What must be grasped is that all that is, is ever present.
Robert: Welcome to Inner Sight. Inner sight is simply seeing that which is always present but not yet fully recognized. You have within you the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way, with new eyes, so stay with us and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our topic today is Consciousness, part 2, and our opening thought is from the works of Alice Bailey, the founder of the Lucis Trust organization, which sponsors this show. She wrote twenty-four volumes of books and all of the dialogue that you’ll hear on this show emanates from those, as does this thought: “What must be grasped is that all that is, is ever present.” I can’t help but think of twentieth century science that we’re still continuing to explore and understand, and to me, this statement by Alice Bailey is very much in sync with quantum physics. The idea that Alice Bailey is setting forth here is that all that ever was, all that ever is, and all that ever will be, does exist out there somewhere in time. We talked before about the expansion of consciousness. What psychological effect does such an expansion have on an individual?
Sarah: I think it can be transformative. It can be like an earthquake, depending on what the expansion entails. These expansions of consciousness can occur for many reasons, from those kinds of induced experiences that anybody who remembers the 1960s can trace back to the use of LSD and other mind-altering drugs, to religious practices, to the quest for self understanding that can be put into motion by a really deep psychological crisis. Any number of paths can lead one to an expansion of consciousness, and they can be devastating or exhilarating depending on how one reacts to them.
Dale: They can have a good or a bad effect. Usually, these expansions enable a person to see more and to understand more of the world beyond his little self, and as I said, it can have good or bad effects depending on how one is able to handle this new information, this new energy. Expansions can be vertical as well as horizontal, and by that I mean you can experience horizontal expansions, where you understand more of the physical world, the tangible world which you live in, but then there is what you call the vertical expansions that are upward or inward to the soul level, and one grasps more and more of that realm of consciousness.
Sarah: One of the parables from the Bible that I think relates to this topic is the parable of the man who built his house on sand, and his house was blown away in a storm, and he was left with nothing. Then there was the person who built his house on a solid foundation of rock, and he survived the storm. The whole point of that parable is to tell us that when we don’t have a secure foundation in our lives and we undergo a crisis, we experience a kind of devastating reaction that doesn’t necessarily expand the consciousness; it can be contracting if anything, it can turn you in upon yourself. But if you have that solid spiritual foundation under you, you can weather a crisis and emerge with a more expanded sense of who you are, an expanded sense of what your possibilities are as a child of God; not in the sense of an ego flattering kind of self knowledge, but with the power and the stability that come from knowing what you are capable of enduring, what you can weather and still survive, and how much you identify with the rest of humanity. These are all psychological effects, aren’t they?
Dale: Yes and those expansions, if they’re related to moving closer to the soul or opening up more to the soul level, then that opens one up to an inflow of energy—the more powerful energies of the soul—and these can have very subtle effects on one’s consciousness that can lead to either more stability, or actually instability. In some cases, this can perhaps even lead to a lot of anxiety and neuroses of different kinds. There is this sudden inflow of energy that maybe the physical brain or the lower personality is not yet ready to handle. It makes it difficult for all this stimulation to come pouring in if we don’t see it as that or don’t identify it as that; but that’s really what’s happening in many of these cases.
Sarah: But these experiences, even when they are devastating to the personality, they can often be very fruitful in the long run. That’s why new experience of all types is so often growth producing. You know the old bromide about how travel is broadening? It really is because it leads you into new experiences, into contact with people that you’ve never met before, into an experience of cultures that might be very different than your own. That’s one example of an expansion of consciousness that might have some discomfort with it, but it leads to a greater sense of the one humanity. The same with education, it can expand the consciousness. It takes a lot of hard work to pursue an education, but you come out on the other side to a broader sense of the world and your place in it.
Dale: One of the sayings in the Bailey writings is from the result of one of these expansions, that one should become a “citizen of the world,” and that’s the long-range goal of these expansions of consciousness.
Sarah: Maybe it would be helpful to review — I think we were talking about this last time in our discussion of consciousness — that consciousness is the production, if you will, that results from the contact of pure spirit, pure divine energy, with matter or form, and both are needed by God. The spirit of God needs matter in which to manifest, and the contact of spirit with the material realm slowly, gradually produces consciousness, which is the sensitivity to the energy of life. Consciousness is another term for the soul, which is this awareness of being both divine in origin and capable of experiencing and manifesting in the world of form. My point is that sensitivity is the result of this impact and part of it; it can be painful, but it can also break down the borders that one has erected around oneself. This is, I think, the whole point of expanding the consciousness: to break out of this self-imposed barrier that makes one — while he is living in the material outer world — think that he is a separated unit of consciousness. That’s the central illusion about life on Earth that all of us who are not fully spiritually realized people have. We’re wrong in assuming that we are separated individuals apart from the whole of life and separate from our fellow men. It’s a profound illusion.
Dale: When one reaches that point of realizing that there is something more, another stage or another layer, another level that one encounters, this often brings up a point of tension and conflict within the person because the decision has to be made whether to adjust to the higher values of the soul, the higher values that one encounters in this expansion, or to stay with an old pattern of thinking that one had in that old life of the past before this expansion. So, there is a real conflict that crops up in people, I think.
Robert: What are the barriers to expanding the consciousness?
Sarah: Well, the sense that we, by residing in a form, a body, are separate from other people. That’s one major barrier. Why the world is made so that we have individual personalities and individual bodies I don’t know. It must fulfill some part in the Plan because this is where the varied and diverse contribution of human beings can be offered to the Plan, through the experience in the equipment that each of us has in a particular lifetime, but on the level of consciousness we don’t have those barriers, and yet we assume they are there. That’s what to me is so interesting about consciousness: that it really is a reflection of what we assume about life. We tend to think that what we experience, what we think, what we are aware of, is reality. But more and more, I’m beginning to realize it isn’t necessarily reality at all. It’s just what we think. It’s a construct that we have created for ourselves, probably over many, many incarnations, and we bring it back with us every time we are reborn. A friend of mine said the other day, “We all have these tapes playing in our heads.” Well, each of us has a tape that we run constantly, and that is our consciousness that we mistake for reality. The central problem is to figure out how to get beyond that tape, to make that breakthrough to a level of reality that is as God experiences the world.
Dale: You mentioned earlier about the illusions that we create as being barriers, and I was just thinking a good example of that was like the illusions created by the faulty accounting practices of Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Anderson and those other companies. They created the illusion of growing, expanding and profitable companies, but actually when you look past that illusion, there was nothing but falseness there.
Sarah: It’s a good example because there’s another scandal that recently came to light. I can’t think of who to attribute it to, but an accountant said that the minute he looked at their books, he realized what they had done. It was a totally fabricated picture that they were trying to present and that anybody with any knowledge of accounting could see through immediately, and again it’s an indication of the fabulousness, I guess — to use the real meaning of the word — the fabulousness of their creation which really has no foundation to it. So, our point is that reality is not necessarily what we present it to be.
Dale: Right. All the investors assumed that what they were reading and what they were hearing was reality, was the truth.
Sarah: They wanted it to be, and they didn’t look too hard.
Dale: That’s where we all buy into the illusion part of it, by investing because we also want the same profits. We want to be part of this growth so we’re willing to go along with what appears to be reality.
Robert: I think another point of this whole discussion is that our consciousness, whether it be illusion or real, determines our behavior. That’s why consciousness is so important. I can’t help but always be reminded of that nice quotation by Victor Hugo that once the mind expands to a new dimension, it can never return to its original form. I think that’s so true and it’s very similar to what you were saying earlier. What are some of the subtle ways that affect the change in human consciousness?
Sarah: If possible, before we respond to that, I’d like to come back to the issue of what the barriers are to the expanding of consciousness. I think enough hasn’t been said about this sense of being a separated unit, an individual. From my understanding, the whole issue of consciousness and the expansion of consciousness centres on this realization in the human being that he is a self. We talked in the previous program about consciousness and how it actually permeates all levels of life, from the mineral kingdom, the vegetable kingdom, the animal kingdom, as well as human. I think you can watch an ant colony or a beehive and know that consciousness does organize life on that level in a way that is quite extraordinary, but the unique thing about the human being is that he realizes he is an individual and a unit—an entity, I guess you could say. He’s aware; he’s self-aware and that is such a significant and essential recognition, but the problem is that we stay stuck in it. We like being separate, apparently, with all its sorrow and loneliness from time to time; we like thinking that we are self-ruling and self-maintaining, when in fact we’re not. We live within a much greater life. We live within the life of God, and yet Western religion seems to present an idea that God resides outside of and apart from the manifested world. To my mind, one of the great contributions of the Eastern religious view is that God, yes, is transcendent, apart from, above and beyond the created world and much greater than that, but also present within it, in every aspect of it. So, the sense of the self is needed to be aware of one’s own potential divinity, but when we reside within that sense of being a separated self, we build a prison, we build a barrier.
Dale: Yes, this self-centeredness is a stage we have to go through; I suppose from the herd. I mean, we’ll work our way up through the animal kingdom and then into the human Kingdom and it’s at that point that the self becomes apparent and we become an individual. This is a stage that’s necessary because we just can’t go from varied consciousness into the next stage of group consciousness, which we’ve talked about before. It’s an inevitable stage that we have to just struggle through and make our way through it and make all kinds of mistakes. So, yes, this is the great barrier to moving on, and I was thinking of these entrenched attitudes that so many people tend to have sometimes and entrenched ways of thinking; they are happy in their little niche in the world and they’re suspicious of every other kind of thinking outside the box, so to speak. I’m thinking of the Luddite mentality. They were this group of individuals in England I think, back in the nineteenth century, who were anti-technology.
Sarah: The Unabomber claimed he was a Luddite.
Dale: It’s individuals and groups of individuals that are stuck and they see no need to move.
Sarah: That’s why sometimes a good crisis is an effective blow against the head that shocks one out of that dream.
Robert: That could be the catalyst that brings us into a new dimension of consciousness, I guess.
Sarah: But wouldn’t you say that humanity is really profoundly polarized in this stage of being vividly self-aware? Not only on an individual level, but whole masses and nations are aware of themselves. The nation state is a fairly new construct as I understand it, of just the last century or two, and again, that’s an expression of self-hood which is necessary, but also becomes a limitation.
Dale: Yes, it becomes a question of sovereignty and that’s a big question that people in every nation are going to have to give way on. In other words, if we are going to realize our oneness and the one humanity, then some of this staunch call for sovereignty will have to be let go, I think.
Sarah: The difficulty is in realizing that the sense of self-containment, of independence can be released, and yet you don’t lose your own spiritual autonomy. You can give up a certain amount of separateness without giving up real spiritual freedom. In fact, you gain it. You gain freedom.
Dale: Yes, that’s the thing that’s hard for them to realize. Perhaps you’re really gaining more in the long run than what you’re giving up. You’re gaining even if you have to give up some sovereignty, you’re gaining more unification with the world.
Sarah: But it’s hard to believe that until you’re really ready to make that leap. I think humanity is really engaged in this process on a massive level today where we have such extreme examples of selfishness and of creativity, which also is an aspect of the consciousness of the self. Great gifted contributions are visible, but also extreme selfishness. I suppose these are all signs that we are poised on this threshold of being ready to merge into a larger, more expanded consciousness, if not of the one humanity, at least of some larger realm of group relationship. I hope so.
Dale: It’s something that has to come because of what’s in store for humanity just over the horizon, so to speak, in this new age that were coming into.
Sarah: What do you mean?
Dale: Well, the universality in consciousness that we’re moving toward. This is what human consciousness is moving towards and will eventually develop through humanity. There will be the expression of universal awareness, and I think that’s what’s ahead for the human race.
Sarah: But you can’t even begin to prepare for that kind of awareness until you have given up some of your sense of being separate from, apart from, different than, perhaps better than everybody else. Maybe next time we can get into this whole discussion of being separated from the larger whole because it’s a fascinating area to ponder on.
Robert: It’s not just an Eastern religion concept. It’s also the latest science that in truth everything and all of life is connected. That’s the reality, and the illusion is what we were talking about before, that we are separate entities, and that’s the falsehood. It’s also interesting to just talk about that idea. I read an article in Science News not too long ago about how ninety percent of the science that was considered to be true and real back in the 1890’s is now considered to be false, so with that note, we should all keep open minded about new possibilities for what reality is. That’s about all the time we have for our discussion today. You’ve been listening to Inner Sight. Now we’d like to close with a world prayer called the Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
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