Dear C,
Your letter is a bit of a challenge to me because I find that I need to discuss things that aren’t actually in this letter. I would appreciate it if you would allow me to comment on some things that may sound critical of you—they aren’t meant to be critical, they’re simply a sharing of my opinion which is based on my own experiences.
Anything that doesn’t sound right to you is obviously not your truth … just my opinion and my guidance and although it suits me and serves me it may not serve you because you will recognize your own truth and you do violence to yourself if you accept any other truth simply because you feel that person is an authority. They’re only an authority in your own creation and the way you make your peace with the Creator.
The type of fears and the type of courage and the type of character that you have is certainly no mistake and it’s unique to you, so with that caveat I shall plunge into considerations that lie behind the words on your page.
You say “It’s been five years now that I developed an interest in metaphysics and spiritualism … as a result of conflict with my church and my present studies and beliefs I was forced to resign.”
The crux of what I want to say has to do with “I was forced to resigned.”
This is undoubtedly the way it felt and does feel to you—that you were “forced to resign.” However, putting it that way clouds the issue of who you are, what you stand for and what service is. Primary to the grasp of your nature is the realization that you are actually a responsible infinite light being. No one can force you—that is the consciousness within your physical body, a separate entity from that physical body, to do anything. People can put you in prisons of words or bars or other limitations, illness and so forth, but they cannot tame or restrain one’s consciousness, one’s passion or one’s love.
It is well to look at the belief system that you were forced to leave, according to your words. To see the difference between belief and faith. If there is a dogmatic bone in your body it will hold you back. The more dogmatic and structured your experiences of the Creator are, the more systematic beliefs to which you hold, the less free your consciousness will be to act as a servant of the most high, not in a way that you personally feel is correct according to your beliefs, but in any way you see occurring in front of your face.
And this does not simply mean the job that you had before, it means anything in the world—it might mean washing the dishes, that is the service that the Creator would ask of you at this particular moment, what you need to do as you hear these words is to look up and see what’s in front of your face and ask the Creator “how may I love this situation—how may I heal this situation—in what way can I act according to your will, Lord, not my will but thine.”
I do not see this surrender in you—I see a pride of belief and I would suggest that Jesus, the Christ did not come into this world to make people powerful because of their belief systems. He asked them to become humble and aware of their servanthood in Christ. If we are to follow Christ we must take up our crosses and follow him. This does not mean that we must quit a church and start another one—not necessarily at all.
It is important to wait in all cases, especially having to do with what to do next about earning money, that a person be humble enough to realize that the Creator might not want them to be head of a spiritual center. You see the world is not going to be healed by any spiritual center—every entity within incarnation on this planet will attempt to heal the self and the things that are put forth in the way of spiritual writings may or may not help people.
What helps people the very very most is when they see one who acts in a loving manner, a godly manner, a compassionate manner, the simple act of remembering the Creator at all times possible—of remembering that infinite experience of dwelling with the Creator in immediate presence, when the body does become holy ground and we kneel before the Lord.
This is what people feel—it radiates from people who are in a non-judgmental place in their own hearts—they’re not judging themselves, they’re not trying to see this and this and this is what I believe, but simply to say “I have faith—I live by faith—I seek to express the love that I am receiving from the infinite One and Lord, how do I do that right now?”
The Creator could want you to pump gas, or work in the fields, or sell cars, or any other thing that you can think of. What the Creator offers one is not an easy ride. Indeed, the more devout one is the bumpier the ride gets because as we surrender to that spirit of love within us and to that deep guidance, we surrender first, I think, and last and foremost certainly, our opinions of what our path is.
We cannot afford to have personal opinions about such a subject as what the Creator wishes for us. If we do, we will be in the same situation that Samuel was in when the Lord called him and Samuel kept going to an earthly person and saying “You called me, you called me?” And Eli said “No, I didn’t call you.” Finally Samuel gets it together and realizes it’s the Lord calling him. And from that point on, Samuel becomes a being that has surrendered completely to the will of the infinite One.
Now this whole story is couched, because of the Old Testament bias towards primitive emotions and far less than perfect clarity, but the central thought of simply saying “Here am I, Lord,” as a basis for determining the will of the infinite One, is untouched by the rather emotion-laden sort of soap opera or melodrama that the rest of the story of Samuel does touch upon.
But you see, it wasn’t that you were forced to resign. There obviously was a disagreement and you chose to resign. To say “forced” would imply and did denote that there was antipathy and disagreement of a final sort between you and the congregation which you were serving. To allow this to remain solidified in your mind is to cause one to become stopped up. The energy of spiritual love cannot flow into the closed heart and right now you are closing your heart, in my opinion, to an extent that is probably extremely uncomfortable to you.
As long as you hold that this is absolutely true, not only for me but for anybody else, you will not be able to open your heart, so the first thing you need to do before you decide about the right stewardship of the Creator’s gift to you, is untangle yourself from the preconception that is perfectly normal and understandable in this illusion, that we are the master of our fate and captains of our destiny. We aren’t. We can either cooperate or we can resist the flow of the river of time and space that is the basis for this illusion.
So the first thing you need to do is work on humility and servanthood and the concept of silence before the Lord. Become silent and don’t ask for anything but simply the presence of the infinite One as you meditate—don’t do this for very long at a time. Twenty or thirty minutes is more than adequate, five minutes if acceptable. It can be repeated as often as you feel necessary, it is simply the food that your spirit needs if it wants to do work more rapidly than would occur without the help that you can give yourself by refraining from using your will in the human sense. Some things, and certainly right action is one of them, needs to be wide open to the silent wisdom that comes through from within, from the roots of consciousness so the higher self may speak of concepts into the conscious self.
The conscious self has a biocomputer brain—it thinks in a linear fashion and it is comfortable with structure. People have an enormous need for the feeling of comfort that the structure of what’s right and what’s wrong and so forth, gives them. However, it does create a lot of fear because you’ve decided what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s a threat and what’s not, and if you get into a negatively oriented situation according to the police system, then you find yourself in fear.
Only when you are humble enough to realize that the Lord may very well want you to do something that you don’t even want to do, but that you are still willing to be in his service because it’s the only freedom that our imprisoned spirits will ever know while imprisoned in this illusion and in this body.
You see, the body lives by intelligence. It pulls everything around it into itself—all of the sights, sounds, all the data from all of the senses, roars into the brain and the brain makes many, many choices very quickly, according to programming that it has begun very early in life—things that work and things that don’t—things that are to be reached for; things to avoid, and so forth. And so about 98% of all perceptions are not registered by our conscious minds.
For instance, I have various aches and pains because I have arthritis to the point where I am more or less in bed, so I have quite a few areas of stimulation from the body sense—I have sensations of coldness in my hands and feet; sensations in my teeth if I talk, I’m hearing a train pass outside—I am looking at a very complex arrangement of shelving that my husband built for me so that I could work while staying in one place. I am looking at hundreds of tapes and records that Jim and I have collected over the years. I’m almost 50 and I don’t throw away much that I like.
I’m looking at the colors of the wall and the ceiling, I’m listening to my husband who is going about making everything clean and as you can see, none of these things would particular impinge upon my senses at this time—I would be aware of them in a peripheral sort of way, but they have nothing to do with my survival or my comfort, consequently, I just don’t notice them. I focus on you, what’s in your letter and what you need and I’m focusing on the energy that I get from the paper that I’m holding, which helps me to deal in getting what is between the lines here.
I’m feeling you as being confused, baffled and very hurt and open at this point to make a great mistake and that is to become bitter or cynical or judgmental. This in no way is that path which the Creator would have us walk. I think our walk is always that of the prodigal son or daughter. We need to lead our first comfortable life in faith because almost inevitably it is too constrictive.
Even those who stay within the Church such as I. have gone through such a period of questioning, testing, and toying, at least, of changing my path completely, from Episcopalian or Christian, to some other path. However, I had a great deal of good advice at the time and have since been encouraged by my spiritual advisers and doing this very odd work that I do, that is, working with unchurched Christians, Buddhist, Muslims or whatever, who have been unchurched, who have been unable now to go into that same church and worship. What I am trying to do then is to allow them to soften—soften in their judgment of themselves, soften in their judgment of what they left, and soften to the word of the infinite Creator. In other words, you have some healing to do before you are able to sit in silence and await the news that is your news for this day, that is your path for this day.
It is a kind of dying. It is a kind of release of the personal ambition and will to a higher and more spacious orientation of self, one that is able to have a point of view that is larger and puts things in better perspective.
So move first into the healing. Ask yourself for forgiveness. Let yourself be completely forgiven. You may not know how tightly you are holding this in your heart. You may not know just how much this has hurt you and how angry and in a way, guilty, and in a way, fearing, that you are. You’re in a difficult situation and its just going to be a time in the desert for you for a while. I don’t know how long, however, you’ll note that nowhere in the scriptures does it say that people never get out of the desert.
The simple truth of the matter is that we may think that we’re in the desert because we are looking out at stimulus, but if we look only, or shall we say, first priority program plugged into the biocomputer so that you consider what is happening before you act. This first priority program would be simply to say “Lord, I am your servant, what would you have me do?”
As I said, if the Lord says “Get thee hence and be a sheepherder” or whatever agricultural things Nigeria does, then it wouldn’t be the place to say “A sheepherder, I’m not a sheepherder, I’m a minister.” Well, that’s true. That’s been your training and it’s been your career. But it may or may not be the thing that is next for you to build a spiritual center. The anger in having the feeling of being forced to resign at a church where people didn’t agree with you will carry over unless it is healed into your next working, into your next attempt at occupation and so forth.
So release any judgments about who you are or what you’re supposed to be doing. Just be humble and kneel before the Lord. Now when you have been able to achieve the realization that you have always been and will always be free precisely because you have surrendered your will to the will of the infinite One, then you will be ready to take up that servanthood, to be a steward of your gifts and to address simply that which is in front of your face.
I would suggest that you see life as much as possible in a flowing manner. It flows from choice to choice to choice in a quiet and gentle stream. The less one is awed or stopped by experiences the more one is able to continue flowing in a resonance with eternity as well as the mundane. There is no way the mundane mind can help you in your work right now. You can use all the analysis you wish but it will not tell you anything except that this or that may be more comfortable than the other thing or more secure, there will be some judgment in any mundane thought process because it is the response of this biocomputer that we have to make decisions; to make choices.
Now the choice that opens you up to infinity and infinite intelligence is the choice to stop listening to that mind—the mind of a second density animal that is very good at coping with the environment of the body but pretty much no good at all at coping with the environment of the spirit. In coping with that spirit one finds good times to be not what they deserve, but what is a gift to them and one find seemingly difficult or negative circumstances as challenges and opportunities to “run the straight race with God’s good grace” as the hymn says.
It is fortunate that your wife is able to support you for this period but I believe that I sense in the feel of this letter a stubbornness about wanting to continue on with this teaching of others, only now you know a better way. Now I challenge that bluntly.
When you say “I know” you must be sure that you know and you must remember that you do not know anything because the end of science is mystery and the beginning and end of spiritual seeking is mystery. No matter what path one takes through life, one is finally forced to face the fact that we will never prove or understand anything about the infinite One—we have to go on blind faith. And we have to be willing to do whatever the Creator wishes us to do.
For instance, I was just moved to another town and had ferreted out the best choir and the best preaching in town that was of my particular brand of Christianity. The choir was an excellent one and I had been singing in choirs since I was four. I was allowed into this very elite group at a very elite church—none of which impressed me much but I was just glad to be singing the repertoire of the beautiful 18th, 19th and 20th Century music that the church has in such great abundance. I felt very blessed. The motto goes “he who sings once, prays twice,” and I have always felt that quite literally to be so.
However, as I went by a little tiny mission church in the part of the countryside in which I was living I felt compelled to go there and I discovered that they did not have a choir—they were completely without music except for what this nice old gentleman would play by ear, he didn’t have any training. Consequently, I couldn’t rely on him for accompaniment, however, the Holy Spirit told me in no uncertain terms “you have to stay here and start a choir here—you have to help this fledgling group—you’re not supposed to go singing that repertoire that you love so much, sorry, but that’s the way it is.”
So, I resigned from the choir and went to sing in this little mission church. I was singing all by myself at first. I figured that this would be the way to get people aggravated enough to say “well, I can sing as well as that.” So with that thought in mind I simply stood up and sang at the appropriate time during the Mass each week. At the end of a couple of months and with Christmas being on the horizon there slowly became a choir. And when I left at the end of five months in order to follow my partners Don and Jim back to Louisville I left that church, I left that church but I left it with a choir.
It was a very painful five months for me—it was very difficult to worship with a congregation where the kind of Anglican propriety that wears robes and reads the ritual quite dignifiedly and solemnly was not available to me during this time. I was attempting to make do with basically spiritual starvation rations, however, the Holy Spirit did not allow me anything but this choice. I could have ignored the Holy Spirit—that I really didn’t want the grief of it. To ignore the Holy
Spirit is simply not a great idea.
So being responsible for what I knew, and living what I knew, I did that, although it was very much not what I wanted to do. I wanted to be another example, a mother and a wife. I have been able to be a wife, but I’ve never been able to be a mother. I believe this was intended by the Holy Spirit and yet I have never stopped grieving for my inability to have children. However, I do accept that as a very wise choice made by a higher self than I am consciously aware of.
Now I don’t know which book you read that you ordered from Samuel Weiser. You said “I want you to assist me with lesson materials to enable me to get acquainted with channeling. My purpose is to serve humanity by organizing a center.”
Okay, that sentence is too long. My purpose is serve humanity, period. You serve humanity first by your consciousness, by who you are, by how you look at life. When people see you radiating the infinite love of the Creator, they see a witness that nothing can stop—not bars, not starvation, not death, because you are manifesting the infinite and it flows through you if you have a loving heart, and people around you will use that as catalyst for their own spiritual seeking.
Now the way the Creator wants you to do this is unknown. You say “My preference is to serve the Creator by doing this …” This is not a good assumption to make for a spiritual person. The proper assumption is “Here am I Lord, what does the spirit have to tell me today, at this very moment, what is the right action at this moment?”
As you humble yourself and clear the cobwebs out of yourself, become hollow, you are more and more able to perceive in an intuitive way of those feelings that you know are your own personal truth, by faith, and not because you can explain them. So the first action I would suggest is to simply let go of your identity.
I sense that you are uncomfortable taking the livelihood of your wife and allowing it to support your growth, but really do not know how to get the backing and the money to express yourself in a way that you now have latched onto as being the truth for you at this time and therefore the truth for other people. This is a dangerous temptation to tell other people what to do. The only person you can ever tell what to do is yourself and the only thing you can tell yourself with any wisdom is to shut up and listen to the silence within.
Now it is not a matter of being unwilling to send you materials. I can guarantee you I will not develop the gift of channeling through the mail. It is my subtle opinion, and I have to live with my own truth and my own responsibilities here, that it is basically a disservice, not a service, to teach people to channel, who do not have a group of at least two other people to go back to after I have taught them to channel so that they may be grounded in this sort of channeling.
What I would greatly suggest to you as an alternative is using your time that you would spend in attempting to learn to channel from an outer source in acquainting yourself with the resources of your inner guidance, of the Holy Spirit that comes from within. You do that first by silence—not that you have to have absolute silence in your mind, you don’t, it’s just a matter of not being concerned about the thoughts that come and go in your mind. You don’t get attached but you allow yourself to be fluid and part of a flow so that something comes into your consciousness and something dives back out of it and there is no judgment involved.
No matter how busy your mind is, as long as you simply focus on your breath and just let thoughts drift through without judging and holding on to them or considering anything about them, you are doing the job of silence. It may be much more possible for you to be silent than in our highly technological society here, but I know that Nigeria has its own technology too, I just don’t know where you are in Nigeria or what your level is of the various luxuries, such as electricity, communication, media and stuff like that.
We try to lead a pretty quiet life ourself although we do have telephones, computers, tape recorders, etc.
The second tool would be the dream journal. You can train yourself to learn more and more from your dreams if you ask yourself before you go to sleep to remember them. Those dreams are those things that are coming up in the subconscious attempting to work out with you what is concerning you at the moment. Consequently, your dreams have a good deal of information to yield if you will but catch them, and I do mean catch them because they are very fleeting. You can remember them quite clearly on the moment of awakening and lose them within minutes.
I would suggest if you have a flashlight with a thin sock over it that you keep by your bed at all times along with your dream journal and a pen or pencil that at any point at which you begin to awaken from a dream your instinct that you suggested to yourself from the night before is as rapidly as possible to get that flashlight on, don’t turn on the lights, stay asleep as much as you can and just start writing down that dream.
Now you will find yourself at first writing very short things about the dream and if you keep on with this as you get used to having given yourself the message “Yes, I need to put this dream down before I wake up,” eventually you’ll be able to turn that rather dim flashlight on and get the dream down and just go back to sleep if it’s not time to wake up yet.
I’ve known people who would wake up seven or eight times a night and write down long dreams because they had trained themselves to the habit of writing those dreams down before they got out of the hypnologic state of mere sleep and vague consciousness.
Let yourself teach yourself. Another thing that is very helpful is the keeping of a regular journal—just thoughts, just writing down what you think right now, what you feel. A lot of your feelings might be negative right now, you might be angry, you might be guilty, you might be resentful. You might be grateful to your wife and at the same time puzzled. You might be angry with the Creator and angry with yourself because all of this had to happen when the Creator was supposed to bring you into the Kingdom of Heaven.
Well, the Kingdom of Heaven is right here. The Creator’s promise was not that he would pull you out of all difficulties before they hurt. The Creator’s promise was quite specifically that he will be with you as you hurt and as you don’t hurt. There is no condition in which the Creator is not there as a voice of love that speaks from inside you. And if you open your heart, if you lose fear, if you simply say “I love and feel able to do whatever you tell me, Lord, I don’t have a sense that I have to do this or I have to do that, so please start giving me some hints here as to what gift I can offer to your benefit right now.
As I said it’s often very disappointing when you open your eyes and you see in front of you a messy room, undone dishes, a tree that needs trimming, something very mundane and boring, but there isn’t anything that’s unholy.
Let us know what you would like and I will get Jim to send you the latest Light/Lines with the range of our things that we have to offer on it and if you will check one thing at time and then as you finish that one thing then send us a request for another, until you are satisfied that you have everything from us that you can and, of course, in addition, I will be glad to continue to work with you in any way that you deem fit.
I would not really be willing to go further at this time but what I would like to do is loosen you from the very solidified place that you are now that you feel betrayed, perhaps by yourself, perhaps by the Creator, certainly by your former church, and find yourself the healing that does exist within all compassionate love. Let yourself be healed and then go forth again, always realizing that you are completely dependent on that voice within and that your will is that of a servant who wishes to obey the master who wishes to give his talents and let them bear fruit to the glory of the one infinite Creator.
God bless your ministry, whatever it may be, and your wife and your family. May you be well and may your path become clear before you.
Yours in love and light,
Carla