The Good, the True and the Beautiful ... the Soul’s Choice

Many voices assert that everything is relative and that perception is the only reality. Consequently, goodness, truth and beauty are frequently described as relative values with a tenuous relationship to universal or absolute realities. From this perspective it may be divisive or separative and even dangerous to discuss one's unique perspective of truth, goodness or beauty. These concerns may be pragmatic because many of us have been damaged by fundamentalists and shallow thinkers who abuse these profound inner realities in the name of their partial truths. So we fear those who assert their control of us in the name of these essential values. Science and the new global awareness, including cultural relativism, our study of archetypes, the world’s mythologies, and much of the fruit of the most recent century’s intellectualism seem to confirm that. But in this relativism, we must also integrate.

So we start the process of integration to make sense of seemingly separate phenomena and to obtain a global awareness — by developing a sense of wholeness and right placement within our consciousness of the parts within the whole. But as we integrate, we discover increasing levels of depth and height. Our first experience of the inner reality seems to confirm that consensus view of the relative and separated nature of things connected through a network of perceptions: thoughts, feelings, and experiences. At some greater depth, but in a shallow layer relative to where we will ultimately go, we encounter the ego and become familiar with its gifts, specifically the ability to cohere and empower the personality in a world of separation. And yet we can go deeper still. We cross layer upon layer of inner reality and we become transpersonal masters. For it takes mastery to comprehend the simultaneity of greater complexity and increasing simplicity, as well as irresolvable ambiguities and resolving truths. As we cross the last threshold of interiority, a new status is obtained: the experience of our hidden divinity (the soul?), and a reversal of consciousness occurs. This new status is actually three simultaneous poises of being: the transcendent, the universal and the individual in the multiplicity; all in one.

No longer dealing with the relative and illusionary, we now deal in the “All Inclusive Real”. The Individual poise of this new consciousness is totally unique to the experience of the individual and yet totally inclusive of the universal awareness. It rightly places the individual as an essential aspect of the completeness of universal oneness, but yet it is able to witness this oneness and this individual uniqueness from a transcendent consciousness. This is the poise of the soul?. At this soul poise, the relative has become absolute and all relatives are honored as extensions, even though deflections and possibly distortions, of the absolute.

Now something new is possible for our experience of ourselves as individuals. The individual, rather than withdrawing in universality or transcendence, goes into motion with a directness unachievable before this realization, and garners unto itself the attributes, possession, experiences most beneficial to its growth and development: its vastness, power, harmony, and rightness of Being. In other words, it gathers to itself and expresses that which is good, true and beautiful to it but within a completeness, an inclusiveness of the universal and even the transcendent’s completion. For the individual, then, the good, the true and the beautiful becomes what is most attractive to the soul; in fact, the soul takes possession of these and forms a conscious body for itself from them. This body is called the psychic being. Most intimate to the soul, the psychic being or body is our closest companion and closest conscious poise in the relative to the absolute. Extending from the soul outward to the psychic being and therefrom is natural to the empowered being. We extend from absolute to relative. And through this movement, the conscious person completes his way of being, his Dharma. He cannot do otherwise. He must perform what he has manifested on Earth to do. And from this intimate powerful awareness, everything essential to the soul is good, true and beautiful, absolutely. And from that deeply internal and central power of being, we extend ourselves outward. Finally, we reemerge from our interiority into the exteriority of our material, emotional and intellectual natures, capable, directly empowered, in action and prepared for whatever will happen. This is the great utility of finding the soul, selecting the good, the true and the beautiful to generate our psychic being and completing the first stage of our personal development as conscious beings: the reversal of consciousness.