By Tom Carney, Arcana Workshops
More and more humans are becoming aware of the fact that part of the boilerplate of Cosmic Physics is that “Energy follows thought.” Destiny of the Nations P. 35
Another is that “Good can come only from Good”. Supermundane II #267
These two statements are not nice platitudes. They are basic facts of Cosmic Physics. They embody a major hunk of the formula used by any creator for the creation or manifestation of any form.
Free Will
It is well known that on this planet, free will is a human condition. This condition has thus made mankind creators. We can, and billions do, freely choose not to exercise our free will and to let others do that for us. Or we can live with it moment by moment.
That choice means that we understand that our thoughts will result in some kind of manifestation. It means realizing that every breath we take is one we freely choose to take. It means we have a hand, even if it is a small one, in the creation and control of human destiny.
How do we feel? Joyful, alive, conscious of the beauty that surrounds us, or depressed or bored or discouraged. These are all choices. Usually, the frequencies of all conditions are abundantly available in any environment in which we happen to be. We can choose which of these will inhabit our etheric systems.
Because energy follows thought, all of these choices condition the manifestation, the appearance of who we are presenting to the world. What we manifest, how we appear, what we do, the actions we do or do not take on the dense physical plane are a composite of the choices we make. They are, literally, a manifestation of our conscious or unconscious thought life.
Our choices are triggered or initiated by the assumptions, consciously or, more likely, unconsciously held, regarding the nature of reality. All of our physical appearance, our behavior, our forms are therefore effects. They are a direct result of those choices which we have, consciously or not, internally made. Hence, “The physical plane is not a principle.”
Form Manipulation
What is important about that fact of cosmic physics is that it is pretty much a waste of time-energy to work on the physical plane. This is true both micro, for each of us and macro, for the one humanity. Every “thing”, every single form from the tiniest quark or “string” to our human relations and all of the systems and structures which manifest our customs and mores, our systems of government, religion, finance and the actual dense physical bodies within which we walk around are effects of our thought lives.
In every case the deficiencies or problems in the systems, including our personal lives, are effects rooted in the assumptions regarding reality which are behind our thinking or, more accurately, our thought-form processing which is not thinking, that generated the forms. We cannot correct these deficiencies by modifying the forms. Any modification or manipulation of the form to accommodate the effects of the flaw will incubate and carry the seeds that generated the problem. Over time that flaw will manifest in some, usually even more devastating, aspect of the form.
An easy to see example, with which many of us are familiar, is overweight. The bodies we use to walk around in the lives we are living are the effects or products of our thought lives. Working on the problem, e.g., “I am 20 pounds overweight. I will diet and exercise and lose the 20 pounds.” Such solutions, even when we have the personal will to carry them through, are most often temporary corrective measures. Eventually the weight reappears. If we want change that is stable and lasting, we need to deal with the cause of the weight gains. We need to start dealing with the assumptions regarding the nature of reality, which we are consciously or, more likely, unconsciously holding, that are generating our actions.
Working With Causes
One could go to a teacher or a counselor or psychologist to get help in working on these problems and hundreds of millions do. Unfortunately most of the available psychological and “spiritual” counseling approaches, while often helpful in the short term, are still dealing with the superficial effects of the issues rather than the causes. As a result people spend years and years and thousands of dollars in some kind of therapy only to find that they are still housing the cause of the issue.
Teaching or counseling or guidance that deals with causes rather than effects will tend to connect us to our deeper inner spiritual self. Such guidance will unavoidably lead to this ancient algorithm. “With self forgetfulness, we gather what we need for the helping of our fellow men.”
Implementing this formula requires something more than processing the thought-forms which are already shaping our lives. It requires thinking. It requires a detached scientific examination of our consciously and largely unconsciously held assumptions regarding the nature of reality.
If this sounds like a modern approach to the using of a most ancient mantra or formula, it is. “Lead us, O Lord, from darkness to light; from the unreal to the real; from death to immortality.” This exploration is made to gain a deeper understanding of the reality, or, more likely, the unreality upon which most of our assumptions are based so that we can change the patterns of our thought lives and thus the effects we manifest.
What one eventually discovers in this deep exploration of assumptions is that the “self” one forgets is the illusionary separated self, the darkness, the unreal, or the form, which dies, and with which one has been identified for a long, long time. We eventually realize that we are not separated from humanity, but that we are humanity, and when we focus our will on service to the Common Good and General Welfare, we will become in all respects, from our physical appearance to the way we conduct our lives, the model of what we think humanity needs to look like. We become the touchstone that transforms, or reconstructs the world.
It is simple physics. Although it may still be hard for many of our scientists to see, energy actually does follow thought. Regardless of the nature or kind, these flaws in our understanding can be dealt with on a causal level. When the motive force for correcting such flaws flows from the realization that they are interfering with our Soul agenda, which is always and only service to the Common Good, we will act. Consciously exercising our free will, we will, almost automatically, institute change to bring our thought life into harmony with our new insight. This change, made at a basic causal level of consciousness will be permanent, or change that matters.
Regarding the overweight issue: We will, for example, without obsessing over it or even thinking much about it, simply start to eat a sensible diet of good food and get the necessary physical exercise to keep the body functioning at an optimal rate to meet the demands our particular service requires. Why? Because we shift the motive power from desire to striving. “A desire is not active, because it creates expectation and expectation is the mother of passivity. Striving, on the other hand, is a generator of motion leading to ascent of the spirit.” (Agni Yoga #210 ) Our focus, our Will, will be on the urgency to meet the needs of our brother and sister selves rather than on our own separative physical, emotional or mental cravings and desires.
An eons-long problem which was generated by the illusory sense of separation is that salvation is not available here and now and that we had to wait for some outside help to save us. Now, realizing that we are literally at one with our brothers and sisters, that we, each of us, is humanity, and in focusing our efforts on the needs of the Common Good, we are actually working on ourselves. We are making ourselves into the “ones we have been waiting for.”
This is all a kind of micro picture. However, looking at the macro side, if we want to actually have a planet that works, if we want change that matters, change that is change, and not just the old insanity reformulated in a new costume, we will have to shift our focus from eternally messing around with the forms and start working from facts of cosmic physics. The fact of Cosmic Physics, “Good can come only from Good” Supermundane II #267, becomes basic.
For example, humanity has modified its economic systems in many ways over thousands of centuries. Poverty, starvation, homelessness, ignorance, illiteracy, disease, to say nothing of the pollution and destruction of the Planet’s ecosystems, are still very much a part of our lives. No amount of manipulation or modifications to the existing thoughtforms, budget changes, economic plans, trade agreements, tax plans will correct these deficiencies.
A Flawed System
The economic system like most of the other human designed systems, has been constructed on two irreconcilably flawed and mutilated concepts based in the great Illusion of Separation. In the finite world of the Great Illusion, limitation rules and existence and value depend on the acquisition of a limited amount of forms or things. Thus, this illusion gives birth to the necessity of having, controlling, possessing, forms or things, and we have the huge glamour of the ownership of property. In this concept of ownership, property includes, not just material things such as land, water, and air, but human beings.
The resulting system which revolves around the acquisition of material things and apparent value has worn many cloaks and taken many forms over the eons. It presently masquerades behind a huge distortion of the principle of Capitalism. This system attempts to functions through the another eons old aberration of the Great Illusion called competition.
Good can come only from Good. Capitalism as it presently functions in current human social and economic systems is not a part of the Plan. Competition, a complete distortion of Life, has no place at all in the Plan.
Any system that is rooted in the blind and ignorant notion of the ownership of property will involve a warped sense of the Principle of Capital and the naturally occurring cosmic force of co-operation. Any such system will exclude the Principle of the Common Good and the General Welfare, and will ultimately fail.
When systems, economic and otherwise, are based on the General Welfare and Common Good which are not just words, but Principles of Cosmic Physics which describe the visible harmony of Infinity, there will be success for the Common Good. But let us discriminate between the present distortion of capitalism and “competition”. Although these two always co-exist, they are entirely different energies
CAPITALISM:
In the world of Reality, Capitalism is a formulation for the initiative power of creation. All systems, from Planets, to nations, to apple trees, will need to have capital, that is they will need initiating power. Capital, the first aspect, the initiating power, regardless of the form it takes, originates in, circulates through, and supports the Common Good and The General Welfare.
This principle of cosmic physics has, for eons, been warped by the delusion of the ownership of property. The delusion that initiating power can be the exclusive property of some individual (a person or presently a “corporation”) has led to the impounding, hoarding and removal of creative power from circulation through the whole. This is the basic cause of imbalance of the Planet. The scales of Life do not have Good in one pan and evil in the other so that a certain amount of good can be balanced by an equal amount of evil. One pan holds Intention and Plan. The other holds Manifestation.
The notion that some individual human being can exclusively own or be the exclusive source of initiating power (sort of like the old concept of God) and be therefore the exclusive separate owner of the fruits of the initiated system is a delusion. This worm is endemic to the illusion of separation. Imagine an apple tree assuming that it owns the sun, its capital, and the apples it produces.
COMPETITION:
As I said, competition, a complete distortion of Life, has no place at all in the Plan. To compete means to be against. It means to struggle or compete against some other to gain the exclusive rights or possession of some thing. It is a thought-form that only makes sense if our conception of cosmos is rooted in the unreal, or the illusion of separation.
In the reality of the One Life, the reality of the harmony of Cosmos, limitation does not exist. Meaning and value evolve from the ability to express responsibility for rather than ownership of our environments of whatever dimension. Cooperation is the mode of evolution.
Life and Competition
Life has nothing to do with owning anything or with winners and losers. Competition does not exist in Nature. There is no separation in Nature. The power that drives evolution is what we call striving. Its mode of manifestation is cooperation. A lump of carbon strives to diamond-hood. It does not compete with the surrounding compounds and or other elements so that it, rather than some other lump of carbon, will become a diamond.
Ages come and go. Ice moved out from the poles and covered portions of the planet. The mountains like present day Half Dome did not compete with or try to defeat the advance of the ice flows so that they could remain as they were. Although beyond our ability, or at least my ability, to understand it, Yosemite Valley unfolded in what must have been a part of the Plan. The dinosaurs did not put up a big fight to keep from evolving into whatever they evolved into.
The Harmony of Nature
There is no such thing as competition in nature. Visit the desert in the Spring. Walk the trails through Tuolumne Meadows. You will see hundreds of varieties of wild flowers and grasses all living joyfully and harmoniously together. Regardless of what the home owner assumes, the dandelions in the lawn are not attacking the grass.
Cooperation
There is a natural resistance to any growth. However, the resistance is not a competition, it is a cooperation. Any seed must push through the resistance of the presence of the soil. However, the seed draws what it needs to push through from the soil, and the soil is enriched, evolved as a result of the exchange of energies with the seed. Any soul must push through the layers of matter, of glamour and illusion in which it is embedded. These glamours and illusions furnish the arena in which the soul experiments, experiences and expresses. As the glamour or illusion is dissipated in the light of reason and love, the matter of which they were constructed is enriched, evolved, purified.
Identification With Form
The presence of the aberration of competition or conscious resistance to evolution, to the unfolding of the Cosmic Plan for the planet, the thing which generates the imbalance of the scales, is a human thing. Our identification with our forms, our owner ship of these properties, and our loathing to “give them up”, that is to take an action which amounts to do what we perceive as dying on some level, is what makes us hang on, by our fingernails, to our property. It is that internal spark of divinity that knows only that it needs to grow, to evolve, to become, that pushes relentlessly against this identification with the form.
This Cosmic Will to evolve and this personal will to hang on to our false identification with our forms generates what we call competition. For us, for now, it is as natural as the sunrise. Without it we would not be human because it is a result of our free will. The harder we strive to go with that internal fire of The Will to evolve, the more force we evoke from the forms with which we are already identified to stay that way.
The Will To Strive
The fact is that the resistance of the forms serves us in the long run. It eventually calls out our deepest will to strive, to achieve, to make the ultimate effort to see the Light. Eventually, we realize the fact of our true spiritual nature. The illusion of separation dissipates, and we shift our efforts from the competition mode to the cooperation mode. The effort shifts from one of “giving up” to “taking over.”
“Inner union demonstrates and outer cleavages are gone.” Resistance becomes the signature of the direction of the Path into Truth, into the unknown country. This is the note behind Master M’s comment, “Comfort is the cemetery of the spirit.” (Hierarchy #391) Therefore, we follow the path of most resistance with joy, that special wisdom.
Giving Up
As we all well know, the Path from animal man to initiate of the wisdom is not a cakewalk. What makes it so enormously difficult is the perception of the separated self that we are always being faced with the need to “give something up” to make what we call sacrifices. What we are learning as we make the move from competition to cooperation is that we give nothing up. We do not anguish over “giving up” hot fudge sundaes, supersize fat burgers or beer, or hubris, greed, avarice, sloth or any of that stuff. We do not even think about “giving up”.
“Giving up” is a thought-form of the path of suffering and self pity. “Oh! We have to give this up.” “Oh! We have to give that up.” We know from years, if not lives, of experiment and experience, most of us anyway, that even if there are temporary gains, that path leads to a lot of anguish and disappointment, but only very slowly if ever to change that matters.
The same reasoning works for all of our form identifications. For example, the owners of property from the most humble individuals to the million or billionaires become identified with the property, whatever it maybe, and are in effect owned by the property. Thus they resist evolution and fight tenaciously to maintain their grip on what they see as their very lives. This is the case, as it is easy to see, even when their lives are full of suffering and turmoil which, without exception, from the poorest to the “richest”, they all are.
Taking Over
When The Light breaks in, as it eventually will, and we begin to rethink and reconstruct our lives working from the principles of the Common Good and General Welfare, the giving up gradually becomes a taking over. We become the co-creating caretakers, cooperators rather than the owners of those resources of the Common Wealth for which we have become responsible.
For a new day, we need new ways. With the heart aflame, we are driven by our realization of and our identification with our true nature which is to love, to give, to serve, rather than dominating and getting and hoarding. All of our self hate, the hair shirt and self flagellation stuff becomes irrelevant and time wasting. We do not have to give up anything. We simply Love. With Pure Reasoning Will we magnetically attract and take over what we need to serve the Common Good.
Sacrifice means resurrection. We die, To be born. Each night merges Into a new dawn. The pain comes from holding on. Sacrifice is saying yes. In the yes we let go. And The pain ends In the New. It is, of course, true– There can be no Phoenix Without the ashes. But Phoenix focused, fused To that rush and release, Pain remains Below With the ashes. And Flying free We wing Joy filled– joyfully Into New and formless Light. Sacrifice Is the commitment Of Summer’s full blown richness To the gloriously incandescent furnace Of Autumn’s kaleidoscopic color And The death white ash of Winter From which has already Sprung Spring. Sacrifice is the doorway into Eternity.An astonishing thing about this approach is that shifting the focus to service of the Common Good opens up a flood gate of realization regarding “the gathering of what we need to help our fellow man.” It is very much like ripping away a huge black veil. When we are clear about our intention, our motivation, our will and our direction, we realize that the false sense of separation, generated by our identification with our forms, that has driven us for so long, has separated us not only from our brothers and sisters, but from our own whole selves.
This realization enables us to accept our whole self as one self and to realize that we need all of our parts, including the so called and much maligned “shadow”, to actually serve the Common Good. It turns out that when we approach this long lost brother we call the shadow with love and gratitude as an actual part of our self, an actual existing member of our family, rather than with fear and hatred, two rather amazing realizations occur.
First, rather that hating and denying and competing for dominance–which is an approach and energy which actually creates and empowers the so called shadow– with this genuine part of our whole being, we can embrace this brother as an incredibly valuable part of our whole self. We can whole heartedly, the only way which works, accept responsibility for the karmic obligations which we generated in our former incarnations.
We will realize that the actions which created these shadow or negative aspects of our karma were the effects of the deficiencies and flaws of our behavior. We will realize that these deficiencies and flaws were in turn the effects of our illusory notion that we were separated, alone, bewildered and caught in some never ending insanity called competition or, better, “war” for value, and meaning, and we can proceed with the work of reconstruction.
Based on the expansion of consciousness from the darkness to the Light and from the unreal to the Real, we will re-motivate our efforts from service to the separated self to service to Humanity. This will reconstruct or replace the deficiencies of behavior and character that caused the problems. We can embrace our whole self and take over what we need for the serving of our fellow men.
Secondly, we discover that we have been denying ourselves the use of a considerable part of our total resources which have been learned and earned by ourselves over many, many incarnations of experimentation, experience, and expression. These resources include our knowledge, powers, and skills including a great deal of experience working with the various Ray energies in all of the bodies.
Some of this experience involved a good amount of suffering and pain from which we eventually learned a great deal. And some involved indescribable experiences of beauty and grandeur that left us stunned and deeply changed.
And, now, when we approach this part of our self in this way, amazingly, rather than resistance, we encounter cooperation and in fact relief, a sense of arrival at that outpost toward which we have been aiming for lifetimes.
Again, it’s not about giving anything up. It is about having the courage to take over, to accept and claim what is our true self. It is about becoming the touchstones of reconstruction.
