If it’s true, as Alice Bailey said, that All that IS is ever present, that implies that everything that we need is available to us right now. We don’t necessarily see the reality of a situation because we are so preconditioned by our expectations, our past experiences and our limited knowledge.
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 for today is Consciousness, part three. All of the dialogue that you’ll hear on this show emanates from the works of Alice Bailey, the founder of the Lucis Trust organization, who wrote twenty-four volumes of books. The essence of those works is what you’ll hear in dialogue every week when you tune into our show. This thought is from Alice Bailey: “What must be grasped is that all that IS is ever present.” We were speaking a lot about consciousness last time, and we’re going to explore that further. Sarah was speaking about the separated self, and about individuality that is so apparent and so physical and so tangible that it actually can be a barrier to the expansion of consciousness. Sarah, I’d like you to explore that a little bit further for our audience.
Sarah: I think the point that I was trying to make was that in the evolution that occurs in the human kingdom, part of the experience and the contribution of being a human being is the development of this sense of individuality, of being a self. That is unique to the human being. It’s said in the writings of Alice Bailey that identity ever continues on the path of evolution. But the sense of being a separated, unique self is not something that we take with us into the higher realms of consciousness. We have to relinquish it because it becomes perhaps the most important barrier of all the ones that we face, and yet we have to progress through that stage of being a self, so that God or divinity can be present in matter. This sense of being a self is the response — the limited, imperfect response — to being aware within our material or physical body. I was thinking about the Buddhist teaching that warns against the pairs of opposites, and that preaches the Noble Middle Way between the pairs of opposites. We tend to think that all of life is quite naturally founded on dualities, and we tend to pick one that we prefer over the other. Dualities like pleasure and pain, we would prefer pleasure; good and bad, we would prefer good; the beautiful and the ugly, we would prefer the beautiful. We use a cleaver in our thinking to divide the world into dualities and the most important duality is our self and the world. There is a separation in that consciousness of being a self. It automatically supposes that we are separate from and apart from the world as we observe it. Well, it’s said in spiritual teachings of all sorts that this is where our problem resides. The writings of Alice Bailey say that the whole secret of the world glamour, the fog and illusion, lies hid in the thought of being a separated unit and that the only way out of it is to find that higher transcendent point of unity. To me, the image I get in my mind is that of a tightrope walker who literally transcends the pairs of opposites: is above them and yet in a way unifies them by the creation of that third point that transcends and completes the picture. There was a Persian mystical poet named Kabir who lived many centuries ago, who said, “Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray.” I love that! Behold but One in all things — One meaning Reality in all things — it’s the second that leads you astray. Aldous Huxley pointed out in his wonderful little book The Perennial Philosophy that even language expresses this recognition that the second leads you astray. He said that, for example, in the Greek language the prefix ‘dys-’ as in dyspepsia has that connotation of something gone wrong. In Latin, the prefixes ‘dis-’ and ‘dys-’, as in dishonorable, dysfunctional, both imply that the second aspect brings in trouble, that there’s an imbalance and a tension created in these pairs of opposites that is reflecting this realization that on some level reality is one. In the Alice Bailey writings, the word would be synthetic, that the reality that our consciousness is trying to grasp is completely synthetic, whole, unified, total, integrated.
Dale: Yes, that’s really the objective behind the working of the soul in the world, to rediscover what actually is. In other words, in the opening thought that says, “All that IS is ever present,” that oneness is ever present, and the wholeness is ever present. What we have to do as individual cells is to rediscover that.
Sarah: Is that why the Buddhist teaching, and Hinduism too, so stress acceptance? That when we resist, when we prefer this over that, when we resist the dualities and try to fight for one over the other—pleasure over pain, joy over sorrow—rather than accepting, we’re not coming to terms with the wholeness.
Dale: You’re not finding the middle way, I suppose. You’re moving towards one or the other. It’s not either pleasure or pain, it’s finding the middle path between them, which sounds like a contradiction, but it’s really neither one nor the other. It’s the pathway between them. That’s the only way you can really transcend pleasure and pain.
Sarah: These barriers to consciousness that we were talking about last time, there are so many of them, but maybe we’ve hit on the most central one, which is the sense of being a separated unit in consciousness.
Robert: Well, I think also that a basic premise of this too is: for reality and consciousness to know anything depends on the consciousness of the knower. So, that’s why it’s so important to expand our consciousness as we each evolve. How is consciousness related to seeing, or are they related?
Sarah: Well, they are because you just touched on that. It relates to the knower. We bring a pair of eyes to our experience. What I mean is we bring a point of view, an attitude, an expectation, and a lot of illusion and fog and a tape that’s running in our heads—we bring all of that to our experience of reality. We probably think that when we go through an experience, we’re seeing it as it is and we give our impression to somebody else of what happened and expect them to understand it in the same way we did, but such is not the case. We don’t necessarily see the reality of the situation because we are so preconditioned by our expectations, our past experiences and our limited knowledge. That’s again a problem of consciousness. The poet Coleridge said that “imagination is the agent of perception,” which I think is suggesting that if we are elastic enough in our view of life, if we are plastic enough, pliable enough to stretch our imagination to encompass a situation that might tend to throw us off balance but in fact can teach us a great deal, then we can learn from it and not be overwhelmed by it.
Dale: I was thinking, while you were speaking, about examples of consciousness being related to seeing. I think the Bailey books somewhere give the example of an infant that develops very gradually the ability to see and to understand his environment. First, the only environment that they see is the crib that they’re in, or the faces of their parents, their mother and father, maybe siblings and gradually their little world begins to expand beyond the crib and into the family life, and as this little person grows, their whole life around them expands as they move into the community, and so forth. Similarly, I think we human beings are at kind of an infant stage or an adolescent stage perhaps, where we are just learning to see and to understand our environment, the Earth. We’re just now learning to see what this Earth really is. It’s our place in the solar system and our place in the universe, and not only the physical universe, but the spiritual universe; there is a spiritual component to the universe. So, I think that there are these examples that we can look at that may help us to understand what seeing really means.
Sarah: Some synonyms for consciousness might help people to realize what we are talking about, too: awareness, perception, recognition. All of these imply that we have to open our eyes to see what is right in front of us. The opening thought about what must be grasped is that all that IS is ever present really is something that kind of disturbs me in the sense that I know the truth of it intuitively, and it really bothers me that I am not able to see all that is probably right in front of me. In other words, I don’t think that we have to go anywhere. A lot of people, when they think of the spiritual path, probably create an image of a road that leads from here to there and that will take them away from whatever is present in their life now, to a better place. But in fact, if it’s true, as Alice Bailey said, that All that IS is ever present, that implies that everything that we need is available to us right now. But we can’t see it. We can’t recognize it, and that’s what really disturbs me.
Dale: You don’t have to go off to some ashram in India to find your path; it’s right here within you.
Sarah: It comes back to that word “acceptance” that I mentioned a while ago. I really think there’s a lot to be gained from pondering on that term. So many of us — especially I think in the West — tend to be fighters, warriors, people who struggle and see life as conflict, and you battle your way forward and fight your way into a better stage of living and so on. Whereas, if you try just to accept what the present state of reality is and see it for the utterly perfect opportunity it probably provides you right now, that might be a lot more beneficial. It’s an alien attitude to me, but I’m working on it (laughs)–that reality is absolutely perfect right now. How about trying that idea on and living by it, no matter what hardship or struggle you’re going through? Maybe it’s just right for you now.
Robert: I see. That is an interesting approach to what reality is about, and also, if we can think of what Christ said, too — you were mentioning before Sarah, about how we go chasing and looking for things when all of our reality might be with us all along — what Christ said was that the “Kingdom of God is within us,” so that certainly underscores what you were saying. Before we go on to the next question, I’m wondering whether or not you have any more to say about this idea that we are exploring.
Sarah: Well, I do. I was doing a little research for this program and I came across a wonderful quotation from William Blake. He said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” I love that because that again is a way of saying that reality is already perfect and whole. Our perception of it is fractured and fragmented, but in its innermost real state, it is already complete and whole and perfect. I found that an extraordinary thought!
Robert: I couldn’t help but think — before, when you were speaking about different perceptions people have of reality, looking at the same issue and seeing it from different levels of consciousness — I was reading something disturbing the other day about someone who I guess was very materialistic, saying that the worth of the human body when you break it down to set dollars and cents is now ten dollars and fifty cents. (laughter) How does that compare with Shakespeare, for example, who looked at human beings as a work of art with the creation of the universe within? Here are two people looking at it from different points of view and different levels of consciousness. Apparently it’s true then that not everyone is really at the same stage of consciousness.
Sarah: No, you’ve just given a splendid example of how they’re not.
Robert: Can you speak more about that, about the different levels of consciousness that people are at?
Sarah: Well, it is an interesting topic and I was wondering where the stream of consciousness concept comes into all this. Anybody who’s read James Joyce’s book Ulysses—well, that was, I think, one of the first depictions of the stream of consciousness as a run-on flow of thought without punctuation or the normal self-imposed limitations for propriety and for all the kinds of rules that we’re supposed to follow. I think the book came at a time when the inner subliminal consciousness was being exposed on a number of levels through the work of the psychologists like Freud and Jung and through great artists like Picasso and Braque, who deconstructed the known world and reassembled it in a whole new way. Where does the stream of consciousness come into this? Because it kind of implies that when consciousness is really allowed to rip, it exposes a lot of emotional and subliminal and unpleasant levels. That’s not what we’re talking about at all, is it?
Dale: No, I think we’re talking about different stages in consciousness. We’re not all at the same stage.
Sarah: I suppose we have to get in touch with that subliminal kind of stream of consciousness to acknowledge it, right? And then transcend it?
Dale: Yes, a lot of it is just part of our past and that keeps coming up in an endless flow.
Sarah: Maybe it’s the tape my friend mentioned: the tape that we play in our head.
Dale: Yeah, and it’s all streaming from the memory banks. I think within each person there is what they call “permanent atoms” that are like little memory banks that store up all the experience of our past. We bring it into this life and it’s all sitting there and it can be brought up if one wants to, but it’s probably best left where it is.
Sarah: Could be retrogressive.
Dale: Yes, there is some tendency to bring all this stuff up from past lives, but it probably leads to a lot more anxiety if one does that. So, I think we’re not really equal in consciousness; we’re perhaps created equal in potential, but we’re certainly not equal in terms of where people are in the level and degree of awareness in consciousness.
Sarah: John Adams put it beautifully. The writer David McCullough said that Adams said that we are all equal in our divine origin and we are all equal before the law, but we’re not equal in attainment or in capacity or in consciousness. One of the most extraordinary stories of the Buddha that I think responds to this question was in Houston Smith’s book The Religions of Man—that Buddha was so extraordinary that when people asked him, “What are you?” he said, “I am awake.” That’s what made him so unique. He was awake and his name Buddha literally means “the Awakened One”–One who is fully present and fully aware of life on its most real level; he saw life as it is. That was the achievement of his struggle to break through in consciousness by sitting under the Bodhi tree for forty days. That’s the story of Buddha’s enlightenment. He made that breakthrough in consciousness that cut through all the barriers, all the veils and saw life whole and complete, and he set about trying to share that realization for the rest of his life, and Buddhism lives on in that pursuit of reality.
Robert: Am I to understand then, Sarah and Dale, that if consciousness is a stage in evolution, then are we all at different stages of evolution, even as we coexist on this planet?
Sarah: Yes, I think it’s an important realization to understand about people. It’s not judgmental and it’s not discriminatory, it’s just realistic. I think we have to not expect more than is possible for a human being to meet. We can’t ask of each person the same standard of expression and realization. Different people have different stages or goals that they are in process of reaching, and they’re not the same for everybody. One of the great gifts of a good teacher is the ability to recognize where the student stands in their evolutionary enfoldment and help that person take what is their next step forward in consciousness—theirs, not the teacher’s. In other words, for some people it might be the best thing for them to be a fully self-focused, rather selfishly oriented individual who is bent on being the best they can be. That might be the right achievement for that person, but for another person, something much more selfless and focused on sacrificial giving might be the right stage.
Dale: Yes, and we have to recognize that there are many stages beyond where we are. We talk about the soul and the mind. That’s just one of the stages. The mind, of course, is recognized as the sixth sense, the synthesizing sense that synthesizes all the information we get through the five senses. But even beyond that, there is the seventh sense, the intuition, and that’s another level altogether that lies above the strictly mental level of understanding. In fact, I think even beyond the intuition, there is another layer yet. So, we still have a long, long way to go and many more stages to develop.
Sarah: That comes back to the idea of using the imagination, because that’s an aspect of the intuition, to “use the imagination as an agent of perception,” Coleridge said. If you want to move into a new sphere of reality, try to imagine a more expanded universe and yourself as a part of it.
Robert: That’s about all the time we have for our discussion today. You’ve been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would 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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