[This session was preceded by a period of tuning and meditation.]
Aaron
I am Aaron. Good morning to you all. I want to share with you how much I enjoyed the spirited energy that rose from this room last night with your joyful gathering. Some of you forget that laughter is also a part of the spiritual path. We are asked please to open the shades. Laughter is one of the most effective ways—laughter, joy and lightness, the lightness that comes with deeply sharing your energy and opening your hearts to one another in playfulness.
There is no other plane that I know of where beings limit their playfulness, the natural playfulness of their light, as much as they do on the earth plane. It is part of your illusion of separation. So it was very beautiful to us, as your spirit friends, to feel and share in your joy.
There are a number of questions that were offered last night. While understanding the importance of each question to the seeker, it is of our mutual agreement, Q’uo and myself and also of those through whom we channel, that it is best to maintain the focus of the original question, “What is the spiritual path and how do we live it?”
Since our time is not unlimited in these particular sessions so that we cannot answer all the questions within each of your hearts, it feels most relevant to the entire group to limit ourselves to those questions which first drew you here, because we have by no means covered that topic. This does not mean that we do not value the other questions, but that we must answer them at a different space/time. Ones such as the one about dying and what happens after dying are easily answered on a Wednesday night.
One thought in my mind is that in a future gathering, rather than starting with a specific focus, we could simply come together as curious seekers with questions. We can explore that route.
Q’uo and I would like first, then, to continue some of our discussion of, “What is the spiritual path and how do we live it?” coming back more to the question, “What is it?” and then to the second half, “How do we live it?”
Speaking to the particular distortions and confusions that offer themselves as catalyst in your lives, we come together here with a number of religious biases. I do not mean bias in a negative term, only in the sense of persuasions or beliefs. A bias might be considered a bend, a bend in the clear stream of light such as that bend that light makes when it hits the water, being bent by the mass of that water so it appears to the eye to have a crook in it. Your individual values, experiences and beliefs serve as deflector to the true light, so that the expression of that light becomes individuated into your own personal bias.
Your religious persuasions are not to be mistaken as synonymous with a spiritual path, rather they are the tools that you use to help you walk your path. There are hundreds of different religious beliefs in the world. We do not wish to favor some above others. They are all of value. Even those which have been viewed as negative in some way provide a value to the seeker.
Time limits us from speaking to the myriad religious persuasions of your many cultures, nor would that be relevant to you. We have here a group whose religious understandings are predominantly Judeo-Christian and Buddhist. There are those among you who have been influenced by the Hindu or Sufi, by Islam, by Native American cultures and beliefs. These are not any the less valuable.
The other reason why I choose to speak predominantly to, let us call it not even Judeo-Christian but Christian and Buddhist, is that the essences of these can be simplified into these qualities of mercy and wisdom. The beings who were the masters of these two faiths have become in your heart/minds the personifications of mercy and wisdom.
If we look into other beliefs, we will find other religious streams. We will find that those beliefs find some balance in these qualities of mercy and wisdom. Judaism, in its purest form, makes a very beautiful balance. Hinduism leans a bit more toward the qualities of love than of wisdom, as do the Sufi faiths. The Native American traditions come to a beautiful balance.
While I speak of balance, be aware that a balance need not be 50/50. Each of you has been in incarnation so many times, you move into your religious bias because of what speaks most eloquently to your heart.
Mercy is one wing of the bird, wisdom is the other. Call it wisdom and compassion, wisdom and love. The bird cannot fly without two wings, but always one will be the stronger. Through the quality only of faith, one can find liberation. Through the quality only of precise and fine-tuned, awakened wisdom, one can find liberation. Could you see that bird struggling to fly with that one wing, the other wing at least held out for balance?
Your spiritual path lays before you the ways in which you find that personal balance. There is no right or wrong here. One cannot offer a recipe: 17% of this and 19% of that and 3% of this and so on. What do you start with? The stew that is too sour may need more sugar. The stew that is too sweet may need more lemon.
So, you must know yourself, know your strengths, relish those strengths and build on them, but not be afraid also to know the places of lack of strength and be willing to strengthen those muscles that are weak. The runner who works only on strengthening his muscles will lack wind in a race. The runner who works on his breath and lungpower and ignores the muscles will find the legs cramping and weak. And yet one runner may know the great strength of her legs and that it is what will put her ahead in the race, so she wisely strengthens her lungs so that they may endure through the race while the legs do the bumping and pushing.
What do you need to strengthen in yourselves? What are your weaknesses? It is always easier to strengthen that which feels most natural to you, that to which you are most deeply drawn. But I beseech you to look at your resistance to strengthening that which is more difficult to strengthen.
So, what are these paths of loving-kindness, mercy and compassion, and of wisdom? I spoke sometime this weekend about using mind to tame mind and using wisdom to tame mind. When I say mind here, remember that I do not mean the brain, but the mind/heart totality.
I want to speak here of stories of these two basic teachers and their teachings: the Buddha and the one who is known as Jesus. I have shared with you many stories from my own heart, from my personal memories of this being in that lifetime in which I was a poor shepherd and knew this being in the flesh, and the ways that he affected me deeply as teacher. Predominant in those memories were the stories of his deep loving-kindness to all beings, his deep sense of humility, his unwillingness to see another being suffer; and yet his deeds were tempered with wisdom.
I have shared the story with many of you of a visit to him soon after that being who was my wife had died and my heart was breaking. I was injured on the way and my leg was broken—that being who I was. I know that he had the ability to heal it, but in his wisdom he saw that my broken leg was not what needed healing. My heart was what needed healing. I was angry at him at first. I said, “I have to go home. I have children and sheep to be tended.” “No,” he said. “Your son can tend the sheep. Your neighbors and family can tend your children. You must stay here until you are healed.” In my ignorance I thought he meant until my leg was healed, and it felt to me that he was withholding his healing. But I was forced to remain there for some months, being tended lovingly, carried from place to place, fed and my soul nourished until that deep grief within me had healed and I was ready to go home and be both mother and father to my family.
So, he was not maudlin in his mercy. It was tempered with wisdom. But he did heal because he could not bear to see another suffer when it was within his power to alleviate that suffering.
The balance to the story is a tale of the Buddha. This is not a personal memory, but a story that has been handed to me and is known in the literature of Buddhist stories. A woman’s young child died, and she was heartbroken as it was her only son. The Buddha was camped nearby with his followers. And some said to her, “He can help.” So she carried the child there and said, “Lord, can you revive him?” The Buddha looked at this dead baby and said to the woman only, “I can help you, but first you must go out and find [a certain kind of spice that was familiar in that country in India]. You must bring me a pinch of this spice.” “Oh, that’s easy,” said the woman. “But,” said the Buddha, “there is one thing. It must come from a household that has not known death.”
The woman was cheered by the prospect that she could help this dead son, and she went and knocked on a door. “Can I have some of this kind of spice?” “Oh, of course,” they said. “But,” she said, “it must come from a home that has not known death.” “We’re sorry,” they said, “our uncle died here last month.” She knocked on the next door. “Of course, you may have the spice.” “But it must come from a house that has not known death. Have you known death?” “Yes,” said the woman sadly, “Our daughter died here last week” … “Have you known death?” “Yes,” the father died last year … “Yes,” the grandmother died three years ago … “Yes,” the infant died in childbirth … “Yes,” the mother died in child birth … “Yes,” the father drowned, and so on, door after door throughout the day until she finally understood: Death is part of the continuum of life. We cannot change what is. We must open our heart to it and continue to move on.
As dusk fell she returned to the Buddha, her tears dried, her heart open. She held her dead son one last time and bade farewell to him. And the Buddha helped her to bury him, cremate him as the case may be. This woman then ordained to become a Buddhist nun and a follower of the Buddha’s, that through her new wisdom she might share with others.
What is “merciful” here? Was it any less merciful to help this woman find an end to her suffering through teaching her about the continuum of life and death and the suffering of holding on to that which cannot be held on to? Perhaps the child’s birth and death were offered simply as a gift to the mother to help her move through this learning. Who are we to judge that?
What I want you to see is that the path of mercy contains wisdom and the path of wisdom contains mercy. And yet, each predominates in one direction or the other. Those of you who are drawn toward the Christ as your spiritual master are drawn more directly toward these teachings of loving-kindness and mercy and forgiveness. Those who are drawn more toward the Buddha as your spiritual master are drawn toward these teachings of wisdom tempered by mercy.
What does this mean in your own lives? Because each of you has strengths and weaknesses, it is easy to adhere to the strength and then hide the weakness, thus losing the opportunity to enrich yourselves and expand your path. Where there is firm adherence only to wisdom, not tempered by mercy and compassion, is there some fear of that mercy, some fear of letting your heart speak for you and following the whispered messages of that heart? Where there is attachment only to the teachings of the heart, is there some fear that if one moves into wisdom, one will also move into the dictates of the conceptual mind—an awareness that the brain cannot lead, that the brain is only a tool?
Perhaps you swing to the opposite extreme at times, that some who in past lives have misused the brain and followed its dictates while screening out the messages of the heart have now become so wary of doing that, that you have swung to the opposite extreme, and vice versa.
In the fullness of your being as human, you are offered this beautiful mind/heart combination. They are one, not two. Both deep wisdom and the ability to love are offered you. May I challenge you to find the appropriate balance for yourselves and to see where fear blocks that balance?
I want to expand this heart/mind, wisdom/compassion talk by speaking a bit further about the relative and ultimate practices and the coming to this intersection of them. This is not quite the same intersection as wisdom and love. All relative practices are not heart practices and all ultimate practices are not wisdom practices. They are both a mixture of the two. But I want to make sure that you understand what I mean by relative versus ultimate practices.
You are faced with great suffering throughout your world. Those of you who are aware and openhearted are attuned to the suffering around you and have deep desire to work to alleviate that suffering: the suffering of those who starve or are homeless or suffer great disease or hardship; the sufferings of the Earth—the polluted rivers and lakes, the dying forests, the species of plants and animals endangered and facing extinction. You know that you must keep your heart open to this suffering and work in whatever ways you can to alleviate suffering. And so you become involved in these relative practices, both spiritual practices such as meditation and prayer, and quasi-spiritual practices such as volunteering your time to help others. When I say “quasi,” I do not mean that it is any less a spiritual practice, only that one moves inward and one extends the energy out into the world. They are both important. Unless one moves deeply into the meditative space where one recognizes the emptiness of self in the doing, the offering of one’s energy, one can solidify self by one’s very work to help others because there becomes a doer and a receiver. If I am helping you, we are separate. Can I serve you without trying to fix you, without any attachment to fixing you as long as we are separate?
It is the inward practices, especially meditation, which help cut through the solid I, which bring in the wisdom aspect that there is really no doer or receiver, that there is really nothing that needs to be done on the ultimate level. This cuts through and allows help to be given without helper or recipient.
Does not the helper benefit as much as the recipient? If I am starving and you give to me, of course you save my life, but what does my receiving your gift give to you? As long as you see yourself as the fixer, you solidify ego and prevent moving into the depth of wisdom. Or are you that being with deep wisdom and a closed heart that denies the reality of suffering on the relative plane. Can there be balance?
There are stories told in the Asian tradition where there is deep belief in karma, of children who fall off of a boat and they cannot swim. No one reaches out a hand to help them. The teaching is simply, “It is their karma.” And they flounder and scream and drown. What kind of closed-hearted being can allow such suffering? What is the denial happening there?
Ultimately we are not responsible for one another, because there is no one another. We are all one. But the wisdom-mind also sees that we are all always responsible for this one; and if an extension of this one is drowning, then its own hand must reach out to save it. Wisdom must always be tempered by compassion. Compassion must always be deepened by wisdom.
What is your own bias here? In which directions do you most need to open yourselves in order to best live this center of the cross of wisdom, of compassion-mind, mercy, and love-mind and wisdom-mind, of relative reality and ultimate reality? Think of it as a cross with a small circle at the intersection. You may rest on the horizontal or vertical leg of the cross, but can you keep yourself within the circle?
I thank you for giving your thoughts to this, my dearest ones, and challenging yourselves as to how you may reside in that circle. I now pass the microphone to my brother/sister, beloved friend of Q’uo. That is all.
Q’uo
I am Q’uo. Greetings in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator. It is a great blessing to be allowed to blend our vibrations with yours and to be asked to share our thoughts with you. As always, we ask that our words be subjected to your personal powers of discrimination, for we are in error often and would not present ourselves as any final authority, but only as those with relatively more experience.
As the one known as Aaron has said, it is well to come to a self-awareness of how one’s inner makeup is configured. Whether the way of the heart more beckons or the way of wisdom, each may be taken. Each intersects with the other at every turn. The difference between them is that of the two sides of one coin; and of this coin, one cannot have too much. Yet every day the supply is newly infinite, fresh-minted in infinite Intelligence, sprinkled liberally into every waking consciousness by the graceful hand of Spirit.
Your need for this manna of love and wisdom is yours due to the circumstance of the veil which descends upon those in the third density, leaving each seeker in a relatively dark and subtly lit environment which has been called the shadow of death. Yet still, the spirit within remains moonlit and the spirit’s walk is one wherein virtue must be scried out carefully, at length and with great patience. This is not unintended, but is specifically meant to be the case. For in the rough-and-tumble daily world in which you enjoy experiencing, innocent, sleeping youngsters still play, unawakened to the beauty and mystery of the call to faith and service.
There is a time which recurs cyclically within each seeker during which the seeker is plunged into a primary awareness of this moonlit landscape of the archetypical awakening mind, which is both mind and heart. These are desert times. During these times the bitterness may seem so great that there is no possibility of healing or redemption into innocence. Yet these are the desert sands which scour away that very bitterness which has plunged the seeker into this period. The going down into the darkness, the experience of spiritual death, of profound and sudden death, of slow and stealthy death—these are rich, not only in pain but in the fertility of new birth.
Enlightenment begins in this so-called dark night of the soul. And as you, the awakened seeker, move through this moonlit time, you drop away or begin the process of such precisely in order that your dearest wish may be followed. And as you emerge from this deep darkness, your new and transformed being is able to see more light, more beauty, more meaning and more of love. Then the sunlight is again yours, for you are a new and innocent child, and it is your time to gamble and romp and rejoice with your brothers and sisters. There is no one spiritual mood, no one best situation; but rather, the path wanders into the lightest and the most profoundly dark, into the most joy and increasing wisdom, and also into the most profound and sorrowful unknowing.
You have been forever and you shall be forever; and yet, not you, but Love that sent you—a spark of Love—out into materialization that you might experience and process that experience with your own peculiar and unique distortions, creating your unique beauty, your unique harvest of experience. How rich, then, is the Creator as It gathers more and more of experience into Itself, becoming more and more richly known to Itself. You cannot walk off of the spiritual path, for all experiences will be gratefully gathered by the one infinite Creator, who seeks to know Itself.
We would at this time turn the microphone to the one known as Aaron. We are those of Q’uo.
[The group paused and joined together in song.]
Aaron
I am Aaron. I want to attend now to some of the questions that were raised last night, questions especially referring to the catalysts of this earth plane and the question, “How do we walk this path with love?”
There are two different issues here. One is, “What is love and what is fear?” And having determined what is love, how do we choose love? What pushes us into the distortion of fear even though we recognize it as fear?
You cannot “should” yourself, force yourself, into taking the path of love when fear feels overwhelming. It is natural to the humans that you are to defend yourselves, and such defense is so often thought to be a movement of fear. But to act in care for the self may also be a movement of love. Thus the question is not what you do so much as, “What is the primary force behind those acts or words?” When you focus on the already present loving motivations, they will be reflected in the acts.
The ends do not justify the means of using force. If we are going to choose love, we must be consistent. Love is natural to you and becomes apparent when there is not fear. You do not need to create love in yourselves. It is already there. Fear blocks it. We do not look, then, at these two paths, fear and love, and say, “I will choose love,” even though we quake with fear. Rather, we say, “What is this fear?” and attend to the fear lovingly so it dissolves, and then love is natural and open. I am not suggesting that it will not still take courage and determination, commitment and energy to choose love, but there is no force involved, just a loving aspiration.
You must, then, begin to see who you really are, that fear is an illusion, that you are Love by your very nature. When you penetrate through the illusion of fear, it self-destructs like a balloon popped by a dart, the dart of penetrating awareness which sees the illusion of fear each time it manifests and refuses steadfastly to be caught in a dialogue with fear; and yet does not disdain that fear but bows to it in respect for its presence, smiles to it but does not dwell in it.
So, how do we do this technically? There are so many possible areas that we could look at that we should need weeks to explore it all: relationships, work, all the various paths through which your life leads you.
I should prefer to look at basic emotions which distort your clear seeing along the paths of relationship—work, family, friendship, learning, religious following and so on—to look at two specific emotions which seem to offer the greatest degree of distortion and to talk about how you may more skillfully work with these.
Let me begin by saying that you have a wide gamut of emotions, but they can basically be broken down into fear and love. Within fear there are two basic kinds of fear: that you will be hurt and that your needs will not be met. The fear that you might be hurt brings up emotions of anger at that which might hurt you. This is a kind of defense. The fear that your needs may not be met brings up greed, sometimes seen as jealousy or grasping anger and desire, both offshoots of fear. Of course, there are many other emotions and they each can be fit into different places. Grief is a mixture of love and fear—a fear that your needs will not be met, that you will be hurt through this loss—and also a sense of deep sorrow which grows out of love for that which has been lost. Part of grief is not fear, but an expression of the depth of your love. It does not manifest itself in wishing to hold on, but it is an expression of the depth of joy that was there in the connection with that which seems to be lost. So, we want to be careful not to pigeon-hole too rigidly here, not to simply say, “This is love; this is fear.” There is always a blending of the two.
Another kind of emotion, one that has been talked about here and about which we have written questions, is unworthiness. This is also some blending of fear and love. We were asked, “Is unworthiness genetic?” No. And yet, it is hereditary in a different way. It is, let us say, culturally conditioned and is especially prevalent in your society. Last year there was a gathering of western Buddhist teachers in India with the Dalai Lama. One of the teachers shared this story: The group was sitting around the table and one teacher asked, “What about those beings who despise themselves, who truly find themselves unworthy and inadequate?” (Remember these were all western teachers, the only easterners there being the Dalai Lama and his assistants.) The Dalai Lama was a bit puzzled. He said, “Do you mean people in mental hospitals?” The group of teachers turned and looked at one another, and the one who had asked the question said, “No, those who are sitting around this table.”
Much of your sense of unworthiness is culturally conditioned. One would need to ask why; not only, “Why does it happen in this culture?” but, “Why did you choose to incarnate into a culture which is conditioned into the distortion of unworthiness?”
What is worthiness or unworthiness? You are divine. How could you possibly ever be unworthy? Unskillful at times, maybe, afraid or angry, a bit dull in your minds at times and creating illusory boundaries for yourself—but unworthy? Where does the story come from?
On the other hand, one might also ask, “If there is no such thing as unworthiness, is there such a thing as worthiness?” There is no duality. Can there be one without the other? Ultimately, there is no worthiness either. Worthiness is a meaningless concept because all beings are worthy. It is only your conceptual mind of duality which creates the concepts worthy and unworthy in balance to one another, and assigns yourself to one realm or the other and assigns other beings to one realm or the other, often assigning yourself to the unworthy category and everybody else to the worthy category.
How did you move into this pattern of distorted illusion, and why? Let us explore some of the reasons behind it as a way, perhaps, of providing some form of freedom from the ensnarement of the illusion.
Those of you who are old souls, which is true of all in this circle, have a very clear understanding of the Divine—of that perfect, unlimited light, which you may call the Eternal, the Absolute, or God, or Q’uo’s term, the one infinite Creator. It does not matter what you call it. The name is but a label for that which cannot be limited by the labels we give it. We each have an understanding of what we mean by that which I prefer to simply label God.
In this dark night of the soul, we see the perfection of that energy and our own seemingly futile attempts to reflect that perfection. We despair. And out of that despair arises a sense of unworthiness. We despair that we can never fully merge with that light and love toward which we so deeply yearn. We despair of our own self-perceived limits and fear in our inability to transcend those limits so that a sense of unworthiness seems almost to become a necessary part of our path. Why?
Well, on the ultimate plane there is no worthy or unworthy and never was. On the relative plane, you must come to know your worthiness. And one of the best tools that can be offered to aid that learning is the pain of feeling unworthiness.
I am asking Barbara here if I may use her as somewhat of an example. At one time she spent some weeks at a meditation retreat in which she was looking at the residual feelings of unworthiness within herself. I asked her to use this analytic approach, which I introduced to you yesterday, when a thought arose. For example, simply seeing the being next to her immersed in meditation, the thought of her own unworthiness arose.
There were many senior dharma teachers at this retreat, by which I would mean highly experienced teachers in her tradition. So, the first few days as she sat next to these famous teachers, there arose in her mind a sense of comparing herself. And then she would look at that thought: “What is this thought? Where did it come from? From my old-mind patterns of unworthiness.” And then I would ask her to ask herself, “In this moment, sitting here, all of us in this room, all seventy of us, is there anyone here who is unworthy? No. Am I unworthy? No. Have I ever been unworthy? No. Then what is this arising of a sense of unworthiness?” And in asking that question she could see that it was old-mind’s way of handling a sense of separation or aloneness, perhaps an arising of anger because she couldn’t hear or some other discomfort, and a way of old-mind’s explaining it to itself. It was a way of dealing with her pain, a story of the mind which seemed to separate her from the direct experience of some pain. She could see that it had been more comfortable to simply put on the cloak “unworthy” than to look at the awareness of the pain. Unworthiness became an escape from that which was more painful to be with than the sense of unworthiness. It was very clear to her each time she looked that in that moment, looking with bare perception of the sense experiences of that moment, unworthiness was illusion. And yet, it yawned before her as a giant chasm.
As she looked, she could see into past lives and into this life the millions of times that she had enacted that process. She began to see it as a bare plain, just slightly inclined, onto which drops of rain fell. A drop of rain that could not soak into the ground ran off, creating the faintest scratch in the earth. The next drop of rain hitting in the vicinity of that scratch ran into the scratch, carving it a tiny bit deeper. Ten drops and you have an eighth of an inch of earth worn away … a thousand drops, a million drops: a river, and eventually the Grand Canyon.
But it is all illusion, an illusion heightened by each occasion of buying into the illusion. When it was clearly seen as illusion—that there has never been unworthiness, and in this moment there is not unworthiness and the process of clear seeing was not one of an hour or a day but of week after week of deep meditation, of constant mindfulness during the process of this retreat—suddenly something clicked into place: “This is all illusion. There has never been worthiness or unworthiness. I don’t have to be caught in this anymore. It is just habit and has nothing to do with reality.” Skillful or unskillful: That might have to do with reality. Patient or impatient, selfish or generous: Those may reflect the actual movements in our hearts, but were they unworthy?
You must work with this process over and over and over, each time cutting through the illusion of unworthiness, seeing how it has arisen. There must be a courageous readiness to deal with those emotions which unworthiness has masked. (I will get into that idea in a moment.) There must be a readiness to give up unworthiness, which means touching on the deeper pain that unworthiness has hidden. The reward is the awareness: There is no worthiness or unworthiness, there is only God.
What happened for Barbara, then, was that as wisdom cut through the illusion and as mercy tempered the pain that had led to grasping at the illusion, the thoughts of worthy and unworthy simply ceased to arise. The habit was broken.
I am not suggesting that she will never experience a sense of unworthiness again. But after she left that retreat, each time that sense of unworthiness has arisen, it has been clearly seen immediately as illusion, self-liberating … pop! goes the balloon, so that she is able to come back again to the clear perception that transcends worthiness and unworthiness, and then to ask, “What emotions have given rise to this illusion?” and to tend lovingly to those emotions.
Let us, then, look at what unworthiness does mask. There are many possibilities and I cannot cover the full range of them. I want to speak to two of the most common. One of the main catalysts that leads many of you into a sense of unworthiness is parental neglect or other abuse in your early childhoods. This does not need to be monumental abuse. Even the baby that is loved may be greeted by a grouchy parent at 3 a.m. The baby may feel the difference between that parent that greets it with love and dries it, feeds it, and that parent that stumbles in yawning, feeling a deep irritation because it is exhausted and its sleep is interrupted. The baby will feel the withholding of love at that time. Feeling the anger directed at it, the baby will often return a sense of anger.
So, we are not just talking about what you term abuse, but the distortion that occurs with the infant’s or child’s anger. The child is helpless and fully dependent on the adult. It needs to form a bond of love with that adult which parents it, singular or plural. It learns early that when it responds to the adult with anger, the adult, who was often less than fully cognizant of its own reactions, reacts with anger.
Back to the child: It needs to be loved. That is its overriding need. So, it quickly picks up the messages, “What can I do to be loved? If I play your game, you’ll love me?” That game varies from family to family. In the worse cases, the child must allow itself to be a recipient of real abuse, and the only way it can do that is by denying its own rage. It learns that its own rage runs contrary to its overriding need to be loved. How does it deal with that rage? If the child is right and expresses that rage, it casts itself out of the boundaries of the adult’s acceptance; therefore, the adult must be right.
Unworthiness becomes the tool by which a child suppresses the rage. It tells itself, “I deserved this abuse” because the alternative is unthinkable: “I did not deserve this abuse; therefore, this adult is wrong and I must contradict this adult, putting myself out of the reach of its acceptance and love.” The child simply lacks the strength to do that.
So, unworthiness becomes the armor over the rage. Even in those cases of non-abuse, the same pattern is true, but it is harder to see. The child does feel rage toward that adult and it is usually not permitted the expression of that rage. It is told, “Your anger is bad.” That is a pattern of your culture, the distortion of your culture.
When you are feeling unworthiness, then, a helpful tool for working with that unworthiness is to simply ask yourself, “What might I be feeling now if I wasn’t feeling unworthy? Can I give myself permission to get in touch with that emotion? Can I forgive myself for feeling that emotion? I do not need to fling my rage at another and I do not need to deny it. If I was seriously abused and I feel rage at that, it is okay to feel that rage. It is not unspiritual. It is just feeling rage.”
You cannot get rid of rage by denying its presence. The open admission of your emotions is the beginning of allowing yourself to transcend those emotions and cease your ownership and identification with them, to begin to view them simply as passing clouds which need no special reaction, only compassion for the pain they cause.
If you were not seriously abused, you may have learned unworthiness for other reasons. Perhaps you were raised by a very judgmental parent who always said, “This is bad; that is bad.” Well, that is a kind of abuse, perhaps less serious than sexual molestation or hitting, but still is a kind of abuse. Or perhaps you were lovingly raised by a non-judgmental parent, but there was still rage and shame about that rage.
Another reason for the arising of a sense of unworthiness is that fear, “Will my needs be met?” teamed with the solidifying of the ego self, the arising of jealousy or greed, and the harsh self-judgment that arises when one experiences that jealousy or greed. This, too, has been learned from the adult who said, “You shouldn’t be selfish. You should share.” Is there anybody here who didn’t hear that as a child? Yes, of course, it would be good if we could all share. But to enforce on the child, “You shouldn’t be selfish,” is to tell the child that its feelings are bad. How much better if the wise adult can tell the child, “I know you’re afraid that your needs won’t be met. I know you feel anger and fear about giving this.” Then, the child can make the decision with support to move beyond its fear, without judging its own fear.
But this has not been the pattern of your culture. Again, why? Because you have all chosen this sense of unworthiness as a catalyst to your growth. You have all chosen birth into this culture and into its particular distortions. You choose the conditions for birth that will offer you the best opportunities for learning. You do not choose incarnative conditions for comfort and convenience. Yes, it is painful. So, what else is new? Are you here to learn or are you not here to learn? You are not incarnated to stop feeling emotions, but to find equanimity with those emotions and compassion for all beings who have emotions.
Instead of waging war with those incarnative experiences which you have moved into, can you begin to embrace them? They are not garbage to be gotten rid of. They are, perhaps, the waste products to be turned back into the soil and become the nutrients for growth; not garbage, but compost. How can you make your sense of unworthiness into compost instead of trying to throw it out? How can you transmute your anger so that it becomes the catalyst for compassion?
So, you have heard the parent or adult say over and over, “You should share. You should not be greedy.” But greed arises. Desire arises. Here is where we again move to the tools of meditation and the nurturing of wisdom-mind, which begins to see how greed and desire arise, thereby cutting through the identification with greed or desire as “mine,” allowing them to arise and dissolve without dwelling on them or owning them. This wisdom becomes one of the nutrients for the arising compassion for that human that keeps getting caught in patterns of greed or jealousy, so that you cease to hate yourself when those emotions arise. They cease to become a catalyst for unworthiness, but become a reminder for compassion.
I could speak to each of you in this room for an hour or more about how these principles apply to your specific situations. We, of course, do not have the time for that, nor is it necessary. You are each very capable of understanding it for yourselves. Please know how fully you are supported in this work. It is truly the work for which you took birth and will lead you to the healing for which you took birth. I would pass the microphone now to Q’uo. That is all.
Q’uo
We are those of Q’uo. Greetings once again in love and light. We ask your cooperation at this time.
[The group is asked to shout, “Ha! Ha! Ha!”]
Group
Ha! Ha! Ha!
We thank each for the instant rise in energy.
How does this organ of reason you call the brain work, which you are so desiring to work to your spiritual benefit? We have described the birth of consciousness of light within as the little Christ child, nurtured in the manger of your heart. Now let us describe this same situation using other ways of description.
The analogy of the computer is also fruitful. You see, you are not one but two life forms which cooperate to offer this rich experience you call the incarnation. The first creature is your physical vehicle. This instinctually-driven creature is at one with all that there is, for it is a second-density being. Each cell within your physical vehicle vibrates with the love and light of the infinite One, and its instinctual desires are for all energies to harmonize.
The intellectual organ of this creature is driven by distinctions, the basic program being very much the 0:1 [of binary operations], the dynamics betwixt the characteristics. The mind which you could realize as biocomputer has its priorities. These priorities are fixed by the computer within, based upon experience. Of the complete range of catalyst which assaults the physical senses, perhaps 2% of these sense impressions are used first. These sense impressions which have been given priority have to do with survival, comfort and finally what may loosely be called preferences or happiness. As you gain experience, these priorities may settle and change somewhat; however, they remain logic-driven.
You carry within you what could be called an operating system which works only with expanded memory. Its programs are deeper than the programs of the biocomputer operating system of your second-density creature. Within the programs of this operating system lie archetypical structures which only flash into the normal biocomputer like the haunting, with a melody which can so easily be missed. Yet within this expanded operating system’s programs lie truth and virtual reprogramming aids which do far more to reprioritize the biocomputer than all the earnest study and effort you can galvanize to life within your increasingly reluctant self.
Now, how to trigger (this instrument would say boot) this expanded operating system? Each of you knows the answer. It is triggered by your meditation and contemplation. The key is silence.
We ask each to become aware of the preciousness of the moments of silence you carve for yourself out of the all-too-preciously-short material you call time. It is self-loving, indeed, to create these moments of touching into that bottomless well of silent listening into which is poured light without measure and from which you may drink until you have no thirst.
The expanded memory’s gift is at once unique and utterly intimate, expressing your deepest authenticity and completely impersonal, for just a tiny bit beneath the surface of your uniqueness lies your universality. This is the second life form that you now seek to nurture and which now seeks to nurture you, for even from the cradle this Christ child reaches out and loves you, for the Creator loves first. Your love of any entity, including the Creator, is a reflection—love reflected in love.
How this baby consciousness loves to love. Let the cradle of your heart, then, be made soft and your breathing deep as you rock this consciousness to more and more vigorous life within you. This is the being which marries, even melds with this second-density creature to produce that unique being—the human—which is both of the earth, born and dying, and of the universe, loved and loving forever. This unlikely combination is perfectly suited to beholding a life and assigning to the impressions received as you go through that life, increasingly meaningful values.
The biocomputer is very useful in going to the grocery, in attending to the errands, in becoming a scholar, in furnishing you with the knowledge necessary to begin and continue ways of making the living and taking care of personal responsibilities which you have chosen to undertake. At the same time, these sense impressions received by this biocomputer are also useful in expanded ways to one who has become aware of this expanded Christ Consciousness which has sprung into life within your flesh, so that you become also a spiritual animal complete. Even within the flesh this transcendence is utterly complete. And the energies which are finite to systems run by logic may become infinite as the larger system is more and more accessed, until it is up and fully running, fully integrated into the biocomputer.
In addition to the use of silence, we encourage each to examine the self for its gifts, whether they be of the arts or the sciences or any gift whatsoever. For all things may be used to spiritual good in those whose gifts are dedicated to the infinite One.
And lastly, as the expanded system becomes comfortable within and when things begin to be seen with new priorities, that long and level plain which is the routine day may begin increasingly to be perceived in more and more of an upraised and joyful posture until this level plain becomes full of the foothills and amazingly craggy mountains which are so interesting, and which so rest the weary eye. Going to the place of employment, working through the day, coming home to do the chores and put the weary self to rest may well be all of the room you need in which to create the accurate perception of heaven with all of its glorious houses and mansions.
Here is high romance as well as greatest difficulty. Here is light inexpressible as well as spiritual moonlight. And as you walk the paths of your days, you may move up and down the scales of perception with increasing ease as you begin to find the pure freedom of that logic which transcends distinction and partakes more and more of the values of love.
We would speak more upon this in the final session. For now, we leave this instrument in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator.