Course XXXVI - Teaching 10: From Man to Cosmos

Nothing new under the sun and any law is a repetition of other similar law.
Bigness is reduced in littleness, and smallness is synthetic image of immensity. A unique, basic, invariable principle expands toward infinity, and contracts to become infinitesimal.
The Cosmic Principle, potentially with no principle in itself, manifests in the Universe as mind, energy and matter: movement, rhythm and form.
In all the process of Cosmic Manifestation, these three fundamental substances succeed each other without a break, coming near, inter-fusing and separating; in a continuous becoming, from the tiniest thing to the biggest, by creating, forming, preserving and destroying any form of life.
The Cosmic Principle, by identifying itself in itself, out of itself, created the Universe, the Manifestation; by this Spontaneous and Pure Act, it remained attached there as if within a Great Divine Karma, which will become exhausted as soon as Creation entirely returns “by Itself” to the bosom of its Creation.
Man is a reproduction of the Cosmos: a microcosm is image of the Macrocosm. Any form and possibility is reunited in it, and from the human viewpoint, it is the culminating point that the end of involution and the beginning of evolution, because it sums up in itself the tiniest things and, at the same time, is reproduction of the Cosmos. Its bones recall its passage through the mineral kingdom; organs and entrails belong to the ancient vegetal kingdom, and different emotional impulses have the whole range of the zoological scale. Strenuously, and at a high price, man has conquered his free will, and the Law of Possibilities extends before him the immensity of a mental field to experience.
The soul of a man travels through the Path of Liberation in time to movements, rhythms and cosmic formations, in stages, cycles and changes.
Fundamental stages of human life correspond to the great, dual vibrational movement that supports the Universe, through rhythmic expansion and absorption of the Cosmic Substance. The active state follows the potential state, and so on, from Eternity to Eternity.
In its expansion throughout the Universe, the Cosmic Substance disperses in seven different forms, like the sun ray on a prism, forming this way Seven Cosmic Rays, seven fundamental colors, which are the composition of any expression of life.
Human events are ever subject to this sevenfold rhythm, just like zodiacal and solar systems.
A seven-month child cuts his first tooth, and at fourteen months he begins walking; at the age of seven he recognizes himself as an individual entity, and becomes an adolescent at the age of fourteen.
Changes in manifested life are innumerable, but always sevenfold. The continuous becoming constitutes the beauty of the worlds. Transformations become ceaseless in man; he does not know what waits for him between one moment and the other, but he knows he will be different. And a being goes on toward the Unity through these changes, rhythms and stages.