Eric says we should go back to Jason Bourne today and how that willingness to step forward for the programme got him into all sorts of trouble. He says that manipulation is at the root of this and that his willingness to look only on the bright side of life is both a blessing and a curse; that most people take three steps back unless they can see some advantage in things for them. His Nan had a word for it. “Some people are very cute;” she used to say.
Eric reminds me that in my willingness to help other people, I have actually been very dis-empowering to them, and that my take charge mentality, because nothing appears to be happening, has very bad consequences; it establishes a dependency and is not liberating. The weird thing is that people nearly always want to take shortcuts and they always, always want others to take the risk for them. In effect it is manipulation. Eric says that he is now a little sick of this.
He says that people have always apparently recognised in him some sort of a potential, then tried to use him. He is not quite sure what that potential is, but reckons a part of it is remaining calm and objective in moments of crisis, some of which are of his own making. It does take a crisis though for people to actually want to listen to him. He says that the three steps back mentality, is risk averse, often controlling and already looking for a scapegoat even before things begin. On the one hand people so badly want heroes, yet they are often so willing to cast them quickly as the villain of piece.
A long time ago and apparently whilst on the Warrior’s path he was foolish enough to allow himself to be set up as a leader for a group of people. Well somebody had to do it didn’t they? There they built him up as a leader of men, they told him he was the alpha male and set him up for people to compete against and very occasionally with him. They told him all sorts of stuff and let him believe that his fate was to lead this group of people and learn what it meant to learn to lead.
Eric still thinks it funny how that all came about.
In his vanity and naïveté he had let his life get away from him and into this fantasy world. In retrospect how many people could hold together an academic position at a top university, a directorship at an evolving spin out company and an imagined position as leader of a group of people working with the Warrior’s path?
It was imagined then. He was never really the leader.
Afterwards it did all seem rather empty. It was a nice fantasy while it lasted.
If one really, really believes in fate and that in any given lifetime one’s job is to fulfil fate, then, can you imagine the impact of being led to believe that one’s fate was to lead a group of people across three continents on some great quest to unite the heart centres of the planet and then, to have that crushed and taken away over a few short weeks?
What then is one supposed to do with what appear to be the remnants of a life? What then? Eric says he truly believed that he had forfeited his fate. And that sort of thing can make one a little reckless, he comments. If the forfeit is still true then what does that leave? Who knows what lies ahead and what does it matter if the fundamental purpose of one’s existence has been swept aside and demolished?
Eric comments that these events led him to search a great many avenues and paths. He took great care to explore each one of them, as soon as a doorway appeared he would follow the path along the corridor of enquiry for a while, letting his intuition guide him.
He could not however unlearn all that he had learned.
This whole affair left him with a deep longing for a path lost and a fate abandoned. There pendant in the web of life were ghosts and visions still hanging. Eric took his time to re-run and re-perceive his life, and each interaction. How different it all looks now.
He says that because we are re-visiting that space in time we have activated some form of intent and that through the inter-connectedness of the web of life that perception is being shared some thousands of miles away. The dreamers of mankind are group conscious he reminds us. Best not to dwell too long on those thought patterns then.
He is reminded that as he was preparing to leave that group he bought himself a TV. He would need something to do instead of answering all those messages and being at the beck and call of others.
Six years later on it all seems so very, very far away and lost, forgotten in the ephemera of time.
Is that still it then? A fate abandoned and a life of decay. There was some talk back then of Eric making a “bid for power”, the theory says that a bid for power comes only once in a lifetime and that should one fail then one is either destroyed or taken back to a point somewhere in the stream of life before one found the Warrior’s path; there to wonder wistfully about what it might have been like to be a Warrior.
Perhaps this then is it. As we sit here typing away in this lovely cottage, no job, no spin out company, no great spiritual quest; a quiet life of beauty and perhaps mediocrity, with no personal power, one where I gradually fade away. Eric doesn’t believe in fat ladies and he hasn’t heard one sing for quite a while now.
Like Jason Bourne we are looking back for Treadstone. If fate really is fate, then there is nothing that can be done about it, sooner or later one has to go there and live it. There seems to be very few threads left and precious little on that island from before.
Eric says that inherent in the possession of knowledge and in positional power is a danger. It can bring out the very worst in one. He is pretty sure that he doesn’t want power any more; he does still want to learn. It seems though there aren’t that many people around that he can learn from. He says that he still has two very big questions though and that we should devise a strategy to unpick one of them first because that has massive implications for many people and for the second one. We should go one step at a time though, for here is such a tightrope. The answer to this first question has implications that are truly earth shattering in dimension.
Today though he is reading a play called Le Roi Pêcheur by Julien Gracq, one of many books that have “jumped out” at him during his life. This book in a subdued cover caught his eye in a tourist information office in Brittany. The office was closed so he had to hunt it down later. When it arrived the pages were not yet properly cut and he had to separate them with his Sabatier. It took quite a while and there was a great sense of satisfaction when he had done this.
“No more heroes, any more,
No more heroes, any more.
Whatever happened to all those heroes…?”
sang the Stranglers many decades ago now, perhaps as a sign of the times with emerging punk rock and that sense of rebellion then. Only to be followed by “Thatcher, Thatcher, the milk snatcher.”
Now we live in times where the majority of politicians are grey and boring or unable to string together a coherent sentence to drawl. There are few heroes. Eric says that you just have to look at the cars they make these days; by and large they are all pretty much the same despite the ardent claims of the manufacturers.
Who then are the male heroes of today?
He reckons that there has been so much spin that substance is hard to find. Irrespective of the vis viva having imbued the material form with life. There is no substance to the words of these politicians, despite the sound of them issuing out causing the matter of the air to vibrate. The words are not matched by deeds and nor by character.
Eric has been paying a lot of attention to spiders lately. He says that at one level they are quite remarkable creatures, they have evolved this capacity to spin the most delicate of webs and then they just wait. They wait for some food to arrive. They are predators. He reckons that many people are like this. Rather than do the hard work of being creative themselves they wait for other people to come along and then live off them and their successes. They feed. They are vampires. They suck the life force out of others.
A lot of people are like this, they are scared that they themselves cannot be creative so they act as if they are friends and bask in the glory of association. I have done this myself. I am sure you have all met the “name dropper” who has so many rich and famous friends and acquaintances; at first glance one can become captivated by the reflected glory and the glamour. The apparent connectivity and the illusion of creativity can quite quickly become jaded when the true colours begin to show.
Some people live their whole lives like this, running so very, very quickly so as not to be caught up by their own half truths and lies. I agree with him for I have seen people steal others ideas and then become quite famous passing those ideas off as their own. Eric tells me that this is how the world works. He also says that such people live lives of fear. Ultimately though, things do catch up.
He reminds me that a Warrior is always advised to look beyond the face value of a situation and see what lies beyond.
People often present a situation in a way that is perhaps most beneficial to them, whilst keeping their true motives as well hidden as possible. Eric reckons that by looking out for what isn’t said, how that isn’t said and the extent to which it isn’t said one can get a glimpse of the fear which is driving the not saying. This then, acts as a portal towards a truth other than that which is being presented.
He reckons that as we are all a mystery unto our selves we cannot easily see our own behaviours, this is sometimes called a blind spot; the best way to see ourselves is to look at those around us and ask ourselves what is it that they are reflecting for me? If we can see a behaviour in others then it must be within the realms of our own personal experience, either we have {or are} exhibited {-ing} that behaviour or someone has done that to us before. It is really handy, though not always comfortable, to be as honest as possible here.
He says that such mirrors can be past, present or future. I agree with him here. I have found that when someone comes into my life and I get a gut feel about them, whether pleasant or unpleasant, then they are going to show me something about myself and perhaps between the two of us there is some learning to be done.
It is very interesting to hear other people talk about their friends and colleagues and even about one-self. I can remember asking someone to describe how I influence others and what they saw. I know myself pretty damn well. This lady said that she saw me as someone who manipulated power behind the scenes. I listened to the face value of what she had said, balanced it against what I know about myself and made a mental note. She has seen this in me therefore it is within the scope of her experience and because it was the very first thing she recognised, to watch out, she is probably doing this right here and now.
Eric says that people do all sorts of things to hide the truth perhaps the most common of these is smoke screening; that is talking about everything but the matter at hand, he says that there is an interesting change in tone of voice when people do this. The next léger de main , is by way of telling a partial truth to cover for a much bigger mistruth, in a sense offering up something unpleasant as a cover, this appeases the other person’s sense or intuition that all is not well yet doesn’t come clean. I too have noticed this on a number of occasions and then let it run.
The thing is that lies then need supporting lies, and I use the word lie also in the sense of lying by omission. This omission creates a non sequitur in the flow or pattern of a cloth that intuitive people pick up on. They may not act on what they perceive yet that pattern of “something missing” is stored in the pattern recognition centre. From time to time then the weaver has to darn the fabric of a lie, to tend to it so that it does not all unravel.
Sometimes complete silence is the best way to encourage this darning for the weaver is always a little anxious. And a lie told often enough becomes a truth and if told by enough people the truth. These truths then, can act as submarines in the fabric of life, waiting to appear at unexpected moments, like the Lehman brothers.
Eric says that taking those three steps back is very hard for him to do, but it is unconditional. He does this more often now. This brings us both back to fate. Eric says for many years now he has wondered about what fate is and more specifically what the general look and feel of his fate are? What are the themes? Part of it is to do with this potential that others see in him. Somehow they seem to want him to materialise something that they want, a vision or direction that they want him to go in.
It goes back to bullying in a number of ways and he remembers a time where all “advised” him on how they would like him to behave. In a very real sense creating an expectation that he felt he should fulfil and a method that they wanted him to follow. He says that one of the biggest challenges for him is summarised in a single word, no. That is, he has never really said it enough.
Bullying has been a theme all his life; as has being manipulated to do the wants of others. One of his psychiatrists was always teasing him that he was a push-over; together they discussed the irony of this in that he has plenty of personal power but never really chooses to exercise it. He says that somehow he just doesn’t fit in with the world and that he is not worldly wise; he is not cute.
Although people want to take short cuts, the facts are that if you do help them, when they don’t really need it, they start to see you as a “sucker” and in time they loose respect for you, they start to take more advantage of you. They even feel sorry for you. This feeling sorry for someone or pitying them is perhaps the most disempowering thing that anyone can do to another.
It neglects the inclusion of a person’s fate in life and goes quite a long way towards robbing them of the possibility of change. It is kind of ironic to be told on the one hand that you are an alpha male and on the other to have people bullying you and trying to take advantage of you. Somehow and in someway this doesn’t fit. It is a puzzle that Eric and I have lived with for much of our lives.
Now and in retrospect Eric wonders whether this whole business about learning to lead wasn’t a complete red herring. Even so he has made quite a study of leadership and what it feels like. So it all was of some use after all. He never liked the wolf pack as an analogy, there is something in that whole approach which doesn’t suit him and it has a great deal to do with Darwinian thinking, survival of the fittest and all that; the hunter and the hunted. Eric says that perhaps it is his pomposity that finds such things distasteful. Why should he have to compete? His needs are very simple he does not need status, he does not need physical plane wealth, he does not need to shag loads of birds.
Eric says he can appear a little strange to people, in that many of them look to him for some form of direction, he does not know why. He has had it explained to him that people sense this potential in him, that he has power. Then, when he tries to point out a direction or way of being, they appear to fight him tooth and claw. It is a mystery. He wonders what the pay off in all this is. What is the purpose behind it all?
This lack of cuteness has gotten him into all sorts of scrapes; particularly with women. Until quite recently it had never really occurred to him that he was attractive or desirable to the opposite sex and this links across to another project l’homme méhaignié, because one of the challenges in this life for him has been that of masculinity. Being bullied at school for being a homo, did nothing for his self confidence. He even wondered whether they were right and that he was a homo after all. He knows he is not, now. Later to be harassed about what sort of a man he was didn’t really help. It made matters worse. Some of the perhaps best intentioned comments, rather than causing him to have the desire to fight, just made him think the other people were oh so stupid and that perhaps they were right, that he was no man after all.
Eric has a different view of masculinity to most, he says that true masculinity is about not being afraid of emotions and feelings, that vulnerability is a lead that he is happy to provide, whereas bravado, back slapping and jock-strap-ery is not masculine. This behaviour is almost as bad as “boys don’t cry”. From his perspective there is nothing more beautiful than to see a man let out tears of poignancy. This warmth and caring is the essence of true masculinity, and when true masculine warmth is expressed it does something quite magical. A friend of his once did it quite naturally to a young woman on a course; she burst into tears, never having experienced it before.
True masculine warmth is a precious substance and it can make the world go round. Being warm, sensitive and caring are all taboo, in the common view of the world and what better place to suppress them than an English boarding school, where you get teased for being a homo. Eric knows he has it and that sooner or later other men will find it too. He hides it for now though, most of the time. Most men use something like this warmth for seduction and it is easily misread as a come on. Eric laughs at the number of times he has been his charming self only to find a woman to immediately point out her relationship status to him. People’s perceptions are quite the funniest things he says.
Eric says that this warmth is closely related to compassion and arises out of being as thoroughly inclusive as one can. He says that because he is not nor has he ever been, an angel he finds it very hard to be judgemental. He knows that he is far from perfect, whatever that may mean, and that he has done many things he is not proud of. He doesn’t like to throw stones at others and laughs at glasshouses.
He reckons that at least he is honest about his own hypocrisy and that is a good place to start; aspirations, he says, are generally a good thing, though it is easy to kid oneself that aspirations have become practice and fact. Intention to change is all that is required, because sooner or later if that intention is real the actions of a being change and the beginning of transmutation takes place; some times though because of the hubris of man this can feel like Sisyphus getting up each morning for another day at the office; three steps forward and three steps back.
Eric reckons then this is the key to leadership, knowing when to step forward and when to step back, stepping forward is what he calls an intervention. Every intervention and action has impact on the flow of life and by and large it is best to do this only sparingly for by being too eager we rob others of their challenges; in effect tying them up with our own apron strings when they are already ready and able to leave the nest.
Tag: Sirius
Chapter 5 Oh come to me….Beautiful Rain
A Fremen dies when he is too long from the desert. We call this the water sickness.
Frank Herbert, “Children of Dune” Gollancz
Orion Publishing Group, London. Page 127 ISBN 0 575 074906
Eric says that today we should talk about rain, beautiful rain. For today is not a day of fire and orange red suns, not yet. He says that we should wait for one of those spectacular sunsets before we talk of fire, today is a day of water. He suggests that before we get started I should open the door so that I can hear the rain and the birdsong because it will help me to remember that I am a being touched by the desert and the bush. My relationship with rain is different from the English. Only those who have lived with cloudless skies and scorching desert suns can love the rain as much as I do.
Today it is comfort rain, soft downy and close. The earth is drinking and all around things are growing, you can almost see them. It is getting heavier now and in the wet slabs of stone I see the shadow of a bird flying above and I look up to see a heron, its wing feathers slightly tatty around the edges and the sound of those wings is soft on the wind. He is taken to the wide rivers of Africa and the parchment creeks of the Australian desert. For his life has also been one of rivers and of mountains. He was born of stock from the foothills of Snowdon and taken as a child from this green and pleasant land, far away across the seas, to the Southern hemisphere. There he was marked by a different sun and saw panoply of stars that truly put the sky into, sky.
Eric says that there is an urban legend; that Eskimos have many words for snow and wonders why aren’t there quite as many for, rain? He says that when rain comes to him in his dreams he understands it as meaning the process of life and a reminder to be aware that the vis viva is always busy; that we should trust whatever it is that the power within has for us to do. He says that now we have got started on this Chautauqua he feels that the time is right for us to be doing it and that the I Ching has agreed, Sheng {Pushing Upward}, and he has noted the text there.
Today then he says that we should talk about relaxing into the process of life and that although this is linked to the journey motif what we should discuss is water and actions, those that yield and dissolve making life more fluid than sand. He says that action without condition is the means by which one walks the path with heart and that for him there can no longer be any other way.
Eric reckons that most people never truly listen to what others say, most lives are spent and he is sure that this is the right word, fighting for air time and clamouring for attention. I agree and am pretty sure that most people use words and phrases they have borrowed from others and spout truths which they themselves have never checked the validity of.
Life then is not about a reactive and hurried knee jerk to the world; a cause and effect, a reason and a justification. There is more than this. In order to be able to do this, what one needs to do is to, stop the world, to……….
Pause.
In a helter-skelter mad-dash dog-chasing-its-tail way there is, whether you believe it or not, still plenty of time to pause, step back and look at the process of life to get some clarity on what is actually going on and then to respond intelligently to what transpires. Yes one can always meet force with force, yet often to yield is so much more powerful, and here I mean power in the sense of learning and knowledge and not the other way. He says that most people have buttons that are easily pressed and initiate a knee jerk reaction which he calls a control drama.
These control dramas are there because the so-called rational mind likes to protect what it holds as sacrosanct behaviour patterns and thoughts, learned at mother’s knee. He reckons the only way that one can begin to unpick them is to first take an inventory of ones doings and then, don’t do them any more.
He rather liked Luke Rheinhart’s “The Dice Man” for this but doesn’t recommend that as a way of being. What he means is that once there is a little clarity about behaviours one can do an exciting experiment on oneself to find out where they all came from and get some freedom, by not responding in such a Pavlovian way.
He says that if there is intent to change one can initiate this in an intelligent way and that one of the best ways to do this is to be like water. That is to yield and dissolve and flow and eddy; to absorb and to treat everything for its potential as a gift of learning and new knowledge. Which as we have already discussed allows the power within to guide our development imbuing us with a vitality which is that capacity to live life to its full, so that the vis viva, imbues the power within to organise the form into living the challenges of physical plane existence to the max.
People have barbs, he says, and some of them are so emotionally charged that they wound, a few words spoken with malicious intent can damage as much, if not more than, a knife. They can cut people down. He reckons that it is the quality of the e-motion which is linked to the underlying intent, that has a sound and the sound is what damages. We will come back to colour and movement perhaps another day he says.
If one listens to both the face value of the words and the tonal balance of their delivery he reckons that you can learn quite a lot about what is actually going on. It is the battle of one-up-man-ship that most people try to exert over each other, that maintains a mis-guided sense of control over life and that this is the basis of the construct we appear to live in. Here competition is against and usually for some form of pecking order. Eric reminds me of Terry and how we knew that despite all his brouhaha and forceful manipulation what he feared most was a simple hug from another man.
He says that he finds it ironic that rational mind has inherent in it the quality of ratio and the quantity of ration. Hinting that it attempts to balance whilst limiting the scope of what it is considering. He says he much prefers the irrational as this is much less limited and full of possibilities; that the worst insult you could give him would be to call him rational. Rational is nearly always tied up to justification and presupposes right, that there is only one answer.
He reckons since we are now here we should look logic up on Wiki.
Logic is the philosophical study, or the formal science, of the principles of valid inference and demonstration. The word derives from Greek λογική (logike), fem. of λογικός (logikos), “possessed of reason, intellectual, dialectical, argumentative”, from λόγος (logos), “word, thought, idea, argument, account, reason, or principle”.
As he has mentioned people do not truly listen to each other and often, before a person has even half finished a sentence, others are preparing rejoinders, whether witty or otherwise. He says that in terms of quality, logic which derives from logos, has perhaps become disconnected from its true source, because the logos is the word or the very first sound echoing out of the void, the first thing which is becoming manifest as a vibration within the nothingness, there and then giving evidence of existence and non-existence. Before the first stirring there was only no-thing. In the act of stirring, awareness came into being as a separation. The first word is not quite ineffable and is so much more than the intellectual pissing contest that people think of as debate and conversation. Who then within the rations of the rational mind defines what is valid and what is right?
Eric says that until one has a working knowledge of the second attention one cannot appreciate the quality of words properly or get a feeling for what is left. This left side or feeling is perhaps heart and not mind. In a very real sense the ratio of rational is therefore incomplete in any case, because this left side knowing or inner tuition is left out of the equation. Thus the rational is therefore, if I may use a reasoning word, in a rather odd sense irrational as the referential framework is so limited; and limited to what is in effect and affect concrete thought. What people call rational is all air, mind and lacks. It is not water.
So the rain of this Chautauqua has taken us of down a side tributary of metaphysics and rhetoric in order to describe and discuss rationality. It has been raining now for hours and the pace of it varies. He says it is drawing us back to rivers and streams and to Annwn and perhaps the Celtic salmon of wisdom that features high in the other world journeys, the journeys into metaphor. For whilst the other world journeys beckon one can never step in the same river twice, the world moves on and we cannot step out of the wardrobe from Narnia into an unchanged world. Time’s arrow as perceived on the physical plane is real enough.
He reckons that if you choose you might see life as a river, perhaps sourced high in the broad mountains of mist or from a small limestone spring in the bucolic vale of a shire. Soon that river meets others and they influence each other flowing urgently and precociously over the mossy rocks of life or perhaps more largo over the broad and leafy floodplains. He reckons you can hear brooks chuckle if you listen carefully enough. These streams become rivers and flow towards the wide seas and oceans of life, where man perhaps makes a mark on the world. There the currents are stronger and deeper; within the depths are hidden treasure, perhaps of the abysmal and perhaps of long lost tropical isles where undiscovered pirate gold lies hidden beneath the sing-song dreamlike palms and hammocks.
On its path to the sea the rivers may come across beaver dams constructed by the auspices of the mind that stem the flow of developing consciousness and block it with the tyranny of fear. Perhaps from time to time the river disappears deep into a sink hole or becomes barren and dry, the flow of life vanishes into the desert of a temporary despair. Like the salmon of wisdom we all leave our redds to begin a process of transformation perhaps from parr to smolt and salmon, before we die returning to the source of our birth and as legend has it, reviewing the wisdom gained during our lives. Eric reckons that if we step back and pause to look at our lives as they happen and not afterwards, this magnificent journey is all the richer.
He says that the most important thing he learned during the days of his descent into the underworld of darkness, is to remember that life is a process. He says that no matter how bad things get and how impossible things seem because of rational mind, provided that you are still breathing, the world doesn’t actually end; and that a good night’s sleep nearly always brings a fresh perspective with the rising of the sun.
He says that back then, it really helped him to visualise his life as the course of a river and that rather than seeing footprints in the sand, he sees the moods and themes of the river that is the expression of the vis viva flowing and that it is the quality of flow that allows us to synchronise, synch-chron-ise with the universe, to be in time with it.
He says that when he is a little lost for direction in life he always asks himself what his river feels like, right here and right now. What has the rational mind beaver been doing that stops the flow, how must he be to break out of a corner. What then is needed to move the logs of consciousness that are blocking the flow? Or, isn’t it perhaps now time for a gentle eddy in life, to sit back in the late summer sunshine and let the mayflies dance upon him; to feel the fish turn and break the surface for a well earned meal.
When he finds a barrier in life he asks himself; what is he trying to force? He says that he tries not to force anything but he has a mind too and that desires. It is that force which depletes the vibrancy and makes his brain ache. Time then to dissolve all that is around into the river of his being and take that new knowledge, time to yield and change direction, time to wear slowly down through the matter of the mountain valley and not scrape as a rock filled glacier might; time to pause and eddy and reflect the sun and then because the rain is falling and this process feeds the river, onwards and to the sea.
Eric cautions that until one has lived in the desert of despair a river may seem just a river, he knows then that the rain is precious and it is the contrast that reveals potential. If there is too much water then a man gets complacent and that is what the Fremen call the water sickness, for without some challenge there is no contrast and it is these challenges that help us to be free and most of all, that is what he wants.
Rule VII
For Applicants: Let the disciple turn his attention to the enunciating of those sounds which echo in the hall where walks the Master. Let him not sound the lesser notes which awaken vibration within the halls of Maya.
For Disciples and Initiates: Let the group life emit the Word of invocation and thus evoke response within those distant Ashrams where move the Chohans of the race of men. They are no longer men as are the Masters, but, having passed beyond that lesser stage, have linked Themselves with the Great Council in the highest Secret Place. Let the group sound a dual chord, reverberating in the halls where move the Masters but finding pause and prolongation within those radiant halls where move the “Lights which carry out the Will of God.”
Of real importance, though relatively small, are two contrasts. These emerge with clarity if you compare the instructions given to applicants for discipleship and those given to initiates. The applicant (or young disciple) is addressed as an individual and is told to give forth “those sounds” which will be heard by the Master in His Ashram – for that is the true significance of the words. The initiate functions in a group (always in a group) and has developed or is rapidly developing group consciousness; in unison with his group and as an integral conscious part of it, the Word must be enunciated; this is not a medley of sounds, but is one clear Word of invocation. You need to remember that the disciple is occupied in resolving the many sounds into the Word; when he has done this, his individual approach to reality terminates, and he begins to act with his group where all activity is concerned. This is a point of major importance for the newer type of disciple to grasp. In the past, the emphasis has been on what the individual initiate had to do in order to fit himself to take initiation, and so become a Master of the Wisdom and a member of the planetary Hierarchy. In the coming new cycle the emphasis will be upon group work and activity, upon group initiation and group approach to the Center of Life. The required mode of life and the needed individual eliminations and adjustments are now so well known (theoretically, at least) that they should have dropped below the threshold of consciousness and should consequently be automatic in their effects. This should also provide a steady inducement to thought which will make the initiate what he ought to be, because his conscious mind is free for group functioning. This is a concept which must be increasingly cultivated; “As a man thinketh in his heart, so he is.” The lower mind should be the organ of heart expression and be as unconscious in its functioning as is the rhythm of the heart itself – the physical heart. The higher mind is intended to become increasingly the field of the initiate’s effort, and hence the constant need for him to build the antahkarana.
In this Rule we are therefore dealing with the work to be done by a group of pledged disciples and initiates; they are learning together to make an approach to Shamballa (involving the Will element); this is as much a goal of the Hierarchy as approach to the Hierarchy is the goal of advanced humanity. It concerns the interrelation of great centers of force. This is a point which esoteric students should attempt to grasp for it completes the planetary chain of Hierarchy and throws a light upon the Way of the Higher Evolution.
Great movements and progressions have always taken place upon the subjective side of life; it is these subjective activities which have made it hard for disciples to grasp the truth and arrive at some true realization of the subjective situation which ever exists between the Hierarchy and Shamballa. The energies concerned are so subtle, and the Beings involved are so advanced and so highly developed (even from the angle of the initiate of the third degree), that it is well-nigh impossible for the teachings (which I seek to give) to be worded in such a manner that they become comprehensible. All that I can do is to make certain statements which (from the standpoint of those I teach) are not verifiable; they have to be accepted on trust and with the reservation that time and the point of view of the individual disciple will later prove their truth – or their non-truth.
The objective of all training given to the disciple is to shift his conscious awareness from the point where he is to levels which are higher than those in the three worlds of definitely human evolution; the intention is to teach him to function on those planes of conscious contact which are as yet so subjective that he only accepts them as existent in theory. The trained initiate knows that they have to become his natural habitat, and that eventually he has to relegate the ordinary and normal human experience to the three worlds of daily expression. These become eventually the worlds that exist below the threshold of consciousness; they are relegated to the realm of the subconscious – recoverable consciously, if necessary for right service of humanity, but as much below the threshold of consciousness as are the ordinary emotional reactions of the average man. These are always recoverable (as modern psychoanalysis has demonstrated) and can become capable of expression and of formulation into conditioning concepts – thus actuating mental perception if deemed of adequate importance. However, it should be borne in mind that the greater part of the emotional life of the disciple must become increasingly subconscious, just as the physical plane life of the normal, healthy human being is entirely automatic and thus subconscious. When the disciple has striven to expand his consciousness, when he has learnt to stabilize his consciousness in the Spiritual Triad, then he becomes part of a great and constant hierarchical effort which strives upwards towards the “Place of Clear Electric Light,” to which the clear cold light of the reason is the first key to the first door.
There are three doors into Shamballa, speaking figuratively:
1. There is the door of the reason, of pure perception of truth. Christ gave the clue to this teaching when He said “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Of that Way we know much, because upon the Way a vast body of teaching has been given, and that teaching, if followed, brings a man into the Hierarchy. He then becomes a factual part of the hierarchical membership. Of that Truth, we know (as aspirants) relatively very little. Truth – as we understand it during the early treading of the Path of Discipleship – is concerned with great verities which are (from the insight of the Enlightened Ones) only the ABC of life. These truths are:
- The manifestation of divinity on the physical plane.
- The doctrine of Avatars. This religious history reveals.
- The nature of consciousness, through the development of psychology.
- The doctrine of the Trinity, as it expresses itself through the aspects and the attributes.
These four expressions of truth will be found to convey all the knowledge with which the initiate must stand equipped when he climbs the Mount of Transfiguration at the time of the third initiation. They have given him a spiritual perception of the Plan.
Of that Life, we know nothing whatsoever. The contemplation of its significance belongs to Those Who can move at will within the “precincts of the Lord of Life” – in Shamballa itself. All we can know about it is its lowest step. This enables us to study the impulse or instinct which enables all forms of life to function, which embodies the principles of responsiveness to contacts and to environment, and which embodies itself in the breath of life; this is also related to the air in some mysterious manner, and also to fire. More anent this subject it would be useless for me to say.
2. There is also the door of the will. This is a penetrating power which relates Plan to Purpose and which has in it the faculty of coherent persistence. The reason for this persistence is that it is not dependent upon the content of the form – whether it is the form of an atom, of a man or of a planet – but upon a vital dynamic and immutable purpose, latent in the consciousness of the planetary Being Who, “having pervaded this entire universe with a fragment” of Himself, Remains – greater, more inscrutable and “firmer in intent” than any of His creations, even the most advanced and the closest to Him. Only those have clear perception of His divine purpose who do not belong to our earth humanity at all; these are the Lives who came with Him to this planet when He came, and Who remain with Him as “the prisoners of loving intention” until the last weary pilgrim has found his way home.”
This spiritual will is something of which humanity knows nothing; it is hidden and veiled by the self-will of the individual and the group will of the soul. Through both of these experiences the human being moves until his individual will is developed and grounded, focused and reoriented, and his group will is unfolded so that it includes and swallows up the dedicated, conscious, individual will. When this fusion has taken place (at the third initiation) a great revelation unfolds itself, and for the first time the initiate senses and then contacts the universal will; from that moment the initiate says, “Father, not my will but Thine be done.” Just a little of what that will includes may emerge as we study this seventh rule and some of the succeeding rules.
3. I can find no words to express the nature of the third door. Let us, in default of a better term, call it the door of the monadic sense of essential duality. Body and life, soul and personality, the Spiritual Triad and its expression, the Christ in incarnation – all these dualities have played their part. Man has passed from one expansion of consciousness to another. Now he comes to the final duality of spirit and matter, prior to their resolution into something to which the terms “isolated unity” and “universal synthesis” give only faint and inadequate clues. To the development of this system of identification the initiate of the degree of Master of the Wisdom, and also (on a higher turn of the spiral) of the degree of the Christ, are focusing all Their efforts. Up to the fourth initiation, the term “system of expansions” would seem illuminating; after that great initiation, the term “system of identification” would appear more appropriate.
When the initiate has passed through the three doors, symbolically speaking, he then faces all life, all events, all predeterminations, all wisdom, all activity and all that the future may hold of service and progress from the angle of the pure reason (infallible and immutable), of true spiritual will (completely identified with the purpose of the planetary Logos), and of the highest possible focused relation. The mystery of relationship becomes revealed to him. Then the entire scheme of evolution and of the intention of the One in Whom he lives and moves and has his being becomes clear to him; he has no more to learn within this planetary scheme; he has become universal in his attitude to all forms of life, and is also identified with the “isolated unity” of Sanat Kumara. Few of the great Lives Who form the inner group of the Council Chamber at Shamballa are now of greater advancement than he; the “Supernal Three,” the “Radiant Seven,” the “Lives embodying the forty-nine Fires,” the “Buddhas of Activity,” and certain “Eternal Spirits” from such centers of dynamic spiritual life as Sirius, or from the constellation which at any one time forms a triangle with our Sun and Sirius, and a Representative from Venus are of greater – far greater – advancement. Otherwise, all initiates of the sixth degree, and a few of the Masters Who have undergone specialized training because They are upon the first Ray of Will or Power (the ray conditioning Shamballa itself), form part of the Great Council. Many Masters and Chohans, however, after serving upon the planet in various capacities, working with the Law of Evolution, pass out of our planetary life altogether.
All the above information concerning the Lives which are far in advance of the disciples of the world contains little of moment for you, except in so far as it falls into a diagrammatic pattern of our planetary life and purpose, and enabling you, therefore, to get a faint glimpse of a synthetic theme and purpose to which all evolving lives must and will eventually conform.
It must ever be borne in mind that the great theme of Light underlies our entire planetary purpose. The full expression of perfect Light, occultly understood, is the engrossing life-purpose of our planetary Logos. Light is the great and obsessing enterprise in the three worlds of human evolution; everywhere men rate the light of the sun as essential to healthy living; some idea of the human urge to light can be grasped if you consider the brilliance of the physically engendered light in which we live when night arrives, and compare it with the mode of lighting the streets and homes of the world prior to the discovery of gas, and later of electricity. The light of knowledge, as the reward of educational processes, is the incentive behind all our great schools of learning in every country in the world and is the goal of much of our world organization; the terminology of light controls even our computation of time. {Atomic clocks?, my addition} The mystery of electricity is unfolding gradually before our rapt eyes and the electrical nature of man is being slowly proven and will later demonstrate that, throughout the human structure and form, man is composed primarily of light atoms, and that the light in the head (so familiar to esotericist) is no fiction or figment of wishful thinking or of a hallucinated imagination, but is definitely brought about by the junction or fusion of the light inherent in substance itself and the light of the soul.
It will be found that this will be capable of scientific proof. It will also be shown that the soul itself is light, and that the entire Hierarchy is a great center of light, causing the symbology of light to govern our thinking, our approach to God, and enabling us to understand somewhat the meaning of the words of Christ “I am the Light of the world.” These words carry meaning to all true disciples and present them with an analogous goal which they define to themselves as that of finding the light, appropriating the light, and themselves becoming light-bearers. The theme of light runs through all the world Scriptures; the idea of enlightenment conditions all the training given to the youth of the world (limited though the application of this idea may be), and the thought of more light governs all the inchoate yearnings of the human spirit.
We have not yet carried the concept up to the Center of Life where dwells the Ancient of Days, the Eternal Youth, the Lord of the World, Sanat Kumara, Melchizedek – God. Yet from that Center streams what has been called the Light of Life, the Light Supernal. These are empty words as yet until we know, as trained initiates, that light is a symptom and an expression of Life, and that essentially, occultly and in a most mysterious way the terms, Light and Life, are interchangeable within the limits of the planetary ring-pass-not. Beyond those limits – who knows? Light can be regarded as a symptom, a reaction to the meeting and consequent fusion of spirit and matter.
Therefore, where that great point of fusion and of solar crisis (for that is what it is, even when producing a planetary crisis) appears in time and space, light also immediately appears and of such intensity that only those who know the light of the soul, and who can bear the hierarchical light can be trained to enter into and form part of the light of Shamballa and walk in those “radiant halls where move the Lights which carry out the Will of God.
To carry the concept a little nearer home: only when the will of the personality and the will of the soul come together – evoked by love – does the light of the soul dominate the material light of the personality. This is a statement of importance. Only when the will of the Monad and the will of the Hierarchy of souls meet and blend in the “upper brackets” (if I may use such a modern business phrase) can the radiant light of Life dominate the blended lights of Humanity and of the Hierarchy. Faintly this group fusion and junction can be seen to be taking place.
It is also the first touch of the radiance of Shamballa which is bringing the universal revelation of evil, a radiance which is now producing the world unrest and which has brought about the lining up of good and evil; this touch of radiance is the conditioning factor behind what is called postwar planning and the ideas of reconstruction and of world rebuilding which are dominating the best human thinking at this time.
It should be carefully borne in mind that evil (cosmic evil or the source of planetary evil) is much closer to Shamballa than it is to Humanity. The Great Lives there move entirely free from glamor; Their vision is one of extreme simplicity; They are concerned only with the great and simple duality of spirit and matter, and not with the many forms which the fusion of these two brings into being. The domination of spirit (and its reflection, soul) by matter is what constitutes evil and this is true whether the statement is applied to the development of the individual or of the group. The “Lights which carry out the will of God” move free from the spell of evil. The Light in which They move safeguards Them, and Their Own innate and inherent radiance repels evil. But They “move alongside the evil to which all lesser forms are prone”; They are part of a great observing Group which “moves forward in time and space”; its members watch the great war and conflict proceed on Earth between the Forces of Light and the Forces of Evil. They have let loose upon Earth the Forces of Light, whilst the Forces of Evil are inherent in substance itself – of which all the many forms of life are constructed.
At this time, the work of the Great Council at Shamballa, ‘Working until now through the Hierarchy, is with the life within the form; They have to proceed with the utmost caution as They thus work, because these Lights know that the danger of premature direct contact with humanity, and of consequent over-stimulation, is great. One of the causes of the present cataclysm is the fact that humanity was deemed capable of taking and receiving a “touch from Shamballa,” without stepping it down via the Hierarchy, as has hitherto been the custom. The determination to apply this touch (which is in the nature of a great experiment) was made in 1825, when the Great Council had its usual centennial meeting. The results you know; they are working out before your eyes. The industrial movement began to take shape one hundred years ago and received a great impetus from this touch. The evil in nations – aggression, greed, intolerance and hate – was aroused as never before, and two world wars occurred, one of which is still raging (written October 1943). Paralleling this was an uprising of good, again in response to the divine “touch,” resulting in the growth of understanding, the spread of idealism, the purification of our educational systems and the inauguration of reforms in every department of human life. All has been speeded up and little such growth was seen on a worldwide scale prior to 1825. The knowledge of the Hierarchy is also spreading over the earth; the facts anent discipleship and initiation are becoming common property; humanity has consequently moved onward into a greater measure of light. Good and evil stand out in clearer focus; light and dark are in a more brilliant juxtaposition; issues of right and wrong are appearing with cleared definition, and humanity as a whole sees the great problems of righteousness and love, of sin and separateness upon a worldwide scale.
The old age and the coming new age, old rhythms of thought and new approaches to truth and consequent new and better ways of life are presented with clarity to the minds of men. The guarantee of the success of the experiment started more than a century ago is the fact that (in spite of much that is undesirable) so many nations have ranged themselves upon the side of right, and only two definitely and altogether upon the side of evil. The evil is more concentrated, and therefore more powerful temporarily upon the physical plane; the good is more diffused and not so pure in its concentrated essence being colored by many undesirable aspects; the good, however, is concentrating rapidly and will triumph. The “Lights that carry out the will of God” now wait to give another touch which will enable the reconstruction work to move forward along right lines, but They wait for the invocative cry of humanity and for the dust of battle and of conflict to die down.
————
Excerpted from: The Rays and the Initiations – Part One – Fourteen Rules For Group Initiation
By Alice Bailey and Djwhal Khul
Chapter 3 Hodie
Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant.
-Mentat Text Two (dicto)
Frank Herbert “Chapter House Dune “, Gollancz,
The Orion Publishing Group, London.
Page 107 ISBN 0 575 07518 X
I had planned to talk today of the darkness within and my exploration of the feelings behind it, somehow it needs a storm to do this for I can then tune into the wildness of nature and revisit those very, very strange days. The beginning of this descent had its roots in the realisation of my own ignorance so eloquently paraphrased above. But Eric says we will sketch over it for now, because today feels like it is a good time to talk about today, though the resonances to 1995 are clear and the merry-go-round of hospital and doctors appointments is the same. This time though I am not seeking death rather, life.
Eric remembers when he first went into the office and said to Dr Depardieu that he was unwell. He remembers the questions about sleep, sex, food and alcohol. He remembers telling him about his plan to get a large amount of heroin and some syringes from work. He remembers telling him that he knew where he could get this and how he felt that this would be the best way. By touching the ephemera of the memory a tinge of sadness creeps into him. How forlorn and lost he felt then and how the temptation to end it all had been playing like a movie re-run in his mind, flickering black and white on the screen; waiting for the final credits to roll, how there was no Technicolor only black and white. He remembers sitting on that tube train and the veins in his arm screaming at him to go and do it. He knows that he has never really said this to anyone before so he is a little nervous. Dr Depardieu gave him some nice green and white pills and these helped him for a while, they bought him some time. The shame of it was a little hard to bear, he had to tell his university that he was ill and the nature of his illness, bringing in those doctors notes every couple of weeks. He felt then the margins of existence, the twilight of the deranged and the futility of the castrated man. Everything he had tried had failed and he began to cling; it was not pretty.
Enough of this then, we will return to the darkness soon, for there is much in there that is lighter than you can imagine and it needs out too. Today, he went to the hospital on his bike; to check for parking spaces and a place to lock it up. For tomorrow he visits the neurologist, later an MRI scan of his neck and brain and then the orthopaedic surgeons will look at the images of the cervical discs pressing on his spinal column. Eric is pleased with his bike, he has ridden it three times now and some of the confidence in him comes back, twenty years is a long time. He guesses it must be true; the idiom about it being just like riding a bike. He is not allowed to drive any more because he lost consciousness a week or so ago. In a strange way cycling takes him back to the carefree days of his late teen years, when he used the bike to escape the noise, to ride for miles and miles around the North Kent countryside. He knows that the medics don’t yet know what is wrong and that they are investigating; they have mentioned stroke and epilepsy. They haven’t mentioned tumour yet and he wonders if he should tell the neurologist about his dream that said he had cervical spine cancer or wait until the images are back. It is difficult to block out these thoughts as there isn’t enough data yet. He wonders if he should mention all the things that he sees and how he understands the nature of consciousness to be. He remembers that these specialists are trained in the church of reason so it might be better not to mention prescience and lucid dreaming.
Today though is fine. The heavy rains of the last few days have passed and the sun shines on the garden. All is well for now and Eric remembers the entreaty to consider every path carefully and to ask yourself only one question; is this for you a path with heart? For if there is no heart then the path will drag you down and suck away your vitality. And he remembers how many times he has asked that question and how many times he has walked away.
It brings him back to one of the things he wanted to talk about, energy. He doesn’t like that word because it has connotations, co-note-tations elsewhere and the use of it hinders. Eric prefers the word vitality. He says that as the power within grows and develops by acquiring knowledge it imbues both upon itself and the form it inhabits, a vitality and vivaciousness. It lends capacity to the form to operate in ways that it never expected and with an awareness that is sharper than before. This vitality gives a sense of time to things that differs. When beings have this, they can choose the speed at which they perceive things, they can literally speed up or slow down the perception and hence time. This speed then is under their control, it gives intensity and focus. People hunt for this vitality, perhaps the elixir of youthfulness, though it is not that. When the power within has it the eyes of the form glow with an iridescence that can be seen by some, or simply as a sparkle of joie de vivre by others. This sense of vitality is a currency for human interactions.
We can build it up in ourselves and others or we can deplete ourselves and others. People try to steal this thing from each other mistakenly thinking they can and that if they have power over another; they have real power. Whereas this vitality is true power, it is limitless and without bound, it grows as we flow in synchronicity with the universe and our fate. In a very real sense it is more extant than the illusions borne of the form and the mind. It comes from life itself and the vis viva expressing outwards from the void.
Eric says that this thing which he calls forceful manipulation is the very bane of humanity and the basis through which the construct of the world is maintained. He says that because most people live in the realms of the hungry ghosts they cannot yet see the impact of this on both themselves and the world. Ultimately this forceful manipulation is based on some form of insecurity or perception of inadequacy whether expressed through self pity or self importance. It is seen in some quarters as standing up for your rights or skill-full negotiation, yet in many of its guises it is actually quite a lot nastier than that. It is linked to dominion and dominance, man in control of his surroundings and his fate. Its detrimental effects can be seem almost everywhere and perhaps it stems from a deep, deep sense of there never being enough, if you like a hole in being-ness that pervades because mankind has in many cases lost touch with his sense of purpose.
Eric seems to remember that a number of years ago now he wrote poetry feverishly doing some three hundred poems in a couple of years. He burned them all along with all his copious note books. He deleted all his emails and all his notes on esoterica in one ceremony of cleansing the past. There was plenty of that force in him back then, he had learned well at the arcane school. He says that he no longer feels the near religious ecstasy that had driven him then. That it was all gone and it had all been folly and that he must dream now.
He has just come back from his afternoon sleep. Since he began doing dreaming practice over eight years ago now, he has practised dreaming, he describes it as a meditative technique used to open up the doorway to the power within, if you like a channel of communication with his inner being. He learned to let this guide him as it appeared there was purpose to this, it seemed to know what it was doing even if it did make for a somewhat non-linear approach to life.
He tells me before he did this formally; he did martial arts as a sort of walking meditation and is reminded how, when he used to run, timing the slip-slap-slip of his running to his breath was a way of bringing the form more consciously under his control. The martial arts opened something else in him and his body began to behave in a way that was much more economical. Later he developed listening to music as a way of doing meditation, he doesn’t know how he knew how to do it, yet he says if you listen very carefully to music and concentrate only on that; it stills the mind. Further if you open your heart to the music it guides you. When he was recovering from the darkness he let the emotions present in music take him to places he had never thought he could go; making it experiential in ways that were quite special.
He first discovered that he really knew how to dream but only in retrospect after he had stumbled across North American Indian shamanism in a school in Hertfordshire of all places. The cynic in him found some considerable hilarity that a bunch of white people would gather, drum and go on shamanic journeys in search of guidance for their lives. He reckoned they were all making it up. He loved the drumming and to drum, the hypnotic rhythm of the drum beat running with the ebb and flow of his inner tuition taking him deeper and away from the noise and clatter of the mind. Being a bit of a rebel though, he didn’t quite do what he was supposed to do. Rather, he sank into the colour which exists in states of pure calm. He let the colour emerge from the black and the formless, taking shape first as a Rorschach ink blot of colour then slowly filling the whole dreamscape. Out of the colour, images would appear and he would follow them and let them unfold, making notes of what he saw there. He learned he could heal, clear spaces and that ritual was a very power full way of focusing intent.
Later he learned to dream by using yellow roses to focus intention before the dreamscape came. Soon all he needed was a few seconds to enter the colour and hold it firm. What came then was dream after dream after dream. This was new and exciting to him he wanted to share these dreams because that is what it seemed he was meant to do. The people around him chastised him for this. He learned to state the intent of dreaming appropriate for his dreaming class. Then somehow many years later he no longer felt that this intent was right and chose another one.
Last year he went again to a dojo, to try his hand at some judo and perhaps regain some fitness. There was something quite strange about the dojo, it was a sports dojo and had none of the reverence and atmosphere of mutual support he had found at the true dojos of his past. On his second visit they practised ippon seonage his favourite throw and perhaps the most effective of all at giving someone a good whack. Something happened to him and he drove home in a haze of dreaming colour knowing that he had changed. He found that he had herniated discs in his cervical spine; there the discs pressed down on the nerves to the left hand side of his body and directly on the spinal column itself. He could see it in the MRI scans himself. His muscles wasted and it took many months to rebuild them and regain function there.
After that his dreaming took another turn. Instead of controlling the entrance into the colour, he shifted very rapidly into another level of trance. His waking dreams had changed. Now again these last few days something has shifted, he experiences a shimmer of consciousness before entering trance. His pulse rate and metabolism slow and within a matter of a few seconds he is dreaming. Now though, the level of lucidity and awareness that he is dreaming is much less detached, the experience is somehow much deeper. His sleep dreams seem much the same as ever.
Which brings us back to paths and there are many of these and it is these that we dream in for ourselves. As ever it brings us back to the heart and the people we share our lives with. It brings us back sharply to the journey and not the destination, there to flow and to do what our inner tuition guides, there not to try to force things unwelcome on the world.
A little under two years ago I wrote that letter in which I resigned from my post as a senior lecturer at a top university. There I was responsible for the pastoral care of the students and there I had given it my all. In this university and the students there I saw many of the worst excesses of man’s impact upon others, there in a moment of clarity I realised that I was in effect cleaning up other people’s messes and putting a sticking plaster on something which was really quite badly damaged. These fine young minds were studying at the church of reason learning the arcane language and practice of concrete science. They invested all their effort towards good grades and the elusive happiness wrapped up and beckoning in the sort of career that a graduate from there might expect. In so doing perhaps attempting to fulfill the hopes and aspirations of “tennis coach” parents trying to live their lives through their children. How strange that self worth for so many was so directly linked to their apparent capacity to achieve recognition through the exam results at this arcane school. I wonder for many of them if this is a path with heart.
For many, previously at the top of the pecking order in their respective schools, it was an epiphany; now the competition was fierce and the curriculum intense, from the old school of we had it tough, so should they. It was there that many lives are to be sacrificed on the altar of academic success and “we must publish first”, so that we can be top of the premier league. There, where the techniques of politics and manipulation coupled with the weight of a famous institution ensured a good slice of research funding to maintain this status quo. Some people were quite nice but I had begun to realise over many a lunch time conversation that I no longer cared which person was getting whatever chair at which university, or who had done the best work on electro-chromism and got that big adventurous chemistry grant. Despite all the wonderful young people many of my colleagues had become to me cardboard cut outs of people playing a stereotypical game called academia, a game of the mind and most definitely not of the heart. It is however hard to imagine just how difficult it is to let something like this go. All of my adult life I had strived to get the position and now to realise it was hollow was quite a blow. The impact on me the day I sent the letter was immense. I knew in that act I was changing my whole world and irrevocably so.
I resigned, with no job to go to, put my flat on the market and looked on the internet for somewhere to live. I had asked myself when was I most happy and it was simple, those days in the Peak District before I met my first wife, before it all got so very complicated and so messy, before once again I let myself be swayed by someone else and caught up in their drama. As luck would have it this beautiful listed cottage was on the market and, as if it was intended, I am now here, in the bucolic shire writing these words. I can step out of my door and into the countryside once more.
Eric still makes me read Physics World from time to time just to keep in touch and he reminds me that the Warrior’s path is not like any other path; that everything along the way has a purpose and a meaning if only we take the care and the time to look for it. He reminds me not to squander anything I have learned; to be like that blotting paper absorbing the ink of life, for each drop of it inscribes the character and adds to the power within.
Here I am then with doubts about my health and ready to embark upon a new marriage with a woman whom I care for more than I could ever have imagined possible. I have no job. I have some money in the bank and I have this Chautauqua that presses and strains to write. I am conscious that I haven’t really let it rip yet and am warming up. I am perhaps adrift in the sea of life, I most certainly am not lost. I know that everything has a purpose. I am waiting for the power within to show the next step, unhurried, secure and ready to respond in whatever way is needed. Tomorrow is another day.
Chapter 4 A Path with Heart
No diagnosis then from Friday’s visit to the hospital, there are a lot of things that have been ruled out and I am feeling a little reassured. This gives me some quiet time to start to elaborate on what I mean by a path with heart. In a sense any path, although we might see it as achieving a goal or ambition, ultimately leads no where, for we all must die and that part of incarnate awareness which is the totality of us, in the words of the Bard, shuffles off the mortal coil. Our form disintegrates or is burned and the atoms of our vehicle are re-cycled and used by the universe for another purpose, our bits might one day end up being a plastic Tesco’s bag; who knows. In any case once the power within has left, it is not that important. The form then becomes the formless. The formless is then reorganised into something else. It is the vis viva that takes the clay of a human being and through the magic of life re-organises it into something else. If the atoms are incorporated in an organic sense then some other consciousness uses them, eventually.
What then is a path with heart? Eric says that this differs for each of us, yet deep down we all know when we are treading a path with heart and when we are not. That is the simplicity of it all. The trouble is that most people lack the honesty and live lives of denial, because they are fearful of change. It takes a great deal of courage and some considerable measure of practice to learn to listen to the heart. The heart is not all fluffy and warm, roses and sentiment. When operating fully it is powerful beyond imagination and can be quite a demanding master. For in one sense the heart, that is an expression of true feeling, is that part of the total being which is most in sync with what the power within has set us up for. In this context the heart is not the muscle which pumps our blood. It is pure feeling.
Eric says that most people get hooked on romance and idealism and use the mind to try to force this romance on the being, to an extent where after compromising the emanations of the heart for so long, it controls. The mind is the master of what he calls the first ring of power whereas the heart transcends this; it operates on the level where true inner tuition takes place. That tuition of the inner being, whether a work in progress or truly listened to, leads one on the path with heart.
Many paths first appear to be a path with heart, the mind hoping above all hope that a given direction in life will be a path with heart. The being then invests a great deal of effort in following these paths, to the point where it will vigorously defend the “fact” that this is a path with heart. Deep down though, everyone knows when they are bullshitting themselves and even those around them. When such a point is finally admitted the reluctance to change can cause all sorts of problems. The heart never lies. It is a shame that human beings do. In a sense many of us get caught up in a trap of our own making.
Consider each path very carefully and ask yourself only this. Is this for me a path with heart? This is really the only question and it is the 64 million dollar one. Everything else is just so much intellectual masturbation. For opening your heart and listening to it renders all else mundane. Eric says that this then is the bottom line. For as we traverse this, the sea of life, whenever we are faced with what appears to be a dilemma, asking this and answering honestly will enable one to gain sufficient clarity to work out what are the next steps that need to be taken.
Like all paths, it leads exactly no where, what it does though is to provide a journey of quite stupendous novelty, variety and excitement. Esoterically the path with heart is linked to the cabalistic glyph of Tiphareth and is associated with choosing between the old and the new. Every day is nascent at dawn, lived to the maximum, dies at the sunset, rests overnight and life starts the next day, fresh. Knowing full well that each day brings change and the being walking the path with heart will not be the same being on the following day. It takes guts to walk such a path.
Eric says that it might be wise to put in another quotation here.
This one is from M.F. Powers
Footprints
One night I dreamed a dream. I was walking along the beach with my Lord.
Across the dark sky flashed scenes from my life. For each scene, I noticed two sets of footprints in the sand, one belonging to me and one to my Lord.
When the last scene of my life shot before me I looked back at the footprints in the sand. I noticed that at times along the path there was only one set of footprints. I also noticed that it happened at the very lowest and saddest times of my life. This always bothered me and I questioned the Lord about my dilemma.
“Lord, you told me that once I decided to follow You, You would walk with me all the way but I noticed that during the most troublesome times of my life there is only one set of footprints. I don’t understand why, when I needed You most, You would leave me.”
He whispered,
“ My precious child, I love you and would never, never leave you during your times of trial and suffering. When you see only one set of footprints it was then that I carried you. “
This then re-presents a journey through life and in choosing a path with heart, there will be times when the challenges such a choice calls forth can make one feel completely lost and abandoned. If one sticks with it, the power within guides and in a sense carries us, even when the rational mind has packed up, run away and felt very sorry for itself. The power within, leads us to do things which we might not always have the emotional wherewithal to do and makes sure that we make it through to the other side. In doing this it causes us to grow and change. At times we all feel sorry for ourselves and play the martyr.
If we choose to look at our lives for what they really are, hopefully before the last days of our sojourn here, we can always find a purpose for what has happened and if we are lucky the meaning inherent in that purpose. For it is really us, our own power within, which sets up the circumstance for us to learn, blaming others is just stupid and disempowering for everyone concerned.
If we do not take responsibility for ourselves who is going to? Is change then a path with heart?
“Be the change you wish to see in the World.”
Mohandas Gandhi
As far as I can tell most people want some form of change in their lives, yet direct the intention and responsibility for that change towards external sources, hoping that if he (or she) changes, then it would make my life better.
It is a wistful hope that is often forgotten as quickly as it arises, and then so, back to the day to day business of living. Very few people are willing to take responsibility for changing themselves, hoping that someone else will do “it” for them. The changes which they think they seek are perhaps just a tinkering around the edges of life, maybe a better holiday would do the trick…? So here is a question for you are you going to walk this most difficult of paths and see if you can find the extent and wonder of your being-ness by listening to the power within?
True change is not for the fainthearted. It is a matter of bringing the inside out, letting the spirit surface and breathe. The outer form can only present an image of the state of the inner being and true change begins inside. Once a process of change has been initiated it can come at one like a relentless tide, where the sea of change washes before it all that one once held as true.
True change is seldom welcomed with open arms, rather it often comes about because of a moment of clarity when one knows without any doubt that a way of thinking and of being is no longer tenable; that living as one has been, has in some strange way ceased to be an affair of the heart. Such moments can be initiatory of change or alternatively spark a journey of denial in an over expressed need to be right. That over expression of just how great the form side of life is must constantly be verbalised and re-enforced by others to mask the flight which the inner person much deeper down, knows that they are doing. This has consequences.
True change starts slowly as a way of being and behaving is gradually and sometimes painfully eroded. Then the shape and the constituents of a life, are stripped away, allowing a space for a new person to emerge from the chrysalis. What that being is, may bear little or no resemblance to the caterpillar it once thought it was, avariciously feeding on the substance of life and taking from all around.
True change can be said to be transmutative, transformative and perhaps transfigurational. The expense of change is a former life, the gift, a new one, heralding untold wonders of what it is to be alive; bringing with it a new found sense of purpose and meaning. Somehow, setting one apart from the crowd, who may look at you blankly because such a change is beyond the scope of their experience and as such, so very much a part of the unknown and perhaps, because of an unwillingness to change, the unknowable.
In this respect if one really does change, no one may ever notice. Because of the 99% rule which says that 99% of people think only of themselves 99% of the time, many will miss what has been an act of magic, worked at over a great many years.
Eric says that there is only one way to go and that is to walk as gently on the earth as possible, trying to not impose petty wants and desires upon others and taking from the world only what it is that is truly needed. And that life is a journey of learning and of approaching, leaving as few footprints as possible on the rice-paper world whilst having the best impact one can.
This then is a path with a heart, we do not own the world; we can celebrate our incarnation by making our lives an expression of the emanations of our hearts as we dance the pattern of our existence, hand in hand with the power within.
INITIATION DEFINED
The question anent initiation is one that is coming more and more before the public. Before many centuries pass the old mysteries will be restored, and an inner body will exist in the Church – the Church of the period, of which the nucleus is already forming – wherein the first initiation will become esoteric, in this sense only, that the taking of the first initiation will, before so very long, be the most sacred ceremony of the Church, performed esoterically as one of the mysteries given at stated periods, attended by those concerned. It will also hold a similar place in the ritual of the Masons. At this ceremony those ready for the first initiation will be publicly admitted to the Lodge by one of its members, authorized to do so by the great Hierophant Himself.
Four Words Defined
When we speak of Initiation, of wisdom, of knowledge, or of the probationary Path, what do we mean? We use the words so glibly, without due consideration of the meaning involved. Take, for instance, the word first mentioned. Many are the definitions, and many are the explanations to be found as to its scope, the preparatory steps, the work to be done between initiations, and its result and effects. One thing before all else is apparent to the most superficial student, and that is, that the magnitude of the subject is such that in order to deal with it adequately one should be able to write from the viewpoint of an initiate; when this is not the case, anything that is said may be reasonable, logical, interesting, or suggestive, but not conclusive.
The word Initiation comes from two Latin words, in, into; and ire, to go; therefore, the making of a beginning, or the entrance into something. It posits, in its widest sense, in the case we are studying, an entrance into the spiritual life, or into a fresh stage in that life. It is the first step, and the succeeding steps, upon the Path of Holiness. Literally, therefore, a man who has taken the first initiation is one who has taken the first step into the spiritual kingdom, having passed out of the definitely human kingdom into the superhuman. Just as he passed out of the animal kingdom into the human at individualization, so he has entered upon the life of the spirit, and for the first time has the right to be called a “spiritual man” in the technical significance of the word. He is entering upon the fifth or final stage in our present fivefold evolution. Having groped his way through the Hall of Ignorance during many ages, and having gone to school in the Hall of Learning, he is now entering into the university, or the Hall of Wisdom. When he has passed through that school he will graduate with his degree as a Master of Compassion.
It might be of benefit to us also if we studied first the difference or the connection between Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom. Though in ordinary parlance they are frequently interchanged, as used technically they are dissimilar.
Knowledge is the product of the Hall of Learning. It might be termed the sum total of human discovery and experience, that which can be recognized by the five senses, and be correlated, diagnosed, and defined by the use of the human intellect. It is that about which we feel mental certitude, or that which we can ascertain by the use of experiment. It is the compendium of the arts and sciences. It concerns all that deals with the building and developing of the form side of things. Therefore it concerns the material side of evolution, matter in the solar systems, in the planet, in the three worlds of human evolution, and in the bodies of men.
Wisdom is the product of the Hall of Wisdom. It has to do with the development of the life within the form, with the progress of the spirit through those ever-changing vehicles, and with the expansions of consciousness that succeed each other from life to life. It deals with the life side of evolution. Since it deals with the essence of things and not with the things themselves, it is the intuitive apprehension of truth apart from the reasoning faculty, and the innate perception that can distinguish between the false and the true, between the real and the unreal. It is more than that, for it is also the growing capacity of the Thinker to enter increasingly into the mind of the Logos, to realize the true inwardness of the great pageant of the universe, to vision the objective, and to harmonize more and more with the higher measure. For our present purpose (which is to study somewhat the Path of Holiness and its various stages) it may be described as the realization of the “Kingdom of God within,” and the apprehension of the “Kingdom of God without” in the solar system. Perhaps it might be expressed as the gradual blending of the paths of the mystic and the occultist, – the rearing of the temple of wisdom upon the foundation of knowledge.
Wisdom is the science of the spirit, just as knowledge is the science of matter. Knowledge is separate and objective, whilst wisdom is synthetic and subjective. Knowledge divides; wisdom unites. Knowledge differentiates whilst wisdom blends. What, then, is meant by the understanding?
The understanding may be defined as the faculty of the Thinker in Time to appropriate knowledge as the foundation for wisdom, that which enables him to adapt the things of form to the life of the spirit, and to take the flashes of inspiration that come to him from the Hall of Wisdom and link them to the facts of the Hall of Learning. Perhaps the whole idea might be expressed in this way:
Wisdom concerns the one Self, knowledge deals with the not-self, whilst the understanding is the point of view of the Ego, or Thinker, or his relation between them.
In the Hall of Ignorance the form controls, and the material side of things has the predominance. Man is there polarized in the personality or lower self. In the Hall of Learning the higher self, or Ego, strives to dominate that form until gradually a point of equilibrium is reached where the man is controlled entirely by neither. Later the Ego controls more and more, until in the Hall of Wisdom it dominates in the three lower worlds, and in increasing degree the inherent divinity assumes the mastery.
Aspects of Initiation
Initiation, or the process of undergoing an expansion of consciousness, is part of the normal process of evolutionary development, viewed on a large scale, and not from the standpoint of the individual. When viewed from the individual standpoint it has come to be narrowed down to the moment wherein the evolving unit definitely apprehends that (by dint of his own effort, aided by the advice and suggestions of the watching Teachers of the race) he has reached a point wherein a certain range of knowledge of a subjective nature, from the physical plane point of view, is his. It is in the nature of that experience wherein a pupil in a school realizes suddenly that he has mastered a lesson, and that the rationale of a subject, and the method of procedure, are his to use intelligently. These moments of intelligent apprehension follow the evolving Monad throughout his long pilgrimage. What has been misinterpreted somewhat at this stage of comprehension is the fact that at various periods the emphasis is laid on different grades of expansion, and always the Hierarchy endeavors to bring the race to the point where its units will have some idea of the next step to be taken.
Each initiation marks the passing of the pupil in the Hall of Wisdom into a higher class, marks the clearer shining forth of the inner fire and the transition from one point of polarization to another, entails the realization of an increasing unity with all that lives and the essential oneness of the self with all selves. It results in a horizon that continuously enlarges until it includes the sphere of creation; it is a growing capacity to see and hear on all the planes. It is an increased consciousness of God’s plans for the world, and an increased ability to enter into those plans and to further them. It is the effort in the abstract mind to pass an examination. It is the honor class in the Master’s school, and is within the attainment of those souls whose karma permits and whose efforts suffice to fulfil the aim.
Initiation leads to the mount whence vision can be had, a vision of the eternal Now, wherein past, present, and future exist as one; a vision of the pageant of the races with the golden thread of pedigree carried through the many types; a vision of the golden sphere that holds in unison all the many evolutions of our system, deva, human, animal, vegetable, mineral, and elemental, and through which the pulsating life can be clearly seen beating in regular rhythm;
- a vision of the Logoic thought-form on the archetypal plane,
- a vision that grows from initiation to initiation until it embraces all the solar system.
Initiation leads to the stream that, once entered, sweeps a man onward until it carries him to the feet of the Lord of the World, to the feet of his Father in Heaven, to the feet of the threefold Logos.
Initiation leads to the cave within whose circumscribing walls the pairs of opposites are known, and the secret of good and evil is revealed. It leads to the Cross and to that utter sacrifice which must transpire before perfect liberation is attained, and the initiate stands free of all earth’s fetters, held by naught in the three worlds. It leads through the Hall of Wisdom, and puts into a man’s hands the key to all information, systemic and cosmic, in graduated sequence. It reveals the hidden mystery that lies at the heart of the solar system. It leads from one state of consciousness to another. As each state is entered the horizon enlarges, the vista extends, and the comprehension includes more and more, until the expansion reaches a point where the self embraces all selves, including all that is “moving and unmoving,” as phrased by an ancient Scripture.
Initiation involves ceremony. It is this aspect that has been emphasized in the minds of men, perhaps a little to the exclusion of the true significance. Primarily it involves the capacity to see, hear, and comprehend, and to synthesize and correlate knowledge. It does not necessarily involve the development of the psychic faculties, but it does entail the inner comprehension that sees the value underlying the form, and recognizes the purpose of pervading circumstances. It is the capacity that senses the lesson to be learnt from any given occurrence and event, and that by means of these comprehensions and recognitions effects an hourly, weekly, yearly growth and expansion. This process of gradual expansion – the result of the definite effort and strenuous right thinking and living of the aspirant himself and not of some occult teacher performing an occult rite – leads to what one might term a crisis.
At this crisis, which necessitates the aid of a Master, a definite act of initiation is performed, which (acting on a particular center) produces a result on some one body. It keys the atoms to a certain pitch, and enables a new rate of rhythm to be attained.
This ceremony of initiation marks a point of attainment. It does not bring about attainment, as is so often the misconception. It simply marks the recognition by the watching Teachers of the race of a definite point in evolution reached by the pupil, and gives two things:
- An expansion of consciousness that admits the personality into the wisdom attained by the Ego, and in the higher initiations into the consciousness of the Monad.
- A brief period of enlightenment wherein the initiate sees that portion of the Path that lies ahead to be trodden, and wherein he shares consciously in the great plan of evolution.
After initiation, the work to be done consists largely in making that expansion of consciousness part of the equipment for the practical use of the personality, and in mastering that portion of the path that has yet to be traversed.
The Place and Effect of Initiation
The ceremony of initiation takes place on the three higher subplanes of the mental plane, and on the three higher planes, according to the initiation. The five-pointed star, at the initiations on the mental plane, flashes out above the head of the initiate. This concerns the first initiations which are undergone in the causal vehicle. It has been said that the first two initiations take place upon the astral plane, but this is incorrect, and the statement has given rise to a misunderstanding. They are felt profoundly in connection with the astral and physical bodies and the lower mental, and affect their control. The chief effect being felt in those bodies the initiate may interpret them as having taken place on the planes concerned, as the vividness of the effect and the stimulation of the first two initiations work out largely in the astral body. But it must ever be remembered that the major initiations are taken in the causal body or – dissociated from that body – on the buddhic plane or atmic plane. At the final two initiations which set a man free from the three worlds, and enable him to function in the body of vitality of the Logos and wield that force, the initiate becomes the five-pointed star and it descends upon him, merges in him, and he is seen at its very center. This descent is brought about by the action of the Initiator, wielding the Rod of Power, and puts a man in touch with the center in the Body of the Planetary Logos of which he is a part, and this consciously. The two initiations called the sixth and seventh take place on the buddhic and atmic planes; the five-pointed star “blazes forth from within Itself,” as the esoteric phrase has it, and becomes the seven-pointed star; it descends upon the man and he enters within the flame.
Again, the four initiations, prior to that of the adept, mark respectively the attainment of certain proportions of atomic matter in the bodies – for instance, at the first initiation one-fourth atomic matter, at the second one-half atomic matter, at the third three-quarters atomic matter, and so on to the completion. Since buddhi is the unifying principle (or the welder of all), at the fifth initiation the adept lets the lower vehicles go, and stands in his buddhic sheath. He creates thence his body of manifestation.
Each initiation gives more control on the rays, if one may so express it, although this does not adequately convey the idea. Words so often mislead. At the fifth initiation, when the adept stands Master in the three worlds, He controls more or less (according to His line of development) the five rays that are specially manifesting at the time He takes the initiation. At the sixth initiation, if He takes the higher degree, He gains power on another ray, and at the seventh initiation He wields power on all the rays. The sixth initiation marks the point of attainment of the Christ, and brings the synthetic ray of the system under His control. We need to remember that initiation gives the initiate power on the rays, and not power over the rays, for this marks a very definite difference. Every initiate has, of course, for his primary or spiritual ray one of the three major rays, and the ray of his Monad is the one on which he at length gains power. The love ray, or the synthetic ray of the system, is the final one achieved.
Those who pass away from the earth after the fifth initiation, or those who do not become Masters in physical incarnation, take their subsequent initiations elsewhere in the system. All are in the Logoic Consciousness. One great fact to be borne in mind is, that the initiations of the planet or of the solar system are but the preparatory initiations of admission into the greater Lodge on Sirius. We have the symbolism held for us fairly well in Masonry, and in combining the Masonic method with what we are told of the steps on the Path of Holiness we get an approximate picture. Let us enlarge somewhat:
The first four initiations of the solar system correspond to the four “initiations of the Threshold,” prior to the first cosmic initiation. The fifth initiation corresponds to the first cosmic initiation, that of “entered apprentice” in Masonry; and makes a Master an “entered apprentice” of the Lodge on Sirius. The sixth initiation is analogous to the second degree in Masonry, whilst the seventh initiation makes the Adept a Master Mason of the Brotherhood on Sirius.
A Master, therefore, is one who has taken the seventh planetary initiation, the fifth solar initiation, and the first Sirian or cosmic initiation.
——–
Excerpted from:
“Initiation, Human and Solar – Chapter II – Initiation Defined” By Alice Bailey and Djwhal Kuhl
This path is of all the Paths the most veiled in the clouds of mystery. The reason for this mystery will only be apparent to the pledged initiate, though a clue to the secret may be gained if it is realized that in a peculiar and esoteric sense the sun Sirius and the Pleiades hold a close relation to each other. It is a relation analogous to that which lower mind holds to higher mind. The lower is receptive to, or negatively polarized to the higher. Sirius is the seat of higher mind and mahat (as it is called, or universal mind) sweeps into manifestation in our solar system through the channel of the Pleiades. It is almost as if a great triangle of mahatic energy was thus formed. Sirius transmits energy to our solar system via that
“…sevenfold brooding Mother, the silver constellation, whose voice is as a tinkling bell, and whose feet pass lightly o’er the radiant path between our worlds and hers.”
Within the solar system there is an interesting correspondence to this cosmic interplay in the relation between the Venus scheme, our Earth scheme and the Venus chain in our scheme.
Curiously enough it will be through a comprehension of the human antahkarana, or the path which links higher and lower mind and which is constructed by the Thinker during the process of evolution, that light on this abstruse matter will come. There is (in connection with our planetary Logos) just such an antahkarana, and as He builds and constructs it, it forms part of the fourth Path, and permits the passage of the bulk of our humanity to this distant objective, and this without obstruction. A clue to the nature of this Path and as to the reason why so many of the human Monads seek this particular stream of energy lies in the right understanding of the above suggestion.
The initiates who tread this way are primarily those of the fourth and the sixth order. As earlier pointed out, this is the Path that the “lords of compassion” most frequently follow, and at this time the Egyptian Master and the Master Jesus are preparing Themselves to tread it. The mystics of the Occident who have come into incarnation during the past one thousand years are a peculiar group of Egos whose impulse is towards this type of cosmic energy. In this system they have developed certain basic recognitions and the “ecstasy” of the occidental mystic is the germ, latent within him, which will some day flower forth into that cosmic rapture for which we have as yet no name.
Cosmic rapture and rhythmic bliss are the attributes of the fourth path. It is a form of identification which is divorced from consciousness altogether. The reason also why the majority of the sons of men follow this Path lies in the fact of its numerical position. These units of the fourth kingdom, the bulk of the fourth Creative Hierarchy on this fourth globe of the fourth scheme in a solar system of the fourth order are innately compelled to seek this fourth WAY in order to perfect themselves. They are called the “blissful dancing points of fanatical devotion.” This is as near as we can get to the true description. They have also been described as the “revolving wheels which turn upon themselves, and find the open door to perfect bliss.”
The energy of Path IV reaches us from Sirius via the Sun. This must be understood as a blind behind which one of the signs of the zodiac veils itself.
The hierarchies concerned with this specific type of cosmic force hide themselves under the numbers fourteen and seventeen. This will serve as a complete blind to the average reader, but will carry to the pledged chela the hint needed to produce illumination.
The method whereby the adept fits himself to pass upon this path is termed that of duplex rotary motion and “rhythmic dancing upon the square.”
The symbol, which is first given to the pledged disciple to study but which may, however, be described, is a duality of interlocked wheels revolving at a great pace in opposite directions, and producing a unified whole. These wheels are portrayed as manifesting electric blue flame, rotating and revolving with great rapidity around an equal-armed Cross. The Cross is pictured in orange fire with a deep emerald green circle, flaming at the point in the center where the four arms of the Cross meet. The symbolism of these colors links this fourth path to the solar system preceding this one. In that system the Sirian influence was more potent than in the present one.
It is not possible to add more to this beyond pointing out that the quality gained by the adept who treads this path may not be revealed. He comes under the concentrated influence of the energy which is identified with the planetary antahkarana. It is not permitted, therefore, to state what its specific quality may be, as it would convey too much information to the intelligent reader as to the nature and the objective of our particular planetary Logos.
PATH IV. THE PATH TO SIRIUS
- Attributes – cosmic rapture and rhythmic bliss.
- Source – Sirius via the Sun which veils a zodiacal sign.
- Hierarchy – veiled by the numbers 14 and 17.
- Method – duplex rotary motion and rhythmic dancing upon the square.
- Symbol – two wheels of electric fire, revolving around an orange Cross, with an emerald at the center.
- Quality – unrevealed.
Above excerpted from “A Treatise on Cosmic Fire – Section Three – Division B – The Nature of the Cosmic Paths”
Below excerpted from “The Rays and the Initiations – Part Two – Section One – The Aspirant and the Mysteries of Initiation”
4. The Path to Sirius
I have frequently hinted in my various books that the Sun, Sirius, is closely related to our planetary Life; much is known in the Hierarchy anent this connection, and the particular relationship of this fourth Path to humanity, the fourth kingdom in nature, but little can be communicated to the general public. I may, however, tell you certain things which may make your imaginative rangings (if I may use so strange a phrase) creatively profitable to you.
This great Sun which is to our solar Logos what the Monad is to the spiritual man, has a peculiar part to play where our Earth is concerned. It might be considered by those with a sound sense of occult proportion that our tiny planet with its planetary Logos (one of the “imperfect Gods” of The Secret Doctrine) would be too small to enter in the slightest way into the consciousness of that Supreme Illumined Entity Who is greater even than our Solar Logos. Such, however, is the case. There is a relationship of very ancient date between our Lord of the World, Sanat Kumara, and the Lord of Sirius, and this exists in spite of the fact that our planet is not a sacred planet. It might be added that our planet is, in the immediate cycle, owing to the factors I have lately considered with you, rapidly passing out of this category, and on the inner planes and subjectively considered is a sacred planet; the effects of this transition from non-sacred to sacred have not fully demonstrated themselves objectively. The mystery of this relationship is partially revealed at one of the higher initiations and it is then realized by the initiates that there is a good and adequate reason for the relation and that the following esoteric events, relations and happenings are simply consequences:
1. The majority of liberated humanity, and therefore a large number of the initiates who have to make decision, choose this way to the cosmic center.
2. The relationship as it expresses itself is between the Hierarchy and Sirius, and not between Shamballa and that stupendous Sun. The energy evoked in response to this relationship enters the Hierarchy via the Heart of the Sun, creating as a consequence a triangle of spiritual energy of enormous potency. You have, therefore;
Sirius
*
The Hierarchy * * Heart of the Sun
3. As progress is made in the course of taking the higher initiations, it becomes apparent to the initiate that two major streams of energy enter our planetary life:
- A stream of energy coming from the cosmic mental plane and from that focal point which is to Sanat Kumara what the egoic lotus, the soul, is to the spiritual man; it carries the life principle of our planet and centers itself in Shamballa. From there it is dispersed throughout all forms upon the planet and we call it Life. It must be remembered that this life principle embodies or is impregnated with the will and purpose of That which over-shadows Sanat Kumara as the soul over-shadows the personality.
- A stream of energy coming from the sun, Sirius; this enters directly into the Hierarchy and carries with it the principle of buddhi, of cosmic love. This, in a mysterious way, is the principle found at the heart of every atom.
The life principle follows the line of 1.3.5.7, whilst the buddhic flow follows the line of 2.4.6. Thus atma-buddhi becomes the blended reality which is brought to full unfoldment as evolution proceeds. The energy of Sirius by-passes (to use a modern word) Shamballa and is focused in the Hierarchy. Its effect is not felt until after the third initiation, though the Masters use this energy whilst training disciples for the second, the fourth and the sixth initiations.
4. The entire work of the Great White Lodge is controlled from Sirius; the Ashrams are subjected to its cyclic inflow; the higher initiations are taken under its stimulation, for the principle of buddhi, of pure love (i.e., love-wisdom) must be active in the heart of every initiate prior to the initiation of the great decision; it is therefore only initiates of the fifth, sixth and higher initiations who can work consciously with the potent buddhic “livingness” which permeates all Ashrams, though unrecognized by the average disciple.
5. This Sirian influence was not recognized, and little of it was definitely focused in the Hierarchy, until Christ came and revealed the love of God to humanity. He is the expression, par excellence, of a Sirian initiation, and it is to that high place He will eventually go – no matter what duties or hierarchical obligations may take Him elsewhere between that time and now. The Buddha was originally to have chosen the fourth Path but other plans confront Him now and will probably claim His choice.
6. Sanat Kumara is not on the Sirian line but – to speak in symbols, not too deeply veiled – Lucifer, Son of the Morning, is closely related, and hence the large number of human beings who will become disciples in the Sirian Lodge. This is the true “Blue Lodge,” and to become a candidate in that Lodge, the initiate of the third degree has to become a lowly aspirant, with all the true and full initiations awaiting him “within the sunshine of the major Sun.”
7. None of the above facts indicates divergence of view between Shamballa and the Hierarchy, nor do they signify cleavage or differing aims and goals. The whole subject is reflected in such minor relations on Earth as those between:
- The Spiritual Triad and the Personality.
- The mental unit and the manasic permanent atom.
- Atma-Buddhi.
- The Christ and the Buddha.
The above somewhat uncorrelated items of information will give you a general idea of the significant connection between our unimportant little planet and that vast expression of divinity, the Life which is manifesting through Sirius; it is an expression which is organized and vital beyond anything man can vision and which is free to a completely unlimited extent, again beyond the power of man to comprehend. The principle of freedom is a leavening energy which can permeate substance in a unique manner; this divine principle represents an aspect of the influence which Sirius exerts on our solar system and particularly on our planet. This principle of freedom is one of the attributes of Deity (like will, love and mind) of which humanity knows as yet little. The freedom for which men fight is one of the lowest aspects of this cosmic freedom, which is related to certain great evolutionary developments that enable the life or spirit aspect to free itself from the impact, the contact and the influence of substance.
It is the principle of freedom which enables Sanat Kumara to dwell on the Earth and yet stand free from all contacts, except with Those Who have trodden the Path of Liberation and now stand free upon the cosmic physical plane; it is that which enables the initiate to achieve a state of “isolated unity”; it is that which lies behind the Spirit of Death and forms the motivating power of that great releasing Agency; it is that which provides a “pathway of power” between our Hierarchy and the distant sun, Sirius, and gives the incentive towards the “culture of freedom” or of liberation which motivates the work of the Masters of the Wisdom; it is that which produced the ferment and the vortex of conflict in far distant ages and which has been recognized in the present through the results of the Law of Evolution in every kingdom in nature; this is that which “substands” or lies under or behind all progress. This mysteriously “exerted influence,” this “pulling away” from form (as we might simply call it), emanates from Sirius and for it we have no name; it is the law of which the three cosmic laws – the Laws of Synthesis, of Attraction and of Economy – are only aspects. None of these three subsidiary laws imposes any rule or limitation upon the Lord of the World. The Law of Freedom, however, does impose certain restrictions, if one can use such a paradoxical phrase. It is responsible for His being known as the “Great Sacrifice,” for (under the control of this law) He created our planetary life and all that is within and upon it, in order to learn to wield this law with full understanding, in full consciousness, and yet at the same time to bring release to the myriad forms of His creation.
The Law of Economy affects humanity as a whole today throughout every phase of its life; the Law of Attraction is beginning to gain some control, particularly in the work which the Hierarchy undertakes to do; and many initiates and senior disciples are becoming aware of the significance of the Law of Synthesis and are reacting to its impact. Later on, when moving to one of the seven Paths, the Master will work with the Law of Freedom. This is not, as you may well surmise, its true name, for in the last analysis, freedom and liberation are effects of its activity. This unique and mysterious law governs the Life and the Lives upon Sirius, and it is to that unknown “sphere of functioning and intelligent activity” what the Law of Economy is to our planet – the lowest of the laws controlling existence in planetary form.
This Law of Economy includes, as you know from my earlier writings, many lesser or subsidiary laws; it might therefore be stated that this Law of Freedom also does the same. Until more divine attributes are realized as existing and recognized as aspects, it is not possible for the name of the law which embodies the Law of Freedom to be given, for there is no word in our language adequately available. The above information will, however, link Sirius and our little planet, the Earth, in your minds.
Below excerpted from “A Treatise on Cosmic Fire – Section Three – Division C – Seven Esoteric Stanzas”
STANZA LXXVII
(From Archive 49)
PATH IV. The Path to Sirius.
The mysterious Lhas of the sacred hidden fire withdraw Their thought, emerge from meditation, and all that is – between the first and third – is lost to sight. Naught is. Sound dies away. The Words are lost, for there is none to hear. The colors fade, and every point grows dim.
The ocean passes into quietude. The Mother slumbers and forgets her Son. The Father too retreats within the unknown place where fire lies hidden.
The serpent stretches forth inert. Its coils smother the lower fire and choke the sparks… Silence reigns. The absent Lhas forget the worlds and play at other games… All passes into nothingness. Yet still the Lhas themselves remain.
* * *
The mysterious Lhas of the fivefold force unite Their thought, sink into meditation deep and link the first and third. The worlds emerge, and – rushing into forms prepared – pursue their cycles.
* * *
The twelve-pointed play Their part and are the result of the communion of the One above the Sun with one of the seven wives.
* * *
The Master of the Sacred Heart is He who builds a Path between the sphere whereon His lot is cast and the great manasic orb. He builds it knowingly, calling in the aid of points of blue. These emerge from the heart of one of the seven. (The PLEIADES.)
These He bloweth upon and they find their place as stones in the one Way He constructeth for the treading of the many as they wend their way through mind to mind and thence to understanding. (Manas to mahat and thence to buddhi.)
.
Frontispiece
The prophet is not diverted by illusions of past, present and future. The fixity of language determines such linear distinctions. Prophets hold a key to the lock in language. The mechanical image remains only an image to them. This is not a mechanical universe. The linear progression of events is imposed by the observer. Cause and effect? That’s not it at all. The prophet utters fateful words. You glimpse a thing “destined to occur”. But the prophetic instant releases something of infinite portent and power. The universe undergoes a ghostly shift. The wise prophet conceals actuality behind shimmering labels. The uninitiated then believe the prophetic language is ambiguous. The listener distrusts the prophetic messenger. Instinct tells you how the utterance blunts the power of such words. The best prophets lead you up to the curtain and let you peer through it yourself.
– The Stolen Journals [1]
Frank Herbert “God Emperor of Dune” Gollancz,, Orion Publishing, London. Page 297 ISBN 0 575 07506 6
1st May 2008
Preface
As they say, “Every journey begins with a single step!”
I am heretic, a heretic to the church of reason. Though it was there that I began my genesis, there I found nemesis and where, I no longer belong.
This very morning as I mulled over koans and Leibniz, Lao Tzu and Newton, I stepped out of my front door. I looked down at our beautiful garden, now partially tamed and resplendent in the spring-ness of spring. Two beautiful white gulls flew overhead filling me with peace. I, yes I, had to return to the source and for me at least a part of the source of all this, is the second law of thermodynamics and that fate full night on a beach in Negril.
Over the last few days I have been waiting on a image from a lady in Australia to arrive and yesterday it did; a rose of deepest blue touched by the tears of heaven. This rose will adorn the cover of this book; “Vis viva – a journey to Sirius”.
Later, pondering on whether to start today or tomorrow and looking to clear my head, I took a stroll around the block. The wet earth rich in aroma from yesterday’s rain, the sun shining down on the fields nearby raised my spirits. And, as I paused to smoke on the bench, much as my grandfather had done, gazing out across the valley to Clydach, I saw a black crow chasing a red tailed kite into the sun. I followed them by eye until I could not bear it. I looked away and then only a few seconds later they were no where to be seen. The skies around here are big and there is no place to hide. But they were gone and I knew. I had to begin. It was an omen.
This book is not a book of answers. It is a book of beginnings. In these pages I will hope to outline a way of thinking that strays from the concretised thought patterns so prevalent today and in doing so will set myself up, for as we know, heretics are never welcome at the altar. Each church has for itself a bane of some kind and the bane of the church of reason is, proof. This is the catch 22 of a limited philosophical and dare I say “scientific” study of life. Here I mean science in the sense of knowing and knowledge and not in the sense of what has become the extension of technology which currently masquerades as science. How can I prove anything to you in the absence of a shared context? I cannot. It is only in reference to your knowledge and the veil of perception which is both yours and mine that I can attempt to communicate. In any case it is not things per se that I want to talk about, though of course things will be a part of this discourse. Proof itself is a concept. Proof is not really a reality but more often a mental construct within a thought pattern or collection of thoughts. In a sense proof requires a theory. In the absence of theory proof itself is only a potential construct of the mind which has yet to come into being.
Whether we like it or not the great philosophical, scientific, psychological and religious schools of thought have all influenced how we as mankind behave. They, along with the media, our peers and parents condition us to behave in certain ways. For example if lots of people agree on something then it becomes a truth and a lie told often enough becomes the truth.
Je pense donc je suis or cogito ergo sum, has permeated much of our thoughts and whether intentionally or otherwise has raised thought onto the high altar of existence, there perhaps to challenge the Divine for supremacy in the minds of man. If there is not thought then how can there be existence? Yet life itself is way beyond the scope of man’s petty intellect, it is so much more than that.
I feel therefore I am, is perhaps a better way of putting it. After all and once all that analytical thinking is done, life is much more of a feeling than a thought. Isn’t it?
Or even better still, simply, I am. Existence and life do not require logic or proof. There is no need for because, donc or ergo. At one level there just is.
The invention of these reasoning words pre-supposes a thought pattern upon the nature of communication that limits one in the exploration of being-ness. These words themselves hint at a direct and linear causality in life and constrain, implying the social conditioning inherent in the use of should and ought.
As part of this book I am going to attempt to reclaim some language before I use it. Words by their very nature, veil the truth and explicitly so. They take on a meaning or life of their own as they are used again and again. Certain sub cultures, let’s say for example the physical sciences use words in highly specified circumstance and within definitional frameworks, as such they cannot for them, have a meaning other than their context specific usage. Energy is a classic here. Ask any scientist what energy actually is and they will gloss over the subject calling it a capacity to do work. So what is this capacity that is energy? Does it really exist?
Here then is the beginning of the borders of a Kurukshetra, the Chautauqua of a journey into perception. Written by a man, in his mid forties, who has published in the physical science literature, co-founded a successful high technology spin out company and who was until recently a senior lecturer in chemistry at a top university. This means because of my qualifications that I am an initiate of a certain degree within the school of concrete science, the new religion of mankind.
Please, bear with me on this journey and let’s see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Organism
In a very real sense we, as a mankind live in a material world. A world that is made up of matter and most of our consciousness or awareness is directed at surviving within the context of that world. Depending upon where we are in life, the process of living can be a real struggle, just getting the basics to sustain the physical form takes up all our effort. Should we have the good fortune to have a little physical plane wealth we might find ourselves with time on our hands; the time to pursue things not directly aimed at sustenance of being. Yet there are relatively few people who actually use this time to focus on the mystery of being-ness. People choose instead to get caught up in various activities that divert away from this, feeling secure that they are leaving such things to the religious leaders, philosophers, scientists and perhaps the poets of this world. In a strange way doing the ostrich of life and taking expressed overt pleasure in being profoundly superficial. From my position how can anyone not wonder what living is all about? Even the most blasé of us must have wondered a little on this, even if that came about only because of the death of a loved one or having to explain to a child where budgerigars go when they die. Such things are quickly brushed under the carpet as if they didn’t happen as perhaps the TV schedule now beckons and we must not miss the latest episode of East Enders.
Our societies conspire to teach us that life is only as it appears or rather how we conspire with each other to view it. Social conditioning fills us with all sorts of limitations to our perception and our choices of behaviour. It is riddled with expectation and the use of conditional vocabulary. It has a purpose in that it has evolved so that a bunch of human beings can live together in a way that is relatively harmonious, sharing a nearly common contextual interpretation of events and happenings, enabling at least some sharing of resource so that life can be sustained for many. Yet how many choose to operate in this world is rapacious, taking everything from life, the planet and each other. Very few people look at the cost, in real terms, of our behaviours on each other and the world we live in. We have come to the point where we are out of rhythm with flow of life and discordant with the universe. In a sense the song of life we now sing is harsh and dissonant. Because, deep down we all know this, we seek doings to occupy our minds so that we do not have to look at the tragedy of it all. At least a part of this comes from the conurbation of humans into large cities, where to keep the population quiet forms of entertainment have been developed. Out of these do indeed spring the highest that human artistic endeavour can achieve but there is much that isn’t. One only has to look at the role models we are asked to subscribe to, where for example celebrity is perhaps the new God and people willingly submit to the knife to get new boobs or bigger fuller lips, in the bizarre hope that it will cover for their deep insecurity about where they are actually going in life.
As humanity it is now time to change. In a sense this need is more real that you can currently imagine. We must now begin that journey home. That journey is to find what we are really capable of and have, for so very many years now, forgotten.
These last few centuries have seen mankind concretising its thoughts in a way never before experienced, bringing about ever more complex material world constructs. The globalisation of commerce and electronic communications has brought together ideas from the far flung corners of the earth into a melting pot of some considerable tension and the strain has been shown quite markedly in recent months. People wave the banners of their various faiths whether they be based in the religions imposed upon them by the power hungry and the fearful or the rationalist materialistic religions of science and hedonism; they wave them as sacrosanct in a manner verging on absolutism and exclusion. This posturing renders the truths hidden in the basic religious teachings silent and neglects the better aspects of scientific enquiry, banished to perhaps a publish at all costs mentality.
Despite all this the recent world events are evidence enough of the illusion of control man uses to help it sleep at night. The universe does not really care what man plans to do. It just is and does its own thing, whether it is tidal waves, earthquakes or hurricanes. In the scope of the infinite we are pretty small fry, despite all our arrogant pretension to the contrary.
Oh that great God of intellect; the one that so demands proof. It is so badly missing the plot. The thought forms of the mind and its self deceit have tricked us all for so long. How much cure is there for all the sickness in the world? Would it not be better to take a more prophylactic approach to living and flow with, rather than against, life?
Let’s start with physical science to begin to look a little deeper.
On the one hand I perceive my physical being as a solid object that eats, drinks, sleeps, craps, urinates, makes love, gets hot, gets cold etc. I can talk about being wet in the rain. Under certain circumstances outside forces such as sunlight change the physical nature of the form, I can feel pain through sun burn for example. I look at other people and might categorise them as attractive or ugly, fat or thin. I may even notice the elaborate woven dead plant material which they choose to drape upon their bodies so as to enhance their overall appearance for whatever purpose. I engage in complex social rituals and participate in group mind activities whereby we conspire to do something.
On the other hand the twentieth and twenty first century schools of thought known as physics, chemistry and biology, point at an altogether different picture. Apparently I am made up of atoms, held together in molecules which exert attractive forces on each other to form membranes, bones, blood vessels and a small grey thing called a brain. These disciplines tell us that the forces holding together these molecules are actually quite weak. Yet nevertheless this collection of molecules seems to move around and function on the physical plane as if there is some inner thing organising them with something akin to intelligence. Though I question here whether thing is as yet the right word.
This organisation of the organism which is a physical plane construct of molecules seems to go on without a great deal of conscious thought. The vehicle which is the human form is kind of, self organising. At certain times it brings notions into conscious thought; better have some food, water etc. I am pretty sure that most people are not conscious of the extent of hydration at a cellular level, yet something is, and as an organism the learned response is to reach for the Evian or whatever. You have to admit that at this level already, it is quite miraculous.
Hang on a minute. If this form is made of atoms and that tree out there is too, then aren’t we made of the same stuff albeit slightly differently organised? So, I am the same as a tree yet different from it. The form side of my life is shared with the rest of the physical world. Somehow this collection of molecules called Eric, is made of the same stuff yet is animated in a way that it is different to a tree. I have a vehicle that can do stuff and move around consuming other stuff in a way that keeps this counter entropic being functioning…
I, rather my physical form, have boundaries. There are edges to my collection of molecules. I can hit things and move them. I am a collection of molecules that act as a factory taking in supplies and producing waste, actually rather a lot of it. I have a carbon footprint. The existence of this, my form, impacts on the local, global and universal ecosystem. I produce carbon dioxide. I am connected to the universe in so very many ways. I recycle molecules used by other beings. You and I may even have shared the same water molecule. I pissed several this morning, someone or something else may soon incorporate these.
When I touch something, although the details of the molecule / molecule interactions escape my consciousness I perceive a sensation or perception of touch.
Digging a little deeper what then is going on? This collection of molecules, places something it calls a hand on the table and touches it. This table is fairly old, it feels slightly rough to the finger and the individual rings that make up the wood have a rather pleasant texture.
How can a molecule feel?
In touching the table and running my fingers over it I have changed both the table and my fingers for ever. Some of my skin and the molecules which make up this thing I call skin will have rubbed off perhaps never to return. The wood is now slightly moistened by the moisture I exude. Yet did I actually touch the wood? That is penetrate the space of the molecular assembly called a table?
This question, if we choose, might lead us deeper into the thought process of trying to think about molecules, then atoms and then maybe, if we are so bold, sub atomic particles. There is apparent consensus as to what, at least on one level, a molecule is. A collection of atoms held together with reasonably strong forces. Exactly how people envisage molecules will vary. These forces come about because of something called charge and this charge has two polarities; positive and negative. Apparently it is a property of matter. If we cut to the chase the concept of charge is still a hypothesis that is widely held to be true, therefore, if consensus of opinion matters it must be and it must exist. It was, if I understand it correctly, first thought of to explain the properties of a collection of molecules when rubbed, and named specifically for a collection of molecules which make amber. Hence we have an electron which is derived from the ancient Greek word for amber. Chemists love electrons; they are the very basis of their trade. I have to come clean and say that I have never seen one so I can’t really be sure that they exist. Though I have to admit that as postulates go, it is pretty good. It has served the test of time.
So these charges interact to produce forces on each other that can be attractive or repulsive. These electrons (and protons) when collected into a molecule then have a collective charge which maps onto a semi-rigid fluctuating shape, giving rise to something that has electrostatic potential. These things (charges) move around and produce a field. Put another charged thing in this field and it experiences a force. These forces hold stuff together and stop my finger pushing through the table. As my finger gets very close the forces get pretty large and unless I am able to exert truly massive force, my finger will never go through the table. It may make the atoms in the table vibrate. But the nuclei in my finger will never touch the nuclei in the table.
At this level I am a bunch of particles, some charged some not, that whiz around producing fluctuating fields that are bound together in molecules, which in turn are held together through weaker forces into cells tissues and bones; the collection of matter which this thing called Eric lives in. I am pretty sure this thing, this vehicle exists. I seem to remember having it around for more that forty of these other things called years. It has changed shape during this time and as a bunch of molecules it not quite as physically able as it once was.
Going deeper into the realms of maths and quantum mechanics one can explain, pretty well how these charges move and behave within in the context and the constructed thought process of physics and chemistry. Some people have got quite famous doing this. Yet all this doesn’t really answer what is this thing called Eric? The one that thinks he is sure that there is a physical form he inhabits. Is that it then, this physical form?
Well no not really. If through meditation I become silent and stop all the thought processes, the form appears to keep working, without me consciously interfering. I can control my thoughts to an extent and because of my training perhaps more so that many others.
I can only assume that there is something animating this collection of molecules, the vis viva of the title. This vis viva whilst contained, at least in the first instance, within the form is not the entirety of the matter, it is also something else. It organises, that is it turns the collection of molecules, into an organism that can express collective action so as to gather sufficient resource to continue its existence. It has a will to survive. Well at least I think it does.
Do I think? Well I guess so. What the hell is thinking anyway?
There is then an entity which experiences a sense of awareness, separate from the day to day running of the collection of molecules, which thinks it thinks. It, the entity is consciously guiding the collection of molecules into pressing the keys on this laptop and trying to communicate with you through an arcane series of glyphs called letters, brought together in a collection to make words and sentences. These in turn represent a series of noises that other collections of molecules and their indwelling thing have evolved over a number of years as a means of communication. The meaning of these words has some commonality, though I cannot be in anyway sure that you will interpret them in the same way that I do. As I write these keystrokes are being stored on a thing called a computer which, if the hypothesis is correct, is breaking them down into a string of zeros and ones written as different charge states in yet another collection of molecules. They are appearing on a screen which is made up of liquid crystals and my eyes (and maybe my brain) are interpreting them back. This is truly fantastic really.
A lot of people have gotten quite famous talking about this thing that is indwelling. Many theories abound and no one can, if they are honest, say that the have the answer to life the universe and everything let alone all the questions. We have psychology, religion, poetry and neuroscience; we have education and training, yoga and meditation. There are religious ecstasy and scientific and rational reasoning. All of these in a sense attempt to extend understanding a little beyond the identification with the collection of molecules. They attempt to take comprehension beyond the day to day factory approach to life and extend beyond instinctual living. Perhaps then this extension from instinct is the difference in how the vis viva, animates the human being, providing an awareness that allows abstraction from the basic functions of life. To believe that we are only our forms and that our being-ness is confined to a chemical-physical process alone detracts from the wonder of being.
This vis viva then is what animates the form. It produces a variety of different types of humans, with differing capacities and capabilities, yet demonstrating some over arching similarities. These enable us to talk of a humanity rather than several.
If you are strongly identified with your form side you may already have been slightly offended by my calling you a bunch of molecules. This in itself speaks volumes. Yet viewed from the angle of a hungry predator, you are simply a source of meat, of food and not the glamorous social being that you sometimes think you are. Quite simply your form is meat, it is carnate and something is in this meat, it is incarnate.
The vis viva incarnates, it animates and organises the collection of molecules and causes them to function in a manner which tends to sustain the physical plane organism. Or rather isn’t it that the vis viva causes a part of the greater whole to incarnate and eke out an existence in the form. In our species there are two genders, male and female. The functions of these two types of forms are similar yet different and hopefully complementary. The nature of the collection of molecules is also different and the instinctual house keeping of them has differing boundaries and rhythms. The physical forms evolve at their own paces.
What it is that is actually incarnate is subject to discussion, each religious community and their spokespeople can go on about this. Quickly we get into questions of faith whether your faith is atheism or theism. I prefer now to use don’t know mind. I don’t know what it is that has incarnated into the form called Eric. I am kind of interested to find out.
This brings me back to that fate full conversation on a beach in Negril and “The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.” Entropy can be thought of as a measure of chaos or disorder. The physical form is ordered and maintaining this order requires energy. The animating indwelling thing marshals the factory and for a while holds the second law at bay, sooner or later it “gives up the ghost” and the entropic process of the decay of form and return to the carbon cycle takes place. I remember quite clearly spouting off to a man on the beach about how life can be explained solely in terms of physics and chemistry, with all the passion of an evangelist. He listened to me as I have done to doorstep preachers with all the patience of someone talking with the insane. As I described that using Occam’s razor there was no need to invoke anything other that physics as nothing else was required to prove the function.
He looked at me and through me.
“You don’t really believe that do you?”
And so began the first phase of a journey part of which I am sharing now.
By this stage Eric was a post doctoral researcher, with some twenty-five published papers to his name. He was going places and an academic career beckoned. Yet all it took was a simple direct comment to demonstrate the sandy nature of the foundations of his evangelism. In a very real sense the outer expression of a world view that was incomplete. Chance would have it that a few days later Eric would climb the Blue Mountain in darkness to see the glory of a dawn, such as he had never seen before; playing witness through majesty and in contrast to the hollowness of his own words. He tried to forget. After that he kind of knew he was going through the motions, though it would be a good many years before he would start to find some answers, but more of that later.
The animating thing within the form had somehow arranged things for him to be there at exactly that point in time, to have that experience and to begin to shatter a mental construct of the world built up over many years in the church of reason and refined through the fixing of attention upon some of the most complex and sometimes mathematical descriptions of the world. My, wasn’t he clever? Study of any doctrine over a period of tens of years invests. Those investments are difficult to let go of and Eric tried ever harder to force them on the world, somehow they would no longer fit.
Without knowing how and in what way Eric had begun to change, he had felt the knock of the spirit. The animating thing, incarnate through the auspices of vis viva had begun to rebel against the construct it was being force fed through constant internalisation and verbalisation shared with his fellow scientists. Something long buried in him was beginning to awaken.
No Man
“No man is an iland intire of it’ selfe:
Every man is a peece of the continent;”
John Donne, Meditation XVII from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.
So then what happened to this organism called Eric and why is he writing this, his own personal Chautauqua? His motives for this are not clear. Nor yet are his natures for there are many of these. All that he has told me is that there is in him a pressing need to express, to find a way to describe what was and is a most interesting path through life and onwards.
“It all started with Jason Bourne.” He tells me this is as good a point as any, from which to start. When Jason, after he realises the nature of what he has gotten himself into, refuses to submit to the programme he is forced, trained as an assassin and begins his missions. When asked to kill a man in front of his children something of the David Webb in him resurfaces, he botches the mission and is nearly killed as a result. He is then quite literally adrift on the sea of life not knowing who or what he is, with but a few clues to his past and a fog of amnesia surrounding him. He goes back to look at all the places and the people he once knew, trying to piece together what has happened.
Metaphor then is what it says on the tin, it is a transfer by linguistic connivance; a transfer from another reality or world into this one. It presupposes that this one is common. Of course it isn’t, yet it might be. In the use of metaphor Eric reckons that one can get a flavour or a taste of what he is trying to say and hint at the depths of the other worlds’ journey to Annwn in search of Awen, the inspiration of the vis viva. The breath which breathes life into all things, the breath that comes on the four winds and the moods they bear with them upon their shoulders, sometimes lightly and sometimes not. The Chautauqua then, is the search for a personal sense of Jesus, that sense of the divine potential incarnate in us all; where we are our own personal saviour, a sangraal quest for our inner being; the sense of at-one-ment with the world around us and perhaps the non mundane.
Eric came upon something quite by accident when he was a young man, caught up in all the hedonism of student life. It was a series of books starting for him with “The Journey to Ixtlan” written by Carlos Castaneda and so he heard of this thing called “the Warrior’s path”. He was rather taken by this series of books and read them all with a zeal, he was later to become famous for. When he talked about them with his flat mates it was rather clear that he had taken them seriously and they hadn’t. Something funny was going on and that year he was rather ill with many fevers. But he could not pretend he hadn’t heard, because he had. He did not know what he had heard but it was, something.
He got his degree and went on to study for a Ph.D. in chemical physics or “pissing about with lasers” as he liked to call it. The solitude of dark laboratories, expensive toys and the beauty of pure, coherent light, brought him much joy. After a while he twigged that he was pretty good at all this, he understood the theories and could make a laser sing. When he stood up to talk about his work, people listened, they even published his papers in scientific journals, what a hoot!
Later, when Eric went back to his school in Gloucestershire and walked around the sports fields, where he had snuck out during “lock up” to watch the fireworks of Guy Fawke’s night, made dangerous, secret, trips “out of bounds” for walnuts and ran and ran and ran. How many times had he done rounds as punishment? How great was that slip-slap-slip of his feet in rhythm with his breath. This was where it all began; one of his Jason Bourne moments, and it was at the hand of a well meaning man who in one sentence and in one act changed a life.
Eric had not settled in boarding school, his school work was messy and erratic reflecting his inner turmoil and his struggles to survive. Finally now at the age of 12 he sat his common entrance examination, though for him it was really another mock as he was due to be in the scholarship class next year. And there it was, on the English paper; write an essay inspired by any of the following. He chose:
“No man is an iland intire of it’ selfe:
Every man is a peece of the continent;”
John Donne, Meditation XVII from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.
There it was his first quay off, off from the day to day and into the palace of dreams, it was the febrile stuff of a doorway into his inner world, shimmering, veil like, in the wind of his existence. There is someone else, after all, who had something of him.
Eric for once let it all go; he expressed all his inner loneliness drifting in a coracle from that Cape Town harbour, abandoned under the stars of the Southern Cross and without hope, until there, on the horizon was the first light of day. The master marked his essay and wrote of the poetry in Eric’s soul on his report card and then he did it. He read it out in assembly.
No man would write like that would they? After all the bullying on his sexuality, that was it, proof and in front of the whole school. There it was, never, never, never let it go again. How very attractive the science classes were after that. How easily he gained marks and passed the exams.
Eric says that it was a life that had two potentialities severed by a choice that was not really his, circumstance made it and his parents were now happy. His Nan though, was so proud of that comment, a poet in the family! When Eric saw the report card quite recently he could still smell the ink, a dark vivid blue, Parker’s Quink, written with a sloping italic nib. He experienced the same fear as he had done thirty years before. Eric had been here, here with the musty thin report book, charting his progress. He had held that book many, many times. Now though he could read between the lines, written by the teachers, having written many such things himself.
This was a node in his life, one of many. That world so precious and private to him had been taken out and with the best intentions, thrashed in public. Eric began to blend and here the chameleon was truly born. The twin Gods of should and ought began to take their hold on his psyche and he became the best sportsman he could be and the best scientist. He still did languages but kept them tight on a rein. He needed the marks for his exams.
Still and even on days like today when the rain caresses the ground he can remember the other country where people can be who they are; and all those water bottle windows gazed through; day dreaming in the foothills of that other country; the one that seems so far yet so close. And, again the window ledge is just wide enough to sit on, waiting for his parents who never came to rescue him. They weren’t of that other country so how could they possibly know what it was like. Nor was anyone it would appear.
I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love:
The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.
And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace.
I Vow to Thee My Country, Sir Cecil A. Spring-Rice, 1918.
And that search for the other country was to continue for many years to come, always resident and poignant in his heart. Ready and fresh in his dreams yet as secret and as encrypted as it was possible to be. Buried deep within the layers of ice, the ice of a thousand tears cried in a silence of a song unsung and unspoken. No one knew what he thought and that gave him a sense of power. There, no one could harm him. There he was safe and he didn’t have to trust anyone.
When they let him read the lessons and the prayers he was very happy. Deep within him then the sense of the sacred was sanctuary and he did not mind that the others had their parents with them and that his were five thousand miles away. He and all the other expat boys got to ring the bells too!
Seigneur, faites de moi un instrument de Votre paix.
Là où il y a de la haine, que je mette l’amour.
Là où il y a l’offense, que je mette le pardon.
Là où il y a la discorde, que je mette l’union.
Là où il y a l’erreur, que je mette la vérité.
Là où il y a le doute, que je mette la foi.
Là où il y a le désespoir, que je mette l’espérance.
Là où il y a les ténèbres, que je mette Votre lumière.
Là où il y a la tristesse, que je mette la joie.
Ô Maître, que je ne cherche pas tant à être consolé qu’à consoler, à être compris qu’à comprendre, à être aimé qu’à aimer, car c’est en donnant qu’on reçoit, c’est en s’oubliant qu’on trouve, c’est en pardonnant qu’on est pardonné, c’est en mourant qu’on ressuscite à l’éternelle vie.
Par Saint François d’Assise
Later in life it was another rose that sneaked into his life and turned partially in the mortice to release the first seeds of an efflorescence that was to take him deep into Annwn and Awen; there again to offer him the proof that he was different and yet ultimately, the same.
Eric tells me that until you have been touched by the fingers of death there is no real concept of life. That you cannot begin to conceive life itself and that living is more of a going through the motions of existence. There is no fecundity in living and the organism which is the vehicle remains only partially awake, until the organising indwelling thing catches the breath of the vis viva and is inspired. Before this can happen the form side of life needs tended. The weeds and brambles that adorn the island of existence are pruned and hacked back; all that is unwanted is bagged up and taken to the re-cycling centre. Only then can the form side of life settle in the sea of floating things and allow creativity to stream forth un-abated. And it is the fingers of death that encourage the danse macabre of transformation, for it is only in the theatre of death that man can see his true script for this, his sojourn on the stage, where he is player for us all.
Eric says that he is lucky in that death has touched him three times now, and that the archetype of le mort should be welcome as it brings with it true change, for only then can man touch the very outer limits of his potential and truly, dance the edge. It is the universe’s way of showing the glory of incarnation and if we chose to see it, the pettiness of our doings and the darkness, which is so very often of our own making.
That island is crammed full with stuff, thoughts, should and ought. Filled with words that are not ours, choc-a-bloc with ideas put there by others, aspirations and ideals that have precious little to do with you; a veritable Shinjuku station at rush hour in time lapse photography where wave after wave of gripes and moans chant the koans of consumerism; the must have and the “if only” of the realms of the hungry ghosts.
“You know that people are rarely truly silent.” He says.
“True silence is what people fear the most. There and then, is the no-thing-ness of existence and it is primordial. It is before and will be after us and that is where the creative power of the void can be found, echoing out the very first sound into the darkness of manifestation; a single word which breaks the silence. It is this connectivity with the in-finite that man fears, insisting that it is only he and his island. He is lost in the sea of life, that he is one and has already separated from the zero.”
Eric likes to call the organising thing that animates the form the power within, as all the other words are now second hand. He distinguishes between the power within and the power without for clarity only. They are all part of the same awareness. He says that this distinction is a hangover from his sense of individuating identity and helps keep him sane, allowing him to tell all the stories that other people like so that they don’t panic or think him odd.
He says we all have a power within and it is the vis viva that animates this potential within us so that it incarnates. The one life chooses an aspect of awareness to materialise into form. This manifestation has an impact, it slows things down so that awareness becomes dream-like and foggy. It is just that so many people like the dream so much they aren’t willing to stop the world and wake up in the dream. The matrix of existence is so full of clamour and glamour that it straps people into a sense of reality that isn’t really there in the sea of the floating things. The folly of permanence and the arrow of time exclude the magic of being; after all we are all counter entropic beings are we not?
The incarnate matrix of existence has its stories and rules, by focusing intent upon their maintenance the world conspires to limit the potentialities to physical plane function whilst the organism and its thoughts keep the power within at bay with the brouhaha of social interaction and the relentless mind numbing noise of mass media and marketing. The voice of the power within remains unheard and talked over by the internal dialogue, often externalised, that convinces itself, at least partially, that the world of illusion is all that there is. This then is the sleight of hand that tells us we should be interested in what Manchester United are doing and whether of not Jennifer Anniston has found Mr Right; a sleight of hand that distracts us from perhaps our true purpose which is maybe, just maybe understanding the meaning behind why the vis viva animated the power within to incarnate so as to gain knowledge through physical plane existence and the challenges inherent in that.
Eric says that the irony is we dreamed this world into being yet most of us don’t even remember doing it and insist that this dream is real. Eric says that people have told him that he is a pretty powerful dreamer and he has no evidence to prove otherwise. He knows that for ten years of his life he did his very best to kill all of his dreams, he numbed them with chemicals and beer so that they would not speak to him at night. He says that coma is a good way to do this. The power within was wise to this and set him up with that visit to Negril, it had been silenced for too long and the sleeper must awaken. Eric didn’t realise it but he was in for a pretty rough ride after that.
The night I took this features later on in Vis Viva…
Traou an Dour 
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