QA178 QUESTION: Are there definite patterns of movements that have been known to mankind that can produce different states of awareness or consciousness?
ANSWER: Well, I would put it the other way around, for it is always consciousness that reigns supreme. It is consciousness that creates, and it is not movement that creates consciousness. But it is consciousness that creates movement – just as consciousness creates everything else.
If you see it in its proper perspective, it will be much easier to understand. What consciousness thinks, perceives, believes, wills, feels, its attitudes, its precepts – all of that creates forms, movement, energy patterns.
Let us take a simple thought. Its particular kind – what it expresses, what it means – will create a feeling, an energy, and therefore a form, an energy pattern – a field form, if you will, an electromagnetic field form. All of the forms as they exist in the universe are the expressions of consciousness and never the other way around.
QUESTION: Given this conscious desire that perhaps people in this Pathwork have, is it possible then through body and physical movements, to reach those parts of your consciousness which you call the unconscious, and therefore to make them conscious in the mind?
ANSWER: Yes. This is why I have always, again and again, advocated the total involvement of the personality in the process. If only one aspect is used as a tool, it cannot fulfill its aim. Now, it is therefore very often that through bodily movements, certain blocks are removed and something gives way. By the same token, meditation is also a kind of movement that can dissolve blocks and stagnation so that consciousness unfolds further. Movement is created.
Then again through both of these, the impetus grows to use movement energy and emphasis in the direction of finding the truth, of willing and committing oneself to do this, over and above and beyond and in spite of the ever-present resistance. Every means available should be used and is necessary to use.
QUESTION: Most religions of the world use the genuflect. Many of them also use the two palms together. The patterns created by the whirling dervishes – movements of those sorts. I feel that we’ve lost contact with what feelings or state of awareness those things inherently represented, but that they do have some inherent meaning above and beyond what we know now.
ANSWER: Well, you see, all ritual had at one time a symbolic meaning behind it. Every single one of the rituals in practically all existing religions had a deep symbolic meaning. The problem arises only when the connection is lost and the ritual becomes mechanical. Then it is meaningless.
It should then be discontinued, because the lazy mind assumes that in the ritual itself, in the mechanical movement itself, lies a beneficial act, or religious or spiritual act, that by itself will create a new consciousness, which it cannot do. But if there is a meaning behind it and if the meaning is truly understood, then it is a helpful thing possibly – for some of these, at any rate, not all of them at this time, any longer.
QUESTION: Is it possible that these positions, the body positions, they bring about the new connections in the body. For instance, if a person bows and puts his head below his heart, lowers his ego, is that position, from the point of view of the energy of the function of the body, significant in some way?
ANSWER: Now, I will answer yet, exactly the way it is before. If the person, let us say, goes into a church in an attitude that truly expresses the feeling, “There is a power beyond my little ego, a vast and infinite power of wisdom. This power exists within me, around me, in every particle of the universe. My little ego has a tendency to be arrogant, to intellectualize, to aggrandize itself,” – this is particularly true in this age of intellectualism and mechanization – “and I let go of the will of this little ego and want to accept this greater wisdom and be open to it, regardless of how fearful or how prejudiced I am,” then such a movement will be meaningful.
But you can take another person and go through the same kind of movement with a totally different attitude behind it. The attitude behind is “I go through this ritual” – without perhaps being articulate about it – “so that others see how religious I am and how good I am, and I make believe that I am a very religious and good person.” Or, for example, it may be done in a spirit of a very sick, masochistic, fatalistic attitude of worshipping a kind of deity who takes over the responsibility of the self.
With such attitudes, if they exist, the movement by itself will not do anything specific, unless you say any kind of movement is better than no movement. But then you may just as well go and have a course of gymnastics. But if it is combined with religious practices, it is a totally different thing if you have a kind of physical approach to your body and your soul, where you express your innermost feelings, as this group is doing now. That is not hypocritical.
It is not a thing of make-believe. It is a direct approach to your self, to whatever you are at this moment. And that is valid. The other is valid provided the spirit is good. But you can have people bowing and kneeling and making the sign of praying, and there is nothing behind it. And you can have someone else with whom it is meaningful because it is an honest expression of a beautiful attitude behind.
QA178 QUESTION: I have a question about movement and energy. The first part of it is, what is this thing the metaphysicians speak of as kundalini? What is its meaning and its purpose?
ANSWER: Well, it is what I explained at one time [Lectures #172-173], when the various energy centers in man’s body really open up and the energy flows in its free and unhampered, unobstructed way. It is just a question of semantics. It is a term that is used for that.
QUESTION: This is then the figure eight?
ANSWER: Yes, there must always be a figure eight. Always. Where the energy flows in its original way, in its natural creation, it must create eights – many overlapping and interacting energy centers of such figures.
QUESTION: There is movement, there’s energy, and there’s consciousness. If energy is behind the movement, shall we assume that this is an agent between the consciousness and movement?
ANSWER: Yes.
QUESTION: If so, and we return to talking about the world of animals, where we have movement-energy, shall we assume that consciousness also takes place with animals?
ANSWER: Oh, yes. In a different form.
QUESTION: If so, where is then the element of religion/God, when in this sequence? Where’s the difference of this perpetuation from questions to movement within the animal and within the man?
ANSWER: You see, it is a degree of manifestation of consciousness. The animal life manifests a reduced consciousness, where the energy is not necessarily a direct product of the manifest consciousness, but a product of sensations and reactions. The energy comes of reacting, of expressing, of perceiving, of experiencing, of sensations. But the consciousness manifests to a much lesser degree of self-awareness than in a human being. But that does not mean that in an unmanifest way, consciousness is not there.