The faculty nothing else uses

Every technique a reader arrives holding in this library shares one structure, and the structure is so ordinary that it is rarely noticed. There is a state to be reached. There is a procedure for reaching it. And there is a practitioner who performs the procedure, on the understanding that the procedure is what does the reaching.

That is the correct shape for a technology. It is also, on the account the material gives, the wrong shape, and wrong in one particular: it assigns the cause to the procedure. The material assigns the cause to the practitioner, in an answer given to a question about mechanism.

The account, in the material’s own words

The material’s position on the one thing all these arts are supposed to produce is stated early and without hedging.

One of the primal distortions of the Law of One is that of healing. Healing occurs when a mind/body/spirit complex realizes, deep within itself, the Law of One; that is, that there is no disharmony, no imperfection; that all is complete and whole and perfect.

Note where the cause is placed: deep within itself. And when the same answer turns to the person in the room, the word it reaches for is a chemical one.

The healer acts as energizer or catalyst for this completely individual process.

Catalyst, not source and not agent: something that alters the rate of a reaction already capable of happening. The helper is given the smaller role in the material’s own account, and the process is named completely individual.

The passage the technique literature should have been arguing with comes in the sixty-sixth session, as a clarification: the configuration is adopted in time/space, not by any event occurring in it.

In this process you may see the transdimensional aspect of what you call will, for it is the will, the seeking, the desire of the entity which causes the indigo body to use the novel configuration and to reform the body which exists in space/time.

The hedge belongs exactly where it sits: you may see the transdimensional aspect of what you call will. The causal claim carries no hedge. Not the ceremony that framed it, not the sequence. The entity’s wanting, doing the work.

The vehicle is described in the same register elsewhere, as something that obeys.

The indigo-ray body which we choose to call the etheric body is, as we have said, the gateway body. In this body form is substance and you may only see this body as that of light as it may mold itself as it desires.

Mold itself as it desires. Not a tool applied, and not a recipient of something applied from elsewhere: a configuration taking its shape from what the entity desires.

Figure 01

Three channels, and the one that does the work

What a strong will is, and why no technique produces one

If the will is the faculty, the material owes an account of what makes one will strong and another weak, and it pays that debt in the forty-seventh session by defining a term.

Thus the structure is regular and, when fully and perfectly crystallized, has certain properties. It will not splinter or break; it is very strong without effort; and it is radiant, traducing light into a beautiful refraction giving pleasure of the eye to many.

An attribution point first, because this library is careful with them. The question at 47.7 asks for a definition of a crystallized entity, and the answer defines a crystal of physical material, in which the elements of each molecule are bonded to those of its neighbours in a regularised way. Applying the figure to the will is ours; the material supplies the figure.

The mechanism word inside it is bonded. A crystal is not a heap of effort; its strength is not accumulated intensity but regularity, each element in the right relation to its neighbour, so that the whole holds without being held. That is what very strong without effort describes, and no technique in the inherited set produces it, because every technique is a technology of effort. Concentration, retention, strain, repetition, breath held against its habit: each works by spending something. The material offers as the measure of a finished will the absence of the spending.

The Tree is the most systematic technique-map this library holds — a graded descent, a technique at each station, a purification arrived at by working them in order — and Ra uses its vocabulary while refusing the reading, declining at 44.14 to let the stations be taken as densities. A map of states is not a list of procedures, and the material keeps handing over the first while every tradition supplies the second. A tradition aiming at the result asks what will produce the effect. The material asks whether the effect is already available in the operator, and defines availability as something that costs nothing to hold. Not two routes to one destination, but two answers to the question of what is being worked on.

The failure mode, which the technique literature has no word for

The material is not romantic about the will. The same session that defines crystallisation defines the way a will goes wrong, in one of the least comfortable passages in the corpus.

The stimulus for this is the faculty of the will. If the will of yellow-ray mind/body/spirit is that which is stronger than the progressive impetus of the physical death towards realization of that which comes, that is, if the will is concentrated enough upon the previous experience, the entity’s shell of yellow ray, though no longer activated, cannot either be completely deactivated and, until the will is released, the mind/body/spirit complex is caught.

Read the mechanism slowly. The will is not dangerous for being strong. It is dangerous for being concentrated enough upon the previous experience and not released. The words doing the work are narrow and bound, and the condition of being caught is that the will holds its object past the point at which the object is gone.

Set beside 47.7 this gives a distinction no technique tradition draws, because a technique tradition has no use for it. The two ways a will fails are not weakness and excess. They are effort and narrowness. A will held by effort has not yet arrived at the thing 47.7 describes; it is a different act entirely. And a will that is genuinely strong can still be what keeps an entity bound, if the thing it is strong about is a life already over. Which is why this is not an instruction to strengthen your will. The material never says that. It says the individual is the mechanism, and in the same session that the one holding it can misapply the mechanism.

Prayer, which is the same claim in miniature

One of the four modes of discipline the material names in a single answer is prayer, and the definition it gives is the strangest in the corpus: it defines the mode by naming the faculty rather than describing an action.

Contemplation or the consideration in a meditative state of an inspiring image or text is extremely useful also among your peoples, and the faculty of will called praying is also of a potentially helpful nature. Whether it is indeed an helpful activity depends quite totally upon the intentions and objects of the one who prays.

Four modes in one answer, and three are operations. This one is a disposition, and the last sentence carries the weight: the effect of the whole act depends on the operator’s intentions and objects, wholly, with the word the material uses for it. No recipient is named, no message specified, the conditional total. Which is why the material can attach a condition to prayer and to nothing else. Prayer is the one mode in which the operator is not a precondition but the entire content. Every other art has something the practitioner is doing to something. This one is the will, described.

The strongest objection in the corpus, and our answer

The reading so far has a real difficulty, and the corpus raises it in its own voice rather than leaving it to us.

Ra’s account of assistance is not thin. At 19.5 the material says some second-density beings made graduation with no outside stimulus at all, only the efficient use of experience, while others were brought into the cycle by harvesting efforts of the same kind of vibratory aid the Confederation sends. The technique tradition’s picture, something more powerful arriving and operating, is a natural reading of a real part of this corpus, not a distortion of it.

The clearest instance is the one that matters most here.

The portion covered is this: the green-ray activation is always vulnerable to the yellow or orange ray of possession, this being largely yellow ray but often coming into orange ray.

A power, acting on a person, ending their capacity to work. On the reading above that is a configuration and not an agent, and the material supports that in the sentence following the quoted one, where the deactivation is attributed to the individual’s own fears and desires of possession. The mechanism of the failure is inside the one it happens to.

This library’s judgment, and it is ours rather than the material’s: the corpus is using two vocabularies for one thing, switching between them according to the question. The power vocabulary describes relations between social memory complexes, where it needs persons to act and a person is the only unit it has. The will vocabulary describes the mechanism inside one complex, where a person would be too coarse. Read the second through the first and you get a great power intervening; read the first through the second and you get a configuration strong without effort. Same event either way, and the material uses whichever suits the question in front of it.

We take the second. The evidence is that the corpus puts the causal weight on the entity and then, answer after answer, declines to take it back. 4.20 calls the process completely individual and gives the helper the word catalyst. 66.14 says the entity’s own desire causes its body to reform. 47.8 says the body molds itself as it desires. Four sessions, four registers, none agreeing with an intervention model. What would falsify our reading is a passage saying a will, however crystallised, is ineffective without aid. We looked in the archive this library keeps; the nearest the material comes is 19.5, which offers outside stimulus as one route among several, not as the condition on the others.

What the technique tradition then has, on this account, is a correct observation attached to the wrong target. Rituals do change people. The error is in reading that as the ritual working on the world rather than on the person performing it, and a great deal of very old and very well-documented practice has made exactly that reading.

What this changes about the way we teach here

We have held one position here for some time. The reasoning behind it has got better; the position has not moved.

The material gives its own reason at 15.13.

It is important to allow each seeker to enlighten itself rather than for any messenger to attempt in language to teach/learn for the entity, thus being teach/learner and learn/teacher.

An imbalance in free will. That reason is sound and it is the one we have used. But 66.14 supplies a second, mechanical rather than ethical. If the technique is not the lever, handing a stranger one does not merely fail to confer authority. It confers the appearance of a lever, which is worse, because the appearance is what a person then spends their years on. A ritual given to a stranger is not only an imbalance. It is a false instrument.

The material’s own gate reads the same way. Asked what a person taking this up should know, the contact supplies not an instruction.

The practice of magical workings demands the most rigorous honesty.

Rigorous honesty is a condition on the operator. Every technique tradition supplies a competence test instead: you have done this before, you can do it again, and you will know it has landed when the state arrives. The material has no such test, and the absence is not an oversight. You cannot practise your way into an absence of effort.

So the practice is unchanged and the ground under it is firmer. We do not hand over an implement and a sequence, and we are not withholding a territory from anyone. We decline to hand over something that would be mistaken for the mechanism, in a subject where the whole work is telling what you are doing from what you are becoming. None of it is a method, none of it is counsel, and this community does no individual healing work of any kind.