Uranda's Last Service
Hallucinations And Blind Spots
Uranda Thursday July 29, 1954 pm
We have been considering that which is necessary to the full release of God's power on earth, and we have recognized something of the basis of spiritual psychiatry. It is possible that during our absence you will be sharing a meditation together upon some of these things. But in a development of the pattern of understanding the underlying factors which prevent fulfilment in human life, and what we can do with respect to them, it comes to the point where it is in the pattern for us to include, at least briefly, how it is that these distortion points or blind spots that have become buried in human consciousness may be cleared away without the necessity of undertaking the usual process of trying to dig them out one by one. It may be necessary sometimes to specifically consider some basic blind spots, draw out the cycle of consciousness with respect to a particular experience, but we do not need to go through this process by which we probe around inside to bring to the surface all of these things. From man's standpoint it is to uncover some ill condition which must be approached from the standpoint of psychiatry. The best he can hope to do is to establish in consciousness a new idea, or a different idea, to substitute one idea for another. Mary people have been helped to a degree by this process, but admittedly it is incomplete and not altogether satisfactory. When man is depending upon his own wisdom, his own idea of what is normal, of what is best for himself or for another, there may not be too much improvement even if there is a successful substitution of ideas.
In conjunction with this we bring to mind the fact that you have been meditating upon Shekinah, the evidence of the Presence of the One Who Dwells. You have been looking at some of the factors of Heavenly Magic. Gradually, you have been developing a sense of the presence of Divine Will. The action on earth of Divine Will, in the working of the Spirit, may be distorted by the human mind so that the power of God is used to produce ill conditions. No one could have produced an ill condition, no one could even get sick, no one could make any ill thing of any kind without using the power of God to do it. But that power of God has been used by the human mind without regard to the Will of God and the wisdom of God.
When we think of the problems which relate to such a state of guilt which we see on every hand in the world, we must necessarily think of futility, the fact that these things cannot be worked out on earth without definite, specific intelligence. They are not going to get better by happenstance, by chance. They are not going to improve by some mysterious magic or power exerted from the outside. They are not just going to get better by themselves. If there is improvement in any person or situation or condition, that improvement must be brought about through the use of intelligence. When we think of intelligence, perhaps we are not sure of what we know or think we know. Your ability to have intelligence or the capacity for intelligence, even though it might be present, would be utterly worthless without knowledge—the things we know.
Human beings try to know many things. They study. They go to school and college and university in order to learn various things. But the Master mentioned something about this necessity of knowing, “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” The state of freedom of which He was speaking was surely a state of being free from sickness, disease, ill conditions of every sort in body, in mind, and in heart—ill conditions of circumstance. As long as we are controlled by the ill conditions round about us in the world, we are not being controlled by God. If most of the things we know relate to those ill conditions, then our knowing is of a nature which produces a state of slavery.
You may watch people in relationship to their pattern of expression in life and day-by-day, as you listen to their words, as you observe their attitude, as you examine the pattern of action, you will begin to note something—they will tend to talk about what they know or think they know. That is rather automatic. The thing they know, where their primary place of interest rests, will most surely be given expression in some way. You do not have to become a mind reader to begin to observe and see and recognize. And if a person, in talking, tells you how he knows what it is to suffer; he knows what it is to have ill conditions of various kinds; he knows what it is to have losses; he knows how inconsiderate someone is over here; he know how foolish someone is over there; he knows how someone down yonder needs to be corrected; he knows so many things. Almost all of the expressions with respect to what he knows relate to the state of slavery, not to the state of freedom. Much of that which human beings express is designed to make you understand why it is that they suffer so or that they have this limitation, why they are not better than they are, why they are not accomplishing more in life. They want you to understand why they have accepted a state of slavery.
Now, underneath this state of slavery or subjection to it, there is always a sense of shame. People are, actually, even though they talk so much about it, even though they may advertise it from the housetops, even though you may not be able to be with them for five minutes without hearing about it, people are ashamed of their own limitations. A great deal of the talking about what they know about ill conditions is supposed, according to the way they think that they think about it, it is supposed to make you see why they cannot help it. They are ashamed of it but they just cannot help it. They cannot expect anything other than that which is there. And ye shall know all about the conditions which make illness, suffering, misery, limitation, and these things shall make you to be slaves.
A blind spot is a trait in the subconscious realm where the individual simply did not learn the truth about something. You cannot learn, actually—you may think you do—but you cannot actually learn that which is untrue, that which is false. As far as the basic pattern of your Being is concerned, these blank spots or blind spots are not filled with wrong ideas, wrong concepts, etc., that are simply areas in the mind where you did not know anything. You did not learn the truth, you did not learn something, because from some source—parents, brothers, sisters, friends, relatives, preachers—you were given an idea with respect to what should be in this area, which is not true. You draped an idea over this area and you thought you had learned something. You accepted the idea but it did not connect up in the mind. It is blank. It is a blind spot. It is a place where a person thinks he knows something and does not. The person who thinks he knows all about the ill conditions, as he has been recognizing it, is simply telling you that these are the wrongs in which he knows nothing. If he knew that he was displaying his ignorance and declaring from the housetops, “In this realm I know nothing; with respect to this I am ignorant,” he probably would not do it quite so freely. But if we start out, say at the age of three or younger, with a blind spot, our parents, our friends help the child anywhere from one to three years of age to accept it as an idea in his mind. The child tends to believe it, just because someone in his or her realm said so. The child believes it, but this area in the mind, where the truth concerning this subject should have gone in, cannot be penetrated by the false concept—it cannot go into the mind; it cannot penetrate.
You go through the motions of learning something, but it does not go into the consciousness in a sense of knowing. It is an idea which the individual thinks that he knows; he has draped it over this area or has set it up there somewhere close. He has collected some ideas together like a pack rat gathers to make a nest and yet that is not something that he really knows. A little while ago I talked about it from the standpoint of what he knows, and yet it is only what the individual thinks that he knows. He thinks that he knows much about what is actually nothing, because that which is not something is the absence of life.
If one has ideas with respect to nothing, he cannot know those ideas. He may think that he knows those ideas, but those ideas do not have the power to penetrate into consciousness in the sense of knowing. As soon as we begin to realize this basic fact, we see that the easy way is exactly that—it is easy. Human beings think that it is hard because they think they know something which they do not know. The difficult part of it, in relationship to helping people get well physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, is not with respect to accomplishing what needs to be done in the sense of the constructive expression, in the sense of establishing the knowing—the difficult thing is to convince the person that what he thinks he knows he does not know. Now, he may be ever so sincere, ever so earnest in his belief, but if what he thinks he knows is really a false idea, that false idea is what? It is really not a thing. It does not have the power to penetrate into consciousness in a real sense. The false idea is the absence of the consciousness of truth. We think it is the presence of something because in imagination we have developed the idea, and we have come to believe that.
Remember what God said at the time that the outworking on earth came, which is commonly called the flood. He said that “the imaginations of men's hearts were only evil continually.” Now, where is the imagination?—in relationship to the heart, the feeling nature—an idea given life by a form, a certain amount of substance for the moment by feeling with respect to it, that it has no power to penetrate this consciousness. It is like the fall as we experience it now—it is a surface thing spread all over; it does not really penetrate. But if we have one blind spot started at the age of one to three, we will say, and another one that comes in five or six, and another one, twelve or thirteen, what happened with respect to these basic blind spots, these basic blank spheres? The individual has at absolute points decided that he knows something which he does not know. He only thinks he knows because that which he imagines that he knows is not something that can be known, in actual fact. So he covers up the area of consciousness where he might know the truth with this thought, this idea, this imagination of his heart.
Suppose we have only five or six basic blind spots by the time a person reaches twenty-one—the individual will come to a point on the surface of his life where he needs to put together what he thinks he know in order to appear to know something about this. So he thinks what he does not know is a false idea; and add this to what he does not know, the false idea; and brings in another something that he does not know, the imagination of his heart—which is only imagination, figment stuff—and he brings it together there and says, “Now, with respect to this, I know. I have seen, I have felt, I have recognized. This I know.” It grows, until starting out with only a few basic blind spots, a key factor, they work back and forth until finally the individual can become blind to the evidence of the Presence of Cause. And he evaluates everything on the basis of what he thinks he sees out here. But what he sees is shaped in the realm of imagination by factors of not knowing, by evil imagination, what he does not know, until effects are not seen for what they actually are. The individual sees something here and he thinks it is one thing and it really is not. He believes it sincerely. He is absolutely convinced of it within himself, but it simply is not so.
If a person goes too far in that process, in which most human beings indulge, he gets out of the range of what normal human beings accept in the realm of hallucination, and he has an extra good one. And they say, “That person is suffering from an hallucination. He is a little bit off. That person is just—why, he really isn't Napoleon, you know; he is run down.” And the person who does not have hallucinations sees the hallucination in someone else, and he himself does not know that they are both just a little bit off. The whole realm of hallucination, people thinking they know things they do not really know, and believing it with earnest sincerity, and then when they begin to talk about knowing the truth, they want to sift what they think they know in the realm of not knowing with what the truth is. They want to knit it together, and shape it, and mold it, and it will not work. The realm of knowing goes back into the realm of true consciousness, which human beings have covered up with their layers of not knowing and with evil imagination, false idea.
When our living out here is based on not knowing, which is to say, hallucination, it becomes more and more empty until we see many people who are—not more than thirty years old sometimes—find life becoming very, very empty. They feel frustrated; they feel cheated; and they start trying to find something worthwhile to fill up their lives. They may start drinking. They go to a lot of motion picture shows. They go to all kinds of entertainment or clubs or something. They are going to try to fill up their lives so their lives will not be so empty, and the reason their lives are empty is because they are not lives—they are only hallucinations. It is an existence. There is a life underneath but what they see is not life, because it has been produced by evil imagination, their own hallucination, which is to say a state where the person thinks he knows something when he does not know it. It is not true. It is a figment of the realm of not knowing.
The Master said, “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” an absolute, positive assertion which is true. He spoke the truth. We can accept it. We can trust Him. But these layers of evil imagination that have been developed on the basis of not knowing—because parents have not known how to teach their children the truth, and the teachers did not know, and the ministers did not know, and the sunday school teachers did not know, friends did not know. So the mind, as far as the consciousness is concerned, and the sloppy upper layer of what is called memory, filled with not knowing and evil imagination, is actually an hallucination. Getting rid of all this is no trouble at all because it is nothing, as soon as the individual is willing to face the fact that it is nothing.
Many of the misunderstandings which people develop in relationship to me and my function as your Minister comes about because I have no choice but to treat nothing as nothing. Now, for little children playing games, we may for the moment fall into the game for a little bit. It has some little stick and it is playing it is an airplane, and we know that the child will grow up and a year or two later a stick will not represent an airplane to him, and he will want a model then—in other words, his pattern of vision will change, and his little hallucination there, which we accept for the moment, does not mean anything. We are not bothered about it. We do not try to correct him. We do not say, the minute a little girl perhaps playing with a scarf over her shoulders is a wedding gown, we do not say, “Oh, no, that is not a wedding gown; and anyway, you are too young; you are not to play like that; that is not sensible; that is foolish.” For a parent to take that attitude is, indeed, foolish. Let the child have that pattern of innocent hallucination or you will establish permanent hallucination, and the child will grow up believing something that is not so. He knows the difference, as a child, between the realm of make-believe and the realm of what is real, and it is not any concern. But when he begins to get older and he lives continually in this realm of hallucination and make-believe, he destroys his effectiveness in life.
He thinks he knows so many elements of not knowing that he has no realization that he needs to know what he does not know—and that is the point of danger. The child, playing his innocent games of make-believe, as he moves along, does not use that to blind himself to the fact that he needs to know something more—the truth. But the young person getting into the teens who carries the pattern over too far, he begins to think he knows when it is only an idea in the realm of not knowing. Then he does not know what he needs to know. He has blinded himself. And finally, he convinces himself that something is true when it absolutely is not—and that is hallucination. He thinks such and such is the case when it is not the case at all, and if you undertake to tell him it is not the case, he will generally argue, or feel that you do not know, or do not understand, or you do not see what he sees or something, because people have established this layer of not knowing in relationship to the evil imagination of their own life. It is a realm of ghosts—it is a realm of memory of things that had best been forgotten. Some people can go back into this ghostly realm of make-believe and tell you the whole story of all the sufferings and miseries and ashes and pains—all the different ways in which they have been cheated or hurt or misunderstood or something else. They can talk and talk and talk about them.
The former things are supposed to pass away so that they will not be remembered nor come into mind, but do they? If a person is existing in a realm of make-believe, hallucination, of not knowing, the only substance that he has in relationship to his memory is that about which he felt something puny. In this realm of hallucination the individual does not have very much keen feeling with respect to what he imagines was the good things. The so-called good or lovely things generally do not make very much impression because they do not have very much feeling current. It is the point where he suffers, where he felt insulted, where he felt hurt in some fashion, that there is the deeper feeling. People will tend to forget more quickly the good things that happen to them, the nice things that people did for them, than they forget the bad things. Of course that is not true of all people. I am talking on a general basis for the moment. But watch it in the patterns of human beings. They will talk about what they think they know, and it tends to revolve around their sufferings, their difficulties, the things that went wrong, the things where they felt hurt mentally, emotionally, physically, because they had the deeper feeling, and consequently with the greater feeling in relationship to these things, the ghost pattern of them remains longer and they remember them and they keep reliving them, reestablishing the fear. If they would hate to keep talking about them and thinking about them and remembering them, pretty soon their ghostly forms would begin to evaporate and they would be gone. The human being imagines, in the evil imaginations of his heart, that if all of these ghosts of evil things were to disappear, he would be utterly empty. The blind spots would show up, the fog would disappear, and he would get back to the point where he is supposed to know something and he would find out that he knows nothing. Well, he does not want to believe that he knows nothing, so he would rather believe some idea with respect to not knowing than he would admit that he knows nothing, knows just a blank spot, a blind spot.
But once we begin to reach the realm of this blind spot, and the individual is willing to see the truth without regard to all of his ideas and beliefs and concepts and so-called experiences, then that truth can penetrate into consciousness, and immediately it becomes a governing factor in an underlying field where it exerts control. And we do not have to go back into the whole slimy mess of not knowing, of existing, of evil imagination, and figure out this, and try to find out why this person has this quirk, and why that person has the other difficulty, and what is back of his hallucination. You know, people who are supposed to have legal hallucination are sometimes misunderstood by people who only think they are sane—they have hallucinations which they all accept as being real. So if they all believe the same hallucination, they are not crazy. It is only when everybody does not believe the hallucination that anyone's crazy. It is still an hallucination. So, probing around in that slimy mess does not get very far.
Unless someone comes to me and says, “Well, now, you'll have to help that person. That person thinks something absolutely terrible. That person has the wrong idea. He certainly has an hallucination.” Of course he does. He will not say it just like that. But the person who has the vision of the other person’s hallucination does not have the capacity to see his own. And I could, perhaps, see an hallucination here—maybe even with someone in this room. And as long as you believe that you have to struggle and fuss and fume and fight with respect to all of these vain imaginations in the realm of not knowing, you are not going to have very much faith in me when I say to you, “That is no trouble at all. All you have to do is to let it alone. That is no trouble at all.” You expect me to get as bothered about it as you do, and when I do not, why, I just don’t understand. I say, let’s get back to the realm of consciousness. Let’s let the truth be established there and we begin to find that the false—the things that were before that were not removed in the realm of not knowing—the vain imaginations, the hallucinations, they just evaporate and pass away. It is easy.
But it takes some trust, some faith, some response, some acknowledgment of the truth. So, whatever you believe or do not believe in the realm of what you call your mind, there is this one truth. And until you know the truth you cannot be made free, regardless of what anyone says in the realm of not knowing. Only as you come to know the truth can you let the truth make you free. And that is such an easy, natural way—now, some people think I have an hallucination when I say that. Quite a few people have, some rather bluntly, some rather gently because they are such good people, indicated that I am having an hallucination when I say it is easy, and they do not believe it. Since they do not believe it, they do not trust me. So they are left in a state where they can hug to their bosoms the ghostly form that they have developed in the realm of imagination and not knowing. And they want me to solve the problems present in the realm of not knowing. Why, I can't! It is impossible! They are trying to get me to do the impossible. No!
In the realm of knowing—for then it is easy, but there it takes intelligence and intelligence must work on the basis of what we know, not just what we think we know. Real thinking as distinguished from thinking that we think; real knowing as distinguished from ideas, from the realm of not knowing; understanding as distinguished from the evil imaginations of men’s hearts—and women’s too, by the way. The realm of nothingness! But as long as human beings are thoroughly convinced that this is the best they can know, their own feelings with respect to the realm of not knowing, they do not even know that they do not know what they need to know, because they will make no effort to know what they ought to know. And until they wake up, their case is a bit hopeless. So we must let them live in the realm of hallucination until they are tired of it. Children after awhile begin to be tired of playing games in the realm of make-believe. They play a little game and it is all right, but they get tired of it, and they want something real. Why? Because we give them a little taste of something real—not too much, not to try to make them live the whole of life in a minute—and then, maybe, they will have another game of make-believe. All right, let them! They are growing up, but they get tired of playing the game of make-believe. But when human beings work too long from the standpoint of not knowing, they become so accustomed to the realm of make-believe that they never get tired of playing the game; and then, of course, it is hallucination. And if everybody has the same hallucination, they can agree on the same patterns of imagination in their hearts, for then they think they have evidence that they are perfectly safe. They are blinded—and yet, it is so simple and so easy.
All we have to do is begin to know the truth without regard to all of these figments of fancy, and as you know the truth, you begin to let it evolve in consciousness, not trying to get it all at once, but coming as a little child, developing more and more away from the realm of make-believe into the realm of knowing, and first thing you know you are maturing, and you are beginning to be a man or a woman. And that is such a good feeling, not just maturing physically, but maturing mentally and emotionally, no longer lost in the mist of the absence of knowing, no longer lost in the misty realms of not knowing, but living in the realm of the truth that makes you free to be what you ought to be. Peace be unto you from the realm of the Prince of Peace, the Lord of Love and Truth and Life, that you may know what it is to Be and share in the creative processes of Becoming, which is called Living.
Peace Be Unto You
© emissaries of divine light
