smallTalk 2024

Talk#4 with Patrick

Progressively separate on the Physical, Deep Body, Deep Emotional, and much later the Deep Mental levels.
Initially separate, in the outer world, between the parts of yourself which want to grow internally and the parts which have no interest in that, or even oppose it. The group of parts which do want to grow align with and receive support from the Spirit to form the “Magnetic Centre” or “Seed to the Soul”. It’s only when it is clear that this internal struggle has been clearly established and will continue, that your Spirit will initiate the germination of that seed within the Deep Emotions, which is the 1st-Initiation – the necessary prelude to working towards the 2nd-Initiation.

Develop that deeper into the Physical-Etheric realm by separating between the external senses and the internal sensors. Close down the outer mind, then turn the mind back inside using the 5 groups of internal sensors – joint sensors, muscle-state sensors, pressure sensors, heat sensors, pain sensors. That separation leads to the strengthening of the Etheric aspect of your inner Self, which acts as a buffer between the rough outer world and the more delicate Deep Emotions – this being the major initial benefit of the Physical-Etheric aspect of taiji, and real yoga.

Next separate between the external emotions and the Deep Emotions. You can only begin to directly purify the lower levels of the Deep Emotions after they no longer overreact to the outer emotions – negative thoughts, disturbed feelings, destructive actions, hormonal responses. Don’t overreact in an infantile or childish way to the difficult events of outer life. If you overreact, the Deep Emotions are pushed around by outer life. At this early stage the Deep Emotions are at the level of an infant. You can barely work directly on them, but you help them develop by working to refine the level below, which supports them, the Deep Body level. That first step from 1st to 2nd-Initiation could be done through religion, where people sincerely pray for help while aiming to better their outer nature, according to the rules of their religion. The Spirit can connect to and influence the Deep Emotions only to their degree of refinement and growth.

We know in ourselves the things that are really negative so you don’t need to be told these things, you don’t need to go to a psychologist, you don’t even need a very complex system of understanding what to refine. You reduce anger, reduce fear, reduce selfishness, reduce all the obvious negativities in daily life, so that they interfere less with the lower part of the Deep Emotions. Alter your behaviour, use positive self-suggestions, ask for help. If you’re really lazy, if that interferes with your inner work, try to be a little more energetic. If you’re super selfish, only ever thinking of yourself, make an effort to consider others more. If grossly greedy, you can almost find the things just by comparing yourself with normal people. If you’re way more selfish or much more fearful than normal, something must be done about it.

The Heavenly Soul includes the Deep Emotions and the Deep Mental. The Earthly or Physical-Etheric Soul which is given by the Earth – it is a part of the Earth and when we leave the body the Heavenly Soul disconnects from and leaves the Earthly Soul behind. You develop the Deep Emotions first, then later the Deep Mental. The upper dantian is the “Heaven” of religions, but is also a part of our 3 worlds. That’s where the Spirit connects with a tenuous, light, delicate, connection, into your Being on the Deep Mental level. Then it spreads down into the Deep Emotional and on into the Deep Body level. We’re given a semi-developed animal body by the Earth, so some connection into the Physical-Etheric level is already possible but the connection into the Deep Emotions is weak, until the Deep Emotions begin to grow.

Your Spirit, gradually through the internal practices, strengthens its influence within the Deep Emotions. When Spirit achieves a secure foothold there, then it will initiate the growth and gradually expands from there. The conditions that determine that step are individually decided by your Higher Self. If you create a small pure area of your Deep Emotions, then Spirit can begin its connection into that small positive part. In order for the Spirit to begin to grow on the Deep Emotional level it needs to first establish a foothold within the Deep Emotional realm. Before you can strengthen your being on the 2nd level there has to be a place to establish them. Maybe you have exceptionally good relationships with your parents or your children, or a life partner or your teacher, some small part of you is very positive whereas the rest is selfishly lost in life.

To consolidate the growth in the Deep Emotions is the work between the 2nd and 3rd-Initiations. This work is done inside yourself, it’s no longer simply following external rules of society or religion. Once your Soul begins to form you must continue to feed it. If you don’t the Soul can potentially fade out of existence. It doesn’t normally happen, but I’ve known people in this situation. More commonly, if you don’t feed it enough, or too irregularly, it becomes a little stagnant, it’s growth stalls. That’s why even though it can ideally take around 21 years to move between the 2nd and 3rd-Initiation, it almost always takes longer. We all have negative stages in our life, we have periods where outer life is overwhelming, some months we might meditate intensely every day while other months it sort of fades because there’s too many things going on in outer life. So consequently, due to the slightly uneven feeding of the Inner Self, the progress from the 2nd to the 3rd-Initiation is almost never achieved exactly in 21 years – typically it takes 30 to 40 years.

As Spirit takes an influence within the Deep Emotions the parts of the Inner Self which respond form the growing Soul, while the parts that don’t respond, form the ego, on that level. Whereas to get to the 2nd-Initiation you refine the roughest parts of your outer life, when you work directly on the Deep Emotions you no longer try to perfect your outer self. Your inner practices will feed and gradually transform the Soul, but you must simultaneously refine the other parts, the ego, otherwise it will block you. The ego will steal your energy and may even directly resist your inner growth. Within the Deep Emotions search for which aspects of the ego are interfering with the growth of the Soul. Understand what are the major things in you that block your inner growth.

The ego spreads over the 3 levels of human existence. It extends from the external world through the Deep Body level, the Deep Emotional and the Deep Mental. The ego is more subtle on the deeper levels, consequently interfering with your growth in a more obscure way. When you’re working between the 2nd and 3rd-Initiations, keep refining your search and understanding of what’s interfering with your inner growth. What keeps you from your daily meditation, what stops you from going deeper in your meditation, what stops you from relating more positively to other people? Different things stop different people. Search for your Chief Feature – the major internal personal feature that’s interfering with your growth. Then work on purifying that, and as you purify it, it will drop in importance, and something more subtle from a deeper layer of the ego will become your Chief Feature.

It’s mainly the work of your outer self to get the Deep Emotions to the stage when you can work directly on them within your Inner Self. For that it’s better to have “positive” aspects of greed, fear or selfishness, which have a good supply of energy behind them. These are easier to transform than more “negative” ones which have no energy behind them. For example, lust, an aspect of greed, is driven by excess basic body energy, which you can transform into work on yourself, whereas laziness, typically an aspect of fear or selfishness, is deficient basic body energy which provides little to be transformed into positive inner work.

If you’re greedy you can turn the greed towards wanting to develop, it will help you for a time. Sometimes with a selfish person, the selfishness can help them for a while, because they want to develop themselves, but it will fade away after a time. But laziness can’t really drive your growth in the beginning. If you’re always tired, if you don’t feel like doing anything, you just won’t do the inner practices, so laziness can block people completely. Fear might also block you completely. You’re scared of the unknown internal world, scared of looking at yourself, scared of what people might think about you when you do these inner practices. So fear can block you in the beginning, but if you’re scared of dying and dissolving away in the etheric, scared of hell, scared of evil spirits, this fear can turn you towards inner development for protection. Religions use the 3 major negativities to herd people towards their Spirit – greed for heavenly rewards, fear of hell, and selfish retreat from society as monks, nuns and priests.

We can say all of these active aspects will help you to grow through the 3 sublevels of the Deep Emotional, but the further you progress the more they will interfere with your inner growth. The Spirit has a natural influence on the upper of the 3 sections of the Deep Emotions, but it can’t descend further until the middle section is purified. As you progress between the 2nd and 3rd-Initiations, the things you have to watch for and purify are not so much the things stopping you from making effort, but the things that stop the influence of the Spirit descending. At that stage things such as greed for internal growth will start to impede the influence of the Spirit rather than help it. What helped you through the 1st stage won’t help you through the last stage. The active things that pushed for development in the beginning, will block you as you go on.

You realise at that stage that much of the inner work is being done by your Higher Self. When you’re somewhere in the middle third of the Deep Emotions, the Spirit is doing at least half the work, deep inside you. That’s why when your internal effort seems like it is going nowhere and you wonder if you’re making any progress at all, as long as you’re sincere and you keep going, Spirit’s influence gradually becomes stronger and will be working from the inside, which you may not initially be aware of. Your spirit helps from the inside out, which is a saving grace as it is next to impossible to do it all for yourself.

Spiritual Pride and Power Two of the big things that block the 2nd half of the growth are Spiritual Pride and Power. If your inner self grows strong you have a type of influence, a power, over undeveloped people and if you use if for personal gain, it will block you. If you start to use your position as a teacher to take advantage of your students, if you take more than you give for example, that will block your progress. Also as you grow inside, small etheric powers may appear. These are the powers of the low-level shamans, psychics and occultists. In the etheric world they might see the early beginnings of what will later become physical processes. They might also see etheric traces of past events. They might find the power to read someone’s mind, power to project thoughts into the person’s mind, to project their mind out to a distance. You can deliberately train them in the Physical-Etheric realm without even having a Soul. As your Soul grows some of these things come naturally. If you in any way grasp at them, identify with them, or use them for personal benefit, they will block your inner growth. They will block the Spirit coming through.

Spiritual Pride can exist on any level of the ego within the 3 worlds of human existence, the Physical-Etheric, Deep Emotional or the Deep Mental. Spiritual Pride in the outer self is where infantile people imagine they’re highly developed, talking to spirits, guides, angels, and dead teachers, “even Mr God himself” as Gurdjieff once joked, and yet they’ve actually achieved very little or nothing at all internally.

But the spiritual pride that grows within the Deep Emotions comes from the true sense of your inner growth and is much more difficult to see in yourself or others. So if your Inner Self is growing in a way that you feel to be accelerating away from undeveloped people, and you attribute that growth to yourself, this is the spiritual pride that will block your inner growth on the way from the 2nd to the 3rd-Initiation. Actually what is growing inside is the influence of your own Spirit, but your Deep Emotional Being starts to imagine that it is highly developed. If the Spirit withdrew it’s power, this growing Soul would fade away and die.

So when the inner self begins to grow within the Deep Emotions, it’s actually your Spiritual Self taking hold there, and if your sense of self within the Deep Emotions begins to feel it is the great being that’s growing, that will block you. If you aim for the positive, Gratitude Humility and Respect towards the Divine, you won’t inflate yourself on any of these levels in the same way.

Q: How can you take more than you give to a student?
P: Some teachers take advantage of their position. On the outer level there are many systems where on joining they explain how your wealth is a hindrance to your growth so you must give it to their organisation and the teacher. The organisation and teacher become rich, while the students become poor and financially dependent. On the psychological level, if the teacher explains that it’s their energy pouring out which is doing everything to you and all you need to do is sit quietly and be transformed, that will cause the students to become unbalanced and overly dependent on the teacher. It’s actually mainly the students’ inner work, and the energy available through the teacher is the extra help that comes in proportion to the students inner effort. It’s very common for teachers, approaching the 3rd-Initiation or past it, to falsely believe that they’ve reached the ultimate enlightenment or they are the most developed person on the Earth. Then if they project that on their students of course they give them a false idea.

Q: Recently, while meditating I was contacted by a dead friend. For me, when you’re dead, you’re not really dead. I would like to know, how to contact them?
P: There are two cases. A person who has died but is still in the etheric realm, they’re not hard to contact. A person who has some connection with their Spirit will return to the Deep Emotional Realm 3 to 7 days after their death. In that 3 to 7 day period it is possible to contact them. After that they become quite difficult to contact. If they don’t have a good contact with the Spirit, they will remain in the etheric for a long time, but gradually fade away. They’re usually very weak on the etheric level, so they can’t do much. You can pray for them but we don’t advise contacting these people or you will start to attract attention from low-level etheric forces. It’s an unusual case where you have contact with someone who’s already back on the Deep Emotional level, that would normally not be allowed. The contact between these realms is managed, a veil is kept between them. So I have to ask what level was the contact?

Q: It was not a grief level, but when he contacted me it was his intonation, it was his voice.
P: I understand, that’s almost certainly on the etheric level. You can have contact with people who have died and are in the etheric world. If you do your meditation and they’re connected with you they may come in the meditation that way. But here is a very big warning, when you hear actual voices in your head it is almost always your own imagination or a low level spirit. Then people who have died and returned to the Deep Emotional, are usually not very developed so unable to come and go freely. It’s not normal you can contact those people. Between realms there’s a barrier which is guarded by a “Keeper”, who decides what crosses that barrier. On the Earth Li Po was the Keeper for some recent decades. If there’s a special reason then your Guide could arrange it with permission from the Keeper.

Q: Is there a usual stage of development where we can have conscious contact with our Guide?
P: I was asking the same question not so long ago, and I was told that it varies for every person, there’s no rule, but its only guaranteed after the 4th-Initiation. Looking for inner contact is one of the most dangerous spiritual practices you can do. More people have fallen off the path from that than any other practice I know of. The Guide is in normal terms, an Angel – a Guardian Angel. They are on the 3rd Energy level, the Deep Mental, Celestial or Heavenly realm. That realm is very high, very, distant from normal people. To communicate with them directly you would need to have good access to the Deep Mental, be well past the 3rd-Initiation. They can, if they choose, access the highest sublevels of the 2nd Energy level, the Deep Emotional, so they most commonly make contact through your high level dreams, when your outer mind can’t interfere. In your deepest meditation your directed intention could get through to them, but any concrete response in words or ideas will almost certainly be your own imagination so you definitely shouldn’t seek that. If they do respond it will filter down through the levels over time as abstract guidance to your thoughts, feelings or actions.

Q: Could you say something about the world as a being, and its Etheric and Deep Emotions?
P: Your Spirit comes from the Being who is momentarily (for a little more than 4 billion years) manifesting through the energy field of the Sun. There’s a lesser Being manifesting through the Earth. Momentarily your Inner Being is a combination of the two, manifesting through your body, but once you withdraw from the Physical-Etheric, Deep Emotional and the Deep Mental, (past the 4th-Initiation), than you withdraw fully back into the Sun itself. The Solar System exists within the protecting energy field of our Galaxy, centred on a super-massive ‘black hole’ momentarily the the body of expression of a tremendous Being, which is the Source beyond which no Human has knowledge.

Q: I asked you before if you had insight to the big “Why”: Why we’re here to evolve? You answered that some questions can’t be answered, I wonder if that would still be the same answer now?
P: It was a true answer then and still is now. The problem has two aspects. First, not all higher knowledge is allowed in the 3 worlds of human existence. Second, Some information can’t be assimilated by the human brain, which has only triple monkey powers (3 times the number of neurons). To bring the information right down into the brain would distort some of the concepts as to render them next to useless. If I ask my ‘Old Teachers’ who are past the 4th-Initiation they are free to know all things in the 3 realms of human existence, but have only partial knowledge in the realms above. But then, a lot of what they know they’re not allowed to speak about. I’ve never heard of someone past the 4th-Initiation abusing their power deliberately, cause they’re fully influenced by their Spirit. They’re almost not human from one point of view. If they chose they could ask higher Beings who look after them from beyond the 4th. But neither the Old Teachers nor the higher Beings are there to give information out on request from below. It would be a type of disrespect in most cases to even ask.

Q: When a person is able to pass both the 3rd and the 4th-Initiation in one life, it means that his Guide has developed at the same time? That’s the only possibility?
P: As far as I know, but there are always exceptions. I’m sure that when you pass the 3rd-Initiation the Guide moves onto the 4th. When you pass the 4th-Initiation the Guide moves onto the 5th. Your fates are linked in this life, because while you are working on this level they are working on the next level for themselves. Their development is linked to yours. They stay with you till your death. Just one Guide for one person, but the Guide can have associates who help when needed.

Q: To become more passive inside and allow the influence of the Spirit to come through, will it help for example to transform fear into respect, greed into gratitude and selfishness into humility?
P: Transforming of negative emotions needs to be done more actively from yourself but to be active on one level doesn’t preclude being passive to the Spirit on a much higher level again. Passive in this sense means receptive, not inactive. If you cultivate humility, gratitude and respect on a deep and subtle level, especially directed towards the Deep Mental and Beyond (the Divine), that will bring you into a positive, receptive relationship to your Spirit. When you truly realise you have no power but what comes through you from above, respect, gratitude and humility naturally appear, while all signs of spiritual pride are dissolved.

Q: Does the Guide help protect you against the pitfalls of growth, like Spiritual Pride?
P: Your Guide can’t do the work for you, but they can guide your efforts – your thoughts, feelings or actions – towards a more refined direction. If you move your hand the Guide can change the direction slightly, so if you open a book the Guide can guide your thumb so it opens at the page they want you to see, but if you don’t bother to open a book when they prompt, then they cant help you. If you think deeply on a subject connected with inner refinement, your Guide can gently guide your thoughts. If you seek to know yourself and refine your nature, your Guide will assist that effort. When you reach for the Beyond, with respect, gratitude and humility, the Guide can bridge the wide gap between your attempt and the Beyond.

Q: In taiji push hands exercises, is someone’s ability to do it in a more refined way related to their level of development?
P: Your inner development is a combination of your level of growth of your Physical-Etheric, Deep Emotional and Deep Mental Being. At the very depths of each of these beings is an aspect of your Spirit – the Deep Body Intelligence, Deep Emotional Intelligence and Deep Mental Intelligence. That gives rise to the possibility of developing yourself through the way of the Fakir, of the Monk and of the Yogi.