Page Content (OCR)
"But you know, Michael," the Colonel said after a thoughtful pause, "this brings me back again to the initial business about distinguishing or differentiating the 'positive' and 'negative' the way in which the higher densities and worlds are supposed to factor out, you know?" "S uc h as?" "Well, the whole categorical thing about 'service—to-—self, 'scr—vice—to—othcrs' to begin with. Yes, I know we seem to be able to distinguish them best according to their extreme cases; but beyond that, maybe more as a functional matter than a philosophical matter, they seem to lend themselves to just those kinds of abstractions and categorical requirements that are so convincingly descriptive of the negative hypothesis altogether!" "In what way?" "In every way! When you think about the concrete implications, a pigeonhole such as 'service—to—others' just seems to promote the kind of vague abstraction that fosters an airy—fairy 'do—gooder' mentality. It's a behavioral straitjacket, like anything else. Why is the 'do—gooder' mentality innately superior? Judging from all the people I know who've been inspired by that sort of theoretical guideline, it just generates a species of compulsive doing, you know, an obsession or overriding drive toward 'works' goaded by nebulous ideals or cloying values like 'the betterment of Man'. Worst of all, it seems the quintessential promotion of dead—abstract mentality since those who subscribe to it do so in the psychological spirit of a son of tradeoff; they obviously don't find anything intrinsically meritorious or valuable in the things they do, since it all takes theat least implicit form of a highly—visible 'sacrifice', a spiritual contract or blatant 'deal—with—god'; it amounts ultimately to an idea similar to the accumulation of 'lists', inventories of deeds done and works performed which when piled up to heaven are supposed to comprise the soul's guarantee of a personal ‘stairway’. "There's always a self-righteous and really fatuous air of 'reward' clinging to such a person's actions and orientation; he seems to be doing it almost always in implicit anticipation of acknowledgment, for the sake of validation — and the overweening pride involved here is that he not only seems to expect acknowledgment or validation from his peers, but ultimately the meritorious sanction and guarantee of God! That's why when I hear, as I often do now in the 'New Age' framework, that the criterion for graduating to the higher—dimensional degrees of Soul development belonging to the '4th density' has to do with the percentage—requirements havering around the category of 'scrvice—to—others', I can't help but feel it's the same old religious song-and-dance that used to pull people into line around the cliche of 'good—deeds'’, only tricked out with even—more-tantalizing doorprizes and meretricious jackpots of 'psychic powers’, unlimited 'seership', 'Divinely—sanctioned' authority..." "As a sage observational description of the working world, you couldn't be more on target," MT laughed. "As a practical matter, though, any form of spiritual criterion, standard or guideline is always subject to interpretation according to the conventional keys. Even though a viable spiritual principle is meant to illuminate those chronic, psychic equationsso that they may be recognized for what they are, and replaced with an informed function more compatible with real Conscious value, any such principle by itself is always acutely—vulnerable to easy appropriation through the conditioned response—pattern so as to convert it fortissimo to the familiarly comfortable coinage of ego—validation. "Though any true spiritual guideline is meant to coach the psyche away from its symbolic substitutions and empty ideals, it is at the same time ambiguously subject to just such interpretive shears. In practice, it always seems as if the most promising philosophical premise is snipped and trimmed to the delimiting dimensions and paltry proportions of the ego—mind's readymade measures, rather than furnishing the proper measure 205 T-Bird_Vs_The_Flying_saucers.htm The Ego of Helpfulness