Heightened Sensitivity
People are worried about the world’s coming to an end. Every now and then a religious sect proclaims the new coming of the end of the world. But although the Earth as we know it continues its steady progress around the Sun, the conscious mind for thousands of people has come to an end, for the simple reason that they are no longer interested in it. For them, the world of inner sounds and colors has opened its far more attractive fare. But the job of sustaining and maintaining expanded awareness is not accomplished by losing the controls over one’s powers of awareness. The actinic world is only attained and sustained by initiating definite controls over the odic world. One state of consciousness is controlled in the process of awareness moving and expanding into another state.
As we progress along the path, we become more and more and more sensitive. This sensitivity is a wonderful thing. It’s like graduating from being an old battery-set radio of the 1920s and ’30s to a sophisticated, solid-state television. This sensitivity that you will begin to recognize is so refined and yet so strong. You communicate with yourself through the nerve currents which extend out, around and through the physical body—physical nerve currents as well as psychic nerve currents. Before we get deeply within on the path, we’re not too sensitive. But as this sensitivity develops, we begin to see through our hands. We begin to hear feeling. We begin to see sound, and all sorts of new faculties manifest.
Now, this can be very distressing, because we see things that we ordinarily would not be able to see. We hear meaning in what people say that ordinarily we would be unaware of, and we can become very disappointed in life, in people or in ourselves. This may seem like falling into a bog on the path, and we don’t want to do this. We want to be sensitive, and yet we want protection, psychic protection. Our dreams become more well defined, but we don’t want to be vulnerable to negative areas of the mind, disruptive areas, experiential areas of the astral plane, while we are sleeping. Neither do we wish to be attacked on the astral plane by the mischievous beings, entities, that are on that particular side of life.
We need this astral protection. We need this psychic protection. The group helps the individual and the individual helps the group. The force field of a group of people on the path goes along at a certain rate of intensity which is not broken, and this gives us tremendous psychic protection. In the very same way, a positive group of people only admit into their midst other positive people. A group of businessmen have a well-managed force field, and generally only a businessman of their same caliber can come and mix with them. A group of artists has a force field, and only artists of the same caliber can get into it. Why? If they let everybody in, they wouldn’t have a force field. The business would fail. The art would go into chaos. Friendships would be destroyed because of other influences coming in and amongst the people.
Force fields protect and sustain not only our outer forms of expression, but deep spiritual layers as well. When we go “out” into superconsciousness, if we are sensitive and unable to protect our subconscious mind, all sorts of other types of influences can enter. We don’t want this to happen, and it’s not necessary. It is a deterrent on the path, for we then are exposed to unseemly astral influences that detract us from our quest.
Make friends with those who are on the path. Be with fine, positive people. Don’t be with negative, complaining people who have no relationship to what you are doing on the inside, or who are criticizing you for what you are doing. There’s the old statement, “One bad apple can turn the whole bushel rotten.” Maybe that will be reversed in the New Age; a lot of things are changing in the New Age. Maybe at some time a whole bag of good apples will make a bad apple good, but so far it hasn’t occurred. Until such a time, we have to be wary of a natural law of nature and live among others of virtuous character and conduct, others who share spiritual insights and seeking.