January 7, 2007

(Carla channeling)

Q’uo

We are those known to you as the principle of Q’uo. Greetings in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator, in Whose service we come to your circle of seeking this day.

We thank you for taking the time and the energy to create a circle of seeking. We thank you for calling us to share our thoughts with you. It is a great blessing and privilege and it fills our heart with joy to be asked to offer our opinions on the subject of the effect on service of attitudes such as pride and doubt.

We, as always, first, however, would request for all of those listening to these words or reading them, that you be aware of how powerful a person that you are. You are the only person capable of distinguishing for yourself between those things that are useful for you in your spiritual process and those things that are not useful for you at this time, no matter how sensible they may be or how well they sound.

You are the guardian of the temple of your process. Please guard well our thoughts as they come to you. If they resonate then by all means take them and use them as you can. If they do not resonate please do not attempt to make use of them but simply lay them aside and move on. We thank you for this consideration for it will enable us to speak without being concerned that we might infringe upon your free will or impede the directness of your progress.

We thank the one known as R for this query. In order to respond to the question about the effect of attitude on service, we must take many steps backwards from the specificity of that question. For such a question begins with the deepest question of all philosophical questions, “Who am I?”

Who are you, my friends? Are you the entity that thinks? Are you the entity that sits in a chair in this room, has clothes on, looks a certain way and has come to this moment of pondering with a personality, a history, and an incarnation’s worth of memory?

Are you the roles that you play? Are you the things that you say?

The one known as D pointed out that in the metaphysical world, our thoughts are things, so that that which you do in the world is not at all, metaphysically speaking, the whole of [who] you are, when you have thought upon thought upon thought that has been generated by you, followed by you, and either dropped or used as a tool for transformation or cyclical worry.

Who are you? Who are we? My friends, you know that we are messengers of unconditional love. Our message is not that we come to you in love but that we and you are love. Because we are all one. So your question is asked against our background of being aware that all of us are one interacting, interpenetrating union of various foci or points which the Creator may use to observe, to process, and to harvest experience. Therefore, when you serve another, you are serving yourself.

However, in a sense of being able to use that information to work spiritually, we realize that there needs to be more discussion. And so we move a step closer to the question and talk about you and those with whom you interact. We have just noted that you and all others are part of a unitary creation. However, as with all good spiritual principles, there is a paradox involved. That paradox is that each of you exists in his own universe. You are the Creator of that inner universe.

Therefore, it is as if you were a sun, radiant and unimaginably full of the love and the light of the one infinite Creator. Others are also suns with their own radiance and effulgence. ¹ Between you, just as there seems to be a great distance between suns, there is a great distance, shall we say, a sea of in-between.

Each who is incarnated in a physical body such as you are is deeply aware of that great water of otherness that seems to exist between one person and another. While it is true that all of this “otherness” is an illusion, nevertheless it is also true that the sense of being different from the rest of creation was carefully set up for you in order to create an atmosphere in which you could do spiritual work.

The Creator has attempted creations in which each entity in third density was aware of the truth of unity. It was discovered that in this atmosphere of being completely aware of who they were, entities were not motivated to seek further. The veiling of this awareness of the unitary nature of all creation was discovered to be an improvement on the design of, shall we say, the schoolroom of third density.

Your particular creation, then, is a creation in which you are veiled from that stunning awareness of your identity with all that exists. And it is as though you live in a body which is a barrier or a defense and certainly a limitation and a demarcation between you and the rest of the world.

When you come into contact with other people, it is as though those two stars become two ships that are sailing closer and closer together. Naturally, they do not wish to run into each other. They navigate around each other with some care.

There is that within each which yearns, however, to come into right relationship with others. There is a deep desire to find harmony, peace, relaxation and mutual affection when you reach out to another person.

How you think about yourself does impact the way that other people see you in a subconscious manner. This is because actions speak louder than words. Your body language, your gestures, your speech, the expression on your face, the look in your eye, all come across to other people in ways you cannot imagine looking in the mirror.

You do not see the self that others see when they look at you. You shall never know how beautiful some people think you are and hopefully you shall never know how unattractive others think you are. You are encased in your own opinion of yourself and while others’ opinions of you may batter against that bastion, they cannot bring it down. What you think about yourself is what is in your creation and in your universe.

There is a moment in the seeker’s life when the seeker chooses his way of life. When that moment comes—and, indeed, for many entities upon the surface of your planet at this time, that moment has not yet come and may not come at all—something changes about the way you see yourself. When you decide you wish to be of service to others and you wish to polarize in that sense, you create an expectation, a hope, and a goal.

Naturally, you cannot imagine precisely what being of service to others will entail. But you set your intention. And with that intention your ship has now formed a rudder. Your star has now formed its orbit. You have created in your universe a Pole Star ² of hope.

This creates, metaphysically speaking, a passage from the spiritually immature person to the spiritually mature person. This is not to say that there is not always work to do in ripening the fruit of self but that until you take yourself seriously enough to make that life decision to offer all that you are in service to others, metaphysically speaking, you have not yet awakened from the dream of incarnation.

When you have taken yourself that seriously and dedicated yourself that completely to the hope of being love within the world that you experience at this time, you become a magical entity. You know who you are to a greater extent than anyone could who has not yet come to the point of making that choice.

As you go about your life after that point, there may be no obvious difference in the services that you render to others. Nevertheless, to you there is a difference! There is a profound difference in that you have taken responsibility to seek resources and materials that will help you to investigate how to be of service and how to be of service more skillfully.

So, in a way, you put yourself under the gun. We use that idiomatic expression because in a way the decision to be of service to others is like the starting gun of a race. It is a marathon. It is more than a marathon. It is a lifetime. And you seek to move steadily, running a “straight race with God’s good grace,” as this instrument’s hymn has it.

This same hymn brings us to our next point. The next words of that particular poem are, “Lift up thine eyes and seek His face.” ³ You are under grace, my friends, when you choose to be of service. A tremendous amount of help surrounds you in that choice. Grace abounds, for when you choose to love, you choose to express the nature of the creation and the Creator. Your choice is in direct alignment with the truth, that truth that is such a great mystery that no one has ever been able to articulate it.

When you lift up from gazing at your own thoughts, your own processes, and the details of your conscious existence, you lift yourself into a goodly company. You lift yourself to a level of concept.

Now let us look at that a moment. Selfhood is in itself a concept and you are asking about this concept when you ask about how attitude can change your service. Lifting up from the concept of self is not looking away from the self, it is seeking a deeper and more informative and helpful kind of awareness of what that self is.

So, as a servant of the light who wishes to serve others, you have a dual awareness of self in that a part of yourself is aware that you are one with all with whom you interact.

The other part of yourself is self-conscious, self-aware and self-bounded by the limits of the thoughts within the brain, the shape of the body, and the shape of the concept of the physical self that you have.

Both of these concepts of self are useful and accurate and you play with them your whole life long. For, when you are moving out the front door to get the paper in the morning, you are moving not only as love itself, incarnated in physical form, you are also moving as a sleepy human who is noticing the weather and the state of the morning and so forth as the paper is fetched from the mailbox. You are at the same time sublime and endlessly and tediously detailed and worldly.

Letting those two concepts of self harmonize themselves is an art. And we encourage you always to make room for the sleepy one who is going out and fetching the morning paper to see the news of the day. As you progress spiritually, do not scorn the everyday and the ordinary. For those are moments of sacredness also.

Indeed, our answer is couched in the concept of allowing the self to become aware, slowly and gradually, of the depth and the richness of your own self. Not shunning or eschewing any part of the self, any part of the veneer of civilization and culture, or the slightly deeper natures of race and teaching and culture. Never shunning sexual differences, but embracing them and acknowledging them. You incarnated just as you are for good reasons. Do not turn your back upon them but appreciate them and see what they have to give you in order to help you be of service to others.

Service to others can be seen to consist of two parts, simplistically speaking. That is, the service you intend to give and the service that you give. In addition to those two parts, there is a third part which is entirely private and important only to yourself.

The service that you intend to give is in line with your decision to be of service to others in the first place. You have set your intention for your lifetime in that cornerstone decision. Each time that you repeat that decision in choosing consciously to be of service to another, you are doubling your polarity. You are creating a more and more powerful self, a self more and more capable of achieving changes in consciousness at will.

You are becoming a magician in the most high sense of that word. You have left your mailbox and your home town behind and you are relating directly to the star of hope. How glorious and how beautiful that upliftment is as we see you repeatedly attempting to set your intention and to serve. Those intentions cannot be taken away. What happens in the world “out there,” shall we say, is of no consequence, in terms of what is happening metaphysically.

Service to others’ second part, shall we say, is the service itself. When you serve another person it is as if you gave a gift. You cannot help but wrap that gift in a certain kind of paper with a certain kind of ribbon and a certain kind of bow. You are who you are. Your gifts are generally wrapped in biases that constitute the wrapping of the present. That person’s reaction to the package will, to some extent, affect his use of the present itself.

We do not say this so that you will be concerned about it. We say this so that you will understand that you are not responsible for the way people take what you offer with a pure and good heart. You are responsible only for the offering and for crafting that offering to be as beautiful as possible.

When you have given that service, whether it be a word, a gesture, a gift of money, a gift of time and attention, or whatever your service to others is, it is completely out of your hands. Your baby has left the dwelling place, never to return. And in someone else’s universe, a gift has been given.

What that entity does with your gift is of no concern to you. Many, many times that which you intend occurs, and there is rejoicing between the two of you. Many other times, my friends, your gifts will not be recognized for what they are. They will be trampled into the dust. They will be taken for the opposite of which you intended. Or any other number of things may occur to that gift.

You have to let that be all right. You cannot be chasing after your service to others and shaping it up, altering a bit here and spiffing up there. You must let it go.

If you find resistance to your gift, we suggest that you study that, sit with that, as the one known as R said earlier. Allow that to be part of your awareness as you ask yourself, “How may I better serve?”

That third and inward part of service to others has to do with the attitudes with which you approach service. As long as you remain within your personality shell, you will always be second-guessing your service. You will always, according to your nature, either be concerned that it was not enough or proud of yourself because you have done such a good job of serving others.

This has little to no impact on the service itself. The service itself has been moved into another entity’s creation. You cannot affect your service by doubting yourself. The service continues unimpeded. You cannot affect the service that you give by being proud of it.

However, everything, my friends, is grist for the mill, including the thoughts that you have about what you do, what you think, and what you say. In the intellectual reaches of your creation, you can chase your tail in an endless number of ways. You can doubt yourself, congratulate yourself, feel guilty, wonder if you could have done better and any number of other emotions, thoughts and feelings which, in turn, become that at which you are now looking.

If you simply continue to watch yourself think and become conscious of the process, you shall eventually achieve realization. We always encourage each to spend time in the silence and to sink down into that silence to receive its riches.

Part of the sinking down into the silence is letting go of your self-concept. With us now, visualize yourself, each of you, in a small room. It is bare, monk-like, and yet when you go to that room, you are happy. For it is the room where you pray and ask. It is the room in which you are fed in that muscular silence of the inner heart. Kneel down upon that bare floor and remove from yourself the concept that you have of who you are. Take it down, my friends. Take every concept away and just allow yourself to kneel before the love and the light of the one infinite Creator.

As you allow yourself—the concept of yourself—to melt away, you become an empty vessel, shaped to hold the love and the light that you find pouring into you in that inner room.

Who are you then, my friends?

When you have emptied yourself so that you can hold the gift of love and light, you are in the position of the one known as Jesus the Christ when he knelt down in the garden of Gethsemane and said, “Not my will but Thine be done.”

And when you rise up and go out again from that inner room, you will find the Earth a sparkling place, bursting with joy. You will sense the air humming around you as if to welcome you to the world.

And you will know who you are.

You will feel that livingness without the need to identify it, define it or describe it. Because you are no longer your personal self when you rise from your knees in that inner room. You are a very impersonal self, that self that all entities truly are beneath the many layers of self that have been taught, the poses that have been struck, and the decisions about details that have limited you this way and that until you have painted yourself into the corner of who you describe yourself as being.

You have burst free of all of that when you become the “I” that serves. And then, my friends, you do not have to wonder how you did. You do not have to doubt yourself and it will not occur to you to pat yourself upon the back.

You cannot stay within that state of mind on a continuing basis if you are like most of those upon your planet. And you are not intended to stay there. For you have work to do that you gave yourself to do, that did not have to do with service to others as much as it had to do with growing your own mature balance of self.

Balance is a very helpful word when it comes to attempting to envision and focus your energies and spend them wisely. There is always a dynamic balance that is going on in your life, no matter what issue you take up. Look for the balance, not for the right or the wrong. Look for the resonance and the sense of deep confidence within that says, “Yes, this is where I should be. This is how I wish to serve. This is my best environment.”

When you feel that you are in the right place at the right time, then there is a relaxation within you.

[Side one of tape ends.]

(Carla channeling)

And you do not strain or stretch in the space which the world has for you. You have made your space by identifying yourself as the “I” that serves. Take your Christhood upon you. Wear it well. Wear it humbly. Wear it proudly. You shall serve, my friends, with excellence.

We are aware that we have but scratched the surface of this topic and yet we are also aware that this instrument is suggesting to us that we move on, and we would ask at this time if there are further questions that you have or a follow-up to the query that has already been asked. We are those of Q’uo.

S

If you wish to serve with unconditional love and yet seemingly those around you do not wish what you have to offer, where do you go with that?

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and we believe we understand your query, my brother. We said earlier through this instrument that when you have offered a service, it is no longer your own. This is a harsh truth sometimes, because sometimes your offering falls upon stony ground.

This has nothing to do with your offering, my brother. For that which you have offered with a full heart and a pure intention is as it is. It cannot be scorned or taken down in the world of concept and metaphysical truth, although in the illusory world which you call consensus reality there is no guarantee that anyone will ever understand any gift that you may give.

We believe that this is the kind of situation about which the one known as Jesus the Christ was attempting to talk when he was speaking of the blessings of being poor in mind, of being in grief, of crying, of being in so many difficult situations and yet before every description of a sad situation—sad seeming to the world—the one known as Jesus said, “Blessed are those… “ We believe that the one that meets your needs at this time is, “Blessed are the meek in heart, for they shall inherit the Earth.”

The blessing of not being understood or accepted for precisely who you are is that it moves you to a deeper place where you offer that self to the lover of your soul that is the infinite Creator. In your grief, there is a beauty that is unmistakable. And all we can suggest to you, my brother, at this time is that you focus on the blessing of this situation and allow it to sweeten you as it humbles you.

Out of that humility and sweetness come the sprouts of new hope, new life, new energies to meet, new loves to greet.

May we answer you further, my brother?

S

No, thank you for that.

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and we thank you as well, my brother. May we ask if there is another query at this time? We are those of Q’uo.

T

Yes, I would like to ask a question. We spoke earlier of meditation and the difficulties of sitting in meditation and finding the time or just going and doing it and I have been working with programming before I go to sleep at night with thoughts that I want to explore or just various things. I guess that I would like to have some comment on the efficacy of doing that. I feel it’s beneficial but I would just like to have some comment on that if you would please.

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and believe we understand your query, my brother. It may seem an unspiritual thing to say, but in truth, a good deal of what is processed through your instrument as a spiritual seeker is much like work on the computer. There is programming involved. You have a set of defaults, in general, in your life. You were born with some of them. Others of them were taught to you by those who wanted to tell you who you are. This constitutes the original programming for the kind of query the one known as R was asking earlier, about how does your attitude affect the service.

When you ask yourself to program for a certain intention before you get to bed at night, you are overriding the original programming and making it your own. This is an excellent thing. As you set your intention, then, set your intention truly, mean it sincerely, ask it humbly, and release it.

Now, it is very important that you release it. Because it will grow if you allow it to grow. That programming alerts other programming deep in your bio-computer, shall we say, programming having to do with accepting help and becoming more sensitive and attentive to guidance. And as you continue to move along one line of intention, you are accelerating the rate of your spiritual growth greatly.

To balance the excellence of this we would simply offer you the corresponding and balancing dynamic to all intentions to accelerate the pace of your spiritual growth. That is, that the more skillfully you program yourself for opening up to transformation, the more change will seem to occur in your life. Change is often very difficult to process. And so you may feel, if you contemplate this, that you have done yourself a disservice. This is not true. You have simply asked of yourself that you move more quickly than the earthly part of you might perhaps feel comfortable in moving.

So, as you move into doing this programming before sleep as a steady and stable practice you may well find that various things in your life seem to jump up at you and say, “I am a problem. I need to be dealt with.” Yes, you have asked this of yourself! These are the little ten-minutes quizzes you get when you are in the midst of transformation. This does not mean that it is not a good idea to do what you were doing, it is simply that it is well to mention that there is a corresponding dynamic when you are being the most successful, shall we say, at becoming more what you would wish to be, in that each effort in that direction is balanced by the challenges or catalyst that will appear in just such a shape and form as to be sure that you meant what you said.

May we answer you further, my brother?

T

No, thank you.

Q’uo

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

Jim

The instrument is attempting to write articles to explain the archetypes to people who would like to study them. What would be the philosophy concerning archetypes that would be the most important to get across?

Q’uo

We are those of Q’uo, and are aware of your query, my sister. In this effort, my sister, your art, pallid though it may be, is the art that must be used; your words, inefficacious that they may be, must be the words used. As you are attempting to learn how to teach and as this information is very active in your life at this time, we cannot infringe upon your free will be attempting to make decisions for you.

We know that you understand and that you were aware that this may be the outcome of such a question. We may, however, share with you our encouragement and encourage you further to relax your mind and to pray before you begin to write each day. There are times that you have forgotten to do this, my sister. Do not forget it. Opening to that guidance is doing a good deal more than you can possibly imagine.

You have an excellent mind, as do many artists. And yet the burden that you wish to sing is beyond your instrument, as it is beyond all human instruments. Therefore, open yourself to the inspiration and the intuition that come from that movement towards prayer, that movement towards the asking, “How may I serve?”

At this time, we would take our leave of this instrument and this group, with great regrets, we must say, for we have greatly enjoyed your company. Your beauty astounds us. The sacred space you have built together houses us too. Thank you.

We leave you in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator. We are known to you as the principle of Q’uo. Adonai. Adonai. Love and light. Light and love.