Assagioli’s egg-diagram and the seven energies
This article, which has been adapted from my book Integral Meditation, offers a brief exploration of how the seven energies or rays correspond to Assagioli’s egg-diagram. The topic deserves in-depth study, but I hope this brief offering will stir your imagination and curiosity.
Let’s start at the beginning: the Seven Rays constitute everything in existence, from the mineral world to the highest spiritual levels of being. From this perspective, there is no area of study where we cannot apply psychoenergetics.
The term “ray” should be understood to refer to the quality associated with it, and not the physical or psychological form in which it is expressed. For example, in the mineral world, metals are forms of energy that have a particular atomic pattern, with each metal having different qualities that emerge through the energy pattern – or “ray quality” – that created them. The same applies to human beings: the combination of rays that are most dominant in us will determine which psychological qualities define our character.
The energies of the rays are not outside us, but are within, making up the essence of who we are. We are energy! Sri Aurobindo poetically says that the rivers (another term for the rays) come from “a superior sea of light and power and joy” and that they reveal Sat-Cit-Ananda, which is “being, consciousness, bliss”.1 This deep insight is one of the concepts that makes psychoenergetics so fascinating: psychoenergetics provides a cosmic view of life, while also offering concrete practical advice for psychological application.
Psychoenergetics, as it is presented in the model of the Seven Types, is a spiritual typology comprised of levels of being, stages of development, states of being, seven types, and the quadrants of experience as described in Ken Wilber’s Integral Psychology.
Wilber emphasises the concept of Spirit-in-Action, which he describes as the universal life force driving the evolution of consciousness. What Wilber calls Spirit-in-Action is the equivalent to the Universal Self in Assagioli’s terminology – and this universal life force is the very fabric of life, the innermost power residing in all living beings. We all ride on the wave of this great evolutionary force: we are this wave – we are Spirit-in-Action.
An important teaching found in many religions concerns the transcendent unmanifest realm that exists outside of time and space. In Buddhism, this realm is called Dharmakaya; in Hinduism it is Parabrahman; in the Christian tradition it is God. Out of this ground of being emerges the will to manifest. The universe appears and continually actualises its potential: this gives us Spirit-in-Action and the Big Bang, which is how the physical realm was created. However, according to the processes of involution and evolution, the inner worlds appeared before the outer worlds. And these inner worlds constitute the manifest ground of reality; they are the source of what is known, in the perennial philosophy, as the Great Chain of Being; they are the “heavens” of an interior space (Sørensen, 2017b). The Seven Rays are the seven streams of spiritual force produced by the Universal Self which shape and maintain creation.
But how do the Seven Rays manifest in us? The spiritual soul receives these energies from the Universal Self and channels them through the personality, and continues to do so throughout our life. The relationship between the three levels of Spirit, soul and personality and the Seven Rays is illustrated in Figure 1, which shows how the Seven Rays flow into the soul, which is depicted at the top of Assagioli’s egg-diagram. From the soul, the rays flow through the superconscious into the conscious “I”, or self, in the middle of the egg, and from here the rays move out into the personality through the agency of our psychological functions (will, feeling, thought, imagination, logic, passion and, eventually, physical action).
The seven rays and Assagioli’s Egg-diagram – showing how the Seven Rays flow into the soul then down into the self and the personality via the seven psychological functions (only will, thought and feeling are listed)
While we’ve seen that the rays and types are in some respect the same, it is still important to differentiate between the energies of the rays and the types, and the different ways that they both manifest.
The rays are ever-present in the great universal ocean; they flow through every manifestation of the All. A type, however, is a particular vehicle for the soul, an energy field, of which there are five different vehicles: the physical or etheric body, the emotional body, the mental body, the personality field, and the soul or causal body. These are the energy fields, or bodies, of which Assagioli (Undated: 6) stated: “The Rays which qualify his soul, his personality, and his mental, emotional and physical bodies.”
Along with the physical body, we have subtle bodies (levels), or “sheaths” as they are called in yogic literature and in Ken Wilber’s writing.2 Each body has a particular type coloured by one of the seven rays.
When we speak of the five dominant types, we are referring to how the seven rays, in a constant stream, are expressed in our lives through the five bodies (levels), which act like coloured filters. The seven rays, which are influencing us all the time, are filtered through the different types and bodies that express them. The different energy fields define how we seek meaning, our character, and how we think, feel and act.
To offer an example of how the seven rays might manifest in an individual life, Figure 2 shows the five levels (layers, bodies) of the inner house, which is made up of our soul and our personality (which contains the levels of body, feeling and thought). We are not aware of all the rooms or floors in our inner house – some have never been inhabited, and few of us know the layout of all the rooms. In the egg- diagram, we see the different holarchies (wholes within wholes) – i.e. each higher level incorporates all the levels beneath it. An exchange takes places through these levels, between the environment and the incoming energies of the different rays.
Moving down the levels, we can see from the symbols at each level that this diagram is depicting a person with a “7-2,521” combination of types: we can see the practical soul type (7), which comprises the red-brown soul body and which incorporates all the other layers in its totality; the blue field is the sensitive personality type (2), which includes the three lower levels, or bodies, of thought, feeling and body; the next layer is the analytical thinking type (5), which incorporates the levels of feeling and body; then we have the blue sensitive feeling type (2), which incorporates the level of body, and at the bottom we find the energy of the dynamic body type (1).
Footnotes
1 Aurobindo, Sri, The Synthesis of Yoga, Complete Works, p. 423, 1999, Sri Aurobindo Publishing Department.
2 See note in chapter 9.
