The question this week, Q’uo, has to do with whether or not it is possible to learn from somebody else’s experience and wisdom through listening, or if real learning only takes place through experiencing what it is you are learning for yourself. Could you speak to this topic, please?
(Carla channeling)
Q’uo
We are those known to you as the principle of Q’uo. Greetings, my friends, in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator, in whose service we come to you this evening.
We thank you for the privilege of being called to your circle of seeking and we are delighted to join your session of working and to speak with you concerning the nature of learning and spiritual learning in particular. However, as always, we would request that each of you, in listening to or reading these words, retain to yourself the ability to discern and discriminate between those thoughts of ours that are helpful to you at that time and resonate to you, and those thoughts that do not hit the mark. We ask that you take what is good and leave the rest behind. If you will do that, we will then feel comfortable in sharing our opinions with you. We thank you for this consideration.
We gaze upon your query as to whether it is possible to learn from another’s wisdom or whether it is only possible to learn from direct experience and we find, as we often do in responding to your queries, that we shall need to create some context for that question.
You are souls within incarnation and consequently you have the mind with which you were born, the intellect, the logical, calculating decision-making instrument that is excellent and useful.
You also have consciousness. You may think of consciousness as the mind of the heart. We shall, therefore, discuss these two faculties of your mind, the mind that is the intellect and the mind of the heart, in a way that distinguishes what kind of learning is possible for each.
Your intellect is very characteristic of your individuality. As you move through your incarnation you shall occasionally find those whose minds work like yours, whose logic circuitry is compatible with your own. There is great blessing in that kind of intellectual companionship. Each mind is unique. To one young child coming upon the concept of numbers for the first time, the concept would remain flat and uninteresting. Therefore, when a teacher came to teach such an entity how to add, such a child would need physically to grasp two apples and to place two more apples beside them and then count, one, two, three, four. And only in that wise would such a child comprehend the fact of the possibility of addition and subtraction, multiplication and division.
To another child, perhaps one with exactly the same intelligence quotient, the first brush with the concept of numbers would be enough for the numbers to come alive and to have presence and shape. There would then be the opening of the vast portion of the mind that is not necessarily logical but contains many more ways of looking at things so that two and two would have the shape of four and four divided by two would have the shape of two. There would not be the reaching and the struggle for comprehension. It would seem to that particular child to be obvious.
In the same way, one child, shown the concept of letters making words, would have no feeling for the exercise and would struggle to sound out words and to read. Another child, whose mind was shaped differently, when introduced to the concept of letters making words, would hungrily drink in every piece of information, because the thirst for words, the appreciation for the texture and shape of words, is part of that particular child’s mind’s shape.
Dealing only with the intellect, then, we would answer your query by saying that an intellectual appreciation amounting to knowledge is quite possible to assimilate. However, the content of such assimilation will be different for each soul in incarnation. Not everyone came into life with the same set of characteristics. Each soul in incarnation packs its bag of characteristics, gifts, biases, distortions, challenges and relationships. Each chooses sometimes profoundly different arrays of these items.
[This is so because] there is the carefully conceived and patiently developed plan for incarnation which each soul has created in cooperation with his higher self before the incarnation begins. There are incarnational themes for learning, there are those clusters of gifts that would suggest to each soul the direction and likely shape of his outer gifts to offer in service to others, and so forth.
Consequently, depending on one’s cluster of gifts, one soul shall be able to understand and use the knowledge learned about the self, the society, the world around that soul, the workings of the natural world, the principles of physics upon which things work and so forth, all very valid avenues of awareness and the accumulation of knowledge and the ability to use that knowledge.
Yet, for the entity who is serenely able to enter into and be excited about numbers does not necessarily mean that the same entity shall be able to light up with the excitement of ideas having to do with philosophy. And to a philosopher, the ability to draw, to sing, or to compose poetry may be utterly lacking.
So there is no universal way to ensure that each child will develop his intellect in the same way, given the same stimuli. The intellect will grow and learn and absorb according to the clusters of gifts with which that soul chose to come into incarnation.
Therefore, intellects are unique and each different from the other, yet equal in that each intellect is the whole of the universe available to that soul in incarnation at the level of the intellect.
You’ll notice that we have not discussed spiritual learning in talking of the intellect. It is possible for an intellectual mind to play with the ideas that are involved in spiritual evolution. However, it is not possible for the intellect to take hold of those ideas and live them, because the advantages of doing so are obvious to the intellect, but the ability to live the good ideas is lacking within the intellect.
We have said often to this group that the longest journey a spiritual seeker makes is the few inches from the mind to the heart. And in order to take hold upon the spiritual ideas that are offered by teacher, mentor, author or personality in the media, the mind of the heart must be engaged.
Many people believe that they are working with their hearts. However, it is not always the case that the heart will open and begin to speak. There is a dynamic between intellect and heart. Some souls within incarnation have a good deal of difficulty relinquishing the insistence upon making sense in logical terms at all times.
The heart’s mind, however, is consciousness. There is only one consciousness and all entities hold that consciousness in common. What varies is each individual’s ability to enter into consciousness and to allow consciousness to replace the intellect.
We do not suggest that it is a good idea to let consciousness live the life to the exclusion of the use of the intellect. The power of analysis is helpful. The ability of the eye and the ear and the senses to coordinate and bring one through motion and driving and all the physical things of life is valuable. You are not simply a soul in incarnation. You are a body in incarnation, and a mind in incarnation. And all those factors twine together to create the experience of an incarnation.
However, in terms of spiritual evolution, that is done almost completely within consciousness. The soul who has chosen to be brought up in a family which practices a spiritual life, not simply that spiritual act of going to church or to synagogue or temple, but the spirituality of everyday, will have the best opportunity as a young person to live in consciousness as well as in the mind.
When a child sees mother and father in prayer, in meditation, or volunteering to feed the homeless at the downtown mission, or building a house with other loving entities so that a homeless family can be sheltered, [he] will have the experience of living in consciousness because he is imitating the behavior of his parents. There is a great emptiness in those children that are brought up without reference to things of the spirit on a daily basis.
Another great teacher of consciousness is solitude in nature. Nature is a great teacher and a great opener of the heart. There is no need to sort and classify that which is experienced in nature. There is no need to speak of the characteristics and the Latinate names of a certain butterfly or a certain tree. There is the taking in of the spiritual food of the experience of earth, wind, fire and water. There is the companionship of tree and toad, rabbit and fox. And all of those companions open up and develop consciousness.
If a soul within incarnation has not had those early advantages, then as they awaken they shall need to find, within the pages of books or in the wisdom of a beloved teacher or mentor or in some such resource, the door into the opening of consciousness.
When a mentor is strong enough in faith, and the student of that mentor develops sufficient devotion and trust in that mentor, he is able in that mentor’s presence to open his consciousness in the same way as his teacher.
Those who follow the Buddha, Jesus, the Christ, Zoroaster, Allah and his prophet Mohammed—may his name be blessed—have an infinite advantage in that they can take a shortcut to a state of mind, that [state of] mind being consciousness, in which faith becomes natural.
The key to being able to absorb wisdom without the necessity of rough-and-tumble experience is that faith that is developed, not at first perhaps in the Creator or the creation or in the right outworking of a perfect plan, but faith in the teacher, the mentor, the guru. Because the guru lives in faith and expresses and acts by reason of faith, and the guru has become transparent to the faith that runs through him, so too the student, in trusting the teacher and entering into the teacher’s universe, becomes equally able to call upon the faculty of faith, for his consciousness has become congruent with the consciousness of his teacher.
In higher densities than this one, there is always this energy between student and teacher, teacher and student, each relationship making a dynamic whole, and such teaching then is sufficient and wisdom’s ways are learned along with deep compassion and unconditional love at the energetic level.
However, my friends, you at this time experience third density. And because of the fact that it is not at all obvious that there is, in addition to the intellect, the faculty of consciousness, many entities shall have to awaken because of things that occur in their lives that constitute great challenges and cause them trauma.
This is necessary because, unless the young heart has been softened by exposure to consciousness, the intellect forms a hard husk around consciousness, and in order for the consciousness within to awaken, that hard husk must be broken, and that is only done through trauma and suffering.
For many, it is at the end of great trauma that the light dawns, the heart opens, and the learning in a spiritual sense of the incarnation can begin. Just as the awn of wheat must be threshed so that the sweet kernel within can be harvested, so the recalcitrant intellect must be battered by deep emotion, pain and suffering, each experience, of course, unique to the person, in order that the consciousness within may finally be appreciated and encouraged by the self to flourish and thrive.
Where does faith come from, my friends? It is illogical to believe that all is well when it is quite obvious to the intellect that there are imperfections everywhere. Yet, no matter how clever the intellect is, its fruits tend to incline toward cynicism and doubt, negativity and fear, whereas the qualities of consciousness are the qualities of the one infinite Creator, whose essence and being is unconditional love.
Dwelling in consciousness, the entire experience of being a self in incarnation is transformed. The “I” of the intellect, with its choices and its chances and its cleverness, becomes the “I” of the heart, the “I” of Christ Consciousness, or the consciousness of love. And part of that very consciousness is faith.
Move, therefore, my friends into the precincts of faith when you are faced with the need to learn a spiritually oriented lesson, for usually such lessons come to you in darkness and in difficulty. There is the temptation at those times to move back into the relative safety of the intellect, where there is no paradox or mystery, but only a linear progression of things learned and things understood.
But if there is the wish to progress spiritually, cling to the consciousness that offers you the faculty of faith. For if you know that all is well, and that the divine plan for your incarnation is working perfectly, you can then take even the harshest circumstance and ask it for the gifts that it brings. You can cooperate with the shape of it, moving into it and towards it rather than away from it or around it. And in that cooperation, transformation occurs and the dark night of the soul yields to a glorious dawn, the sunrise of new peace, new power, new surety.
And if you are one who wishes to offer the gifts of consciousness to others, it depends not on the speeches. Rather, live that which you wish to teach and in your inarticulate being, bursting with love, there is that which shall speak to those whom you wish to aid. Do not be seduced by the cleverness of the intellect, because you shall never talk someone into the Kingdom of Heaven. Be consciousness, share consciousness, let silence grow with your relationship as it will. And trust that that which is within you, which is moving through you from the Creator, shall touch and teach in ways that are too deep for words but are ever so much more powerful.
We thank the ones known as Jim and J for this query and would ask if there is a follow-up to this query at this time. We are those of Q’uo.
Jim
Not for me, Q’uo.
Q’uo
We are those of Q’uo, and would ask if there is another query at this time. We are those of Q’uo.
[No further queries.]
We are those of Q’uo. The resounding silence within this circle of seeking indicates that we have exhausted the queries available to us for discussion at this time. We confess that we regret that there is no more opportunity to converse with each of you, for it is a privilege and a pleasure for us to interact with you. We thank you again for the opportunity to share our humble thoughts with you.
At this time we would leave this instrument and this group 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 vasu borragus.