Dear Teachers,
Following on from our last teaching on the Arterial Self we are keen to develop further that primary dialogue with Father God which should always pre-empt any decisions we take requiring Christian action.
Guidance and advice from other beings or people is most welcome, but with the independent nature of this process, it is inevitable that offense will occur to any who may be seeking undue control over us.
The issue of selfishness versus the Arterial Self finds relevance in this context which indeed makes us tremble.
We believe that a major cause of the impotence of the Christian is that his propensity for guilt has led him to judge many of his promptings as selfish, when in fact they were probably the call of Father God through the Arterial Self. Thus we have not acted - and died.
We now sense that a change is necessary whereby a more active life can be lived, full of enthusiasm and joy, devoid of guilt.
It is at the conjunction where this active life in the future will meet with that other person or being who knowingly or unknowingly seeks control over us, that we feel apprehensive and seek your further teaching. The qualities of enthusiasm and joy in this context feel somewhat elusive and in need of your insight.
Love,
J., J. & C.
Dear Teachers,
My question is to ask about further ways in which we may identify the true desires of our Arterial soul-self. Can we be mistaken? Can we acknowledge something to be exactly that, but instead have simply bought into an imagining? Thank you for this, and for the other questions as well,
Love, X.
Problem b: Impulsiveness
Two would-be parachutists are crouching at the airplane's opening. One, who stands now before the door, hesitates and cannot summon the 'nerve' to step out into the airy spaces and drop. His companion pushes him from behind and so he goes.
Commentary:
In this further study we may set about to examine some scenarios of relationship whereupon one man contrasts another in action or in decision-making. The validity of our own personal requests of another or of decisions to be had for ourselves, may be weighed against not a few considerations, but of many. There is, of course, the arterial waver, and for those who know of themselves what their true desires and life may be, then that is all ... yet also, one great gift of the Arterial Self which is not to be overlooked, is that of it being the decider.
To decide implies that there is a period of time, a pause (no matter how long or short) when the deliberating between takes place. Now if the Arterial Self was purely impulsive then this would negate the opportunity for such actual deciding. Many an action which has been subsequently regretted has come of a nil-thought, impulsive and hurried action. When men or de-men urge an individual, it is always with the implication that there is no tomorrow - no second chance, no other offer, no greater moment, etc. They would indeed go to the length of pushing the other out of the 'plane, even if this was not the decision felt and known by the one who would fall...
So our first key to this arterial knowing is of its value as recognized in the considered pause. The pause being but necessary to it, also the very appreciation of what it is about to encounter consciously, to take in and work with, delight to and bring joy to, and so forth. The pause is verily the space between each dynamic and it becomes the sanctified realm of rest when we have commuted arterially to God and asked of Him what is correct or incorrect at any chosen time.
The urgency of there being no tomorrow is an untruth spiritually speaking. Of all things our tomorrows are the most likely to be in successive abundance, however it is our very own ability to partake in them that may be endangered if we behave as if there is a shortage, and that should somehow exaggerate our actions in the now.
Equally a man cannot represent the past and forever continue on as if there is no new future to be afforded him either. Not all days are to be repetitions of the former, for then the personality atrophies the soul within and chokes the Arterial Self into semi-submission. Rather than then becoming urged prematurely into a quickening future we can find that the man can be with a false face, living to maintain the appearance of a time already passed, which brings us to:
Problem c: Habits Redundant
One can see from this that the Arterial Soul-Self could be equated with the Consciousness Soul, particularly as it relates to Manas (Spirit Self); described in the following:
ReplyDelete"The "I" lives in the soul. Although the highest manifestation of the "I" [I am] belongs to the consciousness soul, one must, nevertheless, say that this "I" raying out from it fills the whole soul, and through it exerts its action upon the body. In the "I" the spirit is alive. The spirit sends its rays into the "I" and lives in it as in a sheath or veil, just as the "I" lives in its sheaths, the body and soul. The spirit develops the "I" from within, outwards; the mineral world develops it from without, inwards. The spirit forming and living as "I" will be called spirit self because it manifests as the "I," or ego, or self of man. The difference between the Spirit Self and the Consciousness Soul can be made clear in the following way. The consciousness soul is in touch with the self-existent truth that is independent of all antipathy and sympathy. The spirit self bears within it the same truth, but taken up into and enclosed by the "I," individualized by it, and absorbed into the independent being of the individual. It is through the eternal truth becoming thus individualized and bound up into one being with the "I" that the "I" itself attains to the eternal.
"The spirit self is a revelation of the spiritual world within the "I," just as from the other side sensations are a revelation of the physical world within the "I." In what is red, green, light, dark, hard, soft, warm, cold one recognizes the revelations of the corporeal world. In what is true and good are to be found the revelations of the spiritual world. In the same sense in which the revelation of the corporeal world is called sensation, let the revelation of the spiritual be called intuition. Even the most simple thought contains intuition because one cannot touch thought with the hands or see it with the eyes. Its revelation must be received from the spirit through the "I." If an undeveloped and a developed man look at a plant, there lives in the ego of the one something quite different from what exists in the ego of the other. Yet the sensation of both are called forth by the same object. The difference lies in this, that the one can form far more perfect thoughts about the object than the other. If objects revealed themselves through sensation only, there could be no progress in spiritual development. Even the savage is affected by nature, but the laws of nature reveal themselves only to the thoughts fructified by intuition of the more highly developed man. The stimuli from the outer world are felt also by the child as incentives to the will, but the commandments of the morally good disclose themselves to him in the course of his development in proportion as he learns to live in the spirit and understand its revelations."
-Theosophy, Rudolf Steiner