Personal Reflections: Influences A B C

Personal Reflections: Influences A B C

My life journey began in a small rural town, born into a family of two nurturing parents, rich with affection and simple means. My parent’s guidance and the influence of two brothers and two sisters were formative and significant in my childhood and into maturity. Also accidental was living in a neighborhood surrounded by aunts, uncles and about 50 relatives whose homes were all within a mile or two of my house in the country woodland where nature could safely be explored without adult supervision. A one-room schoolhouse, classmates and friends (mostly cousins), 1960’s toys, latest fashions, sledding, fast food cuisine and drive-through dining, baseball games, picnics, horse riding, swimming, county fairs and cotton candy, snowmobiles, motor scooters, boating, fishing, etc. - all of these influences of childhood, as idyllic as they might sound, are merely A Influences - that is, influences coming from life - which shaped my early development.

Further personal development could have simply been crowned with college, choosing a career, marrying, having children, contentment and repeat. In the best of circumstances, this is the extent to which nature would have brought me with only A Influences. My satisfaction with life lived entirely with A Influence could have stopped there, and for many millions of people, it does. Of course, there were sorrows and disappointments salt-and-peppered into my childhood, too. Whether idyllic good fortune or other more challenging circumstances influence a person’s life, the circumstances we find ourselves are still equally a question of chance.

For me when still quite young, I received an influx of B Influence in the form of religion and the arts. By definition, B Influences originate from a conscious source. Peter Ouspensky describes that B Influences “do not reach man directly. They are thrown into the general turnover of life, pass through many different minds … and reach a man always mixed with influences of the first kind and generally very little resembling what they were in the beginning.” Further possibilities of development are nevertheless nurtured with B Influence if the effect upon an individual is sufficiently strong. Ultimately such influence begins to coalesce into a group of I’s that form a Magnetic Center - you might think of Magnetic Center as an internal seeker for truth. If this interest continues to grow and strengthen it seeks out more soul nurturing activities found in the arts, philosophy, religion, meditative practices, yoga, etc.

Eventually, with good fortune, my Magnetic Center drew me to C Influence which is a living conscious source, a conscious teaching and a conscious teacher. Inexplicable conscious influences active in my life is what makes connecting to higher centers possible. C Influence is a light which illuminates and shows me where there are obstacles in my path. It is the joyful role of a conscious Teacher to point the way to living in the present moment and to pass along and unravel the mystery of higher states.

“Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.” – Japanese Proverb

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Alcibiades Being Taught by Socrates, Marcello Bacciarelli