The Techniques of Thinking Through And Speaking
By A Teacher
[We have long since known that the teaching of the Tibetan should be "stepped down," put in everyday language, for those who are questing but are not familiar with the esoteric vocabulary. These outlines seem admirable to that end. They are used in a junior college course for speech classes and Mental Hygiene. While the work is done specifically with professional speakers, it is also used for those who apply for introductory speech training for daily living. We all need to learn how to guard our speech! This project seems to us admirable and meets a long felt need. It will also be useful to all students in the endeavour to spread the teaching among friends and acquaintances, in terms that are familiar as many "shy off" from any presentment of occultism as such or as they think it to be. A.P.]
The Stage of Intention
By intention is not meant a mental decision, wish or determination; rather, it is the focusing of energy on the mental level at the point of greatest possible tension.
Intention signifies the bringing about a condition in your consciousness analogous to an imagined condition in the Creator of the Universe when he might determine his desire sphere of influence, and put in that sphere the energy necessary for the purpose he is manifesting.
Gather your forces into the highest point of your mental consciousness, and then hold them there in a state of absolute tension.
Now you understand why you are sometimes asked to "raise your consciousness above the belt" or "hold your consciousness at the highest point you can" or "endeavour to hold your mind steady in the light."
All these remarks are concerned with the task of bringing you, the thinker, purposer, speaker, to the desired point of tension and energy focusing.
Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics often use the word "intention" when preparing candidates for communion. We use the word here in a different sense, for we refer to the use of will, of purpose, or as some would say, spirit.
In your intention, which is the carrying out of your purpose by a literal making, forming and using of tension, there are several steps to be taken:
a. You must achieve the right orientation: First, you will achieve an orientation towards your own soul, if you think of yourself as having or being a soul. Next comes a still higher orientation to Deity, if it is part of your faith to believe in a noble, powerful and benefiencient Deity.
b. Next achieve a mental understanding of the task you are to carry out. This involves the use of the mind in two ways: responsiveness to the highest impressions you can touch, and second, an act or acts of creative imagination. (Not the wild ride of fancy but the careful, accurate imaging of the determined achievement, and the means to that achievement.)
c. Go through a process of gathering energy or absorbing force, in order that these may be confined in the pattern prior to a later process of visualization and projection.
d. Observe an adequate period of clear thinking about process and intention, so that as you dedicate yourself to the achievement of transferring thought, feeling, purpose to others through speech, you may clearly perceive what is being done.
e. It is necessary meanwhile to steady preserve the tension entirely without any strain on the brain cells. This is important.
The Stage of Visualization
Through the stage of intention, your activity has been of a mental nature. The creative imagination has been relatively quiescent; you have been occupied within the mind on the mental levels, and you have looked neither up or down.
Now at last you have reached the right point of tension; you have restrained the reservoir or pool of needed energy within your carefully delimited pattern of form or ring-pass-not; you are ready, as a bridge-builder, to take the next step.
Therefore at this point you proceed to construct the blue print of the work you are going to do; you draw upon the imagination and the facilities as they are to be found at the highest level of your emotional or sensitive nature.
More accurately, let us omit reference to the emotions and retain the term "sensitiveness." Think of that imagination activity, which as its lowest functioning, sometimes is called "intuition." Sensitivity as an expression of the feeling nature is far different from, and may be contrasted to, what has been called spiritual sensitivity. You should purify and refine your imagination so that your imagination is now responsive to spiritual influences, or more precisely what is called at times intuitive perception that is, perception apart from physical sight or any real or imagined "visions" such as are recorded in the Bible.
You will have to step up your creative imagination in its power impact so that it can affect the " pool of energy" which you have gathered for the project you are about to accomplish.
I am about to make an important and significant statement, and so it will be important for you to ponder upon it: the creative activity of the of the imagination is the first organizing influence which works upon and within the "pool" of accumulated energies, held in a state of tension by your Intention.
The creative imagination is in the nature of an active energy, drawn up into relationship with the point of tension; it there and then produces mental effects, or more accurately produces effects on the "material" you have gathered.
The tension is thereby increased; the more potent and clearer your visualization process, the more beautiful and strong will be your production.
Visualization is the process whereby the creative imagination is rendered active, and becomes attracted by and responsive to the point of tension at the mental level.
Your are now at this stage occupied with two energies: one quiescent and held within your pattern, but at a point of extreme tension, while the other is active, picture-forming, outgoing, and responsive to your mind, the mind of the builder.
The Stage of Projection
The task of the thinker and speaker has now reached a critical point.
Many speakers having reached this particular stage, and having developed a real capacity to visualize, and having therefore constructed by its means the desired form or outline, and organized the substance which is to be employed in this later phase of the building process find themselves unable to proceed any further.
What then is the matter?
Primarily, an inability to use the Will in the process of projection. This process is a combination of will, further and continued visualization, and the use of an outpouring of active determination, or the use of outgoing Power.
The exact method of this use of power depends upon the nature of the speaker; there are at least seven major kinds of speakers who have to vary widely for the highest success in the use of what might be called amiable aggressiveness.
Each speaker, having successfully organized the material which he will use is building, brings into activity the will aspect; and now he will use is building, brings into activity the will aspect; and now being consciously aware of process and performance, he proceeds to move the organized substance forward, so that from the centre of force which he has succeeded in accumulating, there appears a projection of his building material.
This is set forth by and o the expression or outpouring of Power. This is a creative process. That which has first come into the so-called head and heart of the speaker is now hurled forth from thence. The speaker is focused in the centre which has appeared on the mental level, and draws on all his resources, that is, his mental, emotional and physical resources; he activates them, and projects them towards his listener or listeners.
You see, then, upon what line the withdrawal of the message takes place as it passes from speaker to hearer. It might be called a great renunciation, in which a message of supreme value to the speaker is seemingly given away. At times the speaker seems to come out of his Holy of Holies to make public what is most sacred. The implications of all this is clear to you if you will ponder upon it.
The speaker in a sense makes a great sacrifice; do not, however, think of sacrifice as giving up, and losing what makes life worth living. The speaker gives what he speaks, but he keeps it also. The sacrifice of the speaker is a sacrifice in the etymological meaning of the word, the making sacred. The speaker achieves a high state of enjoyment, almost ecstasy at times, because he has revealed truth with a majesty or sublimity rarely realized except under the spell of a powerful speaker.
It is the dynamic speaker, not the weak and well-meaning speaker, that achieves this goal. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." The powerful speaker achieves will to good, not just merely good will.
When you have gained the fruit of experience, which is knowledge, and are beginning to transmute it into wisdom, when your objective is to live truly and in reality, when the will to good is the crowning goal of your daily life, then you can begin to evoke the Will.
Invocation and Evocation
The speaker links what is lower and what is higher in his mind; he will make the link between his personality or character and his mechanism an existent fact; he makes the closest possible contact between himself and his message, then between himself and his hearers, eventuating in making the closest possible contact or fusion of his message with his listeners.
The process of the speaker is a living process, growing out of conscious daily experience, and dependent on the expression of the highest aspects of life upon the physical plane as far as is possible.
Where there is an attempt to approximate the personality life to the demands of the Higher nature, and to use the intellect on behalf of humanity, love, friendship or philanthropy is beginning to control and then the significance of "high sacrifice" is increasingly understood, and becomes a natural, spontaneous expression of the speaker's Intension.
Then it becomes possible to project the message, that is, to give it a "happy landing". The activity set up on lower levels of noble manifestation becomes strong enough to produce response from higher levels. Then, when the method of uttering Power is known and rightly used, the object of the speaking is rapidly accomplished.
The speaker should feel in no way discouraged by his ambitious plan. Much happens on the level of preparation where there is right intention as well as scientific tension (purpose and tension combined) and your results reach stages of definite significance before you can yourself be aware of your success.
Intention, visualization and projection, already discussed, are in reality stages of the work of your personality. There are three others which, particularly if you are a clergyman can be expressions of response from higher levels.
Naturally, invocation is based on previous intention, visualization, projection, you are in some measure at least aware of the work you have done; therefore you are yourself invocative. Your life effect is registered on the highest levels of your consciousness; you are recognized, even by bystanders, as "a point of invocative tension."
What sets in motion this tension, and this reservoir of living energy which is yourself? It is set in motion by projected thought, the use of the will, and the definite operating of the power you consciously possess.
Now it is possible for you to use the developed potency in the radius of your influence to call out a response from the highest source you can reach. It is the tension of the lower that evokes the attention of the higher.
We have described but scarcely discussed the dual process of invocation and evocation. The call of the lower becoming stronger, the response of the higher becoming greater, there is finally a contact made, which once made will grow in reciprocal action until the project is completed.
The Process of Stabilization
We have explained the technical process of invocation and evocation. There is a gradual approach between the power aroused from below and the power descending from "on high." There is a contact between the mechanism of the speaker and the highest nature which he can call his own or which he can reach.
It is in a sense of a crises in a beneficial sense when the speaker is aware of liberation, when he recognizes that in a sense he himself is the message which he is giving.
A time comes when the speaker no longer know the dual lower and higher nature, but is simply One, functioning in all ways as a point of sublime energy and arriving triumphantly at the planned activity which he has undertaken. Not only his listeners, but sometimes even the speaker himself "comes down from the mount of transfiguration" with something adazzle in the eyes and the echo of heavenly music ringing in the ears.
Some times a speaker is aware only of the great pull of humanity as a whole, and to this need of humanity there is a response of divinity, and the speaker feels himself to be only a bridge as it were over which help comes, or a voice which is really the voice of another.
A rare privilege it is when a speaker can know that he is a servant of Higher Ones serving humanity, that he as a speaker is carrying out a Higher Will and leading or encouraging his hearers also to carry out a Higher Will.
Do not expect such rare perfection in speaking to be achieved "in the twinkling of an eye." There may be a long period of the gradual approach of the two aspects, the lower and the higher, before they come completely together.
Eventually a mechanism is provided, stable and strong, and capable of being used. And it must be used, for the speaker now knows that he has identified himself in large degree with humanity in need and with the universe of supply from which that need may be supplied.
Happy indeed that the speaker who feels himself "at-one" with his own highest nature, "at-one" with needy humanity, and "at-one" with the supply that meets humanity's need.
Your major need is for an intensification of your inner high aspiration. You need to work more definitely from what might be called a point of tension.
If finally you intensify yourself at your highest point, this may produce a galvanic upheaval of your inner life. Are you prepared for this? Can you make dynamic decisions affecting your inner and outer life, or would you prefer to progress by a much slower way?
If you would excel as a beneficial speaker, not the necessity for speed; the necessity for reorganization of standards of thought and living, and finally, life itself, as well as thought and speech, as an expression of sincerity, sacrifice, and simplicity.
