Now I want to make clear what I mean by this. I mean by this not a lot of preachments or readings out of a book, I mean the examination of nature in these terms. After all, that’s what we do in the schools all the time — we examine nature and human nature, and we try to convey to children and young people and adults in graduate schools what’s known about this. And we convey skills by which persons can know more, and skills by which they can live up to what they know — isn’t that all education is now? But in most schools, including schools conducted more or less by theosophists, the partially dealt with data in terms of this outline is not done.

Now it’s fine to have attitudes that are new and all that, and in India in all the schools that are conducted by people that are connected with the Society this attitude is maintained and that’s useful. A lot of wonderful people have come out of these schools in the old days. Mrs Besant’s Central Hindu College, for instance, was run along these lines. It had the Indian culture as its core, its teaching. All the kids learned about Hinduism as it is, not the symbology of Hinduism you know which you see printed all the time, but the laws of nature and all that is understood by Hinduism; and the result was the production of some very wonderful people. They are now the older generation or they’re dead, so they’re pretty well forgotten, but many of you know ...?...you would recognize then what can really be done merely by having an outline in a school of that kind. Without organizing knowledge around it, which could not be done in those days gone by, but what I’m talking about is this. I’m answering this question in the affirmative on this basis — if you had a school in which all the equipment and resources that are available in a university were on hand or get-able, and by the way that is not nearly as expensive as you’d think, you know — because what really counts, is inexpensive. I’m not talking about expensive research apparatus and so on, just the necessary laboratory equipment — motion pictures, slides and things — I maintain that you could organize that sort of thing so that the people who would go through that kind of study would be unique kinds of people. And we’re going to talk about it some morning. And I hope you shan’t forget that in addition to this methodology and intellectual philosophical and scientific content, there are hundreds of other problems, questions of the emotional life of people and the society they live in and everything else, you see that all comes in. We live in a going-on world, an incomplete world. But you could do this, you could make sure that the skeleton of knowledge and the methodology of knowing and the validity of knowledge was exquisitely organized to be an enjoyable enterprise, and you’d get people who exercised their minds and who grew up as scientists and philosophers, without any impairment of their aesthetic and ethical and social resources.

I just had a letter day before yesterday, for example, from a fellow who tells me that there’s up in Vancouver right now a man who’s invented toys that children between 4 and 6 can play with and after about two hours of playing they compute in fractions! Just think of that, see? It’s just a pedagogical skill that’s come in from Italy where there’s a great deal of thought about this ever since Madame Montessori and there’s no doubt at all that if a school came out with all this sort of thing, science would be just as much fun as music, just as much fun, because it would be the science that reveals nature to you and yourself. (Indistinct words......) Lots of people teach the piano like that too you know, as a horrible and monstrous villainy. Well, anyhow, I maintain this, that the Theosophical Society, its people, its tradition — I maintain that it is the only body of people I know of that can get at this outline and get at it in a realistic way — that’s what I’m trying to do here. Of course there have been various branchings off of the Theosophical Society, I mean where some people have tried to specialize in some way which interests them mostly and that’s a fine thing. I think everybody should do as he likes. But I’m talking about the broad tradition, and especially the tradition that maintains the contact between India’s wealth and the Western wealth — that’s important from my point of view. You can’t do without that. Well, that question has come up from time to time, and it’s in my mind this morning very especially because I’m going to talk about something extremely difficult. In fact, I don’t know how to explain it. Now when I’m stymied, you know I’m stymied. Well, I’m going to try. Any questions or remarks at this moment?

Well then let me review some propositions — some very simple propositions. These organized talks that I’m giving are about the elements, as you know, and we have seen that the true elements are vast principals of some kind, theory, yet, to us all — not clear to me or to anybody else I guess — which appear in the physical world according to their nature. They appear one by one, and we have seen that the center of the earth is what I’m calling the aether element, to give a name to the thing, and then we’ve seen that the lithosphere is the earth element as it presents itself on earth — centro-symmetries in crystals etc, etc. I’m talking now about life. Then there’s the element water — the psyche which has come as protoplasm. Did you run the film last night?

Voice: Oh yes, wonderful.

And that I have been saying is more or less impossible to find any more because all protoplasm we are dealing with is organized now — highly organized — and then we have seen, I tried to show the other night — there’s the air element, that is to say there was a stage when things began to breathe. Protoplasm doesn’t breathe much — primitive protoplasm doesn’t breather much, there’s some respiration, but not much. But when you get plants and animals you have an exchange of oxygen and the air again in the water with plants, and then moved up on the land and then we had animals with lungs and all that. And breathing is the fact of this. Now, in the case of the cold-blooded animals the breathing is not the same high-power oxygenation as it is in warm-blooded animals, and warm blooded animals didn’t come until this fourth stage of life appeared on earth. The warm-blooded animals have oxygenation — breathing and oxygenation going on, you know, at a very high rate. All our lungs contain large square footage of surface, you know, all folded and in there the breath goes every time you breathe. It goes on all the time day and night, and you exchange with the environment, and the oxygen comes in, the blood is purified as you know. It’s collected in a pool around the solar plexis, the impure blood I mean, venous blood, and then it’s pumped through the heart by the heart into the lungs, and there it’s exposed to the air.

It’s really exposed to the outside air brought in for that purpose and the oxygenation contributes to a new kind of creature. It’s essential to a new kind of creature. Those are the warm-blooded animals, which are produced because man is here. Now warm-blooded animals are not particularly spiritual, but man who called them out from nature is spiritual. He is the fire element really. And the warm blooded animals are a sort of way-station between the cold-blooded air creature and the breathing creature, the real breathing creature, and man. The warm-blooded animals are a kind of stage. And then, of course most of the domestic animals are warm-blooded animals, they all are when you come to think about it, aren’t they? Yes. Even birds — they embody this fire principle without self-consciousness, and thus with the emergence of man we have the emergence of this fifth element — fire. Fire. Now it’s alright, you can explain about it in these terms very readily — you know I mentioned it the other morning. Man is the creature with the other warm-blooded animals which has his symmetry over a thermal plane, as it were. You know if our temperature dropped very steeply a few degrees and was maintained there, we’d die. Now there have been experiments with people who have been, you know, you have — this brutal business of the Nazis — who were plunged into cold tanks for hours and so on — and by this sheer will of resistance they hung on somehow and many of them survived — terrifying business. But there, you see, you have a self-conscious person striving, hanging on somehow. We don’t know how that psychological stuff operates. Generally speaking, if you raise the temperature of a person a few degrees — 98.6 is approximately normal for a lot of people — say, 99 degrees — you take it up to 104 or 105 and run it for a couple days and the fellow dies. You see, there’s a very narrow range where the human being operates thermally, organically thermally. This is one of the little propositions about this thing. The symmetry is not, as I showed you the other night, the symmetry of the plane, it’s symmetry of something else. That something else is really a poly-dimensional structure. I’ll talk about it in a minute.

Now, in addition, it’s easy to point out that man is the creature that uses fire practically all his existence — like we’re using the fire here. Fire comes from the photosphere of the sun ultimately, even water power does, and man is the creature, as it were, that knows how to use that fiery energy that’s coming from the glowing surface of the sun.

Now, he’s more complex than that. He’s also buried (?) in two other elements called Fohat and Akasha — oh it get’s so complicated. I’m conscious of what could be done with this if we had the school — that’s why I sigh so deeply. And besides commanding thermal energies he commands electro-magnetic energies, right? which come from Fohat and Akasha. And now he’s breaking open the center of the atom which probably is the aether buried in the center of the earth, actually, or something like that. And generally speaking, he’s far more complicated than the fire element would lead you to suppose. He’s really a bag of tricks! He’s really terribly hard to explain and I’m just pulling him apart a little to try to get some ideas.

Now we’re in the middle of the fourth Round — the Fire element’s been used for many years and it’s running its course — we’re coming to the end of coal dumps and oil dumps — I mean they’re running out on us, but they’re turning out to be very inferior things compared with atomic power — nuclear power. Nuclear power is still used in the form of heat actually because we don’t know how to use it as it really is. You know it’s used to make steam or whatever it is. But the time will come when these magnetic..?.. which they’ve now invented — you know they’ve invented strong magnetic fields where they can release fissionable material, and inside that invisible magnetic field it seems that it will be possible to release this energy as you need it; and all sorts of new laws of harmonics will come into play. And the time will come, if all goes well, before very long, when coal and oil and all these things will be quite primitive and they’ll slowly die into a secondary or third position.

Voice: May I just say a word about those magnetic plants?

Fritz: Yes, please.

Voice: I have a friend who’s at Berkeley and who had worked at Livermore on this, and he says they haven’t been successfully able to do it yet because their magnetic field leaks.

Fritz: Leaks?

Voice: Leaks, and they still have the problem of making one that wont leak.

Fritz: Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Since this came up I learned the other day from this fellow who’s very close to this..?.. man, that magnetism can now be produced in a field so strong and so narrow that it can take all the ....?....strength — that’s the unit with which you calculate a magnetic field, but they can now get a thing like a knife edge of magnetism and when that’s imposed on a bar of steel it separates the atoms just like a knife cuts butter. Magnetism is a miraculous thing. HPB says that gravitation is only a secondary product of the magnetic field, and yet that’s the thing that seems to keep the planets in order......Well, now because we’re in the middle of the fourth Round, man’s fiery nature has expressed itself for countless centuries — in fact from the theosophical point of view, for many millions of years, and now he’s making, in the middle of this Round, the transition really to his higher nature — higher mind and higher resources of different kinds.

Now I want to make something very clear — the fact that we are these things and the fact that we command some techniques in this field, doesn’t mean that we really understand what we’re doing or what we are, and this is the tragedy. Here we are with all this amazing resource — it’s really astonishing what human beings are and can be, but because we are badly organized, we are ethically badly set up — we cannot convey to the individual in childhood what he really is so he comes out and he becomes an instrument for all kinds of thing which may be villainous, you know, in fact — we all know about fissionable material and atom bombs and everything. It’s really a very terrifying thing. What one hopes is that by talking about these things among ourselves we may invent some scheme — that’s what Austie and I want to talk about later — whereby you could communicate this education in various ways, and kids would grow up — and I want to make it clear — kids would grow up not mouthing theosophical words, you see that? alright if you can’t do any better, but I’m talking about mastering theosophical principles. See? Theosophical principles. And those are the principles we are talking about here, just a few of them, and there are a lot more of them. We want to organize learning as it comes along, we want to receive it as it comes, and we want to say what meaning it has philosophically, metaphysically, ethically, morally et cetera. Now I want to pause a minute on that because this is a terribly important thing.

You take a thing like marriage — I suppose everybody here has heard of this? (laughter) I’ll ask you a question. Could you possibly do anything that is intelligent and more than mere fumbling and so on about marriage if your background, your philosophical background is erroneous, you see that? Course you couldn’t. It’s a tremendous enterprise — it’s been going on for an awfully long time you know, in one way or another, and how the human race can continue without it to begin with — it’s a tough proposition. I’m going to talk about Theosophy for a moment. Suppose you don’t know what a human being is, what marriage really is about, see? how are you going to conduct an enterprise like that intelligently? It’s impossible. And of course we see that in the world, don’t we. We see people getting married for all kind of reasons — sometimes apparently for no reason at all. Frightful business! Well — what are the facts? I don’t want to decide what the facts are this morning, that’s quite a thing. If you think reincarnation is nonsense, then obviously, marriage is a certain kind of thing, see? What it is depends on what other philosopher you have instead. If you are a devout Christian and you think marriage is made in Heaven, and you will live with your present spouse forever after in a kind of ....? ....you’ll get ....?..... If on the other hand you think that when you’re dead you’re dead and it doesn’t matter, well then your attitude is different, right? But what we don’t know is that there’s a philosophy that explains this business very adequately. I want it to come out as a part of a total scheme, inevitably which is supported by every bit of knowledge we have, and then things will be very very different — all kinds of things will be different. One’s attitude toward oneself and one’s life and — you know if you had all the knowledge organized so that you really understood that you’d been more than 700 times before, and that this is just another life, the odd thing is that your attitude toward your given life will be, on the one hand quite great willingness to spend it in good causes because there’s another 700 or another thousand if you want to think of it that way — what’s the odds? It would be a good gambling proposition to see what you could do with a life, and don’t kid yourself about one thing — the last drop of egotism (off mike) of it. Isn’t that clear? You see, man is a creative being, a fiery creative being, these problems of man as a creative being arise when there is no proper philosophy — in other words, we can know. We are the only beings who can know. Now we’re the fiery creatures, see? and if we don’t claim this inheritance we are rejecting the one thing we are created to be. That’s what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to show that the Fire element is not a thing in a book, it’s a thing right here in man. Now teaching about this business of elements — especially the last two elements I’m talking about — is extremely difficult in a verbal way and also very difficult when everything is very tense(?). And I want now to explain why that is so, and say a little something constructive about it all. Anybody want to make any remarks before I....?.....for the next piece?

Question: Yes, Fritz, how many incarnations with a theosophical knowledge of the universe would give us a different attitude towards marriage and life? For instance I’ve been knocking around in theosophical circles for a number of years, and I don’t see a great deal of difference yet in the marriage situation and other situations. We have the knowledge and maybe we’ve had it for several incarnations. Would it possibly take a great number of incarnations of this knowledge so that it seeps in so that we could behave differently?

Fritz: That’s a good question.... Let’s say this first of all, although the Theosophical Society has been going on for say 80 years, the people who really know Theosophy is very small. See? That’s what we’re talking about here. Knowledge has not been organized to enable people to say “I know”. There are plenty of people to say “I have heard of”, who can rattle off the planes of nature, and even the sub-planes etc. that’s some knowledge, isn’t it? Verbalism. Right? That’s the first point. Second is this — You must realize that theosophists like other people are imprisoned in society in general and they’re up against it just like everybody else. Maybe they think they’re not in the right circumstances, they’ve got a living to make, and they’ve got all sorts of problems. Now, how long does it take? That depends upon the individual. If a person says in a given life: “I now draw two large black lines under my account, I know that I have to deal with these things, from now on I’m going to alter the whole situation” What happens then? It’s very simple. He says “From now on I shall blame nobody else”. That’s what he really says. “I shall no longer blame anybody else! About anything! I don’t care what it is. I have no complaints to offer except myself”. See? That’s all it amounts to — that’s really the essence of the whole business. When you say to yourself or I say to myself:” I don’t care what happens to me, I did it! This is education coming to me.” Nobody wants to be miserable but let’s face the fact that that’s how it is. Then — now you see it’s very different, now instead of always accommodating oneself to situations outside, or trying to change situations according to wrong standards — one is not ceasing to strive about situations, but the striving is about impersonal things more than about personal things. What happens personally, happens. Now you may say that not everybody’s fortunate enough to be in circumstances where they’re encouraged to do this and so on and so on — well, I know that’s true. But that isn’t all, you see. Wherever you are, and whatever you are, you can always say to yourself: “I’ve no right to lose my temper, I did it to myself. These circumstances are educative” — doesn’t matter what your circumstances are. And there have been people who have got so far in life — maybe they were burned at the stake or whatever it might be — that they went to death saying” This is my business and I had nobody to blame about it”. Well, this little fact, this little fact is the major fact! And the people in the Society who have followed this doctrine have found out — that’s all that I can say. I don’t think it’s a question of the number of lives so much as the resolution exercised. That’s what I’d like to say.

Question: Don’t you think we have to know what we are, who we are within ourselves before we can —

Fritz: I’m not quite certain I know what you mean by what you are and who you are.

Question: Well, so often some people look upon themselves as an animal, for instance or ....I mean, if we recognize the spiritual being that we are, then we know what we’ve got to handle or control the situation.

Fritz: Yes, that’s what we’re talking about — that man is not an animal and that he is able to know, that he’s got to know whether he likes it or not, and he can just go and have himself bumped around so long as he feels that way. But in the end he will know, he will behave too. That’s how the universe is calculated. It’s taken some several thousands of millions of years getting men on the earth, and now that it’s got him here it’s going to make him learn what’s intended, that’s all.

Question: How serious, then, is man’s behaviour with the atomic power? How serious is this threat that we might eliminate ourselves in the process?

Fritz: Well, of course, you know that the whole of the human race would not be eliminated. There are places in the middle of Africa (indistinct) start again.......... or somewhere, maybe it’s in Tibet. I know it’s a real —

Question: So often we hear that argument.

Fritz: Yeah. Well, it would be bad. Who wants to start over again? We’ve got a pretty good start on some nice things and so on. I don’t know what will happen. Lots of people say that if we get past 1864 we’ll be alright.

Several Voices: NINETEEN 64

Fritz: What....................(off mike)

If we could get some good astrologers to set up a few maps — that’s what I would like to do, for which I’d like to suggest approximate dates, one of them being this, another is 1968. I’d like to have that examined very carefully.

How serious is all this? Well, these are the risks that are run by the Hierarchy in releasing knowledge. It’s due to them that we have people like Crookes, he was one of the early men, and Bequerel and those fellows: and now we have this. And I have confidence that though we may make them damn fools of ourselves, enough force will be released in the East — I have great confidence in India’s policy — it’s very marvelous — I read all the speeches I can get hold of, of Nehru. I get three or four things from India from which I get all this dope — it’s really wonderful what they’re doing, and they may yet turn out to have just the policy that will appeal to mankind as a whole. It’s truly a non-violence policy — Gandhi’s policy. They’re one of the few great countries that will accept loans only on condition that nothing is military. Most of the countries that borrow from us borrow with the consent that they will be on our side in the war. I don’t know. I don’t think anybody really knows what’s going to happen — all we can do is work hard.

Well now, I’d like for a minute to talk about the mathematical end of this. Could you stand a little of that? And this is what I mean by that. (Indistinct — off mike) Fact is that we live in a three-dimensional universe. You know — up and down, back and forth, in and out, and this three-dimensional universe is so familiar to us, we are so conditioned to it that we just cannot think in any other terms. And that’s the greatest possible problem in connection with educating yourself in this regard. Even clairvoyants — and now I’m going to say something — even clairvoyants who actually are experiencing in four dimensions know that they’re up against something baffling, don’t understand that it’s four dimensional necessarily. You know that a clairvoyant can see the inside of a thing and the outside of a thing at the same time and they try ro report on this in conventional forms — you’ll see Dora’s auras presently. They’re drawings, you see, they’re conventions that she’s established to try and convey in three dimensions what she’s really experiencing. And she has no mathematics practically, and does her best to try to communicate to what she experiences.

Now, a few people like Leadbeater worked on it — he couldn’t make much of it, he wasn’t mathematical at all, so he couldn’t make much of it. But various people have worked on it at different times; and this is one of the obstacles to real mastery of the subject of the elements because they operate out of higher dimensions into this world, right? A tree is what it is because it operates in space-time, you know that? It’s growing, see? It has a space-time of its own. I don’t mean Einstein’s space-time — growth space-time, that is the space-time of the psychosomatic field, not of the electro-magnetic or gravitational, do I make myself clear? See we have different kinds of space-time — plenty of them, and this is the one I’m speaking of when I say a tree. A tree is an evolution in three dimensional terms of a four dimensional creature. When you say “I see a tree” you’re only seeing a three-dimensional object that you say is a tree — but the tree is really something very illusive. It has a life of its own, an inner life, and it has a form of its own and so on, but the real tree is a creature in the four dimensional world, not of a very high level in the four-dimensional world, that is enjoying the resources of that kind of four-dimensional activity. And trees are all the time exchanging with their psychic environment — their troubles (?) are much fewer than ours. Because we’re called out here all the time by our consciousness of our commitments of different kinds, but the tree can suffer all the physical things that it does with a great philosophy and calm but goes on exchanging in the invisible world. And they do us great good — you’ve heard about that from Dora repeatedly. They do us great good around here, that’s why we don’t like to see them harmed unless it’s quite necessary.

Hello there, Dora — admission .25.

Now this can be got at mathematically, and I have something here that every year or two or three years we demonstrate because it’s so simple that anybody can follow it because it’s demonstrated. And I will now demonstrate our old friend the Mesbius band to show you that things are not what they seem. (Transcriber’s note — see Scientific American, June 1957, Page 166 — good description)

That’s just a ring of paper, see? and it has an inside surface and an outside surface — now we turn it out. . . we now have a curious kind of a ring with only one surface — only one surface, right? I hold my thumb here and I go around like this, see? See where I’m going — but instead of coming back to my thumb I came back to my finger. Now I’ll continue on around from my finger, sticking to the surface, and I come back to my thumb! In other words you have to go twice round in order to get back to the starting point. Both sides, we would say, but the truth is there’s only one side. Of course, theoretically there’s a thickness here too, but (indistinct) . . .that’s got only one surface and it’s a very peculiar creature because it’s really — you have now operated in a higher dimension — when you turned it you see you took advantage of three dimensions — and now if you cut this down the middle instead of getting two rings the way you ought, I mean just plain ordinary two rings that you expect to get.

Voice: Fritz, that single ring has a double twist in it (Other indistinct comments)

Fritz: Now, instead of turning it only half a turn, turn it a whole turn — 360 degrees. Now we shall perform this little feat and we shall have two rings, but instead of being separated they will be interlocked, and one really interlocked them by twisting them and then cutting them. Didn’t look like it, but it is.

Well now, what’s the purpose of this? The purpose of it from my point of view is this — one cannot understand nature in terms of simple naive acceptance of dimensionality the way we experience it. It isn’t like that, you see. The unfolding of plants and animals and human bodies and the unfolding of thoughts and emotions — all this unfolding — is an immensely complicated thing from the point of view of its mathematical reality. And one of the reasons why the Adepts are so extraordinary in this matter is that they got inside this picture technically you see, and they understand the operation of these things from above down in the lower dimensions — or from inside out if you want to put it — they have mastery of this. We can’t go very far with this mathematical thing because it gets too dull pretty soon, but it can be explained a little bit with the help of lantern slides if you want to see them.

Voice: Let’s have them.

Fritz: Alright.

Now over there is the slide which summarizes the situation I’ve been talking about for a long time...?...We’ve already seen crystals are centro-symmetrical or the earth element when it presents itself in life in the physical world is centro-symmetrical. That’s on the left. And we have seen that during the next great era after the Cambrian rocks and up to the Mesozoic the great teacher was plant life — there were animals and some of them were non-symmetrical — most of them were. There were a few animals that were bi-laterally symmetrical, fishes and things like that, but the emphasis all the way along was on axiate development. Then came the Mesozoic. . . And now we have life on land in a big way including land animals. And all the vast cold-blooded animals — dinosaurs and those things — appeared on the scene. And I showed the other night that human beings are not symmetrical over a plane, they are un-symmetrical over a plane. And that is because there is a higher and a lower nature struggling in them and nature has used in the case of human beings this bi-lateral quality to express two things that are fighting each other — the animal man and the impersonal or God-like man . . . .If one were to take the symbol of a cube for instance, then the symbol of the cross unfolds from it quite naturally . . .I don’t want to say that the symbol of the cross is very important to my argument just now. But all of it’s an interesting idea to be pursued sometime.

Question: That’s an unfolded cube, in other words —

Fritz: Just an unfolded cube. The crucifixion, in other words, of the psychic man for the good of the higher man is what’s at stake — that’s what it amounts to.

Now, this three dimensional world is built up like that — it contains volume. You know what I mean — just boxes, right? They contain volume. Now there is another stage to the world beyond that of a four dimensional system — this is the psyche itself, four dimensional system. Now four-dimensional system is not just a lot of nonsense, you see that, it is something. What does it contain? You know a point contains nothing, and it is nothing, A line — you have wash lines and power lines and things like that — lines have some meaning. You can have a surface — a surface is the top of the water, or the top of a shelf, or a shadow or something like that. And they have meaning. Now we all know that volume have meaning. And we use them all the time. And we are volumes, physically speaking — we are volumes. But the next stage would contain something different. What does it contain? It contains durations-durations of a space-time character because it has a temporal axis. What is enclosed in any thing of this kind, is a duration. In other words, your life from the time of conception to the time of death is a unit in four dimensions, but it is a series in three dimensions. And this total unit is what we call a duration. Now what I want to say is, this is a real thing. And when you get Dora at your mercy a little later, with lantern slides, you will observe that she has observed certain commitments of souls, and structure, and the psyche which are connected with it is a life. A life, and that is just as real as the volume for the living cube.

Question: Fritz, you were saying that a lifetime in a sense is a four-dimensional land — we’re just looking at a slice of it this moment?

Fritz: You, the young Austin Bee, and you the future Austin Bee, are right here — see? — but the present Austin Bee is what the eye sees. We’re all vaguely aware of the fact that our memories are present with us, but we only get scraps of it you see. In hypnotism the whole past can be uncovered, it’s all there. And the future’s there, but that’s all very powerfully veiled. .. Yes, that’s what I mean.

Now, that’s the psyche. You see. The whole thing opens up differently . . .The psyche is the durational world but the plan for the duration doesn’t come from the psyche, it comes from the air element, conceptual element. I don’t show that here because it’s five dimensions and fantastic. There is a world in which that which is embodied is not durations but concepts, ideas. Ideas are the reality at the level of the soul. Everybody is an idea, not a passing idea, a very marvelous idea and he’s his own idea. And the matter — you know matter operates at each of these levels — we have all kinds of things connected with those things. The kind of matter that operates with the soul, I’ve said here often, can be said to be conceptual matter whose basic property is that if it doesn’t conceive, it doesn’t exist. That’s an astonishing idea. Most marvelous idea I ever invented! Conceptual matter — matter which by its nature is incapable of operating unless it is involved in conceptual processes — either of the human mind or the mother’s body or what. Seeds, both acorn and what not. That matter can only manifest here when conceptuality is going on — conceptuality according to nature. We have disordered ideas too, you see, but then they are not of this nature — they’re just roamings of the lower mind. Now this conceptuality is inevitable — you can’t stop it, there’s nothing you can do about it, you’re in it whether you like it or not. And this is one of the things connected with marriage and childhood. This pressure — this pressure of this matter here to get its expression, it has its right to turn up too, and all conceptuality of any kind is of its nature. I hope that’s so clear that nobody knows what I’m talking about. That’s a very tough idea — wonderful idea!

Now, it’s way beyond that that the Fire element appears, and it’s just as hopeless to try to explain what it really is. This is Nirvana. You see, when we say Fire, it immediately becomes physical and nonsense really. I don’t know why that term was used except for the reasons I explained earlier. But man is a kind of a god, and if he’s moral and good and helpful and kind and all that sort of thing, and powerful at the same time, he can realize this thing and embody this thing, and something pours out of him that is quite recognizable.

Question: Is this the sixth dimension?

Fritz: Yes, this is the sixth dimension.

Question: Is there a connection between the sixth dimension, or fire element, and the physical element?

Fritz: The sixth enfolds everything here — a lot of it — have you got something specific in mind?

Question: Well, when it is still in the germination state.

Fritz: Oh I see, yes, yes. Well, broadly speaking what happens is this. In the very earliest stage of the ovum you have the kind of processes I put on the slide the other night — you have that going on and the moment it begins to fructify, it obeys the basic geometric law but almost at once, in just a few hours or days, something like that, the dynamism of the higher future of the animals come in, and the geometry is lost to view. That’s how powerful this creative element is, this drive, see? It overcomes the geometry. It varies, it makes it so complicated it’s lost to view. And only these simple abstractions are left. Well, it’s a very complicated business. What we need is some systematic study.

Now we’ll end it by saying this. There’s also two other elements that are non-material in character beyond Fire, beyond Spirit, beyond anything material as you would expect....?....not to be confused with ....?.....those are manifesting things, not basic structures of the cosmos. There is something called Fohat, and something called Akasha, and man actually represents in his bodies these two — undeveloped man not very clearly or very well, but he’s got powers that reside there — and that’s what makes it so complicated when you get this far. Fohat is Reality in motion — or free Reality. Oh, Love, electo-magnetism, the One Force.... And Akasha is one of the most mysterious things, the most interesting things in all theosophical literature. It is the only part of Parabrahman in the universe and it governs the whole universe. It’s both Parabrahman and manifestation at the same time. And what the S.D. says is one of the most fascinating things about it — it says that when Fohat comes out it’s like Light — it’s a kind of Light — electromagnetism is light as you know. Now when Fohat comes out from Parabrahman from all points of the universe perhaps, and it then illuminates the darkness and calls out from the darkness those portions of Parabrahman that are going to be operating in the system — now this which is called out is Akasha — called before that Adi. This thing that is called out does not change, you see that? And being changeless, it is still God Almighty present. I use God Almighty now for the correct term. And though it does not itself change in its nature or anything else, it governs the whole process which is all that....?.... A kind of matrix.

Voice: Catalyst

Fritz: Yeah, more than a catalyst. That’s a good idea — something that is present, that affects things but doesn’t itself change — no doubt that contributes something. No, it’s a little more like a kind of universal geometry, a set of harmonic lines — things like that.

Now the part that we see embodied in living creatures, in the life of man, social orders and things like that — that is stated. The part that is not stated is the rest of Reality — of course that’s the bulk of it — what’s shown is the minor portion. So you have a total system that we sketch very roughly, that starts with points and runs up into its octaves, which is finite you see — infinitude is the opposite of a point. A point is infinitely nothing, and it’s the opposite of the infinitely all. You have a geometric system, and that geometrical system fits in to the scheme of nature and the living orders as we see them here. Well, that’s the kind of thing — I don’t want to say that this should be taught in school — but if the mathematics of nature were taught and all, kinds of things were done as a pleasure, like you have music and singing and so on — it’s fun — if you had that and had the right instruments, the knowledge of all this mysterious background of human existence would come back into the school system.

Question: Fritz, isn’t a line a point in motion?

Fritz: It could be so defined, yes.

Question: Then the line is really nothing, like the point is nothing.

Fritz: Well, a line is something different because you can hand your clothes on a washline! But you can’t hand your clothes on the ....?.....of a point. Speaking quite plainly you see you’re up against some very fundamental problems. And the magnetic field is described not in terms of points in motion — because it isn’t in motion — magnetism is not in motion. A magnetic field can be moved as a whole, but there’s no flow in that. A fellow thought he had, but he was not substantiated by anybody else. A few years ago. No. We say that there’s an infinite number of lines of force. Lines have no thickness, but they have length, see? And you can measure the length of a given line in a magnetic field — closed in it would be like that. So lines have some standing, but you have hit on a very interesting fact...

Question: Fritz, is the intuition the instrument that man will use to measure his fourth-dimensional space-time dimension you spoke of?

Fritz: The intuition is a very peculiar thing and I’m very glad you brought it up. We have to be very careful about the use of that word — that is the most loosely used word in theosophical literature, bar none. There are many people who just tell you that if you cultivate your intuitions — they don’t tell you how you do this — cultivate your intuitions, you’ll know everything without effort — be angels maybe — There is a higher mind, see? The real proof of this is that there is a soul and the soul has extremities. One extremity is the moral will, and the other extremity is the higher mind, and how they move together in the middle is a mysterious business; and in the middle is the thing we call intuition. Now there is no intuition with the moral will, and no intuitions without a well-fed philosophical mind. It’s an illusion to suppose that one possesses intuition without much exercise, right? What does happen is this — that if a person is made to have pleasure in mathematics and those things, and it is the mathematics of nature as well as the mathematics of pure creativity and speculation and so on, then this emotional part of the soul — the intuition is sort of a higher emotion — is fed —

(discussion apparently continued, but the tape ran out.)