400

THE SABIAN CONSTANT

The absolute of the fellowship taken for granted in this or any other genuinely occult group is like all absolutes or is beyond any possible grasp by reason alone. Any intensity of attention to an inner ultimate of self and its ties to other selves is destructive because it takes selves in separation from each other and ends up as unsocializing. The integrity of a spiritual group depends on a lack of any necessity for attention to the integrity. Anyone constantly asking himself if he is honest is entertaining a dishonest potential that always will tend to express itself. A continual expectation of self-aggrandizement and insincerity in fellow seekers is thus a simple lack of personal foundation in the group constant. With human nature comprising all weakness as well as all strength, the absolute of faith in all men at core may be unknown not only to the devotees but to leaders and founders of the endless occult organizations. None the less what the occult group may be depends on the ideal it creates for itself, or to which it points its major effort, and the mark of a group of higher order or genuine conception is in the power of its ideal to hold every inferior manifestation of human character to the ideal. Its ultimate constant is revealed in the eternal diversity built into fellowship.

The foundation emphasis in our group must be on the forward achievement of those who participate in our fellowship, and every emphasis or attention divergent from this betrays our ideal and exalts the disintegrating impact of things falling away from that constant on which the on-going of the group depends. There is no condemnation of individual experience gained through the petty expression of personality, but anything of the sort is neither in nor of our fellowship.

The great diversity of parts in a spiritual organism is unified by the participants' commonly held goal of spiritual achievement.

398

THE IDEAL IS PROTEAN

One of the most difficult of all realizations is that an ideal is free or creatively centered in its own genius, and that there can be no fixed manifestation of it to be pigeonholed in the realms of mere things. What is of the ideal is alive, and co-operation with it is with the fluidity of living phenomena. The consequence of this in the experience of a young seeker is that he is baffled by the very uncertainties that are signature of a growing freedom of his state. We all are tied subconsciously to our enslavement and when the genuine or total release is offered we are likely to desire instead the same pots of flesh that eternally symbolize old fixity or familiar limitation.

The primary purpose of a genuine occult group is to give the seeking heart the new fixity such as will serve through the changing experiences on and beyond normal selfhood. This fixity has to be of the ideal and it is put down in the constancy of whatever ideal experience may come to each seeker. And what is constancy under such a point of view? The ideal itself is protean, but the constant is in a definite sense of progress and of lesson-learning. The first of constant ideal experiences is that of the protection of a spiritual work. This does not mean that there is a physical interposition of forces to alter the direction of events but that all the deep ideal expectations are kept properly oriented. In the extreme case the occultist sees a star of destiny in his affairs. He is part of an inevitability, even in the realm of everyday. But for all genuine occult seeking on this lesser level there is the resiliency of return to the whole of reality of self, and every experience adds to the constant of real selfhood so that nothing remains for an abiding existence except the self's ideal.

The experience of every aspirant is in constant flux, but he maintains his stability through the sure recognition of his progress.

436

WHOLENESS OF MIND

The singleness of mind that is part of our goal for each time of special effort may perhaps be clearer to some of us if we will think of it in terms of the wholeness of mind. The single mind is as frequently the one separated from all interests other than the one engrossing fascination as it is the proper seeing singly through a whole surrounding complex. There is a singleness in a completely exclusive absorption, but such is separative and destructive. Its force as the manifestation of a certain strength of character should be utilized in every possible way, but it should be directed to the whole and not the part of reality. A wholeness of mind is the capacity to recognize an absoluteness in all things or to build every alien element into such a totality in at least potential fashion. There can be no actuality in classification of true and false unless the true is seen as an immediateness of whole reference and the false correspondingly as remoteness in identical reference. Seeing singly is never a fixation of the immediate or ephemeral but rather is unvarying outreach to the superficially false and a certification of the true by defying all limitation.

Bigotry must yield to certainty of soul, and the difference between these is that the surface narrowness of the bigot is some form of defense mechanism. Subconsciously he realizes that he clings to something that can be proved easily to be false. The certainty of soul of the real seeker is confidence not in some revelation, teaching or book and the like but in a capacity within himself to see whole and reality beyond. Wholeness of mind is a gift for completeness. Mind in its whole-seeing is undisturbed by any immediate issue as such.

The aspirant searches for the enduring qualities in all things, thus recognizing the relevance of everything to every other thing.

863

THE IDEA IS A SUBSTITUTE

The idea as a substitute for certain elements that enter into experience facilitates the convergence of everything at the point of reality by bridging over limitations of time and space. The ideas must have an actuality in terms of the given experience and thus it is necessary that they be substantiated and hence lead to the desire that they have affirmation by others, and it also should be apparent to any philosophical and psychological overview that the particular selection as far as a taking of one idea rather than another is concerned is the effort to have the best substantiation of the milieu in which this experience is sustained. Men ask that others aid them to possess ideas in the specific sense that commonly will give them confidence and also that others help them substantiate the very ground of their reality by the acceptance not only of these passing ideas in special contexts but of the general body of ideas as indicating a much broader realization. This latter is usually broad assumption and below conscious awareness.

Thus the Sabian insistence on the pure tool functions of idea is part of the general effort to substantiate the competence of a total race experience by realizing that men reason differently exactly as they show their individual differences by act and appearance and in a way no more destructive to ultimate agreement on major lines, and so seeing their difference in thinking as common effort in experience and not as any indication of destructive cleavage at root. The effort to differentiate between ideas as right or wrong abstractly is unsound in any ultimate sense because it is an invalidation of experience per se. And the effort to take ideas found competent in some experience as effective thereby in other cases without experience is just as unsound.

An idea is a tool for testing out vicariously the felicity of a specific proposed course of action and proves itself a good idea if substantiated in experience.

861

THINKING AND EXPERIENCE

One of the truly great embarrassments we face constantly in our effort to give a whole-souled co-operation in our relationships with all the various individuals and groups who are contributing to an adequate occult enlightenment is that these people ask us to make comment on the ideas by which they are activated as purely idea, and then usually feel we are not very co-operative when we fail to accept their thinking as valid outside the special milieu of their own effort. In this they are assuming that ideas have validity outside the employment of them in any given application of the rational relations. The outstanding feature of the Sabian presentation or a continual drill in an understanding of ideas as tools instead of realities possessing actual existence thus clashes violently with the mode of rationalization that to us is only the scaffolding used by these others, but that as far as they are concerned seems the very heart of the truth they possess.

We do not question the mental processes used by men when it comes to ordinary conduct. Their honesty may be because they fear they will not get into heaven if they are not or because their honesty is the policy that usually demonstrates its value in social realities. The important fact is that the individual is reliable in his relations with other people. Actually the honesty in question is the criticism or a proof with meaning to everyone else as far as his own ideas about moral reliability are concerned. It is only when men reach out in an attempt to find an element of the reliable beyond the bounds of normal experience that they reverse the relation of life with ideas and think a reality established in their own minds is somehow more dependable or real ultimately than the constants in which they have existence.

A general idea that has no immediate bearing on the actual experience of an individual has for him no substance until he has successfully applied it.

768

HARMONY IS NOT PASSIVITY

Occult students are strong for harmonious conditions and effective peace and quiet when often they do not realize the first essential for a real harmony. It primarily is a perfection of what can be done in common. Inaction or a static condition cannot be harmonious because anything is what it does and its real doing has to be what is harmonious. Stagnation is merely a case of activity carried below the level of consideration, and hence a passive harmony is a blindness to the pertinent reality. Sometimes a regimentation of members makes some given group present the outer harmony that impresses an onlooker, but in such a case the surface appearance or immediate satisfaction of the superficial structure and organization comes before the welfare of the living individualities and such a group becomes sterile at core.

In consequence of this it is the Sabian policy to permit the students to push each other around until they learn that they must place the responsibility squarely on their own shoulders quite individually in order to develop and strengthen the co-operation among themselves and so create the actual harmony. A group of human beings undoubtedly will have its quota of troublemakers and when its chief purpose is primarily the perpetuation of itself or the furthering of prerogatives for its leadership and dominant segments it makes good sense to remove its dissidents as far as possible, but this is not spiritual and it does not produce anything but an evanescent harmony or enslavement of the human spirit. To demand that an individual suppress himself as a contribution to a common welfare is to assume that spiritual suicide can be a way to achieve spiritual continuance. It is through the co-operation and not the suppression of self that harmony arises.

True harmony in a group is a vital thing, the varying contributions of the members achieving consonance through the co-operative intent of each.

951

HOW TO MAKE A BETTER WORLD

The world cannot be organized for good for precisely the same reason it cannot be organized for evil primarily. All effort of such a sort is a seeking to make men subject to other men, and thus is not an integration of the natural order by which a culture matures and in which a person conforms at least to a minimal operation of averages or to the basic pattern of general necessity convenient to himself but instead is asking the sacrifices of the many for a satisfaction of the ideas and ambition of the few and this is an aristocracy of force even if it is unselfish and altruistic rather than pure self-seeking in its roots. Essential to true visualization of a better world by a seeker under the Solar Mysteries is that it be better for all who have a part in it in any way, and this means that it must be better in the concept of better accepted by all involved. When the proposition is reversed and the effort is to impose some private notion of the better that may even have high merit, as perhaps in some special aspect, tyranny still raises its ugly face. All enduring reality must be shared along with all growth into an understanding of what any given better must be, and the development of insight into the nature of better in general is the underlying or fundamental goal of all genuine occultism.

We are trying to make the world better by helping people directly within our own purview by means of disciplinary procedures of higher effectiveness because self-elected or self-administered, and by indirect encouragement to perhaps endless others by the contagious example of those among us who demonstrate the eternal values in a manner permitting the broadest of sharing in the reality of them. Moreover, we also encourage other such achievement by sharing in it vicariously.

Any aspirations toward self-betterment are of necessity self-elected, and their power of infectiousness is signature of their value.

838

THE DIVINE NATURE OF CRITICISM

Nothing is more dangerous to the spiritual refinement of the seeker's consciousness than a supine obedience to a group ordering that however it may be organized or constituted or explained turns out to be the dictation of something alien to that seeker's experience, or the administration of a required conformity to static theory and form. At times the Sabian or variant Solar Mysteries requirement may give an appearance of such orientation, and so it is important to see just how the development of spiritual automatons is avoided. In the beginning of Sabian development the measures were a belittling and refusing that species of dramatization of wonders to come that might fascinate those who were spiritually immature, so that quite frequently a newcomer was left to shift for himself and possibly lose interest if not definitely responding to an inner call but meanwhile deterring many who might not be able to stand up and assert themselves in critical issues. Then a frank and quick encouragement in every friendliness of all who did not find what they wanted to go and form their ties elsewhere was generally successful in heading off unhappy recrimination and spiritual upset resulting from a seeker's holding to a discipline unrewarding for him.

A spiritual work that does not undergo continuous reconstruction is no healthy part of life, and if it does not welcome every possible criticism it is not alive to the problems by which it anchors its existence in reality. Criticism is something creative and divine in every genuine sense, and thus whenever born of deep interest it almost inevitably leads to common new realization and constructive joint activity. But if it feeds self-satisfaction on the one hand or group dissatisfaction on the other it falls far short of its true role.

Criticism as it leads to wider understanding is a healthy corrective for a work in fellowship that is alive and so is changing.

470

FREEDOM IS PRE-EMPTED

What is quite difficult for the student to learn is that freedom is never a free gift to man. In one sense it actually is the reward of effort but in another it exists only in its manifestation of itself as free act. Freedom is never an escape from tension since in such a case it would be the release of the being to another limitation of some pertinent sort. Man may be free from his work on his holiday but he also is released from the disciplines of his industry and so is subject to the constrictions resulting from injudicious eating and intemperate use of his energies. Indeed, if a given freedom is not under the protection of a greater bondage of some sort it is far more of the order of a curse than of a blessing.

The value of freedom to the individual is not that which comes to him in the various releases and escapes of life but ever that which he pre-empts for himself and creates through a perfection of being and consummation of livingness. Thus the greatest possible freedom of an everyday sort is that resulting from the development of real respect for self, and the greatest ultimate freedom is that which will come to us when we adopt and maintain as a major goal some task of the transcendent or cosmic order. Even in superficial life the person of great responsibility is freed from much transient detail, and this may be observed to be a principle throughout nature. Cosmic living needs no self-sustainment through the petty illness and discord by which the average man like the proverbial dog with the fleas is kept reminded of his existence, and New Thought and occultism early discovered that the absolute and certain way to lift a life above the plane of discord was to get the being busy in matters of a higher plane.

True freedom is achieved when the aspirant with real respect for self adopts his cosmic task and then pursues it with enthusiasm and steadiness.

837

PROBLEMS ARE EXISTENCE IN ACTION

Problem solving is the way existence continues, and when there are no problems before an individual he in a true sense is dead. Any effort to solve the difficulties of another person could thus be a subtle form of assassination or the most heinous of crimes because the move against that divine spirit by an intervention of self as a screen or an intrusion of an alien between an existent and its reality in any gratuitous way whether wittingly or not and by intention or not is the sin against the Holy Spirit of the Bible. This does not mean that we never should aid our fellows. Heaven forbid! It does mean that our effort is sought or desired and never the case of taking over so as to have our own experience vicariously through them with that selfishness of the proud father at Christmas who buys his boy an electric railroad and then proceeds to play with it himself while claiming he is showing the youngster how to do it. Each individual's experience is entirely sacrosanct in its own terms, and anything done with or through another must be by invitation or a matter of unquestioned community function.

A presolving of problems for people in general is proper when the process creates the greater problems that each person can see and make his own. Spiritual quickening fundamentally challenges each seeker to the achievement of something of worth in his own life and to exacting service in behalf of the vision that has quickened him. But any direction or instruction that is given him on the way must refrain from relieving him of any responsibilities that maintain his character and rather should encourage him to accept more vital ones. If on his part an aspirant loses sight of the vision in quarreling over personal and petty details of responsibility he may well be facing extinction.

In pursuit of his vision one encounters problems but he attacks these with confidence, knowing that in conquering them he will gain strength in his ongoing.

1166

VITALIZING A LONG-RANGE OBJECTIVE

The greatest tragedy in life is the situation in which a normal individual lacks the immediate relationships he needs in giving expression and so continuance to his own nature, and in which there is also neither buttressing out of past experience or heritage nor anchor of understanding and realization in future possibility so that present moments can challenge him and facilitate self-mobilization rather than throw the self again into itself in frustration. And so occultism is likely to put a fundamental emphasis on heritage and to contribute all unwittingly to a pure flight from reality by stressing a reincarnation or utterly remote and unprovable ancestry on the one side and developing a detached and merely grandstand interest in prophecy of events to come as these are out of all pertinent connection with actual facts or needs on the other side as the heritage as yet to be inherited. What is at stake and what is the hallmark of a genuine occultism is a realization that nothing exists in a vacuum and that man fails in expressing his present and personal being if he is not rooted in resources on which he can draw in pertinent relationships of any moment in any situation of import to him or if he lacks a sure anchorage in past experience and conditioned certainties that he may use in sharpening any or every application of his knowledge and skills to his involvement or if he cannot draw everything to effective head in long-range objective.

It is in a proper use of the future in every moment of a fundamentally unstable or mercurial present that the seeker likely may get the highest reward of his self-discovery in a finding of consummations of immortal selfhood in and through his fellows, and this is the vitalizing of long-range objectives that the Solar Mysteries demand.

The aspirant who keeps his eyes on his over-all goal and calls on his deepest certainties is strengthened in dealing with moment-to-moment difficulties.

878

SINCERITY IS HERE AND NOW

In the same way that the glorified dreams of a future or the Utopian promises of the finer world tomorrow are a tonic to men in days of discouragement, so that great world planning has its value because it makes men sensitive to the responsibility resting on them for the creation and conduct of the world in which they find themselves, a true interest in what life may become when men work together in larger understanding and fellow spirit is a stimulus to the individual. The occult tradition has supplied the encouragement needed along this line through its accounts of golden ages in the past and its promise of the Aquarian age now imminent, but never with the idea that the seeker was to try to get back in time to live in that past in any actuality or to attempt to be apart from his fellows and to hibernate in psychological fashion in his effort to project his personal reality into the future.

Where the energies of the individual go is indication of his underlying sense of proportion, and his creative idealism is shown by the extent to which it increases rather than diminishes his participation in the present world of everyday relations. He cannot have a constructive influence on his fellows when he withdraws from them even in their supposed interest, and in consequence his idealizations as an anticipation of coming events must have reality he can share in an immediacy of livingness. It is meaningless to advocate a democracy for the future unless there is some present demonstration of it, or to become significantly concerned over conditions far away when there is no genuine interest in problems at hand about which it may be possible to do something in practical fashion. Utopianism as escape from responsibility is a betrayal of every true good will toward humanity.

The aspirant's creative idealism is measured by his constructive participation in everyday affairs and the increase of significant everyday relationships.

761

IS THE SABIAN WORK UTOPIAN?

The Sabian work escapes the fallacies of utopianism by a very simple emphasis on the immediacy of any doing rather than any appreciable attention to its remote objectives. And so each obligation is pointed at something here and now despite the fact that objects are strengthened and functions are enhanced in their dramatic value by the ideal in a future end purpose. We are organized for a restoration of the Solar Mysteries, and this becomes an ideal of the day when we will have our real recognition as a creative agency in the clarification of modern thought on a global scale or as a catalytic influence in a unification of divergent modes of thinking by which men today are divided hopelessly. But this end purpose would never be furthered if we were to seek to establish it by an organization of it in the frame of whatever understanding we could bring to it in anticipation, and thereupon attempt to impose it on others as a sort of orthodoxy to enter in competition with the myriad of cults and pretensions offered mankind with their plethora of claims and counterclaims of prescience or divinity.

The truly creative and Solar insights have been regained in the fact that we have lived in accordance with such a regaining and shared the gain wherever and whenever possible. We have known a full restoration of these Mysteries from the very moment we began really to do things in their name, and as we have begun to bring this doing into the racial experience through what sharing is possible we have started what in time can become the global phenomenon. Thus the group is the work, or an expenditure of creative effort rather than a dissemination of an orthodoxy of pretension on the pattern of a cult. We share the fruits of discovery and seek to free minds without any claim on them.

The secret of the attainment of any remote ideal goal is immediate action on some small specific facet of that goal.

1113

WEALTH IS THE MEASURE OF MAN

The pursuit of wealth in order to gain privileged advantage over one's fellows is probably the most unspiritual attitude that any individual can develop, but at least equally despicable is the effort to achieve a spiritual wealth with what amounts to a self-seeking of hardly different stuff when its strength primarily is in a repudiation of anything that one's fellows hold precious. What occultism is apt to forget in pure miracle-mongering of communication with superior intelligence and of special contemplation of esoteric knowledge is the simple fact that whatever is possessed whether literally in a physical world or symbolically and intellectually in psychological realms is to be possessed, and ultimately only can be possessed, in stewardship because it is the common creation of all men in their interaction with a total universe or nature at large. Here is where New Thought and the modern Vedanta, especially in Vivekenanda's presentation, have made an immortal contribution and laid the foundation on which we should build if we are to justify the measure of our own channelship.

We have emphasized the New Thought dramatization of high insight through the ritualized Sabian goals demanding of each aspirant that he exhibit the common or everyday excellencies that will give all his fellows a fundamental assurance meaningful to them, and as a later but no less equally important emphasis on the Eastern insights we have prepared a careful exposition of the Bhagavad Gita through the perspective represented by Vivekenanda or that emphasis on the necessary fulfillment by each aspirant of his dharma or obligation and the striving for a complete flowering of his everyday potentials so that he may the better serve his fellows than obtain an elevation above them.

The aspirant's excellencies, derived from mankind and possessed as a trust, are used to serve mankind and not to elevate the aspirant himself.

734

THE DIFFERENCE THAT IS-NESS MAKES

No one can expect to get far on the path unless there is in some way or another if not really in many ways some difference that not only can be recognized in his own life but that continuously holds him to the higher genius of his own effort. We have often emphasized as strongly as possible that Sabian effort requires a plussage. Life is precisely what it may be on its own account and slightly more in an inner way that reveals the beginning of mastership. Many among us in our many conference years at Halcyon were participants in the thirties in what we then dramatized as a determination to live magnificently or if perhaps not achieving spectacular success yet managing to do little things in an exhilarating and glorious manner. It is unimportant how we work for the plussage that makes our lives occult provided that the plussage makes a difference in the everyday details of our living.

Most importantly we are never to be show-offs and expect to gain recognition from invisible powers or from our fellows by being queer, and one sure technique for gaining plussage without a parade of self or a cultivation of inner righteousness such as we can share only with people as much out of real pattern as ourselves is to make use of our affirmations for a spiritual ritualization of everyday activities. The average individual is inclined to begin his day with half-awakened attention to actualities at the best whereas a Sabian aspirant is able by the ritualized expenditure of less than a minute of his time to fix an anchorage for his new day in an eternal pattern. While others are allowing themselves to be carried this way and that by ideas that tend to bind humanity to prevailing conventionalities at high noon and then to relax to simple inertia at night, the Solar aspirant holds anchor.

Mastership encourages leading one's own life on a practical everyday level, but with every thought and act impregnated with the quality of joy.

386

INFECTIOUS LIFE-EXALTATION

Ultimately the indication of our progress on the path or of our success in catching the true spirit of the Sabian fellowship is found in the thing that infects us, whatever it may be. Actually the final effect of our discipline on any level is to sharpen our capacity for living and our faculties for inner sensitiveness. If in ordinary living anyone found that a certain course of interest or conduct inevitably resulted in sickness or upset in his affairs, he would soon see to diverting his efforts in a different direction and applying them in a different manner. Occult work differs from other enterprise in the fact that the whole reality is subjective. It is impossible to judge any occult group adequately on the basis of the results of affiliation with it as such. This point has been covered thoroughly in other materials in this series. We ourselves are judged rather than the work or the doctrines in our life failure and success. The Sabian fellowship contributes vitally to what lies at the root of individuality, be this for better or worse. The spirit of the fellowship, however, remains the upward striving of those who have achieved the most greatly.

We cannot turn with advantage from one to another occult work in an effort to escape a self-judgment. Such turning must be an adjustment to convenience if it is not to intensify the self-revealing of the seeker, at least to others. On the physical plane of things a man who is worn out or not well-centered may be infected by almost any ailment prevalent in his environment, whereas one of high vitality may escape epidemic infection. An artist will be infected by a sunset or a storm on the ocean, a public servant by a sudden emergency and so on through the gamut of human experience. But what infects us occultly?

The aspirant, while gaining a richer and more vital outer life, is at the same time developing a greater capacity for inner infectious sensitiveness.

933

THE ILLUMINATED HERE AND NOW

Life is truly adventuresome when both the outreaching of the seeker from his normal center to some special extreme of potential and his return to his own balanced and enriched base of selfhood share a social need and bring an almost equal measure of adventure to people on every hand from not only his intimates but those he briefly touches in the routine of living. The emphasis on the extreme is continually self-centered in a common mean that gives meaning to the outreach, and then the return to an enjoyment of the mean is helped by the great and continuing contribution of spread toward the extreme. Thus a student of higher thought may have a most transcendental experience in finding the wide presence of divine potentials on every hand but an end result is no more than a waking up from a dream if he does not at the time of the experience and throughout its duration somehow remain conscious of his own center of reality as sustaining the substance of it. He must know that his mean or balance in realization is what is expanded by an exaltation of this sort rather than some supposed special part of himself capable of existing apart from his normal selfhood. There is no possible meaning for self-projection except expansion of consciousness as centered of necessity in the core of self to hold to basic reality.

The Sabian emphasis on plussage throughout experience is an effort to bring the illuminated here and now to the seeker from the very beginning of his pilgrimage. He should see clearly that nothing has value in ceasing to be itself as a way to be more of what it might be supposed to be, and that all reality is addition and multiplication rather than subtraction and division when brought right down to simple terms. Self gains most as it creatively centers what it encounters.

Transcendental experiences are never enjoyed by a fragmented part of self, but are sustained by and enlarge the basic consciousness.

800

THE PROPER FRAME OF REFERENCE

The competitive ideas that bring people to their loyalty to a cult or any sectarian group in any area of human interest have no place in the functioning of the Sabian fellowship, since the group has no foundation in competition. Hence if comparisons are to be made on the basis of a merit as between this and some other gathering of seekers for illumination, obviously the attention is on the exterior agent and not the process. The question of importance is what the aspirant is doing, and not whether he has the best of possible tools. He certainly is expected to use discrimination in selecting the means to aid his spiritual growth, but his effectiveness of effort and not the fine tools he uses will determine the result. A great artist will operate with anything at hand and the world's significant work is accomplished on occasion with far from adequate materials. Superb equipment often stirs the vanity to a point where no achievement is possible.

There are many of us who think the Sabian Assembly quite unique in its centering of emphasis where emphasis belongs, but we can learn whether or not what it provides us is worthwhile only by results we are enabled to get with the assistance and guidance provided. The Assembly is nothing by itself in any spiritual sense, but it lives and has reality through what its members do. Those who look for signs of reality in the Assembly as something apart from their own activity are in danger of assimilating their own sense of nondoing to the Assembly, for a strength outside their own focus of real being, or their seeking and then quarreling with what they see in Sabian activities as so distorted or denied its own effective core. They are misled through the placing of the Assembly in an improper frame of reference.

The only evidence of the value of an aspirant's participation in a spiritual group is what he does under guidance of the group and with the tools it provides.

1122

LITTLE SELF AND BIG SELF

An earnest young Theosophist in presentation of the Gita gave our 1948 western conference a very graphic portrayal of some fundamental distinctions between what he called the little self of everyday experience and the big self of spiritual fulfillment, and demanded that each spiritual seeker come to know himself in terms of the larger rather than smaller identity. In order to apprehend what is involved in such a transition of self-enlargement, as most people visualize the process, it is necessary to have a clear idea of the characteristic or commonly evident manifestations of the little or big selfhood and thus it may be useful to define little-selfness as dependent on services of various other-than-itself aspects of reality to itself and the greater big-selfness as correspondingly dependent on services rendered to such other-than-itself aspects of reality by itself.

As frequently emphasized throughout the Sabian materials in connection with all distinctions like self and not-self and so little self now taken in contrast with big self, the dualisms are but the function of thinking and exist solely in the mind rather than actually reveal themselves in nature. Hence the distinction now emphasized is in most simple terms no more than the matter of direction of self-flow in the individual exercise of being. It must however be made clearer by far for the aspirant since he might well ask just how he could know in which direction the flow of his individual selfhood takes place, or in what respect there could be another selfhood for him than the selfness here asked to know itself as another and still be the one and not the other if such a knowing were possible. The proposition can never be made clear by mere reasoning. It ever is an insight of loyalties.

Experience is a constant flow from in to out and vice versa. The spiritual man knows consummation in his increasing outflow for the spiritual well-being of others.

1124

THE ECONOMY OF NEEDS AND DIVISIONS

The basic psychology of the Solar Mysteries seems wholly beyond the grasp of the average seeker and often to the extent that he can go ahead only by accepting its basic doctrines on faith and grasping them at a later time after his enlargement of experience gives him what he requires by way of pegs in his mind for hanging up or ordering the concepts too unfamiliar to handle at first. What must be grasped most importantly is that any hierarchy of values or relationships is a mechanism of mind that does not exist in nature but that expresses the situation of a self or its consciousness in functional dualism such as a matter-spirit dichotomy administered intellectually as physical matter per se, animation or vitality as matter infused by spirit, personality or consciousness expressed in a discreteness of selfhood as life or spirit manifest or gaining focus in matter and dramatized inversely as spirit infused with matter, and thought or the universality of pure potential in comparison with matter as an illimitable immediateness in particularized potentiality. Ideation thus is spirituality per se or a necessary pole of otherness in nature. Solar Mysteries emphasis in consequence is always on the cosmic interaction established, and there is no ultimate distinction between matter and spirit but only recognition of the eternal and universal division of labor they maintain.

Anything to be considered will by the consideration have a distinctiveness from everything else that individually or separately gains identity in potentiality to become manifest as an object of need or to instrument a division in maintaining an economy of selfhood that is at focus or in issue to discover itself as the little self and perhaps fulfill itself as the big self. Being functions here as thought.

Man is whole and all separations of function are solely for the purpose of examining and understanding. The function of thought is an exercise in pure potentiality.

1125

LITTLE SELF IS THE SELF OF NEEDS

What few but the spiritual giants of the ages realize in any but useless terms because as too abstract they lack any meaning to get translated into their relations with their fellows in the prevailing artificialities of superficial personality is that it is virtually impossible to become the big self without increasingly remaining quite as much the little self as ever. The matter gains expansion in order that it will have a more universal assimilation into the little selves through some necessary exact equivalence in functional being of everyone else encountered or potentially available for encounter everywhere in that widened area of experience and realization that constitutes an actuality of big-selfhood. Service of any sort in a world characterized by interaction of interwoven conveniences in each facet of itself means a reciprocity of function whether the flow of self is to be seen as the big or little aspect. Thus it is better to think of the small self as the self of needs and of the big self as meeting but not seeking the meeting even if the individual of cosmic stature shows his own estate by the immense ramifications of his capacity to have needs that can be met simply and wholesouledly by the little selves around him in a basic case of normal everyday living while gaining every fulfillment that is big self as he himself flows into the others in greater being.

God cannot extricate Himself from the world, and nothing is intellectually more naive than the notion that spirituality is personal extrication or achieving more of God by being less what God must be and doing less what God must do or flowing fully and constantly into all of the least as well as the greatest aspects of the whole. In Solar discipline a seeker must increasingly have needs and meet them.

Everyone has needs both material and spiritual and the aspirant expands his consciousness as he increases the reciprocal process of being supplied and supplying them.

1127

THE NEED TO BE NECESSARY

The characteristics of the big self and little self, as we turn to the point of consideration with which these special letters began, may also be seen as no more than the outward sign of the underlying two needs that in their co-operation establish the conscious individuality or human identity as such. Corresponding to basic little self is the need for functional necessities or that composite of needs by which any organism is what it is. Fundamentally this is self as a continuous and unbroken activity of being self or mobilizing effort in both physical and psychological self-preservation and necessary indulgence of the organic drives from meeting the call of hunger on through the protection or refinement and broadening consummation of a discrete or atomistic existence of the selfhood in every possible way. Of altogether different nature is the other underlying need of conscious or human character or that which constitutes personality as taken in contrast with bare individuality or discrete identity, and this is a need to be necessary or what from this alternative point of view is the ultimate mark of the big self or wholly spiritualized existence. Hence God is best defined as the illimitable capacity for an all-flowing into the nature and reality of everything that exists, or that which can be seen as a personal or conscious Godhood only as comprising an ever-continuing suffering in and with the being of all creatures.

At this point in our consideration it is vital therefore that we do not fall into the fallacy of regarding self in this big aspect as in any way dissociate from self in the little facet of its act of being. Each is complementary to the other, and the least of individuals in the worst of themselves have yet some touch of big self.

The greatest of joys is to recognize and meet the deeper needs of others. No man exists who cannot be touched to the higher or who lacks touch with the divine.

176

HOW TO DIE TO GIVE LIFE

To give of self in the death or the sacrifice that means life to other being is the greatest of occult achievements. Too many seekers however completely misunderstand or misuse this teaching. As a result a cheap and futile martyrdom is presented to the world, and a chance for a real contribution of manifest values to humanity is lost. Indeed, it is their smug satisfaction with their own sacrifices on the part of all too many in the field that stamps the occultists as wholly unsocial or a group really unable to influence their fellows helpfully because of the antagonizing attitude toward life in general. The man who put all the worms back on himself when they fell off, so that they would not miss a meal, became a saint as Simon Stylites of Antioch but his continuing influence on men is merely to disgust them. Monuments are not erected to the great souls who accept death to give life in as superficial a way as might be suggested here. To submit to injustice in a present generation for the sake of a possible approbation by some future generation is a mark of weakness and not strength or sacrifice.

The dying by which a higher or spirit life gives its own life to lower and more objective forms of being is an inner thing that is comparable to the giving of its fruit by a plant for the nourishing of higher or more subjective or social forms of being. Thus there is no objective death in the process of a service of this sort but a rich and enhanced living is the result. Every artist dies momentarily but no less actually in each mood. Achievement knows death in its moment of ecstasy. The attitude of being in a blessing of all life of which man is capable is the melting of selfhood into the larger or spiritual death that is greater life in its giving of inexhaustible inner being.

When one gives to others in blessing and healing he gives from a supply that is forever renewed by the giving and is himself renewed in the process.

177

OCCULT SOCIALIZATION

The idea that many are called and few are chosen is certainly true of the occult field. Only a pitiful few of those touched with the fascinating promise of a higher truth, and led to investigate the mystery of this secret doctrine, will ever remain steadfast at the esoteric shrine through the necessary long years of faithful searching in order to know the actuality of realization at the end of the way of light and truth. The fact that most seekers will give up their quest in a matter of weeks or months or even years is rather well recognized by occult leaders, and yet no genuine or valid reason is given for the phenomenon. It will be said that those who fail are unworthy or that they are fainthearted or are lacking in strength or other qualities of a sort necessary to initiation. It will be pointed out that they are tested and found wanting. Yet if the whole matter is one of the real inner or personal fitness as what is usually believed to be true, that which is demonstrated by a failure of the occult to hold its people or at least to carry its larger body of seekers to the goal is not a lack of something or other in these aspirants but rather a deficiency ultimately to be seen in occultism itself. Certainly a truth that should be assumed capable of passing on that which complements itself in some eventual or completed stage should be more than capable of recognizing practically or definitely the complement of itself in potentiality and as a consequence should be capable of bringing this to the full once a higher interest has been awakened. What the seeking soul requires is an adjustment in the use and not in the quality of its basic ideas.

The whole point of spiritual discipline has been missed. Never intellectualization, it is occult socialization of basic being.

Assurance of continuance in the quest is gained when the aspirant, saturated in the ideals of the group, knows himself to be part of the substance of those ideals.

178

SPIRITUAL DISCERNMENT

The occult socialization that is the goal of a spiritual discipline is never the weeding out of the deficient aspirants but instead is a building into a larger scheme of things of all who actually desire to participate in this to which they are being conditioned when they consciously and definitely become aware of its nature. There is potentially no difference between any one seeker and any other, nor is there any necessity for but a few out of the many called to gain their ultimate membership in the happy company of the chosen. A person who takes the Path may continue to the end. Within himself the only real deficiency that is capable of removing him from the Path is a slackening of interest in the goal before him. Generally this is the result of a faulty idea in the first place. What properly is promised to an aspirant is an opportunity to serve the genius of his own race, and of his own inner or nascently eternal personality. The opportunity cannot be taken as an end in itself, or even real in itself. This is an expression of mutual conditioning of souls interested in more than the normal participation in life by a more than normal concern about life.

The usual social conditioning of a soul is a training in a conformity to the convenience of life in such a fashion that life in turn may be utilized for the pleasure and realization and expansion of that soul. Spiritual discipline is the special conditioning of souls for the special convenience of life. They learn to seek for the real and eternal values of living, rather than mere superficial facts as in return they are enabled to make manifest the more enduring values that endow them personally with a spiritual significance. The making manifest of values is a spiritual discernment that the soul may learn.

Participation in the spiritual community awakens the genius of an aspirant's personality and at the same time offers him opportunity for serving the race genius.

180

THE SEEKER AND SPIRITUAL DISCERNMENT

The election by a soul to conform to the higher or lasting rather than lower or ephemeral values of life, in order that it be privileged to make these manifest among its fellows for life's eternal purposes, may be said to be the total procedure in any entering on the Path made so mysterious in the occult writings. If this making manifest of these values is indeed spiritual discernment, as stated in the previous letter on the subject, the question resolves to a learning of this spiritual discernment as far as each seeker is concerned. There are of course as many ways for learning this as there are ways for the gaining of experience, since all experience eventually yields spiritual discernment, but what is desired is a sure way of attainment on the Path without the necessity of living a host of lifetimes and leaving a result of vital importance to merest chance in experience. Therefore the sacrificing of individual liberty that variety of experience makes possible by the souls caught up in a higher vision but establishing no allegiance either by or to themselves in their association with others whether during a part of one life or for life after life means nothing without fellowship of response in driving urge embracing these others.

This fellowship is above all a practical association the essence of which is the smooth harmony of participation in a cosmic or eternal sustainment or happiness known only in company where personality is shared with never any exclusive joy in achievement or withdrawal in grief and where the substance of this pure living and deep life- participation with each man is encouraged in channels of his own ability and in meeting and knowing his brothers of the Lodge in passing as he lives his own life free of dogmas and conjecture of no relevance.

The seeker, having chosen to live for immortal rather than ephemeral values, refines his discernment of values in free fellowship with others who share the quest.

75

THE TEST OF REAL SERVICE

It often is hard for the student, especially one who may be young in soul growth, to realize that the test of real service lies in a co-operation called out from his associates. It is quite impossible for the leader of a spiritual group, as a matter of actual fact, to delegate some particular task to anyone or to give anyone a special or preferential place or privilege in the group. Fundamentally it is an item of consciousness, if the group may be said to be consciousness per se, and every detail of accomplishment in a group is made possible only because of the free and full tolerance if not actual co-operation of every other part of the group. Never have we known a greater need for service of every conceivable sort than now. And yet because this is a spiritual work and accordingly must place the initiative of every single detail in spirit, that is in consciousness, it is not expedient to proceed until the students come forth and of their own volition and by their own inborn desire take hold of whichever detail may appeal to each one in turn. All Solar Mysteries commissions are self-bestowed.

This is but half of the matter, however. There are often those who are almost too eager to assume responsibility and take a prominent place in the group. Among these will be many who are highly gifted and talented and who, if they can but get the real challenge of the work, will become invaluable. But at such a stage the hardest of all qualifications of leadership must be met, the ability to win at the hands of every associate the cheerful and spontaneous co-operation that marks the possession of the right to leadership in true spiritual realms of consciousness. The recognition of any student's value lies not with higher authority but with group reactions to his own effort.

As spiritual work is initiated, gains strength and stature first in consciousness, so originates the particular contribution of each individual member.

256

THE PRACTICE OF SELF-PRESENCE

Adultship obviously is relative. And yet the adultship or maturity actually achieved by a man is the entire basis of his conscious or responsible being. The savage may be a child to the trader who brings him trinkets for treasure, the trader in turn a child to an aristocrat or sophisticated member of the firm employing him, and this man of affairs similarly a child to some philosopher or giant of mind. Actually every man is a child in the light of his own potentiality and an adult in the light of his experience. Because experience must remain an uneven and discriminating or separating element among men, and because potentiality by the same token is eternally a unifying element working against separation and discrimination, spiritual work deals in terms of potentiality. The genuine cosmic citizenship of man is that association among souls in which each sees only the potentialities and eternal realities in the others, and this fellowship of an occult body with deep inspiration is based on the adultship of its members without consideration of the sort or kind of experience producing the maturity or giving the individual his root sense of confidence in himself.

Apart from the valuable and necessary discipline of true initiation, which the occult group must provide directly or indirectly in one way or another, the purpose of spiritual association is that an individual may have opportunity to practice self-presence and exercise adultship and spiritual competency. He must know he possesses a real power, that within him is that which leads others to appreciate him or joy in his company, and that his inner reality is sure or possessed of spiritual integrity. Experience tends to force man to further growth whereas spirituality permits the enjoyment now of enduring perfection.

Because unification is to be found in potentiality, the spiritual man recognizes only the higher potentials in others and so grows in spiritual integrity.

1175

THE GROUP A BANK OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Spiritual work and achievement is like any other sort in its logistics, and requires capital and outlet as well as organization of effort and a central creativity or challenging motive. When usual business activity is successful it is because there is a provision for meeting a demand with a supply in some sort of efficient fashion. In spiritual areas this demand ultimately is for self-fulfillment, and it is a demand without limit because no individual ever achieves fullness except as it is a greater potential for greater fullness ahead. Here is infinite potentiality as against infinite regression. Fullness is not the end of the effort to achieve itself but rather is a continuing experience of a self-reality that rests not in any static consummation or outer cancellation of all the life that has been the fullness in an outreaching toward it but in a dynamic realization and an assertion or a creativity in which achievement is reinstated promise and challenge. Material fullness is satiety and a throttling of selfhood in the given aspect of effort, but spiritual fullness is a release of creativity in an expanded demand for self-achievement. Spiritual success is giving self its satisfactions in fulfilling other selves, and this is endless because each other self in the process is given new facets that can be fulfilled in turn. Were static goals envisioned this .would be a horror of receding goals in infinite regression, but as fellowship in the spirit of achievement the achieving is the reality of infinite gain.

The seeker who undertakes spiritual business in the symbolism of these letters is much like the man engaging in material commerce. He needs capital and the spiritual work might be reported not inaccurately as a bank of consciousness for his capitalization.

The aspirant's infinite capacity for increasing self- fulfillment is sustained by the group consciousness that itself is fulfilled in the process.

1130

THE SUBCONSCIOUSNESS OF NECESSITY

Perhaps the most beautiful passages in sacred scripture, of all times and all cultures, are the Servant Songs preserved in Isaiah (42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; and 52:13-53:12) and constituting the Old Testament high point of insight from which the mission of Jesus sprang into being in principal part. The need to be necessary has articulation here in the spiritual desire for service, not as such is given to others conceived as separate from self and rendered by a self that has cancelled itself out in the process, but rather as a sharing that will be possible through final fulfillment of self as the big self in terms of its own potentials exalted until they become the potentials of each other self with which it has contact rather than of itself at root and in a manner whereby the self itself primarily is increasingly the fulfillment of all other selves around it rather than itself. Here is a true subconscious of cosmic dimensions because it is not any externalized reality as far as the self is concerned, but is all-potential becoming completely self-potential or is big self gaining supremacy over little self in the total and everyday business of living. Man is the servant or the capitalized Servant or savior of his age or culture because his fundamental need to be necessary has been built up into such a subconsciousness of necessity of and for others that his sense of an inner union with them all is utter and complete, but his living in the need that is common to all is so marked that he is constituted the big self in a sense of the racial spirit or as the spiritualized man or an ongoing or immortal seed manu or seed man that exists only in serving.

With this conception the aspirant loses destructive egotism and becomes the great ego never conscious of its ego-ness.

The servant of men fulfills and exalts the potentials of others as they are part of himself and thus finds exaltation and fulfillment of his own potentials.

1131

THE JOY IN SELF-GROUP FULFILLMENT

The psychology of pleasure is perhaps the least properly understood of all types of psychological analysis because of the oversimplification that assumes satisfaction to be no more than a response to the impact of external factors on passive selfhood on one hand or a facilitated release of some physical or sensory impulse of self on the other and thus thinks of self whether little self or big self as quite discrete or self-existing in its own nature. Actually pleasure is as much a matter of finding a fulfilled occasion of being necessary in an extension of self into a group spatially and history temporally as the achievement of meeting a need or complex of needs of the self. Hence either without the other is disappointing in the end even if momentarily most gratifying. The satiation of mere appetite actually adds to the demands of the given appetite, but if such satisfaction is socialized as in the self-discipline or aesthetic enhancement of the refined individual in any society primitive or civilized, the individual is in quite literal fact able to meet his needs without becoming enslaved to them and in the enjoyments he shares with others he increases all possibilities of his own pleasure in geometrical expansion. Pleasure is not then a matter of habit but of a continuing and rewarding discovery of habit potentials as skills in larger living. Sense indulgence becomes greater in every actual detail and in added significance.

Here is the initial phase of the servant insight that is at core in the Solar Mysteries code of ethics and aesthetics. A life that is lived to itself, no matter how exalted its motives and vision, is self-destroyed in its own vacuum. Appetites are not denigrated as such, since they become the convenience of self-group interactivity.

The joy of life is known when one discovers that his deepest self is shared in appreciation by others, and increases when he becomes skillful in such sharing.

1132

THE SERVANT IS NOT A ROBOT

The ultimate genius of being, whether of God, man or any lowest form of identifiable existence that can be imagined, is no more and no less than simple pleasure. This is what we mean when we speak of God creating the world to fulfill Himself, or sustaining a creation because it is impossible for Him in accordance with His nature to continue in His own essence and power and refrain from this outgiving and indwelling involutionary-evolutionary relation between Himself and the universe. Life most irreducibly is the experience of pleasure, since it is nakedly the unconditioned and literally nonactivated tendency of living entities as far as they themselves are concerned to keep living and in fact to fight desperately to continue doing so. In higher dimensions that which superficially is evident as this drive to survival or the phenomenon of identity as seen wholly from outside becomes pure integrity of self as on the levels of being where consciousness begins to be recognized, so that the description of existence can be interior or personal and show a primary endeavor of self to remain fundamentally consistent or to have the capacity of preserving itself intact in a space distribution of relationship and a time delimitation of individual experience. There is no greater pleasure than this, although the recognitions self has of itself are through a ramification of continuing selfhood by means of specific fulfillments in time-space terms.

The concept of the servant as the God-man, providing the real foundation for Christianity, is therefore one of pleasure in Godly terms or the self-fulfillment through sustaining others in terms of the greatest personal pleasure for these others to the end that always all selfhood is enhanced in an enlarged and personal self-pleasure.

The aspirant who succeeds in maintaining his inner integrity as well as that of others, no matter what circumstances he encounters, knows the full joy of existence.

1133

SPIRITUALITY IS RICHNESS OF LIVING

Spirituality has its finest description in the figure of the server in the Servant Songs of Deutero-lsaiah because such a serving personality like God is endlessly ramifying himself out into lives high and low about him and indomitably in the face of tragedy or happy eventuality as in no way a robot channeling benefits in the blind role of spiritualized tubing but in his own person as an individual to whom all things of which he is a channel have meaning in terms if not of an immediate personal or intellectual significance are yet no less of enduring worth because of the release of God-potentials in those persons to whom his channelship gives him a psychological access. Frequently an aspirant will lose the point in all highly inspired teachings by an inaccurate and actually senseless distinction between the world as the senses know it and the same world as the mind encompasses it. Occult writings more often than not confuse the issue by failing to make true distinctions between the sensational and symbolical realms of reality. It always must be emphasized that they differ functionally in presenting complementary areas of skills or divisions of labor rather than in any fashion becoming self-sufficient worlds that can exist separately, and do so in the common time and space. Here the neophyte builds the erroneous conception that keeps him the divided creature ever defeated in trying to reconcile his appetitive and ideal selves.

No individual thus at war with himself can know richness of existence such as God of necessity from His nature must have. The final spirituality in approach to God-living must be a progressive unfolding in practical terms of an individual and basic richness of living made possible and helped to its full by interactivity among others in intimate association of some measure of higher mutual service.

Cosmic like worldly service depends on a mutuality of interacting among people, and the higher the service the greater the richness of living for all concerned.

375

COMPROMISING OUR LOYALTY

Perhaps the most suggestive phrase in one of my New Year letters, which I read anew before writing this message was the compromising of loyalty evident in our failures to maintain within that full measure of the spiritual self-sustainment to which we have pledged our faithfulness in becoming a part of the Sabian work. I think that the notion of compromise itself is clear enough. In its simple use it is the acceptance of less than desired or a surrender of one interest for the sake of another. In social adjustments it is necessary that compromise and adjustment or arbitration and interchange be part of every vocabulary and practice. However we employ the word compromise as an identification of the common nastiness in social relationships when we speak of a man or a wife as compromised with another woman or man, and all the little cheap compromises of the spirit are in that category.

In our work there is no condemnation for weakness, but a very decided and noncompromising condemnation for every failure of any individual to face and recognize weakness and do something about it in at least the inner reaches of his own consciousness. Ours is not the sort of fellowship in which we find justification for our inadequacies or in which we coddle and wet-nurse ourselves and pack ourselves carefully in cotton with fragile labels on each package of self. Nor are we the sort of group in which we get together to find an escape from a world we accept as terrifying or unconquerable and thereupon reach out miserably to substitute metaphysical hopes and imaginative desires for the richness of the reality that is always at hand if we only grasp it as our own. We begin with self in all our study, but not self-depreciating itself when it might realize itself in an immortal fellowship.

Every aspirant is responsible to himself for maintaining the basic spiritual sustainment by means of which he overcomes his recognized weaknesses.

376

REALIZED IMMORTAL FELLOWSHIP

We compromise our loyalty when we fail of realization in self-sustainment, which cannot be said too often or with too great emphasis. But it is obvious that actually we cannot lift ourselves entirely by an inner and subjective process as by our bootstraps. Such an effort would be a perfect example of the escape from reality, or an endless wastage of life and sincerity because sooner or later there is the return to self as self necessarily is constituted in an undeniably social existence and if the return is in consciousness it bears fruits in bitterness and rebellion against the social reality. Worse, a return unconsciously produces the monomanias and mental deviations to be found everywhere in what has often been taken as the lunatic fringe of everyday occultism and New Thought. What then do we realize? There is a subjective foundation in realization but frequently what we overlook is the distinction in the objects of realization. In the escape from reality there is the realization of the abstract, and in touching divinity or any one or another of the higher concepts there is unquestionably a successful escape. What then is the difficulty?

An abstraction is something drawn out and in abstracting there is necessarily an infinite regress because somewhere there is an element of the concrete or the experienced and in the process there is an enhancement of the bondage to some particular moment of experience. We are in deep water here, yet the matter is simple enough. The real after all is individual and individuality may transfer its basic foundation in reality, but somehow its realization is objective or is complemented or shared and so social. Our work centers its attack here, and in a shared immortal fellowship touches a cosmic reality.

The moments of deep realization in spiritual self-sustainment become real only when shared, and this common sharing becomes cosmic reality.

377

TOUCHING A COSMIC REALITY

The compromise with loyalty within ourselves is not that we choose consciously to fail of self-sustainment, but that we elect a path that seems relatively effortless and thus somehow surrender to an insidious lure as we wish lesser as opposed to greater effort. There obviously is no way to touch cosmic reality except by cosmic effort in ourselves. And nothing in ourselves is cosmic unless it is not only, so to speak, the totality of self but self slightly extended beyond or above its totality or its possible realization of the totality. Perhaps there is nothing that can be put as simply in our work, despite a paradox in the fact that nothing is really as hard to explain as this. The Sabian student always must go the way that promises to call on him to the greatest extent. He must elect the magnificent, the splendid.

Unfortunately there is a close parallel to this class of election in the lunatic fringe of things or in the realm of cheap personality and common or external rivalry. The most familiar form will be recognized in the martyr complex but not so much the wailing or the complaining in which the student will indulge when low in spirit since the spiritual indelicacy of this is obvious to all of us if we possess even the shreds of a sense of humor. Rather it is choosing a path of difficulty with subjective motivation that does not incite the soul to be challenged to a cosmic utterness but allows the individual to be in a position to commandeer sympathy, vampirize consciousness, squeeze in place with those to whom he is drawn by his aspiration, and so on. A tragic fact behind this is the manifestation of his surrender to limitation since subconsciously he is acknowledging others as superior and more privileged than himself. In the fellowship he is a parasite.

The shared cosmic reality results from individual cosmic effort to extend the whole self beyond its present status into achievements ever more demanding.

378

LIBERTY AS A COSMIC FACT

In our consideration of liberty, love and loyalty beginning originally with the new year in 1935 we have seen certain aspects of a true and a false loyalty and it might be well to remind ourselves that behind both true and false loyalty is the striving for liberty by which every soul seeks to find and know itself. Liberty is being per se, and in our spiritual quest eventually we must realize that we must strive always for liberty of soul whenever our course threatens to deny it to us. The minute cheap things that we do show how we ever exist in a subconscious or conscious realization of threatened constriction of our being. On a level of simple reflex when we are struck we strike back. We repay insult with insult, or with a definite uplifting sublimation or adaptation of some sort, not because we wish to insult in turn but because we must conserve our liberty. Therefore the cheapnesses or inadequacies of life are to be viewed constructively in every possible issue as an outreaching of some soul toward liberty.

In a work of definite organization of aspiration it must follow necessarily that liberty is a part of the very foundation of an accomplishment of a self-realization. Consequently we give attention to liberty above all other factors in selfhood, and demand that a soul be stimulated to its expression primarily by its eternal constituency. Liberty must never be taken as an objective convenience, or as a manifestation of physical ease or sensual satisfactions. It must be kept as what it is or as a cosmic fact. Spiritual being is liberty as are ail forms of self. The Sabian aspirant is called on to be free in an immortal sense or as possessing a liberty that is of more than himself and by and through which he escapes all petty compromise forever.

Loyalty to the task of maintaining self-sustainment leads to liberty of soul, and only the free soul is capable of pure and immortal soul-expression.

379

COSMIC LIBERTY IS NOT SMUGNESS

There are many difficulties in the pursuit of liberty of a genuine sort, not the least of which are in the cheapness and inadequacy that we have been discussing. In every lunatic fringe of seekers after higher things there is the false liberty that might be termed smugness and that is wholly obvious in its nature, but a real analysis of its nature is far more than a mere application of a convenient and an unpleasant word. Smugness is more than unjustified contentedness with self. Indeed, the difficulty is that there is no real outer difference between the true and false liberty as here evident. An individual who is smug is thoroughly centered in the reality of being. The aspirant who has achieved touch with Source is similarly centered.

What we really mean by smugness is that a soul has taken a present periphery of being as sufficient, whereas in a genuine touch with Source there is a sense of illimitable periphery of selfhood. A smug person is fundamentally disinterested in others in terms of their possible contribution to his own consciousness and welfare, but one in touch with Source is fundamentally interested in others because it can only be in others that he will glimpse the periphery of his own being. Both types are alike in a basic self-sufficiency. Neither is in danger of cheap or petty compromise. Smugness is not cosmic, however it may seem to its possessor that he has the summum bonum of all, because the cosmos is all-inclusive and social and knows its completeness only in all parts of itself. Smugness shuts out the cosmos in fact though embracing it in theory subjectively. A real liberty is cosmic unrest or a sense of completeness beyond the limit of knowing. It is liberty because it presupposes infinite potentiality in selfhood itself.

Cosmic liberty is freedom to expand. The man possessed of a divine restlessness constantly glimpses his own boundless periphery.

718

SOLVE, DO NOT ELIMINATE PROBLEMS

The most distressing form of human smugness is the willingness of one individual to live the lives of others for them in pure kindness, or to deprive others of experience without asking whether it is according to their wish in the matter. This suggests the old parable of the kindhearted man who saw a butterfly struggling to make the final break away from its chrysalis and cut it free and thereby caused the new creature to go forth in the world with a defective wing. The purpose of struggle is not to make life hard or bitter but to create a means of accomplishment, and the higher goals in occultism do not ever seek the elimination of struggle but rather its clarification in order to have the meaning that may even bring intensification. We work toward a more intellectual understanding of our difficulties and a truer realization of their meaning, and if anything we seek deeper problems. Consciousness is a proposition of problem-solving. If there are less problems in life to solve there is less consciousness and so less living in every sense of the word. We do not wish to make life easy but to find it interesting and satisfying in every depth of involvement.

The objection to utopianism is that it seeks to make the solving of problems an end and assumes that the elimination of them is a desirable program for human existence. It adopts the spirit of the lotus-eaters in promoting the state in which men are not stirred to an accomplishment of anything but protected self-indulgence as this is to be gained with minimum self-exertion. Utopianism is evil because the goal is a thinning out of life as far as the challenge to self-expression is concerned, and because it assumes some people are qualified to plan the well-being of others for no reason but their desire to do so.

All attempts to establish utopia are well lost when exchanged for the opportunity to live the full life of achievement and service.

380

THE RESTLESSNESS OF CERTAINTY

Cosmic liberty has been pictured to us in terms of a new state of being, or new as in contrast with whatever may become a state of bondage, and this has been designated conventionally as a heaven or a perfected existence after a death out of imperfection. In picturization of this it has been stated in the Gospels that admission to the state of heaven is by a birth again, or by becoming as a little child. What is the significance of the emphasis on an infantile consciousness in teaching of this sort? The false interpretation is that we need a smugness of blind faith or unquestioning obedience. Such we have already dismissed. But also characteristic of the child is a restlessness of almost a cosmic sort in even the most unfavored youngster, and this is a real clue to the point. The child is not restless in failure of self-control, although his schooling in control is limited in a lack of experience duration, but in certainty of potentiality. He is without the slightest question of his own inner enduring or of Source.

The liberty of the child is limited in fact by the whims of environment although not so much more than in the adult case but in his own consciousness the child is little limited in liberty. He has no essential fear of the future, dread of the consequences of the past or question of his own experienced realities. His restlessness is of certainty in terms of the striking paradox, and we are called on in an inner discipline to get this same illimitable certainty within. Here is genuine liberty because we do not need to anchor our reality in any specific place. It is restless as absolutely self-sustaining. Here is no instability because the freedom of being in this permits fullest co-operation with any or every possible situation in life.

The aspirant trusts life present, past and future and his own complete adequacy to take constructive part in every conceivable area of experience at any time.

382

LOYALTY IS FELLOWSHIP

Loyalty cannot be demanded from adherents to any genuine occult work because it is a spiritual reality, as has been stated, but I wonder if we are clear in mind as to just what is meant by this as a statement. It is obvious that loyalty must be spiritual in the sense that it must be self-aroused to have any power. Otherwise it is just product of the conditioning of the discipline and thus on no higher or advanced a plane than the ordinary conditioning of everyday being. I am dependent on the genuine support of the students but I cannot bring it out by harping on its needs continually. That would mean I end up by demanding that the students place themselves in subjection to me or surrender their judgment to mine, and the work loses its occult nature in every respect. This phase of the matter I have explained in other places, and this conception of loyalty I believe is well understood.

But there is more to the concept involved. Loyalty can be proper only when it is noncalculating or almost a subconscious sort of eternal attachment deep within the self. Whenever we seek to analyze our loyalties of this genuine sort, all semblance of them promptly disappears as a consequence. We can see a very common working out of the principle in human love and idealism. The man who calls on an expression of judgment to substantiate his love is not a lover. Love may be blind in a very real sense but its actual blindness is evidence or convincing demonstration of its creative or eternal power. We use judgment in the substance of our study and in the solution of problems of life and being but our final loyalty to the work is not the product in any way of this judgment. Rather it is the subconscious flowering of a growth into an immortal fellowship of real-self sustainment.

True immortal fellowship begins with loyalty to that fellowship and is never reasoned into existence but is discovered as a deep inner attachment.

166

THE OCCULT DOCTRINE OF MEMORY

A question of importance is what happens to man's memory between lives in the case of the individual who reincarnates. Occult teachings usually consider memory as either the substance or the manifestation of the substance of one of the higher vehicles, but this explanation begs the question because the inquirer then in pursuing this query must next find what happens to this higher vehicle when there is no physical body within which it has existed or when the ego leaves it to disintegrate presumably in turn precisely as it previously has left the material or everyday vehicle to do so. A higher occultism has an obligation to affirm the vital and eternal necessity of a material and experienced order in all existence as demanded by Plato, or the earliest Lodge initiate, whose writings remain extant as originally written and who as a great and inspired thinker has an authority broader today than perhaps ever before or indeed with an influence that while subtle is increasingly pervasive and therefore a vital necessity to teach the fact that with the loss of physical focus the inner vehicles have only a residual and static existence if any at all. Were such not so, the physical universe would lose its entelechy or purpose with a resulting infinite regression of every lower order to its higher. Consequently at the end the cosmic drama would be annihilation because such reality would demand something above it and aboveness is a finite term. What infinity of all things is possible is the ideal potential of Plato.

Memory is a phenomenon of physical existence. Thus the mechanics of it are never an etching on atoms but rather an individual patterning of points in space or laya centers of which each person becomes the entelechy and successive aggregates of events the substance.

While memory has its actuality in a physical being, its substance as well as its usefulness lies in discovering the patterning of events in individual living.

167

MEMORY DOESN'T GO ANYWHERE

If memory is a phenomenon of physical being, the immediate difficulty for the uncritical thinker is visualizing it apart from association with a tangible physical factor such as the brain. There is however a physical actuality that is manifest in and through and on physical objects as such and this we can identify as pure form. When an object is destroyed its constituent physical substance is never destroyed but is reordered and ceases to exist only in a perspective related to a particularity of object. In a similar way the form or actuality of the object that has held the substance in particular objectivity is hardly destroyed when the physical object as such disappears from everyday actuality. Form continues in general. Is the form or the substance the object, after all? The answer must be that neither the substance nor the form but rather the combination of these factors is the object. The object as the individual is neither, and when the object is eliminated neither of the elements is eliminated. Form may be said to be the living actuality of forms no less physical though in no way visible. Is substance in primordial chemical state ever seen?

When a man dies the substance of his body is transformed so slowly that the body somehow seems to have a reality of its own and apart from this spirit that has dwelt within it. Therefore the usual idea is to associate with the essence that has departed or the ego all the factors of the conscious form-life and being including memory. A failure to see that normal awareness is as much borrowed from the circumstances of being as the basic substance of the physical body is responsible for the idea that memory is somehow a part of the man and is under necessity to accompany the ego up into heavenly realms.

Though a physical object may be destroyed the matter of which it was made is only transformed and the form of the object may become immortal in memory.

168

MEMORY IS AN ACTIVITY

Nine-tenths of the difficulties discovered by seekers in the occult field are due to the fact that the normal human mind always insists on regarding reality as a static and eternal rather than a dynamic and universal element. Selfhood is naturally expressed in time because its root reality is embraced in a constancy of survival or its unchanging isness through all its experiences, but this time is merely a dimension of being and a link between known and unknown spatial factors. Time is the fact of being but space is the degree of being and the broader element in experience that is the inner linking as time is the outer one and a fourth dimension. Reality that is created within space is spiritual because it essentially is an inner and social thing and because its manifestation is timeless or wholly limitless in terms of individual experience. Memory is usually regarded as real in time or as something that survives the circumstances of its origin in fixed or static and substantial record that requires an actuality of contact for recall. Good memory is supposed to be that which is fixed within the being, and poor memory that which has been weakly etched on self.

Actually there can be no distinction between good or bad memory because the memory of things exists eternally in the form of an akasa or a substance of patterns as the occult teaching graphically if rather superficially puts it. The problem in memory and hence in the question of where memory goes that launched these letters is just precisely how mind may remember better. Some minds draw almost anything at all into consciousness at will, and the extension of this power becomes genuine clairvoyance. But this is not any sort of reproduction functioning like a tape recorder of sorts. Memory is an activity.

Memory is a dynamic element. Thus as it deals actively with social or spiritual patterns it becomes adept at patterning the future also.

169

MEMORY IS THE NAME FOR A LIAISON

If memory is an activity, it obviously is nonexistent as a thing and this is the truth of the matter. Memory may conveniently be described as a laya center but there would be difficulty in the use of laya center for this mind focus because it has been restricted as a term to the patterns or tendencies into which general activities shape themselves. The idea in a laya center is that there is the actuality or reality common to all, or to all of those who desire to rise to the patterning any laya center may represent, but the characteristics that distinguish memory from a laya-center patterning is that memory is individual. No man can call any other man's memory to his own being or intrude in any fashion in the consciousness of another. Telepathy is no exception to this principle because in telepathy there are elements common in the consciousness of the communicating parties. It shows a fusion of memories rather than an intrusion into individual memory.

Between the various vehicles or aspects of a man's being there is necessary intercourse or interrelationship, and it is the underlying patterns of all these relationships that constitute memory at the outset. Memory is the name for a liaison between various details of self-activity. Memory is therefore a threefold relation or a link in order between the body and the habit or conditioned structure, then between the conditioned or social self and the personality or individuality as such and finally between the personal self-awareness and the higher self that to the occultist is the basic pattern or spark or the eternal laya center of the individual. To have good memory is really to be capable of fluid liaison within the self, and memory between incarnations disappears unless living personality liaison persists.

Good memory is a fluid relationship between the various aspects of a man's being. The initiate develops an immortal personality and with it an immortal memory.

171

THE NARROWNESS OF BROAD TRUTH

The most surprising phenomenon, to a thinking or observing individual coming into the occult or New Thought field from orthodox associations, is the general narrowness of those who profess great and broad truth. But this is a harmless superficiality on the whole, or a characteristic of a degree of faith that like the small boy on an unfrequented and dark road must whistle to keep up courage. A narrow vision at least holds to its outlook as a virtue in comparison with an indefinite diffusion masquerading as breadth. Small groups of narrow views at least preserve their own integrity. Often the claims of the leaders are such as would appeal only to the gullible, and therefore a man who has not been protected from himself in tumbling into one order of belief must be protected by the administrators of that order from a further tumbling in a new direction. Most interesting however in the consideration of the tendency is a revelation of the ingenuousness inherent in most human nature. Thus a highly successful truth teacher, whose public criticism of astrology and numerology suggests this issue of the regular student letter, is perhaps best known for his promotion of highly speculative mining securities under the implication that the divine nature of his special truth message would protect the purse belonging to the naive trusting feminine follower to whom most generally he appealed and the fact that he has escaped any legal penalties is an operation of the occult law to some extent since he seems to have been more ill-advised than at heart the callous promoter of his fellows and perhaps even himself supposing that high truth will police petty risk.

Astrology represents underlying justice in all creation, but charts this in narrow realization that is breadth in orientation.

Tradition is a form of race memory and the restatement of the occult tradition for a new age has always given the promise of ushering in a renaissance period.