The eternal questions are “Who am I?”, “Where have I come from”, and “Where am I going?”. These can be applied to some of the most immediate of our experiences: our own thoughts and emotions. Ann Ree said,
Niscience is based upon the Marking and Tracing techniques that enable one to experience his frame of consciousness within the Greater Archetypes. One who works within the Greater Archetypes becomes a “Nisciene” beyond nescience or unknowing.
She describes Marking and Tracing as follows,
The first stages of initiation are tracings. These are one’s chief negatives he must work with when he starts on the Path. Markings are divine signs and grace-reassurances experienced during illumination. When one receives a marking, he has attained a station in light through which he will serve as a pure and whole channel, that God may use him. One moves from marking to marking as he evolves in God-Realization.
The sanskrit word for “Mark” is lingam, which is also translated as “sign” or “inference”. (Interpretations of the lingam as a phallic symbol, said Ann Ree, are erroneous.) In one version of a Hindu myth involving their version of the Trinity, Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu, Vishnu and Brahma were arguing as to who was greatest. Siva appeared as a lingam from which emanated an infinite column of light, piercing the the three worlds. Whoever found the end of the column first would be declared the more powerful. Brahma went upwards trying to find the end, and Vishnu descended trying to find the other end. Neither was successful, though Brahma received a Ketaki flower, supposed to have fallen from the top, as a token.
These divine markings and tokens are thus shown to be from the Infinite.
The majority of us are pulled hither and yon by forces we little understand. Thoughts that we believe are our own are in many cases the result of collective forces from the emotional or astral world, survival reflexes from earlier genesis levels, habits etched in from repetition in past lives, or habits and reflexes inherited through the genes. Ann Ree went so far as to say that most thoughts of the average man are not his own.
To the extent that we even recognize what thoughts aren't our own, it is essential to distinguish between those coming from higher and lower sources. The higher thoughts that we eventually make our own can be identified by their long term consequences and whether they serve selfish or glamor ends.
When we are in a state of heated emotion, it is difficult to see things clearly. We attribute things to others that aren’t there. We fail to see ourselves reflected in others and they, likewise, are pulled into the same reactions. Ann Ree wrote,
Through the practice of Marking and Tracing with detachment, one can slow down the rajasic, heated thought-forms in his thinking. In the spilling out, Undersoul casts its unrest upward into the screen of the emotion and the mind. By standing back from this with a cool detachment, one can clear the Undersoul with total awareness. From this come humility, flexibility, and chastity.
Nescience, the opposite of Niscience or knowing, is where we are trapped in a habit-bound mechanistic state of the mind. Certain cultivated mechanical strengths of the mind are true necessary supports and can be very beneficial, but they are not always flexible enough to handle every situation. That twinkling quality that makes us living, creative beings comes from a higher “plus factor”. Without this, intellect mechanisms become as sounding brass or tinkling cymbals and it's initially impressive gains prove to be either of no lasting effect, or, followed too assiduously, they may actually enslave us, becoming our masters - as much of technology does today. “Time saving” devices, for example, leave many with even less time than they had before, for they save time only in order to pursue more perishables or engage in maintenance of the perishables they have hoarded.
The “plus factor” that takes us beyond repetition is ever before us waiting to be grasped. Ann Ree wrote,
There are voices uncountable in this earth seeking to sound into the mind and knowing of man. Men are dull and spiritually illiterate because they are inattentive to the Spirit side of their hierarchy natures. Millions in the earth today are no more than sentient vegetables, living to eat, to sleep. Above all, they desire to be safe. The teacher who asks such ones, “Safe, from what?” is met by bewilderment and hostility. No one in the world is totally secure from the Maya unpredictability forces unless he has knowledge of what these forces are saying.
We are assured by the great sages that many of the truly beneficial inventions and ideas that have come through the agency of finite minds were invisibly inspired by merciful higher sources. I would like to give some examples.
Thomas Paine, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers wrote,
There are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts: those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord.
Several ideas in his pamphlets published during the American Revolution, he admitted, were in second category. Some believe that they were impressed onto him by higher beings responsible for the archetype of America.
Carl Jung wrote, “... there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.” He spoke about an inner figure called Philemon, who personified an objective (non-subjective) part of his psyche. In conversations with Philemon, he observed clearly that Philemon spoke, not himself. Jung described one conversation,
He (Philemon) said that I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, ‘If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you made those people.’
I was introduced to Ann Ree’s writings at around age 10, met Ann Ree at 11, and received my grace name at 12. In my late teens I did not attend services or her classes. At that age I had not developed a sense of responsibility and also took the rare opportunity I had been given for granted, thinking that everything in my world would always be there. For all the reasons I should have availed myself of the rare privilege of her guiding presence, the one that actually pushed me to do so was a peculiar one. One day a few years later, a thought struck me like a thunderbolt: receiving my grace name was so important in my life that I must repay that gift by supporting her great mission in the world as best I could. I didn’t know much about grace names then, or the power of words and names, but after I once again sat at her feet, Ann Ree saw fit to assign me several talks on the manifesting power of the Word and Sound Current: “Logos and Articulation”, “The Invisible made Visible”, “Shadows of Things to Come”.
For a final example of markings, Alice Bailey’s “Telepathy and the Etheric Vehicle” the Tibetan has an account of the telepathy from Master Serapis, who
... sought to bring through some constructive idea for the helping of humanity ... one of [the] disciples on the inner planes, seized upon the suggestion and passed it on (or rather stepped it down) until it registered in the brain of Colonel House [in Woodrow Wilson's cabinet]. He, not recording the source (of which he was totally unaware), passed it on in turn to that sixth ray aspirant, called Woodrow Wilson.
The League of Nations was, alas, ahead of humanity’s readiness at the time and failed due to the weakness of its aspirants.
The phrasing that the intermediate disciple “stepped it down” is very interesting, as the stepping down of volume and power to tributary channels is part of we call in Niscience, mediation. We do not have the high revelatory degree of Ann Ree, but if we have been able to prove some portion of her teachings in our lives, it is our duty to pass it in the vernacular of our experience to others. We are channels of mediation in our daily lives and testimonies through character or action, though not always knowingly.
Elihu, who according to Ann Ree represented Job’s soul voice, said
But it is the spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand.
Job 32:8
So how do we practice marking and tracing? For tracings, one way is to observe our thoughts and reactions to see where they come from - especially if we sense that we are off balance or that our mental reflexes are not adapted fully to the present and particular situations.
At other times we have a marking, a thought that “comes from the blue” and is very helpful. It may come with no prompting whatsoever, but it can come in a state of rest after we have exhausted ourselves trying to find an answer through our well-worn way of thinking. It is as if the calmness we experience after giving up our habitual ways of thinking - and perhaps also the releasing of our mental pride - allows a greater voice to be heard. Great souls are able to maintain this calmness, releasing ego claim and desiring, for greater and more continuous intervals than rest of us. They are alert to the voice of God speaking though all persons and all circumstances.
I love this quote of Jung,
... if some great idea takes hold of us from outside, we must understand that it takes hold of us only because something in us responds to it and goes out to meet it. Richness of mind consists in mental receptivity, not in the accumulation of possessions. What comes to us from outside, and, for that matter, everything that rises up from within, can only be made our own if we are capable of an inner amplitude equal to that of the incoming content.
Yogananda also wrote of the source of true thoughts,
Thoughts are universally and not individually rooted; a truth cannot be created, but only perceived. Any erroneous thought of man is a result of an imperfection, large or small, in his discernment. The goal of yoga science is to calm the mind, that without distortion it may hear the infallible counsel of the Inner Voice.
Marking and Tracing are for the purpose of sifting the true gems from ordinary stones in our thoughts. Making a setting for the gems, nicely called “amplification” by Jung, is how we make them our own and integrate the into our being.
