CALISTHENICS APRIL 1983
· DECISION MAKING EXERCISE – U – M FUNCTIONS -- SUBCONSCIOUS IS MAINLY HABITS – HANDLE YOUR PERSON –EASTER SYMBOLISM –TRAINING OF THE MIND –OBSOLETE TEACHINGS –SACRED PLACE
We will come back to the subject of Easter today, but before we do that, I'd like to know how you are doing with the decision making exercise. How many have succeeded so far?
Martin: Obviously it's your freedom to do it or not, it's your choice, but we look at it from a different angle., The ability to move is needed on all levels. This you know from experience in life. The more ease you have in making a move, the easier life is for you -- so training in that direction, and especially when you are in a difficult condition, in my viewpoint, is needed. When you deal with mastering your personality in order to use it as a tool fit for what you have to do, the ability to take a step is mandatory. Otherwise there is no mastery. You can dream of it but you cannot do it.
We call it "decision making" and you think it's only one decision at a time, but you need to change your whole position in order to do it. So there is a lot involved behind the appearance. This is what you find kind of hard.
We have here a practical exercise, something you can handle, but still you might find it rather hard not to forget one day. Nevertheless, do it and do it steadily, because the kind of muscle you develop pertaining to the change of position to one of just doing things is what you need to do the work we do.
What we do also requires daily work. You can't afford to forget it whenever you want just because it's "spiritual" work. This is the usual position taken, until you awaken more deeply and realize that you cannot afford to forget it. Also, if you don't develop the muscle easily, you will have to do it more painfully. The effort you make with the decision-making exercise sounds kind of mundane and not spiritual, but it's not true, you cannot except any part from the whole.
What we do requires the ability to make decisions and hold to them, and this has to come easily. Suppose you had never practiced decision-making in your life, and one day you awaken to what you really are. This is the moment when you would awaken to big responsibilities. What would you do? You would be in utter and complete despair because you would know what you have to do and you could not do it. Fortunately, there are safety valves, and if you are supposed to assume responsibility at some time you are usually prepared for it, and if you don’t do it, events push you. But please realize that the decision making exercise is good over all the field of expression? Not just with consciousness.
More comments?
Participant: Sometimes I' ll write down the item that I'm going to do the next day and I'll have a picture of what doing that looks like. I'll write down, for instance, that I'm going to study. So the picture that looks like is that I'll sit down and open a book and proceed. Then it comes to the next day and the form that studying takes will be two minutes somewhere, not sitting down, I'll open a book and read a page. This is study, but it isn't exactly what I had in mind when I wrote down the item. So I question myself about whether this fulfills what I wrote?
Martin: You have to learn a lesson by this. There is a psychological principle behind what you say. The day before is not the day after. You make a picture according to what is active at the moment, but the next day what is active is different, at least slightly. So all you can do is accept the picture of the day before as symbolic. Study can take all sorts of forms. And I encourage you to take all of your images that way -- as abstractions of a situation in the form of a symbol, and that's it, no more than that. Now it may happen that the happening comes very close to the image, but never try to make it equate to the image. I repeat, the image belongs to what was working the day before, or six months before, or whatever. I have seen people make images of what has to be done so strong that they oblige themselves to go through with the image when they could have done it a lot more easily. If you take the image as fact, you tend to set a fixed pattern, and then you tend to go ahead through the pattern instead of the action of the day, which could be very different. So learn from the beginning to take images as symbols only, not as fact, and this is true for any image in your awareness. I have to say this because I know very well that if you start seeing things, the mind will have a tendency to say: "That's it!" No, it is not. It is a symbol, an abstraction. If you say: "That's it! ", you limit your awareness to the thingness of the image and miss the life. If you can take it as a symbol only, then you can put a lot more attention on the life involved, and this is what you need.
Another Participant: I can share a difficulty that I've had. On the positive side ,any given goal I have set for myself I have always been able to do, but it's harder for me to remember in the evening to set something for the next day. I often forget, in which case I have to start over again.
Martin: It's a version that you don't always expect, but, of course projecting what is to be done can be forgotten. In a way it's psychologically interesting because there are related aspects in life that come up when you have some ability to check what you do. Being taken in the routine of the usual movement, you might just plain forget to bring the quality you want into life. You can be very effective in the usual movement and forget to bring new aspects into life. These new qualities, in a way, depend on your ability to project what you want to do.
How many of you realize that the position of making a decision is very different from doing it? It is important to notice/ experience that difference. We're coming into a period of time when the M function (creative aspect) becomes much stronger. We come from a period when the U function (figuring out) was strongest. This is why, for instance, you have a real difficulty understanding that the Doer can know the modalities and do at the same time. In the previous period you had to conceive first and eventually even have a mental picture. Not so in the new period everything is together so everything happens simultaneously.
You probably know from your own life the power of habit. So imagine thousands of years with a dominant U function. You cannot wipe it out just like that. You have to become acquainted with the M function. Then you have to bring everything, the A, U, and M,-together in the field of the M function, which ultimately gives you what we call the spaceship. And self-checking, the ability to be aware of what is going on, the ability to follow the movement, etc. -- all this is very needed.
Of course, if you have no will power whatsoever, you are just happy to have done the thing. But if you are a little better skilled, there are other features that come out. There is much more involved in the exercise than it looks like, and the advantage you can take of it by practicing is not just the ability to do something when you decide to, there is a lot more to it. This you will discover little by little.
The ability to tell the difference between the old movement, that we put under the label of U function, and the new movement, which is the real action, must be present. For instance, when you do it "because"... There is no "because" when you actually do it. "Because" belongs to the old movement. You decide to do something, and the next day you do -- that's it. All-out movement -- everything is included. Thus you grow into creativeness.
The more of yourself you put into the movement, the greater the expression. Meaning, what the practice brings to you is dependent on what you put into it. You live on earth, you can put heaven and hell into it. There are some who would want to skip hell, but you ought to realize that if you skip hell you are going to lose balance. If it is weighted on the side of heaven the situation risks tipping over. Then you would land in heaven instead of staying on earth, which is your intention. I don't know if you followed that. Besides the joke, there is a reality here.
Incidentally, yesterday someone said there was no difference after completing the 21 days. I doubt that is true. If you did not notice a change it does not mean that nothing changed, it simply means that you didn't notice. In any practice that is practiced steadily an ability comes out.
…Incidentally, when you have succeeded, you have taken training and come out successfully. Now continue. And all the other trainings are exactly the same -- simple things you do every day. Then you come out with a new ability, a new control over your personality, a new use for your person.
…It's a lot easier to do it systematically than from time to time. When you do it from time to time you haven't created the momentum. Your sub consciousness is not touched. Sub consciousness is mainly habit, and you have to change some habits --so you have to touch the sub-conscious. And this is where you have to do it, steadily, until it touches the whole of you -- super-conscious, conscious, and sub-conscious.
…When you learn to handle your person, don't give it tasks that it cannot do -- this means don't go too fast. If need be, repeat the steps you already made just to create confidence as you said. Then, little by little, increase --let's say, every so many days put in a harder task. Another thing: Give yourself tasks that have a meaning for you -- personal, then deeper and deeper. Progressively. How can you put life in fantasy tasks? If they have meaning you can put life into them -- and this is what you are looking for, the ability to put life into what you do. Otherwise you just do your duty. That's not creative. You can do the same task one day that you did the day before, but you do it with a deeper meaning. It's not the form that is important, but the meaning you bring through the form. Why not put a touch of beauty in your life, or a touch of sacredness. If it has any meaning If it has any meaning for you, why not put a touch of soul into what you do. And so on.
….Speaking of symbols, I want to come back to an aspect of Easter that you don't find in books.
As you know, with the cross you have to let go of everything, even your life. This is the holy poverty or absolute poverty of St. Francis.
In classical teachings the blood symbolically carried the soul. So, on the cross, you have the blood of Jesus, with the Christ acting directly through that personality, falling to the earth. Symbolically, at that moment, Christ ensouled the earth -- from that moment the earth became the body of that Planetary Entity. The moment Christ ensouled the earth, He was a spaceship. So one of the aspects of the other side of the cross is the appearance of the spaceship -- Christ as spaceship if you want.
I want you to follow something else: In occult knowledge, it is known that during the Piscean Age the action of the Christ was worked out by initiates, away from the public, completely hidden. Now it comes into the open. One of the symptoms of this is that man has learned to make spaceships. Very timidly lie goes to the moon, he shuttles into space, but the move is started -- away from the earth, away from geo-centeredness.
To create a spaceship -- man as spaceship -- requires some mastery, and for a long time now I have given hints toward establishing some mastery of consciousness and I've noticed very poor response. Somehow it occurred to me that the response might be so poor because you have no examples, no idea what is involved in mastery.
I came to this, as it often happens, because one person in the group hit a certain note. It happened this time in Mammoth with Dany . One day she suddenly remarked on a type of mastery we have, and what struck me was that her realization for once was not conceptual but factual. So I'm acting on it. I'm going to tell you a few things, but first I would like Dany to tell you what happened.
Dany : Martin and Georgette had been working as they do here with us, and then just the next sentence was about something very mundane around the house. I realized that the whole was present in that mundane thing. There was absolutely no change. I also realized how much we always adjust our little selves to what we do, forgetting that it's not this way at all.
Martin: In other words, that kind of duality between spirituality and the mundane aspect that you usually enjoy does not exist for us -- there is just one situation.
So let's go to some serious stuff on the training of the mind.
Did you ever try to find a boundary between your mind and another mind? Try to look for it, you won't find it. You have your way of using the mind so you say it is your mind, but it is not your mind, it is simply your way of using it.
Remember, I have to speak so I say "I", but for me it is the mind, not my mind. I use it in certain ways, but I have no possessiveness over this mind.
If there is no possessiveness the sense of identity cannot be the same, because one of the features of the known ego is possessiveness. Lose possessiveness and you change identity.
….the sense of identity is open-ended. Everything is open ended. It has learned not be final about what it decides -- because it's a tool that is not yet fully developed. Further, when a tool is fully developed it's not final either; it's only what is going on within a given function. That's a training for the mind.
But let's begin with something simple: being able to tell the difference between an action that is of negative polarity (psychologically related to the sub-conscious) and one that is of positive polarity (psychologically related to the super-conscious), and being able to note the balance between the two -- how they work together or don't work together. My mind has learned to notice these things.
You simply teach the mind to look for these two polarities. You observe, work, do the 21 days, whatever... and then one day you will realize that the mind actually becomes able to make the difference. You will be able to tell when someone is acting "mind-wise" or simply acting. You don't need a special super-conscious for this, you can do it consciously.
Then we have something else. if you want to understand what you can do with the mind, you first have to realize what the mind does. It has two characteristics, which are quite evident: The mind is reflective and it also abstracts, or takes from the whole only certain aspects. If you doubt that the mind abstracts, simply try to convey an experience. You use a lot of sentences but you never give the whole picture. You just can't. You give aspects of it, but not the whole experience. Okay, knowing this, what do you do?
Challenge the mind. Observe. Observe. Observe. Here you abstract. Here you abstract Here you abstract. Your abstractions are reflections. You live the fullness of this and reflect that....
Teach the mind to recognize these two functions. Once you have taught the mind to recognize these two functions, then the mind is at liberty to realize that it has a lot of other functions. You use it in the way you do because you are educated that way. Society uses it that way, so you say the mind is SO When you say the mind is SO your statement is a reflection. It's not the real situation -- never.
If you discover the reflecting aspect of the mind and you become familiar with it, you might be in a position to find what we call the direct mode or the non-reflecting mode. That part of the mind is able to act directly without the need to abstract or reflect, but you usually won't find it if you have not realized how your mind works.
You have heard me speak of these things before. Now I would like you to realize that this person, this mind has learned to see these differences, to realize, to discover other modes -- not one mode but many.
Or, for instance, you have to teach the mind to recognize the difference between the mind function and the emotional function. Mind awareness and emotional awareness. There are differences.
You can go further. You can tell the mind to face what is above the mind -- what the mind is reflecting, what the mind is abstracting. Where does the impulse come from? You can go to a book and read that manas is above the mind and figure out this is where you get your ideas from. But let's be frank, your mind has not had the experience of recognizing another function, you have just used the mind to concoct another theory. When the mind faces another function, it simply faces another function, or, if you want, a quality of life. The labels given are simply for convenience when we speak, but the experience has no labels. So be careful, what you figure out belongs to the reflecting and abstracting mode. The experience is something else.
We have the proposition with the hologram, for instance, to learn to discover other orders of life. Now here the mind faces an impossibility . I say this because according to the rules of the game of the hologram, all knowledge, of whatever kind, belongs to the greenhorn, and you must not project any of it beyond that. If you can train your mind to respect this rule, the mind learns to face something that is utterly and completely different. Teaching your mind to face another order of life that is completely different means strict discipline: You cannot and must not project any known reference into another order.
I do not speak of theory. I taught my mind to do just that. Sometimes you don't realize that we show you every step. if I say I can do this or that with my mind, I say it from experience. I have done it. You can challenge the statement of the mind that says: "the experience is this".
As soon as the mind realizes that what it gives is an abstraction of an event, oblige it to come back to the event itself -- meaning continue to live it. Experiencing, without the veils of consciousness, is all-encompassing. By definition, if it is all-encompassing it has no feature, or all features together. When the mind abstracts there are features, and the fullness of the experience is what we call livance . Learn to use livance . From livance you can abstract all that you want.
And I do suggest that for the training of the mind you learn to take everything as open-ended. Nowadays it is accepted that when you determine through an experience the features of something your position is going to determine what is found. So if you find some definite features, the mind has to know that it only appears so, seen from that angle -- that it is not so in totality. We can take several angles or points of view, depending upon what we have to do, then other features pop up. A crystal, for instance, would be a very different thing for a geologist than for us -- for us it's not the same object, not the same life, not the same range.
…My mind has the faculty to follow what is going on, abstract or reflect certain things, and when it does it, it is able to recognize whether what is abstracted is a projection of a desire, a need, a thought trend, or the actual experience going on. The mind has learned to make these differences.
It sometimes happens that the mind abstracts some aspect, let us say a symbol, it can find out if the symbol is false (meaning a psychological projection of a need) or if it is a symbol, pure and simple, of what is going on. It's able to double-check itself .
It has other means too. It can recognize the life quality in what is going on. The mind is usually happy to think along a certain line and thus include in that line what is going on, instead of the reverse which has another quality. The actual experience has a third quality. My mind is able to make the difference.
Things going on in the mind are always double checked -- always. You can train your mind to do that. When you do that you won't ever again have the tendency to grasp something and say it is S0 -- and believe it. I have known this condition, I don't know it anymore.
There is a funny feature I find in my mind that I've had for a long time. I am always aware of choosing expressions that I've heard, or read, or seen somewhere -- borrowing from the surroundings. It consciously abstracts, meaning it chooses what is useful.
This is what happens when the mind gets centered on life, in other words, on the experience itself, on what is going on. The experience is not an image, it's life going on.
I have to tell you these things so that you can realize that you can change awareness, but, for that you have to take certain steps -- 21 days are very modest.
Participant: A few minutes ago I had an awareness of an experience in myself. I was realizing that the general lack of enthusiasm I experience about life itself is a result of feeling trapped by my mind. After hearing what's been going on, there was a light for a moment -- I saw that I actually could get out of the trap if I could just work on it instead of trying to run from it.
Martin: That makes sense.
This relates to a situation that we have often spoken of, but you might not realize that it is actually true. We come from a time when the personality, presided over by the ego, was separated from its whole at every incarnation so that the personality (those functions) could be matured and developed to the point of being useful. With the Christ Impulse these functions begin to be reunited with the whole, but the pattern of memory makes you work according to the past. The past has a faint memory of something higher, which is perfectly correct, but we are here to say the higher is here. It is here in the first place and the separation is artificial -- it never was real.
Participant: I experience something that I feel as a gap. I don't know exactly how to
….You are aware of that other quality of life, but it's not the normal consciousness. The mind decides that if it cannot grasp it is of no use. This means that your mind is not trained to respect the life as is without wanting to grasp it. It will use the mind, whereas in the reflection the mind wants to use it.
Then there is another point: If you recognize the mind as one function, please recognize the other awareness as another function and don't mix them . They have two different uses.
…. The type of identity that says "I" is the one identified with consciousness not with the other awareness .. I urge you to train your mind to acknowledge that identity is a variable, a kind of point of leverage. Somewhere you have to have leverage for your action and you call this your identity. If you live something else and you want to live on the level of that something else you have to have a corresponding identity. One source of many difficulties is that you stay with the same identity for all situations and this does not work.
You have to very consciously loosen your sense of identity, and realize it's only relative. If you are honest with yourself and you live the other condition, you don't have the same sense of identity. Respect that and eventually you will be able to stay with that new sense of identity and act from there -- including acting through consciousness.
The lower self cannot act on the so-called higher, it has to grab it, meaning reduce it to its own functions, and this is the biggest mistake most people make.
For instance, sometimes when we work and are dealing with another order of life, we don't use any consciousness at all, the usual awareness is gone, including the sense of body -- but we don't ask that of you.
Something that might interest you... I remember some years ago being aware of a certain condition (not mind-wise), and I was also aware of the mind trying to grasp and not being able to. then i realized that if i opened the whole situation to the mind the mind couldn't take it, so I had to feed bits of the event into the mind drop by tiny drop. I don't remember how many days it took. That's part of educating the mind, just to give you a perspective.
There is that which the mind can do on its own level and there is that part that you do from a higher level (whatever "you" is).
The mind has to go through a fitness training, but, in addition to that, you also have to tune the mind according to what you need, not just for overall fitness.
If I take for instance the down-and-away exercise I gave in the book: It hints that suddenly you are in a condition where the usual movements are completely gone. As you begin to realize ,these are not idle words, it's an ability you have to have in your mind, and you have to train for it.
You spoke of soul, you desire soul. Take the desire exercise: If the desire exercise is really done, you may come out soul-wise at will. It does not mean that you will sense soul. Sensing soul is only a step in between. It's better than nothing, of course, but if you are really purposeful and you mean to do the work, it means you come out as soul.
A mastery is a mastery. Why do you think they speak of masters in initiation. It's not exactly a title or rank. Basically these people do master situations and the whole process of initiation is a mastery .
Now in relation to that I have to say something. You have to be aware that all prior teachings, including the Bible, were given for the benefit of the ego-centered awareness, and you are confronting a situation in which, at least for those who pioneer, you face a new situation. The image man has of humanity will be completely gone. It's a very poor photograph of a real situation. You might one day realize that when we say we see you differently we mean it. Hopefully you will awaken to the reality too.
So, please realize the teachings as they are understood and presented are always limited to earth. They sometimes speak of something else, but they insist that you have to deal only with the aspect earth. Ego and earth are the same, and one day you will learn to break the bondage of earth. If you deal with the dynamics of the whole, you cannot say man is created from earth alone. You are in relation with the cosmos. Why limit yourself to the earth aspect alone? And the mind learns to break the bondage.
…Sometimes you meet someone and you have an impression this is the time to put the challenge to work. First acknowledge the impression, then, in your impression certain features will come up. Drop these and start over again, you can do better. By doing this several times (it's like taking pictures from several sides) you might suddenly hit the sensitive point and this is where you have to act. You have to be able to have an impression, register it, drop it, and then have a new impression. This is challenging and is along the line of the position you have to take.
You might come from a discussion with someone, meet a new person, and then suddenly realize you're way off. Okay, drop it and go ahead, but don't oblige the movement to change progressively until it meets the new person. Of course you can do it both ways, but there is a gradual change, meaning you are obliged to keep the movement so that consciousness can register what it does. You keep the movement until it comes to the point where it can meet the other person -- which brings along changes. But do it so that you can double-check, otherwise it's too conceptual. If it is conceptual you remain in the U mode when you are looking for an M mode.
Now you might begin to realize by practice that the mind needs serious training to free itself from the usual, to become a more complete and better tool. Vision hints at something that is reflected. Go with the quality of life the richness of life that is reflected, don’t hang on to the vision itself.
This applies to the physical vision as well. Don’t get hung up on the way you see your person (which gives you your belief of what a human being is). You experience a physical body in a certain way because of the composition of the tools, it does not mean that the so-called physical body is that way. You experience it as concrete because of sensory awareness and for that awareness it is concrete, but increase the awareness and you suddenly realize that you experience the body as not being solid. I have to warn you, these are very real experiences and if you are not ready and it happens you will receive a shock.
So be ready. And this means a training of consciousness –simple logical training – and respect for what you really are. Teach the consciousness to face what you really are.
I have another practical suggestion: Every time you come here, respect this place as a sacred place, a place where divine action goes on. Every time you use your person as a sacred place. It is your body, be careful what you do with it. Keep the quality, the fineness, the beauty of sacredness. If you’ve lost it, ask your soul to give it back.
We are going to play a piece of music we call the spaceship. It's a piece you've already heard from Vangelis. We always use it in the same direction: something different and alien. You're in a spaceship as soon as the music starts. If you meet aliens of course you adjust to what they are. By definition they are very alien -- very different from the usual. You don't have to do anything; it will sink in you as it always does. Just enjoy it. You might even realize that we know what we do. Consciousness is familiar not only with earth-bound aspects, it is also familiar with the other position. So let's go.
(Music)