Mastership Of Soul Sleep

by: Helen Rhodes

Cosmic Consciousness. Pragmatism. Special Keys. Happiness. Dominion. Realization. Healing. Awareness.

“It is possible that some stupendous incident may suddenly surge from without, from another world, from a new phenomenon, and either inform our effort with definite meaning, or definitively destroy it. But we must proceed on our way as though nothing abnormal could ever befall us. Did we know that tomorrow some revelation, a message, for instance, from a more ancient, more luminous planet than ours were to root up our nature, to suppress the laws, the passions and radical truths of our being, or wisest plan still would be to devote the whole of today to the study of these passions, these laws, and these truths, which must blend and accord in our mind; and to remain faithful to the destiny imposed upon us, which is to subdue and, to some extent, raise within and around us the obscure forces of life. None of these, perhaps, will survive the new revelation; but the soul of those who shall up to the end have fulfilled the mission that is pre-eminently the mission of man, must inevitably be in the front rank of all to welcome this revelation.”

--Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee.

MASTERSHIP

Mastership means he attainment of cosmic consciousness. A oneness with infinite purpose. The letting go a handful to take hold of a lifeful. To realize the happiness of emancipation won thru knowledge of what man is and the supremacy of the high potency life. The awakened one knows the victim of the Psychcoma and adjusts himself to it as to a person under the influence of morphine. His one hope is that he may awaken. To understand is to possess a self-commissioned life for the awakening of thousands from the death sleep. Mastership is not satiety, nor ennui, nor renunciation, no, none of these things. It is awareness! A vigorous enlightened insight and recognition, invincible, unquenchable, inextinguishable. It knows what the mental apparatus fails to register, it divines what physical sight conceals and contradicts. It vibrates and energizes to the eternal purpose. It is in union with all that is. The cry of the awakened one is, “Give me wisdom.”

The natural instincts which function easily in some persons toward justice and kindness are so because previous lives have demonstrated that it pays. It is the road to the soul’s happiness and that much has been proved.

Happiness is as primitive an instinct as hunger and by repeated trials a kind of happiness is found that pays. It is not preserved as a virtue but for pure elemental self-protection. Just to live becomes as real a pleasure as to the one who is lost in the pleasure of living. He perceives the profound eloquence of simple things; food, friends, daily doing of common things, retracing all the by-ways of youth, finding infinite pleasure where before was pain because he knows now it was his way of development. Freed and separated, he guides his life along the shoals that threaten other lives, with his heart full of song, secure in the superconscious perception that all is love, yet all is law.

Happiness belongs wholly to the subconscious. It is a reflex and its response is secured just in proportion to the average of truth values we have made our own. When once the habit of analysis is adopted the nonessentials drop away like starved parasites. The affectations and mimicry of conversational boredom give place to wholesome silence, vocal with voiceless resolve. Ideals are wrought out alone. We need to know, to discriminate; we need to reprove, to refuse to give our sanction to what we believe to be wrong; to have principles and to anchor to them, and, above all, to cherish ideals, but to also know that life is fluid and only as we become atrophied and senile do we cease to move from ideal to ideal. Ideals are high water marks of the soul’s capacity to apprehend the superconscious message.

Never allow a mean discontent to grow upon you. Whatever your situation, dug up the good in it; it is always there. And realize that when you have drawn from your present environment all that it was intended to mean to you and contributed to it what it was meant you should, the dissolving process will manifest your further needs. We are no better than our environment until it or we change. A superior understanding forces a superior condition. As fast and as soon as we are aroused from our coma we polarize ourselves to attract new values. The happiest moments you can ever know will come thru glimpsing your own ascent thru the cosmic consciousness.

If your thoughts are unkind, ungrateful, fault-finding, and full of fear, you are magnetized (because centered thru deep feeling) to attract these very things to yourself and you may be caught in a holocaust of personal disappointment. Only as an attitude becomes deep feeling will any change be possible. Mere surface distinctions will never disturb the coma.

Happiness results from the freedom and power to multiply experience from unexpected opportunities, to share life with every living thing. Deep coma means to be separated and isolated intent upon the self. Exclusion develops at two periods of consciousness; first, as it is lulled to sleep thru conceit of its own importance by difference of education, money, or clothes. Finally as the soul grows conscious f opportunity and sees itself in true proportion, as a song of the good God, with hands, feet, mind only as a means to enter into the service of men and for the benefit of all, he possesses an over-flowing fount of happiness that can be tapped by no man. A mean demands his happiness on the level of his consciousness. A Master does not find his satisfactions in that which may entertain an infant.

Dare to be alone! Analyze the mass. Know what ministers to your happiness and seek the highest. Be not afraid to withdraw from the groups of social circles if you have ceased to find happiness there; the law of the ascending life is to allow it to advance. Few people really love the silence because they are beggars in resources and unacquainted with the power which demands the attitude of listener. A Master seeks the lonely places.

A metaphysical or mathematical system educed from the Bible may be interesting but it is a parody. The science of mind needs to apology today. All the heavy artillery of scholarship is turned upon the mental apparatus. Man has an immense evolution behind him and the study is illuminating.

Men dare to laugh at the one who presumes to defend a system as a special divine revelation from God. The scientific world adjusts its psychology to such types of mind and with its academic finger on the pulse of developing tendencies can trace with exactness the fevered spasms of self-importance which leads a person to announce himself or herself as Elijah or The Woman Clothed with the Sun. Freaks are spasms in preserve.

The Hebrew literature has been a handy volume with which to inspire awe and arrogate authority. You do not need to sign away reason and break with all your relationships in the world of progress, because suddenly you have awakened to the power of auto-suggestion. The real fact is you have touched only one of the laws in world economy; it is not the all nor the ultimate. Unity must be sought thru relationships vast enough to include all experience, scientific, historical, religious.

Any system which places restriction upon your thinking, seeking, and proving pauperizes you. Take your private systems if you will, but do not think for one moment that you are in possession of any knowledge of what the Bible is, its meaning, or its history. More knowledge will help you to understand that it takes one with the spirit of the Trusts to exploit the Bible as a private scheme. We need to know what is fact lest we make fable of it all. The student in ever known field of knowledge plods and assorts his finding, widens and deepens all his resources, and never shuts off the light nor burns his bridges.

The Bible is the autobiography of the Hebrew nation. It might have been dug up as was the Mormon Bible, or written by one man as the Koran was, instead of being written by many men covering a period of several hundred years, weaving in its traditions and myths for the purpose of teaching and preaching, rewritten and re-edited according to the need of the prophet’s lash in correcting prevailing evils.

Some parts of the Bible were written as late as 165 B.C. and Genesis was re-edited and put into its present form about 445 B.C. How do we know? Assyriology has been born during the last twenty years and from her buried treasures of palaces, enormous libraries, tables of legal documents, accurate systems of chronology, we have data interchanging across Palestine on its way to Egypt, which returns the compliment by uncovering in 1887 the Amarna letters written 1450 B.C. by a vassal king in Palestine to God. It is a treasury of race experience, and not a collection of infallible oracles and cunningly devised fables. History is God’s one great method of teaching men. Its abiding lesson is that sin is punished and virtue will have its reward. Be experience with great men of the past our life is stimulated and nourished. This study soon leads to the discovery that the Bible throughout does not present the same conclusions of God nor the same standards for moral conduct. The Bible is not a history of the world but of Israel’s traditions.

There are those who have thought they could not be Christians and know anything about psychology, while the fact is you cannot be as good a Christian without it. It pigeonholes experience that is live data. The Bible pronounces no anathema on electricity and the uses of steam or upon any line of achievement of which the ancient Hebrews had not the slightest notion, yet they are not the less useful on that account. You need to understand your material, and have the knowledge that come thru scientific research, history, and religion. Both national and individual life swings around a center. The center of the Hebrew life was God and when the people swung far out on the circumference of life’s fascinations their prophets called them back and centered their lives again. That everlasting rounding-up of a life is sacred history. Other nations center in the Derby and motor cars. Yet one by one an individual steps out, detaches himself from the mass and disintegration is arrested in spots.

The intellectual awakening of this century will not be put off by a conglomerate metaphysical frappe. The relations between cause and effect has revealed a power resident in every man to bring things to pass. The hurry habit makes the spiritual life the specialty of experts who furnish a concise formula for its possession. The one who seeks bargain sales for spiritual outfits grows impatient as he realizes that the spiritual life is a process and not a plaster. Only be blending “to be” and “to get” into “begetting” or “becoming,” can the transformation take place. Physical culture would make man the reflex of his diaphragm. Electric healing would resolve life into human electricity; all good as forms of suggestion which may or may not lead to awakening. The one sure way is to analyze the self. This should never become morbid introspection, which is another word for self-love and a dislike for thinking the self ever at fault.

Analysis ahs been so little used that the word has almost become fossilized syntax and now Pragmatism takes its place as a brand new word and lends its name as sponsor to the things worth while. According to Professor James the psychologist, the Pragmatist accepts the world as an inheritance which obligates each generation to leave it to posterity in an improved condition. It has no dogmas and no doctrines but a method for arriving at truth which it calls “a species of good.”

Pragmatism unstiffens all theories by setting each one to work. It entertains any hypothesis and considers any evidence and offers a free field even to theological ideas if they prove to have a value for concrete life. It assumes that any new knowledge and that primitive ways of thinking may not yet be wholly expunged; that our fundamental ways of thinking are discoveries of exceedingly remote ancestors which have been able to preserve themselves throughout the experience of all subsequent time and that all theories are mental moods of adaptation to reality; that the possession of any truth is not an end in itself, but only a means of vital satisfactions. There is no absolute truth, but that certain truths work out in the course of experience. It argues for a universe unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are at work, rather than the idea of a universe eternally complete, an edition de luxe with duplicate editions full of false readings, each mutilated and distorted in its own way.

Pragmatism asserts that we cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it. That every ideal realized is one moment in the world’s salvation, and that a man should be willing to pay with his own person, if need be, for the realization of the ideas which he frames. Professor James closes his book with these words: “I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe, rather, that we stand in much the same relations to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history, the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their kin. So we are tangent to the wider life of things, and may well believe that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own.”

Pragmatism, then, becomes a class name for various working values in experience, analyze ideals as they work out in life with a spirit or reverence, love, and wisdom. It welcomes unity on the basis of diversity and usefulness and safeguards its conclusions by fearless, searching analysis.

The Awakened one seeks prayer as the most high place where he may renew his life. If prayer preceded every meditation, every act of healing, every work attempted, the way would quickly uncover itself, because the vibrations are centered around positive domination of good thru the quiet process of spiritual energy, without the effort necessary in manipulating the mental and physical currents and controlling the outward energies.

Prayer unites us in a common rhythm with the infinite love and law. “God is also to do for us far more abundantly above all that we can ask or think.” Each may supply for himself another word for God if it would more adequately convey his conception of the infinite energy.

Professor Edward Everett Hale has written a most interesting account of the part prayer played in the certain experience of his. He began by seeking during the day one hour of perfect solitude, in which he might make “the experiment of prayer.” He writes: “As the week went on I began to be conscious of a curious change in myself which I did not and do not explain. My pleasure in the many interests which made up my life began to diminish and become dull. Instead of desiring to finish up the duties of life to turn to its pleasures, I found that for the time its pleasures had little interest. Art, literature, scholarship, the theater, the various things that had filled my mind lost attraction. Plans and ambitions of one sort and another no longer interested me. I felt no especial lack, however; I believe I was conscious of a greater interest.” Prayer disclosed an eternal harmony and gave life new values in the yielding of his own life to a higher law of gravitation. Things released themselves from an exaggerated value and assumed their true proportion.

Let this prayer experience be your daily sacrament. A sacrament is you most high consciousness with the most high spirit of all worlds. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and I will sup with him and he with me.’

Equilibrium of the physical and spiritual forces is true healing. Healing is not force, not hypnotism, nor will power. It comes as a spiritual victory and thru soul struggle. Having attained to the knowledge of Aspiration, Transmutation, Meditation, command the soul to heal itself and then open the objective consciousness to watch the work. It is the spirit that heals, that establishes a law in the perceptions. We need to create a center thru which the power of the spirit can work. We have nothing to do but to visualize the perfect picture; the spirit does the rest thru the illumination of suggestion and the silence.

Think of yourself in pictures, visualize your hopes. “He who builds no castles in the air builds no castle anywhere.” Every thought and act stirs certain life forces, therefore let no force generate which would cancel your desire. It is no part of the result what your opinions are, you are educating your options; the process is to be observed, and while you stop to mourn, disintegration and demagnetization are taking place. Mere telling the subconscious will not change the coma, an impression must be made thru feeling it must be so. Mere words are often caught in the mental machinery and never get any farther. Convey the impression direct as to what you wish fulfilled. Keep your vision upon that, it becomes a thought matrix for manifestation. How you feel within is the potent power. Never tell the subconscious what not to do. “Not” is a limitation and inefficient to stamp the desired impulse. Its physiological action was explained under “Affirmation.”

The dynamo of environment is the body. To be healed means more than bodily harmony. The radiation of harmonious vibration impresses our homes and business relationships. We magnetize conditions. Look upon every disappointment as an increased opportunity; a door closed as another opens. Be serene, calm, joyful, expectant, saying firmly, “I am waiting, I manifest joy unto me.” Walk beside yourself as a friend and companion.

To suggest health to the soul is to receive it if the conditions are fulfilled. First understand that you are a dreaming soul, that you need to arouse yourself. Be concentrated in your effort and impress the subconscious with what you desire to have realized.

To restore normal conditions in another, attain to the silence, and hold in your mind the picture of that one as he should be; see him no other way. Lovingly and often draw this picture to you, thus forming a thought matrix. It will in time become so real a thing that he, too, will glimpse it, and, fed by its vision, come into his own. In the wordless silence thought creates an illimitable universe vast as space and sends its message on wings. Send out love and encouragement to all the world.

What about “getting and having”? It is right to attract our own home to us and have the ability to preserve ourselves from being a burden to anyone? The expediency of the every day facts of existence need not be overlooked or ignored. In any condition are necessary, and the higher we are in the ascending scale of development the clearer are our perceptions of the value of a suitable environment, but our circumstances must justify our demands. One might demonstrate a house and lot remote and unavailing to produce the comfort and usefulness that one room might bring. It is perfectly legitimate to demand a home and a reasonable income; these are as much a part of us as feathers are to a bird, merely protection. In the manner of food and clothes a Master should be able to exercise his freedom as to how his time and energies shall be conserved.

When the church provided homes for its brotherhoods, one great distraction was removed. The question of clothes was easily solved. But, like all good things, it was abused by being an open door to a mere profession of spiritual goods, and there has never been devised a psychic plummet to take the measure of a human motive. The abuse of a privilege, however, does not argue for its unfitness, and such retreats today offered at the least possible expense and governed by the laws of silence and meditation, would be a glorious philanthropy.

Do the work that lies direct before you and the purity of your motive will lift you into channels of supply which are legitimate only as they further usefulness. When a horse and carriage or a motor is a necessary part of your work or development, it will be forthcoming. But as a magic creation for self-indulgence, it may not materialize. An understanding, spiritual, consecrated consciousness does not demand unrelated things. Life is experience! Mere money may negate experience.

The journey up the heights of full awakening may take years, a month, a day; all depends upon the stupor and the determined purpose during the moments of awakening and the use of the hours of meditation and prayer. It also requires that you “travel light” in requiring service from others and carrying no heavy baggage of mental and physical self-necessities.

When one realizes that the un-awakened life is a dreaming out loud, that one thought is as effective as another to provoke action, that only thru conscious directed thought and analysis will result an understanding which will eventuate in an awakening that means supremacy, he enters into the life of the spirit which becomes dominant. The senses become mere mechanical devices by which the soul enters upon the large life of mastership, merely guideposts on the path of service. The one who can enter the subliminal consciousness at will knows a happiness that transcends the sense life. He may say, “I and the Father are one.” He no longer sees himself a separate atom, but lifting his inner eye to the great brooding over-soul, he bathes in its light, unites himself with its purpose, merges his personality with its impersonality, slips into the great eternal and the mask of self is nullified.

In the transforming process the small self-interests have become dissolved. The narrow conventions that conform to “this,” and “that,” no longer operate; he is one with all, no joy but increases his joy, no pain or grief but he can share; dumb to self-glorification, praise and blame are alike to him, for he is sensitized to every human need and the personal sting is defeated.

Beautiful surroundings are enjoyed because they are beautiful and harmonious, not because they are a necessity. He can life in the world but not of it; he can work as those who are ambitious; he can respect life as those who desire it; he can be happy as those who live for happiness. No longer dependent upon human caprice for happiness, he is not offended at anything it may do; he understands, he sees the dreamer dreaming; he seeks experience from the laws of his inner nature. The senses then become symbols of the real; the spirit knows and feels; there is no more war between the spirit and the sense; everything takes on a new meaning. Home, family, friends, food, nature, become mere names for protection, brotherhood, communion. The petty barriers of money and position drop away like magic and the soul stands naked before God, awake of itself!

AFFIRMATIONS

I am working for eternal truth with must emerge. I work for its release into this life whether it be for my own loved ones of for others.

I will do the work before me, I bring into manifestation the will of God. Now do I draw the wisdom of my inner life into my conscious mind.

Divine Father, thou Soul of the universe, I empty myself of self to be filled with Thee. Absorb me, animate me, dominate me until merged with Thy spirit, all the avenues of my being manifest Thy will and Thy law.

Psalm 23.

About the Author

Helen Rhodes