The story of the Fall of Man from Paradise is relevant to humanity's complicated existence today. Over the course of millions of years of human evolution, from the time of ancient Lemuria, man became independent of the divine spiritual powers that once guided him, symbolized by Lucifer's temptation of Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
We see that human consciousness posits a fall of man at the beginning of the historical development of mankind on earth. He would have been incapable of falling into sin if he had remained in his old state, in a state of instinctive guidance by divine spiritual powers.
...Whereas he would then have remained sinless, incapable of sinning, like a mere creature of nature, he now became capable of sinning through this independence from the divine spiritual powers.
This was a necessary part of the Divine Plan. If we had always remained perfectly wise and moral, we would have never become free. We would always know how to act, and there would never be a deliberation of choice between two options.
If we did not have this possibility of choosing, we would still be unconscious in Paradise, among "little angels with pink gowns playing lyres, what a boredom!"...Thus, Evil was a necessity!
As Mephistopheles answers to Faust, when asked who he was: "I am a part of that force who always craves for evil but always ends up doing good".
From that aspect, we should be careful not to idolize free will because it came at the cost of our ignorance in God's Will for us. This Divine Plan is ultimately attained when we freely choose the right thing. Therefore, raising ourselves from ignorance is an essential task. Please see my post, Clairvoyance: a vision of our destiny where I explain this more in detail.
Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. — Matthew 6:9-10
31 “And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours. 32 It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.’ ” — Luke 15:31-32
The Universe and Man
How can a soul at once be free and yet compelled by an inexorable destiny? — Annie Besant
Will is the offspring of the Divine, the God in man; Desire the motive power of the animal life. Most men live in and by desire, mistaking it for will.
But he who would achieve must separate will from desire, and make his will the ruler; for desire is unstable and ever changing, while will is steady and constant. — Madame Blavatsky
Our true Self, the Atman — our essential nature...is in fact not anything personal, individual, or separate in any way but is literally one and the same in essence and identity as...the One Eternal Infinite Divine Principle, the ONE LIFE...although there are many souls, there is only one Spirit, one Self (i.e. one Atman), one Supreme Ultimate Reality.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. ― C.G. Jung
Will does not manifest itself until after memory, comparison, reason, judgment, imagination, have reached a considerable amount of development.
For a long period these growing mental faculties are yoked to the service of the desire-nature. They are the handmaids of kāma, and fly to obey the commands of desire. — Annie Besant
One may ask: Where is this higher human self? Is it within the personal man? No, it is not there. On Saturn, Sun and Moon [earlier embodiments of the Earth], the higher self was diffused over the entire cosmos. At that time the Cosmic Ego [the Holy Spirit] was spread out over all human kind, but now men have to permit it to work upon them.
They must permit this Ego to work upon their previously prepared inner natures. This means that the human inner nature, in other words, the astral body has to be cleansed, purified and ennobled and subjected to katharsis, then a person may expect that the external spirit will stream into him for his illumination.
The symphony of life
We must truly experience this conviction that multiplicity in the spirit is unity.
The fall must be made right again at some point: It must be opposed by a raising of man. As a human being I am sinless only when I find my way back again to the divine spiritual powers.The time had to come for these two things: The free and personal use of Intelligence, and the freedom of the human Will. Hence for human consciousness the original, instinctive vision that penetrated to the spiritual world had to disappear.
It is explicitly important to note that our individuality must remain intact. The idea that we let go of it, is an illusory and misguided belief purported by some in the name of mysticism.
Quite the contrary, we only grow closer to what our divine purpose was from the start. As children of God, as divine sparks, each of us has a role to play in the symphony of life. Sometimes the divine spark is called the Monad, the indivisible and unique part of ourselves.
Everything which causes a man to strive to lose his “I” and dissolve it into a universal consciousness, is the result of weakness. He alone understands the “I” who knows that after he has gained it in the course of cosmic evolution it cannot be lost; and above all man must strive for the strength (if he understands the mission of the world) to make this “I” more and more inward, more and more divine.
True Anthroposophists possess nothing of the empty talk which continually emphasizes the dissolution of the “I” in a universal self, the melting into some sort of primeval sea. True Anthroposophy can only put forward as the final goal, the community of free and independent Egos, of Egos which have become individualized. It is just this that is the mission of the earth, which is expressed in love, that the Egos learn to confront one another freely.
Putting all these elements together, we can understand what free will truly is: acting independently out of a conscious understanding of right and wrong.
We are only truly free when we ascend to moral intuition in pure thought and thus consciously carry out our destiny from the will of the higher self.
It is a matter of becoming aware which paths to take in life, and which to avoid — thus we would act in a very singular manner: in proper thought, word, and action.
The will of the saint, of the hero, shows something of the imperial character of self-motion that we think of as characteristically divine. — Annie Besant
When the spiritual Self is invoked, however, it is rarely a question of choosing between two or more alternative courses of action; at that point one knows that there is only one right thing to do and it becomes a question of whether one has the requisite ability to do it.
Mythology of the Fall
Humanity fell deeper into matter than originally intended; at the time of the primal incarnation, some human spirits, known as "the Sons of Wisdom", pridefully did not want incarnate into physical bodies as soon as they were instructed to. But had those spirits descended earlier, man would remained in a dull trance-like state of consciousness.
That is to say, the incarnation of those who had waited began at a later time. We call this group the ‘Sons of Wisdom’, and it almost appears as if there were a kind of arrogance, a sort of pride about them...Had these other ones also incarnated at the earlier period, mankind would never have been able to acquire the clarity of consciousness which he possesses today.
He would have been held fast in a dull trance-like state of consciousness. He would have developed that kind of consciousness which is to be found in people who have been hypnotised, sleepwalkers and the like. In short, man would have remained in a kind of dreamlike state.
But one thing would have been lacking then—one thing of great importance, if not of the utmost importance—he would have lacked a feeling of freedom, a capacity to exercise his individual discrimination with regard to good and evil by means of his own consciousness, his own human ego.
At a later point in evolution, after the Lemurian Age into the Atlantean Age, these spirits had to take on denser physical bodies. As a result of this Luciferic rebellion, man would struggle with achieving liberation from his carnal passions, yet this is the very safeguard of his freedom.
The Devas delayed their incarnation and only descended to the earth to take possession of physical bodies when humanity had reached a further Stage in its development. Through this they were able to evolve a more mature form of consciousness than would have been the case earlier.
Thus, you see, the cost of man's freedom was the deterioration of his nature, by waiting for his incarnation till he could descend into denser physical conditions.
This is symbolized in the myth of Zeus, Prometheus, and Heracles. Zeus wanted to save man from this suffering, but at the cost of being an instinctual being, not fully conscious and alert. Lucifer's rebellion is symbolized by Prometheus stealing the flame of the gods in Olympus and giving it to humanity so that they could create with it.
Through the figure of Prometheus, Greek mythology has symbolised free humanity struggling towards culture. He is the representative of suffering mankind, but at the same time the giver of freedom.
Prometheus is punished by Zeus when he sends an eagle to gnaw at his liver, the pain and torment of his lower urges and desires. He is set free by Heracles, the strongest of the Greek heroes, who ascends to Spirit from the Underworld by sheer might.
Man had thus descended more deeply and now had to achieve through his own free conscious activity what he would have attained by magical arts and powers. But because he had descended deeper he must suffer pains and torment.
Mankind must progress once more from an intellectual to a spiritual life just as Prometheus was set free from his suffering by Heracles, so will mankind be set free by the power of the Spirit. By descending into matter, mankind has attained self-consciousness. Through the fact that he ascends again.
In exchange for Prometheus' release, Heracles bargains with Zeus to allow Centaur Chiron to give up his immortality, representing man's sacrifice of his animal nature. Thus, Prometheus is set free. And recognized by Zeus for his kindness and wisdom, Chiron is placed among the stars, becoming the constellation of Sagittarius.
The human being who still has a connection with the animal nature—the centaur Chiron—must make a sacrifice. The man of earlier times must be sacrificed. The sacrifice of the centaur is as important for the development of the fifth root-race as man's release by initiates.
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