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The Quintessence of Being: The Descent of the Divine I

from Dream to Reflection, from Image to Incarnation

Part I: The Original Dream

The world before the mirror

Once, the world spoke first.

Before there was interiority, there was participation. A tree wasn’t “out there”—it was known from within. Meaning saturated everything. Wind carried not only weather but meaning. Stars told stories, and names carried power.

Owen Barfield called this original participation: the state in which the boundary between subject and object had not yet formed. Life was a shared medium, and selfhood was not yet solid. It was not primitive—it was porous.

Mark Vernon writes:

Original participation dominates when there is little distinction between what’s felt to be inside someone and what’s outside… The inner life of the cosmos is the inner life of the people.
 –Mark Vernon, A Secret History of Christianity

The ancient world was not naïve. It was unfallen. And that mode of participation held until something began to separate: a line drawn between the one who sees and what is seen.

That line is consciousness.

Before writing, there is memory. Before memory, felt presence. This was the dreamlike world out of which the human “I” would emerge—not as a break with nature, but eventually as its fulfillment.

 

 

Part II: The Mirror of Consciousness

Separation, descent, and the spark of “I”

With the development of literacy—especially in Judea—something remarkable unfolded: a new possibility of interiority. For the first time, human beings began to write about themselves, not just their gods. History gave way to autobiography.

The world fell quiet—but the soul began to speak.

Steiner taught that the Divine I incarnates into humanity as an actual being. Each person bears an uncreated core, a light not born from matter but from eternity. The human being is not just an organism—it is a vessel.

Barfield saw this as the turning point of all human history. The apparent “rise” of consciousness from the mud was really a descent into matter: a spark from above taking root in form. The soil bore the stem, yes—but the seed of life had come from the stars.

Barfield reminds us that what was once unconscious can become conscious again. But not by regression—only by grace through individuation. We do not return to Eden, but we learn to walk in it freely. We cannot go back to original participation, but we can go forward… to what Barfield calls ‘final participation.’ The new mode of participation requires our willingness and is not automatic like the Edenic state before the fall into egotistical existence.

The heart does not manufacture thought. Like the biodynamic farm, it gathers what is already in motion and blesses it. As Steiner taught—and embryologists note with wonder—the embryo pulses before it has a heart. Indeed, the pressure required for a heart to 'pump' blood through capillaries narrower than red blood cells would be beyond plausibility. The movement of blood is not mechanical but organismic—driven by the whole, not a part. The heart is not a pump in the industrial sense, but a rhythmic center, a sanctum of timing and etheric exchange. The body was never manufactured—it grew. It tasted air before it had a mouth, and rhythm before it had a song. To ask if the body is a machine is to assume it was ever manufactured. But the body was never manufactured—it grew.

The soul pulses before it has a name.

 

 

Part III: The Temple of Return

From the one to the many, from image to fire

The line of human becoming bends not toward conclusion, but toward center. For what first descended into one must now unfold through many.

Christ is not the conclusion of incarnation. He is its fullness—its root and radiance. He is not one among many reflections, but the one in whom the Image of God is whole. In us, that light is mirrored—not multiplied like fragments, but refracted like flame in many lamps.

As human beings were teased out of the animals, and the Hebrews from the nations, and Christ from the Hebrews—so now must each individual be drawn into that same pattern: not to imitate from without, but to fulfill from within. The Infinite can never be fully imaged in a single form.

Even Christ—especially Christ—is not a closed perfection but a seed. And that seed must bloom again and again. One Christ is not enough. If the Divine is to be known in form, it must flower in many forms. The image must replicate. The Word must become many voices.

And Rilke—who never blinked at the abyss—offers a line that crowns the whole arc with trembling clarity. To speak not just of things, but of divinity in bloom:

Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit tree, window—at most: column, tower… but to say them, you must understand, oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of existing.
 –Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2000), 75.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin echoes: “Love alone is capable of uniting living beings… by what is deepest in themselves.”

This is not a metaphor. It is a fractal reality. What was once accomplished in the One must now be fulfilled in the many. We are trying to say something simple. That life means something. That form remembers. The divine image is not divided in replication, but refracted like starlight through water—one essence, manifold reflections. The Imago Dei is not over in Christ—it becomes what it always was: a proliferating seed.

This is the divine calculus: that the infinite must be infinitely expressed. To express infinity in time requires an infinite number of iterations: as many sands as the sea or stars in the sky. It is not that the Imago Dei changes, but that our vantage point drifts through time. As Plato said, time is a shimmering image of eternity. Therefore, our perspective on the Imago Dei changes, though it itself does not change. That singular theophanic form enters time endlessly through iterative spirals, an asymptote to eternity.

Let us not mistake this for idealism. The Earth is an open system. Entropy reigns in the cosmos like the ocean’s undertow—but Earth is a Galápagos, where life concentrates in secret. Here, solar light fuels improbability. Negentropy unfolds into narrative. Earth is not exempt from entropy, but open to the light that allows form to rise and complexity to unfold.

Evolution, rightly seen, is not a violation of entropy but its counter-song. As Teilhard said, “Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.”

So too with the soul. Consciousness seems to rise—but in truth it descends. The light of the mind does not grow from mud. It grows through mud. But it comes from elsewhere. It remembers.

You, reading this—your hands are vertebrae, your breath is rhythm. The light in your skull is the question the stars once asked—before you were born into form.

Let us pause here. We are speaking of the Infinite pressed into time, and the unfolding of that pressure in each of us.

The human being is not only the bearer of the world—but the temple that returns the light. Its breath is incense, its bones a cloister, its heart a flame remembered.

The image, as ever, is only the beginning.

Next: Toward an Anointed Agriculture

 

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