Notes - 8

   For within you is the light of the world -- the only light that can be

shed upon the Path. If you are unable to perceive it within you, it is

useless to look for it elsewhere. It is beyond you, because when you reach

it, you have lost yourself. It is unattainable because it forever recedes.

You will enter the light, but you will never touch the flame.

   Steadily, as you watch and worship, its light will grow stronger. Then

you may know that you have found the beginning of the way. And when you

have found the end, its light will suddenly become the infinite light.

 

   Truth has to be wrought out in the texture of daily living before new

truths can be safely imparted.

   Divinity must be lived, expressed and manifested to be understood. God

must be loved, known and revealed within the human heart and brain in

order to be intellectually grasped.

 

   All receive in order to give and to pass on to that which is lesser and

not so evolved.

   Such lesser beings begin to unfold to a spiritual impulse that one's

particular organism can respond to, transmute and utilize. One ceases to

obstruct and begins to transfer, and the doors are opened wide for

spiritual energy.

 

   All units in manifestation on a plane have to discard the vehicle

through which they function, before they can pass on to the subtler

levels.

   All sheaths in their progress from inertia to rhythm via mobility pass

through all the stages, whether they are logoic, causal or human physical

sheath, or a cell.

 

   The man must learn to separate himself from the vehicles in which he

desires, thinks and acts -- to know them as part of the not-Self.

   The whole idea or object of the senses is to reveal the not-Self and to

enable the Self therefore to differentiate between the real and the unreal.

   How can one who is subject to the illusions of the senses, as are all

human creatures, conceive of a state of consciousness? Yet it is this

very illusion which renders unto man eventually the secret password into

the kingdom of God and brings about his release.

   The fires of mind and spirit burn up matter and thereby bring about

liberation from the confining vehicle.

 

   Man has to consciously bring about his own liberation; when the

intensity of the united fires results in complete burning away of all

barriers and the liberation of the spirit by conscious directed efforts

from out of its three-fold sheaths, the partnership is dissolved.

 

   Until the path of knowledge has been added to the path of love, one can

never take a major initiation.

   The head and the heart become united in their endeavour. Mind and pure

reason are blended with love and devotion in an entire readjustment of

the personality to a new realm of awareness. Now states of consciousness

are registered.

 

   Learn the laws of spiritual psychology. Make clear the nature of the

soul of man. Demonstrate the relation between the Self and the sheaths

which that Self may use. Clarify the problem of the supernormal powers and

their safe and useful development.

 

   Power is grown and developed in silence, and only one who can find a

centre of peace within his head, where the paths of the bodily forces and

the spiritual inflowing tides meet, can rightly practise true

discrimination.

   Increase of power always involves a critical test of the vehicle.

 

   Increased psychic sensitiveness is both an indication of growth and at

the same time a test. Those who have passed through the great liberation

have no need to employ the powers inherent in the sheaths. They can use

the infallible knowledge of intuition and the illumination of the

principle of light.

 

   Assimilation and elimination are the laws of the soul life as well as

of the physical life, and when this simple law is disregarded serious

consequences will follow as inevitably as in the physical body.

 

   Even though the disciple waver, the voice of the silence remains within

him, and though he leave the path utterly, yet one day it will resound and

rend him asunder and separate his possessions and passions from his divine

possibilities. Then, with pain and desperate cries from the deserted lower

self he will return.

----

   That an enforced celibacy is an indication of a deep spirituality and a

necessary part of all esoteric and spiritual training is equally useless,

abnormal and undesirable. There is no better school for a disciple, than

a family life, with its enforced relations, its scope of adjustments, its

demanded sacrifices and service, and its opportunities for the full

expression of every part of a man's nature. There is no greater service to

be rendered to the race than the proffering of bodies to incoming souls.

 

   You are permitted to refuse matrimony in order that you may live

incessantly adhering to God. If, however, as one knowing the battle you

are willing to fight, take a wife and beget children.

   The procreation is the union of man and woman and is a divine thing,

for conception and generation are an immortal principle in mortal creation.

----

   In the completed personality comes the expression of the indwelling

self, hidden by the personality, through its creative activity of a

non-physical character.

   Man, who through the method of reincarnation unfolds his consciousness

until it flowers forth as the perfected soul whose nature is light and

whose realization is that of a self-conscious entity.

--------

\  Man dwells simultaneously on many levels of being and each such level

has its own appropriate breath.

   Supreme Lord, explain to me the inner meaning known to Thee; there are

two breathings which arise from the vital centres, why is one breathing

hot and the other cold.

 

   Man is also intended to be radioactive, the incense and perfume of his

life must ascend and this attracts the attention of the initiating factors

which wait to lead him to liberation.

----

   You cannot hang awareness in the void; awareness implies something

which it is aware of -- a duality at best. Awareness is essentially an

awareness of one's limitations and then of others.

 

Awareness has one great weakness -- it has no continuity, whilst

consciousness has no break. This is the vital difference. Consciousness is

of the Divine Fragments, so they are immortal. Awareness is an energy

produced within the body, whether physical, astral or mental. This

generation of energy is profuse in the beginning of life and slowly dries

up, whilst Consciousness is part of, a fragment of, the Unique Original

Force Field, Divine Wholeness, and its most minute fragment or unit is

immortal, Self-generating endlessly.

 

   In matter far subtler than the physical -- such as mind-stuff -- the

created power of consciousness is more readily seen than in the dense

physical plane.

 

   Through the friction of the pairs of opposites, light flashes forth.

The goal of evolution is found to be a gradual series of light

demonstrations veiled and hidden by every form his light.

 

   The internal fires of the planet will affect a human being as radiation

in exactly the same way as the pranic emanations of his etheric body

effects another physical body as radiation.

----

   Higher electronic matter can illuminate the interior of solid objects.

A body of such matter would thus be its own illuminant and its perceptions

could include both the largest and smallest object. In this way it would

illuminate and be aware of each object from all sides simultaneously.

   Its lowest function would be infrared or heat, its middle function

ultraviolet or x-ray; thus its functions would be to impart warmth,

colour, light, growth, health and its highest frequencies could sustain

and penetrate all inward parts. It would be in fact be life-giving!

 

   What can happen to a man whose whole being is made up of desires if

he has no cellular body and does not exist in a cellular world?

   A consciousness which had the same powers in relation to the cellular

could actually perceive molecular matter like air or emotion, could

actually penetrate into the interior of dense bodies or objects like

mountains or the human body, and would enjoy such speeds of movements that

far and near would be completely transformed.

   If the consciousness could be raised to a degree of penetration where

it could function equally fully in relation to the molecular world, many

of the kinds of invisibility would no longer exist for it.

   Above all, a consciousness at liberty in the molecular world, i.e. in

the next state beyond ours, would no longer be aware only of objects, but

also in relations between objects, because in most cases the field of

force representing the relation between objects is composed of matter in

molecular form.

   The molecular body would thus have an enormously increased power of

understanding the nature of existence.

 

   Such fine states of matter with all their miraculous properties and

possibilities of knowing, penetrating and understanding, are too strong

for unprepared man.

 

   Only if we can develop something analogous to scent in a flower, i.e.

an essence of life or consciousness, a principle of consciousness or Soul,

can we begin to move in that world while yet be alive in this. This can be

done by long accumulation of the finest energy; but ordinary man cannot

help spending this energy as fast or nearly as fast as it is produced.

   Sex energy is the finest and subtlest produced within the human

organism. It is most volatile, most difficult to store or keep under

control. It can express itself on any level. Sex dreaming uses up this

fine matter of true sex even faster than actual indulgence.

   The struggle to keep sex in its place without expression is like an

attempt to keep scent in a corner of a room. It is quite impossible. So

that the man who prides himself on being most self-controlled often spends

more time, thought, energy and ingenuity on sex than anyone/anything else.

 

   The rare energy is dissipated that can go into self-remembering which

nourishes the growth of essence.

   In man's ordinary state, i.e. acting as a machine (automatic energy),

when his inner processes proceed quite independently of his will or

desire, this fine matter follows the law governing all free matter in

molecular state: it diffuses from him in all directions which catch his

attention.

   As soon as manufactured, or with very brief delay, this fine matter

passes out of him in one form or another. This diffusing of man's finest

energy takes many forms: it may pass from him in healthy sex, explode from

him unhealthily as rancour, irritation or anger, or leak from him as

self-pity or envy.

 

   He who would soar to heaven must have heaven's wings.

   Mastery of great pain gives consciousness the intensity and flight

necessary to continue apart from the physical body.

   To acquire the power of changing one's vehicle or form for that

molecular world at will, it is necessary to both possess and control a

body belonging to the world above, a body of the next finer state of

matter.

----

   Somewhere in the cosmos, in another world, the fundamental chord of a

man's life has sounded, and here in this world the physical constituents

of his organism have assumed the responding pattern and becomes tangible

to us.

   In the same way, the disintegration of the earthly element of the old

(dying) body appears to set up a vibration which can pass invisibly

through time. This vibration would seem to be the bearer of the final

psychological pattern (sanskaras or structure) of the dying man.

 

   For death is as sure for that which is born, as birth is for that which

is dead.

 

   Judgment is the assignment to the disembodied self of a new body in

accordance with its records.

   Determination of future state is an exact mathematical resultant of

the causes set up in the past life.

 

   The purpose of a state like `hell' would be to restore faulty psychic

products to their original state of sound raw material.

 

   Birth is not the beginning. For at this point the physical vehicle,

which determines what he will be, is already formed: its strong points and

weak, its innate inclinations and potentialities are already established.

   Genes and chromosomes represent the first entry of human life into our

field of physical observation.

   The seed of man appears to emerge from the molecular world. But the

cellular body which grows from it is confined here, and if man is nothing

but a physical body, he can have no communication with his invisible world

of origin until death again reduces him to an essential form.

 

   Since nothing can disappear out of the Universe except with the

dissolution of the whole, if a soul ceases to be here it must mean that it

is born or existing in some other part of the cosmos.

 

   At the time of death the change in existence is from a cellular to a

molecular body.

   Any increase of speed beyond that ruling at conception cannot be

contained within a cellular body. Therefore, if the carrier of a man

continues to accelerate, it must do so in finer worlds than that of his

cellular organism.

   There is definitely a time interval between death and rebirth. But

during this period, the self is not in a cellular state and its

measurement of time is not on the same scale.

 

   The being of men does not change with the state after death, and so

those cravings which obsessed him in his physical life will still obsess

him.

   If we wish to learn in what condition one will be when one has quit the

body, observe in what condition it is while one is joined with the body.

 

   Past the insulation of death and conception, the consciousness of the

ordinary man may not pass.

   The shock which separates the end of one life from the beginning of the

next, which severs the essence from the corpse and launches it back into

the seed, is the most tremendous which a human being is called upon to

face. In fact, it is too strong for ordinary man who has no choice but to

forget and fall asleep.

   Ordinary man has no unbroken consciousness (awareness), i.e.

consciousness does not accompany him at the moment of so-called death; he

cannot know what death is, nor the unification of death. Causes pass from

one life to another unaccompanied by consciousness. If man has continuous

consciousness, death would have a different meaning.

 

   This preserving of memory through death, which implies unbroken

consciousness, is always shown to be a prerequisite for escape from

recurrence of earthly life.

 

   The saint and the criminal are equal in appearance. It is only the

disintegration of this deceptive body and the passage of what remains into

other states of matter that reveals to us the vast gulf between the

sleeping man and him who has created an indestructible principle of

consciousness.

 

   One should learn to die. There is a technique to dying, just as there

is to living.

   The act of dying should be a triumphant finale of life, a glorious

prelude to a conscious exit. A new attitude to death is to be cultivated,

a science of death to be inaugurated.

 

   Death, too, is undertaken at the direction of the ego, no matter how

unaware a human being may be of that direction.

   The moment of death is the greatest test and opportunity that comes to

man, for in this moment everything is possible. After immense preparation,

such a man will choose the moment of his own death to make this supreme

effort.

 

   Highest man cannot wait. He must improve his own heredity, arrange his

own birth.

 

   Preparation for states after death and before birth exactly implies

that we attempt to think and we do dimly being to understand that were

human individuality attached to molecular or electronic bodies, such

bodies would enjoy all kinds of power, properties, and possibilities,

which from the points of view of cellular bodies are inconceivable and

miraculous.

  

   Preparation of the immense task of remaining conscious through death

must be to become intensely conscious of one's self in life. This

acquisition of a permanent principle of consciousness is connected with

the internal development of soul.

   He who dies not before dying perishes when he dies.

 

   Death and transformation are man's unchosen and unchangeable fate. All

that he can choose and change is consciousness -- but to change this is

to change all.

 

   Death then is literally the withdrawal from the heart and from the head

of these two streams of energy, producing, consequently, loss of

consciousness and disintegration of the body.

   Death is a matter essentially of consciousness. We are conscious one

moment on the physical plane and a moment later we withdraw onto another

plane and are actively conscious there (or are we not?). Death will not be

understood as long as our consciousness is identified with the form

aspect.

   Just as soon as we know ourselves to be souls and find that we are

capable of focusing our consciousness on any plane at will, we shall

no longer know death.

 

   Those who forget when they leave the physical bodies, and because they

cannot as yet bring back into the physical brain consciousness the

recollection of that passing out and of the subsequent interval of active

living, they fail to relate death to sleep.

   The activating principle which withdraws mysteriously at death,

partially withdraws in the hour of sleep. This energy has direct relation

with the brain, heart and breathing apparatus.

 

   We should learn as we go to sleep to withdraw the consciousness to the

head. This should be practised as a definite exercise as one falls to

sleep. One should not permit oneself to drift off to sleep, one should

endeavour to preserve consciousness intact until there is a conscious

passing out into the astral plane.

   It involves the ability to withdraw the consciousness into the etheric

(astral) body and yet at the same time to preserve in full consciousness

(awareness) a point of contact in the head and from that point to direct

the automation, the physical body. It presupposes, if successful, certain

etheric conditions in the body.

 

   The ideal is to achieve such a condition of conscious control at will

that man may be focussed in his soul consciousness or focussed in his form

aspect, each act of focussed attention being brought about through a

specific objective necessitating such a focussing.

 

   Once he can live in the Soul consciousness and attain that high

attitude at will, the fluctuations of the form life will not touch him;

then he sees the path that leads from the plane of physical life to the

Soul realm.

   Once the magic of the Soul is grasped by the personality, the Soul

steadily dominates and can be trusted to carry forward the training of the

man to fruition.

 

   In the earlier stage the soul assumes control via the mind and so the

brain becomes responsive to the soul. Man is awakened to a knowledge of

himself as he really is and to the three worlds of his normal evolution.

Later the soul is brought under the dominance of the spirit.

   The Soul consciousness is indeed high, however it is limited in its

expression by the nature and quality of the form. Some forms are highly

responsive owing to the their density and the quality of the atoms of

which they are composed.

 

   The man who develops non-attachment even in his aspiration after

illumination and isolated unity becomes aware eventually through practised

discrimination of the over-shadowing cloud of spiritual knowledge.

 

   The objective of the evolutionary process is to enhance and deepen the

control of the Soul over its instruments. When this is complete we have a

divine incarnation.