Greetings. This is Gary Bean welcoming you to the L/L Research Podcast, In the Now, Episode #58. L/L Research is a nonprofit organization dedicated to freely sharing spiritually-oriented information and fostering community and towards this end has two websites: LLResearch.org and Bring4th.org.

During each episode we respond to questions sent to L/L Research from spiritual seekers like you. Our panel consists of Jim McCarty, Austin Bridges and myself, each of us a devoted student of the Law of One. Your questions allow us to explore the Law of One and related matters of metaphysical interest.

We hope only to offer a resource that enhances your own seeking process. Please know that our replies are not the final word on these subjects. We ask each to listen to exercise their discernment and be sensitive to their resonance in determining what is true for them.

If you would like to send a question for the show, please do so. This humble podcast relies on your questions. You may either send an email to [email protected] or go to www.LLResearch.org/podcast for further instructions.

Again, I’m Gary Bean and we are embarking on a new episode of L/L Research’s weekly podcast, In the Now.

Jim and Austin, are you guys ready to embark?

I believe so.

I am indeed.

All right. We shall get on with it. First question is an emotionally tough one because of its depths. Lou writes via email:

“Hello, fellow seekers. Our closest and dearest friends were blessed with a beautiful granddaughter that developed a terrible disorder known at Rhett Syndrome. Typically after six to eighteen months, a perfectly healthy child will become imprisoned by slowly losing brain functions that include learning, speech, sensory sensations, mood, movement, breathing, cardiac function, and even chewing and swallowing and digestion. This post-natal neurological disorder, most often misdiagnosed as autism and cerebral palsy, is devastating to both the child, family, and all that have the good fortune of knowing her.

While the Law of One hints at why this may occur, can you please share your thoughts on this subject to help level the day-to-day emotional roller coaster for those especially close to her? Moreover, why such innocence is born into this world with such an affliction? Sincerely, Lou.”

Jim, what is your response to Lou’s questions?

Well, in general, I would like to say that there are no mistakes and that every situation we are born into offers us opportunities to learn and the more difficult the situation, the more chance there is to learn.

I’d like to read a little bit from Dr. Michael Newton’s Journey of Souls: The Case Studies of Life Between Lives. In chapter 13 he talks about choosing a new body and I’ll just pick and choose here and there where I read. I’ll start with this here:

“Blueprints for the next life vary in the degree of difficulty the soul/mind sets for itself. If we’ve just come off an easy life, making little interpersonal progress, our soul might want to choose a person in the next time cycle who will face heartache and perhaps tragedy. It is not out of the ordinary for me to see someone who skated through an unchallenging life overloading themselves with turmoil in the next one to catch up with their learning goals.

Many handicapped people think if it were not for genetic mistake or being a victim of an accidental injury, which damaged their body, their lives would be more fulfilled. As heartless as this may sound, my cases show few real accidents involving body damage that don’t fall under the free will of souls. As souls we choose our bodies for a reason. Living in a damaged body does not necessarily have to involve a karmic debt we are paying off because of past life responsibility for an injury to someone else.

It is difficult to try to tell a newly injured person trying to cope with physical disablement that he or she has an opportunity to advance at a faster rate. This knowledge must come from self-discovery. The case histories of my clients convince me that the effort necessary to overcome a bodily impediment does accelerate advancement. Those of us whom society deems less than perfect suffer discrimination which makes the burden even heavier.

Overcoming the obstacles of physical ailments and hurt makes us stronger for the ordeal. Souls search for self-expression by developing different aspects of their character. Regardless of what physical or mental tools are used through the use of many bodies, laws of karma will prevail. If the soul chooses one extreme, somewhere down the line this will be counter-balanced by opposite choice to even out the development.

From what I can gather, a soul’s thoughts about certain human behaviors, preferences for themselves in the next life, are known by guides and those masters charged with operating the life selection stations. It appears to me that some souls take this responsibility more seriously than others. Yet, a soul in the pre-life selection phase can reflect only so much on how they would fit into a specific body. When souls are called to the place of the life selection, the guesswork is over. Now they must match their spiritual identity against a mortal being. Why one soul joined for psychological reasons with two human beings thousands of years apart is the basis of my next case.”

I won’t read the case to you but in general, I think that the difficulty that people face in their life patterns in regard to what Lou is talking about, physical, mental, and emotional disabilities, are the fast track to learning.

It’s much like the situation after the veil is put between the conscious and subconscious mind. Before the veil, everybody saw that they and everyone else was a creator in the creation of unity. It was made out of love and its created light. But, very little progress was made in the polarization process. When the veil was put between the conscious and subconscious mind, it mantled over all of that information and made it much more difficult for people to find out that truth about the nature of reality and themselves.

But, the effort it took to find that out was very successful in polarizing them much more quickly than the pre-veil condition. So, I think it’s the same thing. People who have had these disabilities are on an advanced track. These may well be masters, my friends. These people have chosen a lot to learn and it’s not easy. But, because it’s not easy, if they are successfully able to go through their life experience, they will pick up a lot [more] of what we call polarization or service to others action than people who have an easier life. So, I think that as hard as it is to grasp that and to accept it, when you see the suffering that is going on in the family, it is what’s happening.

Just as a personal experience, when Carla was confined to her wheelchair after having back surgery for about four or five years, she and I learned the most that we ever learned in our lives interpersonally with her being able to unblock her indigo-ray energy center that said she was unworthy, not worthy to receive the love offerings of others. And I opened my heart to be able to give her those love offerings. So, we got a lot of work done and I can testify that it was not easy. But, I think we did get the work done.

Gary?

Reminds me again and again how much I want to read Michael Newton’s work. Thank you so much for sharing, Jim.

Austin, what do you think?

I appreciate Jim’s answer. I think mine will actually sort of build from that because what Jim explained to me is sort of a logical or rational reasoning for this. We want to know why this happens and so that sort of answer addresses the intellectual understanding of why this might happen. But, in my own spiritual journey, I’ve never really been fully satisfied with those answers.

I am comfortable with the intellectual logic behind it. I do believe that what Jim said is essentially the case, that that is what is happening with these individuals. But there is something in my heart that has never fully been satisfied by knowing the logical reasoning for these things.

And I was confronted with this early on in my spiritual journey after finding the Law of One when I was sharing some bits of the Law of One with my best friend at the time who was never really fully interested in it. But, he talked to me about it sometimes until I shared with him what Ra said about cancer and its connection with anger. At the time I interpreted Ra’s words to imply that all cancer is caused by unprocessed anger. I don’t know if that’s necessarily what Ra intended to say now, but that’s what I believed at the time.

This friend of mine had, when he was younger, childhood leukemia and it was an incredibly difficult and heart-breaking time for his entire family. He suffered greatly through the treatment, which lasted years, and I believe that he was in the hospital for a very extended amount of time. I saw the prolonged trauma that he had linger with him even in his adult years.

He’d never really been able to grasp why he went through this experience as a young child and when I told him what Ra said about cancer, he asked me why a young, happy child who didn’t have anger—he came into this world with a bright, shining personality—why a happy child would get cancer like that. And I had no answer for him; at least not one that I thought was appropriate to share.

I had theories like Jim just explained about past lives, pre-incarnational planning, balancing, and things like that. But, I considered how those reasons might make him feel at that moment and I knew that—since he didn’t share the same beliefs that I shared—that such reasoning might actually be offensive to him because I was trying to basically explain away his trauma by giving it an excuse or satisfying my own pain by my own spiritual beliefs or satisfying my own lack of understanding with some spiritual beliefs.

So, I knew that I couldn’t necessarily share with him my own rational, logical beliefs, and I actually personally felt that they were kind of inadequate to address his experiences. And part of me still feels that way to this day when presented with similar scenarios.

While I do believe that there is a method and a system to how things like debilitating childhood diseases happen, like Jim focused his response on and what Michael Newton has found through his work, I’ve never felt okay looking at the suffering of innocent children especially, but just the suffering of innocents in general. And my intellectual understanding, even though I’m comfortable with it, doesn’t help me to relate to those people who are involved in that experience. I can’t use my spiritual understanding to relate to the family of a child who is suffering if they don’t share some sort of similar spiritual basis of belief.

So, the dissonance, or this particular dissonance, was actually a topic during our recent channeling workshop and I remember the gist of what was said and I actually felt that it was a very satisfying response for me at least. It helped me to come to terms a little bit with this sort of scenario. And the basic message was that these reasons we can give for such suffering being inflicted upon the innocent and their families and children and things of that nature, such as previous lifetimes or pre-incarnational agreements and that sort of thing, are all intellectual understandings. They are asking the logical brain to help soothe the disharmony that we feel in our hearts. But, that is simply outside of the realm of what the intellect is capable of.

Certainly, having an intellectual grasp on certain beliefs and natural laws of the universe helps to give us context to our experiences that can be comforting and that can be a great relief when being confronted with things like this. I am intellectually satisfied with my understandings of such experiences and that does count for something. I don’t discount that completely. But, when we are met with something that hurts our hearts despite that intellectual understanding, the solution I think, and what was communicated during this channeling, is not to seek for a deeper intellectual understanding.

The pain that we feel when viewing such suffering is important to our experience in this density. It’s not meant to be understood with our heads, but rather with our hearts. I remember Laitos saying that when this feeling is most poignant, when we feel the most dissonance and hurt in our hearts when viewing these things, it’s good to take that into meditation and sit with it and just experience this sort of inner disharmony and pain and turmoil that we’re feeling when viewing these things—that we can’t seem to come to grasp with. And when we do that and sit with it, we realize that at the heart of this pain that we’re feeling, and the heart of the difficulty that we’re witnessing within us, is the heart of love.

This love doesn’t necessarily solve the problem for you or for anyone else in this experience. It might, you know, there are magical powers of love–I think we all believe that. But for the most part, I think we can not necessarily count of the fact that love is going to heal some awful disease a child has just because we’re meditating on it. But, it does help us recognize a place from which we can relate to the suffering and relate to those affected by the suffering.

So, when we are called to relate to such experiences as childhood diseases, we don’t have to call upon any intellectual understanding of metaphysics behind it. But, we can simply call on the love that we’ve found while sitting with that pain that we felt. And that love could express itself in a number of ways, even if it’s just holding a space to allow someone else their grief or their suffering. Or, it could move us to act for someone in such a situation to brighten their day or to try to relieve their suffering a little bit. And it could move us to even share tears of our own with someone in this scenario.

It could express itself in an infinite number of ways and that is my current understanding of how to relate to such things. It isn’t helpful for me to fit them into a logical system of cause and effect and reasoning and purpose that reincarnation and pre-incarnational planning describes. Instead, just recognizing the love in myself when I’m witnessing such a thing and doing my best to address that love. Even if it’s an inadequate answer to the reason why, it is the most that I can really do in such a situation, and it’s what I have to go with at this moment or at that moment when I’m feeling that.

So, that’s my basic understanding currently of how to relate to those sorts of situations. What do you think, Gary?

As is often the case probably with all three of us, the third person to reply to a seeker’s question has to wonder, do I have anything new to say? You and Jim addressed Lou quite well I would say, but that’s up for Lou to decide, of course. But, Lou, I’ll give you another take at it and see what you think.

I would imagine that you are consulting many sources on this important question and thank you for entrusting us as one among them. As both Austin and Jim conveyed, we are equally baffled and bewildered by the things that transpire in the world, especially the seemingly endless varieties of suffering. I believe instead of focusing on the concept of intellectual understanding as Austin was doing, and I agree with what he was saying, I use the word ‘perspective.’

I think that what you’re seeking here is simply perspective, one that zooms out because when you’re in the ditch it’s difficult to understand the larger terrain around you. It’s more difficult to find the meaning and direction, but when you can lift the perspective, then the landscape becomes clearer. You may be able to see from where you’ve come or where you are headed, or what the purpose of the ditch is relative to the rest of the landscape.

And were I to attempt to zoom out when viewing this situation, I might see that the newborn granddaughter is not the totality of who she is. The grandchild diagnosed with Rhett’s syndrome is a role that she is temporarily playing. But before going further on this point, let me please pause here to clarify that by no stretch of the imagination do I mean to convey that such a perspective eliminates the pain that your friends’ granddaughter will undergo, or the pain of your friends or you or anyone else affected. Perspective simply helps you to relate to the situation with potentially more peace and understanding in your heart, with perhaps even greater ability to serve in the spaciousness that a larger perspective offers. And I think that is what you seek.

So, to continue with this idea that the granddaughter plays a role, just as you and your friends play a role. But you described her as innocent, and relative to the adults of this world, she is indeed innocent. The newborn is fairly pure and empty and hasn’t made decisions yet, hasn’t hurt anybody, and hasn’t taken on some of the seeming stain of the world. But what does innocence mean in the larger picture? That the soul comes into the world a clean slate with no prior history?

In the Law of One cosmology there are, of course, souls completely new to the third-density experience. But, by and large, I think that most here on this planet at this time have a long history. They don’t come into the world newly minted. Instead, as Jim was describing, they carry with them energies set into motion in past lives, perhaps even long ago, that may manifest themselves in this life. As Austin was getting at, seeing things from that vantage point, doesn’t solve the situation.

Did she choose this condition? Did her higher-self choose it? Is she a helpless victim of random or genetic forces? I can’t speak to the cause, but I can attest to the unanimity of perspective among various spiritual understandings that states unequivocally that earth is something of a stage and we actors upon it. This doesn’t mean that that which transpires in the world can be ignored because it is “illusion”. On the contrary, the roles we play force us to confront aspects of ourselves and give us the richness and depth of experience we could not otherwise gain without these roles on this stage.

If someone robs you, if someone cheats you, someone loves you, someone smiles at you, someone raises you, someone devastates you, heals you, awakens you—there are so many complex ways that another person provokes or facilitates your own learning, growth and evolution, and often through confusion and pain. I mean, consider the great range of emotions you have experienced in response to this difficult catalyst thus far. How much have you contemplated the deeper meanings and relationships? How much have you hurt? How much have you with anger or rage or grief thrown yourself against the wall of what’s happening? How has this caused you to reprioritize or to see what is of value in life or to intensify your desire to serve and be there for your friends?

None of that might be possible had this situation not arose. All I’m trying to say is that there is value in what you’re experiencing right now. There is value in what your dear friends are going through now, even though it might be an utter dark night of the soul for them. Ra actually indicated in session #34.14 that “it is to be noted that among your entities a large percentage of all progression has as catalyst, trauma.” It’s not a situation that I’m particularly fond of, but it seems to be a common occurrence here. But, if such trauma or pain and suffering in general are used, it has a way of breaking and deepening us.

As Austin was getting at, this is very difficult terrain for one to navigate so I’m reluctant to say it. But, because I too want to rail against suffering when I see it in others, there must be that value in the experience for the granddaughter, too. I have to believe that. A universe that is unnecessarily cruel, that inflicts pain without the redeeming possibility of learning and growth would make no sense to me. Whether that’s intellectual understanding or perspective or if I’m tapping into the heart at all, I don’t know. But I find that helpful and I believe what Jim offered, which is based on Newton’s research that physical difficulties can offer accelerated growth that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

There is a possibility that on a pre-incarnational level, she took this on—perhaps even sacrificially as a way to be of service to your friends by helping them to learn a certain lesson. Whether that’s a thought to comfort you, or one that illuminates the situation, or one that’s total garbage, is up for you to decide. I can only speculate, but it is very possible.

But, whatever the cause, compassion is of course—no one needs to tell you this—always appropriate. My final closing couple thoughts here are that we are inherently knee-jerk averse to suffering. Suffering is by its very definition that which we want to avoid at all costs, and when it appears, especially in such devastating variety as you and your friends are now undergoing, one wants only to run away or to deny or to destroy or to fix that which is the perceived cause.

I cannot definitively say what the solution is per se, but as to head in the direction that Austin was going, it may be that the solution as it were is simply to accept that which is given. Take all appropriate action to shine love and light and to be of service. But at the end of the day, exercise trust and faith. No situation is so dark that one is prohibited or precluded from consciously evoking the miracle of faith.

Only the smallest seed is needed to bring you to this moment, to open your heart to the possibility of lessening your resistance, lessening your armor and defenses and, and as Austin was describing, just being with your experience, being with all those affected, and allowing it to be and knowing that whatever the surface appearance is, love is the great truth that is behind and underlying and undergirding every situation. And if the situation doesn’t allow you to see that, then faith will.

And that is my reply to you, Lou. Austin, Jim, you guys have any further thoughts to offer?

Not I.

No, not from me.

All right. I hope you can tease out some perspective from there as you and your friends, and especially your friend’s granddaughter, have to walk this very hard road.

Our next question comes from Barbara via email, who writes:

“From what I’ve read so far of the Law of One, balanced chakras are extremely important. On days where I have thoughts or emotions that have balancing, I do the balancing technique. However, I was never sure that my chakras were balanced. Then, I read where you can test your chakras using a pendulum. So, I bought a pendulum and did a test and several were partially blocked. I utilized mudras during meditation to help balance them and, of course, a subsequent test with a pendulum indicated that they were over-stimulated.

Then I learned that your chakras continually change in response to physical and emotional catalysts. Since the chakras appear to fluctuate constantly, what is the purpose of using the pendulum, also referred to as a weight, as discussed in the Law of One? Is the balancing technique the only thing necessary to balance the chakras, or are other means such as mudras beneficial? Peace, love and happiness.”

All right, Austin, got a reply to Barbara’s question?

Yeah, a couple. She asks kind of two very related questions and both of my answers are rather short. So, I’ll just knock them both out.

She first asks what is the purpose of the pendulum and I might be unfit to answer this question because I don’t know. But if I were to speak hypothetically, I‘d say that the pendulum is useful for immediate feedback like Barbara figured out. For instance, if you find a certain blockage just once with the pendulum and then balance it so it’s not blocked any more, you can see what the effects of your exercises are, which might be useful in the sense of collecting data over a long term.

So, say you find a blockage and after you apply the balancing technique, it doesn’t necessarily come back the next time and it’s not a very frequent thing. But say you have a blockage that consistently shows up as you do this sort of exercise or do the reading with the pendulum more and more. Maybe that is an indication of what might be called a more crystalized blockage; something that is more persistent and requires more inner work on your part. That’s my best guess. I don’t really use pendulums, so I can’t say more than that.

She also asks if the balancing technique is the only thing that is necessary, or are things like mudras helpful? I certainly don’t think the balancing technique is the only thing that is necessary or the only thing that is useful. I would say that I think it is the most effective, at least theoretically. To me, it gets to the heart of self-awareness and helps us to be mindful of our states of consciousness so that we can explore them, feel them, and understand them in relationship to their dynamic relationships with our other states.

It’s hard for me to imagine a more effective means of self-knowledge and self-acceptance than to do this balancing technique. But regarding things like mudras, I definitely think there’s a benefit; especially if used in conjunction with some form of mental balancing. The energy centers do have a very physical aspect expressed in our bodies and it only makes sense to me that using our bodies in certain ways will have a certain effect on those energy centers. To express a flow of energy through holding a mudra is extending our mental desire for balance into our bodies. I think that the mind and the body working in tandem like that is a very powerful form of transformation.

Even if the mudra isn’t actually altering the flow of energy—though I think most probably do because there’s been many centuries put into studying these things—the physical expression at least indicates a sort of crystalized desire which increases the effect of acting on such a desire. I think that goes for all types of physical configurations or exercises meant to help with the balance of our energy systems, or really anything we do that expresses a desire or an intent to balance and to apply love to ourselves and to our own emotions, and to find the place of centered compassion. I think no matter what you do to express that intent mentally or physically, it will have an effect on your inner work.

Those are my thoughts. Back to you, Gary.

Well, I’m in your boat in that I haven’t worked a pendulum so I feel kind of unfit. I just had questions and musings. I’ll go up next because I have a feeling that Jim has something more substantive to offer.

So, I think it’s a really interesting question, but it raises a whole can of worms for me, starting with a question: Is there a range or spectrum of depth of blockage in the chakras? That is, can one be blocked on a shallow level, but have an otherwise open and functioning chakra on a deeper level? Or, conversely, can there be very deep blockages that require more intensive work to untangle and balance? It makes sense to me that the energy center would not be an indivisible unit that functions as a unified whole in an either on or off position. In fact, to this point Ra says that an energy center may be partially blocked, indicating to me that there are various layers or depths to each energy center.

Consider your own personality structure: you have various strata to your identity. On the surface are those superficial preferences, tastes, and fads that come and go. Underneath those are moods or mindsets that may persist for hours, days or weeks, and underneath those are periods in your life where you are working on larger patterns of experience that may go for years or decades. Underneath those are patterns that persist throughout the entire lifetime, and underneath an incarnational pattern are rhythms that extend across multiple lifetimes, and you go further down into the racial and planetary and archetypical, cosmic, and All Mind, and so forth.

So, what I’m getting at is what level is the pendulum picking up blockage? This is a fascinating question that, unfortunately, my own studies have not explored. You mentioned how energy centers fluctuate so I would offer the thought that energy centers are definitely not fixed properties. Because they are the centers through which life experiences are created and processed, energy centers—like all life experience—will of necessity fluctuate. The Confederation indicates that balance is not something that is done once and need never done again, but is a moment-by-moment practice.

Consider this analogy, probably a crappy one: The pilot of the aircraft or the ocean-going ship, are both constantly balancing their craft according to the changing conditions. Perhaps the balance needed in the stormy waters is different from the one needed in the calm. Here’s a quote from Ra session #54.8 where they say:

“The precision with which each energy center matches the original thought lies not in the systematic placement of each energy nexus, but rather in the fluid and plastic placement of the balanced blending of these energy centers in such a way that intelligent energy is able to channel itself with minimal distortion.”

And then Ra throws in another profound point in the same Q & A when they said:

“The mind/body/spirit complex is not a machine, it is rather what you may call a tone poem.”

So that gives you a sense of the fluidity. Just look to the fluidity of life, of your personal life, of day-to-day experience, of the social life, of the fluidity of biological life—even mountains rise and fall. There is nothing that is fixed or constant or permanent in the manifest world; everything is in a state of flux and change.

But, it is possible through discipline over time to reduce the fluctuations or perturbations of consciousness. Ra calls this ‘crystallization’ of the energy centers. Through such discipline, the energy centers become regular in their habits—filtering and allowing the love/light energy of the Creator to move through them in a reliable and dependable ways. And as to what crystallized means, Don asked just this question in #47.7 and Ra said:

“We have used this particular term because it has a fairly precise meaning in your language. When a crystalline structure is formed of your physical material, the elements present in each molecule are bonded in a regularized fashion with the elements in each other molecule. Thus, the structure is regular and when fully and perfectly crystallized, has certain properties. It will not splinter or break. It is very strong without effort and it is radiant, traducing light into a beautiful refraction, giving pleasure to the eye of many.”

So, to conclude, there may be a very good source out there regarding the pendulum and energy centers. I’m sure there is, actually. But if not, extensive, and if possible, empirical research could be of aid. For example, one could determine how a pendulum responds to crystallized energy centers, to partially blocked energy centers, to fully unblocked, and so forth. And with enough data, trends might emerge and conclusions could be drawn. But, Jim, what do you think?

You guys did a great job and I really don’t have too much to offer in response.

Gary lied.

Sorry I deceived you.

She asked what pendulums are for. I think basically they are diagnostic tools for people who have the ability to use them. I think it takes a while to develop that ability. I worked with them a long time ago and didn’t have a whole lot of ability and no one was really interested. So, I just put it aside. But now I’m looking at it over there on my shelf because I still have it from about forty years ago.

So, I don’t think pendulums are any value at all in actually balancing your energy centers. I think that the balancing exercises that she mentioned here are probably the most helpful that I know about as far as getting the blockages balanced out in the energy centers. And for that, you simply need to be aware of what’s happening to you in your daily round of activities.

When you find yourself being thrown off your center by any kind of activity, whether it’s positively or negatively oriented, you need to just keep your eye and your heart open to what’s going on in your life. Then, at the end of the day when you’re meditating, look at what dislodged you from your normal flow of agreeableness, of love, of cheerfulness, and of equanimity—whatever that general feeling is that makes you feel most comfortable, and you feel most centered in your own being. Anything that makes you lose that for any reason needs to be looked at in your meditations. This is where you use the balancing exercises.

As Ra said, you simply recreate the situation, make it huge and magnify it. Then, for a moment, image the opposite and allow it to come into your field of vision. Allow these images to get huge, and then basically accept yourself for having both of these types of reactions or responses contained within your being as means by which the Creator can know Itself—as means by which you can know the Creator, and as means by which you can know yourself.

I think I’ve said enough. So, my suggestion would be to not really worry too much about pendulums unless you want to become a healer yourself or to become able to determine how your energy centers are moving back and forth.

As to the changing nature of the energy centers, I imagine there is some movement of either more clarity or less clarity as we are, as she says, affected by emotional and additional catalyst. But in general, I think that the energy centers at their basic nature—at their foundation—are pretty stable in the way that they are able to either allow or block light to move through them. So, I think that what we need to do is to just look at what happens in our daily round of activities, balance it in our meditations, and then keep our eyes and hearts open.

Gary, any final thoughts from you?

No, I thought you had done work with the pendulum, but I knew you’ve done work with–a lot of work—with the balancing exercises themselves. So, great reply all around.

Austin, you have anything more to offer?

I guess maybe a little bit. I can share my experience with a pendulum. I think it’s worth sharing because it helps to inform my skeptical nature. When I was very young, my mom had pendulums and worked with pendulums in the way that Ra describes. I got frustrated with seeing my hand being what is moving the pendulum, so I hung it from a stationary source and tried to get it to rotate without me having any contact with the string, but it did not move.

That doesn’t mean I don’t believe that pendulums work, but I agree completely with Jim in that it is not necessary to inform our work or our balance. I think a lot of people sort of discount the fact that energy centers can primarily be expressed through our experiences. As we examine experiences that have given us catalyst, each of those catalysts will relate to a particular energy center. I don’t think you have to have this intellectual knowledge of which energy center it is. It is helpful in a lot of situations. But as long as you just balance it, no matter what it is, it doesn’t really matter what energy center it is—doing the work will be beneficial. So those are my final thoughts.

Yeah, while Ra’s particular technique of accentuating that which is out of balance and allowing it , as Jim was describing, to grow larger and larger and larger until its antithesis pops up is helpful, I think you could also do balances by just sort of consciously reflecting on your life. For instance, seeing the classic balance that Ra describes as patience/impatience. Let’s say you noticed that hey, I’m a pretty impatient person so I’m going to try practicing patience. The impatience may have already been accentuated because you’ve been practicing it a lot, although maybe not consciously. So, as a mechanism of balancing yourself, you then try to find moments or opportunities where you can practice patience.

Yeah, I agree completely. It doesn’t always necessarily look exactly like how Ra describes it or how Jim was talking about because I have found a lot of benefit in sometimes just becoming conscious of something. As soon as I become conscious of it, it seems to just immediately balance itself. That’s for like smaller things that aren’t lifetime issues. But sometimes, as soon as I’m aware that I’m behaving a certain way or feel a certain way, it just dissolves. So sometimes just mindfulness is all that is needed.

Yeah, agreed. And that’s the value of mirrors, too, from other people. So, what’s our time, Austin?

We are, we have a pretty long episode already so we’re about done.

So, not going to Jeremy’s.

Yeah.

All right. I had a quick, quick, quick, quick follow-up to the first question about what Lou was asking and that’s to highlight again the value and potency of perspective and the example that Jim gave. He and Carla were bound to a hospital bed and in daily and often sometimes extreme suffering. But it was the discovery of Michael Newton’s work and the gaining of perspective that brought a level of peace to Jim and Carla with their situation—a level of understanding. Not that they could necessarily identify exactly why this was happening. Though actually in their case, Jim, you guys did develop a really good understanding of why. Basically, they were able to see that there was purpose and meaning—and even rightness—to it as difficult as it was. So, perspective really illuminated and empowered and helped them. So, Jim, do you have anything to say to our listeners?

Yes. I would just like to thank everybody for listening to our program. We appreciate that. You know, without you guys there wouldn’t be much sense of us being here. Keep sending us questions—we need your questions. And keep sending us your love—we need your love. We will do our best to send it right back to you, and maybe you can pass it on to whomever you see on the street today and wherever you are. We love you all. Cheerio.

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