January 16, 2005

(Carla channeling)

Q’uo

We are those of the principle known to you as Q’uo, and we greet you in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator, in Whose service we come to you this day. It is a great privilege to be called to your group and we are most happy to speak to you about the pitfalls and distractions of the spiritual path. But we would first, as always, like specifically to request of each of you that you retain the ability to discriminate very carefully as you listen to our thoughts, choosing only those thoughts that really seem good to you, with which you wish to work further and discarding the rest immediately. In this way we will feel much more confident that we will not interfere with your free will or disturb the sacredness of your own process.

In asking concerning the pitfalls and the distractions to which one who is attempting to follow a path of spirituality is prey, you ask a fairly broad question. The spiritual path in itself is an amazingly broad thoroughfare carrying, as it does, every being of third density as it attempts to walk between two worlds, the world of third-density consensus reality and the inner world that sometimes completely overtakes the outer world for its importance and clarity.

For the most part, entities who are not consciously walking a spiritual path stay comfortably within third density and enjoy the various images and illusions that pass before the eye, as the one known as G was saying earlier. It is a comfortable and a familiar thing to pass from image to image as one rises and goes through the day; following the employment, following the need for the body for meals and refreshment and for sleep. It is a less comfortable and sometimes frighteningly less familiar thing to follow a spiritual path. And each entity steps onto this path from a misty somewhere before the thought crossed the mind that there was an actual spiritual path. So this broad, spiritual path is home to all of you. Each foot in this room has kicked the dust of that path and that dust has similarly been kicked by every human being on the planet at one time or another. So there is a vast variety of attitudes from those who enter the path of spirit. Consequently, there are various kinds of pitfalls.

Let us approach this question from the standpoint of a model to use to see if you indeed are on the spiritual path. The model of the self on the spiritual path is a model in which you are focusing upon the “I” that you are. There are many uses of the first-person singular. When you think of yourself, you don’t always think of yourself as the same self. When you are thinking of yourself as a spiritual entity on a path, who are you? Who is the “I” that speaks for you when you are on the spiritual path? How would that voice, that identity, that person be different from the “I” that speaks for you in less thoughtful roles?

Hopefully, as you begin to sense yourself as a spiritual entity, the “I” that speaks for you begins to come out of the mist of the surface “I,” the surface personality. The model that this instrument carries in her mind of the entity on the spiritual path is a model in which she is following in the steps of Jesus the Christ. She does not have a model of herself as worshipping but as following after the example of a teacher who seemed to know precisely who he was. He identified himself as an agent of the Creator. This instrument, then, has a model of the self on the spiritual path in which she has an objective referent to who she is because she is following an entity who was of a certain personality. This entity identified himself strictly as the Son of the Father who was about his Father’s business. And it is notable that this entity, in all of his preaching, has never been quoted as asking for worship but only as asking for being followed.

So we would ask entities who are looking at themselves upon the spiritual path quite simply, “Who are you?” Because this is the essential center of that which draws entities to the path of seeking. They become aware that all of the wisdom that has been acquired since their cradle experiences is not enough to satisfy the craving for identity and meaning. They realize that they are going to have to set off on a journey. It is not a journey in the physical world at all but it is very definitely a journey and it very definitely is upon a path that is common to all seekers.

Please realize that on this path you are not gathering as much as allowing things to fall away. The deep and true tones of your identity and your right process come clearly, plangently, sometimes plaintively and sometimes triumphantly, but unmistakably, from time to time there will come a moment—this instrument loves to call them “crystalline moments”—that ping like a bell with a very clear indication of meaning and resonance and in that moment, whatever the realization is, it is easy, it is effortless; and you realize that you have reaped the harvest that has been in process for a long time. You finally hear and feel and see the work that you have done but you never know when that moment will come. Such is the progress of one upon the spiritual path.

Pitfalls, for the new entity to the path, can involve impatience and that reaching and grasping that are the indication of impatience. These are not difficulties that will end or sideline the spiritual seeking for an entity but such impatience does get in the way of a creation that is set to respond to your needs but in a timely fashion. This means sometimes that one must wait. It is very difficult to wrap one’s mind around the necessity for simple waiting.

The one known as Jim was speaking earlier of his delight at finding the time during the off-season of his work to sit and soak in the silence, allowing the creation to speak as it would to him. This willingness to let oneself drift in the flow of the moment is a great resource for all seekers. The entity, Jim, spoke of sitting at sundown and allowing the light slowly, gradually, to fade away, listening to the sounds of the creatures of the day as they quieted down and listening to the creatures of the night begin to sing their night song and just allowing all of this creation to roll past his eyes and his ears and, walking into his abode at the end of that time, feeling curiously invigorated and refreshed. This model of patience is a great one to carry.

Realize that when a spiritually-oriented question is asked within, the answer may come in the next fifteen seconds but it also may come two weeks or two months later. Energies have been set in motion that now must be trusted. Moving from the question to the trusting and the waiting is a great skill to learn. When you sense impatience within yourself, gently remind yourself that in spiritual seeking there is no time.

As the seeker becomes more sophisticated, as learning builds upon learning, the pitfalls of the path can change. If you are one of those who feels that she has had some experience walking this path, realize that your pitfall may well be knowing too much or feeling that you understand. There is truly no end to the evolving self. As things fall away from you and you become more able to penetrate deeper within your consciousness, you will repeatedly find that you need to release concepts from their stricture. You need to be able to allow new insight to change your carefully built-up intelligence about yourself and the world around you. Do not hold on to your identity or your knowledge in the face of new information. Rather, place aside that which you feel that you know and enter fully into the investigation of that which resonates for you. Do not see it as something that challenges your information, but rather, see it as something that may well help you evolve and put into a whole new pattern the information that is still good for you. When experience mounts up, it is as though some entities were carrying around their entire history of experience and attempting to add everything new in on top of this large pile of acquired information from childhood and previous years. It is a good idea to keep that cup of selfhood tipped out and emptied so that it may receive new wine, new information.

There is a certain amount of pride that entities take sometimes in how many things that they have learned, how many books they have read or philosophies that they have studied or religious systems that they have penetrated and can speak about. This kind of pride is often a very deadening influence and we would encourage entities, always, to relate as simply and as directly as possible to ideas, to patterns of thought, and above all to entities around one who may be attempting to enter into conversation concerning spiritual matters. In a world that rushes continuously on so many levels, we would encourage a truly relaxed and lighthearted attitude towards the very serious business of seeking.

This instrument is typical of many upon the spiritual path in that she has a built-in yearning and hunger for devotion. She must be devoted, she must be serving, she has this sense of almost being driven to be as the one known as Jesus, the agent of the Creator. It is good to have that back-pressure; it is not a good thing to allow that pressure to make you hurry or hasten or become anxious. Allow that back-pressure to continue to motivate you but if it motivates you beyond the point at which you are patient and have a sense of proportion and humor concerning your path, then you have entered into that particular pitfall of eagerness and hurriedness.

What that will do to you, if you allow it to drive you, is to do more and more, to try more disciplines, to add a meditation if you haven’t been doing a daily one, then add another one, and then make that one longer, and so forth. The end of such pressured seeking is that you burn out as a seeker and must sit by the side of that spiritual path for a while, mopping your brow and breathing. It sometimes take years for a burnt-out seeker to recover his balance completely and to be able to get back into a real process that feels yeasty and good.

Walking the path is not a difficult thing, it is more a matter of its being a journey for the one who is ready for a long trek. In most paths available in third density there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is the learning process, there is the point in the middle in which you are working very hard and you are becoming better and that culminates with a job well done, a degree of education earned, a promotion at work, and so forth.

In the spiritual path, death is only the beginning. There are no endings, there are many, many beginnings, and there is no end of the middle. You are always in the middle of the spiritual path.

Perhaps the greatest gift is to know that you know nothing and that you will indeed fall into many a pitfall and yet it will not take you off the path. You cannot get lost beyond finding and if you do need to rest, even there at the side of the road you have company.

As to the distractions that are possible on the spiritual path, there is no end of distraction. But [this is true] only if you are of the mind to see things as either spiritual or worldly. If you make a demarcation between those two parts of Earthly existence, everything that is not specifically dedicated study will be seen as, in some way, a distraction.

However, we would suggest to you that all things that a spiritually-oriented entity does are spiritual. Going to the bathroom, doing the dishes, taking out the garbage, feeding the cat: these commonplace and everyday chores are necessary and cannot be construed to have any obvious spiritual characteristics. And yet this instrument, for example, finds ways to invest each of those activities with an awareness that is spiritual in its character.

What part of your day do you honestly feel is a distraction and only that? What thing that you do can you say has no spiritual value? If you can identify some of those items that can be seen as distractions, perhaps you could sit down and contemplate whether there is a way you might invest these chores with the sacred character that comes from service, from love, and from an awareness of who the self is in the spiritual sense. In our opinion, there is no true distraction to an entity whose heart is set upon the Creator because each and every action available to an entity for choice has the potential for being seen in a spiritual light.

One aspect of the spiritual path that we would mention before we would open the meeting to questions would be the simple aspect of silence versus sound, emptiness versus content, for those upon the spiritual path within your culture are coming to that path from a culture very rich in content. It is interesting to note that, within all of this content, critics of the culture often comment on the emptiness of that content, the illusion that it creates and the illusory nature of the image-after-image-after-image that creates the content, whether the medium of such images in the television, the radio, the newspaper or the computer.

A very great portion of the world has cultural influences that lead it more to the appreciation of silence, which seems to lack content, and yet which contains infinite meaning. In your content-rich culture, meaning itself is often lost. Consequently, if you are of the nature that appreciates content, we suggest that you choose your content, for truly, there are many pitfalls, if you would speak of it in that way, for those who are attempting to derive meaning from the surface aspects of your culture, as seen on the television or read in the newspaper. Do not fall into the pitfall of assigning too much meaning to those things that are on the surface. Allow meaning to be a mystery and silence to be your teacher.

We thank you for this question and feel that we perhaps have spoken long enough upon it. At this time we would open the meeting to further questions, if there are any. Is there a further query at this time?

G

Q’uo, I have a lengthy one and I apologize for its length but, hopefully, its answer should be simple. And it’s easier to read straight from the paper.

[Reading]

Q’uo, as I move forward in my path I am experiencing a phenomenon that can be described as the light growing lighter and the dark growing darker. I feel I am experiencing the extremes of what can conveniently be described as a spectrum of feeling. On one hand, I feel strength, vitality and the spiritual perception increase in moments where, basically, all the spiritual literature that points to the truth not only makes sense to me but becomes alive, a living and flowing reality. And subsequently I feel more empowered through self-knowledge to call upon and invoke the higher forces to transform the lower self of me.

On the other hand, I feel ever more acutely the shadow side of myself: one with seemingly more venomous reactions to situations that create a souring and bittering within me. What I don’t know is whether a shadow is growing more strongly in me as I reach for the light because I am neglecting to be conscious of certain aspects of my patterns or whether it is a case of simply becoming more aware of a shadow that is already within me and has been with me, alive and functioning without my conscious awareness to transform its ways. Can you help me to understand whether it is awareness of what is already there or the further creation of distorted thinking within my mind?

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and are aware of your query, my brother. The concept of the shadow self is very helpful in attempting to walk into your own shoes as a being. It is difficult to wrap oneself around this idea of a shadow self. Perhaps if we called it a full-circle self it might be easier to see the construction of the being here, because each of us, we and you, are beings that replicate all aspects of the creation and the Creator. By the time that you have reached third density you have done a tremendous amount of amalgamation of experience. You have been elemental, you have been plant, you have been animal; now you are an animal with a conscience, basically, and you strive to go further. And we have become even more refined by experience, yet we carry the full -circle self, just as do you.

What is there in creation? Whatever you see, that’s you. Any murderer on the block is you. Any thief on the dock is you. Any hero who has just saved the world is you. You are the soldier, you are the bread-winner, you are the mother bearing a child, you are everything. And you don’t get to choose whether you have good in you or bad in you, so-called. You have it all. The strictures and disciplines of the parent for the child attempt to train the child up so that he will behave well and you have learned to behave well. Loving good, seeking the light, you have more and more been able to place yourself in situations and in environments where you were able to live in the sunny side of self, enjoying service and learning and devotion. And these things about you and about all entities are true. However, equally true is that self that does not get encouragement from virtue.

You still have that; you will always have that. It is part of the strength of who you are that you have that. You would not be able to be a full person and to move forward without the full-circle self. Nothing is left behind as you evolve. It becomes arranged in a more and more helpful way as you learn to balance yourself, chakra by chakra, issue by issue, and moment by moment. You are always in flux, so these moments where you become aware of that so-called evil part of yourself come and go. And it is sometimes quite disconcerting to become aware of particularly articulate and eloquent, angry or irritated thoughts. You feel yourself thinking a hateful thought which isn’t fair at all and certainly would never be said aloud and you wonder where that came from and if the evil within you is somehow growing. We assure you it is not growing. It was always there. It chose this particular moment to reveal itself and this is a gift to you of self to self. Take it seriously, look at it carefully, and see, if you can, where the trigger lay that brought forward this particular part of yourself.

May we answer you further, my brother?

G

No, thank you, Q’uo. That was excellent.

Q’uo

We thank you, my brother. Is there a further query at this time?

S

I’ve had a question that I’ve been thinking about for some time. If I wanted to recover all the knowledge and wisdom of all the lifetimes that I had, how would I do that?

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and are aware of your query, my brother. You are asking this query within third-density incarnation and our shortest answer would be to say that you would be able to recover that information…

[Side one of tape ends.]

…immediately following your crossing of the gateway of death. Once through that gateway, reunited with full consciousness and full communication with your higher self, you would have the unimpaired memory of all that you have been and, indeed, all that you would be in the future. Within third density, it is not considered a helpful thing to have that full range of information available. It is considered, as you know, much more helpful for a discreet curtain to be drawn over all previous experiences so that you may hit the particular incarnation in which you are involved running, and give it the serious consideration that it deserves, all on its own.

The ways of penetrating the veil of forgetting are limited within incarnation. There is the dreaming process and those who work with dreams are often able to recover memory of past lives as they gradually find themselves in dream landscapes which constitute a different environment that begins to have a reality of its own.

The most common way that entities are able to recover past life information is the contacting of the deep mind by the conscious mind which is done in sessions of regressive hypnosis in which, with the help of a hypnotist, the self is taken back before birth to previous lives and questions are asked which enable the person to recover some of those memories.

May we answer you further, my brother?

S

That gives me plenty to think about. I have nothing else at this time. Thanks.

Q’uo

We thank you, my brother. Is there another query at this time?

T

Q’uo, I don’t know whether you are able to respond to this question. The image that I’ve received upon waking this morning, is that a symbol of my need for purification and cleansing?

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and are aware of your query, my brother. We find ourselves up against the full stop of free will in this matter, my brother, and are not able to offer information except to encourage you to follow the line of thought upon which you have been moving because we feel that you are in a place which has a great deal of material and we encourage you to explore it.

May we answer you further?

T

No, thank you, Q’uo. I understand.

Q’uo

We appreciate your understanding, my brother. Sometimes we are able to offer little real information and we apologize for that.

Is there a final query at this time?

G

Q’uo. I have another one. Just a few paragraphs long this time. I’m sorry, I just need context for my questions.

[Reading]

For years now I’ve been experiencing moments and time periods of a fuzziness of perception which slightly blurs the boundaries between dream and reality. As I’ve heard many others speak of this same experience, it feels as if the solidity of what was formerly a well-defined reality dissolves and all of a sudden everything in waking consciousness feels literally like a dream. There have been a few incidents of late in which I was seriously not sure if I actually said or did something in the “real world” or whether that same memory was the property of a nightly dream. Is this type of fuzziness the result of the incoming fourth-density energies and the resultant change in consciousness that they bring? Or perhaps, as was cautioned against in the Law of One series, these are symptoms of an over-hasty polarization and the twilight state that accompanies such an impatient drive for progress?

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and are aware of your query, my brother. We cannot give you one single answer, yes or no, because, as we gaze into your pattern, we would say that perhaps two-thirds of those experiences are an artifact of your personality type. You, in common with this instrument, have a certain absent-minded quality that can create this feeling without there being any resonance or meaning to the happenstance. It simply is a time when you are scattered. There are other times, my brother, when there has been a significant shift in your perceptive web because of the intensity of your devotion. In the first instance, two-thirds of the experience, that is, there is no meaning involved, it is simply an artifact of personality. In the remainder of the cases there is great material that is there and it can usefully be mined. So we would suggest that you look for the kind of peculiar resonance that does attend such a shift in consciousness due to devotion.

The third possibility, which you suggested, was that you were experiencing basically a mistake, that you had rushed too much and so forth. And we would ease your mind in that regard, for it is not in either case an artifact of rushing or of trying too hard. Rather, it is a matter of the way that your particular personality has shaped up and the way it handles experiences that it cannot quite encompass with rational thought.

G

Cool beans! Thank you, Q’uo.

Q’uo

We thank you, my brother. You truly are a cool bean. This instrument is asking us why in the world we offered that bit of inanity and we do apologize to the instrument and to everyone else.

[Laughter]

And on that note we will leave you in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator. It has been such a pleasure to be with you and to share your vibrations. Thank you for asking us. We are those of Q’uo. We leave you in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator. Adonai. Adonai vasu.