[This session was preceded by a period of tuning and meditation.]
Aaron
I am Aaron. I want to introduce you to this tuning process by asking you to participate with me in a brief guided meditation.
Please allow yourself to follow along without concern for whether you can or cannot do what I suggest. Our emphasis here is not on getting rid of anything within you, but simply on allowing the barriers of ego self to dissolve so that you may move into the divine aspect of yourself and hear from that place of center.
Begin by taking a few deep breaths and releasing … breathing in … There is nothing external to you. As far out as you can go into the universe, when you breathe in, you take that universe into that which you call self. When you exhale, you exhale that which you call self into the universe … breathing in and letting go, each exhalation dissolving the boundaries of self. Inhale and let go sending any resistance to taking the universe into your heart, sending any resistance that wants to hold on to being “somebody”; just letting it go … If anything holds on, it is okay. It will go. Nothing to do, just being. Breathing in and expanding outward with the exhalation flowing into the universe, then breathing the universe into yourself … open … the heart is weary of its isolation … open … allowing yourself to come into the essence of who you are, letting go of all the concepts of who you always thought you were, just allowing that pure, clear mind/heart to be what it always has been: Pure Awareness, Pure Soul.
As you drop your boundaries, feel the connection to the joy and suffering in the universe. Be aware of the rising aspiration in yourself to be a tool, to offer your energy as tool, for the alleviation of that suffering—not my suffering or your suffering, our suffering. The aspiration to be a source of energy, courage, love, faith, healing, for all beings; to manifest your energy in such a way that it promotes peace and happiness in the universe—this is the primary intention, moving out of the fearful, small self. In your own words, silently state your intention to serve the universe and all that dwells therein, to be a vehicle of Love. I will be quiet for a moment while you phrase this intention in the words of your own heart.
[Pause]
Given that aspiration and intention, the next question is, “How do I implement this?” You alone cannot implement it. You connected to all that is are empowered to implement joy, peace and harmony So the next step is to invite in whatever help there may be, each in your own way, invoking Jesus or the Buddha, asking God’s help. Silently voice your prayer that you may become an instrument for healing and love in this world—not for your own ego, but in service to all; not for your own glory, but that your service may be offered back to God in grateful thanks. For you are but a reflection of that divinity—divine in your own right, but taking your light from that most brilliant and perfect light, and with rejoicing, returning that light, ever brighter, ever clearer. I will pause again, then, so that you may voice your prayer in your own words.
[Pause]
All beings on human and spirit planes contain some mixture of positive and negative polarity. None is totally negative, nor are any but those most fully enlightened masters totally positive. We do not flee from the shadow in ourselves, but aspire to touch that shadow with love and thereby to grow. In the same way we do not flee from external negative energy, but aspire to touch it with love. If there be any being within this circle, human or discarnate, that is of negative polarity, of predominantly negative polarity, that wishes to hear these teachings, we welcome it. It may not speak through this instrument. It is welcome to listen and learn the pathways of service to all beings, the pathways of love.
At this point Barbara will be silent with herself for a few moments. Her own process here is to make the firm statement of what she stands for and values, and that none may channel through her unless they are fully harmonious with her highest values. She uses this process, although 95% of what she channels is this energy that I am, simply because it is an important statement which gives her confidence in what she receives and allows her to relax into the channeling. I will be quiet now and allow you each to meditate in your own way for two or three minutes.
[Pause]
Aaron
I am Aaron. Again, my greetings and love to you all. My brother/sister Q’uo suggests that I begin this session, and I will do so briefly and then turn the microphone to Q’uo. Our topic is, “What is the spiritual path and how do we live it?”
My dear ones, you have been on this spiritual path since the moment when you, as what I call a spark of God, first came into awareness and sensed a separation, illusory but seeming to be real—a separation from that which we might call God. There is nothing you can do that is not part of the spiritual path. There are only more skillful or less skillful ways to walk that path. By skillful I do not mean evil or good, simply ways that bring pain to yourself or others, or ways that help to free all beings from pain. When you “walk” this spiritual path (I put that word, walk, in quotation marks), perhaps what you are really asking is, “How do I become more aware that I am a being on a spiritual path? How do I live my life with deeper awareness?”
Each of you is like a pebble tossed into a giant, still sea, an infinite sea. Each time a pebble splashes, it touches everything around it and sends out waves that affect all the other pebbles. When you send out loving energy, your inter-reaction/interrelationship with the world is far different than when you send out hateful or fearful energy. And yet you are aware (and many of you have often heard me say), as long as you are human, you are going to have emotions. Fear is sometimes going to arise—anger, greed, jealousy … You cannot stop their arising, but you can change your relationship to what arises.
From my perspective, there is a vast difference between the being who feels fear as the foundation for anger or greed and then either becomes reactive and acts in anger or in greed, or becomes hateful to itself because those emotions have arisen; there is a vast difference between that and the being who sees fear arising, sees the anger or greed or other emotion that grows out of the fear and just relaxes and smiles at it and says, “Oh, you again. Here’s jealousy. Here’s desire. Here’s rage.” The difference in what I am speaking of here is in the ownership of what arises.
This is the illusion we keep getting caught in: that we are a self and we own this or that emotion, thought or sensation; and once you own it, you are stuck in it. Do you know the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby? We have used this to illustrate something different, but tonight I want to use it to illustrate this ownership.
Brer Rabbit saw the Tar Baby, thought it was mocking him, so he punched it. He reacted to his anger and then he got stuck in it. He said, “Let me go,” and he punched it again. Two hands stuck! “Let’s try a foot, two feet” … all his limbs stuck. Here is one very stuck rabbit! When you see an emotion arising or a thought, and there is aversion or attachment, and you grasp and try to hold on to it or kick and punch it to try to get rid of it, you begin to think that there is somebody who owns it. Then you are stuck in this concept.
This, too, is a part of your spiritual path. Even being stuck in it is an opportunity for learning, if there is awareness. But usually at that point there is so much fear and frustration predominating that awareness has dissolved.
It is never too late to come back. At any moment you can cut through that ownership and simply smile at yourself: “Here I am stuck in it again.” Once more: “Oh, you again.” Perhaps we could call this one, “Stuck in the Tar.” A deep breath and a reminder: “This is not who I am; but I am human, and as long as I am human this is all going to keep arising. It is not given to me to fight with, but to learn from.” Just relax and be with it.
Barbara spoke earlier this evening about the Dzogchen retreat and about Rigpa, or “luminous great perfection,” which is just a fancy term for finding that space of the Divine in yourself and resting in it over and over and over. This is the essence of the spiritual path as taught by every religion that I have ever encountered in all of my many lifetimes. Some of them had it a bit distorted. Some of them were very clear about it. All of them aspired to that, to reaching that space of Pure Being.
We are not talking about specific religions here, but the spiritual path itself. The essence of that path is to learn how to come back again and again to this divine aspect of you, what I have called the angel aspect of you, to allow that to stabilize, to learn methods of recognizing that experience of angelness, of Pure Awareness. Until you recognize it, you can’t do much about it.
Each of you is in that space far more often than you know, but because there is not awareness, it comes and goes without recognition. So, first you need to recognize that space within you. Then, you work to stabilize it, to be able to relate to the world more and more from that space of clarity and connection.
That, to me, is the spiritual path. As to, “How do we live it?”—that is what we will spend the weekend questioning. How do we live with our fear, our anger, our pain, our desires? How do we make space for all of that humanness in our hearts and find deep love for all of us as we exhibit that humanness? How do we let go of judgment? At the same time, we must be aware that while we aspire to let go of judgment, we are still responsible for our choices. We have here a relative reality and an ultimate reality. There is much that I wish to say about that, but will hold it until tomorrow.
At this point, I would like to pass the microphone to my brother/sister Q’uo. I use the term brother/sister because Q’uo does not offer itself as either feminine or masculine energy, but as a combination of both. I also am neither masculine nor feminine, but I have chosen to manifest my energy and put on a cloak of consciousness and being of that which was masculine.
All of you are a mixture of masculine and feminine. You are incarnated male or female bodies and more fully manifest the energy of that body; but you are all a mixture of both. Q’uo very beautifully balances that mixture, exhibiting the fullness of both the masculine and the feminine. And so I pass the microphone to my brother/sister/friend. That is all.
Q’uo
We are known to you as those of Q’uo. Greetings in the love and in the light of the One infinite Creator.
We thank the one known as Aaron for the masterful introduction, and would continue by noting that we are a complex made up of the thoughts and memory of what you would identify as male and female. We now study and serve as one. Our path to this point in our walk on the path of spiritual seeking has included your range of present incarnational experience. You are upon a path aiming towards an evolution of spirit, which you may intensify and speed up. Many among your people have no wish to learn more quickly the lessons of love; however, each of you does wish to assist that process of spiritual evolution of mind, as some call it.
For our part, we greatly and humbly thank each for calling us to your circle of seeking. For as we share our thoughts with you, we are learning and pursuing our chosen path of service; and your assistance both inspires us and employs us. We ask that each be continually aware that we are fallible. We make mistakes and would not ask that you hear us as the voice of authority. Take those thoughts which resonate within your heart and leave any others by the wayside, for we would not be a stumbling block for any.
So, as the one known as Aaron has said, you are here making choices. Let us examine this situation. It is our understanding that this, your density, is the density of those first self-aware; and in this self-aware state you begin to examine both your inner reality and the nature of your surroundings. Into the chaos of the untaught mind comes this illusion which you know as living. Colors, shapes, entities, relationships, shout out at the infant in incarnation; and the young years are full of the noise becoming signal, the chaos becoming increasingly ordered, the environment becoming internalized, the self painting the environment its own personal colors of meaning.
It is our opinion that the choices you face continue to be of a certain basic nature. Each choice has to do with polarizing or gaining a bias towards either that which is radiant, loving, freeing and expanding, or that which is attracting, pulling, grasping. We call this dynamic a choice of service to others or service to self, and assign the term positive to the service-to-others category, negative to service to self.
[The rest of Q’uo’s statement did not record.]
Aaron
I am Aaron. There are a number of questions we will be investigating this weekend, but primarily it comes down to that which repeats itself over and over in your lives. To walk a spiritual path with awareness and love, one must be aware of when one has moved into fear and cutting off of love.
How do we find that awareness and deepen it? Fear builds walls around our hearts. How do we dissolve that fear? Where does faith come into it? When we have made the best decisions we can, thinking that we are acting out of love, and the results seem to boomerang and cause great pain for us, does that mean we acted out of fear without seeing it clearly or does it mean that we need to have even deeper faith? Sometimes it is one direction, one answer. Sometimes it is the other answer. How do we begin to differentiate that?
Is pain always a warning that we are doing something (I hesitate to use this word, but) wrong? Or is pain inevitable? Might there be pain even in wise choices at times? What is pain about in our lives? Is there ever going to be complete absence of pain in human incarnation or do we simply change our relationship to pain and end our war with it, certainly not inviting it in, but not hating it when it appears? I am not offering any answers here, just raising some of the questions. One can live one’s life trying so hard not to harm others, but if one becomes a somebody trying hard to be harmless, does not that create its own kind of harm?
In a talk earlier this week, I gave an example of a situation that I have seen many times while in incarnation, where monks or nuns in monastic situations try to outdo one another at being nobody. Who can take the food last? Who can do the hardest work? You can make a career out of being a martyr and truly enhance this small ego self, solidify it.
So, it is not so much what you do. It might seem to be very kind that you always serve others and let others go first. What is the motivation for that? When you look, you will find there are multiple motivations. In every act, word, or thought, there are multiple motivations. You have an apple in your pocket and you realize that you are hungry and thirsty. Here is a red, juicy apple. You pull it out. Just as you are about to bite into it, there is a small child, big eyes, very thin, holding out its hand, “Please!” Your heart opens and you give the apple. As you give it, there is the small thought, “Didn’t I do good? Did people see?” The giving of the apple is a pure, loving act. The accompanying thought grows out of a place of fear and wanting to be the good one. It is another aspect of somebody-ness.
So, we never act or speak or think fully out of love or out of fear. How do we get acquainted with our multiple motivations so that we may begin to understand our choices better, and thereby begin to choose more skillfully and lovingly for ourselves and for all beings? This, to me, is the focus of walking a spiritual path. And it is not only the resultant actions, words and thoughts, but the clarifying of motivation, the learning about how this small ego self does solidify, not being afraid of its solidification but using it each time it happens as a catalyst to remind oneself to move back into center, to move back into connection and into the Pure Mind, Pure Self.
We will explore all of this in depth through the weekend and also have time to answer your personal questions, speaking to your personal situations. There is sleepiness. It is late. I want to pass the microphone here to Q’uo. I thank you all for allowing me to share my thoughts with you tonight and very much look forward to our continued sharing through this weekend. My love to you all and I wish you a good night. That is all.
Q’uo
We are those of Q’uo and would echo the one known as Aaron’s sentiments and would leave you with two thoughts.
Firstly, those who seek together to learn service to others shall, in each other, see how impossible it is to serve others without serving the self, for your actions are reflected; and as each serves each, each receives illumination. In your sister’s heart is your self. In your brother’s heart is your self. And you were not incarnated to be calm. Your choices are made in the midst of activity.
Secondly, there is for each outburst or outlay of your energy, the time to take in that food and drink of spirit that nourishes and rests. Begin to be more aware of these dynamics. See your self reflected, see love reflected and feel the outpouring and the in-gathering, one to another and all things whatsoever to the infinite One.
For this evening, we again thank each and bless each, leaving each in joy and in peace in the love and in the light of the One which is all. We are known to you as those of Q’uo. Adonai. Adonai.