¶SPIRITUAL BURNOUT
Group question: The question this evening has to do with what may be various stages in the path of seeking. When the first feeling of passion for a path occurs the seeking is more active and then it cools down. Is this due to a passage through the energy centers and differing kinds of expression of this passion then coming forth? Is it due to getting tired and having old age set in, or is it due to perhaps a natural progression of the stages of seeking?
(Q’uo, December 30, 1990)
I am Q’uo. I greet you in the love and in the light of the One Infinite Creator. This day you wish to know what it is about the spiritual path which creates at the beginning ecstasy, excitement, exaltation, and a great outpouring of evangelism…that does not last. What is it that creates the situation in which the passion, the intensity, and the dedication may well become more and more attenuated in the face of the mundane and horizontally lived incarnational experience? May we say to you that, indeed, there is some of accuracy in the questioner’s suspicion that this is in some part a natural progression. However, the questioner does not take this progression to its completion. Let us speak upon this particular vision.
When one discovers, by whatever means, information that is so inspirational and so relevant to that entity’s growth that it is that which seizes the attention, then is there excitement, glory, joy, optimism, and the strength of new knowledge. Were this to be treated appropriately, the passion, the intensity, and the dedication which you experience at the beginning should never fade. But you, being of an illusion which uses words and of natures which crave the companionship of spiritual communication, are often incapable of protecting your realizations with careful, cautious, and deeply felt silence, thanksgiving, and praise for the realizations that have been the gift at the end of long desert experiences. We speak not, in this case, of time, but of the subjectively felt length of any experience in which the spirit starves for spiritual food. When it finds that food its appetite is great, and it wants to “feed the five thousand” with its loaves and fishes immediately. However, that which has been born in you, though it feels stronger than any previous faith or enthusiasm, is yet a faith-filled and enthusiastic infant.
These are your days of what you call Christ’s mass, in which you kneel, strong, supple, and able as each is, before a helpless, dumb, blind infant, placed in the roughest and most animalistic of shelters, the home of the animals. Let us consider this. This story is, in our opinion, an excellent myth, as are many in your cultures. It is filled with symbols which offer to the spiritual seeker lessons carefully to be considered. You may see the new transformation, the new realizations, as being like the infant in the manger: endlessly beautiful, infinitely loving, and utterly vulnerable because of the intensity of the birth of this infant self within you. How you mistake infant faith! To cast the pearls before the swine is the teacher known as Jesus’ analogy of speaking of one’s own hard-learned spiritual lessons to those who have no inclination to request to hear those wise and compassionate words which the spirit has offered to you in this realization, symbolized by the helpless child.
What causes the student, then, to wish too much to share that which is too delicate, too immature, and too helpless to be exposed to the harsh winter of intellect and skepticism? Often it is the desire to help. However, though one may be working intensely upon opening the heart as much as possible, it is indeed true that many do this without sufficient respect and time spent in preparing the earthen vessel that is your physical vehicle and the mind, which is your mental vehicle, for the realization that, for all their strength and for all their truth, these realizations must wait for witness until the entity that you are within this relativistic illusion has cleared the pathway, made the rough places plain, brought the high places low, and made straight your own pathway to your heart.
The one known as John the Baptist said, “Make straight in the desert a highway for God with us.” Make straight in your hearts the pathway for I AM. How does one make this pathway straight? Largely by coming to terms with your three so-called lower, but what we would call perhaps fundamental, energies, through which all living light must pass to flow into the heart to give it the power and the strength and the stability it needs in order that it may heal, or communicate, discern wisdom, discern spirits, or any other gift of the open heart, all of which are concerned with loving the Creator and humankind. How can you do this if the heart is open but the energy moving into it must move through far too small an opening because you have not come to terms with yourself; you have not accepted yourself; you have not accepted your relationships? You have not accepted the primacy of love, unconditional love, over any personal preference whatsoever.
You have not done the work of forgiveness, perhaps, or self-forgiveness, acceptance, or more likely, self-acceptance. In this instrument’s life, for instance, this instrument struggles to like an entity close to her which she chose for the precise reason that she in no way could possibly like this entity. What was the lesson? To love. Not to like, not to prefer, not intellectually to crave, but to love, simply that. In each entity’s life there are these things which cannot be liked, but which can, through the grace of an Infinite Creator which is Love, be loved, and in the loving of them floats a continuous prayer like a bell-tone that rings throughout space and time and eternity.
So you wish, above all else, not to advertise but to protect this child, while you, to the best of your ability, amend and improve the basic energies of a physical, weak, finite vehicle with finite energies, finite amounts of time and space in which to do the work of a complete incarnation, and to do that right quickly, for in truth, a century of your time is far too short even for you to achieve the first true maturity. So know yourselves as perpetual teenagers, perpetual rebels, perpetual prodigals, far from home, confused, poor in heart, until you are able to realize the richness that lies within this vessel of earth, which noble earthly vessel carries you through an incarnation with its greatest devotion and care.
If your quarrels are with yourself, let them not be that you are ill, or poor, or unhappy, or unfulfilled. These are situations extremely productive of spiritual growth, and cannot be judged within your illusion for their true worth. It is a matter of faith not to rebel against the stringencies that open the heart and cleanse the more basic emotions of love for the self, for life itself, for the relationships that you have with entities, and with social groups. Before one word should be spoken, the dedication to the daily clearing of these energy centers needs to be complete, for it is in persistence and patience and an unflagging desire to realize the truth that we have heard that all densities’ entities may move forward in evolution in the spiritual sense.
There will come a time when you no longer are hampered by obvious encroachments of underactivation or overactivation or other sorts of blockage to letting light move into the heart. But if those obstacles which you can feel are catching you as a fish is hooked, by your own temptations and self aggrandizements, you may feel ready to speak, but you will find that once you gain more maturity, relatively speaking, you will find to your surprise that you are no longer an evangelist. That fervid eagerness, great charismatic power of self and all those things which go into making an entity an excellent evangelist have been seen by the maturing spiritual youngster within to be useless of true worth, for the spiritually maturing child has begun to learn that it can only work upon itself and be a witness to the nations in and of itself.
How then should an entity which has found a personal truth, a personal path from the mundane to eternity, express itself in regard to other people? Two things especially need to be kept in mind. Firstly, the most important witness an entity can offer for the One Creator in glory, in peace, and in joy, is the manifestation of the self with conscious encouragement of the self in unspoken and uncontrived witness. We expect those who have achieved this much maturity to have chosen a path and to be able to speak, of that path. But the first gift that one may give is presence, simply practicing the presence of the Creator within the self, and allowing the practice of that presence to shine forth so that those of any kind may sense that peace which is not the world’s, that joy which the world knows only as happiness, the palest shadow of joy, of love indescribable but quite clearly observable among those who would gaze at the face of one who truly loves. This is your greatest witness; it is your greatest help to your beloved people and to your planet as a whole, for the planet itself responds to self-acceptance, self-forgiveness, and unconditional love. These are metaphysical vibrations as strong in mending the Earth as the pressure of tectonic plates is strong in needing the adjustment of the Earth in catastrophic style.
Secondary witnesses are quite simply those which answer questions which have been asked. When there is a request, there is an opening, a softened spiritual ground, and into this ground it is well that you witness to the extent of your ability as a realized entity, as a user of the language, and as one sensitive to word allergies, if we may put it that way, which the entities to whom you wish to bear witness may have.
Why then does a new path seem to become old? It seems obvious that novelty is a great distorter of perception. Yet even the greatest of truths, even the most sublime of realizations, must deal day by day with precisely those conditions of incarnation designed to test the personal spiritual awareness of the entity which is consciously working upon gaining spiritual mass or polarity. Do not dare to seek to have faith unless you wish to have an uncomfortable life. For as the Creator manifests Itself in the wind and fire of spirit, ever-moving, ever-changing, ever-unpredictable, so too does the spirit manifest itself in each entity’s life. If you are not always open to that which the spirit has to offer this day only, then you are working with information which has grown stale, and if you are not attempting to act as you have learned is the correct way to act, you may not hope of moving further or bearing witness until you go into yourself and review that which you have learned. For there is nothing half-hearted about love.
To begin again, to begin again, to begin again; how the human spirit rebels! Yet within the present moment there is only beginning, and there is nothing but the present moment in any spiritual consideration. So look to the loving and acceptance of the higher power which you may call as you wish. Look to your relationship with that Love that created you. Allow within yourself the birth, in the manger of your heart, of your own spiritual beingness, your true, imperishable, consciousness. Guard it, just as the story speaks of this infant’s mother and father fleeing to protect their child. Protect this child as lovingly, and with as much feeling of honor.
New realizations are born in the deep darkness of what seems like a winter of discontent. They are nourished by faith and strengthened by the will to persevere although the road ahead is blind. Move along that road as guided. When you have been faithful and achieved a stability that expects no rewards for that faith, but only the joy and peace of living in faith, then there will be in front of your eyes the right usage of your time offered to you. You may go through the summer of this marvelous experience of the realization that has been nurtured, protected, and finally has found the sun and grown to bloom. Yet still the cycle is not complete, for as flowers wither, and as the trees of deciduous nature lose their leaves, so shall the fall of each cycle of understanding bring with it its own temptations to move in false directions. Eventually, whether you have learned from this blossoming of the self or no, the harvest time does come. The harvest of that realization is gathered, and another winter of discontent follows.
The cycle moves around, and insofar as a life in faith has been preserved in the individual through the predictable difficulties, just so far may the next realization be more helpful than the first, thusly creating a new spiritual self, with new realizations, which then must go through the springtime of nurturing and protection, the summertime of manifestation, beauty, peace, and the words of freedom, faith and healing, and again, the harvest will be complete. And the imperishable spirit that you are, voluntarily and gladly, in a subconscious manner, moves to the next spiritual infant and time of blooming.
One last thing that we would say before we leave this instrument is never to demean or criticize the self for lacking the strength to meet a situation as one would wish. For the will and the faith of the spirit are expressed in the fruits of intention, first of all, and only as the spirit grows stronger from intending to show love in difficult circumstances does the spirit grow full enough of faith to manifest the infinite beauty of spiritual intention. Let yourself continue a beginner. Let yourself remain infatuated, in love, and shield that passion from a world which has seemingly no positive passion, except in isolated instances at this time. Shield that light until it may grow through you without destroying you, for it is indeed a vibration too great for third-density consciousness. Yet you who are harvestable, potentially, have also the ability to hold light and love in manifestation which is not able to be offered to those who have not worked toward graduation from this density. Never discourage the self or others in a spiritual sense. Support all selves, and speak by your presence those pearls that so inflamed and overjoyed your open hearts, and upon request, speak by witness of a verbal kind. In this way may you never lose the novelty of the present moment, for is any present moment like another, and yet are they not all the present moment?
We thank you for this opportunity to speak through this instrument upon this most interesting question, and we thank the questioner. May all who read or hear be blessed. We are those of the principle of Q’uo. We leave this instrument in love and in light. Adonai.
¶NOTES TO OUR READERS
Tax receipts available for 1993. Just send a card and ask. Great thanks to those whose contributions have kept our books in print and enabled us to send them to prisoners and others who are broke. Heartiest holiday greetings to all.