THE LAW OF ACTIVATION
The Activation of Consciousness
”The activation of consciousness means precisely the awakening of the will.”
The individual develops by activating the consciousness of his envelopes himself. The most important thing is self-initiated consciousness activity. Most people are passive and let their consciousness be activated by vibrations from without. They accept the views of other people without examining what facts they are based on and whether these alleged facts also are real facts. Through their education they have acquired a mental system and reject without examination everything that cannot be fitted into that system, not understanding that all such systems, at the present stage of mankind’s development, are just systems of hypotheses, not of facts.
On the higher levels of the stage of civilization, the individual begins analysing more and more what he has heard and read; he no longer just parrots what others have said. In so doing he begins his self-initiated consciousness activity and with that he starts to contribute to his individual development. By working up his experiences and applying them he acquires, more or less intentionally, qualities and abilities possible with his resources. Eventually he reaches higher levels. The more exactly his conceptual world agrees with reality, the more rapidly he develops. It is only when we see that everything is a problem, begin to take an interest in problems and their solutions, that we strengthen our consciousness activity. When we have seen that the meaning of life is consciousness development and make up our minds to apply that insight in real life, only then do we start activation with one-pointed purposefulness.
It is the task of each and every one to assimilate the consciousness content of its envelopes by activating their passive consciousness. It is up to ourselves to discover the method of doing this. Certainly the method is given. But it is the business of the individual to ascertain that the method is correct and to profit by its usefulness. We never discover what is self-evident, so it must be given us, but then it will be our business to prove its reality to ourselves by our own work.
Anyone whose consciousness is not active but passive runs the risk of falling a victim to vibrations from without, and anyone who does not live in mentality runs the risk of being influenced by the vibrations from the emotional.
Passivity, the lack of one’s own initiative, is a big mistake. The more passive man is, the more slowly he develops. Consciousness development requires self-initiated thinking and is hampered by parrotry and thoughtless acceptance.
Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life One, The Law, The Law of Activation www.laurency.com
Lars Adelskogh, The Explanation, Section Eight, The Law of Activation, www.hylozoik.se; reproduced with permission from Lars Adelskogh.
Control of Consciousness
”At the stage of culture man awakens to the insight that he must learn to control his consciousness, consciously keep his thoughts, feelings, and imagination in check. Thereby he has discovered the most efficient weapon there is in his war against suffering. Using it he can learn to overcome the very most of his suffering.”
The normal individual has his attention directed now to physical things, now to his emotions, now to some mental problem. His attention is thrown between the various envelope consciousnesses largely without any plan and continuity. The control of consciousness alters this planlessness, so that attention works methodically and thereby yields quicker and more fruitful results.
Control of consciousness is done when the self attends to what is happening in the consciousnesses of its various envelopes and learns to determine the content of its waking consciousness. Then the self refuses to pay attention to disturbing sense perceptions, discards intrusive emotions and thoughts for which it does not have any use.
To control thought is to occupy attention with some definite thing, never to let it flitter from one thing to another. One way of counteracting this flittering is to have some problem in the background to which the attention can be directed whenever it does not need to be occupied with the tasks of everyday life. In so doing, everybody has his particular needs, perhaps his particular life task, which then may best serve as the object of his thoughts.
The life task is the meaning of life for this very incarnation. As a rule we can seek for that meaning in our predispositions, interests, circumstances of life and material resources. Every interest develops some quality or ability. Any hobby will do, only if it can make us forget our-selves by keeping our attention occupied with some definite thingalso a lesson in continuous concentration.
We should, as the ancients put it, let our “consciousness be occupied”.
The typical mystics (at the higher emotional stage) speak about the “constant prayer” intended to keep their contact with the superconscious (whatever name they give to it). But there is another way in which consciousness can be occupied, so that no distracting “throw-ins” from the lower worlds need disturb the attention. And that is to live in your present work so concentratedly that your attention is always occupied with whatever you have decided yourself. That is the only way to be fully efficient in your daily work. That is, to use the parlance of the mystics, the constant worship. For everything we do also in the physical world is as divine as in higher worlds.
Control of consciousness is no simple matter. Several incarnations are required to achieve it. Those who feel a need for it, however, show in so doing that they have started the training.
Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life One, Meditation, Control of Consciousness, www.laurency.com
Results of Deficient Control of Consciousness
”Imagination magnifies and imagination causes us to relive suffering many times over.”
Attention strengthens everything it observes. Anyone who watches his faults strengthens them. Good resolutions formed in the living sense of remorse will not just be impotent but will result in the opposite of what is intended.
Nothing of what we attend to will ever be lost. It sinks down into the subconscious, below the threshold of consciousness, and will live its own life there, benefiting or inhibiting the waking consciousness.
The subconscious sorts impressions into various subject complexes which are continually vitalized by new impressions. You can destroy nothing of this. But you can refuse to pay further attention to emotions or thoughts that belong to certain complexes and in so doing you can omit to vitalize them. Eventually they grow so weak as to be unable to send up impulses into the waking consciousness.
Everything man is irritated by strengthens these complexes. He recalls imagined wrongs and gets annoyed once more. Many people in this manner develop emotional and mental ulcers and, finally, even injuries in their organisms. Seventy-five percent of all disease depends on uncontrolled waking consciousness. Irritations affect nerves, cells (including blood corpuscles), etc.
People wonder that it is not enough to know a thing, to learn how things are, to be informed as to how they should act, what they should or should not do. That largely depends on uncontrolled thinking.
They know that they should not think of past mistakes and wrongs. And yet they continually think the same things again, let their imagination dwell on their own mistakes and other people’s violations, etc., are irritated and embittered. All this is uncontrolled thinking. Complexes rise (uncontrolledly) into the waking consciousness and scenes are reflected (uncontrolledly) as before.
People allow their complexes to decide what they should direct their attention to. The thoughtless react to all impressions and split their attention in countless directions.
Without exaggeration it can be stated that over 90 per cent of what man has taken in is more or less fictitious. The knowledge of all this should teach us how important it is to control attention and occupy it with essentials.
Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life One, Meditation, Control of Consciousness, www.laurency.com
Positive life attitude
”Next to the control of thought and systematic attention to desirable thoughts, feelings, and qualities, a positive attitude is the most important thing.”
Our attitude to everything in life, to other people and to ourselves, is either negative or positive.
The positive attitude (traditionally called “good”) includes everything that works in harmony with the laws of life. The positive attitude strives for loving understanding of everything human, strives to see what is best in everybody, and wants to disregard the worse side as a matter of principle. It refrains from judging and moralizing, since it has seen deeper and knows that faults are always universally human, that we see only what we possess ourselves, that whoever judges another judges but himself.
Since everything can be misunderstood, it must be said here that the positive attitude does not imply neutralism or weakness in the face of violations of rights. The positive man does his best to counteract hatred, falsehood, and violence, intervenes resolutely on the side of the violated, but tries at the same time to understand and not to judge the violator – this attitude requires the ability to distinguish between things and people, the errors and the erring.
The positive attitude to life is based on trust in life and trust in self and makes its best to instil the same spirit into others. It wants to bring out and show people their immense possibilities, whatever gives us power, courage, and joy; helps us to overcome our rooted tendency to be hypnotized by hindrances and failures.
From this it is clear that work for attraction – unity, love, understanding, tolerance, brotherhood, co-operation – is the most important evolutionary work that the individual and the collective can do. The necessary basis for this work is the individual’s striving for a positive attitude to life.
The negative attitude (traditionally called “evil”) includes everything that counteracts the laws of freedom, unity, self-realization, and self-activation. (Link to our web pages concerning the Laws of Life) To this belong all tendencies to curtail the right of man to live his life as he thinks fit as long as he does not violate the right of others to the same. To this belong all the moralistic demands of some certain way of life or obedience to convention, all hindrances to the pursuit of knowledge, all restraints on man’s aspiration to higher levels, all dictatorial, totalitarian, and authoritarian tendencies except necessary measures taken against violators of the rights of others, everything that tends to instil into man fear, pessimism, discouragement, and the sense of meaninglessness or absurdity (plenty of examples in modern art), all kinds of gossip, slander and prying into other people’s private life, all suspiciousness and pettiness. And last and first: all judgement and moralization.
We can never do too much in the work to increase positivity in ourselves and others.
Lars Adelskogh, The Explanation, Section Nine, Positivization, www.hylozoik.se; reproduced with permission from Lars Adelskogh.
Serving and activation
”There is a crying want of “labourers in the vineyard”, individuals willing and able to help the planetary hierarchy in its work to give mankind knowledge of reality, of life and of the Law, to solve the many problems of expedient life in the physical world as a necessary condition of consciousness development, the realization of the meaning of life.”
Activation of consciousness must be given an outlet in the physical world as well. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that it is in physical life, by struggling with its problems and solving them, that man acquires all the qualities necessary for the higher evolution.
Service makes us activate our higher emotionality and then helps us to keep our consciousness on that level. Service helps us to keep our attention away from the negative emotions of other people and hinders such emotions from arising in ourselves: emotions of egotism, self-pity, irritation, aggression, depression. Service helps us to see things, people, and ourselves in a more realistic perspective. Service helps us to liberate ourselves from many illusions and fictions.
Self-activation, extravert activity, and service are necessary to efficient evolution also to counteract a too great and useless sensitivity. The explanation is this. Upon the activation of a somewhat higher kind of consciousness follows a greater sensitivity and impressionability. This turns into suggestibility and vulnerability if the individual does not simultaneously learn to control his consciousness, learn to decide himself what his consciousness is to contain. Also extravert work accustoms consciousness to self-activity, to active attention, and in so doing counteracts efficiently the tendency to passivity, impressionability, suggestibility, vulnerability.
One third of our life time we use up for ordinary sleep. In addition, most of our so-called waking hours we live through in some kind of half-sleep. Then we are little more than mental robots, and the self is neither wide awake nor particularly attentive. We see without looking, hear without listening, talk without reflecting, and our so-called thinking is little more than a chain of mechanical associations. When occasionally awakening to a state of greater wakefulness, it is like being roused from sleep, so we have no exact or clear memory of what we have just done or thought about. Only when some certain thing catches our interest do we give it our full attention. However, even in this state of heightened attention we in most cases still lack self-consciousness, the insight of “I am here now”, “I am looking at that thing”, etc. It is in a way frightening to see that one is much more mechanical than conscious, and that one practically does not possess self-consciousness. Instead of being frightened, however, we could use this insight as the starting point in our work upon ourselves.
For we have no incentive to work hard to acquire something that we presume we already possess, namely self-consciousness. Just a bit of self-observation is enough to convince us of the fact that this presumption is a piece of self-deception. Only those who have trained themselves in self-observation and self-remembering for a very long time possess permanent self-consciousness; we others have it for five seconds or so once in a while. All this is indication that mentality is still but faintly developed in mankind. Man is essentially an emotional being.
Lars Adelskogh, The Explanation, Section Nine, Activation, www.hylozoik.se; reproduced with permission from Lars Adelskogh.
The Method of Activation
”The complexes rule unconsciously and instinctively. The impulses coming from the sub-conscious into the waking conscious are automatic and irresistible. If they are not being fought by efficient counter-complexes they will sure enough become ‘the other man in us’, a source of anxiety, agony, neurosis, despair.”
The consciousness expressions of the normal individual are for the most part reception from without or impulses from his subconscious. His self-initiated thoughts (emotions) are dependent on these, on the daily work or interests of various kinds. Attention, concentration, the ability to clearly retain a given content of consciousness slackens as this activity becomes habit and routine.
The ability of activation is above all the ability of prolonged attention. Any other activation of consciousness is faint. Activation is made strongest by the emotional or mental initiative, your own reflection, mental working up of what is received by the waking consciousness. The power of impressions received is directly proportional to the attention paid to them. By keeping consciousness at the thing observed, impressions are vitalized and are given enough time to sink into the subconscious.
A consciousness expression sinks into the subconscious, enters into and vitalizes complexes, which sooner or later feed the waking consciousness with whatever they have been made to receive. It is the complexes that rule us: unconsciously, instinctually, automatically. The individual at the stage of civilization is a set of habits: thinking according to ingrained views and conventions, feeling according to the need for hatred, talking according to inherited patterns of gossip, acting according to egoistic motives and interests.
Most of what we supply the subconscious with is useless in life, not to say hostile to life. All manner of fictions and illusions daily wash over us from everywhere, often becoming bad suggestions. Without suspecting it, we have ourselves made our subconscious our real enemy, a harmful power of great proportions, “the other person in us”, a source of irrational emotional and mental impulses of all sorts.
All this changes, however, according as mankind works its way up to the stages of culture and humanity. Anyone who does not do anything about the matter will move along with the slow passing of millions of years. But anyone who wills for development can begin the change at once. Our subconscious can become our benefactor. The method of activation teaches us how to do this.
We can improve ourselves in two different ways. Both are equally important. The one consists in starving out unserviceable complexes, the other in forming new complexes. By fighting complexes (“faults and failings”) directly you strengthen them. The only way of weakening the complexes is not to supply them with fresh nourishment. If they are never attended to, they will finally grow so weak as to be unable to dominate. Old complexes are counteracted by the formation of new complexes, partly such as are directly opposite to the old ones, partly such as you find the most desirable.
The superconscious is activated through noble feelings and the countless little acts of kindness and services of everyday life. It is also activated by being constantly attended to.
Henry T. Laurency, The Philosophers Stone, Esoteric Life View, The Law of Activation, www.laurency.com
Read more about activation methods in:
Lars Adelskog, The Explanation, Section Nine
Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life One, The Law, The Law of Activation, The Method of Activation
Henry T. Laurency, The Way of Man, The Second Self, The Law of Activation, Methods of Activation
P.D. Ouspensky, The Fourth Way, Swedish translation by Lars Adelskogh
www.laurency.com, www.hylozoik.se