William Butler Yeats’ Theory of Reincarnation – VI
To enter a state of timelessness we have to make an effort to slow ourselves down on all fronts in our daily lives, to release the obsessive fixation of the concerns of everyday society. When we activate our higher Faculties, we feel that our daily lives are more or less okay as they are and that they unfolding as they should at this particular moment. And there’s nothing we can do about it anyway. That’s the phony assurance which society gives us – that we have some sort of control. When we are in-phase, we feel that we can handle the things that happen to us without pother; that life does indeed have a purpose because we can feel that purpose from moment-to-moment. In other words, we can easily recognize when we are following our true life’s purpose by how we deal with our everyday lives and relationships. If there’s any sort of problem, then we are 100% in the wrong (we are acting on a level of Will rather than from the point of view of the higher Faculties).
What we call time is actually not a linear process at all, but rather an interplay between these four levels of memory. Giving one or another level precedence, or importance, is what we call the movement of time; but it has nothing to do with sequence, as we suppose. Rather, it has to do with seek – once. As long as something is being sought, as long as there is striving, then there will be a movement of attention which we perceive as time. When striving ceases, so too does time.
Without this continual Discord through Deception there would be no conscience, no activity; Deception is a technical term of my teachers and may be substituted for “desire”. – A Vision
By “Deception” is meant striving. Striving is not striving after something; desire is not desire for something. Rather they are movements, motions, for their own sake. The putative objects of striving or desire are but thought forms tacked on “later”, as a way of remembering them. It isn’t really the objects of desire which are sought but rather the hunger, the state of desire itself. The objects of desire – thought forms – don’t have any objective existence. This is what is meant by “reality is but a symbol” or “waking consciousness is but a more highly evolved form of dreaming”; and this is the Deception.
Will is the thought form material readily at hand. Body of Fate is all the could be’s and could have beens. Mask is all the dreams and hopes. Creative Mind is all the ideals and spiritual possibilities available to humans. And in any given moment all four of these levels are interacting, manifesting, driving a person forward through time. Who “we” are is a conjunction of tendencies (memories, habits) in a moment of time; that is to say, an ongoing process. And that’s what time is: a conjunction of memories bearing upon a specific individual.
However, human life is part and parcel of thought forms, and thus this distinction of four types of thought forms, which correspond to four types of memories, is a useful way of categorizing the strivings of different people. It is striving which keeps the wheel of life and death turning; when striving ceases, human life ends (and divine life begins). The point is that struggle is what keeps life going, and when struggle ceases, so does all distinction between e.g. this lifetime and some other, or this person and that one. All struggle is a struggle towards separatedness: when struggle ceases, so too does separatedness – i.e. individual consciousness. This is what the 28 phases of the moon show: the cycle of development of the emergence, the growth, and the surrender of separatedness.
The point is that all these different types of memory interact on each other. Mask is a person’s individual ideals, talents, etc. All that he or she is capable of from all possible lifetimes – all the peaks and valleys, not just exalted moments but also moments of greatest depravity, suffering, etc. Creative Mind is what some have called Collective Unconscious – all the racial memories we share as humans, our common sense, which we can each draw upon by virtue of our being human. Body of Fate is probable realities, and Will is this particular personal history. All four of these types of memory bear upon the present moment and help create it.
(adapted from The Great Wheel, Copyright © 2007 by Bob Makransky. All rights reserved).
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