by Mark Probert

Introduction

Some weeks ago Mark was watching a picture on television in which the characters were dolls in the bottom of a barrel. The barrel was sitting on a city street and a Salvation Army lass was ringing a bell. Then these dolls in the bottom of the barrel suddenly came alive, and had no idea where they were, or how they got into the barrel, or what the barrel consisted of, or what it was like outside the barrel, or if there was an outside.

Then they started investigating. Their first investigation was looking up. That looking up caused them to see a wider extent of space than the barrel, so they felt there must be something out there. They had no feeling, no thought whatsoever that they were dolls who had been thrown into the barrel for poor little children. They were now living human beings.

And so it is with man. He is in a barrel called the physical world. He looks up and he seems to feel there must be a greater extent of space above him. There must be other worlds, other times, other places. And so he struggles to find out.

A man in a dream doesn’t know he is dreaming. He’s in the barrel of his own making, and so long as he has no awareness that he is dreaming, he’s caught completely where he is, and he is in his feelings, in his thoughts, in his ideas.

Is there something else in which I exist? What is all that “out there?” I must climb to the top of the barrel and examine what may be there. It’s a struggle to climb to the top of the barrel because the sides are so very smooth that they resist every effort to dig into them, to get a toehold, as it were.

The movie is interesting in that the only way they could climb up the side was to stand on one another’s shoulders and form a human chain. In short, you help me and I’ll help you. Let us get together. Alone we are hopelessly lost. We need one another desperately to find out what life is all about.

There is something else that man possesses that no other animal has. And I do not care how much the educated biologist or anthropologist may deny it, but we humans have something else beyond the genetic system, beyond biological memory. We try, in a feeble way I suppose, to discover what that something else is. But just trying is the important part of learning.

To know where I am is to know my own territory. I am in it! As an individual, you are in it. Now, unless we know, unless we come to know by study, by observation, then we are left wallowing in the mass mind, in the genetic dream. And every time we try to climb up the wall to see if there is some other territory, we will fall back down again. We must keep that feeling that there is, in the human, something more than genetic memory. Otherwise, we’ll never get out of the blasted zoo! That is what the physical world is when we do no more than the rest of the animals do.

Then I am in my own territory. I do not have to go out and battle the soldiers of genes and chromosomes. There are no natural predators in my territory. That’s what gives the creative self a perfect existence – no anxieties, nothing to defend, nothing to really fight for. The big fight comes in finding that marvelous self, that marvelous territory into which we withdraw from the make-believe world, the world of matter, the world of genes and chromosomes with all its violent nature, which imparts that sense of violence and that need to struggle to the being who comes into this, without realizing out of what he has come and what he really is.

It throws him into the blasted storm of life, and he is buffeted, from the day he gets here until the day he leaves here–unless he finds himself. And it is no great work. You do not have to struggle to find that Shangri-La within, that Edenic state. It is here and now within each of us. We need not do a great many mystical things. We need only to be quiet. We need only to be willing to be quiet and listen and begin to feel that wonderful being that has been with us throughout our existence–that great Creative Self.

(Professor Alfred Luntz [through Mark Probert])

Inner Mysteries

To those of you who have never witnessed a so-called spirit communicating through an entranced body, be assured your wonderment is due mostly because your teachings have not been in that direction. So it is very difficult to comprehend. Sometimes it is even frightening, awesome. Religious teachers have let man believe there is something called the supernatural. This means we should be very awed if not downright frightened about a condition we do not understand.

Were it not that religion bases its whole system on the belief in the supernatural, there could be no religion. It is not only the Christian that holds with this, but every religion. It is not only the Christian that holds with this, but every religion is based on the supernatural.

There is nothing supernatural anywhere in existence. And when I say existence I do not mean alone the physical world for the physical world is but a shadow of the real world. It is an externalized image. When we do not know this we believe the reverse. This world of matter is the real world for most of us, and the world we go into after death comes upon the physical structure is a kind of effervescent world. We are now spooks, spirits, ghosts, astral shades. Pleasant words aren’t they? But they have little meaning.

Hardly anyone wants to be a ghost, and no one wants to be a spook. We do not mind too much being a spirit because the religious teachers tell us that is the only time we are going to be saved. They mean we will be saved from them. And you may not be too safe at that for you will possibly go to hell, or to purgatory. Purgatory is in between heaven and hell. It is just a little warm there. But hell, Oh! Ho! Very hot.

Now if you should die and find yourself in either of these two places you are very fortunate indeed. Why? Because you will never find a clergyman or priest there. At last you’re safe again. Safe from the meddling of the priestly system into your life, the life that belongs to you, your right to think as all human beings have the right to do.

Of course if you permit someone else to do your thinking for you, that is all right. You will wake out of that dream in time. No one should try to force you out. When they do they belong where you are. They have not risen above the little dream world, the dream of the importance of the ego, the ego that believes it knows everything.

Death is a very bad word, a very inadequate word. It has no real meaning. If it simply meant the dissolution of the physical structure, all right, but if we try to carry it further than this, it is impossible and has no meaning at all. For you do not die. The body goes through a chemical change, chemical breakdown, but you continue on as before.

Sometimes that is the unfortunate part of it– “as before.” In the early stages of what is called the post mortem state, the individual seldom knows that anything radical has happened to him and so he tries to go on doing the things that he did before. But he gets into a little trouble here. And the greater part of the trouble is that he does not know what the trouble is. That is the trouble.

Now this condition does not last very long unless the individual in question refuses to learn. There are many people while still in the physical body who refuse to learn, and so they go on getting into trouble in the physical world. This ability to get into trouble is even greater after you leave the physical world. Isn’t that an unhappy situation? Unhappy because now you cannot learn too easily as you did while in the physical body. You cannot grasp things so readily. Because in the astral life the moment you think of doing a thing, you are doing it. There is no between thinking and doing.

Here in the physical world you may say—well, I want to do so-and-so but I’ll put it off until tomorrow, or an hour, a month, a year from now, but I will not do it now, only think about it all I like. In the astral world—No! The moment you think about it, you are doing it. The moment you think about a person, you are with them. When you want to leave them you have to stop thinking about them, and that is very difficult.

This is some of the trouble we have in the physical world. We become entranced, ensnared with another personality and would like to withdraw from them, forget them, but we can’t. You see how the same condition carries on in the astral world? You may say, “I will move away from them.” Well, that is one thing you can do here in the physical world that you cannot do in the astral world.

Since this is true, look what happens should you hate somebody for hate is just as powerful as love. It is powerful inasmuch as it will hold you to that which you hate. The same thing happens here only it takes a little longer to show itself. Here we must learn to think for ourselves, to know what the nature of things is, what other people really are so that we can be with them properly in what is called the life beyond this one. And also so that we can be with them here in a sane manner.

You want to go someplace when you are in the astral word? You think of it, and you are there—right now! There is no traveling, the spook body does not travel miles away. The moment the person thinks, they are there. Why is this? Because in reality, in the real nature of things, there is no such thing as time per se. Time is consciousness—your consciousness. This which your bodies move in you think is something called space, and this something called space is separate from you. This is not so! This seeming space is consciousness, your consciousness.

Now, do you have to wait to die in order to go where you want to instantaneously? No! You can do it while still in your physical structure if you put your physical consciousness to it. But before you can do this in a concrete way, you have to practice, you have to learn how. Because why? Because you have been mentally conditioned from the time you were a little baby that you are a body. That means that everywhere you want to go, you, consciousness, your body must go with you. So you have to be dragging it around everywhere.

There will come a time when you will learn how to control the consciousness so that you can say to the body, “Now it has been nice to ride around in you all this time, but I would like to get away for a little while, so would you please go sit down over there. Go to sleep, I am going somewhere else.” The body finds it very easy to go to sleep because it is already asleep. Then you, you the Creator, you the consciousness, you the operator of the machine, go as you will. Of course the body must be put into a cataleptic state to do this or the body will follow the mind. This is the cause of sleepwalking; the mind wants something and the body follows because the consciousness did not disconnect the autonomous commands.

The question is so often asked: Who are the members of the White Brotherhood? The answer is: You are! All humankind are members of the White Brotherhood. What is the White Brotherhood? The Brotherhood of the Light out of which all has come. It is not a group of men and women in India or China sitting on top of some mountain in the Himalayas or the Andes. We human beings are all members of the White Brotherhood, the Brotherhood of the Light. That is god–what we have been taught to call god. But the word is a misnomer. It has no real meaning. Gods are deities to be worshiped. This means we must get down on our knees and grovel. This is all right for those who suffer the hypnotic belief in the supernatural. Those who know better stand up and look the Creator in the face. This is doing honor, not to “him”, but to IT, the Light which you are.

Now, if we are all members of the White Brotherhood, what about these experiences of initiation into the order?

First, I do not want to say anything that will cause any of you to labor under any false belief whatsoever. Because it is the false beliefs that give us fear.

This earth, this material world, YOU made it! The body you walk around in, YOU made it. But since you have been conditioned by what is called the Christian teachings, it is difficult to escape that conditioning right away. Because it is hypnotic. You have to be brought out of your hypnotic state little by little. Consequently when I say certain things, some of this hypnotic teaching lying within you may rebel. Not right away, but in days and weeks it starts to rebel, and it may make you very unhappy, very sick in the body or upset mentally all the way around. I want to tell you these things to prepare you so you will understand what to expect and not be frightened about results. Let us go deeper into what I mean by this.

Here is an individual I have hypnotized. Now I tell him there is going to be nobody in the room with him when he wakes up. I give him this post-hypnotic suggestion, and when he thinks he is awake no one is in the room with him although there may be many people there. But he has no awareness of them at all. Now should one of these people strike a match and carry it toward him, he will see it for I did not suggest that he not see fire, and it will paralyze him with fright. The unknown! No one gave him suggestions for the unknown! No one gave him suggestions for the unexpected so he could meet it with equanimity. This is what disturbs us. This is what brings phobias upon us. This is what gives us complexes and fears of all kinds.

Teachers are most wonderful; they can enlighten us in so many ways, but they cannot prepare us against the unexpected. That is our work. All we can get from teacher is to become aware, to be alive, conscious at all times of what we are doing. If he tries to do more then he is trying to live our life for us, and this leads to trouble—very much trouble.

Now, regarding the White Brotherhood and initiation. If we accept the idea that we, MIND, created the matter world, we naturally must say we created our own body since our body is also matter. Here are two assumptions: We created the world and we created our own bodies. In creating our body we had to do it in such a manner that it took time to reach what it is today. It is an extremely complex chemical body, so it took what we call time to attain. In this attainment, and in fact coming here to the physical world, we lost consciousness of our own divine nature. We lost consciousness that we are ourselves the Creator.

Perhaps I would use another word instead of using the word Creator—use the word dreamer. I dream the dream; I created that dream, it is mine. But I have lost myself in it. Why? Because the dream is hypnotic and owns all of my attention. It is surface, and surface is hypnotic. Again why? Because the body is a sensory body, a measuring machine.

Senses are like what is called a measuring stick, a gauge. We say this is the measuring stick of touch. To me this table is rough. Yet there is no such thing as rough. There are degrees of roughness, or the other side of it, smoothness. But there is no such thing as roughness in itself, no absolute about roughness. Roughness is merely a matter of sense pressure.

The eyes see. How do they see? By pressures; everything is pressure on the sensory body. To this extent we are creating constantly the dream we originally created. We are re-creating it all the time that we are in it, of it. Now, the truth is, if we are the Creator, then we cannot be the dream we have created. We are the dreamer not the dream. But we have fallen into the hypnotic belief that we are the dream and not the dreamer. So then we have turned around and created a dreamer which we call “god” and say, “You did it.” This helps us in our blindness, in our hypnotic state, to wash our hands of all responsibility. I didn’t do it so why should I have the responsibility for it?

(Yada di Shi-ite [through Mark Probert])

Excerpt from Yada Speaks, Selected Communications

See Part II here.