Equations of Being - notes on the nature of love by William Arkle

[Crudely and hastily copied from the Wayback machine - because this is one of my absolute favourites of Arkle's work, and the main website of billarkle.co.uk is unavailable at present. ]

We are finding that it is in our nature to require a sense of reality and a sense of purpose in which our spirits feel a certain sort of freedom, open endedness and ease. An this requirement relates to the inner ethereal activity of our spirit as well as the outer physical expression. To feel at ease, we require an understanding of our purpose which responds to the experiences we have had in our own right, and which appeals to the intelligence and commonsense which has built up in us. But by the term commonsense, we are not talking about average attitudes or the lowest common denominator in society. By commonsense we are trying to indicate a certain sort of innate good sense which is derived from our best thought, emotions and instincts. This type of good sense can feel the reasonability or unreasonability of arguments and ideas, and in trying to be true to ourselves we find we have to be true to this good sense or else we begin to feel ill at ease; we begin to feel hypocritical, out of balance, in danger of fooling ourselves.

It is with this in mind that we shall attempt to build up a philosophy in which we can consider our whole reality in the universe, not only from our own point of view, but also from the position of a creative source; which may be either personal, like the Christian God, or impersonal, in the form of the One Absolute Life. And yet, which ever way it goes, the philosophy has to regard this creative source as being very aware and responsive. We shall find that we have to avoid allowing ourselves to think of it as being something like a ‘biological computer’, or sophisticated machine.

Because the word philosophy has been used, this must not be taken to mean we are going to engage in a dry intellectual discussion. Rather, we are going to need a philosophy which will allow all our best and most immediate responses to life their proper place. As philosophers, we are about to endeavour to stand fully in our human condition at one instant, and fully our of it, as detached observers, at the next instant.

We know very well that it is very difficult to take a detached view of things. We know that it is difficult enough to keep a balanced attitude towards our physical life, let alone discover a balanced view of the more intangible content of our inner reality. To expect ourselves to be able to add to this a view which begins to take in the possible views and attitudes of other peoples inner and outer worlds is to ask a great deal of ourselves. It does not seem that there is any hope of success in this endeavour unless we can use a way of discussion amongst ourselves which is both simple and profound. We need the simplicity in order to avoid confusion, and we need the profundity in order to cover the whole ground..

It will be necessary, therefore, to talk about ourselves and our understanding in direct and penetrating terms. We will not be able to afford one another the politeness we show in our social meetings, where we continually feel for one another’s ‘walls of resistance’ and respectfully retreat from them as they are discovered. To be of any help, we must step right through these polite attitudes of our social selves to the timid and uncertain person that, in nearly every case, is hiding behind them. But we are going to show that this person in hiding should not be so timid or so uncertain. In fact the burden of our effort will be to enhance and bolster-up the true individual that exist on the perimeter of life in a condition of apology for which it is always trying to compensate.

In saying this we are also required to face up to the fact that we are going to disturb and subdue the compensating personality which stands in the way of the true individual. We are going to draw attention to the difference between the two natures which live in the same physical body, and make sure that the correct nature is left in charge and that a fruitful synthesis replaces a running battle.

There is nothing weird about this way of expressing the position. We are not about to face up to some other person in ourselves who will come out of the blue like a thief and a stranger. Rather we are going to try and get on the same good terms with ourselves that we often enjoyed in our childhood.

We are going to become childish, but we are required to become more child-like if we are ever to achieve the directness about which we have been talking. The quality of this child-like nature is one which has not been too overlaid with the structure of limitation placed on it, mostly quite unconsciously, by the attitudes of our parents, friends and teachers. But we are to blame too, for we have allowed the ways of other people to sway us away from our inner sense of fitness and purpose. We have all been weak at times, and these are the occasions in which we have allowed second-rate values to replace the values in our life which we need to maintain if we are to look about us in open-eyed wonder. For not only do we need to have this open attitude to our external experiences, we also need it in our inner life. If we have allowed it to become clouded, then we have allowed ourselves to become cripples. For if a large part of our true nature is denied its value, then this is equivalent to living our life with only one arm or one leg. In fact it is far worse, it is more like having a leg which is back to front, since it causes a division in our nature which allows it to try to follow two opposite directions at the same time. One is the successful conformity to the ways of our man-made society, and the other is to the ways of our most real self, whose values are in many ways at odds with those of society.

And this is how the running battle between two different aspects of our self comes about. One part of ourself is trying to survive in the world as a worldly personality. The other part is trying to survive as a spiritual being according to the values which belong to it’s spirituality. It is towards the significance of this spirituality that we discover we have an ambivalent attitude. If someone denies to us that we are a person of spiritual standards we feel grossly insulted. Yet, if someone openly refers to us as a spiritual or religious person, our first impulse is often to deny it, not out of modesty so much as out of fear. This fear is of ridicule from those who do not have spiritual attitudes, and of what might be expected of us in the future by those who do have spiritual attitudes.

It would therefore be of help to us if we could build up an understanding of creation and the purpose behind creation, which would allow us to accept both parts of our nature in terms of being an inevitable result of that which creation was designed to accomplish. At present, we in the western world are more often than not confronted with religious ideas which give us the feeling that we have committed some terrible sin which has caused sufferings and difficulties to arise as a form of punishment for not being obedient to the commands of the Great Cause, the source of life. Yet if we approach this source in the right way, we may well discover that our religious understanding is often quite wrong and that we have misconstrued the meaning of our difficulties and the rebelliousness that seems to have caused them.

There is a consensus among responsible people in the world which adds together the good, the true and the beautiful and arrives at an image of the perfect being who is able to express all that is held to be most valuable. However we look at this fact it leads us to the realisation that such thoughtful and responsible people are truly carrying around with them an image in their deepest consciousness which is both a Creator and a God and also an ideal towards which they themselves are trying to grow. Whether these people ever put their instinctive understanding of this situation into words or not, or whether they admit the situation to themselves or not, the reality is that they are living a purposeful spiritual life which is governed by the love they bear towards these higher values. The fact that the higher values may be seen by them in terms of their love and respect for human beings, animals or the environment, or that it may be understood in terms of a religious teaching and a Saviour or a Divine Person does not make any difference to the heart of the matter. For the hear of the matter is that they are trying to grow more like the things which they love. In loving mankind, the humanist is becoming godlike. In loving God the religious person is becoming a person who loves all life and all its human forms. Now if we can set up a series of propositions which lead our understanding towards a situation which can account for all these attitudes and can accept them equally, then we shall have a philosophy which will be a real help in every aspect of our everyday life.

Those people who do not have a love for the good, true and beautiful will not be reading this book anyway, so we will continue our discussions without trying to argue why we should love these ideals. Let us be satisfied that we do appreciate these values and that we do wish to be associated with them rather than their opposites. Those people who are sitting on the fence between those two attitudes will have to come along with us as far as they can. Those of us who ‘mean business’ towards the good are the salt of the earth and it is among these that we wish our discussions to develop so that their nature may become more salty and that they dip into it more often.

What I wish to do is to become very bold and suggest that we put ourselves in the position of this Creative Source, the God of what we love, and begin to see things from the position we would be in if we were about to design the plans for this scheme of manifestation of which our worlds are a part. This means that we must feel for the godlike image we have in our consciousness and clarify it to the extent that we can begin to understand at least something of the attitude that would be brought to bear on this creative endeavour. Our Source will have many attributes which we can agree about. Our love for the ideals which we carry in our nature in common will know that such a Creator will have to be, first of all, love itself. We know that we would resist any other Being however many qualities of power, knowledge and talent He had. We know, therefore, that what we refer to as love, in its most profound sense, is also a simple but unmistakable beginning we require and respond to. When we reach a certain stage of growth within our spirit we know this to a degree that we would never argue about it. It is the simple but profound basis to our understanding which is the only one that can remain in harmony with our good sense. And yet there are many things to be drawn out of this love knowledge which as yet we are still hazy about.

Now, when we put ourselves in the position of this Creator, it is then that we have to look more closely at the nature of love and try to understand the principles which it contains. Unless we can do this we cannot begin our designing for we will not be clear about what we are trying to achieve. We could, for instance, design a scheme, as many of us would, which would be like a continuous, perfect, summer holiday situation. We would all begin our designs with the idea of ease and happiness in mind. We would all find that our schemes did not contain responsibility or difficulty. I think we would find that our plans would take for granted that it was easy to include other people in our perfect world. I think we would find that we would make up a perfect and easy world where everyone was like ourselves and where all the things that really mattered to us were simply put into the picture, ready made, as though the reality of them could be programmed into them. All our schemes would contain other people, for none of us would want to be lonely, and all of us would soon begin to realise that other people were an integral part of all that we enjoyed about ourselves. We would discover that a sort of mythical ‘deckchair on golden deserted sands’ situation was a trap that we all fell into. A little would be pleasant, but only because it is what we are most short of in our experience of life as it is on Earth. Even if we allowed ourselves a companion, or even a family, we would find that there was still a lot wrong. The family who sat about with us would get restless as we would.

So we would want to explore a bit, go for a walk, see something new. We may go for a swim. Swimming and short walks, on a perfect beach in perfect weather, with all our loved ones about us; such might be a beginning. But the walks would have to get longer and the swimming would have to include diving. The diving would lead to exploring the seabed and the walks would become voyages of discovery. We would wish to feel that the family or friends were on the sands for us to come back to, but we would want to feel free to explore, we would want to feel free to experiment with different sorts of walking and swimming, different combinations of walking, swimming and sitting in the sun. We would wish to talk to our companions, we would wish to enjoy their company. We would wish to laugh and have a bit of fun. We would wish for them to be real in their own right so that the laughter and fun was real and full of surprise and the unexpected. If we had programmed the other people to be like ourselves we would find it very difficult to keep up the pretence of enjoying their company, their fun and their affection. For pretence it would have to be, since we were really entertaining ourself in other guises.

We are only touching on the problems of designing a scheme of creation that we would consider to be an ideal one. But if we look into the matter further we will come upon the main factors that confront us, even if we are physical persons in physical bodies. What we discover, if we play with this problem, is that whatever form we take and whatever environment we take it in there are certain basic requirements which stem from the nature of love itself. We discover that our sense of love to explore and experiment is as real as our love to bask in sunny happiness. Our sense of love needs other people to do these things with. Our sense of love requires fun and delight with other peoples company, and it requires these other people to be real as we are; we require them to be real in their own right. A big problem we come up against is that any idea of existence requires us to people our world with beings who are different from ourselves, who most certainly must not have been programmed or brainwashed by us in any way. In fact we find that other people who are as real and independent as we are, are something we cannot do without. So we face this situation when we come to design our scheme of manifestation. Our spirit needs freedom to explore, experiment and grow, and it needs to feel that it has companions to share such a life with, and these companions have to be real and independent in their own right. It means that if we start the scheme off, we have to accept that they might wish to do things that did not appeal to us. We would have to learn to accept one another’s different approaches and the fact that although we may have designed the scheme, we had to give to them the same rights as we had. We would have to accept that although we started the scheme off, if it was to be any good to us, if it was to be true and beautiful, then we would have to hand over the control and outcome to them as much as to ourselves.

Against this argument is the realisation that a creative scheme has to ensure that the freedom which is allowed to the other individuals who live in it is handed to them gradually as their responsibility grows and is able to bear it safely. For if we give to our friends, who we wish to live with in our designed creation, the freedom and independence which makes them real to us and therefore makes the experience of their company completely valid, we do not wish to reach a stage at which we ourselves are over-ruled by them.

When we begin to imagine ways of bringing our companions into our creative scheme in such a way that we can give to them their own reality, and give it to them in such a way that we do not dominate them, we realise what a subtle thing this process will have to be. Such companions will have to be given the same creative reality as ourself, the creator, but they will begin their life in a condition of great potentiality which will be entirely unrealised by them. So our scheme of creation will have to be largely educational to start with before our friends will have grown up enough to enter into its delightful creative purpose with their own unique individual ways of looking at things and doing things, and with the responsibility which will ensure that their desire is to enhance all things and not to destroy or diminish.

The other points we will have to observe are concerned with how we will help our friends to come to themselves gradually and take the gift of their own reality upon themselves deliberately. We will have to discover ways of showing them why the good and the beautiful qualities are considered by us, the creator, to be good and beautiful. The only way we can do this is by giving them a taste of the opposite qualities in order that they can knowingly say to themselves ‘I have experienced beautiful and good attitudes which seek to enhance all things; and I have experienced ugly and evil attitudes which seek to diminish and enslave all things, and I chose the good and the beautiful and will always resist the opposite’.

If we find a way of helping our friends into their own reality in this responsible way, then we can enjoy their company in the next level of our creative purpose, which is to have them with us to explore and experiment with our potentiality, which we would consider to be unlimited. The unique character of each of our friends would mean that we were each a continual delight to one another both in terms of our meeting together in our home’ and in our explorations together into the unknown potential of our spirits.

This is then an introduction to the spiritual philosophy which follows. It is by trying to put ourselves in the position of the Creator whose nature is love and spiritedness, that we may be able to draw conclusions which help us to understand and accept the situation on Earth as we find it at the present time. We may realise that the difficulties, while often painful, are also extremely valuable if we can view them as a part of the process of making us into real and responsible individual spirits who can become companions of the endless life in which the Creative Source wishes us to meet Him.

It is most important that we consider if we would prefer to be given a very full and thorough education, in which difficulties acted upon us to strengthen all our characteristics which we feel to be valuable. Or would we prefer an easy form of education in which we could obtain a token reality for ourselves in circumstances which required little effort on our part? Or, again, would we prefer to be created with all our individuality ready made and programmed into us? In which case we would not need education for we would simply respond with the conditioning already at work in our nature, effortless and automatic and not within our power to change. In the long run we would all realise that the difficult and thorough way was the only thing we wanted, for above all, we wish to be real. We want to be valuably real, but we do not want to be artificially valuable.

There must be no misunderstanding over the substance of this philosophy. Nowhere is it ever suggested that we should undertake evil experience in order to become wise. It would be very easy to read into these arguments some excuse for the gratification of degenerate appetites of the flesh and of consciousness. Some might even excuse such behaviour on the grounds that it indicates maturity of spirit, and that purity is only for children and the childlike level of our growth. Those who attempt to think in this way have subverted the whole sense of value that we are trying to reach. If evil occurs as the result of error which is not deliberate, this philosophy shows us how we can make up for it and turn it with responsibility into something of long term value. This is a very different thing to any form of deliberate and irresponsible behaviour undertaken in the name of careless high spirits or the excitement of the cruder forms of our physical sense. Those who choose to become the means of diminishment to others or themselves will pay a price and that price is built into their own nature and the nature of the Creators environments.

Return to Prose Index

Chapter II

Top of Form Bottom of Form

Top of Form Bottom of Form

Close Help

A Geography of Consciousness - Chapter 3 - The Self

Excerpted from A Geography of Consciousness by William Arkle (1974)

Chapter 3 - The Self

It must be expected at the preliminary part of our evolution will be full of mistakes concerning values and identities for the reason that we simply do not as yet possess the understanding to cope with the situation.

The result of these mistakes will be some form of pain and suffering and this seems inevitable unless some direct conditioning was supervision is received. This raises the most fundamental point which concerns are autonomy.

Commonsense and intelligence tells as that are real value lies in a separate unique identity, even if this is still only at the stage of potentiality. If the scheme of things was not concerned with this individuality, then the ordering of the human world would be much simpler for we would all be puppets or automatons and do precisely as we were ordered.

If God of the absolute cause did not choose this way, then it is either because our uniqueness is important to him; or because he enjoys our suffering which is the result of our autonomy. The latter proposition cannot be held seriously.

Our intelligence and actually assumes that the attitude we have towards our own physical world, families and children, is not just a chance for fire, but stems from some supreme attitude on the part of our creator. It can be imagined, therefore, that our relationship and value is to our absolute parents something like that of our children to ourselves, but since that occurs at a much higher level, it must be more ideal and detached from space/time considerations.

The process suggested, whereby responsive abilities are built into identity at the absolute level, which can be called the true self, will enable us to understand and accept more easily the concept of sin.

Whether we admit it or not, the sensation of sin affects us all profoundly and if we are to accept the teaching of original sin which the Western churches give out then we are in danger of putting ourselves in a very wrong and a negative position.

The process of learning by mistakes, which in science and engineering is called the process of trial and error, is confused with the notion of sin and wickedness. This presupposes that we are either put into the world as perfect beings who should know better; or we are put into the world by a sadistic God who knows we are in perfect but who punishes us for being so.

In the first case there would seem little point in going through the process if there is nothing to learn. In the second case one is confronted with a dichotomy which is so absurd that it could only be the result of human aberration.

Instead of the teaching of original sin, it might be well to substitute the teaching of original fallibility. The difference between fallibility and sin is that the first is expected to be indicated by suffering imposed by our surroundings, but the second is expected to be indicated by suffering imposed by God.

Obviously the two are liable to be confused and if the second is chosen, the person concerned is it a most difficult and hopeless position, for he is confronted with a divine example on a cosmic scale of his own immature understanding and development. We cling to the idea that God is concerned with us as individuals who are responsible for their own actions; and yet we also cling to the idea that we are not perfect but are in the process of attaining perfection. Yet we cannot bring ourselves to conceive of the fact that we were born with shortcomings instead of sense.

This idea of sin is perhaps applicable to those of us who deliberately repeat actions which we know are wrong, and which we know will harm other people, and which we are in a position to prevent. But if we have reached the stage of knowing and action is wrong it may not be realised how it is harmful to others and even if so, we may not be in a position to prevent it.

If on the other hand we do something harmful and wrong because we know no better and are unable to respond with absolute awareness to the situation, we can hardly be blamed and we would certainly not have opened ourselves to something akin to divine wrath.

The main trouble with the idea of original sin is that it consciously or unconsciously causes us to associate the very core of our being with something rotten, and this is something in turn unavoidably associated with the act of creation on the part of God. Since the core of our being is where our absolute potentialities lie and sense and since this highest and truest part of our nature is the source and mainspring of our effort and 'salvation', the idea of original sin replaces that part of our nature which should be looked for look to for the solution of all our problems, with some negative and evil presence.

If this doctrine is seen from such a point of view, it becomes apparent that instead of influencing us to become humble and repentant and aware of a natural shortcomings. All the teaching of original sin does is to make us bitterly aware of the unjust and hostile attitude of the source of being. Since it is realised now that the unconscious and deeper consciousness of our nature as a profound and overriding effect on all our conscious deliberations; and since it is also discovered that this unconscious part of our nature has a very strong sense of justice, right and wrong, sin and punishment, virtue and reward; one can see that this fundamental conditioning aspect of our awareness is thrown into a hopeless and distorted state by prevalent religious ideas.

Until the idea of sin is replaced by the idea of shortcoming, we will be destroying effectively the very purpose of religious and spiritual effort, which is to become trustful-of and acquainted-with, first of all the divine qualities of God, and secondarily the divine qualities of our own real nature. It is quite obvious why God is described as forgiving our sins before we commit them; it is because he realises only too clearly that we must continually make such mistakes before we can be of any value to him or to ourselves.

It is not God who has suggested to us the idea of original sin and the necessity of being punished for the results of such sin, it is our own superstitious and unintelligent interpretation of the world around us that has led to this state of affairs. It is our own lack of forgiveness and our own inability to feel responsible for our actions and efforts that have led us to this point of view.

A Geography of Consciousness - The universality of consciousness - from Chapters 1 and 2

Chapter 1 - The Fields of Consciousness

There is some connection between our scale of attitudes (or ‘filters’) and the scale of conditions of matter.

The structure of matter stems from some sub atomic level to that of the atom, then the molecule, the cell, the group of cells, to mineral, vegetable and animal structures. From the animal it leads onto the human, and we must be to discover that it goes on beyond the human.

While all matter is a living in "substance" the substantial part of it is, in fact, non-substantial in the old meaning of the word. Instead of substance we find only organisation of energy. The value of such structure lies in the fact that energy is not pure force, but a composition of force and behaviour patterns.

However, the behaviour pattern is not a mechanical function unless we are dealing with a pure machine. If we are dealing with living structures, then we must accept behaviour patterns as being the result of some form of consciousness and purpose.

Therefore we must describe matter from henceforth as matter-consciousness, to remind ourselves of the fact that the old idea of substance has been superseded and that the mechanical idea of function has little or no ground left for it, and that it must shortly give way to a theory which allows for elementary occurrences to be a result of consciousness, perception and response to perception.

This is an extraordinary situation for us to grasp, since we have been used to the idea that matter is a part of the living scheme of things we call nature but, at the same time, governed by mechanical forces in a purely mechanical situation. Yet it is possible to describe the consciousness of matter as being very different to our own. To get used to this, we have to get used to the special proportions of the universe as compared with the special proportions of the atom and electron.

We must get used to the idea that we have not yet established a definition of the upper and lower limits of consciousness any more than we have established the meaning of largeness and small nest in space. Unconsciously, we all like to feel that the electron is small enough and that's nothing could possibly be organised on an even more minute scale. We also like think that there is nothing larger than a galaxy or are universe. This is all a part of our conditioning as human beings, through which we like to establish the limits of our territory and the exact spot which we call home.

When, however, we begin to sense that we are individuals who exist purely in consciousness, we shall be far more objective about our observations of the physical universe and we shall no longer look for a place in it which we call home. Our home will be our basic attitude. This can be a comfortable and happy one - or otherwise.


Chapter 2 Bodies of communication 

One of our major conditionings is the idea that there is solid substance on which our physical world is built.

It used to be considered that the atom was an indivisible unit of substance which was built up into more complex structures to create the mineral and vegetable worlds. It is now realised that this atom is itself a complex conformation of images whose paths constitute its size but whose interior is largely space to which various energies into relate.

Today substance is not a solid but a temporary structure of energy which gives the impression of solidity because it communicates to us something of its nature. If it was not within the boundaries of our perception of communication, then we should say it did not exist.

This sort of communication must not be confused with our own human ones, for these communications are in terms of elemental qualities and of energy and it is in these terms that atoms are communicating to us and to one another.

We are also conditioned to consider that communications which are not in terms that have meaning for us as humans are not valid communications and do not arise from anything we can class as consciousness. But this again is one of the things that has to be adjusted if we wish to understand the background to human activity.

We must be more objective and open-minded about conditions of consciousness other than our own, and we must be more aware of the possibility that categories of matter which we used to class as non-living on not only living but retain their nature and function through very efficient forms of communication.

As far as said previously, we must not only be prepared to consider that an atom is an entity but we must also be prepared for the fact that it is an entity with a purpose and a responsive awareness.

The position reached when reality is looked at from the point of view of this theory, is that what is normally referred to as a matter is first of all essentially communication and only second there really a structure of energies. This is to say that the value of any particle of matter is the quality which it is communicating.

This quality is not only the important aspect of the situation to us as conscious individuals, but also to the particles of matter as an entity in its own right. It follows from this that we will be in a much better position to understand the significance of matter and the general ground of the experience we are in if we study and classify occurrences in terms of the possible communication content, rather than in terms of their structure and apparently mechanical function.

It may be found that all matter is communication as far as we are concerned. For we are essentially receivers, valuers, and transmitters of information and our true nature is awareness itself; and in no way directly involved with that part of manifestation which we think of as matter. As far as our true significance and reality are concerned, matter is synonymous with communication.

So here we can also say that when we are conscious of matter as such, there is something wrong, for we are not observing the reality of the situation; we have got the wrong set of filters in circuit. When however we observe events in terms of their real content, then we shall not be aware of matter but only communication.

This means that we are employing reasonably suitable filters for that situation. The universe of matter-consciousness which is thought of as the universe of non-living matter is therefore more accurately a universe of communication. However, the subject cannot be left there, since the fact that communication is the chief reality of each individual structure of matter at each level of formation implies consciousness, which in turn implies purposive response and rudimentary desire.

But this is what would be expected and looked for if the premise of the theory is near the truth, for it proposes an evolution of consciousness which starts from the point of zero consciousness and progresses from there to what is termed absolute consciousness. We know that human consciousness is well above the zero position. We must expect that animal conscious that will be closer to it, then vegetable consciousness, and then mineral consciousness. It would be arbitrary to stop there simply because we are approaching the limits of our observation.

Therefore it is necessary to visualise a type of consciousness related to the sub-atomic level of matter and all levels more minute and fundamental than this again.

A Geography of Consciousness by William Arkle - some selected highlights

A Geography of Consciousness by William Arkle 
- some selected highlights 

Preface 

We like to be loved and admired but we also like to love and admire other people. When we love and admire other people, we are able to believe in the joy and merit of their nature. When we are loved and admired we are able to believe in the joy and the merit of our Self. 

When we receive and give love and adoration we are in either case gaining something wholly delightful and desirable. But we do not take the trouble to look more closely at this situation, for the situation seems to be an end in itself. 

If it is examined, however, the sensation in question reveals that it is not so much the giving and receiving of love which matters, but that the love and admiration helps to liberate an aspect of our nature which is joy and is happiness and is a sort of virtuous affectionate delight. 

The trouble with life as we ordinarily experience it is that this part of our nature is always being suppressed and not liberated. But not only do other people continually restrict it, but we find that we are restricting it ourselves. 

The problem however is not as simple as it looks. The difficulty is not simply liberating our Selves but the fact that in trying to do this we liberate our not-Selves. 

When we liberate a not-Self we are not freeing ourselves for an experience of great affection want to light, but rather for an experience of misery, frustration and disappointment.The pain of this makes us think twice about any further attempts at liberation. We are inclined to leave liberation alone for we are not sure if we are going to liberate a God or a Devil. 

The purpose of this book is therefore to help towards our understanding of these processes which are essential to life, if that life is not to remain static. The theories involved are both old and new. Those that are not new have been found in the general literature of mysticism, religion and philosophy, and no attempt has been made to identify the sources.

The attempt has been rather to integrate them into some unified structure and to re-express them in another form. Not only will there be an attempt to map out the geography of the psyche and consciousness in general, but also to describe the principles which are necessary for a journey and the best way to understand the ‘gods’ and ‘devils’ that we might meet on the way.


Chapter 1  - Fields of Consciousness - Manager and factory

We will consider the physical personality and body as a factory and compare our consciousness to the manager of that factory.

We know that normally the manager goes into the office of his factory to collect the latest facts about sales and production in order to control the activity of the factory. But we also know that if he is ill and cannot visit his office, he can telephone his assistant and by asking him for certain facts control the activities of the factory as though the weather himself.

And if the manager had to go on a trip to America or Australia, you could still get in touch with his office and control the factory. In other words, if he were able to possess all the information he required, the manager would never have to visit his factory at all.

He does visit the factory, however, because it enables him to communicate more easily to more people on his stuff. His connection with the factory therefore can be described in terms of communication, whether he is at the factory or at the other side of the world. 

His success as a manager depends to a very large extent on the effectiveness of the communication system he has built up between all the parts of his concern and himself. If one aspect of his business is in bad communication with him, this is the part that he would expect to cause him trouble. 

This is true of his production programs and also of his human relationships among management and workers. The manager of a factory goes to the factory himself, not to improve production, but to make sure that his channels of communication have been feeding him efficiently with accurate information. If he could rely on the effectiveness of his communication systems and the efficiency of the people involved in them, their honesty and so on, he would never have to visit the factory at all. 

The effectiveness of his management therefore would not depend upon any special relationship with the factory. It would depend upon his ability to observe all the information given him in comparison to all the information he already possessed. 

If the manager identified himself with the factory it is very likely that some aspects of production will appear out of proportion to him. This will cause him to form a distorted picture of the situation in his mind and we can then say that he has become aberrated and less efficient. 

His best position as manager, as far as we can understand, is to be in a detached position to the production activity in order to see it all objectively and see it in relation to what the rest of the commercial world is doing. 

Now we ourselves are like the manager in relation to our physical body and personality. We are in fact not connected to this personality function unless we choose to be. We can best observe and direct the function of the personality by being detached from it and by observing the situation it is in, objectively. So long as we are identified with the personality we must expect to experience its values in a distorted way. 

We will also get a distorted picture of our nature if our communication channels are inefficient or inaccurate. We will, in other words, only understand what we are and what we are trying to do, if we experience ourselves as managers and other physical personality as a factory. 

However even the manager is in a subtle sense conditioned by an inner consciousness which dictates to him how he will behave in ethical and other ways. And so with ourselves; we are detached from our physical body whether we like it or not, and we also possess an inner essential awareness within this detached consciousness which we may describe as a first order attitude or filter. The detached consciousness is thus a second order filter and the physical personality is a third order filter. The majority of people are identified with the third order filter, with occasional sensations of the second order. 

But the time has come when we can only solve the outstanding problems of our civilisation by many of us achieving a permanent second order attitude with occasional sensations of the first order.

Consciousness and the nervous system 

It was said previously that we have a good deal of knowledge about the function of our nervous system is and the way in which brain cells communicate information to our physical brain. However unless we identify the physical brain with thought, feeling and consciousness, it is necessary to propose that our true being resides somewhere other than in the physical function of the physical body.

One reason why we tend to identify our consciousness in the head is because our most valuable organs of communication are situated there. If our eyes were placed in our left arm, no doubt we would tend to sense that we were behind them, and therefore in our left arm also. As the ears and mouth are also in the head we feel comfortably placed between them all and at the centre of our reception and transmission of information.

When the nature of the communication processes associated with the human consciousness is examined, a system which is basically an electronic one is found. This, in its courser stages, is associated with physical and chemical changes.

Unfortunately, because men have not as yet succeeded in understanding much about the function of matter beyond the electronic stage, they are inclined to say that the electronic level of experience is the end of the road.

The scientific type of study of these matters is so successful up to this point, that it has acquired an authority greater than that of the theologist, philosopher, psychologist or intelligent human being. When the scientist suddenly stops short in his description of the universe and of man, the temptation to stop short with him is very great.

This, however, is most unfortunate, since there is good reason to believe that the level to which science has attained will be found to be very much on the perimeter of our true nature and are true reality. It must be said, therefore, that something passes beyond the electronic level of function of the human brain and so must pass into a condition of matter which as yet science does not recognise and which pretends to be sceptical about.

The scientist, having the authority which we have given him, tends to make fools of us all when it comes to the understanding of consciousness itself. The scientist is not to blame for this, however. We are ourselves to blame, for the simple reason that we gave our filters to the scientist as soon as we noticed that he was uncommonly successful and full of 'magic and witchcraft'.

We were indeed only too pleased to find someone to give our filters to, since we knew they were very important but that they were a great deal of trouble to the owners.

We must now face up to this situation and endeavour to create some sort of structure in our understanding, which will bridge the gap between the level of matter which the scientific instruments of our age have succeeded in examining and the staff of consciousness itself which is the stuff we actually exist in.

We must break with the temptation to allow our attitudes or filters to be governed by scientific facts and return to a position in which we remain fully responsible for our own attitudes so that they are the result of our own experiences, valuations and intelligence.

The facts which scientists give us are still of great value to us, so long as we do not see ourselves as identified with the world which they are taken from, for this world is the world of time and space which is of no concern to our consciousness as such, but is only a means of communication. We must no more identify ourselves with these physical modes of communication than we should identify ourselves with a telephone!

It will probably be a very long time before instruments are able to observe the stuff of consciousness and discover the seat of it. But we cannot afford to wait until they do. We must therefore use are intelligent imagination to extend the processes which we have examined, towards that awareness which each of us knows exists. So long as we keep this in terms of a broad and tentative vary it cannot do any harm and may help us a good deal.

Late Prose

Floundering

Trying to understand what is just beyond us may be called floundering after the 'x' factor. Floundering is a bit like splashing about in a swimming pool. But floundering is also a necessary precondition to new vision, better vision and growth.

I suppose we can come to the cutting edge of 'Lifeness' through a careful build-up of captured and understood bits of Reality, or through a sudden mad dash. I notice that a genuine contemplation of everlastingness alters the shape of my vision and purpose, so that I guess that a contemplation of the 'X' factor, or fact, may also alter something that I can't explain until it happens.

'X' is a shut-off. All our sense of understanding can build to what we call Being - Consciousness - Bliss ('BCB') and that is exactly as it should happen. But it is quite natural to feel a great wonder about 'how anything so wonderful ever got started in the first place'.

To look 'X' straight in the face for a while seems to increase the appreciation of the 'BCB' factor or, more succinctly, the 'BC' factor. I don't mean to go on splitting hairs for the sake of it, but I am drawing attention to the principle of contrast in connection with waking up. (I am also giving free rein to my instinctive flounderings to see where they take me.)

We can grasp 'BC' (Being Consciousness), but there are degrees of that grasping. I wonder if looking at X increases the appreciation of 'BC', in the same way that looking at everlastingness, or 'E-X', increases our appreciation of NOWness, or 'N-X'.

There seems to be some connection of this X-ness with....

X + E-X = N-X

(The unknowable with the addition of an everlasting approach to itself, gives the most mysterious and potent form of nowness.)

This is permanent aspiration....which makes one feel quite tired even thinking about it....so long as X is unbelievably 'Beautiful'. Beautiful, in this sense, is a step beyond the amalgam of all valuable qualities.
In other words, there is so much more to be appreciated in NOWness than we have yet begun to wonder about, and it is this most profound appreciation and tasting of the NOW that is also the most profound form of Being Awake. The unknown as unknowable is with us NOW and will for ever lead us on towards knowing IT. For 'IT' has to be something very wonderful indeed and must have the seed of our equation, above, within it.

My own attempt to do this was to paint and photograph 'Flowerness' through attending to flowers. There is beauty hiding there which draws me by it's over and above- and beyond- and is an everlasting smile- and always offering the Absolute best..... SO FAR.

This 'so far' is also a clue to 'God being everything, so why does He bother?' question. God is a LIVING God not a 'done it all, that's it, God,' and so He flounders at the 'not yet done' as we are doing now. As we can say, 'It's just for Fun-Delight,' and, 'I can't stand being bored,' reasons. This is also a clue to 'X', I suspect, in that however IT arose, it arose with this kick behind it. But that makes no sense. Nothing makes sense when we try to understand how the 'Seed of all Seeds of lifeness and consciousness' got started. It feels so strange to me that we can grasp this concept with our awareness, which arises from the answer, and yet get no answer.

I don't intend to go on beating my head against this, but I quite enjoy grasping the bones of it and clarifying it to the best of my ability. It seems to be part of the same package that enables me to enjoy the light and colour and shape of flowers in the N-X of now. I detect a big amused smile being directed on me from SOMEONE ! It's a loving smile and also says, 'I like you to be like this, so that we get a really hot game going between us'

IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE IT GOES SO LONG AS IT'S HOT.

Have you noticed that when we do something that is really fun a great feeling of love arises at the same time? Super fun produces super love.

It's not easy to produce super fun because it's God's extreme delight, but it's a super challenge!

An Apology from God

A friend of mine has been pestering me lately by asking me why I am the way I am, which is, to him, rather ungodlike at times. I have to apologise to him about this and try to explain my position.

You see I had to start this great game from the place of great potency which I had come to live in. This place (a position, or attitude) is where the action has to come from, and is thus the place of the power which any action requires. The fun that I envisaged for myself — 'fun' being another word for lovely joyfulness meeting with action and surprise — was to create a playground which could introduce these situations for me and also you, the players, who could play at it all with me. This was to keep the sense of fun cooking and boiling over into new ways of experiencing it — 'it' being the livingness of my being.

It turned out not to be easy, for the conditions required to get it started are those of enormous vitality and perfection, and had a feel about them which clouded the real purpose of it all. These essential preliminary conditions were full of the structures and organising principles that naturally come from the beginning situation I had to build, and into which I could pump 'energy with orders in' so that I could bring the play ground and players into a living situation outside my essential being. When I say outside, I mean in a condition which could enable pure potential to become lots of sorts of bits of this potential — all sorts of bits and pieces broken away from a sort of imprisonment in the oneness of pure being.

Hmmm, I trust I have not lost you in all this; it seems so simple to me and yet I realise it is quite likely to be the opposite for you. Let's try to cut it short.

Angels live and work for Me in these highest realms, and as Teachers will give you the powerful and highly organised feeling of the structures required to build and maintain the playground and players for the great game which is afoot — the playing at living experience game.

My friend has come up from Earth, a place I arranged which would allow him to get to grips with this playing without being aware of, or inhibited by, the stuff that the Angels are dealing with. For the point of it all is to be quite free of the initiating organisation and it's necessary awesome power and energy so that we could all arrive at a naturally friendly, all pals together, way of living out this great fun. You can dig me in the ribs and tell me a joke, and I would love it, but if you get involved with the Organising Angels you will never be able to do this.

See if you are having my sort of lovely fun; if not, try to break away from organisers and their followers. It's all meant to be user friendly to your 'you-ness' and my 'me-ness' together. There's nothing else to do with this everlastingness except to learn how to have the best sort of delightful fun with it.

If you object to this, because you can see and feel the mess and pain that exists among you, just let me say that the freedom to learn what the game is, and how to play it in your own way, is the only way it is ever going to work for us all. When you learn how to do it properly it will make the very best sense, and stop being such a nasty preliminary episode for so many of you.

Sorry if I'm beginning to sound uncaring. I am not uncaring, but I can't help living with my big smile because I can see where it is all leading. I bet there are times when you too get this feeling with you own children. There are, however, no games worth playing which don't have all sorts of 'testing times' within the overall gladness about having something to play at rather than nothing to play at.

Enjoy the Process

ME

"My cup runneth over" and I am concerned to catch the valuable life experience and not allow it to go to waste doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. There are so many possibilities to choose from in my creative play.

GOD

You simply cannot do everything all of the time. Experiment and waste go together and lead to discovery, so don't become anxious about results. Try to enjoy the process itself which allows for lateral thinking and lateral diversions.

The new things are not found where you expect them to be. We can't live "new beginnings" without letting go of the "old beginnings" and allowing them to slip away. All that is really valuable will come back to you when it is needed. This is part of The Game of life which requires forgetting and letting go with good grace and a sense of non-importance of ones valuable Self. Do not fear to waste your time and energy, you will never run out of them and the "Crisis" in the World is only solved by those who follow the best instincts of their Spiritual Nature. As these work out all together, so each one of you finds yourself holding and demonstrating a bit of the necessary jig-saw puzzle of life coming into a new and better expression of itself, Myself-Ourself.

Be with the big, fearless love which smiles on everything from its sense of Everlastingness and the Completeness that lies behind all Living Reality. For Reality is complete in one sense although it strives to play at Itself in another sense. Life Games are set up for playfulness and not because our being nature is frightened of losing anything. We think we can lose but we can't. There are safety nets around everything since all comes from perfect Love, Joy, Fun, Bliss, Wisdom and Humour!

What you see as misery in the World is what you see in your child as it lives from crisis to crisis each hour of the day with each one being "the end of the world" in severity. Your world is like this child, it is the way young things grow...only the scale is different. They will both grow out of it.

All these words are just to help you to get to grips with the Spirit of life for your Self and in your own way. This leads to a simplicity in the midst of complexity which appears to others to be Wisdom and beyond words. Words point to this and that, here and there, but Wisdom is beyond this and that, it is Being with the essence of the possibility of life.

To allow it to work out as experience we play at putting together "stage sets" or Worlds, each one different, to draw out variety in the nuances of life possibilities. Our Spirit learns to manage this as we grow up, we then visit each others Worlds as we add to our collection of "ways to do life"; rather like a Bee collecting honey from all sorts of flowers.

So don't be surprised when other people visit your World and you start to visit theirs. You can't do this in the contraptions you use to visit the moon. You will do it properly when your idea of yourself becomes more spiritual in nature and much more ethereal in conception. Then you will "allow" yourselves to look at ethereal science and ways of doing things which are in keeping with the graceful efficiency of Spiritual Wisdom. Then you will see the Big Stage of Universal Productions Ltd. as being a very graceful project.

At present, when you approach Wisdom and the Love-Joy of it's nature you go "all funny" about it and go into all sorts of "over the top" forms of reverence, discipline and dogma and throw your common sense out of the window. Your idea of power and importance as your crude, dominant personalities use it on Earth is the cause of this and, of course, is fear based rather than love based. I am not like this. My power and dominance is only there to enable love and joy to please us all, you all and My Self. It is then so natural that My happiness is wrapped up in our collective happiness, and our collective misery too, while you learn to grow up in understanding. I can cope with this misery, but you, being youngsters, often feel that you can't cope because you have not learned to live from your strength which is only found in the nature of your Spirit, the Spirit we all share. Our Selfness and our Oneness are thus so easily linked together in the love play of this Innermost Nature.

And so I sigh and smile and wait.

You are all so silly and stupid and adorable and childish as yet, and I can't hurry this growth without spoiling the virtue of your condition of development from spiritual sleep to self-chosen awareness. I just want you to feel how "nice" it all is, even when it seems to be "all nasty". Tricky, I know!

The best thing to do is to try to experience Me and what goes with Me for your Self. Inner and outer contemplation, meditation and conscious direction of your attention and intention are common sense ways of knowing Me, and thus your own You, and lead to recognising how interwoven we are.

A Cup of Day

What shall I do to-day?
What will to-day do with me?
What will I do to to-day?
What will we do to each other?
Hello, play-friend day, here we are so wonderfully arranged, each on our own side of the tennis net of life, neither of us concerned to win but only to be the best companion in the game. We may touch upon surprise or we may enjoy the re-happenings of old joys. The new and unknown thing still loves to reveal itself among the best of the beauties stored in our treasure chest of the known.
If I wish I can choose to Be with the thrill of the cutting edge of this game, where 'the net' is. The thrill can be so deep that what we would call its excitement is so much a part of its primary Being that it feels as though it is utter peace at the same time. What a paradox.
I look at IT, and then IT looks at me with 'that' smile.
Do you know 'that' smile in yourself ?
It seems to be able to smile on everything, whatever it is. How can it do that unless everything, whatever it is, is something to be glad about ?

I will ask...
The reply comes...

'I only smile like this because I know that everything that is happening is in place of nothing happening. You and I both want to play the game of the happening of living experience - whatever happens - instead of remaining in the Absolute Being state of no game, the state of Pre-Creation and no happening.
Because of your strong connection with a relatively coarse level of physical play most of you fail to see My smile and so you forget what the atmosphere and mood was that set it all up, and still broods over it all.
Ah well, play is play and one thing leads to another, but there are times when I wish that your fever of dominant self-wilfulness would subside, with all its contrary forms of unplayful activity, for these confuse you and you don't realise that life is meant to be an opportunity for you to live out your best joys with as much definition as possible. I want you to smile on Me as I smile on you. I don't know how I can say it more clearly than that.'

The play and music of creation

...Another question you would like to ask me is why I should need so many children around about me in this scheme of mine. Why would not twenty or fifty be enough?

To begin with you do not yet know the depth of my nature. You do not yet know just how much I have to give. If what I had to give were just a simple thing it would not require an elaborate situation to give it in, but what I have to give is most elaborate, and so, to create the necessary width of understanding, I need to find expression for all my qualities, and lay them all out for you to see.

As many of these qualities have to be lived, so I need many different children to live amongst one another. My plan was vast in your sight because my being is vast also, but do not let that be a cause to think that any of you do not matter to me; you matter to me all as individual children and also as players in my play.

If you do not play your part, who is to do it for you? No one can, and it thus leaves a gap in my book. As my book is a long one it needs many words and you are both my children and my words to one another.

You are all players in my orchestra, and I cannot make the sounds I had hoped for if any of you are unable to play the individual parts that make up the whole piece of music. My orchestra is not like yours. In my orchestra no two parts are the same but they are all needed to make up the true beauty of the sound I have visioned...

I need a large family because I need to express a large number of characters, so do not think only of rushing to my heaven, for it is not necessarily in heaven that you will be able to learn the part you have to play. Remember that where character is concerned it is the hardest experiences that stamp the deepest patterns, and, when you think of my music, try to remember that it is a continuous creation and not a single piece that is to be repeated.

I have no desire to repeat my music, rather do I spin it newly all the while, so what you add to it now, and at any other time, is continually affecting the performance. You and I are making this music now, and each of your sounds is valuable to the effect, and I am the one who all the time gathers them in and weaves them together into a whole of constantly changing music. Thus I even make use of the discordant sounds since they all express in some way the reality of the complete situation.

Not that I would have you think that I sit back and coldly conduct this music, or feel any pleasure from discordant notes. I am doing many things at the same time in ways that you would not yet understand, and each discordant note pulls at my heart and my sympathy.

My music is not made to entertain, it is the expression of our endeavour, and effort, and suffering, woven together with the beauty of the beginning and the end. It is the sound of the whole book as it is being read by you all. It is this very music that I use to order and adapt my school to the needs that I sense in it. It reports to my sensitive ear the exact condition of my whole work and my nature responds to its beauty and its needs.


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