The Great Ray

[James Parkinson]

The Great Ray is central to the teachings of the Fourth Way. What is the most practical application of it for your personal work? How has it changed over the years?

[Colin Blundell]

LOAVES DO NOT GROW IN A WHEATFIELD
(Maurice Nicoll)

Many seem to find coming to terms with the cosmology of the 4th Way a bit of a strain and I’m no exception when it comes down to (or goes up to) ‘hydrogens’. For the most part, anyway, people don’t think cosmologically. As Maurice Nicoll points out in his Commentary 14/2/42, we live in our small world getting on with our own self-interests. We normally have no proper consciousness of one another or of the world we live in. Anything anybody says about the cosmos has little or no meaning to us because it means getting ourselves to think beyond our own small corner of the universe.

What’s more we identify with, and therefore lose ourselves in, all the self-interests, the things we get worked up about, the things we imagine we believe in, career, sporting events, politics, the powerful A Influences the things we look at and become interested in—I've just become aware that I have lost my self in the last few moments by identifying with what I’m writing right now! All identification is loss of self; when we have lost ourselves what real chance is there of finding our place in a big black universe, of concerning ourselves with where we might be on a so-called Ray of Creation?

Long before I came across the 4th Way, I carried around with me The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius for study at odd moments. So I think I was prepared at least for the concept of the Ray of Creation when I first came across it.

Marcus Aurelius: 7/9 All things are interwoven with one another; a sacred bond unites them; there is scarcely one thing that is isolated from another. Everything is coordinated, everything works together in giving form to the universe. The world-order is a unity made up of multiplicity: God is one, pervading all things...

As always, Maurice Nicoll (Commentaries 2/3/41) has some very down to earth things to say as a way in to thinking about the Ray of Creation. What we might usefully acquire, he says, is ‘relative understanding’. Since whatever you choose to think about is connected with and depends on something else, it’s just not possible to fully understand anything by itself; in order to understand the part you need to have some understanding of the whole.

Good practice for acquiring ‘relative understanding’, I've found, is to choose something that you imagine is familiar to you and elaborate its connection with everything else.

For example, this fountain pen I choose to use before going to the wordprocessor—its manufacture, people involved, their lives, the flow of ink as compared with a ball-point, quill-pen and ink, making marks with charcoal on prehistoric cave walls, my personal preference for writing with a fountain pen when there are so many other modern writing implements, using black ink since 1954 when my best friend used it, pens I’ve had and the events in my life... and so on till the connection is made with my significance and meaning on earth. This special pen is at the tip of my thinking; thinking helps me begin to understand why I'm here... and so on.

How many things do we just take for granted? Water comes out of taps, wires come into houses with electricity in them, food provision, sewage disposal. Relative understanding makes us think of these things in a different way: what would life be like without having such things ‘on tap’? What will it be like when petrol runs out?

‘Relative understanding’ helps us not to take ordinary objects for granted: regular practice at it gets you to see them in their connectedness. Loaves do not grow in a wheatfield...

Marcus Aurelius: 5/24 Think of the totality of all Being, and what a mite of it is yours; think of all Time and the brief fleeting instant of it that is allotted to yourself; think of Destiny and how puny a part of it you are.

He advises us to Survey the circling stars (7/47) as a way of giving ourselves a cosmic perspective. This helps me to sing my way up t

[Colin Blundell]

Continuation...

He advises us to Survey the circling stars (7/47) as a way of giving ourselves a cosmic perspective. This helps me to sing my way up the Sun Octave to put myself in my place, imagining the hugeness of space as I go. My screensaver is the one that has stars and so on coming at you out of the screen so I frequently have the experience of swimming in space.

And then I sometimes (when I think about it and need it) put the Octave inside myself and use it, microcosmically, to sing the process of learning for instance. This is Beryl Pogson’s practical idea:-

Doh Hear using what I’ve learned as a fresh beginning
Transformation of Negative Emotion keeping excitement and misery at bay
Si Do making it happen
Lah Will developing a plan of action
Sol Aim what I need to think about next
Fah Understand joining the learning with my feeling of self
Self-remembering remind myself that this is me here and now
Mi Acknowledge that I’m getting somewhere but there’s more to do
Re Know some of the bits and pieces of it
Doh Hear (or read) something I want to learn

How does this work for you when you apply it to something you're learning?

This is the most practical use that I make of the Ray of Creation: to see my learning as a parallel to the way the Sun Octave works, expanding and developing, everything connected up together. At each stage I can remind myself to check that the Centres I’m in are appropriate to what I’m doing; ask myself whether the ‘I’s I’m in are sound. I sing the process.

The Sun Octave is outside of me; the learning process is the Sun Octave inside of me.

And sometimes (quite often) there’s total discord.

[Colin Blundell]

PS The Doh Re Mi Octave is to be read from the bottom up!