The Message bearer's prime concern is to communicate word lessons. The principle role of a spiritual teacher has nothing to do with a message. No word lessons. What then? World lessons!
Let's imagine for a minute that the higher self is not just an abstract idea but that it really exists as a subtle inner beingness. Let's also imagine that the day-to-day ego-self is so noisy with memories, thinking, fears and desires that it drowns out the higher self.
The spiritual teacher awakens the inner beingness in you and keeps it awake until it can stay aware. There's really not message in this; it's more of a matching of vibration and attitude.
The spiritual teacher fills in for your higher self until it awakens. The teacher observes you with compassionate acceptance. This attitude of the personal spiritual teacher creates an echo in your subtle inner beingness and, after a time, you begin to perceive your ego-self with the same compassionate acceptance and understanding as the spiritual teacher does. You are transformed. Your ego-self relaxes and disappears. This is not a transformation that you can think your way through. It is experienced. The path of Avatar is structured so everyone can experience this transformation.
Word lesson - A word lesson is an effort to convey an experience via spoken or written symbols. A word lesson can be informative or enjoyable or inspiring. Aword lesson is an expression of someone's belief. A word lesson can be a very nice thing, but it should not be confused with a world lesson.
World lesson - A world lesson is something that you live through. It's something you encounter and deal with in life, and from the world lesson you emerge changed, more experienced, wiser. A world lesson is an experience. It does not require translation into symbols or sounds for you to remember it. It becomes part of what you know, of how you define yourself to yourself. A word lesson seldom has this impact. A world lesson becomes a word lesson as soon as it is expressed. What you know becomes a belief as soon as it is expressed. A word lesson can convey description and instructions, but as far as expereince, it is pale.
What is the structure of The Avatar
Path?
by Harry Palmer, author of the Avatar Materials
On January 22, 1996, Harry Palmer gave a lecture at The Wizards Course on the structure of the Avatar path. Due to the many request we received for this to be distributed, it was transcribed and edited for Inside Avatar (a newsletter for Avatar graduates). Now it being made available through the Avatar Journal and this web sight.
How do you achieve enlightenment?
Gautama Budda lived in the forest, and then he moved to the city and lived in the city for awhile. Then he moved to a mountain and lived on the mountain for awhile. Then he moved alongside a river and lived beside a river for awhile. Then under a banyan tree, he discovered enlightenment.
So it seems to me that the path is pretty simple. First you live in the forest, then you move to the city, then go live on a mountain for awhile, then a live along a river for awhile, and then look for a banyan tree.
No? Then I have to assume that it wasn't where Buddha was living, but that there were certain circumstances that occurred in his life that created the enlightenment.
The same is true for the Avatar materials. They're designed to parallel certain unfoldments or realizations that people have in life. Section I, II, and III are called The Avatar Course.
Below Section I is the current state of the world. Mankind currently reacts from a deeply indoctrinated sleep. Even if you were to say, "Wake Up!" nothing much would happen. Past conclusions and old fears make the decisions. Nearly everyone is operating on someone else's answers. People live in what was. They perceive only enough to excite their own conclusions.
In the current state of the world, relationships are either consciously or unconsciously manipulative. They're governed by praise and insult. What people say to each other creates a reaction. If the reaction is pleasurable--"Oh, I'm in love." If the reaction is painful--"I hate you." The manipulation is transparent. It acts out of old conclusions and beliefs. Currently human consciousness is like a roll of exposed film. It no longer pictures the world moment by moment but carries around pictures of what the world was once like. Individuals wrestle with fears and demons of their grandfathers--demons that only they can see. This is the general condition of the world that we're introducing Avatar into.
The sections of Avatar parallel certain unfoldments or realizations that a person will go through as they awaken from this indoctrinated sleep. Sometimes a person goes through the Avatar sections faster than they unfold. Sometimes you will find somebody going through Section III Avatar but really unfolding to the realizations of Section I. This perfectly OK. The process of unfoldment has begun, and that is what is important. Occasional, because people come to Avatar from other spiritual practices, they'll have realizations and transformations on ReSurfacing that you wouldn't expect. Again this is perfectly okay because it's what is occurring to the person that's important, not the name or the number of the section they're doing.
I'm going to go through the sections one by one and describe the unfoldment process that parallels each section.
I think you will find it interesting that the realizations and transformations are not a straight line or series of steps towards spiritual enlightenment. Rather, they outline a winding path of necessary experience that winds deeply into the ego self of the material world and back in order to arrive at an experience of enlightenment.
Progress does not always mean that one is moving in the direction of being more spiritual. That's not always the direction of the path. Sometimes being less spiritual is the direction of progress.
Religions tend to form around the high points of the path. And until a person falls into sin and is excommunicated, there is no further progress. The last step before sainthood is to commit an unpardonable sin. It creates compassion and empathy for the sin's of one's fellows. How can someone who always does good understand someone else's failure to do good? Not doing good. would seem very odd to someone who always did good.
Word lessons can be presented as a straight path to enlightenment, but not world lessons. Life wanders. It stops to explore. It falls down and then gets back up and brushes itself off. That Avatar understands this is one of its strengths.
Section I of Avatar is called ReSurfacing. It refers to the action of disentangling oneself from old creations and rising back into awareness. This section could be called the self-discovery course. A being who has lost himself or herself in the movie of life has forgotten that they're at the movies. People dream and them forget that they're asleep. ReSurfacing reminds people of the difference between the self and the experience the self is having.
Later on the path, we may be working to become one with experience. But at this level of wakening the direction is to realize that there's a difference between the perceiver and the perception. There is a difference between one's self and one's role model. There's a difference between action and reaction. There is a difference.
The fundamental unfoldment that occurs on ReSurfacing, the realization that ReSurfacing saws back and forth to bring a person to is this: "I am." This isn't an, "Oh sure, I am." This is an, "Oh my God, I really am." It's an "I am." that is discovered responsibility. This is such a powerful realization that if you were to lead a person only to this experience--not just have him add it to his mantra, but to actually have him experience "I am,"--you've broken the grip of indoctrinated sleep. You've woken personal responsibility in place of robotic reaction according to authority. The person can now observe and act. When somebody talks about Avatar as a self-discovery course, they're talking about this level of unfoldment.
Section II Avatar is a self-empowerment course. The only prerequisite to Section II is to find a self to empower. All suffering arises from mental processes, in particular from beliefs and judgments. It's not any surprise that certain philosophies and religions have considered life to be suffering. They had no technology to handle mental processes. The best They could do is to work at stilling the mind--meditate. When the mind is still, the suffering ceases. But they were not trying to still a twentieth-century mind. A twentieth-century mind has had at least a decade of schooling in how to be anxious. It has seen 75,000 commercials. It's watched 25,000 hours of drama, the best of which has left emotional scars (Bambi's mother didn't come home.) I think if the Buddha had had a twentieth-century mind he might have said, "Life is really intense suffering."
Section II is a modern approach to recovering control over the mind. This is such an unusual accomplishment that many people don't believe it can be done. But it can, and it's part of the unfoldment that happens on Section II Avatar.
After the student has sorted out his or her existing beingness, the next issue is "What can I create?" One of the secrets of the creation exercises is that it quiets the mind. When a student does the creation exercises properly, the student experiences stillness. The stillness may be temporary, because the person has not yet reached the point in the path where he or she is prepared to be the stillness. They're more concerned with getting or getting rid of something.
So on Section II, the path begins to wind. It takes a detour into the material world. Ego development is built into the last part of the creation exercises to prepare the student for the next unfoldment of life. After the realization, "I am," the next realization on the path is, "And I'm pretty darned cool." Section II removes limitations and introduces one to creating the conscious reality that one prefers. This is the ultimate pleasure of the ego, to create exactly what one wants.
So why would we encourage the development of the ego when we know the ego is the source of so many difficulties in the world? Because it is the next world lesson that an evolving being needs to experience. The ego is an area that needs to be explored. Sometimes it's the egotistic efforts of self-aggrandizement that produce our cultural and technological masterpieces. The ego is an adolescent's rite of passage.
If the ego fails to flower, there is no further spiritual growth. To continue awakening, the self must reach a balance. If it has experienced unhappiness, it needs to create happiness. If it has experienced failure, it needs to experience success. If a person has experienced feeling submissive, they need to balance it by feeling dominant. Living from the past must be balanced with goals for the future. The Section II Source List present an ethical way for a person to achieve this balance. Many people finish Sections II course materials before they've achieved a balance in the life. But the thing is, after Section II they're always evolving towards a balance. Evolving towards because they understand living deliberately. Self empowerment allows a person to restore balance in his or her life. Enlightenment occurs naturally when that balance is reached. You could think of Section II as a technology that allows a person to achieve karmic balance with the universe.
Section III is an enlightenment course. It brings a person into the space that defines the self. By discreating the tentacles of belief from the past, one comes back into present. Beliefs and reality can be reshaped from the present. The doer acts deliberately. On Section III, an awareness awakens that is beyond the conscious self...
These are the sections that make up The Avatar Course described by words. But, the true strength of Avatar is that it is an experiential course. Words are merely a tool that Avatar Masters use to help guide individual students who are experiencing their own paths toward enlightenment.