We ended the last presentation by looking at what liberation from the physical world meant. When you escape your shackles to the physical attractions around you, your desire to engage with them diminishes to a point where it ceases to rule your life. In this way, you become independent of physical circumstances. It needs to be reiterated that liberating yourself from physical desires does not mean you abandon your role in the physical environment, nor do you denigrate the one world in which you do all your learning. It is the physical world that provides the possibilities for consciousness development. Sitting in a cave and pretending that you are not sitting in a cave, maybe a phase we all go through, like teenagehood, but remember, it is just a phase.
The next obvious challenge is to gain liberation from identification with the world of emotions. You know this has occurred with you are no longer under the spell of its allurements. When this occurs, that monad has come to realise that emotional desires demand satisfaction. This does not lead to contentment but to greater thirst. Your judgment is blinded and this counteracts evolution. Is this a price worth paying? Once this insight is gained, the power of illusions diminishes. Are these emotions a bad thing? No, they are a good thing, but they are just a tool to get the monad through certain stages of its consciousness development. Emotional energy entices those that are ignorant about the “Meaning of Life”. They experience necessary energies that allow them to develop the powers of attraction and imagination. These are the powers found in emotional consciousness.
We move on to liberation from identification with your mental consciousness. This, as you can imagine, is very difficult for the intelligentsia, as Laurency points out. The challenge lies in the fact that it is very difficult to distinguish between fiction, which is mental ideas, from reality ideas, which are Platonic and come from the Causal World. These causal ideas are provided to us by the Hierarchy. We have to break out of the trap where the fiction we construct deceives us and where the ideologies we construct around these fictions falsify reality.
The sad situation is that Humanity does not know itself. It invariably identifies itself with one of its envelopes of incarnation, mostly physical, and then thinks this is who they are. They experience consciousness subjectively and think that this consciousness is located in their organic brain.
We face a major operational problem in our evolution. Our Monad, the self, is not conscious (yet) in its causal envelope. It regains consciousness, only, when it returns to its envelopes of incarnation. Why should this then be a problem? Because our envelopes of incarnation are new. They have no memory of who we are. Our permanent atoms and permanent molecule do, but that is locked away in our subconscious. The upshot of this is that the self can not identify itself. You get the age-old refrain, “who am I”? As a result of this “fact of life”, a Christian dogma has arisen that the self has no pre-existence and is created, along with the organism. When does this “deplorable” state of affairs get rectified? Only when the self gains causal consciousness and is able to study all its previous incarnations and realise its continuous identity. When will this happen? If you subscribe to the theory that we are all about to ascend in short order, then it should be about Thursday next week!
For the rest of us, sometime in the distant future, we will come to realise that our self-identity is everything that remains of the experiences in the Human Kingdom. This self has been an individual self in the four lowest natural kingdoms, Mineral, Plant, Animal and finally Human. Getting to this point, we realise our trajectory points us in the direction of becoming an evermore comprehensive collective self, in ever higher kingdoms. To “ascend” to the next kingdom, the self has to give up its egotism. In this manner, it enters into the collective consciousness in World 46. The bottom line is that an ego-focused self can not become a collective self and unite with other selves.
This leads to a fundamental conclusion. Anyone who wishes to reach higher levels of consciousness must first realise that they are at a lower level of consciousness. To us, it may sound obvious, but to many, that is a bitter pill to swallow. However, if you are prepared to get your head around this principle, then you have to also admit that the personality is selfish and that whatever binds the personality to itself, is a hindrance to entering a condition of unity with all. True happiness is not your personal happiness but the happiness of all.
By now, it should be clear that consciousness development is a continuous process, both extensively and intensively. What you are seeking to achieve, is the acquisition of self-consciousness in ever higher kinds of matter in a world and then between worlds. Note that you always find yourself in matter. Consciousness can not exist by itself. If this acquisition of consciousness is just subjective, you have no proof of it. To get this proof, you require objective consciousness. This is achieved by acquiring objective self-consciousness in a higher material world. What we are talking about here, is a monad that is still focused on the 1st Triad. Once the monad becomes a 2nd-self, the difference between subjective and objective consciousness disappears. Why? Because in World 46, the beginning of the 5th Kingdom of Nature, the self perceives things both subjectively and objectively and is self-conscious at the same time. You basically perceive an object and become that object as you perceive it. Consequently, the matter aspect of life, which was front and centre on the 1st Triad, seems to disappear. Of course, it has not gone anywhere, but to the perceiver, it seems no longer to have any relevance. What matters now is the consciousness aspect of existence. Where does the monad now focus its intent? To the acquisition of the ‘energy’ aspect of life. Here matter is perceived as energy and manifests itself as magic. Occurring simultaneously, always, is the continuous expansion of consciousness.
Just to recap; the monad, otherwise known as the “self”, identifies itself with its envelopes and their consciousness. The entire evolutionary process, notice the use of the word “evolutionary”, as distinct from “involutionary”, is a process by which the self-conscious monad identifies itself with ever higher levels of consciousness. This can occur in different molecular kinds and different envelopes. It should be noted that this process occurs automatically in the lowest four kingdoms of nature.
Laurency warns us that when the individual identifies themselves with the physical, then they are little more than an intelligent but dangerous beast of prey. Things get better, 85 per cent of Humanity identifies themselves with their emotions. Not just any emotions but with their lower emotions. These monads are victims of illusions that hamper their development. In the final envelope to be found on the 1st Triad, the monad now identifies itself with its mentality. If at this time the self lacks esoteric knowledge, they become a victim of life’s fiction and they are life-ignorant. The final stage of development in the Human Kingdom comes when the self reaches causal consciousness. It is now able to ascertain directly whatever it wants in the lowest worlds, 47 to 49.
In our studies, we have outlined that the self passes through five stages of development in the Human Kingdom. At the 1. Young stage, the self identifies itself with the physical consciousness of the organism. At the 2. Community and 3. Cultured stage, the self identifies with its emotional envelope. At the 4. Compassionate stage, it is the mental envelope that is identified with. Finally, the 5. Illuminated self identifies itself with its causal envelope, which is the higher part of the mental envelope, existing on the 2nd triad. Now things get really exciting, as the monad is capable of identifying itself with the total consciousness of the Causal World. This world retains the memory of everything that has occurred in the three worlds of the planet (47-49), ever since the planet came into being.
Where to now? The monad, or self, identifies its existence in the 1st triad with consciousness development in the 2nd and eventually the 3rd triad. The liberation from the 1st Triad by the monad occurs when it moves its focus from the 47:4 permanent molecule to the 47:1 permanent atom. It is now in a position to dissolve its old causal envelope, one that does not belong to it anyway, and one that has been with it through its entire journey through the 4th Kingdom, and instantaneously makes a new causal envelope. This one is no longer the property of the solar devas but is now proudly the property of the self. At some point, the self identifies itself with the consciousness found in the 2nd triad’s Unity/Essential atom (46:1). When this occurs, the monad is said to have become an Essential self. Remember when you have got this far, you have conquered four planes of matter and you are on the 5th. You now only have 45 more planes to go.
See you in the next presentation, where we discuss sacrifice and liberation.