The Cosmos of Mind

Understanding that reality, essentially unified, can be considered from two points of view — as being (that is, from the standpoint of the collection of objects), and as consciousness (that is, as the collection of subjects) — is one of the cornerstones of any path of development.

Nevertheless, while the study of where attention is directed — that is, the “external” world, its mapping and classification — is pursued thoroughly and persistently, the efforts aimed at studying the sources of that attention are far less substantial. The reason for this imbalance is well known — powerful destructive forces operate within consciousness, resisting self-examination, forces for which the existence of dark, regions untouched by attention is advantageous.

Therefore, for Magi striving for harmonious development, the mapping of mind is no less an essential part of their existence than the study of the “external” world.

Let us briefly revisit the Myth’s view of mind. As we have said, from the standpoint of mind the entire unified reality is described as psychocosmos, just as from the standpoint of being it is regarded as the macrocosm or the “physical” cosmos.

The foundation of the psychocosmos, it is held, is the primordial absolute space, devoid of coordinates and irregularities. This absolutely empty (and, at the same time, absolutely filled with potentials) space the Myth calls mind in the strict sense of the word. However, by entering into the process of self-knowledge — and for that purpose by differentiating and objectifying from its unmanifest homogeneity its actual characteristics — mind forms a network of processes and agents that are collectively called awareness.

These characteristics and agents are, in general, matricial in nature, and the matrices themselves are ordered and maintained by a hierarchy of meanings — the logoi of mind.

Thus the psychocosmos is formed — an aggregate of separate “worlds”, processes and agents, ordered along axes of meaning within the “empty” space of consciousness.

Within this psychocosmos the Myth distinguishes three principal “levels” — the level of “original fullness” (or “emptiness”), the level of self-awareness (the level of the manifestation of subjects) and the active level (the level of processes). It is clear that at the original level mind lies beyond description, at the second it is present, and only at the third level does its actual existence unfold.

The level of absolute consciousness is one and indivisible; at the level of presence, consciousness is binary — it contains only the primordial duality “I/not-I” — while at the level of action it is constructed according to the tetragrammatic law.

Accordingly, it is at the level of action that the processes of self-actualization and self-realization of consciousness occur, and it is by relying on being that consciousness builds its hierarchy.

We have also discussed at length that those areas of mind which arise in its self-study as “reactions” to certain incompleteness or unfinishedness, or lack of awareness, though differentiated from potential fullness, are not yet “illuminated” and are therefore called “shadow”; they become the habitat of the psychocosmos’s destructive forces. Accordingly, the task of mind is not only the search for and actualization of its potentials, but the completion of that search — its fullness and the most complete fulfillment possible — as well as the correction of the mistakes that were made in previous searches and actualizations.

The description and mapping of consciousness, the discovery of its dead-ends, and the opening doors within it to development are among the most important actions that a consciousness striving for inner harmony must undertake, so that its structure is truly ordered, psychocosmic, and not destructive and chaotic.