Thoughts from the Teacher about Being, with some Poetry

Thoughts from the Teacher about Being, with some Poetry

For this post, I would like to share some angles from the teacher interwoven with some poetry from a student in the School. I hope the prose and poetry of the message on being come through to you, reader.

A change in level of being does not occur all at once. One must bridge stagnant places within oneself and verify the ideas of the System to produce the courage to go on. If one makes efforts consistently, each day will take care of itself. The System works only if one uses it. ─ The Teacher

What Can a Man Do? by John Craig

(selections from The Well: For a New Civilization)

What can a man do? Arrange some objects with symmetry;

tether for a moment one’s gaze to a fine impression;

walk out the door and move along the streets of suffering

without judging God; make one’s transactions with cheerfulness.

It is difficult to remember that there’s a reason

one’s soul resides on a planet so far from paradise.

All souls are here for the heavy work of transformation,

and that labor requires a mind simple in the moment.

How is it possible that the loving God created

this place where innocent children starve and the distortion

of beauty makes a profit? Think on this: would you enter

eternity as you are? Is your being perfected?

Without Earth there is no lifting; without the injustice

and the sorrow and the beauty and the bounty of Earth,

no transformation, no growth of the soul. The muddy flow

of time goes on to its dead end, and what can a man do?

When one changes one’s level of being, one becomes more of one’s Self each time. ─ The Teacher

Simple Being by John Craig

The proud stomach, the chatty mind, even the yearning heart

cannot know the joy of pure awareness. Simple being

is the ultimate delight, and though we picture childhood

bright with the pure colors of innocence, unrestricted

by the knowledge of sin, pure being is even simpler.

Can you comprehend the world you’ve made? Can you remove

the weighty robe you’ve knitted from the yarns of your senses?

As one changes one’s level of being, one increasingly sees the obvious. There is more of one to see it with. ─ The Teacher

Simple Being (continued)

The passage to God is not an achievement. Having placed

a strong belt around the belly, having learned not to listen

to the mind’s broadcast, having distilled to rare clarity

the heart’s desire, the one you have become is still a slave.

His last service is to die on the bank as he pushes

the empty boat out onto the river. There is nothing

for the boat to do – no task, no accomplishment, nothing.

One must work beyond one’s level of being to change one’s level of being. ─ The Teacher

Simple Being (conclusion)

The passage to God is the complete submission to nothing,

and from that silent state the next world appears and brings you

forth, born yet again in the meaning you must master

and abandon. Flesh dust, astral body, pure light itself –

God is discovered in disrobing, fulfilling a form

and departing from it, finding the nothingness beyond.

Thus our return, level upon level, to pure being.

And a closing thought from another teacher in the Fourth Way tradition:

Light is undiminishable, eternal and omni-present. In every religion that existed these qualities have been recognized as divine. So that we are forced to the conclusion that light, actual sensible light, is indeed the direct vehicle of divinity: it is the consciousness of God.

— Rodney Collin

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