The Avatar Course - Perspective II

Perspective II

The Ability to Create Self
by Harry Palmer

We've all had the experience of reading a good book or watching a good drama and for a while assuming some aspect of one of the characters. Maybe we pick up a new expression or a new way of dressing; maybe we pick up a swagger or an intriguing opinion. It feels good to explore the new viewpoint.

In our hearts we know it's only playacting and soon our "real" self reappears.

On the negative side, most of us have had the experience of recognizing some aspect from someone we didn't particularly admire as part of our "real" self. Maybe we catch our self treating a child like someone who once treated us that way or expressing an opinion whose only basis is that we resisted it when we heard some other self express it.

Even more alarming, we may discover we have the same illness or infirmity of body that some other self we knew had÷some other self we may not have treated as well as we should have. Try as we might to suppress this resisted aspect, it reappears.

When we begin to study what is known about the structure of the self, we find it consists of preferences (beliefs) and a relative time-space location from which the preferences are asserted. The preferences are like the semitransparent overlays that turn the white light of a projector into an image on a screen. Some of the overlays we cannot easily remove, because they contain a forgotten recording of events that automatically asserts the overlay as the ONLY choice. The image projected through these overlays onto the screen is sensed as, "Here I am. This is me."

Most of this is standard phil-ligion-ology (PHIL-osophy, re-LIGION, psych-OLOGY) and is understood by most of the more popular schools.

Since each school is subject to its own belief system overlays, there are wide disagreements as to which overlays are preferable. A common denominator is that almost every school will argue for some and against others.

The goal of installing, removing or modifying: the overlays is the principal task addressed by most of the doctrines, scriptures or technologies generated by these schools. The means as well as which overlays are to be addressed differ, but the determination to change something is remarkably analogous.

The most basic means of modifying an overlay, and probably the least dangerous, consists of reacquainting the individual with the recordings of forgotten events that are causing the overlay to be asserted. The hope is that new conclusions will be drawn altering the overlay and thereby achieving a change in self.

The major difficulty with such an approach is illustrated by the fact that when white light is projected through both a blue overlay and a yellow overlay, it will appear on the screen as green. If we determine to eliminate the green light, we will probably go looking for a green overlay, which in this case doesn't exist. If the green light represents a psychosomatic illness or a state of depression or an unacceptable behavior, we might have some difficulty in locating the exact combination of overlays that is responsible for the condition's creation.

This stumbling block has left many of us wishing that we could remove all the overlays, insuring that the right combination was eliminated. Then, on a blank screen, we could replace selected overlays to generate the self that would interest the people we wish to attract or to generate the self that would align with what we want to achieve.

And literally, the Avatar¨ Course came to our rescue!

One of the results we experienced on Avatar was the ability to closely approach and/or achieve identitylessness÷ in other words, to experience a self that is without aspect or location. It was and is an enlightening, in-every- moment ability to make any choice or none, to select our own overlays. That state is true self, the Avatar. It offered us the opportunity to create the image of life that we preferred, but there was no guarantee of success without our own push.

The first task we faced as new Avatars was to integrate the efforts that had previously obstructed our choices. The world obligingly presented them. To many of us, this integration was even a greater challenge that the exercises on the course, but who would turn their back when the gift of standing at the helm of life was offered?

Could anyone have ever dreamed what an incredible thrill the Avatar Materials would unleash?

The Mission of Avatar®
by Harry Palmer

The mission of Avatar in the world is to catalyze the integration of belief systems.

To the people who have taken Avatar or the Avatar Master Course, this mission statement is so instinctively obvious that little is ever said about it. Even when Avatars are countries apart, there is a natural alignment that causes their efforts to forward the mission. Orders and supervision are rarely necessary.

Attempting to explain this spontaneous cooperation to someone who has not yet experienced Avatar is an interesting challenge.

Clearly one cannot draw a circle or circumscribe a quantity or quality without creating an inside and an outside. Whenever a line is drawn, two sides appear. They may be in-side and out-side, as in the case of a circle, or right- side and left-side in the case of a vertical line, or near-side and far-side in the case of a horizontal line.

This two-sided principle is known as dualism or polar relativity, or simply by the Chinese rendition of yin and yang. The light depends upon the dark; the direction up cannot exist without also determining the direction down; what is good is relative to what is bad; what should be done determines as well what should not be done.

When the primal awareness, which neither contains nor is contained, acts to define itself, it defines as well what it is not. In one brush stroke, two sides appear: the I am and the other. This awareness of definition is the birth of consciousness.

Consciousness knows itself as what it has defined itself as, or one side of the line or boundary that has been created. Thus it has reduced its ownership and control of creation by half.

How many more times can consciousness reduce its ownership and control by half?

If it were to define and deny itself thirty one times (i.e., thirty-one geometric divisions), the two billion plus others on planet Earth would be accounted for. If these two billion plus were then to divide and deny themselves ten more times, every creature and every creation in the Universe would probably be accounted for.

The life that each of us experiences is an interplay of resisted and desired motion between the qualities and quantities that we create and define ourselves as and the qualities and quantities that we create but assert that we are not. (Conscious intention is merely a knowing shift of identification.) To an Avatar Master who experiences a non- dual essence, life is simple and fun.

An Avatar Master teaches the use of tools and techniques for bringing about a reconciliation between the factors that the student feels as I am and the factors that he or she feels as I am not. This is more than an understanding.

As progress is made, the sides begin to fade and disappear. The Avatar student begins his or her own re- engineering of consciousness knocking down walls, opening spaces, changing directions and quickly finds a sense of harmony with and wholeness about existence that, prior to initiation by the Avatar Master, only the esoteric few have ever experienced.

With this harmony and wholeness comes a natural, rational extension of space and genuine tolerance of others.

Communication opens up; viewpoints are explored and modified; separation and difference begin to dissolve into the illusory specters they have always been. An effortless love is born.

The efforts of the new Avatar or the new Master are instinctively in alignment with the mission of Avatar: . . . to catalyze the integration of belief systems.