November 14, 2004

(Carla channeling)

Q’uo

We are those known to you as the principle of Q’uo and we greet you in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator, Whom we serve. It is a great blessing to be called to your group this day to speak concerning forms and rituals and breaking them and making them and understanding how form works with the entity that you are. And we look forward to sharing our opinions with you. But we would ask you before we begin, as always, to use your discrimination very carefully in listening to what we have to say. We are not authority figures or teachers in the traditional sense of feeling that we know more than you do. Rather, we are those with perhaps a more varied palette of experiences from which to draw than you. However, we are brothers and sisters, walking with you on one path, the path which we all share. And it will allow us to speak freely if you will take complete responsibility for whether or not you use any of the thoughts that we share at this time. If you will promise to let all thoughts that do not resonate with you to fall away, then we will feel much more free to speak without being concerned that we may infringe upon someone’s free will or invade someone’s rightful process of evolution.

First of all, let us speak a bit about how we see you and ourselves, for both you and we have form—not the same kind of form, but we do have that which could be recognized as an ego or an identity, as do you. You experience bodies. You experience a characteristic shape to the way you think and the way you process catalyst and create memory. And yet the essence of each of us is without form, in that traditional sense of a shape to be described or something to be seen, known and identified. Each of you, each of us, is an essence. If we were to be mechanical, we might describe each of us as a system of energy fields within the greater energy field of the universe or the Creator. Yet, this does not catch the magic of the soul, for each of you is indescribably unique. There has only ever been one of you and in all of the heartbeats of the infinite Creator, in all the creations stretching into infinity, there will never be another you. You are precious beyond telling to the infinite One because you have come through eons of form and experience to reach the richness and the variety of the mystery of you that you now experience; not precisely as your identity but as that upon which your identity within this incarnation stands. For you are so much more than this local experience, this lifetime, this personhood.

We see you as glowing crystals, instruments through which the Creator moves, playing Its tunes, Its joyful songs, Its mournful hymns and all of the thousand, thousand songs of being. And we hear you. We hear the wind of spirit move through you. We hear the song you sing, and we stand in awe of the beauty of that song and the poignancy of the heart that sings that song. We see you glow with the colors of energy touched by the myriad momentary experiences which are shaping you at this time. And we rest in that light and we drink of the richness of the beauty that you represent. You are a face of the Creator that has never been seen before and will never be seen again. You have a reality beyond any expression, beyond any response. You are beyond our laughter and our tears; beyond our appreciation or our admiration. You escape us. Each entity that is part of the Creator overflows any way we might have of grasping or understanding you. You are too much. Any limit we might think to put on your identities is folly, for you will exceed it—carelessly, casually or earnestly and intentionally. You cannot help being more than you could ever imagine and know. This is the essence of you, as we understand souls. There is no holding you, there is no limiting you, there is truly no instructing you or guiding you. There is only appreciating the face of the Creator as you express the beingness of your nature.

Each of you moved into the pattern in which you are now dancing for very good reasons. Each of you entered this particular incarnation with fairly coherent plans for service and for learning. Each of you stood as on the brink of a great abyss and planned. You packed, shall we say, a personality; you packed the baggage that you needed. Some of you packed with immense generosity and no concern whatsoever in the fate of redcaps in your wake, towing valise upon valise of personality traits and quirks. Others of you chose to pack just a bag or a backpack: a simple, stable, structure of life seeing as being needed, a straightforward personality—not too much baggage, not too much to burden the soul as it takes on this experience. But whatever you packed, in the way of a personality shell, you put those things in your suitcases because you felt that they were what you would need in order to mine the riches that you had prepared for yourself. And you did see yourself as a miner as you came into this lifetime. You buried your luggage within yourself, within the form of body, of face, name, history, parents, upbringing. You chose that carefully. And so you leapt into the abyss of incarnation, the archetypical fool, walking by faith and not by sight, jumping into the mystery.

What did you hope but that you would be ultimately and egregiously confused? Some of you packed more of that confusion than others. For some of you it took years and years of incarnation just to discover that you were not who you thought you were. Others of you came through from the word go, from the birth, knowing that you were not what those about you were attempting to tell you that you were. Whatever your beginnings, each of you in this circle of seeking has reached a point of incarnation where the ground has become level and the playing field is seen. Each acknowledges the mystery of selfhood. Each sees the self as a player of a certain kind of game. It is not a game of gain, but it is a gamble. Hands are dealt in this game and you play the cards which you were dealt. And you get to choose how you shall play those cards. You cannot choose the cards, yet you may shape the game by the way you play. The object of the game is an increase in awareness and the question with which you come to us this day regards how you can evaluate the kind of game that you are playing—to know whether that game is the appropriate one for you at this time; appropriate in terms of learning and in terms of service. For these were your twin goals upon taking life and breath and body.

How you burned to learn more about your true nature! You came into incarnation with certain prejudices concerning yourself. In your biased opinion you felt a better balance might be needed in one or another sense, in one or another phase of life and all that it has to offer. In your energy body you carried those biases and those hopes. This instrument is familiar with a seven-chakra body system so we may say that your incarnational lessons are scattered among those seven chakras and those seven ways of seeing energy. How do you deal with survival? That’s the red ray. How do you deal with personal relationships? Orange ray. How do you deal with legal groups and responsibilities such as jobs, marriages, families? That’s yellow ray. How do you work within your heart to open it and to become more fully the loving entity that you are by your very nature? That’s green ray. How can you communicate and relate in terms of soul to soul? That’s blue ray. How can you relate to the infinite Creator within yourself, within all of creation, and within the Creator itself? That is indigo ray. And who are you, really? That is violet ray. Each of you has unique incarnational lessons that you have asked yourself by the very way that you are built; by the very way that you tend to think. Each of you has biases you encounter again and again, biases which are unique to you. Again, these are gifts of the self to the self, gifts to be unwrapped at leisure and pondered through the years and the decades of an incarnation. This is the raw material ¹ of your particular mystery. And that is the self before it meets the world that spins within your mind and before your eyes.

The one known as Julian of Norwich said it very simply. She is recalled by this instrument to have said, “All things are well. All things are well. All manner of things shall be well.” And this is your matrix. You live in a creation in which you cannot put a step wrong. You cannot make a mistake. On the level of souls, you are immune to error. For there is nowhere to step that is outside of the creation. There are no choices to make that place you outside the ken of your guidance. You cannot choose wrongly. However, in a universe of infinite possibilities each choice that you make redefines your universe. Consequently, it is not a simple thing to determine right action and right choices for the self.

Let us look at the concept of forms. A pottery bowl is a form. Its function is to be empty. That which you take in fills that bowl in a certain way. Each of you may think of the self, the physical body, as a form. And, indeed, there is value in expressing yourself at the very basic level of physical form. How you express yourself involves the way you cut your hair, the decorations that you might wear, the clothes that you place upon your body, the garments that you choose, the colors, and the fabrics. All of these things enter into creating yourself as a picture or an image. You have spoken somewhat of mirrors and the way that entities around you are showing you aspects of yourself that you either like or of which you disapprove. Yet you realize that all of those images are you. It is very instructive sometimes simply to look at oneself closely in the mirror, not at the image but into the image. And if you look closely, for instance, you might begin to see different faces move across your face as all of the forms that you have taken as a soul in various lifetimes begin to roll past your mind’s eye. Or you might look into the eyes that are looking at you in the mirror and begin to see the infinity that lies within that form of physical body.

Habits and ways of life are also forms, bowls into which you are able to put your catalyst and brew your experience. Are you a shallow, wide bowl that picks up a great deal but at not a great deal of depth? Or are you a narrow, deep vase that can be filled with a great deal of water and go very, very deep but not terribly wide? Or has your eye for beauty caused you to become an amphora or some form of ewer in which there is shape and flow and pattern? What is the characteristic shape of your thoughts as you process from the inception of a thought about your day, your nature, or your choices? What is the shape, what is the form that that process takes within you? Are you satisfied with it? Do you have a sense of that deep content of which the one known as J was speaking, where the form of the life, the thoughts, the process are such good, stout helpers and are serving so well that there is no need sensed by the self to institute the breakage of the old form or the creation of a new one? Or are you in a situation where, as the one known as T said, there is a real question as to whether some parts of this form need to be broken and a new shape of thought and choice selected? Wherever you are, you are, as many have said within this circle, in the perfect position for this particular moment in your incarnation. Things are going well, however it may feel on the outside, that surface that the world knows as consensus reality.

We are aware that it is not helpful to the conscious mind that so much remains a mystery. It is often desired that the whole be known, that the pattern be clear, that the choices be laid out, analyzable, gettable, sensible, rational, and yet, you are not those things, for that would limit you far too much. And so those hopes of a simple solution, a clear and obvious answer to whatever questions you have, are thoughts that are not going to be rewarded by manifestation. You do remain a mystery and your choices do remain choices made by faith and not by sight. You cannot see to the end of your path You cannot figure out even one day in the future, much less the burden of the remainder of your incarnation and all of its hopes for learning and for service.

And so you are thrown back upon your own senses, those senses that elude rationalization. This instrument often uses the term “resonance,” and we find that it is a useful term because it expresses that for which we would wish you to search when you are asking yourself about the choices before you. The world says, do what is right. And yet, what is right for one entity at one moment will not be right for that entity [at another,] and will never be right for another entity even if it is [at] the same moment. Truth, reality and essence are endlessly subjective.

It is very helpful for you to begin to trust yourself, not because you know anything but because you are who you are. This is your material. This is your gift. What you make of yourself within this lifetime will only show a little bit on the surface of consensus reality. Your work, your interactions with others on the conscious level, all of those things that create fame and fortune and give a sense of power and validity, are but hair growing from the head of someone whose mind and heart are infinite. What you can express of yourself is a tiny portion of what you are actually doing here and what you are actually giving to yourself, to those around you, and to the infinite Creator as you live your life. It is hard for us to express just how little of your essence ever comes through into those things that the world values, those things you do—your career, your reputation, your doings—and how incredibly much of your essence escapes any such shallow manifestation and remains part of the dance of creation, part of the pattern of the Creator that is being woven and rewoven in an endless creation of tapestry as moments march on in consensus reality and your very short, very action-packed incarnation ticks away. You have all the time in the world, quite literally, and yet your time is very short. You are a paradox and you live a paradox.

How to value the forms, the things with which you shape your life, is as subjective and personal and intimate as what scent you prefer, what color you choose to wear, how you choose to express yourself. When you come to look upon an issue, then, your safest route is in trusting the self and looking for resonance. This instrument was saying earlier, apropos of a question about when one’s limit has been reached, that, in her experience, the limits that she had reached and overstepped were not those that she decided upon but those times when she realized that her nature had already made that choice for her and she was just getting the results of that election. It is not enough to feel that one is doing the right thing. It must also be, as one gazes at that thing, that one senses into it with a sense of resonance, a sense that this is alive for me.

For you see, forms can die while the life within the form still exists. Form in the sense of a ritual, for instance, is something that those entities who choose to play the card of religion will experience changing time and again. For within a religion, the forms do not change, but the way that an entity relates to those forms can change completely, so that in one moment, a form of expression of devotion to the one infinite Creator may be a source of tremendous comfort whereas in another moment, it may seem to be hollow and dead. And it is very important to listen to the self as it reacts to the form, not asking the self, “How can I relate to this wonderful form?” but rather asking the self, “How can this wonderful entity that I am find resonance in this form?” And if that form has no resonance, then it needs to be let go and another one chosen. Or, in some cases, it is a matter of waiting for another kind of form, another kind of ritual of living to form itself to you as you simply exist within the mystery of your own, often contradictory, feelings.

The one known as V was teasing earlier by saying that our answer is always meditation when it comes to [your asking us,] “How do I contact that part of myself that says this is resonant and that is not?” And we completely acknowledge the justness of her teasing. It is true that so often we simply ask you to meditate. And we would talk about that a minute because there is a substantive point to be made here. We are not going for a form of meditation when we suggest that you meditate. What we are attempting to do is lift you from form. Silence is an absence of form. Entities can create form for the silence by saying, “Well, I meet the silence in this and this way.” And that may be Zen meditation, walking meditation, contemplation, visualization and so forth. We are attempting to help you lift away from the prisons that you create when you lean on form to the exclusion of observing the contents that that form is holding. In so many ways, you are seduced time and again by the more subtle forms of non-physical formation, ritual and habit.

How to lift entities away from that? In many cultures, instead of entering silence the practice of mystics is to enter rhythm by chanting, whirling and dancing. Repetitive movements, repetitive sounds, repetitive tones are things that will batter and finally break the habit of thought. Whether you are drawn to entering the formless by simply sitting down and stopping talking, by designing a particular kind of silence, or by entering into the chanting or other ritual which takes one out of oneself by out-talking the talker, is completely a matter of your own discernment. But the job that you face when you attempt to disconnect yourself from form is to get past the lions at the gate of your temple, that is, your heart. Those guardians do not want you inside if you are still of the world. They do not want you inside your precious heart still grumbling, worried, bargaining, rationalizing, justifying or worried about being right. There are many teachings…

[Side one of tape ends.]

…of bringing oneself to one’s own knees outside the door of the heart and laying it all down: every idea, every concept of self, every vestige of, “I did this,” and, “I thought that,” and, “I’m right”—emptying the self and becoming truly able to receive. However you get there, get there before you enter the sacred space of your own heart. For there the Creator awaits you, full of love, full of Its own nature, which is your nature as well, waiting to enfold you in the embrace of absolute and unconditional adoration and devotion.

The one known as D often says at the end of a reading, “You are loved more than you can ever possibly imagine.” And this is true. Can you feel, as we speak about it, the quality and the abundance of that love? Can you sense into how justified and how completely approved of you are? You have no faults that are not forgiven, no perceived imperfections that the Creator does not see as balanced. Whatever your suffering, whatever the quandaries before you at this time, whatever those dreams are that you have not yet come into the experience of receiving, they are as nothing to the one infinite Creator. We hope that it is against that backdrop that you may stand and observe the issues before you in consensus reality. If you can gain a sense of the depth of the stability of your essence, you will know that your feet are in rich and substantial ground, ground that will not move beneath your feet regardless of how many times everything disappears from beneath your feet within that shallow, manifested world of consensus reality. You will know that disasters and troubles and woes are indeed real in that shallow sense but they are backed up by a part of yourself that is larger and more substantial than that thin stream of event of catalyst and experience.

As you meet these woes, troubles and issues, do your best to continue seeing yourself as that crystalline entity that we described to you and know that all things are well, all things are well, and all manner of things shall be well.

We would at this time open the questioning to any further queries that you may have at this time.

J

Yes, Q’uo, this is J, and it’s great to be in your energy. I was wondering if there was anything that I or anyone else in this room can do to help make this instrument more comfortable?

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and are aware of your query, my sister. Indeed, each within this group has the capacity to aid this instrument in one way or another, as this instrument has the capacity to aid each within this group. May you enjoy the process of finding ways to serve each other and know that in all things there is reciprocity and balance. We thank the one known as J for this generous query and would encourage each within this circle to be aware of the many ways in which you are uniquely oriented to help and support those around you. What is your nature? What are your gifts? As you interact with those loving presences that are in your midst, you will find ever new ways to enhance the experience of the group of which you are a part.

May we answer you further, my sister?

J

I believe that each of us comes in on a different ray, one through seven, and I was wondering if you could tell me which ray it is that I came in on?

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and are aware of your query, my sister. We find that responding to this query would be to infringe upon your free will and we apologize for giving that answer.

Is there another query at this time?

J

No, not at this time, thank you, Q’uo.

Q’uo

Is there another query at this time?

R

I have a question, Q’uo, from someone who can’t be here but asks the following question which is somewhat specific, so I ask for forbearance if you cannot answer, but comments would be appreciated on this topic. Are migraine headaches connected to psychic greetings in any way?

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and are aware of your query, my brother. As it happens we are able to respond to that query because of the way it was asked. Everything that one experiences can have a relationship to psychic greeting. Psychic greeting, as we understand this term, is a way of describing the experience of receiving resistance and the experience is often understood by an entity as being a kind of attack by another entity that is unseen. In actuality, greetings occur all the time because of the distortions which pull various parts of the energy body away from complete balance. For instance, with this instrument, it frequently receives physical discomfort because of its many physical distortions over decades of experiencing the process of a disease called rheumatoid arthritis. Because of the fact that various bones and joints and so forth have become distorted, they can be energized to ache more than they did before. The question that we would put to the one known as G, who, indeed, this instrument knows asked that question, would be, “Is it more helpful to think of a negative, unseen entity energizing a physical distortion within the vascular system which would cause the headaches? Or is it more helpful to realize that there is resistance because of distortions within the being?” If one projects to an outside entity the role of persecutor or attacker, then one, in a way, cheats oneself of the chance to come face to face with the shadow self. Is it more helpful to see oneself as a being which is meeting resistance from an enemy? Or is it more helpful to see the self as a being which is experiencing resistance from its shadow self? We would encourage any who experience the seeming energizing of a previous distortion [to perceive it] as a signal that suggests you take a good look at what is going on in the process of evolution, as you understand yourself and your situation and your process. This never departs entirely from mystery. The mists may clear, briefly, and one may have realizations and epiphanies concerning the self and the process, but the process is ongoing and the mists will again surround one. And those shadows will come out of that mist and impinge upon one. The question hopefully remains, “What is the message that such shadows bring? And, how may I respond well to that message?”

Is there another query at this time?

G

Q’uo, I have one. In the Law of One series, Ra is speaking of kundalini and cautions that, to attempt to raise the locus, which is defined as the meeting place between the inner and cosmic forces, to attempt to raise that locus without an understanding or awareness of the metaphysical principles of magnetism is to invite great imbalance. I was wondering if you could define more clearly what those metaphysical principles of magnetism are?

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and are aware of your query, my brother. We look for a way to discuss this with you without impinging upon your process and do not find one and for that we do apologize. We would like to speak with you further. We would ask if you would perhaps move back into your studies, contemplate a bit more, and see what you could do to ask the question a different way. More help than that we cannot be and do again apologize.

Is there a final query at this time?

R

You are invited to stay for tea and cookies afterwards, Q’uo.

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and are aware of your invitation, my brother, and we assure that we always stay for tea and cookies. And, indeed, into the night and into the next morning. You can get rid of us if you ask us to leave! We are devoted to this group and to each within it and you have only to request our presence for us to be with you.

Since we seem to have exhausted the questions at this time, we leave each of you as we found you, in the unity of the house of the Creator, the love and the light, the spirit and the form that is all that there is. We are those of Q’uo. Adonai.