"Does the machine provide something for the transformation of the
soul and if it does not, why are we involved with it?" M. asked.
"Why do you ask this?" G. replied. "Do you not understand how the
machine provides transformation? How can you be here in a school
and fail to understand the machine as a transformational device?
Does the machine provide something for the transformation of the
soul? This is thefoundation, the basis, the deepest premise of the
Work!
"Begin with this basic premise: if the machine does not provide
transformation, what are we doing with it? Why are we in it?
"Of course the obvious answer is that we are not in it, but if we
were in it – you know what I mean by this – if we were fully in it, it
would be a transformational device. It occurs to me that you are
thinking of the machine as a three-dimensional object, but it is not.
It is a four dimensional evolutionary tunnel through creation, a
factory in the same sense as Felix the Cat cartoons... a change-o
machine in which someone or something goes through one end of
the machine and comes out the other end as something totally
different.
"Raw material enters one end of the factory, goes through a series
of processes – which in themselves are no big deal – but at the
other end it emerges from the factory as a completely different
object, something completely changed, just as we may begin with
an oil by-product at one end and come out with a plastic fire engine
at the other end, it has gone through a series of transformational
processes. We may not even know which ones exactly, but we
know it entered as raw material and emerged as a finished product
of some kind because it went through the factory.
"The human machine is a three-dimensional object, but at the same
time it also is a four dimensional corridor, a factory in which a raw
product which we call 'spirit' or 'the unformed soul' enters on one
end, goes through a series of transformational processes and
emerges at the other end a finished product, if the factory is
functional.
"The purpose of many of our special exercises is to bring the
factory to a functional state. Most factories are turned off. They do
not function, so raw material goes in one end and emerges at the
other end completely unchanged. So, obviously the human
machine exists – not as a device – but literally as a factory for the
transformation of the soul. It is a terrible waste, a genuine sin, to
not turn the factory on and get it operational, to get it actually
functional.
"Many of the exercise techniques are designed to make the factory
functional, to activate the machinery, crank it up, get it operational,
get it going.
"But I see you are thinking of the human machine as a three-
dimensional solid object – an object 'in the round' which, viewed
from outside seems to be a convex form, when in fact in four
dimensions it is a concave form, actually a corridor, a tunnel
through creation, and the passage through this tunnel creates the
illusion of time and space. A series of events is not time, and
should not by itself provide a sense of time.
"Each event should be isolated in itself to itself. There is no
passage of time within the event itself. The illusion of passing of
linear time is produced by passing from one event to another. Each
event is only momentary. If we changed our view of time, each
event would expand to almost infinite dimension.
"The effect of being changed by the machine can be definitely
sensed by putting on a mask over the face of the machine. The
mask on the machine has a slightly transformational effect on the
machine which should show clearly how the machine has a
transformational effect on the soul. The machine provides the key
for transformation."
"I discovered during my conversation with the essence mask," M.
said, "that the machine could act as a translation device for the
essence, similar to the way the guide functions for the voyager in
transit."
"That is a different subject entirely," G. interrupted. "Your view of
the
machine must be changed; it is all wrong. Its activities are
completely frozen; its path through the creation is unchangeable
because the machine is the path. It is not taking a path, it is the
path, the path which you happen to be taking. How can you take a
different path? You are in the machine's path. The machine will not
change, it is locked in, utterly frozen.
"The only real question is, 'Is the factory operational or is it dead?'
Generally the factory is shut down dead, it is not operational. To
turn the factory on requires knowledge – exact knowledge – we
must know exactly where the switches are, which machines to
activate, which machines with which you need not bother.
Economy of operation is necessary so the machine does not blow
away all its energy accomplishing something completely useless.
We wish the factory to be operational, but also economical,
efficient.
"The factory can also perform a variety of other functions besides
transformation. It has a variety of uses depending upon which parts
of it are activated, its chemistry, its electrical factors. It can
produce a variety of products, not just an evolved soul. We might
not wish to produce those other products – or we might.
"We must have some idea of the operation of the factory – how the
factory operates, what it is, what it is capable of and how to make
it do what it is designed to do... to transform energy, of which we –
in the real sense – are made. In the very beginning all we really
need is the idea of the factory to understand that the human
machine is not an object, but a path, a corridor through a factory, a
transformational path, which has the effect of transformation of the
soul into a finished product, in what we call an Evolved Man.
"If we were not passing through a human machine, we may be
evolved, but we would not be an evolved man, but an evolved
'something else' and, eventually, we might wish to do that also."
"I get a strong picture that it is like a foundry, in the way you have
talked about foundries," M. said.
"Just think in terms of Felix the Cat and the change-o machine," G.
replied, "and think of your machine as a path through time and
space. It is moving around on a mudball; the mudball is whirling
around through space in a spiral form because the entire solar
system is moving, flying around at seventeen thousand miles an
hour.
"Even in the ordinary view, your present path through time and
space describes a spiral. The life of the machine is actually a
spiral. Think of your machine's path from birth to death as a path;
just think where it goes, how it walks, how it stands, in all its
changing postures. Now think of this as a corridor in time, and you
will get a good view of the 'four-dimensional worm'.
"All these gyrations through time and space... just imagine! Walk
across the room."
P. stood up and followed the instruction. "Now think of the path that
the machine cut through air. Can you imagine the path that it cuts
through the air? Just imagine that the surrounding atmosphere is
solid. Now walk through this solidness as if moving through a mine
tunnel..."
P. turned, and this time stomped deliberately across the room
looking as if he could move through any obstacle that may arise.
"Now change the shape, go down, go up, change the path cut by
the machine slowly, so you can see exactly how the path runs; it
is curved a bit; watch the path take the shape of the machine." P.
looked back to see the shape he had cut.
"The machine, you see, is actually a path, not a solid object. How
you got from there to there is through that machine, that corridor,
that path.The machine is hollow, not solid. It is a path, not a thing.
"Just on the most simple level, let us say you are walking through
snow, there is a snow bank thirty feet high. Walk through it, walk
through a snow-bank. Boom! You are through it! Now turn around,
look back, and see the path you made. That is the human
machine, not what walked through. What walked through is the
soul. The human machine is the path itself. Look at it again, look
at it, that is actually the machine in four-dimensional view.
"In three dimensions you will see it at each moment making the
path. You might even think of changing the path, but you cannot
even if you wished to and had the will. That is the path it is
designed to take, it always takes. It is frozen in the creation. You
saw this path and its possible evolutionary result, before you
entered the path; you saw the product that it could deliver."
P. said, "So the shape is the three-dimensions, and the fourth
dimension is..."
"But it also gave the soul its own unique shape and form," G.
interrupted. "You took on the shape of the machine. As you walked
through the path, you assume the shape little by little, from a
grapefruit to a man. The soul took on the shape of a man, not just
the shape but all the psychological implications, all the attitudes,
all the habits, all the activities, all the goals and the purposes of a
man.
"If the factory was operational, you emerged without organic habits,
but in the shape of a man. If it was not, you emerged in the shape
of a man with all the organic habits, which will lead to rebirth.
"There was a man who had been imprisoned incorrectly for
something he had not done. He had been in prison for thirty-five
years for a crime he did not commit, and it was discovered that
another man on his deathbed confessed to the crime the man in
prison was supposed to have committed. Somebody read about it
in some obscure section of a newspaper that somebody had
confessed to this crime and, having remembered the trial thirty-five
years ago, wondered if the man in prison had ever been executed,
and found out that he was still alive and in a prison.
"On the day of his release, the journalists flocked around him as he
left the prison hoping to discover something about this man. During
the time he had been in prison, machine-made cigarettes first
came out on the market; they were in packages wrapped in silver
foil, which was actually silver on a paper backing.
"Silver was cheap enough at the time and one could remove the
silver from the backing and crumple it up in a little silver ball. The
falsely imprisoned inmate had been collecting silver foil for thirty-
five years while he was in prison. He smoked, and removed the
silver and pushed it into a glass bottle. By the time of his release,
he had several bottles filled with silver and, as the silver was
crammed into the bottle, of course it took the shape of a bottle.
The silver filled the interior of the bottle.
"As he walked away from the prison one reporter asked him, 'After
thirty-five years in jail for a crime you did not commit, how does it
feel to be out of prison, to be away from prison life?' He took one of
the bottles and held it in front of him and dropped it on the
sidewalk. The bottle smashed, but the silver stayed the same
shape. In doing this he demonstrated the Work itself, the shaping
of the soul by the organic machine."
"One of the other points you were talking about was the feeding of
the soul," M. said.
"It just occurred to me that you were thinking of the body as an
object rather than as a path," G. said. "The body or the machine is
a path through a giant factory. This whole world is actually a
factory; this whole world is the creation. Quite frankly, this world is
the entire creation and it includes the idea that there are other
worlds, and there are! Each world is the same creation, but in a
different form, all existing simultaneously. Differentiated only by the
fixation of attention."
"When you are talking about the other worlds, are you talking about
the world described as the jealous-god world?" P. asked.
"No," G. replied, "All planets and suns are connected, all part of
one single thing which, if viewed three-dimensionally, appears to be
separated, but all the stars are really one thing in a fragmented
view, all fragmented because the vision is fixated in three
dimensions; seldom in more than three dimensions.
"Viewed in more than three dimensions it is obvious that it is all one
thing. Viewed in at least four dimensions it would be clear that they
are not objects moving in space, that they are completely frozen,
immobile.The illusion of time isolates, and the point of isolation
isolates events."
"This event," P. began, "would it stand by itself with the illusion of
time?
That is to say, is time between events?"
"Let us look at the event in which everything explodes radiating
outward," G. replied. "Now take away the concept of time and then
view this 'big bang.' Without time, we can see that the full radiation
outward into what we call empty space is one and the same thing,
still connected to that central source.
"Time is actually not a series of events. It is a way of cutting, a
way of isolating events within one single thing, a way of
fragmenting something which is not really fragmented in truth. Even
in nature, the whole of creation is not isolated. Time is a subjective
way of isolating and connecting events which exist eternally
unchanged within the creation."
M. added, "I think of this in terms of giving my name significance in
the sense that, by isolating events into blocks of time, I can record
the path that my personal awareness is taking."
"Imagine a self-luminous globe," G. said, "from which radiate
strands going out in all different directions. Now imagine having cut
all those strands into three-dimensional sections. Take away the
central globe and this leaves stars hanging in space.
"The expanding universe is not expanding at all, but it gives the
illusion of many worlds each separate from the other. Really the
whole of creation is one object, all suns connected to a central
sun, a Solar Absolute, connected all the time."
"We view this from the earth," M. added.
"... No," G. corrected, "we are viewing it from the Solar Absolute,
viewing it in isolations, viewing the machine as a solid object, not
as a hollow tube. The illusion of time provides us with the
dimensional hallucination, so we do not recognize that we are
walking through something; we are not the 'something.'"
"You have made that analogy before," P. said, "that our path is
already taken and that we are like worms."
"It is not exactly like a worm," G. said. "Think of yourself as a two-
dimensional figure – a cardboard cutout passing through a corridor.
There are times in which you can achieve certain states during
which you can actually see that you are a flat cardboard figure
passing through a corridor which gives the illusion of time,
dimension, color, form, significance, and so forth, but really it is a
transformational voyage."
"What you said then... this occurred to me at the Montreal
workshop,"
M. added, "when I put on my mask and I had this realization that I
was putting something on a flat cardboard character as if I had a
paperdoll cutout and I wanted to give it a three-dimensional quality,
that then you start putting qualities on it to build it, to expand it
out."
"Now imagine taking the mask off," G. said.
"There is still an effect
from the mask, which you will notice even if you are taking the
mask off at the end of the workshop – the vestigial traces remain of
the mask. We can see examples of this effect while observing
people walking on the street.
"We were driving down the street in a cab and I said you can look
out there and see who has had martial arts training. The traces
remain; it is visible on them that they have been through a martial
arts training, so you can see the effects even though they are not
now this moment taking martial arts training, the effect is so
profound, so powerful, that particles cling long after the event.
"For instance, you can teach certain amorphic creatures to assume
certain shapes. You can teach them to assume those shapes.
They will forget and revert to their amorphic shape, but it is not
forgotten. Your real essential self is amorphous, a shapeless blob
which can assume any shape, and having passed through certain
shapes, the memory remains; even if not in the immediate
awareness, the memory remains somewhere, because something
immortal has been through the transformational experience.
"You will not remain in the shape of a man forever, but you have
been through the experience. If the machine, the factory, had been
on during this experience, you will be able to use this. If not, then
the understanding will not remain, and you will have knowledge just
while you are in it. You have knowledge of a man while you are a
man, but if the machine is not operational as a transformational
instrument, this knowledge dies when you resume your amorphic
shape. If the machine is on, the knowledge remains in a special
form, what is called understanding.
"We pass through the human form and while we are in the human
form we take on the attributes, the aspects, the knowledge of a
human being. If the machine has been dead, at death we lose it all
when we pass out of the creation, at the end of the corridor, as we
resume our amorphic shape, we lose the entire experience.
Everything we knew as a man we lose.
"But if the electrical force of transformation takes within us, it
changes us, transforms us, so that we retain the knowledge, the
attributes, of a man; we never forget what it was to be a man, but
only if we passed through something alive, something living, which
had an electrical effect on us. If we passed through something
dead, something cold, something lifeless, something dark, it never
takes, because the electrical effect is absent.
"We take on the attributes, even in a lifeless machine, but when we
leave it, nothing has happened to the soul. No transformation has
taken place. The knowledge does not live. If it is on when we pass
through it, the knowledge is transferred electrically into us and
becomes what we call understanding – an undying knowledge; part
of the soul's experience.
"Passing through lifeless corridors we cannot remember having
passed through them, but the living ones we passed through, we
remember, not with the mind which dies with the machine. Think of
it this way. Many things happened to you which you may not
remember with your mind, but you do remember with your body. It
is the same for the soul. It may not remember with its immediate
attention, but it does remember with its electrical field.
"It has passed through something alive. It will never lose that, even
if it is not directly aware of this lifetime. You will definitely forget
it.
Bits and pieces might come to you; your higher body will not forget.
"The effect is electrical! The crackling, tingling feeling of passing
through a living human being, a real alchemical factory! What,
exactly, is undergoing transformation? What is it that is being
changed? You are being changed! Not the machine. The machine
is the actual factory. We do not care about the machine's change!
We cannot change the machine even if we wished to. The machine
can change us. Most people work to change their machine. We
work to be changed by the machine.
"One is impossible, the other is possible. One is useless, the other,
useful. One dies at death, the other lives forever. The machine will
die in the sense that we will leave the machine, pass out the other
end, the anus of the machine, but the effect of the machine will live
with us, because the energy has shaped us, formed us, the
experience will not die."
"Then what about the process of turning on the machine?" P.
asked.
"That is the trick!" G. replied, "Is it not? Nobody else can turn your
machine on for you; you must activate it for yourself. And if you do
not wish to, you can pass through dark corridors, forever...!"
"We know there are artificial ways to turn the machine on," M. said,
"but they are not lasting."
"No, but they need not be lasting," G. said. "There are artificial
ways to turn the machine on. There are natural ways to activate the
machine, just long enough to accomplish one transformational
process at a time."
"And you are not changing the machine," P. said. "You are just
activating it."
"You are just turning it on and off," G. clarified.
"It seems like what we were talking about earlier about just the
process of becoming aware of working on myself is enough," P.
began, "are you saying that case is applicable now or not?"
"Just the desire to work on yourself without even actually working
on yourself is enough to begin the process even if you do not
immediately do something about it," G. replied. "It is enough to
poison you."
"It does not turn on the machine though," P. said.
"It turns on parts of it," G. said. "Which in turn may activate parts
which may activate parts which may activate parts which may
activate parts, little by little. One light goes on here, one light goes
on there. This activates, that activates, little by little. The factory
does not activate all at one."
"Are we trying to generate light in the corridors?" M. asked.
"Yes, there is an electrical force as you pass through," G. replied.
"You
feel a definite tingle. Have you aver passed your hands through
some kind
of electrical force field?"
"Power lines," M. offered.
"This is what it should feel like to be in your body," G. explained.
"You are hurtling through an electrical corridor; it is alive! All the
lights are on! All the bells are going off! All the time!
"But it does not activate like that all at once. The process of
bringing the machine to life is called awakening. That is literally
what awakening means, not just becoming a little more aware.
Awareness is no big deal; it is simply another technique of
activating one small part of the machine. You are activating the
factory little by little by various techniques. Enlightenment,
awakening, awareness, consciousness are all ways of
activating small parts of the factory. They are not in themselves
important.
"Those poor fellows walking around who are conscious, just
conscious, thinking that this is an end! They have learned to
activate one machine in the factory. Big deal! So people who are
offering enlightenment, look at them twice, and realize that they are
in worse shape than you, because they do not even know what it is
for. They have activated one small device and stopped there. They
have not activated the whole factory. They have activated one tiny
section of one little part of one transforming device somewhere in
the factory."
"This sounds like one person working at a Ford Motor Automobile
Plant turning bolts and thinking he is building a car," M. said, "and
there is nothing else going on: the factory is totally empty."
G. said, "But nothing is actually being made. We hear him clanking
away in the dark. This is what it is like to see someone who is
supposedly conscious or somebody who is supposed to be a
Perfect Master. They have only activated one little machine in the
factory, and they are happily clanking away with it.
"It is very important to realize that the whole factory must not be
activated, just select portions of it. Otherwise the factory blows its
force."
"So there must be a strategy," M. interjected.
"A strategy," G. agreed enthusiastically, "an exact strategy for
activating the factory! And remember, we do not really wish to
activate the factory, not with our whole self. We are lazy; we do not
wish to pay for life when we can just drift through it, to activate all
the lights when we can just drift through it in the dark. We do not
really wish to hurtle through the electrical brilliance, the electrical
field which is the operational factory, that is to say, the alchemical
laboratory.
"Once you have gone through an evolutionary factory in which you
have learned to be a man, you need not repeat the experiment. But
if you keep going through Dead Evolutionary Factories, you are
much more likely to pass through again and again.
"It is a little painful, to pass through a living form, any living form,
being shaped, manipulated and expanded. You do not like the
sensation of being a living human being – you like the sensation of
being an amorphic ectoplasmic ghost, but it cures you of
something, and at the same time gives you new equipment you
never had before as a being.
"You will only be an evolved man for one moment, just as you pass
out of the corridor, and then... back to your amorphous shape! But
you will have been a human being! If in addition you wish to
produce an Adamic Body, you will have an additional tool that you
would not have had otherwise; you will have been an evolved
Mastress... not just a male or a female, but a Mastress."
"This is what you mean by, 'There are other things you could do in
the corridor,'" M. realized.
"If also you have learned how to take part in an Angelic Assembly,"
G.said, "you will have accomplished something else, and you will
have another tool, another bit of equipment that you would have
never had if you had not passed through a factory which was alive.
And there are other things you could do. But do not confuse it.
"Some things activate the factory – some things the factory does.
The factory actually produces certain things. For instance, the
Angelic Assembly is a form of work which activates a portion of the
factory. Taking part in the Angelic Assembly by itself actually
produces a permanent transformational effect. Thus, it has a two-
fold purpose. It activates a portion of the factory, which would not
otherwise activate, and at the same time it provides a
transformational effect for the use of the Absolute.
"But then there is the form of consciousness which we call the
invocation of presence. It is not itself an end-product and does not
produce an end-product."
"It is like a key for one room," M. suggested.
"The invocation of presence is the fail-safe code which tells the
machine, the factory, that you are not joking around, it is no
accident, that it is not a drill! You convince the factory eventually,
by the repeated invocation of presence, that you do wish to activate
it, bring it to life.
© 1980 - 2001 IDHHB, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
