Dr Sir John Whitman Ray Anniversary Message
2013
Hello everyone.
21 April, 2013 now marks 12 years since the death of Dr Sir John Whitman Ray, founder of Body Electronics. While many of the tributes I have written have begun in similar fashion, I observe my former reluctance to use the word “death” and recognise my own resistance to the word. It may be correct that there is no death, at least not of the immortal spirit, but of all things worldly there is a time of ending. No thing of the physical universe has been created to be permanent and enduring, including our bodies, yet we have attachments to these things – we desire them to persist, in our unwillingness for them not to be. It is this resistance to demise that ensures it, and, ironically, blocks our memory also, such that a thing cannot even live on in our memory in its hologrammic, full sensory, detailed, accurate, permanent and vivid glory.
When we, as a creator, build a thing that we love, there is often an inclination to protect it, unwilling to see our creation come to an end, or else destroy it before anyone else can or before it degrades of its own accord. To desire it to continue forever is not realistic and goes against the design of the universe, where all things are designed to degrade in the absence of consciousness. The Ultimate Creator has intended that, “All things must pass,” all “things” being the created effects of consciousness, which includes all matter in the universe and the universe itself.
This would be a pretty grim outlook for life if we did not realise that the essence or spirit of life is not the physical body or outer appearance of life, with which we are most familiar. The outer, effect body, the physical body, is corruptible and no more than a vehicle, an outer garment, of an inner, less often perceived, eternal and incorruptible, causal body that is not of this universe. This causal body temporarily projects itself into the universe for the purpose of experiencing and mastering the electrical phenomena of material creation. In short, the eternal spirit is real, more real than the physical body, and merely inhabits a human body and animates it with personality on an intended temporary basis, as a means toward perfecting itself, much like we as a tourist may visit another country to expand our cultural understanding.
Seeing as physical death merely indicates the withdrawal of that spirit from one of its many physical bodies, then indeed, “There is no death,” and to use the word is to misinterpret events; in reality, the spirit has literally passed on to its next assignment.
Can we be so perceptive (or philosophical) as to realise this, that is the question? The slew of emotionality we feel after the death of a loved one, including grief, fear, anger, indifference, numbness, pain, etc, is indicative of our inability to have this realisation, such that when we use the words “passed on”, or one of many similar phrases, in preference to “death”, it indicates that we are being euphemistic and cannot confront the permanence that we perceive to be associated with death.
It is only because we do not understand death, or cannot release our own selfish attachments to a person, that this emotionality surfaces.
There is a life to be celebrated, there remains an eternal spirit that encompasses all memory and consciousness of the dead individual – all that is gone is its outer shell, which no longer serves a purpose.
Death and the Scale of Emotions
To enumerate the manifestations of emotionality around death, let us again consider the Scale of Emotions:
At Enthusiasm, we experience love and may perceive the Divine Plan Fulfilled, thus recognising that there was no death. Although the relationship we had may now have ended, it was never going to be permanent in this mortal form and we still have the ability to be one with this life essence or spirit. It is only at Enthusiasm that we have this capacity. It is not a matter of séances or spiritual manipulation, for our choice to be one with another consciousness is all that is required when we have no resistance. This is a Godly Act and not spiritualism of any form. In the words of Walter Russell, “Everything (and everyone) that ever was, still is, and everything that ever will be, already is.” Thus the meaning of, “Love is stronger than death.”
As we begin to resist love, we feel an emotional and physical sensation of pain in our body, an inability or unwillingness to endure life (or death) as it is. Because we wish it to be other than as it is, we block out the reality and thus cannot experience it, thus creating a separation from the Oneness with spirit that is otherwise possible. We have “cut ourselves off” through the denial of our ability to love the circumstance of death and thus can only perceive one end of the duality of Life – Death, the end where we see only death and cannot bear it, thus the sensation of pain.
Anger follows at level 3 as we seek to control or overcome the pain we feel and/or the circumstance of death that we resist. In our efforts to control that which was always designed to be beyond our control, there will often be misguided efforts to see “the will of the deceased done” or to take personal advantage of the circumstances, neither of which actions are rational since the reality of the Life – Death duality is neither perceived nor encompassed.
At Fear, there is a withdrawal from the situation – the person cannot be brought back and the controlling behaviours of one may be matched and outdone by those of another, leaving retreat as the only apparent option. Love, encompassment, is always an option, but in the withdrawal from Anger to Fear there is an admission of defeat that begins to relegate one from the cause end of creation towards the effect end of creation, hence the turning point that Fear represents on the Scale of Emotions. The choices at Fear are often imperative and urgent and generally include a hasty withdrawal, or running away, as if one could in fact run away from a thing in order to resolve it. Any such running away or avoidance is a temporary solution, since karmically there is an unresolved resistance to a duality still to be dealt with if one is to reach their own Perfection. Karmic returns are thus a blessing.
At Grief, the conversation is changed from experiential and involved to intellectual and philosophical. Although there may be an outpouring of grief and tears, internally (and often externally as well) there is a struggle to rationalise the death, to “make” it ok when in fact it is not ok. Sympathies and platitudes abound at this level, particularly at funerals, such that it may become even more difficult to see things as they really are. At Grief, one is generally focussed upon their own loss, rather than that of the deceased, much less the fact that nothing can stand in the way of the Perfection of the Spirit, in the long term. One door may indeed be shut, but not without another necessarily being opened.
The failed level of response to the “poor me”, victim level of Grief is Apathy, the level of non-response. At Apathy, there forms an indifference to loss and a sense of powerlessness. At this level, characterised by social activism, death cannot be banned, but every possible cause of it can and “should” be, in the eyes of the apathetic. Smoking should be banned, alcohol should be banned, pesticides should be banned, etc, etc. Not that I am condoning any of those things, but in our resistance to death at the level of Apathy, the game is about banding together in the hope that a difference may be made (preferably by someone else). When it comes to the inevitability of death, this is not possible. Rather than focus on the sure steps to one’s Perfection, one blindly and aimlessly (through others) seeks to avoid demise.
Ultimately, when it comes to increasing resistance, there is Unconsciousness, the numbness or inability to feel anything, which by its very nature is a precursor of spiritual death. In other words, resistance to death accelerates our own death.
All is reversible at any time, but why is it not reversed, generally speaking? Why do we not love, when love is the resolver of all resistances?
Why not love?
Although pointholding is a great gift to mankind, a far greater gift is love, or, more particularly, unconditional love. This has already been shown to us by Christ, and also what we were meant to learn from one John Whitman Ray when we studied Body Electronics. Sure, there was a bunch of stuff about points and the Scale of Emotions, nutrition, and iridology, etc, but all of this is little more than an intellectual curiosity without the application, the continual application of love without condition.
Moses was told that if the people would reject One Law, they would be given ten, and if they rejected the ten, then they would be given 100, etc, all lower laws than the One.
By way of parallel, if we consider Unconditional Love to be the One, then the laws of Body Electronics (which are just the laws of the universe that were already extant, organised for our clarity by John) are simply that same law being spelled out in each situation it could be applied to.
Thus, regarding the Scale of Emotions, the thing to do at Unconsciousness is to love the numbness; at Apathy, to love the indifference; at Grief, to love the victim role; at Fear, to love the lack of control; at Anger, to love that which one desires to put into submission; at Pain, to love the pain and one-pointedness of non-love, such that one might...love. We have a scale of seven emotions and yet only one action to take at any time. The complexity of the Scale of Emotions is thus only for those who reject the simplicity of loving unconditionally.
We don’t really need Body Electronics except as an outer form to put us directly face-to-face with those things we have no desire to love. It’s just that without it the human nature (as opposed to Divine Nature) is not to love without first having some reason or justification to love. Fine. That’s how you want to play it? Then let’s take Unconsciousness (or Pain, or Anger, or Fear, or whatever comes up) and feel it, intensify it, really feel it, and now love it. Got the next thing? Ok – feel it, intensify it, really feel it, now love it. It’s not so mysterious, but doing it is entirely transformational, even miraculous at times.
Again, the question should be asked, “Why do we really need Body Electronics?” The real answer is that we don’t, since all we really need to do is love unconditionally (“Oh yeah, that whole Bible thing, right?”). But the answer that’s most applicable is that we don’t want to love unconditionally and this permeates every level of activity we find ourselves in, to the extent that this one redeeming option is generally the very last one we think of, consider, or act on. This, then, is why we need a discipline like Body Electronics, to force feed or navigate us through our manifold resistances to love.
For example, if we didn’t understand the principles of Body Electronics, this is what we’d habitually do in a situation of, say, Grief: “Oh I feel like such a victim. That’s because I am a victim, so nothing else to be done except wish I wasn’t such a victim.” It’s a downward spiral. We can’t entertain the ridiculous notion of unconditional love since we’re so identified with being a victim. As far as we’re concerned, we simply are a victim, so any talk of being able to do something that would actually change that by taking a position of being causal is just stupid, irrational, and doomed to failure (“because we’re a victim, dur”) and so it comes to pass.
If, in the unlikely, yet clearly possible, event that we do apply unconditional love for a moment at Grief, our reward is not instant freedom, but feelings of intense fear, which as far as we’re concerned is exactly like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, so all bets are off, love is withdrawn and we’re right back where we started, being a victim –“See, I told you so.”
Quick fix not in our best interests
The fundamental issue is that we expect a little love effort to be repaid by an instant release of all our misery – certainly, if this happened we would be far more inclined to love in future. But if this was the case our lessons in life would not be so profound. In essence, we seek a pat on the back for every little effort, even when our misdemeanours are many and great. No, given our history of non-love, to learn what it means to be unconditional, there cannot be an instant reward, otherwise there would be no lesson and little inclination to love continuously. Remember, to be unconditional, our motivation to love cannot arise from a justification based on the “benefits” of loving. One day we may be in a different space, having loved unconditionally through great re-experienced adversity, wherein a little love will heal all, but we are, for the most part, yet to have earned that.
Loving unconditionally, due to our level of depravity (that’s us, folks) is generally rewarded by some greater level of discomfort as we approach the memory of that moment where we actually consciously decided not to love a thing that we were fully aware of being capable of loving. No-one actually likes to remember this stuff; even a masochist has a different reason for choosing pain.
If we were climbing a mountainside and every step up was equivalent to an act of unconditional love and as a result of that step we saw a more beautiful vista before us, we would likely be increasingly motivated to love – but that wouldn’t be unconditional and so that design would defeat the purpose of climbing the mountain. In fact, we’d have no problem loving in that design because we’d turn into “love junkies” as a result of all that instant gratification.
Instead, the thing we get the greater clarity on is, not entirely unsurprisingly, the extent of our own depravity or erroneous behaviour, which is not especially motivating or joyful to behold. In fact, most people view it as a huge disincentive, but therein the benefit of unconditional love, whenever it may be applied to oneself. We are able, in fact, karmically bound, to re-experience our resistances – the only real question is whether we will love them or not. Thus, rather than revealing a more beautiful vista, each step up the mountain is a step further into the cloud of our suppressed memory until, that is, we eventually pop out above the clouds.
So, with a taste of humour in my mouth, we reach the end of a tribute to Dr Ray that I never got to write, at least not as I had intended, having been sidetracked by questioning the meaning of death, as expressed in the very first sentence. Good thing too, as I’m sure this tribute is much better than what I had planned.
So to all, like me, who need to understand and apply Unconditional Love a heck of a lot more in our daily life, not just when motivated to “on the table”, I wish you all blessings in your endeavours for another year.
In Love, Light, and Perfection,
I AM
Graham Bennett
As a footnote, lest I leave you with only one side of the truth, that death is inevitable, there is indeed a design called mortality, which is encoded in our genes and yet there are ways to go beyond our genetic programming. “To go beyond” mortality, as with any other limitation, cannot be achieved while simultaneously resisting it. Even if death were inevitable, it should now be clear that to die is not the end. We have to look at the big picture here: we already have died a large number of times, none of which should be regarded as failures, although clearly we had not reached mastery. Whether it be in this body or another, at some time we will all attain to our incorruptible enduring forms with a full memory of all our experience. As with anything in life, it is never the circumstance that is the problem, but our attitude towards it and this we absolutely have a choice of.
Things can indeed be sustained indefinitely and incorruptibly, as long as consciousness desires it without resistance. Yet in this state of non-resistance we would eventually see that the end game is not in maintaining any particular physical form.
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