Objective Reality – Beyond World Twelve to World Six

The natural world is more clearly inviting us into its mysteries, these days. I’m spending an hour each morning raking leaves. The distractions of ordinary life seem muted by the pandemic. Energies more rare, more refined, appear outdoors. And this natural world speaks to something higher in ourselves, more essential. 

Entire worlds exist and touch us in overlapping ways. The heavy world of negative emotions, false personality; the mundane world of grown-up cares, with cars and jobs and paying bills; the lighter, freer world of our essential nature. Like matryoshka dolls, the hard casing of one world cracks open–revealing something else within. 

The Fourth Way calls these energies ‘hydrogens.’ Their levels of lightness belong to different cosmic layers. These levels descend from the world of the Absolute, to our sun and solar system, to our human life, and even lower, as a ‘Ray of Creation.’ The light energy of childhood is world 24. And within it contains the even-higher energy of the sun, linked to our own self-awareness, world 12. Within world 12—should we experience it long and deeply enough—a taste of something even higher comes: world 6.

P.D. Ouspensky:  World 24 [is] permeated with the substance of world 12… each note of the vibrations of world 24 contains a whole octave of the vibrations of world 12… World 12 is permeated with …world 6…

The Gate to Objective Reality

Nothing personal passes through the gate that is World 12. Objective reality lies beyond, outside ourselves. 

Then even our personal efforts to be present, to develop self-awareness, self-knowledge, have their human limit. As we develop, we come to realize that personal effort gives way to a greater reality. And this objective reality is ready for us at any time–it presses in, “has need of us,” as Rilke wrote.    

Rodney Collin: The more a man separates his aim from the habits and failings of his body and personality and the more he forces the latter, however unwillingly, to serve that aim, the more intensely will he become conscious of himself. Gradually, his most hidden weaknesses, self-indulgences, excuses, and on the other hand, his longings, capacities, and aspirations will be drawn into the light of consciousness. Just as in the regeneration of heavenly bodies, more and more of their hard hidden interior must convert into an atmospheric envelope capable of being irradiated and vitalized by the sun.

Rowena Taylor is an editor of FourthWayToday.org, and has been a student of the Fourth Way for more than four decades.