TWO LECTURES INTRODUCTORY TO THE WORK

MBM: Lecture I   April 30, 1931

We will plunge directly into serious matters.

There are three ranks, or grades, of people, covering all humanity: The sleeping, the largest in number, the Broadway type, etc., the philosophically dead.  The philosopher knows it is a temporary state, an indication of an intermediate state composed of those who are aware only of the practical, three-dimensional world.  These are followers of the cult of success — the belief that the success in practical things is the apex of all that is desired, or desirable.  We know them by thousands.  We can recognize them by their speech, acts, etc.  They are sleep-walkers.  A state that is not inquiring, nor even perceptive that there is anything beyond the third dimension.

The waking: Interesting.  They are beginning to perceive that what they thought was reality, or the whole range of man’s experience, is not actually the case at all.  The slow process of awakening, goes on in bits over years of time.  (Marked characteristics in this waking process.  Something like coming out of ether.  Splitting sometimes, belongs to the waking to a larger consciousness.)  He now wakes to what he thought was the totality but is not so — that round about him are moving a variety of agencies he does not perceive.  (Among people, ordinarily) laziness, rebellion, rationalization, denial, appalling ignorance.  It takes effort to come out of the ether.

This inquiry.  According to the heritage; it may be feeling inquiry.  This emotional state may, in turn, lead them to the psychic consciousness.  The one who has awakened may have many, many types of experience.  For a time they are inevitably held by the psychic world: may be in terms of emotion, emotionalism, social service, kindly things, passionate emotional inquiry into larger things, development of psychic sensitivities.  And, for a longer or shorter period, the patient who is not yet awake at that stage goes through the steps of waking.  He does come to know, in the awake, that there are other realities.

The existence of God is known only to those who have purified themselves.  A ship does not appear on the horizon just because you focus on it.  “The pure in heart shall see God.”  Man judges, also, in the “sleeping state” by what he perceives through his five senses.

What is a reality?  It is that which has actuality, and is not a projection out of the self.  Its actuality is literal.

There is reality outside, and beyond, the third dimension.  That is one of the signs of coming out of ether.  When they get ready to awaken they begin to get restless — against religion, government, financial control, – just preliminary gestures.  Those who are doing that are not awake, – not even waking.  They are anticipating awakening.  A vast number go through those preliminary gestures.  When the_awakening comes, it_is akin to the coming out of ether, when the patient senses dimly, vaguely, a reality which is knocking at his door.  If you don’t perceive that reality fully, that does not invalidate it.

 

Soul  A thing that had not yet been described, and probably could not be by the scientist.  This was said at the recent convention of philosophers.  But there is a soul, and the soul has a reality that is not of this dimension.  Every time you try to analyze the nature of the soul according to this dimension be sure you are booked for disappointment.

Awakening through mind.  Some do that.  Man is three-fold, and now dominant in emotions, now in thinking.  Inquires.  More or less rationally.  It takes years before the bits he perceives of the larger dimension begin to make a coherent, indispensable pattern.

Let us try to see what mind . . . . . . condensing it.  He sees there is some purpose in the human experience, some logic, order, though he cannot follow its ways.  To be in a kind of superior sequence, a different sequence than the third dimension.  Sooner or later he touches one or both of two avenues of aid: (1) folklore; (2) myth.  And under myth I associate the great religious myth.

Myths are the tradition, somewhat deteriorated, of past races.  They have passed out of the hands of great Teachers, and carry in them the hidden (except to those who know) certain stories of the processes of human experience.  They ,,are not easily understood, but when understood are full of the richest significance, innumerable keys to the awakened one.

Folklore is the same tradition, but on a lower octave, in the hands of the crowd.  It too contains the story of the processes of human experience, in the language of the crowd. Myth is in the language of the priest, who speaks to the mass but whose teaching is to the few.

Direct teaching:  There is a third stream, but it is perceived only when one has gone through the myth training.  It is not in myth form.  So three avenues are open to the inquirer of the reason of human experience.

Scientific support of dimensions beyond the third.  Only briefly.  One, the work of the new psychology of the unconscious, where, unmistakably is being tapped the actuality of another dimension;

(2) through certain guarded and watched over processes of psychic research in the hands of trained investigators who are open-minded.

(3) through the physicist, who, on the boundaries of his investigation, is also forced, and gladly acknowledges, the actuality of another dimension.  These latter three are building from below up.  The other three are building from above down.

The mystery and meaning of human experience is largely explained in myths.  The keen student finds an amazing correspondence in these myths.  Every great race has its own describing the nature, purpose, and therefore meaning of human experience.  What is it?  It is for unfolding, through rigorous discipline, the potentialities in the human entity.  They are more than soul powers.

Difference between soul and spirit.  There is a vast difference.  In great octaves: body, soul, mind, spirit.  Soul is planted in body, to develop through mind to spirit.  Separate sharply the meaning of spirit as compared to the idea of the psychic research department, which broadly, lumps everything disembodied as spirit.  They work from below up.  We talk for a few moments philosophically.

Purpose of human experience:  To grow, in the rigorous training of bodily experience and psychic experience to the unfolding of higher potentials.  If you are getting nervous about my going off into larger realities – there is the story of the farmer and the clergyman: the farmer said, I don’t believe there is a heaven; the clergyman: very well, go elsewhere.

Myth of Zagreus: Zagreus the son of Zeus and Persephone.  The Titans were his enemies, were forever after him.  In the end the Titans got him.  Cut up his body, and boiled it, and scattered the pieces.  It is the story of the mystic Dionysus.  Zagreus is the name in the earlier times.  He is exactly the same as Adam in the Old Testament.  Who is Adam?  Adam is the same as Osiris in the Egyptian tradition; and he is the same as Freya in the Norse tradition.  Freya, wanted of the giants.  Who are the giants?  Going back to Genesis, there we find the story of four Adams.  Of course not in the English or German (texts.)  Adam is not the name of a man, but is the generic name of the souls who are going through, or rather to go through, the human experience.  And the mystery is the hidden thing which, when you are a myste, or beginning to awaken and inquire with your mind, – then you are beginning to know what is behind the mystery, – to make an actual reality beyond this one.

Four Adams are the generic name for different stages of humanity, – or humanity to be.  When conditions are ripe (ready?) then the Adam, the humanity, begins to occupy the house.  The first, celestial, Adam and the heavenly Adam, the two first, do not especially belong to our picture.  But the third Adam, Adam-Kadmon – the duality, masculine and feminine, – souls before they have put on one kind of body, to go through the human evolution, – that Adam appears in the early chapters of Genesis.

In the Hebraic Old Testament you do not get so easily the reason for this human experience.  Only in the large pattern of the Five Books of Moses.  Nevertheless, we find the story of the soul going down into matter.  Eden is not a place, and it will never be found in Asia, or any other place on earth, because it is a condition, a state; and in the old, secret tradition you will find sufficient evidence of this.

The word itself means a cave.  In this state the soul is not yet down in the thick coat of skin.  But after looking down into the lower regions, and becoming interested to go through the human evolution, and then being drawn through desire, even as you are today, so humanity left the state called Eden, – went into the denser conditions and put on the thick coat of skin.  It, too, is a myth, and the same as Freya and Zagreus.  It is the human experience, and is not to be read literally.

The first waking states are marked by distrust, – unoriented.  So the old stories are discarded time and again; but we pick them up, inevitably, sooner or later.  Which you will pick up does not make much difference, but that you will pick up one or several is inevitable.

Darwin.  What about the findings of science?  The same that the architect and the builder have to do with the house into which you are going to move.  You are not going into a house that is not built.  The story of the evolution, ascent of man, is correct, and in no way invalidates myths.  The evolution as described by Darwin and his followers is the description of the building of the house, and is, in the large, correct.  Just as houses in this dimension are the result of experiments over ages, so in the larger picture the evolution of man from the fish is the building of our modern houses.  We must not think that the evolution of the house invalidates the occupants of the house.

The bodies evolve, but at a given time, when they are ready, they are occupied.  The details are a profound study.  But it is not for the development of the house that man lives.  By the same token, the purpose of human experience is not for the development of the body but, just as the use of the house, for another purpose.  The awakening – one begins dimly to suspect that.  They do not know just how or why.  Here we are striving after wealth, possessions, pleasure-pain in the sense world, and doing it in the midst of the actuality of such enormous realities that even to touch them livingly here and there is to be stung into a new kind of consciousness.

(Here MBM read something about the acquisition of intellectual knowledge.)  He makes tremendous mistakes.  Believes that if he learns much he can know much.  Or, if by his heart, believes that by having faith and doing good deeds, that he will arrive.  But the way is not paved with good intentions.  No more than a house.  An actuality that demands obedience to the laws that govern its nature.  Good intentions and worthy, unselfish deeds are virtually no good whatever.

The psychic approach.  The maze of the psychic, – a reality too, – is like an octopus that has its own especial kind of tentacles to grab the unsuspecting victim.

The mind approach.  Begins with a study of facts, –  gets to the intellectual rung, and thinks it has arrived.  But the intellect, no more than the heart, is capable of unlocking the doors to the Larger.

Realities.  Let me pause, and return to the question of realities.  There are not just two realities: physical and psychic – a heaven, if you like, as some of the naive people used to think.  Neither is there just a psychic world.  But there is rung after rung, and man has within himself certain potentialities – certain nodes by which he may himself apprehend the fact of what I say.  Man has within himself the physical, by which he contacts the physical world; the emotional, which is the forerunner of the psychic.  Indeed, the emotional is the “this sidedness” of the psychic; and the psychic world has its reality, – as actual, as precise, as governed by law, as this dimension.  But woe to him who believes that the psychic world is the end of things, and orients himself to it.  A warning about the psychic world is included in all the great myths: the Gilgamesh Saga, the classic myth; the Popol Vuh, the old Greek, the Chinese.  Because it is the world of reflections – that which shines as gold, but is not gold.  In the myths there is the speech (?) of the world of reflections, and the warning that to be held by these things is to be caught in the deadly clutch.

Another reality — that for which man has the faculty through his mind.  The mind is the way, – and the only way, to spirit.  The danger of the psychic world is illustrated by the fact that many people waking out of ether speak of soul and spirit as synonymous – sure proof that they do not see beyond the psychic plane.

For the mind, in its highest functions, alone is able to apprehend spirit.  Humanity does not know spirit.  It knows soul, but not spirit.  Beyond mind is the reality of spirit; and beyond that, other realities.  But of these it is not necessary to speak.

The value of human experience.  Let me return to the value of human experience.  Two trees in the Garden of Eden.  The words: “Thou shalt not eat of this tree” — the tree of the knowledge of the difference between good and evil.  Adam also was not to eat of the Tree of Life, but no warning about that.  It was not a tree, of course.  It was not really intended that man should not eat of this tree.  Those who are intimidated are to be weeded out.  Those who had guts ate of that tree.

The tradition from which the Hebraic is derived had it more clearly.  In an old Egyptian myth, it runs something like this; Incipient humanity, coming down, looked down to earth and saw its beauty, – its potentiality, its glory and power, and were enamored of it; and wove themselves about, and into, the beautiful earth, that looked up smilingly.  In the Hebraic: “The sons of God went in unto the daughters of men.”  In that tradition, almost alone, there is a bitter note put on this process.

The story usually tells the wonder of going down into the human evolution, because through it alone – that stern, dense, stiff, unwieldy objective reality – man could learn and be disciplined.  Children of vigorous parents.  Heroic Teachers who watched over the human evolution were not to be fooled.

So humanity, like sturdy sons of sturdy parents, set forth on a long, long journey.  With all the dangers.  Of course there are dangers.  Everywhere those who face danger come out worthily, are the ones who command our honor.  But that is small.  The big thing is the power they have gained, – the development of the potentialities in the self.  And that is the purpose of human experience.

So you will find it in all the myths.  Coming down and being torn into many pieces — the dismemberment motif.  Each little piece of you grows strong.  It would be weird if one developed only a muscle.  We need the mind developed.  The whole body needs to be developed, or: you need development all through.  You are the Adam, and need the development in a variety of ways.  Therefore you are dis-membered.

The dismemberment motif in the Hebraic:  It is in the whole Five Books of Moses.  For the figures in the Books of Moses are illustrations of pieces of the dismembered Adam, and a description in allegory — also in deeper code, of the processes of its corollary: at-one-ment; that is, integration, – after enlightenment.

The Awakened:  Who are they?  Just as the sleeping and the waking cover thousands of degrees, so likewise the awakened.  But, broadly speaking, the awakened begin with self-consciousness — that is, the consciousness of, and an understanding of the purpose of human experience, and a cooperation, – deliberate, purposive, – with it.

Transition from the awakening to the awakened.  A large order.  It implies, first, a recognition of the difference between the living oriented in full, or in completeness, to this dimension, – and to something larger.  It means work, effort — deliberate, determined, continued effort to coordinate living with a new scheme of things.  Very hard work.  It means understanding certain fundamental things, and appreciation of their difference, – such as soul, mind, spirit, and their relative place in the scheme of things.  It means an undertaking, in terms of one’s totality, the process of human evolution – instead of in terms of one’s persona.

Persona  One comes to an uncomfortable realization that the person whom we thought we were is only a wee bit of what we are.  Underneath and beyond it is good, bad and indifferent.  Our responsibility is for our totality, and not for our personality.  A great difference.  But in the consciousness of that, and with it, grows already the potent consciousness, and the development of the receptors toward a larger dimension.

For the so-called unconscious of the new psychology is not, except in its barest outlines, what the new psychology has conceived it.  In its actual nature, the metaphysic of which no psychologist has yet faced the challenge and solved, it is a fourth dimensional nature that man possesses.  The so-called unconscious, or transliminal, has in itself the nodes, receptors, for fourth dimensional consciousness.  And as man develops the potentiality in it he comes to possess, through himself and in himself, the personal knowledge, – the experiential knowledge, of the actuality of fourth, and higher, dimensions.  It is very different from the way of physics and psychic research, or the ordinary psychology of the conscious.  It is a metaphysical actuality and entity.

When man comes to sense he is an Adam, going through his evolution, and that this is an interim (state), or portion of a long process – when he begins to apprehend the laws governing it, and is ready to discipline himself to a larger orientation, – then and then only is he waking up, – in a hospital.  That is, under intelligent guidance.

There are many ways of waking up.  Some are slow, and some courageous, adventurous.  All the while that humanity is chasing, restlessly, there are regions of such superlative adventure, dramatic experience, calling for such genuine courage and skill, that it seems tragic . . . that they are not known (or something to that effect.)

Other realities are about us all the time.  Maybe two forms of matter can occupy the same space at the same time.  Radio waves go through concrete.  That points the way to what we will all know: that this dimension does not preclude a doubling up.  Or that the substance of another dimension can occupy what we so glibly call space, simultaneously with the objective position of it in this dimension.  Physics and psychic research will give accumulating evidence of the reality of other dimensions.

The myth and the teachings come from the Light; the sciences come from man’s light.  These two are meeting.  They have met, for some . . . . a vision more actual than my appearance before you now.

Awaken yourselves . . . . as in a hospital . . . . clearing lungs of the gases.  Purify the blood stream, and open your eyes.  And remember the boat on the horizon.  It is there.  “Purge our eyes and senses of the preoccupation with the little, inocuous things of this dimension.”  When we have come far enough to realize, the effort is losing its power over us, and we are waking.

That there is a science of reconstruction, – a place for all things in the Larger scheme, – that I will take up with you next week.

 

 

TWO LECTURES INTRODUCTORY TO THE WORK

MBM   Lecture II   May 7, 1931

Last week we considered some concepts and patterns that you have already perhaps met as you have moved toward the inquiry of larger things.  Tonight our question is a little more personal.

What is the individual person’s task in regard to this large pattern?  Once we become convinced that there is actuality in this pattern, the inevitable interest of man is to find out how to cooperate with that pattern.  What Dewey says is pragmatic: “Man’s beliefs about the world, and his conduct, is the deepest problem of life.”  To coordinate, or relate yourself intelligently, profoundly, constructively, to a pattern, or a scheme of things, is the big thing of life.  Which brings us to the consideration of the individual man himself.

Man, know thyself:  Thousands have tried to find what secrets were hidden in man himself.  Very few have penetrated to the actual content of the meaning of “know thyself.”  The meaning, not the content, you will get when I remind you of the saying that the microcosm is like the macrocosm.  And when man comes to know himself he will know what the macrocosm is.  The behaviorists, and others, have not gone far enough into the deeps so that they could possibly have any concept of what belonged to the macrocosm.  It is not three-dimensional.

Before we go on, let us linger a bit on the meaning of the word know.  The ordinary meaning is a kind of collection of factual data.  That knowing could be conveyed from books and other means to eyes, ears, etc.  That is not what knowing means.  If so, you could know the meaning of the macrocosm, and so know the microcosm.  But knowing is complex.  You must be prepared to find depths and breadths in the meaning of words.  Knowing is a partner with doing.  Only by doing can you know.  Thus, the secrets of the macrocosm are hidden because doing is not accomplished.

Yesterday was a great day for workers in some fields.  It was Freud’s birthday, and high tributes were paid to this man.  He has been compared with Darwin.  I believe that the time will come when it will be seen, with greater perspective, that the discoveries of Freud are analogous to the discoveries and findings of Darwin and Wallace.  It is the marking of an epoch — not only in medicine, penology and other fields but, I suspect, in a way that contributes to philosophy.  It was Freud who opened up the deeps, or the so-called unconscious, of man’s nature.

Now I am back on our main path.  If man must know himself in order to play a part, and cooperate intelligently, in the larger scheme of things, he must know himself not merely in terms of conscious observation — that becomes shallow, but he must plumb deeps in himself.  And immediately the knowledge we have had of ourselves in terms of conscious observation reminds us of an old saying: that the wisdom of man is foolishness with God. That hits, with especial vigor, the intellectual.  But it hits also those who think they know themselves through conscious observation.

In order to cooperate with a larger scheme of things, – with the involution of the light spark, the descent of the Adams into the thick coats of skin, – there must be a searching below the mere appearance of things.  And therefore to Freud, I think, belongs the great honor of really valid good for humanity of the whole past century.  Personally, I think Freud’s mind is magnificent, – to my mind, incomparably greater than any of his followers, though I may be more in sympathy with Jung.  But he had, – has, – nothing of the brilliance, or capacity, or investigating power, or of far-seeing that has the mind of Sigmund Freud.  Be that as it may, from Freud has come the first step to a new kind of knowledge of man.

Am I speaking in favor of psychoanalysis?  No — definitely not.  But I am speaking in favor of the enormous areas which the investigations of Freud opened up — in their superficial areas.  Through Freud, we have, unmistakably, the evidence of the actuality of regions in man, reservoirs of memory, which are closed to consciousness.

Let us go back to philosophy, – or religion, or myth.  You have heard it said that there is a Book of Life.  That book is supposed to be the record made by a recording angel of man’s activities.  I suspect Dr. Freud never thought, – perhaps does not think for a moment yet that he has opened up a door that eventually leads to the Book of the Recording Angel.

The Recording Angel is an actuality.  Not a figure in white, with wings, etc.  It is that of another dimension in yourselves which records, inevitably, unerringly, all things that have been done, or have not been done.  No different from what goes on in the three-dimensional world.  But the unconscious is not of the third dimension, and we do thus come to the beginning of a new vision of things, – a world which has no substance, through a cognition of the book of life, as philosophy and religion would call it.  Freud calls it the unconscious.  Do they mean the same thing?  Not quite.  For Freud has turned only a few pages, and his interests have not gone very deeply into the distant chapters.

Let us see what we have if man should know himself.  We have the conscious and the unconscious — the book of life.  But that won’t satisfy us consciously, nor the inquiring mind in us.  The unconscious is the record of our experiences in life — memories, fears, experiences of pain and pleasure, from birth on, and with it the scars that they have made in us.  It is important that presently we come to know those.

But deeper investigation shows that that is only the first chapter, and that the book does not consist of one chapter only.  And it is for this reason that I maintain that Freud’s work, for one who is investigating larger things, is of greater importance as an opening wedge than is his work to education, to penology, to art, to jurisprudence, and the many directions in which it has already been applied.  Those are three-dimensional applications, – to a three-dimensional living – to make this a little more comfortable, a little more orderly world to live in.

But Freud put in the wedge that leads to an investigation beyond this dimension.  I do not believe Freud knows it.  It does not matter whether he does.  At least he has not followed that path of investigation.  But the pages of the chapters following on chapter one belong to a larger, or different, past than the so-called personal unconscious, as Dr. Jung has described it.

Man, conscious and unconscious, has the beginning of a contribution to “Man, know thyself.”  That is not enough.  Let us follow further, from a slightly different direction.  We discover that man is not only a thing of the body and the passions and lusts, appetites that are normal and appetites that are abnormal, but that also he has an emotional and a mental nature.  And again, these are big stretches, and we see man as three-fold in this dimension yet capable of expressing the emotional and the mental in a limited fashion.  It is as though this world were not altogether contrived for the expression of the emotional and mental worlds in man.  These two interrelate themselves with the so-called unconscious.  When we come to know this unconscious better we gradually untangle the threads that indicate the heart side and the mind side.

But beyond that a new kind of entity arises.  How shall we call it?  Perhaps for the moment soul.  And this soul has its own unique characteristics.

Here at Pojodag we conceive, – indeed, it is proven, – that man, meeting life in this dimension, meets it, as it were, through three different avenues.  Our picture grows complex: conscious and unconscious; physical, emotional and mental; and now we add a third.  You see, even to give a kind of intellectual schemology of knowing oneself is not simple!

We note that in the life of the unconscious there is a determinant that stands apart from human experience as the child, the youth, the adult have experienced it.  That we call the heritage.  In every one of us is the push of the past.  Not only the past of from twenty, thirty, fifty years, but the past of the light spark coming into involution.  Now then, if the things of which we spoke last week as in a great pattern are true we would expect to find somewheres the record of these things.  And the records are, indeed, in the book of life, – not pages, but something of another dimension, which is analogous to a book and hence has been called a book.

In these records are the push, the momentum, or your experience before your birth.  That has its own, especial dynamic.  That meets, presently, through birth, with the thick coat of skin, and then sets forth on its earthly, or three-dimensional career.  The thick coat is gotten from your parents, and belongs to that long line of progression that I mentioned last week, briefly, as allied to the Darwinian theory, or the ascent of the body of man.  That, we call inheritance.  It is that which you have received from your physical parents, – which is peculiar to your individual family and race stock.  It is no more, or less, than what we might call the nature and powers, and efficiency (or the opposite) in a tailor from whom you may order a costume.

Many people identify themselves with their body and their family, probably the majority.  You may as well identify yourself with the shop where you bought the gown you are wearing.  As the gown has its characteristics, giving you ease, grace, etc., so that which you have received through the family stock.  Just as it is desirable to have a good tailor, so it is desirable to build good family stock, healthy bodies.  But, from the larger point of view, to identify yourself with them is a serious error.  And you have probably seen, from time to time, that there are those who transcend the limitations of the tailor that fashioned their garments.  If your garment has not been fashioned well, it is a mere incident, – unless you are the kind who believe the person is like that which they wear, – will speak only to those who are well dressed.  Appearances only!  And the one who looks at the Larger pattern must see that these things are the mere externals.

The thing which is actual is: the individual heritage, the inheritance, and then the environment.  These three are the pull, – the give and take, the battleground in which we all exist.

In this scheme of three, man does not identify himself with his environment; neither should he identify himself with his body, his family, his race; and when he is large enough, not even with his time.  But that is a large order.  Thus, man who comes into the condition of a body and environment.  Heritage, which is behind, is the element, the nucleus, for which he who seeks to know himself must search and quest.

Now back to the unconscious.  In the unconscious, man comes to know he is more than he thought he was.  That he is full of a variety of criss-cross trends.  These trends remind us strangely of what philosophy and the myths of the past have said regarding dismemberment.  You remember, the Titans tore up Zagreus and scattered the parts of his body.  The same with Osiris.  Thus, these myths have for ages told what the investigations of Sigmund Freud in the last forty-five years have begun to make patent.  Man, every one of us, has, even in his conscious, found contrary wishes and trends.  But when he comes to find what he is like in the unconscious he is in a deep of conflictingtrends, hopes, wishes, fears, and knows that these old myths spoke truly: that he is, indeed, dismembered.

He must now seek the key to coordination, or integration.  No one can begin to integrate what he does not know.  Hence the first reasons for coming to know the unconscious.

I take it that everyone here knows the fundamental points in regard to psychoanalysis: that it is analytic, reductive; that it sees man as intended to be a healthy, normal, three-dimensional animal, with his body in this world, without any regard to a before and an after, – a little three-score-and-ten, and then out.  Therefore, without any incongruity, we can sympathize with the short-sighted ones who would turn back men to the healthy animal stages.  Out of which has arisen another slogan, having to do with repressed desires.  To express repressed desires — not always in fairness to Freud — has come to be the byword for the solution of human ills.

If you are fully asleep, – that is, if you are so under ether that you could not be more, at this present time, than a three-dimensional animal, then we might say the Freudian analysis, back to the adaptation to sex,  three dimensional living, would be justified.  But when we come to the second group, of those who are awake, coming out of ether, or some way to find something beyond, then this method will no longer do, and we must conceive we can turn to pages of life back a little further, and find a new key to the knowledge of man.

Then we find something else in the transliminal: That these problems that belong to this dimension are a first chapter only; and that the real task is to get through that chapter and begin the second.  The second chapter has to do with the tasks of reorienting the self to a progressive story, – and that the living in the third dimension is not, therefore, the whole.

Now, what is the transliminal?  Here we have replaced the word unconscious with transliminal.  For, as soon as you think a bit about these matters, you find the word unconscious inadequate.  It has merely to do with a state of non-awareness, but is not descriptive whatsoever, except of a state of non-awareness of the person of whom it is spoken.  As you come to know this other region it is absurd to say you are unaware of it: the world which is you as much as your conscious across the threshold.

Why have anything to do with it, when we can blot it out?  It bursts across in angers, fears, attachments, – in the neuroses and psychoses may break forth violently.  They are only more pronounced cases, a turn over into consciousness of the fears, etc. which are in the unconscious of all of us, until they have been cleaned and ordered.

From another angle, what must be the purpose of an understanding of larger things, in turning to this unconscious.  First and foremost, that he seeks a way of integrating himself.  And he can’t integrate what he does not know….can’t solve the problems which are hidden.  That is the first part.

But immediately upon that, as he works with the unconscious, comes the realization that behind this unconscious are other forces.  Hence, as we study still further, the unconscious, replaced by the transliminal, is again replaced; and we discover that we are in the realm of a true metaphysic — that this so-called unconscious is the beginning of a door to the fourth dimensional.  Not only ordinary dreams, which have to do with personal problems; but, beyond that, the chapters that have to do with heritage.  There you meet a new kind of force, and you discover that what you thought was merely memory records is a true metaphysic.  It has a physical of its own, but it is beyond this physical.

Some of you will have made efforts toward development of one kind or another:  that this school, or that school or cult have said that the body must be trained, the blood stream righted; that you must concentrate on the centers, purify the blood stream, etc.  I am going to say that even where there is validity in some of these teachings — and in very few is there — that they are now obsolete.  Why?  Because of Sigmund Freud.  Because Sigmund Freud opened the door to the unconscious.  Just as out of the first experiments with electricity, with steam, with chemistry, with engineering, and endless other avenues of research, the first investigators could not see where that would lead, so here Freud.

Again, what is the unconscious?  What is the transliminal; what is the metaphysical entity; what is the book of life?  Why is it not intelligent, – why is it now obsolete to meditate on the centers, and so forth?  Because the latter chapters of the book of life are themselves the very stuff of your own metaphysical entity, – your own psychic body; and the best way of purifying it is not via indirection, but via direction.  Therefore, to purify the unconscious, the transliminal, to order that life, obeying certain laws that govern its type of life, as different from the physical body, – as you obey that, you are doing incomparably more than meditating on centers or purifying blood streams.

For the transliminal becomes the metaphysical entity which we call the psychic body; and he who would evolve himself veridically must do that which purifies, strengthens and develops the psychic body.  Not because that is the ultimate, but because that is the next.

Thus the unconscious opens the door to the hidden key in the old slogan, so cryptically repeated down the ages: Man, know thyself.  What man will know of himself is not anything that can be told by speech, but it is known by experience.

Have you ever thought how, in this modern time, people ,are setting out, with a kind of violence even, to get experience at first hand?  They are no longer content to be told about themselves, and get things vicariously, even through the drama or the book, which were the last resorts of vicarious gratification.  Now humans are starting out to get at experience and, being ignorant, not knowing what they are after, they are plunged, right and left, into the fire — a dangerous fire, that burns and lacerates.  But behind it, whatever the experience, is that urge to know.  That is so healthy.  What they are doing is pitiful, but the urge is a new release toward the thing itself, in experience.  And as no one knows really, except by experience, so no one can know what they are, nor have the key to the macrocosm, except in terms of becoming.  That is experiential.  That is hard work.

I might say, in regard to meditation on the centers, concentration, etc., that that is not nearly as incisive as is the work of purifying the psychic body.  When you sit down to meditate on a center, or various kinds of centers, those, somehow, do not impinge on desire, and so it is much more readily done.  For one can presently go about with their desires just as they were before their practice.  One reason that so few persons have found out what the mystery is behind Man, know thyself is that it requires doing.  And man is reluctant to do, – to give up the dominance of this dimension for another.  No one insists on it being done; but if you once get a sense of the pattern of larger things, – if you have nibbled at the cheese, seen the grapes hanging. . . . if you have sniffed in the ether the strange odor of vast and remote things; if in one way or another there has knocked at your door the realization of immensities beyond this, – then you can’t have quite peace again.  The ether is beginning to leave your lungs, and you will have to take cognizance somewhere, sometime, of the ordering of yourself.

And bit by bit as you do this, – as you come to find the first chapter, the second chapter, you will come to know the metaphysical entity; you will come to develop the substance side of the fourth dimension in you, so that those doors which are the next will be opened to your cognition.  The remoter ones remain hidden.  There is nothing that can be said intellectually that is more than the merest scratching of the surface.  The wisdom of this world is foolishness.  The best that could be said in words is as nothing before the experiential unfolding in yourself.

Those powers are now hidden in the transliminal.  It is not a world of dreams, though you go through the world of dreams to reach it; but the transliminal leads to a metaphysical entity, with as great a reality as our floor.

If these things are stirring in you, the first step in knowing yourself requires a duality: a knowing and a doing.  You can’t do without knowing.  Your knowing is of no value without doing.  You have to, as it were, know how you are constituted — not biologically, though that is an incident, but metaphysically.  You must learn the laws that govern the unfolding.  You must clean house.  Must take on the responsibility for the totality of yourself.

You first become governor, seeing how well you can rule the dismembered parts of you.  They have set out to gain experience, and are to be brought together into a living organism.  That organism, when it is completed, is the final key to the macrocosm.

Therefore the dismembered bits of you, which are now seeking this experience, that experience, are to be understood, drawn in, made a part of a new kind of thing.  In proportion as you do that – and this without fail — there evolves a new type of consciousness, capable of insight, penetration, – beyond anything that belongs to this plane.  There are faculties which extend beyond this dimension.  They are embryonic here.  Sometime, somewhere, you undertake to obey the larger pattern, which is inherent in the whole scheme of human involution and evolution.

To do that, these two things are necessary: (1) the laws which govern that development, and (2) the doing of the things which those laws demand.  Those two things make for the return, or the assembling of the pieces of the dismembered Horus.

There is a little version of this story with the Greek myth of Persephone, who marries Pluto.  Persephone is the soul (masculine in the Egyptian).  Persephone is the mate of Eros, the love that drew the light spark down into the goodly substance of earth.  And so, through Eros, Persephone was drawn down to Pluto, and became, with him, queen of his realm.  Pluto is said to be the god of the underworld.  This is the world, the dark place, the cave.  The mother of Persephone (same as Isis in the Egyptian) seeks to redeem Persephone from the lower world, and presently this condition is brought about by her (Ceres): that half of the day shall be spent in the upper world, with the gods, and half in the lower, with Pluto.  That myth is one that describes the potentiality that, through the sleep state, you may again, through Ceres, learn of the dimension from which you are now exiled.

Many things go into the labor of Ceres, or Isis.  Much belongs to the work of the Persephone side in us.  But as we do the work of the Ceres-Persephone, which belongs to relating ourselves again to the Larger, these extended faculties, which is what is meant there, open up, and the dimensions we now see begin to shift, and we know of other things.

So the old myths hint, to those who can read here, many profundities.  These things have been known, – are known, to those who are awake.  To the awakening, they should have real significance.  Thus, in the daytime we are with Pluto.  We learn through the transliminal, bit by bit, how to relate ourselves again to the as yet hidden powers in the individual unit — to bring it bit by bit to the awakened, powerful entity it is to be on its return.

The whole pattern follows, in a chapter here and a chapter there, – something a little longer than three-score-and-ten.  The gigantic pattern is of so vast a process that time and space, in our terms, cannot possibly encompass it.  Those who know something of it frankly say it cannot be understood save by those who know it.  Like is known to like alone.

The Pattern awaits . . . . and the processes of the unfolding of the powers; the two phases – the phase of learning the laws, of seeing how these things are governed in the various regions in which man is to unfold, – and the doing.  Those are the things that belong to the Work here at Pojodag.

 

Editors Notes:

Pojodag: An acronym for Path of the Joining of devotion and Gnosis, used for the training department of the School directed by MBM.

See Living Magazine Sept. 1937 issue pp. 5 & 6 for an article entitled “Are These Your Questions?”, informal answers to typical questions about life.