The Follower

2002-2-12 04:53:00

From Self Consciousness to Initiation -- Chapter 4, The Beginning

Class Two -- The Follower

You thought that your troubles were over as you entered Class Two. You were wrapped up in the thought that all was well for the Lord had taken away all your sins. You had reached a personal impasse, there was nothing more you could do, you placed everything in the hands of God and He took care of it for you. He took away your despair and replaced it with peace. It was not from any work or deed you did -- you were saved by His grace.

You had found it.

From now on when you had troubles you would just pile them upon the Lord and he would solve them for you. You would just keep on doing this until you died, then you would go to heaven and worship with the angels eternally.

You thought that your schooling was over. You thought that the Freshman Period, or Class One, was all the learning you would ever need before you returned to God.

How wrong you were.

Nevertheless, after the "born-again" experience you were determined to keep the faith until the end of your life so you could reap your eternal reward. Overall, this was a fairly happy period for you. You had been under such spiritual strain for so many lifetimes, you deserved a little break here, so no great demands were made upon you for a while.

You began to see that all solutions were in neat little packages. Everything was either entirely good or evil with no exceptions. This was the right way and that was the wrong way. Your religion had the absolute answers to all the mysteries that you would ever need to know. This was a wonderful thought for you. You were one of God's chosen ones who had been divinely guided to the correct faith. All those other billions who believed differently would not have the divine deliverance that you had.

You were happy in the fact that God had saved you. Your only sadness, you told yourself, was in the thought of all the ignorant others who had not seen the light as you had. "God is just," you thought. "Therefore, those who are not saved somehow deserve to go to the hell which is prepared for them."

You therefore became quite judgmental. You talked at length with a certain neighbor and you could not get him to accept the Lord the way you did. You liked the guy but felt sorry for him for he was condemned by God because he rejected salvation.

Actually, the neighbor was in a higher class than you were. If you were ready, he could have been your teacher and actually became so in later lives, but alas, you had many lessons to learn first.

In this life, you made your first solid attempt at establishing a relationship based on emotional feeling and values derived from religious rules. Your religion taught you that a man is supposed to be a good loving husband, the head of his home and to be a good father to his children.

This was a helpful teaching for you to acquire. In past lives you had mates, but valued possessions more than you did them. You had very little sense of loyalty to your family. However, during this religious period you did, through the adherence of religious customs, gain this needed sense of loyalty to your loved ones. You learned to be devoted to a cause and the precepts of that cause.

In entering Class Two you switched polarities. When you were in Class One all of your decisions were motivated by instinct and Self interest. It is true that you felt some Emotion, especially near the end of the class period, but as you approached a decision, and felt the influence of Emotion and Instinct, you then followed Instinct.

Now that you are in Class Two and you feel the pull of Emotion and Instinct, you go with Emotion. You have not left Self behind for Self has merely identified itself with Emotion. What now feels best for you seems to be in the best interests if Self.

In this life you had the same wife as the one you traded off earlier. You felt a strong sense of duty toward her and you were faithful to her. You did your best here to do as your religion taught you. You had a little payback from her though. She was quite good-looking, not as religious as you were and somewhat flirtatious. She had numerous affairs behind your back. She did not respect your piety and thought you were backward and awkward. She stayed with you was because of the children and you were a good provider.

You suspected she was cheating on you but could not prove it. Something in you picked up the truth and it made you very restless. This was the main obstacle that kept you from fully enjoying this life.

In the life after this you married her again and she once more cheated on you. This time you discovered her and killed her and her lover. You escaped punishment because of the society in which you lived, but suffered tremendous guilt for a season. Then you underwent the "born-again" experience again. It was powerful and seemed to be a familiar feeling, but not as strong as that experienced in the last life.

You may wonder: Why did you have to experience this feeling over again? The truth is that in all your existence you have the "born-again" experience in many different lifetimes. The first time you experienced this, or any other spiritual experience, the intensity seems to be the greatest.

In each lifetime we have to retrace our steps. All progress we have gained in the past must be repeated in miniature. This is also true physically. Our physical evolution is retraced by the embryo from a one-celled animal, to a tadpole type creature, to a lizard with a tail, and so on to the human. From the age of approximately eight to twenty-one we relive, in fast motion, our spiritual evolution since entering Class One.

This does not mean that you always had the "born-again" experience before the age of twenty-one, but it does mean that you regained all your basic intelligence you had acquired in past lives by the time you reached that age.

In some lives you never had the "born-again" experience and in others you had it as a youth, or in your twenties or thirties. All of your experiences and opportunities are planned by intelligence higher than your Self and they are made to fit in with a growth experience.

In all the lives after you were first "born-again" you had the capacity to experience this at age twenty-one, but sometimes it happened later.

There are exceptions to all rules, however, because of free-will and there were times that you ignored the forces which pushed you toward progress and were not able to duplicate your past successes. When this happened you usually were taken out of incarnation early. This was done according to the law of economy which does not allow us to completely waste our time unless we choose the Dark Path. We shall speak more of this later for this Left Hand Path cannot be chosen in the Class Two period.

Much of what we do in each life is a repeating of accomplishments of the past. We do this for the same reason that we use repetition in memorizing. If we do not repeat the item we will lose it, but if we repeat it enough we never lose it. Similarly, when we gain in consciousness through an experience, then we repeat the experience quite a number of times until we fully adapt to it. As the learning becomes more and more a part of us we find that we only need repeat it occasionally as a refresher and finally none at all. The experience is incorporated into the personality and the ego does not need to dwell on it any more.

So it is with the "born-again" experience. You went through it many times under numerous circumstances until you permanently registered it in your psyche.

The energy which creates the "born-again" experience is from God, but it is a God energy which passes through the emotions with no interpretation from higher parts of yourself. When the God energy is seen through the emotions alone it is as if you were looking in a mirror as Paul said: "For now we see through a glass darkly...." (1 Cor 13:12)  It causes us to see things obscurely, in a reversed matter, as is reflected by a mirror.

In fact, Class Two should be called the class which is given in the "hall of mirrors." To see the real truth in Class Two you must do two things: First come to the realization that there are mirrors reflecting the real thing, but in reality, is reversed. Second, you must look at the opposite of what seems to be the truth to find the truth.

As you started out in Class Two you did not question the mirror image. You accepted all that your feelings fed you as being right without question. There were times, however, that you deviated from your feelings, but each time you did this you felt guilt and pain. Even when you went astray from your feelings you still acknowledged that they were correct.

The problem you had was that you believed in your feelings and tried to follow them but they still did not always bring you peace of mind and happiness. Then when you reverted to your instincts you fared worse yet.

You needed some order to your life. You needed to find the will of God so you could just follow it and then you did not have to worry about your instincts or emotions leading you astray.

After your "born-again" experience you found this order in a God "up there." Some said that this God was a wise Heavenly Father who knew all things and could always be trusted. Your religion seemed to tell you he was a being in the form of a man who sat on a throne in the heavens. In another breath it told you that God was an omni-present Spirit who was everywhere. You never tried to mentally put together how both could be true, but your thoughts seemed to drift toward accepting the kind wise old man on a throne. When you said your prayers you liked to think of this image.

This was a change for you, for in the beginning you saw God as a Great Spirit who was in all things. God was in the plants, the animals, the earth and even man. Now you saw God as "out there" somewhere on a throne. You began to think it was primitive to think of God as in plants, rocks, animals and so on. Yes, God was a loving father. You could see him in your mind.

There was only one problem with this idea. You could not personally talk to God and receive instructions from him. Surely you could be with him all you wanted in the next world, but this one God seemed reluctant to soil himself by giving continuous revelation to man.

Where was God's word? This was a question you would ask yourself many times in numerous lifetimes and to this question you received many different answers. All the answers were partially correct, but none were entirely correct. They were all given to you to cause you to seek the true answer.

During Class Two you were told that God's word was in a Holy book. You were told that this book contained all of God's word to man and that we will never need any more. If you follow the words of the book you will be saved and never be led astray.

You were somewhat confused, however, when you tried to understand the book by yourself. You needed help in interpreting it. In seeking this help you discovered that the founder of your religion was a great man who was very close to God. He was such a saint that surely his interpretations of scripture were more accurate than any that you could dream up.

It would be so nice if you could talk to him, but he was dead and beyond your reach. Nevertheless, you were reassured by your religion that the current leaders of your church were equally as close to God. All the interpretations of the book that they give out to the flock are infallibly correct and agree with the original leader. The reason they are correct is because they teach exactly what was is in the book.

It did not occur to you at that time to ask why leaders of other religions were also claiming to teach exactly what is in the book and they differ in opinion from your religion.

You did not want to be bothered with this. Emotion does not discriminate. It merely wants yes or no, right or wrong, not shades of gray. You wanted something which was either all right or all wrong.

You decided to accept as truth exactly what your religious leaders told you that the Book meant. Discerning all the nuances of the book itself was too big of a task, but accepting the basic truths given out by the leaders was quite simple. It was a simple black-and-white thing to do, and, at that time, you were capable of nothing more.

The leaders were not too demanding on you. They seemed to realize that living all the teachings of the Book were somewhat impractical and were quite tolerant of some of your weaknesses as long as you acknowledged their high position.

The one thing they were not tolerant of was that of anyone questioning their authority, or the correctness of their teachings. In fact if you think back you may remember a life you lived in Palestine when you saw religious leaders crucify the greatest of us all, even Jesus, because he brought their teachings into question. I am not going to tell you whether you had enough light at that time to see beyond the doctrine of the those religious leaders, but there was a time when you did not. None of us were able to see through the illusion when we were beginning in Class Two. Even Jesus went through this schooling in ancient times in another solar system and "though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered." (Heb 5:8)

Even so all the grades in this earth school teach us obedience by the things which we suffer.

As a beginner in Class Two then, you accepted without question the teachings of your religious leaders.

At times it was difficult for you to live up to their standards, but at least you did not have to do a lot of thinking for yourself. You did not have to risk making a big mistake. All you had to do was follow the leader and all would be well, so you thought. If things did not turn out right then it was the leader's fault, and not your own. A beginning Class Two student does not like to take responsibility.

You were not in the same religion in each life, but were placed in numerous different ones for each had something to teach you. It seemed that when you condemned a particular religion in one life that you were born into that religion in the next. This forced you to see opposing points of view.

All the religions you were born into had diverse teachings, but all seemed to have some ultimate authority that was not to be questioned. Some of the religions had a book as the authority, as we mentioned earlier. With some others it was a living man who had some special communication with God that was beyond the rest of the flock. Listening to this person was the same as listening to God. This seemed more exciting in some ways than finding God in a book. You had always wanted to talk with God and talking to this man was the same thing.

Then in another life your authority was some type of priest who claimed to be just a man like yourself, but was honored by God with a position of authority. Because God had placed him in this position you were duty-bound to accept him just as you would God, because he was taking the place of God. If he were to make a mistake you were to follow him anyway and you would be given credit in heaven as if you had followed God.

Your discriminating mind had not developed yet so you did not try to make sense of this, but it appealed to you because it was black-and-white. You only had one decision to make. Either follow or not follow.

The one thing these religions had in common was that they all had a human representative (or representatives) who had special insight into the mind of God (or power from God) and this insight was not to be questioned any more than you were to question God if he were here.

Your religious authorities seemed to support other authorities. They seemed to work in close harmony with political, medical and educational authorities. It was as if they were all in some brotherhood. There were sometimes minor disagreements with the fringes of these brotherhoods, but overall they seemed members of the same club. All major authorities in your life were pleased with you if you accepted them reverently. They were even more pleased if you respected authorities in other fields. They called you "stable" for doing this.

But somehow you sensed this stability would not last forever.

  

-- End Of Chapter Four --

  

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