9.  The Messages of Jesus

Christ's own life is an example of discipline and personal development.  He raised His consciousness higher and higher until finally He was in direct communication with Cosmic Consciousness, which was a pure channel bringing Creative Intelligence through Himself to mankind.  The messages of Jesus are really simple.  Love yourself and you will be able to love others.   Respect yourself and you will be able to respect others.  We can return to this self-love and self-respect by being reborn in our own minds.

This rebirth is created by developing the energy through biological means to once again be as open as little children and only then can we enter the Kingdom.  But we cannot pass through these levels without starting with a simple exercise of sitting quietly for twenty minutes a day.  This seems like a fairly easy thing to do when we consider each day has twenty-four hours but as you read this book and experiment with these exercises you will discover, to your great chagrin, how very difficult it is to pass through the first portal.

The bondage, we will discover, is the bondage of our own ego.  What we must acknowledge is its existence and by melting it down through meditation we can then rebuild it in the form of God consciousness.  If Christians really existed they would believe in God and by the fact of their own existence they would also know that His Son did not suffer on the cross.  How could He have suffered when He was in direct contact with God?  Only the remnants of His ego suffered, if indeed any ego existed.  His infinite compassion on the cross for His mother and family, and even for Peter, who in fear of his own physical safety, denied his relationship with Christ three times before the cock crowed, did not affect His compassion and love.  If man has the consciousness and the energy to understand and accept the mystery that he is but a soul encased in the temple of the body, he would be able to live his life perpetually in the spirit and then comprehend and feel Jesus' message to live daily in joy and not suffering; but man actually enjoys his own suffering.

Man's ego loves to talk about his operation or his illness or negative things that have happened to him to indicate the extent of this enjoyment of suffering.  The cross is a symbol of suffering because we have accepted, through indoctrination that man is born in sin instead of accepting that man is born perfect as a new born baby and descends into the sin of ignorance by indoctrination.   Jesus tells us to seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened, that in His Father's house are many mansions, and if it was not so He would not tell us.  The mansions are mansions of consciousness.  His seeking is the seeking to raise one's consciousness and so understand the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.   Jesus proclaimed that we should rejoice, that we are all God's children; to live each day fully in faith; not to worry about tomorrow because if we do our best each day, tomorrow will take care of itself; to live in the now, not in the past or future, but to live each day as if it were our last on this earth.  If you, the reader of the book, for example, could truly convince yourself that you had but one last week to live before you died, how changed would your attitude be when you looked at your wife, or husband, or best friend, or just looked outside, seeing the trees, and realizing the beauty all around you that you seldom really see.

Gurdjieff speaks of the fact that man can only awaken if he can realize constantly his own physical death and the death of every living creature.  Here is an example of trying to break through the veils we have over our eyes.  We shy away from any thought of our own death.  It is something we do not even want to contemplate or think about.  Even when someone dies, we put cosmetics and lipstick on the face to convince ourselves that they are only sleeping.   But each morning if we could accept the fact that this may be our last day on earth, how differently we would live.  How much more we would try to love and understand all those around us.  How changed would be our attitudes.  But it takes energy to even contemplate this thought.  Yet if we project ahead, we know that our physical time is limited.  Still we cannot struggle out of the illusion.   This is but one indication of how difficult it is for man to wake up and be able to live each day as if it were his last.

Instead, man lives in the future, looking forward to his two week's vacation, or looking forward to what he is going to do tomorrow, forgetting to use his faculties to the fullest, and to live only here and now.  It is not a question of morbid contemplation of death.  It is a question of realizing our life now, and to live each day to the fullest.  Smile and say words of cheer to to the next face you meet and feel how you will change the vibrations.  That is how we create the universe we live in.  You know when you look at a frown on the face of another person, it brings you down and if you look at a smiling face, it improves your own state.  Yet these are the simple basic things that we find so difficult to comprehend.  How much more difficult, therefore, to comprehend the possibility of changing completely the physical way you now feel by getting control of the body's demands, therefore developing additional energy that will change your life.  Living in the now is a truth so absolute that it transcends even our comprehension of how do it.

When Jesus was brought before Pilate the night he was arrested, Pilate asked Jesus what is truth.  Jesus remained silent, according to the sacred books, and did not answer Pilate because He understood that truth was relevant.  In other words it depends on one's level of awareness.  The need of living in the now is an obvious truth to anyone who can comprehend through their level of awareness the vital necessity of doing so.  The fact that we cannot remember much that has happened to us in the past year except crises or unusual high events when we gained enough energy to be aware of the now, is an indication of man's dilemma.  To a person who cannot comprehend the need to live life in the now, the statement that this is the truth to him makes no sense.  The lack of understanding of truth is itself a bondage.  Men on higher levels of awareness can actually carry on a conversation in a room filled with people and yet no one else in the room understands what they are talking about, because they are talking on a higher level of knowledge that requires higher energy to comprehend.

The more light of knowledge we put on anything, the more we dispel the darkness of ignorance.  To thine own self be true, and self is a collection of atoms.  Everything is energy and men are always changing.

If people feel constantly guilty they cannot respect themselves.  Man has through centuries carried sex guilt with him.   Man's greatest difficulty is understanding spirituality and sexuality.  The sex act is an act of creativity.  It is a spiritual act not to be despised and from here all secular perversions have come.  In order to feel fulfilled the woman must first worship the man.  This is the oneness of man and woman that Jesus spoke about.   Both the virgin and the prostitute worshipped Jesus because they saw God manifest in Him and it was this image they worshipped, just as all women if they desire by total surrender, can see in their beloved the manifestation of God.  This brings sex to its highest potential but throughout the ages all mention of sex and sex energy has been removed from all religious books.  Temple scenes of the Kama Sutra in India were destroyed by the English, and the temples desecrated because the English wished to destroy these traditions, and in order to destroy former tradition, all signs and memories and meanings of them had to be wiped out.  The Kama Sutra depicted a truth of man and woman possessing the qualities of god and goddess, and that the creative act was not something to pervert into an act of guilt and sin, because it freed the masses from their guilt by recognizing the spirituality behind all sex energy.  The English, because of their own traditions, did everything in their power to destroy this knowledge.

Knowledge is light.  The more light we throw on a subject, the greater the understanding and the greater the understanding, the greater the power we have, and knowledge is power.  To withhold knowledge is bondage of the mind and after man's fall, he bound himself with the traditions of suffering.   Yet a sin is only a sin when our traditions make it so.  Something that is a sin in one culture is not a sin in another, indicating how relative truth is dependent on man's level of consciousness.  It is extremely difficult for the average man to rid himself of the traditions that have been so engrained and indoctrinated in his consciousness that it is impossible for him to even begin to question their meaning.   We know for example, that a child's mind is completely open.  The amount of indoctrination he received at the age of three is equal to ten years of indoctrinating he may receive at twenty.

Sexual energy, which is the source of the Kundalini power, if directed properly, raises positive energy into a position where every man is able to question the meaning of any tradition and thereby remove the yoke of wasted energy by creating a union and harmony within the body, which is the aim of Yoga.   Our traditions have so bound us that we have forgotten that we were born free men.  Priests and nuns originally did marry in order to conserve their sex energy and use it positively as a means of increasing consciousness.  However, even the reasons for the vows of chastity have been lost.

True knowledge is indeed freedom, but when knowledge is controlled by those in authority for whatever motives, man is enslaved and manipulated.  At birth, a perfect body is born but it is an open nervous system totally receptive to indoctrination; and the indoctrination immediately starts in direct ratio to the parents' consciousness and the consciousness surrounding the child during these formative years.  Only the child born into an enlightened family is automatically fed pure knowledge.  Few of us in this incarnation have enjoyed that privilege.  The terror of our position can be seen.

How can we, as parents, enlighten our own children unless we are first able to comprehend the fact that we can continue to raise our own consciousness.  Man is easily a victim of auto-suggestion.  To a large extent all men seem to wish to be followers, because they do not possess the energy or the knowledge of energy development to be capable of thinking through their own conclusions and developing original thought which other men with sufficient energy are capable of doing.  This is why men are constantly looking for opinions established by others and we have developed a whole culture of editorial writers and opinion makers instead of attempting to develop a public who can think for itself.

Anybody who has ever fallen in love understands what happens when we direct our energy and emotions to another person.   By giving off a pure feeling of love we change our vibratory levels and we receive back love.  As long as we can maintain this heightened feeling of love, we receive it back.  It is only lost when we slowly withdraw it by the slow erosion of time when we start seeing the other's reflected frailties.  Again this loss takes place through allowing our energy to become negative instead of positive.  If we have the knowledge of how to continually save energy and develop it, we can maintain this state of love.   But love can only be maintained consciously.  As we fall from the level of consciousness, we fall out of love back into selfishness.  It is man's constant fall.

It is hard to maintain a level of consciousness without recognizing all the subtle ways that the body uses up energy.   It requires a great deal of energy to digest a heavy meal.  The more gross the food we eat, the greater the energy loss.  The intake of alcohol burns energy.   Smoking of cigarettes burns energy.  Unnecessary body movements and tension burn energy.  Unnecessary talking and useless worry burn energy.  When we lack the knowledge of conserving and building energy, we lack the ability to stay consciously high.  There are many subtle things that burn energy that we are not aware of.   Seeing a movie that is negative burns energy.  Watching television burns energy and changes our state.  If you carefully watch yourself go through a single day, you will be amazed by the different states that subtly take place.  When a person lies, he burns energy because the lie then exists and has to be rationalized.   It is all a subtle waste of energy.

If you know somebody who is generally always positive, you will be attracted to them because they give off energy.  This is what is known as animal magnetism.  Some people, because of a better physical condition, radiate more energy than others.  Normally these are the leaders of any society, although in many cases, they become trapped by their own ego and misdirect the energy.  The Supreme Intelligence however, seems to have a great sense of humour because if one has power one must use it or he will lose it.  But by the same token if he abuses it, he will also lose it.

As one meditates one starts to slowly understand that real progress is impossible unless it is being done purely, which means that although it is being done to raise one's own consciousness, having raised it one must not exploit others or he will again lose it.  We see examples of this when somebody develops and concentrates the energy the obtain success and then indulges in all sorts of materialism.  As he ages he makes all sorts of frantic attempts to maintain the attractiveness of the body, and yet the inner self is but a reflection of the outer self and the face, despite lifting or any other methods, starts to show the hardness of his own selfishness.  Other people as they grow older take on a serenity and beauty of face that cannot be obtained except through inner work and an unfolding through consciousness of life's meaning.  We cannot underestimate the great difficulty of controlling our own ego.  But once one has entered the way it becomes easier.  The expansion of consciousness does make one more tolerant of others.  The discovery of additional energy sources not only greatly increases one's health but gives new meaning to one's life.  But one has to be careful that the ego does not bring him down.  As Ram Dass said, just as we start to become satisfied with our own progress, the ego tiptoes around us and taps us on the shoulder and tells us how great we are.  It is devious, it is clever, and it does not give up easily.  Yet the great drama of life, if we see it as a drama, truly offers us the opportunity to play any part we want.  We can be happy and contribute, or we can be negative and selfish.  We can follow the natural food laws or we can indulge and take pride in our indulgence.  We can share our knowledge and thereby obtain more, or we can withhold our knowledge and slowly lose it.   Man realizes, as he progresses, that he is not, as he thought, just one person.   He is many people.  Each person finds himself acting differently in different situations as different traits take over and proclaim themselves the real I.

Gurdjieff has explained that all of us have many little workmen inside us without a foreman.  One takes over and acknowledges that he is going to give up smoking.  But the others don't agree and suddenly he finds himself smoking again.  Or one decides that he is going to get up early the next day and enjoy the dawn, but another turns the alarm clock off.  It is first necessary to develop a foreman who is able to keep the other I's under control, and slowly, by withdrawing energy from them, weaken them until the foreman is truly in charge and is able to constantly develop energy and thereby raise consciousness to the extent that we never need fear losing the one-pointedness again, at least not for a longer period.

Eastern philosophy tells us that just as we cannot comprehend our own death, many of us cannot comprehend the thought of reincarnation, that we are provided with a body through which we can experience life after life, perfecting our being and not creating more karma.  Karma is an inheritance of our previous lives and it is desire for more experience that brings us back into a new incarnation.  So we have to burn off the karma of our desires and past actions until finally we are freed.

It is difficult for those of us who are Christians to even comprehend that the majority of human beings at present on this planet believe in reincarnation and that their entire life is lived in this knowledge.  The Indian who acts as a servant, acknowledges his master as an incarnation of God, that by serving him in his manifest form he will slowly end his previous karmas and that it is an honour to serve unselfishly.  If we can accept that this life should be lived in the here and now, and if we can control our desires for more and more material goods or more and more experience, we are able to understand the first steps to obtaining peace of mind.   But our entire Western philosophy is one of increased desires as a way of life.

All advertising is based on stimulating desires to make you unhappy with your present car, your present house, your present clothing, your present economic state.  It is constantly activating you as a consumer for more and more until you are finally burnt out in your endless quest for materialism.   The new American youth who confuses his parents by rejecting materialism and wearing old blue jeans, is in essence rejecting this vicious circle of materialism.   But like all things there must be a balance.  If we peacefully accept tour lot and sit and wait for death, we are just as guilty as if we spent our lives in a hectic race to accumulate materialism.  But if we set proper values on what is necessary for a happy life and use time to study and develop the possibility of increased consciousness, accepting life as an unfolding drama that requires conscious effort, we regain our enthusiasm. Our drama is an eternal drama.  Either Easter Sunday and the Resurrection and all the holy books are true or they are a gigantic hoax and man does not possess a spirit or a soul, and life is but an accident.  But in order to acknowledge the drama one must be conscious of one's own potential and see one's life as a never-ending, exciting, and beautiful adventure.

As we look back we see that God never imposed on us anything greater than we could bear.  Things which at the time seemed to be unpleasant, actually have turned out for the best and after the trial we emerge a more complete person.  But first to make any progress one has to have one's house in order.