Theos-Talk Archives (December 1996 Message tl00685)

Tom wrote:

>I have never understood why the "higher self" is referred to as both being a
>part of the individual and as acting on the individual.  If it knows
>something that I do not know, then it is not me.

Are you only your knowledge, grasshopper? ;-)>

I think "me and the not-me" is extremely significant to deal with.

The "higher-self" is refered to as being "the individual" and as acting
on and somewhat through "the personality", which is said to be the
temporary and conditionally invested part of it, entangled with matter
of the lower mental and astral types. The formation of a personal human
ego is both the reason for human incarnate experience and the source of
the problem.

In the life of an ordinary human being, the personality is
quasi-autonomous, and apparently separate from it's inner parent by a
gap in consciousness between lower and higher manas. A person can live
"cradle to grave" and consciously know little more of their higher Ego
than faint impulses and stirrings, usually through the heart (the seat
in man of higher triad), though they are founded on it and it's life and
power manifest as the nucleus of their being.

(Re: don't look for the higher ego in your head, look for it in your
heart.)

If an interior effort is made to give allegiance to the higher self,
surrender the personality to it and live so as to become more and more
"it's presence in action where you are", then by law of invitation it
can descend into human psychology, acting in the lower planes through
the instument of man. How much so, for how long, and in what way depends
on the quality of personal character, the constancy of the sacrifice,
and what of the higher life it has made itself able to receive.

This is the reconciliation of heart and head (seat of the lower
personality), experienced as a conscious renewal or "rebirth."

Love is said to be the key. Knowledge alone is less desirable.

____

>>and become lost souls.

>I do not see how it is possible for anything to be separate from something
>that is all-encompassing.

<snip>

>How long do these lost souls stay that way, or are they annihilated without
>ever recovering?  I remember a phrase from "The Mahatma Letters" which said
>that some souls undergo misery and torment for a manvantara, but I cannot
>remember to whom it was referring.

The teaching on the subject, as I remember it, is that when a final,
terminal split occurs, the constituent parts of the lower personal
vehicles, along with whatever causal matter breaks away with them,
eventually dissipate and return to the common pool of elements, much
like the dissolution of lower vehicles in the normal course of events
post-mortem.

There is economy to nature, nothing is lost in respect to raw materials,
psychological or otherwise. But to the severed entity it's a matter of
experiencing consequences. The dissolution process is said to be
frenzied agony, burning with desire without possibility of satisfaction
until integrity is lost and the elements are set free.

The higher ego, over long cycles of time, has gambled and lost all or
most of it's manvantaric investment in the lower planes through a
"determined (personal) persistence in deliberate evil". At the
appropriate time, a critical mass of selfishness is achieved and the
final break occurs: the Ego's effort for the cycle is a failure.

Stunned, it is said to take it's losses, karmic consequences and for the
time being, cut off from the current of evolution, stand - or so it
seems - outside that evolution, in the condition of "avichi" (the
"waveless" or that which is without vibration). It will have to wait,
perhaps even until a future evolutionary scheme to try its hand at the
human cycle again, which, owing to karma, inevitably takes place at a
much lower level.

The important distinction to make in all of this is between the higher
Ego and the personality. More to the point, it is the important
connection to make.

Mark
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