of the Creator’s Breath inside the Space and the purest carrier of Its will, thought and manifestation. As for the spiritual expression, it must exist and be respectable, because underneath it lies the Divine Will and Its Laws.
