Descent of Worlds 1 to 12

Considering the creation of the universe to be an act of Will does not violate any natural laws. Can one conceive of the laws of physics separate from the universe they shape? Perhaps. And perhaps the true creation was the creation of those laws. The laws of physics are indeed part of the framework that makes our world what it is. Before the creation there was nothing: no time, no space, and perhaps not even the laws of physics. That very nothing left room for the creation to take place. The Will that created this universe instantiated itself as, among other things, the laws of physics. Out of that creative act there arose space, time, eternity, hyparxis, energy, matter, and the laws of nature to govern it all. The limitations thus imposed by the dimensions and the laws allow great latitude for freedom within their framework. But not the unlimited and absolute freedom inherent in the void prior to the creation.

Looking at the flow of creation from our perspective, we see an inner, spiritual aspect along with an outer, material aspect, inextricably entwined. In the pristine purity of the original void, the material and spiritual are not separate. But a separation emerges as the descent progresses from the void into materiality. It is our cosmic role as human beings to heal that separation at our level, to unify the spiritual and the material once again.

If we look at the levels of reality as a series of increasingly restricted Worlds, we can name World 1 [see note 1] as that pre-creation, proto-void of absolute freedom, home of the singular, creative, and benevolent Will. From World 1, the Divine Will acts to create the universe, an act that we call the Big Bang. We use the present tense because, given the accelerating expansion of the universe, creation is an ongoing act that transcends time and space, a moment that encompasses all of time and happens everywhere. Given what we know about quantum entanglement and that its simplest explanation is as a shared identity, a shared will, we can see that everything that comes out of World 1 has that One Will behind it, embedded in it, in a deeper form of entanglement than the one we have so far measured and proven.

The result that flows from World 1 is what we call World 3, the framework of dimensions and natural laws, its contents of unimaginable amounts of energy in a hot soup of fundamental particles, and the now self-limited, yet all-pervasive, will of the Creator. This endowment of dimensions and laws, energy and matter, and free will is the foundation of all the lower worlds and pervades them. That threefold structure reverberates throughout: in the three gunas of the Vedas, in the Holy Trinity of Christianity, in the body, soul, and spirit, in the body, heart, and mind, in function, being, and will, in the positive, negative, and neutral charges, and in the pairs of fundamental particles along with the force carrier between them, to name but a few examples. At this level unity remains foremost. For example, there is no differentiation between fundamental particles of the same type. Will takes the three qualities of active, receptive, and synergic, but that World remains formless. It is the world of inherent unity, the world of Love.

When through interactions among the forces at play, the primordial soup of particles condenses into simple atoms and molecules, World 6 is born. For the first time light can roam freely. And that original, sacred light is the spiritual hallmark of World 6. Only the most highly evolved souls can reside in that world, souls whose uniqueness does not negate their unity in the universal will descending from above. This is the lowest world that the Divine Will can reach without severe limitation. The great religions come down to us from World 6, as do the Sacred impulses such as hope, faith, and love.

Gravity starts to act as clouds of matter coalesce into bodies, forming stars, galaxies, planets, and the rest. This is World 12, whose fulcrum is each individual star. Between those stars, and between the galaxies they form, are distances so immense that we measure them in light-years and even billions of light-years. The rapidly expanding vastness renders space practically infinite; and the time scale so great that it borders on eternity.

These features resonate with the coalescence of our personal world as our own potential individuality and as the boundless consciousness to which we can be privy. This brings us presence, integrated and unified presence, backstopped by our individual will, our real I that opens into the great will descending from above, so that the core of our presence, the experienced source of our being, is fathomless silence and pure peace. With nothing separating us, we would not even say that we are connected, for that implies two separate entities that are linked. In World 12, we are not merely linked, we are one, because all will is one, and at the same time we are many individual wills. To maintain ourselves in World 12 we must concentrate the conscious energy.

What would it mean to open to the Sacred Impulses or to the higher will?

[1] The nomenclature, definitions, and descriptions presented for the Worlds derive from the writings and talks of G.I. Gurdjieff and J.G. Bennett, with modifications by the author.

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