Vol. 44 No. 1 - Mark L. Prophet - January 7, 2001
Class of the Resurrection Flame
The Use of Thoughtforms in the Expansion of Consciousness
Our lecture today is about the use of thoughtforms in the expansion of consciousness. I think we have to recognize that God uses geometry and that his geometry is found in the many geometric shapes, such as the trapezoid, the square, the cube and the other symbols that have been used in the ancient fraternities. These geometric shapes can become the basis of our thoughtforms.
Geometrizing is a methodology of God, for God has methods. If you look carefully through a microscope and study cytology, the structure of the cells of the body, or study rocks and matter formations, you will realize that there is a natural geometry in the Lord’s creation of matter.
The word matter really means “mater,” or “mother.” It comes from the Latin, and, of course, our physicians have used it to name various parts of the body like the dura mater of the brain, the pia mater, and so on. The matter universe is the body of the Mother, for she gave us a body made of herself.
We recognize that the cup of our consciousness may be great or it may be small, but, thank God, it can be enlarged and I’ll try to show you how this works. Down through the years we have had dictations from the Masters relating to thoughtforms. For example, one of the Masters once said, “If your consciousness is the size of a thimble, you can expand it to the size of a barrel, or bigger.” <1>
What we then do is to envision the hoop of the thimble, the circle itself and the depth of the thimble, its size, its dimension, and we mentally expand them to become the size of a barrel. Basically, we see the geometric forms that are within familiar objects and we qualify them with greater dimension.
The Thoughtform of a Cup
If we want to increase the capacity of our mind to receive, we can envision the thoughtform of a cup, a goblet, a chalice. The moment you think of a cup, you may have a tendency in your mind to associate the cup with a little cold water that you are giving “in my name,” you know, as Jesus said. <2> By thinking of giving something to someone else, something that they may need, you are extending your own ideas, through the symbol of the cup, into the lives of others.
Let’s change that cup now, put a foot on it and make it into a chalice. Immediately you think of the purification of the Holy Spirit, the descending dove coming down into the cup and you begin to feel that it is like a magnetic flux--a flux of light that is made by drawing down light rays into the cup and bending them to take the form of the cup.
When the light rays bend in there, we suddenly get the idea of the accumulation of light rays, for they are overlaying one upon another like a patina. In the same way, we can take an object and coat it with gold, put a patina of pure gold over it. In this case, we have the cup in mind.
Light descends from the Presence in the form of a dove and bends into the chalice and then piles up. You see, we can cause the light rays to just keep overlaying upon themselves until they increase in density. When you think of light, you think of illumination, or lumens, as light doesn’t have actual density, yet it is still a density of light, for we can mentally cause it to accumulate in a given spot.
The value of thoughtforms in the expansion of consciousness relates to the human heart, for the heart has within it a chamber of great beauty. And as one can have chalices within chalices, so one can have geometric forms within geometric forms.
Cosmic Trigonometry
Consciousness is actually constrained by thoughtforms. I want you to understand this. It is both constrained and expanded. In other words, with consciousness you can do a great deal because you are creating thoughtforms that relate to the geometrizing of God, that become a sort of cosmic trigonometry. It’s a magnificent thing, a cosmic calculus. It’s a form of the Divine Mind that is used for expansive purposes.
A human being contains enough spaghetti inside of him (if I may use the term spaghetti rather jokingly), such as blood vessels and nerve paths and various other cylindrical networks throughout the body, so that if you put them all together, you might be able to go all the way to the moon. In the same way, we can see that objects can be compressed into a small space mentally.
We are little jewel boxes, physically speaking, but we are also little jewel boxes mentally speaking. We have a great deal more room in our mental jewel box than we do in our physical one. However, when we begin to expand our consciousness through thoughtforms, the first step is to bring the thoughtform into consonance with our physical form.
In this way it becomes rational to us, and if the thoughtform is not dealt with this way, it is like having a nebulous cloud out there in space. What is it but a cloud of steam? You may try to define it or name it or duplicate it in thought and feeling, but you cannot.
When, instead, you deal with familiar objects, such as your physical body, you can relate to a thoughtform within your physical form. Then, by the power of the mind, which has the power of expansion, you can take the thoughtform out of the body and put it in space or wherever you want. Then you are actually attracting to that thoughtform the various emanations of your consciousness.
You are creating an extension in consciousness that later becomes a method whereby you can expand your mind and being. Do you follow what I am trying to say?
Take Dominion over Your Life
Start out with a chalice, for example, not a very big one, just a little cup or a glass around the heart. Then invoke the Spirit of God into that chalice. Someone may question this by saying, “What right do I have as an individual to invoke the Spirit of God into my chalice?”
You have every right. God gave it to you in the beginning when he said, “Let us make man in our image,” <3> and he made you in his image. He made you in his likeness and he created you to be the authority in your world.
One of the biggest problems today is that people do not want to take authority in their world. They allow other people to literally push them into different ideas and fads. For example, if somebody in Paris this year decides to create long skirts, maxi-skirts, then much of the world will follow the Paris fad. It is the same with miniskirts and with everything else.
We have to understand that we must take dominion over our life and we have every right to do it in regard to these thoughtforms. We are then doing what God commanded us to do. He said we should take dominion over the earth and he wasn’t just talking about the physical earth. He was talking about the earth that is our self, our life.
What does it say in the Bible? It says, “And the earth standing out of the water and in the water.” <4> What is it talking about, “out of the water and in the water”? Almost an image of a human baptism, you see. Someone standing out of the water and in the water is in two planes of being.
Here we are, mentally creating a chalice around the heart. The value of that chalice is purely as a starting point, a place to begin to expand your consciousness. You could go out and suddenly decide to surround yourself with a chalice so big that you could hardly imagine it around you, but to be effective your creation has to be relevant to what you can imagine. You cannot make an infinite chalice now, can you? It has to be in the known universe and you have to deal with known objects.
You start out, then, with the physical and you make your chalice bigger and bigger and bigger. One day you will come to the point where you can actually decide that you will surround yourself with a mental chalice that is as big as the earth. And you do.
You may also elect, instead of standing in a chalice, to stand in a pyramid or a cylinder or a square, a cube or any other geometric object. And these thoughtforms can become the means of the expansion of your consciousness.
Limit Your Experiments
I particularly want to warn people that no one who is interested in tethering himself to reality should indulge in this to the extent of living in a world of fantasy or delusion. These experiments in consciousness should be controlled and carefully engaged in for a limited time only, because of the lever, the lever of relativity.
When you start these mental doings, you are starting a process in the macrocosm that occurs first in the microcosm. You may not be able to create that infinite chalice we spoke of, but your God Presence can, and according to cosmic law, the pattern for it must come from your level. In other words, you are the authority for your world.
Therefore, through the creation of proper thoughtforms and your desire to produce states of consciousness that are representative of an expanded awareness, you make these forms and then release them into the Universal. In addition, I recommend and advocate holy prayer before doing so.
I also recommend protection from Mighty Astrea so that you are not in any way invaded by astral entities. I recommend care and consideration in the creation of these thoughtforms and I recommend that after you have created them to the size you desire that you then turn the thoughtforms over to your God Presence for amplification.
Why is that? Because your God Presence has now received the mandate of your authority to create, and whether you are awake or asleep your God Presence will take it up. Do you know what that means? Do you know, for example, that the greatest healing that can occur is when the God Presence does it?
You, in your human self, can do nothing. Jesus’ statement, “I of myself can do nothing. It is the Father in me which doeth the work” <5> was about the transfer of authority from the human will to the divine will and about the power of the cosmic lever of relativity for man in the name of God. This is an involved process but I have tried to reduce it to words that can be understood. I personally have done a few things with this most effectively and I know that it does work.
I suggest that you confine your early experiments to simple forms because a great deal depends upon your standards of morality and decency and upon eliminating conflicting images from your world. Unless you eliminate the conflicting images by not filling your mind with all of the crud, if I may use a word of the world, you cannot expect to mix a heavenly elixir with a human idea. It will not work as effectively.
It may work a little, but first I would try to purify the consciousness with the violet flame. I would have only the highest motives in my doings and then I would work in the field of expanding my awareness and consciousness by the use of thoughtforms.
The Thoughtform of Wings
These thoughtforms may also include such objects as wings. I have spent a great deal of time with the thoughtform of wings and I find it most valuable for elevating the consciousness. In order to generate wings I suggest that you listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for example, or the Grail music from Parsifal by Richard Wagner, or his “Ride of the Valkyries” or other classical pieces that are very inspiring and elevating to your consciousness. The music from Lohengrin is also very good.
When you use this music, you envision a pair of wings on, say, an hourglass, and you see the wings raising the hourglass. The idea is that time is being elevated to its proper use. What better use can you put it to than to understand that God, who is eternity represented by time rising, is magnetized into your image and then transferred to you because you have given the authority to your God Presence to act for you.
Without your mandate of prayer or decrees or your desire voiced in some manner to the Spirit, there can be no manifestation. This is the same thing, in a way, as what was known in the metaphysical movements as treasure mapping. But dealing with geometric figures and thoughtforms is a far more advanced method.
All kinds of thoughtforms are valuable. For example, for pregnant mothers it is particularly valuable to try to mentally trace the lines of one of the ancient Grecian statues in order to bring its form into physical manifestation. First, they carry the image up to their God Presence through their Holy Christ Self, through their desire, and then they call for it to be brought down into their womb and used as a matrix for the body elemental of the mother and the formative elemental of the child.
Working with Color and Sound
Let us also deal with color. We will say that our chalice is at first colorless. We may create it in black and white, but it is also possible for us to embellish the thoughtform by the use of correct color, choosing primarily the pastel colors, such as the pinks, the violets, the soft pastel yellows. All these colors can be mentally added to our thoughtform.
You may say to me, “Well, wouldn’t black and white be enough?” I would answer, “No,” because black and white is in-volved to a certain degree with the nature of the gray ones. White is all right in itself, but the moment you put any black into it at all, you dilute the whole formula.
I suggest that rather than using black, you use colors, even in the formation of the lines that make up the form of the chalice. And I would suggest that you actually use color rather than black as the demarcation line for your subject.
In addition to color, I want to bring in another extremely important factor in the use of thoughtforms, and that is the quality of tone. After you have created, say, a beautiful violet-colored chalice in the ethers, involving either the heart chakra or the third eye or any other part of your being, you can qualify it with tone.
It is always desirable that we call for a tone such as high C, for if we get the right tone, it will vibrate according to certain laws of the universe and actually produce a physical mani- festation. The science of intonation is part of the “hidden wisdom” spoken of by Paul as the mystery of God. <6> So I am not permitted to give you the full structure of what you can do with tone in connection with the mind, but I can say that you can use tone in your thoughtform, which gives a further solidity to your object from a mental standpoint.
Whatever you send out will return to you. So, by this law, if you don’t use the quality of tone in it, you will lack something of value to yourself. The more reality you put into the mental image, the greater the chance of having the object materialize, but not necessarily in the sense that you’re going to bring forth beautiful little glasses that drop from the Universal, like Baird Spalding did out in the desert. <7>
I am not talking about making glasses, although this happens to be one of the steps. I am talking about improving and expanding awareness and consciousness by guiding your thoughts along geometric lines, which is one of the first steps to take before you can use the creative ability God gave you. Later on, you can use this in symmetry, such as the molding of sculpture.
You can actually mold and sculpt, if you wish, using these principles. But I think that the person who begins to work first in the realm of mind and form and cosmic symmetry has a better chance of executing this in the world of form than the person who does not. Do you follow me?
Increase Your Creative Abilities
I recommend to all who are interested in these experiments that you engage in them for a limited time. If you engage in them for too long, you may find that you will be subject to potentially harmful influences. By using them for just a short time, like five or ten minutes once or twice a day, you will begin to condition your mind, your spirit and your being to your creative abilities.
These creative abilities will come out in all of your work. You will begin to understand how to use your physical senses in an improved manner. You will understand that you are working with the fingers of the mind and with the creative ability of the mind through the use of these thoughtforms and later you will be able to transfer your sensory awareness to your fingertips.
This is the only kind of sensitivity training we approve of, for through it you will have an expanded awareness in your lower consciousness as well as in your higher consciousness and you will increase your sensitivity in your analyses of conditions, things and people. You will find that you can pick up vibratory patterns much more easily and be less subject to the mental manipulations of those who may be using witchcraft and black magic against you, for example, or against anyone in the world.
You will be stronger because you are using these images through the creation of thoughtforms. If you do it under God’s direction through your Presence, you will have greater control over your creativity than you have ever had before. But don’t expect this control to manifest immediately. It may not do so for a period of three or four months.
However, if you keep building into your consciousness these valuable experiments in the use of thoughtforms for the expansion of consciousness--purely for the use of good, now, not for evil--you will be strengthening your mental body and your creative faculties. I recommend that you try this, but not to make it a god to yourself. It is only one of the creative aspects of life. There are many.
Avoid Condemnation
We now know how to deal with tone and color. In our recognition of the use of these creative faculties, a great deal may be obtained. Man is actually preparing to enter in to his own divinity, for in reality he was made in the divine image. This is one way he can return to that image.
What a silly thing it is when people stress, “In sin did my mother conceive me.” <8> That is condemnation, or self-condem-nation, which is really a tool of the forces of evil. It is not to be used by the aspirant on the spiritual path. He should not use it against others or against himself. Condemnation is stultifying; it prevents a man from actually realizing what things are all about--what is real about himself and what is illusion.
So, just out of the interest of further enhancing your creative ability, I will give you a little skit that I sometimes do for the benefit of people. They come up to me and ask me a question and sometimes they say, “Do you know this?” or “Do you know that?”
And I’ll say, “Well, not knowing with any great degree of certainty, I therefore hesitate to respond to you, fearing that I might thereby prevaricate and suffer dire calamity, which has naught to do with the indubitable angelic acclamation of the ineffable austerity of the approaching woes or the incontrovertible inexhaustibility of divine providence. But by now I hope that your sufficiency is quite suffancified because any more would be a vulgar superfluity.” [laughter]
This is the sort of thing that really doesn’t do anything for you but it probably entertains you a little bit!
The Use of the Spiral
In the main, I want to bring to your attention that creative ability is possible through the use of geometric figures. I also want to take up the spiral at this time because it is a delightful mechanism. We are dealing now with the circle or with the laws of eternal cycles so that we can create a golden circle and then attach it mentally to the next circle. The way to do it is with the spiral--then you have a natural flow, you see. You have no interruption if you do it with spirals.
Can you imagine piling circles one on top of another like a bunch of dinner plates? You begin to wonder after a while if they’re all going to fall down. So instead of doing that you just connect them all in one beautiful flow, and it’s a spiral staircase that leads to the stars.
When you begin working with these figures, you will be absolutely amazed to realize that God uses geometry so wonderfully. He uses it to illustrate to humanity their own natural abilities to scale the stars in creative thought. It is also very practical. Through these exercises, uneducated men can suddenly become educated. Why? Because we are dealing with the processes of automation.
I think most of you are familiar with the Russian scientist Pavlov and his work with conditioned reflexes. It was a matter of placing sensing devices in a dog’s mouth to register its saliva. Pavlov found that by ringing a bell, a dinner bell, and then feeding the dog, that he could measure the saliva that would always come whenever the dog was fed.
Later on, he took away the food, rang the bell and he still got the saliva. So he began to understand the matter of conditioned responses, you see. But that was a very limited thing. That was only a first step for man to understand the spirals of the cosmos and the controls that can be actually used by us for our betterment. It was also to guard against the influences of people who have nefarious ideas and who don’t yet understand the principles that God has given to us of live and let live.
These experiments have been used in a negative way by Lavrenty Beria who used to be with the NKVD (secret police). And it was used in a wrong way as a hypnotic device to manipulate and control political prisoners in time of war and to influence people in various nations. We have no right to try to control anybody against their free will. God doesn’t prac- tice it, does he? But we have every intent of practicing taking dominion over our world and developing our own creative ability.
If we don’t develop it, somebody else won’t develop it for us, will they? Do you believe they will? They can’t; it’s impossible. We have to develop it for ourselves. And each of you will have to follow these experiments.
It’s like the dead language of Latin, for example. A Latin scholar goes ahead and learns to speak Latin. “Well,” you say, “it’s a dead language. Who wants to speak Latin?” The mental gymnastics involved in speaking Latin, however, prepare him to understand almost every other language on the face of the earth. My Latin teacher used to whip me when I was a smaller lad, you see, and I am very appreciative of that. It would be kind of hard to whip me right now, but at that time she could whip me!
I think we should understand the need to make ourselves do these mental exercises, just as we eat our daily bread. We need to become well-rounded people who are able to utilize the mechanics of the Spirit in the creating of form.
I happen to believe that you will need it, even when you come to the point of your ascension and then go on to the further point of rising to become, perhaps, a God of another solar system. Did you hear what I said? I said a God of another solar system. You? Yes, you, that’s who. Somewhere along the pathway you will have to master the creation and control of form and substance. Form and substance is very important to Spirit because Spirit created it for a reason.
Actually what we’re trying to do in these thoughtforms is to help you to gain creative power and control over your life and your life’s energies. It is a pantomime, which eventually will become a very effective means of helping you to grow spiritually. Yes, it could be used negatively, but if you do, you’ll pay and pay and pay. So I pray to God that nobody will ever use it in a negative way, but will just use this knowledge to take their first toddling steps in dealing with energy from a higher level.
God bless you, and thank you for your attention.
The lecture, “The Use of Thoughtforms in the Expansion of Consciousness,” was delivered by the Messenger of the Great White Brotherhood Mark L. Prophet on Saturday, April 10, 1971, during the Easter Class, Class of the Resurrection Flame, held at La Tourelle, Colorado Springs, Colorado. Excerpts from this lecture were published in The Coming Revolution in Higher Consciousness, Spring 1981.
2. Mark 9:41.
3. Gen. 1:26.
4. 2 Peter 3:5.
6. 1 Cor. 2:7.
7. Baird Spalding wrote the five-volume series, Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East.
8. Ps. 51:5.
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