Soul-Group and Stages of Transcendence

 

The following are excerpts from Road To Immortality, an extraordinary work attributed to Frederick Myers. He supposedly dictated it through the Irish medium Geraldine Cummins. Frederick was a top XIXth century pioneer in consciousness research who seemed to prove this his ideas of existence beyond his physical death. His views are completely legitimate and in tune with the experiences some of us already have. So, it´s not a question of believing or not in channelling. Who cares? Geraldine might have been simply part of Frederick´s Soul-group, making this easier. In any case, the content is worth studying. Here you have some passages:

I
WHY?
THE RIDDLE OF ETERNITY

The spirit, or deeper mind, which nourishes a number
of journeying souls with its light is a thought of God. This it life.
Now, the mystic speaks of the god within him. This is
an entirely erroneous statement. The term God means
the Supreme Mind, the Idea behind all life, the Whole in
terms of pure thought, a Whole within which is cradled
the Alpha and Omega of existence as a mental concept.
Every act, every thought, every fact in the history of the
Universes, every part of them, is contained within that
Whole. Therein is the original concept of all. So it is preposterous
presumption on the part of the mystic to call his
own spirit God.
These myriad thoughts, or spirits, begotten by the
Mighty Idea, differ from one another; many of them,
nearly all, before they control and manifest themselves in
matter, are crude, innocent and incomplete embryos. They
must gather to themselves numberless experiences, manifest
and express themselves in uncountable forms before
they attain to completion, before they may know perfect
wisdom, true reality. Once these are acquired, they may
take on divine attributes and pass out Yonder, entering
within the Supreme Idea and becoming part of the
Whole.
The reason, therefore, for the universe and for all
appearances, for even the little mundane joys and sorrows
of human beings, is to be found in the term "evolution of
spirit," the need for complete fulfilment which can be
obtained through limitation, through the expression of the
spirit in form. For only through that expression can spirit
grow, developing from the embryo, only through manifestation
in appearance can spirit obtain fulfilment. For
this purpose were we born, for this purpose we enter and
31
pass through myriad worlds or states, and always the
material universe is growing, expanding, giving fuller and
fuller expression to mind. The purpose of existence may
be summed up in a phrase-the evolution of mind in matter
that varies in degree and kind-so that mind develops
through manifestation, and in an ever-expanding universe
ever increases in power and gains thereby the true conception
of reality. The myriad thoughts of God, those
spirits which inform with life all material forms, are the
lowest manifestation of God, and must thus learn to become
God-like-to become an effective part of the Whole.
p.31-32

VI
THE GROUP-SOUL

I think I have explained to
you before, that as there are certain centres in the brain,
so in psychic life there are a number of souls all bound
together by one spirit, depending for their nourishment
on that spirit.

[…] You may think my statement frivolous, but the fact that we do appear on earth to be paying for the sins of another life is, in a certain sense, true. It was our life, and yet not our life. In other words, a soul belonging to the group of which I am a part lived that previous life which built up for me the framework of my earthly life, lived it before I had passed through the gates of birth.

[...] Many Soul-men do not seek another earth life, but their spirit manifests itself many times on earth when I talk of my spiritual forbears I do not speak of my physical ancestors, I speak of those soul-ancestors who are bound to me by one spirit.
There may be contained within that spirit twenty souls,
a hundred souls, a thousand souls.


[...] I shall not live again on earth, but a
new soul, one who will join our group, will shortly enter
into the pattern or karma I have woven for him on earth.
No doubt "karma" is a word I use incorrectly here. For
it is something more and something less than karma that he inherits. I am, therefore, a kingdom, and yet I am but a unit in that kingdom. You may say to me that, for the Soul-man, one earth life is not enough. But, as we evolve here, we enter into those memories and experiences of other lives that are to be found in the existence of the souls that preceded us, and are of our group.

You will perceive in my analysis of the group-soul that we are individuals and members of one whole. And when you come to the Fourth, and more particularly to the Fifth stage, you will realise how fine and beautiful is this brotherhood within the one being; how it deepens and intensifies existence; how it destroys the cold selfishness so necessary to an earth life, where one living creature must continually destroanother's manifestation in matter in order to maintain its
physical life.
In the Fourth stage the soul becomes sensible of the
group-soul, and through the awareness there arises a
great change. He begins gropingly to realise the character of experience, the possibilities of mind; and in this Fourth stage if he is a Soul-man he is peculiarly liable to error

 […] For instance, a fanatical Buddhist or a very devout Christian may be held within the groove of his earthly beliefs. For those other souls in his community are, perhaps, also held in the chains of those particular ideas […]  He is held fast in the tentacles of an octopus. This octopus is the earthly Christian or Buddhist idea of an After-life, their view of the universe as created when on earth. Now, you will recognise that such conditions tend to inhibit progress. For it means-to use another metaphor-dwelling in an intellectual chrysalis, living in the past earthly conceptions. p.65

Spirit-Man
Spirit-man is not caught in this eidolon or living ghost,
in this wraith of earthly beliefs. The great masters are not thus ensnared. Christ, the Son of God, entered into Hades, but He did not abide in any of the other planes of being. Christ, being inspired directly by God, was connected with no group-soul. He passed from Hades out Yonder; for His physical body was, during His lifetime on earth, the direct expression in the clay of that Essence, the Imagination of God. Truly, Christ was a limited expression of the Whole, was in earthly life linked to the Whole. But every Christian born upon the earth is inspired by some individualised spirit. When I write "individualised" I desire to indicate that it is a thought of God; it is not, therefore, the Whole, it is not the Fount of all life.

[…] Now, if the soul is to pass from the Fourth to the Fifth
stage he must first shake off, cast from him any dogma,
any special earthly outlook which has shaped his mentality,
which confines it. p-62-66

VII
THE PLANE OF FLAME
THE FIFTH PLANE
Birth into the Fifth Stage

THERE comes a time when the soul who dwells on the
Fourth plane of life prepares for the incident of death.
This death does not resemble the death of man. At this
particular point in evolution the soul has perfect and
absolute control of form, of his appearance, of his eidolon or living ghost. This is the last veil between him and a conception of existence without form. He must free himself before he can go. up another rung of the ladder, and freedom can only come through the deliberate process called "The Breaking of the Image." It is the farewell to appearance, to form as a necessity, to colour, to feeling as a certainty, as a condition of life.
 

[…] Again the soul enters into unconsciousness; and when he is hom into the Fifth stage he has cast from him certain attributes that were his when he still inhabited the Image; for his soul was, in part, that Shape of Light he has now discarded.
[…] He knows then that he must
choose either to go forward or backwards. The spirit
actually forces the choice.
[…] When at the gate of the many-coloured world, the Soul-man sometimes chooses to drop back into the first division of this region

The Symbol of the Fifth Stage

The term "flame" expresses the
Fifth stage. For now the soul becomes emotionally whole, aware not alone of himself, but of all those other souls who are of his group. He remains himself, yet is all those other selves as well. He no longer dwells in form. -as it is conceived by man-but he dwells still in what might be described as an "outline." All the past emotions, passions, intellectual modes of expression belonging to his companion souls shape this outline, an outline of emotional thought; a great fire which stirs and moves this mighty being now. While he abides in this Fifth plane experience is manifold, is a multiplication, loses, in a sense, its apparent oneness. He lives indeed a life that seems to bum like a
flame. flame. It is a time of severe discipline, of vastly increased intellectual feeling, of great limitations, of boundless freedoms,  of the glimpsing of infinite horizons.p.68

[…] He is thus all the
time becoming more and more merged with the Unifying
Spirit.
A rare intensity of feeling, of joy, ecstasy, sorrow,
of dark despair nourish him, feed his life. Yet, all the
while, he is, in a sense, apart, aloof. He is not caught in
the storm of this emotional whirlpool. p.69

[…] The soul, on this Fifth level of consciousness, is continuously conscious. There are now no gaps, no periods of non-existence. He revels in the emotional and intellectual life of all those comrade souls who are on the various rungs of the ladders which reach up to the One Spirit and are lighted by it. But this soul, at the climax of his existence on the plane of flame, is as an artist who lives in his masterpiece, derives from it, in all its features, in the freshness of its evolving, changing creation, that strange exultation which may, perhaps, at one rare moment, be known to a creative genius-though very faintly-while he still lives upon the earth. p.69


The Soul-man, however, may not leave it for the Sixth. plane until the group-soul is complete, until those other
souls, necessary to this design woven in the tapestry of
eternity, have also attained to this level of consciousness.
Some may still be far behind. But while in this state of
being, the Soul-man becomes aware of the emotional life of all the more primitive souls who inhabit denser and denser matter and, yet, belong to his group. He becomes aware, in short, of all the parts of the great body which his spirit, or the Unifying Principle, feeds with its Light. He realises the subconscious life of the flower, the insect, the bird, the beast, all those forms which are connected with the governor of his being, that Light from Above.

 The Construction of the Group-soul

The actual construction of the group-soul must be
clearly visualised. Its spirit feeds, with life and mental
light, certain plants, trees, flowers, birds, insects, fish,
beasts, men and women; representatives of living
creatures in varying states of evolution. It inspires souls
who are on various planes, various levels of consciousness in the Mter-death. It feeds, also, creatures on other planets. For the spirit must gather a harvest of experience in every form. Gradually these intelligences evolve and merge. The experience necessary to the spirit is completed when all the souls necessary to the design have reached this Fifth plane.Once they become sensible of their oneness and their individuality they may go forward to the Sixth plane. There is, then, a breaking of the threads, a casting away of the dross of emotional experience, a sifting and changing on the part of all these souls. p.70

VIII

THE PLANE OF WHITE LIGHT
THE SIXTH PLANE
Pure Reason

White light represents the perfect equanimity of
pure thought. Such equanimity becomes the possession of the souls who enter this last rich kingdom of experience.
They bear with them the wisdom of form, the incalculable secret wisdom, gathered only through limitation, harvested from numberless years, garnered from lives passed is myriad forms. Knowledge of good and evil and of what lies beyond good and evil now belongs to them. They are lords of life, for they have conquered. They are capable of living now without form, of existing as white light, as the pure thought of their Creator. They have joined the Immortals.
The purpose of the Sixth plane of being might be
described as "the assimilation of the many-in-one," the
unifying of all those mind-units I have called souls, within the spirit. p.71

IX
OUT YONDER, TIMELESSNESS
THE SEVENTH PLANE
Part of the Divine Principle

The Seventh state might be described as the "passage
from form to formlessness.” But pray do not misunderstand the term formlessness"...The soul who enters that Seventh state passes into the Beyond and becomes one with God. 

This merging with the Idea, with the Great Source of spirit does not imply annihilation. You still exist as an
individual. You are as a wave in the sea; and you have at last entered into Reality and cast from you all the illusions of appearances. But some intangible essence has been added to your spirit through its long habitation of matter,

[…]Actually, the passage from the Sixth to the Seventh
state means the flight from the material universe, from
that space which is a part of it. You dwell not only outside of time but outside of the universe on this last plane of being. Yet you can be and are, in one sense, within the universe.

[…] When you dwell¡ out Yonder, you, as a part of the Divine Principle in its essence, are wholly aware of the imagination of God.  So you are aware of every second in time, you are aware of the whole history of the earth from Alpha to Omega.p.73
the whole history of the earth from Alpha to Omega.p.73