by Yada di Shi’ite

Yada: It is very interesting to learn of the intricacies of man’s life at large and the extreme complexity of creation. Everything that can be seen, meaning form, matter in form, has its origin in what is called geometrical patterns in and formed by the primary substance which is sometimes referred to by what is called Fohat.

Student: That is the Theosophical term?

Yada: Yes. Now this is, as of course you know, a name, a label. Of course human beings put labels and tags on everything. When a form is created, a label is put on it. But before this, the substance that creates that form also gets a label. This is the only way man can intelligently catalog his learnings, but I think it is the smart man who knows there is a difference between that which is named and that which is not named, the un-nameable. Knowing this, he no longer has reason to fight with meanings where names are concerned. He is no longer intrigued by ultimates. He knows he can learn only so much; he can go only so far in naming. He knows that, unless he does catalog that which he learns, his learnings will be lost. Man is a cataloguer and all because he has lost awareness that he was the originator of it all. When he came here he lost his awareness, as he does in most cases, and last, he forgets that he was an earthman when he leaves here.

Not everybody, by any means, has a memory of earth-life after he has been moved out of it. There is a kind of sleep that falls on most minds. After a short period of time you may say the post mortem state has to come to an end. Now, this is good. Were it not so we would not be able to learn about the life we are going into, or the life we have come out of to come here to the physical world.

For one to know their origin is to live their knowing. This means they could not stay in the physical world; they could not stay in the astral world, for what we know, we become. Is it not so? Now, after we have reached a certain state of development, then things take a change, conditions for us are changed. We can move freely from plane to plane and remember the planes we are on and the planes we are going to. We have memory patterns of how these conditions are, but for a man to live, a human being to live freely and completely on one particular plane, even the smartest, the most advanced in knowledge, largely shuts off his memory of the plane he has just come from.

He has experienced it, experienced what he had to do while he was there. What would be gained by continued memory of that plane? What, indeed, is a plane but a state of consciousness, a state of consciousness that has been created and is created out of one’s need? These needs have arisen out of attitudes toward experiences on that particular plane.

Many people who come to the physical world have no memory of having lived in a place called the astral world, or any other higher state of consciousness, or even of ever having lived on earth before. No memory of it! Yet they do have a kind of memory of it. That memory shows itself by what these people do here. To take an example of what I mean, let us consider someone coming as a great musician; he has no memory of having lived on the earth before. Sometimes he does, but this is very rare. What seems to make him a genius in music is his compulsion, the unconscious drive to create music. You may take from him all the writings of music, you may put him in prison, you may deafen him. As you well know, there have been several great masters in music who were deaf, but this did not stop them.

The only way you can stop such a person is to kill him. If he does not make music for the world, he will lose his intelligence. He will become what is called insane. Music is his life. It is his nature. He can do no other, and this is true also of the criminal mind. Do you think that by putting these people in prison you can stop them from committing crimes? All the time they are in there they are hatching crimes. They never stop. They cannot stop. The only way you can stop them is to condition them hypnotically and this takes a great deal of time, a great deal of work and even then, if you do not keep guard, these people will revert to their criminal ways. You may say, oh, there have been many, many people who were criminals who were changed by certain, experiences and stopped their crimes.

Only for the time being. They have not stopped. They go on with it mentally if this is their nature, if these memory patterns have been sown there. They may change over several lifetimes, yes. Let us say one is born into a country where crime is encouraged, like certain factions that are known as the Thuggas. These people are trained from early childhood to be criminals. The training has become so set in their minds that they, lifetime after lifetime, can have this kind of recall even though they move their consciousness into creating another body in another country.

The human brain as far as objective consciousness is concerned, is by its nature subject to what is called suggestion – hypnotism. We all work and live this way; by suggestion. If not by our own after we have broken away from others who have given us suggestions to keep us moving as that particular society thinks is best, then by ourselves, by our experiences. Our attention is held and our mind becomes set. Nothing, no experiences and no attitude to an experience is ever lost.

We find this true in the nature of all things in the whole vast universe. Nothing new has come into the universe and nothing has gone out of it. We humans, by our attitudes to our experiences, create our own existence; so it is a wise man that reasons, or tries to reason with the nature of his own being. What is it? Am I doing this or doing that because I am under compulsions from some other experience in the now of my life, or some other now of the past? Or do I have command over my life? Am I the master of my fate and the captain of my soul? I am quoting, of course, you know. Do I do these things because I see the intelligence in them, or because I have been moved emotionally to act?

Now, to be moved emotionally is very nice if you have control over those emotions. But that is the problem. Many people among you are known in your society as nice people, kindly people, good people. If they are, you may be sure they are fighting memory patterns from when they were not such nice people. I think your psychiatrists and your more educated psychologists are aware of this, though they may not say or admit to any past life; they at least know what an adult is and what he has been by his attitudes to experiences from the day he came here, and before he got here at the time of conception. Yes, I think your modern psychologists know this.

I do not think it is possible that you can do this sort of thing, but I think it would be a very helpful thing regarding your criminals and your courts of law. How often, if ever, when a – what you call them – a victim, a prisoner, one who has committed a crime is brought into your courts of law, how often does the judge ask this one, how did you get here? What brought you here? How did you get started? His crime is not of what he is facing the court for now; his crime had its origin in his early life and perhaps even in another life. But these facts are not taken into consideration by your courts, and I do not know that they should be, because right now you do not have the time to take care of your criminals, to judge them, and you do not have enough money to pacify your politicians so that they would be interested, so that they could forget money long enough to be concerned with justice and the law per se. That is why your country is full of crime. Very few times does a doctor try to find out why one is sick. What is the origin of your present sickness? When did it start? What were some of your early symptoms of sickness?

How many of your people in the medical world today do not seem to recognize (and if they do they pay no attention to it) that this disorder of the stomach that is called mild case of sour stomach, acid stomach, indigestion, they do not think for a moment that this is going to lead up to, and is the beginning of a complete glandular breakdown. The slow process of it begins to show itself in what is called ulcers. And what started all this? What was the origin of it? Early frustrations, early anxieties, early fears, uncertainties. These have caused the energies, the strong vital energies and substances to react negatively upon their body and create blocks in the nerves and blocks in the glandular system so that the glandular system cannot function properly anymore.

I think sometime the medical man will, especially if you are going into one of your hospitals, try to get some kind of history of your sickness in the past. Do you know if this is so?

Student: Yes, they always take what they call a history of the patient, of the diseases the patient has had, but they do not dig any deeper in order to find out how the first ailment started.

Yada: This is so.

Student: Consequently they are not aware of the fact that the seat of the illness needs to be brought to the surface.

Yada: No. They treat the symptoms. They are not interested. They are only interested in you as a unit of disorder in a healthy society that they think is harmonious.

Every criminal becomes an object of condemnation to the entire society and the laws thereof. To punish this criminal is like punishing someone who is suffering from some kind of physical diseases. Punishment is not the answer to the stopping of crime. To stop it, get at the seat of the crime, what started it? Now the truth of what I am saying is very evident in your system today for you take a criminal, put him in jail, hold him there for a given number of years, months, or whatever, and you let him out again and you think he is alright. You think he is going to stop committing crime? Almost never does he stop, and when he does stop, the only thing that causes him to stop or to appear to have stopped, is his fear of further punishment. It is like telling a man to stop drinking, please, because if you don’t, you are going to die. Now I am certain that this is not going to stop him. To condemn him to death is not the answer. To threaten him is not going to cure him.

Student: Yada, before you came in were you aware of the experiment that was being demonstrated to us and I was wondering if the application of something like this would help a doctor in some manner to become more aware of where the disease lay?

Yada: To some extent, yes. If the doctor would learn the nature of the make-up of the patient it would help him considerably, but he does not have time for that so it is unimaginable to me that you could even interest your doctors in anything like this. They are interested, not in patients, not in healing, but in making money.

Student: Occasionally we do become aware of a psychiatrist who is interested in this sort of thing.

Yada: Yes, and there are medical men who, even though they are medical men, are interested in this. There are many who would like to do better, but your social system has them crowded around by making demands that they live like the crowd and make money, make money. This is the whole scheme, the whole plan of your social system and you talk about India having a caste system! You have it right here in your own country! A caste system! Without money, what are you? The rich try to propagandize the glory of being poor, but this is to keep the poor from wanting to be rich and crowding them out. No, your social system has not taught honour, respect, intelligence to the young. The teachers, the adults, those adults who, in time, have gathered so much misinformation about life, about the facts of being, are no longer capable of doing the intelligent thing for the sake of intelligent action.

Student: They don’t know how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Yada: No. It is, how much can I make by being intelligent? To what degree of intelligence must I go to make money? Your schools teach this. The schools are a system of teaching for money, not for the joy of doing good work, but for what their financial status will be, what their status will be in their social system. And do you want to go out and change all this? Do I want to change all this? Not really.

So what do we want? What is all this talk about, all this much ado about nothing? All this self-development is not the effort to develop someone else. Did not the man called Jesus work for his own intelligence before He could go out and help teach those who were coming up behind Him, the incoming members of the mystical order? A man going to school must educate himself before he can educate his pupils, or even have pupils; so all this ado is about something. That something is you. There is a short saying in your world. It is charity begins at home. Now this is very trite. It becomes trite, becomes stale, as it is bandied about with no sincerity behind it, but it is a great truth.

Most of the metaphysical people are out trying to hustle members for their particular organizations. It is as if the more members they have, the better they are, but what they mean is the bigger they are, the more financial power they get.

You want membership as yourself. Life is the greatest and the only true organization. You are a member of it by birth. You are a member into the Light, not by physical birth but by mental awareness of the divine nature of your own being. By the way you respond to your experiences called living, you are going through the initiation, you are suffering the cross of ignorance in order to rise again into the Divine Light, to return to yourself, to the Christ within.

Where do you stand in this great and only organization? Only you know that. No books, no teachers, no great or small gurus can tell you. None can lead you into the Light; none can open the door to the Room of Light. Only you can do that. The best that any teacher, any organization, can do for you or for me is to let us know that there is a possibility that we are greater beings than we have any idea of.

My friends, there is a possibility. Do you want to know whence comes your suffering and all this endless trouble to exist, to exist right here in the physical world? It is not a drive for a greater state of being whether you call it the Christian heaven or otherwise, because we do not know if such states exist. We do not know. This means we have to find out and all that does for them is to say that there is a possibility that you are greater than you have any idea of. Do you not think it is worth a little of your time to see if this is so? If you do, I can offer you one small reward and that is, you will discover why you are suffering and this will tell you, automatically, how to get out of it.

Getting out of it is, what we who do not think, are trying to do all the time, but the path we take is an emotional one which is called running away, escaping. We cannot do this because there is nowhere to go. The thought which bothers me can be gotten rid of nowhere. Everywhere I go that which I am is still with me. What is it that is with me? When I know, then I will know how to get away so that it will no longer pursue me.

Student: If you stand and face it you will find that it is not so terrible as it seems.

Yada: Of course, of course. If one who is to become annointed, if he is to take his initiation, which he must do, he must face it without fear and he will discover, to his great joy, that it is not so painful as he thought. It is our fear of the unknown that causes us to run, either physically or mentally. We who seek to know must come to the realization that we cannot be hurt, we cannot be harmed, that every experience we suffer is good for us. It furthers our education; it brings us to know what is, and knowing what is we automatically know what is not. Now, does one who steps into a higher light wherein he has the understanding of the nature of his physical surroundings, does he try to stop what is going on there? Of course not. He sees what it is and, therefore, tries to rise above it. It no more touches him, but he sees that it is good for those who have not risen above it. It is a necessity for them.

Student: A caterpillar must be a caterpillar before it can become a butterfly.

Yada: This is so. Would it be intelligent for one who has become a butterfly to look back and frown on the caterpillar or to be worried about being a cocoon? Can he look down on these states from which he has come and say, be no more. You are evil, you are not necessary. In order to become a butterfly he must be a caterpillar and then a cocoon. He must go through these stages, so he pays no attention to these things he once was, whether a cocoon or a caterpillar. All his attention is centered on being a butterfly. In his short life, he lives it so fully, that he is not concerned about his departure from the cocoon state. He is not concerned with time. He lives only in action, in motion. This makes him a wonderful being, a wonderfully whole being.

I think that man did not eat of the Tree of Life. He ate of the Tree of Knowledge and then forgot which tree he ate from, because he shows so little understanding of the nature of life and his own being. Am I to do anything about it? No. It is right, it is good, and this is the way it is. How can we argue with that which is?

Student: You can’t argue that the cocoon stage was wrong.

Yada: No. Then again, the caterpillar stage has its caterpillar is-ness. No time did he argue about it and say, I wish I was a cocoon. I would be in a more beautiful state, or I wish I was past my state of cocoon-ness and was now a butterfly. What a vanity! One of your great bards says that life is of the stuff that dreams are made of. This is true only to the sleeper, the low emotional-self who knows not. All is confusion for him because he is always seeking to be what he is not yet and forgets that he is in the process. In his forgetfulness of what he is, he suffers, for the emotional self never forgets. The emotional self, the ego self, has its mind so set on itself that it is not concerned about higher states of being. This is why it is so difficult to rise above that emotional self. It is a hypnotic state; it is an entranced state.

I have had people say to me, Yada, so what? What is there to be done about it? To know all this does not keep us from suffering. I say to them, do you know all of this? You do not. You know it intellectually, yes. But you do not know it where you live it. That is knowing.

Knowing is being. The butterfly knows himself from what he does. This is his pleasure. This is butterfly consciousness. Now, if he thought he was something else from his low emotional desires, he could not become something else. He could not live his knowing. For instance, he could not have bee consciousness. Butterfly consciousness and bee consciousness are specialties. They are very circumscribed, perfect in their own states of consciousness.

The reason the human consciousness is so different than any other kind of consciousness is because it can think upon what it is doing. It can guide itself. It can think about doing a thing and then do it perhaps days, weeks, month, years later. Man is a creator, a designer. This is the nature of his consciousness, so he can be what he wants to be. His destiny is in his own hands. But, largely speaking, the greater number of human beings coming into the world have lost this control over their destiny. They have no conscious control over it, so they must fight, struggle to get on the way back.

You see, all this fighting, all this struggling comes under one name – experience. We humans are truly blessed above all other forms that life has gone through. There is only one life and it takes many forms. It creates centers to dwell in, in order to get experience. When it reaches the state of the human it is ready, at least ready, to do what no other form can do. It can rise above the dream it has created, the external creation, and yet its form self can continue to exist in it.

The man Jesus said, “I am in your world but I am not of it”. Do you remember this? This is your lot. He was saying this for all human kind. Wonderful! But your priestly system, whatever the denomination may be, is the same. It has never taught the people that you are divine beings! Oh, no! You are evil! You are bad! What does this do to a sleeping ego? It drives it mad! It drives it deeper into insanity. It is all right. I fear not. I have no anxious thoughts. Each one of us creators will find our way back home in due time. For those of you who truly seek, one thing is important – that you try to think. Try each day to become a little more detached from your surroundings. Detach emotionally, I mean. Do not permit yourself to be tied up in your external picturing.

Part II coming soon.