65. Who is the man?

The audio recording is available at https://youtu.be/F-ITgO9fBic.

In our universality, as in duality, as the representative of intersections, we can primarily refer to the following:

1. Man as body (corpus), soul, (anima, psziché) and spirit (spiritus, pneuma): life is not only describable by the rules of biology (e.g., growth, reproduction), physics (e.g., movement, changes in volume), chemistry (e.g., chemical reactions), or mathematics (e.g., equations, simulation models, statistical calculations), but also by the qualitative relationships that transcend these, which are linked to dual pairs such as being and life, body and soul, matter and spirit, space and time, and exist within the relationship between man and the One and Only. The participating pairs are always in interaction, interdependent, and are not opposites, as many think or, worse, are taught. It could even be said that our "world," and within it, man, is the quantitative and qualitative network of material and spiritual relationships. Note: In Chinese tradition, the hun is the spirit, or immortal soul, and the anima the mortal one. 

Man's soul is the form; the body is the manifestation of the properties given by the form, the content; and the spirit is the soul "fit and ready" for returning to the One and Only. Depending on the degree to which we prioritize the human trinity (body, soul, and spirit), the "reality" surrounding us can be either objective (material, bodily, external, finite, and disintegrated into its parts, which we individually or collectively experience with our senses) or subjective (non-objective, unified, internal, which we carry within us and can understand with the meaning of the soul). Whoever perfects this inner, meaningful cognition through awakening, by the initiation teachings and life example of our Initiation Master, becomes a spiritual, universal, true, and normal human being. 

The person living according to the body (or more broadly, matter) sees the reality perceived by their five senses as the world. But for the person who also has a spiritual, inner world, this is only a passing illusion. The bodily person confuses their self with the body. They are unaware of both their self and their body. They do not ask, for example, "What is the body?" Is it bone, muscle, and flesh mass, or is it carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, etc., according to its chemical composition? They do not recognize that, for example, a 70 kg human body, which contains approximately 45 kg of oxygen, 12 kg of carbon, 7 kg of hydrogen, 1.8 kg of nitrogen, 1.7 kg of calcium, and smaller amounts of other elements like iron, copper, and zinc, is not theirs but a loan they have received. And it is proper to return this loan. 

2. The dual nature of the human soul: In the space called Paradise (the unified state), man was in the One, and the One was in the man. Upon entering time (the expulsion), unity was broken, and duality emerged; from the One came the many, from quality came quantity, from space came time, from being came life. Man was tasked with reversing this transformation, or in other words, to make one from the many, to create quality from quantity, space from time, and being from life—to close the cycle. The soul belonging to the unity of being is the universal self, or spirit, while the soul that entered time is the individual self. The connection with the One is given by the universal self, the intellect soul that surpasses reason. 

This connection, this bond, this depth is the most difficult to understand, the most mysterious, and its interpretation has occupied theologians, philosophers, artists, and laypeople for centuries. It was the modern liberal age that removed the intellect of the soul and attributed it to reason (rationality). When so-called "rational arguments" were used to understand the soul, disciplines like psychology emerged, attempting to understand and treat the individual self, or sociology, which tries something similar at the societal level. Both need to understand that the human soul is dual, something already known in the Middle Ages. For example, Master Eckhart in the early 1300s put it this way: "There is something in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable... and this something is the intellect." Plato might have thought similarly when he described man as a combination of freedom (the universal self) and necessity (the individual self). 

3. Man as the representative of universality, part of the order, is the image and analogy of the One and Only: Man's universality is given by the intersection of horizontal life (time) and vertical being (space), or more precisely, by the recognition that the universal self (centre) of man is common with the centre of all other intersections (dualities). Since the centre or axis is not only found in the microcosm of man but also in the macrocosm of the planets, it could be said that our world exists and "operates" through the centres, which is universality. We can find an example of the necessity of the centre in genetics, where during cell division, chromosomes from the poles are guided by the centromere (the centre) to the division site. If there were two centres in the universality, which would no longer be a true centre, but a periphery. 

The "operation" of the centre, the maintenance of balance, is given by stillness; the periphery, while the movement, provides imbalance. When man loses his balance, the hierarchical order, he is pushed to the periphery, and becoming disorderly. For man, balance is given by the relationship between the centre, the universal self, and the periphery, the individual self. When we are imbalanced, our individual self is dominating; when we are balanced, our universal self prevails. The universal self is the image and likeness of the One and Only.