AMYDON-EXETER CENTRE 113

Pranayama

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The third section in the ancient teaching of Yoga is called pranayama. It is concerned with the structure of the created world, in which man lives, and with the forces and substances which can help - or hinder - his spiritual progress; it also has to do with teaching each person to control and direct the creative forces, which are responsible for the maintenance and healing of his physical being.

Prana is a Sanskrit word for these creative forces or powers - the life force - which build all structure on the invisible physical plane first of all, and, through it, create and then maintain all physical forms. These are the spiritual forces that are responsible for all Organic Life on Earth. The Greek word pneuma originally referred to the same creative forces. The Sanskrit word yama is concerned with “commandment” or “direction”, meaning “to have command over” something, or being able to direct it.

This aspect of the teaching, called pranayama, concentrates on all that a man needs to know, and the kind of effort he has to make, in order to command, or direct, the creative forces in himself. He learns to direct the creative forces to wherever they are needed, in himself or in others, to restore or heal physically; he learns to raise their level of operation in himself from the sub-conscious to the conscious, not only through becoming aware of their automatic functioning, but, eventually, by gaining control over them where this serves a useful purpose.

There are certain esoteric teachings which maintain that a man, in order to grow spiritually, has to work against the current of Nature; otherwise, he remains part of it, and subject to the laws of Organic Life on Earth, living a mechanical and, therefore, semi-conscious existence, because the “power” behind Organic Life desires to keep him in this state.

This is a misunderstanding and distortion of the ancient teaching of pranayama, which states simply that man, in order to acquire self-mastery, has to gain control over the forces of prana operating in himself. This does not mean that the forces of prana - the creative forces - are either inefficient in their job of maintaining the physical being of a person, or that they are in any way inimical to the growth of his etheric being - or “desire” to keep him where he is, in order to “serve their own purposes.” Their purpose is solely the creation and maintenance of all organic forms of life, which are physical vehicles for varied spiritual expressions of Creativity. Rather than being inimical to spiritual growth, prana consists of forces without which the physical body could not be maintained, and no spiritual growth could take place at all for a man during his life on Earth. Physical wholeness is essential for his spiritual growth.

Pranayama is the practice by which a man learns to become responsible for the totality of his physical life. This does not mean interference with the efficient working of the creative forces, but becoming conscious of their activity, and responsible for them in the way a Minister in control of a government department is responsible for all its working - for the overall direction and setting of guide-lines or aims - while allowing each specialist or technician to function at his most efficient level with his own specialized knowledge. This image may be applied to the individual's practice of pranayama, where a man does not imagine that he can undertake the specialized work of maintaining his own bodily structure and organs, but wishes to be “master in his own house.”

A man may first of all become conscious of the presence of the creative forces or prana in himself through his own insufficiency, by way of having some physical disability or illness, for which he seeks healing by additional pranic forces. If he practises a simple exercise of “pranayama”, he may have an experience of healing, which will mark the beginning of his real cognizance of the existence of these creative forces, and can gradually lead to a more conscious relationship with them.

The simple exercise of pranayama for the healing of a person's physical body is as follows. The person sits in a cross-legged position, and focuses attention on his Solar Plexus. He seeks to become aware of the omnipresence of the pranic forces around him, and then, on a slow in-take of breath, feels them being indrawn into his Solar Plexus. On the exhaled breath, the person uses his imagination to send prana out to all parts of his body - or to those parts in particular need of healing. For this exercise to be effective, it must be practised once a day, for five minutes at a time - preferably in the morning on first rising. These forces work directly on the Solar Plexus, and, through it, on the whole physical body of a man - or on the specific part in need.

The creative forces of prana can and do maintain the human body, as far as they are allowed to do so by man's free will, without any need for the exercise of pranayama, or for consciousness of their activity on the part of the person concerned. However, when a man begins consciously to direct the pranic forces, two things happen. The amount of the available force is increased, and something else is added to it through the fact of his raised level of consciousness. This is a spiritual substance, which derives from the man's own Creative Imagination, and is added to, or enters into the vibration of, the creative forces. Through his conscious act of directing the healing pranic forces, a person uses the powers of his Creative Imagination, and, in fact, sends out much more than what was originally visualized. Many physical weaknesses or illnesses, to which a man may be subject, can be overcome by the combination of this spiritual substance and the creative forces which the exercise of consciously directing prana sends out.

These principles form the basis of all physical healing. All healers, under whatever name they practise,1 employ this simple exercise of pranayama, even if they do not do so consciously, or are unaware of the true nature of the healing process, the forces involved, and the structure or technique of their deployment. Spiritual healers are sometimes more aware of the etheric forces involved in the process of physical healing than are practitioners whose skills rely on modern scientific methods. But there is much misunderstanding and dangerous imagination among healers who are associated with various systems of healing, with faith healing, or with spiritualism and mediumistic practices. In all forms of healing the healer is assisted by persons on etheric planes, who bring to their task a wider range of knowledge and techniques than is available to the one who operates on the physical plane.2

1. Whether aleopathy, homoeopathy, naturopathy, spiritual healing, or other.

2. The quality of the healing power is always directly related to the level of being of the healer, and of the spirit whom he attracts.

In some cases of highly intuitive healers, and in certain forms of healing, a surgical operation may be entirely directed from the etheric or spiritual plane; in all serious or difficult cases, the long process of healing is always aided by spirit beings. Whatever the source to which healing may be attributed, and whatever healers or people may think about the nature of healing, the process is always the same, and is based on the same essentially simple method of pranayama. It is the same creative forces and the same spiritual substance which are used to heal.3

3. There is a source of healing which transcends the creative force and is used by persons who have evolved beyond the etheric spheres altogether; but a discussion of this does not belong to the teaching about pranayama and healing by the pranic forces.

The first exercise of pranayama has to do with directing the creative forces for purposes of healing. The second exercise is one in which a man can bring the substance of peace into his physical being.

Substance or matter is sometimes thought of as being wholly different in nature from forces or vibrations; this differentiation is often taken for granted. In fact, however, all substances have rates of vibration, and all vibrations have a “substantial nature” or consistency. The designation “substance” or “vibration”, therefore, depends less on the intrinsic nature of something than on its function, which function may also vary under different circumstances. The function of the creative forces is eminently active, always moving, creating, maintaining, repairing, healing, and so they are referred to as “forces” rather than “substances”. The function of peace is not to activate, but to slow down the rate at which anything vibrates, and so it is referred to as a substance.

Peace is a solar substance, that enters into the etheric sphere, and works on all etheric vibrations - plant and animal as well as human. All levels in the Earth's etheric are - or can be - affected by this substance. It is a substance which effects the harmonious natural expression of all life, and which makes development of spiritual growth, that is innate in his being but not previously capable of being actualized, possible for a man. The substance of peace can affect the physical life of all organisms on Earth indirectly, by way of their etheric bodies. It is the state of a man's etheric body upon which the substance of peace acts; but where a man exists on, or is tuned into the vibrations of the lowest states of “darkness”, peace can have only an indirect effect, because the atmosphere of negative fantasy surrounding the person - whether he is in a physical body or not - is too dense for direct penetration.

The exercise to bring peace into a person's being takes the same form as the exercise of pranyama by which a man draws healing force into his Solar Plexus. The person visualizes drawing in the substance of peace on his rhythm of in-breathing. The peace substance has many personal uses. If a person falls under the domination of any one of the instinctive emotions, which are part of his physical life on Earth, he can use this exercise to temper the impact of these emotions, and lessen their effect on him. It is an exercise which can be performed silently and invisibly on occasions, when there is disharmony in the person's surroundings, or when another person is suffering from an emotionally over-wrought or hysterical state. The substance of peace may be directed to others with the same effectiveness as when it is applied to the person himself. This same exercise can also be used to bring peace to disharmonious spirits, whose vibrations have been registered on the person's own Solar Plexus, or who are seeking to impinge on his life in some way. But it is not a method of protection for the person against spirit impingement, or the disharmonious vibrations of others. It is an exercise to be used for the purpose of slowing down the vibrations of anyone (or of any part of creation), who is in a state of disharmony, or distortion, including the person himself.

There is protection for man, at every stage in the universe through which he evolves. Protection is also an actual spiritual substance, which is part of the forces of creation; its functioning, like that of the peace substance, depends upon a conscious act on the part of the person who desires it. Protection does not happen automatically at any level, for it is not an integral part of the creative process. Protection is a more passive substance than the substance of peace (nothing can be completely passive, or it would be inert), and may be compared with a sensitive membrane or an umbrella, both of which images indicate something of the essential nature of this substance. Protection exists everywhere as a spiritual substance, not only on the physical Earth. It is a substance that exists at every level, on the levels of distortion and darkness, as well as on the levels of spiritual growth - whether or not people call upon its power. It also exists beyond the etheric sphere.

The substance of protection acts upon the physical man through his Solar Plexus, and can be consciously drawn into the Solar Plexus, and directed outwards by the same exercise as the one used in directing the creative forces, or the substance of peace. (It is performed in exactly the same way, for the same duration, and with the same frequency.) The substance can be directed, so as to create a membrane of protection around the person and his own activities, or around other people and their activities. It lasts for twenty-four hours on the Earth plane, but its time-span is different on other etheric planes of existence.

The protection which this membrane gives is against anything which could harm a person (or animal or plant) physically or spiritually, whether through accident or wilful intent.4 The exception to its protecting power concerns the will of the person who has performed the exercise and directed its power, for he is not protected, if he wilfully seeks to destroy what he has himself helped to create. A person for whom protection has been asked is protected against his own wilfulness, unless there is a conscious intention to destroy that protection. This is the only act against which there is no protection.

4. There is no absolute protection on the physical Earth, although there is in all other spheres. Absolutes do not exist at all on Earth, and all “certainties”, whatever their nature, are what may be called “90‰ certain”. There is always the possibility of failure, because of the nature of the physical creation, which is separate from - although linked with - the etheric creation, and has a momentum of its own. So it is with the substance of protection.

Prayers for protection, whether offered ritualistically or extemporaneously, have been used by all people, at all times in the history of mankind. They not only belong to men's ritualised social behaviour or organized religion, but they are an integral part of his individual etheric nature. The quality of the protection given in response to ritual prayer is not the same as that which results from the exercise for protection. All verbal or mental prayers for protection, offered by people anywhere - in whatever age, or culture, or religion, are answered not by an actual substance, which is part of the forces of creation, but by persons in spirit, who carry out their self-appointed tasks to the best of their abilities.

There is one other force that exists within the sphere in which man lives, and connects with him through his Solar Plexus. This is the self-perfecting or evolutionary force. It is a cosmic force, which exists within all Organic Life, but manifests differently according to the level of existence on which it operates. It expresses differently in individual men and women to the way in which it manifests in animal or plant life. It is not part of the creative forces, nor is it involved in the actual process of creation, but becomes part of every created physical5 form at the time of that form's creation, and never ceases to in-form the direction of its life throughout its entire existence. Whereas the work of the creative forces is to create, and then maintain or heal what has been created, the work of the self-perfecting force lies in (a) working within each form to create the conditions for the perfection of the species6, and (b) the development of greater intelligence, sensitivity, and responsiveness as expressions of Will. This latter manifestation is innate in all human beings, where the self-perfecting force becomes the evolutionary force: for evolution belongs only to man.

5. It does not exist on the etheric planes or in the etheric sphere, except as part of man's intrinsic nature. It does not exist in plant or animal life on the etheric spheres - but only in man.

6. This was particularly true in earlier times, when the species were in process of physical formation, although it is still true to a lesser extent.

As far as the self-perfecting force is concerned, all Organic Life divides simply into two categories: species-oriented life and individuated life. Whatever other differences exist between ducks and roses - and they are many and profound - they are similar in this one respect, that their identities are with their species, rather than in their individual manifestations. All7 Organic Life, apart from mammals, has an identity with their respective species; mammals alone have an individual identity, albeit over widely ranging degrees of individuation. This difference, between mammals and all the rest of Organic Life, is of the essence, and indicates that, with the creation of mammalian life, some other factor entered in, which was not present at the other stages in creation.

7. With occasional exceptions in a number of vertebrates, where the odd animal individuates, and becomes capable of separate and individual responses and relationships.

In the beginning, the two spiritual forces of creation and self-perfection were created simultaneously by the Creator as forces to structure and populate the whole etheric sphere. Out of this etheric sphere, in time, a small segment was “densified” as the physical Earth and the solar system.8 When that time came, and the physical Earth was created, these two forces began to work on the surface of the Earth within its own time-scale. Their work was, by its nature, time-structured, and progressive, commencing with the creation of the most simple and primitive, and growing into increasingly complex forms.9 This work was not evolutionary in nature, for every species was a separate creation.10

8. This “materialization” of every expression of life in the etheric sphere, in denser forms, was not originally envisaged, but came about, at a very much later stage, as a way of dealing with the problems of spiritual entropy, in an attempt to give new impetus to the evolution of individual human beings.

9. The creation of physical forms, on the physical Earth, was from simple to increasingly complex, and worked in reverse to the original etheric creation, where man was created first, before any other etheric forms of plant or animal life were created.

10. The history of Organic Life on Earth appears “evolutionary” in retrospect, and unrelated to the working of real and prior spiritual creation on the etheric plane.

The work of the self-perfecting force was always to strive beyond the current stage, not only for perfection within the existing forms, but, beyond them, to more perfect and complex forms - ultimately more responsive or sensitive forms. This is the force that, over vast æons of time, not only perfected the different species of plant and animal life, but created ever more intelligent and responsive structures through which the Spiritual Will could manifest. It was not responsible, however, for the leaps in being, which distinguished, first of all, the lower animal life from plant life, and then - even more important from this point of view - mammalia from all other forms of Organic Life. Mammalian life was the physical manifestation of a different and separate spiritual creation from the spiritual creation which had manifested in all earlier animal life. The spiritual creation of man was a separate and prior creation to all the others.*

* A Culbone Visitor's note: The Sumerian tradition suggests, however, that in what seems to have been, at least in part, the trial-and-error process of realizing the creation of man in his present form, certain other mammalian species, e.g., the lion, might have appeared first on planet Earth.

All species of Organic Life were created as distinct and separate identities of an etheric nature long after man's creation, and they had existence on etheric planes long before their manifestation physically on Earth. The creation of physical form was a different creation altogether, and proceeded in the time-scale of the physical Earth from simple forms to more complex and responsive forms.11

11. There were two separate and distinct acts of creation, which proceeded from different starting-points, and involved different kinds of process. On the etheric plane, man was created first, and all plant and animal species were created much “later” as separate manifestations, and not as part of any evolutionary or inter-species growth process. The creation of the physical Earth was very much “later” still, and manifested slowly within a “time” scale, and through evolutionary progression from simple to complex forms. Here, the physical form of man was evolved last of all, and etheric beings only began to enter into physical bodies for an experience of life on a physical Earth after long ages of “time” - after the evolutionary process had reached the stage of preparing adequate physical bodies for him to inhabit.

The first order of physical creation comprised all plant life; the second order of physical creation had to do with all the species of the “lower”, less complex animals. In the third order of physical creation, the mammalian, a new possibility of individuation entered into physical life on Earth which had not existed previously. The two previous orders of creation were created as capable of manifesting in individual forms on the physical plane, as they had done on the etheric planes, as separate expressions of the different species of plant or animal life; their spiritual identities were not individual, but remained collective and with the respective species on the physical as well as on the etheric plane. At the conclusion of its particular physical manifestation, the creative force within each plant or “lower” animal returns to its own species. But, with the third order of creation, the manifestation of separate physical forms of mammal life was accompanied by a simultaneous spiritual or etheric individuation, in which each animal received its own separate identity which it would retain throughout its entire subsequent etheric existence (even after the conclusion of its physical life.)12 The fourth order of physical creation was the creation of human forms: of those individual forms into which the separate and unique etheric beings could enter - for the purpose of certain kinds of experience necessary to themselves and their spiritual evolution.

12. The individual physical animal is always a new creation without prior etheric existence. Separate spiritual identity did not exist at all on etheric planes prior to the physical manifestation of mammal life. A Culbone Visitor's note: Reading Denis Saurat's Milton - Man and Thinker (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd 1944) and Gods of the People (London: John Westhouse 1947) enriches one's understanding of the Christadelphian perspective in this respect.

Every plant and animal species and each individual human being had separate spiritual existence on the etheric plane before entering into physical life. But the physical manifestation of each species awaited the perfecting of the appropriate physical structure, which was proceeding in the time-scale of the Earth. And each species came into manifestation physically as the perfecting process reached its own point of entry with the creation of its particular physical form. Each species began to manifest physically on Earth, when this process had reached the stage of perfection necessary for it.

With regard to man, the “time” of his first manifestation on Earth was more complex. It not only depended upon that stage being reached when the physical form, within which he was to manifest, had been perfected.13 but also his attaining to a certain stage in his own individual spiritual evolution before the Earth-experience could be of use to him.14 Until the middle of the nineteenth century, few men entered upon physical life on Earth before they were spiritually prepared for it, and able to make some use of the form of physical expression in which they found themselves (not more than ten thousand people in any one century). Since the middle of the nineteenth century, however, an ever-increasing number of people have entered physical bodies that were not suited to their stage of evolution, or into societies whose conditions were inimical to any real learning experience or growth of being - or entered without adequate spiritual preparation themselves for their once-only life on Earth.*

13. There have been many physical forms into which individual men have incarnated, commencing with the earliest forms of proto-man. These forms represent more primitive stages in man's etheric or spiritual evolution. Man never incarnated in the physical forms of plant or animal life. As men evolved spiritually, so the physical forms of mankind progressed as vehicles for his physical manifestation. A Culbone Visitor's note: For details of an accessible and well presented, relatively detailed discussion of some further aspects of the question of how human life began on Earth cf Zecharia Sitchin's various books. Much that the author affirms about such matters in this and the following Chapters, even if psychologically sound, can, for purposes of improved communication within our human family, usefully be complemented by appropriate reference to the sources Sitchin has indicated.

14. See the Addendum at the conclusion of this section.

* A Culbone Visitor's note: Here Joan D'Arcy Cooper's teaching is clearer and simpler as an expression of the primordial tradition than Alice Bailey, H. P. Blavatsky, or Rudolf Steiner, all of whose quantitatively more extensive contributions to the literature, which contain much that is of value, are widely and readily available.

Organic life on Earth is thus represented by four separate physical creations, from plant life to man. Within the separate creations, the evolutionary (or self-perfecting) force worked, and still works, for the perfection of forms for each species; but there is no evolution between the species. Originally, at the beginning of the separate physical creations, this force sought for ever new and more perfect forms for each species to express through; the impetus of this aspect of the force has slowly diminished over the period of historical time.

As the impetus for the perfecting of form dwindled, so the other aspect of this same force, the evolutionary impulse, has grown in strength. Not that the possibility of evolution between the separate creations ever existed - or ever will do so. It exists only within the separate creation of man, and works only within individual men and women - not on the species as such - as a force that reinforces each person's own will to grow and evolve spiritually. The evolutionary force has itself evolved; it is a more evolved stage of the self-perfecting force. For “perfection” in man is not a specialized physical form with a certain mind of intelligence, nor even a particular etheric expression of Life. Perfection for man is individual and unique, a continuous growth of being: of sensitivity, responsiveness, and the will to assume personal responsibility. It is a growth that is without limits or finiteness.

The plant and animal species, and the individuated mammals within their species, are intrinsically spiritual creations and beings; as such, they are not subject to the laws governing physical life on Earth. As far as they are concerned, the self-perfecting or evolutionary force works solely within the structure of physical life on Earth, and is subject to its laws, conditions, and time-scale. This force cannot alter the etheric reality of plant or animal life, or effect spiritual changes. These species and the individuated animals forms were created spiritually perfect, and do not in any way evolve - or need to evolve - from one spiritual form to another, either in their Earth experience, or on the spiritual plane, where their existence continues for eternity in the etheric body of Organic Life as a whole.15 But the physical manifestations of Organic Life are not perfect, as they were intended to be, because of the conditions which men have allowed to develop, and the states of greed and violence which man has created. Man's vibrations have distorted the physical manifestations and behaviour of both plant and animal life on Earth; because of their sensitivity, plants and animals have picked up or in-breathed these vibrations, so that their own physical expressions have become distorted to a point of considerable variance with their spiritual beings.16 After their lives in physical bodies are completed, all animals or animal species have to be spiritually cleansed of these vibrations, and of their un-natural behaviour patterns, before being able to continue their normal spiritual existence on the etheric plane.

15. The etheric body of Organic Life, which is a whole and distinct etheric body, was created after the physical Earth was first created, but before any physical forms of plant or animal life were created. Before the physical Earth was created, there was no such body of Organic Life to which the separate, etheric plant and animal species belonged.

16. For example, no animals were created to eat other animals. The carnivorous “instinct”, even of the predators, was not originally natural to them, but came about as a reflection of man's behaviour, and of the vibrations emanating from man. The reaction of the cat family to anything that moves is of the same origin: the response of a highly sensitive animal nature to the emanations from man's mind, and from his behaviour.

It is difficult for human beings, whose minds are structured by ideas of change and growth, to accept the existence of life which does not alter in its etheric nature, but simply has been as it is for all time. It does not fit into his conceptual world. But the fact is that all Organic Life, plant and animal, does not need to “go anywhere” spiritually, nor is it subject to any state of change; and yet it is never static, but is always moving in accordance with its own intrinsic nature.

At the same time Organic Life on Earth expresses physically, in so many different ways, this concept of growth and evolution. It was created in part for the purpose of so impressing on man an awareness of growth as to awaken his own desire for spiritual growth, and remind him of his true nature and purpose. All physical life expresses a birth-growth-death-rebirth cycle, which is not reflective of the spiritual nature of any species, nor of etheric life in general. Organic Life on Earth has, in a sense, “taken on” this task for the benefit of man; for the Earth can be seen as his spiritual “forcing house”, where physical experience can sharpen and clarify the choices open to him, and create the conditions in which individuals can will their own spiritual growth.

The lower centres in a man revolve around, and derive their meaning from, his self will. The self will of a person controls his life from its centre in the Sex chakra, incorporating his sense of identity and his desire for power, which are integral to it. The self will is always changing form or discovering new interests through which to express; the desire for power finds limitless avenues for expression, which can be masked by varied faces of compliancy, consideration, and even self awareness. The self will changes form, but is, nonetheless, always present somewhere, with a grip on the person and his life. Not even the light of consciousness can actually free the person from the grip of this will.

Yet there comes a turning point for the student of yoga when some change is possible, when the essential being of a man begins to make itself felt more decisely, not only through the higher centres in him, but in other ways as well. Up to this point, while the person has tried to understand and practise the yamas and niyamas, as well as he could, and endeavoured to acquire both flexibility of, and control over his mind and body (which work on the asanas implies), the self will has been both participant and partial beneficiary. The person has become more aware in his relationships with other people, and his attitudes towards them have altered. There have been many changes in his thinking about himself, and in the structure of his physical life. There are encouraging signs and proofs that the person is on the right journey - on the right road for himself. And yet, in many different ways, the old will still reveals itself characteristically. So much has changed, and yet the old self is still around.

The turning point comes when the etheric being or nature of the man - all he has brought with him into his physical life from previous experiences and the knowledge he has acquired from long existence on etheric planes - starts to impress itself on his consciousness through his kundalini sense. This “sense” is latent in the Sex Centre of every person. It is a focal point through which the true nature of a person and his own real, although previously hidden knowledge can express.

When the kundalini sense begins to function, it manifests internally, within the person himself, and causes him to experience another order of reality which does not readily fit into his physical life pattern; nor is it comprehensible in terms of his ordinary thinking. These experiences, which happen in a person through the kundalini sense can, therefore, challenge the very authority of the self will on which his physical life is based, because they are reflections of the true nature of his being: they are expressions of his own reality, whatever the stage of its development.

The word kundalini is found in both ancient and contemporary Yoga literature17, where it usually refers to a latent energy or power “curled up like a serpent at the base of the spine”18 which, when awakened, is supposed to travel up the spine through the chakras and give rise to psychic powers and higher states of consciousness. This is, however, a very misleading conception which can encourage dangerous fantasies in people who take it seriously or seek such powers.

17. The word is not proto-Sanskrit in origin - although it is of equally ancient derivation, nor was this knowledge about the kundalini sense taught in the original, Sumerian Yoga teaching. It was taken into that teaching in its early stages through contact with another culture.

18. See Ernest Wood's book: Yoga (Pelican Books 1959), and its references to “Kundalini”.

The word kundalini means, in general, something which is potential or latent. It is not, in fact, an energy or power at all, but a kind of “sense” or sensitive point which exists in man's Sex Centre and picks up vibrations from his etheric being, which refer to its real nature and the experiences which had previously gone into its formation. This sense exists in the Sex Centre because it is man's centre of gravity - ^{or levity!} for most of his evolution, and there must be a way in which his own true nature and etheric being can get through to him. Thus, through this sense a man may re-experience portions of experiences he has had over æons of time, and which have gone into the making of his being at its present stage. Through this process of re-experiencing he can also become aware of the actual existence of his etheric being and may eventually be able to make a conscious connection with it; he is likewise slowly reminded of the purpose or meaning implicit in his etheric existence, and so the perspective from which he regards his present physical life can begin to alter. In time, this physical life of a man may come to be experienced in relation to the purpose and needs of his etheric being. His physical life can them become more essentially a spiritual journey.

If the experiences belonging to a man's etheric being, and picked up by his kundalini sense, are not understood as such they can become distorted by the self will and contribute to its imagination about itself. His sense of self then becomes filled with the energy with which these new revelations are charged19 and he seems to himself to be filled with power. If the kundalini sense is swamped in this way by the man's Sex Centre and everything that feeds and gives identity to his physical self, it is no longer capable of picking up the more subtle vibrations from his inner, etheric being. His life again becomes directed wholly outwards towards the acquisition of power for the self, and the opportunity for re-establishing contact with his real self is past - at least for the time being. Another opportunity for the functioning of his kundalini sense may become possible later, but only during some crisis in the course of his physical life.

19. All the centres or chakras contain energy-reservoirs, on which they draw for their functioning or use. A Culbone Visitor's note: Joan's fondness throughout her writing for materially long albeit syntactically uncomplicated sentences almost devoid of punctuation probably derives from and reflects some degree of easy familiarity with the literary style of formal legal documents.

There can be no alteration in the structure and direction of a man's physical life on Earth - and no permanent change in the nature of his real inner being, with which he entered upon that life - except through the kundalini sense and the right development of its sensitivity. Many factors in a man's physical life, which do not belong to his inner nature, contribute to the development of his physical self and all that identifies him to himself and others on the physical plane. This self, in which is centred his self will, can only perpetuate itself - never change itself. Even the creative forces in a man, which created and then maintain his physical body, have no power to bring about spiritual changes. The nature of an individual as he is, at any particular stage in his evolution as an etheric being, can only change through a change in what he wills. And an alteration in the nature of his willing only comes about through an increase in his awareness of himself, which is a result of renewed contact with his true nature in the midst of his physical life. This contact - which comes through his kundalini sense - gradually restores to him contat with his own unique knowledge and prior experience which make possible a change in the nature and direction of his willing. It is this change which is the purpose of every man's physical life on Earth.

The etheric being of a man manifests directly on his physical life in three different ways and through three separate focal points: his Creative Imagination, his Head Centre, and the kundalini sense. All three are important for the change in direction which marks the commencement of his evolution and for its continuation. If his etheric being expressed only through his Creative Imagination, the person would have no awareness of the nature of his own etheric being and no inner guidance and he would create new images of self, new phantasies, or even monsters! If his etheric being manifested only through the Head Centre, its guidance and perception of reality would be abstract or theoretical because it was not related to the man's own nature, that is, to any experience or awareness of his own true substance. Such abstract “inspiration” could create a dichotomy in the man's experience of himself, whereby the expressions of his lower centres and his physical life generally would be seen as opposed to the information which came through his Head Centre; or else such “inspiration” would produce no result at all. This is the dualism in which some philosophers and theologians profess to believe but which has no real basis in man's own nature. Experience of the nature and state of his own etheric or real being, through the kundalini sense, is therefore essential for a man before any real change can take place in the direction of what he wills and in the structure of his self will. After that the perceptions which the increased sensitivity of his Head Centre makes possible fall on his awareness of and knowledge about himself, and his own creative force - his Creative Imagination - can be used to actualize the next stage in his spiritual growth.

The self will of a man cannot be defined solely in terms of his lower centres and the physical expression of his life, although for a long time - and with many people for most of their lives - the self is circumscribed by the lower centres, the Sex Centre in particular. The self will is, in essence, the expression of a man's etheric being - a reflection of his Divine Will, or, rather, the form in which it appears during his physical life on Earth. There is no other will in a man during his physical life on Earth except his self will; it alone is the expression of his Divine Will. Even if the direction of its expression is wholly outwards and determined by the man's material life, it is nonetheless a reflection of the inner or etheric nature of that man. There is no built-in dualism in a man which consists of two wills, one “outer” and the other reflecting an inward-facing or spiritual desire. And yet his willing is not singular but composed of a multiplicity of desires which, taken together, determine the nature of the will and its direction from moment to moment. For any change to take place in a man's nature, there must first of all be a change in the nature of his willing, which means a consolidation of one group of desires to give consistent direction to his willing.

When the kundalini sense is awakened in a person, the knowledge inherent in his own inner being returns to him slowly. It is this knowledge which can, in time, bring about a change in the nature of his self will. It is possible for this process to commence in any person whatever his level of being, but it occurs more frequently in those people in whom an awareness has already begun to develop that their lives are concerned with some kind of spiritual growth. For anyone who, before entering upon a physical life, had begun to evolve perceptions that lead beyond self having or self expression, this is a most important time. When the kundalini sense begins to function in the physical life, he can be reminded from then on, in one way or another, of the etheric experiences which led to and inspired his spiritual growth. It is important for the Yoga pupil to become conscious of this process of awakening and recovery in himself and its true nature.

The kundalini sense is at work in all people to a certain degree from the commencement of their lives. For it to manifest more fully, imparting the experiences and nature of the person's etheric being, there must be awareness on the part of that person. The question for everyone, therefore, at a certain stage, becomes one of identifying the kundalini sense in himself, distinguishing the various forms in which it manifests and has manifested throughout his life, and recognizing that this is the way in which his own inner being has been endeavouring to reveal itself to him.

There are various indications of its presence. One form in which the kundalini sense expresses itself is as a sometimes vague but nonetheless distinctive longing or nostalgia for something “lost”. This can manifest in different ways, expressing (in Western cultures) pantheistically, religiously, or sexually. (The forms of expression are not intrinsic to the kundalini sense but rather modes of expression characteristic of these cultures.) The longing for union with nature is largely a spiritual longing or the expression of a person's inner being. The idealised Man or Woman - the image of all that is good, true, perfect, with whom the sexually maturing young person identifies himself - is also largely an expression of the person's inner being.20 Religious expressions of the kundalini sense have filled literature with the love imagery of the devotee or mystic from earliest times. The Spiritual Marriage, the longing of the Bride for the Bridegroom, the Mystical Union with Christ are some of the many descriptions of a person's response to intimations of spiritual reality in himself. Underlying these forms of expression is the unconscious desire for spiritual growth; but this desire may be externalized and draw the man away from perceiving the true nature of his longing onto a plane where satisfaction is short-lived and fulfilment impossible.

20. It is not wholly this, because the physical sex urge is a distinct and powerful urge in man, especially in the early years of maturity.

One difficulty for the person lies in distinguishing the fact of the kundalini sense, and what it is revealing to a man about the nature of his own being, from his fantasies and the cultural or religious forms in which his fantasies are expressed.

Mystical experience describes a form of human experience which is as old as mankind. The term is often used to refer, in particular, to the Mysteries of Greece and Rome, or to the Egyptian Mysteries, and implies a body of hidden or secret or sacred knowledge. These Mysteries were based on a certain body of knowledge or ancient teaching, hidden from most people but passed on from High Priest to High Priest, or from guru to pupil, by way of certain schools of learning and various forms of initiation. All religions have their “secret” or esoteric aspect and schools for the teaching of a sacred or hidden body of knowledge exist - and have always existed - in most highly-developed cultures. Their existence depends in part upon that innate desire in man for secrecy and the sense of personal power which the possession of secret knowledge gives him.21 But, even more than that, the perpetuation of all esoteric schools and teachings - all Mysteries - depends upon (1) the need to preserve in its entirety a certain body of knowledge about man and the conditions necessary for his spiritual evolution, (2) the desire of individual persons for self-knowledge, and (3) the desire to acquire special powers or a higher level of consciousness. These esoteric teachings and their rites of initiation, whatever the form of their manifestation, depend upon a correlation of outer and inner: of external form with the interior state of mind of the individual person. But however close the correlation of outer with inner might be, a form could never exist within which the etheric being of an individual could grow or evolve naturally, for the requirements of any “school” of teaching will always impose on him its own conceptual pattern. Even a person who, out of the strongest desire for truth, joined such a school would, on becoming a pupil, lose the possibility of making free contact with his own conscience and his own etheric nature - out of which contact alone can come true spiritual growth.22

21. There is a trait in the etheric beings of all people, until they reach a certain stage, that desires to hold on to, or keep secret, some bit of knowledge, or some possession. This desire for secrecy is a manifestation of the desire for personal power.

22. As the ancient “schools” became more exo-teric, and the Mysteries became popularized, so the external rites of initiation became rituals in which an increasing number of people participated, the criterion for participation being faith, or adherence to doctrine, and not knowledge - or self-knowledge - and a supposed growth of being, as had originally been requirements for initiation. An aspect of this ritual which existed in many religious sects - most clearly formulated in the Eleusinian Mysteries - was the act of “eating the G-d”, literally or symbolically. Through this ancient act or ritual the person believed he acquired some of the attributes or power of the One he ate, or made contact with Him, or felt himself protected and secure in the meaning and definition of his life.

Such was the teaching of the one called Christ who taught that the direction for a man's new growth and wholeness lay within his own being. His real teaching was about the growth of each person's own unique being out of his own knowledge and experience and free from any external form of coercion. The essence of this teaching lay in showing each man how to take personal responsibility for himself and his life.

Another manifestation of the kundalini sense lies in certain kinds of dreams which are considered erotic by some schools of modern psychology but are, in some people, intimations of their inner reality and the awakening desire to contact - to feel, to touch - their own inner beings. An idealised form of the opposite sex often appears in these dreams - usually someone unknown to the dreamer, with whom he or she is in complete and intimate harmony. If sexual desire enters into this situation it rarely expresses itself in the sexual act but rather in a passive lying together. In fact, the Stranger in the dream, whether male or female, is always passive and never sexually domineering. The need expressed in such dreams is for contact, for harmony or at-onement - never for sexual excitement, even if the latter occasionally takes over and colours the dream.

These dreams occur not only in adolescence or early adulthood, but may continue throughout the whole of a person's life and are very upsetting to someone in the middle years if their origin is not recognized or their purpose understood. For they are not always expressions of biological sexual frustration, where the indicated remedly lies in the direction of new sexual experience or a different partner. The dream may be an expression of the person's own kundalini sense and can recall in him his inner being and its nature.

Finally, the existence of the kundalini sense may be revealed to people through an experience of recognition which is called up by some often trivial incident in the person's physical life that coincides with the memory of a former etheric experience or relationship. It sometimes manifests as a feeling of déja vu. Nearly everyone has experienced, with varying degrees of sensitivity and awareness, a familiarity with people, places, or situations for which the known life cannot account. Many people experience strong affinities with a particular culture or language or music and art form which cannot be explained by the circumstances of their physical lives. A marked feeling of poignancy often accompanies these experiences, as if a former intimacy, once known and lost, were briefly touched again. Through his kundalini sense a person can receive many different indications of experiences and knowledge which belong to him through previous existence on etheric planes, and which are part of his etheric being. Through recognizing their nature, the person builds new links between his present physical life and his real inner being.

After a person has taken the first steps in becoming aware of the kundalini sense in himself and its individual modes of expression, the next step lies in the Yoga practices of savasana. Savasana is concerned with the complete relaxation of body and mind and leads, ultimately, to states of mind called meditation, which is the attitude of listening or awareness that grows out of inner stillness. Relaxation of body and mind is a necessary preparation for growth in self-awareness; self-awareness is the first stage in meditation and precedes all other forms of awareness that extend gradually to include more and more of the etheric sphere in which the person has his being.

The first practice of savasana concerns relaxation of the body. A simple method is used, but for it to be effective it must be practised regularly, at least once a day for ten minutes, over a considerable period of time. The person proceeds in the following way: he lies on a mat on the floor, in a warm yet not airless place, and places his hands on his solar plexus. He gives attention first of all to his hands, then to his solar plexus and all the sensations connected with it. He seeks to be aware of it as the centre of his physical being, of its warmth, of the way in which it sends this sensation of warmth radiating out in all directions, to all parts of his body. As the person directs his attention to the solar plexus, he tries to relax all the muscles connected with it. When he has achieved what is possible for him at that particular time, he begins the relaxation of his whole body. In this, he commences with the feet and proceeds upwards, throughout the length of his body, tensing and relaxing each group of muscles in turn, as far as he can, and ending with the small muscles in his throat, tongue, face, and scalp. When he has achieved the degree of relaxation possible for him at that moment, he should continue to lie in this position for approximately three minutes.

When a person first commences this exercise of savasana he will find it difficult to apply his mind to giving attention in this way. He will also discover a low level of awareness in himself and tend to generalise and skip over whole groups or areas of muscle. In time, however, as he perseveres, he will become aware of greater detail and of the state of different sets of muscles. He will develop an awareness of the degrees of habitual tension existing in certain parts of his body. As he continues so lines of connection between these different physical tensions and certain habits of thought or thought-patterns will reveal themselves to him. When this begins to happen, he has reached the second stage in the practice of savasana.

With this new stage comes the need for an increased degree of mental relaxation and, with it, another level of awareness through which the person learns in greater detail about the inter-locking of his thought-patterns or attitudes of mind with muscle and body tension. At this stage the practice of savasana is extended into the person's daily life, and it is here that the inter-connections between mind and body are revealed to him most clearly - often as fleeting revelations in the middle of an experience or of instant “photographs” impressed upon his mind. Awareness of a mental habit can recall a series of bodily tensions, or the experience of muscular contractions can call up a related thought-pattern. At the stage the person discovers that in order to relax the physical muscle he has to make a more conscious effort to release the related thought habit as well. This requires great patience and the will to persevere over a considerable period of time, for the inter-locking of thought-patterns and body tension has built-up through long association. These casual(!?) inter-relationships between mind and body have also created a structure of tensions in the person which is self-perpetuating. The activation, for example, of a particular muscular tension may evoke an anxiety-thought for no reason other than the fact of long association.

This second stage in the practice of savasana has to do with loosening the structure of inter-connected tensions and mental habits through relaxation, not of eradicating them. Any attempt at this point to eliminate tensions or their causes would either beget new ones or alter the form in which the old ones manifested. So the aim should not be directed to getting rid of tension - which would be another cause of tension - but rather to the relaxation of body and awareness of mind. But for relaxation and awareness to develop beyond their starting points, there must awaken in the person a willingness to proceed which is based on acceptance: an acceptance of what he observes to be his own mental and physical state at the time. The degree to which he accepts his state, or states, is a reflection of his own integrity, and upon this depend both his desire and ability to proceed with the practices of savasana.

Even in the beginning the practice of savasana can give a person temporary experiences of total relaxation; but the habitual patterns of mind will again be entered into and the old situations will call forth old tensions. However, they will not be quite the same, for something has happened as a result of savasana. The former state does not always return in the same form, nor with the same rigidity; old attitudes, and therefore former tensions, do not have the same hold on the person's mind. A new state of being is slowly developing through the practice of savasana which becomes in time like another room in the person's house of himself, into which he can learn to move at will and which he can eventually inhabit. But this is a further stage to which the person comes in time, as he proceeds with other forms of savasana which may loosely be called practices of meditation.

The experience of total relaxation, which has been described as “another room” in the house of the person's being, is not an experience of emptiness but of completeness. His body is suffused with warmth and his minds is without tensions: he may seem to be “floating”;23 and yet it is not the absence of tension which is most noticeable but the presence of something else. It is a state of harmony which reveals the presence of his own etheric being, his inner self.

23. This is not a description of any kind of state in which the person “leaves his body”, as some people imagine. It is not possible for any person to leave his physical body until the time comes for his passing. All such descriptions are either phantasies, or relate to an experience of extended awareness of mind, which is interpreted as “leaving the body”.

The most “active” factor in the etheric nature of a person24 is called the Creative Imagination and is another name for the creative force within man's etheric being. It is not the same creative force25 which created and maintains his physical body but rather his own unique ability to create, which is latent in every human being. Its direction and form are determined by each person's own will; its capacity for expression develops through usage and depends upon how and for what it is used. The Creative Imagination is the Divine creative faculty put into the being of everyone at the time of his spiritual creation. It has always been used by evolving beings to create the higher worlds of Light - and by distorted beings to create worlds where darkness and demons exist.

24. Symbolized by the apex of the triangle in the Diagram of Man or “Enneagram”.

25. These are not two separate creative forces, but different manifestations of the universal Creative Force, one having the capacity for creation on the physical plane and the other - the Creative Imagination - being able to create anything, anywhere in the etheric or spiritual spheres.

The Creative Imagination is expressed through man's physical being during his life in a physical body, its place of functioning being the central frontal part of the brain. It comes partly into the orbit of the physical mind and can be used by it, for the frontal part of man's brain is also the venue of his physical mind. This mind, as it develops, becomes connected with either the left or right frontal part of the brain - only one side of which is developed in any one person. (The whole of the frontal part of the brain is used by the self will.) All that a man creates, mentally and physically, during his physical lifetime is a result of the use his will makes of his Creative Imagination, which expresses through the agency of the physical mind. All spiritual growth in a man, at whatever stage, is first of all projected by his Creative Imagination as potential or as an outline of what is possible, after which it is “entered into” and expressed by the man himself. The Creative Imagination makes the “plan”, as it were, which the man builds up through a continuing process of expression. But even the Creative Imagination does not originate anything new; all new creation, whether in the sense of a person's spiritual growth or his artistic expression, derives in seed form from a higher level of being outside the person himself. The Creative Imagination takes the “seed” and works upon it. This is the principle on which each man's creation of himself is based; it describes the process by which he evolves slowly, over vast periods of time, and also the process of creation in that portion of the universe on which his life directly impinges and for which he is uniquely responsible.

All creation - apart from man - was created by the Creative Imagination of individual beings at various stages of evolution. Nothing exists which was not created in this way. The same Creative Imagination exists today in all men and, with it, infinite possibilities for further creation. But new creation is not, in fact, expressed only in the form of new stages in man's spiritual growth, but at every level and in ordinary daily existence in the personal world in which each individual lives and has his being. Every person uses his Creative Imagination from moment to moment to create the world in which he really lives, that is, the world through which he relates to everything in his life.26

26. This is not “merely” a mental world, but the actual world in which each person has his existence, a world which is more truly “real” for him than the material-physical objects which he takes as real. For it is this world, which he himself created, which defines his relationship to all things, and to all people.

Creation takes place, firstly, through the act of visualisation. In most people, visualisation is an activity that takes place in the head, through the Formatory or Physical Mind, the results of which are not complete “creations” but outlines of form that become real to the person only through a process which requires a period of time. The process of making real what is initially an outline of form - that is, making subjectively real for the person himself - depends on the person's will and the degree of his willing. Thus, two activities are involved in most forms of creation, the act of visualisation and a process which commences with the act of willing. These two factors make up every human experience, for experience is creation.

This is the pattern of creation on the etheric plane, and every form which has - or is to have - physical shape is first of all an etheric manifestation. A building, a piece of sculpture, a painting, must be created etherically in every detail before it can be translated into stone and mortar, clay, or paint. This is the principle from which deviation is not possible.27 A piece of music may even be heard as a whole by the inner ear of the composer before he comes to the stage of setting down the notation in time-sequence,28 that is, creating its physical form.

27. There are artists who think that they create directly on canvas, without any idea or plan of more than the most shadowy form. They are either ignorant of the process of creation at work in themselves, or else are unconscious mediums, whose hands and minds are used by another's will to create his art-form.

28. Mozart is supposed to have heard the whole of his 40th Symphony in a single moment of time.

All creation must take place first of all on the etheric plane; its translation into physical form - if it takes place at all - is the result of another process which is based on laws that govern all forms of expression on the physical Earth. Most of creation exists only in etheric form, as etheric or spiritual reality for the person or persons concerned; it is not translated into physical form at all. All that men create through their physical minds constitutes etheric reality for them; this etheric world may not be expressed in physical form, and yet it affects and interpenetrates every aspect of a man's physical environment.

All creations that proceed from the Creative Imagination in a man are real and not abstract. Whatever the forms in which these creations are expressed, they have real existence for that person because they are composed of real etheric substance.

A man uses his Creative Imagination, consciously or unconsciously, according to the nature of his own being; he cannot do otherwise. It may manifest in hundreds of different ways in the everyday lives of people, for the Creative Imagination is the means by which the invisible or mental world is created within which most people on Earth live most of their lives. It is only when someone has exhausted its possibilities in one direction or another, or tired of this “world” within which he passes his life, that new possibilities of creation become open to him. When he comes to see the old forms of creation as trivial or irrelevant or unreal, so his own Creative Imagination can offer an infinite response to new forms, according to the direction in which his will wishes to go and the Inspiration which he attracts. This Creative Imagination - the etheric Creative Force within all human beings - is always available when a man needs it, to create new forms of expression for the self and new worlds for him to inhabit.

But at certain stages, or when people are in a particular state, this Creative Imagination is often used to excite or overstimulate or titillate the senses, creating an exaggerated and highly-coloured world which can seriously distort the person's life. He may even come to depend upon this exaggerated world of fantasy and derive his meaning from it until it enters into all his relationships to others as well as to himself. This is the state of mind within which all forms of magic thrive and in which people are vulnerable to the apprehension of demons or to mental derangement. The private world of fantasy can lead a person into manifestation of mass hysteria at political rallies or football matches and religious forms of emotionalism, such as speaking in tongues. It is the power of the Creative Imagination in people to which demagogues or wartime leaders appeal and which they draw on to create mass states of mind. To this faculty in man, and under certain conditions or in certain states, is due the appeal of such varied public displays as Roman Circuses, public executions, Royal Weddings, and Disneylands. It can be used as a source of exaggeration and unreason on mass scale to give people a sense of importance through participating in events or crises or fantasy worlds.

This highly-coloured world which people can create for themselves at certain stages, and in which they are to themselves the centre, is real for them and they usually attract other people into their lives who share in the same kind of “reality”. But it has only subjective validity and is not real in itself; it has no objective reality.

In time, this “world” within which a person lives his life - whatever its meanings, fantasies, or distractions - is revealed to him for what it is. Understanding comes gradually and new truths are disclosed again and again as the person is slowly loosened from the “pictures” of himself and his life which his mind had created. But at each stage a man loses only what has already, in a sense, ceased to exist for him. It may be replaced immediately by another picture of his life, with only slight alterations in the former structure of his mind. In this case, no space intervenes between the two states, but one interior world slowly merges into the other. In some cases, where the person is making real spiritual growth, the world he created, and in which he lived, is replaced temporarily with a desert-like world where he experiences greater clarity of vision and understanding about the nature of these pictures and the structure of what he had previously taken as reality. However brief such an experience may be, the quality of “truth” changes for him and never returns to its previous state. For an individual's “truth” derives from his experience and the state of his being; it is the essence of what he takes as real. Occasionally he may have an insight into that other Truth which is more complex and many-facetted than anything of which he could have conceived previously. For Truth - all-embracing, Objective Truth - is an experience of the total and evolving world, with all its levels of being, at any single moment of existence.

One task of the person who has entered upon an experience of “desert” or “wilderness” is to identify the elements of fantasy or unreality in his life, which had placed limitations upon his own spiritual growth; the second task is to experience what is now. Fantasy of one kind or another has prevented the person living in now. He has lived to a certain extent in what was going to happen next or, retrospectively, in past experiences. This is imaginary as far as the now-ness of things is concerned.

It is very difficult to experience now. The experience of nows may seem empty and even dull to someone whose mind has seldom been still or who has rarely taken in “what is” because the mind he had created was always there to colour or re-structure it - to distract him from it or in some way to impose its own pattern upon it. Now seems colourless and insipid because the person is more used to artificial colour or artificial stimulants.

To live in the present - the now - requires a conscious effort. And it is largely through various practices of meditation29 that the person develops states of awareness which make this possible. These practices are discussed in detail in a later section, and belong in theory to the stage of pratyahara; but in fact the practice of meditation begins much earlier for the student of Yoga, whenever the need arises in him, and develops in different forms throughout every stage of his evolution.

29. The word “meditation” is said to derive from the Latin meditatio, and there are various connotations of the word in most European languages which cover a wide range of meanings: to plan something, to give attention to one thing by a process of limitation or exclusion, absorption in an interior state to the exclusion of exterior phenomena, attentiveness, etc. To go further back, the word derives from a word meaning “to be in the middle”, and it is this which gives a clue to the true meaning of meditation, that is, to stand in the middle of life with interior and exterior awareness.

Dreamlike states and fantasy-dominated worlds exist on subconscious levels where little or no effort is required and a person may, in a certain sense, drift through his life.30 Such states can slowly fade as the person's awareness grows, for they are semi-automatic. The purpose inherent in the effort required to recognise the different elements of fantasy which structure the life of a person is to bring him to a higher state of consiousness in which he has a more continuous awareness of himself and his life. All states of awareness make possible at least some distinction between subject and objective reality and permit new forms of experience. From being the victim of a subconscious dreamlike existence, the person can progress through stages of seeing and experiencing things more clearly as they are and come to the stage in his evolution where he is master in his own house, to a certain extent, and able to control the mind which would distort and weave its web of fantasy around his life.

30. Effort is expended in relation to the dream or fantasy - and often it is considerable effort, but this is not the same kind of effort as that required to seek the intrinsic reality in things.

But to begin with he has to see and accept the reality of his own self will, as it is, and the subjective fantasy world which this will has created and out of which it seeks to act upon every situation around him. He has to accept the inability of his own will to act in relation to situations without fantasy or without the desire to alter them.31 When the person can accept his own limitations and the inability of his will to act non-subjectively, he begins to make contact with part of his own etheric being which can inspire him with the knowledge that eventually makes a different kind of action possible.

31. To act without the desire to alter something means acting in relation to the need of the particular situation, the needs of the other people involved; it is not the re-action of the self will.

If a person is to accept his daily life he has to accept the realities in his life as they are: the people, the conditions, and the events as they occur. This involves, in part, acknowledging his inability to alter factors which are unalterable. A decrease in the need to alter the conditions of his life gives rise to less dissatisfaction. When the man is more contented and less agitated and excitable, through desire for superficial change, so the real possibility of altering some things begins to arise. The possibility of real change derives from the man's etheric being and not from his self will. With growth in awareness, there develops in the person an increasing desire to take responsibility for his own life and to have more control over his own body and mind. In this way opportunities occur for the kind of change consonant with spiritual reality.

If a person can accept all that occurs in his everyday life, the power of the self will is lessened and he becomes more open to the kundalini sense and the possibility of re-establishing contact with his own etheric being.

Acceptance is a conscious act. It requires a considerable degree of awareness, for example, to accept interruptions as events that belong to a particular day; to curb an habitual impatience with someone through accepting the reality of that person's nature, which only he can alter; to say “yes” to an activity which is usually performed with reluctance and recognise its place in the structure of the daily life.

Acceptance also means a conscious saying of “yes” to the unalterable circumstances and conditions within which the person's own life is set, which have outwardly structured his life, or which form the social-cultural web within which his life is expressed.

Wasteful in energy and damaging to the person's relationship to himself is his failure to accept the structure of conditions or circumstances into which he was personally born. Parents, education, and social status can be used by anyone to justify his failure to make spiritual effort - to justify his own laziness - and enable him to postpone the commencement of the kind and degree of spiritual growth which would be right for him at a particular stage. So long as a person in any way rejects the personal circumstances which form - or formed - the external structure of his life, so long will his attention be directed away from the purpose for which he came into this life, and so long will he be looking to external conditions to provide solutions and securities.

Each person attracts his own set of circumstances according to his own etheric being, its nature, and the stage of its evolution. It is only from where he is that a person can begin to grow spiritually, and “where he is” means the kind of being he has developed, with all its strengths and weaknesses, up to the time of his entrance into physical life. It is both logical and essential that the external circumstances of his physical life should reflect in some degree the vibrations of his own real etheric nature.32 Therefore, growth in a person's being can only commence when he has turned around from the attitude that sees causes in external circumstances and has begun to use them instead to show him something of the nature of his own being; for these circumstances suggest - at least in part - the purpose for which he came into a physical life.

32. Although these essential conditions can be overlaid with much that does not belong to a person's life, through the will of other people, or the general conditions that exist on the Earth at any particular time.

This is particularly important with regard to a person's parents. Whoever they are, or whatever their relationship to him at any particular stage, his own growth of being depends upon an acceptance of them as they are and the fact of his relationship to them. “Blame of parents” is an effective obstacle to any kind of growth in a person.

The present physical life of every person is the only possible starting point for his spiritual growth. All that belongs to the person's mental or manual equipment is his own and belongs to no one else in exactly the same form, for it has been earned previously by his own efforts. As no two people make identical effort in their etheric lives, so no two people will have identical equipment to use in their physical lives33 - or identical weaknesses. Each person's physical life - its circumstances, conditions, and relationships - is his own particular field of work in relation to which his etheric nature and character can develop and grow. He alone has the task and the ability to work his own “field”, which is the segment of Life that belongs to him alone.

33. Ideas or attitudes founded on an illusion of equality of people or “talents”, and the envy from which such ideas ultimately spring, only distract a person from what belongs to his own life. Whole societies, and now human life generally on Earth, are distorted in their true function as a framework for individual human endeavour, by the predominance of a philosophy of human equality. Individual lives are distorted by the idea of “rights” that belong to them, and by the kinds of protection which technologically advanced societies provide against discovering in physical terms the nature of their own strengths and weaknesses. In this way, most people are discouraged from accepting the reality of their own natures, which is the only starting point for spiritual growth, and the sole reason for their Earth lives.

Since before the time of Patanjali, at least two thousand years ago, the section or step in yoga called pranayama has meant solely “control of the breath” or exercises by which a man stopped, held, or punctuated his breathing for purposes which were only in part physiological. The ultimate aim of all breath control, as taught by traditional yoga schools, is mind control and the creation of certain states of being. In the original oral teaching of Yoga, however, breathing exercises as such occupied only a small part of the subject of pranayama and were taught solely for physiological reasons. No controls were ever placed on the inhalation or exhalation of the breath itself nor were any artificial rhythms imposed on the motion of the lungs. The later practice of breath-stoppages was never taught in this earliest form of Yoga because it had no connection with the purpose implicit in the breathing exercises which was the development of health and balance in the natural physical man. Breath-control would have been considered dangerous as an interference with natural physiological processes; for only slight physical benefit would result from such exercises, and they could damage the ability of the lungs to perform their natural function.

Detailed breathing exercises, involving both control and stoppage of the breath, were invented by priests and formed part of temple or religious practices at a later time - beginning about a thousand years after the oral teaching of Yoga commenced. They are recorded briefly in the Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali; in a simple, more innocuous form, they constitute part of the Yoga-for-Health teaching of the West. They were developed originally for the purpose of attaining to certain psychic powers. As such, these breathing techniques became part of a vast body of diverse religious and philosophical teachings whose narrow and distorted practices may be found in some measure in every religious or quasi-religious group all over the world. All such practices become in the end an obstacle to man's real spiritual development because they interfere with the normal functioning of his physical and mental being upon which his spiritual development depends. Spiritual growth can only be gradual. To attempt short-cuts, of whatever nature, sets up inner blockages and distortions which may take a long time to remove or remedy before the person can enter again upon his true spiritual journey.

In the original oral teaching of Yoga two different kinds of exercise were taught - and are still being taught - in connection with pranayama. For physiological purposes, the Full Yoga Breath was taught as the principal breathing technique to expand the lungs to their full capacity; in this connection pupils learned about the importance of fully oxygenating the blood-stream to keep the body's cells and tissue in good repair and to release toxic matter. They were given enough knowledge about the nature and functioning of their own bodies for them to be able to understand the importance of having a regular and sufficient supply of oxygen to maintain the body in a state of health. In the twentieth century, this Full Yoga Breath is of even greater relevance than it was five or six thousand years ago - in fact, its importance can scarcely be exaggerated if a man's body is to remain (or even become) healthy; for the habits of shallow breathing and hollow chests, impure air, and the greatly increased incidence of toxic matter (particularly in the form of chemicals) in man's body have been in large part responsible for his present state of physical disharmony. This state did not exist, or only rarely, in earlier times. Hence, the increased importance of teaching the Full Yoga Breath to twentieth century man before going on to the series of pranayama exercises.

The Full Yoga Breath commences with the student standing or lying - never sitting - in a relaxed position. He first of all becomes aware of his Solar Plexus and begins a slow in-take of breath as if it were being drawn into the Solar Plexus. He allows the breath to rise, on a slow rhythmical count, through the lower, middle, and upper lungs. As breath fills his lungs so he extends his arms up and out to increase their capacity. When the lungs are full, there is no pause and the breath is slowly released, on the same slow rhythmical count, and leaves the upper, middle, and lower lungs in that order, the arms being lowered simultaneously. The student practises this two or three times a day, taking a minimum of four Full Yoga Breaths on each occasion.

The second kind of exercise connected with pranayama is not a breathing exercise in the strictest sense, because the student is not in fact directing the breath at all. In every form of this exercise it is the rhythm of inhaling and exhaling air which is used as a focus for drawing in Creative Force. These exercises are an essential part of the teaching about pranayama because they have to do with the individual's practice in learning to have control over the Creative Force. The essence of each exercise lies not in the act of breathing but in the absorption of “free” prana and the directing of this and the internal Creative Force (that is, the Creative Force inherent in the person himself) to various parts of the body to cleanse or clear away toxins and other waste matter, or to heal.34

34. This is another form of the basic pranayama exercise described .

In performing this exercise of pranayama the person visualises drawing the Creative Force into the centre of Elimination on an inhaled breath and directing it to the part or parts of his body in need of cleansing or re-vitalising. In order to be effective, this must be repeated continuously for a period of five minutes. This is the pattern for all the exercises of pranayama.

Every exercise of pranayama is based on a relaxed, easy rhythm of breathing which is neither shallow nor deep but performed slowly and without strain. Once established, the rhythm of breathing must be natural and require no conscious effort, for the person should be able to give his whole attention to the directing of prana.

There are eight specific exercises of pranayama apart from the general cleansing exercise given above. Seven of these exercises follow the same basic pattern, commencing with the person placing his consciousness in each of the seven centres in turn. “Placing his consciousness” means visualising the particular centre in terms of its position on the spine, its meaning, and its function, and then entering into it, as it were, so that the person feels he is inhabiting it. From his consciousness in that centre, however limited it may be, he visualises drawing in prana or the Creative Force (while he simultaneously and slowly draws in his breath.) Visualising means not so much “seeing” as the use of all his senses in an interior way to “feel” or “experience” the drawing in of prana into a particular centre. This involves considerable use of his Creative Imagination. Thoughts will possibly occur to the man as to the nature of prana; in fact, a person may be sensitive to many aspects of the prana nature while performing this exercise. He may also experience a sense of wonder or mystery. As the persons draws prana into a particular centre, he should have in mind that the reason for doing so is to cleanse, heal, and strengthen that centre. Finally, on the exhaled breath - and there should be no pause or holding of the breath - the person visualises the dispersal of anything which might impede the perfect functioning of the particular centre. The exercise is repeated five times for each centre, that is, with five complete breaths.

This exercise may be performed for one centre only or it may be taken as a seven-fold exercise in which each centre is focussed on in turn. In the seven-fold exercise, the person commences with the three lower centres - the order is not important, but he should take time and care to become conscious in each one before performing pranayama. This means that the person should truly “centre himself” in each chakra and experience its nature before beginning the exercise connected with that centre. After performing the exercise of pranayama in the lower three centres, he proceeds to the Solar Plexus, then to the Heart, Throat, and Head Centres, following the same procedure with each one.

These seven exercises - or the seven-fold exercise - must always precede the eighth exercise which has to do with drawing prana up and down the spine, from the Sex Centre to the Head Centre. This final exercise of pranayama is an important exercise, for it joins the whole being of a man together by connecting the seven centres with one another. Six of these centres are situated on the spinal column of the invisible physical body of man and reflected onto his physical spinal column; the seventh, or Head Centre, is sited aboved the spinal column, so there is a gap between it and the spinal column which contains the other six centres. There is a definite purpose in this gap. The Head Centre is separated from all the other centres so that it can have the innate capacity for functioning independently and be able to inspire or direct a man, whatever his stage of evolution, from outside the limits of his physical life and experience. Separated from the other centres in this way, the Head Centre is freed to receive and channel knowledge which belongs to the person from previous experiences of an etheric nature and which is contained within his etheric being.

The main purpose of the eighth exercise of pranayama is to relate all seven centres in a man to one another and to create a functioning whole. An important aspect of this lies in bridging the gap between the spinal column and the Head Centre and thus bring the inspirations coming from that centre into relationship with the other six centres.

The exercise is performed in this way. On an intake of breath the person visualises prana entering his spine at the Sex Centre and travelling up one side of it, through each of the other centres: Elimination and Digestion Centres, Solar Plexus, Heart, Throat, and Head Centres. As prana travels up the spine, he should make the effort to feel himself briefly into each centre in turn, visualising its nature and purpose. At the Head Centre he “turns around”, as it were, and brings prana down the other side of the spine, through the centres in reverse order, as he exhales his breath. On the succeeding complete breath he brings prana up the other side of the spine and down the first side, thus alternating sides in the up-and-down movement of prana for five complete breaths.*

* A Culbone Visitor's note: For worthwhile elaborations cf. Mantak Chia, Awaken Healing Energy through the Tao (New York: Aurora Press 1983); Transform Stress into Vitality; Chi Self-Massage; Iron Shirt Chi Kung; Cultivating Female Sexual Energy (Huntington: Healing Tao Press 1985, 1986, 1986, 1986) and other volumes in the same series.

All eight exercises have the purpose of cleansing, healing, and strengthening the centres and the channels in the spine35 through which the centres are connected with one another in the invisible physical body. The cleansing is necessary because of abnormal ways in which man lives his life on Earth, feeding his mind and body on what can cause distortion or malfunctioning. Only when the centres are functioning correctly in themselves is the harmonious working together of them possible which was intended for man's physical life on Earth.

35. The two channels on either side of the spinal column exist only in man's invisible physical body, and are, in fact, not two separate channels at all, but one continuous and unbroken circular tube, extending from the Sex to the Head Centre and back. Only the third or central channel actually exists within the spinal column of the physical body of man.

These exercises also help to develop those centres which have remained under-developed through the way in which a man has lived in his physical body36 and to so adjust their working that each centre is able to perform its true function37 and not usurp that of another centre. The exercises also serve the very important purpose of making the person more aware of the centres in himself and of the underlying unity of being which their functioning should reflect. As his consciousness increases of both the existence and the harmonious working of all his centres, so they in fact begin to work in approximation to the true potential which they had when he was first born into a physical body.38

36. They do not develop the centres beyond the stage which the person had attained to spiritually before his entrance into a physical body, but only correct the maladjustments acquired in the process of that physical life.

37. Any misappropriation of function by one or more centres, which existed prior to the person's entry into physical life, is not cured in this way. Nor is there any certainty that the malfunctioning acquired during the physical life can be completely cured through these exercises.

38. Their development beyond this point or stage is another matter altogether.

All people come into a physical life with etheric beings which are in some state of imbalance in one direction or another, because all development is one-sided and has to do with first one aspect of a man's being and then another. A man's centres are, however, not only unequal in relation to their inherent potentialities, but their ability to function normally is distorted by the way in which man lives his life on the physical Earth. This kind of distortion is very different from the basic etheric imbalance which exists in everyone in some degree - and is very exaggerated in some people.* In part, the distortion caused by man's life on the physical Earth is due to his self will which identifies more with one function than another and may create a structure of fantasy around its activities. These fantasies have been rationalized by theorists in all ages but in particular by twentieth-century psychologists who develop theories about the personality or psychological “types of man” - categories into which all people are supposed to fall because of innate differences.39 These may, in fact, be kinds of imbalance which belong to a certain stage in the person's evolution or they may represent kinds of distortion characteristic of a particular society or culture at any one time. These limited and often irrelevant explanations of human psychology tend to encourage people to continue with their self fantasies, giving them theories to justify the labels they pin on themselves. The initial imbalance in a person can be strengthened in this way; his centres may remain under-developed or their functioning may even atrophy or become distorted in the direction emphasized by the particular theory.

* Alexander Cannon's Sleeping through Space (Woodthorpe, Walcolt Publishing Co. 1938) and The Invisible Influence (Aquarian Press 1969) confirm and valuably amplify what is here stated. The fruits of relative freedom from distortion are charmingly illustrated in Dr. Marsha Woolf's & Professor Karen Blanc's The Rainmaker - The Life Story of Venerable Ngagpa Yeshe Dorje Rinpoche (Boston: Sigo Press 1994) with a Foreword by the 14th Dalai Lama. Professor Robert A. T. Thurman's Afterword illuminates how closely Tibetan Buddhism shares Joan Cooper's understanding of Truth.

39. There are in fact twelve essential or spiritual types of human being, which were created in the beginning, and correspond to the twelve tones of the octave, each note or type representing a different quality of whole (not partial) vibration or eternal being. But the reality lies not in the note as such, but in the individual human beings through which it is expressed. And it is the individual human expression which is eternal, not any abstraction.

The eight exercises of pranayama can begin to rectify this situation more effectively than could be done by any other means, because they unite the efforts of a man's consciousness, will, Creative Imagination, and physical being. They give him actual experience of the different centres, their functioning and relationships to one another, and of that unity in which all the functions form a whole within his own personal being.

All the centres in individual men and women have certain potentials for working which differ from person to person, the potential in any one man being the result of his previous spiritual efforts before entering physical life. These potentials vary in accordance with the stages people have reached in their spiritual development; but however undeveloped spiritually the being of a person may be, it nonetheless contains all seven centres. No one on Earth is entirely without the intuitive faculty of the Head Centre or the ability to communicate in some form or other through the Throat Centre. It is a dangerous abstraction which suggests that one person or another is not an intuitive type. He doesn't know about his intuitions, he doesn't hear them, perhaps; but this doesn't mean that they are not functioning to some extent in every person on Earth.

A man does not need to make effort in order to develop those functions in himself which are under-developed. In fact, the actual making of effort and the person's motive in doing so may create a further imbalance and diver him from a growth pattern which would manifest and evolve naturally in relation to his own growth in awareness. For his first task is to extend his awareness of himself gradually beond the artificial pictures he has of himself. He has to become aware of and observe his centres through the practices of pranayama without criticism. As he focusses his attention on each one of the centres in turn, he holds in his mind a conception of the true nature and function of the centre and of any malfunctioning or weakness of which he is aware. As he does this, and as he performs the exercises, he will become aware of a change gradually taking place. He will be aware of a stronger, more assured and responsive working of the centre and of distortions slowly diminishing. These real - physical and conscious - experiences of his own centres and their working will give the person greater confidence in his own being; they will also act on his acquired or artificial attitudes and ideas about himself and bring about gradually a loosening of their influence over his mind.

The experience of these pranayama exercises will also allow the natural unity of a person's being,40 as it should have existed at birth,41 gradually to become part of his own consciousness. He will have an increasing experience of wholeness,42 nor merely an idea about the unity of his being. He will experience the various functions that belong to both the physical and etheric parts of his being as they are at his own stage of evolution, and his understanding of their natures in relation to one another will deepen through inspiration. It is only this experience of the nature and wholeness of his own being, the growing sense of confidence which it can generate, and the consequent ability to assume responsibility for his own life that form the basis for any real change in a person and are the foundation for all spiritual growth.

40. This “natural unity” may be a state of spiritual distortion or imbalance which belonged to the person before his entry into physical life, but of which he is unaware, because of all that life in a physical body has laid over it. It is the underlying state of his own etheric being of which he has to become aware.

41. The “natural unity” may already have been distorted at the time of his birth, through prenatal experiences within his mother. 42. Even if it is a distorted wholeness.

True teaching relates only to what men are able at each stage to experience for themselves; it never has to do with abstract knowledge or theories which are not relevant or in some way related to a man's own understanding, at different stages. All true teaching must also be based upon the experience of the whole man and include very aspect of his etheric and physical being. Any teaching which is partial and creates dualisms or attempts to exclude one part of man's being or experience, with the intention of improving or strengthening another part, is a false teaching because it seeks to create an artificial man; it does not start from the natural man or from the man's true nature or reality. These two criteria are useful measures against which to examine the validity of teachers and teachings.*

* A Culbone Visitor's note: As Joan D'Arcy Cooper's A Service of Meditation (1979) appears not so far to have been published, I feel it fits in well here:::

A Service Of Meditation

(1) Introduction - This is different from a classroom meditation. It is a service as well as a meditation. We desire to serve; to wait on the highest part of our selves, to wait upon the G-d who reflects all light and love and who provides every opportunity for our spiritual growth; to wait upon Christ from whom comes all our teaching and guidance. We join together in a corporate act of worshipping the Highest - not alone, but so that we may experience our togetherness.

The year can be experienced as a Journey through stages of birth, growth, harvest, letting go, dying. This is the underlying rhythm of all life on this Earth, a pattern which is both physical and spiritual. Each stage is marked by definite changes in the kind of power and its expression. We are most aware of the physical times of change, the Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, Autumn Equinox, Winter Solstice.42a But in between these stages in the physical rhythm of the year are four still points which indicate another, invisible, spiritual rhythm. These still points occur at times when the creative energies of the Earth are at their slowest and when we can be most receptive to Spiritual Vibrations. There is a special power available at these times: the 1st February, 1st May, 1st August, 1st November. Ancient peoples devised festivals for these times so that by coming together and participating in corporate (rather than individual) acts of worship and meditation, men and women could create and focus and receive this power for spiritual enlightenment and experience of a certain kind. Each still point has its own special purpose and holds out the possibility of a certain kind of experience. On the 1st November (which is called All Saints Day by the Church) spiritual power exists to enable one to withdraw from one's physical life, and its various forms of expression, and to experience the reality of eternal life.

42a. Equinox - Time at which Sun crosses Equator, and day and night are equal. Solstice - Time at which the Sun is farthest from the Equator and appears to pause before returning.

(2) Prayers (together) - Father of the sphere above us and beyond us, and of all creation, we praise You. May your power and influence reach every part of us. Direct our thoughts, open the pores of our minds, inspire us with visions that can nourish our spirits. Enable us to share in an experience of reality which is greater than any visible forms - through letting go these forms. Amen.

(3) Meditation

(4) Music (courtesy of: Hymns Ancient & Modern, no. 373)

(5) Prayer together -

We give thanks, O G-d, for the experience we have shared this day, and which You have directed. Enable us to go forth with our personal vision and our experience of togetherness to share with others through our life and thought. Amen.

When the kundalini sense begins to function in a person, at whatever stage in his life, and he is re-connected in some degree with his previous etheric experiences - although he may be wholly unaware of what is happening,43 a certain amount of energy is released in him. This new source of energy finds expression in whatever direction the will is facing at the moment of its release. If the person is still dominated by self fantasies of which he is unconscious, this new energy will go to increase their power over him. Often the accession of new energy makes a person feel more powerful and it goes into those forms through which his desire to experience power has been expressed.

43. He may re-experience certain aspects of, or connections from, his previous etheric existence, without understanding what they are, and so attribute these experiences to another cause.

The desire for the experience of power exists in men from the beginning, for it belongs to the nature of man's will, and is expressed on all the lower stages in etheric life as well as through the physical lives of men on Earth. It is centred in his Sex Centre, which is the focal point of his feeling of “I”; but it does not belong exclusively to man's physical nature or to his physical life. In fact, it is part of his etheric being and expresses in various forms throughout the first four levels of his evolution until after very long periods of time, a man has evolved beyond the fourth level and no longer seeks his own identity through an experience of power. But until a person has evolved to this point, the desire for power exists in one form or another in him and he is vulnerable to the dangers or distractions which it opens him up to, whether he lives in a physical or etheric body.

The desire for the experience of power has many different forms of expression, depending upon the person's previous experiences, the particular direction his life has taken, and the historical epochs and cultural milieu to which he has been attracted and in which his physical life is expressed.

Power-seeking manifest most obviously in the practice of magic. Various forms of the practice of magic have existed in all ages and cultures (and continue to exist in etheric spheres, for they do not belong exclusively to the physical Earth.) Some of these forms are simple and uncomplicated, being expressions of the day-to-day existence of less sophisticated people in their relationships to the material, visible, and invisible world around them. These forms are generally innocuous and have little damaging or lasting effect on their minds. More sophisticated forms, developed by people with either complex or distorted beings, can do more damage; and intellectualised expressions of the desire for power, which are reinforced by complicated structures of rationalisation, can damage or distort the whole etheric being of a person. Such damage may extend far beyond his Earth experience and can take centuries of Earth-time to eradicate.

The desire for the experience of power can also take the form of the desire to be possessed by power. In modern times this often finds expression in the seeking for individual identity through group or mass power - although the desire to participate in expressions of group power has always existed, in one form or another. At all times in human history a person's desire to participate in a power experience44 (as distinct from his desire to possess power or instruments of power for himself) has meant in fact a relinquishment of his own will and an opening up of his being to allow the will of another to enter in to use or possess him.45 Not that the true nature and structure of this experience is recognised or understood by the person or persons concerned. Different interpretations are given and various theories are advanced on the subject of power possession and the desire to be possessed by power, but the fact is that the desire in a person for this kind of experience sends out a vibration which is a form of invitation to those in the spirit world who await such opportunities for expression. The concept that such power is impersonal or resides solely in the person himself only increases the potential danger; against such possession he can see no need for protection.

44. Many forms of organized religious expression, Christian and non-Christian, are based on this desire in men. For example, the Pentecostal Movement derives much of its impetus from this factor in man, and many of its dangers are explained in the text above.

45. All forms of trance mediumship, whatever their purported aim - whether healing, or guidance, or other, are based on this kind of possession. And the spirit who enters into the physical being of another person, substituting his will with its own, is always from one of the lower spheres, and, to a certain extent, distorted in its own being. No spirit from any of the higher etheric spheres would ever enter into such a relationship, because his own understanding of the nature and meaning of the individual will, and the conditions necessary for its growth, would make it impossible for him to do so.

The idea of the existence of a kundalini force derived originally from the experience of being possessed by power. This theory was constructed by a small cult within the Hindu religions, several hundred years before the time of Buddha, by men who desired above all else the experience of power-possession and who, through experimentation on themselves, had worked out techniques for opening their beings to what was, in fact, spirit-possession. These people had no understanding of what they were doing. They imagined that the kundalini force was a power to be awakened in themselves, which could be increased from impersonal power sources in the universe, and that this could be achieved through the techniques they had devised. Furthermore, they were not aware of the nature of their motives, which were both personal and “group” in origin; for along with their obsession with personal power-possession was the desire to increase and spread the power of their own sect. Through the elaboration of such a theory, devised and taught by their own sect, they alone would act as its interpreters, they alone would instruct people and lead them to an awakening of the same kundalini force in themselves. They alone would be the arbiters of who should be allowed to awaken this force in himself and under what conditions, and who should not. But of these underlying motives they were, at that time, unaware. The theory of the kundalini force evolved through the years, taking on more refinements, increasing sophistication, various interpretations.

All theories regarding a kundalini force are based on certain facts about the nature of man.46 The principal set of facts used in these theories realtes to the structure of the spine in man's invisible physical body and the three channels it contains, which are a central channel and two connected channels that form a continuous oval around it. The two channels are in fact used by the Creative Force in each person for the purpose of maintaining or healing the person's invisible physical body and, through it, his physical body. These channels are essential for the maintenance of a man's health during his life in a physical body. The central channel is used solely to transmit the basic energy-substance, that derives from each person's individual will, to the separate chakras, or centres, where it is transformed into the different types of energy required by these centres for their functioning. All energy-substance in a man derives originally from his will but is developed for use by the different centres into separate forms of energy. Energies are developed in a man's invisible physical body but are drawn on for the functioning of his physical body and for every activity in which it is engaged during his physical life on Earth.

46. But these facts are taken out of context and distorted.

The basic energy-substance in one man differs from that in every other person; no two energy-substances are ever the same, any more than two individual wills are ever identical. The nature of this energy-substance, and the various forms in which it is developed by the centres in a man, remains consistent and in accordance with the nature of his will regardless of changes in his health, mood, desires, life-pattern, etc. Only one factor can alter the nature of a man's energy-substance and that is a change in the level of his being or in the degree of his consciousness. A man's consciousness becomes transformed with the evolution of his will; as the nature of his will evolves in direction and structure so his energy-substance becomes finer and more adaptable. These finer vibrations affect the working of his seven centres. This is the true change which can be effected by the only force that vibrates through the central channel in man's spine, and such change is only possible with the growth in his awareness, consciousness, and being.

The theories that relate to a kundalini force are also based on the actual existence of a certain substance of which the people who propound these theories are completely unaware. This is an etheric substance which was constructed by certain individuals in spirit form for the destruction of mankind and all his creative achievements.* This destructive substance was “created” around the beginning of the third millennium B.C. by persons who had acquired certain powers during their lifetimes in the so-called Old Kingdom of Egypt and who extended and made use of these powers for evil purposes after their physical death. One result was the creation of this destructive substance, which has been used ever since that time by certain individuals in spirit form whose purpose was to break up or destroy every kind of living or non-living form on both the etheric and physical planes. This was to be achieved by using the destructive substance to over-excite or increase the rate of vibration of people's nervous systems, or the structures of any animal or plant, or the composition of an inanimate, material form.

* A Culbone Visitor's note: This is not a reference to the Noah's Flood approximately 13,000 years ago, but the time-frame indicated corresponds with the detonation of seven atom-bombs in Abraham's day, when not only Sodom & Gomorrah were destroyed.

All living or inanimate forms can be affected by this destructive substance on the physical plane; but on the etheric plane only human beings can be affected by it. This substance is never impersonal and can never affect any form of life or any object except when it is deliberately used by a person or persons.47 Knowledge about its existence belongs primarily to people on etheric planes, and its systematic use to destroy all that men create and to distract them from their spiritual journeys originates in the lowest and darkest spheres of the etheric world.

47. Sometimes its use is unconscious, and in such a case its transmission may be compared with that of a dangerous disease through a carrier. But even if the agent is unconscious of the purpose and intent of the destructive substance he is transmitting, the person or persons using him to transmit it are fully aware of what they are doing.

All theories that postulate a kundalini force encourage the opening up of individuals to an excitement of their beings or an over-stimulation of their nervous system through what they imagine to be the entrance of this desirable kundalini force. In fact, it is an invitation to those in spirit form who seek to destroy, and what is naïvely imagined to be the kundalini force is actually the destructive substance.

At its commencement, over-excitement always appears to be a kind of energy - and, in a certain sense it is, for the feeling of power coincides with a new thrust of energy that derives from the person or persons using this substance of destruction. Any increase in energy always comes from outside the man who is affected by this destructive substance and is the personal energy of the ones who seek to destroy. Every increase in the quantity of energy within a person always derives from outside his own being. Additional energy therefore makes the person increasingly dependent upon those from whom the energy derives so that even his own will is ultimately affected. The over-stimulation of the nervous system brings about its deterioration in time and a degeneration in the structure of that person's body, the rate of decline being related to the intrinsic nature of the person. The brain of a person is the first part affected by any increase in vibration, and it becomes increasingly difficult for the person to give attention or concentrate, or even remain normally sensitive to the world around him. Eventually all the organs in his body can be affected by over-stimulation.

It is important to realise that this destructive substance cannot enter the being of a person or animal, or into any inanimate form, unless there is the will to destroy. Will is always personal, and the will to destroy life and form is always the will of an individual person. The word “evil” describes this will to destroy or any person's act of willing destruction. The inherent meaning of evil is exactly this, namely, the will to destroy what is divine or what has been created for the purpose of man's spiritual growth; the word “evil” does not refer to the substance itself, which was built up by those who willed evil but which has no active power in itself.

Everything within a person that leads him to desire or enjoy the experience of participation in power, or of power-possession, is directly opposed to man's spiritual and conscious growth, for it proceeds from his fantasies about self; it is also an invitation to control - or possession - from outside, with the result that his degree of awareness is lessened, his own will is over-shadowed by another will, and his sense of personal responsibility is diminished. Such a man becomes an open channel through which any discarnate spirit, or spirits, can express, either temporarily or over a logner period of time. In most cases the man will not be conscious of what is happening, but will experience merely a new rush of power or an increase of force behind some form of self expression or sometimes a wave of emotion violently expressing through him. All this he takes as “I”, usually enjoying the more extreme feeling of himself - even if its expression is occasionally violent, but never suspecting its origin. The dangers to his own being can scarcely be exaggerated.

So long as a man desires power, whether consciously or unconsciously, so long will he be open to possession by unseen spirits of a kind which is far more dangerous to himself and others than are those forms of discarnate spirit possession which occur temporarily in the lives of the majority of people on Earth today.48 For a large proportion of people are not only open to temporary forms of spirit possession, through moods reflective of inherent weaknesses, but they bring with them, through under-developed or distorted beings, some unresolved personal attachment from their previous existence on etheric planes. Such negative attachments often take on a form of spirit possession during the physical life which cannot be resolved until that life is ended. It is not these forms of possession which are of the greatest danger to the person and those about him, but the ones which occur in the course of the man's physical life as a direct result of his desire for power.

48. See Addendum at the end of this chapter.

The first danger is to the man's own being and the influence his desire for the experience of power can gradually acquire over it, his mind becoming re-stuctured in relation to the forms his desire takes. Through these forms discarnate spirits establish a pattern of entrance and possession. So long as the person continues in this desire for the experience of power, so long will this pattern remain set. All spiritual growth ceases, and his being can begin to grow again only after the desire for power has worked itself out and the structure of mind has been broken down which it had built up. This state can last throughout the whole of his physical life and for a period of time following his life on Earth.

The second kind of danger exists for other people with whom this person is connected and through whom their minds may become damaged in certain respects. This damage is never lasting - although it can remain with a person for the whole of his physical life - and can easily be remedied at the conclusion of that life on Earth. Nevertheless, the natural pattern of his Earth-life is altered and may even become distorted.

A third form of danger exists for the discarnate spirits themselves who have become caught up with the person's desire for the experience of power. If they become involved in only a temporary expression of emotion through the physical being of someone, or if they merely continue to express their own forms of identification with former Earth-experience without doing this through the physical beings of other people, their own period of bondage is not unnecessarily protracted. These spirits are open to various forms of help which the spirit world (as well as certain people on the physical Earth) can offer, and learning and change of being proceed steadily and naturally for them. However, when discarnate spirits become involved in more permanent forms of possession, the task of freeing them is made much more difficult. For one thing, the desire of the spirits to possess is linked with that of the man who is possessed, and this bond grows in strength as all concerned - the one in a physical body and the ones who are discarnate - become increasingly interlocked in a complex structure from which it may take a long period of work to extricate them. All the people who form part of this structure of possession are affected and the natural expression of their minds and beings is suspended until such time as this structure is broken down.

Another aspect of the desire for power finds expression in and through religious institutions and their systems of mythology and rationalisation. As these institutions grow so they become vast systems in which all the people involved feel bound together or secured49 through belief in their redemptive power or the meaning their lives derive through belonging and participation. This structure of formalised inter-relationship, in which peoples' lives interlock with one another, is secured by the articles of belief and the rituals upon which any particular religious institution is founded and which subconsciously threaten the person who deviates or seeks to think independently with “hell-fire” as well as with social ostracism. The real danger for the etheric being of a person whose life is involved in a religious institution lies in the hold it exerts over his mind which projects far beyond the lifetime of the physical body.

49. The word religion relates to the Latin “religare” or “ligare”, meaning to bind back, secure, hold fast. A Culbone Visitor's note: Cicero noted that religio is also linked with legere (“to read”) and eligere (“to choose”). Hence, the religious person reads and re-reads the lessons of his still developing life, as these are inscribed within his heart, reads and re-reads the signs inscribed in the places and times proper to his own situation, dares, by a radical act of choice, to say “Yes” to That and, ideally at least, “No” to whatever seemings are opposed to That, and so re-attaches himSelf to G-d. Incidentally, “secure” derives from the Latin “sine cura”, which is to say: “without anxiety”.

The people for whom all religious institutions present the greatest danger are its own priests and acolytes whose lives are inextricably interwoven with them. Through the church or temple, moreover, the server experiences power over other people - and power on an even vaster scale through his rôle or position in it. This is the sense of power which the church or institution and its systems of belief lend him by way of being able to confer or withhold the blessings of forgiveness, healing, peace, absolution. Also, in all systems of belief (philosophical and political as well as religious) is incorporated a hierarchy of “demons”, power over which a priest has in varying degrees - in some instances through the ritual of exorcism.

The danger for the person involved in such a system exists in the extent to which it closes the door on any free expression of his own being, through which eventually he has to grow and learn, as well as on the direction of spiritual growth which his being would naturally follow. If the church or system rejects the forms of expression natural to his own spiritual growth, as it must do in time by its very nature as an institution or system of beliefs, the person will seldom be able even to recognise what is natural to his own being and its growth or, recognising it, break away from the all-embracing structure of belief in which he finds himself. The fact of belonging to a religion or system of beliefs makes such an act of independence almost impossible for a person, because his entire future life or salvation seems to him to depend upon his continuing adherence to it. Independence of thought is not only heretical but, in terms of every system, a rejection of both salvation and the spiritual goal towards which the person is striving.50 Long periods of help from outside - from the spiritual realms and from those in physical bodies who are qualified to assist - are necessary before the person can truly be freed from the hold which a church or system of belief exercises over his being.

50. A rejection of an atheistic system of belief, such as Marxism in its various forms, labels the person as unbeliever, heretic, foolish, or, at worst, insane, but the person does not have his spiritual salvation, or goals, or growth-pattern challenged. This is because such systems deny the existence of any life other than the visible, material-physical one. This denial, of course, causes other - and, in some senses, worse - forms of mental distortion.

The story of the man who sells his soul to the Devil exists in all ancient legends and tales. The Devil represents what the man desires most to possess - but which ends up by possessing him. In each person this comes back to the desire for power in some form: the power of magic, mystical power, sexual power, or the more sophisticated forms of power by which a man can rationalise his own being to himself and know he is “right”. Ultimately, each man's Devil is created by his imagination about himself; whatever its form, it both serves and feeds this imagination, developing it, justifying it, and thereby increasing its power over the person. A state of fear also gives power to a man's Devil, and, conversely, the Devil increases a man's fear; for fear is the ultimate expression of his inability to accept reality and can only flourish where a mind is founded on fantasy.

The Devil may be defined as the power of imagination and self fantasies over a person. Anything which increases or feeds this power may be said to be “in league with the Devil”. Even where the results may be of benefit to other people, as, for example, in the performance of spirit healing, if there is any sensation of power to feed the person's image of self or give him a sense of identity, the activity may be referred to as the “work of the Devil”.51 A few positive results can never justify causing distortion in the being of the person through whom these results come; and, in the end, the distorting influence of the imagination about the self, and the desire for power to feed it, will make itself felt even through healing vibrations, as they extend to other people. Whatever the nature of an activity,52 if it encourages what is imaginary or distorted in the person, it can only in the end reflect distortion onto all the other people involved.

51. This does not mean that every activity of a certain kind - e.g., all spirit healing - is the “work of the Devil.” The nature of an activity depends upon the individual person's relationship to it.

52. Activities do not have intrinsic natures. Their quality always depends upon the being of the person performing it, and his motive.

Magical practices constitute the most obvious expressions of power, magic being the naked use of any form of power by the self and the self absorbed will. The distinction between so-called white magicians and black magicians is not fundamental: all magicians desire and use power for themselves, whether the results for other people are good or bad. Their motives may be different - and this does distinguish magicians from one another. The black magician intends to do harm and wills it; the white magician intends to do good but is unconscious of what is involved and so does harm to himself and often to others as well. The results for all magicians have the effect of strengthening the hold of imagination upon the mind and increasing the taste for and enjoyment of power. Even the healer may be a magician, however good or true the results obtained. And in the long run a healer-magician can affect many lives adversely because of his often hidden motive of power-seeking which gives rise to jealousy, envy, and, often, bitter disappointment.

There are certain characteristic ways in which the power of imagination manifests in people who are dominated by it or which point unmistakably to this state of being. (a) The person whose life centres around the power of imagination is usually in a state of abundant or exaggerated good health through which he or she tends to dominate people who are physically weaker. This is always accompanied by insensitivity to the states of others. The person can eat what he likes and even do what he likes with impunity for a long time, careless of the energy supply which seems limitless and often deliberately insulting to the more careful husbanding of resources which other people need to employ. (b) There is often a noticeable neglect of personal and daily responsibilities, except where they form part of the structure of his fantasies about self. (c) The person's mind always contains a number of rigid attitudes which, when challenged, reveal their power over the person in the violence of his reaction. (d) There is also a strong flavour of sexuality in the person's obsession with some aspect of self which is particularly apparent in all forms of religiosity, mysticism, spiritualistic and occult expressions, healing and allied gifts, and in certain artistic expressions. This is often projected outwards onto an object - healer, teacher, god - as onto a lover. Much poetry of the Christian mystics bears witness to this, as do some parts of Church liturgy. This is not normal sexuality but the result of the power of imagination over a person. Behind it, driving that imagination, is a power which derives ultimately from some form of possession or inter-penetration by the spirit world.

The structure of all forms of fanaticism and obsession can be understood only in terms of this fact, that the excessive power behind these forms derives, without exception, from discarnate spirits. Discarnate spirits express through people's own weaknesses. These weaknesses are of different kinds and may be of inertia or despondency, anger or jealousy; they may derive from an imbalance in the person's being due to lack of development in certain directions or from attitudes originating in undigested pre-Earth experiences. Discarnate spirits working through some weaknesses may lead the person to severe mental illness or even to acts of violence. Psychiatric hospitals and prisons in modern times are full of people whose personal weaknesses have been used and expressed through by large numbers of discarnate spirits who are themselves still trapped in their own weaknesses and in the desire to continue to express them.

People can become trapped in various forms of frustration, depression, bitterness, or fear. These states, like all strongly negative states, attract from the invisible etheric planes surrounding the person like-minded discarnate spirits who reinforce the person's state with their own. This kind of unfortunate relationship can imprison both persons more deeply in the negative states which brought about the initial connection. It can last far beyond the physical lifetime.

A similar negative link can be formed through an act of violence in which both assailant and victim become bound together through their experience and its interlocking states of aggression and fear. (There is always a “third party” in this action in the form of a discarnate spirit who initiates the expression of violence, but it is not bound to action or to the other two people in the same way.) This kind of “imprisonment” of two people to each other and to the experience can persist beyond the physical life of either one or both of them, after which an even greater effort of consciousness and will is needed to free them.

It is not only experiences of violence that produce states of negative attachment. Frustration arising from real or imagined injustice can become the main focal point in a person's life; jealousy, envy, or hatred can be directed so strongly towards someone (who may have evoked it unwittingly), that it structures the entire mental world which the person in-breathes and within which he lives. A negative polarisation of this kind may so absorb the attention and energy of a person throughout his lifetime, that he in a sense becomes his frustration, his depression, or his jealousy. And when he pases out of physical life, he “awakens” on an etheric plane in the same state. (In fact, what was a mental state on the physical plane becomes the person's environment in the etheric sphere.) Often, he does not even know that he has passed on to another plane of existence.

Every negative state of mind, indulged and inhabited on the physical plane, remains with the person during his etheric existence as part of his own nature as well as his environment. Change can only take place through his own will - and this may mean after long periods of time, when he becomes aware of the structure of this state and seeks for help to change it. Then the ones who are able to help can begin to teach him. With new knowledge, and through his own efforts, the person can dissolve this state and become free in time.

The “rescue work” of freeing people from every degree of negative mental state is undertaken by millions of spirits on different levels, all of whom have gone through similar experiences in the course of their own evolution. A number of people in physical bodies are also engaged in rescue work. They provide a focus for peace and healing and give knowledge which those in spirit could not receive in any other way, often because they imagine they are still on a physical plane of existence and do not recognise forms of help offered by the spirit world. (In fact, many spirits find it impossible for a long time to accept that they have passed through the experience called “death” and entered upon another plane of existence.) Rescue work is a gigantic task, the dimensions of which can scarcely be over-estimated.

Man's lack of awareness of his own being and his own motives and his failure to accept even existing knowledge about the inter-penetration of spirit and Earth planes - the fact that all men are etheric beings now - makes him especially vulnerable. What he cannot see, and won't even accept the existence of, will continue to influence or use him until he desires a change in his own state of consciousness. The only real protection for the individual person against distortion from such inter-penetration by the spirit world is the light of his own consciousness.

The individual person exposes himself to danger through his own free will, whether consciously or unconsciously; his only protection lies in a different kind of use of his free will to procure understanding, to practise awareness, and to assume conscious responsibility for his life and its expression. This cannot be achieved in a moment, but protection commences with the realisation that every expression of a man's being has a vibration which is linked with other vibrations of the same quality in the unseen world around him. All expressions of impatience, anger, envy, bitterness, dissatisfaction, despair are vibrations of a certain kind which both excite and attract similar vibrations; expressions of sympathy, contentment, patience tune in to and attract their own quality of vibration in the universe. From moment to moment in the daily life of every person, through thoughts and actions, he can express and tune in to either positive or negative vibrations. If he desires protection against the influence of discarnate spirits who seek the expression of their own self wills through other human beings, he has firstly to guard against expressing through himself the kind of vibration he does not want to attract. From moment to moment the choice is his own. It is as simple as that, requiring neither special teaching nor rituals; it is a choice - an exercise - open to everyone, according to his ability.

When a person's awareness of his kundalini sense, and, through it, of the reality of his own etheric being, has grown and reached the point where it can begin to influence his self will and his willing, then a “new” will is formed which can become a regenerating force for all his centres. Not only does a more efficient working of these centres become possible, but the quality of their working is altered; they work more harmoniously together, each one performing its own task.

This spiritual quickening bcomes apparent first of all in the Sex Centre - which has not to do with physical sex but with the basis of a man's identity while in a physical body. Fantasy no loger dominates the working of this Centre, for the person's feeling I-ness - his identity - no longer rests on imagination to the same extent. He is now re-connected with his own etheric being and intimations of knowledge and experience which are truly his own inner reality. Because he is not scattered in the way he used to be, his energy is more concentrated and available for use in new directions determined from within, by his “new” will. Energy wells up and flows, often seeming inexhaustible in its supply.

The effect of a person's newly-awakened awareness of his own etheric reality on the Centre of Elimination can be to cleanse and heal the whole of his physical body. The internal organs may be strengthened, becoming more capable of dealing with the body's toxins, and the blood-stream cleared of impurities. This process may take a long time, but real and lasting health can only take place at all when the new will has been formed in the individual and when the imaginary self is no longer in control, producing the old habitual stresses and tensions in the body. All real physical healing must be preceded by a spiritual transformation in the person's being, after which healing is possible, not only of damage caused by former tensions but also of organic and inherited weaknesses as well, as far as the nature of these weaknesses permits. The physical body of the person can be made capable of performing all the tasks which belong to the true nature of his life, of whose structure he is now becoming aware; he is then given both the energy and the strength to express the purpose of his physical life on Earth, where formerly imagination about himself usurped his energy and distorted the purpose and pattern of this life.

The Centre of Digestion is the reception centre for all that enters into a man from the physical world, for all sense impressions, all air, all food for the body. Usually tensions caused by the self will affect this Centre and make it incapable of receiving all the foods necessary for the maintenance of the body - except for sense impressions, all of which are registered regardless of tensions, but not truly received and sent on to the appropriate organ or centre. For man's receptivity to these impressions is selective, in accordance with his sense of self or “I”. These tensions also reflect onto the physical organs to which the various foods and impressions are directed and which deal with their physical digestion, that is, the brain, lungs, stomach, pancreas, nervous system, etc. The effect of the new will on this Centre is to relax tension generally and facilitate the digestion of all foods, the impressions being directed along their right channels to the nerve receptors and appropriate parts of the brain. In this way the real intelligence of the person may be increased, for intelligence can be equated with sensitivity to and awareness of the world in which he lives.

The Solar Plexus is a “reception centre” or focus for all the etheric forces and vibrations with which a person is surrounded. Every human being - indeed, all life - is etheric now. He lives not only in the visible physical world but equally and more truly in the invisible one. It is through this invisible Centre, the Solar Plexus, and its reflection onto his physical spine that a man's contact with the etheric world occurs and is maintained; it is through this Centre that the etheric world contacts him.

The etheric world contains seven distinct stages or levels through which all men must evolve (and seven related forms or “worlds” of distortion). These stages are composed of different qualities of experience and human expression; they reflect different forms of life. The seven stages represent discrete levels of experience which, taken together, contain every conceivable plane of etheric existence. The seven stages of evolution comprise co-existing, although separate, worlds of ever-increasing light and spirituality; whereas the worlds of distortion express types of spiritual malformation and levels of darkness. A man's etheric body inter-penetrates his physical body, and so also do all the various etheric levels of vibration interpenetrate the physical plane of existence. The etheric is not “other” or separate from the physical material world visible to man's physical sight. Any one of these distinct etheric levels can find expression on the physical plane; for men at all stages of evolution, and with every form of distortion, incarnate in physical bodies; and any spiritual level, from deepest darkness to greatest light, can be experienced by man while he is in a physical body, undergoing an expression of physical life on Earth.

The Solar Plexus in a person is the door by which etheric vibrations enter his physical body. Just as the Centre of Digestion provides a door for the entrance of all sense impressions, and registers them with mechanical accuracy, so does the Solar Plexus provide an entrance for all etheric vibrations and record them with equal accuracy. All levels of vibration can enter a person through his Solar Plexus, although he may be completely unconscious of them or aware only of their physical effect upon him. Vibrations from the seven dark or lower etheric spheres enter and sometimes “attack” a person through his Solar Plexus. So long as the person retains conscious control of and responsibility for his own mind, these lower vibrations can only gain entrance to his body through the Solar Plexus and affect his body alone, not his mind or actions. If the person, for one reason or another, abdicates responsibility for his own mind and the actions that spring from it, then direct entry can be gained by any discarnate spirit that seeks its own expression through the medium of another person's body. A man may consciously relinquish sole control over his own mind and actions, which is his responsibility alone, or he may unconsciously relinquish it through motives whose true nature is hidden from himself; the results are similar, however, for he has opened himself to possession and all the dangers attendant thereon.

The other rôle of the Solar Plexus, apart from it being the door for the entry of etheric vibrations (some of which, like the Creative or Healing Force, are essential for maintaining man's physical life and without which his body would decay and died), has to do with its conscious use. This may best be explained in relation to the symbol of the wheel. The word chakra means a wheel. The wheel of the Solar Plexus, when consciously “turned”* by the person's will, can draw in a specific substance or vibration and then radiate it out again as directed by that person's consciousness. In this way the forces of Healing or Protection or the substance of peace can be consciously selected out of the etheric atmosphere surrounding a person, drawn in, and used by that person for himself or other people or for some form of animal or plant life. Once the wheel of the Solar Plexus is set in motion by the person's conscious will to draw in and re-direct a certain force or substance, it will continue to turn of its own accord, without further conscious direction, until the exercise is completed. (That is, for a period of five minutes. It is more effective, however, if the person continues to give the exercise his conscious attention.) The Solar Plexus cannot be used as a wheel in the person's unconscious states or before he has re-connected with his own etheric being through the Kundalini sense.

* A Culbone Visitor's note: For important instances cf. Mt 12:13; 17:23; Mk 5:30; Jn 20:14.

The re-connection of a man with his own etheric being affects the Solar Plexus by strengthening the nerves of which it is physically composed. Strengthening the nerves has the two-fold effect of making them both more resilient and more sensitive. Increase in sensitivity means an increase in the ability of the Solar Plexus to pick up etheric vibrations, whereas greater resilience means a certain amount of protection against intrusion by the lower etheric vibrations. The “new” will implies a change in consciousness, an increase in the man's awareness of himself, and makes possible the working of the Solar Plexus as a wheel, so that new or additional forces can enter the person's body from outside, through the Solar Plexus - whether they are the Creative or Healing Force, the Force of Protection, or the peace substance.

Through the Solar Plexus a man tunes in to the whole of the Earth's etheric. This etheric includes all possible “psychologies” of man, all possible states of mind which mankind can express. The understanding of these states, psychological or mental, does not come through the Solar Plexus because that Centre does not provide a framework or terms of reference in relation to which understanding arises. The facts alone are received and experienced (although only in part) through the Solar Plexus: in this way the seeds of understanding are sown; but they only grow through the inspiration, intuition, and knowledge that come through a man's Head Centre.

When a man re-connects with his own etheric being and the knowledge inherent in it, the effect is most apparent in relation to his Head Centre. The Head Centre is a focus or instrument which both receives vibrations of intuition and knowledge and sends them on to the man's own physical mind. When his physical mind reaches the stage of becoming truly receptive to this knowledge, so the Head Centre becomes increasingly sensitive in both its capacities. It becomes more receptive and more efficient as a transmitter of inspiration from the person's own etheric body, which inspiration consists largely of knowledge accumulated through previous experience the person has had on other planes of existence. And it also becomes more sensitive to the vibrations of guidance or help from other spiritual beings who are on the same positive wave length as the man himself and who draw near to offer assistance or advice from time to time, and at crucial moments in his life.†

† A Culbone Visitor's note: Cf. W. M. Abbott, The Documents of Vatican II (London: Geoffrey Chapman 1966) p.98: “From a higher authority there is communicated to the Fathers an explanatory and prefatory note on the modi concerning Chapter III of the schema De Ecclesia…" What was - is - the nature of this ‘higher authority’?

The new will, developed out of a person's re-connection with his own etheric being, also affects his Throat Centre. Its effect physically is to strengthen the organs associated with communication - the central nervous system and the thyroid and parathyroid glands. The desire to communicate is also strengthened. The desire to communicate comes, first of all, from the man's etheric being and this desire makes itself felt to greater effect. But as desire is only fully capable of expression when it is willed, so the new will in a man brings a new capacity for communication. The desire to communicate is not general or theoretical; it is related to specific changes in the man's being, in particular to the actual stage of his being and the form in which it is capable of expressing. It is also related to the person's renewed contact with his own inner source of inspiration and knowledge. The desire to communicate becomes, in part, the desire to communicate the inspiration which he himself receives and to share with others, in one way or another, the knowledge and understanding which he is discovering are the treasures of his own many experiences and “lifetimes”. This new desire to communicate is, in a sense, a transformation of all former desires for self expression; only it is no longer a desire to express or glorify the imaginary self but rather the desire of a man to share with others the fruits - the truth - of his own experience. The ability to communicate by voice and word, and in every other way, is increased by this new will in a man.

The Heart Centre begins to develop only after a man has begun to reconnect with his own etheric being. Until that time comes, its potentialities are only latent. The Head and Throat Centres are at work in all men whatever stage of development they have reached. Everyone receives inspiration from his own etheric body and knowledge derived from his own previous experiences even though he often cannot connect with their vibrations, much less understand their origin. In every man there is a desire to communicate with the world around him, whatever form it may take. But the Heart Centre only begins to function after a person has reached a certain level of development where he no longer desires the experience, the expression, or the communication for himself. As long as his centre of gravity or feeling of identity is wholly in the Sex Centre, so long do his thoughts and actions serve and feed the physical self; only when the foundation of his identity has moved inwards, towards his own etheric reality, and he has begun to know who he is, does he become free to care about and learn who other people are. Until that time comes, other people - the world around him - do not exist for him as beings in their own right, apart from their rôle in relation to his own sense of identity.

The Heart Centre is the means by which a man can enter into and understand the nature of other beings separate from, but not separated from, himself. These may be other human beings or animals or various forms of plant life. Through the Heart Centre a person can connect with and learn to understand the nature of all life.

The word empathy, derived from Greek, best describes the working of the Heart Centre at this stage,53 for it means consciously entering into the experience of another being. Through his Heart Centre a man receives the vibrations or impulses from another being which provide him with the facts about that being's nature, present state, and inner meaning - signature (as Jakob Boehme described it). These facts are actually experienced by the man through his Heart Centre; it is this experience from which his knowledge about and understanding of the other being derive. This is the beginning of what may be called objective experience, which is the direct experience of facts or qualities uninfluenced by the personal mind of the experiencer. From this seed-experiencer can grow the ability to experience and, through experience, understand many aspects and levels of reality.

53. There are other stages and other expressions of the Heart Centre, which belong to a much later point in man's evolution.+

The Centre of Digestion in a man receives impressions from the physical world around him: all food, air, and sense impressions. They are registered automatically. The Solar Plexus in a man receives impressions from the etheric world in the same way. Both centres can work in half-light or even in darkness; neither depends for its working on a man's awareness of himself. The Heart Centre, on the contrary, does not work automatically at all and is only called into operation by the extension of a man's consciousness. This does not come about through any abstract desire for knowledge or in order to satisfy some intellectual curiosity. A man's conscious willing can only proceed from a desire to go out to, or give to, another being. Then only does the Heart Centre - in response to the man's own desire, consciousness, willing - begin to function and pick up vibrations from the total reality of the particular person or being, at a particular moment in time. It picks up physical vibrations - which the Centre of Digestion may also have registered: it picks up etheric vibrations - which may also have been received by the Solar Plexus. It also picks up vibrations from the inner nature of the other being and, most important of all, receives all the separate vibrations as a single experience of the whole person or being, in which each impression is related to the whole pattern. Every impression is registered by the Heart Centre, but coordination takes place through the experience. This experience is only possible through the Heart Centre. The Heart Centre is the focal point through which all experience of objective reality is possible. The objective reality of a human being reveals where that person is in terms of his own spiritual evolution; or, if it refers to an animal or plant which does not evolve spiritually, the pattern of objective reality reflects the perfect etheric form of the particular animal or plant.

Objective reality also reveals what a person or animal or plant needs at a particular moment in time. Through his Heart Centre alone a man can have an objective experience of the other person's (or object's) physical or spiritual needs, undistorted by the partial knowledge given by his other centres and uncoloured by his own fantasies. Through his Heart Centre he can know his own responsibility in relation to each person or being and what action (if any) he must take himself from moment to moment.

It is the “new” will in a man which makes possible the working and the development of his Heart Centre. Through re-connecting with his own etheric being, and the growth of this new will, he becomes able for the first time to experience objective reality: to perceive and experience things as they are in himself and in the world around him. This ability does not arise overnight but grows very slowly. The commencement of this ability to experience objective reality, however, marks an entirely new stage in the man's own spiritual evolution: it is one of the few truly discrete steps in the whole pattern of his spiritual growth. Its growth continues throughout the eternity of the man, because there is no limit to objective reality and no limit to the new levels and aspects of it which man can experience.

The new will in a man makes possible not only the experience of objective reality through his Heart Centre but also the will to act responsibly in relation to this experience. This means to act in relation to what is revealed to him from moment to moment, allowing his actions to remain flexible and proceed from his ever-changing, ever new experience of what is. It means acting (or not acting) in relation to the total need of the other person or being, in terms of the greatest good for his spiritual purpose or meaning. Until there is this “new” will a person would be unable to act purely from his perception of another man's needs; all his actions would be influenced by his own attitudes, desires, or fantasies. Thus the new will makes it possible for a man to begin to express and carry out one of the most important purposes inherent in his own spiritual nature, which is to aid the growth and regeneration of the world around him.

Man - not plant or animal life - was the original “creation”. All men were created simultaneously. A few evolved spiritually but the vast majority did not evolve or evolved very little. The ones who did evolve were concerned with the state of other men and, discovering the capacity in themselves for creation, created other forms of life as forms only for men to enter into and gain varieties of experience through and provide what they hoped would be an impetus to man's further development. These forms were plant and animal forms similar to (but not identical with) those which exist today, only they did not then have independent existence as separate species but existed solely as forms for the experience of human beings on the etheric planes. This was the first creation undertaken by spiritual beings - that is, by more highly-evolved men - to help the rest of mankind evolve spiritually. The creation of plant and animal forms as separate species, with independent existence, was a much later creation, undertaken by individual persons who had themselves evolved through the different forms. They created the separate species out of gratitude for their own experiences and because they had come to love the forms. (The physical creation of these species was yet another and very much later creation, which was part of the creation of the physical Earth, undertaken for the same reasons as the original creation of the plant and animal forms, namely, to provide an impetus for the evolution of individual men, as well as to remind them of their experiences within these forms.)

From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards the nature of physical life on Earth had so changed that there was need for a much higher degree of spiritual evolution before the individual person could benefit from his incarnation. If someone were born on Earth today in a more primitive (that is, undeveloped but not distorted) etheric state, he simply could not benefit from his experience in the complex, machine- and material-oriented social structures which exist everywhere. His spiritual being could become distorted and his own spiritual evolution set back for a long period of time.

For the past hundred years and more the Earth has become increasingly peopled with persons who have arrived “before their time”, that is, been born before they were sufficiently advanced spiritually for the experience of an Earth-life to be of value for them. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, 70% of the people on Earth had taken on physical lives before they were sufficiently evolved for their lives to be spiritually fruitful. Moreover, through a preponderance of spiritually under-developed people on Earth, the conditions of life under which all people had to live had deteriorated so much by that time that it was difficult for anyone to find his own individual expression through normal physical life, and a natural form of growth for his etheric being was impossible. Social structures had become more gross and all-encompassing and, by stressing the collective groupings rather than individual expression, made it increasingly difficult for any person to stand out against collective pressures, to take individual decisions and personal initiative, and to become truly accessible to the voice of his own conscience. The quality of life - which resides wholly in the ability of individuals to express individually - declined and is continuing to decline throughout the whole of the twentieth century.

This lack of spiritual development in the majority of people on Earth may be defined as an insufficient development of the three upper chakras through which a person's etheric, or spiritual, body expresses. One of these centres might be more highly developed in some people, but usually all three centres are under-developed and the etheric beings of these people express solely through the three lower centres. The evolutionary stage has not yet been reached where there is either the necessity or the possibility for a sense of purpose, direction, or guidance. In all these people the preponderance of development lies with the chakras belonging to the physical body, through which the physical or animal nature expresses. This represents the stage of expression natural for their etheric beings. If they had remained in the etheric sphere, instead of incarnating, their evolution would have proceeded gradually and naturally; but by their precipitate entrance into physical bodies, they run the risk of prolonging this stage and making their evolution beyond it much more difficult. For their etheric beings are wholly caught up in a material-physical orientation that structures and even ensnares their minds far beyond the natural limitations of the physical life. Futhermore, a preponderance of such spiritually under-developed people on Earth influences the structuring of all human societies to the detriment of those people who are more evolved spiritually and who need a more differentiated social environment and culture for their beings to express through and grow.

The majority of people who are “born before their time” enter an Earth experience because of their dependence upon other persons who have taken on, or are about to take on, a physical life. They may also be drawn into physical life through some vibration of excitement which attracts them. But it is always their dependence upon - or their identification with - another person which is the primary cause of their will to be born into an Earth-body. (The “other person” may or may not have been before his or her time. If he or she is born with sufficient spiritual preparation - that is, at the “right time” for him - the physical life-experience will proceed naturally and not be adversely affected by the subsequent birth of someone who is so closely dependent upon him.) It is not impossible for a person who has been born before his time to develop spiritually, but it depends upon the strength of his own will and the stage of its evolution, for great efforts have to be made to do so. If there has not been sufficient development of will, the ability to make such effort does not exist.

A person may also have a will which is one-sided in its strength and direction or closely identified with the will of the person through whom he was attracted into a physical life in the first place. A strong and rigid self will is evidence of obsession or possession - or sometimes both. More than a third of the people who are born before their time have strong and rigid wills.

The strength of will which a person possesses in his physical life has always been developed through the effort needed to pursue a specific line of direction while still in the etheric spheres. A specialised or one-sided development in the person's being appears in the form of a “talent” on the physical plane: a talent for some form of art, music, research, money-making, and so on. Whatever the talent, it represents a direction set before the entrance of that person into his physical life; his being was already centred upon this single expression or this one-sided development which his will procured - and in relation to which his will was vastly strengthened.

Some people, who nevertheless belong to this group of strong willed people, appear passive or “weak” willed. Seeming passivity often hides obstinacy, and the will in this person may be strong in its resistance to other wills rather than in expressing its own. This kind of one-sidedness takes a negative form and attracts to itself various forms of frustration or depression, and usually possession by discarnate spirits whose expressions take the same form. In fact, even strong-willed people with a more positive form of expression can also exhibit a pronounced obstinacy and the accompanying negative forms of expression as well.

People with this kind of will always attract, at some point during the course of their physical lives, discarnate spirits with a similar one-sided development who add force or strength to their own wills. Such possession, even of a temporary nature - which it rarely is - makes a new evolution of will for that person almost impossible. His physical life is usually “wasted” and he must await a return to an etheric plane of existence before his will can be extricated from the will of the discarnate spirit - or spirits - and from his own one-sided development, and begin anew the slow process of evolution.

In about half the cases of people with this kind of strong will, a more comprehensive form of spirit possession is expressed which, again, originated in experiences prior to the person's physical life on Earth. These experiences - unresolved on the etheric plane - are carried with the person into his physical life and affect that life in the form of being possessed (from time to time) by the discarnate spirit to whom these previous experiences relate. Because the unresolved relationships are usually of a negative nature, so the form of possession is usually a negative one and hangs over the physical life of the person like a cloud, interfering with and often cutting him off from a natural expression of his life. The lives of 18% of people on Earth today may be described in this way. (It is important to realise that the personal attachments which draw these people into physical life in the first place are never identical with the possessions which hold them back and make impossible a natural and complete expression of that life. These “attachments”, representing the weak and under-developed side of the person, are always to members of the opposite sex; whereas the “possessions” occur through the developing will and its experiences which one or both parties failed to work out or resolve before entering upon a physical life.)

Strong will and single-mindedness are often highly valued as attainments worthy of emulation by whole societies on Earth, whereas in fact they represent as much a spiritual weakness as do any forms of so called neurotic obsession. The apparent “strength” is a kind of rigidity which will have to be broken down before any real growth in being can take place.

Slightly fewer than two-thirds of the people who have been born before their time - that is, 45% of all people on Earth today - should not have been born at all because their beings are too un-developed and primitive for them to make use of the opportunities for growth which life in a physical body presents. Their entrance into physical life, while made possible by a close relationship with someone already in or entering into a physical body, was motivated solely by a form of greed; without this motivation of greed, a physical life would never have been sought at this stage. While still living in the etheric spheres, these people were attracted by the baubles of material civilisation - the possessions and the activities which they saw people on Earth enjoying, and it was these sights which fascinated and awoke in them a desire for physical life. This was not a desire for experience but only for material possessions and activities that would titillate the senses, for they as yet knew nothing about the spiritual growth which is possible for every human being. They came into physical bodies solely to enjoy: there is no other purpose for their life on Earth; they have completely forgotten their previous existence and the etheric spheres in which their beings have true reality.

Only 30% of all people on Earth at this time, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, are capable of profiting from their experience in physical bodies; for them alone is experience in itself of primary importance, and the wisdom or understanding which can be learned from such experience. Among the first group of people with strong wills, there are those who know about spiritual growth and the purpose of spiritual life - but are unable to act from that knowledge during their lifetimes. It is only people in this last group - that is, people who have incarnated at the right time for them - who are capable of real growth and development during their physical lives. They alone have the potentiality for taking on added responsibilities for other people and creating conditions within which not only the flowering of men's physical natures becomes possible but also opportunities exist to learn about the true nature of man and his potentiality for spiritual growth. They alone can give society the structures men need for their spiritual evolution.

- Shalom & Welcome! -

© The Neith Network Library 2002
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