The mind in two vocabularies

The material’s account of the mind is the part of it that most readers bounce off, and the bounce is structural rather than intellectual. Ra describes the mind as a set of movements: a matrix that receives, a potentiator that supplies, catalyst, experience, transformation. Then, when the questioner brings the tarot images he was working with, Ra corrects the names of the archetypes at length. By session eighty-eight it is doing something more interesting than correcting. It is saying that every version of the system is a distortion, and that this was known before anyone drew a card.

The admission that comes with the map

Ra is asked whether the tarot still has value, and the answer opens with the frame that governs everything after it.

It is appropriate to study one form of constructed and organized distortion of the archetypical mind in depth in order to arrive at the position of being able to become and to experience archetypes at will.

Read the phrase twice: constructed and organized distortion of the archetypical mind. Ra is not offering a neutral diagram and warning that a poor copy might be made of it. It is saying the diagram is a distortion, and that a deliberately organised distortion is the best that can be done, because the thing itself is not a set of images. The tarot deck is a translation, and Ra says as much in the same answer by calling the three options it offers choices rather than versions of one truth.

Then it gives the instruction most readers skip.

It is well to investigate each discipline, not as a dilettante, but as one who seeks the touchstone, one who wishes to feel the pull of the magnet.

Three disciplines are named, one is to be chosen, and the choice is expected to be made on attraction rather than on merit, because no one studies a system deeply that they find merely correct. And the final step is not further study. It is moving beyond the written in order to express the understanding in a way that is the student’s own.

The second admission is a caution about what the map is of.

However, it must be seen once again that the archetypical mind does not equal the acting incarnational mind/body/spirit complex’s progression or evolution.

This is Ra refusing a tidy equivalence. The questioner had proposed that the archetypes describe a sequence a person passes through, and Ra says no, because the archetypal mind is not the incarnate complex’s progression. The Great Way is a framework within which the archetypes move, not a stage reached. Any reader who has ever treated the archetypes as levels to be attained has made exactly the mistake being corrected here, in the transcript, at the point where it was first available to make.

Why one vocabulary and not several

Put the two admissions together and the practical consequence is narrower than it looks. A system of this kind cannot be assembled from the best parts of several systems, because each one is an organised distortion with its own internal geometry, and the geometry is the part that does the work. Mixing them yields the vocabulary without the structure.

The material has said this elsewhere, in a different context, and said it sharply.

It is not for a being of polarity in the physical consciousness to pick and choose among attributes, thus building the roles that cause blockages and confusions in the already-distorted mind complex.

That sentence is about roles rather than systems, and the principle travels. A person who selects the pieces of a framework they find agreeable has not adopted a framework. They have adopted their own preferences and given them the framework’s authority, which is the specific operation that produces a blockage in the mind complex instead of a discipline of it.

India’s own vocabulary, and where this community stands

This is where the essay has to be honest about its own position, so the following is labelled clearly: it is this community’s reading, not something the material says.

Readers here arrive with vocabularies already in hand. The three bodies as they are usually taught map onto distinctions the material makes, but not cleanly, and the mapping is done so often and so casually that the seams have stopped being visible. The koshas are not the seven rays. The three gunas are not the three distortions of free will, love and light, though the two triads are close enough in feel that they get used interchangeably in conversation. And the causal, subtle and gross division that runs through a great deal of Indian metaphysics has a real correspondence in the material’s own language, which is why this community uses it, while knowing that the correspondence is ours rather than the transcripts’.

What this community has found, after several years of study and one long argument, is that every framework is strongest where it begins and weakest at its far edge. A system that trains a person well at the start will eventually produce a distortion at the point where its own assumptions stop being examined. Our own reading of the two traditions we know best, and this is ours and is meant to be argued with:

• Advaita Vedanta trains the disciplines and the experiential foundation very well. Its characteristic weakness is an absolutism about the causal that can act as a ceiling on catalyst processing. A reader who has been taught that the world is ultimately unreal will eventually have to ask what they are supposed to do with the catalyst arriving from a world they have been told is not there.
• Much of the Indian and broader Eastern tradition undervalues the gross physical realm and the psychological structures while overvaluing the subtle energy body. The practical result is practitioners who can speak about the channels and cannot hold a conversation with their own family.

Neither of those observations is a verdict on either tradition, and neither is unusual. They are the same shape: a strength pushed past its edge becomes the thing that limits the person using it.

What the archetypes are for

The reason this is worth the care is that the archetypal system is not a cosmology to be admired. It is a description of how a complex processes its own experience, which makes it the closest the material comes to a manual.

This community’s working summary, which is ours and not Ra’s, is that catalyst enters through the potenziation of the unconscious, is worked on by the matrix, and leaves as experience. Experience then resets the design of the next catalyst. The loop is the mechanism, and the loop is what makes the disciplines matter: a person who processes catalyst well is incrementally handed a different kind of catalyst, and a person who does not is handed the same one again.

Ra’s own closing line on the discipline of the personality belongs here, because it describes the same loop from the inside.

The heart of the discipline of the personality is threefold. One, know yourself. Two, accept yourself. Three, become the Creator.

Know, accept, become. The order is the content. A map of the mind used before the acceptance step is a way of describing a self that has not been looked at, which is precisely the position the material says produces confusion in an already-distorted mind complex.

So the recommendation this community makes to a reader is small and maybe disappointing. Choose one vocabulary. Study it deeply enough to be able to say something in it that the system does not already contain. Then put it down. The archetypes are there to be used and become, not collected, and Ra’s own three choices are offered on the assumption that whoever takes one will eventually stop reading and start expressing.

Choose one vocabulary, and the question stops being which system is correct. It becomes whether the reader’s own life has started to look like what the system describes.