Init. (Occ.)

It is difficult, of course, to understand what is meant by Union with God, but some idea may be given of what it is intended to mean. If we assume that, whatsoever may have been (apart from the falseness of using a tense, which implies time) the manner of God's creation of the world, the substance of that creation was the conversion by God of His own consciousness into the plural consciousness of separate beings The great cry of the Indian Deity, «Oh that I might be many!» gives the idea without the idea of reality.

Union with God means therefore the repetition by the Adept of the Divine Act of Creation, by which he is identical with God in act, or manner of act, but, at the same time, an inversion of the Divine Act, by which he is still divided from God, or God's opposite, else he were God Himself and no union were required.

The Adept, if he succeed in making his consciousness one with the consciousness of all things, in making it an unconsciousness (or unselfconsciousness} which is conscious, repeats within himself the Divine Act, which is the conversion of God's individual consciousness into God's plural consciousness in individuals. But, at the same time, he thus reaches back to the plurality God attained when making that whole of which he is a part, and, in repeating God's Act, he is really inverting it, and, in inverting it, going back on the way to God, and thus attaining union with God.

If we represent the whole scheme of this by two equilateral triangles on the same base, each, so to speak, opposite to the other, we shall obtain a clear idea, or an idea as clear as possible, of the method of attainment. God, apex of the upper triangle, opens out into the base, and the base narrows down into the castdown apex of the lower triangle. From the apex of the lower triangle there is ascent into the base-line of both: thus the descent of God is repeated upwards, and, at the same time, there is ascent towards God.

Now this, whichever way it be considered, leads us to the peculiar theory of three types of consciousness: the Divine Consciousness, the World Consciousness, and the Individual Consciousness. In the first identity is absolute, there being neither subject nor object. In the second the subject has made itself its own object, and, being infinite because indivisible, becomes objectively infinite, that is infinite because infinitely divisible. In the third the subject has made itself as object its own subject, and has taken consciousness of itself, and therefore consciousness of itself in every infinitesimal element of that object.

The more each infinitesimal subject makes itself an object unto itself, the more it approaches the first back-step to the Supreme Consciousness. From this it will eventually pass to annulling this, and going back to the primal stage of Divine consciousness.