Why Work on Ourselves At All?
Man Carving His Own Destiny, Albin Polasek
1. We have all had glimpses of something beyond phenomenal-organic reality. We. remember these glimpses.
2. We feel drawn to this nonphenomenal vision of reality.
3. We have made individual efforts and they have failed.
4. We are completely disappointed in the organic world and its achievements, and the loss of everything when at the end of life, we are swept away by forces beyond our control.
5. We have experienced the necessity for correctly organized group effort.
6. The group effort supports a special unique type of consciousness which can eventually, through repetition and voluntary establishment of exalted habits, be aligned to the work.
7. We are shipwrecked among people who are wholly absorbed in the mechanical pursuits of organic life. In a group, we find for the first time others with whom we can share our ideas, lives, and experiences. Here in the work-community, it is permitted to be authentic.
8. We are running our of time. Every available moment must be used for work.
9. Work on Self, establishing the attention and presence of one’s rightful I, by self invocation, and the study of the machine, to form a bridge between organic life and the Work.
10. Group discipline is a constant reminder of our work to take our place in the circle of invocation.
11. The voluntary work program makes possible the use of ordinary actions of daily life for the work with inner exercises, producing alchemical transformation to the nonphenomenal real world.
12. The voluntary work program is designed to produce automatic habitual conditioning for conscious passage through the phenomenal world and rebirth into the nonphenomenal reality.
13. The active study of the machine combined with activation of presence clarifies on’s vision of the nonphenomenal reality.
14. Work on Self provides a special situation in which individuals can confront and produce voluntarily those factors which have been a problem for them in the eternal, nonphenomenal world.
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We will study these 14 factors that E.J. Gold has suggested in the Preface to The Invocation of Presence often during the course of our study of this volume. The question of WHY work on our self, brings to mind the opening lines from the Improvement of the Understanding by Spinoza;
After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.