School Talk 21 - Mountain Climbing

In the last few weeks we've been talking a considerable amount bother here and in person and at the talks and also in the newsletter about higher states of consciousness. In fact, we're going to call it climbing the mountain. So we want to also talk about a practical way of achieving the higher states of consciousness.

Now in order to do this, we're going to use the tone scale, the mental states that people experience. It starts off at the lowest possible state-coma. The next one is apathy. The next is fear. The next is held resentment. The next is anger. The next is boredom. The next is contentment, which crosses the line and then becomes the higher states of vital interest, exhilaration, etc. etc. [See Levels of Consciousness (Tape 7) on web site for more detailed description} We won't go into all of these. They go up to about thirteen or fourteen on the scale. So they're all conditioned states of being we just brought up, up to contentment. Contentment usually depends on circumstances. Vital interest, exhilaration and so forth are dependent on one's efforts and intentions.

The first thing we will look at is the mechanism, which uses tones. Man has essentially three brains. He has the cerebellum, which is where most conditioned mechanical responses take place. Now we condition the cerebellum very early in life, probably as an infant, possibly the first day we arrived and so on down the road. All the things like the whole purpose of living is to be non-disturbed and they are complaining and sticking up for rights and blaming on one side of the cerebellum-the other side is pleasing, quoting authorities, self-improvement and so on. All of these are mechanical responses.

Then we have the cerebrum which is the new brain, or a much more elegant developed brain like the cerebellum, and it's divided into halves, the right and the left-much of which you've probably read about lately in various and sundry publications. It is that the right brain does one thing and the left-brain does another thing and possibly these are correct and they may not be-it is really immaterial. The brain is a mechanism used by intelligence or life or spirit, whatever word you prefer to call it in order to function with a body and an interchange with society and other people.

So the cerebellum, being a very serious brain, is possibly involved in anger, fear, held resentment, apathy and so forth. But it can be domesticated; and that, probably, is the first chore that one takes on if one is to go to higher states of consciousness. These emotional responses that arise, are very primitive and they are common with all animals that we know about. Animals all have these same sorts of emotions like anger, fear, and apathy and possibly even boredom. They may even get that high on the tone scale. These emotions are reactions.

Now to get these domesticated, some work has to be done on the next level of the cerebrum. So the first thing that the cerebrum can do is to use logic and reason which is, I believe, in most cases attributed to the left-brain. So it has to work to see the subject of self knowing, self remembering, start on that and work with it, which gets the emotions under control that they at least can be used with volition.

See, the average person feels that emotions are human nature, so it's human nature to get angry if you're not treated exactly as you want to be. It's human nature to be frightened of the unknown. It's human nature to be resentful. It's human nature to feel apathetic when one has been rejected or disapproved of or in some other way disappointed. So as long as that is just accepted as the nature of the human being, of course, nothing is going to be done about it. We find people still indulging in it, even though they have been going through the motions of studying self-knowing and self-remembering and higher consciousness for Lord knows how long. It doesn't make any difference; they're probably still using these to a great extent.

So first off is balancing, to get it in order so that it's under conscious volition. In order to do this, one thing which is very interesting in practice is alternating states-two states, we'll say, anger and vital interest. First you have anger and you do it deliberately; and then you do vital interest, and you do it deliberately. Or we'll say fear and contentment, or held resentment and vital interest. To play these backwards and forwards. It begins to balance them a wee bit so that the person can see that they can take charge of their inner state of being and bring it into some condition where it would be a desirable state of well being to say the very least.

Now when a person begins to get the whole bit of logic and reason extremely well developed, they get lopsided a little bit. They don't use the other side of their being so that there is a balance that can be taking place. So we would recommend to the person who would use logic and reason for a while to then practice fantasy for a while.

Now fantasy is when the dog's talk and the bird's come and tell you things from across the country. We have fairies and djinns, and all sorts of other creatures that we're not really familiar with, but we let the imagination run into fantasy, which is a balancing.

Now we have some people who come in who are almost 100% into the fantasy world and in attempting to balance them, we get them to use logic and reason and begin to be much more serious and study things like plain math if nothing else.

Much more people come in are decidedly set on logic and reason and don't allow themselves any fantasy or any imagination and so on. You may have noticed that there are considerable numbers of stories that are current today. Most people who study sooner or later come in contact with some of Idries Shah's work, which is basically filled with stories. They usually take these books and sit down and read stories one after the other from front to back and feel they have some interpretation on them and can, no doubt, find a moral to it like it was a parable or something like Hans Christian Anderson's books. Now that's not the purpose of these stories. The purpose of these stories is to be used when somebody is very serious. They use funny ones like the Nass Ruden stories, the jokes; or they will go into studying the ones with fantasy where there are djinns who do all sorts of works and man has control over the djinns. There are ones where there are ants tell you there is buried treasure underneath. So a person begins to be more comfortable with the miraculous; and of course, most people who are very logical and reasonable, are then not very comfortable with miracles-with the unusual-with the fantastic, they're uncomfortable with that.

So then a person who would be very set in their fantasies and caught up in them, the first effort is to get them back into some semblance of thinking seriously or logically and reasonably-of studying the world of things that go on so that they can balance their fantasy world.

Now humor is usually used as something that is creative and it's attributed to the same world as fantasy, so here the person begins to work on being balanced. Then what is frequently referred to these days as the right and left-brain, which may and may not be accurate? It's fine, though, for illustration purposes, and we're working for a balance between the two. So to just sit and read stories one after the other is probably about the same as reading the funny papers or the Wall Street columns or what-have-you It particularly does nothing so far as leading one towards higher consciousness. However; if the person is heavy on the one side and does the other, such as we said a while ago, that we alternate between the conscious brain that has some consciousness as to what is going on or conscious volition and the reactive brain of the cerebellum. It begins to balance the affects; and also makes the cerebellum material begin to be where it's under conscious control.

Now always, the material is from consciousness, from Spirit, from Life, whatever word you want, but it does not use these mechanisms or biological computers to accomplish things with the minimum amount of effort.

People buy computers because they feel it will greatly reduce the amount of detail work. Life uses the brain, which is the ultimate in a computer-it's a biological computer, but it's certainly to relieve the detail work of having to figure out every little thing as it comes along. If it weren't for these brain-computer type things, you'd have to learn how to dress yourself every morning and that would probably take you several hours, so you wouldn't get anything else done. But these computers have need to be reprogrammed from time to time due to the fact that you live in a different world.

When you were a child, you lived in a child world. When you were an infant, you lived in the infant world; and all of us lived in a set of responses {of the four dual basic urges and the six decisions of not I's] that were necessary for survival at that time. Later you lived in the adolescent world, then the student world.

Possibly today you live in the every day-work-a-day world-possibly you're still using the same old programming that was there when you were an infant or when you were a child or when you were an adolescent. So obviously the computer program needs to be updated, and this is one of the major things that we address in a school situation. That one begins to see that the old program is not to one's advantage today, and that a new set of programming is very much in order.

So we start putting in new programming--that we want to understand what we're doing, constantly balancing. So if a person becomes too serious, in an attempt to create a little levity, we make a little fun of it. If a person gets too much play, play, play and fantasizing, we attempt to put a little practicality in it. If a person is heavy into emotions, we attempt to raise the level up to where there is a consciousness involved. If the person becomes too set in their ways of being only interested in teaching material, we try to get them interested in the every day world. The world of earning a living, the world of business, what-have-you

In fact, the esoteric school usually has some semblance of having a business around it. The business doesn't usually make any money; and it may be costly, but nevertheless, it's there to put the person back into the practical world of saying-here, we've got to earn a living.

So all these things make it very essential. We hope that you're beginning to see that contrast is a way of seeing things, and contrast is a way of creating a balance. Now if one becomes totally immersed in fantasy stories of having djinns that do all your work for you, they wash the dishes, they make the bed, they sweet the floors, they do the bookkeeping, and carrying out the trash; very shortly we could get the idea that we could develop the skills of harnessing a djinn and keep it around the house. Probably we'd all like to have one.

No doubt, that there is something very equivalent to a djinn that lives in the consciousness if we will allow it to be there. There are things that can begin to take over and to run. For example, without very much effort, you can drive a car across the state wherever you may live without really paying very much attention to the mechanism of the car, because that is taken over by a djinn that exists somewhere in our being that once we've programmed it in, we can carry on any kind of conversation. We may be rehearsing a speech. We may be rehearsing a business transaction or anything else, and the car's being drivin' on.

A little while ago coming up the street, I saw a lady telling somebody off in no uncertain terms in a car. She was in there by herself, but somebody was really being told off. So we can easily say that we have djinn, which drives for you.

Now the fact that it's been held up as some sort of a demon that only Solomon had a ring with a seal on it that could make the djinn behave as everyone wanted it to; so of course, everybody would like to have Solomon's ring, most especially us lazy folks. We'd like to have this ring too so we could put a little push on the forehead of the djinn and he'd have to do everything we said and couldn't do any of his dirty work on us.

However, the djinn that we all have around with us or the many djinns do just the same thing, but we do have to be in control of them which is probably the symbiology of Solomon's ring. That is, if we're not in control of these things, they begin to take over and control us. So let's see if you can begin to look at the possibility of number one, seeing that you have domesticated the material that arises from or works through the cerebellum; and let us see if we can keep a balance between the things that go on, (whether we are logical and reasonable, which we pride ourselves on that), or whether we're carried away with fantasies and tell ourselves that we see visions--that we see all sorts of strange things going on that other people can't see. One of my friends says that you better go see you're optometrist if you have those, I don't know. It is a source of attention, but possibly doesn't amount to very much.

If we get carried away in other places, or we're probably lost, it would behoove us to begin to study and preferably under the supervision of someone that can, without any prejudice of any kind, see which direction one is leaning to. Now one person comes in needs one kind of stories to balance them out; and another kind of person needs entirely different kind of work or effort in order for them to become balanced. The balancing is what we're all working on. How much time can we stay in being balanced. Probably a lot more than we do. Now it is common everyday knowledge that people say that so and so is unbalanced. We mean he's crazy. He or she has lost their way-but there is nothing that can be going on in this person that can be dependable. Their unbalanced, we say. So even common folklore knows that balancing is worthwhile, and unbalanced means that we have become lopsided-unable to perform as well as we might, or actualize our potential in the real world.

So balancing is the thing that one is looking at in this particular stage of existence, and as we become balanced, we begin to see that we have all sorts of capabilities that we didn't have before. Now when we talk about higher states of consciousness, we're referring a feeling as much as anything else, because the feeling does definitely go with it. So we'd say if you're angry, you are in a certain level of consciousness. If you're apathetic, you're in a certain level of consciousness. Now these are listed at the lower levels possibly for a very good reason. They're anti-survival. They just don't work well except in very unusual situations, which a person could act if they were conscious and they used these states. If you would need to be angry, if such should ever occur, you could easily be in anger and probably much more effectively angry than if it just happened in reaction and you called it human nature. So instead of it being a happening, it would be a response, which is quite different.

What we're working on is looking at the higher states of consciousness. It wouldn't be that we could use our own sense of keeping the balance going, so let's say that one becomes too serious which is a rather uncomfortable level of consciousness to say the least-even though it may be effective. But in order to balance it, one would add a bit of fantasy. So let's fantasize for a wee bit. So we talked at first that we could alternate states of being or states of consciousness like anger and vital interest or fear and exhilaration or something on that order. We alternate it. One for a few minutes and the other for a few minutes. One for a few minutes and then another for a few minutes. Now this is the beginning of taking charge.

Now if we wanted to be in a state of exhilaration, we would begin to act exhilarated-there would be activity. There would be fast activity. There would be vitally changing things and putting it around. Exhilaration comes along with fine days and everything else, but you don't have to have a fine day-it can be any kind of a day. Then we would say that one wanted to reinforce that state of exhilaration. It would probably be wise for a few minutes to alternate with apathy. That's about as far down as one can go to go away from exhilaration is to go to apathy. So it would be well to alternate for a few minutes to get the feel of each one and pretty soon you wouldn't want the apathy, so you wouldn't use it very much and probably have no physical use for it except in very rare cases.

If you're locked up with someone that's intent upon doing you harm, you're probably doing better to do apathetic than to get angry or act very wise. Now he'd probably let you alone. The possum family learned years ago, probably centuries ago what they call sulling. They play dead when they're caught or captured or the dogs get close to them--they fall over and play dead. Then the dogs let them alone. Whatever was annoying the possum, whether it was another animal or something else, all the predator sees is just an old dead animal lying there. The animal goes off and leaves the possum alone. As soon as the danger is gone, the possum revives and goes trotting off. So their survival method is called sulling.

So we're all caught in these experiences and sometimes it may be possible, who knows, that it would be wise at the moment to be apathetic. Everybody would probably let you alone and nobody seems to be very much interested in trying to carry on a conversation or straighten you out or enforce any rule if you're apathetic. It just doesn't work very well. It's no fun. You know people don't have any fun if you don't resist. So it's possible that being apathetic and exhilarated would be a good alternate to work for a little bit, and then you can begin to get into the state of exhilaration or exaltation any time you like.

Then you might take bliss and boredom. That would be a good alternate pair-bliss and boredom, and we could practice either one of these. Now when we've practiced something, we don't expect that in one practice session that everything is going to be like a pro. When we practice, some of the time, we do it very poorly, and some of the time we do it quite well. Often when we practice something and perform badly, we arouse feelings of failure or helplessness or hopelessness. "I've no ability, and I'll have to quit the practice-why even bother." Or "I'm no good." Other times we practice quite well and we tell ourselves, "We have it now", and three's no need to practice more.

However, the real pro never quits practicing. The pro golfer practices daily. The outstanding musician practices many hours daily. Of course, we can also tell ourselves that I don't like to practice apathy. But to be in charge, one wants to be where we can be absolutely free to experience these things. Then we don't have to be on guard.

So first, I would recommend that we do the alternate states of anger and vital interest or exhilaration and boredom. Let's do these a number of times until we are acquainted with them.

Let's assign ourselves to be serious for a little while and study things and try to reason and then let's fantasize like all the fairy tales you've ever read. You know they give children fairy tales because the parents are trying to make the kid serious. The child reads the fairy tales where everything is possible and then they can go into states where one can begin to work to experience a given feeling or sensation or states of consciousness at will. So I can easily recommend that you practice and practice and practice experiencing given states of being. They don't always have to be alternates, but the alternating is an excellent practice.

So if you would choose to practice and practice, you will find that some days you won't be so good at it and other days you'll be very good at it, but don't let the good days tell you don't need to practice anymore; and don't let the days that you didn't do it very well tell you that there is no point in practicing further because you will never be able to do it--that you are a hopeless failure.

So, I would highly recommend that you practice as much as you can. Thank you and good night.