Diagram 012

Re talk:  33, 43

  Consider the reality being the ideas of a person being in a state of exceptional awareness, a state where he is not pushed and pulled by his own "emotions", where he is not at the mercy of the flows of Life.  Consider that that reality has to do most directly with a certain substance in the blood.  I've told you, and you can see and feel it for yourself, that consciousness is a pulsing electrical current.  Without this electrical energy, you are dead; without its culminating at the level of the Line, you would have no personality.  You would have no "I".  But there is another factor which affects consciousness.  There is the blood factor, the substance in the blood which reaches the brain simultaneously with the pulsing culmination of electrical energy at the Line.   Consider not just the spine, but the nervous system itself.  And Consider the flow of blood in this diagram.  The spine forms a little alleyway, from the base to the brain.  There is a filter box at the base of the spine, and another one situated where the spine becomes the brain.  At either locale, the blood can bypass the filter and continue straight to the brain, or it can be filtered in either place.  All of you have some familiarity with the descriptions from religious or esoteric literature that point to certain locales within man, for instance, that there is a seat, a center for the emotions.  Or from far Eastern schools, that there is a place at the base of the spine which is the resource of man's carnal, physical nature.  And all such descriptions are reflections of something quite real.

 To put it crudely, and to divide that which cannot be divided, the lower filter box in the drawing feeds the life of the body -- your physical processes, while the upper box, situated roughly at the juncture between where the spine becomes the brain, feeds the upper levels of the system.

     Consider that the ordinary reflections of This -- everything from pseudo systems to all forms of religion -- have always concerned themselves with Man's emotional condition.  There are whole systems constructed on the basis of love, and, at the very least, they all proscribe negative emotions -- anger, hatred, jealousy, greed, lust -- the list goes on and on.  And as always, such systems -- such directives, are an unintended, involuntary reflection of something quite real.  The people involved don't understand why such "emotions" are prohibited, except that it's obviously un-godlike behavior.  But you must understand more.  You must See that the energies that are expressed as human emotion are, at best, irrelevant to your efforts in This.  And at worst they are a direct hindrance.  And, in any case, you must See just what these emotions are, within your own system.  It is true, as religions would have it, that it's not good to engage in negative emotions.  It isn't, in fact, godlike behavior to hate your neighbor.  But to leave the description there tells you nothing.  It furnishes no food for understanding, no fuel for further ignition of the higher regions of your own nervous system. JC talk 33

     And here we go:  the continual filtering of the blood is a necessary process; it maintains a certain physical stability, and the filters may be seen, both within the body of Life and within that of the individual, as localized places of conflict. 

     The filters do indeed extract a necessary substance, but they are also places of growth, places of refinement.  And the higher filter box is where the gradual, Life-controlled process of Man rising from the lower levels occurs.  This final filtering is the final battleground:  it is the scene of battle between man-the-animal and man-the-intellectual-being.  Even though higher levels of the system are now in operation and, in fact, now seem to dictate and govern a man's existence, a certain raw passion is necessary at the lower levels for the simple maintenance and defense of the system.  It is a passion-of-the-lower levels that keeps you alive; it keeps the body alive.  And notice that I don't call this passion by the dreaded name of "emotion".  I'm making a distinction here:  at that level, it is passion.  Physical passion.  And the same intensity and degree of this passion is not required for the development and operation of the higher system.  Hence the necessity of the final filtering and refinement of the blood for use by the upper nervous system. 

     What I want you to See is that this final filter is itself the scene of continual eruption.  It is the birthplace of the ordinary emotions.  So emotions -- whether they are labeled good and proper or not -- are in a very real and physical sense, in a way that you can see in your own system, the result of a continuing battle between the upper and lower systems.  That final box is a battleground, but it is a necessary part of growth.  It is part of the process of Life, and of Life in Man, continuing to the farthest possible reaches of the nervous system. JC talk 43