CHAPTER NINE
The Greater Faith - 3
"In the beginning" a solution is emanated out of the Infinite Potential (which is the ultimate reality of what we call SPACE) to answer the need of a closing cycle. This solution balances and harmonizes the need, as the need of a family for a home is satisfied or neutralized by the architect's blueprints of the house they will be able to live in. Every need is always and forever balanced by a solution, and the power of this potential solution is "spirit." Spirit is the energy of the infinite potential of SPACE . We live within an infinite ocean of potentiality. The protean activity of this ocean of potentiality is spirit in manifestation. To experience this ever-present potential is to know Reality; it is to sense infinite "Love." But being blind, we can only think of "laws"!
There is only one Supreme Law: Everything is as the need for harmony requires. Everything acts in order to satisfy what, at the time and to the best of its knowledge, it feels it needs. Everything seeks to act according to its fundamental nature. Any other path of action increases the need, because it intensifies the resistance to the action and this calls for a greater effort and exertion.
Man's nature, however, is to be conscious of the meaning of the infinite and cyclic interaction of need and solution; for only thus can he be what he essentially is: a Localizing agent for the power of the metacosmic Principle of Individual Existence which I have called simply (in capital letters) ONE. This Principle or Essence (the words are most inadequate, alas!) is what is at the root of eternal, cyclic MOTION. Always and everywhere harmonic MOTION animates SPACE — and the results are an infinity of universes in which individualization produces basic needs and these draw out of the infinite potential of SPACE wave upon wave of spirit.
To feel, sense and experience this immediate response of spirit to individual need; to become oneself the channel or instrumentality for the release of such a response of spirit, is to realize the superficiality of the concept of law. Everything is possible that an essential need requires.
However, as long as men behave, feel and think as egos who have no sense of infinite potentiality, no realization of the cyclic picture as a whole, no awareness of the Great Architect's vision and of his divine formative Mind (whence emanates the archetypal form of the cycle of which He is origin, source and guiding Intelligence), and no impulse toward absolute harmony, save as the latter is dimly reflected on the agitated surface of their passion for what they call love — to such egos laws must appear necessary.
They will indeed be necessary in societies forever disrupted by the chaotic desires and the free will of our egos. It is the ego which calls for kings; and its karma requires tyrants and dictators, generals and atom bombs, to be worked out up to some Gotterddmmerung finale.
It is the ego which places its faith in laws, because its shaky faith must be bolstered by something rigid, unchangeable, rational, and never upset by passion or caprice: the law. It is the ego which worships law-givers, human or divine, because the shadow of such a faith, fear, must cling desperately to some awesome but magnificent Countenance that seems to the ego "authority," but in sober fact is only "ruling power."
The creation of the universe by "authority" is that creation of which the first chapter of Genesis speaks. The Author is ELOHIM and He Creates with "Light" the essential Ideas of the universe of which He is the multiune Seed. It is a creation in Harmony; the harmonizing solution to the need of "the Deep," of Chaos. By contrast, the second chapter of Genesis tells of a "secondary creation" by one aspect of the ELOHIM-"JHVH Elohim" (Jehovah or Yahweh) who fashions man from earth and water, then animates the statue which He produced with the "breath of life." This divine producer of natural man is the manager and ruler of the realm of life (the biosphere); and it is from this realm of foundations and of unconscious shapes that man must emerge. He is faced with a command: "Thou shalt not eat of the fruit"; but where there is command, man must break the order. The command and the breaking are two sides of the same coin; law and anarchy are inseparable polar opposites.
Let me state once more that the realm of law and lawbreaking is the realm of egos. A Big Ego rules over it. That He must so rule is His ordeal and His karma; for He performs there the cosmic task of forcing individual men to rebel against His will in order that, through the tragedy and trials which He must, as Lawgiver, focus upon those who break the law, these rebels may in time rise above this tragic realm of laws and of the possibility to be free to break laws.
As human beings so rise, they emerge eventually into the realm of the "primary creation" by ELOHIM; they have the vision of the Temple-to-be as emanated by the Mind of ELOHIM, the Great Architect. In full wakefulness they know, through total attunement and identification with the clear mind that reveals to them their destiny, their dharma, their truth-of-self. This perfectly clear, egoless, unobstructed state of dharma fulfillment is nirvana-in-action; it is exemplified by the Buddha who, having experienced nirvana, returned to teach and work among men for forty years of a perfect and illumined life.
Having reached this state man no longer needs to place his faith in the laws of nature or of the cosmos. He experiences a "greater Faith" — the faith in the inexhaustible potentiality of SPACE and in the omnipresence and all-harmonizing potency of spirit.
The lesser faith in laws belongs to the ego always seeking to use something to its own advantage, for self-assurance or self-aggrandizement. The ego is like the corporation lawyer whose job it is to be so conversant with all the systems of rules and regulations imposed by the State to coerce people into the superficialities of a well ordered society that he may find ways and means safely to circumvent the law.
Our modern engineers are merely lawyers! They find out what natural laws allow within a more or less safe margin of risk; then they proudly use their knowledge of laws to gain their ends. But anyone who thinks of gaining his end is still an ego. Anyone who "uses the law" is bound to the concept of law; he is self-imprisoned in the realm of legality — social or cosmic. His allegiance is to the realm of the ego, of separativeness and of fear — the fear that is masquerading under boastful arrogance, cocksure optimism, and human pride, or under a feigned humility before the Big Brother or the "jealous God" that rules the world of laws.
This faith in laws is indeed the "lesser faith" because it is faith in some power that is, in the last analysis, always outside of the self. It is the child's faith, once his faith ceases to be an absolutely unconscious and instinctive reliance upon the mother and has turned into a conditional faith in his ability to get the parents to give him what he wants if he obeys enough of the parents' laws to be able to break them safely by cajoling, prayer, or ruse. The child accepts punishment as part of the bargain. One must risk, must one not, when one is an ego bent upon achieving success and pleasure? Some impetuous egos go in for foolish and daring risks — whether or not karmic spanking is more or less inevitable. Others, grown wiser and more calculating, plan carefully in terms of what military men and our State Department call calculated risks. But there is no essential difference between the foolish and the wise when they act in terms of this lesser faith.
Yet, such a faith is certainly not to be belittled, as it represents a necessary phase of development just as the ego does. But beyond the narrowly focused consciousness of the ego, and reaching toward a condition of essential openness to whatever may stream forth out of the ocean of Infinite Potentiality, a higher stage of human development should appear to the ego-weary mind. A greater faith, a faith in the spirit which, in a kind of sublime "automatism," provides all existences with the answer to all essential needs, can dawn at the horizon of man's consciousness. Such a faith is crucially needed as man strives toward a transcendent state of being and consciousness in which he becomes his living truth-of-self.
"Openness" here does not mean passivity or mediumship, or the unconscious inevitability of animal instinct. It means first of all total wakefulness and utter lucidity. It means an unglamored evaluation of the past, a profound historical sense of cyclic processes, a disciplined mind that can form itself into a translucent lens through which the Light-energy of spirit can be focused in a perfectly formed revelation of meaning.
What will be revealed is the essential meaning. The precise formulation and the action which the individual will produce will be "his", but not his in terms of ego desire or ability to use the law cleverly. It will be his in terms of the particular destiny, individuality, or dharma that he essentially is — in terms of his fundamental nature. Spirit does not dictate, it reveals; it makes the deeper, higher consciousness see. Then the flash of vision is given form by the mind of the perceiver in terms of what is needed — needed by the individual, or by those he or she may serve by sharing with them what can be made understandable of the vision.
Alas! Something often occurs to a person who has had but fleeting experiences of the greater faith. He finds himself confronted with needs that seem crucial and immediate, the solution of the spirit does not appear; the vision is clouded; the lens of the mind is barren of forms, symbols, or meaning. Then the panicky individual falls back on his old lesser faith, as Moses did when he struck the rock several times in his impatience for seemingly so badly needed water. Fear reawakens the ego-will. The eagerness for a solution — for a sign from God, the Christian mystic would say — is so desperate, so emotional, that the individual's consciousness slips into the old realm of laws and regulations. There someone is always available to answer the need in the way of the legalistic mind. In the realm of ego there is always some Big Ego to tell you, the little confused ego, exactly what to do or say . . . "for better or worse."
This may be necessary; the individual's failure of faith will have made it necessary. When the greater faith fails, it is probably good to depend upon the lesser faith. Yet in an ultimate sense a thorough crisis, even a breakdown, may at times be better than a comfortable solution, or another kind of orthodoxy to confuse a little more, even while it helps, for a while, the mind and the will.
This is where the difficult discrimination concerning when and how to help others comes in. The eagerness to "save," whether oneself or others, may be a sign that the would-be savior knows only of the lesser faith. It may be a lovely glamour with which the ego masks its real desire for being a Big Brother to some little ego, an "old soul" well ready to take care of "just a beginner"; and how often this is the case in so-called occult or religious organizations Yet, even a sincere reliance upon the greater faith may also turn into a "spiritual" excuse for not helping those who ask for needed assistance; it may become a kind of soul-weariness, or rapturous selfishness.
No one can tell another what his faith should be. Indeed there is no question of what it should be, but only of what it can be. There is no ideal or path absolutely valid for all people. All that one can do is to exteriorize whatever way has been revealed by an experiencer is known through a basic inner awareness of one's fundamental nature. There is no law greater than one's fundamental nature. There is no religion or system of laws greater than dharma.