human potential

It was the night of Thursday, December 10, 1992, and I was alone, downstairs at The Monroe Institute’s Nancy Penn Center. The Gateway course that we had just completed had been quite a roller-coaster, opening chambers within me that would take years to explore. I didn’t know how my life would shape up from there, but I knew that something decisive had happened.

I had plenty of mistakes yet to make, plenty of illusions yet to be baffled by, plenty of blunders and forgettings and stupidities to commit and suffer from. In no way could it be said that I now “had it all together,” as people used to say. But – if only for the moment – I was awake, and if I could wake up once, presumably I could wake up again.

This was only partly because of the psychic exploration encouraged and facilitated by the tape exercises. I had taken to that like a man dying of thirst who comes to an oasis. My liberation from the constrictions that had bound my past came partly from tape-assisted experiences, but more from interacting with the other participants, and with one in particular. I had always found it hard, dealing with people. Really, in ways I can scarcely remember at this distance, I was afraid of people. Gateway took that away. Long story, not one to go into here.

The point here is that on that Thursday night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, I was roaming around the darkened silent building in a state of quiet exultation, my senses and intuitions wide open, with no internal doubting-Thomas interfering., and three things happened.

The first thing: In the debrief room at Nancy Penn was a little goldfish bowl, complete with two pretty unimpressive fish. That night, roaming around, my attention was caught by the bowl and I sort of focused on the fish. (I don’t know how to describe what I did without making it seem special, which it was not.) I really, really concentrated on them – and both fish suddenly moved, in a jerky, startled-seeming way, as if they were people who had just heard a loud noise and realized there was somebody else there. (I know it sounds crazy, sounds like wild imagination.)

The second thing, I was in the exercise room, on the bottom floor, and I looked out the window and saw a fir tree, whipping back and forth in the wind. Following impulse, I went out the door and embraced the tree, like putting your face into a cat’s fur, and felt an emotional bond. But then, I have always loved trees. I was out there in my bare feet, standing in the snow, using what I have been taught about maintaining my body temperature, and the very cold seemed to reinforce my mood.

The third thing came next morning, looking up at the sky and seeing birds interacting with each other, making complicated recurring patterns as they soared.

A while later, I put my feelings into this little poem.

Focus 21
The fish were startled.
They saw me. Out of nowhere
a kindred consciousness appeared.
The fir tree, tossing and shaking
from the wind’s rough caressing hand,
called me. I went. The circling
fir arms said “joy.” The playful birds
making patterns said “joy.” The ice
engaged my feet and it said “joy.”

A long sad lifetime changes.
The view from here says “joy,” and says
that’s all it ever was.

When people have asked me about my Gateway, I sometimes tell them, it was the beginning of my life as a conscious individual. But I don’t find it very easy to say why, and certainly not how.

Hi all,

Somehow I feel that you all are well aware of these quotes, but I had to send them along anyway. Onward… Peter

Favorite quotes from Albert Einstein 🙏

“I didn’t arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind.”

“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter.”

“Time and space are not conditions in which we live, but modes by which we think. Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, determined by the external world.”

“Time does not exist – we invented it. Time is what the clock says. The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

“I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.”

“The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.”

“A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

“Our separation from each other is an optical illusion.”

“When something vibrates, the electrons of the entire universe resonate with it. Everything is connected. The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.”

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

“We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.”

“When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.”

“The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.”

“The ancients knew something, which we seem to have forgotten.”

“The more I learn of physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics.”

“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike. We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us. It is entirely possible that behind the perception of our senses, worlds are hidden of which we are unaware.”

“I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books.”

“The common idea that I am an atheist is based on a big mistake. Anyone who interprets my scientific theories this way, did not understand them.”

“Everything is determined, every beginning and ending, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”

“The religion of the future will be moving God and avoid dogma and theology.”

“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”

“Everything is energy and that is all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you can not help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.”

“I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not care about money. Decorations, titles or distinctions mean nothing to me. I do not crave praise. I claim credit for nothing. A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.”

 

Some excerpts from “Magic,” a 24-page essay by W.B. Yeats written in his thirties, in 1901, contained within the book Essays and Introductions, published in 1961, 22 years after his death.

“I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are –

(1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy

(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.

…

“In coming years I was to see and hear of many such visions, and though I was not to be convinced, though half convinced once or twice, that they were old lives, in an ordinary sense of the word life, I was to learn that they have almost always some quite definite relation to dominant moods and moulding events in this life. They are, perhaps … symbolical histories of these moods and events, or rather symbolical shadows of the impulses that have made them, messages as it were out of the ancestral being of the questioner.

…

“I could tell of stranger images, of stranger enchantments, of stranger imaginations, cast consciously or unconsciously over as great distances by friends or by myself, were it not that the greater energies of the mind seldom break forth but when the deeps are loosened. They break forth amid events too private or too sacred for public speech, or seem themselves, I know not why, to belong to hidden things. I have written of these breakings forth, these loosenings of the deep, with some care and some detail, but I shall keep my record shut. After all, one can but bear witness less to convince him who won’t believe than to protect him who does, as Blake puts it, enduring unbelief and misbelief and ridicule as best one may. I shall be content to show that past times have believed as I do….

…

“Examples like this are as yet too little classified, too little analysed, to convince the stranger, but some of them are proof enough for those they have happened to, proof that there is a memory of Nature that reveals events and symbols of distant centuries. Mystics of many countries and many centuries have spoken of this memory; and the honest men and charlatans, who keep the magical traditions which will someday be studied as a part of folk-lore, base most that is of importance in their claims upon this memory.

…

“I cannot now think symbols less than the greats of all powers whether they are used consciously by the masters f magic, or half unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist. At first I tried to distinguish between symbols and symbols, between what I called inherent symbols and arbitrary symbols, but the distinction has come to mean little or nothing. Whether their power has arisen out of themselves, or whether it has an arbitrary origin, matters little, for they act, as I believe, because the Great Memory associates them with certain events and moods and persons. Whatever the passions of man have gathered about, becomes a symbol in the Great Memory, and in the hands of him who has the secret it is a worker of wonders, a caller-up of angels or of devils.”

 

This is a small taste only of a very compressed and powerful statement of out his experience, for Yeats was an accomplished magician, quite as much as he was a powerful poet and playwright. But I thought it would be of interest to us, his intellectual and spiritual heirs, twelve decades on.

 

Can’t remember where I copied this from.

For those of you who have access to Netflix, i recommend “Mission: Joy. Finding Happiness in Troubled Times,” a documentary of about 80 minutes featuring the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

i paused it at about the one-hour mark, to put up this notice, when the Dalai Lama said, in effect, goodness is basic human nature, but people read newspapers and believe what they read, then feel more hopelessness and then feel that humanity is bad.

That’s very true. I, who was once a news junkie, turned my back on it long ago, starting with any medium depending on commercials, and moving farther and farther away from the mainstream. I somewhat regret losing track of things, sometimes quite acutely, but I see no alternative, at least for me. Other people’s paths differ, of course. But the Dalai Lama’s point remains: You get a distorted view of the world, of each other, when you rely too heavily upon the news as reported.

This isn’t the essence of the program. The essence is living in joy, and there can be no greater affirmation than to watch the joyful interaction between this man who has lived most of his life in exile, and this man who grew up in poverty and had to engage in a lifelong fight against racism and oppression.

It is the truth that Viktor Frankl learned in a concentration camp, and it is no less true today.

This email, from a friend who wishes to remain anonymous, speaks for itself and should interest at least some.

Frank –

The scientific paper at this link has just been published. It concerns experiments that appear to measure the physical effects of a human energy field.

http://www.acamjournal.com/open-access/studies-of-the-origin-and-nature-of-the-energetic-forces-420.pdf

In the experiments described in this paper, I was the experimental subject. (Please keep my anonymity.) I meditated under the apparatus described, which very precisely records the movements of a pendulum arrangement.

The pendulum exhibits anomalous behavior when a human is under or near it. The effects, which can last for a considerable time after the subject has left the seat, do not appear to be from conventionally understood forces.

I thought you would find it interesting.

I greatly enjoy your TGU conversations which I get by E-mail.

…

I continue to try channeling, now in my sixth year of attempts. While I rarely receive anything more than one or two words, I did recently pick up an entire sentence:

“We will provide you with answers and explanations in due time.”

Thanks! Please hurry LOL!

I have found it very efficient to speak into an iPad or Mac instead of taking the time to write down or type my received information or thoughts.

Both of these devices now have outstanding speech-to-text built-in, which rapidly and reliably types into a file anything I say. And these no longer require connection to the Internet to recognize the speech and transcribe it into text, so there is no significant delay in use.

With best regards,