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Fifth Mansion - TO RELEASE

From the foundation symbolically built in the fourth mansion, from the home — be it a material or a psycho-mental home — the established individual is able to operate. The energies wound up in the concrete structure can now be released as efficient power. To release, to express, to create: such are the basic keynotes of the fifth mansion. And as the energies which man can release are many and varied, the fifth mansion of the self is apt to be a field for the bringing forth of strange and wondrous powers, but also at times of very queer and nefarious ones. In all cases it is the field for self-expression, for the pouring forth of self in pure spontaneity of being.

Here we find expressed whatever has been built in the fourth mansion. It is a place of emanation, also of emancipation. The free man expresses the freedom which he has gained through mastery of the laws of form and through an understanding of the nature of the materials he is to use. The homeless one expresses the psychological tensions produced by his homelessness and instability. The dreamer sings his "castles in Spain", which sway in the breeze like colored soap-bubbles. He who has built his home as a dungeon releases his inhibitions as complexes or vices. The arrogant lord of the castle flaunts his pride and gambles his wealth away. The fool speculates on his folly. He whom society has deprived of home and soul executes his crimes . . . While all the time mothers, here, bear children; great geniuses create immortal sons; and the Universal Mind gives birth to the First born, the "Flames" that are, in ancient mythologies, the Spirits of men.

This mansion is the creative mansion; and as all creation presupposes a release of power through the formative agency of the mind, here we find the creative mind in action — from the Universal Mind to the most insignificant human minds housed in frail bodies of clay. If the fourth mansion can be characterized by the term "focus", the fifth carries the symbol of the ray. It is the realm of the sun-ray. It is the realm of the pulsating flow of the life-force. It is the mansion of the heart and of the photosphere of the sun. It is the symbol of "operative wholeness"; for that which is whole must needs be effulgent. The saint cannot hide his halo of sanctity. The devil cannot hide the scorching exhalations of his destructive homelessness; for he is the destroyer of souls and of spiritual homes, the disintegrator of all foundations.

There is a close connection between this and the first mansion. Here is revealed objectively and actively the selfhood of the individual. The abstract has become, not only concrete, but active. And activity is the one quality of Life. We are alive because we act. We act because we find, in our body, the basis for action. And if it is often said that the body is the negative counterpart of the highest spirit (atma) in man, it is because all activity is founded upon a "body", of this or that type, at one level or another of substance.

Fundamentally, the individual self is a pattern of activity or, in modern terminology, of behavior — provided we extend the boundaries of the field of activity usually covered by this last word. That is why the first mansion was called the mansion of the breath: breathing being the first independent activity of the organism. But at a later stage the breath must be made to release the rhythm of selfhood hidden therein. Thus, in the fifth mansion breath becomes expressive and modulated tone. It becomes song and melody. The birth-cry unfolds as the symphony. At the same time the ancestral possessions of the second mansion become working capital, to invest or to speculate with; the intellect becomes the word which goes forth in command; and feelings become emotions.

There has been a great deal of confusion caused by not sufficiently differentiating these two words — feelings and emotions — and that which they represent. To feel is to receive upon an integrated foundation of selfhood impacts from total life-situations. I must have an organic body to feel what is attempting to disrupt the organic quality of this body. I feel hungry. I feel cold. These are organic bodily feelings; that is, the ways by means of which a situation that may disrupt the wholeness of my body (viz., lack of food, insufficient heat, etc.) is registered by the conscious "I".

Likewise I feel sad or exalted, at the psychological level of being, if the life-situation in which I find myself as a soul decreases or increases the integral quality of my psyche. Wherever there is feeling, there a concrete and organic entity is becoming impressed by a life-situation as a whole. Feelings arise always from a total situation, and differ in that from intellectual judgments, which tear the situation into bits in order to analyze it. Feelings originate as the whole personality meets the concrete world as a whole.

Out of this meeting arises from the center of the whole personality a reaction: a going toward some object in attraction, or a going away from the object in repulsion. Thus love and hatred. This reaction, and all the mechanisms by means of which the feeling is exteriorized into some sort of muscular gesture (direct or indirect), constitute an emotion. E-motion means "a moving outward". Often, however, the movement outward is inhibited; and so there is emotion without apparent muscular motion. But the modern psychologist has shown us that even where there is no apparent motion, very small, normally undetectable contractions of inner muscles may be revealed by sensitive apparatuses.

It is because of this normally unperceivable character of most emotional muscular reactions (at least in civilized societies) that the terms "emotion" and "feeling" have been used so indiscriminately. But a "feeling" is always an organic or psychic impression or realization caused by a particular (or a diffuse and vague) life-situation. It is that which causes us to react, not as a finger or a leg or a partial organ, but as a total being, whether it be predominantly at the physiological or at the psychological level. From the basis of this total being, from the basis of our conscious or unconscious selfhood, we move. We release ourselves in an emotion. And if this release is inhibited, an accumulation of psychic energy is started, which leads to psychological or physiological disturbances — or to a definite change of attitude toward life. The nature of the disturbance or change of attitude varies with every individual and every situation. These variations lead to certain processes which belong to the realm of the sixth mansion.

The fourth mansion is the mansion of feelings; the fifth, that of emotions. The latter is a fiery mansion, because emotions are eruptions of the fire of individual selfhood. It is a mansion of power, because through it the power initiated in the breath and made concrete in the body or the soul-organism is made manifest and released. To each type of breath corresponds symbolically a type of release of power — therefore of emotions: emotions released through the engine of the body; through the engine of the soul organism; through the (to us quite incomprehensible) engine of the spiritual organism.


In the man of the first birth — the ordinary man of today — emotions arise, more or less obviously, from the self that finds in the body his engine for the release of "I am" power. These emotions are reactions to organic feelings. They are genetic and collective. They deal with hunger, with sex, with the desire for self-aggrandizement, with anger and jealousy, with fear. They are rooted in the three great organic instincts: self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, self-reproduction — also, to some extent, self-realization in objects or persons that we transform into mirrors wherein we contemplate and narcisstically adore ourselves.

These emotions, being reactions to organic feelings — sublimated, as they may appear in civilized society — are rooted in the blood, the symbol of organic wholeness. Psychologically speaking, they are closely connected with the activity of the endocrine glands. The hormones of the latter blend in the bloodstream, which, under impulsions originating from the heart and from various secondary nervous and muscular reactions, stimulates or restrains the activities of our organs of action.

There is nothing basically individual in these emotions, when they are allowed to release themselves naturally. It is only as their release is inhibited that the individual self is able to use, along new channels of expression, the repressed physiological and psychological energies. The manner in which this transformation will operate is dictated by "soul-images", which in turn are the results of abstract concepts, of ideas and ideals.

Here is a point of great significance, the understanding of which is essential for a proper evaluation of all methods and techniques of spiritual development. Ideas and ideals are abstractions which belong to the first mansion. They acquire power only as they are converted in the fourth mansion into "soul-images", that is, into definite representations, symbolical in character and susceptible of arousing feelings and a resulting release of psychic power. This release, occurring symbolically in the fifth mansion, is the true creative expression of the individual self.

While the racial self could express itself through the physical body, which belongs to the race rather than to the individual, every truly individual mode of expression requires as a foundation a psycho-mental organism (at least in a rudimentary stage of development). Such an organism is developed through the operation of "soul-images". In other words, the soul-organism is the product of the creative imagination, of the power of visualization — what the Hindu philosophers called Kriyashakti. It is the product of the individual's ideals and ideas, once these have been precipitated into the psyche in the shape of "images of power", images that compel psychic reactions. Such images as those of "the Buddha in meditation", "the crucified Christ", "the Virgin-Mother and the Christ-child", and many others less linked with religious symbolism, are psychically potent. They have been the sources of feelings and emotions for millions of men. They have actually formed the souls (the psycho-mental organisms) of millions.

These images are of course collective, in the sense that they have the power of generations back of them. Yet the individual who makes them his own is able to give formation therewith to his own psychic energies or "soul-forces". This is spiritual creativeness. The creative artist acts in the same manner. In the great cultural periods the images used by the creative artist are strongly collective and born of the needs and experiences of the racial or national group as a whole. The artist fulfills the aspiration of his collectivity and is impelled by ancestral forces finding in him a focal point for their release. During periods of transition, such as our nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the creative release is more strongly conditioned by the individual artist's own realizations as a spiritual being. The creative action is a descent of power from spiritual sources into the individual, who becomes thus an exemplar of the future rather than the fruition of a long line of ancestry. In the First case we have a Haydn and a Bach; in the second a Beethoven.

With such types of creative activity we come to the level of the man of the second birth who has transcended mere physiological action. At the first level of human development the fifth mansion is that of the physical progeny; man does not project his own individual pattern or image of being so much as he becomes a transmitter of a genetic pattern. His children are the progeny of his ancestors, through him. This fifth mansion is also that of education, which is a kind of mental-psychological giving birth — the true educator being, at least potentially, the father-mother of the psychological organism of the child. If, however, we come to the level of the second birth, the child being brought forth in this mansion by the man who has built his bi-polar soul-organism is ultimately the Christ-child within, the "Living God". The works of all great creative artists are progressive symbols of such a psycho-mental birth; symbols for the use of the race at large, especially in the great periods of religious and classical culture — but also symbols that reveal the progressive soul-integration of the artist as a representative personality whose inner (and possibly, but rarely, outer) life can serve as an example to others similarly polarized.

What the fifth mansion means to those of the third birth is necessarily clouded in mystery; for to very few indeed is it given to know the significance of the "body" of light which is the "home" of the spirit. At this stage the individual and the collective become one. Life is then a progressive series of illuminations and of identifications with ever more universal realities. Man then reaches beyond the individual stage, even though in so doing he acts even more truly from the core of his Selfhood. The "soul-images" through which he releases the power of his "light" must be vast and cosmic Archetypes with which he has identified himself; and, as the mystics have said, he is "taken up" by his God. He acts, yet God — or the collectivity of his spiritual Predecessors — acts in and through him. And his path is effulgent with the glory of cosmic harmony.






This edition copyright © 2008 Michael R. Meyer
All Rights Reserved.





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