and Commentaries on Savitri by Vitvan
Published in 2003 by THE SCHOOL OF THE NATURAL ORDER, INC. P. O. BOX 150 BAKER, NV 89311
and Commentaries on Savitri by Vitvan
Published in 2003 by THE SCHOOL OF THE NATURAL ORDER, INC. P. O. BOX 150 BAKER, NV 89311
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the following: Quotations from Savitri, 1954, by Sri Aurobindo. Reprinted by permission of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust. Pondicherry – 605002, India. Picture appearing on page 38 “Man, Visible and Invisible” by C. W. Leadbeater The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar Chennai 600020, India
2003 by The School of the Natural Order, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United Un ited States of America. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permiss pe rmission ion except the case of brief brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. ©
The School of the Natural Order, Inc. P.O. Box 150 Baker, NV 89311 Email:
[email protected] Phone: 775-234-7304 http://www.sno.org ISBN O-942630-36-X
First Paperback Edition
CONTENTS LIST OF CHARTS............................................................v i PREFACE.......................................................................... v i i ABOUT THE COVER……………………………………x CHAPTER 1 .................................................................... 3 CHAPTER 2 .................................................................. 11 CHAPTER 3 .................................................................. 27 CHAPTER 4 .................................................................. 43 CHAPTER 5 .................................................................. 59 CHAPTER 6 .................................................................. 73 CHAPTER 7 .................................................................. 85 CHAPTER 8 .................................................................. 95 CHAPTER 9 ................................................................ 107
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LIST OF CHARTS
The Seven Initiations.................................................1 Force Field of an Initiate...........................................8 Levels on Which a Given Man Functions............15 The Dynamic Septenary Cosmos .................24 – 25 Aura...........................................................................38 Four Somatic Divisions of Man.............................41 The Chain According to Function.......................115
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PREFACE
Descriptions of the seven initiations are a part of the ancient wisdom teachings and can be found in much metaphysical literature. This ancient wisdom has been available for as long as there have been teachers and students of the wisdom teachings. However, in the previous cycle they were considered “esoteric knowledge” to be revealed by teachers only to students who were “ready to receive” such information. Most of the teachings were generally given by word of mouth directly from teacher to student. With the dawning of the new age (circa the 1890’s, according to Vitvan) such hidden teachings began to become public knowledge for the first time. Vitvan’s dharma, his life’s work, he has stated, was to make those teachings available to modern students in modern terminology they could understand. Prior to 1938 his lectures and writings formed the curriculum of his School of the Sacred Science. Then he took a class in general semantics at the University of Chicago from Alfred Korzybski. In general semantics he felt that he had found the “missing link” between “spiritual” teachings and modern science. He was so inspired by general semantics that he determined to rewrite his entire body of work to correlate the wisdom teachings with the latest scientific findings, including a general semantics approach to language and thought processes. His teachings could now be presented in terms that did not offend the modern western thinkers. In the 1940’s he began using his newfound insights in his lectures and writings. He then changed the name of his school to the School of the Natural Order. All of his vii
writings since that time are a revelation of those esoteric teachings in language acceptable and understandable to the western mind. Vitvan’s description is laid out so that students can locate their place on the path and then proceed to consciously cooperate with the process of selfdevelopment. In so doing, they can greatly facilitate the rest of their “journey” on the path to enlightenment. Most of Vitvan’s work since the 1950’s was given as lectures at the School of the Natural Order headquarters. It has been available both in the form of audio tapes and printed lessons. If you are a student who is seeking to de-mystify the esoteric mystery teachings in order to fulfill a longing to take your development into your own hands, Vitvan’s explanations may be just the help you have been looking for. In the spring of 1955, Vitvan was introduced to the recently published book, Savitri , by Sri Aurobindo. It is an epic poem some 940 pages long based on a well-known (in India) Hindu myth. In Aurobindo’s hands the myth serves as a vehicle for describing the final phases of the self-development process. According to Vitvan, the poetic cadence in which it is written attunes the reader to the finer frequencies of the higher levels of consciousness from which it was given. Vitvan was so excited by it that he wanted to share it with his students, so he chose segments of it which he found especially inspiring and pertinent, to use at the beginning of his classes on The Seven Initiations. These excerpts and Vitvan’s explanations of them begin with Chapter Two. viii
Some mention should be made about the use of capitalized words in this book. In Vitvan’s old work, as in many metaphysical writings of the previous cycle, many words were capitalized in order to distinguish them as having special meanings in the context of the wisdom teachings. In transcribing Vitvan’s lectures into printed form most of that kind of capitalization has been eliminated. However, a few of the terms that refer to levels of consciousness beyond the Second Crossing (see chart “The Dynamic Septenary Cosmos” on pages 24-25) are capitalized to indicate that they pertain to these higher levels. Vitvan’s use of the word Mind, for instance, refers to the Mind level consciousness as opposed to the word mind, which refers to the mental aspect of the personality. Finally, a word of thanks to a few of my fellow students of the School of the Natural Order: to Alice Moffat for her printed transcriptions of Vitvan’s lectures; to Marcia Phillips, Melissa Renfro, and Jim Woolsey for their help on the covers of the book; and to Val Taylor and Bill Coffman for their editing suggestions and assistance. This book is the School’s effort to make Vitvan’s teachings about this important subject available to more of the general public. May these pages inform and inspire you as you take your next steps on the path to enlightenment. Marj Coffman, editor
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ABOUT THE COVER
The scenic mountain pictured behind the title is a photograph of Mt. Wheeler, the 13,065 foot peak on the eastern Nevada border that towers majestically over Home Farm, the headquarters of the School of the Natural Order. The School is situated on 320 acres of land near the base of the mountain. Several simple but comfortable rooms are available on the premises for students who choose to visit and enjoy the quiet of the high desert. The tree is a bristlecone pine, drawn for us by artist and illustrator, Marcia Phillips, who also does illustrations for nearby Great Basin National Park. While it is not our logo, it is a symbol of the nearby environment. Many ancient bristlecone pines grow near the higher edge of the tree line on Mt. Wheeler and other nearby mountains. To some of the older students of the School, its life is analogous to the School’s: it has been around for a very long time, and despite harsh growing conditions, it continues to survive. In our logo, which appears on the title page of this book, we usethe ancient symbols the serpent and the eagle. The serpent is representative of wisdom; its coiled form is suggestive of the power latent in the sacral center, Kundalini (called by the Greeks the power of the Christos). The eagle was supposed to be the only creature that could look directly into the sun. It represents spiritual vision. The eagle (spiritual vision) is carrying the serpent (the Christos power) to x
great heights, the ascent of the force from the sacral center to the crown center. “Sortem suam quisquet amet,” the Latin phrase beneath the logo, literally translated means, “Let each one love his destiny.” The word destiny describes meaning on two levels: on one level each person creates his own destiny; on another level each one discovers his destiny. By the power of love we surmount or overcome our created destiny. And by the power of love we discover the foundtion of our existence and Be-ing. If you would like to learn more about the School of the Natural Order and its activities, please visit our website: www.sno.org.
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In the Name of the Father, In the Name of the Mother, In the Name of the Son, May the Blessed Ones lead us From darkness into Light.
We realize that in our present state of development, our evolutionary point considering the race-as-a-whole, we do not have the power and strength to counteract inharmonious, destructive influences. So, in true humility we turn our thought to Higher Ones, the higher developed ones, and we say, “In the Name of the Father,” the Positive Power; “In the Name of the Mother,” the Negative Principle; and “In the name of the Son,” the Logos, the only Begotten Son of Cosmic Power. Then we say this invocation: “May the Blessed Ones lead us from darkness into Light.” It is suggested that you dwell with this invocation as part of your daily meditation practice. The more you practice it, the more you work your consciousness into the influence flowing from those higher levels, the more you will have that support, that additional help, to counteract the conditions with which you are confronted in your daily life. We say, “In the Name of the Mother”—the negative principle of all—instead of Holy Ghost, because it is difficult to set up a referent for that term. So we say the Mother Principle which brings forth all that is. A synonym is the word nature, that which gives birth. And “in the Name of the Son,” because the Father becomes conscious in the Son, the only Begotten, then everything else flows from that Logos, the Son. We invoke that, and then we ask, “May the Blessed Ones lead us from darkness into Light.” The more you practice that meditation, the more you will discover how wonderful it is. xii
S N O I T A I T I N I N E V E
S
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2
THE SEVEN INITIATIONS CHAPTER 1
I am well aware that there are many who know more about this process that we call initiation than I do. I can only explain that which I know by experience, and if there are those of you who know this process, you may check on me. Because of its many uses, I find it is very desirable to set up a referent for the word initiation. Recently I read a book about a movement in India in which the word initiation was employed a great deal. This book set forth that when the master of the group or the order looked upon one and said, “You may join our organization,” or “You are elected,” one was “given the nod,“ etc., then that one was initiated. There have been many other writings about what is meant by initiation. I am taking no exception to all of these definitions or descriptions that the word initiation symbolizes, but without taking exception to any of them I wish to set up the referent for the way in which we in our School describe the meaning for the word. We do not have a rigorous mathematical language in which one symbol stands for one meaning and no other possible meaning. We have to laboriously describe meanings in order to be as precise as possible. That sharpens our thinking and orients us to being careful in describing meaning for the words we use. I do not want to plunge in and use this word initiation unless I am sure I know what I am talking about and as nearly as possible get you to understand what I am talking about.
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In the diagram on page 1 we have numerous dots which we have labeled “The Many.” Think of the many persons in a given state or in the United States, Asia, or Africa or on the planet—just the many. Each dot symbolizes one person in the mass, in the many. Each one of these persons has his own mentalized private world, and each is integrated in and motivated by an oversoul called the race mind, or the race psyche. I know that each person in his private world thinks that what he thinks is his thoughts. Each person thinks that what he feels are his own feelings, that they have no reference or relationship to anyone or anything else. Each person thinks that what he desires are his desires, that they have no relationship to anything or anyone else. All of that is in the private world of each one. When we can get past his censorship and go into his consciousness psychoanalytically, psychologically, psychically, we can examine the mentalizing, the manufacturing process, that keeps him thinking well of himself. When we get past that censorship in psychological exploration we find that every thought one thinks, every feeling one has, every desire one experiences, and so forth, is due to synchronization of his forces, his wave-frequencies, with other persons. Vibrationally, wave-frequency speaking, each of those other persons likewise is integrated, en rapport, with a number of others, and so on, until the whole interrelationship of force frequencies makes up what we call the race psyche. This is the point to be stressed: so long as a given person is motivated by those unconscious relationships he is not an initiate. He belongs to the world, part and parcel of it; he is ‘regular’. Our founding fathers were highly developed individualists; yet in our own 4
country, which is based upon extreme individualism, tremendous pressure is being brought to bear to ‘get in line’, ‘don’t think outside’. You must belong, conform, be regular, etc. None of those persons are initiates, and we could not use the term initiate, no matter how many nods they get. Inherently, innately, they still function under influences of what we call the race psyche. But let us suppose that one of them becomes restless, dissatisfied; he tries to put himself in a groove, to belong, to be regular, but it just will not work. He keeps seeking, seeking, and he can’t settle down. And the gang—perhaps members of his own household— says, “What is the matter? You are trying this, trying that. Settle down and just be normal.” But he just cannot do it. He wanders around disconsolate and discontented until he makes contact with an initiate. Then he exclaims, “I am home.” He has found a harbor and he drops anchor. He says, “This is what I’ve been looking for, and I didn’t know what it was.” By making that contact, he has obeyed the scriptural admonition, “Come ye therefore out from among them and be ye therefore separate.” Do not take that literally; it does not mean that you must take your ‘physical body’ out of the gang. It means getting your forces cut loose from those unconscious influences and forces that have been motivating you—the thinkings, feelings, desires, etc. that belong to the great many. This is the beginning of a new process and of such a one it is said, “When the fire is kindled, who can put it out?” He cannot put it out and it cannot be put out. In his newfound joy he begins to make the usual mistake: he becomes over-zealous. In his enthusiasm he wants to rush to his loved ones—mother, father, wife, children, friends—and tell them all about it. He is 5
so filled with joy that he wants to share it with everyone, until they all begin to look at him with peculiar glances and ask, “Have you gone crazy?” Little by little he is forced back into himself and he becomes timid about trying to tell anyone about his wonderful discovery. It is like the man down who went through the experience of having so many of his neighbors and kinfolk called him crazy that he finally accepted it. Then he read a certain book. He jumped up and danced around and exclaimed, “Thank God! Here is another crazy man!” He found another one that was also crazy! Haven’t you gone through it? If you haven’t, it is ahead of you. We laugh, but it is almost tragic. Little by little, one is forced back into himself, into secrecy, and he gets timid about trying to tell anyone about it and he just lives it in himself alone. This contact is the beginning of an introduction into new realms, worlds that are going to open, little by little, which “the many” cannot even imagine, because they have no background, no experience, no referent. Note that each person has his own mentalized private world but he is also integrated in the overall intricate pattern of relationships constituting what we call the race mind. The entire process of what is called initiation has no reference whatever to that world, that state. To understand this process, in imagination try to offset from all your private world evaluations and race-psyche influences. This process that is entered upon after this first contact with an initiate is made is so different that it is difficult to describe. So please do not look at this process from your personal, human frame of reference. It has to do with an entirely different level or state. 6
This process of initiation operates in just the same way whether that higher level one contacted is in incarnation, has a ‘physical body’, or not. The initiate on the level from which he functions has no consciousness of whether there is a ‘physical body’ or not. He is a channel for higher level force in either case. Another point to remember is that an Initiate functions outside of time and space. This contact can be made whether the person with whom the contact is made is in Los Angeles, Calcutta, or Timbuktu. It is the operation of a higher-world dimensionality, and we have to rule out time and space. There is nothing in space (exterior to one) that is going to awaken one. Higher level forces must have channels through which to operate. So if one has come out of the herd, how is that contact made? Sometimes it is made on the personal level even when the Initiate might not want it at all. But the Initiate has to recognize it. When one’s light gets bright enough, when he is ready, there are many invisible watchers on the heights who guide him. He may pick up a book, go to a lecture, hear of a teacher. Like mental telepathy, he is guided to one with whom he can make a contact. Just as a seed will not germinate without the proper environmental influence—light, moisture, soil—so on the human level one must make contact with an Initiate to become awakened, ‘lit’. It takes one that is ‘lit’ to light another; he cannot light himself. To use analogy, one candle can light many other candles and not be impoverished thereby. The air surrounding us, three dimensionally speaking, is charged with energy. We can think of radio-active influences from broadcast stations, which we would never know about without some gadget, a radio or TV set that picks up 7
the energy and channels it. So it is with everything; there must be a channel. The chart below illustrates an infinite number of channels, one integrated into another. The circle represents the essential Power-to-be-conscious, the Self of that Field, and each field represents spheres within spheres. When a person ‘comes out’ he makes a contact with an initiate on the periphery of the initiate’s forcefield on Mind level. That contact is not made on any level below the Mind level. There are many different relationships on other levels—biological, etheric, psychic, etc., among the many. But when the contact is made with the initiate it is not on any of those levels. It is on Mind level, the enduring, the permanent, the real: “Heaven and earth shall pass away but not one jot or tittle of it shall unnoticed pass, until all is fulfilled.”
Force Field of an Initiate
After this contact is made with the force field on Mind level of an initiate, little by little the person moves ‘in’. He can move ‘out’ also. The going might get a little rugged, or he loses faith, or has personal axes to grind. He can even turn against the one with whom he made the contact and try and destroy him. But once he has made that Mind level contact he will 8
never be accepted by another higher one. He must reestablish the contact with the one with whom the contact was first made. That is the way it works. And it may be ‘days’—incarnations—before he can find his way back and re-establish the contact. After making contact with the force field of an Initiate, as one begins to move ‘in’ closer, a complete re-metamorphosing process takes place. His psyche begins to undergo a tremendous change and new worlds begin to open to him. At this point, let us set up a referent for the Real Self, the Individualized Powerto-be-conscious. Picture that Higher Self in finer ‘matter’ or substance, as a configuration. It is lovely, beautiful—not like “the old man that must be put off,” but a bright shining Be-ing representative of that state of consciousness on Mind level. We use an illustration that every person is like a green nut. When it is cut in half you cannot tell the kernel from the shell or the shell from the hull. It looks all the same. But after this contact is made and one begins to develop, the shell loosens up from the hull; the kernel, the meat, loosens up from the shell; and that kernel and that meat configurates into a beautiful person inside the old shell. This means that the conditions, influences, and entities that do not belong to the radiant Light are expurgated. This is what we call the purificatory process on the path. a person makes contact with an Initiate, he has been living in an objectified state of consciousness in which he thinks about ‘things’ and ‘objects’ and about getting them. One can think about ‘things’— tables, chairs, flowers, etc., but when he functions he feels, desires, reacts, wants. Students must make that sharp differentiation between thinking and Before
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functioning. Those who do not make that differentiation between thinking and functioning believe that they function in an objective world; but they do not and cannot. Why? Because the objective world is only a picture created in the mental phase of the psyche. Let us use an analogy to clarify this difference. Watch a movie; look at the shadows on the screen. When you lose consciousness that they are only shadows you will weep or you will laugh because you fall into the illusion that they are real. Weeping and laughing are functioning—about the shadows. Now cross over from your weeping and your laughing or your absorbed interest and try to function in the shadows. It cannot be done. This is an accurate analogy and you should practice and think about it until you understand the way you think and the way you function. This that we call the objective world is a world of shadows, images in your psyche that appear ‘out there’, substantive. But you cannot function in those shadows. You can think about them and you can function about them. Note the difference: You can function about them, because when you want one or more of these shadows you can get hot and bothered about wanting it. You can react when you are thwarted in your efforts to acquire them, but you cannot cross over and function in them.
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CHAPTER 2 Comments on Savitri The French poet, Paul Richard, traveled all over the world looking for a teacher. He hadn’t found one, and he was on his way home when he met Rabindranath Tagore, the famous Indian poet, in Japan, and told him about his search for a teacher. Tagore said to him, “I can refer you to my teacher, but I don’t know whether he will take you or not.” Tagore wrote a letter of introduction to his teacher, Aurobindo Ghose, whose ashram was in Pondicherry, French India. Paul was delighted to get that letter, and he took it to Aurobindo and was accepted. That was a great event, because Paul Richard was quite a scholar and he brought good equipment to his teacher, Aurobindo. And after a year or so of guidance and study they began to publish Aurobindo’s work in a magazine which they called Arya. In 1928 I was able to secure the complete set of seven volumes of the published magazines, which I value very highly. Outside of one work, James Morgan Pryse’s The Restored New Testament, it was the only work that we ever introduced into our School because we found it to be in complete agreement with our work. This narrative about how difficult it is to find a teacher, about Paul Richard’s work with Aurobindo, etc., indicates the far-reaching consequences which eventuated from just one student’s finding a teacher. Aurobindo Ghose, that teacher to whom Tagore referred Paul Richard, thereafter wrote an epic poem called Savitri. There are no words suitable to describe this work. It is the most dumbfounding, remarkable work I have ever had in my hands. It is difficult because it is written on such an exceedingly high level, but I wish to acquaint you with it as another means of tuning in to higher levels. It is divided into cantos. The first canto, labeled The Symbol Dawn, begins:
I t was the hour before the Gods awake. A cross the path of the divine Event T he huge foreboding mind of N ight, alone I n her unlit temple of eternity, Lay stretched immobile upon Silence’ marge. I just love that language, that word structure! I will not try to go into the technicalities of the rhythm, the cadence, the feet, measure, etc. It is very peculiar, but those of you who have musical education will be able to
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catch it without any explanation. It is too technical to describe, so I will confine myself to describing meaning. In Christian Biblical terminology, what I have just read is described as “darkness upon the face of the deep.” All is void. Nothing but darkness upon the face of the deep; hence, “it was the hour before the Gods awake.” First let us describe the Gods. Refer to the diagram on page 115, “The Chain According to Function.” The Lords of the Flame, the highest three degrees of Initiation, are called the Gods. Do not think this is polytheism. It is not. This is qualified monism. The One becomes the many, but it is the One in whom all is focused. The One becomes many— many differentiations—and when we say, “becomes the many” we have qualified the One. So this doctrine is based upon qualified monism. Monism says there is One and all else is not (is illusion). Qualified monism says there is One that becomes many—many differentiations—and that qualifies the monistic phase, the Absolute monistic idea. In our Western tradition we label it the Logos, the Word. The Gods are those who function under the immediate power, influence, focus of Logoic power, the seven rays. Why do they sleep? Because they are still under the Saguna aspect of the Supreme. Beyond the Logos, the resonant, creating power which the Upanishads and the Vedas label Saguna Brahma, there is a level beyond name and form in which nothing sleeps; a level beyond the gunas, Nirguna Brahma. It is eternity Itself, the absence of time, eternal living Light, eternal consciousness. We do not have any word in our English language for the beginning of the creative process. We have to borrow words from languages that have developed the philosophy, the teaching about it, so we borrow a Sanskrit word, manvantara. When we use the label creative process, widen your thought; expand your consciousness to galactic proportions. The beginning of a galaxy is the beginning of a creative process, and we call that creative process a manvantara. The most comprehensive cosmic galactic creative process is called a mahamanvantara. The prefix mahameans exceedingly large, great. Mahamanvantara—the largest overall creative process. According to the teachings of both Western and Eastern traditions, there is nothing but darkness upon the face of the deep. Darkness, then That is a metaphor. The birth of the Son is due to the union of the positive
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and negative. The resonance, the Word, goes forth, so to speak, which is another metaphor. When we study modern physics we find complete confirmation of it. Physics shows us that the first objective indication of the creative process is the formation of an atom of hydrogen. One positively charged unit of light unites with one negatively charged unit—the proton and electron become married. That is the first marriage ceremony in the great mahamanvantara; one positive and one negative come together and immediately there is a unit of light. “Let there be Light.” With our understanding of modern physics we could paraphrase all of that and say, “Let there be one atom of hydrogen.” That is saying the same thing in other words.
T he huge foreboding mind of N ight, alone I n her unlit temple of eternity, Lay stretched immobile upon Silence’ marge. Substitute that there is nothing but hydrogen, galactically, and the creative process begins. Anything that has a beginning presupposes an ending. What is born must die, whether it is a galaxy of galaxies, a galaxy, a solar system, or a planet or an atom. There is an end to a creative process, just as there is a beginning. There is an end to a mahamanvantara. When the end comes, everything that is ‘out’, everything that is in the creative process stops. This is not strange. It is like sleeping and waking. You lose consciousness, then you wake up again. You wake up again precisely where you lost consciousness. Just apply that on a galactic scale. There is a day of Brahma, a day of the creating process, an outbreathing, an outflowing; then there is an inbreathing, an infolding, a night. When the night, infolding, occurs, everything stops precisely where it was conscious of itself; and at the next outbreathing, the next creative process, they all awake exactly where they went to sleep just as you do. You awaken in precisely the same state in which you went to sleep. So . . .
I t was the hour before the Gods awake. Isn’t that wonderful! I think that this is the most wonderful, precious thing in the world: to understand these things, to learn of them, to bask in them.the Word, the resonance, begins. “And God said, ‘Let there be Light.’”
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Lesson 2 A Given Man Can or Does Function On One or More of Four Levels
4
Mind—the Lowest Regions
Level of
Light’s
3
Higher Psyche — Human ‘Soul’
2
Lower Psyche — Animal ‘Soul’
1
Elementalistic — Configurational, Nature’s Formative Forces
0
Abstracted Mentalized Private World, the Objective State
In describing what we label initiations I wish to refer to the four levels upon which we respectively can or do function. Please notice the zero level on the diagram above. The zero was put there advisedly, because man cannot function in the objective world. That world is merely an objectified state of consciousness. One can think or mentalize about it, but watch yourself and check on what I am saying. You can check on this every minute of every day if you will learn how. Where do you function and how do you function? Note the word function. You can think about ‘things’—tables, chairs, piano, flowers, etc., but when you function you feel, you desire, you react, you want or don’t want. See the difference between thinking and functioning? Students must make that sharp differentiation between thinking and functioning. Those who are not educated, not informed about differentiating between thinking and functioning, think that they function in the objective world. But no matter how hard they try they cannot. Why? Because the 14
objective world is only pictures or images in their minds, in their psyches. This is not hard to comprehend if you practice paying attention to the difference between the way you function, the way you think, and the way you think you function. Please refer to the chart on page 1 as we review the first initiation. A multiplicity of personalities is represented by the dots. Each personality has a contact, rapport, synchronization, a flowing together or harmonization with other personalities, regardless of the degree or the level or the guna. “Birds of a feather flock together,” our grandparents used to say. Each personality makes a contact with other personalities, and every one of those other personalities has a multiplicity of relationships and friendships, etc. Continue this networking until this whole thing is a tangled skein of interrelationships. Please remember this. When one functions in the lower psyche or the higher psyche, whether consciously or unconsciously, he learns that in that world relationships are as tangible, as objectified as ‘things’ and ‘objects’ are to the sense of touch. These relationships in the absence of neural sense are real; like ‘things’ and ‘objects’, they are tangible. Any time that a relationship, friendly rapport, at-one-ness with another is established in the psychic world it is a real thing and you deal with it just as you would ‘things’ and ‘objects’. The stronger the relationship, harmony, love, feeling friendly, etc., the stronger, the more powerful it is. The higher the level upon which one functions, the more solid the relationship and more enduring it is. Relationships in the objective world, the zero world, are fleeting. Any relationship of physical bodies with physical bodies is fleeting. 15
This is important when we consider the description of the initiations. When a person in the race psyche makes contact with an Initiate, this abstracted mentalized private world, this objectified state, begins to fade away. It begins with the first contact with the real stream of Light, of Power, of the wave-frequency streams of Reality. It will not be long after that contact is made before all of this abstracted mentalized private world, the objectified state, looks like a zero. It begins to fade away. But to say to one who is identified with ‘things’, ‘objects’, images, shadows, that it is a zero appears to him like some form of idiocy. If he says that this is the reality he is trying to grasp, do not argue. He belongs to that collective, the many, the race mind, the race psyche. Go to the first level upon which one functions, the instinctive, elementalistic level, like your hunger for food and all other sorts of hungers, elementalistic motivations. Relationships there endure longer. Relationships on the animal level are yet longer enduring, more solid. At the level of the higher psyche, the personality at its best, relationships endure much longer. And in the old aristotelian marriage ceremony vow, “...until death do us part,” the relationship is supposed to hold until death separates you. On the highest level death does not separate you at all. Relationships endure life after life, cycle after cycle. These contacts break the tangled skein of relationships in the race psyche. The breaking of these personal relationships in the race psyche is obeying the admonition: “Come ye therefore out from among them and be ye therefore separate.” Be an individual in your own right instead of unconsciously being motivated by all the influences of the race mind. That represents the reorientation of consciousness from the race psyche to 16
the beginning of Reality, the beginning of that which endures, the beginning of that which is yesterday, today and forever; the beginning of that which you can take with you and bring back again. Nothing else down here in zero can you take with you, let alone bring back. This is the beginning of “laying up treasures where thieves cannot break through and steal,” etc. This is the “pearl of great price buried in your own garden.” If you knew that, how diligently you would dig until you found it! Well, there is precious treasure buried in your own garden. Wake up! Get your eyes open! Get away from this zero business and see it! The moment you see it you will never stop until you get it. You will pursue it until you are conscious of it and possess it as your own. How does one know he has taken the first degree? The reorientation of consciousness at the first degree is seldom known at the time. One who goes through the first degree of initiation is never conscious of what has taken place. This is a peculiar anomaly because it has caused serious, expensive confusion. Doctors have gotten wealthy because of this confusion. When one in the race psyche has made the contact with his teacher and that relationship is established, his own consciousness undergoes a reorientation to new lines of force. (Remember this contact operates the same whether the teacher is ‘in’ or ‘out’ of ‘physical’ incarnation; it makes no difference whether or not he has a ‘body’ in which he is functioning. He functions precisely the same. One who functions on that level does not change when he goes out of his body. He goes right on doing what he needs to be doing, because he works in force relationships.)
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When one in the race psyche makes that contact he is seldom conscious of it unless he has some instruction such as training in a school like this. Before the contact is made one lives in an objectified state of consciousness, an objective manifold of values. He thinks about ‘things’ and ‘objects’ and how to acquire them. He functions only by sense, what he can see, hear, etc. Before the contact is made he can only function by neural sensation, but when that contact is made and reorientation of consciousness takes place he begins to function by response to vibrations, wavefrequency contexts of situations. After this contact is made, one begins to be affected by influences and the quality of those influences. He can contact a person that he has known for a long time and that person has some mental quirks about something. Now, instead of just brushing off that person’s influences he gets sick. He registers that person’s wave-frequencies in his solar center and he gets nauseated, bloated with gas, or suffers indigestion, etc. Then he goes to a doctor and says, “Doctor, something is wrong. I can’t digest my food. I feel sick all the time.” (Some doctors who are getting wise today know that there are inharmonious conditions involved.) Something has taken place, but the young initiate doesn’t know what it is. Also, for one integrated in the race psyche, sexual relationships are just neural. But after this contact has been made the approach has to be entirely different. It has to be harmonized in frequency before there can be any relationship. The sex act must be the culmination of the frequency responses. In your mind run through your past experiences and those of your friends that you remember and see how expensive this ignorance is! Turn your thought to 18
the influences, vibrations, the qualities of wavefrequencies you get into—and sometimes get swamped in! Think of everything ‘objective’ that you might have done. Then learn how to check on yourself. You can tell very quickly if that change has taken place in your consciousness and you are reoriented to a different kind of lines of force, levels, etc. If it has, you need to learn how to take care of yourself, you need to discover how persons and places affect you organically and functionally. You will learn to cultivate those persons and places that create loveliness, harmony, beauty, vitality, etc., and you will learn how to function consciously in the new worlds into which you’re being introduced. There is your first degree of initiation. Let us move on to the second degree of initiation. In the second degree there is an eagerness, a hunger, that takes place for association with others who have gone through the first or are in the second or maybe in the third degree of initiation. That avidness is not present in the first degree of initiation because the objectified state is still too strong. One at that state does not consciously seek companionship with those of like mind, but that comes with the second degree. One goes through the second degree of initiation more or less unconsciously also. Some are conscious of what has taken place, but the majority are not. They are still unconscious mentally, objectively speaking, but they have that drive to read or study or talk or just be with others of a similar state, because they crave the harmonization of frequencies. That is one symptom of the second degree of initiation. Here is another symptom. They lose interest in purely intellectual forms of literature. This is quite striking at the second degree of initiation. If what is 19
written is wholly intellectualized, mentalized, etc., structurally it may have perfect language, grammar, rhetoric, it may be highly polished, but if there isn’t any soul, any life to it, they begin to lose interest. They avidly seek reading matter that is written by someone who is conscious of what he is writing about in the various lines of creativity. There must be that creativity in the expression, the literature, before the one at that state can have any interest in it at all. Toward that latter part of the second degree of initiation one begins to be taught while out of his body. He joins groups. Many have to take this rather skeptically. Please do. I want our students to prove everything for themselves. We say in our School wait until you prove everything that is said by experience before you accept it. But at the same time do not reject it, because you might cut yourself off. Do not accept what I say and do not reject it until you prove it or disprove it. Please remember that. But just now I am speaking to you of that which I know. This story will illustrate my experience. Back in 1919 I accepted a commission from the president of the Theosophical Society to revive the outlying lodges in the Society. On the evening that my lecture in San Jose was scheduled, there were several other activities going on in town, and we had a very meager audience—objectively. At that time I consciously functioned in the psychic world far more than I functioned in the objective world. So when the president of the San Jose society apologized to me afterward for the small turnout, I said, “What? Not a crowd? Every chair was full and there were people standing in the aisles.” I said that innocently and honestly. He looked at me incredulously. “Yes,” I said, 20
“every chair was full and they were standing up in the aisles and in the back.” He said, “No, sir, I’m sorry to have to tell you they weren’t.” Then I said, “Wait!” I had lost the differentiation between the two levels. I honestly saw every chair full and standing room and they were standing up around and I lectured to an overflow crowd. Take it or leave it! I cannot prove it to you but I am telling you what I know. But let us return to the second degree of initiation. Toward the end of the second degree of initiation one is sort of taken into charge by the higher ones and their helpers, and while out of his body he is directed to a teaching, a teacher, or a work that is going on, but he does not bring back the memory. If he is alert he can bring back the recognition of how fine he feels. He wakes up in the morning feeling like he has been in heaven, or on the fringes of it. He wakes up feeling so fine, but that is all he can bring back. Actually, he has been directed by a helper on the ‘inner’ levels. There is lots of work going on there all the time that the zero ones do not know anything about. To them it is a closed book. That teaching during the second degree of initiation goes on for years. Eventually much of it begins to percolate through to the more opaque objective mind, the mental consciousness. One goes through that period of instruction, the “Hall of Learning,” and gradually, sometimes painfully, he learns himself, the reality, the invisible worlds. Here, in preparation for the third initiation, the induction into the third degree, one is taken out of his body. A great event takes place as he develops and learns. This time he is conscious of what is going on. In full consciousness he is taken out of his body to a 21
company of higher ones. He sees them and they see him. Here is a common experience when that takes place: One is taken out of his body to a ceremony. When he is taken out he would like to see the one who is taking him and he might twist his head around trying to see, but the candidate is never allowed see the face of the one who is giving him the third initiation. When you hear of such experiences, there are certain earmarks that let you know that they are genuine and certain earmarks let you know it is spurious. At the third initiation if you see the initiator’s face, it is not real, because he will never let you see his face. One is taken before quite a company, one of the groups of the inner order. He is taken before one of these inner orders, and there in a most solemn ceremony he is accepted, recognized, inducted into the order. Then he is taken back to his ‘physical body’, where he begins to be a conscious worker, a Brother of the Third Degree. This is part of the real governing brotherhood, the invisible government of the worlds. It is real and genuine. I stand in the presence of all that I know and testify, they are real. There is a real invisible government of the worlds, and there are many branches and orders of that government.
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CHAPTER 3 Comments on Savitri I t was the hour before the Gods awake. A cross the path of the divine Event T he huge foreboding mind of N ight, alone I n her unlit temple of eternity, Lay stretched immobile upon Silence’ marge. A lmost one felt, opaque, i mpenetrable, I n the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse T he abysm of the unbodied Infinite; A fathomless zero occupied the world. The key point in this reading of Savitri, the unbodied Infinite, is a valuable point for students in this School to understand; because whatever specific point of reference, specific detail in the evolutionary process, we may describe, we have that whole broad comprehensive background into which we can fit the detail to better understand what is being described. In this exceedingly broad, comprehensive state of realization out of which Aurobindo is writing we want to focus here on one particular point: the unbodied Infinite. For a moment please disregard all of your aristotelian concepts of the Infinite. Pretend you never had them. You can go back to them if you want, because that ingrained and deeply impressed suggestion from childhood is not easily erased. It takes a long time, even after our intellectual understanding has clarified, to eliminate the psychic impression of early suggestions. But insofar as possible, let us pretend we never had any concept about the Infinite. The unbodied Infinite is a Triad (See Beyond Name and Form on the chart on page 24-25). If we were teaching a class in the Kabbalah we would label the upper point of the Highest Triad Kether, the Crown. In function throughout the whole creative process, meaning the cosmic process, it is experienced as balance, equilibrium, the binding power. Modern physicists deal with the proton, the electron, and the third factor, the meson, which becomes evident as the neutron. It is only recently (1955) that physicists have awakened to the realization that the neutron is the configurational representation of force. The neutron has no positive charge and no negative charge. It is the binding power of the positive proton and the negative electron. The Binding Power is a power that holds
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everything together, and when we come down to the human level it is called love. So love is another label for the Binding Power. Love holds man and woman together and that makes a home. When love goes a house is left, but there isn’t any home. We must bring these things that we study as high principles right down and feel them, know them, experience them. We must make everything functional. I count it of no gain whatever unless I experience these things as function. Go back to Kether, the binding power, expressed as the law of balance, the law of equilibrium that holds whatever you want to name together. Name anything, from the galaxies down to the atom, including your home and including your body. There is a force that holds it together in balance, in equilibrium. It is the highest unit of the Highest Triad. The other units are the Positive Power and the Negative Substance. This Highest Triad is called the unbodied Infinite. What constitutes embodiment, relative to the Infinite? It has been given many names. In India it is called Nirguna Brahma. Buddhists call it Purushatama. Embodiment constitutes the negative aspect of the Highest Triad. Were we studying field physics we would say magnetic force, magnetic energy. But when we come out from high perceptive insight we say substance is the negative aspect of the Highest Triad. As synonyms we could use the labels light, energy, etheric matter, teloplasm, ectoplasm, protoplasm, cytoplasm, cellular structure of living matter. These are labels for different divisions of subtleness, fineness, of Negative Substance, of the negative aspect. At the beginning of the dawn of a mahamanvantara, a cosmic creative process, the Positive Power enters the Negative Substance and is buried, is lost, apparently; but it stirs the substance into a high degree of activity. Think of activity as waves and frequencies in and of substance. The higher, the finer, the substance, the higher the frequency and the shorter the wave; the grosser, the fewer waves per unit of time, slower frequency and longer waves. The unbodied Infinite enters embodiment by bringing forth the Only Begotten, the Son, the Logos, and all power is given unto the Son from then on throughout the whole creative process. The Mother Substance was virgin and the Positive Power hovered over the virgin substance. The virgin substance conceived, and the dynamic creative process began. Think for a moment of the silliness that has been evoked over the virgin birth. Think of the hundreds of years of terrible argument over that immaculate conception and the virgin birth. It has only indicated one thing: profound stupidity and ignorance.
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A lmost one felt, opaque, i mpenetrable, I n the somber symbol of her eyeless muse. That is the Mother. No activity yet, only the “eyeless muse,” the abysm of the unbodied Infinite.
T he abysm of the unbodied I nfinite A fathomless zero occupied the world.
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Lesson 3
Let us begin to understand the third degree of initiation by building some background for understanding this degree in the initiatory process. Please refer to the diagram of a helix, a spiral, below. We begin at the bottom with an atom and end at the top of the spiral in Living Light. You no doubt are familiar with what is called evolution—the creative process of a mahamanvantara—so I will mention only a few factors.
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It used to be thought that at a certain point between the mineral and the plant kingdoms, scientists maintained that there was a ‘dividing line’. Years ago they used to argue a great deal about that ‘dividing line’ where the mineral left off and the plant began. In the study of crystallography there is a point where some crystals in solution, like colloids, become animated and microscopic algae develop. So in the creative process the mineral seems to merge into the plant. They also argued about a line where the plant
merged into the animal. Then the plant world seems to merge into the animal kingdom. This building up process of the mass of atoms from hydrogen to uranium and beyond as described in the periodic table we label elemental essences. It is composed of the whirls of forces, units of light-energy. This represents the elemental configurational process. This process goes through the mineral, the plant, the animal, and on 29
the etheric configurational level proceeds throughout the man state. The first factor to note in relation to all of the initiations is that every relatively higher turn of the helix repeats and condenses in time all that has preceded it. Second, as the whole of the ‘past’ in the creating process develops, unfolds, outbreathes, etc., it rises into higher levels of the Mother Substance with which the Power-to-be-conscious clothes itself. As it proceeds in the process, it keeps clothing itself with finer and finer degrees of matter, degrees of substance. On the chart on page 30 we indicate those degrees by what we call cytoplasm, protoplasm, living matter, etheric substance, energy, light, and Living Light. For clarity of understanding, let me repeat: As the motivating, creating, activating Power-to-be-conscious expands its consciousness of itself, it clothes the many degrees of expanding consciousness with finer and finer substance (called the Mother, the negative aspect of the two-in-one Power). These degrees of expanding awareness become manifest in finer and finer energy substance until by and by there is nothing but a body of Light—the Temple of Light, in which the Power will be conscious and in which it will function. There is a third point that is extremely important. On the chart there are three divisions to each level of the spiral. At the man state, we will label the first one living matter. That is the physiological vehicle. As the physical body develops it condenses and epitomizes all of the past. Even a superficial study of the mitotic process in embryology will reveal this. We know there is going to be no physical body unless there is first a union of a positive sperm and a negative ovum. The Japanese people date a person’s age from conception. 30
We aristotelians of the west date age from the birth of the body from its mother. We say the baby is born at a certain hour, day, year, etc. But the Japanese count the birth from the moment of conception and they say you are born at that moment. If you think seriously and deeply about it, you will find that they are accurate. There is a living being at the time of conception. That union continues as it repeats the whole past. However, there is a long past back of the creation of the sperm and the ovum. Think of the aeonian process of evolution that, according to current scientific thinking (1955), began about four billion years ago. All of that is wrapped up and repeated in the building of the configuration. The evolutionary process that goes on from the union of the sperm and the ovum to the physiological organism as a rule is completed in about 28 years. Notice that I said as a rule. Some may think it is completed by age 18 to 21, but in actuality it is not complete at that time. The point of beginning, union, we could label birth, the whole of the past being repeated on the configurational level. It will endure to a point that we are going to label death—disintegration of the physiological organism. Thus, it becomes a dynamic process, not a static ‘thing’. The second line of the spiral indicates the evolving process having reached the dividing line between what is labeled the animal state and the man state. Somewhere between the higher animal and the lower man phase or state of the process, a new vehicle manifests. We call it the psychic nature. It is a personality, a person. The referent for that word person is the guna (quality) content of the psyche. We divide it into two divisions—the lower and the higher. For our purpose in describing the process however, we 31
group the lower and the higher psyche together. In the early stages of the palingenetic process we find that there is not much advancement made in each time round, but the higher the state of development of the person, the faster becomes the expanding process of consciousness. From conception, development of the physiolgical organism continues for seven years before the development of this new vehicle, the psyche, begins. In the higher animal state we note individual characteristics which indicate the beginning of the development of the psychic nature. The psychic nature parallels the continuing development of the physiological organism. When death, disintegration of the physiological organism, takes place, the psychic nature continues a little longer. The time will vary with individuals, persons, but it will generally continue a little longer before it begins to disintegrate. The psyche disintegrates because it is built out of reactions to values given, reactions to functions, etc., in relation to the ‘physical body’. Consciousness functions through our feelings, desires, emotions, and mentalizations about, not ‘in’ the configurational side. The value given, the quality of desires, the quality of thinking, and emotions about ‘things’ and ‘objects’, bounces back. What you send out must come back. “Thine only is the hand that holds the rope that drags thee on; let go thy hold, Sannysin bold! Say, ‘Om tat sat, Om!’” (The Song of Sannyasin, author unknown) So if you do not like your suffering, stop creating it. It is as simple as that. As long as you are reveling in your suffering, go on and create more of it. We do not moralize with you; we are only asking you to wake up and find out how you do it. When you get tired enough, sick enough, you will let go. This is how the psyche is developed and why it discontinues after the dissolution of the physiological organism. 32
As expansion of consciousness continues there is a third vehicle that begins to develop. We call it the immortal vehicle, the Individualizing Self on Mind level. The degree in which that third vehicle, “the third story of the three-story house” is developed is commensurate with the consciousness one has of immortality. That consciousness begins when the Power-to-be-conscious in the animal state differentiates itself from the animal and becomes man, primitive man. Mind Substance becomes the vehicle of individualization on the Mind level, because there can be no consciousness without a vehicle in which to function. After dissolution of the physiological organism—the first death—and the disintegration of the psyche—the second death —the Body of Light, also referred to as the Temple of Light, the Solar Vesture, the Immortal Body does not disappear. In the expanding process, when the Body of Light is fully developed, the Power—the Real Self of you and me— will continue fully conscious from birth to death and death to birth. Let us apply what has just been said to the third degree of initiation. At the third degree one learns to consciously function in his psyche independently of his physiological organism. The many, as well as the first and second degree initiates, are conscious of only one vehicle—the physiological organism. But as one develops through the third degree, he becomes aware of his psyche and begins to consciously function in it. How does this take place? Let us once again use the analogy of a green nut. As it ripens the shell loosens from the hull and the meat begins to loosen from the shell. The third degree initiate experiences what we call the shakes—an actual and very definite shaking experience in the process of loosening the 33
psychic vehicle from the physiological organism. There is a religious organization known as the Shakers who are good aristotelian fundamentalists. They think the shaking is due to the ‘spirit’—and I guess it is, for in the Bible we read, “There was an earthquake in heaven for the space of half an hour.” The psyche loosens from the ‘physical body’ so that the third degree initiate can go out of his body in his psyche in full consciousness. He must learn to operate on the psychic level. After the third degree is completed, then comes the development of the Individualized Self on Mind level. When one becomes seated in that consciousness of Be-ing—being a distinct, luminous Light, a selfluminous Self—he “enters the Father’s house and departs therefrom no more.” He is no longer a prodigal son wandering out in the psychic world, groping for understanding, “eating the husks that the swine eat,” and thinking he is having a good time. When one becomes seated in the consciousness of his Be-ing on Mind level, he operates from that level without losing his seat. He can extend his consciousness onto any level. As Paul said, he can become “all things unto all men,” equally at home in a hovel or a palace and not embarrassed or elated by anything. If there is a job to do, he does it according to the conditions of the level upon which the job obtains. He can do all of that “even though he makes his bed in the depths of hell,” (if he has to for a purpose). That means he never loses his seat after becoming seated on Mind level. What I am trying to say to you is that in the School of the Natural Order we do not try to get ‘way up there’, on a high level with beautiful angels. And we do not go ‘down’ and camouflage either, if we have to work on a lower level. The whole point is to develop 34
conscious control over one’s forces so that he can focus them wherever necessary without losing his seat. Remember this fundamental point in this teaching, because if you attempt to climb up to some ‘high point’, you are going to get a holier-than-thou attitude that you are ‘high’ and another is ‘low’. We have nothing like that in our teaching. We recognize that every step or stage is just as important as any other step or stage when it is basic to the developing process. It is like a person who has reached the university level in his education who looks back to high school and to grade school, and even to kindergarten with the realization that he would not be where he is now if it were not for each one of those grades. So each grade becomes very important at that point in the evolutionary process. That takes all of that goodiegoodie, holier-than-thou attitude out of one. Aristotelians identify with the image-appearingsubstantive of the ‘physical body’. They think the psyche is something ‘subjective’, and therefore questionable. Before contact is made with a Higher Initiate, those who belong to the many live in identification with their ‘physical bodies’. They have no idea that there could be anything else. It is similar to a man starting to build a three-story house and when the ground floor is completed he moves in and lives there without going on to complete second and third stories or the roof. But the third degree initiate, after the first contact is made, not only must build a second story. Then he must occupy it, conquer it, and rule it. After being inducted into a higher order, one must learn to consciously go out of his ‘physical body’ and function without it and return to it without help. This represents one of several phases of the work that 35
has to be done during the period of the third degree of initiation. There are other phases that go on simultaneously, but I must describe them separately and you can piece them together. Please refer to the chart on page 38 as we continue with this description. During the first degree, and particularly the second degree of development, one begins to register frequencies. These waves-frequencies that are registered can be described in terms of colors, from socalled higher wave-frequencies or colors, to lower ones. Violet represents Mind level functioning; brilliant yellow indicates high mental development, intellectuality; cerulean blue indicates a religious, devotional state of consciousness—the deeper one’s devotion, to home, country, wife, children, school, church, etc., the deeper the blue. Crimson to light pink denotes love; the deeper shade, protective love and the light pink, mother-love. Green in the aura represents adaptability, one who is liked by everyone and who likes everyone. Grey is indicative of fear, and brown, selfishness. These colors represent gunas, qualities, seen in the psychic aura of a person. Of
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course, there are also endless combinations and degrees of intensity of color. When one first begins to function in the psychic nature, during the first two degrees of initiation, he becomes sensitive to waves-frequencies registered from persons, places, and things. Even towns and cities have an overall influence or force. The registry takes place on the periphery of the psychic nature. If the mentality is well developed, that is, if objective identification is strong, it develops a ‘wall’ of mental force around the person. The hard-headed business man builds a defense mechanism behind which he tries to hide his feelings, his sentiment, his love—until something comes along that breaks through this barrier. Therefore, when the mentality is well developed there is less registry, because the crystallized conditions on the surface of the psyche act as a barrier. After one has reached the third degree in the process of development, the five centers of the psychic nature begin to stir and awaken and he no longer functions by peripheral registry alone. He begins to function by the activity of each of the five centers. The Brother of the First Degree does not do this, nor does the Brother of the Second Degree. Those who belong to the many, the crowd, are far from it. But the Brother of the Third Degree has to enter the psyche and learn his centers, focus his consciousness in them, then purify and control them. While learning his centers and how to control and direct the forces by which they are activated, he must also learn to function in his psyche independent from his ‘physical body’.
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We have a beautiful parable in the Bible that illustrates the work to be done during the third degree of initiation. It is the parable of the five wise virgins who preserved the oil in their lamps and went forth to meet the Bridegroom—to become Be-ings on Mind level. That is, they were initiated into the fourth degree. There were also five foolish virgins who spent the oil in their lamps. They had no light to go forth to meet the Bridegroom. They stumbled around in the dark and missed their chance. This is the work of the third degree initiate, the process that each one is coming to or that he has passed through. It is the exact pattern set way back in the Highest Triad when Papa married Mama. There is only one way for us to grow up, after we have been born, and that is according to the plan or pattern. What we call initiation constitutes a growing up, becoming adults, instead of being lost children wandering around in ignorance in our private worlds.
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The five centers of the psychic nature represent four divisions of the structural aspect of any given person. Referring to the chart, “The Four Somatic Divisions of Man,” the earth symbolizes the configurational phase. Handle this carefully. The configuration is a dynamic process, not a ‘thing’ or an ‘object’. We have to drop down to the abstracted private world to get the thingified concept of a dynamic configurational state. Separate the ‘thing’ from the dynamic process. Please get the difference. Dwell with this until anything to which you can point becomes an ensemble of positive and negative points of light, whirling with incredible activity and held together by the binding power. This is so simple it is elementary. Yet without the ability to actually see those dynamic points of light you will get down into the zero world and give value to ‘things’ and ‘objects’. Earth symbolizes this configurational level of consciousness. Water represents the psychic world. Air represents the mental or intellectual world when the mental and intellectual are used as instruments through which the dynamic process operates. In the zero world we have a mentalized objective state of identification built from values given in identification with ‘things’ and ‘objects’; but here, air represents a functional aspect of the psyche itself, not something developed out of experience in objective identification. ‘Fire’ represents the Living Spirit. We must first learn to function in the psyche on these four levels, before we can learn to function on the Mind level (the fourth degree of initiation). This is a weighty statement, so let me say it again. One must learn to function on the four levels of his total structural self in his psychic consciousness, in his 40
personality, as a preparation preliminary to functioning on the Mind level. We must learn how to function in the psyche by developing the centers and operating in and with those centers consciously as we would operate with instruments.
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CHAPTER 4 Comments on Savitri Please refer again to the chart on page 24-25 We are describing the Highest Triad, Beyond Name and Form. The only way whereby the illuminati know this triad is by reason of its effects. It is a sort of deductive process. By all its marvelous manifested effects they arrive at the perception of that which is ‘beyond’, ‘behind’, all cosmic activities. This triad has been called the still spirit. By reason of its stillness, all activity is possible. .
We can use an analogy. Take a sheet of glass, and underneath the glass place a strong magnet. Sprinkle iron filings around on top of the glass. Instantly, there is activity in those iron filings. Then it all settles into a regular geometric pattern, like frost on windows. The magnet did not move, relative to sense. It was still, but look at the tremendous activity it produced! Here is another example. Meteorologists tell us that in the center, the eye, of a hurricane it is still; but by reason of its stillness it produces the activity around the periphery. Another example can be found on a dollar bill. Turn to the reverse side, to the Great Seal of the United States of America. Notice that there is part of a pyramid that is floating above the base of the pyramid. In that floating top of the pyramid there is an eye. Those who had the perception to use such symbols knew their significance. Eventually we will work out of the chaos that we all have to go through to get into the center, the eye, and become identified with it. Let us label this Highest Triad, the still spirit, the Power-to-beconscious. The moment we label it the Power-to-be-conscious, we do not think of the cosmic process as something abstract and remote. We try to bring it right down to that which can be experienced. With what power do you think, feel, act, enjoy, affirm, believe—even deny that there is a Power? That is what we are talking about; that is how we know it. It is, and that is undeniable on the grounds that it takes something to be conscious of a denial or affirmation in order to deny, affirm, believe, etc. So in our School of the Natural Order we do not ask you to believe in God—never! We ask you to accept, not believe, the Power with which
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you believe. Then when we become conditioned in thinking that way, then we turn anywhere, to any “this” (anything to which you can point) and we see the operation of that Power—the Power-to-be-conscious, the power to exist. Here is the point I am leading up to: this Power cannot be conscious of itself unless it is united with something, with a substance, with a force, with an energy, by the activity of which consciousness is engendered. Therefore, that Power must fecundate the Mother, the negative. All activity of that which we label the Mother, nature, light, energy, living matter, and all of its far-flung divisions of substance, enables the Power-to-be-conscious, enables consciousness itself, because the activity produced in that substance is what we call consciousness, whether it is light, energy, protoplasm, etc. It is the activity of the substance that we call consciousness. So there is a Power, but to be conscious takes the Mother. When we live in this thought, work in it, build our inner faculties of perception so that it becomes functional, then the activity is called waves and frequencies. Up to the present time, those scientists who deal with atomic particles are treating those waves-frequencies intellectually, as objective to the intellectual symbols by which they are designated for communication purposes. But some have gone beyond that and have encountered, registered, demonstrated, that each of those waves is characterized by a resonance. When we hear that resonance we call it the sound currents. And how we hear it! Roaring like a Niagara sometimes! But watch—the resonance is also called the Word, the Logos. Logos is the Greek label for causation. Logos, the resonance, the Word, constitutes the reason for all existences. It is the Reason, the causative factor. This is our referent for the word Logos. One more point and then we can read intelligently how Aurobindo describes it in this grand and noble epic. This all becomes the activity we label consciousness. That is, all activity takes place in consciousness. It has no other existence. It is an act, an activity, of becoming conscious. Then think of the vast, far-flung multiplicities or divisions. Divisions of what? Of that act of becoming conscious. We are in that process. Watch yourself over a period of ten years—that is brief enough—and you will discover that the only joy, the only peace, the only satisfying condition or state or experience is when you are fulfilling your degree in the process of becoming conscious. You will not discover it in a day, because you might be too much identified with the activity and the effects and the manifestations thereof. But every ten years review the past ten years and
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see what you got out of all the experiences that you thought you would get a great deal out of, and you will find dust and ashes except for those particular points in which you fulfilled your degree of Self-awareness. If you do not believe that statement, check on it. Recall all the hopes, enthusiasm, all of your expectations. Find out what gives loveliness, beauty, peace, joy, happiness, and satisfaction. You will find it will be every time you have fulfilled the urge within you to be more and more aware of that great, imperishable, indestructible Power-to-beconscious. That Power unites with the Mother—disappears, apparently; but tremendous activity of the Mother ensues until it emerges in Light and Self-awareness. A synonym for Light is Self-awareness. With this in mind, let us read more of Savitri.
A power of fallen boundless self awake Between the first and the last N othingness, Recalling the tenebrous womb from which it came, T urned from the insoluble mystery of birth A nd the tardy process of mortali ty A nd longed to reach its end in vacant N ought. This calls for a little explanation. The Highest Triad is nonexistent. Existent: ex , meaning out, and sistere, the Latin root meaning to stand; hence, to stand out. Non-existence is nought, does not stand out. It has returned to the center, to the eye, which is zero. -
We have two zeros. Down in the abstracted private world we have a zero, because abstractions have no existence except in the consciousness of those abstracting from the reality. And at the other extreme we have a zero—non-existence. That is, non-standing out, in complete consciousness of Self.
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Lesson 4
Let us now turn our attention to how one learns to function in the psychic world, how one learns to function just as if he did not have a physical body and 44
eat, I smell it and taste it. You can smell persons and places and even taste them. The frequency can be fully experienced. Where one does not pay any attention to anything except the ‘thing’ his consciousness is identified with that material world, as it is sometimes called. Then one develops feelings and desires and has lots of emotional upheavals about ‘things’ and ‘objects’. Out of all those actions and reactions a mentality, an intellectuality, is developed. Let us borrow the Sanskrit word for it and call it lower manas. One time during a private class in Denver I was trying to explain this intellect and how it functions only in relation to ‘things’ and ‘objects’ and cannot go beyond it or above it. It can only function objectively, and I called it the concrete mind. A man who studied with us and once in awhile would substitute for me when I was not there was a part of that class. On one occasion I was absent from the class and he substituted and he was reviewing the concrete mind. “Don’t you know what he means when he says ‘concrete mind? He means cement.” We have laughed about that through the years—cement. Well, it is like that, actually, because we have the allegorical story of Lot’s wife fleeing from Sodom. (That means fleeing from the lower psyche, if you want to know the symbolism.) Fleeing from Sodom, she turned around and looked back and crystallized into a pillar of salt. She looked back. That is, she looked back to traditional authority, to what is called history, to former states of development in objective identification. Look back and you become crystallized—like cement. So let us label that intellect lower manas. 46
But there is another intellect. This other intellect emerges and develops out of lower manas. As lower manas develops in objective identity, there are many ‘subjective’ experiences in which one will ruminate upon thinking about ‘objects’, where one has feelings that he contemplates, where one feels motivating urges, and he turns to analyze those motivating urges. One does not live just in perception. One lives in apperception. Perception is to know; apperception is to know that you know. When you dwell on all those experiences that are apperceptive, knowing what you know, another intellect is built. This other intellect as it grows and develops displaces and replaces the concrete mind, the lower manas. We give it the label higher manas. It becomes an instrument through which the Mind level principles (Atma—Buddhi—Manas) operate in formulating ways and means to describe what is known. It marshals ways and means to execute directives from the spiritual world, from the higher, Mind level world. It organizes the multiplicity of ways and means to carry out directives from the higher levels, but it never sets itself up as determinative as to ways and means. Lower manas will take a bit in its teeth and want to determine what to do, and generally does, and inevitably runs things into the ground, over the precipice, or somewhere. Watch anyone with lower manas—let us say he has a powerful intellect, objectively speaking. Watch when it takes charge. It is not long until calamity occurs, or he fails in his attempts. One may condemn the lower manas as objective and concrete, particularly when it tries to set itself up as the leader, determiner, director. But not higher manas, because it will never set itself up and take charge. It keeps itself as a shining instrument in the hands of the Higher Self. It is higher manas 47
through which the Higher Self works to execute directives, determinations, etc. Higher manas never tries to assume directing, that is, to create determinations. It is an instrument through which determinations, directives, are executed. Please remember this important difference. The higher intellect is the instrument of the Higher Self, used to execute directives and marshal thoughts. When one writes out of realization (and I speak from long experience), it would be impossible without higher manas. The higher manas does not see, perceive, have the insight; but the higher manas can marshal the thoughts and words and sentence structure with which to describe what is perceived. There is the difference between lower manas and higher manas. Cultivate higher manas as an instrument in the hands of the Individualized Being, the Higher Self on Mind level. It is the finest instrument that the Individual has to work with. But keep it and respect it as an instrument. The Higher Self utilizes that higher manas. Higher manas is being demonstrated right here in the organization of the words and thoughts with which to describe this deeper, higher perceptive insight—even about higher manas! We have described that when one functions in the objective state of consciousness a crystallized thought form is developed on the periphery of the psyche. This structure on the periphery of the psychic body operates as censorship. I want to identify it now as the censor which keeps the content of the psyche bottled up so that it is impenetrable, so that the person cannot discover the content of his own psyche. This crystallized peripheral shell is lower manas. Because of 48
this shell, lower manas, the content of the psychic nature is called the unconscious. The content of the psyche is unconscious, relative to lower manas; but it is not unconscious relative to anything above the psychic nature, and it is not unconscious to higher manas. I want to emphasize this point and make it clear for one reason. Before we are through with this discussion of the third degree, we are going to see where this censorship (actually and literally the peripheral crust, the cement, the concrete) is broken up and dissolved, and the whole content of the psyche comes out on the periphery. This is part of the third degree work that must take place. The concrete, crystallized crust, the censorship, is completely broken to pieces and dissolved, and then the scripture is fulfilled, “There is nothing hidden but what will be revealed.” Do not allow pride and vanity and all that censorship stuff such as, “How do I look?” and “What will they think?” and “What will they say?” to interfere. When that peripheral crust is broken, all will be revealed. Better turn tail and run if you do not want to get to that point. Find a hole and crawl into it, because as sure as the sun rises and sets, the peripheral crust of the psyche, the censorship, is going to be broken and the whole content of the psychic nature will come to the periphery. When that happens, do not be ashamed of it. Get the attitude, “I do not care where I am in the whole cosmic scheme, my basic point of development, I just want to be good where I am. If I am a dog, I want to be a good dog.” Break up that censorship in advance. Then you will have an easy time when the forces break it up and all the hidden (relative to the concrete mind) content of the psychic nature comes out onto the periphery. That is wholesome! We must have a washday or a housecleaning. How do we do it? We hang it all out, or we take the rugs out and beat them; 49
we scrub and use disinfectant, and we clean it all up inside. Then, scripturally speaking, the inside of the cup is just as clean as the outside. We clean the inside of the cup as well as the outside. The Brother of the Third Degree has to do that. Why? Because the moment he steps out of his body (and he is going to learn how to do that), or when death comes and he is out of his body, then everything within his consciousness is out on the periphery, and “anyone who runs may read.” Think of this for a minute. If you think this through you will say, “Let’s get it out! Let’s have that day of washing the dirty linen. I don’t want to harbor it.” Because the moment you are out, in projection (consciously or otherwise), or after death, the whole content is there on the periphery, and it is like an illuminated billboard. Everyone can see it. Years ago, we used to call the ‘physical body’ the ‘foxhole’, a term used in World War II. We used to say of a person (that is, his psyche), when he is in the foxhole he can decorate it. He can powder and paint it, cut its hair, trim its whiskers, and make it look nice. But behind his decoration, in his foxhole, he sort of hides out from himself and from everyone else. In objective identification he can safely do that. But at the third degree state one is leaving objective identification and becoming acquainted with his psyche. He is getting out of his foxhole. He does not have to hide behind it. The content is out and he knows it, and so does everyone else who is out of objective identification. In fact, many in objective identification are getting sensitive; they are beginning to see and particularly to smell. So, one of the particular jobs, work to be done, by the Brother of the Third Degree, is to clean up the content of his psyche so that he does 50
One who is ready for the third degree is leaving behind objective identification identification and turning the consciousness to learning the next level. He is ready to live in the psychic world. He learns it by personal conscious experience in it. He must learn to function in it as if he did not have a body, as he will be between death and birth. He will learn how to function without his physical body. Now he must learn how to conquer and control his psyche. That means he must control all desires, all emotions, and stand like a rock with determination. He must go beyond that and control the psychic forces which motivate desires and emotions, and he must control those forces so that he can organize them and direct them into creative, constructive work. That is the work of the Brother of the Third Degree. He cannot do it mentally, in lower manas. He can think about it, study about it, etc., but he cannot do it mentally. He cannot do it verbalistically. He has to do it actually. That is, he has to learn to function as he learns to control it. There are two things he must learn to do to facilitate this. First, he must learn to “build a boat” before he goes out and experiences the psychic world. To build this boat he must bring his forces up to the heart center and above. Notice that I said above. That is very significant. Years ago when I used to train students to go out, I used to say be sure your forces are up to the heart center, because if you go out with your forces below the heart center you will go out on the lower psychic world. There is no Brother of the Third Degree strong enough to withstand the obsessional unmentionables that inhabit the lower psychic world. One from a higher degree can descend into those realms if he is strong enough and can get back out of 52
hell, but not a Brother of the Third Degree. Today we find that the evil influences released in the world in this transition period have reached the heart center level and you cannot trust the heart center any more because evil forces are even on the heart level. They will get you through the heart and wreck you. So now we say get your forces to the heart center and above. That is the first part of “building the boat”—making sure the forces are high in the north half before you go out. Here is the other part: Build up faith and confidence. This is simple, elementary; but there are students who have been in our School for years and have no faith in guardian angels. Believe me, those guardian angels are just as real as you are; they are real beings, real people. I know many of them. Have faith and confidence in the guardian angels; have faith and confidence in the protective forces, in the higher ones, and if you are a good g ood orthodox religionist, religionist, have faith in God. But whatever you do, please have faith and confidence, such faith and confidence that nothing can happen to you. “A thousand shall fall at thy side . . .” Have faith. Believe, as a beginning of faith; build it, build faith to the point that you can say with Job, “Even though thou slayest me,” I will have faith that it is the best thing for a higher purpose. I am trying to establish your confidence in a supporting higher influence. Build that confidence and faith and you are “in the boat.” Lose your faith and confidence and your forces go down to the dogs. Build your faith and confidence that nothing can happen; or, if something does happen, it is for the best. You will discover that if you look for the best, you will find the greatest benefactor. Then you are so happy at what you get out of each situation that you cannot react. That 53
which on the objective level might look like a catastrophe may be a blessing in disguise. Please have a little faith and you will see that all events are your benefactors. They are teaching you something and you can make it positive instead of going down under the negative. Bless your misfortunes. Now imagine you are in your boat. How are you going to learn the psychic world? You are going to go out in the boat and learn it. You can concentrate upon it and do it. I am talking to the Brother of the Third Degree, or one getting to that point. Such a one can learn to leave his body consciously for the purpose of learning the psychic world. It is unwise to do so before this state. There are a few things he must do as he becomes acquainted with the psychic world. First, he must mentally prepare himself for the shock of seeing his own body for the first time. It looks like a corpse. Many become frightened at this point and go back to the body. Also, as a rule, one is horizontal when he gets out. He must mentally think his feet down. He does not ‘put’ them down, he must see them down, mentally, then they will be down and he will feel all right. Then he must proceed with caution at first, staying in his room and learning to overcome the old aristotelian habit of going around ‘things’ and ‘objects’. He must see himself where he wants to go, then he will be there. Later, if he wants to go to someone, he sees himself going to the one he wishes to contact. Then he will just go there, because the substance of his psychic body is so much finer than the substance of material ‘things’ that going through things is just like throwing sand through coarse mesh chicken wire. The interstices, the spaces between the units of energy of 54
material objects, are so much farther apart than in the finer substances of the psychic body that it passes right through as if the material ‘object’ was not there. If one has reached this state, he must practice. He must concentrate, keeping possession of himself, seeing himself doing whatever he wants to do, and he will do it right now. That is the way we are all functioning in the psychic world, but we do not bring back the memory of it. One more point, because it is a shock to get over. One sees his loved ones the same as in the physical body, only they are more beautiful. If the inside of the cup is clean, they are radiant. However, the one functioning psychically can seldom attract the attention of the one he is contacting. It is an exception that one will stop what he is doing and say, “I felt the presence of someone,” and he may be about to name the person contacting him. If you have that experience of sensing someone’s presence, it may be that someone is trying to tell you something, to visit with you in order to put something over to you, etc. Do not allow your objective identification to obscure such finer sensibilities and responsiveness. Stop and pay attention to it. The Brother of the Third Degree learns the psychic world just as he has learned the ‘objective’ world; he must control it. The third degree is a very important one because at this state of development one is getting ready for something beyond the psychic world.
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CHAPTER 5 Comments on Savitri Aurobindo continues his description of the beginning of a new mahamanvantara in this passage. I will describe the meaning later, but I have a few more comments about our last reading.
A s in a dark beginning of all things, A mute featureless semblance of the U nknown Repeating for ever the unconscious act, Prolonging for ever the unseeing will, Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force W hose moved creative slumber ki ndles the suns A nd carr ies our l ives in its somnambulist whirl. A thwart the vain enormous trance of Space, I ts formless stupor without mind or life, A shadow spinning through a soulless V oid, T hrown back once more into unthinki ng dreams, Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs Forgetful of her spirit and her fate. T he impassive ski es were neutral, empty, still. T hen something in the inscrutable darkness stirred; A nameless movement, an unt hought I dea I nsistent, dissati sfied, without an aim, Something that wished but knew not how to be, T eased the I nconscient to wake I gnorance. “... to wake Ignorance.” This is a description of that which we name the triad Beyond Name and Form, and which we also label the Power-tobe-conscious. Those labels belong to us. It remains forever still, unmoved, and unmoving, the unmoving stillness which moves all things by reason that it is still. Remember the analogy of the magnet under the plate of glass. The magnet is still, unmoved, unmoving, but it sets up tremendous activity in the iron fillings poured onto the glass. That is a crude analogy, but it illustrates the force, the power, of stillness. Watch for that power as you go along month by month and year by year. Those who are running around do not accomplish very much; but the one who is still, contemplative, is a center of tremendous activity.
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It is this unnamed Power which moves the negative, the Mother. (We say the Mother Principle, the Mother Substance.) The process is so gradual that it seems it is forever accomplishing the creative process to those of us functioning in time and trying to evaluate that which is in eternity. Remember the referent for the word eternity—not endless time, but the absence of time—no time at all. Eternal now is the way to describe the referent for the word eternity. It has no future; it has no past; just eternal now. But we who function in time, the movement, trying to evaluate that which is beyond time, out of time, think it is forever. We read and study about the long evolutionary process—just one period in the evolutionary process is 150 million years—and we think, “Gracious alive, 150 million years! And that is just one period in a long, long, aeonian evolutionary process!” But to that which is out of time, beyond time, in that eternal stillness, there is no 150 million years. I remember my teacher trying to put this same point over to me, and he said, “Between the close of one cosmic creative process and the beginning of another, it is a blink of the eyes—close them and open them—billions of years in time, but to that which is out of time, beyond time, it is like a wink.” You have to catch the idea of no time as a yardstick with which to measure; therefore, what difference does it make between one second and one billion years in time? None at all; none whatever. But it seems forever. There is a stirring caused by “an unthought idea.” We repeat that process. No matter what we do or contemplate doing, it begins with an idea. Let us say you are planning to build a house. You do not just start right out and build a house. The first thing is the idea. Then you begin to act in accordance with that idea. So it is with everything. Even the cosmic creative process begins with idea—the unthought idea—and organization begins. And at last there is an awakening in the substance. But it is not an awakening to wisdom. It is an awakening in ignorance. Then follows the long process of evolving, expanding out of ignorance; but ignorance had to awaken first. This is the inconscient state—like the functions, the processes, that are going on right now in the psychic world, beneath the awareness of our mentality. We are ignorant of the activity that is going on in the individualizing process in Mind substance because it is beneath the level of objective consciousness, but it is going on. There is a high degree of activity of which we are ignorant, and the activity is the awakening of ignorance. That which is not yet consciously conscious is the awakening of ignorance.
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When Savitri was first published, scholars who are accustomed to reading the Vedas, the Upanishads, and recondite philosophies found the first part of it extremely difficult. That is why I am taking time to delineate it, explain it, until you catch the background that is being described. It is my humble opinion that this is the greatest epic ever given. If you will pardon the little pat on the shoulder, I pride myself in being well read, particularly in philosophy, and I have never encountered anything in all the pre-Christian Gnosis, in all the wisdom of Egypt, of Chaldea and Greece, from Heraclites and Pythagoras to Plato, or anything of modern philosophies, that can touch the level from which Savitri was given.
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Lesson 5
In concluding the thought on the Brother of the Third Degree, I am painfully conscious that I am leaving out more than I can put in. I can only paint with a broad brush, and the multiplicity of fine detail is left for your awareness, intuition, and experience. A few lessons back I said that there are many processes going on simultaneously that cannot be described simultaneously. Now we take up one of those processes that is active and is going on together with all that has been described up to this point. I have reference to what we call the purificatory period on the path. Prior to reaching this state in the initiatory process one seldom, if ever, has any realization that a purificatory process is necessary. But when the third degree is reached, there are many glimmers, glimpses, like sheet lightning on a summer evening, there are many flashes of insight. By and by the Brother of the Third Degree begins to understand those flashes, rifts in the cloud of ignorance, and in that seeing he begins to apprehend the beauty and purity of the heaven world state, the clarity and the purity of the Christ 59
consciousness, the coming of the Christos. Not until he begins to apprehend that Mind level state does it dawn upon him how unclean, how impure he is. How in the world would one ever know the impurity? Mentally, in his private world he might say, “I am a good citizen, I am honest, I pay my bills, I try to be square with everyone, I do not steal and I don’t deceive anyone.” He has pride in his honor, his reputation, and all that sort of thing. In all of that, what is there to be purified? It is the lower psychic nature with its animal influences, propensities, and qualities, the motivating forces of generation, which are more animal than human. It is that which has been cultivated in what he has heretofore called normal and natural, the remnants and the holdovers of what has heretofore been cultivated and accumulated. If we are the least bit negative to the race psyche or to others we unconsciously acquire lots of animalized influences, forces, gunas, in addition to cultivating them. Remember, we are talking about what occurs when one reaches the third degree in the initiatory process. If one has passed through the second degree he is awakening psychically, but mentally he does not know what is going on in his psychic world. Or if he is a brother of the first degree and has made his first contact that quickened him, or particularly if he belongs to the race mind and the crowd, there is no need or requirement to undergo a process of purification. Let him be an animal all he wants to be— nobody cares—I do not think he cares. He can throw his weight around, be sort of proud that he is a good animal. Honor it, respect it, “Sure, you are a good animal.” Do not ever tell him that there is a purificatory process ahead of him because he is not concerned with it and he should not attempt it. If he 60
did, he would be attempting something that is beyond his state, and he could not live up to it if he wanted to. If he tried, he would have to put in a tremendous amount of mental effort to repress the animal propensities. And if he repressed his animal propensities it would be like screwing the safety valve down tight on a boiler. You know what would happen to the boiler! There are many who get mentally self-righteous or spiritually ambitious and say, “No, I am not going to live like an animal.” They repress their animal propensities and develop all sorts of neurotic outlets and substituted and compensatory forms of expression. They may have nervous or mental breakdowns, whereas they should be good animals. See that? If you are a dog, be a good dog. But one who has reached the third degree in the evolutionary process, who has gradually expanded the consciousness and developed out of that, is faced with something that is inescapable. He must purify his vehicles. He must purify the temple in preparation for the coming of the Christ, the coming of the Light. That Greater Light, that Greater Power, that Fire (because that is the Fire), cannot come into an unpurified state of consciousness. It cannot come into unpurified vehicles—the higher psyche, the lower psyche, and the configuration. It would be disastrous to awaken that fire and bring it in when the vehicles have not been sufficiently purified. That is why the Brother of the Third Degree must gather all of the forces of the five centers pertaining to the psyche and bring them up to the highest level of the psychic nature. We call this the Garden of the Gods, the Garden of Aaru. Bringing up of the psychic forces out of generation is the coming out of Egyptian 61
bondage into the Promised Land. (That is a great analogy, or allegory, in our Christian Bible.) In the New Testament, this raising of the creative forces of the psyche from the lower phases of generation, which are not much different from animal biological urges, is represented as John the Baptist, who “goeth ahead and prepareth the way….” “I baptize thee with water,” said John (the symbol for the psychic world), “but there is one coming after me who will baptize thee with fire and the spirit.” The Christos will come, and that must follow the purificatory process, the work of John the Baptist. There are several divisions of the work of purification of the vehicles. First the higher psychic level must be purified. By what is the higher psyche characterized? Love, over and above everything else. Love is characterized by an impelling urge to give. I have said this so many times that I get a little embarrassed in myself by such repetition, but it is very necessary to repeat. When we use the word love we have as a referent a motivating force to give. Contrast that with desire, a motivating force to get, and you have the difference. Love, the force, is analogous to death. When you love you die to yourself. If you have never experienced that motivating power, you have no referent; but when you do experience it you will find that love demands self-surrender, a giving up, a dying. The personality begins to die when you begin to love. The word love is so often used, and terribly misused, to conceal and camouflage desire, “I want, I want, I want to get something.” Does anyone say, “Come on, I just want you”? Turn on the radio and you hear in song after song, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” Why, they do not mean anything of the kind! They mean I want you—the quicker the better. But 62
remember this: when you are really in love you surrender, you give and give and give. So by what is that higher psyche characterized? Above all things, by love. You will fall in love, and you will want to give—to give everything. And you never think, “What am I going to get out of it?” It never dawns on you that you are going to get something. You just feel so overflowing, full of joy and happiness to give. Period. You do not go beyond that. And when you are in love with truth and light and wisdom, then you do surrender and give all to it. Kindness, sympathy, and helpfulness also characterize the higher psyche. All that we value in human relationships— warm, true friendship—such that when you are in need of help there is help. That is the higher psyche. Then how and why does that need purification for the coming of the Christ? You may be doing all of that with the consciousness that you are doing it—not that you are going to get something out of it, but that you are doing it—egoic satisfaction in the doing, personalization of those activities that we call the higher psyche. You might even be a little proud, have some vainglory and some selfishness about it. There is where the need for purification comes. You must realize that the motivating force of love is not something that originates in yourself. It is a higher level of influence in the overall force stemming from the heights that you have come into. You are being motivated by a higher influence. Nothing originates within you; therefore, the pride and egoic satisfaction and the personalization of it must be given up and surrendered in the realization that it is a higher influence coming in to which you are surrendering. You are becoming a channel, an instrument, through which that higher influence can work. In that 63
recognition the higher psyche becomes free from the little, personal self. It becomes free and clear, very lovely and very beautiful. Not until that loveliness, loveliness, that beauty of the higher psyche, has become established does the Brother of the Third Degree realize what a job has to be done on his lower psyche. In that beauty and loveliness of the purification of the higher psyche two things happen. On the one side, he reaches above and makes more contact with those on the lowest levels of Light’s Regions, the Mind level, the power and influence of the Christ state. On the other is the purification of his lower psyche. There is purpose in this, because the Brother of the Third Degree cannot muster the strength to cope with the influence of the lower psyche by himself. One has to be in the battle, right up against it, to realize how terribly tenacious these animalized (mostly sexual) influences can be. Those who have been through the battle know what a job it is. The Brother of the Third Degree does not have the power or the strength to cope with those influences unless he has reached up and gotten hold of a superior, higher, power. It is in preparation for this purificatory period on the path that long before we reach it we begin to cultivate, “In the Name of the Father, in the Name of the Mother, in the Name of the Son, may the Blessed Ones lead us from darkness into Light.” We begin to invoke it, we pray for strength. It is extremely necessary to cultivate the practice of looking to a higher level for power, for strength, because when one is up against the conflict between higher psyche and lower psyche, he has to call upon all the strength that he can obtain. He needs lots of it. 64
At this state, for the first time, he becomes an Arjuna and enters the fields of Kurukshetra, as described in that great epic, the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita has reference to where the lines are drawn, the lineup, and there is a showdown, with no quarter given. The forces of the lower psychic world line up against you, within your members, and all the forces of your higher psyche, and what you can reach up and obtain from higher ones and higher levels constitute another lineup. The dichotomy becomes sharp. You can go through your AUM chanting and your meditation work, you can listen to the sound currents until they roar in you like a Niagara, and at the same time that you are in all that loveliness and beauty on the higher psyche the devils of the lower psyche are raising old Ned with you. They are kicking up everything to prevent your getting more light and more fire. They are pulling you down, trying to dissuade you against higher development. There is a sharp, definite lineup between the forces of darkness and the forces of Light within you. That dichotomy, that division, is distinct. You do not have to guess about it. Many students reaching this state have said, “How can it be that I can sit in meditation and I lift my forces and I hear the sound currents and it is just wonderful and beautiful, and here on the lower level of of my nature terrific activity is going on at the same time? How can I lift my forces with this going on? I thought my forces were motivating these things.” Not at all! You can lift your forces into the higher psyche and beyond, but you have not purified the temple of those entities that have occupied it and are still occupying it. They are going to fight you and see who is going to win and complete the occupation of the temple. That is the field of Kurukshetra referred to in the Bhagavad 65
Gita, and the Brother of the Third Degree becomes Arjuna. When he sees those things that he has loved, that he has cultivated, enjoyed, has really been proud of his manhood in the enjoyment of them, etc., he says, “Oh, I am not going to fight them.” He gets weak. But the higher power, Krishna, the Christ, tells him he must fight and win the battle.
The Egyptians understood this so well that they labeled the higher psyche the north half, and they labeled the lower psyche and all of the entities that have to be cleared out the south half. Egyptologists are mystified to this day as to why, when a new pharaoh was crowned his first act was to organize all the armies and march to the border of the south half. There other armies were organized for battle, and a tremendous sham battle went on between the north half and the south half. Why? That was a symbolical representation of The Battle, the battle on the plains of Kurukshetra, we would say. Without exception, every one of the denizens, the entities, the influences, the forces of the south half has to be completely expurgated so that the Power can descend to the lower levels and occupy the temple. When that battle has gone on successfully, relatively speaking, you begin to get the upper hand of all those entities. They are not taking you for a ride every time they want to ride. You have a little rein on them. There is one thing you can depend on: if you do not control them, they are going to control you. They will run you to complete exhaustion. Do not make the mistake of thinking that this control is on your objective mental level. When that battle is pretty pretty well successful, successful, by no means completed, but you have a good hold of it and you are exercising exercising 66
control to a considerable degree, you are exercising control in your higher psyche. In your private world you exercise no control at all. In the mentalized private world one is busy alibiing, trying to justify, and manufacturing reasons for all by which he is motivated. Control is developed by building up the superior force drawn from contacts with Light’s Regions that controls the entities of the lower psyche. Get the difference between the objective manifold of values and control by a superior force. Mental control is repression. Control by the forces of Light leads to liberation. When the battle has gone on pretty well successfully by reason of the fact that the higher forces have built up, then comes in the third and last phase of the purificatory process. The battle between the higher psyche and the lower psyche is not yet finished. It is still going on when the third phase in the purificatory process begins. The quality of flesh in the physiological organism, the quality of the living matter of which the physiological organism is constituted, must be changed. The quality of matter has a wide range, from pure animalized tissue to a metamorphosis into Light. There are two extremes, from the dark, heavy, tamasic qualities, to high, beautiful, sattvic qualities, of the flesh itself. The flesh must be remetamorphosed, because so long as the quality of animal propensities remains in the flesh, the body cannot entertain the higher Fire, the higher Light of the Christ. It has to undergo purification. Here is the only point in the entire process of self development that the problem of diet enters in. It is true that if we eat animal flesh we are going to partake of the animal quality of that flesh. Handle this carefully. I am not advocating abstinence from meat eating for the first or second degree initiates, let alone the many. But for the third degree initiate, a 67
dietary regimen becomes necessary at this particular point in his ongoing. The battle must go on until the physiological organism itself has been remetamorphosed into higher quality of flesh, of living matter. However, one at this stage in his development must take care not to become over-sensitive. He must regulate himself according to the environmental influences in which he is living. In order to preserve his body to carry on his work, he may at times need to eat meat, drink wine, etc. He still must live in this world, and he cannot refine his vehicles until they become strong; so he has to toughen himself to withstand grosser frequencies. Do not fight the things that have to be expurgated. Work on this principle, which is the most important principle I can give you: your forces will flow, channel themselves, in the direction you sustain by thought and focus of attention . The only way the lower qualities of the animal nature can be expurgated is by building up higher light, higher force, higher-vibrating influences. Your forces will channel in the direction sustained by your thought and attention. Sustain your attention to the Light, the Christ, the Mind substance. Learn to lift your forces to the head centers. Listen to the sound currents when they come. Sustain attention to that which you want until you bring it in. Only by that higher power can they be expurgated. Do not turn and fight. Give as little recognition to the lower forces and entities as possible, because you channel your forces into them if you fight them. Bring in the higher force and it will expurgate the other. You have to build up the higher power in order to cope with the forces of the south half. You will be thrown down over and over again if you try to fight. The Christ will purify his own 68
temple with a whip. He will lash them out, down to the quality of the flesh. So learn how to fight the lower by building up the higher. That is the work to be done by the Brother of the Third Degree.
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CHAPTER 6 Comments on Savitri Think of the Mother as the Negative Substance of the whole universe. Think of light and how light is converted into energy (for a referent for energy, think of electricity), and energy is converted into living matter. Between energy and living matter there are many gradations: etheric substance, teloplasm, ectoplasm, protoplasm, cytoplasm, and finally, living matter of which cellular structures are composed. Now allow your mind to expand: light, energy, etheric substance, through the gradations to protoplasm and living matter—all of that is negative, the substance, the Mother. It is a wonderful thought to work your consciousness into, because the Mother clothes the Power-to-beconscious. On the more objective level, the Mother provides everything that we eat, wear or use. Try to find one exception! Everything you eat, wear, or use is matter, mater, Mother. But ‘in’, ‘behind’ it, there is a Power that fecundates, that motivates, that activates the Mother, and the Mother brings forth according to the state in which the Power is conscious. So we say the Power-to-be-conscious is emerging, little by little, through a long, long (to us, long) aeonian process, emerging out of mater, like the life germ in an ovum, until it finally pips its shell, emerges. The Power-to-be-conscious in you and in me is struggling to pip its shell and be Self-aware. Self-aware—that is the process which is infinitely repeated, from the galaxy to the atom. Everywhere you look, see it. Isn’t it the life germ in the seed? Plant a seed without a life germ; it will decay. Plant a seed with a life germ; is it not the Power in the life germ that unfolds and configurates the substance and makes the tree, flower, or vegetable? It is going on all the time in everything; not only in you and me, in everything. But in this great epic poem, Aurobindo describes it on the cosmic scale; the dawn of a new creation, the dawn of a new creative process. The first little quiver of the awakening of the Power in the Mother is now described.
A throe that came and left a quivering trace Gave room for an old ti red want unfi lled … From cycle to cycle in the palingenetic process called reincarnation, in the first seven years in the life of a child, before the cortex is developed and obscures the finer sensibilities, there is a memory, faint or strong
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according to the degree of development of the Power-to-be-conscious. It may be like a haunting memory of past existences, “I’ve been here before; this is familiar.” We can also expand that beyond the child. Years ago I specialized in vocational counseling and I would go back in the youth’s life between the ages of first memory (about two or three years old), the first thing they could remember, up to seven years, and I would say, “What did you want to do; what did you dream about doing; what did you pretend doing?” Look for memory of the past, because every time the reincarnating principle, the individualizing Self on Mind level, comes back again into earth life, it always comes back with the clear intention of doing some one thing, in order to develop the weakest link in the chain. That is, the weakest point in their development is that which they must pursue to strengthen and develop and round out. In this way I would elicit memory of the past. I am using this as an analogy to explain this one line, “Gave room for an old tired want unfilled”; that is, it wants to be conscious. Carry the analogy of the memory of past lives of the child up to the level of a cosmic process. From mahamanvantara to mahamanvantara (remember, that means a great universal galactic level creative process) the first admonition is “Let there be Light.” Light comes first. Now watch. In the Power-to-be-conscious buried in the Mother Substance, the darkness, there is a memory of the past mahamanvantara. That Power is pure intelligence, even though it is buried in the darkness before the Mother has been stirred into activity and the activity is configurated into worlds, suns, stars, satellites and planets. There is a memory there. That memory is referred to when that first quivering stirring came into the darkness, in the Mother. And it “gave room for an old tired want unfilled”; that is, it wants to be conscious. Beginners have great trouble with this, because they say, “The Power wants to be conscious?” Yes, because when it is completely conscious of itself—that means absolutely full consciousness, it is unconscious that it is conscious. Let us use analogy. If there is anything about you which is completely in your consciousness you are unconscious of it. Are you conscious of the hair on your head? No, because that is completely in your consciousness. Once that of which you become completely conscious gets into your consciousness, you are unconscious of it. I am tempted to play upon this for a little bit, because many serious mistakes are made because of it. When a person or a condition is coming into your consciousness it is on the periphery of your psychic field and you are very conscious of it. When it gets in, really gets into the psychic
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nature, you are unconscious of it until you drive it back on the periphery again. Then you become very conscious of it again. That of which you are fully conscious you are unconscious of. One mistake is this. In my counseling activities I have heard many stories. And among the many stories that I have heard and worked with, one goes like this: I will never forget when I met my wife. I had rosy colored glasses on—everything was wonderful. We got married, and we grew together. But then, someone else came along. I couldn't keep my eyes straight. I fell for that other one and a triangle developed. I said, “When you and your wife grew completely together you became unconscious of her, and because of your mental, objective identification, you took it for granted that that was all you. She is half of your relationship now, remember, all this time, but you became unconscious that she was half of the relationship. You thought it was all you, and that you were independent, free to look elsewhere. And a serious mistake resulted. No use to expound on that too much, is there. That unconscious egotism of man, that thinks he is it—and he is only fifty percent. But when they grow together they become unconscious of each other. They don't have to talk very much. They just look and grunt or point, and each understands the other.” I use these very familiar things as my method. This is my psychology, my method of teaching that which is on a more recondite level. Then we can get hold of it. So there is this “want unfilled” that wants to be conscious. Why? Because it is coming out of absolute consciousness of itself, therefore it is unconscious. It has to have the other—other than itself—in order to be conscious of itself.
A throe that came and left a quivering trace Gave room for an old ti red want unfi lled A t peace in its subconscient moonless cave.... I am tempted to go into that word “moonless,” the lunar cycle of development, “At peace in its subconscient moonless cave....”
T o raise its head and look f or absent light, Straini ng closed eyes of vanished memory, Like one who searches for a bygone self
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A nd only meets the corpse of his desire. . . .
***** Lesson 6
We are now ready to consider the fourth degree of initiation. I will make it as plain as I can so that you will have at least some understanding of what the fourth degree of initiation means. There are several preliminary points to describe before we work ourselves into the process itself. Among these points concerning the fourth degree is a change in values. One at this state undergoes a complete reorientation and change in values. He is not moral. Do not be alarmed. He is not immoral. He is amoral. That means neither moral nor immoral. Such a one has transvalued values; he has a higher standard of values than moral values or immoral values. That does not apply to anyone below the fourth degree of initiation, but it is extremely pertinent at the fourth degree state. At the fourth degree of initiation there is a complete change in the space-time way of functioning. Prior to the fourth degree, (the third, the second, the first, the many) consciousness functions in space and time. Note the word functions. Not the way one thinks, but the way one actually functions, whether he is conscious of the way he functions or not. Space, prior to the fourth degree, is objective due to aristotelian, objective identification. And time is only a motion sensation created by movement upon the objective space. Clocks and watches are geared to the movement of the earth and planes relative to the sidereal fixed stars. Movement, motion sensation, creates the concept of time. Do not think that this is some high, recondite, and impractical point in the teaching. You will find 74
that this is intensely applicable to yourself and your ongoing. Let us discuss what constitutes space before we get into the movement of that which we call time. First, configurations of energy systems are referred to as ‘things’ and ‘objects’ because one in objective identification only registers the peripheral outline of rapidly moving units of energy. The units of energy are moving so rapidly one only gets an outline picture of the peripheral movement, and he calls that a ‘thing’, an ‘object’. One in this state of objective identification has to have two or more ‘objects’ in order to form a concept of space. These ‘objects’ are called points of reference. If, in imagination, one could cast himself out where he has no points of reference—no sun, no stars, no moon, no planet, no ‘thing’, no ‘object’—there is no possible way that one could formulate a concept of space. If those points of reference are gone it is impossible to conceive of aristotelian, objective space. Any movement within that frame of reference creates the concept of time. (Frame of reference: ‘things’ or ‘objects’ looking a certain distance apart, etc.) Those in objective identification live in that kind of space and that kind of time. They live in space and time. The following illustration will show what I mean. If one takes a trip, he travels from here (a point of reference) to there (another point of reference). He traverses the road section by section, whether it is measured in miles or kilometers or what have you. Traversing section by section gives him the motion sensation of time. We say two hours, three hours, according to the rate of motion. But now, go up in an airplane where the point called here and the point called there can be seen simultaneously, in one act of 75
consciousness. That is not difficult. One can do that in an airplane. He can look down and see both points with one look—no motion, no time. He sees both points—now. When the fourth degree of initiation is reached, all objective identification has been transcended. One can still put his mind or thought on the old kind of space and the old kind of time—motion within that old space. One can mentally do it and get by well enough. He can pretend to function like those who are limited to that kind of space and time, but in consciousness he does not function anymore in objective space, the apparent distance between two or more ‘objects’. In consciousness he no longer functions in that kind of time. A complete change has taken place. There is a new kind of space and time in which he functions; he links them together. He no longer refers to space and time, he says space-time. Time becomes a fourth coordinate of his frame of reference. Before the fourth degree of initiation one has three coordinates, three dimensions, to his frame of reference: up and down, back and fourth, length or breadth; or call it altitude, longitude, and latitude. At the fourth initiation one adds a fourth coordinate. Fourth initiation and fourth coordinate are both synonyms for the state in which the consciousness functions. In imagination, allow a vertical line to cross a horizontal line and then put a third line through the crossing point at right angles to them both. There are the three coordinates in which one can locate anything, even himself. Now add the fourth coordinate. It functions at right angles to the three preceding coordinates. Here is how it works. In the old aristotelian-identification sense of time, time is composed of a series of points. (Call these points 76
seconds, minutes, hours, it makes no difference.) Consider each one of these points of time as separate, so that you can take one point of time and say, “That is now.” All points of time which have been but are not now we will call the past; all points which are not now but are going to be we will call future. Those in objective identification will say that the future is flowing past a point called now into the past. Ask anyone in objective identification and he will say that is correct: all points of time that are not now but are going to be are the future, and all the points of time that have been but are not now are the past. The points of time seem to flow past one point called now, the present. Mentally those in objective identification live in the past, present, and future. Does that sound reasonable, logical? All right. Let a given point represent the sharpest razor edge imaginable. At what infinitesimal fractional part of a second are we going to say now? Cut it down to thousandths, millionths, billionths of a second. Where is that point? Gone— there is no such point. What a delusion! One who has reached the fourth degree does not see these points of time as past, present, or future anymore. He sees time spatially. All is now. The past is right now to him; the future, to a certain extent that I will explain, is right now; as points of time—past, present, and future—they disappear. He no longer functions that way. So much for time. Hold this in mind while we consider space. The fourth degree initiate no longer functions in the objective sense of space because time is now a fourth coordinate that is added to his three spatial coordinates. That has given him a different space in which to function. To him three-dimensional space has disappeared; but there is another space in which he 77
functions, a space determined by the sphere describing his state of consciousness. Let us use analogy to describe that space. When a little child is growing up, the sphere in which his consciousness functions can be described by his home, his bed, his toys, his yard. He knows nothing yet about the outside world. Even though his parents take him in a car and go somewhere, the child does not register the outside world. He registers just his little world. That little world in which the child functions is the sphere, the space, in which consciousness operates. The more limited the sphere, the space, in which consciousness operates, the more time there is to the child. (Notice, I used that word space as a synonym for the word sphere, or world, in which the child’s consciousness operates.) As he grows up, the child feels he has a long, long time. He thinks he will never grow up. He is so anxious to get grown up that he will put on daddy’s hat or big coat, or mother’s long clothes, etc., and play at being grown up. We are all so anxious to grow up. It has been accurately calculated that the years between the ages of seven and fourteen in the life of a child are equal to twenty-five years in the life of an adult. That is, the duration is longer for the same number of years. Seven years to an adult seems like twenty-five years to the child (speaking generally and in the average). What makes the difference? Little by little the sphere, the space in which the consciousness of the child functions, expands. He learns more of the world outside of his own yard. Gradually, as he grows up, he learns more of the world outside of his own neighborhood or town. As he continues to grow, his sphere expands. And the more that the sphere in which consciousness functions expands, the less time. So let us say that the child grows up and becomes a pilot. He takes off from, say, Ft. Worth, Texas, and goes to 78
Australia or Tokyo, etc., and back. Now watch. Even this big earth (to those of us who are grounded) becomes a sphere in which his consciousness functions. The larger the sphere, space, in which consciousness functions, the less time. That is our analogy. Now let us apply the analogy. The many have a limited sphere, space, in which consciousness functions. It is limited to ‘things’ and ‘objects’, the objective state of identification. That sphere, space, becomes expanded at the first degree of initiation. The first degree initiate, as we have seen, has made a contact with the next higher world, the psychic world. Through the second, and particularly the third initiation, he has entered the psychic world and explored it until he understands that world just as one limited to sense functioning, objective identification, has learned the objective world. He has added a new world. It is a complete world, a larger sphere than the planet as a sphere. When one has finished the third degree of initiation in preparation for the fourth, he is as familiar with the psychic world as one limited to objective identification and the ‘physical sense’ way of functioning is familiar with the ‘objective’ world. He has added a whole tremendously larger sphere to the sphere that he had before. His sphere has expanded and his time has become short. As in the analogy, he has grown up. He is not a child now. He functions in a larger sphere; therefore, his time is shorter. He has expanded the points of time into a “now sense.” He has converted the sense of time into space. There are gradual degrees of this conversion, because there are many points of time yet to be expanded. He is not fully grown yet, but from his sense of now, the present, he 79
has expanded the time into space. He functions in a larger sphere, a larger world, a larger space. From the third degree of initiation to the fourth he has added the psychic world to his former ‘objective’ world. That means the sphere in which he functions has become enormously enlarged. His space is greater now and his time sense is shorter. We grow by expanding the space, the sphere, in which consciousness functions. Here the sphere means the breadth, length, depth, height, and duration. The word space can be used as a synonym for the sphere in which consciousness functions. Another synonym for the word sphere is state, the state in which consciousness functions. Now we have three labels, three synonyms: sphere, state, space. So your space is the peripheral limit in which your consciousness functions. When we have that nailed down we can comprehend the change that takes place in time. That is a different kind of time than the motion sensation, the movement between ‘things’ and ‘objects’ or points of reference. Time becomes the action of a given space, state, sphere, upon a relatively higher space, state, sphere—the action of a lesser space upon a higher space—the action of one’s state upon a higher state he has not as yet reached. That action gives him a sense of time. So he has a different kind of time. Many will say to a fourth degree initiate, “How long does it take to get out of this objective identification and go through the degrees of exploration of the psychic world, get it behind you, and come out of it?” They are thinking in sidereal time, objective identification time, and no answer can be given, because it is a matter of duration. One state operating upon a higher state, higher space, in sidereal time might take, say, seven years; but that seven years 80
is equal to the same action, of a similar state upon a higher state, a similar space upon a higher space, that will take seven incarnations. The duration is the same. It sounds like a trick question that I give to students when I can get them up to this point of the new space and the new time (new-old space, new-old time; always has been, always will be, but it is new to them when they first come into it). I say, “Please describe to me why a dog that lives to be twelve years of age is older than a man who lives to the age of eighty.” I have given you the answer already. The dog lives in a lesser space, state. His action is faster upon a higher space, let us say the space of the state of consciousness of a man. His action is much more rapid, therefore time increases. The smaller the space, the greater the time; the larger the space, the less time, because of less action upon a higher space. So the state of consciousness of the dog has to compensate for what the man sees as space. Therefore his time is much more extensive, rapid, because a man at eighty has not had that same tempo, rapidity, of his space upon a higher space. There is less action upon a higher space at the man state; more action in the case of the dog. So the dog is older at twelve than a man at eighty. Remember in our description of time in the objective sense, we picked out one point of time and called it present, and the future took off flowing over a point called present into the past. Now I am going to try to describe how at the fourth degree of initiation the points of time in the future and the points of time in the past gradually merge together in the consciousness of the now. To the degree that consciousness has expanded into the points of time called the future, and simultaneously into the points of time called the past, in the objective sense, and can 81
perceive them in one act of consciousness, that constitutes duration, the duration of the now. At the fourth degree of initiation these points of time in the future and points of time in the past gradually merge together in the conscious of now. Duration is the fourth degree experience of time. All is now, and “time, time shall be no more.” Time has vanished into eternity. Eternity—not endless time; the absence of time is the referent for eternity. We grow out of time into eternity. After the fourth degree, we return, in the next turn of the palingenetic cycle, from eternity into time.
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CHAPTER 7 Comments on Savitri Instead of reading right through the epic story of the vast, illimitable cosmic process, I am selecting some passages suitable for the thought which is developed in the Seven Initiations. We come now to that part of the epic, Book One, Canto Four, which relates to the state we describe as the many, before the real awakening. We all have much experience of this.
A s one forgetting he searches for himself; A s if he had lost an inner light he seeks: A s a sojourner, lingering amid alien scenes H e journeys to a home he knows no more. H is own self’s truth he seeks who is the T ruth; H e is the Player who became the play, H e is the T hinker who became the thought; H e is the many who was the silent One. I n the symbol figures of the cosmic Force A nd in her livi ng and inanimate signs A nd in her complex tracery of events H e explores the ceaseless miracle of himself T ill the thousand fold enigma has been solved I n the single light of an all -witnessing Soul.
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Lesson 7 We now turn our attention to an overall description of the seven different degrees in fineness of forces that eventuate in the consciousness of the man as he treads the path, follows the evolutionary process. We are all in an evolutionary process. When we discover that there is a process and intelligently cooperate with it we change our label and call it the path of development, the path of attainment, and we 83
enter the path. I often say that the greatest boon that can happen to anyone in all his stream of incarnations is to find the path. And the next greatest boon is to stay on it after you have found it. Many wobble around and fall off after they get on it because it is hard going to stay on against all the temptations that drag you down and pull you off and dissuade you this way and that. It takes much intestinal fortitude—real, downright courage—to stay on it after you have found it. As one treads the path changes take place within the consciousness. These changes can be described as different degrees of fineness of the wavesfrequencies by which one is motivated. The longer waves and the less number of waves per unit of time are called lower or grosser frequency. The shorter waves and the greater number of waves per unit of time are called higher, finer frequencies. Let us call the division between a trough and a trough some unit of time—one second, or one minute, or one hour, or one micro-second. A wave is flowing, whether you call it from crest to crest or from trough to trough. The number of waves that will traverse in this moment of time, is called frequency.The waves from high tension electric wires are 3,000 miles long from crest to crest, or from trough to trough. By contrast, there are waves so short that they are only 10 -13 centimeters long. This is incomprehensibly small. If I were to write that figure out I would have to start at one end of the blackboard and I would be clear over to the other end with my zeros to write 10-13. There are known waves that are extremely short—beyond x-rays. They are called gamma rays. I am talking about known waves. Mental waves and Mind waves are finer yet;
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that is, a greater number of frequencies per unit of time. In every case, whether one is relatively younger or relatively older in the evolutionary process, as we tread the path we are motivated by wave-frequency registration. The younger the basic state of the individualizing Self, the broader the wave and the lesser number of frequencies per unit of time, the coarser, grosser are the frequencies by which we are motivated. If I wanted to quote the Bible, instead of saying “the wave-frequencies by which we are motivated,” I would say, “Naught of myself I do. The Father worketh hitherto and I work.” I am trying to emphasize that point that sooner or later in the evolutionary process we have to lay down all egotistical, egocentralized ideas that “I am doing this.” Little by little we must lie down and die, be good dogs, surrender. Sooner or later, little by little, “every knee shall bend and every tongue shall confess.” “God is all in all.” All in all does not make any allowance, not even for you, to stick to that egotistic notion—“I’m doing it.” In myself I have to practice daily, hourly. Someone wrote a hymn, “I need Thee every hour,” and then someone else wrote a hymn and said, “Moment by moment I need Thee, oh Lord.” Split second by split second you are motivated by a wave-frequency and it did not originate within your body or your nerves. You registered it. You arrested the frequency. Once at a dinner party I was told by an astute intellectual that every thought you think is a chemical action in your brain and every feeling that you have is due to glandular secretions, and it all originates within you. Then he said, “If I would take an axe and hit you over the head you would stop and that’s the end of 85
everything.” I did not argue with him, but it so happened that earlier in the evening the radio had been turned on and we had listened to a program. When he ran down, all I said was, “Take your axe and break up that radio. Now tell me there are no waves or frequencies here. That is all there is to it. Break up the instrument that registered and there are no more waves and frequencies to register.” That rocked him right back on his heels because his whole argument was destroyed just by my referring to the radio. We are just like that radio. Our brain cells, our finely developed and evolved mechanisms, register frequencies. And in our psychic side we register the qualities of feelings, desires and influences of others in the environment. In a like manner we can expand and lift our consciousness from a lower level to a higher level, just like the radio, we can tune in on higher broadcasting stations that will motivate and inspire us. Whenever I write a book, the first thing I do before sitting down with pencil and paper is to tune in. Sometimes I take off and just get away and do nothing for a week or two until I get tuned in. Then I go to my desk and I cannot write fast enough. It just pours, but I am not doing that. I tune in to the Higher Ones that are sending out the waves and frequencies on higher levels. We need to practice tuning in just as we practice anything else we do. Practice it until you get onto it; do not let this be just entertainment. Every day, practice until you become efficient. But my point is this: consciousness expands from a lesser to a higher state. It expands out of time into a higher space, which is representative of eternity, duration. When all past and all present are now, that is eternity. As consciousness expands, higher level waves-frequencies are contacted. We all begin with the animal level, motivated by 86
generative urges. We are not looking down on that state. We all begin there, and it is not much different from the animal. The only difference is that a man can rationalize it or talk about it. He can make sex the theme of his daily conversation, but functionally, he begins just the same as the animals, motivated by generative urges. That is only one aspect of the total man. Like an iceberg, the physiological form is only one-seventh of its total area above the surface. There is six-sevenths of every one of us that does not appear objectively—the psychic nature, the mental nature, and the Mind level, and beyond the Mind level the Reality, Light’s Regions. We evolve, expand, and gradually we contact finer frequencies, shorter waves. We pass through emotional thinking into higher manas. (The concrete mind and the higher manas were described at length in an earlier lesson.) We pass on through that into pure rationality, beyond mentation. Mentation belongs in the conceptual cortical level. Finally we reach the orientation of consciousness into the thousand-petalled lotus, which the Hindus call Sahasradala. We do not have a word in our English language for that, so we have to borrow one from the Sanskrit. In the process of finding and treading the path and developing ourselves, widening our space, our sphere, and contacting finer and higher waves and frequencies by which we are motivated, changes take place within each and every one of us. When that fact was given by the Higher Ones, the lesser ones were told, “If you do this within yourself you can shortcut the long evolutionary process. Instead of going through the palingenetic cycle over and over to gain
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just a little, if you will understand the process and work with it, you will accelerate your evolution.” This is one of the secrets of secrets. In times past you would have to go through all sorts of probationary tests. You would have had to work to prove yourself worthy before such teaching as this would be given to you, but because the process is going on so rapidly that humanity as a whole has to be instructed, it is given openly instead of being kept secret. The answer to all of the confusion and groping today is education. Get understanding, education. This is crucial. Unless this humanity wakes up and gets some understanding about the cosmic process in which it is integrated we could blunder into some major catastrophe that will set us back, not millions of years, but even further. A new creative process will have to begin all over again. Humanity as a whole must wake up and understand the forces by which it is motivated, because the more we understand them, the more we can control them. It is very important to understand that if we learn what takes place within our members, physiological, etheric, psychic, mental, spiritual, and Mind level, as the evolutionary process proceeds, and apply that process within ourselves, we will immeasurably advance and enhance the evolutionary process. The information is available and we need to use it. Let us summarize the ground that we have covered up to the fourth degree. We all begin in the many; we belong to the herd, to the crowd. We are integrated in the race mind, the race psyche, and we automatically repeat the forces and influences with which, or with whom, we form a rapport. When we form a rapport we are motivated by the content of the consciousness of the one or ones with whom the 88
rapport is formed: friends, the crowd you belong to, or the race psyche as a whole. That is why we call it “the many.” We all start in objective identification. First we exhaust experience in the private world. In this aristotelian state of objective identification we have mental values, mental me ntal codes, ambitions, ambitions, and ideals. We have all sorts of private-world hopes, wishes, and longings. We have a sense of possession of ‘things’ and ‘objects’ and money. (There is nothing wrong with money if a man can use it as a commodity, but focusing his values on it as the object and aim of his existence is not right. Not money, but the love of money, the attachment to it, is the root of much evil. So long as we are in an organized society society money has to be, until there is some other sort of organization of society established. As long as money is the medium of exchange in the structure of the society in which we are incarnated, use it, on its level, for its purpose. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. . . .” but do not stop there. Do not make it the object and end of living, of existence. After you have rendered unto Caesar the things that belong to Caesar, then go on with your development on your other levels and departments.) Finally, we exhaust experience in objectivity and we graduate. Then we take up other investigations, such as natural science. Everyone studies natural science. One cannot plant a garden or consider sanitation or hygiene without the study of natural science. We exhaust that experience, but in the process we make a contact that begins to stir the forces in the psyche. We register influences for which no objective reason can be given. That is the first degree of initiation, initiation, the th e first contact with a higher developed one, which stirs the forces in the psyche. 89
There are three degrees of exploring, learning, and developing control in the psychic world. These are a repetition of what we did in the process of becoming conscious in the objective self-conscious state. As we exhaust experience in the objective self-conscious state and go beyond it, we contact the higher waves and shorter frequencies of the psychic world. Then we go through three degrees of development in experiencing the psychic world. You say, “Why, I have never been psychic in my life.” Did you ever get angry, ‘hot and bothered’ over something? Did you ever get emotionally disturbed or become fired with enthusiasm and interest about something? Think of the years and years we spend desiring this, that, and the other ‘thing’. That all belongs to the psychic world. Eventually we exhaust experience in feelings and desirings. You would never n ever tell a young person not to fall in love. How many times have we all done it—fallen in love, and fallen out? We exhaust experience in love! You think you cannot? Oh yes, you can and you do. Perhaps you fell in love and you thought, “Ah, this is it, for eternity. No one ever loved like my love and me.” But here is a secret you must not tell. Sooner or later you are going to exhaust all love experiences, every one of them. Something Someth ing else might come in—you might turn intellectual—but it will not take you long to exhaust that experience because intellectualizing leads you right out into the desert where you are parched and dry and you y ou soon exhaust intellectual experience. During the first three degrees, after we have made a contact with a higher, finer wave-frequency that we call the first, second, and third degrees in 90
initiation, we go through a long, long process of exhausting experience in the psychic world. The psyche is the soul of the physiological organism just as the Mind Power, the Christos, is the soul of the psyche. And the Logos is the soul of all souls, even the Christos. It is the soul of the Christ, and it has a soul integrated in the One. With the exhausting of the last experience, or a little before, a new contact is made. A new quickening comes, a new awakening, the awakening to the Reality itself, itself, the fourth degree of initiation. initiation.
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CHAPTER 8 Comments on Savitri After the awakening comes consciousness focused in knowledge. Between the deep unconscious sleep and the awakening is the dance of Kali, where the Mother Principle exerts the predominating influence upon the awakening and emerging Power-to-be-conscious. I think a little further explanation will help us understand the reading. We emerge from deep unconscious sleep into a dream state, then gradually we awaken from the dream state into being fully awake. Similarly, the Positive Power is buried in the Mother, in deep unconsciousness. But in that unconsciousness it motivates and activates the Mother Substance, metamorphosing that Mother Substance from Light into energy, energy into etheric substance, etheric substance into living matter. Grasp that on a cosmic scale as a vast process, incomprehensible to our thought, and then divide that into three divisions: first, the deep unconsciousness on the part of the Power which is buried in matter, mater—no consciousness of itself. Then comes the awakening to the activity going on that we would call objective interests, psychic feelings, desirings, and lovings, and thinking about desirings, etc. The Power-to-beconscious becomes conscious of that activity, but to itself it is a dream preceding the awakening. Then comes the emergence out of all of that psychic activity into full consciousness of itself, independent of the Mother, but enlisting the Mother, after emergence therefrom, as a helpmate. The Mother becomes the Bride and the two represent the One, like a positive and negative pole; because from the molecule to the galaxy, there must be a positive and a negative pole or there is nothing. Treat all mental activity, all psychic activity and the representations thereof, and images appearing substantive, as dreams. These are dream pictures, relative to the awakening Power. This is not true relative to the one in the dream, because it is real to him so long as he is in the dream. In that dream state it is the activity of the Mother that is predominant, and that activity, without design or rhyme or reason is full of caprice like a dream. To human sensibilities it is terribly and devastatingly tragic. Think of the world wars. Think of one portion of humanity organizing itself and destroying wholesale another portion of humanity—genocide. That is the dance of Kali. That is to say, it is the dream activity. It is the predominance of the Mother force, before the great
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awakening, before that force is ruled and controlled. Continuing, from Book I, Canto V:
T his knowledge first he had of time-born men. . . . “He,” the awakening Power-to-be-conscious, “time born,” in contradistinction to the eternity; born in eternity or born in time.
A dmitted through a curtain of bright mind T hat hangs between our thought and absolute sight,... “Admitted,” meaning the knowledge, and “bright mind,” meaning Higher Buddhi, the bright mind that hangs between thought (Lower Buddhi) and absolute sight.
H e found the occult cave, t he mystic door N ear t o the well of vi sion in the soul, A nd entered where the W ings of Glory brood I n the sunlit space where all is forever known. I ndifferent to doubt and to belief, A vid of the naked real’s single shock... And it is a shock that knocks all your values galley west and scatters your dream pictures to the winds!
H e shore the cord of mind that ties the earth-heart A nd cast away the yoke of M atter’s law. T he body’s rules bound not the spirit’s powers: W hen life had stopped its beats, death broke not in; H e dared to live when breath and thought were still. T hus could he step into that magic place W hich few can even glimpse with hurried glance Lifted for a moment from mind’s labored works A nd the poverty of N ature’s earthly sight. A ll that the Gods have learned is there self-known. T here in a hidden chamber closed and mute A re kept the record graphs of the cosmic scribe,
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A nd there the tables of the sacred Law, T here is the Book of Being’s index page, T he text and glossary of the V edic truth A re there; the rhythms and the metres of the stars Significant of the movements of our fate: This is esoteric astrology. We need a course in it; the real meaning of the relationships between those configurations of the celestial realm to the configurations in the terrestrial realm.
T he symbol powers of number and of form, A nd the secret code of the history of the world A nd N ature’s correspondence with the soul A re wr itten in the mystic heart of life…. This refers to the Akashic records as well as the correspondence between celestial configurations and terrestrial configurations. Oh my, sometimes I want to be reborn, over and over, in order to encompass what there is to encompass, what there is to know. You cannot crowd it all in during one brief lifetime; time is too short.
***** Lesson 8
We have just reviewed the successive steps up to the fourth degree in the initiatory process. Let us continue from there. At the fourth degree in the initiatory process, a complete reorientation of consciousness takes place. However, this is not instantaneous. It is analogous to a baby that is born to its mother in a physical sense. That baby is born, and it then grows through childhood, adolescence, etc. Think of the gradual process of growing and developing into full adulthood. Now use the analogy. You can go back to the first, second, and third degrees of initiation and apply it as well. The babe is born. Irrespective of the age of the body, one is born a babe, because the Self 95
operates on its own level, the Mind level. The individualizing process is continuing on the Mind level until birth takes place. When one becomes a fourth degree initiate, he is a babe that is just born on the Mind level. Years ago there was a book called Zanoni by Bulwar Lytton. Its archaic language is somewhat difficult for modern readers to follow, but it is an interesting literary romance. There are two main characters portrayed in Zanoni. One is a new master, a young fourth degree initiate, Zanoni. Oh, my! the blunders and mistakes he makes, learning how to grow up on that level! His greatest weakness is sympathy. His love for everything and everyone is so strong that his sympathy goes out and that opens the door into his consciousness to all sorts of destructive influences and forces. The young one on Mind level, as Zanoni is portrayed in this book, has not yet learned the difference between sympathy and compassion. That is one of his lessons as he grows up. The other character portrayed in the book is named Mejnour, and he is the older fourth degree initiate. Where Zanoni wants to rush out and take people in (and gets into a peck of trouble), Mejnour says, “No, wait, wait—wait a long time.” The beauty of the story is in the portrayal of these two fourth degree initiates—the one, just growing up (he is probably adolescent as the story takes place), and the other, the old fourth degree one who is in no hurry at all. He will wait a long, long time before giving recognition to anyone. That book is worth wading through for one who is studying the process of development. Keep in mind that when one is born, like the newborn babe, but he has not yet grown up. You must 96
not expect the younger ones, irrespective of their degree, to manifest the wisdom, power, and knowledge of an older one of the same degree. This point will help you a great deal in the future as you delve deeper and deeper into the more recondite part of this instruction. At the fourth degree initiation a complete reorientation of consciousness takes place. In prior states, as consciousness emerges out of the many, awakening to the psychic world, the psychic side of life, people function, for the most part, in objective identification. They know nothing except what they can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. They know nothing outside of those five sense faculties with which they function. Do not blame them for being skeptical about what we are explaining here as to other worlds. Some of them are brilliant intellectuals, like the psychiatrist who, functioning in objective identification, would say, “All of this doctrine and teaching of inner worlds, etc., is flown-away virtue, an escape mechanism, a flight from reality, wish fulfillment, hopes and longings born of disappointments. The properties, the qualities of softness, hardness, etc., are conditions of your consciousness. This objective world is the reality.” Let us not repeat here the rigmarole of an ensemble of units of energy and the interstices between the units of energy and how it is more space than anything else— that is, nothing. We all know it, or ought to know it by this time. They would call all this other a flight from that reality. One by one we make contact and gradually awaken consciousness to the psychic side of life. (If you ever use the words ‘psychic side of life’ in the presence of those who think of some ghost or apparition or visitations from departed loved ones as a 97
referent for the word psychic, be very sure that you correct them so as not to be misunderstood.) Remember, our referent for the word psychic is everything that you feel, everything you desire, your human love and affection, your attachment to things and persons and places, your thought about all that. As we awaken from the limitation of sense faculties and their manner of functioning to the psychic world we learn to recognize motivations. We learn all the hidden content of the unconscious until every particle of the psychic world is as definitely outlined and detailed to consciousness as any familiar thing is in the objective sense. Between our emergence from the many and the third degree we awaken to, explore, and learn the psychic world. Bit by bit we conquer it, and rising above it we become ruler of all its influences. Finally we become emancipated from both the south half and the north half of the psychic nature. Then, in the third degree, we learn to extricate ourselves from the psychic world in preparation for the fourth degree. Up until development has taken place at the fourth degree in a sufficient measure so that the orientation to objectivity is finally broken and reorientation of consciousness takes place, the orientation of consciousness is still objective. Instead of describing this in terms of identification, we could describe it in terms of attachment—to things, persons, places—even to countries. I remember my teacher telling me when he was teaching me about this same point that his inordinate attachment to Mother India caused him to reincarnate in India. He knew, and his teacher told him, that he should have been reincarnated in America. But undue attachment, even to a country, will cause attraction, attachment. So instead of describing this change in orientation of consciousness in terms of identification, we can 98
describe it in terms of attachment. We become attached to a particular place, a particular country, a particular person, family, etc. I must reiterate: we are not advocating that you do this. One cannot do it until he is basically ready. We are describing a process, not saying come on and do it. You may be able to do it in some degree and you may not be able to do it for a long time to come. But here is the value of it. We do not have an orthodox God up there in the stratosphere. We do not have a person who was nailed on a cross and shed his blood as a human sacrifice to appease “that Big Boy up there in the stratosphere” so that he will not be angry with us, and so that we can play the fiddle and dance and then go into heaven scot-free. We have to pay our honest debts. If I played the fiddle or danced to the playing of the fiddle and it was wrong, I want to correct my own mistake, and therefore learn how not to do it next time. I do not want any good man to die and shed his blood to let me, still in an animalized condition, get into heaven. What will I do there as an animal? Then what takes the place of hope and expectation of heaven? What gives meaning and purpose to life? Sometimes I envy those who believe that they know, who seem fortified by hope and purpose in that belief. But we must be very careful never to take that away from them. Step around very carefully, because you might destroy their hope. You might destroy some fortification that they have by which to live. Never take those things away from them. Leave them alone to grow out of their beliefs. However, my point is this: we do not have anything like that to give meaning and purpose to life, to make sense of our daily struggle. But when you learn this 99
process, the natural order process, it will give overwhelming meaning and purpose and reason to life. If it serves no other purpose, that is why it should be understood. You have something to look forward to, and you have something that gives meaning to where you are now as you work your way on and up. As the complete reorientation of consciousness takes place, one no longer can look to objectivity and expect anything out of it. He has gone through it now; over and over he has pursued it, like a will-o’-the-wisp, like a mirage on the desert. Please, as you impart your understanding to others, do not tell them to stop it. Tell them that they have not browned it on both sides yet. Tell them they have been parsimonious. Tell them that they lack courage. Tell them to go out and get everything they can. That is the way to do it. They should keep on until they learn that it is all a will-o’the-wisp. They will learn. The fourth degree initiate cannot look back to objectivity—‘things’ and ‘objects’—as the bringer of peace and security. Nor can he look back to the psychic world—feelings, desirings, emotions, mentalizations, attachments, and human love, the expressions of animalized propensities and motivations. He has exhausted all of it. He has found that it was a double mirage. As he looks back and sees the mirage in both objectivity and the psychic world, he is beginning to turn and look the other way. And as he looks the other way he begins to be conscious of what lies the other way. He looks ‘up’. He becomes acquainted with the orders of Beings. He becomes aware of other worlds, but not all at once. He could not stand it all at once, even though he is a fourth degree awakened one. Little by little he begins to understand the orders of Beings, the rank upon rank upon rank of angels, archangels, 100
the great illumined archetypal gods, and through their instrumentality learns the power of all powers, the Logos. He becomes so absorbed, fascinated, interested in what he has discovered, that a complete reorientation of his consciousness takes place and he becomes oriented to the higher worlds. This is the great turning point, the fourth degree of initiation. Let us set up a referent for the word conversion. Literally, to be converted means turning around and going the other way. But if you take the referent by description, it is a complete reorientation of consciousness from objectivity and the psychic world to the realms of Reality, the realms of Be-ings. The idea that it is a hallucination, a flight from reality, a wish fulfillment, etc., as the aristotelean objective identifiers might allege, is in error. It becomes the most vivid, enduring, non-psychic, and non-metaphysical experience. Did you catch all those ‘non-’ words? Every one of them is important. Non-aristotelian, nonmetaphysical, non-occult, experience develops until one’s consciousness grows in complete orientation to the higher orders of Being. That reorientation of consciousness affects one in so many ways that it fills his whole life from top to bottom. Here is where the transvaluation of values enters, among other things. What does that mean? It means he can look back to the first, the second, the third degrees, and to the many, and see where the inner and finer laws, forces, allegiances, etc., were being violated by the struggle to be moral or to be good. Ninety-eight percent of marriages are legalized adultery, according to the way the fourth degree initiate would look at it. Then what justifies living together as man and wife? From the fourth degree of initiation up marriages are made in heaven, and if they 101
are not made in heaven, they are not made at all! Is that too strong a statement? I want to show you the difference between morality, immorality, and the transvaluation of values at the fourth degree. When man and woman meet and their forces flow together just as the original positive and negative power that creates the universe flows, then they exemplify the original bond, the original unity. They are married. A great one is alleged to have said, “Unless your righteousness (which I always interpret as right-ness according to one’s basic state of development) exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you have no part in the Kingdom.” Except your righteousness shall exceed their righteousness is a far more binding, rigorous code than any code of morality or the violation thereof in the objective state. In addition, the fourth degree initiate looks upon ‘things’ to be used to further the purpose and cause of the angelic world in which he stands as a representation, and for nothing else. ‘Things’ and ‘objects’ have value so long as they serve the purpose: growth, development, evolution, bringing the Light, dispelling the darkness, and serving the cause. As soon as a ‘thing’ or an ‘object’ or a place no longer serves the purpose he represents, he is through with it. No matter what the cost—five cents or five million dollars—it makes no difference. As long as it serves the purpose in which he is enlisted, it has value; when it no longer serves that purpose, it has no value. Therefore, value is transferred from ‘thing’ or ‘object’, goods, chattels, lands or titles, to what it serves. That is, if it serves the purpose he represents it has value. This is the transvaluation of values. I knew someone at this state once upon a time, and I witnessed him build a place. No one could work 102
harder than he did to build it. I also knew that he spent $128,000 in the 1920’s in building up that particular place—for a purpose. But a combination of circumstances eventuated. The use of the place for his purpose was destroyed, so he went in and packed his suitcase, walked out and never went back. Subsequently I visited that place and I said, “Who built this place?” “Oh, there was some crazy guy that used to live here. He went off the deep end, went nuts. He spent over $100,000 on it; then one day he went into the house, packed a suitcase, walked out, and we never did see him again.” We can laugh about that, and the laughter is due to the way it is looked upon in the moral code, the objective value sense, compared to the way it is evaluated by the one who has reached the fourth degree of initiation. Everything is for a use; and as soon as those conditions can no longer be used, the fourth degree initiate is through with them. They have no value at all to him. No wonder such actions are considered crazy. But are they crazy? It is all relative, according to the state of consciousness, according to where one is on the path. The fourth degree initiate will never compromise his allegiance to the higher orders. He does not seek martyrdom, but he will never compromise. The heavens can fall; he will never compromise his allegiance to the higher orders. He will never sell out for a mess of pottage. He will hold that allegiance inviolate. The most serious thing that can happen to one who has formed the allegiance to the higher and inner orders is to be cut off. When one reaches that higher contact or higher state he would 103
sacrifice everything else before he would sacrifice his allegiance to it. Now I think I have told you all I could possibly put in words about the first four degrees of the initiatory process. The only thing remaining is to describe the higher orders, insofar as it is possible to describe them for our limited states of consciousness.
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CHAPTER 9 Comments on Savitri This passage of Savitri pinpoints the fourth degree in the initiatory process
I n a divi ne retreat f rom mortal thought, I n a prodigious gesture of soul-sight, H is being towered into pathless heights, N aked of its vesture of humanity. A s thus it rose, to meet him bare and pure A strong D escent leaped down. A M ight, a Flame, A Beauty half-vi sible with deathless eyes, A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire, Enveloped him wi th its stupendous limbs A nd penetrated nerve and heart and brain T hat thri lled and fainted wi th the epiphany: H is natur e shuddered in the U nknown’s grasp. I n a moment shorter than D eath, longer than T ime, By a power more ruthless than Love, happier than H eaven, T aken sovereignly i nto eternal arms, H aled and coerced by a stark absolute bliss, I n a whirlwi nd circuit of delight and force H urried into unimaginable depths, U pborne into immeasurable heights, I t was torn out f rom its mortality A nd underwent a new and bourneless change . . . What power that has! “In a divine retreat from mortal thought,” “His being towered into pathless heights . . . ” And note, “It was torn out from its mortality . . .” the World Mother, the genetrix, gives birth to the Christ. “And underwent a new and bourneless change,” described in our last lesson.
A n Omniscient knowing without sight or thought A n indecipherable Omnipotence, A mystic Form that could contain the worlds, Y et made one human breast its passionate shrine,
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D rew him out of his seeki ng loneliness I nto the magni tudes of God’s embrace. * * * * *
Lesson 9
I believe reiteration in our school work is in order when certain salient points must be made. Therefore, I am going to repeat this most important point. If you, or anyone, lifts another one too fast and too far above his fundamental basic point of development you will create a rebellion in that one against you because he has to defend, desperately at times, the point which he has reached in the expanding or emerging evolutionary process. Remember, only as one fulfills the point in which he is now basically conscious of himself can he expand his consciousness beyond that point. The Bible says, “I come not to destroy, but to fulfill”—to fulfill the law and the prophets. We would say fulfill the natural order. So you must not lift another too fast and too far beyond his fundamental basic point of development, because if you do, you will create rebellion in him. He has to fight to defend his point on the grounds that he must fulfill, round out, the point in which he is now conscious in order to expand his consciousness beyond that point. We have two factors to keep in mind. The first is that each one must find his own basic evolutionary point in the emerging process—the emergence of the Power-to-be-conscious out of the Mother Substance— and he must fulfill that point in order to expand his consciousness beyond it. That is fundamental. The second factor is that one must be very keen to sharply 106
differentiate between his basic point and the evil influences that would deter him from fulfilling his basic evolutionary point. Unless one has the ability to do this, he will mistake those evil influences for his basic point of development, and therefore he will cooperate with the evil thinking he is serving the good. Through the years I have witnessed one or another being occupied by evil conditions, forces, suggestions, and entities while thinking they are his basic point to fulfill. With the best of intentions he “goes to hell in a hand basket” because he did not sharply differentiate between the evil which entered his lower vehicles and his basic point of development. Sometimes it takes quite a struggle to maintain one’s basic point against the pull back and down. Sometimes one must exercise a great deal of intestinal fortitude and downright courage to resist it. This process of development is a real conflict. Life at its very best is a conflict. It is a long time after we get far or high enough in development that the conflict ceases. During the transition period—that reorientation period from the many through the first three degrees of initiation and a great part of the fourth—there is a constant struggle between the evil influences that drag back and the newborn élan, impetus, influence, of the Christ that carries one up and fulfills, fulfills , the evolutionary point. This reiteration is for this purpose: In describing the initiatory process that we have been discussing for the past several lessons, we are not advocating for you or anyone to come on up and be a Lord of the Flame, a High Degree Initiate (see chart on page 115). We are advocating that you fulfill your point in the natural order process. But in fulfilling your evolutionary status in the whole evolutionary process, we think that it 107
would be advantageous for you to know, intellectually at least, the background, the structure, function, and order of the process in which you are fundamentally integrated. That understanding of the structural, functional, orderly process takes the place, in our consciousness, of the God up there in the stratosphere. Neither do we subscribe to the notion of a Savior shedding of human blood as a sacrifice nor the idea that one does not have to do anything in order go on in and participate in all of the higher levels, which are called heaven. We in the School of the Natural Order do not have anything like that to give us peace or comfort. It gives us nausea rather than any peace or comfort. So instead of taking away all that supports and gives meaning and purpose to our work, all that gives meaning and purpose to life itself, we strive to describe and understand the basic, fundamental structure of the whole cosmic process. Only upon that do we have grounds to proceed with the fulfillment of our place and basic evolutionary state. Thus we are buoyed with hope and expectation that there is something beyond just going around and around, eating and sleeping and procreating and on and on. There is something else to this thing called life, something that is full of power, light, joy, happiness, and wisdom, because man cannot live—and be man—by bread alone. Animals might, but not man. Man must have other food to satisfy his other departments of consciousness. In the last lesson I stated that I had said about all there was to say about the first four degrees in the initiatory process. Then I sat down and went into a huddle with myself and found that I had not scratched the surface of what there is to tell about it. So I must include a more minute description and diagram of the 108
unfolding process. Please refer to the chart, “The Chain According to Function,” on page 115. This diagram represents functional processes, not structure. For instance, you see how I have drawn a cone-like symbol from the circle, all the way through. Each one of these circles represents a field in which a given Individualized Be-ing functions. Allow me to pause and set up a referent for the way I use the word Be-ing. During the becoming process, becoming conscious of being, there is no individualization sufficiently developed to constitute Be-ing. Each one of us functions on one or more of the four levels simultaneously. (For reference see the chart on page 15.) The configurational level is one. Then the psychic consciousness or psychic nature is developed out of what we abstract from the configurational level. The mental, intellectual, lower manas (remember the concrete mind we described a few lessons back) is abstracted from the configurational world. We abstract; we draw from it. In plain, everyday aristotelian language, we live in sensations, sense life (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching). Out of that sense life we abstract and create a mental category of values. We call that the objective manifold of values, lower manas. That lower manas, that mentalization abstracted from sensation, from the configurational world, is a private world. Each of us has a separate private world. It has nothing to do with the reality at all; it is only what we abstract from it. In that private world we act and react emotionally. Our feelings and our desires get involved, and then we emotionalize about this and that mental image that we have abstracted. That is difficult to comprehend when one is so canalized in objective identification, in ‘things’ and ‘objects’ and emoting, feeling, and desiring about them. It is hard to break that conditioning, but it is out 109
of one’s feelings, desirings, emotionalizings, and thinkings (all in the private world) that the psychic nature is built. It is built up and up until it becomes an independent vehicle in which consciousness can transfer over and function, even to the point of being independent of the physiological organism. That is a tremendous build-up. But in all of that evolutionary process there is no Be-ing. There is a sort of racial group influence that motivates us—race-mind influence, not individualization. There is no Be-ing in that whole process. There is another level besides the abstracted, private world, other than the configurational world, and beyond both the lower and the higher psychic world. There is the level upon which the Power-to-beconscious functions. That goes back to the essential Self, the Higher Self, the Real Self, the Christos, the Christ within. That functions on another level which we label Mind—not intellect, but Mind. Consciousness of Be-ing develops on that level. As one individualizes on that level he becomes conscious of Be-ing on that level, individualizing himself. By that process he fulfills the admonition, “Come ye therefore out from among them and be ye therefore separate,” that is, individual. Then one is no longer in the process of becoming. He has become—become conscious as a birthless, deathless Be-ing who does not function in time, but functions in eternity, the absence of time. To understand that is wonderful! To me it is absolutely thrilling! There is no rhyme, nor reason, nor purpose to anything without that understanding. With it there are indescribable lengths and heights, depths and breadths that one can reach.
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Let us return to this lesson’s diagram (page 115). Notice the dots near the cones. Each one who has arrived at the consciousness of Be-ing, being an Individual, in Mind, in Light’s Regions (although it’s the lowest level) is represented by a dot. (Do not confuse these with the dots representing the many.) Each one who has so arrived has a field of influence, like an electrical or magnetic field. I often compare it to a simple magnet. You cannot see, hear, smell, taste, or touch the field, but look how powerful it is. It configurates the units of energy. The power of Be-ing, as described by these circles, functions similarly. Note that the first three degrees in the teleos or perfective, phase in the process of becoming (becoming a Be-ing) have no other fields attached. They are oriented to one, to a fourth degree initiate. Please do not interpret that on a personal level. The fourth degree initiate does not care anything about your personal life. That is your private world. Whether you see the fourth degree initiate or not does not make one bit of difference. It does not matter to a fourth degree initiate whether he has a configuration or not. Years and years may go by after you make the contact and you never see him, but you are in his field. Now we come to the focalizations of the fields diagrammatically portrayed on our chart. Remember, it is a diagram of function not of structure. That focalization represents the influence of the field of the Higher One with whom one makes contact. In the private world we think we are independent; we think we are able to do this or that with impunity. We think we can tell the world to go chase itself. But in the functional world, the Real World, the world of Light and energy, no one is independent. Everyone is integrated, either in the race mind or he has come out, 111
sufficiently individualized, and has formed a contact with a relatively higher level. But more than one can make that contact and be a focalization of the field of the consciousness of a higher one, and on and on to the Highest Ones, the Archetypal Gods, the highest Lords of the Flame, the Mahachohans (if you are acquainted with Sanskrit words). Those are labels for what in the Bible Paul has referred to as powers and principalities and dominions in the higher levels, in the higher worlds. Do not stumble over labels; look for meaning all the time. The Highest Ones become a focalization of the consciousness of the Logos itself, under the mighty powerhouse, the Centralization of all Existences. We are not asking you to believe this. We are just describing it the way we understand it. You can prove it to yourself by just going your independent way and disregarding it. Life will teach it to you “the hard way.” Eventually every one of us will learn to understand and cooperate with the natural order process. “Every knee shall bend and every tongue shall confess.” That means we will recognize it—ultimately. To me, in my consciousness, there is nothing else. That is it. But publicly, I will say if— if this is true, nothing can deter it; nothing can interfere with it; nothing can thwart it. It works itself out into its fullness of Light and Understanding and Power. Sortem suam quisquet amet—let each love his destiny!
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