by Doug Scott, LCSW

The Heart of Things

Why are we here at all? Ra’s answer is simple and runs all the way down: the Creator wants to know Itself. In the first distortion, the Law of Free Will, “it is recognized that the Creator will know Itself” (27.8). And as Ra puts it, “The Creator does not properly create as much as It experiences Itself” (82.10). In other words, the telos of experience — its goal, the thing it is reaching for — is gnosis of self. Every life is the One knowing Itself from the inside.

So it’s no accident that Ra puts self-knowledge at the heart of the work. “The heart of the discipline of the personality is threefold: One, know yourself. Two, accept yourself. Three, become the Creator” (74.11). Ra adds that this continuing discipline involves the adept “in knowing itself, accepting itself, and thus clearing the path towards the great indigo gateway to the Creator.” Hold on to that word indigo. We’ll find it below the soil.

Ra is just as careful to say that technique isn’t the heart. Asked whether anything matters besides discipline of the personality, knowledge of self and strengthening of will, Ra answers: “This is technique. This is not the heart. Let us examine the heart of evolution. Let us remember that we are all one” and “Unity, love, light, and joy: this is the heart of evolution of the spirit” (52.11). Then: “Always begin and end in the Creator, not in technique.”

That is where this piece begins too. For a while now my inner voice — my Higher Self, I suspect — kept inviting me to sit with the energy centers as Ra depicts them. I wasn’t looking for where they sit along the spine. I was looking for what they do. Then, on the morning of November 8, in that in-between place where I was half asleep and half awake, I saw a tree, and it was very clarifying. The familiar column of seven lights tells us, more or less, where the centers are located in space/time. The tree showed me how they function.

With the help of some technology (thank God for it), I built what I saw as a living 3-D model, and I recently walked a friend through it for the first time. What follows follows that walk-through, step by step, with stills from the video. Explore the Tree of the Primary Rays for yourself — drag to orbit, pinch or scroll to zoom, and switch between before and after the veil.

As always, I try to keep three things apart: what Ra says, what follows closely from Ra’s words, and what I am proposing. Where I’m proposing, I’ll say so.

Start with the Green Ray Alone

The walk-through begins with nothing on the screen but one flat green lotus: the green ray center, the heart. Ra calls it “the center from which third-density beings may springboard, shall we say, towards infinite intelligence” (15.12).

I’ve come to take that literally. The heart isn’t only a seat of consciousness that we move through on the way up to the higher centers. It is always and everywhere the center of our being. Everything comes from the heart, and everything returns to the heart.

The image that helps me most is a pilot. A pilot can fly a primitive airplane that’s basically a glorified go-kart with wings, or the most advanced plane we have. Either way it’s still a pilot in a cockpit. The degree to which the pilot is an adept is the degree to which the pilot can open and activate the higher centers — the go-kart can’t go very high, since one gust of wind brings it down. But wherever the pilot flies, the cockpit is in the heart. In other words, the heart is where the up and the down meet together.

And the heart is not only ours. “There is a center to infinity. From this center all spreads. Therefore, there are centers to the creation, to the galaxies, to star systems, to planetary systems, and to consciousness. In each case you may see growth from the center outward” (82.7). Everything has a heart. We’ll come back to this when we reach the roots.

Three Activities of a Primary Nature

Then the tree grows out of the heart. Before the veil, there are really only three major energy centers — I would argue there are always only three. Ra singles out three of the rays: “The red, yellow, and blue rays are primary because they signify activity of a primary nature” (41.25). In the vision these three are the tree itself.

• Red is the trunk. Ra calls red “the foundation ray” (39.10), and a trunk is a foundation that rises. In the model it’s a transparent red field spiraling upward, the way a toroidal field flows. The heart’s first expression is the elemental body, and this is it.
• Yellow is the branches. Yellow is “the ray of self-awareness and interaction” (41.25), “the great stepping stone ray” (39.10). At the crown, where red gives way to yellow, the trunk explodes into self-awareness — the one differentiating into the many.
• Blue is the canopy and its leaves. Ra describes the blue center as “capable of having perhaps one hundred facets and capable of great flashing brilliance” (51.8). In the model one very faint faceted sphere surrounds the whole crown, and the branches keep growing until they touch its facets. Each facet a branch reaches is a leaf.

The ends of the branches are all the different ways we try to co-create a manner of experiencing ourselves. That fits Ra’s striking line that “the Creator does not properly create as much as It experiences Itself” (82.10). Blue is “the first ray of radiation of self regardless of any actions from another” (41.25) — the self that has agency, expressing outward. A leaf opens to the light on its own terms, whatever the leaves around it are doing.

Each center keeps the shape Ra gives it in 51.8: the red center at the base of the trunk is the spoked wheel, the yellow center at the crown is the many-faceted star, and the green is the lotus. My proposal: the primaries are one organism. Red is the One undifferentiated, rising; yellow is the explosion of self-awareness; blue is the many each made whole again, every leaf its own small field, radiating.

Before the Veil: Orange Roots and Open Minds

The model opens on the tree before the veil. The ground is a transparent plane, and below it you can see the roots spreading out — and they are orange.

I chose orange on purpose. Ra connects orange with the self on an individual basis (32.2), what I’d call personal identity. But before the veil there wasn’t much personal identity to speak of, because everything was already known. I am you, you are me, we are the Creator. Ra describes that condition this way: “The connection with the Creator is that of the umbilical cord. The security is total” (82.22). So in the tree the personal self lives in the roots, wholly connected, an umbilical cord to all that is.

Ra also gives an image I love. The veiling “may be seen to be analogous to the mantling of the earth over all the jewels within the earth’s crust; whereas previously all facets of the Creator were consciously known” (85.19). Before the veil, the jewels lay in plain sight.

That’s why, below the ground, the orange roots reach the deeper minds and those minds lie open and luminous: the silver sphere of the racial mind, then the Earth, then the golden sphere of the Solar Logos, and the vast starry sphere of the galaxy. All of it was accessible.

Yet Ra is clear about what this ease cost. Before the veil, experience “would be pale, without vibrancy or the keen edge of interest that such brings in the post-veiling mind/body/spirit complex” (105.18). Total security meant that “no love is terribly important; no pain terribly frightening” (82.22). Something had to change.

After the Veil: The Sap, the Struggle and the Dance

Switch the model to “After the veil” and the ground becomes a thick, shimmering silver veil. Below it, nothing can be seen from above. Ra names what the veil divides: “The mechanism of the veiling between the conscious and unconscious portions of the mind was a declaration that the mind was complex” (83.19). The veil is the ground of being for the incarnate self.

The heart is still there at the base, because everything still emerges from the heart. But something has moved. Personal identity no longer lives in the roots. It’s now in the middle of the trunk, flowing upward like sap — the trunk stays red on the outside, providing the body, while the sap rising inside it turns orange.

Up in the branches, pairs of orange and yellow bubbles travel together. Ra describes orange as the self expressing “its power on an individual basis” and yellow as concerning “the entity in relation to, shall we say, groups, societies” (32.2). So the personal self and the social self travel the branches together, and through the lower two-thirds they fight. They push apart, slam together and shiver. Who am I in this social situation? Who am I versus my parents, versus my culture? That struggle can take lifetimes.

Then, in the last third, nearer the blue, they settle and begin to circle one another in a coordinated dance. I know who I am in this society: I’m not the society, but I’m a part of it. That’s the balancing of the lower triad of centers, and my proposal is that orange is born from trying to understand itself as a part of yellow and yet an individual apart from it. The struggle comes first, and the dance comes as the two find their way toward the blue.

Harvestable on the Positive Path

With the lower triad ordered, the heart can really be activated, and that’s what the switch Harvestable STO shows: the last quarter of every branch turns green on the outside while the orange and yellow keep dancing within. Ra calls green “the great turning point sexually as well as in each other mode of experience. The green ray may then be turned outward, the entity then giving rather than receiving” (32.5).

The heart is the center of love and understanding — Ra pairs the two for the fourth density, “the cycle of love or understanding” (16.21). My working definition of understanding is efficient and effective perception: in other words, seeing clearly. Ra speaks of a fifth-density understanding that is “a measure of efficiency of perception” (47.6). Its outward expression I’d call efficacious perception — taking what is seen clearly and putting it into action. That’s the turn from reception to expression, the heart maturing into blue, which Ra says is the center that “for the first time, is outgoing as well as inpouring” (15.12).

Harvestable on the Negative Path

The switch Harvestable STS shows something different at the ends of the branches. No green appears. Instead, red, orange and yellow wind around one another on the bark in a tight, bright braid. Ra says the negatively polarized entity “will have achieved harvest due to extremely efficient use of red and yellow/orange, moving directly to the gateway indigo” (47.4), and that in assessing negative harvest “the intensity of the red as well as the orange and the yellow rays is looked upon quite carefully” (34.16).

Indigo Roots: Understanding by Standing Under

After the veil the roots are still there, but now they’re indigo. This was the surprise of the vision for me, and it has been the surprise for others too — the first person I showed it to expected indigo to sit above blue, not down in the roots.

Here’s why it belongs below. Ra says that perhaps the most important thing to come from the veiling was “the faculty of will or pure desire” (85.19), and pairs will with faith again and again: “consciousness which has been disciplined by will and faith is that consciousness which may contact intelligent infinity directly” (80.20). As a seeker approaches adepthood, will and faith open a capacity to see and work with what is hidden. From a tree’s perspective, what is hidden? The roots.

Ra’s words about the adept point the same way. Working toward the subtle bodies, “you may activate your own inner vision” (58.3). “Visualization is the tool of the adept” (49.8), a visualization “held steady to the inward eye” (50.8). And the visions of “prophets and mystics” “come through the roots of mind and speak to a hungry world” (86.12); the dreaming that serves “the vision of the mystic” takes place “in time/space” (86.15). Ra even names time/space “the so-called inner planes” (21.7).

My proposal draws these together: below the soil of the veil lies time/space, and the indigo roots are the adept learning to perceive there. An adept learns to understand by standing under — perceiving both what is manifested above the soil in space/time and what is unmanifested there but existent below it in time/space.

Think of someone doing cross-stitch. The needle passes through the screen, and on the front side the image forms. But turn it over and you find all the intertwining, connecting, undergirding threads. There’s an order there, but it’s hidden; what we ordinarily see is only the image. That underside is what I mean by time/space. The way down is the way up.

The Minds Below and Their Hearts

Below the roots hang the deeper minds, each a sphere, nested inside one another and all touching at a single point at the top, where the roots reach them. The smallest is an indigo sphere, the mind of the Higher Self, half the size of the racial mind and nested within it; I’ll say more about it below.

• The racial mind, a silver sphere of many facets. Ra calls this “racial or planetary mind” “a repository of biases remembered by the mind/body/spirit complexes which have enjoyed the experience of this planetary influence,” and adds: “Not only did each race add to the planetary mind, but also each race possesses a racial mind” (91.6–91.7).
• The planetary mind, a transparent Earth, much larger.
• The mind of the Solar Logos, a golden sphere ten times larger again. Ra defines the archetypical mind as “that mind which is peculiar to the Logos of this planetary sphere,” containing “the material which it pleased the Logos to offer as refinements to the great cosmic beingness” (74.4), and calls it “one of the roots of mind, not the deepest” (90.14). My proposal: this sphere holds the archetypical mind, and since the Logos is more than what it chose to offer, it holds the wider mind of the Solar Logos as well.
• The galactic mind, a violet sphere dusted with stars, so vast that from the tree it looks like a horizon.

They turn at different rates, slowing as they grow, the galactic slowest of all. Ra’s own map runs the same direction: “Moving down to the roots of mind we find the progression of consciousness which gradually turns from the personal to the racial memory to the cosmic influxes” (30.2).

The Synapse

Each indigo root ends the way a nerve ending does: a glowing bulb, a narrow gap, and on the far side a receiving cup that belongs to the roots of the racial mind. Sparks cross the gap. The planetary mind or the Solar Logos is a far greater being than we are, and yet we are part of one body — two cells in a body, communicating across a synapse. If it’s true somewhere, it has to be true everywhere.

Ra adds a caution worth keeping. Ra calls it a “misapprehension” to think of the spirit as a shuttle “between the roots and the trunk of mind,” because “in working with the mind we are working within one complex” (67.30). The roots meeting the racial mind is mind meeting mind. Yet at the deepest end, Ra says, this progression down the roots of mind “becomes a direct contactor of that shuttle which we call the spirit complex,” the channel “whereby the inpourings from all of the various universal, planetary, and personal inpourings may be funneled into the roots of consciousness” (30.2). And “the adept is calling directly through the spirit to the universe for its power, for the spirit is a shuttle” (80.14).

The Hearts

After the veil the jewels are covered. The earth crusts over, and the deeper minds go dark: in the model they become shadows. But each one keeps a heart at its center, a small point of light flowing outward — because infinity has a center, and so does each creation within it (82.7).

Two switches show what the adept can do. Light the hearts turns each into a bright golden sphere radiating in every direction. Roots to the hearts grows the indigo roots down to the center of each heart: the Higher Self’s heart first, then the racial heart, the planetary heart, the solar heart, and the galactic heart. My proposal: through our own roots of mind, in time/space, using will and faith, we can learn to tap into these layers of the heart — not only the various levels of the Logos, but the heart of each. These are ways to experience the very levels of God, as it were.

Why the Negative Path Doesn’t Reach Them

Switch to Harvestable STS and the hearts stay dark; the roots draw back. Ra says, “We remind you that the negative path is one of separation. What is the first separation? The self from the self” (36.14).

Ra’s commentary on the Transformation of Mind card makes the difference vivid. “Many use the trunk and roots of mind as if that portion of mind were a badly used, prostituted entity. Then this entity gains from this great storehouse that which is rough, prostituted, and without great virtue. Those who turn to the deep mind seeing it in the guise of the maiden go forth to court it. The courtship has nothing of plunder in its semblance and may be protracted, yet the treasure gained by such careful courtship is great” (99.8). The roots can be plundered or courted. Only courtship reaches the heart.

The Higher Self in Indigo

The walk-through ended where it began, with the pilot in the heart. The adept pilot still sits in the heart, but now has access to wider expressions: intentional co-creativity in blue, and then, further out, work in the subtle realms — the indigo. And the indigo is where I locate the Higher Self. That’s why its sphere in the tree is indigo, and why its heart is the first the indigo roots reach.

The Higher Self isn’t trying to squeeze itself into the third-density body. It is exactly where it needs to be in order to guide us. Ra says the higher self “seems to exist simultaneously with the mind/body/spirit complex which it aids. This is not actually simultaneous, for the higher self is moving to the mind/body/spirit complex, as needed, from a position in development of the entity which would be considered in the future of this entity” (36.5). It “is of a certain advancement within sixth density going into the seventh” (36.8).

Ra makes the same point about ritual. In a magical working the adept, to use linear terms, calls the higher self down for the span of the working — and then “it is most central to deliberately take off the magical personality after the working in order that the higher self resume its appropriate configuration as analog to the space/time mind/body/spirit” (75.36).

My proposal: the relationship between the Higher Self and our third-density self is the shuttle, the spirit. What carries that relationship across a lifetime, and across lifetimes, is what I call the significant self: all the biases and experiences of all our lives distilled into a pristine packet of essence, which is you. In more familiar words, the soul.

Picture two vessels side by side. One is the self in third density, gathering experience. The other is the Higher Self, a self that knows itself as unity but has no experience yet of its own. Every bit of experience flows from the first into the second, and the Higher Self takes it in at once. That continues through fourth and fifth density, with communication between the two growing all the while. Then, somewhere in mid-sixth density, the two are consummated: the one that has been growing becomes the Higher Self proper, fully activated. They were always one, but now it is an activated oneness.

And beyond that, in late sixth density, where Ra says they are, the Higher Selves within a social memory complex begin to unite as well. Ra says that “each social memory complex has an oversoul of a type which is difficult to describe to you in words” (36.22). My proposal: at the threshold of seventh density, all the Higher Selves become one oversoul, made of all of those consummations, moving together onto the path of seventh density.

Where the Analogy Bends

• This is a picture of function. The tree shows what the centers do and how they relate. It makes no claim about where they sit in the body, and it doesn’t replace the column of seven.
• Color is a teaching image. Arguments from how light or pigment mixes don’t carry weight here.
• The sizes are symbolic. The spheres of mind grow by large steps so the nesting can be seen. They aren’t drawn to any real scale.
• Some of this is mine. Ra gives the pieces — the primary rays, the veil, the roots of mind, inner vision, time/space, the shuttle. Joining them into one tree, the hearts of the minds, the synapse, and the significant self are my proposals.

Still to Come

The primal Logos isn’t drawn yet — the very heart of the creation, beyond the galactic sphere. Neither is violet, or the place of indigo as the gateway that Ra says both paths reach (47.4). The tree will keep growing.

I’m offering these thoughts for what they are worth. Explore the interactive model — drag to orbit, pinch or scroll to zoom, and turn the layers on and off.

Sources

• Ra Contact: 15.12, 16.21, 21.7, 27.8, 30.2, 32.2, 32.5, 34.16, 36.5, 36.8, 36.14, 36.22, 39.10, 41.25, 47.4, 47.6, 49.8, 50.8, 51.8, 52.11, 58.3, 67.30, 74.4, 74.11, 75.36, 80.14, 80.20, 82.7, 82.10, 82.22, 83.19, 85.19, 86.12, 86.15, 90.14, 91.6–91.7, 99.8, 105.18
• Video: The Tree of the Primary Rays: The Heart, the Veil, and the Roots of Mind
• Interactive model: The Tree of the Primary Rays

• Cosmic Christ