As I said, this thing we have with solving problems with walls is
pretty much an ancient ingrained habit. Generated by the development of a
separative sense of self consciousness and the fear of attack and need for a
sense of security, it greatly precedes the appearance of ancient peoples. A few
examples:
We have the Walls of Jericho, (not to be confused with
the American metalcore band from Detroit Michigan) dated at 8000 BC. The Walls of Athens, some 7500 years later in 500 BC, connected Athens with its ports at Piraeus and Phalerum, which were about 6 miles from the city gates. The Antonine and Hadrian
walls in England are a mere 2000 years old. The Great wall of China, is only
1700 years old but anywhere from 5000, to 13,000 miles long, depending on how
one defines wall. Although originally built to keep bad people out, today it is
more of an artifact and a tourist attraction than anything else.
From 50 BC or so up through AD 1600 any
collection of buildings that resembled a town or city had a wall. These walls
provided the playground for the favorite pastime of the kings and would be
kings and emperors of invading and killing each other in countless sieges and
wars. As cannons evolved into real artillery huge walls around cities and the
like became extinct. However, there was hardly a breath in the idiotic pastime
of the Rulers to prove how great they were by striving to conquer and rule more
stuff, including other people.
Evan as we gradually began to limit the frequency
of wars with guns and bombs, the psychic need for walls flourished. The
generation of other fences and walls like tariff walls and trade walls, race,
class, and citizenship walls became more prominent and higher or wider. In the
present, civilized modern world, we are into walls more than ever.
Drive through any town or city that has single
family dwellings and we will see walls, or at the very least, fences by the
millions around our houses and yards. Even in large upscale apartment buildings,
one will encounter walls, human walls called “Door Men”, whose function it is
to keep undesirable individuals out. Also, in addition to the fear of harm and
need for security, today’s walls are very much about indicating ownership, “private
property”, what is mine and what is yours. And encounter signs that say NO
TRASPASSING
After a thousand or so centuries, it begins to
become obvious that all of these walls and the fear, hate, and greed that drive
their construction are the effects or the impacts of the polarity of the
separative consciousness. On the one hand, the considerable
intellect that is driven by the polarized ignorance of a consciousness
identified with a materialistic fixation will naturally tend toward manifesting
systems that foster separation, imbalance, competition, and war that maintain
the illusion of separation. Not that the materially polarized consciousness is
dumb, quite the contrary. It is brilliant in all creative arenas that require a
deep comprehension and manipulation of details.
Not dumb, it is simply ignorant of the synthesis
of Cosmos.
On the other hand, the intellect that is driven
by a consciousness that has an intuitional realization of its indivisible
identification with the existing energetic multidimensional Cosmos will tend toward
manifesting systems that are in balance or harmonic cooperation with the
Principles and Laws of Cosmic physics. The elimination of walls and boundaries
of all kinds of separation will be the effect or impact of its natural creative
drive.
In either case, Intelligence is the genius
builder of forms. It is a Creative Energy which we called Spirit. We called it
Spirit, because our separative one dimensional intellectual development was not
able to deal with something immaterial, something that we couldn’t see. In order to separate it from other Spirt
stuff, and identify it, we put it into a special box which, because it was
creative Spirt and since, obviously, women made babies, we labeled feminine. We
created Mother Nature.
In about the same breath, the males, because they
did not want the women to be putting on airs, demeaned all things feminine as
weak and generated the myth of Man Over Nature. They claimed that another energy
or Spirit, Will, which was obviously superior, was male. It came from, who
else, the Father, so shut up and get into the kitchen.
This construction of one of the major psychic
walls that has kept Humanity from being whole for a very long time has some of
its roots in the Adam and Eve Myth. Adam was a man, the result of “god”
breathing life into some mud. (This by the way is the classical creative
conception of the entire Cosmos. We call it “Spirit into Matter.) Then, according
to the myth, by taking one of Adam’s ribs god built a woman. However you dice
or slice this, woman comes out as a second hand, or rib, product. Ergo, the
superiority of the male.
This habitual wall building habit is what is really deeply
responsible not only for the feminine, masculine wall but for most of the
separation and competition that springs from our fixed identification on the
dense physical and our fear and hate, and greed.
HOWEVER!
“Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.”
Robert Frost was alluding to the natural forces of Cosmos, what we
think of as cosmic physics. Once again, it is essential for any reasonable
comprehension of Cosmic Reality to realize that energy is gender neutral. Its
Primary appearance is what we call Will, Love, and Intelligence. These three
always and only co-exist.
At any rate, besides all of these separative constructing habits,
there is within us a couple of other “forces” that actually drive Evolution. For
one, there is an undeniable, unstoppable, deep psychic drive that makes us want
to KNOW! What, exactly, is behind that wall, or around the next bend in the
road, or river, or hall way? This is the simple question that drives Human
Evolution.
Frequently, as we all know from countless experiences, there is
some kind of a wall, usually an interior one, that inhibits us, that clicks on
that ancient program that keeps us from fulfilling that need to know. The name
of this wall, not made of bricks and mortar, is, obviously, fear.
Fear is the prison of the Wall Builder in all areas of our lives.
Its cell mate is Doubt. Think about it. MM calls these two the Dark whispers.
The other Force Within is the germ that lies at the core of our
entire journey. It is the defining gift that makes it possible for us to
become, at last, Human Beings. It is called Free Will. It is the Courage of the
Heart to exercise our Freewill that is evolving within us and enabling us to
move through and reach beyond all walls of illusion and
separation. Regardless of the cost, we simply must read that next
chapter, see that next horizon.
Interesting, isn’t it, that we have been tasked to choose to be
Creators of the Good simply by recognizing It.
Each Teacher of life bases His power
only upon images of Truth, and creates the future by His thought, not by the
consciousness of the crowd.
The ashes of past fires may dim the
vision, but the fires of new images of Truth glow in the Infinite. When we have
transcended the narrow boundaries of ethnicity and nationality, is it not all
the same to us which planet is nurtured by spatial thought? The only important
thing is that the thought be filled with a realization of the Common Good. Then
the crosscurrents of nations will not distract the eye that is directed toward
the inevitable evolution.
Reverence for the dwelling place of the
Teacher should not be reverence for the soil, or for temple rituals, but for
the igniting of justice in space.
We often exhausted Ourselves in
improving the condition of humanity, but do not regret having sent even one
evolutionary thought. These thoughts take root and flourish like an enchanted
garden; and as magically invisible are the workers in this garden. Know how to
direct your thought to the Common Good and We will always be with you.
Let us end with a legend: “Let us look
at the stars. We were told that the vessel of Wisdom poured its contents from
out of Tushita, and the drops of the miraculous draft became aglow
in space. But the Teacher said, ‘Thus glow the tips of the arrows of thought,
because thought pierces the radiant substance and creates worlds.’”
Creative thought, do not cease to adorn
space with thy flowers of light!
Agni Yoga #122
