School Talk #21 by Rhondell

In the last few weeks we’ve been talking a considerable amount
both 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. 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 than 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 this is correct
and 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 Nasrudin
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 symbology 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.
If someone caught a possum and banged it around a bit, they call it
sulling the possum.

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.