Recently I have been listening to my intuition by allowing my voice free expression, as I have for many years. Lately though it seems to have more power or penetration of insight. Perhaps it is that I trust it more. Because I am starting to define ideas and approaches for a new book, I have been asking ‘voice’ for information and advice. Last night, with Hyone’s help I asked about the Self – the theme of the book – and had a very full response. Below, verbatim, is what was said.

I felt confused about this issue of the book. But when the question was asked I immediately knew that I want to write a book about the Self, the Centre. It has been a lifelong search. I realised today that I was researching this in my early twenties. It was one of the earliest articles I wrote – about cosmic consciousness. So it is a theme in my life, a personal search.

In my youth I was looking for something. I wanted to find a teacher. I wanted to find ways into what I felt was another world. I read, I meditated, I joined the Rosicrucians and pinned my hopes to them. And behind the search was a powerful drive.

In more recent years I realised part of the drive was an alternative to the sort of relationship I might have had with my father. But there was another side to the urge that is still with me and has survived all the changes.

There is a part of this man that he has never actually involved in his present life. It has never been expressed. It has never been incarnated. It is almost as if it was not born with him. It has never expressed through the body. It hasn’t made itself real through the body. So it is almost as if it has been a spiritual twin, a ghost, a spirit guide. It is influencing his life – God, what a story – and yet is so frustrated. Frustrated all the time because it can’t live its life. It is pushing and pushing this person toward what it wants to do, yet it is not felt as wholly Tony. It is not something he had built into his life and trusts, and so he does not live it in the same way as he lives the other areas of his life.

If I attempt to answer this question I have to gather pieces of information to make it understandable. And the first piece of information is this man’s life, his life, and his own personal development. He has become somebody who is not generally seen as a spiritual person. This even though he is seen to write and deal with this area of the spirit, he is not seen to be a spiritual person. It is not a view people have of him. There is a conflict in him about this, as he senses that within him an enormous area of his experience and feeling are to do with the spiritual. This is a strange paradox.

There is another aspect of this that has to do with the way he lives his life. He lives as if he has not got any connection with the spiritual. He does not act out any contact with the spiritual. He does not publicly meditate, go to church, lead groups or classes to do with the spiritual. He does not promulgate these areas either. He is not outwardly involved in the spiritual either. There is a part of this puzzle that has to do with the period in which we live.

In these times, and in this culture we have a certain view, or a certain way of doing things. It does not encourage people to express or live the hidden side of their nature – except in a psychic manner such as telling fortunes or giving people psychic readings. In Eastern countries you do not have to produce anything to be supported as a monk or sanyassin. In this country you have to produce the goods. You have to be more commercial. You need a product if you are to be considered. So the question has to consider those things.

The part of Tony that has not incarnated is a part that has access to those things, to the powers of the spirit, and could express them or demonstrate them.

When I look at the question though, I see there is a problem that is a part of Tony’s nature. It has created this division. When he was born there was a struggle about incarnation. He didn’t want to be incarnated. He didn’t want to face again the experience of the world. So a very large part of him was cut off from involvement and expression. It was pulled back or held back. It did not directly build the body or build the experience it might have done otherwise.

In considering how he might bring that part of him into expression now, there is still a possibility it can be done. As always it is involved in giving himself to others. The more you give that part of self to others the more it is built into the life of the body – the more it is expressed and expressible in the world. The more there is willingness to expose it and give it to others, the more it grows.

Is he ready to develop a working situation with other people from that point of view? He is making moves to declare this side of himself openly, and this is the beginning.

Another aspect is that he does not need to worry about it. If the relationship with the Self is enlarged it happens by itself. It will come of its own accord. It is like hairs on a man’s chin. They grow when he reaches a certain stage of development. One does not have to keep rubbing in lotions to make them grow. That is unnecessary worry.

So it is more important what has to be undone in Tony’s life rather than what has to be done.

What has to be undone in his life?

He has already realised today something about the question of ambition. A book he read many years ago – Light On The Path – says at the very beginning ‘Kill out ambition’. When he first read that all those years ago he couldn’t find any understanding of it.

What is there one needs? What is there one could hope for if one is already all things? Ambition is a misconception. It is ignorance. It is a part of the problem that holds back the realisation of the Self. To feel that we must strive for something to get satisfaction is the problem. Yet avoiding ambition has nothing to do with doing or being active. It has nothing to do with that. In fact the book goes on to day one must work or strive as those do who are ambitious. Of course one does, one lives, one breathes – none of this matters. The business of not doing things, of feeling that if I do such a thing I will not be spiritual is quite ridiculous. One is already the Self. One is already the one totality. We have cut ourselves off from it by all these attitudes and beliefs we have taken in – that we have to grab and strive and grasp for ourselves alone. We do not, not from that point of view.

There are many processes of belief that can trap consciousness, that stop it taking wing, flying into that immensity, going home. That is why the film ET was so moving for many people. This lost creature from a much wider life, a much more inclusive life, a much more powerful life, a much more connected life, is lost, trapped and injured in our everyday life here. It is the story of the human spirit and its desire to go home again – its attempt to regain its original state – not to be lost and deserted in the physical state. That means to be lost in sense impressions and the belief we are cut off and separate.

The film illustrates the importance to re-establish connection. We have to use whatever is at hand to do that, as ET does in the film. We live in the belief we are alone and separate. We believe it therefore we create it. We create a prison out of our beliefs.

Is this one of the things Tony needs to undo, the belief that he is alone?

In the past there was a period in human growth where it was necessary to be shut off from that connection. That was the fall mentioned in the Bible. Immense periods of time elapsed. What it was for, what it means, is that there was a process which occurred that was to limit human beings. It is difficult to talk about this.

It was a period when human beings fell, became smaller, became more involved in the processes of the Earth. They built around them a body in a way they had not done before. They created a situation that cut them off from each other. They could only see each other through the senses, hear each other through their ears, touch each other through their fingers and flesh. That wasn’t the situation before.

There is a story about this event. And the story is about a man falling in love with a woman. We call it the story of Adam and Eve. And in this love there generates a temptation. The temptation is such that a situation is created. To have the experience of such love, to do that, they had to unbalance themselves. To have the form of love which might exist between a she dog and a male dog, to experience that drive, they had to unbalance themselves, they had to cut off a part of their nature – the male or female. They had to repress it, to push it down, to hold it at bay, to make it unconscious. Otherwise that love could not occur. That relationship could not occur. And this was the original sin as spoken of in the Bible. It is that at some time we have denied a part of ourselves and we are still experiencing the consequences of that. We have built a body, a world, and a way of life around it. Each of us are haunted by the story of the stranger who knows and loves us yet we do not know them, or we run from them; the loved one who is unearthly, the beloved we can never find. We are haunted by this search for love. We attempt to recreate it in relationships with each other. But of course we never actually find it, although we resurrect something of our own being in our attempts to love each other, to forgive, to give something of ourselves to the other, to support each other in that loneliness.

It is in this quality of compassion for each other that we can begin to resurrect the denied part of ourselves. The part of us that was lost, pushed away, wilfully denied for the sake of experience.

There is a part of the story that suggests that at first it was not too serious. The beings could pull in and out of the isolated condition. Cayce tells this story. As Tony I find it hard to believe though. I can make sense of this feeling of something we long for. It is something that is so difficult for us to admit. It is that we have created this ourselves – this incompleteness. When we get near to touching that wholeness again, we don’t want it. We don’t want it. We don’t actually want it!

When I look into that past and see that period when I – we – pulled away, and chose to abandon the life of the One, the life of community, I see that I wanted to make something myself. I wanted to make something myself. There was a desire for power. A desire to live in a way that enhanced my own being, in a way that made it something unique, something godlike. I wanted to be like my father. I wanted to have all that power. I wanted to do it alone. I was not by myself in this. The difficulty is that whoever made that decision, actually created a movement, a sort of current we created. We caused a massive flow of energy in a particular direction. Once we had set it into motion because we willed it, we got carried along in it, carried along in our own creativity, in our own desire, in our own expectations. It was like a great dream. A huge creative process was begun. We created a world, we created a life, we created a whole set of processes. We became the victims of our own creativity. In this case the word victim simply means we eat what we have created.

When we begin to wake up – When we begin to look at what we have done with our dream, we begin to experience a sense of guilt. Yet there is no blame. There is no blame. But it is the guilt that stops us going back. We attempt to justify ourselves. We press on. I am perfectly okay by myself. I don’t need anyone. It is the story of the prodigal son.

One of the difficulties confronting us is that we actually repress or hide from ourselves the knowledge of who we are. We deny it from ourselves. It is difficult to accept because we are ashamed. Ashamed that we have lived in a pigsty and eaten the food of the pigs.

This is what is burning in me – I cannot believe this. This is a fantasy. A huge fantasy I am wanting for some reason. If it were not a fantasy why don’t I live in my father’s house? Why can’t I reach out a hand and say ‘Take up your bed and walk’. It stops me living that life. I cannot believe this. That is what I confront as I begin to touch these feelings.

Is that because there is such a strong I? What is this I which cannot believe?

It is the observer. The part of me that observes. I observe, in a long lifetime I haven’t actually met someone who exhibits that kingship. I have read about such people, but there is always someone else who demonstrates they are a fraud, and can actually do the ‘trick’ themselves. It wouldn’t even be a proof if one saw it. It would only be a proof if one did it oneself. The only thing I have even done like that is the projection from my body to home in London. Then I could never repeat it, so how is that proof? Even that becomes questionable because since then I have some across people who have a body mind split out of loneliness or inner problems, and they exhibit projection, but no proof. So is it me creating it again – creating my need to have such proof. I also know that in a dream we can create any such experience. Unless I can wake up in my sleep and observe your body and see a problem in your liver and say go to your doctor now and have an examination – and this was confirmed, and then could do this several times – that would be proof.

Despite a long life of trying I get to the point of disbelief.

I have been praying for Quentin – that I might be able to demonstrate a projection, to take away that feeling of death in life. But I cannot make it a reality. I can’t even make it a reality for myself.

Now it is like someone talking to me saying – Tony, look, supposing that all these things you have said are not true – the fall, having a wider life, the inner connections with all things. Nevertheless you are faced with your human life here and now. It still becomes fairly obvious that what you believe and think you begin to live and make real. You are therefore in a trap of your own creation. It is not like somebody else can take it away from you. It is no good appealing to God to take it away from you, because it is you who have the power of creating it or recreating it. It cannot be taken away from you. You made this trap. You have to find the combination yourself and undo it. Whatever you find when you open the door, well, you will find whatever you will find. But that is for you to discover. But it remains that you cannot live as anything as yourself as you are unless you recreate yourself. In simple words, if you are living disbelief, then you are living disbelief. You are actually living a belief in limitations. So you create your own limitations. If you live a belief that you have wider possibilities – even if that belief is that you have a right to talk to your neighbour, then perhaps you will go to them and say ‘can I have a spoonful of sugar’. You have still stepped beyond your previous limitations. You have created a wider life. So who knows where the boundaries are? Who knows that if you say I will go beyond that boundary what will be there?

This question of wanting to project and show your son implies that if I had been able to do that from the time I was 18, there would have been massive consequences as I had not dealt with all the unconscious muck still inside me.

There is a direction that is opening up in front of you. In the next few weeks you will define more fully the work you want to do on this book about the self. You will begin to present it to publishers. You will extend yourself into the world more fully. The world is you. You are the world. If you extend yourself more fully, then it extends to you, and you extend yourself into that inner world at the same time. This is where you will find your pathway, and this is how you will find your way back. Each of us has our own pathway, as we have to unlock the prison we have made of our own creativity.

In a months time I have the sense there will be a person we contact who will help us. It is almost like a direction our lives are taking at the moment. I have a sense of something. It is like radio waves reaching out. As they change they tune in to a different spectrum of incoming signals. We are changing what we are transmitting, and so we are receiving different inputs. The radio wave transmitting also is itself the aerial. We are also changing what we are creating in life. I have the word meeting, or wanting or looking coming though and can’t define it.

The change in what we transmit changes what we do, but also who we meet. We have actually changed what we are putting out. In doing so we have opened ourselves to people we would never have met before. So in a month’s time there is a meeting as there is something developing. It is not that the meeting is a momentous one. It is that it is an avenue. It will start something, in bringing something about. It will offer us an avenue – it opens a direction – the possibility of a direction, and we might feel ready to take that direction. It is just like something opening. We will say let us take that direction, as it will have a mutual attraction.