Author Archive

We Live in Special Times

The Influences We Live Amidst

We all live in influences we rarely recognise clearly. Language is a good example of this. The English language has an enormous number of words taken from other past and present cultures. The word ‘church’, or ‘kirk’ in Scotland, is taken originally from the Greek work kurikon. The word battle is from the Old French word bataille.

Such words embody ideas or concepts that are now part of our fundamental view of life and the world. In a very real sense they are the building blocks that go to shape the way we think about and see things. They shape the very way you consider things and respond. With a different language you might have a very different worldview.

Then there is the influence of tradition and past developments. For instance your home and work conditions today are the result of development over thousands of years of past human experience. The present environment is a vast accumulation of past insights and discoveries. And then there are the powerful world views that arrive with the religious or philosophical beliefs of other cultures. In the West, the impact of Eastern beliefs and views of human existence is enormous, as is that of other cultures such as the Native Americans and other indigenous people.

It is easy to forget that the development of modern psychotherapeutic techniques arising from pioneers such as Freud, Jung and Adler, have revolutionised home, educational, business and even religious practices. This is a very crude example, but we no longer believe we need to flog ourselves with a whip to arrive at a sense of well-being as did many monks and nuns in the past. We no longer believe we need to completely retreat from the world to grow and realise our innate potential and transcendent nature.

The efforts, insight and work of past innovators and explorers have acted in the way of road building or pathfinding. We can now move along the path of self expression or self discovery and creativity with far greater speed and ease than in the past. The wealth of information from the many cultures that now impinge upon our own act as an enormous wealth offering us a whole spectrum of human possibilities.

Overall the effect is that many more people are now highly educated and widely cultured without great effort, sacrifice or travel. A huge number of men and women have reached insights about the meaning and direction of their life that only very few managed in the past. This widened and educated perspective has led many to the point of seeing beyond national boundaries and any one cultural or religious belief. They form a growing body of people whose perspectives have evolved and are influencing society and the direction of change. From such changed perspective there grows an urge, a motivation, toward a different type of existence and social relationshiip than presently exists.

The important point being made is that there is an enormous opportunity at the moment to reach for a new life, and to become part of the powerful cultural and cosmic forces that are flowing though humanity making it easier to transform your life – easier to evolve.

The Build-Up From the Past

In many cultures there is reference to the influence ancestors have on the living. Ancestors are therefore often worshipped or turned to for advice or help in those cultures. In the west this is often thought of as a superstitious idea, yet in most homes I have been in there is a small area where family photographs are displayed almost like a shrine.

Gravestone in Japan showing offerings of food

Ancestor worship is a recognition of the way the actions and character of our past family and ‘tribal’ members is a living influence in our life today.

The tools we use in our work today have been formed and evolved through countless generations. Who was it who first invented the hammer? How long ago was that? We owe that imaginative ancestor great respect, and we need to remember that every time we take up a tool, or work with needle and thread, or read, we are experiencing a living stream of influence from our ancestors.

Some of this influence is not as obvious as a needle and thread, or our modern oven. Much of what we inherit as a gift from our ancestors is the mental and spiritual atmosphere in which we exist. I was born in a country town in which four people were burned alive for daring to read the bible themselves and interpret it in their own way. You and I have inherited the freedom they died for. You and I have inherited the power of transformation, or spiritual insight such people have left behind. The way is easier for us – though we too are building the road ahead for those who come after us. So we need to remember that if we take the path of self transformation, or self realisation, we can go much faster and further than our forebears did. We have the input, power and wisdom of many cultures and historic periods to guide and encourage us. (See definition of the word spiritual.

The Place of the Ancestors in our Lives

For you and I, for society, to have developed to the point we have, rests on enormous self giving and sacrifice. The fact that we are here now — being here now, rests upon all the love, the sacrifice, the sheer gut wrenching work that has been given by our personal and racial ancestors.
Why don’t we have a national ancestors day to recognise this and to give thanks and praise?

We could then recognise the gift of life and social order that we have been given. It would help us to recognise our own part in life also. It would be a time that we recognised those who had simply just lived their lives without any great accliam or desire to be in the forefront. It would not be about those who had done something heroic, or who had invented something, or had fought in a war. It would be the recognition of those who had simply lived their life, and in doing so being part of the structure and development of not only our own personal existence, but also the foundation of our present society. They were the ones who built it, bit by bit, to become what we take for granted. Many of us are still working to improve the society we live in, and to improve the lives of our own children. But we receive so much from the past, from the work and life of others. The homes we have, the roads, the electricity and water in our homes, the whole huge structure of the background of life in which we live. Even the knowledge of how to do things was forged and developed by our ancestors. What ever our work is, whether it is as a parent, a construction worker, a teacher, as somebody cleaning the roads and removing garbage, we are maintaining the very structure of our society and handing on a gift to those who follow. When we realise that, we can then see what an enormous heritage we have received from the past and from those who lived it. Without that simple everyday living, working, loving, there would be nothing. Let us salute our forebears in recognition of what they have left us. Let us kneel before them in thanks to received the blessings they have given us. Let us seek a national ancestors day!

Advances in discovery are almost at the point of infinity

The number of human inventions, starting with bone tools, evolving through stone implements to metal, was at first very slow, occurring over huge periods of time. More recently the rate of invention has increased to such a degree that new ideas and objects are constantly emerging. If one drew a graph of this it would have a very slow rise over millions of years. Then, in the present the curve rises steeply. In fact it is rising so steeply that some people predict it will soon reach infinity. What this will mean in terms of change entering our lives is difficult or impossible to forecast or imagine. However, it is safe to say its impact will be enormous. Even though we have not yet reached the point of infinite change, we are still faced by an ever growing number of choices and changing impacts.

What we can already see is that new ideas or artifacts such as television, the Internet and the mobile phone, alter the way society operates and people live their lives. Such things bring new challenges, new threats as well as new opportunities and greater personal outreach.

Some years ago, while exploring these ideas, I wrote a piece about the super augmentation that we humans have acquired. To quote:

Humans have always extended their powers in some way. When Spanish conquerors appeared in South America riding horses, the indigenous people thought they weren’t human, that they were gods. The native people hadn’t previously seen this connection between man and beast. The Spanish had extended their ability to move across terrain by riding horses, a common practice in the Old World. This ability to extend ourselves is ancient, as with stone axes, bows, spears, boats, and later guns, cars, planes, and so on ad infinitum.

This drive to extend ourselves, and our life within the super organism of human society, is the womb and beasts giving birth to and suckling a new type of human person and society.

Remember, as we now come into view of the future, that when a significant extension of individual powerwithin human society occurred in the past, it radically changed how human beings experienced themselves, and human society functioned. For instance the horse and boat extended the range of food gathering, conquest, trade, and exchange of information. The printing press amplified one individual’s ability to communicate enormously. It enabled groups to promulgate ideas. The radio amplified the human voice so it could be heard simultaneously by millions. The television has projected the human image so that one person can be known across the world.

Take someone like the US president. If we place him or her in a desert alone like an old aborigine, without any modern equipment, he or she might soon die. If they had lived within an Aboriginal community they might have become an elder within the tribe. But because of the super-organism in which they were raised and presently live, they have a much greater connection and power to influence enormous numbers of people.

In fact the present president is a totally different being than you and I. Different because he is part of the super organism, or political party, in which he exists. This super organism has developed enormous technological aids, and the president is plugged into these means of super augmenting his human powers. Compared with the Aborigine group, the president has god like powers to extend his or her influence. If the president landed in ancient Mexico in his private jet they would hail him as a god. The president can appear to millions of people at the same moment and speak to them; he or she can travel to any part of the world; their thoughts and words have great influence; their decisions are augmented not only by her/himself, but also by a huge network of other human beings all over the world, along with a war machine and industry. His image, his words, his deeds are all recorded and will exist as an influence long after he is dead physically.

When the president is in the society or organism of his birth, but also when he is ‘plugged in’ or connected to the controls of the super organism of his political party, he IS a god being. His ideas are known and implemented. He is the centre of a flow of money and opportunity. He is a media figure, a politician, an entertainer. He is locked into an enormous body which flexes at his command and touches people and events all over the world, with the power of life or death.
Robot

The person we know as the president is not just a normal human being. If he were, most of us would never have ‘met’ him. He is a technological and social phenomena. He is a human being who has been enhanced and extended enormously to god-like proportions. If he were uncoupled from these enhancements he would revert to aboriginal existence. So would we all, because to some extent we all share these enhancements.

This poses us with the question of what we will become with further enhancements. They are certainly on their way. They will certainly affect your life and the lives of those around you. Are you ready to meet them? Are you ready to deal with or take part in the enormous social changes that are on their way? What will be your stance?

See: Acceleration Watch: What is the Singularity?: Sorg the God.

The Pressure of Change Pushes us to Adapt

There is still speculation about global warming and what earth changes it will bring if it develops further. But there is no doubt about the ever changing political and economic climate of the world and the pressures that brings for us to adapt. There is no doubt about the enormous changes new technology is bringing in terms of health, longevity and the possibility of enhanced mental and emotional experience. There is no doubt that change is a fundamental part of life and the universe.

A recent feature in New Scientist described how Dr. Ilham Abuljadayel, while doing some research on blood cells from a leukaemia patient, discovered how to form stem cells from a patient’s blood. She later used this technology to cure patients with what was previously incurable severe aplastic anaemia. At first her work was not recognised, but more recently specialists from different parts of the world are using her methods. The company TriStem has been set up in the UK to support her research.

Also, Chosun University professor Song Chang-hun in South Korea says many spinal cord patients will have the opportunity to receive stem cell therapy by 2006. During a recent news conference, one of Song’s patients — a 37-year-old spinal cord patient who became paralyzed 19 years ago — stood up from her wheelchair and walked with the help of a walker. She took her first steps about 40 days after being treated with stem cells from the blood of umbilical cords.

The opportunities and challenges of the future, even of the present, press us to find a way of constantly upgrading our attitudes and responses to what surrounds us. This could be likened to upgrading the software you use on your computer. Unfortunately it is more personal and challenging because we so often identify with our perceptions and beliefs as if they were something that if lost, would somehow be like losing a limb. After all, how many people have killed when their religious belief or political ideology was questioned? Perhaps we need to let go of the past in some way. Or at least, we need to be able to reprogram our habitual responses – those that are painful or destructive anyway. There are simple tools to do this, or more complex or expensive methods. See: Reprogramming the Unconscious; EMDR; Sedona Method.

Of course those links are just suggestions not recommendations. One of the greatest methods is to learn a way of continuous re-evaluation that enable you to meet the here and now challenges of everyday life in a creative way. I believe this calls for a way of living that links your conscious personality with your deeply unconscious life processes and mind. This union is like an evolutionary step, one pressing for development in our life today. See: The Core Experience.

While, as said above, we owe so much to our ancestors, they have also left us situations that are completely inhuman. Many aspects of society and governmental rulings were set in place as means to manipulate and keep control of people’s minds and actions. Why do just a few people need to be paid vast sums of money for doing their work? Why do we have a society in which basic needs such as a house need to be worked for most of ones life? We sometimes think of animals as dumb, as having less intelligence – yet a rabbit can toil for a short period and have a home for life. The economic system that is involved in the system involved in a house costing you twenty or more years of labour is a means of keeping you a slave. We pride ourselves as having abolished slavery, yet we are nearly all slaves to the system we live in.

Even stone age societies such as the Ladahk in todays world, have it easier. They labour for only six months in every year. Unfortunately governments cannot tolerate free and self sufficient people. As has happened in Indonesia and elsewhere, the government pushes self sufficient forest dwellers into houses so they have to pay rent and become a slave to the system. Then the government can takes away their land.


The latest edition of New Scientist is an example of the new thinking

Visions of the Future

There have always been prophets of the future. But prophesy is notoriously difficult to get right. As Edgar Cayce said, the future is like shadows cast by our present actions. If we shift a little, the shadows and the patterns shift also.

A frequent prediction one hears at the moment is that America is gradually slipping into an economic and political decline, while China and India are rapidly growing in power and wealth.

But perhaps the most potent predictor of the future is ourselves. We are constantly creating the world by what we think and do, and how we relate to each other. The enormous power of change is happening right now. We are right in the middle of momentous times. Look around carefully and take note of what you see. Particularly look at the points of development, the growing tip of change – often expressed in good music and literature.

Each of us, in our dreams and meditations sometimes have glimpses of what may be emerging into the world, of what we ourselves are growing toward. Sometimes these are very personal, and sometimes they deal with the wider life of society. But often these are dreams or visions to help us find our own way in the changes we are confronted by.

What we can be certain of is that change will occur, and we are involved in it in one way or another right now. Certainly new technology will as radically change our world and lives in the future as it has in the past. The car, the airplane, the telephone and TV have revolutionised the world beyond any political or religious influence. They have changed the way we live and think. They have altered how we live in the world and how we relate to each other. Technological advances still to come will probably bring even greater change. Undoubtedly it is change beyond what we can imagine at the moment.

However, we all face the question of what can I do? How do I choose the right direction? What effect will my small personal life have on this huge moving mass of humanity?

Well, you are part of the mass. You are one of the runners in the human race. What you do and think touches the lives of those around you. Those around you influence and play parts in the lives of others. In this way we all touch each other.

Each of us, in our hearts, have urges that arise from our awareness of the world we live within. At heart we know we are part of the world and the universe. Perhaps this innate love and vision has been battered by events or circumstances in our past. If so, seek healing. But if you have that vision, if you can feel yourself as part of this moving wonderful process of life that is constantly changing, live out what your individual vision is. The life within you is calling you to live your vision. Listen to it. Take time each day to listen to what lies under the rush of thoughts and feelings that often blanket out your sure knowledge of where you stand in the world, and what direction to take. Be cautious about following leaders unless they have exactly your vision. Feel the pulse of those around you in the streets. Know what moves people and what they seek. Look and listen. Your heart will hear and tell you what your place is in the middle of it all. Your intuition is your compass and map..

At a time I was feeling hopeless I asked my own heart to give me advice. This is what it said:

Whatever you believe life is about, you are nevertheless faced with your human life here and now. Everyday life demonstrates again and again that what you believe and think you begin to live and make real. If you believe that getting drunk every weekend is the way to go, then that is the way you will go.

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 out of what you fear, long for, believe and do. So 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 in a different way than you are unless you recreate yourself.

In simple words, if you are living a belief that life is hopeless and without point, then 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’. If you do, you will have stepped beyond your previous limitations. You will have created a wider life. So who knows where the boundaries are? Who knows, if you say I will go beyond that boundary, what will be there? If you take one small step after another, who knows where it will take you?

Who knows where you will travel if you take the next small step?

You are Never Alone

And always remember – you are not alone, and you are not impoverished.

The story of the loaves and fishes is a simple reminder that we are only poor if we hold onto our own handful of food and wealth. When we put our small sustenance and wealth with others we are enormously rich and powerful.

Governments and multinational corporations attempt such allegiances all the time, and unless we the people also collectively realise our power and wealth, we remain at the mercy of such often soulless giants.

To do this we need to recognise the need for transcendence of national, religious and racial boundaries, the need for self giving to create a new humanity.

Remember also that through links of love you create a boat of eternity. I believe love transcends time and death. It is part of the eternal Life that permeates all creation. Allowing it to flow through your life connects you with that immensity and eternity. Create loving links that are mutually supportive. Create a boat in which you can sail beyond change.

And always remember – you are not alone, and you are not impoverished.

To do this we need to recognise the need for transcendence of national, religious and racial boundaries, the need for self giving to create a new humanity.

We Are Co-creators in the Cosmos

Chris: This has reminded me of something you talked about in regard to physical substance — matter. You said that modern physics has shown that we change it by looking at it. What are the implications of that?

Tony: That is an amazing idea isn’t it?

Considering that quantum physics now assures us that subatomic particles can change their very nature simply by us observing them, I often wonder if, when we look at a flower and feel how beautiful it is, we in some way change it.

In his book Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot gives an understandable description of this. He says that, ‘Physicists have found compelling evidence that the only time electrons and other “quanta” manifest as particles is when we are looking at them. At all other times they behave as waves. This is as strange as owning a bowling ball that traces a single line down the lane while you are watching it, but leaves a wave pattern every time you blink your eyes.’

We usually see the world as bounded by time and three dimensions. But another extraordinary statement about the world around us is one put forward by Irish physicist John Stewart Bell. It is a quantum theorem that has revolutionised the way reality is considered. In brief, the theorem states that when two sub-microscopic particles are split and moved to a distance from each other, the action on, or of, particle ‘A’, is instantaneously reproduced with particle ‘B’. This interaction does not rely on any known link or communication and is considered to stand above normal physical laws of nature, as it is faster than light. Prior to such findings it was thought nothing could transcend the speed of light. See Feature by Talbot.

Despite these findings we still hear scientists talking about the solid and time bound world in which nothing can move faster than light. I guess we all live in the past in one way or another, and in fact our world view, considering these new findings, is still dragging somewhere in the 19th century.
Chick

The everyday events in life are still miraculous

Newtonian physics, in which the atom was the fundamental and immutable particle in the universe, gradually robbed us of a magical view of our environment that existed previously, and still exists in many tribal cultures.

This reminds me of something I read in Lyle Watson’s book Supernature. He said that having written about some of the strange things that could be observed, which many scientists would never investigate because they appear to be completely impossible from their present view of the universe, a man in Italy wrote to him asking for Lyle to come and witness something his young son did. Lyle followed through on the request, and while observing the young boy of about four years old, the father rolled a tennis ball to his son. The son played with it for a while, and without any apparent struggle rolled the ball back. But now the ball was inside out without any break in its surface.

Lyle then took another ball and wrote his name on the outside of it. He rolled the ball to the boy and in a few minutes it was rolled back inside out.

Later, with witnesses, Lyle cut the second ball open and there was his signature on the inside of what had been an unbroken ball.

What Lyle says is that our present scientific view sees what he witnessed as completely impossible. It is against most of the fundamental things that our science states are laws of our universe, making what happened out of the question.

Having said that, here we are living in the world where it seems impossible for us to turn tennis balls inside out without cutting them in some way; distances have to be crossed physically by some means of transport; people appear to be completely separate from us in mind and body; death appears to be a final end; we feel hemmed in by the limits of our ability to know — so what does it mean that a four year old boy turned a tennis ball inside out?

Well, the new physics begins to give us evidence that we live in the midst of a universe that is far more amazing than we have ever previously thought. We live in some ways as co-creators of this universe. But my deepest feelings about what this means is that we each have a phenomenal potential. We each have possibilities beyond anything we can imagine. As human beings we haven’t even begun to really explore that potential and to use it in our everyday life. To me that is the most important path forward for each of us.

Personally I find it amazing that many Christians, who profess deep belief in their Bible, can’t see and accept that. In Genesis it says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness …. And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” That means we have the potential of being godlike. Miracles are part of our nature!

Touching Your Core Self – Part 6

Allowing the power of your core to flow into your conscious life is fundamentally simple. But simple things have complexity. The difficulty is that the core is the fount of life in your being. It is the potential for all that you can achieve or become. But it is life, and as when we watch a plant grow, it may appear as if little is happening at times. The growth is occasionally only realised by comparing present with past. But sometimes life is dynamic and urgent. Then the power is obvious and even challenging.
{short description of image}

When this is remembered there are simple steps to releasing the power of your core.

* First you need to become quiet for a few moments and recognise the experience of your own existence. Recognise that you do not have to believe in your existence. You are convinced of it because you exist.
* Next take time to consider what you think or feel underlies your existence. Do you think of yourself as caused by chemical processes, biological activities, or maybe even mechanical and unconscious forces? Perhaps you believe that God created you. Whatever you believe, can you completely define how that came about? Or perhaps another way of asking this question is to say do you think everything is known about whatever it is that causes you to exist? For instance although we now know a great deal about life processes in biological science, life is still recognised as a mystery. Can you take that attitude to your own origins? Can you accept that at the base of your being is a mystery?
* If you can accept there is a great deal of unknown about what causes you to exist, and that despite what you have learned, you still know very little, can you accept there are possibilities about your being that you do not know and perhaps cannot grasp at present?

* The state of not knowing is important. It frees you of preconceived or rigid ideas and opinions that might stand in the way – so this step requires no belief. What it does require is a sense that there is something you do not understand that brings you into being. Take time to develop this condition of not knowing.

* When you feel the open condition active in you, state in some way that is an expression of this pivotal moment in your life, that you want the unknown mystery at your core to emerge more fully into your experience. A suggested statement is: “I come with all my being held open to the action of the mystery that is my core self.”

{short description of image}

* Those steps are deeply important. Unless you can take them it is unlikely that you can move more fully into meeting your core. Too many ideas, concepts, beliefs and convictions stand in the way of what is at present unknown to you. But if you can have a sense of innocence in connection with the mystery that is even now providing you with an experience of existing, then you have already begun the adventure of transcending the limitations you have lived within.

* To further that state of grace, you need to consider what is your condition as you stand before the mystery of yourself. It is helpful to ask yourself how someone gets the best out of you. Do they do this by criticising and attacking you? Do you warm to them if they are indifferent to you? Are you creative and give of your best in their presence if they have no links of sympathy with you? Whatever you arrive at as the condition that helps you to flower and express, build this into your approach, your attitude, toward the mystery that is at the heart of yourself.

* Come before the mystery of your own core every day. Spend about fifteen to thirty minutes a day open in this way. If you wish to deepen your relationship with your core, use the technique described in The Arm Circling Exercise.

As the author of this series of features on the Core, I have had over thirty years experience of opening to the mystery of my inner self. I sought it because I was ill in body and mind, suffering depression, suicidal urges, sexual problems and psychosomatic pain. Gradually I found healing and was led through an extraordinary series of experiences. I have attempted to explain what this approach to the core means and how to use it in my books Mind and Movement, and Liberating the Body. While I recognise that experts in such fields as medicine and psychotherapy are necessary and helpful, I personally never sought a teacher or therapist though I was desperately sick. For a reason I am unable to explain, I knew my own being is an intrinsic part of the universe, and of universal wisdom and power. I therefore trusted this mystery at my core to lead me in a way that was most helpful. It did, and I have been healed and deeply educated by the relationship with that incredible wonder that is at the centre of all of us.

What I observe in people around me is that they often search frantically for help from others, and pay enormous amounts of money to gain such help. I see that they have little or no real certainty of their own innate power and wonder, and so always look to others. All I can say is that perhaps for some this is necessary. But it misses one of the greatest blessings we can find. That blessing is your own inner power and connection with the Core of your own existence.

Touching Your Core Self – Part 5

In a few simple words, what you find when you open to and allow the action of your core more fully is your best.

You may have been living only a fraction of what you are capable of. Perhaps you even killed out some of the wonder that is you. This might be because you live in a culture that murders the spirit, or because some of the lovely parts of your nature were criticised or even punished. So when you open to your core these parts are allowed to begin their emergence.

Sometimes your best might be painful to meet. This is because in some way you have lived a caricature of it, a twisted version of your own truth. Then you may have to confront what you have built or planted in your life and the life of others. This is not a punishment, simply an opportunity to rebuild something more satisfying and expressive of the spectrum of your own radiance.

Healing occurs. This may be healing of your body. But usually this starts with the healing of your psyche, the transformation of your subtler feelings, attitudes and convictions. It reaches deep into your being and brings love to the lost and hurt child you may hold within you. It releases the beautiful human animal that you are in your origins, unfolds its wisdom and insight, and blesses its natural urges, transforming and transcending them.

Most of us are suffering amnesia. Strangely, in our culture this amnesia is accepted as normal. It is normal to have forgotten our childhood, to no longer remember our birth and our life in the womb. Especially, it is considered normal to have forgotten our life in eternity. In fact people who start to remember this are sometimes diagnosed as mentally unstable. This truly is a time of blindness.

Overall, transcendence is where it takes you as your journey of growth and the power of your core flows into consciousness. For your personality, your consciousness, is like water that has been absorbed by a rock, or the heat of the sun transformed into wood or coal. The water in the rock cannot help believe it is a rock. The wonderful energy locked in the coal or wood might identify itself as black coal or a length of wood. You may completely believe you are the body and its frailties, or only see yourself as your physical looks, your sexual gender, or what other people say you are. You might measure yourself by what you achieved or failed to achieve in your schooling, by your family background, or by what work you do or how much money you have. All of those measurements are like the water that can take any shape, or the energy that could achieve all manner of things, only seeing itself as a rock or a piece of coal.

But perhaps your sense of yourself arises out of your personal misery, out of depression or emotional pain.

Is that how you see yourself? Is that the limit of what you know yourself to be? Is that the lie that you have taken to be the truth?

If that is so it is a tragedy. It is from that painful, tiny and limited world that you are rescued by the action of the core. The Core Experience enables you to transcend the prison bars of those limitations.

A man dreamt the following while allowing his core to gradually heal him:

A man now led me to a side entrance to the right of a large business building. A big door opened as he approached, as if done by a magic eye. Suddenly he nimbly ran in and did something so that two huge granite slabs at least a foot thick began to close me in. The man watched with pleasure at my plight.

My indecision stopped me acting decisively. I could easily have run back. Instead I hesitated and saw the doors close on me. I could see the man hoped I was to be imprisoned for good, buried alive between these huge granite slabs. But somehow I released the vibration – sound – a hymn, that flows through my body at night. In a way that I cannot properly describe, it made the doors powerless to trap me. Also it penetrated to the very core of the building. In the dream that seemed very significant, but I do not know in waking why.

The dream dramatically depicts the two wills operative in us as mentioned earlier. The external will wants to prevent any real change. It is involved in the ‘business’ of the material world and doesn’t want that disturbed. The dreamer had been experiencing a vibratory energy flowing through his body while he slept. This had started since he had allowed his core to express more fully. The dream illustrates how this, described in the dream as a sound, a vibration or a hymn, has the power to remove even the greatest of obstacles, the most powerful of prisons. It also told him that this power flowing in him penetrated to the fundamental substance of the building – his body. In practical terms the dream, and the process working in him, wiped away his sense of limitations in everyday situations. So many of us limit ourselves because we believe we must have someone else’s permission to do things. Perhaps that permission is in the form of an exam pass, or an acknowledgement of our capability in some form, and in this way we may hold ourselves back from allowing our own genius or creativity to arise.

The above dream mentions a vibratory experience. This may be one of the results of opening to your core as it releases your potential. A person who recorded their experiences of surrender to their core says, “There was a peculiar conscious and semiconscious experience without dream images. My hips and pubic area vibrated.”

But what emerges can vary enormously depending upon who you are and how much of yourself you bring to the surrender to the other will. For some people it comes as spontaneous physical movement. In others it is mostly an internal shifting of feelings and intuitions, perhaps occasionally arising as waking dreams of great intensity. Sometimes people describe it as ‘Amazing Grace’ that bathes them in a wonderful new life and freedom.
Breakthrough

This depicts the pilgrim breaking through the world of appearances into the transcendent realm of experience.

Sometimes the transcendent is known in silence. This following description gives a taste of this.

Then it came to me that I had to listen in deep stillness – not think, not seek to understand, not struggle, just listen. My whole being entered into silence, gently listening as one might listen to the rain falling on a lake. Then suddenly it was known – the feather blowing in the wind – the sound of one hand clapping – the essence of human existence. Open against the sky – emptiness – enormity.

This was truly an experience of enlightenment. All cares, all pain fell away from me. I had an incredible sense of freedom such as I had never experience before. Every moment of every day we are free – free to choose – free to create pain or peace – free to go or stay – free to live or die. This extraordinary experience of freedom, and of the dropping away of normal perceptions, lasted for three days. Everything looked different. I don’t mean it felt different. I mean it looked different. I remember seeing a bird flying across the sky and it was simply Bird. Maybe even that isn’t true. It was simply what it is without any name.

Here is another description of meeting that wonder.

I was in Spain at Cortijo Romero, a holiday centre. A group of us had been opening to our inner life, and supporting each other in this. When it was my turn and I began to feel what was happening inside me I suddenly remembered my father’s death. He had fallen on the garden path after working in his garage, and died there of a heart failure. Then I had a deeply felt experience of meeting death. Not just thoughts and some feelings, but like it is in dreams when you are convinced you are totally in the situation. But death was much more than I had ever imagined it to be. And as I became one with it I knew it as the essence of life in all those about me. Life and death, I knew, are the same thing. Death is life naked of forms, of body, of lies. Then I wept because it was so beautiful. It is the best in everybody that I know. I wept because I keep forgetting just how beautiful this essence of life is, this spirit of all that we see and know around us. All I usually see is the form, the body, the changing shape of things. Now I was remembering, and I knew I loved this Naked Beauty beyond anything else.

This experience transforms your feelings about death, enabling you to live your life more fully, free of fear. It transforms relationships from grasping dependence or fear of loss, into the knowledge that you are always love itself, and at your core is a gentle bliss that does not depend upon external connections or events. It brings more of you into play, whether that more is in personal growth, creativity, sport, or relationship. Every aspect of your being can be enhanced. See: Life and Death.

Touching Your Core Self – Part 6

Touching Your Core Self – Part 4

When the Core process in us that produces dreams is allowed expression in our conscious experience it carries with it the same sort of power and phenomena we see in dreams. While we dream we are totally immersed in what is being experienced. We live in a full surround virtual reality that produces in us the conviction that what we see and experience is outside of us and is real.

We also need to remember that the dream process expresses in symbols. If we put this together with the experience of the full surround virtual reality of the dream, then we can say that our Core expresses its wisdom, healing process or insight in the form of apparently objective people, scenes and events that symbolise its message. In his book The Forgotten Language, Erich Fromm points out that the language of symbols is as old as humanity, and is universal. He says:

Symbolic language is a language in which inner experiences, feelings and thoughts are expressed as if they were sensory experiences, events in the outer world. It is a language which has a different logic from the conventional one we speak in the daytime, a logic in which not time and space are the ruling categories but intensity and association. It is the one universal language the human race has ever developed, the same for all cultures and throughout history.

He goes on to say:

For the people of the past, living in the great cultures of both East and West, there was no doubt as to the answer to the question of whether it was important to understand this language in our waking state. For them myths and dreams were among the most significant expressions of the mind, and failure to understand them would have amounted to illiteracy. It is only in the past few hundred years of western culture that this attitude has changed. At best, myths were supposed to be naïve fabrications of the prescientific mind, created long before man had made his great discoveries about nature and had learned some of the secrets of its mastery.

{short description of image}

Erich Fromm

See Notes on Fromm

Because of the work of such people as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and a host of anthropologists, we now know that the great myths of the world that lie at the heart of religion, are not to be taken as historical facts. They are immense creations of the human unconscious, the human Core, as it expresses the mystery that it is.

If we return to the consideration of what it is like when we allow the Core to express into consciousness, we can begin to understand from what has been said that it can be a very powerful and moving experience. As with dreams, it can be deeply felt, it can be expressed in symbolic and apparently objective events, and it can open realms of experience previously not known.

However, it is not my desire to make the experience of the Core sound mysterious. But in very simple language, such experiences can be likened to the process of growth we see in a plant. At first there is only a seed. As the seed grows it begins to express what previously was only a potential, a latent possibility. Even in its growth it may reach a point where it seems to have expressed all that it is. Then suddenly something new and perhaps beautiful happens, a bud forms and a flower opens. But even that is not the end, for after the flowering seeds may form. Of course, this is an analogy, and it represents the fact that as human beings we may feel that we have reached our full growth. However, the experience of your Core reveals that there is so much more of you to flower, so much more to bear fruit.
{short description of image}

When we condense the great myths of the world and the great dreams of men and women to their essence, that is their message. They tell us that as human beings we have an immense potential. We have within the possibility of the emergence of a new human type – a new woman and a new man.

So let us look at what people have found when they opened to the action of their Core.

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.

{short description of image}

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.
{short description of image}

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

Touching Your Core Self – Part 2

Core Experience is an everyday part of your life. Without it your heart would not beat, your food would not digest, your immune system would collapse, and the miraculous interplay of transactions and processes that take part within your body and consciousness would cease. Nearly all of us take this for granted. It is fundamental to our existence. But mostly we remain unconscious of any real meeting with our core. Many of us have no sense of the wonder and transformation this experience can bring. Also there are many things about our Core that are often not understood or are misunderstood. Sometimes these factors are simply overlooked, or not recognised as being deeply important. See: Self-Regulation

One of these concerns the things we decide to do. For instance we can decide to undress and have a bath, but few of us can decide to slow or speed the action of our heart. Many of the vital activities of your being are beyond the control of your will. Because this is such an ordinary part of our life we may not see, or have thought out, what the possibilities of this are. But if we continue a little further an extraordinary aspect of the Core begins to become clear.

During waking life you may not give much attention to the Core activities going on in and around you. That is normal because those activities take care of themselves. Or at least, they do in a general way. But many of the things we do, and many of the ways we think and feel can interfere with the harmonious working of the Core. We know for instance that continued stress, hateful thoughts or guilt can contribute towards illness. We know that alcohol is a poison that the body has to use resources to deal with. Likewise we know that tobacco and junk food are bad for our health. Nevertheless many of us still bombard our body with those things, and thereby call upon the processes put in action by our Core to deal with them.
{short description of image}

That type of lifestyle is often seen as acceptable because within our culture we are raised to look upon the functions of our body as a sort of automatic and insentient machine. We may accept this despite the fact that we as a person are the focused awareness and sensitiveness of life in the body.

If we branch off from this direction briefly we might be able to see how ridiculous that view is. We can do this by looking at another common experience – sleep.

During sleep all, or nearly all your conscious activities, the things you decide or will to do, fall away. In fact you cannot fall under the spell of sleep unless you surrender your conscious will. This surrender of self, of conscious will, is usually done without any real awareness. It is a habit, a pattern that enables us to drop into the extraordinary world of sleep. If you have difficulty surrendering your will; if you cannot let go of the preoccupations of your conscious self, then you cannot allow the healing process of sleep.

While you sleep the activities of your Core are hardly interfered with. But there is still some interference or resistance to the activity of the Core. The psychiatrist Freud pointed out that people who feel shame or guilt about sex do not dream directly about it even while asleep. Instead they symbolise it to avoid their feelings of guilt. To express this in a slightly different way, Freud was saying that the process of dreams was trying to release sexual feelings, but the conscious self was resisting the action through guilt or shame.

That is an example of two wills working against each other. In other words the conscious will opposes the Core will. This is an important point so I will reiterate it. You have two levels of will. You have a conscious will and you have a will arising from your Core. So at times your core will may be opposed by what you as a person wish for, fear, feel or decide to do.

This is so important, so much at the root of much of our human experience that I am going to take time to unfold the meaning of it. And I do this because much of the suffering we experience during our life comes about because of the conflict between the conscious personality and the Core.

First of all let us look at some of the things that have been learned about core activity during the last century. Many of the things, such as the general functioning of your body and the processes of the immune system are now understood by many of us in some degree. As already said, because our culture tends to lead us to a view of the body as being almost a dumb brute, we may look upon those processes as being interesting but with the thought, “What has that got to do with me?” The “me” in this case refers to what is usually called one’s ego, personality, or conscious self. The attitude once again shows how little connection is felt between “oneself” and one’s core processes. But there is a core activity which intrigues many of us. It is the process of dreaming with its surrounding and often strange phenomena such as sleep paralysis. (See Sleep Paralysis).
Dream Deprivation

Dreams only occur when your ego, your conscious self, is surrendered in sleep. While you dream you are in a completely different state of being physically and mentally than when you are awake. For a start, all your voluntary muscles are paralysed during dreaming. This is why when you try to run or move in some dreams, you feel as if you are made of lead. Some people begin to wake at this point and are terrified because they cannot move. This is called sleep paralysis. In fact there is no problem, nothing to be afraid of. It is simply another example of how our poor vulnerable conscious self has little or no understanding of what the Core does and wishes to do.

A number of experiments were made under test conditions of preventing people from dreaming. This was accomplished easily because when a person dreams their eyes undergo rapid movements. So each time the sleeping person exhibited rapid eye movements (REM) they were woken to prevent the dream from continuing. The results of experimenting with dream deprivation generally resulted in the person quickly exhibiting a confused state of mind and developing psychotic symptoms – that is, severe mental delusions.

During other experiments Allan Rechtschaffen and his co-workers in Chicago convincingly demonstrated that sleep loss could be fatal. Sleep-deprived rats failed to regulate their energy and literally consumed themselves metabolically. In experiments during which people were deprived of dreaming but not sleeping – that is they were allowed to sleep but not dream, and were woken each time they started to dream and then allowed to go to sleep again – they eventually have to be allowed to dream because they started hallucinating while awake and the urge to dream was imperative. So it is difficult to judge whether the rats died through lack of sleep or from lack of dreaming. But it seems likely that the sleep loss is less important than the loss of dreaming.
{short description of image}

These experiments are a classic example of the conflict between conscious will or decision, and the will or purposiveness of the Core. As is suggested, the conflict can end in death. But what is more important is that a lesser degree of conflict can end in mental instability, illness, depression, a sense of disconnection from those around us, and in feelings of meaninglessness.

However, there is yet another aspect of dreaming that further illustrates the relationship between ego and Core. The fact of rapid eye movement during dreaming is fairly well known. What is less known is that during a dream whatever action or movements, sounds or postures we take up in a dream, are sent out by the brain as signals to the muscles in the body. An area of the brain, the pons, blocks the signals to the muscles, otherwise we would be walking, running, making love, in fact performing all the actions we are in a dream. If you have watched a dog dreaming you can in fact see the tiny movements breaking through to their legs. In animals in which the pons has been damaged the animal actually runs, hunts, and acts out completely what it is dreaming. See Eugene Aserinsky.

Your core processes have not only overseen the whole progression of growth and maturity from conception onwards; they not only regulate the organs and functions of your body, your Core can also express as dramatic movement, speech, lovemaking, and storytelling – after all, animals do not have a conscious self to direct their activities. In fact, every aspect of dreaming from prediction, the creation of plots with beginning middle and end, the development of a full surround virtual reality, is part of the potential of your Core. It can condense your experience and present it has a summary and meaning of your life. It can scan the multitude of impressions you collect during your daily life and place them together as a profound perception of the underlying mystery of life. It can confront you with your own avoided pains and fears. It can attempt to heal and mature your personality, full as it may be with its own beliefs and opinions, its directions and conflicts. And all of these amazing possibilities can be worked with, can emerge more fully into consciousness, as we learn to open to the Core and recognise how and why it communicates with us.

Touching Your Core Self – Part 3

Touching Your Core Self – Part 1

This is a six part series, plus notes: Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Notes

From the moment of conception until birth your tiny being increased its weight about twenty-seven million times. During that momentous spurt of growth incredible changes and developments took place within you. At first your cells subdivided in the manner of any fundamental cellular growth. Then the foundations of your spine, your nervous system and brain emerged. But at that point your body developed gill like structures in the manner of a fish.

Slowly your human potential emerged and developed, strengthening and readying you for birth.During those months of uterine life you went through the whole process of evolution in a condensed form.

From a single celled creature you developed into a multi celled being, then on from that into a creature that could move and have focused feelings and responses to experience. Recently (2003) scientific proof, through the ultrasound scan, has shown that the unborn baby responds to sound, smiles, and shows all the features that are evident after birth.

That mysterious and wonderful process of life that brought you to birth occurred quite without your conscious effort or participation. You share that journey from conception to birth in kinship with all the other life forms that exist with you on this earth. But unlike most of the other creatures you developed self-awareness and can look back on your origins. Nevertheless, even though you have attained some level of self-awareness, the process that brought you into being still functions within you to continue your existence. Without it you would immediately cease to be. In fact most of the vital processes within you still occur without any conscious effort or participation on your part. Your ego, your conscious self, is a tiny and almost insignificant part of the process. However, what you do, what you think and what you feel can enhance or interfere with that core process.

One of the most obvious ways we relate to this core process, and one of the most mysterious, is seen when we lose personal awareness in sleep, or are knocked unconscious or drugged to sleep. Something – and I am calling it your Core – brings you back to consciousness. Meanwhile it continues to stimulate breathing, heartbeat, and all the vital processes to keep you alive.

As human beings we have investigated and probed the core process to the point where we understand some of the ways in which it works, and some of the ways in which we can co-operate with it or interfere with it. Nevertheless that Core still remains largely a mystery. In fact with the development of the new investigations of physics, such as quantum mechanics, the mystery deepens. See Bell’s Inequality Theorem

Touching Your Core Self – Part 2

THE VISION OF THE BEGINNING

Chris: How would you describe the origins of things?

Tony:

The passions of my early life — I suppose that’s what were — led me in the past to read an enormous amount of books. But gradually over the years certain things have happened to me that I have drawn a tremendous amount of information from. For instance I had an incredible experience during which I felt as if I had gone back to the beginning of things.During my life I have been blessed with a reasonable amount of human pain. But a greater blessing still has been that at times I have been given visions of such wonder the pain has been washed from me.

I had been wondering about difficulties in my life. I could see that they were causal. They had arisen from relationships with, for instance, my mother. But those events in themselves had been caused by things previous to them. So I was asking myself what was behind those events.

During the experience in question I felt I was at the very beginning of the universe. I knew and experienced that beginning of things as a huge awareness. There was no separation in it at all. I had the impression that prior to it a whole universe had existed that had gradually sunk back, melted, or synthesised into this single great ocean of substance and awareness. Although to be more precise I guess I should describe it as a whole condensed universe that was also consciousness.

The vision I describe here came about when, after many years of trying to heal an agony of soul connected with my sexuality, I held onto the question of why had this occurred to me. Having seen that the events of early childhood had been the instigators of much of the pain, I felt that if my pain had a causal explanation, why shouldn’t the events that produced it also have a cause.

I therefore asked the question as to why these events had arisen in my life. All of what happened is not relevant in connection with Genesis, so I will describe only the major feature of the vision.

Christ stood before me. Not as it were in a body, but I was overwhelmed by the presence of a great being which appeared to be a part of all things and all time. Christ lifted up my consciousness, causing me to feel as if my awareness also spread over the immensity of time, and from this condition I was shown the beginning of things.

I cannot say I saw this, more that I experienced the condition of the beginning. And this condition was the gathering together of what I understood to be a whole universe that had previously existed. All that had existed had come to such unity that although this was physical, it was also, in its unity, a being.

As I experienced this I felt at last as if a resolution between science and religion had taken place in me. For here was something like the cosmic egg science suggests preceded the ‘big bang’. But what had been left out, I realised, was this consciousness, this immense being. In retrospect, it also suggests to me the difficult question of Elohim being many beings and yet one. For all life had here found a unity in one immense being beyond my comprehension. It was, in fact, difficult to grasp because I was overcome by emotion as I witnessed this.

As I opened to this enormous perception, there was a deepening of understanding, in which Christ aided my comprehension. For I realised that the oneness or unity of this being was unbroken. It was everything. Nothing could exist outside of it. Even if it were to create something, that thing would not have existence outside of the one.

This condition of ‘all-one’ had led to a form of al-one-ness. This was as near as my human understanding could grasp. Christ in fact said to me – “You must understand, this is your perception of it.”

Out of this aloneness, this great being had longed that other beings might exist. But in its present form this was impossible. Then I understood something that tore my heart to pieces, as it still does today when I dwell on the memory of the experience. This Being purposefully went about destroying itself so that our present universe – we – might have existence. It was such a wondrous action, for it was done in such a way, with such skill, with such love and self sacrifice, that its very death was a magnificent creative act. In other words its death struck into action forces and effects that created the universe in all its variety. This death is what we know as the ‘Big Bang’.

As I experienced this, I realised that everything that exists is a part of that wondrous being. There is nothing that is not of its love. So that whatever arises in the universe arises out of, and as, THAT. The human sense of God is a realisation of the very substance of our own being. The awe we might feel is from an intuition of what has been given us as our own existence.

And as that being died, its very last impulse was for those new beings who might arise from its death. That impulse we call love. It flashed through the universe and still permeates every particle in a way that we cannot yet perceive, but which is like a touch upon the pulsating chaotic movements of particles and lives.

We are the seeds of that love. We are God. And in our small portion of the universe, we face a particular lesson through the shortness of our bodily lives. We face death. Yet that is the greatest of things. For that is the heart of everything, the very act of love out of which our lives have been formed. If we discover the secret of that, we discover our creator and eternal nature.

The Prophecy of The Star Beings

In January of 2003 I had an amazing dream. In it I was walking home at night in the countryside, and I looked up at the night sky, and saw with wonder that huge stylised figures made of thousands of stars danced across the sky from horizon to horizon.

It took me a long time to enter deeply into this dream, but when I did I met what I have called the Star Beings.

Because I have explained these beings and what the communications between us were more fully elsewhere, I will simply say that I recognised them as what ancient cultures have called the gods. But they were in no way like the strange portrayals of the ancient gods we see in films and drama; powerful caricatures of human beings with amazing powers. These beings did not have human form with crazy quirks, angers and desire for power that humans have. I experienced them as the spectrum of fundamental forces and energies that work together to create the universe.

However, these forces that usually we take as somehow inanimate or without awareness, like the force of gravity or the energy pouring out of the sun, I experienced as having awareness and intelligence. I knew them as existing in the water we drink and the air we breathe. I knew them as our real parents, of whose body we take into us to exist. I knew them as the beings we are constantly hurting through our destructive relationship with nature. They explained to me that we have not yet fulfilled our role, a role that placed us as the custodians of life on Earth. They also told me that the time of the Lion and the Bull are coming.

The message I receive from the ancient beings, the Star Beings, is that the time of the Bull and the Lion is approaching. This is simply a cycle just as summer and winter are cycles. And I was shown that the lion represents what we can call the carnivore. The carnivore lives off the weak or the sick. It pulls down what is old or decrepit. In the terms of the Star Beings it represents processes or forces that pull down those things in society and in the world that are ailing, that are weak, that are not flowing with the energy of life. This force pulls down what is sick — the degenerative parts of society and of the world.

The bull, as in the ancient Mediterranean world, represents the Earth Shaker. In its most physical sense it depicts earthquakes. But it is really about forces that shake the world making weak structures crumble. So the lion and the bull together suggest incredibly powerful forces acting upon society and the world. Things, social and personal attitudes and ways of life, business practices, national and political structures that do not have a good foundation, things that are degenerate, diseased or weak will be gradually cleansed. In a way, what is weak shakes itself to bits through its own internal energy. It self destructs because it is not connected with life giving forces.

We can see this happening in recent world events.

I have explained my meeting with the Star Beings more fully in Prophetic Dream of the Coming Years. See also 2012 The Mayan Years of Destiny; 2012 Prophecies

The Splendid Alternative

Some people can apparently look deep into the internal processes of their own or someone else’s body simply by closing their eyes. Dr. Shafica Karagulla, a neuro psychiatrist, spent many years studying this phenomenon. As a doctor and psychiatrist she was able to gain the trust of other doctors when lecturing on the subject, and found that many of them use it to aid their diagnosis (1)

Recently my son Leon and I sat with a man, Andrew, who wanted to experiment with this ability. Andrew had been using the internal sight for some years, but wanted to test it with ourselves as witnesses. As a subject, Leon, who is reading natural science at Cambridge, chose a question about stick insects he was observing. For two days he had seen that occasionally they held a drop of water between their front legs. He could not decide whether this was condensation they drank or something they produced. If they did produce it why?

Andrew knew little about stick insects. He closed his eyes and told us in moments that he had a sense of observing the insects internally. “I have the feeling that a difference arises between the creatures internal fluids and its environment. The creature has no organ for discharging excess body fluids, so it discharges it from its mouth. This has something to do with the atmospheric pressure and its body fluids.”

Within an hour of searching through text books on the insects, Leon found information which enabled us to check Andrew’s statement. The textbook said that as the class of insects did not have organs to specifically excrete body fluids, excess fluids were discharged using a salivary gland in the mouth.

At times human beings are capable of the most extraordinary things. Sometimes these are explained in a way to make them sound mysterious or disturbing, and sometimes in a manner to deflect interest from them. George Washington Carver, one of the USA’s greatest scientists (2) played down his own abilities in this area. Having by his own efforts revolutionised the agriculture of the American South, he was faced with a crisis arising from his success. He had pressed the poor black farmers to stop growing cotton, which depleted the soil, and plant peanuts. A huge glut of peanuts resulted, leaving the farmers without a saleable product.

Carver shut himself in his laboratory and prayed. He threw into that obscure place within himself that Andrew tapped, the question of what could be done with the peanut. Information started bubbling up into his conscious mind. He tested it. After three days, during which time he had not emerged from his laboratory, he had solved the problem. Out of his internal quest he had defined ways of producing oils, creosote, salad cream, fibre boards, paint, and several dozen synthesized products, all from the peanut and its shell.

In recent years evidence has shown that attempting to mobilize our own splendid alternative of self-healing can greatly aid recovery during serious illness. In fact crisis is the best time to try accessing our own potential in alternative problem solving. The wild talents humans have are not limited to looking into the secrets of the body or nature. They include healing of ills; an amazingly heightened perception of other people and the world, which usually brings depths of understanding not previously achieved; insight into where our own or other peoples participation in events is leading; an ability to know the history of objects; and many more. Being in need, or having serious reasons to access our alternative sources of information and power, is one of the best ways of producing a response.

After teaching for a month in Greece, I was lodging at a study centre in Athens for a week waiting my flight home. During the middle of the week I developed a gum infection. I had experienced this once before. It had lasted for several days, and at times caused me to be delirious. It was cured only by antibiotics. The pain of the present infection became so intense during the night I got up at two a.m. and searched the bungalow for pain killers. I couldn’t find any and felt homesick and a long way from my doctor and dentist.

I paced the floor for a while holding my face; thought of waking the manager of the centre in another building, but then remembered that for the past month I had been encouraging people to reach out for the MORE when they needed it. The More being their own potential ‘splendid alternatives’- and I needed it. My gum was so swollen it was beginning to overlap the back tooth.

In front of where I stood was a photograph of Sai Baba, an Indian guru connected with the centre. I took his image to represent the help I needed, reached out and touched the photograph, touched my cheek and said, “Please help me. I need it.” Still with the pain I crawled into bed to keep warm. In fifteen minutes I was asleep. All pain had gone. In the morning the swelling had disappeared. The skin on the gum was loose because the swelling had gone so quickly.

The degree of response one gets from reaching for the More ranges from zero to a reaction that taxes our ability to comprehend or believe. The latter happened to Dr Clair King who eventually had to accept there was a power to heal beyond his own ability as a surgeon. Five year old Robert Kasner was taken to him for an emergency eye operation. His cornea had been slashed by a piece of flying glass, allowing the liquid in the eye to drain out. The operation was performed at Aultman Hospital, and a flap of conjunctiva pulled to patch the wound. After twelve days the dressing was removed, only to reveal that the patch had not held. The iris was protruding again. Robert needed another operation. An appointment was made for three days later.
{short description of image}

When Dr. King examined Robert prior to the operation after three days he could not believe what he saw. The eye was completely healed. He was astonished, even embarrassed. On asking the parents how this was possible, they told him simply that, “We took Robert to a Kathryn Kuhlman service. Prayers were offered for his healing.” (3) Dr. King Later joined the Order of St Luke the Physician.

That our present world view is in general such a mundane one is very strange. We are always surrounded by the miraculous. Every day if we look into the sky we see wonderful cosmic phenomena. On a clear night we view the past of millions years ago because of the time the light of the stars takes to reach us. But we clothe our mind in a sense of pettiness and limitation which shuts out new possibilities. Kathryn Kuhlman, who was one of the great focal points for alternative healing in the USA, says of this, “When I walk out onto the platform – for a healing service at Carnegie Hall, Pittsburgh – I trust God for miracles to happen and they do. There is no mental block whatsoever.”

We often complicate our view of our own ability to touch the MORE by thinking we must develop the ability, earn it, do something worthy of it, lead a blameless life – anything but accept the simple fact that it is as near to us, yet as mysterious as our own memory. But perhaps we do not want to allow it into our life. Writing on this C. S. Lewis says, in his book Miracles, there comes a time when people who have been dabbling in a search for what I have called The Splendid Alternative, suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found it. Worse still, supposing IT found us! It is a sort of Rubicon. One goes across; or not. But if one does, there is no manner of security against miracles. One may be in for anything!

For the past thirty years I have searched for the miraculous. For twenty of those years I have worked as a therapist. This often meant taking for myself, and helping others to take, a long circuitous route to health, wholeness and creativity. One looked for causes, dealt with them and moved on. But I sense out of those years a more splendid alternative. I see how we clothe ourselves in ideas and emotions of separation, of limitation, of paralysis. It is like standing together by a pool of sparkling water with a cup. You want to drink but cry out – Is it mine to drink? Does it belong to someone else? Will I have to pay for it? I feel so weak I can’t manage. But I am honestly ill. Is it a mirage?

Reach out. Fill your cup. Drink of your wholeness. Take the water of life. It IS yours.

1 See her book Breakthrough To Creativity, published by DeVorss.

2 A biography was to be published in the seventies. It never appeared – only a feature in Readers Digest.

3 See Kathryn Kuhlman’s book God Can Do It Again, published by Oliphants.

The Secret Power – the Force that heals

Although this chapter starts by dealing with very physical processes, it is in fact about a very metaphysical or transcendent process. It is, as far as my own understanding has allowed me to penetrate, the process by which the very highest in human life expresses itself into the mental, emotional and physical. I believe it should be understood by all people dealing with so called spiritual or psychic phenomena.

If the self regulatory processes of your being ceased its action you would be dead in a very short time. Even a brisk walk causes such enormous changes in the body it would kill you without the action of self regulation. The production of lactic acid, unchecked, would destroy the system. Also the drop in blood sugar, unless balanced by the release of glucose from the storage in tissues and liver, would result in collapse.

The level after level of safety factors built into our system are nothing short of incredible. For adequate functioning our blood pressure needs to be at about 110 to 120 (i.e. it displaces 110 millimeters of mercury). It can drop to 70—80 before a critical situation arises in which tissue may die because blood is not reaching it. If we lose a lot of blood, even as much as 30 or 40 percent, the self-regulatory process maintains adequate blood pressure by constricting the blood vessels. This action is controlled by a part of the brain. If that brain area is injured or destroyed, other centres take control. If they arc eliminated, ganglia in the sympathetic nervous system direct the action. If they too are eliminated the walls of the arteries and veins themselves regulate their own activity.

Keeping balance during change – dealing with stress

Such functions are usually listed under the heading ‘homeostasis’. The word means to ‘keep level or balanced during change’. The ball cock in a toilet is an excellent example of mechanical homeostasis. As soon as we flush the toilet the ball-cock descends allowing water to pour into the cistern. When the water reaches a certain height the water entering is stopped, thus a level is maintained despite change. To quote from Anthony’s Textbook of Anatomy and Physiology (Mosby), The principle of homeostasis is one of the most fundamental of all physiological principles. It may be stated in this way: the body must maintain relative constancy of its chemicals and processes in order to survive. Or stated even more briefly: health ad survival depend upon the body maintaining or quickly restoring homeostasis.

In 1885 the Belgian physiologist Leon Fredericq described it this way:

The living being is an agency of such sort that each disturbing influence induces by itself the calling forth of compensatory activity to neutralise or repair the disturbance. The higher in the scale of living beings, the more numerous, the more perfect and the more complicated do these regulatory activities become. They tend to free the organism completely from the unfavourable influences and changes occurring in the environment.

In 1900 Charles Richet a French physiologist went further by saying:

The living being is stable. It must be so in order not to be destroyed, dissolved or disintegrated by the colossal forces, often adverse, which surround it. By an apparent contradiction it maintains its stability only if it is excitable and capable of modifying itself according to external stimuli and adjusting its responses to the stimulation. In a sense it is stable because it is modifiable — the slight instability is the necessary condition for the true stability of the organism.

The wisdom of the body

In 1933 Walter B. Cannon published his remarkable book The Wisdom of The Body (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd.). Through his years of research and experiment he added enormously to the understanding of physiological homeostasis. He points out that the self regulatory process not only has to adapt the body to outer influences, “There is also resistances to disturbance from within. For example the heat produced in maximal muscular effort, continued for twenty minutes, would be so great that, if it were not properly dissipated, it would cause some of the albuminous substances of the body to become stiff, like a hard boiled egg”. He points out that such processes are not originally given naturally, but are slowly developed by organisms as they evolve. Thus the frog cannot prevent free evaporation of water from its body, so cannot be long free of its home pond. Nor can it effectively regulate its temperature, so becomes torpid and sluggish in cold weather.

This helps in understanding what Fredericq meant in saying the “regulatory agencies. . . free the organism completely from the unfavourable influences and changes occurring in the environment.” Obviously this is only partly true, and humans have much greater freedom from environment than the frog. Nevertheless we cannot survive in anything except small changes of temperature, outside or inside, but must use special equipment in, what is for us, extreme heat and cold. Also, in the airlessness of space, and while submerged in water, we must again use special ‘clothing’. These things we create by our mental ingenuity. Therefore, we can say that self regulation is not a fixed ability, and our conscious use of intelligence and experience are also aspects of the homeostatic process. Through expanding our ability to adapt to outer and inner environments we have expanding freedom. If our ability to adapt lessens, then our freedom lessens also.
Learning to keep balance in a changing world

This learning process even takes place in such major homeostatic features as heat control and regulation of blood sugar level. During this century it was found that for quite a long period after birth babies have little control of temperature regulation. When exposed to cold their temperature drops with hardly any reaction to prevent it, rather like a frog. There are also much greater swings in a baby’s blood sugar level than in an adult. The baby only gradually ‘learns’ to respond to these new features of inner and outer change after the steady temperature and blood sugar of its prenatal life in the internal sea of its mother.

We could perhaps say the baby learned such regulation unconsciously, or without conscious deliberation. In order to gain greater ‘freedom’ though, even the baby is faced by the need to learn. The unconscious wisdom which enables it to learn complicated bodily adaptations also operates in adults and in other ways. Walter Cannon describes this as follows:

Many years ago Murphy and I observed with X rays a curious phenomena after the first part of the small intestine (the duodenum) had been cut across and sewed together again. Although peristaltic waves were passing routinely over the stomach, the sphincter at the outlet (the pyloric sphincter) held tight against them, and only after about five hours did it relax and permit the gastric contents to enter the injured gut. The interest here lies in the relation of the delay to the process of healing; according to surgical observation, about four hours are required after an intestinal suture for a plastic exudate to form and make a tight joint. It was after the proper time had elapsed for that process to come to completion, therefore, that the chyme from the stomach was allowed to advance. Similar results were obtained when the section and suture were made further along the alimentary canal.

Such unconscious though purposeful activities are expressions of this inner wisdom our being has, and are all part of our self-regulatory process. The urge to eat and drink, to work, play and learn, the longing to hold someone and be held, to make love; to sleep and wake, are all ways we keep the balance of our nature. If any of these are severely curtailed our nature may become unbalanced and even crippled in its ability to freely extend itself in reasonable freedom.

The enormous drive to grow

Caron Kent adds to the usually mentioned instincts what he sees as one of the most fundamental — the urge to grow. From conception onwards this urge is powerfully manifest. From conception until birth the growing organism increases its weight alone up to 27 million times. So it is an energetic urge, but also one which brings detailed control over the miracle of forming a living human body. This comes about by stage after stage of formative forces acting in the construction of our being. As an egg and sperm we are tiny single celled creatures. The next two stages of development as the cells increase in size and number resembles the activities found in many simple living things such as plants. The twenty day old embryo develops four brachial grooves, which in the embryo of a fish grow into gills. At this point the formative forces which produce a fish are active, as were the formative forces of a plant at an earlier stage. These are then supplanted by forces which bring about features of the mammalian upright animal we are. As one textbook states, “A human is not constructed like a modern office building, as cheaply and efficiently as possible. . .but rather like an ancient historic edifice to which wings and sections were added at different times and which was not modernised until it was almost completed.”

If we recall Richet’s statement that instability is the necessary condition for true stability, and consider how this works in the realm of the personality, we have some idea of psychological as well as physiological homeostasis. In a very simplistic sense if we are overcome by fear and feel unable to move, unless we are capable of releasing confidence we will remain paralysed. If our psyche is not ‘unstable’ or mobile enough, this compensatory shift cannot take place. These shifts, between the dynamic opposites of our nature — tension and relaxation; pain and pleasure; spontaneity and control, are vital for our healthy psychological survival. Factors preventing such mobility are causes for illness and even death. Locked feelings of guilt, shock or stress are recognised as productive of major illness. So part of the healthy homeostatic action is to actually be ‘mobile’ enough to deeply grieve or release emotion, instead of being rigidly controlled or coping. The ‘control’ and the ‘out of control’ balance each other. If we are so controlled that we become ill through suppressed anger or grief, we are less in control of our life and well being than someone who can let themselves cry uncontrollably for a while.

It is partly this ability to have a wide range of choices or opposites available to us that makes human survival and self-regulation more efficient than in other animals. In Africa for instance, herds of deer are being driven from the open grasslands because of human use of the land. The instincts of the deer lead them to always seek survival on the open plains, because this has always been their habitat. It is ‘natural’ for them to hide from enemies on the plain. But on the plains they are killed, and it would be better for their survival to hide in the forested areas. To manage that, however, they would have to be capable of suppressing their instinctive ‘natural’ drive, and acting in a new way.
New areas of the brain had to be developed

Perhaps human beings faced a similar conflict in the past. When forests dwindled their only chance of survival was in open country which was an ‘unnatural’ habitat for them. So to survive they had to deny their instinctive inner urge. Perhaps this is where the idea of original sin arose, when humans denied the voice of God/instinct within them. However it happened, humans can now question their own drives and evaluate them against survival and achievement. They thereby have extended their homeostatic functions. Ling and Buckman, in their book Lysergic Acid and Ritalin in The Treatment of Neurosis, say:

“New areas of the brain had to be developed not only to integrate, but also to inhibit primitive survival oriented impulses and to enable them to store stimuli to act on them later. It is this ability to defer action and to act in a purposeful and objective rather than instinctive way that distinguishes the well integrated adult from the child, the primitive from the neurotic.”

Ron Hubbard looked at human beings as if they were an engineering problem. Although this gives a different view from someone like Jung, it does have a lot of helpful information. Writing about the human computer, which he calls the Analyser, Hubbard describes it as capable of computing on any problem and arriving at a correct conclusion if the information it has is sound. It can work extremely quickly and can handle large numbers of problems simultaneously, as occurs when we drive a car. It can re-evaluate its past memories and conclusions, and come to new conclusions. It has a nearly infinite memory bank. It is self determining and does not need an outside operator. It is also self regulating and avoids, through estimating probable outcomes, future damage. Through the senses it contacts the objective world, and has a sense of self. Its memories are stored in time sequence, with full colour, movement, sound, smell, feeling, and self awareness. It has the faculty of imagination to enable it to compute on probabilities or create new survival aids. It is also portable.

Hubbard recognised that anyone with a healthy body who did not have brain damage through injury or surgery, had all the above abilities. Nevertheless, despite the fact the human computer is self-regulating, Hubbard had to admit that with all its faculties, the computer was frequently ill or malfunctioning. Experimenting with hypnosis on a patient who was colour blind and could not remember sounds or images, Hubbard found the person could be relaxed to a point where the problems disappeared. At this level the person could think clearly, had no colour blindness, had consideration for his wife, all of which were usually missing, but were again absent on the patient’s return to ‘normal’ consciousness. So Hubbard’s conclusion from this and other experiments was that underneath the functional aberrations was a whole and healthy person. This left the question though as to how the aberrations got into the computer.

Further experiment showed that any sort of aberration such as stuttering, hallucinations, phobias, compulsions, schizophrenia, fears, hysterical blindness, paralysis, could all be brought about in healthy hypnotic subjects simply by suggesting it. Such suggestions as: “When you awake you will not be able to hear/feel anything in your arm/ remember who you are. You will be sick every time you eat an apple/frightened when you get near women/etc,” brought about the aberration it described. With hypnosis however, the suggested deafness or fear faded fairly quickly, simply because the ‘human computer’ is self-regulating. So what causes the aberrations which haunt people for years to stay in place?

Do you have a held down 7 on your computer?

Hubbard’s work led him to see that the non-hypnotic aberrations get in from the outside world. The only reasons aberrations could stay in place in the human computer would be if, unlike general experience, their causative experience had got past the Analyser, could not be recalled, and so could not be re-evaluated. He gives the example of an adding machine which works perfectly unless we hold down the number seven. When the seven is held down all future calculations are wrong. The machine then seems insane. Allow the seven up and sanity returns, just as it does when the hypnotic suggestion is removed. In his book ‘Dianetics-The Evolution of a Science’Hubbard explains what he discovered to be the cause of the ‘held down seven’. It was PAIN. During a painful life experience such as an accident or frightening surgical operation in childhood, our analyser is knocked out of operation. A lump of experience enters us unassessed. It is not our analyser which operates when we put our hand on a hot stove, crash in a car, fall under a blow from dad, or feel the agony of mum apparently having deserted us. It is the reactive or instinctive mind.

Our memory is a full experience of sound, sight, emotions and pain! Once we have felt the pain of being burnt, next time our hand gets even near such heat an automatic action pulls our body away. The same happens with emotional pain. To pull away is reactive and seems necessary for survival. So we automatically pull away not only from painful and frightening things in the outer world, but also from any part of our inner memory and feelings which are painful or frightening. Pulling our consciousness away from a memory means we cannot recall or evaluate and integrate it. We may remember the event, but when it comes to recalling the painful emotions and fears we pull back. Therefore many areas of vitally important experience, decisions and thoughts connected with it, wisdom learned from it, are HELD DOWN SEVENS.

Also, suggestions may have entered the memory at the same time. If a man is involved in a car accident, and during it someone shouts, “DON’T MOVE!”, this is just as active as any hypnotic suggestion. Because it is held back from the self-regulating activity of remembrance and evaluation though, it can remain active. Therefore the man may literally not move, not take chances in life, always be worried something is going to hurt him.

Hubbard called these moments of painful unevaluated experience ‘engrams’. These not only caused aberrations in the person but were also contagious. They lead to an acting out of our pain on our children or others. A mother lost a baby and nearly died. Her pain and fear are now engrams. This leads her to irrational behaviour. So when her daughter shows affection for boyfriends mother hits or threatens her because of her own fear of pregnancy. Her daughter grows up with a fear of sex. Some such reactive behaviour is passed on for generation after generation unless it is reevaluated. Wilhelm Reich called it the THE EMOTIONAL PLAGUE. War, political murder, religious carnage, social discrimination, go on through the centuries despite human ability to reason and see them as evils. As Reich says, “If you live in a cellar too long, you will hate the sunshine.” There can be no real change in individual and social conditions at an emotional and feeling level unless individuals agree to reevaluate their own unconscious pains, longings and values.

In Europe and the U.S.A. today so many babies are battered to death that infants have a high probability of being battered rather than being sick from normal causes. Also, parents who have not re-evaluated the pains of several wars have passed their aberrations to children who now are themselves raising families. This means more individual and social sickness, which in turn means more broken homes, which produces more children who will pass on their own pain.

It goes on and on. To stop it we need, as adults with egos, to learn how to extend our self-regulating process. We need to do this with awareness of our natural avoidance of pain and fear. As Von Franz says in Man and His Symbols, we “must get rid of purposive and wishful aims. The ego must be able to listen.”

What will happen then? The pieces of experience that have been ‘held down’ can be released for integration and understanding. This can only occur if we let ourselves ‘experience’ what is released. During reactive behaviour we are seldom coolly intellectual. Most of what occurs is deeply emotional or physical. Therefore to calmly have an intellectual view of the experience is not enough. To experience it is to feel its deeply emotional or physical quality. Talk therapy will only touch surface layers of experience.

Homeostasis Dreams and the Unconscious

It is easy for us to understand many of the physiological processes of self-regulation, but our culture is sadly lacking in understanding how deeply self-regulation penetrates our psychology and the processes of the mind.

Doctors and therapists who supervised LSD sessions in the 1960’s, noted the conflict between the two reactions of defence/control or surrender. They felt this conflict may be the source of the severe anxiety experienced by some people as they face their own internal traumas. The conflict is sometimes resolved by a collapse of the ego defences, and the subject then feels a terrible sense of disintegration. This is usually experienced as a distortion of the body image (the physical awareness of self), so that the patient feels his flesh is falling away from his bones, that time and space have disintegrated, that he is nothing but a sound or a colour or an emotion. This is called ‘depersonalisation,’ and it may seem to the patient that he has gone completely mad or even died.

Somewhere within the total personality, however, there appears to be a continuing integrative force (self-regulation); though an individual may be overwhelmed by the LSD experience, some part of his mind still seems to observe, evaluate, comment, and even attempt to integrate this otherwise hidden material with the knowledge of conscious life. This may disappear for brief periods, when the fear of insanity or death supervenes, but for most of the time it is clearly at work. No one knows what type of ‘thinking’ this may be. It appears to be different both from ‘reality thinking’ and ‘autistic thinking,’ from the patterns of conscious thought and the imagery of fantasy, a kind of bridge between two types of mental process. Lawrence Lessing, in a Fortune article on recent sleep research, has written: ‘At the same time recent evidence shows that there may well be a second, lower level of dreaming extending down even into deep sleep, consisting largely of abstract thoughts or isolated symbols, much harder to recall than the generally vivid, active imagery of rapid-eye-movement dreaming.’ (Abstracted from Dreams and Dreaming by Norman Mackenzie.)

Although the massive experimental and experiential entrance into the usually hidden facets of human awareness provided by LSD psychotherapy confirmed and deepened the insight and understanding of the basic tenets Freud had proposed, other processes were revealed that Freud had never mentioned. One of these Grof called COEX Systems. He defined this as a collection or nexus of memories. These linked memories and associated fantasies when experienced express particular situations or problems in the person meeting them. What was seen in people’s experience of this was that as one COEX system spontaneously arose and was dealt with the next would be waiting in line and present itself without any technique or therapeutic pressure. W. V. Caldwell says of this, “During the course of therapy, emotional complexes present themselves one after another, as though waiting in line for release. There is seldom any hiatus between the solution of the old and the appearance of the new.”

This spontaneous presentation of new material to deal with, and the actual automatic healing process occurring as the old memories and emotions are met, is a very clear example of the self-regulatory process. The problems we hold within us are lined up waiting to be dealt with. Our being is all the time trying to present these to our awareness for us to integrate. It does this in any way that is possible, and as soon as something unblocks the resistances holding this back, the healing process can begin.

Jung, Hadfield and several other dream researchers believe the dream process is one of the main self regulatory processes in the psyche. See Man and His Symbols, Jung – Dreams and Nightmares, Hadfield – Mind and Movement, Liberating The Body; Crisp. This means that the process underlying dream production helps keep psychological balance, just as homeostasis keeps body functions balanced by producing perspiration when hot, shivering when cold, and the almost miraculous minutiae of internal changes. Despite self-regulation or homeostasis being an obvious and fundamental process in the body, in nature and the cosmos as a whole, it still appears difficult for many people investigating the mind to accept a similar function psychologically.

In his book Dreams and Nightmares, (Pelican 1954) J. A. Hadfield puts forward what he calls a Biological Theory of Dreams. He says the function of dreams is that by reproducing difficult or unsolved life situations or experiences, the dream aids towards a solving or resolution of the problems. He gives the example of a man climbing a cliff who slips fractionally. He then may dream of actually falling and waking terrified. Subsequently the dream recurs, but in each the dreamer tries out a different behaviour, such as clasping for a branch, until he manages to act appropriately to avert the disaster. Hadfield sums up by saying dreams stand in the place of experience. They make us relive areas of anxious or difficult experience. They thus help problem solving. But they not only look back at past behaviour, they act just like thinking in considering future plans and needs.

Morrison’s findings with animal dreams, (see movements during sleep) opens the possibility that practising and developing skills and strategies may be the function dreams performed in early animals. They may enable us to economically learn from experience, and to play with experience in untidy or irrational ways. This ‘untidiness’ enables experience to be juxtapositioned in so many ways, useful new behaviour could arise from the occasional creative juxtapositioning. See: Evans, Christopher.

Dr. J. A. Hadfield, in his book Dreams and Nightmares (Penguin) describes this process as follows:

If a branch of a tree is cut, new shoots spring out; if you injure your hand, all the forces of the blood are mobilised until that wound is healed and you are made whole. It is a law of nature. So it is psychologically: every individual has potentialities in his nature, all of which are not merely seeking their own individual ends, but each and all of which serve the functions of the personality as a whole. Our personality as a whole, like every organism, is working towards its own fulfillment.

Hadfield connects this even more directly with the overall self-regulatory physical processes in saying:

There is in the psyche an automatic movement toward readjustment, towards an equilibrium, toward a restoration of the balance of our personality. This automatic adaptation of the organism is one of the main functions of the dream as indeed it is of bodily functions and of the personality as a whole. This idea need not cause us much concern for this automatic self regulating process is a well known phenomenon in Physics and Physiology. The function of compensation which Jung has emphasised appears to be one of the means by which this automatic adaptation takes place, for the expression of repressed tendencies has the effect of getting rid of conflict in the personality. For the time being, it is true, the release may make the conflict more acute as the repressed emotions emerge, and we have violent dreams from which we wake with a start. But by this means, the balance of our personality is restored.’

The difference between Jung and Hadfield is that Hadfield is saying the dream is not merely ‘compensating’ for something the conscious personality is doing but is being purposive in pushing toward healing or growth. As with the physical process of self-regulation, which overall supports growth and stability, this psychological process in dreams appears to have much the same function.

To make this psychological self-regulatory process more understandable, let us remember some of the main physiological processes. Richet said ‘instability is the necessary condition for true stability, and our being must be able to modify itself in relationship to the external stimuli. In a very simplistic sense this means that if we are overcome by fear we must be capable of feeling courage to compensate. Without this compensation we remain paralysed with fear. If our psyche is not ‘unstable’ or mobile enough, this compensatory release cannot occur.

Freud and Jung join the Discussion

Freud showed modern man that apart from their everyday waking life, they also had an obscure or hidden inner life taking place unconsciously. He showed that people had tendencies or desires they would not admit even to themselves. These desires or impulses were held back or repressed from conscious recognition and expression, and dreams portrayed some of these hidden longings or traumas. These longings, according to Freud, were mostly childhood or sexual urges that were natural at the time, and expressive of the stage of development the child was going through. They had never been fulfilled because the child had gained the impression from adults that such things were either wrong, would cause people to withdraw love or support, or were very injurious. As an example, a mother might withdraw love every time the child sucked its thumb, or be terribly shocked on finding the child masturbating. Thus, the drives to gain pleasure in the thumb, or to fulfil the need to release a sexual tension, would be repressed. As further growth can only arise out of the fulfilled activity of early growth processes, and as such drives are parts of physical and psychological growth, further growth is thereby blocked. Dreams would show the energy drive – to masturbate – and the factor that blocked it – the fear of disapproval or being unwhole. The self-regulatory process of energy release is thereby stopped, and degrees of illness in body and soul would be experienced.

Freud also brought to light that the emotions of an earlier injury, such as being nearly drowned , or bitten by a dog, or being beaten or unloved by a parent, could be repressed and cause present illness or neurotic behaviour. But Freud never seemed to clearly express the self regulatory aspect of the unconscious processes such as dreams. As Caron Kent says, “In Freudian analysis the emphasis is still placed on the ego and its conflicts. It is held that the ego is in conflict with its instincts or some other obscure forces. That the unconscious itself was a spontaneous source from which the ego as well as the organism unfolded, was not conceived. Freud did not see that before man can say “I am” – “I will” – “I think” – he has to grow, to breath, to digest and to metabolise. The mysterious force in our being is the growth force.”

In modern times, Jung has been the great explorer of this side of human nature in regard to the unconscious, and Wilhelm Reich in regard to the body. Through long years of study, Jung showed that dreams do not simply express the conflict between our conscious self and our instincts. They are also an expression, capable of being recognised by consciousness, of the wisdom underlying our existence. The wisdom that forms a baby, that holds the stomach sphincter closed while the intestine heals, that unfolds human personality, pre-exists our ego. This wisdom, expressing as it does in the growth forces, and the self-regulatory process of everyday life, lies deeper than our personal awareness, existed before it, and communicates with it. It is from this source the compensatory and growth forces of our being emerge, and if we have cut them off, our ability to meet our inner and outer life, our freedom, is diminished.

This deep centre of our being, from which our body, its structure, its functioning and our conscious ego or psyche arise, Jung named the ‘Self’. In past ages it has been called Spirit or Atman. Writing of this, and the way dreams express it, Von Franz says in Man and His Symbols (Aldus)

Thus our dream life creates a meandering pattern in which individual strands or tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. If one watches this meandering design over a long period of time, one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process of psychic growth – the process of individuation.

Gradually a wider and more mature personality emerges and by degrees becomes effective and even visible to others. Since this psychic growth cannot be brought about by conscious effort of will power, but happens involuntarily and naturally, it is in dreams frequently symbolised by the tree whose slow, powerful, involuntary growth fulfils a definite pattern.

But this creative nucleus of the psychic growth – the Self – can only come into play when the ego gets rid of purposive and wishful aims, and tries to go to a deeper, more basic form of existence. The ego must be able to listen attentively and to give itself, without any desire or purpose, to that inner urge toward growth.

Von Franz, here explaining the Jungian attitude, expresses one polarity of our relationship with our own source – that of surrender to it. Other schools express the other polarity of making the ego so strong and defended it can dominate its source and instincts. There is a middle way, but before commenting on this, what has been said of body and soul is brought into clear relief by recent research into sleep and dreams. It was found that “every normal adult and child over a certain, as yet undetermined, but very tender, age, have hallucinatory experiences of dreaming, as a regular, repetitive concomitant of natural sleep.” That is, every person tested, dreams in cycles throughout sleep.

“This nightly pattern is as universal as sleep – and as regular as the motions of the planetary bodies. At first one falls into a deep dreamless sleep. After about sixty or seventy minutes there is a rising up toward waking consciousness and one dreams for about nine minute. Down into dreamless sleep again, but not as deep. After ninety minutes, up toward waking consciousness again, and about nineteen minutes of dreaming. Now a shallower trough of dreamless sleep for another ninety minutes, up, and this time twenty four minutes dreaming. Down, and up after ninety minutes for twenty-eight minutes. The fifth period of dreaming then continues until fully waking. People who were woken as dreams began, and thus were prevented from dreaming, after a few days showed signs of mental’ and physical breakdown.

There are several important points to note regarding these findings about the psychological process of self-regulation or homeostasis. For instance, Freud made it quite plain that many contents of the unconscious cannot, or do not, easily rise into awareness. Therefore such things as sexual urges were symbolised in dreams instead of being directly felt. This means that even while asleep and dreaming the process of repression or control continues. So although there is an attempt, on the part of one’s unconscious processes, to deal with conflicts, to release and integrate past trauma, there is an opposition to this through repression and the avoidance of pain. As Ron Hubbard puts it, we have a held down 7.

We need to make a conscious decision to heal ourselves

Because of this, the conscious decision to face our own internal contents has to be made. This decision must include being ready to meet pain, disorientation, and the distorted feelings that arise from past trauma. Even with such a decision the journey is still not an easy one, for the release does not then occur spontaneously. We still have to persist, because at each step we are, as Freud puts it, resisting our own move toward health.
You can sail the seas of a stormy life

Dr. Oliver Sacks worked with the drug L. Dopa with patients who had lain in a coma-like state for years. This led them to wake and once more consciously face the world of objective and subjective experience. He says of these ‘awakenings’ “all the operations in coming to terms with oneself and the world, in face of continual changes in both, are subsumed in Claud Bernard’s fundamental concept of ‘homeostasis’ . . . We have to recognise homeostatic endeavours at all levels of being, from molecular and cellular to social and cultural, all in infinite relation to each other.”

His patients, often severely diseased physically and emotionally, sometimes managed, he says, to become astute and expert navigators, steering themselves through seas of trouble which would have caused less expert patients to founder on the spot. “Thus some patients with severe illnesses got well and remained so, and some less ill never managed. They had obviously learned or not learned to work with their own nature.”

He goes on to say that we must concede the possibility that nature, and, therefore, human nature, has an almost limitless ability to reorganise itself at chemical, cellular and hormonal levels. This is seen in action where, with the ‘will to get well’ patients inexplicably recover from the most serious of illnesses. “One must allow,” he writes “with surprise, with delight, that such things happen. Health goes deeper than any disease.”
Opening the Doors to the Self

So far it has been pointed out that the self-regulatory process is fundamental in body and mind. It has also been shown that we may unconsciously resist the action of that because of the pain or disorientation it might temporarily cause in its healing action. Dreams have been described as one of the main processes of self-regulation in the psyche, but once again, their action of healing can be resisted.

Physiologically the process of vomiting is a self-regulatory process, ridding the body of poisons or harmful bacteria. Psychologically, powerful spontaneous body movements and emotions are also ways the self-regulatory process deals with harmful experience. Because this is so important, it is helpful to understand something of its action.

As almost anybody can observe, sometimes during sleep and dreaming, we call out, or our body moves expressive of what is happening in the dream. Adrian Morrison at the University of Pennsylvania, uncovered some interesting information in connection with this. Usually, in animals and humans, a small area of the pons in the brain prevents our muscular system from responding to signals from the brain while we are dreaming. If this were not so we would make full body movements while asleep as we do in the dream. As it happens, only a tiny fraction of these movements break through, except for the rapid eye movement of dreaming. But Morrison noticed that in mammals in which the pons is damaged, full body movements are made during REM sleep.

Although this has already been described elsewhere in the book, because of its importance I repeat that this shows not only can the dream process create a spontaneous fantasy or experience we call a dream, not only can it invest the dream with deeply felt emotions or creative ideas, it also expresses as full body movement. Such body activities are prevented by the pons from being expressed except perhaps in small jerks or movements. Nevertheless, speech, walking, dancing, fighting and making love, are all frequent dream subjects.

So human beings have at least two centres that can direct body processes. We are used to making conscious decisions about walking or moving our hands, but few of us suspect that another part of our being outside our conscious volition is capable and practised in making full body movements and expressing in complex speech.

I believe that by letting things happen without criticism or interference, we can actually allow the dream process to break through into waking life and express in full body movements, speech, a dramatic themes, and deeply felt emotions. We begin to be aware of things that usually happen to our psyche only while we sleep. Our consciousness is expanded to the point where it includes a realm of experience that is in many ways different from our waking world. In quite a real sense we begin to ‘wake up’ in what was sleep. We start to become explorers of the unconscious. As exciting as that is, it might not have much point, apart from a novelty, if it were not for the many possibilities the awakening holds.

Many therapeutic approaches completely overlook this fundamental process of self-healing through physical movement. Neither Freud nor Jung really dealt with this. Only Reich and the approaches emerging from him fully appreciated it. Yet many traumatic experiences, from birth through to medical operations, are deeply physical. Tensions in our body do not simply melt away. Often the desires, anger and movements that are linked with the original episode need to be expressed and released in some way. Apart from that, body and mind are not separate. They are intimately meshed, and what needs to be felt with one is expressed with the other.

But my experiences with self-regulation points to a central core self from which all else emerges. This core seems to be a link with all natural processes, and from which we as individuals emerge. Most of us are suffering amnesia. Strangely, in our culture this amnesia is accepted as normal. It is normal to have forgotten our childhood, to no longer remember our birth and our life in the womb. Especially, it is considered normal to have forgotten our life in eternity. In fact people who start to remember this are sometimes diagnosed as mentally unstable. This truly is a time of blindness.

The recognition of a core self

Ancient cultures all recognised this, and many of them developed techniques in which an environment in which this could occur were developed. We are not simply a body, nor simply a mind. We are not simply a creature of time and death, but also a creature of those aspects of the universe that lie beyond time and space. So when a therapist only talks and debates with us, they are only dealing with thinking. You need an acknowledgement of your body and your spirit to become whole. Accept nothing less.

Therefore the opening to this process of self-regulation takes you into and through the jungle of your inner fears and strength, but more important than anything else, it opens you to the influence of the transcendent principle that is at your core. That transcendent influence leads you into becoming a new being.
Summary

* Self-regulation is fundamental to all cosmic activities and life forms.
* In humans it acts both at a physical and a psychological level.
* It assures survival.
* It is partly a spontaneous process and is partly learned.
* Most self-regulation occurs unconsciously, and learning to consciously cooperate with its action is a learned skill.
* Such skill enlarges ones possibilities.
* Vomiting and digestion are functions of physical self regulation.
* The rising into consciousness of emotions and experience for integration and re-evaluation are functions of psychological self-regulation.
* The process of self regulation is constantly attempting to present past traumas and ‘held down 7’s’ for integration and healing. However, there are forces of resistance to this active in us, and these have to be moved through if we are to succeed in becoming whole.
* Pain and such feelings as fear and guilt frequently cause us to prevent experience and emotions from emerging into consciousness.
* Freud showed that if a person is afraid of sexual feelings their sexuality is repressed even in their dreams.
* Such deeply repressed feelings cause psychological and physical tension and illness.
* Allowing spontaneous body and feeling fantasy allows the emotions and experience held in the unconscious to be released, evaluated and integrated.
* At points where fear or pain usually block the process one can decisively allow the self-regulatory process to continue.
* Because this allows previously unrealised experience to be known, an enlargement of our personal self awareness occurs.

The Secret Bible – The Kabbalah

The whole book can be purchased in Kindle or Paperback.

The Ancient Biblical Tradition – Kabbalah is the teachings of the old Hebrew scholars

If one takes the Bible, one sees line upon line of writing clearly visible to the eye. Kabbalah is that which is to be read between the lines.

But as the Talmud points out “If you would seek to understand the invisible, then first have an open eye for the visible, for if you do not know the visible your foundation is on shifting ground.”

This process of “reading between the lines is known as “Mystical exegesis” and in the contribution by Tony Crisp that follows this introduction an excellent example is given of how it can be applied to that greatly misinterpreted book – “The Book of Genesis”.

From mouth to ear, from master to disciple, the tradition of Kabbalah was passed down through the ages. At times, parts of it were written down but it can never be fully written down for its real inner secrets are locked away deep in the recesses of the mind of God where even the purest and noblest of the Tzaddikim, the truly holy and just men, cannot penetrate. And even those aspects of it that can be uncovered in meditation are more truly symbols than words. Bill Heilbronn

1. ATZILAH – THE WORLD OF EMANATION

Simple stories can hold within them enormous depths of meaning and wisdom. In our heritage of such stories, we could find some of the deepest commentaries on life’s meaning and human existence, if only we would look, or had the key. Take the story of Adam and Eve for instance: is that a primitive fantasy to explain life? Was it created by the ignorant to placate the superstitious? Millions of people have said it was. But popular opinion is not always right. Let us look a little more closely and find out. In this closer look I must first acknowledge the scholarship of F. J. Mayers as expressed in his book The Unknown God – Ain Soph. This is my source for much that is quoted. See: Ain Soph

Hebrew, an ancient language, is quite different to English. This becomes obvious when we remember that the Greek letters alpha, and omega, mean ‘beginning’ and ‘end’. We still say ‘alpha and ‘omega’ to mean the beginning and the end of something, but perhaps without knowing that in a similar way, all of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet have a meaning quite by themselves.

Just as the Greek – Alpha – means “the beginning” so does the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet Aleph mean primal creation, for it is the inaudible out-breathing preparatory to making a sound and only made audible by the vowel pointing that underlies it. Daleth as a letter means multiplication, becoming many, and Mem is the sign of unlimited plurality. If we put these together, we discover something interesting. ADM – Adam.

Symbolism of Adam and Eve

Here, staring us in the face, is the possibility that the word Adam is not singular. It is not referring to an individual. It says – the first creative cause multiplying and becoming many. If anything, it is referring to a force or process in nature, certainly not some physical forebear. Yet for generations this is what we have been led into believing. But let us take the story from the beginning and see the wonderful wisdom it unfolds. It would take too much space to do this word by word as has been done with the word Adam, so I will only give a synthesis of this deeper translation, with occasional notes. To make this understandable without too many notes, I will have to enlarge on the actual words used. For instance, a general translation of the first verse of Genesis is. “Firstly, Elohim created the heavens and the earth”.

Now, several things will be misunderstood if we leave it at that. A little word ‘eth’ that is the combination of the first and last – aleph and tau – letters of the Hebrew alphabet, has been left out of translation. Also, we must note that it does not say ‘In the beginning’ which suggests a process in time and space, suggestion that this creation was taking place beyond time and space – for as shown by scientific research, time and space were created by the big bang.

The word ‘Elohim’ literally means ‘gods’ or God the gods. That is, the seven creative forces emerging from that which lies behind the emergence of the universe. The word ‘created’ is translated from the word Bara, which broken into letters means “internal movement of the creative life energy in its first action, or from the primary cause”. It suggests an artist arriving at an internal conception of a work, which he will later materialise. i.e., it is all in the mind at this point. The words Heaven and Earth, are therefore not talking about physical realities, but spiritual realities in the conception of the Creator. The word Heavens is ‘Shamaim’, which means infinite source or potential of life forms or life energies. The word Earth is ‘aretz’, which in Hebrew means primal vibrating substance. So we have the source of life forms – the mother, and that substance which it uses.

Obviously, the sentence ‘Firstly Elohim created the heavens and the earth’, gives no idea of these meanings. If we enlarge upon it we may arrive at something that brings this understanding. Therefore, at the risk of making many mistakes, I will give a free rendering.

That which moved not and remains always unknowable expressed out of itself seven creative forces. There was conceived within the one purpose of these the plan and living spiritual reality of the whole cosmos. From beginning to end, all existed as divine realities in this conception. But, it was not yet made real in time, space and motion. But the creative energies began to bring into being the forces and archetypes that would be the spiritual body upon which the physical universe would later hang.

(V. 2 King James Version – And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.)

The basic substance of the universe was in darkness, chaotic and unmoulded, as yet without form. All the elements of existence were in chaos and unknown. But the creative forces extended into the unformed. Beyond time and space the divine energies caused a great symphony of vibratory energy to express. The Word, which through its patterns of vibrations would be the pattern of creation.” See Big Bang and God are the Same

(V.3 ‘And God said: Let there be light, and there was light’.)

The patterns of energy in the divine conception were full of meaning and consciousness.

(V. 4 ‘And God saw the light that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness’.)

And the creative forces, when the power of consciousness and order was whole, set it in opposition to, and to act upon, the chaotic primal substance, which lacked awareness. Thus, from out of that which was neither conscious or unconscious, substance or non-substance, form or formless, but all things – a cosmic conception had flashed into being. Form and formless were now separated, consciousness and unconsciousness, energy and substance, set apart to form a duality to interact.

Symbolism of Creation

(V.5 ‘And God called the light Day, and the darkness Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day’.)

And the creative forces gave unto the positive, conscious side of the duality, the quality of universal consciousness and the power to make all things into cosmic consciousness, to express the divine plan. The negative, unconscious side of the dual had the power to limit, to hide, to bring forth forms. Then was the first cycle of inner activity complete, and there began a new cycle.

V.6 ‘And God said: Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’

It might be as well to point out here that the Elohim, was seven creative forces – the gods, and are the same as the seven Chakras, and the seven churches. They are Pure Consciousness – Understanding or intellect – Will – Love – Destruction – Creation – Energy or Unconscious substance.

And as an outworking through the creative forces, there came about a link between the cosmic consciousness, and the cosmic substance. Through this the active could act on the passive; the ‘light’ enter the ‘darkness’. Thus ended the second cycle of cosmic activity.

V. 7 and 8 as above. V.9 ‘And God said: Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear; and it was so.’

In this cosmic conception when the positive forces acted upon the primal substance they would begin to coalesce into matter, as the basis for the physical universe. This would lead to the formation of the physical worlds.

(V 10 ‘And God called the dry land Earth: and the gathering together of the waters he called the Seas: and God saw that it was good’)

The word Seas is the same as that – for waters – iamin – with “ee” prefixed. This makes it mean ‘visible waters’, i.e., the materialisation of what was previously only spiritual. The words ‘dry land’ are ‘iabasha’ which means ‘the dryness: Earth is ‘aretz’ which means the limit of materiality, physical matter. Thus we arrive again at a different idea than just the Earth, with its Seas.

The primal substance would by this action lead to its most material expression, known in the Cosmic spectrum of forces as physical matter. This was the plan of the Cosmic conception and was ‘good’.

(V. 11 ‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed. and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its own kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so).

In the Light, or awareness, the cosmic conception would be held. The Darkness, or primal substance, would receive the projections from the Light, as a screen. First was the tendency that led it to materialise as matter. Now the energy-forms (the Word i.e., God ‘said’) within the Light projected the next step, which would be the energies acting upon the mineral kingdom causing it to vegetate. As this power acted upon the mineral kingdom, there would arise the forms of the vegetable kingdom. Like sound causing patterns of response in the air, these energies would cause self perpetuating forms to arise: cellular life forms which themselves would reproduce according to its – the patterns of the Word – own nature.

V. 12 & 13 ‘And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after its kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after its kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.)

And from matter there was planned to arise that expressing the vegetative forces bearing the power to reproduce, and forms that carried within them this hidden power of the Word to vegetate. And this was the cosmic conception, and was good. Thus there came an ending and a beginning that was the completion of the third creative cycle.

(V. 14 & 15 ‘And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

In this passage, the Hebrew words for Sun and Moon – Shemish and larech – are not used. The word maoroth is used instead. It means dual light, light givers or foci of light. As the word used for ‘light’ has already been shown to also mean the divine consciousness or intelligence which acts upon the ‘darkness’, it need not mean physical ‘light’. The word ‘signs’ is othoth, which means symbolic signs, or ‘to be coming’. ‘Seasons’ is the word moadim, which literally means ‘periods, division of time.’ And Shanah, the word translated year, means regular recurrent period.)

The divine conception was still working through the archetypes that were not yet materialised, and the forces issuing from the seven creative energies – the Word – were planned to cause intelligent power to express through the substance of the stars. Like great beings living in the bodies of the stars, the forces they expressed into the cosmos would influence the events of the physical universe to take place. Within themselves would be the potentials of what was to come about. Their power would bring about the changing qualities flowing to the worlds. In great cycles their beings would express to bring recurrent and spiralling changes into the physical cosmos which was not yet formed. They would rule the forces of the universe, for they were the patterns of its life and being that the creation was setting up.

(V. 16 & 19 ‘And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

In this passage the word ‘stars’ is translated from the word ‘cocabbim’. In the previous passage, the heavenly intelligences are shown as expressing themselves through the physical body of the stars. In the usual translation, this would therefore seem to be an unnecessary repetition. But the basis of the word ‘coccabim’ is cabab, which means to ‘roll around’. The root of the word is koch which refers to forces or virtues. In the night sky, it is only the planets of our own solar system that ‘roll around’. It is therefore likely this word refers to the forces or energies radiating from the planets. This is why I have rendered the passage in the way following.

And the creative activities, manifesting through the cosmic mind, and the primal cosmic substance, when they particularised into the cosmic intelligences of the stars, and the comparative unconsciousness of matter, would become realised as two levels of consciousness. The awareness of the Light would be cosmic, linking directly with the creative and cyclic activities. The consciousness in matter would be limited, and aware of physical things. And the cosmic intelligence and energies expressing through the planets, would influence these two levels of awareness that were aspects of one consciousness. Through the influence of the planets would arise the experience of separation or difference between the consciousness that looked to the creator, and the consciousness that looked toward the created. And there was an ending and a beginning, as this was an expression of the cosmic conception. Thus ended the fourth cycle of the creative activities.

2. BRIAH – THE WORLD OF CREATION

(V. 20 to 23 ‘And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind, and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.” And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

We have already seen that ‘waters’ refers to the universal primal substance, acted upon by the primal energies and intelligence – the Light. The words ‘ishertzou sheretz’ translated ‘moving creatures that hath life’, means ‘bringing forth that which undulates or vibrates and proliferates’.

The words nephesh chaiah, usually translated living soul, and here used in connection with what was to be brought forth from the waters, means literally, that which takes in, breathes in, individualises, then expresses out, the universal energy or consciousness. The soul is, therefore, described here as an activity brought into being by the creative processes, which individualises and expresses the cosmic energies or awareness. Whales – ‘tanninum’ – means the activity or power to propagate abundantly or hugely from the waters. Because people took ‘waters’ to mean the seas, they obviously felt this must refer to some large physical sea creature, instead of a cosmic activity. We must remember that this is still talking about the internal (bara) creation or the thinking out in detail what will be later materialised.

The vibratory energies acting upon the primal substance, when they had set in motion the forces causing the primal substance to tend toward becoming matter, and the forces which would lead towards that matter ‘vegetating’, would then cause activities of life movement, of individualisation, to occur. To move, to express as separate individuals to rise up toward the higher consciousness from material existence, these were the forces that would be set in motion. And they would carry in them the power to propagate themselves from the cosmic substance, wherever in the universe suitable environments occurred, and the mineral and vegetative forces were already manifest. And this was an expression of the cosmic conception. Then the creative forces – Elohim – filled them with power by extending it to them. There was an ending and a beginning, and thus the fifth cycle of creative activity was complete.

(V. 24 & 25 ‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind, and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

Let us look at the words rendered as ‘cattle’ – behemah – ‘creeping thing’ – remesh – ‘beast of the earth’ – chaitho – aretz – ‘everything that creepeth’ – cal remesh – ‘upon the ground’ – ha-adamah.

Behemah means inner life activity, or invisible life activity of a universal nature but with a particular direction. It is a singular word, not plural. Cal-nemesh means ‘all movement or progress upward’. Chaith-h aretz – ‘beast of the earth’ means earth life, or life on or in earth.

‘Ha-adamah’ however, should never be translated ‘upon the ground’. As we have seen ‘aretz’ refers to primal and physical substance. The word Adamah derives from Adam, which later does not refer to the ground at all. The prefix ‘ha’ means ‘a tendency toward, or movement to’. As it is a prefix to Adam, it is saying ‘a tendency or movement toward Adam – i.e., mankind-wards, to self awareness, not necessarily in the form of humans.

And the creative energies will lead the universal life forms to manifest in physical matter, and to express themselves as actual physical creatures . Yet within the being of the creatures is the cosmic life forces causing their existence, in them would occur the potential to develop self-awarenesss. And this was an expression of the cosmic conception.

Was Adam a Man and Eve a Woman?

(V. 26 & 27 ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

So God created man in his image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.

Some of the things we must note here are that ‘God’ said let US – our image, referring to himself as Elohim, the many. So God is not here a single being. This Elohim also at once talks of men and women, not just Mankind, Adam.

The word translated image is ‘tzelem’ which means shadow, or something which extends outwards, a projection or complementary reflection. The word as ‘likeness’ is ‘chidamothou’, ‘dam’ is blood, which in Hebrew thought refers to the ‘same quality’, or ‘kinship or family’. It means altogether, ‘for likeness of us’ or ‘as kin of ours’. It is also a verb which means ‘to be a likeness maker’. So Adam is both created and creator. We notice also that Adam is male and female, singular and plural. As in the human kingdom the word ‘man’ is both male and female, singular and plural. As the spiritual potential of any individual human being, Adam is all that humans can be, both sexes. As we saw at the beginning, ADM means that which sprung from the first cause and became many. It is, therefore, like the ‘whale’ a divine cosmic impulse, and not an individual man at all but the impulse to become Man-Kind.

One last thing is that the Hebrew original designates Adam’s power as IN the life of the earth and animals, not as a ruler over them.

The creative forces, expressing their vibratory energies – the Word – now unfolded into cosmic realisation, that which would be aware of its own divine nature. And there would arise to consciousness that which until now had been working within the realms of the minerals, vegetables and animals unconsciously.

Unconsciously it would work, leading the vegetable to evolve from the mineral, the animal to arise from the vegetable, and would give birth to the human kingdom of personal awareness. For this human kingdom would reflect the divine forces into the lower kingdoms, and be a channel for their energies to flow to the yet higher kingdoms of Elohim – for to be male and female is to be a receiver and a transmitter, a link between the above and the below.

(V. 28 to 31 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, “Be fruitful, and multiply. and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat, and it was so.”

And God saw everything that he had created, and behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

And in receiving the higher forces into its life, and reflecting them into the lower kingdom, humanity would transform, uplift and be a carer for those kingdoms. They would become more fruitful.

Humanity shall also, by being a reflector or projection of the creative forces, have rulership over the multiplicity of impulses, energies, feelings and drives in these kingdoms and thus in itself.

But the inner life must be built up and fed upon those energies that express as the vegetable kingdom, and which transforms material forces, and integrate into fruitfulness. Humanity’s individual energies must open to the creative forces, and bear fruit, and incorporate the divine creative energies in that fruitful creativity.

To the animal kingdom this was not given. They would incorporate in their beings only the energies that grow and open multifarious qualities, and not those which create out of matter and the Light. But humans would be a tree that walks, an animal plant that opens its flowering consciousness to God, and whose fruits would enclose the Light, for his activities were planned to express divine creative powers. And this was an expression of the cosmic conception, and was good. The ending and beginning completed the sixth cycle of creative activity.

(Chapter 2 V. 1 and 2 ‘Thus the heavens and earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

And God blessed the seventh period, and sanctified it; because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

Thus the plan of the many levels of consciousness and life activity were completed, and all the laws, principles and powers that would cause them to exist and governed them had been formed as seeds ready to grow and express themselves.

All the seven cycles of cosmic creation were now ready to be expressed. In the different levels of being these creative activities still continue. For the seven Elohim have caused to exist in humans seven stages of consciousness. These are mineral consciousness, vegetables consciousness, animal consciousness, human – self -consciousness – cosmic consciousness and God consciousness. And in this seventh consciousness or activity, all forces are balanced and return to their original unity, ceasing their previous activity. For at this level God is returned into its original condition, and not to be known as in the other levels, in creative opposition, in relationship, in self awareness, in creative thought, or as the unity of many parts. And this seventh level is full of God’s blessedness, for here all are made one again, and creation and separation ends; for we too are made whole and complete here. Thus the creative activity had been expressed, and now the divine Creator returned unto itself to watch its creation express.

(V. 3 to 6 ‘These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.’

One great fact we have to mention here is that before the word ‘generations’, a word is left out of all English, and the prior Latin, translations. The word is ‘tho’. It means symbolic. It is saying that all the previously described creation drama was symbolic of what occurred before the physical universe came about. The stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, which follow, were also SYMBOLIC. Yet it was left out. Why? To leave people in ignorance? Would they then be free of churches and priests? Would they understand too much? Also, when the English translation uses the word ‘heaven’ in the original it is always a plural word.

The Hebrew words translated ‘not a man’ are literally, ‘Adam was not’. The word translated ‘ground’ is Adamah, which does not denote anything material at all. As already explained, it means ‘man-ward’.

All that has been described is an attempt to present, in symbolic language, how the divine consciousness inwardly created the detailed plan of all that was to exist.

All the potentials for the mineral, vegetable, animal, human and other kingdoms had been brought about. They existed as realities that had not yet taken on physical expression. The physical universe was not yet existent, and the vegetable, animal and human had not come into material expression. But from here there was to begin an ascent from the lowest to the highest. All would be expressed in matter, time and space, that had been created spiritually in the divine conception. There was as yet no expression of the divine plan, for there were no individual souls, no spirits of humanity to work with God at creating the physical worlds and all in them. For the Eternal One had not yet caused these things to rain or descend into matter, to express in the many worlds of the material universe.

Then energies locked up in the primal substance, began the process of the ascent to the highest. From the power that would lead to humans, there acted upon the primal substance that which began the process of physical creation.

3. YETZIRAH – THE WORLD OF FORMATIVE FORCES

(V. 7 ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

So despite the earlier statement that man and woman had been created, this is repeated again, showing again that the previous was a mental creation, not a physical.

The word ‘ground’ is again, in the original, Adamah, the basic spiritual forces or divine impulses, and consciousness which has a tendency toward self awareness. The word translated ‘formed’ is utzer. It means ‘to create from the substance of the eternal’. The word ‘man’ is Adam, which means collective humanity, the composite of all people. It is like an organ of many cells. The many cells are humans, the collection of cells, the organ, is Adam.

The words ‘living soul’ are ‘nishemath chayim’. The first word means high or exalted. But ‘chayim’ is a plural word, so cannot be translated soul. Like so much of this translation, the meaning has been twisted to fit the limited understanding of the translators. Chayim means ‘lives’ or ‘souls’. Living soul is translated from the words ‘nephish haiah’ already described. They mean a taking in of the universal life and consciousness, and individualising it.

The eternal creative forces, from out of their own nature, and with the most refined forces and activities leading toward individual existence and awareness, caused the Cosmic Man to act as a channel for the outpouring of divine energies to the creation of the worlds in space. The cosmic man, the Adam, would take into its being the higher energies, and then express them to the material worlds, taking part in the creative drama to take place.

And in this way, the cosmic man became aware as countless individual exalted beings. Thus it was that the spirits of humanity came into being, arising as separate beings in the cosmic nature of Adam. Not born into physical bodies, but arising to work as co-creators with the Eternal, unfolding in matter the cosmic plan.

(V. 8 & 9 ‘And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Planted, in the original is ‘itta’. It suggests the giving of a permanent form, to arrange in matter. Gan, translated ‘garden’ means ‘an enclosure, or a sphere of activity. It is rather like our skin enclosing the sphere of activity we call our body. The word eastward is ‘m’kedem’, which means ‘before’. It is used in Hebrew to show humanity’s view of eternity from his sense of time. So it means to be ‘out of eternity’, or to be able to ‘look back on eternity from time’. Eden, or aden, means something which is given existence but is transitory. The word ground is once more, Adamah; thus the ridiculous confusion of describing trees which have knowledge of good and evil or a ‘tree of life’ being in the ‘ground’.

‘Whetz’ the Word for tree, means something that grows and develops, whether physical, mental or spiritual.

And the Eternal, working through the divine beings that were Adam, brought about in the physical universe a condition in which Adam, the uncountable spirits of humankind, could experience and work upon time and the limitations of space and matter. But these spirits were not in physical bodies.

And out of the energies flowing into mankind, the Eternal One caused forces to emerge into the spiritual beings of latent humanity that would fulfil their needs and understanding. In the very midst of their involvement of working in time and space, they would still know eternal life within them, for there was the possibility of becoming too involved in the direct experience of material life, with its conflicting opposites.

(V. 10 to 14 ‘And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.

The name of the first is Pison; that is it compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold, and the gold of that land is- good; there is bdellium and the onyx stone.

And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same it is that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.

The word river here is ‘nahar’, it means, quite simply, ‘life force’. It is a great stream of divine energies or life forces. While the word water – Nishekah – means to make fertile or productive, to bring life to. ‘Heads’ is translated from ‘neshim’, which means to break down, or to decompose. That is, from oneness to become many, like the spectrum in the rainbow does from colourless light.

The word Pishon describes the idea of an energy that fills all space, and causes ideas, thoughts, mental conceptions, to become materialised or take on form. Havilah means the activities and conditions of physical life.

The word ‘beddolah’ translated bdellium, means literally, ‘mysterious dividing’. Onyx is from ‘aeben ha-shoham’ which says ‘stone of universal sublimation’. It is doubtful whether this is an original verse in the text.

Gichon means any force or energy of a universal nature, which is mechanical, chemical, instinctive or unconscious, depending upon what it acts. Cush, translated Ethiopia, in Hebrew means fiery, impulsive or forceful. It refers to energies arising from passion or emotions.

Hiddekel is the force produced by human thought and will. Assyria has been translated from Ashur, which means ‘the blessings of’. The Hebrew text does not have the words ‘the fourth river’. Euphrates is used because the Hebrew ‘houa phrath’ sounds like it, and the translators were locked on the idea of physical places. Houa is in each of the preceding verses, and is there translated as ‘it, or that’, or ‘that one’. Phrath means the power to propagate or be fertile’.

And as the great creative life energy flows out of the sphere of activities in which the spirits of humanity take part, the life force is directed into four activities as it is expressed toward time, space and motion.

The quality or power of the first is to evolve physical realities from the cosmic conception. This acts upon all physical life, on all that is material. It builds the bodies of all things, all worlds. In this work the divine consciousness is reflected, like gold being sunshine made material.

And the quality of the second stream of life force is that which acts as unconscious mind in all creation. It shows as mechanical force, chemical ‘intelligence’, instinctive wisdom in plants and animals. It flows through all the attractions and repulsions in nature, and is seen as emotions. This fills all bodies with energy and sensation.

And the quality of the third expression of life force is individual consciousness as thought and awareness of being a separate soul. It flows from the Eternal One and returns to it, for the soul partakes of Eternity and Time. It converses alike with heaven and earth. This gives bodies a soul. Upon these flow that which causes them to be in harmony with one another, to express the divine purpose, and to he expressive of their qualities. This directs the body and soul to act in harmony with all creation, and in accord with its own innate nature.

(V. 15 to 17 And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

‘ikach’, translated ‘took’, means ‘a tendency’ or an ‘inclination toward’. The word put is ‘innach’ which means to feel at home in, or feel settled or right in. Despite many peoples idea that paradise is a place where one does not have to work, and that work is for the fools, the Hebrew word translated ‘dress’ means to work or labour. It suggests here that to take part in creation in harmony with the divine forces – to work at this – is a divine impulse in humanity.

The word ‘commanded,’ ‘itzaw’, means ‘gave guidance’ or ‘guide-lines’. This means that instead of saying ‘NO’, divine guidance is saying, ‘Be warned in advance that if you choose to ‘eat’ this, the consequences will be painful’. ‘Surely die’ is from the words ‘moth tamoth’. As we have seen, the many spirits of humanity, are not yet in physical bodies. The words mean that ‘Adam’ will die from one condition and experience another. This is borne out by the fact that Adam did not die when it ate the fruit.

And the Unknown One had placed within the spirits of mankind an urge that would find happiness and fulfilment through acting as channels and co-workers with the divine creative forces flowing to the material worlds. To work as free beings without physical bodies in the whole cosmos, was mankind’s innate work and home. To act as links between the eternal and the changing, the physical and the formless, and to watch over the work of creation, was their birthright. For the state of ‘Eden’ was to be aware of physical worlds and yet remain aware, or to have the centre of consciousness in the Eternal.

And the Unknown One placed within humanity the understanding that they could take part in and experience any aspect of the creative work taking place in the physical realm. Of this they could partake or ‘experience’. But in their consciousness of the Eternal they knew no opposites. They were guided always by the divine will of universal oneness, not from a sense of separateness. Thus they knew no polarities of good or bad, male or female because each soul was both male and female; and if they should plunge their consciousness into the physical realm completely by closing themselves to their eternal awareness, they would die to their sense of the eternal and know the opposites of the physical realm only. These opposites are illusion.

(V. 18 ‘And the Lord God said, It is not good that man should be alone: I will make an help meet for him.

The word for lonely is ‘l’abaddo’. It means ‘In a state of internal oneness’. In the text it suggest a lack of self-realisation, of only being a reflection of the divine will, and having no separate will of one’s own.

The verse, in saying the Unknown expressed it as ‘not good’ that a state of oneness, of lacking self expression, points out that ‘God’ sought companions, a means of self realisation, a mirror, in creation. The same is now being sought for ‘Adam’.

The word ‘meet’ is translated from the Hebrew ‘be-igid-O’. It is a difficult many faceted word, but includes the meanings ‘to make something known’, to ‘reflect something’, to ‘will or do something’ and to divide into active and passive.

And the Eternal One held in its being that there should not be a state in which the spirits of mankind knew only the One Will without choice. They should be free to choose and to decide. Yet in their consciousness of the Eternal, they lacked any idea of separateness, or any ability to make decisions of their own. God wished for companions who shared the Eternal consciousness, and not just puppets of the divine Will. They too should share the pleasure of self-realisation in creation. The divine conception had willed that the spirits of humanity develop a faculty of will, the ability to reflect upon a course, to decide, to have choice, and find their own divine creative powers in free will.

(V. 19 and 20 ‘And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.

Once more, the word ‘ground’ is translated from Adamah which is not earth or matter at all, but the forces of the Elohim which move man-wards; i.e., the evolutionary energy. The word ‘called’ is from ‘ikra’, which can also mean, engraved, character, carving, writing, etc.’. It means, as a whole, to give a quality or character to something. It must also be noticed that the word formed is used, and not creation. Creation had already taken place at spiritual levels. Now things were taking form in their actual inner qualities, their character, which would result in a particular physical shape.

And out of the activities and states of being from which the spirits of mankind had arisen, the Unknown One, working through Adam, caused all the creatures of nature, plant and animal, to be distinguished. Acting as the channel for this activity to become real in the physical universe, the spirits of mankind took part in this creation. In this way they began to realise what they were, for each creature was formed out of a quality, power or level of awareness in the Adam. Each creature was an expression of an aspect of the Adam’s total being. It was in this way that the spirits of mankind gave a quality, an inner nature, out of themselves, to the evolving aspects of nature. Yet in no creature did the spirits of mankind see a reflection of their total nature.

Free to Choose

(V. 21 to 23 ‘And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh thereof. And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man made he a woman and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman. because she was taken out of man.

Adam, remember, still has no physical body. The word translated ‘a deep sleep’ is ‘thareddemah’. It means an entrancement; to withdraw to ones very centre; to surrender self. The words translated ‘one of his ribs’ are ‘achath metz-alothais’. Acath means ‘one’ as when we speak of a family being one; i.e., one in unity. Tzaloth means ribs, not rib, or more precisely, the thing which envelops, protects or covers.

The sentence including the words ‘woman’ and ‘man’, says – ‘To this he gave (the name) Aisha, because from Aish this was taken’. It doesn’t say ‘she’ was taken, but ‘this’ was taken. Aisha means: ai – desire, inclination, self expression. Aish – all activity in which ones individual self is expressed. Aisha adds a letter which means in this case, ‘life, or movement toward some purpose.‘ In Hebrew the word is spelt A-SH-H, while the aish is spelt A-I-S-H. Aisha, or Ash-h, is therefore, the faculty of will and emotion, individual feeling and will, and the ability to conceive personal desires, thoughts and plans.

And the Eternal One caused the spirits of mankind to withdraw their consciousness from activity and surrender to the process taking place in their beings. So they lost themselves in the divine will while it acted upon them. And the divine activity in Adam caused a separation of their unity with the one will to occur. Out of their united will was made individual will. For the spirits of mankind had not been capable of personal or individual decision, but now the divine made this a part of their being. And the Adam knew this was now substance of his substance and part of his innermost nature. For out of mankind’s divine inclination toward self-expression, which made them a reflection of the divine forces that had created them, there had arisen their own individual will, with its power of expression.

(V. 24 & 25 ‘Therefore, shall a man leave his father and his mother. and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

Commentators see a different style on these verses, and some conclude they were added to the original.

Therefore, are mankind become capable of turning from the creative activities that gave birth to them, and living by their own will. Yet were the spirits of mankind still in accord with the divine will, even though they now had self will, and they had known no shame due to misuse of will.

(Chapter 3 V. 1 ‘Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.

The word translated ‘serpent’ is Nahash. The word for snake in Hebrew is sheretz. Nahash is a special word that does not refer to a snake at all, but to a force or process. It means evolutionary energy, or energy which tends to individualisation or selfhood. A whirlpool is simply water. But it is water drawn by an energy circling toward its centre. This circle of force draws things to its own centre – to its own self. In the previous notes it was said that three basic states underlay all existence. The first is the Unknown God – neither light nor dark, male or female, nor any opposites. From this issued the Word, or Elohim, the creative activities which caused a separation to take place. Thus the Light-consciousness, and Dark-unconsciousness, came about. These are also known as the centrifugal and centripetal forces.

One caused all things to expand from a centre, the other to draw in to the centre. Nahash is the in-drawing energy or whirlpool that causes men’s spirits to have a personal centre that gives individuality. The power of Light is the opposite, it universalises.

One other point is that whereas thinking and willing were united in the Adam – now they are separate.

Now the activity leading toward selfhood in the human spirits was so subtly a part of their nature, that unlike the other activities that had been expressed outwardly as the evolution of cellular life and animals, it was difficult to stand aside from it. The mineral, animal and vegetable forces had not involved mankind so strongly. They had been objectified easily.

(V. 1 to 6 ‘And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent; we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die: And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day that ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

We have already dealt with the above words.

Now that the human spirits could follow their own feelings, from the forces that caused human spirits to have individual existence there arose a question. It entered their consciousness asking, “Did Elohim really mean that I should not totally experience material existence? Surely, if I entered the sphere of opposites I would gain knowledge and experience from it?

And the divine wisdom in men warned them of the consequence of this, saying, you must not centre your consciousness in matter, for by that you will die to your cosmic awareness and have only consciousness through physical senses.

But the forces of individuation, flowing into matter, seemed to say that if they allowed their being to enter into and experience physical life, how could they lose their eternal consciousness? Instead they would gain knowledge of the opposites, of the paradox that Elohim knows.

Then the desires for this fired their will, for many spirits wished to know life in physical realms; to experience fully the knowledge of time and space, of the incompleteness of being just male or female, of looking out through the senses of a physical body, and knowing the feel of winds and water, separation and aloneness. Thus came about the fall of the angels, and many spirits fell into life within a physical body.

4. ASSIYAH – THE WORLD OF PHYSICAL MATTER

(V. 7 & 8 ‘And the eyes of them both opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.

The word translated ‘naked’ – ‘aroom’, really means blindness, deprivation of light. The words ‘sewed’ and ‘fig leaves’ are from ‘va-ithepherou’ and ‘aleh thaench’. These mean to produce, to give birth to a – covering of sorrow or sobbing. Aprons – ‘la-hem’ – means strife or contention, when its roots are analysed. Tree – ‘etz’ as already said, is physical substance.

And the spirits of humanity who involved themselves in matter knew the life of the body. Having turned from the one will to their own desire, they realised how utterly naked of any personal wisdom they were. Having turned from the cosmic wisdom that had guided them, they found no light of their own to lead them. And shame and sorrow was born in them by their act, and among them contention already arose due to their disunited will.

And as the light of their cosmic awareness waned, the presence of Elohim was yet with them. But through their shame they turned from it to the consciousness of the bodies they had made for themselves.

(V. 9 to 16 ‘And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and hid myself.

And he said, who told thee thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I command thou shouldst not eat?

And the man said, the woman who thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

And the Lord God said unto the woman. What is it thou hast done? And the woman said, The Serpent beguiled me and I did eat.

And the Lord God said unto the serpent. Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon they belly shalt thou go, and dust shall thou eat all the days of thy life. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception: in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be toward thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

The word beguiled is ‘hishiani’, which means ‘a mental blank’ or disorder of thought’. The word for cursed is ‘aroor’. It suggests an ‘evil through excess’ (most of the other words have been previously dealt with.

And the presence of the Eternal One yet came to men in their turning away. It entered their being like a great question – Why?

Never having known any other condition than complete at-one-ment with the cosmic life, their awareness of being separate from the One Life, and naked of wisdom, aroused in them the feeling of awe and fear of this immense presence they had once been a part of. It was so vast. ‘I turned from you in fear,’ they said. For now, as beings feeling themselves separate, the One Life seemed like a being outside themselves, a personal God. They feared being swallowed in the vastness.

Did this come from involving yourself in biological substance, against which your inner wisdom warned you?

Yes, the separate desires and will which you caused to arise in us, led us to be involved in the experience. Our desires led us into a condition of unbalance because we allowed them to be directed by the self-centred activities alone.

Then the presence of the Unknown One caused the fallen angels to know that the self-centring, individualising forces had been allowed excessive activity. In the cosmic life, these forces drew the divine energies inward to humanity’s personal awareness, to be expressed as creativity by the opposing forces. But now the evolutionary energy will have to work upon the lowest of natural forces, the mineral kingdom. It had led consciousness into the physical realm, and must now work there, inclined earthwards.

And a conflict would arise between humanity’s will, their desires, and their instinctive drives arising from the life force of Nahash. The evolutionary energy could still ‘uplift’ humanity even when involved in matter. It would develop mankind as individuals until they once more achieved cosmic awareness. But an individual’s personal desires would crush out this activity, and the evolutionary energy, would thus act in conflict with a person’s conscious will.

In the cosmic life, mankind gave birth to all the creations of mind under direction of divine will. To think was to immediately bring into being what was thought. But now, all accomplishment would be through difficulty and personal effort and experience gained in trial and error. In future, will and desire would have to be directed by thinking. For now that the forces of desire and motivation which act upon will are not directed by the divine, they will have to seek guidance from the limitations of knowledge gained, and personal wisdom harvested.

(V. 17 to 19 ‘And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.

Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Again, the word ground is translated from Adamah.

And the fallen spirits of humanity knew from their diminishing awareness of the Whole, that they had not hearkened to the wisdom within themselves which had warned them not to unbalance their consciousness toward the physical only. Their own unchecked desire nature had led them to it. Their awareness of the Whole informed them of this, enabling them to see that by such an act they had been their own undoing. Their spiritual energies (ground-Adamah) had been brought into disorder and unbalance. Life experience, because of this, would be a struggle. Yet they would be forced to partake of/experience this and it would bring forth pain and misery. Nevertheless, the natural forces of growth and survival would sustain them, and by their own efforts they would gain a spiritual wisdom of their own making. From the ‘corn’ or harvest of their natural energies they would bake the ‘bread’ of their spiritual sustenance. In this way they would eventually return to their original condition in the spiritualised forces. For from divine consciousness they were formed, and into divine life they would return.

(V. 20 & 21 ‘And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.

Unto Adam also and to his wife, did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them.

‘Havah’ is the Hebrew from which Eve is taken. It means ‘materialisation of beings’. ‘Coats of skins’ is translated from ‘Che-thanoth’. They mean ‘giving body to protect’. It is necessary to point out that the original material bodies the Adam experienced – the fig leaves – were made by the spirits of humanity themselves. These ‘coats of skin’ are now made by God. Some investigators believe that originally the spirits of men made fantasy forms such as mermaids, centaurs, satyrs, etc., in which to taste physical life. But men became trapped in these thought forms. Therefore, physical bodies of a new type were made as a means of escape from eternal entrapment in matter. The bodies of ape like creatures were inhabited by the spirits of men, and thus quickly changed them.

And men knew that their desires had led them to become physical creatures, and they called their will Havah-Eve. And mankind had become trapped by their own desires, in bodies of flesh that were yet eternal. And the Word, the creative love and wisdom of the Whole, caused bodies of existing animals to be suitable to receive the spirits of men. In this way they would know the cycle of birth and death; of physical life and a return to their source, until they, by the ‘sweat of their brow’ had liberated themselves from their attachment to the life of the senses.

(V. 22 to 24 ‘And the Lord God said, Behold the man is become as one of us to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of Life and eat and live for ever.

Therefore, the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

The word ‘igaresh’ does not mean ‘drove out’, but to ‘put at a distance’. No chasing out is suggested.

Ezekiel in his vision, does not at first use the word cherubim, but in Chapter X used it to describe his ‘living creatures’. Another similar description is found in Revelation verses 2-8 of Chapter 4. The animals described are easily recognised as the four fixed signs of the zodiac. As such they represent great cosmic intelligent forces or agencies.

The word Cherubim is the plural of cherub. It means ‘in the likeness of the visible heavens, or the fourfold heavens. The word translated sword is ‘chereb’. It means ‘life influence’.)

And the Unknown One, knowing what many spirits of men had done, directed the creative forces to guard man from his own foolishness. If men still had their full spiritual power, they could still cause their physical bodies to live for ever, which would separate them from their cosmic awareness and life perpetually.

So the spirits of humanity were cut off from their awareness of their higher nature in Eden. They were placed in bodies knowing birth and death, having to enter body after body, lest they avoid developing the spiritual qualities of their innate nature by forming an eternal thought body, in which they could avoid change and the fruit of their own actions.

For humanity must now till the ground of their own spiritual nature to bring forth its fruitfulness. Mankind thus left the timeless and entered into an awareness of time. And thus became subject to the great cosmic intelligences and life forces which acted upon time and space. The influence of these great forces penetrated the whole realm of space and time in which humans now found themselves, directing their experience, fate, urges and thought toward liberation. Men would be led along the ‘way of the growth through many lives’, the pathway of the soul back to the ‘ground’ of their existence.

Thus did the Word speak it. Thus will it be.

See Jesse Watkins Enlightenment

The Quickening

I believe an enormous and powerful spiritual event is occurring at this time.

To explain this I need to use an analogy. We have all grown from seeds. From the sperm and ovum, like a seed planted in our mothers womb, we have experienced the miracle of growth to become who and what we are.

In this way we have been planted within the earth of our body. For many of us this is all we know, the physical world and its needs and demands. But some of us have grown enough to put our stem and leaves above the surface of the soil. Then our being opens to a new power, the sun.

Of course this is just an analogy. I mean by it that many of us have opened our consciousness beyond the awareness of our body. We have in one way or another become aware of dimensions beyond the physical. But we have opened to a cloudy sky. The environment, the mental, emotional and social environment within which we live is like heavy cloud. But now, there is a break in the cloud and the sun is shining through. Again this is an analogy, but it says that enormous spiritual power is now touching the lives of those who are open to it.

Like the sun touching the leaves of a plant, this powerful spiritual energy throws immense possibilities of growth and change into us. This is the quickening. It is a power that is flowing into many lives transforming them, transforming the lives of those around them, and the world itself.

Some people who are experiencing this have felt empty of motivation lately. This is probably because to some extent they are dying to the world. I don’t mean they are dying physically, only that a change is going on in their being causing a swing over from a connection with the exterior world and desires for things of the world, to greater life within the spirit.

I believe that many people are in this condition. They are puzzled by the lack of motivation and enormous quiet that has fallen upon them. I believe they are dying to the world as this enormous flood of new life enters them. When this new force enters your life, you may feel a vibratory energy flowing through you. It is powerful enough at times for other people to actually feel your body vibrating at a very fast rate. This is the power of life transforming you in subtle ways. If you watch your dreams they will also show your relationship with this quickening.

How do we Open to this Quickening?

1. Take time to clarify what you feel is at the core of your existence. You are not being asked if you believe in God. No such belief is necessary. If there is a God you will find it at your core without any belief, just as you know the wind on your face without having to believe in it. What you are being asked is if you brought about your own existence, and if you completely know who and what you are. If you do know, then you need read no further. If you are uncertain and believe that you are probably a mass of chemical, biological or energetic responses, ask yourself again if you know deep down that you have the final answer. If you admit that you do not know for certain, you can take the next step.

2. The state of not knowing is important. It frees you of preconceived or rigid ideas and opinions that might stand in the way – so this step requires no belief. What it does require is a sense that there is something you do not understand that brings you into being. Take time to develop this condition of not knowing.

3. When you feel the open ‘not knowing’ condition active in you, state in some way that is an expression of this pivotal moment in your life, that you want the unknown mystery at your core to emerge more fully into your experience. A suggested statement is: “I come with all my being held open to the action of the mystery that is my core self.”

See: This is the Time of the Quickening; Life Stream; Groundswell and The Glory

Any influx of energy, whether it is chemical, electrical or personal, produces change. Opening to this enormous influx of energy has the same effect. Because we are all unique the changes that arise will very much be in connection with who you are, your background, culture, and potential. In general though, the changes are towards enlargement, growth, and a further emergence of your inner potentials. It also tends to produce greater awareness of being an integral part of an infinite and timeless continuum. Your personal relationship with that continuum gradually unfolds.

However, change is not always easy. Sometimes we resist it with great energy. Change confronts us with our weaknesses as well as our strengths. It reveals who we are much more fully than if we are in a stable situation.

But this quickening, overall, is about integration. It is about recognition of connection with all that exists in our universe. It is about meeting the you that is timeless, along with the history your timeless self unfolds to you. It is about being part of an enormous social and world change that we are on the brink of at the moment. What part you will play in that depends upon who you are and what you dare to be.

The Mystery of Parenthood

Chris: But moving on from that, I wanted to ask you what your ideas and feelings regarding parenthood are.

Tony: From about the age of 13 I had become very interested in the philosophies of Eastern and Western metaphysics. Such philosophies are full of teachings concerning reincarnation and karma. Some of the ideas presented were also about parenting and being involved in helping a being to incarnate in the body you help to form as parents.

As the years have passed my understanding and views about how, as a parent, we provide an opportunity and environment in which a spirit can incarnate have become more refined. Nevertheless, I still believe that as parents we are part of a continuum very few of us are really aware of. I believe the physical and psychological health of the parents is vital, and that we should not undertake parenthood lightly. I don’t mean we should be deadly serious about it, but I do feel that we need to make sure we have the right atmosphere and environment for a child to be born into.

Because of my interest in this I have devoted quite a big area on my web site to reporting peoples dreams, impressions and experiences of readying themselves to receive and give birth to an incoming being. But of course, the birth is just the beginning of being parents.

In some of my writings about this I have said that being a parent, especially if you are the mother, is one of the most demanding, fulfilling, challenging and rewarding experiences any of us can meet. Unfortunately, northern European and American attitudes to parenthood have moved into a strange artificial condition for many people. I see some mothers wanting to be independent of their babies almost from birth. Yet being parents is one of the most fundamental expressions of being alive. It extends and nurtures life. It is a doorway through which the future emerges. And it can also be a way of exploring one of the greatest mysteries of life – the emergence of a conscious personality from a tiny mammalian life form. I believe that the personality of a child is not innate in the physical body. Left alone without being cared for or spoken to, no personality would spontaneously bloom in the body of the child.

Father and child

Any personality that does develop is an amazing weaving of parental and social relationships, interlaced with the quality and hereditary traits carried in the body. Nature and nurture work together within the framework of infinite possibilities.

Parenting is like a work of art, and the canvas you work with, while not a complete blank it has an incredible range of possibilities. As can been seen from studies of poor parenting, and nurturing parenting, you can raise a stunted criminal personality, or a gifted radiant person from twins and separated at birth. Some parts of the art need much work. It might involve some pain and struggle. But great art is never done without a full engagement of the artist. So we need to bring to our parenthood all our creative skills. You need to use your wisdom and discernment. I believe one should not let failures turn us from creating what can be a great painting.

But looking at parenting from the light of personal transformation, being a parent is a spiritual path. Strangely I have never seen this mentioned in books on mysticism, yoga or the inner life. Nevertheless parenthood has all the disciplines of great spiritual endeavour. In the incredibly intimate relationship between mother and baby, or parents and baby, you meet the mystery of LIFE face to face. In various spiritual disciplines or belief systems this is stated in a variety of ways. In Christianity it appears as, “Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” In other words you are dealing with an expression of the divine in dealing with your child. In helping your child to discover its own depths and potential, you are helping Life to discover itself.

Perhaps the greatest preparation for this approach to parenthood is for you to have opened your life to the influence of your own Core or Spiritual influence. This amounts to an attempt to live your life with fuller awareness of how who you are and what you do interacts with the depths and heights of life around you, within you, and beyond your present knowledge. See Opening to Life

As parents we do not simply help create a body for a being who has never existed before. We are a doorway for the spirit to enter on another stage of an eternal journey into discovering its wonder and place in the scheme of things. If we are open to it, we may consciously take part in this. My own experience of this was when I dreamt that a being wanted to enter into my wife. It asked me to have sex with my wife to form a body for it. We did this and I then dreamt my wife was pregnant with a son.

We need to remember that we evolved from a single cell, which is a seed from which all life forms evolved from, doesn’t become old or die because it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it does so it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. We all started from the original one cell, and we, you and I, are the result of gathered experience.

No plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories, education and programming you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self.

Finding this very ancient self, hidden as it is by all your personal thinking and opinions, you find you are free from all the painful emotions, suicidal urges and personal hurts.

One of the most powerful things to recognise about parenthood however, is the connection between the emerging identity that we as parents care for, and language. In some of my explorations of the unconscious I at times met the experience of being in my mother’s womb. I discovered that my identity is rooted in the integrity I felt in the womb. This integrity was a physical thing, a sense of the cells and organs of my body existing as an individual organism. The integrity arose out of the process in me of defending myself as an organism against any disrupting influence such as infections. But onto that integrity as it stretched into my early years, something strange, wonderful, frighteningly powerful was added – language.

I believe that language is the software of the brain. It is a software package that radically alters the state of awareness existing previous to its installation. Without language there is no self-awareness. With it an unlimited series of concepts are formed, including the words ‘I’ – ‘Me’ – ‘Myself’ – ‘Mine’ – ‘You’. Around those concepts, those words, develops or emerges, the amazing phenomenon of self-awareness.

When I stand on the shoreline of the ocean of language, and gaze over it, all I can manage to say is, “Dear God!” or “Wow!” Its immensity, its impact, is so immeasurable, so astounding, that it is beyond proper description. I have called it a software package because there are so many languages, and because each language brings us a different way of perceiving experience, and involves us in different cultural values. Each language is, in fact, a treasure house of a particular culture, its attitudes, its history and its connection with other races and languages.

But the important point I am arriving at in regard to parenting a child is that because a baby who is not taught language does not develop self awareness, does not become a person, it is important to realise that the person it does become is largely conditioned by language too. The promise a baby has in becoming a human being, is shaped almost entirely by what is passed on to it by its parents, teachers and culture. This is an incredibly important point in considering the evolution of mind or personality. The new born baby, if raised by a wolf mother, becomes a wolf. It does not become a human person. If it is raised by a bear it becomes a bear. If it is raised by an ignorant and brutal mother and culture it becomes an ignorant and brutal person. If it is raised with love and nourished emotionally and intellectually, it becomes someone capable of love and high intelligence.

However, there is still something that is not said here. It is that as a human baby we are potentially anything, and being raised as a human being might be as limiting to our potential as being raised a wolf would be in regard to our potential to learn language. This may sound a silly idea, but if the baby were raised by a being superior to humans, the likelihood is that the baby would become more than we commonly experience as a human. In a fictional way, Robert Heinlein explores this in his book Stranger in a Strange Land. What I feel is really the greatest thing to pass on to a parent is for me to say – Give much thought to language and how it shapes your view of and experience of the world and each other. Then pass on what you learn in the way you teach your child language.

The Long Memory of Existence

Somehow I had opened to a direct awareness of inner deeps, and I had the consciousness of my being stretching back endlessly through my fathers. This past seemed to speak through me spontaneously and said, “Through the inheritance of our culture I have a soul. Without the self giving of men and women throughout the ages I would have no soul, no personal awareness of my own. Because of language, and the accumulation of knowledge, I have a soul. This is mankind’s gift to me. Without it I would be like an animal.”

By this I understood that I would have no self-awareness, and I saw more clearly than ever before, that this vital part of our being is literally a gift from the self giving, suffering, generous, adventure and love of all creative mankind.

“This is why people take an interest in schooling, in culture. Unconsciously they know what a wonderful thing we have received. Yet I have never wanted to give.” Here I began to groan with the pain of seeing, experiencing the wonder of what is given us, of what we can give to the future, to our own times. I cried out in tears at the simple beauty of giving of self, of trying, even if not very well, to better education, opportunities, experience, of children, so their own soul may be even more richly endowed than our own.”

I groaned and wept at the vision of what had been given, of what I could give. How I too could add my bit to this gift of a soul to children of all time.
{short description of image}

Another level now arose. I experienced myself as the life of my billions of cells. I could feel the tingling life of these tiny lives in my body. I felt something of their variety and unity. Particularly I was aware of a band of cells across my forehead. They were so vitally alive with sensation it felt as if suddenly they were trickling with water and my forehead was wet. I felt it but it was dry. The powerful sensation, of an irregular shape across the forehead, continued for some time though.

Other questions now arose, floating up into consciousness without me seeking them. “But if the cells die, is there any part of my being that remains, is unchanged? Is death the end? Is there anything other than our usual awareness of oneself?

When these questions rose it was as if I went in search of that in me that was in itself the answer. But as the quest deepened it became a non striving, non searching quest. If the answer existed, it did so as the basis of my being. I could not search for this fundamental because such a search would be made by and with peripheral activities, hopes, drives. It would only be my thoughts, not a direct experience of what I am.

Gradually my being became quieter and quieter. My breathing slowed so much it seemed almost non-existent. I had a feeling of my peripheral, changing self, slowly dying in ashes to reveal what all the world is seeking. I felt that as my peripheral self died, there was the possibility of this other part of my being shining through more brightly. My wife was still beside me, and I had the sense of my body being an altar on which the exterior me had burnt away, revealing an eternal quality, and she and other people, receiving it, worshipping it. There was nothing personal or worthy of self praise about this, because all of us have this central wonder. But I never really seemed to experience this thing. It never shone out. In the end I wondered if what I was experiencing was yet another cul-de-sac one is led to believe the Self is found through – that is by letting the outer self die. Looking back I think I was retracing an ancient path to this core of myself, one that is no longer applicable to us. We need not to die to, but live from this beauty.

Again into a sleep state, my hand on my penis. It was like a glow of pleasure in my genitals which radiated through the rest of my body. I began to feel the radiance of my fundamental being throughout me. This was what was missing as I lay quiet, in ashes. Now I was vitally alive, not quiet as in a death like state, yet life, being, was pouring through me.

Now an amazing thing. I heard a voice. I instantly knew it was the voice I had heard talking to me in a previous vision. But this time I could hear it clearly. It was the voice of all ages, all things, all times, of now, the essence of all life, present and past, talking to me. It said – “I am that I am.”

I remember now that prior to this occurring I had experienced some physical movements and words coming up, saying, “Pride. My pride is in the way of me seeing who I am.” I had then resolved to be willing to see anything about myself, even if I didn’t like it. I can’t remember all the details, but images of great prehistoric creatures had arisen, like they were part of my essential being and I must open to them. I felt fear about this, but opened to accept them into myself. I still felt fear but let them in. Then the voice came.

I felt this was the voice of Life, but I and this voice were one. There was no real difference between what I am and this that was in all times and things. I really felt myself as an integral part of all life and existence. And this flow of life pleasure in me so strong, it was the essential expression of this essence. It was myself. I must let it flow through me to those I contacted. Why had I held back so much with Anne? Why had I’m not let the joyousness of it come through me, into kisses or whatever necessary to give it expression and reality in another person’s experience? I was so frightened of consequences, so had been holding on. Yet I could see now how much we all need, how much Anne needs, that flow of powerful loving life to be given her. It assures us of our own joyous eternity within. I wanted to say to Anne, “I, my life, love you. Go on with strength and pleasure.”

I felt my love for Chris too. It all seemed so powerfully sexual, but this didn’t seem to matter in the least at the time. To hold on was to deny the strength or certainty our love gives to others. I felt in touch with, bathed by, the essence of life, the basic stuff of existence.

The question arose – I am one and the same as – “I am that I am” – yet I am also an individual life with particular abilities, strengths, weaknesses, and living in a particular time and place. What is my place and work in the whole?”

Recently I had deeply considered the question of what the quality of our own times is, and how I could best be a creative part of it. Now realisation after realisation poured up. I had felt our times were without the direction and purpose of past times, given as they were, aims and goals by religion, war or politics, and given cohesion also. I felt our times lacked these. The inner response was of a person bent over many things studiously examining them. Yes, our society lacked a direction, but look, this was right. What we are doing is to carefully examine in a new way, the whole mass of human experience and culture of past and present. We are weighing it, testing it, evaluating it, re-filing it. We are not taking on trust any past claims. Out of this evaluation will, is, arising slowly a new view of human existence. It is a view built not on ideals or hopes or dreams, but from a frank acceptance of what we are. Out of this will grow the desire to remodel our society upon the real needs of human existence. Out of it is arising a shift in relationships, work, schooling, family life, everything. People will begin to break free of unconscious patterns of behaviour and choose to work out new ways of behaviour. Sexuality is one of the big realms of change. Here I saw a lightning flash of images. From a modern man and woman the images changed, flash, flash, to primitive couples, animal couples, right back in evolution. The sexual position of the male mounting the female, and female being beneath, I saw as having left a very deep biological patterning of behaviour which is difficult to erase. The woman, from this patterning, seeks a submissive role with her partner. Also there is the pattern to be intimate with the dominant male in a group, even if he is not her chosen partner. In this way safety and security is gained for herself and her mate and offspring.

Such patterning I could see needs to be made conscious, accepted it as existing, and then the images bound in it gradually unconsciously redirected into other ways of relating.

My place in all this is to be a part of this personal and social re-evaluating process. To carry on my work, giving myself and what I have, more fully if I can. To help people become more aware of their unconscious life, so they can redirect it.

Next >

< Previous

Tony Crisp

Author Archive

The Influences We Live Amidst

The Build-Up From the Past

The Place of the Ancestors in our Lives

Advances in discovery are almost at the point of infinity

The Pressure of Change Pushes us to Adapt

The latest edition of New Scientist is an example of the new thinking

Visions of the Future

You are Never Alone

This is a six part series, plus notes: Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Notes

Keeping balance during change – dealing with stress

The wisdom of the body

The enormous drive to grow

Do you have a held down 7 on your computer?

Homeostasis Dreams and the Unconscious

Freud and Jung join the Discussion

We need to make a conscious decision to heal ourselves

The recognition of a core self

The whole book can be purchased in Kindle or Paperback.

The Ancient Biblical Tradition – Kabbalah is the teachings of the old Hebrew scholars

1. ATZILAH – THE WORLD OF EMANATION

Symbolism of Adam and Eve

(V. 2 King James Version – And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.)

(V.3 ‘And God said: Let there be light, and there was light’.)

(V. 4 ‘And God saw the light that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness’.)

Symbolism of Creation

(V.5 ‘And God called the light Day, and the darkness Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day’.)

V.6 ‘And God said: Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’

V. 7 and 8 as above. V.9 ‘And God said: Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear; and it was so.’

(V 10 ‘And God called the dry land Earth: and the gathering together of the waters he called the Seas: and God saw that it was good’)

(V. 11 ‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed. and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its own kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so).

V. 12 & 13 ‘And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after its kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after its kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.)

(V. 14 & 15 ‘And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

2. BRIAH – THE WORLD OF CREATION

Was Adam a Man and Eve a Woman?

(V. 26 & 27 ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

So God created man in his image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.

(Chapter 2 V. 1 and 2 ‘Thus the heavens and earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

3. YETZIRAH – THE WORLD OF FORMATIVE FORCES

(V. 7 ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

(V. 10 to 14 ‘And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.

The name of the first is Pison; that is it compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold, and the gold of that land is- good; there is bdellium and the onyx stone.

And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same it is that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.

(V. 15 to 17 And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

(V. 18 ‘And the Lord God said, It is not good that man should be alone: I will make an help meet for him.

Free to Choose

(V. 24 & 25 ‘Therefore, shall a man leave his father and his mother. and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

(Chapter 3 V. 1 ‘Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.

4. ASSIYAH – THE WORLD OF PHYSICAL MATTER

(V. 9 to 16 ‘And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and hid myself.

And he said, who told thee thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I command thou shouldst not eat?

And the man said, the woman who thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

And the Lord God said unto the woman. What is it thou hast done? And the woman said, The Serpent beguiled me and I did eat.

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception: in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be toward thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

(V. 17 to 19 ‘And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.

Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

(V. 20 & 21 ‘And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.

Unto Adam also and to his wife, did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them.

(V. 22 to 24 ‘And the Lord God said, Behold the man is become as one of us to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of Life and eat and live for ever.

Therefore, the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

How do we Open to this Quickening?

Features & Articles

Disclosure