Public Meeting
First Quarter 1987
How Can One Improve His Self-Esteem?
Q. What are some methods that are useful for self esteem?
A. That is a very large subject since it touches on almost everything in one’s life. But there are some techniques by which to better control your environment and yourself. It’s great to feel that you are in control and know that your emotions are beneficial to you and will move you further upward rather than feeling victimized by life. You really feel that you are an okay human being and you like yourself. If you love yourself, it is no longer necessary to impose yourself on other people. You become more selfless, and it’s more important to you to do things for other people than to do things for yourself. You have the strength to support them rather than seek their support of your insufficiencies. Practicing the things that you hope to eventually become always makes it easier to actually acquire them. If you have a goal model, visualize yourself as that person and practice acting like that person. Anything that you can set your mind on becoming, you can be. You can completely change your personality around. Your subconscious mind, which evaluates the worthiness, acceptability, and reality of your every action and your self-image, can be reprogrammed to fit whatever you can imagine. The subconscious mind is the place where every experience and response you’ve ever had is stored, yet it is totally unable to distinguish between reality and imagination, since that is the function of the conscious mind. Whatever you will to do, however, is first judged by the unconscious as to its feasibility. If you have been programmed by yourself and others that you are unworthy or inept or unlovable, you have low self-esteem; so you will exhibit the behavior of a loser. But if you reprogram yourself with continual imaginary scenarios of success, love, and worthiness, then your subconscious judges you to be capable of those very things, and you will act upon those images instead of being self-limited to failure.
How Can One Deal with Excessive Emotions?
Q. I have a conflict on how to handle some feelings. Say that you are in a situation where you feel anger at something. On one side, I get the sentiment that you should feel that anger and find an acceptable outlet for it. I mean, go home and beat on the bed with a tennis racket or go out in the field and shout at the sky if you are angry at a co-worker. Don’t blister his ear, but find a constructive outlet for it. On the other side, there is the sentiment that says transmute that anger. Say, yes I am angry, which means that I want something I am not getting. What is it that I want and what am I doing to get what I want, and thus rationalize yourself through the anger. Which way is right?
A. Both, depending upon where you happen to be at the moment in your thinking or feelings. Both ways work. They are just two techniques for helping to get it over with. The person that is suffering the most from your anger is you. So you have to rationally decide if the anger is justifiable and what should be done about it. Do you straighten out your own thinking because it is not rational for you to be angry, or should you straighten the other guy out because he is causing that justifiable anger in you? You have to try to see clearly what the root of your response is. You never become angry when you are in control of a situation. But bottling up anger and denying it is destructive. It ends up as hypertension and ulcers and things of that sort, which means that you really didn’t get rid of the anger. You didn’t discharge it, you just internalized it, and now it’s taking it out on you rather than on somebody else.
Can One Intellectualize Neurosis Away?
Q. Can’t you just recognize hang-ups intellectually, and say such and so happened to me, so I can stop having a problem with it now?
A. People with phobias, for instance, are terrified of something as commonplace as a cat or a high place or crowds, and they haven’t the foggiest notion of where it comes from. The cause is just completely blocked from their conscious memory. The only way back is through psychoanalysis, or dream therapy, and methods of that sort. Step-by-step the therapist has to go back and try to eventually uncover the true source of those emotions. This is a hit-or-miss proposition which can go on for a long period of time before you are likely to get to the root cause, and in many cases you never do. You can probably uncover such causes on your own be using the same psychoanalytic techniques. We all have buried anxieties and repressed traumatic experiences, and I don’t think that any of us could live long enough to completely rid ourself of them, which is one of the problems of growing up in a society where so many negative things are put upon us. We retain childish responses which are usually out of proportion to the strength of the stimulus and live our lives modified by them. We did it to ourselves, as it were, but it would be much nicer if we didn’t have a society that was putting all of these painful situations and images on us.
What Is the Connection Between Attitude and
Advancement?
Q. You’ve said negative attitudes can downgrade your Egoic character on the Astral Plane, and it seems like attitudes have a lot to do with character development on the physical plane as well. What’s the connection between attitudes and Egoic Advancement?
A. Everyone operates on the basis of what he really believes, not what our religion or philosophy says we are supposed to believe. What you believe determines your attitudes, and your attitudes, in turn, determine how you’re going to respond to different happenings in your life. For example, take several people to whom the same kind of experiences occurs. How do they view that event? One person may see it as a tragedy, another as an interesting sidelight, and yet another totally disregards it. Our growth is dependent not only upon the experiences we have but upon how we feel about them and what we understand about them. Our attitudes predetermine the particular direction our thoughts will take. Thoughts modify our subjective environment and attract external conditions into our lives. We project into the Universe our mental energies and pictures, and the Universe responds in kind.
Attitudes count heavily in our soul growth because they are our habits of thinking. You must change thought habits in order to look at things in new and different ways. You can alter the impact of circumstances by taking a different attitude toward them. This is called mental transmutation and it is a very valuable tool. It’s a conscious method of evolving a different attitude about the things that are in your environment or things that happen to you or your own thoughts.
Are Ego and Mind the Same?
A. An Ego is an individualized portion of Mind power. At the last progression of the life waves, all the animal life essence moved to human life essence and then the powers of Mind were conveyed by God to that essence. That essence is an energy on the fourth place of existence; and after it was endowed with Mind power, it was divided into discrete portions we call Egos. The knowledge and mental skills that an Ego has accumulated over all his lifetimes is what we call his soul. The Ego, being an individualized portion of Mind power, regards his experiences in ways that are unique to himself. Soul can be destroyed but Ego cannot. If, at the progression of the life waves, a person has not achieved Mastership, then all his soul knowledge is removed and he is put back to being pure Ego without any memory of experience. An Ego is never destroyed. Once an Ego is created, he exists forever until eventually he achieves Mastership, Angelic, Archangelic, and Celestial advancement. There is no difference between the Mind power originally granted a man or a woman. Their experiences over many incarnations are usually different, but they arrive at degrees of advancement in equal numbers.
What Do Male and Female Bodies Manifest at Birth?
Q. What then is the difference that manifests between male and female Egos at birth?
A. The many thousands of experiences an Ego has had as either a man or a woman. Character evolves differently through masculine experiences than it does through feminine experiences. Egoic needs are identical for all human beings regardless of one’s polarity. Character must operate in the context of the sex of one’s body and the culture into which one is born. This has a decided influence on how one’s personality will develop. Personality is that bag of tricks which you evolved each lifetime in order to meet your needs as easily and comfortably as possible without running afoul of karmic and social law. How you interact with other people is your personality and it can be modified as you mature during an incarnation. Character and personality are not the same. Character remains basically constant and determines the background color of one’s Astral aura. Emotions show in the aura as flares of different colors, depending on whether a person is angry, sad, etc. Character is gradually evolved over tens of thousands of years and is a basic part of an Ego’s soul.
What Is the Difference Between an Astral Shell and
Astral Body?
Q. What is the difference between an astral shell and an Astral Body?
A. When an animal dies, it takes about three days for its astral energies to be depleted individually from each of the cells. At that point, the Astral Body has dissolved and the energies have returned to the pool of Animal Life Essence. The dissolving Astral Body of an animal stays with the animal’s physical body after death and does not travel around on the Astral Plane.
Human beings have an Astral Body that stays with their physical body all the time and it can be “seen” by a clairvoyant as a narrow band of light around the physical body. When the human physical body dies, the Astral Body disappears as the Animal Life Essence departs.
An astral shell can be formed at will almost instantly while a human being is functioning out of body or while between incarnations on the Astral Plane. This shell is used for identification purposes. When one’s Ego is away from the physical body to allow it to sleep, he can Egoically travel. Your Ego is either mentally associated with your body in awake consciousness or else away from the body during sleep. The person who has learned to mentally project his experiences during Egoic traveling upon his sleeping body’s brain, whereby it can be recalled upon awakening, is said to be an astral traveler.
Masters residing on the Mental Plane of existence use a Mental Body. One fully develops his Mental Body somewhere around the eleventh degree of Brotherhood. Masters prefer to mentally induce an image of how They want to be seen. They prefer not to create an astral shell since it takes about three days for the shell to dissolve. During that time, lower entities might inhabit the shell in order to impersonate Higher Beings.
What Is Clairvoyance?
A. Clairvoyance is the ability to perceive the two planes of existence that have the next higher nutational rates of vibration above the physical plane: the Astral and Etheric Planes. This ability has nothing to do with actual physical sight; it is essentially the mental perception of another human being’s mental activities and/or physical state. The mind energy of another Ego is perceived by clairvoyants as a large, colorful, ever-changing emanation known as the aura. If the Ego being viewed is incarnate he also has an Astral Body made up of atoms of the third nutational rate and an astral radiation which is due to the Animal Life Essence animating his body’s cells. These appear as a narrow band of light slightly larger than the physical body. The aura associated with a person’s Egoic mind can be “seen” whether that person is disembodied or in his physical vehicle, and the aura fluctuates as a direct result of the person’s mind activity.
Clairvoyant
abilities usually start with a person being able to see the Vital Body and
related etheric energies of plants and animals. The Vital Body is “seen” as a
narrow band of light around every living organism. The Vital Body of humans is
also seen as a narrow band around the physical vehicle, which is strictly an
animal organism. Being able to see the Vital Body enables persons of sufficient
clairvoyant abilities to “read” the state of another person’s health or to see
any etheric energy blockages that might exist. The auras of human beings
reflect the mind energies of the person. Our inner makeup is on display
wherever we are for those people who are able to perceive the etheric and
astral auras.
Are Acupuncture Points Related to the Chakras?
Q. Are acupuncture points related to the chakras?
A. The energy that feeds the Vital Bodies of plants, animals, and men from the sun is an energy on the second plane of existence which radiates to the Earth for sustenance for all living creatures. This etheric energy enters your body at specific points and follows pathways which are part of our Vital Body. These pathways lead to organs deep inside your body and then to the surface of the body again so that the flow forms a loop in and out. The surface inlets and outlets are the acupuncture points. Chakras, on the other hand, are seen on the Astral Plane. To some clairvoyants they look like flowers slowly turning on the back and on the head.
There are seven major plexi of the autonomic nervous system along our spinal column and head. Each of the plexi controls one of the endocrine glands. Chemical-electrical nerve energy on the physical plane flows through the plexi and so does the etheric energy which sustains the Vital Body. On the Astral plane, the animal life essence which animates the living cells also flows through the plexi. Because emotions originate in our mind on the fourth plane, our emotions have an effect, through the plexi, on four levels: the physical, the Etheric, the Astral, and the Mental planes. Emotions affect the endocrine glands, and resultant changes in energy flow through the plexi can be seen clairvoyantly in the corresponding chakras on the Astral Plane. Various emotions, such as fear or anger, cause changes in the size, colors, and rotation rate of the chakras. An Ego who is decarnate on the Astral Plane has no chakras. Chakras are associated with a person’s physical body, and they are astral phenomena directly associated with the nerve plexi.
Are the Brotherhoods Promoting All This Technology?
Q. Do the Brotherhoods have anything to do with the extensive technological developments of this century?
A. Only to the extent that they have encouraged
persons who have that kind of technical background to incarnate at this
particular time. The Brotherhoods have been concerned with the establishment of
a small, tight-knit core of people who are going to found the Nation of God.
That is what the city of