Views from the Real World
Affirmation and negation:
Everything within man either evolves or involves. An entity is something which remains for a certain duration without involving. Each substance, whether organic or inorganic, can be an entity. Later we shall see that everything is organic. Every entity emanates, sends forth certain matter. This refers equally to the earth, to man, and to the microbe.
For exact study, exact language is needed
…(M)an cannot “do” anything and that everything is “done” in him… (M)an is a very complicated organism …..and is capable of reacting in a very complicated manner to external impressions. This capacity for reaction in man is so complicated, and the answering movements may be so remote from the causes which called them forth, and conditioned them, that a man’s actions, or at least a part of them, seem to a naive observer to be quite spontaneous and independent.
As a matter of fact, man is not capable of even the smallest independent or spontaneous action. The whole of him is nothing but the result of external influences. Man is a process, a transmitting station of forces. If we imagine a man deprived from his birth of all impressions, and by some miracle having preserved his life, such a man would not be capable of a single action or movement. In actual fact he could not live, as he could neither breathe nor feed. Life is a very complicated series of actions—breathing, feeding, interchange of matters, growth of cells and tissues, reflexes, nervous impulses and so on. A man lacking external impressions could not have any of these things, and of course he could not show those manifestations, those actions, which are usually regarded as of the will and consciousness.
Life Is Real Only Then, When I Am
The Three worlds of man
…every man, if he is just an ordinary man, that is, one who has never consciously “worked on himself,” has two worlds; and if he has worked on himself, and has become a so to say “candidate for another life,” he has even three worlds.
…A soul is not born with man and can neither unfold nor take form in him so long as his body is not fully developed.
It is a luxury that can only appear and attain completion in the period of “responsible age,” that is to say, in a man’s maturity.
The soul, like the physical body, is also matter—only, it consists of “finer” matter.
The matter from which the soul is formed and from which it later nourishes and perfects itself is, in general, elaborated during the processes that take place between the two essential forces upon which the entire Universe is founded.
The matter in which the soul is coated can be produced exclusively by the action of these two forces, which are called “good” and “evil” by ancient science, or “affirmation” and “negation,” while contemporary science calls them “attraction” and “repulsion.”
In the common presence of a man, these two forces have their source in two of the totalities of general psychic functioning, which have already been mentioned.
One of them coincides with that function whose factors proceed from the results of impressions received from outside, and the other appears as a function whose factors issue chiefly from the results of the specific functioning of the organs, as determined by heredity.
…
The full realization and precise determination in man of that totality of functioning whose factors are constituted from impressions coming from outside is called the “outer world” of man.
And the full realization of the other totality, whose factors have arisen from automatically flowing “experiences” and from reflexes of the organism—notably of those organs whose specific character is transmitted by heredity—is called the “inner world” of man.
In relation to these two worlds, man appears in reality to be merely a slave, because his various perceptions and manifestations cannot be other than conformable to the quality and nature of the factors making up these totalities.
He cannot have his own initiative; he is not free to want or not to want, but is obliged to carry out passively this or that “result” proceeding from other outer or inner results.
Such a man, that is to say, man who is related to only two worlds, can never do anything; on the contrary, everything is done through him. In everything, he is but the blind instrument of the caprices of his outer and inner worlds.
The highest esoteric science calls such a man “a man in quotation marks”; in other words he is named a man and at the same time he is not a man.
He is not a man such as he should be, because his perceptions and his manifestations do not flow according to his own initiative but take place either under the influence of accidental causes or in accordance with functioning that conforms to the laws of the two worlds.
In the case of “a man in quotation marks,” the “I” is missing and what takes its place and “fills its role” is the factor of initiative proceeding from that one of the two above-mentioned totalities in which the center of gravity of his general state is located.
The “I” in a real man represents that totality of the functioning of his general psyche whose factors have their origin in the results of contemplation, or simply in the contact between the first two totalities, that is, between the factors of his inner world and of his outer world.
The totality of the manifestations of this third function of the general psyche of man also represents a world in itself….it is the third world of man. …strictly speaking, as the ancient sciences understood, the real “inner world of man”…
I shall call this third definite totality of functioning in the general psyche of man by the same name it was given in the distant past, that is: “the world of man.”
According to this terminology, the general psyche of man in its definitive form is considered to be the result of conformity to these three independent worlds.
The first is the outer world—in other words, everything existing outside him, both what he can see and feel as well as what is invisible and intangible for him.
The second is the inner world—in other words, all the automatic processes of his nature and the mechanical repercussions of these processes.
The third world is his own world, depending neither upon his “outer world” nor upon his “inner world”; that is to say, it is independent of the caprices of the processes that flow in him as well as of the imperfections in these processes that bring them about.
Thus, it is quite obvious that the whole secret of human existence lies in the difference in the formation of the factors that are necessary for these three relatively independent functions of the general psyche of man.
And this difference consists solely in that the factors of the first two totalities are formed by themselves, in conformity to laws, as a result of chance causes not depending on them, while the factors of the third totality are formed exclusively by an intentional blending of the functions of the first two.
And it is indeed in this sense that one must understand the saying, common to all the old religious teachings, that “man receives all his possibilities from On High.”
The Reality of Being
#82. My true nature is consciousness
I hold myself here trying to see my barriers—my tensions, my thoughts—so that, in this seeing, they can fall by themselves. I do not judge them or wish to substitute something better. I become sensitive to something they hide toward which I am drawn, as by a magnet. It is as though I pass beyond. And I have another impression of myself, an impression of matter that is alive, of a life in which the density of my body disappears. Then I come to a second threshold, where I feel that I am no longer a compact mass but an infinity of living particles in movement, in vibration. I feel myself as participating in a Being whose force gives me life, which I then radiate around me. It is like a kind of cosmic breathing in which I take part.
I must never forget what gives life to the form. The form alone does not exist. That which “is” in the form, that which has taken form, is the essence of what is questioning in me. I seek therefore to return to the source. The more the “I” seeks to know itself, the more it participates in consciousness and the less in the body in which it is submerged. All thinking comes from the thought “I.” But from where does the thought “I” come? When we look within and return to the source, the thought “I” disappears. And when it disappears, the feeling “I am” appears by itself. Then we attain consciousness, our true nature. When we know our true “I,” something emerges from the depths of being and takes over. It is behind the mind. It is infinite, divine, eternal. We call it the soul.