Grass with insects and butterflies
by female painter Yanyan
Hand scroll, Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279)
Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, China
Influence—the act of impressions flowing inward into human beings—is the action that creates the inner universe in a man or a woman. Influence, in other words, is actually a sexual act. Through it, a child is conceived and born.
One needs to experience it as such, in an intimacy so close to the seed of one's soul that one can actually understand something new is being born in oneself. This is the secret of water changing into wine; influences are as they flow inwards transformed into a higher substance, something of a different order.
The miraculous and absolutely tangible nature of this transformation can't be understated; yet so few of us understand what it is, or that it is in fact a real phenomenon, not a biblical parable.
In order for man or woman to be available to the transformation of influence, personality and essence have to be properly balanced.
The diagram of the
Star of David indicates the relationship and nature of both essence and personality. Essence, under the influence of higher parts, combines with personality, under influences from a lower level, in a harmonious interaction. Because essence and personality are both under the law of three, each one has an emotional, physical, and intellectual part. That is to say, both essence and personality need to have feeling, strength, and intelligence in equal measure in order to function properly. If any of these qualities is too weak in either part, the expression of Being suffers accordingly.
A man who wants to Be must apply his attention quite actively; attention, the part that sees—which in this diagram is indicated by the circle which circumscribes the star—needs to be equally applied to all six points on the diagram.
It's easy to forget that the law of three is a quality of expression within existence that never goes away; that it is present in every object, event, circumstance, and condition. Because we hear the words “the law of three,” and it sounds like a formulation, we don't see that it's a living thing in ourselves, our work, our life—in every moment.
Attention can help the awareness to become more attuned to this harmonic relationship. And just an awareness of it—a seeing of how things are—already begins to bring tones which aren't tuned to quite the right rate of vibration closer to a center where they can blend.
Henry Brown, who led my old group for many years, used to describe it as an action something like tuning one of those old radios, the kind they use during the second world war, where there were a number of knobs on the front that needed to be tweaked until the signal came in properly.
In any event, I keep coming back to this question with readers because it's so essential to understand these particular questions. Influences reaching a disrupted system (which describes all of us) have a terribly difficult time finding their right place. Almost all of the influences, inward flowing impressions, that we receive are supposed to be reaching deep into the recesses of our Being, depositing substances there which nourish roots from which our soul grows. But they don't get there; the turbulence in our personality causes very little to be deposited, and a great deal of what is received gets flushed out of the system before it ever reaches a place where it can do us any good.
This is why the cultivation of stillness and silence can help us. To a certain extent, this quiets the waters and allows the right material to be deposited in the correct place. It's not, unfortunately, a
panacea; completely still water becomes stagnant. There must be an inner action that we participate in, not just a global cultivation of passivity. The part that
sees needs to be present throughout the action; it's what joins the essence and the personality, what helps to make a whole.
I respectfully hope you will take good care.