November 19, 2006

(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, in whose service we come to you this day.

It is a delight to be called to your circle of seeking and we are most glad to share our humble thoughts with you concerning the dynamics between the personality and the soul or spiritual essence.

As always, however, we would preface our remarks by the request that you not take them too seriously. We offer our opinions hoping that they will be of use to you. We cannot know what of our thoughts will prove useful to you and what of our thoughts will not prove of any use at this time. We would ask of you to use your discrimination and carefully and consciously select those thoughts that you wish to follow up, using those thoughts as resources. We would ask that you forget all of those thoughts with which you have not specifically felt resonance. In this way we would have the opportunity to speak freely without being concerned that we shall in some way infringe upon your free will and the rhythm of your spiritual process. We thank you for this consideration.

Perhaps you have seen a type of mollusk that creates a shell that is called the chambered nautilus. The animal that creates this shell first creates one shell which is in the nature of a scoop or an amphitheater. As it lives and gains in time and experience it gradually creates a second, larger amphitheater for itself. As this sea creature matures and gains in age, it creates house after house after house, always spiraling into a larger area, always creating a vaster domain, always bringing the self into a more spacious point of view or range of view.

The personality, as you have termed it, can be seen to be this kind of being. It must have a house. It must create and form and erect and maintain a façade of some kind. That is the nature of what you call the personality.

Now let us talk a bit about the personality. In its own way, your essence has a personality. There is a flavor to the vibrations that are uniquely your own. However, this flavoring of sweetness and spice is extraneous to the basic vibration of your being. In contrast to your personality on Planet Earth—that is, your earthly personality—your soul essence does not have that kind of personality.

For the moment we are focusing on the personality because, as the one known as Jim said in his query, one must deal with this concept, this perception of a dynamic between the personality and the soul, with the personality itself as a conscious being, in a third-density physical vehicle, living a life on Planet Earth. The personality is that which gives voice even to the most deep and profound of spiritual truths.

Indeed, that is why artists, prophets, priests and other visionaries so often cry out in anguish. For they can feel and taste the truth, but to move it into words is more work than many can ever encompass. Therefore, one must work with the personality in order to aid the spiritual seeking of the self.

One cannot simply work within silence and allow that to be the spiritual practice. There needs to be a structure of thought that is able to hold and order the concerns of the lifetime. The house or chamber of the nautilus that you are born with is a small house. Its structures are simple. When you are a very small child you gain the concept of “me” and “mine” and the nurturer and the one who is loved and the one who loves you. These are very simple structures, but they are very meaningful.

You barely begin to realize that there are other entities in the world—until you are first told to share. That is perhaps the beginning of your career of one who grows on Planet Earth. For that concept of someone else to whom you are kind makes a shift and a change in consciousness that moves you to a larger house, to a larger point of view.

Throughout your life then, cyclically, when you have prepared to move house, spiritually, emotionally, and mentally speaking, you shall find yourself in a more spacious palace and a more panoramic view shall be yours as well. Such houses are not built of nothing. In the case of the personality upon Planet Earth, the move from a smaller to a larger house, a smaller to a larger point of view is costly. You pay the price in whatever suffering you do as you work on what you conceive of as your spiritual process. You also work upon it with every consciously received moment of thanksgiving and joy.

This instrument has said to herself and others many times that if she can focus on giving thanksgiving and praise for what is happening, she finds there is less of the difficult work to do that seems to involve suffering, either mental, emotional, spiritual or physical.

The pressure to grow is indelibly etched into your very essence. You are, by your very nature, a life form in the midst of an evolutionary process. You may dig in your heels and attempt to resist growing and you will slow the rate of growth, but you cannot stop growing.

What entities can do, and often choose to do, being unaware of a spiritual dimension to their lives, is attempt to remain as deeply asleep as possible, softening the blows of life with pleasure, distraction and sleep. We are not speaking to those who wish to sleep. Therefore, we sympathize with you! For you are awake; you cannot go back to sleep. You truly do wish to grow and you truly are weary at times of the amount of suffering that seems to be involved.

And the catalyst, as the one known as C, as the one known as Carla, and as the one known as Jim all said, does not stop simply because you become aware that it is catalyst. You do the work of becoming grateful for the good catalyst and thankful for the good work to do. You can only manipulate your true feelings so far.

This instrument was speaking earlier, for instance, of how she must remove from her consciousness all of the details of her present moment before she can come to that formless awareness of self that is the real self, the consciousness that is shared with the infinite Creator and with all the forces of love and light within her world.

It is possible to become that emptied, open vessel, but it takes work. It takes a deliberate and ruthless willingness to release pain and, more than that, to release the resentment that grows up around having to feel the pain. We realize that we are talking to a wide range of entities. For some of you, the pain is emotional. For some of you the pain is physical. And for some the pain is spiritual. In all cases there is a mixture of each, but always there is an emphasis on one of those three.

Whatever the kind of suffering that you are experiencing, it has the same function within the growth processes of your soul. It is designed, as the one known as C said, to target specific issues which you came into this incarnation fairly determined to balance. You had to give up the memory of all this good planning, so the actual agenda of your life only comes to you little by little unless you are very lucky and it strikes you all at once.

If you receive a whole vision like that, almost nothing can stop you. But for most entities, the vision is acquired slowly and in stages. And there is a lot of self-doubt. There is the wondering if you are on the right track. Could you be doing something better? Could you be doing something else? Could you be more honest with yourself? And so forth and so on. [These are] questions that are good to ask, questions that are needful to ask, but questions that distract you from the process of letting faith be your keel and hope your rudder.

You can only go so far with your chamber, given that we continue to use the image of the chambered nautilus. The most marvelously expansive palace with the widest point of view possible will give to you everything right up to the limit of the rational and the known. You will look upon physical things from this personality shell. You will see stars, but they will not live. You will hear the wind, but you will not hear it speaking to you. You are trapped, as a personality, in a world of thought and form.

You cannot see that the forms and the thoughts are common to you all. You cannot see beyond the uniqueness of your body and its obviously physical separation from all other bodies. You cannot see the dance of your auras as they dance upon each other and form harmonics and combinations of woven color that are quite remarkable in their beauty.

You cannot see all of the entities of Earth—the flowers, the trees, the animals, the water, all the elements with their characteristic vibrations and their characteristic auras, all merging and flowing in and out of each other in an endless harmony and a beautiful symphony. That is the limitation of that entity that you are when you use the word, “I.”

You moved into incarnation in this very limited physical vehicle with its very limited instincts and mentality because you as a soul had work to do. It may well help, when you are in the midst of suffering, to remember and validate for yourself the simple fact that you chose the work you are about now in the world. You wanted it very much. You wanted the opportunity badly. Not only did you want to help others, you wanted to work on your vibration.

Some of you felt that you were overbalanced toward love and tended towards becoming martyrs rather than applying the wisdom that balances martyrdom and creates of it continued life and continued teaching and an expansion of possibilities.

Some of you came into this incarnation with the opinion that you had far too much wisdom and that it was keeping you from coming into the full openness of heart that you truly wished for yourself. From whichever dynamic you are approaching balance, you will be drawn to certain lessons. Those who wish to gain wisdom will be offered opportunities to use wisdom. Those of you who wish to become openhearted will find those themes of catalytic event occurring again and again that challenge you to open your heart at the expense of rationality and the perceived wisdom.

Realize that when you do this work, your responsibility is to form an intention and to offer it up to the spirit within you. There is much that is hidden in mystery about your guidance. Do not attempt, then, to reason out these moments of suffering and learning. Certainly, apply the wisdom of analysis as you wish. But realize always that skillful work with the personality involves moving back into the silence, allowing the personality to fall away, becoming empty, as this instrument was talking about doing earlier, and receiving in that silence things that are and will remain a mystery but which will, nevertheless, create for you the possibilities of new structure, a larger home, a more capacious and compassionate personality.

We would say, “No,” to the question would we suggest for you to lose the personality. You do not wish to lose the personality, although as various parts of it fall away naturally, it is a wonderfully freeing experience. Your personality is a perfectly good structure. You are, however, working to refine your personality.

Now the word “refine” means to purify, and it calls up images of the fiery furnace and being reduced to your liquid components of this metal, that metal, and so forth, and the dross being drained off and the good part being made into some fine steel or creating something metallic. Yours is not that kind of refinery. If you will notice your physical vehicle, it is a chemical refinery. It takes in raw foods. It uses the good, and it excretes the waste.

It may help you to think of your mental and emotional appetites in the same way. You’re going to be eating a lot of raw food when it comes to food as experience. It will hit you sometimes like a French au cuisine dinner, sometimes like an unfortunate trip to a greasy burger place, and sometimes somewhere in between.

Some of the experiences that you receive will be sweet to your tongue and delicious to process—your lover’s touch, the cry of your baby, those wonderful times when you see the beauty of the moment in the sunshine and shadow. Treasure and store up those moments of pure awareness.

The kind of refinery you are as a soul is one who takes all that hits the self in the present moment and gazes at it with an eye to response. If you are too quick to respond, then you have quickly used up that opportunity. If the response is not complete or well thought out, or on the level you would have preferred if you thought about it further, then you have minimized the effectiveness of this particular catalyst.

Consequently, in terms of dealing with difficult catalyst, it is helpful that you become aware of your resistance to it. It is understandable for you to resist by instinct anything that will make you uncomfortable. Whether it is a physical discomfort because of a physical condition or an emotional discomfort because of a difficult relationship, the discomfort is there and the instinct of your physical vehicle with its intellect is to resist it.

You wish either to change it or to eliminate it. The last thing you want to do is accept it, appreciate it, bless it, and use it. Yet for those who have the presence of mind to go through that process of separating the self from the immediacy of the catalyst and becoming that self that is aware of the catalyst and wishes to choose how to respond, such catalyst can begin to be seen as the gift that it truly is.

It is the work of a lifetime to learn not to resist seemingly difficult catalyst. Yet as each of you has at times discovered, when you release all resistance and embrace the situation your environment lightens as if dawn had just broken on a new day. You are able to say, “All right, I see this and I welcome it. Help me learn how to receive this gift. Help me to have insight into its purpose in my life. Help me to look in the mirror of this discomfort and see the face of the infinite Creator.”

We believe that this is a good stopping place for this particular topic and we would, at this time, ask if there are other queries that this group may have. We are those of Q’uo.

[No further queries.]

We are those of Q’uo. As we seem to have exhausted the questions in this group at this time, we shall thank you once again for calling us to your circle and for allowing us the privilege of sharing your vibrations. We leave you in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator. We are those known to you as the principle of Q’uo. Adonai. Adonai.