ENERGY ENHANCEMENT

Energy Enhancement can lead you to God or the universal absolute and it promises Nirvana and transformation, as these things are within you already. Energy Enhancement will not “tell” you about truth, but will give you the Real Spiritual Experience to provoke and challenge and excite into awakening to the truth which lies within. This kind of truth cannot be given as it takes two to Tango and it is the purity and resolution of the Student which calls forth the Energies of Existence. Yet, it can felt through personal experiences which take you out of normal states of awareness – through Initiations and Rites of Passage calling you into new ways of seeing Self and everything you once believed was real.

Within you lies a doorway to the Infinite. The journey to find that doorway can be arduous for it takes you into the landscape of your inner being. Are you willing to Initiate one of the greatest challenges of your life? Are you willing to change your ideas of who you thought you were in order to discover who you really are? Say, “Yes”. Leave behind your safety net and discover the knowledge that is your birthright. Many stand at this doorway, but few dare enter.

Inside you live the Mysteries of the Universe. Energy Enhancement is a doorway into that Grand Adventure.

WORK

1.1. The Ideology of Work

Work for economic ends has not always been the dominant activity of mankind. It has only been dominant across the whole of society since the advent of industrial capitalism, about two hundred years ago. Before capitalism, people in pre-modern societies, in the Middle Ages and the Ancient World, worked far less than they do nowadays, as they do in the precapitalist societies that still exist today. In fact, the difference was such that the first industrialists, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had great difficulty getting their workforce to do a full day's work, week in week out. The first factory bosses went bankrupt precisely for this reason.

That is to say that what the British and the Germans call `the work ethic' and the `work-based society' are recent phenomena.

It is a feature of `work-based societies' that they consider work as at one and the same time a moral duty, a social obligation and the route to personal success. The ideology of work assumes that,

- the more each individual works, the better off everyone will be;

- those who work little or not at all are acting against the interests of the community as a whole and do not deserve to be members of it;

- those who work hard achieve social success and those who do not succeed have only themselves to blame.
This ideology is still deeply ingrained and hardly a day passes without some politician, be he Right - or left-wing, urging us to work and insisting that work is the only way to solve the present crisis. If we are to `beat unemployment', they add, we must work more, not less.

FDR promised and delivered full employment because there is just so much work which needs to be done to improve the conditions of EVERYONE on this planet.

It has been found over the millenia that societal control by an oligarchic elite is enhanced by poverty and putting people out of Work - by exacerbating  the feelings of helplessness as in PTSD and removing any finances which can change the situation. Thus the Policy of Poverty over the ages. Usually only War has changed this situation and then only for a short time.

1.2. The Crisis of the Work Ethic

In actual fact the work ethic has not become obsolete. It is no longer true that producing more means working more, or that producing more will lead to a better way of life. The connection between more and better has not been broken; our needs for many products and services are only adequately met for a small proportion of the population, and many of our as-yet- unsatisfied needs will be met by producing more, and also by producing differently without producing any pollution, and producing other things which are needed. This is especially true as regards our needs for communication - internet, computers, LCD screens, 5.1 surround sound systems and tablet computers to read books on - for that we need innovation, genius, air, water through irrigation to make the deserts flourish, space, silence, beauty, art, music, books time and human contact.

It true that humanity likes to work and to innovate and communicateand the more each individual works, the better off everyone will be. The present crisis has stimulated technological change of an unprecedented scale and speed: `the micro-chip revolution'. The object and indeed the effect of this revolution has been to make rapidly increasing savings in labour, in the industrial, administrative and service sectors. Increasing production is secured in these sectors by decreasing amounts of labour in these areas. However these products only reach 20% of humanity and there are many more areas - irrigation, transport by maglev, fusion power, music, art, and Movies As a result, the work ethic is more viable in such a situation and work based society is thrown into overdrive to make everyone rich in a lack of pollution, housing, water, communication, power, libraries, movies, music, space, time and peace and joy and happiness.

1.3. The Neo-conservative Ideology of Hard Work

Not everyone is aware of this crisis. Some are aware of it but find it in their interest to deny its existence and increase poverty. This is true, in particular, of a large number of `neo-conservatives', bent on upholding the ideology of work in a context in which paid work is becoming increasingly scarce by their actions. They thus encourage people looking for paid work to enter into increasingly fierce competition with each other, relying on this competition to bring down the cost of labour (that is, wages) and allow the `strong' to eliminate the `weak'. They look to this neoDarwinian process of the `survival of the fittest' to bring about the rebirth of a dynamic form of capitalism, with all its blemishes removed together with all or part of its social legislation. And the Neo-conservatives know that 100% need to be rich and yet their policy of poverty creates the above situation of decreasing the number of rich people when so much needs to be done to increase the richness of everyone - all 100% of humanity all over the world.

1.4. Working Less so that Everyone can Work

It is in the common interest of waged workers not to compete with one other, to organize a united response to their employers and collectively negotiate their conditions of employment with the latter. This common interest finds its expression in trade unionism.

In a context in which the elite decrease economic activity so as to increase poverty, there is not enough paid full-time work to go round, abandoning the work ethic becomes a false condition of survival for the trade-union movement. The liberation from work and the idea of `working less so everyone on this planet can work' and so become rich is, after all, at the origin of the struggle of the labour movement.  Trade Unions need to point out the necessity for more work to make everyone on this planet rich. Not to do so is a betrayal on the movement's part.

1.5. Forms of Work

By work we have come to understand a paid activity, performed on behalf of a third party (the employer), to achieve goals we have not chosen for ourselves and according to procedures and schedules laid down by the person paying our wages. There is widespread confusion between `work' and `job' or `employment', as there is between the `right to work', the `right to a wage' and the `right to an income'.

Now, in practice, not all activities constitute work, and neither is all work paid or done with payment in mind. We have to distinguish between three types of work.

1.5.1. Work for economic ends

This is work done with payment in mind. Here money, that is, commodity exchange, is the principal goal. One works first of all to `earn a living', and the satisfaction or pleasure one may possibly derive from such work is a subordinate consideration. This may be termed -work for economic ends.

1.5.2. Domestic labour and work-for-oneself

This is work done not with a view to exchange but in order to achieve a result of which one is, directly, the principal beneficiary. `Reproductive' work, that is, domestic labour, which guarantees the basic and immediate necessities of life day after day - preparing food, keeping oneself and one's home clean, giving birth to children and bringing them up, and so on - is an example of this kind of work. It was and still is often the case that women are made to do such work on top of the work they do for economic ends.

Since the domestic community (the nuclear or extended family) is one in which life is based on sharing everything rather than on an accounting calculation and commodity exchange, it is only recently that the idea of wages for housework has arisen. Previously, by contrast, domestic labour was seen as work done by and for the domestic community as a whole. This attitude, it should be stressed, is only justifiable if all the members of the domestic community share the tasks equitably. A number of activists have called for women to be given wages for housework in the form of a public allowance, in recognition of the social utility of such work. But this will not lead to the equitable sharing of household chores and moreover it poses the following problems:

- it transforms domestic labour into work for economic ends, that is, into a domestic (servant's) job;
- it places domestic labour in the same category as socially useful work, whereas its aim is - and should be - not social utility but the well-being and personal fulfilment of the members of the community, which is not at all the same thing. The confusion between the fulfilment of individuals and their social utility stems from a totalitarian conception of society in which there is no place for the uniqueness and singularity of the individual or for the specificity of the private sphere. By nature this sphere is - and should be - exempt from social control and the criteria of public utility.

1.5.3. Autonomous activity

Autonomous activities are activities one performs freely and not from necessity, as creative ends in themselves for the benefit of humanity. This includes all activities which are experienced as fulfilling, enriching, sources of meaning and happiness: artistic, philosophical, scientific, relational, educational, charitable and mutual-aid activities, activities of auto-production, and so on. All these activities require `work' in the sense that they require effort and methodical application but their meaning lies as much in their performance as in their product: activities such as these are the substance of life itself. But this always requires there to be sufficient time to do them. Indeed, the same activity - bringing up children, preparing a meal or taking care of our surroundings, for example - can take the form of a chore in which one is subject to what seem like oppressive constraints or of a gratifying activity, depending on whether one is harrassed by lack of time or whether the activity can be performed at leisure, in co-operation with others and through the voluntary sharing of the tasks involved.

1.6. The End of Utopia

The progressive domination of work for only economic ends was made possible by the advent of capitalism and the generalization of commodity exchange. We owe to it in particular the destruction of a great deal of non-commodity services and exchanges and domestic production in which work for economic ends and the pleasure of creating something of beauty were inextricably linked. This explains why the labour movement originally challenged the overriding importance industrial capitalism attached to waged work and economic ends. However, in calling for the abolition of wage labour and for the government or self government of society by freely associated workers in control of the means of production, the demands of the workers ran directly counter to the developments that were actually taking place. The movement was utopian in so far as the possibility of giving substance to its demands had not emerged.

Yet what was utopian in the early nineteenth century has ceased in part to be so today: the economy and the social process of production require decreasing quantities of wage labour. Only rich societies can afford the luxury of work for pleasure, for soul path, for the benefit of humanity.  Poor societies, societies created poor only can have the subordination of all other human activities and goals to waged work, for economic ends. Emancipation from economic and commercial rationality is becoming a possibility only in rich societies where work has created the necessary richness.


CRISIS OF WORK, CRISIS OF SOCIETY

2.1. Giving Meaning to the Changes: The Liberation of Time

Trade unionism cannot continue to exist as a movement with a future unless it expands its mission beyond the defence of the particular interests of waged workers. In industry, as in the classical tertiary sector, we are witnessing an increasingly accelerated reduction in the amount of labour despite the vast majority of humanity getting by on only one dollar a day. The policy of poverty is instituted by all, and this world as it is now is the result. And its getting worse.

 The German trade-union movement has estimated that, of the new forms of technology which will be available by the year 2000, only 5 per cent are currently being put to use. The reserves of productivity (that is, foreseeable labour savings) in the industrial and classical tertiary sectors are immense yet they are not being put to use for the benefit of ALL.

Not only the liberation from work for economic ends, through reductions in working hours and the development of other types of activities, self-regulated and self-determined by the individuals involved, but the freedom from poverty for all the population of the world are the ways to give positive meaning to the savings in wage labour brought about by the current technological revolution yet unless we have change, they will never be used for this.

The project for a society of liberated time, in which everyone will be able to work but will work less and less for economic ends, is the possible meaning of the current historical developments. Such a project is able to give cohesion and a unifying perspective to the different elements that make up the social movement since (1) it is a logical extension of the experiences and struggles of workers in the past; (2) it reaches beyond that experience and those struggles towards objectives which correspond to the interests of both workers and non-workers, and is thus able to cement bonds of solidarity and common political will between them; (3) it corresponds to the aspirations of the ever-growing proportion of men and women who wish to (re)gain control in and of their own lives, yet they will never have this opportunity. Since we are told that history stretches back 6000 years to Babylon yet there are many ruins in the Andes over 17,000 years old and The millennias old - how many - has been successful all that time - the Policy of Poverty will ensure that people will work all the hours god sends for a pittance and the rest will be "useless eaters" (Quote from Kissinger) scheduled for poverty and genocide.

ENERGY ENHANCEMENT LIFE GAMES

- A Game Worth Playing

THIS ARTICLE IS CONCERNED with games and aims.

 It has been stated by Thomas Szasz that what people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort or esteem but games worth playing.1 He who cannot find a game worth playing is apt to fall prey to accidie, defined by the Fathers of the Church as one of the Deadly Sins, but now regarded as a symptom of sickness. Accidie is a paralysis of the will, a failure of the appetite, a condition of generalized boredom, total disenchantment—"God, oh God, how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!" Such a state of mind, Szasz tells us, is a prelude to what is loosely called "mental illness," which, though Szasz defines this illness as a myth, nevertheless fills half the beds in hospitals and makes multitudes of people a burden to themselves and to society.

Seek, above all, for a game worth playing. Such is the advice of the oracle to modern man. Having found the game, play it with intensity—play as if your life and sanity depended on it. ( They do depend on it. ) Follow the example of the French existentialists and flourish a banner bearing the word "engagement." Though nothing means anything and all roads are marked "No EXIT," yet seem to offer a game worth playing, then invent one.2 For it must move as if your movements had some purpose. If life does not be clear, even to the most clouded intelligence, that any game is better than no game.

What sort of games does life offer? We can study Stephen Potter for tips on "gamesmanship." We can ( and should) read Eric Berne on Games People Play.3 If we have mathematical inclinations we can look into the work of John von Neumann or Norbert Wiener, who devoted some of their best thinking to the elaboration of a theory of games.4

From the Hindu scriptures we can learn of the cosmic game, the alternation of lila and nitya, the Dance of Shiva, in which primordial unity is transformed into multiplicity through the constant interplay of the three faunas. In the works of the mystic novelist, Hermann Hesse, we can read of the Magic Theater in which all life games are possible or of the game of games (Glassperlenspiel) in which all elements of human experience are brought together in a single synthesis."

What is a game? An interaction between people involving ulterior motives? Berne uses the word in this sense in Games People Play. But a game involves more than this. It is essentially a trial of strength or a trial of wits played within a matrix which is defined by rules."' Rules are essential. If the rules are not observed, the game ceases to be a game at all. A meaningful game of chess would be impossible if one player insisted on treating all pawns as queens.

Life games reflect real life aims. And the games men choose to play indicate not only their type, but also their level of inner development. Following Thomas Szasz ( more or less) we can divide life games into object games and meta-games. Object games can be thought of as games played for the attainment of material things, primarily money and the objects which money can buy. Meta-games are played for intangibles such as knowledge or the "salvation of the soul." In our culture object games predominate. In earlier cultures meta-games predominated. To the players of meta games, object games have always seemed shallow and futile, an attitude summarized in the Gospel saying: "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" To the players of object games, meta-games seem fuzzy and ill-defined, involving nebulous concepts like beauty, truth or salvation. The whole human population of the earth can be divided roughly into two groups, meta-game players and object-game players, the Prosperos and the Calibans.8 The Ascenders and the Descenders The two have never understood one another and it is safe to predict that they never will. They are, psychologically speaking, different species of man and their conflicts throughout the ages have added greatly to the sum of human misery.

Life Games

As this is written, a sow bug crawls across a desk. If he is turned over on his back, one can observe the tremendous struggle he goes through to get on his feet again. During this interval he has a "purpose" in his life.

When he succeeds, one can almost see the look of victory on his face. Off he goes, and one can imagine him telling his tale at the next meeting of sow bugs, looked up to by the younger generation as an insect who has made it.

And yet mixed with his smugness is a little disappointment. Now that he has come out on top, life seems aimless. Maybe he will return in the hope of repeating his triumph. It might be worth marking his back with ink, so as to recognize him if he risks it. A courageous animal, the sow bug. No wonder he has survived for millions of years.

This is the Existential Position of Eric Berne which is true of any game except the Master Game of Illumination.

All games are played according to rules. In man-made games such as poker the rules are imposed by the laws of probability (odds against a straight are 254 to 1, against a flush, 508 to 1.) or they are dependent on special limitations (pawns and other pieces in chess each having its own move). In life games, rules are imposed by natural, economic or social conditions. The player must both remember the aim and know the rules. Apart from this, the quality of his game depends on his own innate characteristics.

Great chess masters are born, not made. Great football players are bound to have certain physical characteristics. The game a man can play is determined by his type ( of which more later). Ho who tries to play a game for which his type does not fit him violates his Own essence with consequences that are often disastrous.

The Low Games
The main types of life games are shown in Table I.

 Hog in Trough is an object game pure and simple. The aim is to get one's nose in the trough as deeply as possible, guzzle as much as possible, elbow the other hogs aside as forcefully as possible. A strong Hog in Trough player has all the qualities with which communist propaganda endows the capitalist, insatiable greed, ruthlessness, cunning, selfishness. Pure Hog in Trough is not considered entirely respectable in the contemporary U.S.A. and is generally played today with a certain moderation that would have seemed sissy to the giants oi the game who savagely exploited the resources of the continent a century or so ago. Although the 4 trillions of dollars stolen out of the system by the latest 2008 housing bubble and by the yearly bubbles for 200 years - The rules of the game have become more complex and the game itself more subtle.

Cock on Dunghill is played for fame. It is designed primarily to inflate the false ego and to keep it inflated. Players of Cock on Dunghill are hungry to be known and talked about. They want, in a word, to be celebrities, whether or not they have anything worth celebrating. The game is practically forced upon people in some professions ( actors, politicians), who are compelled to maintain a "public image" which may have no relationship to the thing they really are. But the real player of Cock on Dunghill, whose happiness depends entirely on the frequency with which he (or she) sees his name in the papers, does not much care about public images. For him any publicity is better than no publicity. He would rather be well known as a scoundrel than not known at all.

The Moloch Game is the deadliest of all games, played for "glory" or for "victory," by various grades of professional mankillers (trained to regard such killing as creditable provided those they kill favor a different religion or political system and can thus be collectively referred to as "the enemy." "They were all bad" - Big Arnie. These people are created for a purpose and that purpose is the creation of poverty, low intellect - dumming down, in order to kill off the intellectual elite every few years - the cull, and control humanity for thousands of years. Moloch Game is a purely human game. Other mammals, though they fight with members of their own species, observe a certain decent moderation and rarely fight to the death.9 But the players of the Moloch Game have no moderation. Lured on by some glittering dream of glory or power, they kill with boundless enthusiasm, destroying whole cities, devastating entire countries. The game is played so passionately and with such abandon that nothing, neither pity, decency, sympathy or even common sense, is allowed to interfere with the destructive orgy. As the devotees of the god Moloch sacrificed their children to the idol, so the players of the Moloch Game sacrifice the lives of thousands of young males in the name of some glittering abstraction ( formerly "glory," now more generally "de¬fence") or a silly phrase couched in a dead language: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." - It is good and beautiful to die for ones country. 1

Some of the war poets (World War I vintage) had bitter things to say about this phrase:
"If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori."
(Wilfred Owen, Poems [New York: The Viking Press, 1931].)

But so great is the power wielded by the players of this game, exerted through various forms of coercion and blackmail, that the thousands of young men involved make little protest. They "go to their graves like beds," not daring to expose the emptiness of the glittering words on which the Moloch Game is based.

These three games, Hog in Trough, Cock on Dunghill and the Moloch Game, are all more or less pathological activities. The players who "win" win nothing that they can truly call their own. "Hog in Trough" may emerge twice as rich as Croesus only to find himself embittered, empty and unhappy, at a loss to know what to do with the wealth he has amassed.

"Cock on Dunghill" may make himself so famous that everyone knows his name only to realize that this fame of his is a mere shadow and a source of inconvenience.

Players of the Moloch Game may wade in blood up to the ears only to find that the victory or glory for which they sacrificed a million lives are empty words, like richly bedizened whores who lure men to their destruction. There is a criminal element in all these games because, in every instance, they do harm both to the player and to the society of which he forms a part. So warped, however, are the standards by which men measure criminality that players of these games are more apt to be regarded as "pillars of society" than dangerous lunatics who should be exiled to remote islands where they can do no harm to themselves or Others.

Between the higher and the lower games is the neutral game, the Householder Game, the aim of which is simply to raise a family and provide it with the necessities of life. One cannot call it either a meta-game or an object game. It is the basic biological game on which the continuation of the human race depends. It is also possible to find, in every human society, a certain number of nonplayers, people who, due to some constitutional defect, are unable to find any game worth playing, who are, as a result, chronic outsiders, who feel alienated from society and generally become mentally deranged, tend to become antisocial and criminal

The High Games
The Meta-Games are rarely played in their pure form but are perverted in order to maintain dumming down. Money and wealth depend upon human invention to maintain the increase in human population, interaction, culture, genius and joy in life. Without this genius, humanity is set in the pattern of poverty seen on this planet for the last 100,000 years.

The Art Game is directed toward the expression of an inner awareness defined as beauty. The awareness is purely subjective. One mans beauty be another man's horror. The beautiful of one age can seem ugly to another. But bad players of the art game have no inner awareness all. They are technically proficient and imitate those who ha yg awareness, conforming to the fashion whatever that fashion may he. The whole Art Game, as played today, is heavily taintede with commercialism, the greed of the collector pervades it like a bad smell

It is further complicated by the tendency to show off that afflicts all contemporary artists, whether they be painters, sculptors, writers or composers. As all traditional concepts of the beautiful have been abandoned, anything goes, just so long, as it is new and startling. This makes it almost impossible to tell whether a work of art corresponds to some inner awareness of the artist or merely shows that he was trying to be clever 11

The Science Game is also rarely played in its pure form. Much of it is mere jugglery, a tiresome ringing of changes on a few basic
themes by investigators who are little more than technicians with higher degrees.

The Science Game has become so complex, so vast and so expensive that more or less routine enterprises are given preference.

Anything truly original tends to be excluded by that formidable array of committees that stands between the scientist and the money he needs for research. He must either tailor his research plans to fit the preconceived ideas of the committee or find himself without funds. Moreover, in the Science Game as in the Art Game there is much insincerity and a frenzied quest for status that sparks endless puerile arguments over priority of publication. The game is played not so much for knowledge as to bolster the scientist's ego.

To the Art Game and the Science Game we must add the Religion Game, a meta-game played for an aim loosely defined as the attainment of salvation. The Religion Game, as played in the past, had a fairly well-defined set of rules. It was essentially a game played by paid priests of one sort or another for their personal benefit. To compel their fellowmen to play the game, the priests invented various gods, with whom they alone could communicate, whose wrath they alone could assuage, whose cooperation they alone could enlist. He who wanted help from the gods or who wished to avert their wrath had to pay the priests to obtain his ends. The game was further enlivened, and the hold of the priests on the minds of their victims further strengthened, by the inven¬tion of two after-death states, a blissful heaven and a terrible hell. To stay out of the hell and get into the heaven, the player of the Religion Game had to pay the priests, or his relatives had to pay them after his death. This "pay the priest" aspect of the Religion Game has caused several cynics to define it as the world's oldest confidence trick designed to enable certain unscrupulous individuals to make a profit out of the credulity and suggestibility of their fellow men by interceding on their behalf with some nebulous god or ensuring their entry into an equally nebulous heaven. It was this aspect of the Religion Game that caused Sigmund Freud to ex¬claim, more in sorrow than anger: "The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that for one whose attitude to y is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life." 12

A hideous aspect of the Religion Game resulted from the insistence by certain priests that their brand of god was the only god, that their form of the game was the only permissible form. So eager were these priests to keep the game entirely in their own hands that they did not hesitate to persecute, torture or kill any who happened to wish to play the game by other rules.

This practice was started by the Jews, whose enthusiasm for their one and only and very jealous father-god justified those slaughterings the accounts of which constitute so much of the bulk of the Old Testament. As well has how to create an altar of sacrifice, how big, where to put the holes for the blood to run out of.

The Policy of the "Long War" is that of economic destruction to keep humanity at the level of the beast. In Current lexicon, "To bomb them back into the Stone Age" in order to maintain the control of humanity exerted for thousands of years. "It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail" - Gengis Khan, who was paid in Machiavelian manner by the Catholic Popes to attack Islam from behind. The wars of Napolean and the First and Second World wars to destroy the economic capacity of Europe. Also Iraq, Iran, Afganistan. The practice was eagerly adopted by the elite of the so-called Christians, who, not satisfied with slaughtering Moslems and Jews, turned like rabid dogs on one another in a series of ghastly religious wars, Protestant versus Catholic. The Moslems, who borrowed the rules of their Religion Game from Jews and Christians alike, did not fail to copy the bad habits of both. Believers were exhorted in the Koran to wage war on the infidel, the slaughter of unbelievers being defined as one sure way of gaining entry into the Moslem heaven ( a much lusher paradise than the rather insipid affair offered by their priests to conforming Christians).

It would simplify our account of the games if we could offer the above description of the Religion Game without further comment. Unfortunately, this is impossible. Simply to define the Religion Game as the world's oldest con game is as "patently infantile" ( to borrow Freud's words) as it is to take seriously the anthropomorphic father-god floating in his bed sheet somewhere in the stratosphere surrounded by cherubs and seraphs and other improbable species of celestial fauna (the "gaseous vertebrate" so derided by Ernst Haeckel).

For it must be obvious to any fair-minded observer that there is another element in the Religion Game besides that of playing on the credulity of believers and selling them entry permits into a phoney heaven. All the great religions offer examples of saints and mystics who obviously did not play the game for material gain, whose indifference to personal comfort, to wealth and to fame was so complete as to arouse our wonder and admiration. It is equally obvious from the writings and sayings of these mystics that they were not so naive as to take seriously either the gaseous vertebrate or heaven with its golden harps or hell with its ovens. Obviously they played the game by entirely different rules and for entirely different aims from those of the priestly con men, who sold trips to heaven for hard cash and insisted on payment in advance (no refund if not fully satisfied, either).

What game did these mystics play? Within the matrix imposed by their religion, these players were attempting the most difficult game of all, the Master Game, the aim of which is the attainment of full consciousness or real awakening. It was natural for these players to play their game within a religious matrix. The basic idea underlying all the great religions is that man is asleep, that he lives amid dreams and delusions, that he cuts himself off from the universal consciousness (the only meaningful definition of God) to crawl into the narrow shell of a personal ego. To emerge from this narrow shell, to regain union with the universal consciousness, to pass from the darkness of the ego-centered illusion into the light of the non-ego, this was the real aim of the Religion Game as defined by the great teachers, Jesus, Gautama, Krishna, Mahavira, Lao-tze and the Platonic Socrates.

Among the Moslems this teaching was promulgated by the Sufis, who praised in their poems the delights of reunion with the Friend. To all these players, it was obvious that the Religion Game as played by the paid priests, with its shabby confidence tricks, promises, threats, persecutions and killings, was merely a hideous travesty of the real game, a terrible confirmation of the truth of the statement: "This people praise me with their lips but their hearts are far from me. . . They have eyes but see not, ears and hear not, neither do they understand."

So little did they understand that, at least within the matrix of the "Christian" religion, it actually became physically dangerous during several centuries to try to play the Master Game at all. Serious players found themselves accused of heresy, imprisoned by the Inquisitors, tortured, burned alive. It became impossible to play the game openly. To survive at all, one had to adopt a disguise, pretend that one's real interest was alchemy or magic, both of which were permitted by the priests, who did not understand the real significance of either.

Alchemy was particularly safe as its stated aim, the transmutation of base metals into gold, posed no challenge whatever to the authority of the priests. Therefore it was behind the mask of alchemy that many players of the Master Game concealed their real aims, formulating the rules of the game in an elaborate secret code in which the transmutations of substances within the body were expressed in terms of mercury, sulfur, salt and other elements. There were, of course, numerous alchemists who took the whole science at its face value, who believed that the Great Work referred to the production of metallic gold, who impoverished and frequently poisoned themselves in the quest for the great secret, and incidentally laid the foundations of modern chemistry. But for the serious alchemist the transmutation involved the formation of the pure spiritual golden aura - Aurum Non Vulgi - Not Fool's Gold, or the genesis of the homunculus, both of which symbolized the creation of fully conscious, cosmically oriented man out of the ego-centered puppet that goes by the name of man but is really only a pathetic caricature of what man could be. So well did the alchemists conceal their secrets that it took all the intuitive genius of Carl Gustav Jung (perhaps the leading authority on the subject) a large part of his life to unravel this mystery.13

Today no danger is involved in playing or attempting to play the Master Game. The tyranny of the priests has more or less ended. The Religion Game, though often as much of a con game as ever, is played without threats of torture and death. A good deal of the old venom has gone out of the game; in fact, it is even possible for priests who wear round their necks the label "Catholic" to be moderately polite to those who wear the once hated label "Protestant." So the game is now played with a certain amount of restraint not because men have become more tolerant, but because the whole issue of heaven versus hell, salvation versus damnation, is no longer taken very seriously. Even the theologians admit that the old father-god ( Haeckel's "gaseous vertebrate") is dead as far as anyone above the Jehovah's Witness level is concerned. The fight today is between rival political systems rather than rival theologies.

But although it is safe to play the Master Game, this has not served to make it popular. It still remains the most demanding and difficult of games and, in our society, there are few who play.

Contemporary man, hypnotized by the glitter of his own gadgets, has little contact with his inner world, concerns himself with outer, not inner space. But the Master Game is played entirely in the inner world, a vast and complex territory about which men know very little. The aim of the game is true awakening, full development of the powers latent in man.

The game can be played only by people whose observations of themselves and others have led them to a certain conclusion, namely, that man's ordinary state of consciousness, his so-called waking state, is not the highest level of consciousness of which he is capable. In fact, this state is so far from real awakening that it could appropriately be called a form of somnambulism, a condition of "waking sleep." 14

Once a person has reached this conclusion, he is no longer able to sleep comfortably. A new appetite develops within him, the hunger for real awakening, for full consciousness. He realizes that he sees, hears, knows only a tiny fraction of what he could see, hear and know, that he lives in the poorest, shabbiest of the rooms in his inner dwelling, but that he could enter other rooms, beauti¬ful and filled with treasures, the windows of which look out on eternity and infinity. In these rooms he would transcend his petty personal self and undergo spiritual rebirth, "the rising from the tomb" which is the theme of so many myths and the basis of all the mystery religions, including Christianity.

He who arrives at this conclusion is ready to play the Master Game. But though he may be ready, he does not necessarily know how to play. He cannot draw upon instinctive knowledge, for na¬ture has not endowed men with such instincts. She provides for man's development up to the age of puberty, she endows him with the instinct to propagate his kind, but after this she leaves him to his own devices. Far from helping man to develop further into the harmonious and enlightened being he might become, the blind force of evolution has actually put obstacles in his way.15

One who would play the Master Game is therefore compelled to seek a teacher, a skilled player who knows the rules. But where will he find such a teacher? A materialistic, spiritually impoverished culture can offer no instructions to the aspirant. The huge, highly specialized training centers that call themselves universities are obviously lacking in universality. They do not put the emphasis on expansion of consciousness first and acquisition of specialized knowledge second. They educate only a small part of man's totality. They cram the intellectual brain with facts, pay some lip service to the education of the physical body by encouraging idiotic competitive sports. But true education, in the sense of expansion of consciousness and the harmonious development of man's latent powers, they do not offer.

Here it is sufficient to say that the Master Game can never be made easy to play. It demands all that a man has, all his feelings, all his thoughts, his entire resources, physical and spiritual. If he tries to play it in a halfhearted way or tries to get results by unlawful means, he runs the risk of destroying his own potential. For this reason it is better not to embark on the game at all than to play it halfheartedly.


Energy Enhancement
The present site offers a synthesis of many methods derived from different sources, all of which are designed to help the practitioner to emerge from the darkness of waking sleep into the light of full consciousness. Purely for convenience, these methods are referred to collectively as Energy Enhancement, Enhancement because they bring about a higher synthesis, a new level of order within the psyche. Energy Enhancement is based on the idea that man can create by his own efforts a new being within himself ( the second birth). As a result, he can enjoy certain experiences, exercise certain powers, attain certain insights that are quite inconceivable to man in his once-born state.

Energy Enhancement involves the highest form of creativity of which man is capable, the creation of a truly inner-directed being out of a helpless other-directed slave. This creative work involves every aspect of man's behavior, the instinctive, motor, emotional and intellectual. It involves an understanding of the chemistry of the body and of the mind. It involves a study of type and all that pertains to type, the strengths and weaknesses that type imposes.

It involves a study of creative activity, arts, crafts, techniques of various kinds and of the effects these activities produce on levels of consciousness. It involves a study of events on the large scale and on the small, an awareness of the processes taking place in human and nonhuman communities that affect the individual adversely or otherwise. For man cannot be studied apart from his environment and he who would know himself must also know the world in which he lives.

The theory of Energy Enhancement can be studied in books." The practice is a different matter. For this a teacher is necessary. One who tries to practice the method without a teacher almost inevitably encounters certain difficulties which he cannot surmount. The illusion-creating mechanism in man's psyche does not cease to operate merely because a man decides to practice Creative Psychology. In fact, in such a one, it may operate all the more actively. So he may enjoy all sorts of pseudo-experiences, the result not of an expansion of consciousness but of the workings of his own imagination. A teacher can help him to sort out the true from the false, can warn him about the traps that lie in his path. Furthermore, the solitary practitioner of Energy Enhancement lives today in a culture that is more or less totally opposed to the aims he has set himself, that does not recognize the existence of the Master Game, and regards players of this game as queer or slightly mad.

The player thus confronts great opposition from the culture in which he lives and must strive with forces which tend to bring his game to a halt before it has even started. Only by finding a teacher and becoming part of the group of pupils that that teacher has collected about him can the player find encouragement and support. Otherwise he simply forgets his aim, or wanders off down some side road and loses himself. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to find such teachers and such groups.

They do not advertise, they operate under disguises. Moreover, there exists an abundance of frauds and fools who pass themselves off as teachers without having any right to do so. So the would-be player of the Master Game encounters at the outset one of the most difficult tests in his career. He must find a teacher who is neither a fool nor a fraud and convince that teacher that he, the would-be pupil, is worth teaching. His future development depends largely on the skill with which he performs this task.20

KUNDALINI AND THE DIRECTORS OF "ENERGY ENHANCEMENT SYNTHESIS OF LIGHT" BIOGRAPHIES - SATCHIDANAND and DEVI DHYANI - CLICK HERE!!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Szasz, T. S., The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Hoeber-Harper, 1961).

2. "You're free. Choose. That is, invent." Sartre, J. P., Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957).

3. S. Berne, Eric, Games People Play (London: Deutsch, 1966).

4. Von_ Neumann, J., and Morgenstein, 0., Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1947); Wiener, Norbert, The Human Use of Human Beings (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1954).

5. Hesse, Hermann, Steppenwolf (London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Ltd., 1963).

6. -, Magister Ludi (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1957).
7. See section on "matrices and codes" in Koestler, Arthur, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964).

8. Shakespeare, W., The Tempest. This is the most esoteric of all Shakespeare's plays. Its central theme work is the alchemical magnum Opus. For a modern variation on this theme, the reader should consult Fowles, J., The Magus (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966).

9. Carthy, J. D., and Ebling, F. J., editors, The Natural History of Aggression (New York: Academic Press, 1965).

10. Some of the war poets (World War I vintage) had bitter things to say about this phrase:
"If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori." (Wilfred Owen, Poems [New York: The Viking Press, 1931].)

11. "Creative thought, creative art or creative poetry are all excuses to expose the world to aberrations born in the sullied minds of the so-called intellectual elite of the West. The true creative artist never cries his creativeness to the skies. The true intellectual never claims to be one. It is the unfulfilled, the unsuccessful, the lazy and the foolish who weld together old bicycles and claim to be creative. They are sur¬rounded by their kind who shower the rubbish with praises so that, in their turn, they may be the recipients of praise." (Shiekh Abdul Muhl in Rafael Lefort's The Teachers of Gurdjieff [London: V. Gollancz, 1966], p. 115).

12. Freud, Sigmund, Civilisation and Its Discontents (Hogarth Press, 1963).

13. Jung's writings on alchemy are at times as obscure as the texts they interpret. The shortest and most lucid of his commentaries on this subject will be found in the chapter "The Work" in his Memories, Dreams and Reflections (Routledge and Collins, 1963)

14. This term, "waking sleep," is one of several technical terms used in the system of C. Gurdjieff, as intrepreted by P. D. Ouspensky. See Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World).

15. For an account of the possible evolutionary origin of these obstacles, see Science and Salvation (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1962).

16. An attempt to outlaw use of peyote by members of the Native American Church was made by the legislature of the State of California but was ruled unconstitutional by the State Supreme Court.

11. It must be admitted that Patanjali, the great Hindu commentator on yoga, describes "simples" (ausadhi) along with samadhi (roughly, a state of meditation) among the means of attaining the siddhis (yogic powers) but ". . . hemp and similar drugs produced ecstasy and not the yogic samadhi." See Mircea Eliade's book in note 19. According to the latter authority the use of hemp, opium or other narcotics that belongs properly to shamanism, and to decadent shamanism at that.

12. "Verily there are many hard and almost insurmountable obstacles in Yoga, yet the Yogi should go on with his practice at all hazards; even were his life to come to the throat." Siva Samhita, translated by Vasu, R.B.S.C. (Lahore, 1888; reprinted in Allahabad, 1914).

13. Energy Enhancement, a modern synthesis, combines physiology and psychology, eliminates the artificial barrier created between them by dualistic theories separating mind and matter. There is no single formulation of the teaching. It cannot be learned from books, but only by practice under the guidance of a teacher, P. D. Ouspensky, G. Gurdjieff and others. See Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous, op. cit.; and his A New Model of the Universe (London: Kegan Paul, 1938); Gurdjieff, G., All and Everything (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1958); Gurdjieff, G,, Meetings with Remarkable Men (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1964). References will be made in this book to the "Gurdjieffian System," but the term is used only for convenience. The studies of Rafael Lefort in The Teachers of Gurdjieff (London: V. Gollanez, 1966)

Although it must be repeatedly emphasized that little can be learned from books, reading may be of some value in preparing the student and helping him to define what he needs to Know. The student, however, should beware of substituting mere reading for actual practice and guard against losing himself in the jungles of terminology and the deserts of mere scholasticism. The following books may prove useful:

Bernard, Theos, Hatha Yoga (London: Rider and Co., 1950).

Eliade, Mircea, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958).

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., editor, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (London, Oxford University Press, 1935).

Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines (London: Oxford University Press, 1935).

Frankl, V. E., Man's Search for Meaning (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1963).

Idries Shah, The Sufis (London: W. H. Allen, 1964).

Jacobs, H., Western Psychotherapy and Hindu Sadhana (London:Allen and Unwin, 1961).

James, William, On Vital Reserves: The Energies of Men (New York: Holt, 1939).

The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929).

Maslow, A. H., Toward a Psychology of Being (New York: Van Nostrand, 1962).

Mishra, R. W., The Textbook of Yoga Psychology (New York: The Julian Press, 1963).

Watts, Alan, Psychotherapy East and West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961).
-, The Way of Zen (New York: Pantheon Books, 1957).

20. Madame Alexandra David-Neel has described in some detail the trials and tribulations of would-be initiates in Tibet during their search for a teacher. Admission to the Way is never made easy. Overcoming the obstacles deliberately put in the path demands heroic efforts on the part of the student. See David-Neel, Alexandra, Magic and Mystery in Tibet (London: Souvenir Press, 1967), Chapter V.

 

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