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What is the mastery of the self? To properly answer this question, we must first define the self. Know, O chela of the light, that you are what you are regardless of what you think you are. The affirmation of the Real Self of every man and woman - the declaration of being and consciousness - is I AM WHO I AM.1
From out the white-fire core of the individualization of the God flame, the eternal Presence declares the geometry of self-realization. A God is born. And out of that God, self-awareness, as a ball of identity, is thrust into the planes of Matter. The ball, a microcosm of selfhood flung from far-off worlds, is an extension of the Great Spirit. It is an extension of God-selfhood, of self-awareness in other dimensions.
The ball is a microcosm spun out of the great Macrocosm of all-pervading consciousness that men call God. The ball of self is suspended in that consciousness, tethered to its source by the thread of contact that is called the crystal cord. And so the ball of identity, like a child's toy bouncing from an elastic string tied to a paddle, is free to move in time and space, yet ever subject to the movement of the hand of the Great Law that governs its comings and its goings in finite dimensions.
"O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens. ... When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained, what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet."2
To define the self for those who have not yet realized the self, I must employ terms that you understand in your present twilight awareness, in the hopes that these terms will translate to the outer self certain images of the inner self and thereby provide you with the foundations for an ever-expanding awareness of being.
There is a portion of the self that is immutable. That portion of selfhood that is the permanent atom of being is called the I AM Presence. It is the Monad of Self suspended in the planes of Spirit. It is the Godhead individualized as a living flame, as a point of consciousness, as a sphere of identity. It is God - your God Self.
The goal of life and of self-mastery is to merge with this atom of selfhood that is absolute reality. Thus we have established the purpose for self-mastery. But we have not entirely defined the self; nor have we answered the question of the chela who has asked, "What is the purpose of selfhood and the self?"
In answer to this question, the Lord Buddha has said, "Only when you realize the full potential of your self will you fully understand the purpose of self." Nonetheless, I am permitted to explain that the nature of God as consciousness is realized in the infinite frequencies of both the spiritual and the material cosmos in aspects of God self-awareness infinitely diversified, infinitely unified. Therefore, if you could dial your own consciousness one by one through the infinite stations, or frequencies, of God's consciousness, by and by through billions of light-years of self-transcending selfhood, you would begin to have a perspective of the constant that is God - a constantly self-transcending energy field.
And now, blessed chelas, lest you despair on the path of discovering the self, let us turn aside for a moment from our self-ponderings of the infinite and see what portion of the Infinite One has been realized in the immediate forcefield of that which you call your self.
The seed of this self, of course, had to come forth from the Great God Self, for there is no other source from whence it could come. Cycling through the spheres of the great Monad of Life, the seed of self-awareness gathers skeins of light - thread by thread, wound and woven, woven and wound about the point of awareness, building an energy field. And the seed becomes a soul born out of Spirit's own union with life. And the soul is a miniature sun revolving about the central sun of Universal Being.
You see, the energy that is God, that is the white-fire core of consciousness, is in perfect polarity - plus and minus. The sphere of God-being is a whirling atom that is called the Alpha-to-Omega. Out of the whirling of the polarity of the I AM THAT I AM, the seed of the soul is born. And as it moves through the cycles of the Monad, it forms a new polarity with the center. And the electron of selfhood, a new selfhood, is born.
That electron, when thrust forth from the atom of God's being, is the materialization of the God flame. With the bursting-forth of the negative polarity of the first atom of selfhood, Matter and the material cosmos was born - the counterpart of Spirit and the spiritual cosmos. As God multiplied himself over and over again in the I AM Presence (the individualized spark of being), the seeds that became souls - the souls that were thrust from the planes of Spirit - became living souls in the planes of Matter.
Just as the seed gathered skeins of light to form the identity of the soul, so the emergent souls gathered skeins of Matter to form the vehicles of selfhood in time and space - the mind, the memory, the emotions tethered to the physical form. Thus veiled in flesh and blood, the soul was equipped to navigate in time and space. Billions of seeds of selfhood are evolving in the solar systems that span the far reaches of the material cosmos. Alas, souls evolving in the whirl of energy you call your world have not the perspective of their origin in the vast beyond.
This which you call your self, then, is a finite portion of the infinite, a little world of selfhood destined to one day become, through self-realization, the greater world of selfhood. By free will the souls of man and woman may experiment with the laws governing time and space and may elect, as electrons of the central sun, to return to the white-fire core of being through conformity with the mind of God.
Know, O chela of the will of God, that the purpose of the path and of chelaship is that you might bring that portion of selfhood that has separated from the center, that has gone forth into the Matter cosmos, into eternal alignment with the permanent atom of being.
Unfortunately, once the separation occurred, the soul's adaptation to the frequencies of Matter resulted, after millions of years of evolution, in a loss of memory of origin, of true being, and of the wholeness of the self. As the memory of selfhood became more and more obscured by the frequencies of Matter, the mind, the emotions, the form, and the form consciousness were found less and less in conformity with the inner lodestone of reality, the I AM Presence. And by and by these sheaths of awareness that surrounded the soul took on an identity of their own - and a pseudoidentity at that.
This pseudoidentity was molded by the awareness of life in Matter which little by little became independent of the soul's inner awareness of the Real Self. And the sheaths of identity produced a self-identification based upon the mirrored images of selfhood reflected from face to face, from life to life, yet never mirroring the face of reality or the life that is God.
"Now we see through a glass, darkly."3 To address a civilization that is based solely upon the pseudoimage of selfhood which we call the synthetic image - the image that is a manufactured counterfeit of the Real Self - and to say to that civilization, "That which you think you are, you are not: that which you think you are not, you are," we must appeal to the soul and to the soul's distant memory of reality. This we do in the certainty that the souls who are ready will be quickened. "Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left."4
Our purpose in this series of Pearls of Wisdom, O chela, is to take you by the hand and lead you gently from the outer awareness of mind, memory, and emotions - feelings, percepts, and recepts registering through the five senses that are tethered to a material existence - to the inner awareness of the soul through the discipline of energies and consciousness. That portion of the self which you have invested in this outer awareness must be withdrawn from the outer and reinvested in the inner.
At that point we begin the development of the consciousness of the soul that is called solar awareness. Newly born to the soul, you must begin to learn to experience life with the faculties of the soul. Like the five physical senses, these senses of the soul, dormant for aeons, are being quickened by cosmic currents and cosmic rays to realign that which you call your self to the point of identity that is in reality your Real Self.
Until we come together again for the contemplation of the finite self against the backdrop of the Infinite Self, won't you consider the query of the Psalmist "What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?" Consider how being springs from being springs from being and how molecules of selfhood emerge from other molecules of selfhood, which emerge from still other molecules of self-consciousness. For to become the Real Self, you must meditate upon that self, its origin and destiny - its laws, its geometry.
I have given you a series of expanding matrices designed to expand, through your own meditation, the circumference of self-awareness.