September 5, 2005

(Carla channeling)

Q’uo

We are those of the principle known to you as Q’uo. Greetings in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator. We thank the one known as V for requesting our opinion upon the question of life changes and ways of adjusting to such changes. We are more than happy to share our energy and our thoughts at this time. We also thank the one known as Carla and the one known as Vara, for they too have set aside time during their busy lives to create this circle of seeking.

We would ask them and any who may read these words one thing before we begin and that is simply that each who considers what we have to say use his discrimination in choosing whether or not to listen to any particular thought of ours. Some thoughts may seem to be very helpful, and, if so, we would be glad for you to work with these thoughts. However, some thoughts may not seem to be helpful. In that case, we would ask that the thoughts be simply set aside and discarded as not being useful at this time. In this way, your responsibility in taking charge of using your discrimination in order to work with our material creates for us the opportunity to share our thoughts freely without being unduly concerned that we may inadvertently disturb the process of your own spiritual evolution. We greatly thank each for this consideration.

Our hearts are most sympathetic to your question, my sister. And, indeed, we find many resonances within this instrument’s mind, thoughts and experiences which relate directly to the issues which your question raises.

This instrument, for instance, just this morning chose to write a letter to the rector of her parish where she has been a member of the choir and a regular attendee for thirty-seven years. However, this instrument has experienced changes in her health and just this day she has chosen to make the corresponding and appropriate changes in her lifestyle that reflect the fact that she is not able to spend long periods of time sitting up as opposed to reclining somewhat in her seat. Therefore, she has changed from a parish that is half an hour from her by car to a parish that is two blocks from her house, to which she is able to walk or to ride her motorized wheelchair.

There is a tremendous burden, shall we say, of grief [that] this decision has created as catalyst for this instrument to use as a gift as she works through it and acknowledges and processes her legitimate and authentic feelings and emotions. Change is difficult to accommodate. This instrument, herself, is not yet aware on a conscious level of this burden or gift of grief or the other attendant and seemingly negative emotions connected with this decision to change churches. There is anger and frustration and it is directed not at others, but at herself. How could she be so foolish as to become weak in the body? How could she be so poor in worth as to be unable to carry on with a pattern that fit her life and suited her personality for thirty-seven years?

Yet, because this instrument is one who tends towards dealing straightforwardly with perceived catalyst, the instrument has started the process of moving through the evolution that such change as she has instituted requires.

Just in such a way, my sister, have you faced, at last, the changes that have taken place in your life and the burden and gift of catalyst that these changes have brought to you. And so we would begin [by speaking] about change itself.

The nature of your present experience of life on planet Earth is that of having to deal with change repeatedly and cyclically. There were changes from babyhood to being a schoolchild that were most difficult. There were similar changes from childhood to being a teenager, from being a teenager to being a young adult, and so forth. Every cycle of living has a natural periodicity.

There is that time when a new cycle of living is brand new and everything is exciting. There is the blooming or thriving part of a cycle when the first flush of joy at the new cycle is gone, and, similarly, so are the difficulties involved in making the changes to accommodate the new cycle over with, processed and done with. In this time of the heyday or the summer of a cycle, there is a wonderful feeling of settling into a new environment and making it your own. While this season is occurring, it can easily seem as though this situation of life were in a state that could be sustained comfortably and joyfully the whole rest of one’s life on planet Earth.

Yet inevitably, in time, that cycle, too, has its season of waning days and early nights. Eventually there comes the time when that cycle has come to an end and another cycle has begun.

It is those times that are frequently called the dark night of the soul. For as one undergoes the death of oneself as known within one cycle, it is not at all easy to retain enough confidence in the underlying sturdiness of the self to have faith in the fact that this new cycle that is just beginning has benefits as well as causing changes that are more uncomfortable and seem to indicate, in a way, the death of the self.

Change and all of its concomitant gifts of struggle, pondering, adjustment and all of its emotional burdens or gifts such as frustration and anger at having to change and that lack of self-confidence as to whether one will be able to weather the change satisfactorily, do not feel either helpful or comfortable. One is very tempted to ask the self why one must go through these changes. The basic question here, my sister, is why life is all about repeated times of change. We would answer that by asking you to consider yourself in a way that you perhaps have not considered yourself before.

We ask you to consider your physical body as a spiritual refinery, an oven, if you will, or a furnace in which old things are burnt up and changed into new things. The nature of transformation in the physical world often contains an element of destruction. If one wishes to process ore to refine the metal that is considered precious out of the basic ore, one must place the ore into the refining fire. There, the original material is actually transformed by melting it, reducing the ore to its component parts and, through the processes of refinery, taking away the slag or waste products and collecting the pure and precious metal.

My sister, within your body you carry the precious gift of consciousness. You hoped by placing this enormous and magical consciousness into the cup of your body to carry into an environment which is rich in the sense of time and place, your entire consciousness held within a tiny cup which is your body.

You gave yourself gifts of personality and as well you gave yourself gifts of limitation and even confusion. Before incarnation, it was your judgment that the love, the wisdom, and the power or will within you may not be completely in balance, according to the highest and best vision that your infinite and eternal spirit would judge. And so you sat down with your higher self, or, as this instrument sometimes calls it, your guidance system, before incarnation and planned carefully the shape and the general themes of an incarnation within this system of illusions that you call reality or life.

Having only your faculty of faith at your side, you wished within this fiery furnace of life on Earth to take an incarnationally long look at this balance that you have within your self, largely [the balance] between love and wisdom.

For many entities coming into incarnation and already qualified for graduation to fourth density—which is your case, my sister—the balance between love and wisdom [is], by your own judgment, that is, to be long on love and short on wisdom. It is, in fact, one of this instrument’s incarnational lessons. And so we speak to you both when we say that many of the changes in both of your lives have to do with reining in this tremendously large heart that you have and this enormous desire to serve and finding a slightly enhanced balance between love and wisdom in which you have granted to wisdom a larger portion of the value that you place upon your thoughts.

Wisdom does not seem to be as important as the open heart [to you both] and the absolute love that you both so value. Yet love without wisdom creates a sense of martyrdom and often an abbreviated end to an incarnation as an entity keeps giving beyond [that] which she can give, until she literally breaks her health and is therefore taken out of the incarnation by illness. Therefore, this instrument has worked long and hard on a very conscious level for some years at attempting to be more and more aware of the importance of asking for the gift of wisdom.

There are a number of ways to ask for wisdom. This instrument’s way is to move into a state of meditation and then simply ask the self, “What would my highest and best self do in this situation?” Often, the suggestion that comes into the mind at this point is one which is not attractive to the waking personality. For instance, when this instrument first considered moving her letter of membership from one Episcopal parish to another, her warm and loving heart which passionately adores her present church, simply shut off the conversation. It was not until repeated experiences of pain and suffering caused this instrument to revisit her inner conversation that she was able to acknowledge the gift of wisdom and to move into the fiery furnace of transformation and to ask, in all humility, “What does my highest and best self guide me to do in this situation?”

When this instrument finally asked the question in that way, the answer was immediate and simple: it was time for a change. And not only that, it was time to embrace that change, to look forward to that change and to run towards that change, even though she did not know and still does not know what will happen next.

We would suggest to you, my sister, that you have encountered the beginning of a cycle in your life at this time. That cycle can be identified as that time of transformation that moves from middle age into old age and from vigorous health into declining health. We ask you to be consciously aware at this moment that this is not, in and of itself, a negative change. It is a part of the natural progression of your body, your mind, and your spirit within incarnation on planet Earth.

We would suggest to you further that, as the body begins to fall away, the gift of that seemingly negative occurrence to you is that it has become obvious to you that you are not your body, if you have the courage to grasp this gift and use it.

Within your question you stated that your memory is faulty and yet we would greatly expect, as is the truth of most entities, that your memory of how it feels to be yourself is intact. You have not lost one iota of your identity. And you shall not lose any portion of meaningful identity throughout this cycle.

As you enter into the gates of larger life at the end of this cycle, your identity will still be intact, just as it was when you entered through the gates of birth into this that you call incarnation or life.

Indeed, for all the seeming changes that you have experienced throughout your life, we would say to you that your actual, internal identity has shifted very little. This is to be expected. You are a citizen of eternity. This incarnation was designed to enable you to work on subtle points of balance within your eternal nature and to give you the opportunity to serve.

Now, service to others is in part service to perceived other selves. It is in part service to the greater consciousness that lies within you in that you are serving the Creator as you dig down deeper and deeper within yourself to discover the true nature of who you are. And further, it is service to the infinite Creator.

As you enter into the gates of larger life, move through the death process, and begin to review the incarnation you will find that this review, when finished, is the most precious gift that you could possibly give the Creator. You have worked tremendously hard in your incarnation to observe accurately and think deeply upon the experiences that you have undergone. Your heart has been opened and made joyful by many things within your incarnation, and that same heart has been sorrowed and broken by many other things which have occurred within the same incarnation. Both the joys and the sorrows have etched patterns within your energy body and have created for you a sharpening, a focusing, and a clarity of the colorations of that energy body. You have learned much and you have earned those lessons learned. And everything that you have learned is part of your gift to the infinite Creator.

The Creator sent you forth, at the beginning of this creation, as a collector, observer and transmuter of experience. Your job has been, and continues to be, to observe all things; to create within yourself an awareness of how you feel about those things; to create questions and find the heart of your desire as you look at how you feel, and then to move yourself forward along the paths that you have chosen in order to respond.

Again and again you have been called forth from contentment into discontent, from sameness into change, from stability into the seeming chaos of transformation. This is such a transformational time for you as well as for this instrument. We would ask simply that you approach the changes that this time in your life calls forth from you with a stubborn and fearless faith that all is well and that these transformational changes are not to your detriment although the world may see them that way.

We ask you to have the faith to know beyond all telling and beyond all doubting that what is happening to you is perfect. It is precisely what should be happening at this point in this incarnation. The material of loss is rich material, my sister.

We would speak a bit about the issue of self-worth. For loss is experienced in an entirely different way by a self-confident person from the way it is experienced by a person who is suffering a feeling of a loss of self-worth. You and this instrument, once again, have a great deal in common in that both of you have repeatedly had your self-confidence undermined almost completely. In this instrument’s case, it has occurred largely within childhood and not so much within any portion of adulthood. However, this instrument tends to spend time inadvertently moving into the precincts of low self-worth and lack of self-confidence on an instinctual or knee-jerk-reaction basis.

And we find, my sister, [that you], both in childhood and in adulthood, have been challenged by those who do not give you respect and do question your worth. This is very difficult catalyst to ignore and it tends to be internalized so that those voices from outside you that say, “You are not worthy,” become that voice within you which says, “You are not worthy. You are faulty. You are in error.”

We suggest to both the one known as V and the one known as Carla that whenever you find yourselves speaking to yourself in tones that have internalized this judgment of the self, that you—verbally, consciously, and out loud—correct the statement. If you say, “Oh V, you are so stupid! You forgot the phone call,” stop right there, my sister! For you have the work of the refining fire.

For you are not stupid. You are a woman with a faulty memory. That does not make you unworthy. It makes you a woman with faulty memory. Pick yourself up, as the song says, dust yourself off, and say to yourself, “You are worthy. You are perfect. Now, what shall we do about the late phone call? Let us correct that error. Let us move onward. Everything is okay. All is well.” It is much more important for you to achieve that feeling of self-worth within yourself than to worry or fret because you have forgotten a telephone call.

This instrument also has faulty memory and this instrument and the one known as Vara were laughing together at that fact when they realized that the time for the call had come and gone ¹ and perhaps it would be necessary to call the one known as V and create the contact in that way. And the one known as Vara said to the one known as Carla, “You wouldn’t know anything about faulty memory, now would you?” And both entities laughed heartily, for indeed the one known as Carla has terrible memory and has created innumerable occasions where she has inconvenienced not only the one known as Vara but all of those within her vicinity.

The circumstances of the present moment are neither positive nor negative. They are the perfect conditions for the evolution of your spirit at this time. What is the goal that you may pursue in the knowledge that you are doing the very best that you can so that you may indeed feel, in a very legitimate and rightful sense, that self-worth and peace of mind that you so crave? It is to realize that your job at this time is to be present with yourself, to encourage and support yourself.

This is the time within your life where you are collecting all the loose ends of self up. You are having the opportunity to love all of them and accept all of them as parts of yourself. If you look at yourself with judgment you shall cut up your peace and you shall be forever in a state of distress and sorrow. If, on the other hand, you start from a standpoint of absolute faith and the point of view that all is as it should be and all is well, then each thing that occurs to you can be looked at with an eye to examining how that makes you feel and what messages you are offering to yourself because of those emotions. And then you are able to examine those emotions to see if you are judging or loving yourself.

[Side one of tape ends.]

You will then be able to deal with each thing that occurs to you from the standpoint of acceptance and the encouragement of those processes through which one goes when one is examining a situation with an eye to solving any problems that the situation has brought up and then, at a deeper level, with an eye to collecting, within the self, the full harvest of information gained from the examination of those emotions and feelings that have been brought up by any given point of difficulty.

Many things will fall away during each part of an incarnation. The refining fire removes the waste of unneeded material. That which is not needed does fall away. That which remains is gold.

Lastly, before we open this session to further questions, we would like to take a look at what gold you contain and what treasure you have within you. As we said at the beginning of this conversation, the ore within you or the self within you that you brought into incarnation is huge, much greater than can be imagined in terms of a personality or a human selfhood. You, and all sparks of the Creator, are a portion of the one infinite Creator.

You are a Creator, furthermore, who, though very imperfect in its realization of itself as Creator, has hands and a voice with which you can reach out and make a change in the environment and in which you speak up and express truth as you see it in this environment of mirrors and illusions that is consensus reality. You can be, therefore, the hands and the voice of the one infinite Creator.

The gold that is in you is your deepest self and as you have moved through many transformations in your life already, you have perhaps noticed that as things fall away from you and as you mature, you have become less and less a creature of personality and more and more a creature of the open heart, a creature whose selfhood is not bounded by what she does, what she wears, and where she goes, but who she is.

This is the part of your incarnation where you are most directly in contact with the ultimate question of, “Who am I?” If you identify yourself with the slag and the waste products of evolution, you shall stay with your body, your personality, and your former habit and you shall be mourning and grieving for your loss.

If, on the other hand, you have the fearlessness to embrace the changes that have taken place within your body, you may see that they are in their way a gift that lets you see more deeply into who you truly are.

What is the true nature of V? What manner of being is she? Recently, an acquaintance of this instrument said to her, “I have always thought I was a physical person having a spiritual experience. I am now, at last, coming to realize that I am a spiritual person having a physical experience.” The shift from the self as a person, a wife, a mother, and so forth, to realization of the self as a part of the infinite Creator is a huge shift. Further, it is a shift from doing to being.

When this instrument, for some three years, was unable to sit up in her bed, or to work in any way, the emotions that this raised within her breast were most bitter. In order to work with this catalyst, this instrument did something which we would encourage you to attempt to do also. She put in front of her eyes, where she could not fail to see it, some personally meaningful language. She made herself two signs. One sign read, simply, “Faith: The Final Frontier.” The other sign was a quotation from the letters of St Paul. The quotation read, “For if we live, we live in Christ, and if we die, we die in Christ. Whether we live or die, therefore, we are in Christ, and Christ, is in us.” When everything was taken from this instrument except being, after many tears and sessions of hopelessness and helplessness, this instrument finally emptied herself of all self-pity and any judgment whatsoever and applied herself to the business of being empty.

And what she found when she was truly empty was that angelic hosts were around her. The holy spirit was with her. And light poured into that empty cup so that she lay there on her bed, glowing and vibrating with joy. She had nothing to do but be that which she believed was her deepest self and she found that deepest self in her open heart and in her desire to follow Jesus the Christ in living the life of absolute faith.

Faith is the final frontier. When you lay hold on that faith, even though you have had to leap into the abyss of not knowing in order to lay hold upon it, you will find, my sister, that you are firmly supported in the mid-air of not knowing. Those energies that you cannot see are with you. Angels are all around you and all they wish to do is love and support you. You are loved and you are most worthy to do this work.

We also are with you. You have only to ask for those of Q’uo, mentally, in your meditations, and we shall be with you to strengthen your meditation and lend you the stability of our belief in you as worthy, beautiful and perfect. For we see you as you truly are: a child of the one Creator, a portion of the creative principle, and a giver of tremendous gifts in all that you are.

This instrument is requesting of us that we open this session to any further questions [you may have] at this time. My sister, do you have a further question at this time?

V

I don’t think I do. I’ve never felt so full of love like this before, I feel really tearful, because it was just perfect. I just look forward to having the tape and being able to go through it all and I feel really blessed. I don’t, I think ,have anything to say but thank you.

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo and are aware of your statement, my sister. And we feel similarly blessed in sharing this time and this space with you. We are those of Q’uo. And we leave you in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator. Adonai, my sister, Adonai.

V

Thank you so much.