You and Your Higher Counterpart

Man looking understandingly at himself today discovers that he is a rider of his own follies. He sees himself immersed in his own world of activity, little realizing that he is being hemmed about with a world of his own thought creation.

If man will only look at himself, whether he be ambitious, healthy, or otherwise, he will discover that he is a prisoner in the environment he creates with his mind. A portion of his time he assigns to his business or profession. When he relaxes, his mind follows the pursuit of pleasure. He is seldom conscious that he is the victim and prisoner of his own thought environment. Society, with its passions, pleasures, and desires, has made him what he is, and if he were told that he must stand and live alone, despair and loneliness would sweep over him.

In the approach to the great discovery of this age the student learns that man is composed of two parts which are not separated from each other, the physical man and the natural man. This higher “you,” the man of nature, represents the Truth within you, and lives in the realm of Wisdom and Truth, where splendor and bliss reign. It is this being within you that has the wisdom records of all your past experiences, and his atoms are the watchers and recorders of all that you have experienced in the world of conscious nature and of man.

This natural man possesses the memory of all time, but physical man in the lower world has but the fragments of what may be called the consciousness of memory, and has little control over these fragments, for he does not possess the power to bring this conscious memory into action.

Conditions of society bring about a pressure to decrease man’s power of thought, and his power to retain any memory of what he has witnessed. Try to think what you were doing at this moment a week ago, and you will be startled at your lack of memory.

People say that memory is a gift of God, but we say that it is a gift of the natural man. The closing down on memory by nature is one of her penalties for the breaking of her commandments by men, but natural law originally gave men a remembrance of nature’s divine source when they left the body, but at the present time most people only “go to sleep,” yet is it possible for them consciously to go into the higher realms.

We must not forget that the higher and the lower self represent truth and ignorance. Through Yoga practice we seek union with the higher self, the real man in man. What makes Yoga practice so interesting is the regaining of past knowledge, for, as we aspire inwardly for Truth, the truth that we attained in past lives begins to assemble about our own parental stem of experience, and by this we attain to knowledge.

But memory is a different thing. We possess atoms which are the historians of our own evolution and, as we aspire, we become conscious that anything we have known in the past, and which we have individually experienced, can be returned to us by these atoms, according to their discrimination. But these atoms must work in accordance with the law of our own real being. Even now there is a great deal of leakage of memory from the higher to the lower self, which has the effect of giving man intermittently salient facts regarding his own character.

The situations in which man acted contrary to his own conscience are the most difficult for him to forget. He remembers chiefly the things which impressed him deeply at the time, the humiliations in childhood, and events which impressed themselves upon his own sensitivity. He remembers also the noble things, the pouring forth of good to him from others, and his moments of happiness and sorrow. If he will analyze himself he will realize that his memory retains many of the good things which he has received from others, and that other things seemingly disappear. A bad man may die, but the good which he did is what remains longest in the memory of others. It is the kind thoughts arising from the memory, which a man leaves behind, which assist him through the purgatorial stages of the illusion spheres which he enters and seeks to pass through at the death of his body.

The student Yogi becomes more interested in his own self-created world than in the world about him. He seeks to know the truth of his own being within his own self-created universe, the Universe of the Lord God of Truth within. As he progresses he attains to periods of wisdom instruction, and truths are made known to him, for intermittently the great avatars and prophets make disclosures to humanity.

Through Yoga practice there is to be found a diagram or chart within man, marking the ascending and retrograde movements of his past into the consciousness of Truth. This chart shows his attainments in power, as well as in weakness. It shows the periods when he became strong and powerful and a leader in the cause of justice, and the time when he came back to be absorbed again in the herd when individual expression seemingly ceased and his environment overcame him, a time when he almost reverted to those lower animal types through which he had evolved. Here he seemed to become lost in the darkness and oblivion of time. But patiently his man of nature watched over him, stimulating him to self-thought and urging him to light again his torch, so that he could pass out of the darkness of night.

The Yogi, regarding nature as a mother merciful to her children, realizes her love never departs from them. No matter how far away they stray from her guidance, she forgives them for their past ignorance, when they again seek to return to her instruction, which she broadcasts just before the dawn.

Humanity today seldom seeks to “listen in” at that period when nature pours out her grace and bounty to humanity. Tired with the day’s labor, man misses the most beautiful moments of the day. He admires the beauty of the sunset, but he misses the more beautiful sunrise, when nature seeks to redeem man from his periods of error and give him instruction most needed for his deliverance.

There is much wisdom in the old Arcadian expression, “Heralds of the Dawn,” for it is at this moment that the consciousness of beauty may be known by the human mind. As these heralds proclaim the coming of a perfect day, so a great chain of initiates is assembling in the four quarters of the globe, and they are about to chant a mantram to disperse the worry and fear which is attaching itself to our human minds. It will require a great effort to dispose of destructive political machinations, so that the human mind may seek wholeheartedly for the Lord God of Truth within to abolish the slavery which today encumbers their lower mind bodies.

Already there are a large number of people in Tibet who are seeking to bring peace to the nations by their intercession to God, that his purpose may be made manifest. So it is hoped humanity will come to contact the natural man and walk in the truth and wisdom of his teaching.