As soon as we start on the path to enlightenment, we begin to wonder about our own personal life, and that becomes very important to us, even to the point where sometimes it could make an aspirant rather selfish, because he becomes more interested in himself, his own personal life, than people around him. ¶This is one of the things on the path that really should be avoided, and again a complete change of perspective is needed. We have to change our perspective and begin to realize that beautiful body of the soul which has been growing through the many, many lifetimes that we have spent on the Earth. It’s an indestructible body, and each lifetime it grows a little bit stronger in its inner nerve system. That is called the soul, or the psyche. ¶This body has been in existence for some thousand years or more on this planet, through the reincarnation process, and it is rather mature when the individual asks for the realization of the Self. It has lived so many lifetimes and gone through so many different experiences that in its maturity it wants its last experience on this Earth, that of Self Realization. ¶So, therefore, our individual existence, our individual life, should be identified with the immortal body, not with the physical body, not with the emotional body, not with the intellectual body, not with the astral body, which of course is the instinctive-intellectual body, but with the body of the soul that has come along and had one body after another. It’s come along on the physical plane and had a physical body. Then it was overshadowed by an astral body. Then it was overshadowed by another physical body. Then it was overshadowed by an astral body. Then it was overshadowed by a physical body. And the layers went onto the body of the soul—the instinctive, the intellectual, the physical. And now, in its maturity, the layers are coming off again. ¶We drop off the intellect. We drop off the instinctive actions and reactions. The only thing we want to keep is the physical body and the body of the soul. And that is the path that we are on. And when this begins to happen, when the beautiful, refined body of light and the physical body merge as one, we see light all the way through the physical body, right into the feet, into the hands, through the head, through the torso, through the spine. We’re just walking in a sea of light. ¶This inner light is so beautiful. All day long my head has been filled with light. It feels that if I were to reach up and put both hands around the top of my head, there wouldn’t be a head there. It feels like there is nothing there. It just goes on and on and on into endless space, as I look back up within the head. When I look into the back of my neck, I see an array of, they look like, wires, and these, of course, are the nerve currents that run through the spinal cord. They’re all bright and active and scintillating, drawing energy from the central source of energy. And, of course, if you looked into the central source of energy, what would you see? You would see light coming out of nothing. That’s what it looks like, light coming out of nothing. §
The Self God is within all of this. It is beyond all bodies. It is beyond all form. It is beyond all intellect, beyond time, beyond space. That is the big realization on this planet, the thing that should be yearned for, sought for; all desires should be pointed in that direction. And then, once realized, you live out the life of the physical body and do what you can do in service to your fellow man, who is also coming along the same path that you have walked on before. ¶All knowing also is right within you. This body of light of the soul is the body of the superconscious mind. It is all-knowing. We have to approach it through the physical brain, and it takes a little time to draw forth inspiration and knowing, but the more refined the physical body becomes, the more like this soul body, the knowing is there superconsciously. It’s a beautiful thing to think about, that all knowing is within man. Everything that has been brought through—all books, all systems, all religions, all philosophies—has come through man, but not always through the intellectual man or the instinctive man, but through the man whose body of his soul and his physical body have merged as one. ¶There are other things that are within us, too. Even the devil that they talk about, it’s also right within us. That’s the instinctive mind. That’s also the intellectual mind, the doubter that says, “I don’t know if I should be on the path to enlightenment. Maybe I should be doing something else.” That’s the area of the mind that causes us to argue with ourselves, or have a mental argument with a friend of ours. That’s the antagonistic force of the instinctive area of the mind, as well as the intellectual area of the mind. §
And while this is going on, what does the body of the soul, the real body of you, what does it do? It’s about its business, working, learning, studying on inner planes of consciousness and waiting for the instinctive and intellectual and physical elements to grow up a little bit and merge, for life is just a tremendously great experience. Each lifetime has been a great experience for the soul. ¶The more experiences we can have during a lifetime and approach those experiences in a positive way, the more we begin to crush out the instinctive elements, the more we begin to mold the intellect so it is like the superconscious mind rather than being like the instinctive area of the mind, the more we can begin to mold the physical atoms so that they become closer attuned to the spiritual forces emanating from the soul body. The more experiences we can have and face those experiences positively, the faster we evolve. The fewer experiences we have, the slower we evolve. The knowing of how to handle each experience that comes to us in our lifetime comes from the soul. It’s our superconscious self. ¶The instinctive mind will want to run after certain experiences and be repelled by other experiences. It is the area of duality, of likes and dislikes. The instinctive mind will react and resent experiences of a certain nature. The intellectual mind will rationalize other types of experiences that happen to us during a lifetime, argue them out and try to find out reasons why. The superconscious mind of the soul will know the reason why. It will come in an intuitive flash. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter anyway. ¶The spiritual body of you, which is permanent, has always remained constant. It has always been constant because it’s directly in tune with the constant central source of all energy of the universe. This one source of energy feeds through your spiritual body and out through the intellectual sheath, the astral or emotional sheath, and the physical body. So, identify yourself as the inner being. Never see yourself as an outer being. Then experience won’t be reacted to. It will be understood from a mountaintop consciousness. Then experience won’t be sought for the enjoyment of the experience. The Self will be sought for, and the experience will be part of the path to you. §
Each experience that we have is a good experience, because it molds us. It shapes us, just like an artist would mold a piece of clay. From an ugly hunk of clay can emerge a divine being, molded by the artist. In that same way, the experiences of life, even those that boomerang back on us and those we think are terrible, mold us. But they only mold us quickly and benefit us tremendously if we hold our perspective as the inner man, the timeless man, the immortal being. Only in this way can this happen. That’s the attitude, the thoughts we must have, as we go along on the path of enlightenment. ¶The mere fact that you want Self Realization in this life means that you have been through hundreds of thousands of experiences. You have been nearly everything that there is to be on this planet. And now, in your last lifetime, you are finishing up the experiential patterns that you didn’t handle in a life prior. ¶Life is a series of experiences, one after another. Each experience can be looked at as a classroom in the big university of life if we only approach it that way. Who is going to these classrooms? Who is the member of this university of life? It’s not your instinctive mind. It’s not your intellectual mind. It’s the body of your soul, your superconscious self, that wonderful body of light. It’s maturing under the stress and strain, as the intellect gives back its power to the soul, as the instinct gives back its power to the soul, as the physical elements give back their power to the soul, and all merge into a beautiful oneness. In this way, the beings of the New Age are going to walk on Earth. Each one will have light flowing through his whole body and he will inwardly see his body glowing in light, even in the darkest night. ¶The good-and-bad concept should be thrown out with a lot of other things, including the up-and-down concept. There is no good; there is no bad. You don’t raise your consciousness, nor do you lower it. These are just concepts that have come in by various philosophers who tried to explain these deeper teachings the very best that they could. What is bad is good, and what is good is good. And a higher state of consciousness and a lower state of consciousness, they don’t exist at all. We simply hold a certain perspective of awareness, and we look out, and we go in.§
When you look out through the eyes of your soul, it’s like a great executive in a large building’s penthouse office. His desk is right in the middle of that office, and he looks out and he sees the people working around him. Then he looks farther out and he sees the vast panes of windows. Then he looks farther out, and he sees the city below, and he sees the sky, he sees the traffic. Then he looks back into himself. He sees his subconscious mind, with thoughts about his home life and other things that do not involve his immediate surroundings in this grand office. He looks deeper into himself, and he has an intuitive flash. Something has come to him, how he can help his enterprise be moved and motivated in a more dynamic way. He looks deeper within himself for the source where that intuitive flash comes from, begins to see light within his head, light within his body. Again he becomes conscious of people working around him. Again he becomes conscious of the panes of the windows. He has to leave this office. He goes down in an elevator. He walks out onto the street. He is the same being. His perspective is an inner perspective. He doesn’t go up and down in consciousness. ¶The mystic does not go up and down in consciousness. It only seems like that. But that is not actually what happens. It makes it very difficult when we hold the up-and-down and good-and-bad concepts, because they work in time sequences. If we are bad, it takes a certain amount of time before we can become good. And if we are good, there is a great possibility that we might be bad during a certain period of our life. If we are in a high state of consciousness, percentages have it that we may be in a low state of consciousness. It’s going to take a lot of time to climb up high, and we might fall down, so what’s the use? We have all of these semantic connotations with the words good and bad and up and down, and therefore we throw them out of our mystical vocabulary and the connotations that go along with them. We say we go within, deep within. We say we come out into outer consciousness. We say there is no good, there is no bad, there is just experience, and within each experience there is a lesson. Some experiences might make our nervous system react so strongly that it may take hours to pull ourselves together. ¶But once we pull ourselves together, that exercise evolves the body of the soul that much more. We have transmuted tremendous instinctive and intellectual energies into this body of the soul. We have fed it. We have given it a good meal. And we never face that same experience again, nor react the same way.§
The next time the same experiential pattern appears, we approach it from a mountaintop consciousness, because we have conquered those instinctive elements. Our intellect has been trained by family and friends, schoolteachers and business acquaintances. We have to build a new intellect, an intellect from the soul out into the intellectual mind, rather than from the instinctive area of the mind into the intellect, to be successful on the path of enlightenment. ¶If we look at the past and we look at the future as both a series of dreams, and the only thing that we are concerned with is our immediate reactions and what we carry with us now, we see that the past is there to test us and the future is there to challenge us. We cannot change the past, but we can change how we react to what has happened to us in the past, and we can change the future, anytime we want to. ¶The soul builds a body around us in this life. That’s what’s happened to all of us. This body goes through the same experiences, year after year; the emotions go through the same experiences, year after year, until we build up strong enough within ourself to face the experience without reaction to the experience. Then we go into a new series of experiences. ¶Give yourself a test to prove this out. Go to a movie, one that will make you laugh and make you cry and make you suffer, right along with the players. And that’s how we live our life. We laugh, we cry, we suffer, we have joy, we have peace, like actors on a great stage. Then go to the same movie the next day, and go through the same emotions again, another cycle in the same life pattern. Then go to the movie the day following that, and go through the same emotions. Then go the next day, and you will find you will go through the same emotions, but not quite as well. Then go the next day. You will find your mind begins to wander into how the film was produced, just where the cameraman was standing when he filmed this emotional shot. You’re becoming mystical. That is how the mystic faces his experiences. “How was this produced? Where was the cameraman?” Go the next day, and you will again be distracted and may wonder about the voltage that runs the carbon arc light that penetrates the film! Then go the next day. You won’t be involved in the picture at all, or the emotion. You could care less. You had that experience, you lived it through, and you lived it out. It was neither good nor bad. It was neither high nor low. But you’re completely involved in the cameraman, the actors, the personalities of the actors. You begin to get perceptive, and you see that a particular actor was saying something and going through something but thinking about something entirely different. You didn’t catch that the first time. You were blinded by emotion. §
Go again and again and again, and finally you would become deeply involved with yourself and the people around you, and you will start having a new set of experiences. Someone’s eating popcorn on the left side and someone’s smoking on the right side, and you get up and move. The very first time you went to see the movie, you were not even conscious of anyone around you. ¶And finally, after going to this same movie for two weeks, you sit down and you start breathing and going within yourself, and you are not conscious of someone on the left side or someone on the right side, or the film or the light penetrating the film or what is on the film. You are breathing and going within yourself, and you begin to enjoy the bliss of your own being. That is what a mystic does in life. That’s a wonderful meditation. If you don’t want to go to the same film two or three weeks, night after night after night, well then just pretend that you do. Meditate on it, and in the course of a short meditation you will see how a mystic lives his life. Now, of course, one film and its nerve-wracking experiences conquered, there’s always another film being played in town, and you could start right over again—the same thing we do in our experiences. We go through one set of experiences. We react to them. We go within ourselves. We lose consciousness of the experience itself because we know how it was created. We studied it out so well. It has come to us in intuitive flashes. Then we go into the next movie, the next scene. ¶Now, when the mystic wants to understand his series of experiences, he does not analyze himself. He doesn’t go through the emotion of “Why did this happen to me?” “What did I do to deserve that?” “What did this experience come to me for? I want to know the reason, and only when I know the reason can I go on.” This binds him to the intellectual area of the mind. He lives his experiences in the consciousness of the eternity of the moment, and if an intuitive flash, a mountaintop consciousness, comes to him where he can see how he fit into the experiential pattern, he accepts it and he knows it’s right, because it permeates him so dramatically, from the top of his head right through his entire body. ¶The mystic waits for these intuitive flashes, and he links one up with another. But he doesn’t flow his awareness through the intellectual mind and spend time in that area to try to analyze each happening or each reaction to try to justify it, to excuse it or to find out why it has happened. He doesn’t do that. Why? Because the soul, the superconscious mind, doesn’t work that way.§