Group discussion: The group suggested a question and answer session with possibly more discussion regarding the forgiveness meditation.

[This session was preceded by a period of tuning and meditation.]

We are those of the principle known to you as Q’uo, and with a light and merry heart we greet you in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator. It has been such a blessing to spend these few hours with you in seeking together a more lucid distortion of the one great original Thought, which is Love.

It has been such a pleasure to speak about living a life in faith and devotion. The one known as Aaron speaks for us when he says that he could discuss this subject at almost infinite length, for living devotionally is as much our hope as it is yours. And as the logicians have it, we keep getting halfway to the goal, then halfway to the goal, then halfway to the goal, closer and closer; yet still the goal is before us, surrounded in sublime mystery.

There are relatively easy spiritual practices such as meditation, prayer, contemplation and the reading of inspired works, the listening to inspired music, and the sharing of worship in groups such as this that light up your planet especially on this Sabbath day. And there are relatively difficult spiritual practices such as standing in the checkout line at the grocer’s and scrubbing the toilet bowl. The life of devotion is lived where you are or not at all. It is a common hope of those upon your earth plane someday to retire to a pleasant and secluded place where finally you can devote yourself to worship; but we suggest to you that the life of devotion is lived now, wherever you may be. It is the confidence and focus within that turns bare earth into holy ground, blazing with the incandescent light of love supernal, limitless, and whole.

It is your challenge to find ways to open the heart to the present moment and the love therein. You shall fail according to your cruel judgment, again and again. We ask you to know deeply and surely that each mistake, each error, each missed opportunity, is a gift to the infinite One just as much as each moment when you judge yourselves to be, as this instrument would say, “on the beam/in the groove.” Clumsy or graceful, awkward or flowing, your spirit is utterly beloved.

Begin to allow yourself to feel that you are never alone, never isolated, never alienated, in the world within that is as real to each of you as the world without. In that world you have many companions: those unseen which you call angels, those such as we who accompany those with the desire to ask for us as they sit in meditation or as they go about the small business of the everyday life. May you encourage yourselves when you forget where your center is. May you rest in contentment and praise those sublime moments when you can feel the rhythm of creation and the rightness of all that there is.

You are the universe in little, and as a holograph you are as whole and complete as the infinite illusion in which you and we dwell. Know that as you serve either by disciplining and refining yourself or by being a part of the good in another’s life, you serve the light.

Thank you for this great privilege. The one known as Aaron and we can never express adequately our love for your pilgrim souls. Blessings. Blessings. Blessings. How reluctantly we come to the end of our time on the soapbox. Ah, the soapbox, the pedestal. We spout truth and then we come down and roll down the hill with you into the warmth of the water, splashing, playing in the sunlight. May you play together like otters. May you be merry with each other. May you share each other’s burdens and joys. May you know that you are about the Creator’s business.

We now open the working to your questions. As our beloved Aaron says, simply express which of us you wish to respond, and we shall go from there. May we have the first query, please?

I have one I would like to ask Aaron. This is a statement of my understanding of something he spoke about last evening. I will read it and ask for his enhancement to my understanding. For the incarnate self, forgiveness is a process; but forgiveness radiates as an aspect of the whole Self, so the process of forgiveness is part of the movement from a thought-point to a known space, a going nowhere. Could Aaron comment?

I am Aaron. Does the right hand need to forgive the left hand? If the baby, the fetus, is kicking in the night and wakes the mother, does the mother need to forgive the fetus? In the first example, the right and left hands are clearly a part of the same being. The mother and fetus still experience that state of non-separation.

The angel aspect of yourself knows it is not separate and never has been separate. It knows the crystal clarity of its oneness, which could never become tarnished. To move into incarnation is to accept the illusion of separation, to agree to this veil of forgetting of your true being. Thus, you move into the illusion that there are spots on the wings, that the body and the mind are unclean in some way.

You have all heard me call you angels in earthsuits. Yes, I, from the human perspective, you practice forgiveness because there has been the experience of pain for the human and the practice of forgiveness opens the heart. It is not just bringing you back to where you were; you are then Love. And there is no limit to the amount of love that you can express. If there were a limit, there would be no reason to move into incarnation. As you are aware, the universe does not run on linear time; there is no rush, no schedule. So, you would rest in the astral planes, picking up those lessons of love easily as they came until you had reached that point where you could say, “I’ve learned it.”

As Q’uo just expressed, that shining light is always ahead. One has never finished, even in sixth density. I am not finished. There is always more to learn about love. You have entered incarnation in faith that this is a tool that will help you to learn about love, not to a finished point, but to continually enhance the process of loving.

We find that the wonder and beauty is that those that have graduated through the earth plane teach love and compassion to the rest of the universe. Truly, the masters of love in our universe are amongst those who have moved through Earth’s catalyst. It is a very powerful teacher. Yes, I like your image: the spot expands.

There was never anything to forgive, but from the human perspective you have practiced forgiveness. And that practice expands you out of the small ego self and into the heart we all share, into that place where there is no individuated self taken as real, but only the illusion of individuated self, as you are learning, too. Thus, you practice forgiveness not so much to forgive, although that is the idea within the relative mind, but to stretch the heart, to move out of your illusions of separation.

You are unbalanced. I said to some of you this morning, you come into incarnation and you immediately pick up thick glasses that serve as microscope. They allow you to tie and untie the knots, to see what you do. But they close you off to the vast perspective that you had before you came into incarnation.

If somebody lifts these microscope glasses for a moment, you look out and say, “Wow! There is all that space.” Then the glasses slip back. How quickly you forget that space. When you practice entering that space regularly through any spiritual practice, you learn to rest very stably; but the knots still need to be tied and untied. If someone has stepped on you and asked your pardon, you still need to work with the pain and hurt and come to the place where the human can offer forgiveness, can let go of its fear, anger, and separation.

The practice of forgiveness leads you repeatedly back to the angel. But the practice of forgiveness is also what allows the human to put back on its microscope glasses and work with the knots of incarnation in a much more skillful and loving way.

Does this answer your question, I, or may I speak further to it? I pause.

There are some new ideas. I have the feeling that I am substituting the idea of the angel state to erase the incarnate-self idea, and I don’t believe it’s correct. Aaron is speaking about a partnership, a balance.

A balance between the relative and ultimate self. Aaron says a partnership is a perfect word.

I am currently walking between the two.

Aaron says (I am paraphrasing Aaron), at first one tends to leap back and forth. He says picture yourself alone on the seesaw trying to get it to balance. First you run from one end to the other, and then you begin to understand how to keep your weight balanced equally on both ends. He asks you to also remember his image of the box in the infinitely spacious room. The relative rests in the ultimate. You cannot leave the ultimate, only forget about it for awhile.

I am Aaron. Of course, for the angel there can be nothing to forgive. How could there be? Of course, for the human, caught deeply in its own small ego self, forgiveness is almost impossible. You are living in a balance, a partnership between, so that the human does not hear there is nothing to forgive, because for the human there is something to forgive. But forgiveness is possible because you recognize that the angel exists and that you are both sides through from human to angel, the balance always changing slightly depending on the needs and clarity of the moment. I pause.

I like the idea of forgiveness as a spiritual practice.

I am Aaron. Only watch for pride and self-righteousness, which are apt to crop up when you become the one who is forgiving. And if they do crop up, then shift the forgiveness practice to find forgiveness for the human who has found pride in its path. I pause.

May we hear your further questions? I pause.

Please Aaron and Q’uo, speak to us further with more depth regarding pride. We are angels. When we discover this, how can we also not be clothed in pride?

I am Aaron. I hear your question, my sister. To be clothed in pride is just to be clothed in pride, just as to feel anger arise is just to feel anger arise, just as to step on a tack until the blood flows from your foot is just to step on a tack and have blood flow. Certain conditions give rise to certain inner circumstances. Yes, eventually you will reach a point where anger and pride do not arise, at least not nearly so often or forcefully, but this is not done through will power.

There is a deep humility and understanding that you are human; and as you realize your angelness, pride has arisen: “Here I am being the angel; and suddenly here’s pride. So what else is new? I do not need to act upon that pride nor to get rid of it, only to note, here is pride.”

Pride is part of the distortion of fear, part of that which wants to be somebody, to be safe and in control. How can the loving heart not open to the human who wants to feel safe and in control? When you embrace the fearful self that does not feel safe, the circumstances that gave rise to pride begin to diminish. And in that way, pride begins to dissolve. When there is nobody left who feels unsafe, then pride and anger and other such emotions will cease to arise. May I pass this further to Q’uo? I pause.

We are those of Q’uo. My sister, perhaps you recall the parable of the teacher known to you as Jesus concerning the Pharisee and the tax collector. The parable goes that there were two men in the temple. One was a Pharisee, the other a tax collector, which in those days was tantamount to the dishonest, greedy, and altogether undesirable. The Pharisee prayed thusly, “Lord I thank thee that I am not as other men are: robbers, thieves, hypocrites. I fast two times a week. I tithe to the temple.” The publican on the other hand was on his knees, praying, “Lord, have mercy on me, for I am a sinner.” 1 Which of the two prayed well?

The issue of pride is going to be yours and every seeker’s intimate companion for the foreseeable future. We ask you simply to view the self as if you were a rough, huge planetoid with deep ridges and valleys—an elephantine chunk of jagged roundness, tiny in the infinite reaches of space. The influences and essences of the cosmos beam and radiate in a refining fire, lamentably playing over those mountains of pride and all the associated errors of the soul in manifestation. In the fullness of time, to use the least distorted word, those ridges shall be smooth; and through eons of lifetimes, with painstaking thoroughness, the path or orbit of your consciousness shall become smooth and then smoother until at last the mantle of rock that covers your surface as flesh covers the living being within shall finally be polished away, and the immense jewel that your consciousness is shall emerge and become as the sun. And this sun body at last will have no pride, for it shall simply be. Do not hurry towards that destiny. Enjoy your crust of imperfections. They shall not harm your spirit, but only give it the catalyst that your consciousness seeks in order to buff and polish and slowly erode the parts of your self that are least true.

Know that all things are acceptable. Each entity sees its own shadows; and the more the spirit wishes and longs to be free of humanness, the more that humanness shall be unable to serve you and teach you what you came to learn. We suggest you simply stop resisting these untoward and wayward tendencies. These are the shadows made dark because you are beginning to shine. The taking of the spiritual temperature is judgment; and as you find yourself caught in pride and judgment, smile. Take those broken shards of your being and hand them on up to the infinite One. They shall be transformed in that mighty hand and return a hundred blessings as you yield them up with an honest and contrite heart. Meanwhile this is the very creation and the exact moment into which you came to find your Creator. Drinking your coffee, you bring the world into balance.

May we answer you further, my sister?

In this painstaking thoroughness we find ourselves entering into perfectionist behaviors, striving to reach what we already know we are. And knowing seems not to help very much. We become frustrated with this awful veil. We cannot be perfect, and yet we know we are. What a struggle!

I am Aaron. I hear your pain. Yet, if you were already perfect in human terms, why would you have incarnated? The veil is not burden to you but is a gift, not a very pleasant gift at times; but it is precisely the catalyst that you need.

I ask this instrument to move deeper into a trance state. There is a story told about the spiritual teacher, Gurdjieff. There lived in his community a man who was rude. He did not do his share of the work. He even smelled badly because he did not bathe. He became tired of others’ negativity toward him and he left. Gurdjieff went after him and asked him to come back. While others paid to live in the community, Gurdjieff said to him, “If you will come back, I will pay you.” The man was reluctant at first, but he was greedy; and since Gurdjieff offered to pay him, he agreed and returned.

Those in the community were aghast. They said, “How could you invite him back? How could you pay him to come back?” Gurdjieff said, “He is the yeast for the bread. Here in this place where everyone is kind and generous with one another, how else will you learn compassion?”

Child, this yearning for perfection in you, this self-striving to become what it already is, the fears, the patterns of reactivity, pride, all of it—these are the yeast for your bread. In the astral plane and beyond, you will practice discarnate skills, practice your perfection. Why seek to practice that perfection within the incarnation? This does not mean that you do not aspire to perfection. But understand that the human is perfect in its imperfection.

I would speak also to the strength to your aspiring. There is such pain in many of your hearts because you see this brilliant light of the Divine and you see the shadow in the self and feel, “I can never be worthy of that.” You then wish so badly to be rid of the shadow. This is a piece of every seeker’s path, that dark night of the soul. But when you pass through the dark night, you begin to see the truth of what Q’uo just said—that the shadows are seen only because of the inherent luminousness of your being. The brighter you shine, the starker are the shadows. Just let the light shine. Be the light and give kindness instead of contempt to this being who has agreed to also carry shadow. May I further answer your question or is this sufficient? I pause.

Is loving more deeply one way to move out of perfectionism?

I am Aaron. It is the only way. I pause.

We are those of Q’uo. My sister, you shall progress. You shall not know in this your present illusion how or because of what stimuli. In fact, the whole point of this illusion is to so confuse and addle and aggravate the sentient self that eventually you stop attempting to make sense of it all and move from head to heart. We ask that you employ that which you have in abundance: your sense of humor. Is your life not a marvelous situation comedy? In music you have many times experienced that when the conductor calls for the hush of singing quietly, the chorus begins to be heavy and instinctively begins singing more slowly and losing the pulse. The effort of creating the pleasant piano sound weights down that sense of rhythm. The answer to perceived error is not adding wisdom, but rather lifting away into the rhythm. Lift when you experience this frustration and pain. Lift and laugh at the well-termed human comedy. There is great humor in the infinite Creator.

May we speak further, dear friend?

I wish to inject something here. When I said love is the only way, I do not mean that you must find a love switch and flick it from off to on. The offer of love is a dimmer switch. You have found the switch. You keep nudging it up through many of the practices we have spoken of this weekend—through prayer and meditation, through the practice of generosity, through mindful awareness of how negative and harmful emotions arise, through reaching that hand up to Divinity and taking the help that is offered to lift you, through cultivating faith and patience.

Like the one who has walked a long path in the dark night without clear sense of where she has walked, but at dawn she finds herself higher in the mountain looking back and able to say, “Ah! There’s the ravine where I stumbled, there’s the steep place, there’s the place where there was mud; and I have come through them all.” And then you turn and look, and notice that the mountain goes up and up and up. You are in process.

The love that is inherent to you cannot help but manifest itself if you give it the opportunity to do so. May we speak further or is this sufficient? I pause.

I thank you both.

We are those of Q’uo, and we seem to linger on this issue with you my sister; but we simply have such a love of talking. We have one last suggestion in this regard, and that is that you adopt for yourself the motto, “God bless this mess.” We are those of Q’uo and are open to further queries at this time.

I have a recurring dream of being in a situation where people are all standing around a huge trough of slop, and I find that it is mandatory that I dive into this trough. I have no choice. And as I go through this slop I feel no pain; and I suddenly arrive in an L-shaped, white room with those around me robed in white. I am feeling grateful, as these are my brothers and sisters, perhaps colleagues and teachers. Is this the school in which we learn while we’re sleeping and not in the Earth?

I am Aaron. I hear your question, K. First, may I state that this dream is as perfect an illustration of the process of incarnation as I have ever heard. A pile of slop … yes, as Q’uo said, “Bless this mess.”

There are two different types of dreams: that which is symbolic and that which we call a teaching dream. This would seem to have portion of both—the diving into the trough of slop being the symbolic part; and the awareness that only when you move through the messiness of incarnation, the messiness of a body and emotions, do you emerge into the angel that you are.

You stated that they seem to be teachers, but perhaps also colleagues. K, likely these are teachers, but teachers are also colleagues. One cannot teach without learning. It is a mutual participation.

The dream does not seem to me to represent only a wish to arrive in this room, but also a statement of readiness. We on the upper planes use teaching dreams when the meditation practice is not sufficiently developed to allow you to hear us in a more conscious state, so we bypass that conscious state into the dream. It is a very effective way of reaching you. The only problem with it is that often there is not the practice to retain the dream after, so it is not as clearly integrated into the incarnate state as it would be in meditation. Those who have further developed the ability to hear their teachers while the body is in the state we call awake as opposed to asleep find that teaching dreams seem to slacken off.

What I hear from you, K, is that there is a readiness to enter this realm. I would like to suggest that if this is a repeated dream or in meditation itself, you allow yourself to open to the experience of that room and then you make the very firm statement, “What do I need to learn? I am open. Please teach me,” and just see what you hear. May I please pass this question now to Q’uo? I pause.

We are those of Q’uo and have little to add to what our brother has said, except to say that the kindest thing that you can do as the white-robed one who has taken on the mantle of earth is to trust in and cooperate with the rhythms of your unfolding destiny. Allow the falling away of things in their own time. Allow the contradictions, opposites, and riddles that characterize spiritual matters to tangle you up and to be untangled in the natural way.

We fear the hour grows late. We would ask for a final query at this time. We are those of Q’uo.

[No further queries.]

I am Aaron. In the process of moving through your incarnation, there are many times when there is simply pain in yourself and in others. And I am often asked, “What helps? What allows me to touch that pain with more kindness?”

There is a very powerful practice taken from Tibetan Buddhism. It is called Tonglen or “giving/receiving practice.” I find it a very powerful tool to use in case of suffering within the self or without. I would like to teach it to you.

I ask you to bring into your heart and mind the image of someone who is suffering. They do not have to be mired down by suffering, but someone who’s experiencing pain. It could be someone in this room, someone in your family or your circle of friends, even someone whose face you have seen on your television screen, a victim of a disaster of one sort or another. Normally, before we do this practice we ask the person, the Higher Self of the person, “May I do this practice with you?” We do not impose our need to serve another on the person.

So, the first step is to invite this person into your heart and mind and ask, “May I do this practice with you?” Visualize or feel yourself sitting within a cylinder of light. This is not something you need to imagine since you are already sitting in a cylinder of light. Simply open yourself in whatever way is appropriate to the experience of that light. If imagination is what works, that is fine. But remember, you are not creating by your imagination, you are merely allowing yourself into a different level of reality.

Breathing in, allow that light to come through the crown chakra and down to the heart center. Breathing out, feel it centered in the heart. Breathing in, intention to send it out to where there is suffering … and exhale, sending it out either as a ray coming from the heart or you may feel it as a ray coming through the third eye or even with the breath; wherever it feels most natural to you, send it out. Breathing in, light coming into the heart center … breathing out, let it stabilize … breathing in, intention to release … out, release … in, light … out, stabilize … in, intention … out, release … in … out … in, release.

Now we are going to add the second part of the practice. With this next exhale, note the suffering as a heavy, black, tar-like mass. Breathe it in, taking it into the heart center. Notice any resistance to allowing that suffering into the self. Out, feeling the heaviness of it. You do not need to carry this. You are merely the vehicle through whom it passes. In, intention to release … out, release it up through the upper chakras and crown chakra and back up to the Divine, letting it go … out … Again from the beginning … in, light … out, feeling it fill the heart … in, intention to release … out, release … in, the big, black mass … out, feeling the weight of it … in, intention to release … out, release …

You may do this practice at this speed, at double, or at half speed. In other words, in light and send it out … in blackness and send it out. That is double speed. Or: In, light … exhale … in, feeling that light filling, and exhale … in, noting the intention to release … exhale … in and then releasing it with the exhale … in, drawing that heavy blackness into yourself … exhale … in, feeling the heaviness of it … exhale … in and out with the intention to release … in, feeling it gathering from the heart center and rising … and out, send it out.

I am going to be silent for several minutes. Please work at the speed that feels best to you. Please choose one and stay with it for the duration of these few minutes. Now, I will be silent.

[Pause]

[Bell]

May the love and light within this room shine itself out into the universe.

[Bell]

Everywhere in this universe may all beings come to know their own infinite capacity as instrument for light.

[Bell]

With the continued expansion of that capacity may all beings find their way into the light and come to know their true being and thereby find perfect peace.

There are no words for my boundless love and appreciation of you. As you walk this path and sometimes feel alone, please remember how deeply you are cherished and be aware of all the hands that extend themselves in love to accompany you on the path. I pass this to Q’uo to have the opportunity also to say farewell for a while, because, of course, there is never a good-bye when one soul speaks to another. That is all.

We are those of the principle of Q’uo. Bon voyage. We are with you on the waves. Adonai.

We leave this instrument and you in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator. We are known to you as Q’uo. Adonai. Adonai.

  1. Holy Bible, Luke 18:10-13. ↩