The ripple did forget the Self, to be sure--but it was a ripple of the Self, and remained so throughout the play. Thus, this movement from the higher into the lower--which is involution--is at once an act of pure creation and effulgent radiance (on the part of Atman), and a tragic tale of suffering and epic unhappiness (on the part of the self-ripple attempting the Atman project). The ultimate aim of evolution--the movement from the lower to the higher--is to awaken as Atman, and thus retain the glory of the creation without being forced to act in the drama of self suffering.
During the course of our universe's history (and science helps us here), we have evolved from level-1 (which began approximately fifteen billion years ago with the Big Bang) to level-2 (which occurred several billions of years later when matter awakened into some realization of life) to level-3 (which so far has been reached fully by humans only). Evolution is, as it were, half completed. "Mankind," said Plotinus, "is poised midway between the gods and the beasts."
But in the past course of human history, some men and women, through the evolutionary discipline of higher religion, succeeded in pushing their own development and evolution into level-4: that of saintly religion and the first intuition of a transcendental reality, one in essence lying above and beyond the ordinary mind, self, body, and world. This "beyond" was poetically called heaven; this oneness was called the one God.
This intuition did not fully occur until around 3000 B.C., with the rise of the first great monotheistic religions. (Prior to that time, there were only polytheistic realizations--a god of fire, a god of water, etc. This was really sympathetic magic, stemming from a simple manipulation of level-2, emotionalsexual energies and rites.) By the time Of 500 B.C., however, certain evolutionary souls pushed their development into the causal--Christ, Buddha, Krishna, the great axial sages. Their insights were drawn out and extended to produce what the Tibetans called the Svabhavikakaya path--the path of level-6, or already realized Truth, the path of Zen, Vajrayana, Vedanta. What remains is for the world to follow suit, via evolutionary or process meditation, into the higher realms themselves.
According to the perennial philosophy, not only does this whole process of involution and evolution play itself out over centuries, it repeats itself moment to moment, ceaselessly and instantaneously. In this moment and this moment and this, an individual starts out at infinity. But in this moment and this moment and this, he contracts away from infinity and ends up reduced to the level of his present adaptation. He involves to the highest point he has yet evolved--and all the higher realms are simply forgotten, rendered unconscious. This is why all meditation is called remembrance or recollection (Sanskrit smriti, Pali sati, as in satipatthana, Plato's anamnesis, Sufi zikr--all are precisely translated as "memory" or "remembrance").
This whole panoply of higher levels generating the lower moment to moment, and of the dazzling interpenetrating of each level with the others, and of the extraordinary dynamics between the levels, all occurring in a field of effulgent radiance--all this is meant when the mystic-sage speaks of multidimensional interpenetration with nonequivalence
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