You aren’t your stupid khakis, or your car, or your bank account…

 

    In my previous post, I stressed the importance of regarding yourself as more than just a physical body. I wanted to give a quote from Manly P. Hall’s “Lectures on Ancient Philosophy”. If you haven’t checked out his lectures on virtually everything, I highly suggest you give him a read. Or listen, they have audio lectures online as well. I’ll leave a link at the bottom of the post.

    Regarding the student of ancient metaphysics, ” Such a one regards his own bodies as shadows that encircle him, as planets encircle their sovereign sun. All his forms he views as something apart from himself for he is formless, and though functioning in a sphere of generation he is not deluded by his workmanship. Gazing up on the personalities he has objectified, he must say:

    ” I am not they. They come forth from me to do my bidding and furnish the garment of my experience. They are like hands and feet which move at my command, and withdraw themselves from outer objects at my will. These shadows live and die, yet I am not born with their birth nor do I cease with their dying. Their coming and going alike are incidental and have no effect upon my solidarity. Immersed in the confusion of mortality these shadows experience the twin illusions of joy and sorrow, health and sickness, gain and loss. Yet if they gain all the shadows of possession and encompass the whole illusion, they are no greater than before; for the thing they gain is nothing and the thing they lose is of equal value. If one of these shadows rises to great dignity and becomes a ruler of all the rest, what is he but nothing ruling nothing? If in despair these shadows wander about, is not their despair, like their joy, but a dream which fades into the nothingness that is its essential nature when the dreamer awakes? I close my eyes and, lo, a world of phantoms is imaged in the nothingness that I behold. These phantoms engage in intensive labors, concerning themselves with the weighty problems of their dream existence. At last I tire of sleeping, and exhausted with my own rest I open my eyes. The empire of my sleep dissolves as though it had never been; the vast but ghostly enterprises have no more substance than those who served them. In the daylight of conscious wakefulness all the shadows of the darkness melt away, to leave in their stead only a vast expanse of luminosity. The many have vanished and the one remains. Instead of worlds there is only the I, the eternal and unchanging Self which dreams creation, and upon its awakening dissipates the whole.”

    “But woe unto him who in his dream unites himself with his shadows and loses sight of his mastery over them; for he then assumes the concerns of his phantom forms. He struggles for the achievements of ephemerality; he seeks to build empire out of a dream, only to finally discover the senselessness of the fabric with which he wrought, since permanence cannot be fashioned out of impermanent stuff. Then the self is tormented with every problem of the not-self; the joys and sorrows man images become so real that the goodness of life is blotted out, and crushing despair broods over all. The wise live not in dreams nor in the world of dreams, but in Reality. They have opened their eyes and scattered forever the shades of night; they have left behind the trooping pageantry of incident, and upon the solid foundation of eternal and enduring Self have builded a destiny that shall not pass away.”

    This realization that the Self is more than all we perceive in this material realm is vital to the heightening of consciousness. It is the reason the “Message to Humanity” message is still pertinent today. We can complain and blame and so on, but until the consciousness of mankind is realized to be more than just a result of matter being manipulated, it will continue on. This is not a religious blog in any way, but I will be using texts from all forms religion as well as utilizing the view point of the atheist or agnostic in order to show the underlying current running throughout them all. I hope you find the parallels as intriguing as I do, and in looking at all of these beliefs and non-beliefs regarding the consciousness of man, maybe we can become more wakeful.

    Manly P. Hall’s library of lectures can be found at http://www.manlyphall.us

Love.