“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
William Blake
Esoteric teaching identifies the Buddha and the Christ as the two great Avatars. They represent the supreme achievement of the human being to embody a divine principle; light in the example of the Buddha, and love in the incarnation of Christ. More recently, since the year 1400, the writings of Alice Bailey tell us, there have been constant appearances of “lesser avatars”—those men and women who have served some cause or truth, some human need, and who were so successful (if not properly recognized in their time) that they were able to change the direction of humanity’s thought by their pioneering efforts in a particular field. Such an example, we’re told, was Leonardo da Vinci, whose life and accomplishments served to expand man’s understanding of the beauty of the created world, whether the wonders of nature or the beauty of the human form.
Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Leonardo da Vinci, notes that “Leonardo’s signature talent was the ability to convey, by marrying observation with imagination, not only the works of nature but also the infinite things that nature never created. He relished the wonders that can be seen by eye but also those seen only by the imagination.” Observation and imagination are perhaps the two foremost powers of the mind, for they demand clarity of perception and the capacity to visualize the subjective realm. Leonardo’s lifelong quest was to understand “nothing less than knowing fully the measure of man and how he fits into the cosmos,” Isaacson wrote. “The universal measure of man was the quest that defined Leonardo’s life, the one that ties together his art and his science”.
Today Leonardo is known principally for his works of art, paintings so sublime that they remain timeless expressions of the merging of spiritual meaning and beauty of form. Yet, interestingly, Isaacson points out that he considered himself more of an engineer than a painter, for his keen mind and unbounded curiosity led him to inquire into the why’s and how’s of the entire visible world. There was very little in nature that didn’t hold for Leonardo something of “teachable value” in his compelling need to understand the workings of the natural world. In one of his copious notebooks (a lifelong habit that remains a comprehensive view of the range of his mind and thought) he wrote a note to self: “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.” Really? Who would choose a project like that? Leonardo did, because his curiosity about the natural world compelled him to try to understand the underlying causes of just about everything. The appearance and function were not sufficient to satisfy him until the underlying cause was recognized. What he discovered through his investigations is that the woodpecker’s tongue is an amazing biological phenomenon of extraordinary length; so long that, when retracted, it must be coiled around the brain, creating a cushion that protects the woodpecker’s brain from the terrific force when it hammers its head against the trunks of trees.
The well developed mind can recognize relationships between conditions that might seem different or even opposed. Isaacson points out that Leonardo saw parallels in his exploration of the biological components of bodies both animal and human, leading him to dissect untold numbers of cadavers, both human and animal, in order to understand their nervous, muscular and skeletal systems. Those hours upon hours of scientific study enabled him to paint the physical body in its most subtle manifestations, as, for instance, in the smile of his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, and in his paintings that depict the beauty and dynamic power of the horse.
Leonardo’s efforts to understand how things worked led him to perceive patterns in various systems that could be applied to others. His fascination with wind currents and water eddies caused him to relate their swirling patterns to his greatest insight derived from dissection: the way the pumping action of the aortic valve of the heart works in the circulation of the blood, a discovery that was only verified by anatomists some 450 years later, in the 1960s.
Sometimes, Isaacson wrote, Leonardo’s mind ranged beyond his ability to manifest what he intuitively imagined, and he was not able to apply his understanding of the aortic valve to the larger circulatory system, a breakthrough that had to wait until the work of William Harvey a century later. Even so, today the existence of scuba gear, helicopters, flying machines, and pumps to drain swamps were envisioned, if not achieved in physical form, five hundred years ago by the inquiring, relentlessly inquisitive mind of Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo’s interest in the human form was based on the analogy between the human body and the body of the earth. “Man is the image of the world”, he wrote—the microcosm and macrocosm relationship, which can be traced back to the ancients. “All the arts and all the world’s rules are derived from a well-composed and proportioned human body”, he wrote. His depiction of Vitruvian Man expresses the human mind’s understanding of how the human being not only fits into but replicates the proportions of the human body with the grand order of the universe. And, as Walter Isaacson points out, “It also symbolizes an ideal of humanism that celebrates the dignity, value, and rational agency of humans as individuals.”
Leonardo’s genius was mixed with his tendency to leave projects incomplete; so wide-ranging was his curiosity that he often moved on to his next interest before completing a project already underway. This was one of his flaws and he was deeply human. As Isaacson notes, “He was not graced with the type of brilliance that is completely unfathomable to us. Instead, he was self-taught and willed his way to his genius. So even though we may never be able to match Leonardo’s talents, we can learn from him and try to be more like him.” Isaacson speculates on some of Leonardo’s qualities that we might try to duplicate. Be curious, relentlessly so. The world around Leonardo was endlessly fascinating and captured not only his interest but his intense desire to understand what made it what it was and why. Second, he retained an almost child-like sense of wonder. He never outgrew the wonder that characterizes young children but often dissipates as adulthood approaches. Another vital attribute of Leonardo’s was the power to observe. He noted people’s facial expressions with acute sensitivity; he saw how some birds move their wings faster on the upswing while others are faster on the downswing. He was fascinated by the movement of water and endlessly envisioned ways to adapt the patterns of its movement to various other goals. And he paid enormous attention to details; his notebooks are full of diagrams, sketches, and comments on projects that he envisioned—so many, in fact, that he never succeeded in bringing to fruition all that was developed by his imagination.
Alice Bailey wrote, “Much work is being accomplished by man for men, and through the agency of scientific, religious and educational endeavour, the human consciousness is steadily expanding until one by one the Sons of God are breaking through their limitations into the world of souls. In the retrospect of history, the picture of the emerging prisoner, Man, can be seen in clear delineation. Little by little he has mastered the planetary boundaries; little by little, he has grown from the stage of cave man to that of a Shakespeare, a Newton, a Leonardo da Vinci, an Einstein, a St. Francis of Assisi, to a Christ and a Buddha. The capacity of man to achieve in any field of human expression seems practically unlimited, and if the past few thousand years have seen such a stupendous growth, what shall we see in the next five thousand years!”
*Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci, Simon & Schuster, 2017