EXPANDING STATES OF SELF-AWARENESS
Lesson 12
I feel compelled to begin this lesson with a few prefatory remarks before we take up where we left off in the last lesson. I speak to you in this lesson more particularly than usual out of experience in energy forces and frequencies. I am desirous that you understand me so that you can evaluate this teaching and decide whether you want to accept it or not. In order to do so, I would like you to try to offset from your a priori beliefs, dogmas, creeds, semantic blockages, or what have you. So I am asking you to put aside your prior beliefs for the sake of understanding this lesson.
Let us play make believe that we are out of this phenomenal world. Let us pretend that we are in this world as it is in reality. Notice I said "this world" as it is in reality-a dynamic process, a multiplicity of configurations of units of energy, non-metaphysical. For understanding this lesson, we are offsetting from objectifying and thingifying and mentalizing about what we thingify and objectify. We are playing make-believe that we are in the world in which we function, not the world in which we think we function. We are imagining that we function in the world from which the forces motivate the way we feel, what we desire, including our emotings, actions and reactions, lovings, thinkings, etc. We are motivated by invisible influences-waves-frequencies which we register beneath the level of the cortex.
The cortex functions only in objective identification, the values given thereto, and reactions to values given. That is the sole province of the cortex. The psychiatric profession calls it the unconscious, but it is only unconscious to cortical awareness. It is not unconscious to those who have entered that world and have become at home in it, who know how to function in it, etc. To such a one there is nothing unconscious about it; it is more vividly conscious than this 'objective' world.
I once visited with a man who had recently returned from India after helping Aurobindo Ghose for seven years in putting out a magazine called Era. He said to me, "I'm fed up with the metaphysical world and these metaphysicians." I asked him, "What do you mean by the 'metaphysical world?'" "Well, I want to get down to just plain objective identification," he replied. So I tried to explain to him, "Today, to the perceivers, the only metaphysicians that are left are those in objective identification." Meta- means other than or behind. And in modern physics what we are dealing with is an energy world and configurations thereof, bands of waves and frequencies. Whether we are describing radio engineering and electronics, or the study of the structure of the atom, its fusion and fission, etc., when we talk about physics we are discussing a dynamic world composed of units of energy configurated in a multiplicity of representations. And we call the study of that world physics.
Due to the limitations of the neural sense faculties that cannot register that world as it is in reality, that is, due to the failure of neural sense method of functioning we abstract from the waves-frequencies registered. We cannot see, hear, smell, taste or touch except by the registry of wave-frequencies impinging upon the nerve endings. Remember that. From the stimuli registered we abstract. Then we formulate pictures, images, and because those pictures or images appear substantive they cause us to believe that our pictures are the reality. But that is pure metaphysics! So who are the metaphysicians? The students of this School are not metaphysicians, because they are beginning to think of this world as it is in reality. "I'm fed up with metaphysics." One who has conditioned himself through the years, as Vitvan has, to function in this world (not another world, this world) as it is in reality thinks in terms of wave-frequencies and influences determined by the qualities which those waves and frequencies carry. He has become conditioned to that method of functioning, or method of thinking. The objective identifiers, the thingifiers, are the metaphysicians.
Let me reiterate one point that was given a few lessons back. The wave, the sine wave we could call it, is like a carrier, a vehicle upon which information can be loaded. It works just like an automobile. Get in it (or on it) and it will transport you from here to there. The radio and electronic engineers have learned how to load information onto those waves of energy. Then the waves carry the information from the broadcasting station to, let us say, your radio or television set and reproduce it in a phenomenal way. Similarly, each and every person is both a broadcasting station and a receiving station at the same time. Every feeling, little or big, is a bundle of wave-frequencies loaded with the qualities, gunas, you are entertaining at any given moment. With every trickle of desire-sometimes more than just a trickle-compulsion urges in desiring, etc., the wave-frequency goes out. The quality or character of that desire is loaded onto the wave-frequency. Desire can range all the way from gross appetites to a divinity in desire, "to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy might," to desire that more than you desire anything else. There are heights of desire and there are depths of desire lower than the animal. Those are some of the qualities of desire that we load onto the wave-frequencies that we send out.
Likewise consider your lovings and your thinkings. Do you see why a great one said to the scribes and Pharisees, you only pay attention to the outer decorum, correctness, but inside you are putrid, full of dead and unseemly things? We in the School of the Natural Order want to be circumspect about the qualities of our feelings and desires even when we are alone and in bed at night with no one around looking on or knowing anything about us. We must watch what kind of qualities or gunas we are loading onto the frequencies we are sending out. Those who are closest to us, en rapport, synchronized with our frequencies, get them first. That is, they are the most affected. That wave-frequency world has nothing to do with space. Our loved one can be a thousand miles away or be right in bed with you-it doesn't make any difference. Those who are en rapport get them first. Others, register them in a lesser degree until they becomes diffused in what we call the race psyche.
So unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you have no possibility of entering the Kingdom. That puts each one of us on the spot. When one takes on the job of being a teacher, a representative of the real world, he has many calling on him, looking to him, trying to tune in with him. He carries that responsibility of what they are receiving when they do tune in and make connection. He must watch every little tiny quality that he allows in the frequencies. That is a grave responsibility.
I speak to you out of functioning with full consciousness in that energy world almost all of the time. Sometimes I can hardly sleep at night when I think I ought to because the forces are too high, too many, perhaps, are calling on me. All this explanation is for one purpose. I want you to understand this world in which I live. But don't accept this explanation. I wish that you would attack it and try to disprove it until you exhaust yourself with trying. When you can't disprove it, then accept it. That's the kind of a student I like. But for the sake of understanding it so that you can properly evaluate it, offset from your mental ideas and beliefs, because when we put aside all beliefs we may learn how to function. Put aside all your preconceived prejudices, put aside all of your acceptances, and try to register this lesson, given from the standpoint of one who knows. (I say that in all humility.) I am one who has consciously worked it out in the forces and frequencies and battled it through step by step, until he has arrived at a definite conclusion regarding this development that we are seeking.
We are now ready to begin this lesson. As you know, the force and power of love is symbolized as Venus in Libra. According to the Greeks, Venus was the goddess of love. The constellation labeled Libra, represents the scales, the balance, that has pans for weighing. It is a marvelous symbol, because you are going to see, if you do not already know, that the force of love puts everything in the balance, in the scales, and weighs it out.
Nowadays it is difficult to introduce this power that we label love because there is not yet in the race psyche an adequate referent for the word love. The situation in the race psyche today is comparable to what it was in 1604 to 1611, when King James of England ordered the scholars to compile the Christian Bible. Your Christian Bible is no older than 1604-1611. I will not go into biblical history to show you the warring cults and contentions that were going on at that time, but they had the Wycliffe Bible, the Tyndale Bible, the Cloverdale Bible, and the Vulgate Bible as manuscripts. They also had manuscripts called the Books of Moses, and the Books of the Maccabees, and a vast number of different compilations translated from the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. The controversies over these documents were becoming so disrupting to the realm that King James ordered these contentions to stop. He requested his scholars to compile one scripture, one Bible out of the mass of manuscripts. These scholars were as familiar with the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew as they were with English.
So they took this mass of documents and began to compile what we now call the King James version of our Christian Bible. When that work was completed in 1611, it was given to the people, and they were to have no other. But the Papacy withdrew and wouldn't accept it. They stayed with the Vulgate. How all of this occurred is an interesting scholarly study, but it is not germane to our present purpose. But the whole point I am trying to make is that when they came to the Greek word agape, they had difficulty translating it. The Greeks had five words for different degrees of meaning for our one word love. When the Greeks used the word agape it meant the higher purified and refined influence of eros-nearly opposite to the meaning of eros. Yet we translate eros as love; we also translate agape as love. But there is as much difference between eros and agape as there is between brilliant daylight and darkest night. Yet we have one word-love.
Thus, when the scholars appointed by King James who compiled your Bible that you use today came to the word agape, the English word love was in disrepute. It had an odium attached to it comparable to today's usage with the constant grinding out in our popular music lyrics of "I love you, I love you." What they really mean is "I want you when I want you and where I want you." But they say, "I love you." Today we are like the scholars of King James' time. We are up against a colossal semantic situation in the race psyche. But those English scholars would not translate the word agape into the English word love, so they substituted the word charity. "Faith, hope, and love" is how it appears in the Greek testament. "Faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love." Without that I am nothing. "I am as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal." So they backed out and wouldn't translate it as the English word love. They said charity, which is the most innocuous thing in the world when we know the necessary steps in order to achieve knowledge. Faith and love must be developed as functional forces and frequencies before knowledge is born.
Remember also that we sharply differentiate the referent for the word knowledge from the accumulation of information. The accumulation of information about everything, even about man physiologically, or psychologically is information, not knowledge. For that accumulation of information we use the term epistemology. There is no knowledge involved in information. Call it epistemology; call it accumulation of information. But to know a thing, even though you know nothing about it, is knowledge. To enter into sympathetic rapport, en rapport, and feel like it feels, be conscious as it is conscious, is knowledge. You may not be able to describe one thing about it; perhaps you don't care to describe anything about it, the anatomical or physiological characteristics. etc.
Real knowing is knowing without thinking. Don't think that I have gone off the deep end, metaphyzling. There is a faculty whereby we know. We don't think-the fact of the matter is, any thinking would distort your ability to know. There is an awareness, an immediacy of knowledge, knowing without thinking. That is the knowledge that is born out of love, but one must first develop love before it can be done. One can become a walking encyclopedia of information about everything and have no knowledge at all-just loaded down with information.
Now let us return to the word love. I am not plunging into this until I clear up our referent for the word. Love is a motivating force that is pure (pure-as a chemist in a laboratory would purify a certain element, abstracting all foreign matter-not in a moralistic sense). We must develop pure love, free and clean from eros, from the influence of the genetrix, the world mother, biological or psychological drive for sense expression. Need I make it plainer? Pure love that is strong and powerful is the referent for the word agape.
We need to work our consciousness into the meaning of "God is love." God is love; love is God. When you experience that pure love you experience God, from where I sit. Don't look up into the skies or into the stratosphere or into the caves of the Himalayan mountains or in your closet or under your bed. Look into your heart, your heart center, for that sunburst of the force that has only one compulsion to it-to give. It does not want anything, and you can't give it anything. It only wants to give. When that force is so strong that you just want give, with no thought that you are going to get anything, God has arrived in your heart, according to the way I see it. Love is born-agape.
If we would advocate developing a group motivated by a force labeled agape we would lay ourselves wide open to comments such as, "Oh, that's a free love outfit up there." Well, of course it's free! We couldn't deny it. Anyone can get it; no one can corral it. But if we would advocate that our purpose and our ideal is to develop a group of men and women and children motivated by that great power called agape, we would be busy just trying to explain ourselves. So we don't advocate it. But this is what is taking place: There is an evolutionary process going on in our group oversoul, that can be labeled agape. We just let it evolve and go on without, "pulling its ears and stroking its hair" and making a virtue of it. It is just growing naturally, with no contamination of the lower force called eros. "Love ye one another even as I have loved you." Haven't you read that over and over? What did you think it meant?
When the motivating forces are brought up from the generative center through the solar center, Mars in Scorpio, and they open the heart center, then one will experience agape. Then one is motivated to give and to share, with no thought of self. How does one accomplish this awakening? Awhile back I said these five centers of the psychic nature represent the key to higher development. To begin to live in the north half one must lift the forces up to the heart center, anahata. This awakening is symbolized by Venus, the most beautiful, brightest object in the skies, in Libra. I am describing a state, not advocating something for one to do who doesn't even know that he has these vortices of psychic force. For the most part, the sleepers, as we call them, register waves and frequencies beneath the level of their cortex, because they are only busy thinking how to accomplish the objects of desire. They register according to the affinity within their psychic nature. This is quite an important point, because we need to learn that when we are disturbed by the wave frequency registry of someone else, we must not blame that other person. Blaming the other person accomplishes nothing. If you do not like what you register, get that affinity out of your own psyche and you won't register anything of that nature, that quality. Understanding this cuts out any basis for alibiing about anything.
Let us approach this same point again. Intrinsically you are the Power-to-be-conscious. You are the Power-to-be-conscious. And you, the intrinsic self, the Power-to-be-conscious, cannot function on any level unless you have a vehicle configurated of the substance of that level. You cannot function in this configurational world that some still call the 'objective' world, the 'physical' unless you have a 'physical' body. Similarly, you cannot function in the psychic world unless you have a psychic body composed of the substance of that world. What is the substance of that world?
In prior lessons I have described how Light was metamorphosed into energy, and then energy was metamorphosed into etheric substance, and that substance was metamorphozed into what we call teloplasm, ectoplasm, cytoplasm, the pupa substance, etc., before it becomes colloidal. From that colloidal state it configurates into atomic, molecular, and cellular structures, organs, organisms, etc. That is the process. So what is the substance of the psychic world? The gradations from energy to that etheric band of the whole metamorphozing process of light into living matter. Just that band from energy into etheric substance is the energy of the psychic world, of your psychic vehicle. There is a vast array of gradations of qualities of that substance. We could call those gradations planes, levels, or states of self-awareness. Think of the qualities of feelings, desirings, lovings, emotings, and thinkings loaded onto the wave-frequency of which that band pass is constituent. Those qualities do not belong to it inherently; we load them onto those energy forces configurated by the Power which is conscious of itself.
That configuration represents the state in which the Power is conscious. Then that substance is built in to your personality pattern, that is, built in to your psychic nature. What you have built in, cultivated, or acquired through the years, through the past cyclic processes that we call palingenesis will have affinity for corresponding wave-frequencies. And those wave-frequencies will activate us, motivate us-beneath the level of the cortex 99 times out of 100. The cortex is functioning in response to objective identification, to the world of images appearing substantive. It is so busy there that it just keeps going and going, creating so much noise and racket that all of this other subtle registry passes beneath the level of awareness, unknown to it, therefore called the unconscious. But the subtle registry is going on, whether you are awake or asleep, and particularly when you are cortically off guard, asleep. And you are motivated, activated, in your dreams and experiences, by those wave-frequencies registered according to affinity that you have in your psyche. If you don't like those motivations when you finally wake up and discover them, don't alibi. Don't blame Tom, Dick, or Harry, or Mary or Jane or anyone. Say, "See here, I've got to get that stuff out of my own psyche."
Then you can become immune to registration of those qualities. The laws, principles, of chemical affinity are analogous to the wave-frequency world. In this world as an energy system you will find that there is a natural attraction. "Birds of a feather will flock together," our grandmothers used to say. You will just gravitate by invisible influences to persons, places, and things where you can be activated according to your affinities. "I feel at home," you say, with this one or that one, this crowd or that crowd.
How do you improve yourself? First, raise your forces above the lower levels. Keep your forces up until all these affinities that have been heretofore cultivated on a lower level have atrophied and dropped away. You starve them of their substance and they do just atrophy and drop away. But before those centers are awakened, those who do not know that they have a psychic nature with foci of forces, force centers, function on the periphery of the psyche. They register according to the affinity, content, constituents, of the psyche itself. How very simple! There is nothing deep, nothing mystical, nothing occult about it. Just elect what you want to be, elect what you would do, elect the level upon which you would like to function all of the time, and just hold it, until you pull all of your forces to that level in your psyche. And the other will all drop away from you, will be no more.
That carries me to a point that is debated a great deal in psycho-analytical circles and among modern psychologists. How can one surmount the substituted and compensatory outlets of the power drive, the motivation, of the generative level and of the selfish ego-centralized solar level? How can one become free from all substituted and compensatory forms of expression due to the repression of the motivating force on, let us say the level of eros? How can one become completely free with no higher 'spiritual' substitutions to take the place of physiological or psychological, maladjustments? How can one avoid functional and organic disorders due to substituted and compensatory forms of expression when the motivating force has been repressed? In other words, how can one become free?
In our last lesson I made the point unqualifiedly, that any amount of sensuality, free and unrestrained or promiscuous or not, does not liberate the repressions, but makes a bad matter worse. It makes a bad matter worse on the grounds that anyone who gives in to sensuality will attract to him and around him the evil and imps, of the demon world. Any unrestrained libertinism, sensuality, is the high road to hell, by reason of the fact that one opens himself to the influences of that world. True liberation from all repression, with no so-called spiritual or higher level substitutions as an escape mechanism, occurs when the force is brought up and opens the heart center. This motivation of love, not only for men and women, and dogs and cats, is like a sunburst. One loves the whole universe, including the air, the sun, the grass and flowers and trees. One feels tremendous waves of love that enfold all the world. That motivation of love asks nothing but the privilege to give. It just wants to give, and the only repression that it suffers is when it cannot give, cannot pour out. When that release comes with bringing the force up to anahata, the heart center, it becomes the universal solvent. The substitutions and compensatory forms of expression drop away, because the force by which they were motivated has been taken out of them and brought to the heart center and expressed in love, agape.
I challenge the keenest psychiatrist to search the world or review all of his case histories and find even one who has that heart center open and the love force pouring out that has any form of substituted or compensatory forms of expression. In my work of nearly fifty years of interviewing hundreds of students I have never found one who had reached the heart center and opened it that has any vestige of a compensatory or substituted form of expression.
Once I was visiting with a spinster lady, who was a long-time family friend. I asked her, "Amy, how in the world did you get by? I know you are a virgin. How have you gotten by? You have no evidence of any substituted or compensatory form of expression-healthy and robust and hearty with a fine mentality. How did you do it?" Well, I knew all the time how she did it, but I was drawing her out. She told me, "I've found a secret. I found love in my heart, and I just pour out love to everything. I don't do anything else. And that is the way I did it." She was free-emancipated. Her reply was a confirmation of what I knew. I could supply many other similar examples of persons who have brought the force up to the heart center and have liberated it, opened it and poured out love, that love that is a synonym for God. When God comes into the consciousness, into the psyche, comes down or comes in, we label it love-unselfish pure love, agape.
Now I am closing in on what I have been trying to describe for the last three or four lessons. Live in the north half. By opening the heart center and releasing that power of love we begin to live in the north half. What happens to the south half? As we live in the north half, free, we are even free from eros, not a trickle of him any more. This brings me to our next lesson. Why don't we go on to the Christos power? Because we have to build a vehicle in order to function in that world, and we are a long way from building it. How are we going to function in a world without a vehicle that belongs to that world in which to function? We are now ready to describe the next step in the process of expanding our consciousness to the Mind level.
-Vitvan, Tape series dated 1955 - 1956 -Marj Coffman, ed, 1998