Touching Your Core Self – Part 3

I have used the word Core to represent the potential that was lying within the sperm and ovum at your conception. The potential expressed not only as growth, it also held the possibilities of consciousness, the self-regulating processes enabling you to survive daily life, and the enormous creativity and powers of insight displayed in the process of dreaming. It has been explained above that this potential, your Core, can express as drama, speech, and movement that does not arise from your conscious will. If we think of will, or willpower, as a drive towards something, or a resistance against something, then your Core has a will of its own. This is observable in the integrity of your body as it fights against disease – the resistance against something. It is also observable in your growth and in the way your core expresses as passionate drama and physical movement in your dreams – a drive towards something.
The Two Wills

It has been stressed that there are two wills at work within you. This is not a new idea. Many ancient thinkers and writers have expressed it in one way or another. For instance, Jakob Boehme who lived between 1575 and 1624 wrote that:

Thou must consider that there are in thy Soul two Wills, an inferiour Will, which is for driving thee to Things without and below; and a superiour Will, which is for drawing to Things within and above. These two Wills are now set together, as it were, Back to Back, and in a direct Contrariety to each other; but in the Beginning, it was not so. (See: Jacob Behmen)

It has to be remembered that early philosophers and thinkers saw the Core as divine, and what it willed as being the will of God. For that reason Saint Augustine wrote that:

The new will which I began to have was not yet strong enough to overcome that other will, strengthened by long indulgence. So these two wills, one old, one new, one carnal, the other spiritual, contended with each other and disturbed my soul.

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Jacob Boehme

The ancient explorers of the human soul did not have at their disposal the enormous amount of experimental research, along with the literature of the world, to base their writings on. This wider influence of thought reveals that one feature of the potential expressed by the Core is often overlooked. This is the possibility of the Core breaking through into your ordinary personal awareness.

This breakthrough occurs when the conscious self takes on a passive and accepting attitude to the Core, and allows it to express. Then, what was usually only active in dreams emerges into conscious experience. When this happens the healing, creative and perceptual possibilities of the Core are experienced. If the person can accept this, physical movement, speech, song or sounds, subjective imagery, all arise from other than the conscious will, and emerge into awareness. This is not something we are not accustomed to. I mean that we experience this every night in our dreams. What is new is that we might let ourselves become more aquainted with what our Core self wishes to express.

In ancient cultures, when people were less inhibited, less frightened of what they called the spiritual influence, it was common for people to allow visions and spontaneous movement and speech – i.e. their dream process to break through into waking awareness. Being more tightly imprisoned by our physical senses, and our concepts of what is proper and sensible behaviour, we tend to keep the will of our Core bound in chains. When we look back and critically examine past writings, looking at them through our own limited range of experience, we tend to see such experiences as fanciful or exaggerated. For instance the entry in an encyclopedia regarding Jacob Boehme says, “From an early age he believed that he saw visions, and throughout his life he claimed to be divinely inspired.” Notice the writer has to question Boehme’s claim to visions and divine contact. Strange that with all our sleep laboratories and insight into dreaming we still express some anxiety about the dream process breaking through into consciousness.
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George Washington Carver, one of the great scientists of our times, found he could receive scientific insight through prayer. See Carver.

In western culture we have just such an example of how a group of people discovered how to allow the action of their Core into their daily life. This historical event, the experience of Pentecost, seen in the beginnings of Christianity, also illustrates how the rational mind of today looks upon what the early Christians describe either as something special that happened only at that time for those people, or as fanciful and exaggerated reports.

In today’s world, when we experience a full flow of the Core, we still know it as meeting Life itself. If we want to call that God or divinity, why not? It is the essence of the creative process of life in us. At such times we confront the enormous potential from which we have emerged, and which still holds more than we have ever manifested. Perhaps we have a different perspective on it than our ancestors, but we can still recognise that we are meeting the same wonder.
Edgar Cayce, an apparently uneducated man who lived and worked during the last century, could accurately diagnose illness in others without any medical training. He did this by opening himself to his core, or what he called the cosmic mind. He pointed out that we each have within us the potential for the extraordinary abilities he daily demonstrated if we learn to acknowledge and allow our core to manifest more fully in our waking life.

Touching Your Core Self – Part 4

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