The World According to Charles: A Crash Course

© 2003 Kurt Leland

Part I: The Origin of Our Universe

I’ve learned since I began working with Charles in 1981 that he never introduces a concept without having in mind where it fits into a much larger network of ideas. I knew nothing of this network for years. Yet Charles kept slowly and patiently adding thought to thought as if stringing beads--not in single strands, but in complex arrays.

Once in a while a new concept and an old one would be placed side by side, and suddenly I would become aware of an underlying pattern. Whenever I thought that I’d fully grasped the design and could perhaps add the next bead or two myself, Charles would choose a completely different one, and I would come to a new understanding of the larger whole he’d been attempting to convey all along.

Charles is very economical with his thought-beads. He never seems to forget which ones are available, and often uses the same thought over and over in striking and unexpected associations. Thus, the understanding of more recently received material often requires a grasp of what has been said from the beginning.

When I announced to the class that I’d been holding in Chicago, almost every week from 1982-84, that I would be moving to Boston, Charles proceeded to deliver a grand review of all of the material he’d thus far produced. It was only then that I became aware of what he’d been up to and how everything fit together. In the meantime, the terms had become such a standard part of my vocabulary in talking to virtually everyone I knew, that when I arrived in Boston in the fall of 1984, it was quite a shock to be reminded that no one there would have the slightest idea of what I meant.

Luckily, my former roommate and his wife-to-be, who had met in the Chicago class, moved to Boston at the same time I did, because of his job transfer. We tried to get a new class going, but the three of us were bored with rehashing the old stuff--we wanted to get on with things.

If Charles had led us through an elementary algebra of the soul in Chicago, we were ready for Algebra II! So I prepared the following summary of Charles's fundamental concepts in order to brief the new class with the lingo they were likely to hear when I was in trance. And, true to form, virtually everything Charles has said since then has used at least one and usually several of the terms defined herein.

None of the actual wording of this article has been channeled, except for that in the second to last section. The rest I’ve produced from memory of various Charles sessions, including ones spoken in class or in private, or handwritten for myself. While I assembled the material in my own words, I felt as if I were responding to essay questions on a kind of cosmic "take-home" examination, perhaps preparing to graduate from this crash course myself, hopefully without crashing!

* * *

The most basic concept in the Charles material--and, in fact, the first statement he ever uttered--is: "Symbols are a means consciousness uses to monitor its own development." Charles claims that everything he teaches emanates from this single sentence.

There are two corollaries: 1) "Everything has validity; you need only find the reality in which it has its validity" (or: Symbols demand appropriate interpretation; appropriate interpretation equals validity; validity is a function of usefulness--every interpretation changes the reality perceived, or, in fact, creates that reality; hence, realities are defined by what’s perceived as valid, and therefore useful, in each); 2) "Reality consists in as many definitions of it as one has tolerance for" (or: One’s willingness to interpret symbols, even several different ways, determines the extent to which one perceives what’s real beneath--or beyond--appearances).

* * *

The cosmology that has evolved through many sessions with Charles begins with a consciousness that he calls the UNDIFFERENTIATED ALL. This consciousness conceived of the notion of growth. It proceeded to separate a portion of itself from itself for the purposes of monitoring its own development. Before this separation, the Undifferentiated All contained everything of which it could possibly conceive, but in an association of total blending. There was no beginning, ending, or in-between--just is-ness folded in on itself, non-things (or nothing) swirling around, with no individual characteristics that could allow for one wave or current to be distinguished from another.

After the separation, the Undifferentiated All had created an individual "something" that was different from itself--a symbol of itself, which it could then monitor. The interactions between the watcher on one side, and the watched on the other, would allow for growth.

But the watcher was no longer truly undifferentiated. By dividing subject (itself) from object (symbol of itself), it had created this and all other universes that are based on the principle of growth. It had thus become All That Is.

Charles calls the "watcher" portion of the Undifferentiated All, or All That Is, the WITNESS. Its function is to observe. He calls the "watched" portion the PARTICIPANT. Its function is to do.

In order to initiate the process of growth, the Undifferentiated All, as Witness, had to give itself something to observe. The Participant portion of itself, therefore, had to have something to do. So the Participant was assigned the task of evolving back to oneness with the Undifferentiated All--in other words, striving to overcome the initial separation that created it.

Every observation made by the Witness would modify the behavior of what was observed, as the Witness projected various possibilities for the Participant to execute. In the execution of each of these possibilities, the Participant would modify the perceptions of the Witness. Thus did change--the Participant's perception of this dynamic interaction--and development--the Witness's perception of the interaction--originate. Change plus development would realize the original conception of the Undifferentiated All, the notion of growth.

The yin-yang symbol, with its light and dark half circles separated by an s-curve, pictures the Undifferentiated All. The dark half is the Witness (or "yin") force. The light half is the Participant (or "yang") force.

In order to evolve back to oneness and overcome separation, the Participant portion of the Undifferentiated All subdivided itself still further. In this way, it could monitor its own process of completing the task assigned by the Undifferentiated All. Thus, the Participant itself contains many "smaller" Witnesses and Participants.

The Witness/Participant dichotomy, therefore, exists as a given throughout All That Is--from the primary separation of the Undifferentiated All, through further separations that produced individual human souls, to cells, atoms, and even smaller units. A fetus forming in the womb from a single cell dividing again and again duplicates this process.

To complete its task, each subdivision of All That Is, including the human being, though inviolably an entity unto itself, must strive for an awareness of its belonging to ever more comprehensive collectives of consciousness--the most comprehensive of these collectives being, of course, the Undifferentiated All. Hence, each human being aspires to develop its fullest potential as an individual; and, while maintaining that individuality, strives to be reabsorbed into the Undifferentiated All.

Charles emphasizes again and again that each of us exists in his or her own private universe. Everything surrounding us, including other people, are symbols we use to monitor our development. And yet, all that surrounds us, including people, are also fragments of All That Is.

The extent to which we perceive ourselves as separate from All That Is, or any of its fragments, is the extent to which we’ll experience loneliness. Love allows us to link two or more private universes together. It helps each of us to understand our presence in some larger conglomerate, whether a couple, a family, a group of friends, or something larger.

The process of becoming one once more with the Undifferentiated All, or All That Is, begins with love. Love is the force that overcomes separation. Love is the Undifferentiated All. Thus, our capacity to love determines how close or how far away we may be from the Undifferentiated All. Our private universes are only as big as that love.

* * *

Charles indicates that there are only four ways in which the Witness and Participant can interact. He defines the STATE OF THE WITNESS as nonphysical reality, and the STATE OF THE PARTICIPANT as physical reality, such as our universe.

Movement from the state of the Witness to the state of the Participant--or from nonphysical to physical realities--is called INITIATION (in the sense of creative beginning to an action).

Full manifestation within physical reality of what has been initiated is called MAINTENANCE.

Return from physical reality to nonphysical reality is called DISSOLUTION.

Full presence within nonphysical reality is called TRANSFORMATION. What had been observed by the Witness in the other three phases of the cycle will now transform the Witness's perception of both itself and the Participant.

We in the physical universe will perceive these interactions not as motion, but as force, because we’re subject to them. We’ve been initiated through birth. We’re maintained for as long as we live. We dissolve back into nonphysical reality when we die. What we’ve learned from a lifetime will then inform and transform the Witness that originally projected us into the physical.

Charles has linked these four PRIMEVAL FORCES operating in our universe--the initiating, maintaining, dissolving and transforming forces--with the four types of taste receptors in the tongue: tart, salt, sweet, bitter, respectively. These four taste receptors, when stimulated, set into motion certain of the body's operational programs, allowing it to prepare itself physiologically (which means in terms of chemical balances, as produced by various organs) for processing certain kinds of food, and psychologically for processing certain types of experience.

Food is therefore a symbol of experience: mental (tart), physical (salt), emotional (sweet), or that of consciousness itself (bitter). Thus, the mind is an expression of the initiating force, the body an expression of the maintaining force, the emotions an expression of the dissolving force, and consciousness an expression of the transforming force.

Each of these four primeval forces can act under the influence of the Witness or that of the Participant. The eight (two times four) fundamental CATEGORIES OF EXPRESSION result. In human terms, these categories of expression manifest themselves as the eight components of the psyche, symbolized by the eight dream characters discussed below.

When any pair of the four primary forces are linked, the sixteen (four times four) LAWS OF MANIFESTATION result. Only phenomena behaving according to these laws of manifestation can be perceived in the physical universe.

When any of the eight categories of expression, whether defined as components of the psyche, or as dream characters, acts under the influence of one of the four primeval forces, a BROAD ENERGY PATTERN will be produced--of which there are thirty-two. These energy patterns provide the basic framework for any lesson we might need to learn in physical reality.

Finally, any interactions between the eight categories of expression, or their respective dream characters, produces sixty-four (eight times eight) SITUATIONS--described as "hexagrams" in the I Ching. Also called The Book of Changes, this four-thousand-year-old book of Chinese philosophy, according to Charles, is a map of the universe, built up from the possible interrelations of all the situations or forces present in it.

It took Charles many years to get around to producing a list of the laws of manifestation, and he has never done so for the broad energy patterns. At some point, I’ll post this list as a class transcript.

^UP^