Reading this in India today

Nobody meets this material with an empty frame, and that is the first thing to say, because it is what an introduction written for a Western reader almost never says.

The frame is there before the first page. In a great many houses meditation was taught before it was chosen, at school in some states and at home by a grandmother who would never have called it practice. There is bhajan at a festival, kirtan that outruns the hour anyone planned for, a lamp lit on a particular evening, a fast kept on a particular day. One household keeps all of it. Another has an uncle’s opinion about going abroad and nothing else. Both are ordinary, and so is the middle, which is a family tradition half kept and held less as doctrine than as a rhythm to be decent by.

Alongside that, and often inside it, asana and pranayama learned from a relative or from a phone. Astrology as a default grammar: a chart drawn once for you before you could read it, and a set of dispositions you have been told about ever since, all handled as description rather than prediction. And often a figure, a guru, a teacher, a lineage, someone whose word settles a question because of who they are. Sometimes none of that, and none is also a position, arrived at over some years of finding out.

None of it is a lack. It is a full room, and the material walks into it.

Figure 01

The reader arrives with a full frame, and the transfer is a vocabulary

What it actually adds

The accounting, and I would rather it came out smaller than the material’s partisans would like.

It hands over the word and not the system, and it admits that is what a handoff is. Across the set we hold, chakra occurs ten times. Six are in the questioner’s half of the exchange, in six different sessions where somebody brought the word in with them. The other four are the material’s, and each sits in apposition to its own term: a chakra or energy center, the chakras or energy centers, the seventh chakra as you speak of these energy centers. Yoga is named once. India, or Indian, appears in two passages out of two thousand six hundred and thirty-two, both about where people came from rather than what they knew. Beside meditation at ninety-nine and astrology at twenty-six, that is the shape of the transfer. Our reading, and it is ours: not a defect, and not a verdict on what you already have. But the vocabulary is then no evidence the transcript reached the system, and none against you. Read chakra in a session and think you have understood something about your own practice, and check whether you took in a word or a method. Only one of those is in the text.

It names Indian material, and it names it once. The serpent on a tarot card is significant, session 93 tells us, in a culture which coexists with your own but which is not your own, and it is what some call the kundalini. That is the whole difficulty of this essay, said by the material rather than by us, while discussing a picture. It is the sort of sentence a Western teacher of Indian practice will not usually say, and an Indian reader has often been offered the opposite by people who meant well.

It also takes an Indian system as its worked example and calls it damaged in the same breath. Session 84: each system is quite distorted and its teachings always half lost, one such system is tantric yoga, and here is how it works. Whether half lost describes the tradition or the limits of the one reporting on it is the largest open question here, and it is picked up at the end.

And the addition I would keep if I could keep one is its genre. Two hundred and fifty-two passages carry shall we say. One hundred and twenty-three carry as you would call. Asked for the best way to serve, it grades its own answer and then withdraws it.

Speaking to the intention of your question, the best way for each seeker in third density to be of service to others is unique to that mind/body/spirit complex. This means that the mind/body/spirit complex must then seek within itself the intelligence of its own discernment as to the way it may best serve other-selves. This will be different for each. There is no best. There is no generalization. Nothing is known.

No best, no generalization, nothing known. Set against a tradition that will hand you a settled answer, and hand it early, that is a real thing you do not get elsewhere. The material is a machine for marking the edge of its own knowledge, and it grades its own central practice, calling the passive kind by far the most generally useful of the four, a measured comparative claim and almost boring. It will also say when it failed to hear you. Session 13 has the contact conceding it misperceived a query and asking for it to be restated.

We may have misperceived your query. We were under the distortion/impression that we had responded to this particular query. Would you restate the query?

Worth more than one more doctrine, because the transcripts are usually presented as a book. They are a record of a working, and the working misfires in plain sight.

Where it asks you to put something down

Two, and the first is a correction to something very widely believed.

The material is credited with a licence: take what you can use, set aside the rest. I went looking for that sentence in the whole set and it is not there. It belongs to the channeling that followed this one, and the version in circulation is more permissive than the thing people are reading. What this material says is narrower, and in one place it says the opposite.

It is not for a being of polarity in the physical consciousness to pick and choose among attributes, thus building the roles that cause blockages and confusions in the already-distorted mind complex.

Picking and choosing among attributes builds the roles that cause blockages. That lands on the commonest way a person in India meets this material, which is to assemble a comfortable subset, the parts about love, the parts about light, the meditation parts, and call the result the whole of it. Our judgment, stated as ours because it is ours: a reader who does that is doing what session 5 forbids, and the fact that it feels like a synthesis is not evidence that it is one. The material is not a buffet. Its whole is larger than any one interest in it, and taking a piece is a way of avoiding the size.

That is not the same as swallowing all of it, and the material never says that. It declines to name the right subset, and declines firmly.

I will not suggest the proper series of questions. This is your prerogative as free agent of the Law of One having learn/understood that our social memory complex cannot effectually discern the distortions of the societal mind/body/spirit complex of your peoples.

A social memory complex cannot discern the distortions of a societal mind well enough to decide what another should be asked. So which parts should I take has no answer from the source, and asking it is a question about your own discernment rather than about the text. What this community offers is not a selection. It is a room of people who have not settled it.

It is necessary that each being use free and complete discernment from within the all-self which is at the heart of the mind/body/spirit complex.

The second thing to put down is astrology, and it cuts, because a chart is a default grammar in a great many Indian lives.

The origin of this system of study and divination is twofold: firstly, there is that influence which, coming in a distorted fashion from those who were priests attempting to teach the Law of One in Egypt, gave form to the understanding, if you will pardon the misnomer, which they had received. These forms were then made a regular portion of the learn/teachings of an initiate. The second influence is that of those entities in the lands you call Ur, Chaldea, and Mesopotamia who, from old, had received the, shall we say, data for which they called having to do with the heavens. Thusly we find two methods of divination being melded into one with uneven results; the, as you call it, astrology and the form being combined to suggest what you might call the correspondences which are typical of the distortions you may see as attempts to view archetypes.

Two methods of divination, melded, with uneven results, one arriving in a distorted fashion from priests attempting to teach the Law of One.

The material does not simply reject astrology, and I will not pretend it does. Session 76 offers it, in the same breath, as one of three disciplines to study in depth, alongside the tarot and the Tree of Life.

Here is the judgment this library makes, and we own it. Those two things are in tension and the material does not reconcile them, so we will not fake a reconciliation. What we take from the pair is narrower than a rejection and firmer than a permission: the practice may be kept and the authority released. The material’s own phrase for the operation, nine times across the tarot sessions, is to release a thing from its stricture. That is not this is false. It is that the shape it was given is a distortion, and the thing the shape was made from is not inside the shape.

Applied honestly that is a demotion, not a deletion. Keeping the discipline of reading a chart is one thing; treating the chart as the source of what will happen to you is another, and the stricture belongs to the second. Where our claim stops: we have no standing on whether a birth chart is a good description of a person, only on whether this material is being read accurately, and on that it is critical. We say so rather than balancing it away.

Indian in origin, Western in form

The awkwardness, and it is sharper than the usual version of the same observation.

The material was recorded in the United States, in North American English. Its own key analogy for its central term is a scale it calls western. Its account of where its divination came from points at Egypt, Ur, Chaldea and Mesopotamia, and not at the Ganges. Its hedges are a Western speech habit.

Both readers are badly served, in opposite ways. An Indian reader has the vocabulary and not the frame. A Western reader gets the frame, the question and answer, the channel, the study group and the insistence that nobody hands over the conclusion, has to learn every term from nothing, and will read chakra as though it were a neutral translation of something.

Which way does that leave the person in India? Worse, and the counts above are the reason. A frame you were raised inside is not visible as a frame, because you did not put it there. This material arrives wearing your tradition’s clothes: Egyptian priests, Chaldean divination, a Sanskrit sound, a serpent that is somebody’s kundalini. It reads as confirmation rather than as proposal, and confirmation is the one thing a critical reader cannot use.

The Western reader is handed something visibly foreign and examines it. The Indian reader is handed something that flatters and does not. Neither is the better person. One error is visible and gets caught; the other is invisible and does not. That is a claim about how errors get detected, not about people, and it has a consequence worth acting on. The material’s hedging is the protection here, so the case for reading it slowly is stronger than the case for reading it confidently. Hold the shall we say in view and you can notice when a claim outruns what you were given.

What is still unresolved

Four, and none is settled by a paragraph.

Whether the account of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources is true. It is checkable against the traditions it names, it does not read well to anybody who knows them, and we have no independent way to adjudicate. We report it as the material’s claim and not as a finding.

Whether the indictment in session 76 and the offer of astrology as a discipline can both stand. The material does not reconcile them. We took a position above, and a position is not a reconciliation.

Whether half lost describes the tradition or the speaker. If the tradition, the first half of this essay reports on a practice already in decline, and the honest response is grief. If the speaker, it reports on our own broken access: the practices are intact and simply not available to us. We do not know which, and the answer decides the essay.

And whether a reader in India is better served by this material than by what they arrived with. We do not have the evidence to say. The essay on studying it here is about a different question, and a reader who wants that one should have it.