Energy

Transmutation

Between-Ness

and

Transmission

by

Richard Rose

Published by the TAT Foundation

1686 Marshall Street, Benwood, WV 26031

Copyright © 1975 by Richard Rose

All rights reserved

Printed and bound in the United States of America

Original edition published in 1975, second edition 1985

0.916

Transmission

I have studied for years to find my definition. And in trying to find self-definition, I realized the interrelation between myself and everybody else, between myself and the universe. Alan Watts would have us give up in despair, and have us humbly return to the chemistry of nature. I am referring to his work called The Book. Materialism and agnosticism come easy. It is less difficult to surrender to fatalism than it is to try to enhance your own consciousness. We live in times when hedonism has not only become the political opiate of the poor, but it is also the prescription by the psychiatrist for all who have troubles that he cannot cure, and who ask radical questions that he cannot answer, and yet should answer because whatever troubles the mind is his responsibility. Not to shirk nor to evade answers.

Mankind as a whole, boasts an intellectual ego. Mankind encourages individuals who tell mankind that they are scientists, and as such are methodical thinkers whose thinking leads inexorably to the truth and consequently to the realization of summa bona for all mankind. We find these pseudo-gods of rectitude, these pretenders to infallibility . . . to be unable to answer questions in their domain, and to explain phenomena governed by the laws that they claim for the backbone of their professional stance.

Nobody would think of doubting the material scientists, the physicists, chemists and mathematicians. Science reached certain conclusions and every budding young scientist memorized from the textbooks of authority hardly daring to ask questions as to the method by which certain laws were ascertained. It is like the procedure for finding the square root of a number. They say it is explainable, but that it is better just to use the formula and forget about the reasoning for carrying the numbers in the fashion prescribed. It works, they say, and that is all that is necessary.

Yet some of these scientists dared to venture in the face of professional anathema from their superiors or pseudo-superiors. William Crookes, in a talk before the Royal Society of Chemists in 1888 suggested that the analyzation of matter would never end with the limited table of elements available at that time. He hinted that it might never end with any table of elements. He was talking of yttrium and didymium specifically, and the ability to find two new elements from the latter. However, as late as 1939, when I was majoring in chemistry in college, we were taught that there were no more than ninety-two or ninety-six possible. The Encyclopedia Britannica for 1911 lists only ninety-two elements, and yet it begins its article on Chemistry with a tribute to Crookes' radiometer, emphasizing the enormous debt that society owed to Crookes for his work.

Today, true to Crookes' predictions, we have over a hundred elements with no end in sight. Crookes went on to work with spiritualism, and witnessed materialisations, that would not be recognized by science today, even though he photographed them. We look at some of these phenomena, and wonder at the hard-headedness of professionals who fear to admit that there is something which they do not know.

Levitations occur. There is a book on it by Crawford, that is hard to find because at the time it was printed, it was touted by the experts as dealing with a subject of legerdemain, not actual levitation contrary to the laws of gravity. We hear of a Russian lady moving salt and pepper shakers, and hear of Uri Geller who presumably can bend metal objects with mind power. And if these things are true, then we need to have another look at the whole world of Science. If there is such a thing as bona-fide faith healing, then it is the responsibility of medical science to broaden its scope, not denounce the novelty. If exorcism is a workable function, that demonstrates that there are entities who are able to seriously affect our lives and behavior, then it is the responsibility of the psychiatric scientist to broaden their scope, not to pretend that the whole concept of entities will go away if we ignore it.

Men like Crookes and Swedenborg dropped the tools of science and started looking in other directions because of a decision that science was not going to answer the real serious problems of mankind, and because of another decision,—that they did not consider it futile to embark upon esoteric endeavors.

It is my belief that there are many unique men of their caliber who have reversed their course so to speak, and that they felt that there was some key not yet found that might unlock the whole puzzle of creation . . . the visible creation, that is. We hear of earlier scientists in their quest for the philosopher's stone, the universal catalyst. Some say that it was a search for a gold catalyst, and others think that the alchemists were really looking for a key that would answer spiritual questions.

I am not speaking of the general urge by inquisitive scientists to simply delve deeply and more deeply into the given paths of their science, hoping for any new discovery. I am talking about the hunch or intuition that some great scientists have,—that whispers convincingly to them that there is a universal constant which they are not taking into consideration as conventional scientists,—that there is a key, which when found, will open up perspective in all directions and possibly answer all questions.

Emerson, in his essay on Plato, would have us believe that all progressive thinkers along these lines are Platonists. But Plato was not the first philosopher. He followed Pythagoras and Socrates, and supposedly studied under them.

William Crookes used the word Protyle, to express that which might be the missing piece in the jig-saw puzzle. Crookes will be remembered for his work with the radiometer, but the word Protyle has been forgotten, even by the Webster dictionary. It is not listed.

When I was twenty-two years of age, I realized that science was truly the serpent engorged with its own tail. I lost interest in chemistry with its infinite tangentialities. I noticed that there were men like Crookes, Swedenborg, and Eliphas Levi (Louis Constant), who had previously decided that the old railroad tracks will only take you where there are railroad tracks.

It is possible that the missing piece may be, in reality, missing pieces. Or, in other words, we may discover several ways, or languages for describing this new perspective. It is possible that some of the magical discoveries are only partial discoveries. But that is not to be lamented. Each revelation that implies a departure from previous conviction gives hope at least for more effort and more revelation.

At one time Faith was thought to be the ultimate discovery. It may only be a law, subject to other conditions. Faith may have been the lever or mechanism by which the universe was created. However, our individual faith does not always work too well, because the individual often tries to match his motivated faith against the whole structure of nature without knowing it. Faith is definitely a law that has cosmic roots, but as a law it gives us no inkling as to the cause of ourselves or the universe.

The man who wrote the book titled The Crack in the Cosmic Egg senses that there is a yet-unexplained method of working things to our own benefit, if we could just find it. A unique way of holding the head, perhaps. Some manner of running between the raindrops.

This brings us to the first step in this particular paper. It is based upon my belief that, like Faith, there is another universal constant. It is simply Tension.

I find that all who write about new theories, try to use convincing terminology, portentious scientific borrowings, and wearying philosophic argumentation. So much so, that their labor in that direction confuses the reader and promotes doubt because of the borrowing of doubtful sources.

I think that these things can be described simply. A thousand hours of argument is not as convincing as the gentle touch of a girl when we are passionate, nor as conclusive as the blow of a mace on our heads by the police when we are dissident. There is a lot of philosophy in a policeman's mace.

I know better than to bludgeon or to woo. But I will try to be brief by using simple terms because I am convinced that that is the best way to communicate. If the understanding of the Principle of Tension embraces and explains such phenomena as parental love, sexual violence and fear of the grave,—then such understanding will give at least a utility-value to this paper, if nothing else. And as with the Law of Faith, this Principle of Tension can be exercised within limitations, by us, to achieve some goals previously not considered in the cards for us.

Tension is, beyond doubt, the reason for seeking for the universal constant. Tension, like God, makes us look for it, or understand it. If we look about us we will lose some of our conviction that mankind is not looking for it,—that all of mankind is hopelessly locked in despair and the narcotism of hedonism.

The little child, caught between the parental games and the disciplines of schooling, plays little games that show that his uncomplicated mind presumes that there is an uncomplicated way of having things come out in his favor. His intuitions come to him without any logical sophistication. He hops over cracks in the pavement, making it a ritual to ward off trouble or to insure luck. He presses his nose to the window-pane and tries both negative and positive appeals to nature when the snow begins to fall, because this child somehow thinks that he can affect the forces of nature and cause it to snow for him.

He never really grows up in a way. Doctors and mathematicians, when playing poker will superstitiously employ similar, totemic implementations. They will not sit in a certain seat. They must cut the cards three times. They repeat little mantras inside their head while dealing. They will not pick up the cards until all are dealt. They believe that a deck of cards can become unlucky, and they will ask for a new deck. They will blame a man standing behind them if they have bad luck.

Some children when they grow up, become magicians. If their desires lead them toward finding material levers for that which seems to be a strictly material world. Kabbalism, Astrology and Numerology are all attempts to find the universal constant. Out of this intuition that man has for the universal constant, have evolved many esoteric sciences, religious rituals and cult-gimmicks. And it can be admitted that some of them work, but only in specific instances, or in limited fields, or with limited results, and never with a true knowledge of all the factors involved.

An instance of this limitation is taken from the Bible. Christ went about performing sensational miracles, but could not do much in His hometown. "And He did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief." The faith of Christ and His followers was no match for the unbelief of the folks back home. So that the Law of Faith has limitations. To move the mountains, requires agreeable, believing mountains.

Science and sorcery alike, rely upon prediction. And both will continue to fail until they learn all of the factors. If an omnipotent God had been behind the attempts for miracles at Nazareth, there would have been no failure. This means then that Jesus was operating from the quantum of faith-power that He had generated away from Nazareth, and among people more likely to accept Him.

We can examine Faith then as being a sort of universal constant, that is subject to certain conditions. It would seem that if we were to make the Law of Faith work, we would have to find some science to control those conditions and factors. The first condition, is that the faith must be universal. Nothing happens if we alone, have faith. Another condition, is that the implementation of the Law of Faith, which might be called an Act of Faith, produces the desired phenomenal result only at a point of gracefulness and balance. These last two words may involve quite a few factors. A woman touching the hem of Christ's robe may syphon off the needed quantum of energy focused in Christ and needed to perform healing in another direction. An unexpected headache, or unexpected onslaught of diarrhea, might cause the healer to postpone his undertaking. It has been found that an impersonal, un-opinionated operator (having his attention strictly on healing with no personal or political motives), is more successful than a man with an egotistic cause. Yet while being impersonal, he must still be dynamic. While this seems paradoxical, it implies that such action (healing) should be for the purpose of healing, not for the sake of an ego. Christ could not heal where there was unbelief or irritation. The operator cannot work under strain. He must succeed because of previous, possibly lesser successes. HE CANNOT BE UNDER TENSION. And tension is the factor that causes the search for miracles, and tension helps the realization of those miracles, but unless understood, is the negativity of those same miracle-phenomena if counter-tension can be introduced. Disbelief will kill the phenomena or miracle.

There is a certain adroitness in working "miracles" or producing phenomena, whether it be healing or transmission. This adroitness, I would like to call the science of Between-ness. More must be said of it later. It is the art of bringing about conditions by which the various laws will be effective. So that in the case of faith-healing, measures would be employed to prevent failure from disbelief or from undue strain on the part of the operator.

In my earlier years when I went about looking for books and teachers, I learned that there were very few groups on earth that diligently looked for any alkahest or universal constant. Do not be over-charitable at this point and indicate that all religious people are looking for it. All men seek the Truth, but half-heartedly and almost unconsciously. The beginners of the great religions and their immediate disciples were seekers, but from then on most of the adherents to a given religion were and are accepters, and devotees of mummery.

I found that most of the individuals or groups engaged in the work of finding a universal constant, or in employing at least some specific catalysts were not only secretive but possibly hard to find as well. The Gurdjieffian sect was an exception. Certain Zen teachers might be qualified to come into this category,—but the most are pretenders to the right of an ancient, unknown heritage,—the inheritance of the mantle from a genuine heir of Buddha.

Percival claimed to have found a specific catalyst. His system was similar to the systems of kundalini yoga that emanate from India. Percival supposedly mistakenly left the impression that his system would lead to conscious corporeal immortality. Not much has been heard of him since his death.

Gurdjieff laid claim to some knowledge of a universal constant. However, some of his disciples left him, (the English segment, I am told), because he claimed he could control his own destiny. It was after an automobile accident that those disciples decided that he did not have the needed magic, or formula to control the environment.

Nevertheless, Gurdjieff had something. He had power. Fritz Peters claims that he was healed by Gurdjieff, almost instantaneously. The writings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky are not wasted. These men at least found some specific catalysts. Or, they found mechanisms which we call disciplines that worked, and brought about an increase in self-awareness.

That which is already available is the knowledge of specific catalysts. These include the Law of Faith, the various laws mentioned in The Albigen Papers and certain laws on Energy which this paper will explain. Gurdjieff was able to utilize these laws of energy, if I am to presume that the books by Fritz Peters are true accounts. Christ knew of this law also, or He would not have been aware of the drain on His quantum of energy when the woman touched His garment-hem. The sad commentary may be that the teaching of the mechanics of creating, conserving and projecting energy may have been a vocal teaching not committed to writing, in both the case of Gurdjieff and Christ, if it was taught or given at all.

Tension and Life-Form

Our inability to understand the function of tension stems from a stereotyped idea of Nature and life in general. We do not care to look deeply into nature. We prefer to have delightful little games of intercourse with all beings . . . in our heads of course. We look upon the fledgling and kitten alike with an artificial sense of motherhood, and the wonderment of motherhood. We never bother to explain to ourselves, or to seek an explanation of why the kitten grows up and eats the "innocent" little bird-fledgling.

We make the mistake of embracing a theological doctrine that everything is placed here as our toys or food. We fall into the role of playing God by virtue of being God's chosen animal. We observe and cause animal misery, and cause a tremendous lot of it with a sort of compassionate facetiousness that lets us see only half of the picture . . . organic life up to the scale of man.

Let us take a look at nature in the summertime. The birds are making a noise which we call singing. (They were created to sing to us!) It is the year of the cicada, and there is a strident, monotonous complaint. They are singing, or screaming themselves to death. They have lived for seventeen years in the darkness of the soil, and are the survivors of an egg-crop planted seventeen years ago. They have battled from one stage to another to come up from the earth,—all in order to live one intense screaming day of reproduction.

A young, helpless bird tumbles desperately from its cradle-nest, and within minutes it is eaten by a sleek, beautiful cat.

The cat that lurks beneath the tree has kittens to feed. A bird a day, or a mouse a day, will keep her in milk for the kittens. The robin has her fledglings to feed. Two worms a day, for her, and a worm a day apiece for each of the fledglings. If it is an earthworm that is eaten, that earthworm, in turn must eat millions of smaller protozoans in order to build the body of another worm.

Now we must have a look at the cat. Is she really worth all of this? Sometimes a female cat will bring home a half-grown rabbit for the litter. In the business of equality, it would seem that one cat is worth about six hundred mice or sparrows, if the cat lives two years. It would take six hundred mice to maintain the life of such a cat. It would seem that the purpose of mice is cats.

It would seem that the purpose of worms is robins or sparrows, chickens or ground-moles. It would seem that the seething ferment of protozoan-life in the soil is basically worms, or the higher insects that devour them.

What is going on in the aquarium of life? There is an incessant churning about of animals and plants trying desperately to keep alive. For what purpose? In each animal and plant there is an evident implant to struggle and to avoid death.

We look upon the aquarium of life as a creation. We presume that creation was not haphazard or accidental,—that the creation was engineered by an intelligence with a profound motive. At least this is the theological explanation of all that is visible. If this is the case it behooves us to look for our significance,—our place in that plan. For instance, were the planets placed here for our breeding pad, for our pleasure, and for our sustenance, or were we placed here to aid in the evolution of planets? In other words, what right have we to assume that man should endow the planets with such insignificance by making them out to be a mere utility for mankind?

Such reasoning might well be applied to viruses and bacteria, and such viruses and bacteria might philosophize that man and animal alike were created to form a culture-bed for their life-style. Man, the most evolved, is not slain by tigers alone but by the tiny virus and bacterium as well.

Let us examine the reasons for this creation, while being aware all the while, of the fact that it is a relentless scene of carnage. A beautiful, delicate butterfly sails past us, and we marvel at the intricacies of its structure and design. However, this butterfly is lucky if it lives long enough to lay its eggs before being consumed by another animal. We like to think that butterflies and small animals are without consciousness, such as we evince. Yet if we watch them closely, we find that they move in an individualistic, intelligent manner.

Each tries to avoid death and injury, and each seems to know how to find a dry refuge when the rain begins. And we cannot help but wonder, why such a beautiful and highly specialized creature is created, to live only a few days. We hear that all of creation is "for the glory of God," and we cannot help but ponder the quality of glory that must be rendered from the reduction of millions of beautiful beings into soul-less, senseless fertilizer. I say soul-less because most theologians infer that small creatures have no souls.

Souls are only for the more complex and favored anthropoids, whose beautiful bodies likewise are reduced to millions of tons of fertilizer. And when we lose a beautiful child to death, we know that somehow the situation between us and the butterfly differs only in our conceit that we are more important,—and we rationalize even our death as being more noble and more special.

There are some possible answers to this painful ferment that we call life or creation. One is, of course, that the whole thing is an accident. This would rule out the need for a chief engineer.

Another explanation, would be that protoplasm tends toward inertia, and that it must suffer continual irritation in order to be prodded into trying to extend its life, to avoid death, and to genetically improve a self-conscious dynamism. This explanation has some value. Mankind makes its greatest technological progress, it would seem, in the painful, bloody welter of war. The individual, in order to advance his individual abilities, must submit to the disciplines and pressures needed in education. However, man seems to advance much more quickly than the rest of the animal kingdom, and this may result from the artificialness, meaning non-Naturalness, of the war-stimulant, and educational stimulants. Man does not kill to eat when he kills his own species, and seldom does he allow the bodies of the victims to fertilize the earth, or to be used as food for other species. And in the realm of education, man's early education (diaper-training) begins man on a course that is not destined to fertilize the earth, or to stimulate the aquarium with bacterial agitation. He is constantly trying to thwart the previous balance of Nature. He dumps sewage into the rivers from which he drinks, jealously denying it to the surface of the soil, where it might do some good. He is developing vestigial organs from domestic living which he labels progress. His sex-life bears a frequency witnessed in no other animal, except possibly the male goat or ram. There is no doubt that man is stimulating himself, or is being stimulated, but there is no evidence to show that all of this evident stimulation has moved his interior dynamic nature to affect his genetic structure so that he will be less of a robot, and more of a self-conscious, dynamic creature.

We come to the conclusion therefore, upon looking at the centuries of human absurdities, and the centuries of struggle in the animal kingdom that lifts the animals upward not one visible fraction, that evolution is not the reason for all this suffering . . . at least not evolution alone. The clam cannot get out of his shell, after being in there perhaps for a million years.

There is another explanation for the carnage and irritation. It is known as "natural selection." The weaker ones are killed in order to guarantee that the species will grow stronger, or at least hold its own in the aquarium. However, this does not hold true in either the human kingdom or the animal kingdom. Man kills off the able-bodied in war, and leaves the breeding to the inadequate. Animals on the other hand are apt to perish in wholesale lots when they become too strong and numerous. When the fox is able to catch every rodent and bird, it starves to death.

When the lemming is able to capture every blade of grass, it starves to death. Each, the carnivore and the herbivore, is no better than its food. So that if the grass became eliminated by blight, and if all plant life became eliminated by blight, then undoubtedly it would not be long until all of the animal kingdom would perish. Likewise, if all the rodents committed suicide, it might be fatal to their chief enemy, the fox. At this point, I wonder what the chief-engineer would be doing while the rabbits were committing suicide. Quite a gap might develop in the balance of things. With this in mind, we might consider that man might not be allowed to exterminate himself in an atomic war . . . unless a fatal ignition had been planned for aeons to trigger the transformation of our planet into a sun.

There is still another explanation for the battle of life. This would be the transmutation of energy, from coarse to more subtle beings. This would imply that the lower forms of life, (and this might include men), have actually no purpose except to develop food for higher and higher life-forms. The immediate question would pop up as to the identity of the "highest" life form which would be the recipient of all this waste and profit.

We have the grass supporting the cow. The grass cannot continue to grow in the same place unless it is periodically fertilized, as it will exhaust the life of the soil. So that from this simple relationship, a whole ferment of life is explainable. The cow is eaten by the lion, the tiger, or the human, and most of the cow's dung and body is returned to the soil. In the jungle the lion is not killed for food, but like the fox is directly dependent on disease or starvation to limit his numbers.

The plant eats non-organic foods. It is, in turn, organic food for higher organic bodies. The amoeba eats bacteria of very simple form. The amoeba is eaten by a metazoan of very simple form. The metazoan is eaten by a little larger metazoan. And so on up until a form of life is developed that is digestible by humans and other carnivorous predators. And yet all the while that man is profiting from this weary chain of parasitism, he is being attacked and destroyed by some virus or infection of protozoa or metazoa of microscopic nature. The virus is preparing man for his death, and his return to the process that gave him life.

Something is evident in all of this chain of parasitism. On the ascending scale of parasitism (the use of smaller or less complex organisms for food) almost all, if not all parasites, are superior to that which they eat, and they in turn produce a still higher (more subtle?) form of energy than was possessed by the beings ingested. We would not consider trying to digest the exoskeletal shells of beetles, but the chicken does not hesitate. In fact the chicken has special grinding apparatus to take care of hard objects. On the other hand we do not hesitate to eat the chicken, or the chicken's eggs.

The cat eats the chicken, but we do not eat the cat. The animals seem to follow the same rule, so we cannot blame this choice on the Bible (directions to eat only cloven-hoofed animals, etc.) The dog does not eat the cat even if he kills it. The dog will not eat the flesh of a snake, wolf, or predator whose diet is meat alone. The animals seem to sense that the flesh of these predators is not subtle, or delicate enough to attract the appetite. Paracelsus claimed that the predators had a fiery "mumia," or flesh-essence. Vegetarians indicate that eating the flesh of animals makes humans more like the predators, while other foods are inclined to develop man into a more benevolent creature.

In this business of the transmutation of energy through living food, let us look at this thing called personality. It is evident that besides the destruction of complex, and beautifully designed bodies, we also witness the destruction of personality. If you have ever lived on a farm, and viewed the animal life there with less than total detachment, you could not have avoided noticing the lack of regard for personality.

It is evident that animals have personality. They do not seem to have, but that is because we only watch them as objects, not as beings. They are capable of irritation, anger, jealousy and affection. And what is still more, they are all self-conscious to the point that they are aware of danger to their body and life. Some observers think that animals know nothing about death, but such observers have never witnessed the mourning of cattle when one of their number has been killed. I have seen animals in the slaughter house take peculiar steps to avoid death. One small slaughter house killed the cattle by shooting them with a small caliber rifle. On several occasions, older bulls would go to the farthest corner away from the man with the gun, and steadfastly hold their head in the corner so that not even a side-shot could be effective.

We know for instance that mice have personality, when we pen them up and become acquainted with them as pets. Kittens and cats have personality. A calf likewise has a personality, and we are aware of this if we watch a cow closely that is "fresh." A language is used by the cow that is emotional, and the calf responds to it.

It would be easier to witness this endless carnage if personality were not involved. We even try to adjust our theology to soothe our conscience in our desperate search for protein. Yet simultaneously with the theological excuse that animals are soul-less, comes another theological exhortation to avoid eating meat, at least on Fridays.

We know that we would not eat our friends, or even our pet dogs, because we are aware of their personality. There are people who practice cannibalism, but we do not find that their ingestion of "superior" food, renders them superior to other men. In fact the groups who practice cannibalism are looked upon as being less than equal culturally to other people. I bring this up, because of the evident scale of value of food and parasitism, which might seem to make the cannibal the top parasite, and might seem to endow the cannibal with being the chief purpose for all animal and plant life.

Why is it necessary for the food of the cat to have such dynamic self-consciousness and personality? Why could not the mouse be a stupid creature, unaware of its danger, and unaware of life's importance? Why does the chicken or duck that we eat, have to have a unique nature, and a dynamism for life?

We see the Law of Progression in effect with the upward scale of parasitism. By Law of Progression, is here meant that any series of events or circumstances that indicates consistent direction, also indicates a possible continuance of that direction beyond the series presently witnessable. In other words if it be possible to fly two thousand feet, it is conceivably possible to fly two thousand and one feet.

The Law of Progression insinuates that we are possibly the victims of parasites. Yet we see nothing eating our bodies. We carefully embalm the bodies so that nothing will eat them, and we bury them in protective concrete.

So, if there is a parasitical entity using mankind, it must be invisible to us. At first glance this may seem like going to great lengths to demonstrate that a likelihood, or a possibility should be viewed as a reality. However, let us look at the possibility with some intuition.

We deplore the deaths of our children, and even our old people. Death is a terrible finality, as far as personality is concerned. When we look upon the corpse of our loved one, we are dumbstruck with the fact that is upon us,—namely, that the personality which we knew, will never again be known to us. We can rationalize resurrection, but all the evidence points to imminent decay of body and brain, and personality cannot be the same even if it were possible to detach itself from them, in some spiritual form of life. Our computer cries out to us, that our loved one has died forever, as far as we really know.

This means that we, too, shall die. And in dying the somatic personality shall leave the scene with the same finality.

Now let us suppose that each creature has a soul, or is a soul. We can accept this, and still have no explanation for the carnage in the aquarium of life, unless that carnage fits into the scheme of things as being some sort of meaningful factor, in relation to the soul.

We hear of the theory of spiritual evolution through reincarnation. And this theory has the hope-instilling promise that the soul somehow grows in size, importance or some sort of quantum, by virtue of ascending through an educational series of lives, which lives consist mostly of suffering as a result of the person or animal's inability to choose right conduct.

This whole process indicates an impotent creator, or engineer. An omnipotent creator, would make things perfect to begin with. We cannot, looking at this scene from the human viewpoint, with human notions of justice, see the wisdom in the centuries or aeons of endless torture for all life-forms.

In the Law of Progression, we are dealing with a series, in this case with an evolutionary series. We can look both ways at that series. And looking backward, even with an eye for justice by human or animal standards, we cannot see the same degree of personality in microscopic bacteria. Nor can we see meaningfulness in the concept that each virus has a soul, that must either be a virus-soul forever, or suffer through billions of years to evolve into a personality and body that will be more specialized and dynamic.

So that in looking back over the series in question, we can see that if we are more evolved than chickens, and if chickens are more evolved than worms, then by reverse progression or retrogression we can see that a virus may have little or no individuality or specialization.

It is my opinion that there are a limited number of explanations for this suffering, and the four named probably take in the most of them. However, these explanations are only explanations offered by the mundane, relative mind. We must always realize that a view from the direct mind or an Absolute mind will give us another explanation. Such an explanation might be that the creation, carnage and conceptualization of suffering are all simple (complex?) dramatizations by the mind, projected upon some screen for the experience of the projector.

Since we have not reached the ability to view the creation with such an Absolute mind, the only sensible alternative is to view and speak from the mundane mind. If all of this world is a dream or drama . . . there must be a moral to the story . . . a theme, at least.

I propose that we examine the parasitical system unembellished by wishful thinking. That which we see is animals eating animals. We are an animal eating plants and animals. There is a chance that some animal is eating us. Or some entity.

We cannot see the virus that causes cancer or the common cold. Yet we admit that such exists. We cannot see an incubus, or succubus, and we deny that they exist.

If the purpose of mankind is to produce energy for other beings, which may not be visible to us, then that energy would need to be subtle because we are not visibly attacked and eaten. This theory of the existence of entity-parasites, does not automatically bring with it the need to accept these entities as being of superior essence. They would no doubt be strategically superior, but then so would a mosquito, or flea, if either were able to tap our veins, drink, and get away without our knowing it.

This theory (that man has a subtle energy, and that it is subject to parasitical attack) is not new. When the woman who was afflicted with an issue of blood, touched the hem of the garment of Christ, she tapped His energy-quantum, and the drain was so noticeable that He felt it.

Most healing is done with this energy-quantum, whether it is done by a single healer or by a battery of believers. The miracles of Christ were the exertions of quantum-energy.

Individual genius is directly related to the ability by that individual to know and store, and properly use that quantum-energy. Likewise with spiritual progress. Spiritual progress depends upon that transmuted energy. In other words, man eats food and produces energy. This energy has a quantum, and possibly also has a quality and difference of types, some energy being usable only in certain limited directions or applications.

Evidence of the parasitical use of this energy is indicated in many branches of esoteric philosophy and religion. The priesthood of many religions stingily guard their energy with celibacy. Rites have evolved to exorcise the entities that would drain the energy of traumatic victims. Experiments were conducted to find chemicals (asafoetida) that might dispel some entities.

The finer energy manifests itself in some instances as ectoplasm. And this substance is manifestly used by entities to weave portraits of people (shells), so that the medium will produce more energy. We can only surmise that the entity in question does not work for nothing.

This still does not give us a clear picture of that which is happening behind the scenes, nor do we have a clear idea of our relationship to the whole process. One important unanswered question deals with our importance as a personality. The second question has to do with the relationship of personality-survival to essence-survival.

In other words, it looks as though we cannot expect to depend too much on personality-survival. Most religions and movements teach or infer that the personality does survive death. However this belief is small comfort when we stand beside the casket of a loved one, and hear the message from the depths of our computer telling us that we have definitely seen the last of our friend.

Personality is in itself a transient thing when we study it. The personality of the child is not the same as that of the aged adult. When a child dies, we do not remember it as a mature personality, but as an immature child. This has led some spiritualists to make the claim that a child matures after death, and develops a mature personality. If this is true, we still would never again see the same child's personality which we knew at the time of its death.

Since personality is a changing thing, it cannot be looked upon as being the person. If a person is not a single unique personality, then we can only presume that if he has a uniqueness, it must be his essence which is unique, individual, and unchanging. If a man is a series of different people (personalities) he then could expect his immortality to be a memory of that series, or he might expect indefinite change beyond the death state. In which case, his relatives might not recognize him if they saw him.

We find that personality is changed by things which happen to the person, and more remarkably still, it is changed by persons with whom contact is made. Again we come to the possibility of energy-transfer. It has been said that couples who are married for many years, sometimes grow to resemble one another. It is known that if we love a person, we are inclined to adopt their way of thinking. And when we adopt a way of thinking, our whole being changes, and this includes the body, even though the process is slow.

Nearly everyone who has any hope for immortality, has also a hope (which he would like to call a faith) that man's individual personality will be eternally unchanged. There is no logical reason for this to be the case. However, it seems man, the constant victim of change, conjures visions of a state of no-change. If the child of ten could encounter himself at the age of seventy, he would probably view the old man as being a stranger.

Some religions try to wrap together a dogma of personality-permanence with this evident transience of the original stages of personality. As mentioned earlier, the Spiritualists claim that the person who dies as a child, finishes his growth "on the other side." This may be their dogma, but one outstanding case of materialization would imply that such is not always the case. Harry Price, who spent much of his life investigating Spiritualistic phenomena, lists one materialization as probably the only one that he considered to be authentic. He saw, in 1937, a materialization of a little girl, who had died at the age of six no later than 1924. Yet thirteen years later she appeared, fully visible and touchable. (Price could pick up her pulse and heartbeat.) She was still a six-year-old child, about three feet seven inches tall.

This brings us to another side of the coin. Many Spiritualists at this point will tell us that this little girl may have been the creation of an entity. It is evident that in studying Spiritualistic phenomena we must take into account that some materializations are phosphorescent cheesecloth, some are the manipulations of questionable spirits "on the other side," and yet some may be real.

It just seems that no matter how you view all evidence that might corroborate personality-immortality, we still come up with parts of that evidence that contradict or nullify anything that might point to a definite hope for personality survival.

Many people dream of the dead, and find comfort or conviction that the deceased are really communicating with them. However, the visions in the dreams, may well be the manipulation of entities in a mental dimension, or they may be the incarnated results of our own anguish. Many of such dreams of a particular relative show the person as having a different personality in different dreams.

All of this may be understood better if we find that the personality is little more than a mask, and find the real Self in both the vision (the deceased) and the viewer.

*******

Let us examine now, the strange methods by which human energy is syphoned off. The most outstanding and seemingly useless one (from our viewpoint) is the massive bloodletting in wartime. We see a different pattern of energy-taking upon the comparison of the energy loss by animals and humans in death and in sexual outlets.

The animal is generally killed for food. There are no wholesale slaughterings of animals for the sake of warfare between animals. Likewise the sexual habits or outlets of animals are generally timed for reproduction only. The animal breeds in the breeding season. Man breeds at all times.

In the last war, World War II, we can estimate that around forty million people were slain. This is not an exact figure, and I am not concerned with exact statistics, but the Russians alone lost between fourteen and twenty million, Germany and Italy admitted eight million casualties, England lost a million and a quarter men and France and Japan each lost at least a million men.

It is absurd to believe that all of these men died without that dying somehow being accepted or caused by the engineer in charge of this project. We find that some wars are sparked by events more than planned by humans,—no one concerned wanted to do more than bluff. We find that all wars are caused by factors so complex that not even the combined intentions of any government could cause or stop a war. Individuals, like Hitler, may be credited with creating an atmosphere wherein their constituents were galvanized into a war-spirit, but even Hitler is at most merely a tool for the Zeitgeist. No individual can predict or cause a war unless the time is ripe.

We can safely presume that in primitive or aboriginal cultures, there was little war. This can be seen by studying primitive peoples. The Australian aborigines, the rain forest people of the Philippines, the Eskimos, and most of the tribes of Africa, seem to care little for war. In New Guinea, some head-hunters kill each other, but it is presumed that this is done to find some escape from the banana and vegetable diet.

As man progressed, and became more scientifically advanced, we notice that his wars almost became rhythmical. From the earliest days of history, history bears mostly a record of bloodshed, caused by man killing man.

In the last century, and up until World War II, this rhythm showed about a twenty year cycle, just for this country alone. We had wars in 1898, 1917, 1941, with the cycle growing quicker with the Korean and Vietnam wars.

This regularity, and increase in regularity may have some meaning. We notice that there have been few wars among the primitive peoples, and for the more advanced countries there were more wars among the highly specialized nations and less among the second rate powers who might have more reason to fight. Mexico, for instance, has not been involved in a war since their revolution, and that was a limited, local war.

Some reason backwards, and state that nations who fight are those who are highly developed along technological and scientific lines. It may be that those who have the most highly evolved minds and bodies are those most in demand.

We notice that this slaughter of men in war, does not come under the same law as the slaughter for natural selection, as was noted before. War is manifestly a harvest of prime flesh, not a culling of unfit individuals in the herd.

I can only presume that the motivation for war is prompted by those entities that profit from bloodshed . . . and has little or nothing to do with the motives and ambitions of tribes or nations. I presume this even as I presume that the motivation or temptation that leads to a sexual excess, is likewise motivated or caused by the entity that profits by the experience . . . and has nothing much to do with the individual. Man's pleasure, his ego, and his sexual drive are all implanted.

As with any habit, we will notice that a nation that wars, will not grow stronger, but will consistently be weakened down by the excess, and will be replaced as the world-power or dominant nation. The entity or force that prompts the nation or individual to excess, must profit by the prompting in some manner . . . if we estimate that entities do not just do things for no reason at all. If battlefield blood is the equivalent of food for an entity or class of entities, then we can presume that the entities will grow stronger, being fed, and grow weaker, if denied that food. And the opposite seems to be more apparent for the individual who manages to deny himself (and the entities involved) sexual excesses, meaning celibacy or conservation denies the entity and rewards the person.

*******

What has this to do with good and evil. Are these entities superior to us and beyond resistance on our part? Or are they simply acting to the best of their ability in their dimension . . . seeking out sustenance as an ordinary animal might, with no notice at all toward that which he or it eats?

*******

We have reviewed the upward growth of life-forms, noting that each evolution may be good, in that inert matter may develop expression, so that life itself may eternally spring from that which is either dead, or inert to the point where it seems to be dead.

If man's destiny is rooted in that upward growth, then the whole weary, aeon-lasting stage of metamorphosis may seem worth the while for us. But in that planned or unplanned evolution, there seems to be no divine signature or parallel upward growth of spirituality. We become more complex, and with the complexity of body and mind, and technological fruits of these complexities, we seem to be less and less oriented toward, or programmed for, the solution of man's spiritual problems.

By spirituality, or spiritual problems is here meant the recognition by the individual that infinite individual survival may be possible.

Spirituality is recognized only as the result of a crisis . . . some grand crisis resulting from aeons of lesser crises. All upward growth is the result of crisis. And it is for this reason that national technology is stimulated by the crisis of war to produce a new, advanced technology of war that is later carried over in some useful form after the war.

The crisis in an individual which may be caused by a collision with another willful human being, may result in the post-crisis development of that individual, into being a superior adversary in the long run.

There are many stories, or biographies, of men who have endured physical oppression for periods of time, after which they rose to be giants, both mentally and physically. The story of Samson, is an account of a double crisis. Samson's concern for his fellow-countrymen developed a crisis in him, and caused him to focus all of his physical energy toward the accomplishment of freeing his people. His story is similar to the Kung-Fu and Karate origins, where an oppressed people summoned their energy, focused it, and found a way of deliverance. The story of Samson, is sometimes interpreted as being a parable, a subtle allusion to the ability of determined men to raise their kundalini, to develop enormous physical immunity, and insight by rechannelling their sexual energy. So that it may be symbolically put, when the account reads that when he (Samson) encountered the woman, he lost his sight, and his strength. The double crisis resulted from his memory of the first crisis, and of his knowledge that he could create another crisis if he wished.

John of the Cross became enlightened possibly as the result of a crisis. The crisis-death of Christ caused the veil of the temple to be split, and caused the sky to darken for three hours, according to Mark and Luke.

On a lesser scale, we find the pages of history filled with the feats of divers Galahads, who conquered real or technological dragons, by the summoning of total energy, (because his heart was pure,) to overcome the seemingly impossible.

Energy and Between-ness

Energy is the result of interaction or Tension. Energy results from the mere proximity of dissimilar substances, as in the case of different metals and the resultant galvanic action. Energy results from the proximity of two different types of human protoplasm, insomuch that ulceration or rejection of tissue results.

Energy results, sometimes favorably, and sometimes unfavorably, every time two animal bodies come in contact with each other. It has been suggested that all early life forms resulted from the energy which occurred at the edge of the sea or other body of water, from which edges it spread both ways, deeper into the sea, and farther into the land-mass. The civilization that we have today was a result of between-ness, for it all sprang from the action between the land and the water. Of course the action was complex, and became increasingly complex as forms resulted. It has been said that all of life was created by a supreme being, but even if this is so, that supreme being chose a method that was gradual and gradated, and was not done in the twinkling of an eye, meaning a human eye. Complexity breeds complexity, as has been explained in the writings about the Law of Complexity. With new complexities come new opportunities for between-ness of a more complex and almost miraculous nature.

The moon passed over the shore-line, and the between-ness or polarity of the earth and moon was effective on the water, as it seems to be on most fluids. The result was an ebbing and flowing of tide, giving more surface to that part of the sea that is the most productive for plant-life. We find that the moon is suspected of having an influence on human behavior, whether because of its effect on body fluids in general, or particular, subtle fluids that are located in the spinal sheath and brain. Believers in astrology go a step further and argue that every planet affects us to some degree, if it is visible to us.

Energy is the result of polarity. Which is a more scientific way of saying between-ness. However, polarity is taken to signify electricity, or at least it might leave the impression that all phenomena of between-ness are measurable electrically. There is a powerful force that keeps things together. It is that balance between centripetal and centrifugal forces, between the tendency to grow, and the ever-present tendency to collapse. This balance does not seem to be connected to electricity.

There is manifestly a tension, a balanced pull-and-repelling process that maintains the position of planets and suns in relation to each other. It can be called many things, this tension. Electromagnetic field, or gravity versus centrifugal force (if rotating) or polarity with a nearby body.

If we take the tension of magnetic force, we find that the peak force lies halfway between the two poles of a magnet. This of course presumes that the magnetic force of both poles is equal. So that if we place two magnets some distance apart, and place a metal object between, that metal object will remain at rest if we can place it at the exact middle point of the intervening distance. Again this presumes that the magnets are of the same force and size.

If we place two horseshoe magnets or polar magnets opposite one another, with the positive pole opposite the positive pole of the other, and the negative opposite the negative pole of the other, and these two magnets are placed in a trough or channel so that they cannot flip over or move to one side in order to make proper contact . . . those two magnets will repel one another when forced together, and they will create a space between them, and the repulsion distance is related to the gravitational pull or weight of the magnets plus the friction of the two magnets in the channel or trough.

Now all of this is well-known to every grade-school student, but the reason for emphasis here lies in the previous lack of observation of this mid-point as being the high point of force.

An electric spark leaps across a set of points, as in a sparkplug. The source of energy is overloaded, and can afford to lose or eject or reject some energy. There is a distance that is too close, and a distance that is too far for the proper effect of the spark, so that the energy of that spark may be a force that can be channelled into new directions, other than just an electric current flowing from one place to another. By new directions I mean the spark is used to activate the gasoline.

Tension is brought about by finding the proper spark-gap. Force results, and from a seemingly inert gallon of gas a car may move its weight and contents thirty miles down the road.

Now if this same analogy is carried over to the planetary magnetism, it is highly possible that there is a stream-field of force midway between the heavenly bodies, besides there being just a place of gravity-neutrality by virtue of the relations of planetary mass to gravitational power. Of course this is just idle speculation, in passing, and has no great bearing on the message here, but the speculation, for what it is worth, is that the most awesome force in the universe would lie there, and that that force might be tapped.

However, our main concern here is in the analysis of life and the formulation to some clumsy degree of, one, an explanation of transmutation of energy, and, two, the transmission of more subtle essences.

We look at very primitive forms of life and find that a ketone enzyme has been created (or accidentally formed) after the accidental reaction of certain inert, inorganic compounds. In other words, from inorganic hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and perhaps nitrogen,—I do not know the formula,—came a primitive virus, a ketone enzyme, or some complicated molecule-chain bearing the seeds of all future life.

Life is tension at work. Life is a force which results from less sophisticated elements in interaction. The result of the interaction of two or more lesser agents, or life forms, is new form. Life constantly creates forms, inertia (death) removes them. We will come to this in detail later.

The sun, being a vast body perhaps at its peak of interaction, and being to some degree able to focus some of its energy upon the earth, was and is able to play a tremendous role in the evolution of plants and animals from their most primitive forms. The energy of the sun is focused to the extent that we are in that safe mid-point which is neither so hot as to destroy us, nor so cold as to forbid molecular reaction. Our existence results from the magic of between-ness.

And so, with the sun and many other factors of between-ness, many forms of life appeared on earth, and these forms began to interact even as the inert elements had interacted before them. And with each new form of life that resulted from the energy of this interaction, a more subtle life-farm was developed.

We see a pattern evolving, and again wonder if there is a Supreme Intelligence engineering the whole thing. It seems too infinitely complex for sheer chance.

The primitive protozoans and one-celled plants become the food of creatures that are somewhat larger, or more sophisticated in design and diverse as to function. Some plants become huge and kill off lesser plants with their shade. Some plants kill other plants just by being near them and prosper by the fertility left by the dead plants.

The worm eats tiny life-forms and is eaten by birds and moles, and even hogs, which are more sophisticated. The birds and moles have to learn to survive despite the presence of snakes, cats, dogs, and other seemingly useless animals. However, without these seemingly useless animals the bird would over-produce, become runted and diseased, and approach inertia as a species. The bird is caught between the desire to rest, eat, and play, and its implanted survival motivation. We might presume that the predators if they do nothing else, keep the bird and the other game on their toes, and at the same time insure at least some maintenance of alertness, intelligence, and consciousness.

We come now to the human—the chief predator. Omnivorous, but highly specialized, he is unfortunately highly scornful of all his many parent-forms that preceded him, and still support him in some degree or other.

We look out the window at this point and observe the world as a sorrowful slaughterhouse, a place of blood and carnage, wherein the most noble efforts of nature and the whole system of Tension lead and evolve only to semen, blood, and blockheads.

It is not that bad, however. For one thing, it cannot be any other way. If we take away the carnage, we take away the magical secret of the fountain of life, which has come a long way from the virus on the seashore.

Man would not evolve physically, economically, mentally, or spiritually without his constant state of Tension. And his constant overall state of Tension is made up of myriad factor-states of Tension. His consciousness is the most complex of all the animal kingdom, and he can design intelligence-quotient-tests that flatter him twice, first with a fictitious number that is always higher than other animals' and secondly, with the assured conceit that he can measure intelligence.

It is my conviction that the animal may be superior to the human in being more aware of his state of being. However, the animal cannot verbalize to us or to other animals any feeling that it might have about its relation to the Source from which all awareness emanates. Man has to tell himself by telling his neighbors, even as I am doing now. The animal is aware of its Is-ness. Man belabors himself to learn to talk, to develop an alphabet, and then to confuse himself with the Babel of word-meanings and meaninglessness. The animal simply feels, exudes its feelings and its sensitive fellow animals pick it up.

We must retrace our steps a bit and take note of the change of energy that takes place in the human, which is not present in the animal. By the same token, the rate of evolution has been more rapid in the human than in the other animals. This has mainly been because man has been able to survive the usual adversities that might be labeled factors of tension (which generate some force), and besides that, has artificially created other conditions of irritation and tension that have provoked force far out of proportion to any force that stimulates the members of lesser animal kingdoms.

In social relationships man has made an increasingly complex game of life. His councils and congresses are forever dreaming up new rules to the game, so that the survivors must with each generation be more astute than the last. More children are committing suicide, faced with the appalling odds, which indicates to their sensitive intuitions that the game is so complex, and so unrewarding, that it just is not worth playing. If they do not commit suicide, which is the trend of our lemming civilization, they separate themselves from society and try to look for the Necessity for life itself. In other words, the time has come for most of us to see if it is worth the effort. And strangely enough, when we embark upon this path of self-definition, we are thrown back upon our relative nature again, and we find that we can only learn, or transcend this state or find a better or more real state by utilizing those same force vectors that led us up to and into the present complexity and confusion.

It has been said that God is simple, but man would like to make Him complex. Man has the urge to be theatrical, to assume that God is infinite complexity because man is infinitely more complex than a grain of sand or amoeba. Somehow man must find a way to stop, for a few minutes at least, the whole machinery of complexity that dominates his attention and consumes his energy.

Man, being the king of all beasts, would have grown soft if he did not find something that preyed upon man. So tribal wars developed, and as these became traditional, man had no further need for stimulation. However, out of warfare itself most of man's technology seems to evolve. And with that new technology, new trades and social ramifications sprang up. Man went through many different scenes of confrontation with opposites, and as he emerged from these tests he took with him new Force , new capacity for pressure. And the new pressure hurried his mental evolution.

At one time man merely killed, ate, reproduced, and died or was killed. When he began to farm, he became caught between the attraction to the old way of life and the necessity for change. He survived and came up with new energy. He developed foods that could be stored for long periods of time, which gave him leisure time to develop a still better technology, and to dissipate more. At first he plowed his corn with a bow strapped to his body, to protect his garden from savages and wild game. He learned to tame animals for their milk and meat, and he also learned how to make alcohol.

It would be interesting to know when man's sex habits began to find the wide variance with animal's sex patterns. It must be presumed that primitive man was required to function sexually about the same as an ape or monkey. Attention to other things most certainly took some of the inclination away from seasonal sex habits. In other words the sex frequency of animals is not continuous, as in the case with humans, because most animals have periods in which they reproduce, followed by periods in which they are sexually inactive. I have mentioned in previous papers that some animals that are close to man, or that resemble man, seem to copy man's lack of respect for sexual seasons.

The cow, which has the same gestation period as the human female, will not tolerate any attention from the bull after conception occurs, and until a considerable time after the birth of the young. This makes the cow's sexual frequency about once every eleven months, in a life that lasts only six or eight years. On the other hand the female human would think nothing of daily sexual activity in a life that may last seventy years, of which seventy, at least fifty years would see that same frequency maintained, if the opportunity lasted that long.

This should tell us something. Man takes from other plants and animals a great variety of foods. Many of these foods are more complex, or have more subtle substances than are produced by animals beneath them on the scale of complexity and specialization of structure. For instance man prefers the milk of the cow to that of the members of the cat family. He prefers the meat of herbivores to that of carnivores, finding the meat of the rabbit more delicate and subtle in texture and taste than the meat of the skunk or of the fox.

There is an upward spiral in the evolution of animals toward the production of more subtle protoplasm, eventually climaxing in man with a body that contains the most subtle nervous system and brain of all animals. So man takes the cream from all the animals and plants. He produces almost like a robot and wastes more carelessly than any animal more subtle protoplasm than a hundred bulls or three hundred cows, and the wasted protoplasm may exceed his body weight by five or six times. Of course a cow gives a lot of milk (which she would not give if man were not so demanding), but nature originally planned her to produce only enough for her offspring.

We are faced with the prospect that man is not the last step in the ladder of energy-absorption. If we conclude that the production of milk is aimed at human betterment; if we conclude that chickens are allowed to exist in greater numbers and under greater protection than wild fowls because they furnish food for humans; then it can be concluded that all such animals depend for their existence upon the type of food that they supply for mankind, and it can then be concluded also that they manifestly have little value apart from their value as food for others. We get the picture of the whole animal world being channelled into a controlled existence for the betterment of the human diet, or for labor or protection for the human, as in the case of the cow, dog, and horse. The buffalo is encouraged to disappear, except as a museum piece, because he is not as tractable as a beef-cow, and does not produce both milk and meat. The predators are only allowed to exist where it pleases the ecologists to find them useful in thinning out game which man does not wish to eat, or which is too difficult to catch in a planned fashion.

We come now to a proposition: If animals are judged to exist only for human food or energy, then it is proper to suppose that humans may be encouraged or allowed to live because of their energy-service to a strategically superior type of being. I use these words "strategically superior" because there is no evidence to prove that the things which are parasitical towards us are superior. They are just able to get away with it by being able to function in the overall plan of nature, and by being able to catch us in a state of between-ness. The state of between-ness, in this final instance, is the catch between man's ability to produce tremendous quantities of energy, and his inability to do any engineering work on the human direction of subtle human energy.

It might be said also that man is caught between a tremendous fountain of energy and an undefined bit of programming toward inertia (death) through dissipation. This dissipation might well be the bearing of energy in a very subtle form to other, invisible entities.

This brings us full turn to the age-old belief by sages and saints that man is the victim of invisible entities, demons, incubi, succubi, elementals, or even souls of the deceased. And men (sages and saints) were firmly convinced of this, long before they knew anything about electrical polarity or the microscopic beginnings of life forms.

If mankind has a purpose, and if science refuses to admit that man has a spiritual essence, then man's purpose must be related to the place he takes and fills in the natural balance, in the total balanced aquarium of life, not just the visible or evident picture of animal life. So that if man is host to parasites that are invisible to the best microscopes of man, such as the virus (that is known by its results) and if these parasites are accepted as being real by the scientific world, then it is indeed possible that there are yet other undiscovered, or unphotographed parasites that might be living at man's expense.

I can see no other explanation for the huge expenditure of energy. The laws of energy point out that energy is not lost in any chemical or physical interaction. It must go somewhere. Some of the mystics of bygone eras, such as Paracelsus, maintained that such entities did exist, and those mystics proceeded to name and categorize them. Furthermore, they claimed that these entities were visible to some clairvoyant people. The older religious writings lead us to believe that these entities were considered to be evil, that is, designed to do damage to the spiritual life of mankind.

It is possible that they are symbiotic, as regards human life. It is also possible that we are like the chickens in the pen, or the cow in the pasture. We may have become so dependent upon their stimulus that we have become slaves to the momentary pleasure with which we are baited. The function of such an entity would supposedly be to make effective the implants of curiosity and desire, so that we would not fail to reproduce. The entity however is only concerned with the energy exuded and lost in dissipation, and consequently man is allowed to dabble in forms of energy loss that are denied lesser animals.

Regardless of the probableness of the above postulation as to super-human parasites, it is evident that man produces infinitely more energy than is needed to survive and reproduce. It behooves us, in the event that we wish to remain skeptical, to find out the reason for this energy waste.

We cannot excuse it by saying that man enjoys. It should be evident by now to most readers of these notes that man is consumed while thinking he is consuming. We find that sex is not a mighty prerogative and divine exercise by a semi-divine being, franchised by a fully divine being, so that man may gorge himself on the apples of pleasure . . . from all trees but one.

We find that sex is a trap, and yet a necessity. And if we can find that focal point whereby we can remain untrapped, and yet functioning enough to fulfill the necessity, we may unleash still another new force out of that highly specialized form of tension.

Transmutation and Transmission

We come now to the business of employment of Tension, and to the application of adroitness, or between-ness. If we apply the Law of Progression to the parasitical scale it is possible to speculate with some certainty that there are parasites strategically superior to us. But we can use that same Law of Progression to speculate that we can evolve higher ourselves. If there are other entities in a plane of better advantage, then it is possible for us to find that plane. Those invisible entities are attached to us by virtue of, or for consumption of some subtle energy that we possess. The next possibility according to the Law of Progression is that we may use that same energy to lift ourselves beyond the present state.

It is evident that the energy mentioned may be downgraded. That is, the energy thus continently salvaged may be used in directions not adducive to the evolvement of the individual spiritually. It can be dissipated in sexual excesses, or in other exudations. It can be used to heal people, which in the final analysis is an ego-trip by the healer, and a spending downward of valuable energy. Some healers, if they have already reached Satori, or Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi, may have no great need to conserve their energy, and may spend some of it downward in Transmission, or in the bringing upward of someone ready or sufficiently evolved.

Transmission involves large amounts of energy, so something should be known about energy: Somatic, Mental, and Essential (of essence.) The last one is not conceptualizable except by the application of the Law of Progression to the other two forms. It is however, experienceable. The first two, Somatic and Mental energies, have observable quanta. The first one has measurable quanta of energy. One of these quanta is called a calorie. The caloric system of measuring energy attempts to measure the amount of Somatic Energy that is gained by a given quantity of food.

Somatic Energy may be stored. It is stored in the fat and muscle, and in the general body protoplasm. It is dissipated by body action and by giving off of heat to maintain body-security from cold. It is also transmuted under certain conditions to produce Mental Energy. Without the assimilation of food which first becomes body energy, there can be no Mental Energy.

Mental Energy is different from Somatic Energy, and is not lessened by body fatigue. In fact, when the body is fatigued and seemingly low on energy, the phenomena of Mental Energy manifest as ably as if the subject were vigorous; and sometimes more ably. Mental Energy seems to be affected however by physical tension, and is also inhibited when the body is narcotized or anaesthetized. It is presumed that physical tension in turn, in some cases, is caused by mental or nervous tensions. Which is another way of saying that the Mental Energy does not work well when there is mental tension. This may seem paradoxical because I am about to state that Mental Energy is heightened or summoned by exercises that involve mental tension. What happens is that the results of that tension are not manifested until the tension subsides or is exploded by its own force. Satori can be effected through mental tension . . . sometimes by a very traumatic form of tension. The experience of Satori itself occurs as a result of the explosion or "going over the top" or "going over the mountain" of that climax of tension. In Satori there is no tension. That is, after Satori is experienced,—there is no more tension.

Somatic Energy can only be projected by physical movements of the body, thus having an effect in that manner upon the environment. Mental Energy can be projected in various ways, and it is good to study some of these ways before ever attempting to effect Transmission. This is necessary because during Transmission, the teacher must have the ability to enter and control the mind of the student, if an attempt is made for direct Transmission. Telepathy and Astral Projection are made possible through the use of Mental Energy. Another form of energy projection is that which occurs in healing. A person may expedite the projection of Mental Energy for healing purposes by touching the subject.

If a spot can be designated as the store-house of Mental Energy, it must be the more subtle tissues of the brain and nervous system. It is contained somewhere in the body because it is noticeably lost by the body touch (as in the case of Christ and the woman who touched His garment). It too has a certain quantum, because the projector of that energy runs out of it, and somatic weakness signals the loss of his power. Theoretically then, it should be measurable.

This Mental Energy might also be called Neural Energy, because I presume that it is directly connected with the working of the brain and the learning processes. Also it must be transmitted over the nervous system. I believe, that although there is nothing scientific to prove it from anatomical research to date, there is energy dispatched across the nervous system in times of crisis. The bloodstream could not possibly pump the adrenalin fast enough to provide the enormous amounts of energy that a few muscles may expend in a few seconds, after which the whole body is prostrated by fatigue. Where does this refreshing energy come from when the swimmer is fatigued and exhausted to a point that would indicate that the system of cell replenishment was taxed beyond its capacity already? Where does the energy come from that enables a man to lift a two ton truck from the body of a child pinned in the wreckage? It seems to come from the whole body, because immediately after the incident the whole body feels the exhaustion, not just the muscles that were overtaxed. This is another example of the miracle of Tension. It is, in the case of the parent lifting the truck, an example of Neural or Mental Energy being directed to save the organism as a whole.

Creation of Mental Energy

The use of energy involves three steps: The creation or generation of energy, the conservation of energy, and the projection or sublimation of energy. In dealing with the first step, we find that it is a practice which has been undertaken for many years in Asia. When we talk here about these three steps, we are focusing particularly on Mental Energy.

Some Mental Energy is attained automatically from the body. The mind works when the body is awake, and the Mental Energy subsides when the body goes to sleep. When the body is asleep, or anaesthetized, the mind may be operative, or able to receive impressions . . . or even able to travel independently of the body. It should be said then that mental activity apparently subsides during the states of sleep and anaesthesia, to all external appearances at the time. Upon awakening the subject may have considerable scope of memories of events and experiences during that state of unconsciousness, or apparent unconsciousness.

The accumulation of an increase in Mental or Neural Energy beyond that which is needed for ordinary cerebration is brought about by various disciplines and exercises. It has been demonstrated that the manifest purpose of all Somatic and Neural energies is to either reproduce or sustain some entity system. In other words, the head of the male praying mantis has no value in the scheme of things once the orgasm is completed. The same with the male black widow spider. All of the cerebrations of that arachnid's lifetime are incidental to the momentary sexual destiny of copulation and immediate death. To generate any higher form of energy, it is necessary to be aware of our sexual nature, and our sexual destiny, but not to despair that we will never have a better fate than that of being a factor in fertility.

If we consider ourselves to be as helpless and programmed as the praying mantis seems to be, then of course there is nothing to do but respond to nature.

Celibacy to Generate Mental Quantum

I have mentioned many times that we should not take a collision course with nature, but there is such a thing as taking a vacation from the game of energy-spending, sex and reproduction. We are coming now to the subject of celibacy. Celibacy was one of the disciplines used to generate additional Mental Quantum, usually with the hope of finding Essence-Realization, or GOD. Unfortunately some of the ascetics made the mistake of identifying nature with the devil. Sex was something to be abolished forever, in order to make us worthy in the sight of God. If those same ascetics believe that God created man, body and soul, then God would not be offended or abashed to look upon his own handiwork . . . and sex is part of the man.

This intensive, suicidal form of celibacy that made all sex into sin, was not healthy nor necessary for evolvement. It is advisable to inhibit the sex drain on our energy to give some of it a chance to reach the brain, if nothing else. If the course of celibacy is initiated by a man, it should not be abruptly total in the inhibition of sexual practices, especially if there has been considerable or heavy sexual frequency. The aim should be temporary, total abstinence from the conscious sex act. This last sentence was purposely expressive, but still needs some explanation. By "temporary" is meant the number of years that are needed to reach our goal. We cannot start off by putting a time limit on the amount of time to be spent, because we do not know how long it will take to bring about enlightenment. We must have only one temporal reservation about the duration of our search. We should promise nature that once enlightenment is attained, we will return to our natural destinies; but we must also promise ourselves that we will see the thing through, if it kills us or drives us insane. Only such determination will make this exercise in "between-ness" effective.

We go now to the next word "total abstinence." It sounds like an impossibility. It is an aim, and it should be an honest aim. The closer we come to letting automatic natural functions take over the sexual overflow of energy, the closer we are to peace of mind and mental freedom. Do not get discouraged in other words, if this is not done easily in the first year.

This last paragraph gives us more meaning for the last four words of the italicized sentence, the conscious sex act. The sexual habits are aggravated if we consciously identify with them. By the same token, do not think that you are free from sex if you are able to indulge in sex without caring. As long as you are voluntarily indulging in sex, you are encouraging a pattern of increasing frequency, and hence more irresponsible leaning or rationalization in that direction. Non-identification or non-attachment is desirable as an attitude toward sex, but a person must be careful in trying to assume non-identification to a state of mind which might in reality be a state of calloused indifference to both the pleasure and penalty of sexual excesses. True non-attachment comes about with evolvement, and takes sex as a means to the expression of friendship and beauty, without the need to feel compelled to reinforce any friendship with sex alone, or to feel important in a scene that might have some beauty. To do and not to be doing.

It is in the study of sex that we find more meaning to the expression that energy travels over and is projected from the nervous system. The female orgasm is predominately a neural orgasm, not necessarily a local physical titillation alone. Likewise in drug experiences, the use of psychedelic drugs by sensitive people brings about a realization by those users, that drugs like LSD produce a super-sensuous experience that literally and almost visibly drains the nervous energy without any increase in blood circulation. There is no loss of energy from body actions, and no discharges as in sexual sensuosity, but there is an intensely higher exaction or price inflicted upon the nervous system.

The raising of the Kundalini is not the only method of transmutation of sexual energy into mental-energy-quanta. Intense concentration has been known to drain physical energy to a point where the body would feel a pleasant upward surge of mental inspiration accompanied by a physical, galvanic but agreeable soothing of body tension. This is the use of between-ness by the mathematician or scientific genius, such as Nikola Tesla. They applied tension to their work for an extended duration of time, and endured the body tension that generally goes with scholastic concentration. Only when the mind conquers the problem at hand, does it relax, and after the mind relaxes then the body relaxes, and this dual process of relaxing in victory enables the mind to become clearer and more astute in each such exercise. This is the manner in which the Eureka experience is brought about that elevates man from the emotional level to the intellectual level, or man number three (a Gurdjieffian calibration).

Actually such a surge of energy is an elevation of the Kundalini, although the subject may not know it, or even care to know it. Concentration, if persistent enough, will transmute the sexual energy, and influence the direction of future sexual energy build-ups. Most Kundalini exercises involve concentration, and therein lies the real secret of raising that power.

This is the magnificent exercise of reversing the downward vector. Ordinarily the human body is so programmed that only a limited amount of mental energy is developed from the nutrition in the circulatory system. The male especially is capable of developing large amounts of sexual energy from ingested food. Such a factory is capable of contributing a proportionate distillate of that coarser form of energy to the neural or mental department.

In my early twenties, when I first embarked energetically on the philosophic path, I encountered writings that told of yoga exercises that were supposed to do all sorts of things from finding peace of mind, and health of the body, to ultimate wisdom. Those books never gave me an inkling as to that which was meant by ultimate wisdom. I even received the impression that such wisdom was material, or of a sort that might lead to a better understanding of life processes so that man could live to an indefinite age, and use those extended years to solve the still larger problem of the divine or spiritual verities. I was immediately aware that the books on yoga proved nothing on the subject, and that even the Hatha Yoga claims had little basis or corroboration from western health views. I must admit that my whole attraction to the yoga-addiction was one of intuition. I felt that a person had to preserve the health, because a person that is dying cannot prospect bravely in spiritual matters. He will grasp the first straw that appears. Likewise, I sensed that sex was a trap, and found no argument with advice about celibacy. Also I became a vegetarian without any argument. I believed that our individuality was based upon, or was qualified eternally by, that which we did, or allowed to become part of us. I believed that the meat eaters were predators, regardless of whether they were part-time members of the local S.P.C.A. or not. We were secondly then, that which we ate . . . and consequently not much better. Of course in those years I was obsessed with the idea of being better than the animals . . . it never occurred to me then that the human layman (unenlightened) was not much better off than the animal. It does not matter how intricately organized or specialized the bodies are if the entity itself does not know what it is.

Consequently, one of the reasons for writing this, is my promise in the ignorant days of my youth, to the unborn youths of that time who are now born, that I would share that which I would find, even to these details on how to live in health and sanity while pursuing the course that pragmatists view with tongue in cheek, and which they are sometimes inclined to denounce as a course prompted by or leading to insanity. There was no one around to advise me of the dangerous side-effects of celibacy, or of the danger of becoming addicted mentally to ideas that possibly had no real basis as being anything adducive to ultimate truth . . . and with many of the cult ideas there was no basis of truthful direction in even the preliminary steps and the general tenets of their dogma.

Celibacy is a science. It can kill you if you are not a skilled master of it. Many middle-aged priests die of prostate cancer because even in a monastery filled only with men, there is a pervasive bashfulness that prevents the asking of advice or the giving of it, beyond the facetious advice to confess sexual indulgences. This type of attitude (of celibacy being holy, and indulgence being a sin) leads to the development of a masochistic individual, who really suffers mentally and emotionally all the while that he is having pleasure with the body. It is no wonder that the Catholic Church is decaying. Its whole body (or at least the hierarchical head) is composed of sick masochists, if they have not yet discovered an intelligent attitude toward sexual sin.

Celibacy is not holy nor is sex a sin. Celibacy is a tool, an implement that we voluntarily pick up, knowing it is hot and that it may burn the experimenter. This paper cannot advise all individually about each individual approach to energy-building through celibacy, because all men are constructed differently or at least have developed sex habits of varying intensities and types of sexual action. Fetishes, associations, particular inhibitions, plus a wide variety of subtle incidental factors must be taken into account with each individual case when giving advice.

However, a few guideposts can be set up. One is that sex should not be attacked as an evil. We have no choice but to attack the problem with all the will and vigor that we can muster, but we should avoid attacking ourself. We should also constantly remind ourselves that we are determined to be celibate, but that we will not blow our brains out if we are occasionally remiss in the early days of the attempt. This seems paradoxical. We must be determined, yet we should never be "up-tight." Our perseverance should be in the head, watching how we outwit ourselves, or how nature outwits our fumbling attempts.

We should never take the stand that nature is evil either. The sexual organs are an integral part of the whole carcass, and without them we would not exist. Nature will tolerate a leave of absence, and nature has a process or safety valve system for such periods. This safety mechanism (the automatic overflow of prostate fluid in the male) will however, only work efficiently while the body is young and elastic. It should not be relied upon when we approach or enter the forties. Most cases of enlightenment occur before forty anyway, if we can credit the findings of R.M. Bucke, who has done extensive research on conditions of enlightenment, so we should not plan to go on indefinitely with the celibate experiment.

It is consequently important that we try sincerely, however; just leading a half-hearted pretence of celibacy with the idea that something has to happen before forty would be unwise. Rather we should live as though we knew we had to take advantage of the young years when the body is elastic, knowing that if we do not achieve Satori in those years, we are out of luck.

Getting back to guideposts, celibacy should be approached mentally, not physically. No physical means of repression is advisable. A few frantic fanatics have castrated themselves, not realizing they were removing the energy reactor. Others have taken drugs or chemicals. It is rumored that monasteries and penal institutions slip saltpetre or other sexual depressants into the coffee or food. Some of these chemicals so taken, may either cause cancer, or may serve as a chemical castration which will deprive the subject the energy which could be raised from sexual vitality.

Celibacy can be approached mentally. And the best way, once again, is by reversing the mental vectors that are oriented downward. If the sexual urge is persistent and strong, we should get into some sort of discipline (mental) that will keep the mind occupied so that it will not wander into morbid reverie.

Thoughts incite the glands, and glands reinforce the thought processes, and even arouse the thoughts. When the glands are ready the thoughts appear as out of nowhere. When the female is fertile the body Will remind her even if she has not consciously remembered the time of the month. This is noticed in animals and is more evidential when observed in animals such as the cow, because cows do not have calendars. They do not say to themselves, "I have ten more days and then I will come into heat." They will be grazing quietly and all of a sudden they will stop eating, look up and begin to grow restless. In a few minutes they will bawl, and head for the nearest bull. This clock is ovarian more than cerebral. The chicken does not have a calendar either. It breeds when the ovarian cycle is at the right point, ready for fertilization. It does not breed because it first has lustful thoughts. The lustful thoughts (if she bothers to think about it at all) are the result of a physical timing device.

For this reason, celibacy for females involves a different discipline than for males. In the male, the glands can incite the thoughts with a frequency that has been set by that male's previous frequency of sex. In other words if the male has been used to a daily outlet, he will build up sexual replacement fluid every twenty-four hours. His first step is not total abstinence then, but the deliberate indulgence for awhile, every other day, then every third day, etc. Watching all the while for the inclination to be over intense in those holidays from celibacy. And all the while that he is carrying on this physical withdrawal he should keep his mind occupied twenty-four hours a day with either sleep or non-identifying studies. If he goes for a walk or is in a place where he is unable to read or study, (even while doing physical work) he should try some sort of chant or prayer that will serve to remind him each moment about his intentions.

Something should be said about intentions. You cannot force yourself to have intentions. If you join a group because you feel that you need their company, or for other social reasons . . . (sometimes it is the challenging ego that likes to boast an ability for impossible tasks) . . . a few months of celibate living will bring you around to face yourself. If your real drive is sex and you have not developed a previous philosophic commitment to enable you to see the desperate need of total action, then your real intentions will make themselves known to you, and you will drop out of the group, because you will not find the challenging ego as important as the sex drive or sex ego.

Before entering the celibate path, you should know clearly what you are getting into. You should realize the somatic reactions, and the sweeping catalysis of uncontrolled reverie. In other words, do not underestimate nature. The many forces of adversity will bombard even the most philosophic head with astute rationalization when the heat is on. You must know beforehand that you are going to be impressed, strongly impressed, by the hormones that will find their way through the blood into the thought patterns.

Voices within you will not always cry out for sex. We are watching for that attack. The voices will cry out doubts, and accusations of folly. We will start to doubt if we are doing any more than kidding ourselves. And we can at any time pick up a dozen books on modern psychology that will tell you that sexual perversions and degeneracies even have been liberated from limbo and on the other side of the fence sexual repression has been damned as insane. Crowley's "do what thou wilt" has become the theme of modern psychology. If sex is prompted by demons as some church fathers tell us, then the devil must be depicted without the pitch-fork if he is to be modern. (All religion is caught up with progressiveness.) The modern devil would be holding an ice pick, wearing a stethoscope, and pill-box for the sufferers of dissipation.

The Hindus say that the cause of all suffering is desire. It can be said more plainly by the superintendent of the local insane asylum. (The home for exceptional people.) He said, when I asked him about his consensus of case histories in looking for causes for insanity, "Nearly all our cases could have been avoided if the individuals had kept their pants buttoned."

In deifying sex, this man's modern opponents will produce more insanity, and society will be convinced of the need to build bigger and better quarters for lunatics. The better quarters should be reserved for the guardians of our sanity, who are deserting us in increasing number through suicide.

You cannot turn your back upon six thousand years of monastic experimentation, and on conclusions about mental well-being that have come about by learning to live over periods of thousands of years. Evolution has brought us, up to the turn of the century at least, to a strong belief that sex was the source of all of our trouble. There must have been some good reasons for those conclusions.

I realize that monastic life without a comprehensive scientific approach to celibacy played hob with the inmates. I also realize that religion, stumbled a bit in trying to kill off all the devils by shutting off their energy supply, and in so doing invented all sorts of ecclesiastical mumbo-jumbo that made for financial independence for the clergy and slavery for the peasants.

Marriage was a form of sexual restriction, that was not just socially helpful, it was hygienic as well. Sexual promiscuity, while fulfilling the demands of nature (pregnancy), also contributed to the spreading of congenital defects and diseases.

In this generation of youthful license (we should postpone our lechery until we are too old to hurt anyone, and then maybe it will be weaker), I am encountering hundreds, and hundreds of young people whose sex lives have brought them to a point of suicide, or suicidal tendencies. "Do what thou wilt" encouraged them to mix sex with dope, booze, and even with ritualistic magic, and the results have become frightening. One lady, twenty-eight, claimed that she had five demons, or entities inhabiting her body. She ascribed it to smoking "grass" and tampering with sex at the same time. I felt that she was only telling me half the details, but she was getting the point across.

We are that which we do. I am using up this space to talk about sex because the student embarking upon a path of celibacy should not ever be swayed into thinking he is inadequate in the path, or insane. One of the first fruits of celibacy, in fact is peace of mind. When you finally are free from the identification, the freedom brings with it such an exaltation that you can only be tempted by yourself. You have to watch for narcissism then. The most wonderful years of my life were the seven—from twenty-one to twenty-eight—that I spent in celibacy. Even though I was ignorant in those days of the requisite protective science and made a few painful mistakes.

Our manifest natural purpose is reproduction prior to death. If we are to have, or are to manifest another purpose, that of searching for our definition, then we cannot allow the natural, downward vector of sex to prevent us from that purpose.

Getting back to inner convictions and the vacillation of purpose, we should realize beforehand, that the first few months of celibacy will involve turbulence. During that turbulence we are apt to practice self-recrimination and try to reason that this celibacy thing is unnatural because it heightens the discomfort. But, before you started on the path, you knew that sex was turbulent—whatever the form of expression you had for the outlet. And if you depart from celibacy to find some period of time as a respite from turbulence, or if you rationalize that you should really get married so that marriage will take care of the turbulence while you are pursuing spirituality, you will find that few marriage partners are co-operative with any ideas of limited sexual activity, or with any form of religion that does not bless the connubial act as being everything from nice to sacred.

The body will follow if the mind leads. The big handicaps in relation to celibacy are the mental games . . . and their infinite variety.

One of the traps that sometimes results from unscientific celibacy is sexual deviation. Especially if the person is inclined to some degree in that direction to begin with. There is an inclination to blame all turbulence on the opposite sex, and to consider the opposite sex to be sinful.

What follows then is a justification or endorsement of the indulgence in any sex act so long as it does not involve the opposite sex. Eve is considered therefore to be the genesis of all evil. Sacred books and philosophic works are quoted and misquoted to reinforce that which the male deviate wishes to believe. The female deviate likewise is able to find quite a few sources that will sustain any wish that she has to believe that men are the factor behind all feminine sin, shame, and failure.

The Mechanics of Transmission

Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi, or Enlightenment can occur in different ways. To be an authentic experience however it should be a spontaneous event. If it is planned or if detailed expectations are drawn up in our mind, then we run the chance of creating or synthesizing an experience. Even if the experience so hoped for or anticipated is genuine, there is no way of ascertaining if it is real after it is all over, if it is planned or postulated in any manner beforehand. A person might think that any experience of the magnitude and scope that Sahaja Samadhi is expected to be, would of a necessity be self-convincing, regardless of how it came about.

In the first stages of its happening, you may be overcome by an intense hopelessness with the collapse of the egos. This may be followed by a feeling of unreality and insanity. Enlightenment definitely does give a new definition to sanity and reality, so this trauma can be expected; by trauma meaning visible anguish that precedes genuine realization or Being. So a person can read about this and work themselves up into a nervous breakdown, and falsely presume that he has reached Sahaja Samadhi. Spontaneous Samadhi is usually the result of several if not many years of intense effort, and direction of the whole being to self-understanding.

There are two roads to enlightenment: The way of intense, individual effort that has no predictableness at all about it; it is just a relentless blind struggle to summon the whole entity to find definition. The other way is semi-synthetic. It too involves all of the above conditions and unpredictableness, but in addition to the solitary efforts of the student, there are attempts by the student to accelerate his progress with the aid of a group of fellows, or with the aid of a teacher or helper. In Asia these teachers are called masters.

In the use of the semi-synthetic method of expediting the individual search for Truth, some artificial methods are employed to provoke the Tension needed for a break-through. These methods are not universally advisable, and unfortunately some of the sects that operate under the banner of Zen manage a flourishing, assembly-line production of fleeced, unenlightened victims.

Tension is the prime element in any spiritual exaltation. Sometimes the tension is accumulated and unconsciously endured over a period of years. A person that might be classed (according to the Gurdjieffian number system) as man number one, may live pretty much of an animal existence. His primitive egos may be getting him into trouble. He lands in the penitentiary and decides to start reading the Bible. He is deprived of sex, alcohol, and most of the games that he played on the outside, and this causes Tension.

But he continues to read the Bible. And as the Tension increases, he further increases it (unconsciously) by starting to pray. He is torn by doubts and even becomes angry at the invisible God that does not answer his prayers. But he has made up his mind. He is going to try this business of religion because he feels it is his last hope. His prayer is from hope, but he is stretched emotionally from the other side by frustration, ignorance, doubt, and even anger. If his determination remains long enough, he will witness a breakthrough, an exaltation which embraces him with the emotional level of man number two. This exaltation would incidentally be called salvation. It is the graduation of the instinctive or animal man.

Each step upwards is marked by an exaltation that can be identified. And each step upwards comes about only by Tension, Tension that is slowly cumulative or Tension that is deliberately encouraged by the embarking of the student on a path of willful spiritual intent.

Zen was a system that attempted to employ various artificial means of inducing that Tension. I have called the koan a nonsense tool that is used with intensive concentration, to bring about sense. The koan is an artifice whose value is the Tension it produces. This Tension inflicts itself upon the mind alone.

Keisaku is another system of Tension-induction. This is a physical attack that is used by some of the schools of Zen that claim to be able to produce enlightened people in batches. It combines sometimes with enforced chanting of a sound or koan. Generally the koan Mu.

The Tension is heightened by forcing the candidate to prove his mental concentration on Mu by having the student call out the word Mu incessantly, while the attendants beat him on the back with a stick. This process may have some value in training a person to concentrate, but any guarantees of insuring enlightenment with it would be subject to doubt.

Any pre-enlightenment discipline is going to result in a traumatic period of time. The traumatic period is brought about by the fight that is put up by the egos, if nothing else.

The teacher who uses only mental or verbal attacks to produce Tension must be an astute psychologist. He must know the subject's mind intimately, and be able to predict fairly precisely the effects of any shocks he might induce. The first requisite therefore for a teacher is that he be able to "go inside" the head of the student or candidate. He knows the mind of the student, and thinks the thoughts of the student when he wishes.

The propitious moment is the time when the student is both ready for the fruits of intense, synthetic Tension, and at the same time is able to go inside the head of the teacher—and witness, and experience by this catalytic process—the state of enlightenment that is always with the teacher.

A functioning teacher should be able to bring the student into his own head, by knowing the levers and the propitious time, when it arrives. To bring about any exaltation before the mind is ripe would be to abort genuine enlightenment, and in its place indulge the mind in some lesser amazement.

We go now to the individual methods or levers used by the teacher to increase Tension or to induce shocks that will take energy from egos and other pastimes. These cannot be explained to the student, because if you explain to a person that you are going to shock him, he will be prepared to offset the shock. This calls for some confidence on the part of the student in the teacher. Such confidence should not be given blindly. However if a student spends a year with a teacher, he should pretty well know if he is safe or not.

There is a direct form of transmission that occurs in just a few seconds, with people who have had no previous contact with the teacher, but who may have come to the teacher as a result of intense anguish or Tension from other causes than those induced by a spiritual discipline. Cases of this sort have occurred in our group, where a person would be affected by walking into the room. In a state of total collapse one person, a young lady, witnessed the mountain experience, and realized the whole world as an illusion.

These experiences vary, but they are milestones that tell you that you are on the right path. Sometimes the experience is reflected upon the group. Others near may feel it coming. In many incidents the room seems to be electrified. A particular teacher got into a car with one of the students. Immediately the car seemed filled with electricity. He checked the student to see if he felt it. The student noticed that his ears were ringing strangely. This was a variation of reception or of interpretation of the phenomena.

Power may be generated. And it is good that it is, for sudden Transmission must be accompanied by an enormous amount of energy. This energy can be felt in the room by sensitive people.

When the conditions are right, it has been demonstrated that the teacher can go directly to the mind of a student, hold and direct that mind with his. This abridges years of work. However, it has been also found that conditions are right when the group has a common spiritual goal with no one present that might be negative, or a drainer of group energy.

Our particular group employs a practice of sitting in a meditative circle that is known as a rapport session. In these sessions energy usually manifests itself in the room within a half hour. If it does not manifest itself within a half hour, the conditions are not right, and the practice may be stopped, since there is little chance of anything happening beyond increasing fatigue on the part of all. The cause should be searched out. It is generally found that some individual is draining the group. Sometimes it is more than one person. To avoid draining the group, certain precautions can be taken. Try to discourage members from the sitting if they have been dissipating recently. If the membership is large enough in the group, it can be broken up into smaller groups, each containing different levels but with the members of those smaller groups being picked for compatibility (rapport ability) with each other, knowing that they can affect compatibility better in a group of their equals.

A monitor or teacher should be present that is able to perceive the presence of the energy in the room, and who is likewise able to know the person in the room most able to receive it. When he knows this, he can direct it, and propel the recipient into an experience.

The teacher should be free to use simple techniques to augment the rapport, or to produce Tension. The rapport is really a Tension technique in itself. It is a phenomenon inspired by the Tension of meditation, combined with the automatic habit of sharing energy, the latter being the inclination of social functions. This function, or session, occurring as it does among people who have no physical or sexual contacts, will automatically utilize that Tension for reaching out, or hunger for contact, to project the only things that remain or are usable to make contact. These things are intensified telepathy and projected energy.

Just to read this will do you no good. To become you must act. To act properly the act should be of the duration of a lifetime. If you should get a dividend before the end of that lifetime, rejoice. If the lifetime passes, and there seems to be no hope of enlightenment, be content that your life was not an act of foolishness, and know that your life of action is now an eternal fact. So that this brotherhood fact is more real than the transient world of illusion, in that some of its members have transcended illusion.

1986 Addition

Ten years have passed since the original publication of the original Energy Transmutation, Between-ness and Transmission Paper.

In the last ten years some very important literature of a scientific nature has appeared. It somewhat validates some of my statements made without scientific backing, and also validates to its particular degree—the statement that many intuitional convictions are later vindicated by scientific discoveries.

For many years I have been convinced that man lives in the gap of the synapse. If he has a soul, this gap is where it touches the body, and where the brain or memory of the spirit counterpart of each man also records the mundane experiences.

In 1975 I still had no idea how this worked mechanically or chemically. I reasoned it from the Law of Progression, as written in the preceding publication.

I recently picked up a book by Richard M. Restak, copyrighted in 1977. In it and other books I learned that electrical charges carried impulses across the synaptic gap changing the potassium or sodium balance in the receiving neuron. My analogy to the spark-plug in the automobile now made more sense, even though the terminology is complex.

Also a review of some of the recent information on prostaglandins gives some weight to my advice given on celibacy. Mark Jaqua recently published a paper on Conservation Therapy.

Prostaglandins are found to be controlled by testosterone levels. Testosterone levels in men are several times the testosterone levels in women. The seminal vesicles produce four hundred times the amount of prostaglandins that come from the rest of the body.

Since prostaglandins are involved in neuro-transmission they have a proportional effect in the bodies which produce the most. These findings add more meaning to my advice on the needs for celibacy, and the different approaches to celibacy by the different sexes,—which advice came about as a result of intuition. Consequently I take a step further and by giving my life's experiment as a witness, assert that intuition itself is directly related to celibacy and the management of prostaglandins.

Notes on Tension

LIFE STAGES:

Devotional (emotional) until age 17

 hiatus of disappointment

Scientific or pseudo-scientific, 17 to 21 (psychology, astrology, etc.)

 hiatus of dissatisfaction

Experimental/Philosophical, 21 to 28

 hiatus of despair

Period of religious experience (a leap resulting from a shock)

Period of evaluation of the experience

Work on Verbalization of the experience

Work on finding a means to help others bring it about

*******

EVALUATION:

That my life was a sort of evolution toward a point of realization.

Discovered that a point of exaltation or expanded consciousness was reached by being at tension.

Discovered that spiritual growth moves according to the Law of Progression but that such growth has limitations. (Such progression is affected by a continual application of tension, which is not unbearable.)

Discovered that great tension releases great energy and with great energy it is possible to produce shocks that enable man to do what we call here a LEAP. Such leaps are necessary to abridge non-finite spiritual obstacles.

TENSION:

Holds the planets in place.

Surface tension holds the drop of water together and holds the ocean's surface when the tides are out.

Gravity is tension.

Love between the sexes is tension.

All educational processes are or involve tension.

Osmosis is tension produced by a membrane . . . and organic life depends upon tension-processes such as osmosis, capillary action, photosynthesis, and food-assimilation. The balanced ecological aquarium of life is a ceaseless, bloody tension.

A steel bar or ingot contains tension, which is defined as stresses . . . and a bridge collapses when those stresses are no longer there.

Thought itself is the result of tension.

Being awake is being at tension.

Most of man's discoveries have to do with mechanisms whereby are created states or conditions of tension, and through which the tension is released in a given direction. (The bow and arrow is such a device, as are the cannon and the rocket.)

The combustion engine operates with energy obtained by the release of tension (in this case molecular tension) in an explosive substance with the aid of a catalytic spark. A water turbine operates from the tension created by piling up water in a dam.

We find that to build up tension, energy is required. (Evidently this input is justified because there is an energy-profit from such operations.)

A diesel engine uses compression which takes or uses energy in order to release energy in the form of work.

In the case of the dam, the energy input is in the form of the labor of making the dam and the turbine and machinery.

The rocket may carry compressed oxygen, which required energy to bring it to the liquid state.

*******

All education, whether mechanical or spiritual, follows along the lines of the law of progression.

All education succeeds from the energy of tension; from the tension that is created by polar alternates.

Tension cannot be created without establishing some sort of polarity.

The alternates are starvation or plenty . . . an abundance of satisfaction-promise for appetites and desires to come as opposed to a poverty of expression . . . also possible wisdom as opposed to evident ignorance.

*******

The teacher creates tension by whatever means possible. That is the job of the teacher. (Individuals do not study well by themselves, so schools are necessary. The competition and the reminding of school life stimulates and encourages the student. This is true in spiritual schools also.)

The student learns under threats. (It may be the threat of failure, or the threat of being second-best, or even the threat of physical discomfort.)

*******

A spiritual system is an educational system even though the subject matter is abstract and intangible. (Consequently any spiritual path may require a tension-producing system infinitely more complex than an educational system that deals with physical sciences, or with routines that require only memory work.)

Let us take as an example the study of the Ultimate Self, or the search for God, defining God here as that which is the Ultimate Truth, or the Ultimate State of Reality-

First of all we find that we cannot drift into any spiritual increase. Blind devotion can only be tolerated by people rooted in emotionalism. Belief will get for us doubts, if we try to force ourselves to believe anything.

The next step is to try to apply ourselves to a study of spirituality. But when we begin such a study we find ourselves dealing with an endless morass of words, of varied and ambiguous meaning.

We find our senses (our only witnesses) to be undependable.

We find our research data, or our data to date, to be a veritable Tower of Babel.

We find reason to be inadequate in infinite speculations. ("The finite mind will never perceive the infinite.")

We find our intuition in need of improvement . . . and in need of some catalyst that will make for better functioning. And yet the intuition is the only faculty that promises to abridge volumes of evidence about God or the Ultimate Self, massive volumes that are possibly erroneous or slanted, or simply colored by the nature of the writers of the books.

We rarely approach a spiritual system from a logical basis, but rather with the aid of that massive computerization of all data at once which we call "intuition."

When an intuitive conclusion has been reached, we look for or accept a particular path or system which is harmonious with that conclusion.

This evaluation or deciding is a result, almost invariably, of years of tension.

Zen has a maximum efficiency in getting results from tension. Zen is a system of tension.

Transmission is tension-energy directed at the highest possible goal. (Do not mistake the simplicity of this statement to mean that Satori can be effected mechanically. The whole formula is not written, nor is it writable, because each case demands a slightly different formula. There is a personal variable and a propitious, unpredictable moment needed . . . and a teacher comes in handy, especially a teacher who is able to create a state of tension, and who is able to see the student's critical moment when Enlightenment is at hand.)

A Zen master is a master of tension. (And he must also be a unique type of psychologist, one who sees the student's head from the inside, not as an external behavioristic diagnostician.)

I think this will give you some idea of the significance of the koan. A particular koan is not applicable to all schools, teachers or students. But any Zen school will have some mechanism for building tension. I believe that the process of tension and tension-effects are to be found everywhere in nature. The energy of intentional thinking may well be the result of synaptic energy (energy caused by the strain of synaptic space.) An analogy to the synapses would be the spark plugs in a motor. The spark is effective mid-way between the points (a thought and enlightenment occurs half-way between nothing and everything.)

Take that parallel into the human mechanism for progression. That which is needed is the dynamic energy summoned up by a crisis, and in the instance of Zen techniques, that dynamic energy must be synthetically summoned.

*******

The task of the seeker of eternity is to die while living, to know of death so that the seeker will know of all the secrets of life. To effect this enormous task, the seeker must produce an enormous amount of energy. And to create that energy the polar mechanism must have a large gap.. .a gap as large as death itself.

Bi-Polar Tension

(The science of Between-ness)

The tension between the male and female results in intense speculation and ecstasy.

The tension between life and death is explosive thinking.

The tension between thought and thoughtlessness is attention, ecstasy, or terror.

The tension caused by putting attention on ecstasy and terror results in action.

The tension between action and inertia results in life.

The tension between being and non-being results in Enlightenment.

The tension between fullness and emptiness is a vacuum.

THE WAY

Listen to the confusion of ignorance. For that which is wisdom belongs to the silent.

Are you of the tumultuous masses that agonize for definition? Then of the human babble of voices, can you hear this voice? For this voice speaks words, and all words define nothing.

In the abyss there is a path, that is invisible, that leads to the garden. Oh, what foolishness, to speak to the blind, and to those who hear words.

Only those who believe there is a path will ever find one. Only those with faith will find despair. And those who despair may come closer to Truth.

Now you have seen words with two eyes; for one eye will avail thee nothing. Though it is but one thing that thou seekest.

Two people must thou be, man and woman. Either must thou be, and yet neither, in thy heart.

Thou must lose to have, and forsake love to be Love.

If thy purpose be steadfast and certain, then unto the very goal be sure of nothing. But be certain that the paradox permeates all. For if thou art certain that thou hast eaten the dragon, and thy stomach feels vast, how much greater is thy nausea if thou cannot digest or regurgitate.

That which is important is to know, and to listen to words that will enable thee to know. But logic has only the pretence of knowing.

Then that which is important is feeling, but feeling without testing the feeling, even though it be a feeling of certainty, is but pretence. For even as disease at either end of a nerve renders unreliable feeling, so the subject or object of intuition may be rendered erratically.

So that there is not one without the other. And together they are Being. To know, and to know nothing. To feel, and cease feeling and become.

But before thou knowest nothing, thou must lie with the conceit of knowing. In what bed dost thou lie?

Know thou of salvation? Of Saviours and Adversaries? From what art thou saved? From death? Then know that all men die, even saviours. For it is only by dying that one knows of life. For life has no value until it is lost.

Know thou of faith? Dost thou seize thy mouth that it cry out not against thy ears? To know is to know that which is. To believe is to weave.

Know thou of Love? Lovest thou which end of the nerve? Lovest thou thy body or the fat of thy intellect? Hast thou love, or art thou Love?

Know thou of Thought? Hast thou proven everything with worded thoughts? Then great is thy vanity. For thou art caught in the whirling hub of the wheel, not in the seat of the chariot.

Know thou of Piety? Then thou knowest of right and wrong, and knowing both is sweet sickness, that results from surfeit of impiety. But greater still is he that is both pious and impious, and is neither.

Know thou of Teachers? Know that teachers beget teachers, even as words beget words. And if the words of the teacher are kind to the ear, then the ear hears that which it wishes to hear. Then how shall the ear hear of that which IS? For the real teacher speaks neither to the ear, nor the mind, nor the heart, but by circumstance and acts. Yet the real teacher is not a man, and is known only in that circumstances befall us.

Know thou thyself? Art thou the asker of the question or answerer of thine own questions? Thou art not the quest, and yet first must thou find thyself.

To be the quest, oh soul thou must first be a seeker. To avoid action, thou must first determine for great action.

Peace to the wanderer.

Publisher Information

Copies of this book can be obtained by writing TAT BOOK SERVICE, 1686 Marshall Street, Benwood, West Virginia 26031.

OTHER WRITINGS BY RICHARD ROSE:

The Albigen Papers, PB $6.00, HB $8.00

Psychology of the Observer, PB $6.00

Carillon: Poems, Essays & Philosophy of Richard Rose, PB $6.00

The Direct-Mind Experience, PB $8.00, HB $10.00

Meditation and Visualization, PB $2.00