By Marguerite dar Boggia
MONAD IS A GENERAL term for a variety of consciousness centers, whether in the constitution of a man or of a universe. In man, a microcosm, there are a number of monads: the divine monad or inner god, the spiritual, the human, and the vital-astral monad, each being the offspring of the monad immediately superior to it. No matter what its grade, every monad is a learning, evolving entity.
Man is composite, wholly mortal in his lower aspects, and unconditionally immortal only in the monadic essence, his inner god. From this monadic essence, his sevenfold nature evolves and manifests various phases of the stream of consciousness that man essentially is. The spiritual monad forms around itself a veil, a body, in which it can express certain parts of its energies on a lower plane, and this again exudes from itself a less ethereal vehicle, a soul, which enables the spiritual monad to manifest on a still lower plane. And so the process is repeated serially, these garments of light becoming progressively grosser until we reach the linga-sarira or model body which, in its turn and as the last effort, exudes forth and builds the physical body. In this way, man's sheaths of selfhood unfolded.
We, humans, are but evolved life atoms, and in comparison with beings higher than ourselves, our spiritual natures are but life atoms living in and of the essence of the higher gods. Thus there exists an intimate communion between the gods and men because, in these greater and vaster cosmic spheres, we are evolving life atoms of that sublimer stage.
Not only is every being an expression of an individualized divinity, its inner god, but all these inner gods are under the sway of, and living in and forming a part of, some greater divinity, itself but a part of a superior host collectively aggregated within the life sphere of some divinity still more sublime; and so on ad infinitum.
The supreme Hierarch of the cosmic hierarchy includes within its body corporate this vast aggregate of inner gods, much as our body contains all the life atoms which compose it. In boundless Space, there are an infinite number of such cosmic hierarchies.
Every one of us, in eons upon eons in the far distant past, was a life-atom continuously forming a part of the body, or of the intellectual portion, or of the psychical range, of the constitution of some entity who now is a divinity -- our own supreme Hierarch -- and we are trailing along behind as part of that divinity's 'family.' These supreme hierarchs, infinitude in number, form the inhabitants of the divine spiritual universe, just as we, in our relatively little sphere of consciousness and energy, are the inhabitants here. We are gods to the life atoms which enter our bodies and to the higher gods into whose vehicles and spheres of life we enter. We are life atoms.
Gods or monadic essences, monad, ego, souls, life-atoms, atoms -- these form a descending series. First, a monadic essence or god clothes itself with its monad, which in turn clothes itself with its ego; this again enwraps itself with its soul, which clothes itself with one particular life-atom around which are grouped by karmic attraction other minor life atoms, likewise emanated by the originating monadic essence. Thus every monad is derivative from its parent god, yet its future destiny is to unfold itself into a god. This apparent inversion of teaching will not seem so difficult to understand if we remember that as soon as a monad becomes a god, through an unfolding of its latent faculties, it then and there begins to emanate its own child monad and the hosts of minor children monads which in their aggregate furnish it with various vehicles -- all of this reproducing the above-mentioned series from gods to atoms.
A monad entering our hierarchy starts its existence as an unself-conscious god-spark, then flowering out through humanity, it attains divinity and ends its career in that particular manvantara as a full-blown god. It would be absurd to say that the monad of an atom or hornblende, through the long ages, by wriggling in and out of other minerals and in and out of vegetables and heaven knows how many kinds of beasts, finally wriggled into a man.
Evolution does not mean a continual accretion of experience upon experience upon experience, as indicated by the old quasi-Darwinian theory of evolution. Evolution is a flowing out from within, the unrolling, the unfolding of what is already within. Character, individuality, self-conscious energy, and self-conscious power all come from within. The core of every entity, whether god, monad, man, or atom, is, in ESSENCE, a divinity. In the gods, it is a still higher divinity; in human beings, it is a god. This is the monadic essence.
The statement of the Lord Buddha that nothing composite endures and consequently that as man is a composite entity, there is in him no immortal and unchanging 'soul' is the key. The 'soul' of man is changing from instant to instant -- learning, growing, expanding, evolving -- so that at no two consecutive seconds of time or of experience is it the same. Therefore it is not immortal. For immortality means enduring continually as you are. If you evolve, you change, and therefore you cannot be immortal in the part which evolves because you are growing into something greater.
Hence the monad of an atom of carbon or any other mineral is not the same thing as the monad of Shakespeare, Newton, or Plato. The essence in each case is identic, but not the monad. It is this essence which projects a ray or extends a portion of its energy in and upon the astral realm, which energy thus at its tip becomes the astral monad -- itself a mere phase of the energies and capacities inherent in the monadic essence. The next phase, and speaking now in aeonic periods, is the human monad. When the human phase of the monadic essence passes, we shall have become spiritual monads. When the spiritual phase passes, we shall then have become the monadic essence itself and thus shall have returned home as a full-blown god.
The monadic essence, because it is the root of everything that flows forth from it, is like the sun shining upon the evolving entity derived from it -- the many monads which are its rays. But if we think of such an entity as radically separate, progressing along an absolutely distinct path from other entities, we shall wander far afield.
Every monad or soul is, in a certain sense, an entity destined to evolve to the spiritual stage of its parent monadic essence. As the human child grows up to be like his father, sprung from the father and yet different, another individual, so is it with any monad. The human soul, for example, is destined to develop into a spiritual soul because already latent in and overshadowing the human entity is a Buddha or Christ, itself destined in time to flower out as a Dhyani-Chohan, a god; for a Dhyani-Chohan is the very heart of a Buddha or Christ.
Dhyani-Chohan is a term taken from the Mahayana Buddhism of Central and Northern Asia and is a generalizing expression very much like the word gods. Indeed, the very highest classes of dhyani-chohans are identical with the gods, while all the lower or intermediate classes run down the scale of the cosmic structure, thus including demigods and other self-conscious entities of still inferior grades, until we reach beings like us who are what one might call embodied dhyani-chohans of a lower grade, for such we truly are in our buddhi-manasic parts. It would be wrong to speak of the elementals as dhyani-chohans, for the significant meaning of Dhyani is a self-conscious individual of a more or less spiritual character who, to us, seems to be involved in lofty 'contemplation,' i.e., in what Hindu philosophy calls dhyana. Hence, all the different grades of dhyani-chohans more properly belong to the higher parts of the cosmic hierarchical structure. The lower portions of this structure are the three general classes of the elementals, the various kinds of nature-sprites (elemental slightly evolved), and the grades of beings higher than the nature sprites up to and including the human kingdom. Above the human kingdom, which is marked by self-consciousness and the beginnings of spiritual dhyana, begin the lowest groups of the dhyani-chohans, the highest classes of which are gods.