This series covers events from 04/29/1983 - 08/26/1983

This extraordinary series of classes, conducted from April through July 1983, is a comprehensive investigation into Plotinus's doctrine of Soul, using an original synthetic framework that integrates Plotinian metaphysics, Vedantic and Samkhyan psychology, Paul Brunton's mentalism, and astrological cosmology.

The series begins with a foundational paper, and a class discussing it, titled “The Third Phase of Soul.” Soul can be conceived as dual or tripartite. When conceived as tripartite, the first two phases, the intellectual and reasoning phases, are thought of as the soul in the Nous, or Absolute Soul, while the third, or lowest, phase is referred to as Mercurius, or Asmita (a term borrowed from Yoga/Samkhya philosophy, which means the I AMness as identified with the functioning of a vehicle). Each Asmita is an individual unit of life emanated from Absolute Soul. These individual souls descend into manifestation by receiving the World-Idea, an Idea produced and organized by the Universal and cosmic souls.

Each unit soul projects the World-Idea as its own thought, which includes various levels of embodiment, and ultimately experiences itself as a subject in a world that now seems other. The kosas (sheaths) of Vedantic psychology and the soul vehicles of Neoplatonism are forms of embodiment at different levels of the cosmos, from the stars to the planetary spheres to the Earth, and correspond to various levels of knowledge that are made available to each individual soul through identification with these vehicles.

This theme is then elaborated on and discussed in later sessions, by providing more detail about how the two lowest vehicles have the memories of the Earth Goddess (the “Dragon”) as their “matter” and showing the connection of these vehicles with astrology: The 360 degrees of the tropical zodiac are at the level of the Dragon. The natal planetary degrees indicate the essences or ideas that the lower phase of soul will experience as its life and will extract and come to know as life is lived. Indeed, this is how the soul fulfills its purpose in descending into the cosmos.

How the lower soul comes to acquire true knowledge through its experience of the world and how this is exemplified by the soul’s incarnating in a series of lives, each with a unique natal chart, is then explored and amplified in several other papers in this series, and the classes in which they were read and discussed: “The Epistemology of Soul,” “Soul as Double Knower,” “Time and Eternity,” and “Evolution of the Individual Mind.”

Key sessions examine the Sage's happiness, the relationship between time and eternity, and omnipresence and participation, which shows how individual souls participate in Absolute Soul without fragmenting the universal principle. Edited versions of several of the papers (or parts of them) in this series were included in the chapter “The System of Nature” in Astronoesis.

Classes and documents available in this series