In our final look at the topic of identification and liberation, we turn our attention to the struggles faced by the esoterician as they seek to liberate themselves from their emotional and mental states of consciousness. As has been discussed with the eastern philosophical tradition of ignoring our material world and considering it an illusion, we can not achieve liberation by refusing to attend to the needs of these lower envelopes. There are those that would scourge their flesh, to rid themselves of god knows what, but they certainly made a mess of themselves. Believe it or not, they were incurring bucketloads of karma in the process. You see, our bodies do not belong to us. They are independently evolving tertiary monads that are in association with us for both our mutual benefits. If we commit serious bodily harm to them, rebalancing has to occur. This may manifest itself in subsequent incarnations when a soul is born with deformities, reminiscent of those that they caused themselves previously. The conclusion to this point is that if there are issues that a disciple faces that cause difficulties and conflicts, they are just storing up problems that they must solve at a later date. In this manner, they are able to finally liberate themselves from these conditions. Equally importantly, it puts the liberated monad in a position to help others with the same problems.
Asceticism, in its traditional sense, has always been regarded as some form of super-human endeavour. Society has regarded ascetics as being a kind of elite. Esotericians regard asceticism as a pointless endeavour. Laurency considers this practice as one that yields unwarranted smugness. By contrast, an esoterician abstains from one thing after another in order to convince themselves that whatever is abstained from, has no power over them. Abstinence is enacted as and when it is wanted. There is no “slavery to vices”. The esoterician seeks their own mastery. They decide when they are to satisfy physical needs. As has already been mentioned, the persona should always treat the organism well. The more refined and robust this tool is made, the better it serves its purpose for the furtherance of the objectives of the monad.
Ok, that is the physical organism taken care of. What is next? The emotional envelope. Now things become a lot more complicated. Why? Because this envelope has acquired patterns over millions of years and it is stuffed full of bad habits, tendencies and all manner of repulsive emotional energy. The main problem is that the persona has identified itself with all these emotional energies as being the core of what they are. This could not be further from the truth, but millions of years of programming are a lot of knots to untie. Let us assume that the monad has mastered Stage 1, Young Soul, of human development and dealt with physical cravings and now actively applies their energies to mastering their emotions. How long is it going to take? Usually many lifetimes. This difficult task is achieved with the help of the persona’s mental consciousness. The persona learns to dominate their emotional life with their mental consciousness. The physical organism was dominated relatively easily through its emotional will. In order to master their emotional tendencies, the persona must strengthen their mental will and learn to make that rational motive the determining factor in all decisions. The way this is done is that the persona counteracts the emotional complexes found in their subconscious memory, with new and opposite complexes. They replace their “bad” quality with good ones. How is this done? You starve out the repulsive tendencies by simply ignoring them. You deny them energy. By ignoring the bad, you starve them out, as you are not re-invigorating them with your conscious energy. Conversely, by meditating on the good qualities you wish to manifest, you gradually acquire them.
Liberation from the 1st Triad to the 2nd is not an easy process, but you can make life a lot easier for yourself if you engage in a number of thought processes. In order to become a causal self, the individual must constantly try to imagine how a causal self would judge their environment and events and how they would then act. If you constantly direct your attention to higher consciousness and love “as if” you already possess causal consciousness, you activate a process that will lead to you eventually living in that state in reality. One good practice is to say to yourself: “I am not my envelopes. I am not these kinds of consciousness.” “I am not my sense perception, I am not my feelings and I am not my thoughts. This presupposes that you have some idea as to your stage of development and that you have not overestimated your development, which is usually the case. This is the mistake most occultists make. Esoteric knowledge is not an indicator of development. Esoterics, however, does liberate you from superstitions but this is not an automatic transformation into one of the higher beings you may have read about. As a rule of thumb, an esoterician can assume that they are at the emotional stage if they can be swayed by their emotions. That is just about all of us.
When it comes to identifying with the higher to gain liberation from the lower, disciples are warned not to occupy themselves unnecessarily with the problems of liberation. By focusing your attention, you reinforce whatever you observe and the lower envelopes are stimulated. This makes subsequent liberation that much more difficult.
So why do we work for liberation? We come into incarnations to gain experiences and learn from them. This is the meaning of life. Once you have read the memo, you realise that everything that comes across your path has a particular meaning. How this all comes into being is beyond our pay grade at present. You have to understand cosmic organisation and its tools in the worlds of our Solar System. Universes come into existence so that monads can become gods and go on to help other monads do the same.
The path to liberation is, according to Laurency, to “value everything higher as the most valuable.” We, as humans, will only be free when we pay due respect to but do not fixate on, the physical, emotional and mental aspects of ourselves. This is a step-by-step process. We move from the physical world into the world of ideas, the causal world. We learn to view everything from a point of Unity, what Laurency calls essentiality. From this vantage point, you have a planetary view of reality. Eventually, we gain a cosmic perspective. The Lord Buddha is the first member of our kingdom to have achieved that, so be patient. We may have to invent things for lack of facts but the tendency to enlarge our horizons affects liberation from many of its limitations.
Development is hard work and winning freedom involves liberating ourselves from everything that charms, fascinates, appears ideal, indispensable, irreplaceable or divine. We need to do this level after level. When we reach the next level it appears the highest, until we liberate ourselves from this level as well. Laurency tells us that “development in its entirety is liberation from dependence on the matter aspect in the 4th natural kingdom and dependence on the consciousness aspect in the 5th natural kingdom. In the 6th natural kingdom, the individual gains a fuller understanding of the motion aspect, will aspect, and energy aspect, and this leads to what Humanity, with its very limited resources of perception, would call omniscience and omnipotence, within the Solar System.”
“The more thoroughly you are able to liberate yourself from the lower, the more easily you assimilate the higher. This liberation goes on without applying any force and is the expression of an irresistible need that will not have and cannot think of anything else. This inner need is a sign that you have established contact with your guardian angel, in doing, you experience yourself as the ideal that you are in the causal world.”
The term “revelation” can be applied to a process, whereby an individual, by their own efforts, instinctively and automatically, through the laws of life, makes new discoveries. “Liberation from the power of emotional attraction through mental sovereignty can be brought about in two different ways. One way is the attempt to kill out all the feelings of attraction so that the individual becomes cold and hard. The other way is the mental cultivation of feelings of sympathy, with full understanding and simultaneous knowledge of the necessity of independence. For most people, this will be possible only after many painful experiences. As a rule, this presupposes that the self has acquired higher causal consciousness (47:2) and is able to see things from the causal standpoint.”
Buddha said that judgment, at Humanity’s current level of development, is the result of energies of emotional attraction applied in a manner that liberates us from our dependencies on lower kinds of energy. If we remain enthralled by these lower energies, our judgment is blinded. By freeing ourselves from the dependence on these lower energies, we are then free to use energies in the right way.
If one expands one’s thoughts and then does not go further, one becomes a fanatic and a prisoner to your viewpoint. In closing our review of the topic of identification and liberation, here is a quote from Laurency, “A good aid in the formation of your character is to make yourself an ideal picture of the individual you wish to be. By daily contemplating this picture, you are influenced more and more to imitate it.”