LESSON NUMBER 44 ANSWERS TO STUDENTS QUESTIONS

We find it very surprising, as well as gratifying, to find that the questions which students are asking are becoming fewer as their knowledge increases, and are becoming more and more scientific and philosophical rather than metaphysical as they were in the beginning.

As a matter of fact many beginners among the students have frankly stated that the scientific parts were way over their heads and were difficult to understand. These same students now say the very opposite. Many very eagerly reach out for the scientific explanation of things and write us that they are becoming “more scientifically minded” and more and more they automatically apply LAW and PRINCIPLE to the solution of problems.

Over and over again we say as we now again say, that the knowledge which is scientifically given in these lessons, and applied as workable philosophy, is sufficient unto itself for the solution of all problems. It is sufficient also as a basis for laying down a policy of action for today and the future.

There is no need to go to others. You have the LAW and full knowledge of God’s ways. Month by month you have observed the interweaving of that golden thread of BALANCE which has become a strong force in guiding your meditations.

We treasure hearing of the wonderful results of strength in the carrying of your DESIRE into meditation with full knowledge that the way for fulfillment of your desire will come to you if you talk to God about it. When you ask advice from others you subtract from your own transcendency.

Transcendent beings do not thus subtract from themselves. For this reason we again say to you that we are pleased because you want to know more of God’s ways which you can only know by the direct scientific approach rather than the indirect metaphysical one.

The following questions will illustrate the change in trend toward the more scientific approach.

QUESTION. “In Figures 41, 42, 43 and 44 you describe how positive and negative electricity pull apart by the increasing polarity of a growing tree. You use that fact to prove that opposites repel each other instead of attracting each other as science teaches. In Figures 45, 46 and 47 however, the negative and positive poles seem to pull together as the tree decays. Would not that indicate the opposite charges attract each other half of each cycle and repel during the other half?”

ANSWER. No. In Figures 45, 46 and 47 the devitalizing tree is losing its vitality, which means that it is losing its power to polarize. Its positive and negative poles are still pulling apart but with less power. Depolarization is taking place as each pole voids its power to pull apart. In the first half of the cycle vitality increases which means that its poles pull apart with greater vigor. In the second half of the cycle vitality decreases, which means that its pole s lose their ability to pull apart from each other–but they still pull apart until their vitality is gone, and they have no power left in them to pull apart. At no period in the cycle do positive and negative polarity attract. Its whole purpose is to pull apart–for the purpose of polarity is to divide

QUESTION. “You sometimes speak of men who are unfolding cosmically as having extra-sensory perception. That interests me greatly for often when I feel tremendously inspired and forgetful of my body I seem to feel and know things that I do not ordinarily know.

“The research into extra-sensory perception carried on at Duke University interests me very much because many of the things done there experimentally, which they cannot explain, happen to me constantly and I cannot explain them. One strange thing happens very often to me When my wife has been away overlong and I wonder where she is and get worried about her absence she will surely call me on the telephone and tell me where she is and why she was delayed. But stranger still, I will suddenly feel compelled to go to the door a minute or two before she arrives home. I feel sure that she is there, and it is most always true that she actually does arrive within a minute.

“I wish you would explain this scientifically, for I have no explanation for it whatsoever. The statement you made about one’s sense perception increasing as his knowledge increases, and as mankind becomes more cosmic, leads me to believe that you know more about this phenomena than you care to tell us. I know that many others of your students will appreciate deeper knowledge upon this subject.”

ANSWER. Sense perception means that one has an awareness of motion. Motion indicates its presence by means of vibrating waves. There is no other way for one to become aware of motion than by one’s ability to sense wave vibrations, which really means to feel wave vibrations.

You feel wave vibrations by seeing them with your eyes, hearing them with your ears, smelling them with your nose, tasting them with your tongue or touching them with your body. All of these “five senses” are but one sense of feeling motion of some kind, somewhere.

Now we get to the basis of sensing–for motion is all that one senses, and when motion begins in any kind of wave vibration, that motion can be sensed by some people more than others; some animals more than others: and some animals more than humans.

Humans, for example, cannot hear the sounds of insects which are loud sounds to some birds. Humans cannot smell as animals do. Their “sense perception” of hearing and smelling is not anywhere near as keen as that of a dog.

Wave vibrations range from a trillionth (or more) of a centimeter in wave length, or hundreds of thousands per second in time to hundreds of feet or miles in length for one wave.

The accompanying diagram will illustrate this principle. See Figure 116. The little white slit in this whole range of sense perception shows how small one’s sense perception of seeing is. It is marked A. That small slit marks the range of wave vibrations which the eye can see, a small color range on either side of incandescent white light.

Archival Plate (image076.gif)

When that range of sense perception by the means of sight ends, down in the ultra violet on the blue side, your body can feel what your eyes cannot see. It will become violently tanned by violet rays which are beyond your range of sight. Also the photo negative can see more than you can.

Faster than the ultraviolet are X rays which can see through your body, and you can increase your range of sense perception by multiplying your visible range, electrically and photographically, so that you can see your own skeleton. By this means you enlarge your range of sense perception mechanically.

Beyond X rays are gamma and cosmic rays which are thousands of times faster vibrations than X rays. Naturally they are far beyond man’s range of sense perception, for life would be intolerable if the range were so great.

Between the tremendous blue and red expanses of the wave octave is that narrow little range which limits man. When man’s limit is reached on the red side he can multiply his power to perceive wave vibrations by an instrument called the bolometer. By means of it he can measure infra-red variations which the eye cannot possibly see. To the eye those rays are black, yet the bat can actually see them as light, and so can many other animals. By applying the knowledge given you in lesson number 43 you know that the bat is not really seeing light, but is sensing motion.

The Eastman Company produced a negative so sensitive to infra-red rays, that when forty or fifty people were photographed in a room so dark that one could not see his own hand, the photograph looked like any other photograph taken in the light. Every face was as fully recognizable and the shadows cast by the light source were as sharp and clear as those produced in the upper range of sunlight sources. Again we say, the explanation is not in greater power of vision but greater sensitivity to the motion of short waves of high frequency, or vice versa.

Farther still beyond the infra-red there are the long radar waves which a bat can sense with its body as it flies and thus miss hitting objects in the dark which are beyond the range of its sight sensing. Man has been able to increase his sense range, mechanically, by multiplying the potential of these radio waves so that they can be detected by an electrical condenser.

The machine which shortens these waves into man’s range of hearing is an extension of his body which makes it possible for a ship to sense what is ahead in the dark, or fog, or under it, the way the bat does with his actual body.

Beyond this radar range are other longer broadcasting and radio waves which also are very far beyond man’s range of perception.

What are these long radio waves? They are the sounds of your voice, for one example, which spread out through the universe in ever lengthening waves at the speed of light, until they pass beyond the range of man’s perception a hundred feet or so away from that sound of your voice.

Man has been enabled to condense those long waves which no man can hear into short ones which he can hear. By shortening them to the lengths and frequencies which come from you as sound waves other people all over the globe can hear what you say as clearly as though they were in the same room with you. That is what condensing means. It is also what polarizing means: “Dying” sounds are being resurrected as “living” sounds.

That is another mechanical way of extending the sense perception of humans. It may be possible, some day, to repolarize wave records of voices heard in the long past. The principle is the same but electrical knowledge is still in its beginnings.

Give thought to this with us for a moment. We all very thoughtlessly feel that our spoken words die soon after we have spoken them. We do not realize that the words as well as the thoughts which caused them are eternally recorded as negative images in reverse. These records live eternally through all the universe. Man has been enabled to condense them while they are closely circling the earth. When however, they reach too far out in their spiral journey away from the earth it may be that man can never mechanically rewind those long spirals into short enough ones for us to hear, or see.

It IS possible, however, for Cosmic conscious humans to see, hear and feel waves which electrical machines could never condense. The whole human race is gradually increasing its sense range into far reaches of the Cosmos. The growth of God awareness in man is the measure of his increasing sense perception.

Cosmic knowledge is the fulcrum which reaches out into its thought-wave extensions to interpret the rhythms, and the meaning of those thought waves with which space is so filled. As your Cosmic awareness increases your range of sense perception proportionately increases.

Your increasing God awareness extends your sense perception into invisible thought waves by intensive decentration. You then bring these infinitely long thought-waves into the greater frequencies of short waves by intensive concentration. This enables you to vision your thought body into form and motion of your imagining which you might carry further by giving it a material body, or you may not. The power and the process are the same whether you do give it a material body or leave it unfinished as a mental image, a mental “dream”.

If you do give your vision a material body you pass it on to the culture of the future, which aids others to find that kingdom of heaven which all are seeking. If you do not do so you have at least found more Light on your own path which cannot but help to illumine others to the extent in which you have LIVED it, thus uplifting others to the extent that they can see the Light of your example extended to themselves.

If you would know the great glory of extending your sense perception into the invisible–into the silences and the universal stillness of God’s Light–go deeply into communion with God as much and as often as you can.

In meditation with God you may explore the vast reaches of the thought-wave universe where Creation into the bodies of things begins. Go therefore and walk and talk with God. “See Him. Know Him. Be Him. Be thou the fulcrum of thine own power.” The fulcrum of power is KNOWLEDGE of Mind. Its extension into waves of motion is the THINKING of Mind.

One hour spent with God in the depths of His forests could give you more of wealth than a thousand shelves of books or mountains of gold. One hour spent alone with God could unfold you toward the higher strata of Mind-power intended for man, than whole libraries of books could give to you in centuries.

We say to you, therefore, that when you can continuously walk and talk With God and work as ONE with Him you can then know His masterfulness manifested in your works and your Mind will be One with His in the ecstasy of His rhythmic thinking.

QUESTION. “It is difficult for me to readjust my old teachings to such new thinking as yours but I am gradually doing so. Just now I am struggling to reconstruct my traditional beliefs concerning polarity to your very different teachings which are diametrically opposite to conventional text book teachings.

“What puzzles me most is your statement that an anode–or positive pole–is also a cathode and a cathode–or negative pole is also an anode.

“I quote the following from a text book definition of polarity which is contrary to your teachings: ‘Polarity is the property possessed by certain bodies, by which they exert forces in opposite directions with a positive pole having power to attract and a negative pole having power to repel’ Will you clarify this for me please?

“Also please tell me if the text books are right in saying that the positive (anode) pole is the terminal by which an electric current enters a conductor on its way to the cathode.”

ANSWER to first question: The definition given for polarity is not only entirely incorrect in regard to Natural Law which we are teaching, but it is inconsistent with your old traditional teachings.

For example the words–“exert forces in opposite directions”–mean that they pull away from each other –which is TRUTH. Your traditional text book teachings tell you, however, that these two opposite expressions of polarity attract each other. How can these two forces attract each other and also pull away from each other. I wonder why you have not long ago thought this discrepancy out for yourself. You might as consistently say that a man can walk forward and backward at the same time.

The definition then says that “the positive pole has the power to attract and the negative pole has the power to repel. I wonder why you have never thought that one out for yourself while experimenting with a bar magnet and nails, or iron filings. You know that both ends will attract–and equally. One end will pick up as much weight in iron filings, or as many nails as the other. Each one is equally gravitative and radiative.

Likewise, both ends will repel–and equally. But what is it they repel? Neither repels the iron filings, or the nails for they fairly jump at either pole and cling so hard that you can feel their reluctance to leave by their resistance to being pulled away from either pole.

What is it that they do repel? The positive pole repels the negative. It pushes it away to the other end of each nail as far as it will go for they are opposites and opposites oppose–they do not attract. And the negative pole does the same thing to the positive.

In other words both poles do exactly the same thing but each is the reverse of the other. Each pole pulls inward to express the force of gravity and each pole likewise, thrusts outward to express the force of radiativity. Therefore, both are anodes and both are cathodes, for every light particle which approaches either is positive (for it is contracting) and every light particle which leaves either is negative (for it is expanding).

Polarity really means the division of a balanced condition–such as the universal equilibrium–into two equally unbalanced conditions which have to move to find their lost balance. Matter does not attract matter, nor does it repel. Motion exists solely because each of the two divided conditions are seeking balance in each other.

There is another discrepancy in the text book definition you quoted. That is the statement that “polarity is the property possessed by certain bodies” etc. What your text book means is that iron can be polarized to pick up iron, but all bodies of every kind are polarized.

Every cell in your body, every planet and star in the heavens and every particle of light in the universe has north and south poles located as far away from each other as they can get, and also as far from their mutual equators as they can get.

ANSWER to second question: The electric current travels both ways through a wire not just one way. The way you can reason this out for yourself is as follows. Begin your reasoning process from the source of the current, such as an electric storage battery. This consists of two cells; one of which is plus equilibrium and the other is minus equilibrium.

In other words one is like a highly compressed gas which needs to explode outward to find its balance. The other is like a vacuum tube which needs to explode inward to find its balance. The moment you connect them with a wire each seeks what it needs from the other one on the other side of their mutual equator.

The current runs both ways to interchange. You call it an electric current if the equalization process is sent through a small gage wire conduit, or a short circuit if you send it through a large wire. In a short circuit the resistance to each other’s passing causes a burst of flame. In a small gage wire the resistance is not so great so the “short circuit” takes a long time to equalize both cells into what is known as a dead battery.

QUESTION. “In speaking of desire should we reach the stillness and ask God to declare His will, or should we take our desire to Him? I do not feel certain whether I should ask God to make known His desires with me, or whether I should take my desire to Him. I am confused over the point of God’ s Will and my Will.”

ANSWER. Take your desire to God. Ask Him to show you the way to fulfill it or to keep you from fulfilling it if it is not in line with your unfolding destiny. You are Mind–the God-Mind. You are co-Creator with God. Your desire is part of Creation–YOUR part. You are not a marionette dangling on a string. Do not differentiate between YOUR Will and GOD’S Will. They are ONE–the universal WILL–or SOUL–from which desire springs for fulfillment. Become that ONE

UNIVERSAL WILL. Ask of it as being God. Ask of it as being YOU. Place yourself where the Law works with you to the fulfillment of your desire.

Let me give you an example. Suppose you are now far along in the fulfillment of a desire. You have opened a business and are progressing steadily. You decide that you want to borrow fifty thousand dollars to push your business and you ask God to fulfill your desire. You are working with the LAW when you become a part of the Universal Will and the law will not let you have that fifty thousand dollars. The bank returns your application with a polite NO. You would be bitterly disappointed if you did not know that God IS helping your business by keeping you from making that loan. Knowing your Oneness with God you are not disappointed. You then seek deeper understanding and within a very short time you will be shown that you would have hurt, rather than have helped your business if you had taken on that debt.

Your confusion as to God’s Will or yours is due to your having not yet arrived at that point where your ONENESS with God is absolute. God says: “See Me. Know Me. Be Me.” You can overcome that deficiency by getting more and more into the habit of working knowingly with God from moment to moment AS ONE–not as TWO. Meditate also with Him AS ONE–not as TWO. You will then have no further confusion regarding whether YOUR Will or God’s Will is to be done. When you are working knowingly with the Law your desires will be fulfilled with the precision in which the rose leaf unfolds or a planet keeps to its orbit. It is only when you cease being SENSED BODY and become KNOWING MIND that the true vision of your destiny lies before you like an illumined path. You can follow that LIGHT and never stumble when you ARE THAT LIGHT.

QUESTION. The God Mind being omnipotent and omnipresent, would not the thinking which springs from that Mind be of the same quality–hence not illusion? By illusion do you mean not permanent and changing? Is there no objective universe? Would not the visible universe be as real as the Mind which created it?”

ANSWER. The thoughts of Mind are not Mind. Think of your own thoughts. You might write a play of imaginative thoughts and ideas. They would be ever changing but you would not be. They might include a murder and murderer without your becoming one. And the play you write has only the reality which your imagination has given it. And if you do not write the play, but only think it, there is nothing tangible to become objective for another one to see. He could see YOU, who thought it, but he could not see the thoughts. Thoughts of a person are not the person. Thoughts become objective when they are given form. The only form that can be given is the form of the motion which records the thoughts. The recording apparatus which gives form to those thoughts is an electric instrument which God uses to record His thoughts. This unit tells you about it. Its name is wave-field. Its product is motion. The resultant forms of that motion are illusions–mirages–unrealities which simulate what they are not. We hope this will clarify your confusion.

QUESTION. “Say one lives to 70 years then (dies) takes 70 years of rest. Does one automatically begin the work period or does one’s desires have something to do with it? How do we get a physical body again? Do we fasten on to an unborn child?”

ANSWER. All effects of polarization are both cyclic and periodic. You have a daily cycle of living and a nightly cycle of dying. They balance. That is polarization for a day followed by depolarization for a night. You do not automatically awaken in the morning and “fasten on to an unborn child” You awaken and repolarize your body for another day of living.

You also have a life cycle of polarization and depolarization. When you awaken you do not fasten on to another body, you fasten on to your own. You always have a body—the kind of a body you are making. You may discard it for another but that other was regenerated from the pattern YOU made for it. YOU exist eternally. YOU think eternally. YOU are constantly recording YOUR thinking in electric waves of matter which constitute YOUR body. You do not record your thoughts in another person’s body. You could not do this.

Desire has much to do with the periodicity of your returning. Just as a fireman must be awakened to attend to world’s needs if the necessity arises so can world desire affect your periodicity and call you back before your period of rest is normally over to help satisfy world needs. You are a part of world desire and world destiny as well as of your own personal one. As universal Mind you are subject to the call of universal Mind.

Units 7 and 8 will amplify this question for you.

Treasured Students:

Swannanoa, Waynesboro. Virginia

These lessons have been written in the hope that the new knowledge contained in them would materially help to unfold Cosmic awareness in those who are desirous of greater Cosmic Consciousness and are ready for it.

It is, therefore, extremely gratifying to have so many letters from our student friends which give great evidence of transcendent awareness far beyond their former normalcy. Letter after letter contains evidence of not only increased mental perception into the realms of the unknown–and presumably unknowable–but also of increased range of sense perception, which comes as a natural corollary as Mind awareness increases.

We have answered one of these questions regarding extrasensory perception in Lesson No. 44. But we think you might all be more highly inspired to increase your mental perception through becoming more one with God if you could but realize that your sense perception would increase to extraordinary, and even amazingly, greater range.

It seems strange, but it is true, that the more one can forget his body the greater his body sense perception increases. The human race is unfolding in that direction. There will come a time when one’s sense perception will reach so far that one can sense the thoughts of others for thousands of miles as clearly as one can now sense them by reading a cablegram.

In this short space it is not possible for me to tell you at great length how I could sense all motion in all the universe during periods of my thirty-nine day Cosmic experience in 1921 but I can briefly tell it and the chemical, astronomical and other charts I have made, and the new knowledge which I have given to the world because of it, is indisputable proof of its truth.

During that period I could sense all Creation in the making. When I became wholly Light of Mind I became the fulcrum from which all thought-records were extended. I be came a focal point in the stillness from which the universe of all CAUSE and all EFFECT was extended.

In a flash it was all mine to know, as others in past history have been made to know in one instantaneous flash. But I was not permitted to be just that fulcrum of Light for one instants for there was a purpose back of that experience. That purpose was to interpret God’s Message to man of this age in the rhythms of His knowing, and to give man a new cosmogony upon which to build a new world in man’s unfolding.

That is why that severance from body to become Mind alone for an instant of time took place, and why it was then extended into the universe of time and motion in order that I could give body forms to God’s Message and to His KNOWING.

During that period the invisible range of perception was wholly mine. I could “perceive” all motion. All of God’s processes of Creation were brought within the range of my sense perception. I could “see” light winding up into incandescent spheres and unwinding into the void from which they sprang. I could see the wave and every variation of its tonal building into octaves and those octave waves which man cannot see, or perceive, even with instruments were as clear to my perception as those five and a half octaves which he can perceive.

For days I felt the movements of ocean beds where mighty adjustments are taking place to keep the planet in balance especially in the Pacific where mighty changes will take place some day not too far away in time. I strongly felt the nearness of Japan’s plunge into deep seas. It took several days of effort to obliterate this sensing which I made great effort to do because such things were not a part of my purpose, nor of my commanding.

When, however, this extended sensing reached into the heavens I held to them and rapidly made diagrams of the many things which must be written down and charted for man’s new knowing.

At one time I charted the whole solar system and all of the balanced relations of each planet to each other, and to its central sun. Before that 1921 experience I knew practically nothing about astronomy.

The drawing I then made was upon tissue paper. I kept pasting new sections to it as I found I had not sufficient space for the orbits of outer planets and their relative positions with each other. Although I have lost this drawing I have the evidence of the accuracy of the interplanetary positions and relations thus charted, because I employed an astronomer to mathematically check my drawings and give me the result of his findings. I shall preserve these answers for posterity and hope, some day, to also find the drawing which is, perhaps, in some forgotten portfolio.

Each of the planets in that drawing were in their proper place in relation to each other and to the sun with some slight inaccuracies due to the difficulty of making accurate projection with T squares and triangles upon tissue paper.

It would take many pages to begin to cover the miracles which unfolded into commonplace naturalness during this thirty-nine day period, so the above must suffice as briefly stated examples which do not even touch the edge of greater things which I have not yet told to man, nor perhaps can ever tell.

The lesson you can learn from this is that the more you can become the still fulcrum of Cosmic KNOWING the more you can extend the lever of your thinking from that fulcrum and make its meaning known to you.

If what is herein written will help you to increase your own Cosmic awareness for even a little, it is well worth having told you what heights you can reach in your journey toward human transcendency.

Our loving thoughts to you always, especially now because of having reached the last lesson of this Course.

Sincerely yours, Walter Russell