Thomas Troward's The Dore Lectures on Mental Science,
Chapter Two...Individuality
Chapter 2 of Thomas Troward's The Dore Lectures on Mental Science, titled 'Individuality,' explores the essential nature of the individual as a necessary channel for the Universal Creative Power, emphasizing that true livingness is measured by intelligence and will.
1. The Measure of Livingness
Troward begins by noting the graded scale of life in the universe, from inanimate matter to man. The difference in the quality of "livingness" between a plant, a fish, an animal, and a human is determined by the degree of intelligence.
The higher the intelligence, the more completely the mode of motion (action/experience) is under its conscious control.
Intelligence is therefore the essential quality of Spirit (Life), while Form is the distinctive quality of Matter.
2. The Universal vs. The Individual
The chapter makes a crucial distinction between:
Cosmic Intelligence (Universal Law): This operates by a law of averages for the maintenance and advancement of the race. It is a process in which the individual has not taken a conscious, volitional part.
Individual Intelligence: This is differentiated from the Cosmic Intelligence by the presence of individual volition (will-power). It represents the highest product of the cosmic evolutionary process.
Troward argues that as intelligence advances, the individual is increasingly taken out of the law of averages and gains greater power in controlling the conditions of their own survival.
3. Man's Function as a Distributor
Troward's central tenet in this chapter is that the Universal can only act on the plane of the Particular by becoming the particular—that is, by expressing itself through the individual.
Man's function in the cosmic order is to act as a distributor of the Divine power.
Our part is to provide a concrete center around which the Divine energies can play, attracting and differentiating the undistributed flow of the Universal into suitable directions.
This means that our individual creative power must be in harmony with the Universal Principle, because we are distributing, not originally creating, the power.
4. The Power of Self-Recognition
The chapter concludes by defining the highest form of self-recognition:
Lower Self-Recognition: Realizing the self as the ego—separate and distinct from the non-ego (everything else).
Higher Self-Recognition: Realizing one's own spiritual nature as an individualization of pure Spirit, seeing others not as the non-ego, but as the alter-ego (another self) in a different mode of expression.
This higher recognition of self necessarily controls the lower modes of spirit (matter/circumstance) that have not yet reached the same level of self-recognition, as those lower modes are in bondage to a law they do not yet know.
The book The Creative Process in the Individual explores similar concepts about how individuals harness universal creative power:
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