Five Modalities

Consciousness and The Arts, Individual Values, Love and Psychology, Religion and Yoga, Science and Materialism

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Jesus says, “Two fight three, and three fight two in one house”. The two are the Will and the Intellect; the three are the lower mental activities, the emotions, and the inertias of the physical body.

Let us look at these five more closely. They are modalities of the sixth principle which transcends and embraces them. The five, counting from the lowest, are

  1. the Body,
  2. the Feeling-Emotions,
  3. the Time-thinkings or Mentations,
  4. the Eternal Principles or Concepts, and
  5. the Will or Initiative.
  6. The sixth is Consciousness itself.
  • The Body is the easiest to consider, for we can locate it in space, touch it, experience its resistance.
  • Feelings and Emotions are less easy to deal with, because of their fluidity or instability.
  • Time-thinkings or Mentions are like Time itself, floating, momentary, here one moment, gone the next.
  • Eternal principles are hard to hold because of their high abstraction.
  • But hardest of the five is the Will itself, for it is present only in the now-moment. “Initiative” means the power that starts action. Only at the now-moment when an act is started is initiative or free will present. Immediately afterwards the effects of initiative roll on their way as inertias.

Freedom implies Self-responsibility

We repeat, only at the instant of the start of an act is there real initiative or will. After it the released forces go on their way as inertia. From this it follows that the man of spirit must from moment to moment re-posit his awareness of himself as the initiator of his own acts. He must hold himself wholly responsible for all his actions. We can see immediately why there is so little tendency to re-gain our lost freedom. Freedom implies self-responsibility, and this implies possible “comeback”. “As you sow, so shall you reap“, says Jesus. This is the most frightening of all thoughts.

We live in a world constituted of power.

Our every thought, feeling and will releases energy into our environment.

Energy cannot act without producing reactions. With every act we perform, we impose not only on our surroundings, but also, by the reactions we stimulate, on ourselves.

We are our own executioners.

This, of course, is as it should be, but not as we like it.
We prefer to believe that not all our actions generate reactions.
We prefer to believe that the energies we release will somehow be dissipated or absorbed by the environment, and that we shall not have to deal with their results, unless we find them pleasant enough for our glad acceptance.

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