November 22, 1996

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

Aaron

I am Aaron. My greetings and love to you all. I cannot overly state the joy it gives to us on the spirit plane to gather together here, incarnate and disincarnate, to share our energy, our thoughts and our deepest seeking together. I thank you.

I smile at the way Jim has written this question because it reflects a primary distortion. Your deep concern as humans is always, “How do I do it with more purity, with more clarity?” The question might be better phrased, “How do I do it with more love?” More love will probably bring that greater clarity and purity, but not necessarily. If there is fear which is creating distortion and you bring love to that fear, in the long run it will help to resolve the distortion. In the beginning it may not.

What bringing love in will do is not to guarantee absolute purity but to enhance your compassion. My dear ones, if you plan to allow the universe to channel through you with absolute purity, then why are you in incarnation? It is very easy on my plane. Here is the greatest gift: to allow the expression of the Universe filtered through the human! You are not here to learn perfection. You are here to learn faith and love. You are here to learn compassion also, although that is mostly the lesson of fourth density; but each of you is moving into that density.

The human is never going to be perfect. These fears that arise in you which create some sort of blockage to your work are not problems; they are gifts. They are reminders to have compassion for this human vehicle with all its complex mechanisms. This does not mean you are not responsible for what comes through you. If it becomes increasingly distorted, you are responsible for recognizing that distortion and doing the inner work to clarify the distortion to the point that it is again adequately clear. I stress adequately. I can channel the universe with absolute purity, but it lacks the gifts of human interpretation.

Can you see that it is only fear that drives the desire for perfection and not love? So may we phrase the question: “How do I learn to become a channel which offers what most is needed in the deepest spirit of love which is possible for me; and secondly, when I experience distortion, how do I greet that distortion with love?”

It does not matter what form your channeling takes; there is going to be distortion. And that very catalyst which creates distortion is the greatest gift, because only through that distortion can you really practice compassion and kindness.

It was our idea that my dear brother/sister/friend of Q’uo would open this session. So with joy I hand the microphone to Q’uo. I pause.

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and we greet you in the love and the light of the one infinite Creator. May we add our thanks and our gratitude to the one known as Aaron, for each within this circle of seeking has sacrificed much to come to this circle; and we are aware in our memory of the seeming lack of time when in incarnation in your density.

The choice of where to place the attention is a choice full of weight within the incarnative scheme or nexus or arrangement of priorities; and scheduling of time simply to have come to this circle creates that opening, that opportunity, that cannot be purchased at any price. You have given yourself this chance and have given us an enormous gift, for you enable us to be of service. Sharing our thoughts with those who might find them interesting is our chosen form of service, and you enable us to progress in our own destiny. You could not give us a more precious present; and we cherish this occasion, asking only, as always, that each seeker use her own powers of discrimination and retain only those truths which resound within as if she had already known those truths but had forgotten them. Those are the truths that are yours personally. Allow us to share all our thoughts, but allow those thoughts which do not echo of recognition within to be left gently behind.

Let us then begin by gazing upon what this instrument would call the human condition. Each dwells in two distinct worlds, if we may oversimplify for the sake of discussion. There is the physical portion of existence within which each has a physically difficult time of second density, of what this instrument would call the great ape variety and what one of your philosophers has called the featherless chicken. ¹ This earthly, mortal, limited vehicle contains brainpower designed specifically to solve problems, to make choices. This is practical and useful within the Earth world. We do not scorn the human brain. We simply note that it is either a servant or a master. Those who would advance spiritually are well advised, in our opinion, to reduce the dependency of the consciousness on the choices and intellectual structures which the human brain is so good at creating.

Within this earthly plane you are still completely a citizen of the universe. You are infinite, eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent. You are what has been and what will be. You are a child of the Creator; and indeed, we all seek together for that place in space and time when we shall cease to be citizens of duality and move back into the heart of the one original Thought, which has created all that there is. That Thought is love, and each of you is love. Consider yourself within the earth plane as one who is upon a journey, sent forth from the beginning of time and space to gather experience—and always, always returning, circling back to the source, to love. And at the same time that you are upon this plane, you are perfect, pure, unblemished, without error; and this identity remains absolute no matter what your perception of yourself or your progression might be.

When you as a seeker, then, begin to desire to clear the channel for more clear channeling of the love and the light of the infinite One, there is the tendency to think in terms of working from the viewpoint of the one who wishes to take from work in consciousness that which does not belong. However, the concept that may in actual practice do the most to clear the channel is to go against logic and instead move back into those energies that, were the human structure as a house, would be in the basement. The clearing of channels continues in the progress made in joining the self with the lower energies in a loving and non-judgmental way, through gazing with care upon the arrangement of what this instrument would call the dark side of personality—that side wherein reside those instincts for survival, sexuality, human relationships with self and other selves.

The feeling is to get away from the body and its millions of complaints and needs, yet in actuality you worked hard to deserve the opportunity to come into your physical body and into physical incarnation. The nuts and bolts, the nitty-gritty of bodily awareness, is continuingly important to attend to and embrace. The confusion that swamps the entity because of the sensory input of the physical vehicle is a problem, for in confusion nothing can be known. The physical body is a blanket of confusion; and by dwelling within it you are removed from knowledge of the truth as to what your energies are actually doing. In the body you have no choice if you are spiritually oriented but to find faith and use that faith in order to make your choices, beginning with how you relate to your self: to your intransigent need to continue to survive, to continue the species, to attend to all of these things.

Do not brush these things aside, for the greatest of choices begins with these choices; and as you embrace and involve yourself, so do you open the way to that center within called the heart chakra or the green-ray energy center. The opening of the heart is possible only when the seeker gives up on the intellect and moves in unknowingness. The seeker lives in faith. What does this mean? As this instrument would say, we’ll talk.

We turn over the microphone to our friend, our beloved brother Aaron, with great delight. We leave this instrument for the nonce. We are those known to you as the principle of Q’uo.

Aaron

I am Aaron. As I begin to speak, I wish to echo Q’uo’s thought. Please take what is useful of my words—that which rings true to your own deepest truth—and allow it into your heart. As for the rest, discard it without a second thought.

Q’uo has spoken of the two aspects of your being, what I call the angel and the earthsuit. You are angels in earthsuits. If you wanted just to be angels and manifest perfect clarity, you would not have chosen to incarnate. Any can manifest its energy with great love and clarity as an angel. Can you do it in the earthsuit? Even more important, what happens when you bring the balance of these two together? For you are not only the earthsuit; no, no, no! You are the angel in the earthsuit.

It is through this balance—taking the constant catalysts of the earth plane and drawing them into the heart of love—that you not only learn for yourselves, but that you manifest your energy into the world with increasing purity and love and thus offer that energy to all beings. Very often you become lost enough in the earthsuit catalyst that you lose view of what you are really doing. You are simply forging ahead blindly, and yet sometimes one has to do that.

Speaking of her drive to perfection, once, with this instrument, I asked her a simple but difficult question. I said to her, “Imagine that you are with a group of people on top of a mountain. You are walking, when suddenly the weather turns, clouds roll in, it begins to snow. Where you had been hiking was very steep, with many precipices. You feel that you cannot walk because of the density of the weather, and yet you recognize that you must get off the mountain. What you really want is someone to come along from the group and say, ‘I know this mountain so well. Follow me and I will lead you down.’ But no one comes. Everyone sits down and shakes from fear and from cold. You are fully aware that in less than an hour of this treacherous wind and cold, people are going to enter into hypothermia, people are going to die. You do not know the path. You only had a glimpse at it as it lay ahead, just as the clouds rolled in. What are you going to do? Are you going to wait there for somebody else to say, ‘I know the mountain. I will lead us,’ or are you going to do it yourself? What if you are not perfectly prepared?”

When is it ego to say, “I will lead”? When is it love? More correctly phrased, when is it the voice of the small self who acts in service to that self, perhaps to enhance or self-inflate? When is it the voice of the large self that acts in service to all beings?

First, you must allow that both voices are going to be present. You are this angel in an earthsuit. While the angel’s voice may come through loud and clear, the human voice also must be present or else you are not having a human experience. Perhaps the angel’s voice says, “I think I can do this. If I move very carefully, I think I can do this.” Then you hear ego’s voice saying, “Oh, won’t everybody make a fuss over me when we get safely to the bottom.” Hearing that second thought, you may surmise, “This is not my deepest truth that says it can lead the descent. This is only ego.” If you strike out in anger against that ego’s voice, then you cannot hear love’s voice. You become so much at war with the small-self aspect of you that you shut out the existence of anything else.

On the other hand, you can hear that small self’s voice and just say, “Aha, here is self that wants recognition. Here is self that feels pain, and it wants to be a hero. Shhhh, I hear you. I hear how afraid you are, and I hear the ego self grasping at this opportunity for some notice.” When you treat the small self with kindness, its voice quiets. Then you have the opportunity to reopen once again to the greater self, that voice that is still whispering insistently, “We must get these people off the mountain or people are going to die. It will take courage from all of us, but it can be done.”

When you ask, “How can I become a purer channel?” that absolute purity is always accessible within you. Confusion and distortion are also always there. If my friends who have heard this example before will pardon me, a very simple illustration of your being is to take a very smooth white sheet of paper with absolutely no wrinkles, wad it up into a ball and squeeze it tight so it becomes wrinkled. Then open it out again; the sheet appears filled with wrinkles. Look at that sheet of paper. Can you see that the perfect sheet of paper still exists? It has not gone anywhere. The wrinkles also exist. We are not denying either truth. Which do you choose to practice? Do you choose to practice the wrinkles or the perfect sheet of paper? To practice that perfect sheet does not mean to deny the existence of the wrinkles, only not to need to enact them—and even further, not to fixate on them in any way. This is of tremendous importance.

This shadow aspect of the self will exist. Do not fixate on it in any way and do not deny it. You do not need to be ruled by it and you do not need to fight against it. Your work is to draw it into the heart of love. When the conditions have ceased which gave rise to that particular wrinkle, it will go if you are not relating to it in a way which gives it further conditions from which to perpetuate itself! It will go. You do not need to push it away. To fret over it is a way of practicing it—can you see that? When you are busy attacking the wrinkle, you are giving solidity to it. In karmic terms, your energy contracts around that particular wrinkle and it plants the seeds for the next moment.

I think it is very important to understand how that works. Let us use as a hypothetical example, the thinking of the self as unworthy. This concept is the wrinkle. To strive to become a worthy person sets up a pattern of contractions every time there is an opportunity to be generous or kind. The generosity and kindness are gifts to another, of course; and yet if there is a strong somebody being generous and kind, it sets up reverberations which solidify the self. That somebody who is struggling not to be unworthy is struggling to be worthy. In either case, it solidifies this self who must push away unworthiness and grasp at worthiness. It does not acknowledge the deeper truth that there is no such thing as unworthy or worthy. How could any human—any being on any plane—be unworthy or worthy? Generous maybe, wise/unwise, skillful/unskillful; but worthy/unworthy?

Even such a movement as generous or greedy can set in motion this pattern of solidified self. You may see yourself as clinging, greedy, and make the decision, “I’m going to defeat this wrinkle. I’m going to become generous each time fear arises”—and with it a clinging pattern. You castigate yourself and say, “Look how bad I am to have this fear energy. I’m going to be generous,” and you push yourself to give.

So long as you are fixated on being the generous one, you are going to continue karmically to enact situations in your life in which clinging or giving are primary. The mastering of this lesson does not involve only giving freely even when there is fear. That giving will come naturally when there is no obstruction to it. The idea of the generous self here serves as obstruction. The entire notion of the self as giver or clinger, of self which must be “fixed,” must be released. Freedom from perpetuating this pattern comes when you can release fixation on the whole movement of clinging and giving.

Note the fear from which these patterns arise. Note that certain conditions give rise to that fear. Observe the self which is fearful with a great deal of kindness and compassion. Then this solid self is no longer the one who is giving or clinging; then the heart knows what to do. There is no more giver; there is no more clinger; giving happens. There is no subject and object, no one who gives, nothing which is given.

The fear does not disappear automatically any more than our would-be guide on the top of the mountain loses its fear when it says, “Follow me,” and takes the first step. The fear may be immense. That is just it! If you were just spirit, Pure Spirit, giving or leading people down the mountain, there would be no fear and there would be no challenge. The challenge is not to be fearless. The challenge is to bring love where there is fear.

The work is to cease to fixate on getting rid of anything—fear, jealousy, greed, anger—but instead to draw all of these emotions and the causes for them into the loving heart. Then you can watch these patterns come and go in yourself; and a loving heart knows what to do. As Q’uo said, the brain stops directing the show and the heart becomes the ruler.

At this point I would like to pass the microphone back to my brother/sister/friend Q’uo. I pause.

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and are again with this instrument.

We can sense all of you experiencing these thoughts, feeding them back into your consciousness and sorting through them as through items at a rummage sale, and appreciate the bewildering effect of so many old and new ideas countermingled. But have faith; there is a part of yourself that overarches and interpenetrates all of your self and experience, which you can rely upon. You already know that which is needful for you at this particular juncture, so relax the desire to comprehend and practice that trust in your own deeper intuition that constitutes one way of expressing things.

We would like to describe for you an entry into that portion of self that has its selfness in faith. It lies within the heart center, is literally and figuratively at the heart and of the heart. As the energy moves into the physical body through the feet up into the root chakra or energy center at the joining of the legs, it encounters a beautiful, crystalline … we give this instrument a picture of a geodesic dome, a structure in time/space that enabled that energy of red ray to express the energy from the red through that co-Creator’s ready energy center. And as the energy gathers, that energy becomes more crystalline and transparent to that love/light that is expressing into manifestation from unmoved love. Moving upwards it encounters another beautiful crystalline structure that resides in the belly itself, that contracts against dangers of association with the self and with the complexity of dual and triple, completely unusual and conflicting needs of the self and one other self. As the seeker gathers experience, the choices made can more and more energize this nexus of energy; and the energy allowed through moves up to that place where belly meets chest, that omphalos of power. This is the plane of your Earth. This is the social energy center where the self deals with society and its associations, whether experiencing as a member of a family, as a citizen of a country, in any group in which you are working with distortions of the yellow-ray energy center; and again, the choices that you make can, through the incarnative experience, help to crystallize and make transparent this center.

As one works with all of these energies to balance them, one is literally making more room for energy from the Creator to pour in its original strength into the heart center. The problem with attempting to work in consciousness with ascended masters or entities such as we is that one is working from the top down, whereas the stable basis of energy shall always first depend upon the amount of energy that comes into the heart from the root chakra upward. No matter how much energy is called into the system from the heart, it must move downward to the place where the energy from the Creator has originated its entrance into the mind and body complex. Thusly, you see seekers who find themselves in desperate straits because they are attempting to open the heart by inspiration, and yet they have no home in which to place this inspiration; and so, like a bird, all that is felt from contact from that source flies away like lost hope and is gone when the eyes open and the entity is once again within the busyness of everyday life.

But come with us into the heart, just for a moment, where we feel that there is the need to experience love; and we wish to tell you that you can do this at any time. But come with us now. Feel that energy coming through those distortions in each center, yet moving upwards to the heart. See that energy coming from above, as it were, that calls for inspiration and flows like liquid into the heart; and these two meet where lions guard the door. And you bow to the lions and you do not say, “I deserve to be here”; you say, “Have mercy on me, for I seek love.” And the lions bow to you and the door opens and you walk into this room, this holy of holies. This is the open heart. Sit down. Take your shoes off. You are upon holy ground. Now you are with the Creator, who can give you rest. You are loved with a passion that creates and destroys worlds. Oh, how you are loved. We turn the microphone back to our beloved friend Aaron.

Aaron

I am Aaron. Where is that place of most brilliant light and love? Is it somewhere out there? Is it something you must attain through self-purification or other types of pursuit? No, it is within. It is that perfect sheet of paper that still exists, even though the wrinkles are also there. That Pure Heart-Mind is always available to you, my friends. It is not the existence of the wrinkles, of the shadow, that keeps you from that brilliant inner light. It is your relationship to those wrinkles, to that shadow.

I am back to the same point. The wrinkles will come and go. You are human. If you step on a tack, there is going to be pain and contraction of the physical and emotional bodies. If somebody screams at you insultingly, rudely, there is going to be a contraction of the emotional body. If you are very hungry and somebody takes away your meal, there is going to be fear. These movements do not prevent you from resting in that light nor manifesting from that brilliant and loving heart. They are simply fear, desire, anger, confusion. They need no reaction from you.

You cannot get rid of these by forcing them out. By strong will power you can rid your outer experience of them; but they still lie hidden in the ground, simply waiting for a break in your fierce suppression so that they can sneak through. But if you learn to allow these kinds of emotions and confusion, which are the human experience, to move through you—and never lose that place of center—then you need fear them no more. You know will never lose the awareness that you sit in the light. The Pure Heart is always accessible!

I would offer an example of what I have just said, and even more, of what Q’uo said preceding me. Returning to our guide on the mountain … you are this guide, and you have said, “Stand up and walk with me. I will lead us to safety.” For a while you follow the path. The snow has not yet obscured it. Then the snow drives harder and the wind is stronger. You become aware that you have lost the path. What are you going to do? You stop and acknowledge, “I’ve lost the path and don’t know where I am.”

Fear may come up very strongly for those of you who aspire to live your lives with love. It might be a very fierce self-critical fear which said, “You knew you couldn’t do it. It was all ego that said, ‘I’m going to lead.’” So what are you going to do, just tell everybody to sit down in the snow and die because you made a mistake?

What if it was fear that said, “I will lead”? Are you denying that there was also a deep wisdom which said, “We must make an attempt to get off the mountain”? It is certain death versus a possibility of survival. As soon as you open your heart to yourself, as soon as you hear your pain and fear, you reopen into the wisdom and clear heart. And the clear heart says, “Okay, I made a mistake; I got lost.” That does not mean that negativity was leading, even if negativity was there. The loving heart was also there. Coming back to the loving heart, you simply pick yourself up—trail or no trail—and begin moving slowly down the mountain. On the trail it is easier; off the trail it will be a little harder. The task is the same: You have got to get down from the mountain.

There is a teaching in both Buddhism and Christianity which I find useful here. This instrument has been reading a very clear book, written jointly by a Zen master, Robert Aitken Roshi, and a Jesuit priest, Brother David Stendl-Rast. It is called The Ground We Share. ² The focus of the book is to explore the commonalities. Aitken Roshi speaks of a Buddhist teaching given the very technical name, Three Kayas. The word kaya means “body.” It talks of the “truth body” or dharmakaya, the everperfect; and at the other end, the “form body” or nirmanakaya. This is not just the material body; by form I mean any kind of a form. A thought is also a form, as is an emotion. This is the outer-expression body. There is a bridge that joins them, called the “wealth body” or sambhogakaya. I call this the “transition body.” Think of the everperfect; think also of the final expression. The wealth or transition body is a bridge of intention, of karmic force and other elements, which serves as vehicle for the everperfect to express itself into the world.

A very simple example would offer the sun as a metaphor for the everperfect. The expression of the sun on the earth plane might be the heat that you feel on your back when you sit in the sun, or a patch of sunlight on the grass. The atmosphere, the clouds, and so on carry the particular qualities of the sun and permit them to be expressed onto the physical plane. It is not a perfect metaphor, but you can see the two ends and center of it clearly.

In Christian terms, within the Trinity we can substitute Father for everperfect, Son for the form body, Holy Spirit for the wealth or transition body (the intention energy level). This is not a perfect match but quite adequate. You may think it uneven because the Son contains God, is direct expression of God. Yes! And the nirmanakaya contains the dharmakaya, too, and is direct expression of it! I find this a very valuable teaching for this reason. No matter where one looks on your physical plane, you see the self-display of the divine.

In the teachings in the languages of both Buddhism and Christianity, the inner core and outer expression are not separate: the Son is voice of the Father; the Son is the expression of God in the world. In Buddhist teaching, everything on the form level or in outer manifestation is expression of the everperfect. You cannot separate them. This is vital.

In the transition body, we pick up the many energy streams which may offer distortion of the absolutely pure core. Please remember that within this core are the possibilities of distortion, or distortion could not occur or would be dual with the core itself. The negativity in you is not in dualistic opposition to the divine, it is simply a distortion of the divine. Love is also a distortion of the divine.

Some distortions, when you play them out in the world, may do harm. Then clearly you are responsible for that harm. You must clean up your spills. Some distortions may be of great service to others; nevertheless, they are distortions, carry adhering karma and must be attended. They are all a display of the divine. My dear ones, you do not have to be afraid of what moves through you. There is nothing there but God. When you ask, then, “How can I manifest my energy more purely in the world?” remember that there is nothing there but God, sometimes being expressed with distortion, or even great distortion. “How can I come to a reduction of distortion?”—by offering forgiveness and kindness. Hatred will never dissolve hatred and negativity. Only love will dissolve negativity. Only love will dissolve confusion and distortion. Whatever distortion expresses itself, you must bring it into the heart of love.

Ah yes, the question is, “How do we do this?” Perhaps that is best left for tomorrow’s discussion. I would leave you tonight only with this thought: There is nothing which is not God. Therefore, when you see in dualist terms, that is an invitation to remind yourself that what you are seeing is itself a distortion and is the voice of fear. Instead of trying to chase it away with a big stick, do as this instrument would do: Hold out a goody in your hand and invite it to come and take a taste of it. Offer it loving-kindness. Embrace your fear in that way; do not hate it and order it away.

The distortion-free place is always accessible to you. When you are reacting from a place of fear, which is creating increasing distortion in the outpouring of the energy that flows through you, that is not a statement that absolute clarity and love are not available. It is only a statement that you are increasingly practicing the wrinkles. Then you must come back to the everperfect. As I said, I would prefer to leave the how of how we do that to tomorrow so as not to overtax here with too many different thoughts.

At this point, and with great thanks for your willingness to hear me and open your hearts to these thoughts, I turn the microphone back to Q’uo. I pause.

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and would give you farewell fairly briefly.

We would make a request of you. We are aware of the questions within the group, and we and Aaron naturally planned to open the dialogue to questions on the morrow. It would be helpful, we feel, if the circle spoke together before the next session to work out what the group feels it wishes to offer as the next input to this dialogue. That we would appreciate, for the more total the group’s comfort with each other and with the activity comes our own greater ability to communicate with a corresponding focus.

We would leave you this evening with a brief return to the one known as Aaron’s topic. We would take you into the office and place the paper with the wrinkle on the machine and make the copy. On the copy you may see every wrinkle. Turn the paper over. It is clean. This is actually more like what your situation is than the simple paper, for you yourself are as a shell of personality. As the mark of that toner upon that paper describing those shadows of wrinkles, that shell of personality that is living your incarnation and interacting with your human function is only as thick as a sheet of paper. All that you are resides in fullness. Each wrinkle, each shadow, is sacramental. Each energy center is holy. The trick is to know each energy as a sacrament within.

Dear ones, we wish you deep sleep, joyous0 dreams, and a fresh day beginning oh, so soon. For now, we leave this instrument in the love and the light of the one infinite Creator. We are known to you as those of Q’uo. Adonai. Adonai.