The Pardes, inasmuch as it is the ‘center of the world’, is, according to the primary meaning of its Sanskrit equivalent paradesha, the ‘supreme region’, but it is also, according to a secondary meaning of the same word, the ‘distant region’, ever since it has become, in the course of cyclical development, actually inaccessible to ordinary humanity. It is in fact, at least apparently, the most distant of all things, being situated at the ‘end of the world’ both in the spatial sense (the summit of the mountain of the ‘Terrestrial Paradise’ touching the lunar sphere) and in the temporal sense (the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’ descending to the earth at the end of the cycle); nevertheless, it is always in reality the nearest of all things, since it has never ceased to be at the center of all things,[107] and this brings out the inversion of relationship between the ‘exterior’ and ‘interior’ points of view. Only, in order that this proximity may be actually realized, the temporal condition must necessarily be suppressed, because it is the unfolding of time in conformity with the laws of manifestation that has brought about the apparent separation from the center, and also because time, according to the very definition of succession, cannot turn back on its course; release from the temporal condition is always possible for certain beings in particular, but as far as humanity (or more exactly a humanity) taken in its entirety is concerned, a release from time obviously implies that the said humanity has passed completely through the cycle of its corporeal manifestation: only then can it, together with the whole of the terrestrial environment that depends on it and participates in the same cyclic movement, be really reintegrated into the ‘primordial state’, or, what is the same thing, into the ‘center of the world’. This center is where ‘time is changed into space’, because it is where the direct reflection in our state of existence of the principial eternity is found, and thereby all succession is excluded: moreover death cannot attain thereto, so that it is also the very ‘seat of immortality’;[108] all things appear therein in perfect simultaneity in a changeless present, through the power of the ‘third eye’ with which man has recovered the ‘sense of eternity’.[109]
24
Toward Dissolution
Having given some attention to the end of the cycle, it is now necessary as it were to turn back again, in order to examine more fully the causes that can, under the conditions of the present period, play an effective part in leading humanity and the world toward that end. Two contributing tendencies may be distinguished, and their description involves the use of terms suggesting an apparent antinomy: on one side is the tendency toward what has been called the ‘solidification’ of the world, and it is this that has been mainly considered so far, and on the other side is the tendency toward the dissolution of the world, and it remains to examine in detail the action of the latter, for it must not be forgotten that every such end necessarily takes one form and one only, that of a dissolution of the manifested as such. Let it be said at once that the second of the two tendencies now seems to be beginning to predominate; for, in the first place, materialism properly so called, corresponding as it clearly does to ‘solidification’ in its grossest form (the word ‘petrifaction’ could almost be used, by analogy with what minerals represent in this connection), has already lost much ground, at least in the domain of scientific and philosophical theory, if not yet in that of the common mentality; and this is so far true that, as pointed out earlier, the very notion of ‘matter’ as it existed in these theories has begun to fade away and to dissolve. In the second place, and correlatively to this change, the illusion of security that held sway at the time when materialism had attained its greatest influence, and that was then more or less inseparable from the prevailing idea of ‘ordinary life’, has in the main been dissipated by the events that have taken place and the speed of their succession, so much so that the dominant impression today is very different, for it has become an impression of instability extending to all domains. Since ‘solidity’ necessarily implies stability, this again shows clearly that the point of greatest effective ‘solidity’ within the possibilities of our world has not only been reached, but has also already been passed, and consequently that dissolution is the goal toward which the world will be traveling henceforth.
The acceleration of time itself, as it becomes ever more pronounced and causes changes to be ever more rapid, seems to lead of its own accord toward dissolution, but it cannot for that reason be said that the general direction of events has been modified, for the cyclical movement inevitably continues to follow the same descending course. Moreover, the physical theories just referred to, while they too change with growing rapidity like everything else, continue nonetheless to take on a more and more exclusively quantitative character, to such a point that their character has now become assimilated to that of purely mathematical theories, and this change, as previously indicated, takes them yet further away from the sensible reality that they claim to explain, and leads them into a domain that is necessarily situated on a lower plane than that of sensible reality, as was explained earlier when pure quantity was under consideration. In any case, the ‘solid’, even at its greatest conceivable density and impenetrability, by no means corresponds to pure quantity, having always at least a minimum of qualitative elements; it is moreover corporeal by definition, and is even in a sense the most corporeal thing possible; now ‘corporeality’ is by definition such that space, however ‘compressed’ it may be under the conditions appertaining to a ‘solid’, is necessarily inherent in its constitution, and space, let it be recalled again, can in no way be assimilated to pure quantity. Even if the point of view of modern science were to be adopted momentarily, so that on the one hand ‘corporeality’ could be reduced to extension in accordance with Descartes’ ideas, and on the other hand space could be regarded as nothing but a mere mode of quantity, the difficulty still remaining would be that everything would be still be in the domain of continuous quantity; a change to the domain of discontinuous quantity, that is, of number, which alone can be looked upon as representing pure quantity, must then obviously imply, by reason of the said discontinuity alone, that neither the ‘solid’, nor anything else that is corporeal, can subsequently be taken into account.
A point is therefore reached in the gradual reduction of everything to the quantitative at which this reduction no longer leads toward ‘solidification’, and at this point there arises a desire to assimilate continuous quantity to discontinuous quantity. Bodies can then no longer persist as such, but are dissolved into a sort of ‘atomic’ dust without cohesion; it would therefore be possible to speak of a real ‘pulverization’ of the world, and such is evidently one of the possible forms of cyclic dissolution.[110] Nevertheless, although dissolution can be envisaged in this way from a certain point of view, it also appears from another point of view, and in accordance with a mode of expression made use of earlier, as a ‘volatilization’. ‘Pulverization’, however complete it may be imagined to be, always leaves ‘residues’, even though they may be really impalpable; but as against this, the end of the cycle, if it is to be fully accomplished, implies that everything that is comprised in the cycle disappears completely insofar as it was manifested; these two different conceptions however each represent a part of the truth. Indeed, the positive results of cyclical manifestation are ‘crystallized’ in order that they may then be ‘transmuted’ into the germs of the possibilities of the future cycle, and this constitutes the end-point of ‘solidification’ under its ‘benefic’ aspect (implying essentially the ‘sublimation’ that coincides with the final ‘reversal’), whereas whatever cannot be used in this way, that is to say, broadly speaking, whatever constitutes the purely negative results of the particular manifestation, is ‘precipitated’ in the form of a caput mortuum in the alchemist’s sense of the word, into the most inferior ‘prolongations’ of our state of existence, or into that part of the subtle domain that can properly be qualified as ‘infra-corporeal’;[111] but in either case a passage has taken place into extra-corporeal modalities, respectively superior and inferior, in such a way that it can be said that corporeal manifestation itself, so far as the particular cycle is concerned, has really disappeared completely or has been ‘volatilized’. It can be seen that it is always necessary at all stages up to the very last to bear in mind the two terms corresponding to what are called in Hermetism ‘coagulation’ and ‘solution’, and to do so from two sides at once: thus on the ‘benefic’ side are ‘crystallization’ and ‘sublimation’, and on the ‘malefic’ side are ‘precipitation’ and the final return to the indistinction of ‘chaos’.[112]
108
On the ‘seat of immortality’ and what corresponds to it in the human being, see
109
On the symbolism of the ‘third eye’, see
110
111
This is what the Hebrew Kabbalah, as was pointed out earlier, calls the ‘world of rinds’ (
112
It should be evident that the two sides here referred to as ‘benefic’ and ‘malefic’ correspond exactly to the ‘right’ and ‘left’ sides on which the ‘elect’ and the damned respectively are drawn up in the ‘Last Judgment’, which is nothing other than the final ‘discrimination’ of the results of cyclical manifestation.