The Reality of Being
94. A cosmic scale
We need to understand the idea of a cosmic scale, that there is a link connecting humanity with a higher influence. Our lives, the purpose of being alive, can only be understood in relation to forces whose scale and grandeur go beyond ourselves. I am here to obey, to obey an authority that I recognize as greater because I am a particle of it. It calls to be recognized, to be served and to shine through me. There is a need to put myself under this higher influence and a need to relate to it in submitting to its service. I do not realize at the outset that my wish to be is a cosmic wish and that my being needs to situate itself and find its place in a world of forces. I consider it my subjective property, something I can make use of for personal profit. My search is organized on the scale of this subjectivity in which everything is measured from a subjective point of view— me and God. Yet at a certain point I must realize that the origin of the need I feel is not in me alone. There is a cosmic need for the new being that I could become.
Views From the Real World
February 17, 1924
Working on oneself is not so difficult as wishing to work, taking the decision. This is so because our centers have to agree among themselves, having realized that, if they are to do anything together, they have to submit to a common master. But it is difficult for them to agree because once there is a master, it will no longer be possible for any of them to order the others about and to do what they like.
New York, February 24, 1924 – Man is subject to many influences.
…influences come from things that are near to us. But there are also other influences which come from big things, from the earth, from the planets and from the sun, where laws of a different order operate…
…Always everything influences us. Every thought, feeling, movement is a result of one or another influence. Everything we do, all our manifestations are what they are because something influences us from without. …We may want to get free from one or two, but having got free of them we may acquire another ten.
…Everything is mechanical.
… As a rule, at every moment of our life only one center works in us… By itself a center has no consciousness, no memory; it …merely possesses a special capacity of recording.
Indeed it greatly resembles …a recording tape. If I say something to it, it can later repeat it. It is completely mechanical, organically mechanical. All centers differ slightly as to their substance, but their properties are the same.
…Our mind has no critical faculty in itself, no consciousness, nothing. And all the other centers are the same.
…In the majority of cases each center lives its own life. It believes everything it hears, without criticism, and records everything as it has heard it. …(I)t believes everything…
…If you wish to hear new things in a new way, you must listen in a new way…
In Search of the Miraculous
Chapter 9
“…(O)ne must know that, apart from these three centers… we have two more centers, fully developed and properly functioning, but they are not connected with our usual life, nor with the three centers in which we are aware of ourselves.
…This present teaching …affirms that the higher centers exist in man and are fully developed.
“It is the lower centers that are undeveloped. And it is precisely this lack of development, or the incomplete functioning, of the lower centers that prevents us from making use of the work of the higher centers.
…”In order to obtain a correct and permanent connection between the lower and the higher centers, it is necessary to regulate and quicken the work of the lower centers.
…the primary object must consist in freeing each center from work foreign and unnatural to it, and in bringing it back to its own work which it can do better than any other center. …
“In order to regulate and balance the work of the three centers whose functions constitute our life, it is necessary to learn to economize the energy produced by our organism, not to waste this energy on unnecessary functions, and to save it for that activity which will gradually connect the lower centers with the higher.
This Fundamental Quest, Henriette Lannes
Part III Exchanges 1963-64
Mme Lannes: I feel that I need to be helped by something in which I’ve never had confidence: a finer, more active energy. I do not turn toward it.
(This energy) can relate me to something indisputably more alive. Certain moments are given me because I am attentive. I try to turn my trust toward the source of my life; there the help is. When we are asleep, we turn our backs on it and our lives cannot be clarified by this source.
Exchange in London: Impressions
Henri Tracol: …nearly everything impresses us, nearly everything exerts an action on us, a sort of pressure. This can be called an impression. …No matter what process is taking place, it is a source of impressions. No matter what action affects us from outside, it must be taken as an impression.
…it is food that I receive. …This is why it’s so important to understand what permits me to receive impressions, and how I receive them. It is still more important to understand whether I am open to impressions and in what measure I receive them. I receive them all the time.
You spoke, in effect, of influences. Something flows. Energy flows, and flows out from a source. It goes wherever there is an action. The movement of energy can be taken as an influence. But it reaches me through impressions. If I encounter an influence without receiving it, I receive no impressions and it has no action on me. I need the impression—it is like the materialization of the influence—to help me transform something in myself.
… In a very theoretical way, I can judge that all the impressions I receive that help me in the transformation of heavy hydrogens into finer hydrogens can be considered good. But in fact it doesn’t occur in that way: how I receive impressions is actually more important than the classification of impressions. I can receive something intended to transform my presence, but I take it in such a way that it becomes a very bad impression. The converse is also true.
In reality, what is therefore most important is my way of opening, of receiving, and then of giving myself to the action of the influence I receive through impressions and welcoming that action.