Beyond Caterpillar Consciousness
By Roza Riaikkenen (edited by Andrew Rooke)
Published in Sunrise
magazine, August/September 2006 and Australian Theosophical Society Newsletter
N61 March 1998
Would a caterpillar be happy to die if it
knew that in this way it would become a beautiful butterfly? Would we be
prepared to venture past our everyday consciousness if we knew of the wondrous
worlds beyond? Let us imagine a caterpillar, its vision confined to the surface
of a leaf, its world encompassed by the nearby foliage. The caterpillar knows
nothing of the wider universe of the tree and its network of roots and
branches, much less the seasons that control its growth. They exist in a
dimension the caterpillar cannot imagine.
The same applies to us. Our physical body
lives in three-dimensional space but our spiritual body extends far from its
material manifestation, experiencing the far reaches of space — to its parent
star and beyond to the Absolute. As an inseparable part of the Absolute, our
higher spiritual aspects are multidimensional. But we earthbound human beings,
limited as we are by three-dimensional consciousness, cannot see with the clear
eye of the spiritual self. Focusing on our physical body, we cannot understand
the effect of our spiritual selves upon our health, relationships, and destiny.
We may try in vain to find explanations
limited to the tangible material world with which we are familiar. We cannot
penetrate to the real roots of the effects we experience in the outer world
because they lie in the dimensions of our spiritual self. We often seem so
attached to our familiar material world that we act as though unaware of other
dimensions. When we purify our mind from the welter of routine thoughts and
opinions, we become capable of expanding and multiplying the coordinates of our
professional and personal lives, and thus expanding our personal universe and
its possibilities.
In its wildest dreams a caterpillar is not
aware of its potential to fly. By shedding its skin, it can grow wings, become
a butterfly, and partake of a whole new dimension of life. Our caterpillar may
be apprehensive about the necessity to change. It seems like death, but dying
as a caterpillar it resurrects as a butterfly! We cannot realize or imagine the
consciousness and might of the Absolute — whether we call it God or another
name — the real reason and creative force acting in all dimensions, although
mankind has received descriptions of divine cosmic laws from enlightened
teachers throughout the ages.
The science of the new millennium could
derive its premises from these universal multidimensional laws, changing our
point of view, observing things from the all-dimensional spiritual level of the
Absolute rather than from the limited three-dimensional level of a terrestrial being.
Having crossed the threshold of the new millennium, each of us has a choice:
whether to remain secure and fixed in our limited notions or to start the
process of forming a multidimensional view grounded in spirit. So, do we want
to remain caterpillars or fly free as butterflies?