WISDEOM 16

“To be is to do”—Socrates.

“To do is to be”—Jean-Paul Sartre.

“Do be do be do”—Frank Sinatra.

P. 147-148

No , that’s not a mistake--same numbers as last week--we just went deeper!

Often times when we pray we have a preconceived notion of how that prayer should be answered or how we think it will be answered. Although this is a natural inclination of the mind you can begin to notice that our preconceived or pre-programmed notions of what should be, drastically limit our awareness. You probably recall the old joke about the two row boats and a helicopter* Well this is a similar dynamics.

*A severe flood hits a remote village. The resident of one home decides to stay and pray that God will save him. The water rises and a man in a boat comes by, but the homeowner politely thanks him and says, “God will save me.” A little later the water is up to the top floor and another rowboat comes by with the same response. Finally he is sitting on the roof and a helicopter comes by and offers to carry him to safety--, “No, thank you, God will save me.” 

The water continues to rise and he finally drowns. 

He is quite annoyed with his Creator as he comes to the gates of heaven and unloads on St. Peter who finally responds--”Joe, what the hell do you want we sent you two rowboats and a helicopter. 

It is important to note that we are not being asked to do something that we do not do all the time anyway. When we are watching a movie or reading a fantasy or present at a musical play, we are doing with some teachers would call “the willful suspension of disbelief.” We don't go about criticizing the impossibility of people dancing in the streets, we just simply accept that and enjoy it as part of the show.

Somehow we seem to think in matters of the spirit that we should completely understand and agree with and even predict what shows up. When we are in that limited state of consciousness we are looking over there for the answer when the answer presented to me is right in front of my nose.

“And the alignment that we are offering you now, to a higher vibration, a higher way of seeing, will do much of the work for you provided you set the intention to hold your vibration, and your awareness of the worth of your fellows, and the self in truth, in high and wise acknowledgment in the inherent divine within all. ”

Our willingness and intention to see things differently, to be raised to a higher vibration, can allow that to happen. I think the imagery used a while ago was imagining dropping the sandbags that were holding down this hot air balloon. The balloon rises on its own, to a higher vibration, once we let go of the preconceived notions that we were holding on to.

A number of years ago when working with this material I had the image of an Olympic sport called “curling.” It is a type of shuffleboard on ice. Along with attempting to place the stone in the highest point area, two of the teammates with brooms or brushes are madly sweeping in front of this moving stone to guide it in the desired direction. They do not touch the stone; they simply clear the path. It is very similar to the biblical reference made by John the Baptist to “make the rough ways smooth and the crooked ways straight.” Once the path has been cleared, it is quite a bit easier for me to travel on. 

This counteracts the preconceived notion that I carry with me quite often that somehow or another I am doing this all by myself and that this work of Spirit appears to be drudgery more than anything else.

It is quite fascinating to me as we work together on Sunday mornings how much humor we can work into our study and our Awakening. It reinforces for me that this whole thing could be quite a joyful experience!

We mentioned that being at a higher vibration gives us a different point of view. The old points of view or the turmoil below continue to exist. It is just that they no longer have much of an influence over us. My higher vision or my higher vibration allows me to see these (lower vibrational energies) as the limitation that they are.

There was a question that made reference to “The Disappearance of the Universe,” and for those who are not aware of it that is a book title by Gary Renard. He is a student of the Course and one of the major teachings of A Course in Miracles is that all of this stuff is an illusion and once we let go or release all of our illusory ideas or attachments there are no more lessons to be learned and so the world of matter or the classroom we have created is no longer necessary and disappears. The course might say it had no substance anyway.

I'm not going to get into a philosophical debate about real or unreal or Illusion or not. My viewpoint today, although that might change, is that as long as I am here then I am still choosing to learn and to grow.

One of the insights that was revealed to me a while ago was that Love or God or the Creative Source, whatever you would like to call it, is not a static entity. It evolves, and each one of us in our own unique way through our learning, through our growing, through our stretching, through our expression, contributes to that evolution.

This idea stands in stark contrast to my ego or my personality self that looks at all this in a very linear way and wants it to be done, wants it to be finished. For me that is probably one of my more conscious struggles. Although I hesitate to use the word struggle. I am working on moving away from that sort of negativity.

I guess I might be able to say along with Doctor Seuss, Life's a great Balancing Act. We live in a world where we have created duality as being one of our more formidable teachers and at the same time we realize that duality is not the truth. There is only One. That is why it is so silly to speak of my divine nature when really there is only One. There is no such thing as my divine nature or your divine nature, there is simply Divine Nature.

The seeming contradiction we explored towards the end of our work this morning had to do with the sense or the idea of loving and embracing our own worthiness, and realizing that when we embrace our worthiness, we are embracing ourselves right where we are at this moment, which again sometimes can be a limited perception, but at the same time we open ourselves to continuing growth in evolution.

It is only in linear time that we need to decide which one of those comes first--embracing myself or openness to the possibilities of life. In the world of Spirit those two energies are so intertwined with one another, are so dependent upon one another, that it is truly impossible to decide which comes first or which one necessitates the other.

They both exist. Now we recognize there are times when you might experience yourself as being down or depleted that it will be necessary for you to first consciously reinforce your worth by embracing the self as you perceive it to be at this moment. But even when that occurs, we encourage you to be aware that you are doing a necessary piece of work by pulling yourself out of or allowing yourself to rise above the illusion of separateness.

Thank you all for your love and your devotion to the work we all do as individuals and to know that the work we are doing with or for or by ourselves Hutches and Grace's every moment and every aspect of creation. 

I could not resist this one:

WISDOM 14

We could say that the history of human suffering is our inability to come to terms with spiritual hunger. Like one big cosmic joke, humans were born yearning for a home of tranquil abiding, yet without the map to get there. In every age some people seem to know more than others about the way home. They have been called shamans, prophets, and messiahs, monks and gurus, poets and philosophers, scientists and psychologists. They spend their time contemplating the way home and reporting their findings. Religions and big bang theories are attributed to their wisdom. Yet when all is said and done, each one of us is left abiding in the mystery, longing for the tranquillity that is whispered about in the depths of our own hearts. Thus a critical step on the spiritual path, and one that we will take over and over, is to let ourselves experience spiritual hunger long enough and deep enough to follow it to its source.

                             Lesser, Elizabeth. The Seeker's Guide

p,146-147

No one ever explained this to me before and it is just starting to make sense to me now. We have varied forms of awareness. We sometimes speak in the language of the Higher Self, Christ Consciousness as opposed to a lower self or an ego- personality consciousness. Unfortunately that imagery and description lends itself to another form of dualistic thinking. Sort of like the image of having an angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other.

What we are looking at here however, is that we are functioning on various levels of awareness and perception. The more awake, more aware that we are, the more we have the ability to choose (what vibration, what frequency, what “station” we are listening to). What we might have perceived in the past as being a struggle between good and evil or the higher and the lower, is simply the reflection of the natural resistance that exists when we were going about doing something new.

Quite a while ago I used the idea of imagining a hillside and you were holding a heavy ball then you let roll down the hill. In the beginning, it is totally arbitrary of what path the ball might take. After a while however, the rolling of the ball creates grooves or ruts in the hillside which the ball will naturally seek out because they have less resistance. Now if we want the ball to take a new path, it is going to require some guidance, some direction, and there will be resistance, because seeking out a well-worn path is energetically much simpler and easier to do.

(Remember this one: “If you always do what you've always done; you’ll always get what you've always got”).

One aspect of this learning today is to imagine ourselves in the same state. There is a natural resistance to creating a new behavior or new pattern which in many ways might be “outside the box” of the pathway we are used to using. We urge you all to be aware that resistance does not necessarily mean struggle, but it does mean moving past or through the inertia that might be created by old patterns of thought and action.

Another lesson that is connected to all of this as well, and here is where my past learning has become stuck sometimes, is that I find myself attempting to reach and touch the Divine within me with my limited personality-ego consciousness. Do you get a sense of the contradiction here?

It is like trying to go to the moon riding on the tail of a kite. It's a perfectly wonderful kite, but it is not made to go past is stratosphere. It does a wonderful job floating on the wind here on earth, but that is all it can do. We can be utterly frustrating and filled with condemnation and judgment when we try and make it do what it cannot. I am not judging the kite. It is a perfectly marvelous and wonderful kite, it is just not made to do the task that I have set for it. 

My personality, body, mind, history etc. can eventually become a perfect vehicle for the Divine Light to shine through, but it is not the Light it self, not can it really “comprehend” the Light. ( I think that might have been what John was hinting at when he stated, “The Light shone in the darkness and the darkness knew it not.”)—up until now, I was never sure what he was talking about!!

Now in the midst of our spiritual search we have all done much learning through books and workshops and strangely enough we are not denying the importance of these. Many times the experience offered the intellect or the personality consciousness sometimes can wake up a part or an aspect or a hunger for a deeper spiritual experience within us. There are times also when our thinking mind, our personality, brings us to the edge of deeper awareness but it can go no further. If we are gentle and non-judging towards ourselves, we can be grateful for these moments leading us up to the point of surrender again. We might not have been able to get there if simply left to our own devices.

Another example from this morning was that of a hot air balloon that is hovering slightly above the ground but is weighted down with a number of sandbags(attachments/addictions) and what the guides are helping us do is to release or cut some of those sandbags loose so that we can rise to a higher level of vibration and knowing. Notice we did not condemn the lower knowing or lower vibration. We recognize that our awareness and experience of it was a necessary step in the process. When we realize that we can even be grateful for the teachings of the lower vibration is brought to us.

A continuing frustration for me is “falling into forgetfulness.” I became aware this morning that my forgetfulness is an opening to the awareness of the attachments I have that are getting in the way. So, the trip is not just about waking up again, it about becoming aware of what put me to sleep and working with that.

“Now, when we offer you this, very simply we are saying that these new ideas that we are offering you, that seem to be there above you somehow, are, in fact, possible but you cannot attend to them in fullness with the level of perception that you have held to this date. If you held the level of perception that would help you understand this, to call this into your being, to know it as so, we promise you this: You would have done it already. So what we are responsible for now, as your teachers, are lifting you to a new vantage point where this new understanding is possible, where the limitations you have used to keep yourself at bay no longer serve you and you move beyond them to a new acceptance of what is there always. And we say this with emphasis, what is there always.”

Even though we speak of a “new” level of awareness nothing new is being created here. You are moving to a level of awareness that has always existed.

Now we do not want to neglect another factor here that we might begin to call your inner longing. You have become aware in this study and studies like it of a deep yearning, a hunger within your soul, not only to be at peace but to be embraced by that sense of oneness and wholeness that you already know exists. Your longing is like a spring-board that, with the energy of willingness, intention and surrender, projects you into a deeper and more complete way of knowing (of who you are).

You cannot yearn for something that you don't already have some experience of, even on just a deep level of your soul that you are not totally conscious of. If you were attempting to explain the taste Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Chocolate Chip to a native in the Amazon rainforest, there would be no language, their would be no common ground and therefore there would be no comprehension. There is nothing wrong with either one of you, it is just the experience that is lacking. And the experience is necessary for the awareness. 

What we are suggesting here is that an aspect of your soul is always resonating at this higher level or this higher frequency even though you might not be aware of it. Your deep awareness of this higher vibration responds as you are called to it even though it might not seem that you have the experience.

Another example of this is also something you have all experienced. You have all read some books more than once and often times you have had the experience of seemingly seeing a sentence or idea for the first time, almost as if that paragraph was not there the first time you read the book. Now, what is going on here? In between the first reading and the second you have become aware on some level of your being of a life experience that you can now relate to and that this section of the book on some level refers to. Before you had that experience whatever might have been there in the book was nothing but words. There was no inner experience for that concept “stick” to.

“As we lift you to a higher vantage point in your knowing, in your awareness, you are not discovering what has not been there, you are accepting what is there already. When an explorer went off in a boat and discovered a continent, he discovered what had been there always, but was misperceived, was thought to be illusory, legendary, but not fact. Our responsibility now, as you allow us, is to re-create your consciousness in accordance with the Word, in accordance with the Divine Self that you are, so that what you claim, what you perceive, is in alignment with this truth. The decisions you make from this level of awareness must be very different from what you have made in lower vibration, for the simple reason that you see things differently, you understand them differently, and you attend to the needs of the self and others from this perspective in a different way.”

We are hoping in this work that we are sharing together that you will all be in to look at your needs and the needs of the other in a different light.

Last week I described that moment of awakening that came about through the simple words “I am a divine child of God and so are you.” Now I realize I might forget that, but it will never truly be beyond my reach and because of that I cannot but perceive myself and you and my relationship to you differently than I might have an past.

Peace, Joy, Love and Gratitude.

WISDOM 13

p. 145-146

“Finding yourself is not really how it works. You aren't the $10 bill in last winter’s coat pocket. You are also not lost. Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people's opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. Finding yourself is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a re-membering who you were before the world got its hands on you.” Emily McDowell.

“To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.

I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed. They said I was a boy named Rudolph Waltz, and that was that. They said the year was 1932, and that was that. They said I was in Midland City, Ohio, and that was that.

They never shut up. Year after year they piled detail upon detail. They do it still.”

from Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut

******************

I am a Divine Child of God but…

My past gets in my way. T

he baggage I am carrying, sometimes a small U-Haul cart other times a semi, gets in the way.

When I begin to realize that my perception of my baggage changes practically everyday, I also begin to realize the illusory nature of what it is that I am holding onto. That does not mean “my stuff” disappears. What it does mean, however, is that I begin to give my stuff less and less attention. It becomes rather irrelevant in this defining of who and what I am. In fact, I begin to learn that defining who I am is part of my baggage. I don't need a definition. Who I am is beyond definition. Sit with that one for a moment.

When someone completed that statement “I am a Divine Child of God…” by saying “I am a Divine child of God and so are you,” for a moment, it all became clear to me. If I embrace that last statement as the truth then there can be no “buts,” no arguments, no exceptions. There is only one reality, “I am a divine child of God and so are you.” Those are words, but the expression of those words, and the vibration aligned with it is that of Unity consciousness. Essentially there is no difference between you and me; there is no you and me, there just IS.

Now while we are on this Earthly plane each one of us is the unique expression of the Divine; that is both our teaching and our learning. It does not reinforce the idea of separateness, but carries with it that we are all colors of the same rainbow. In fact that is a metaphor or image that is used quite often-- a shining white light through a prism and seeing it break down into its significant primary colors. Each color is a unique expression of that white light.

“Now you perceive everything.” That includes yourself and everyone and everything around you. it is beginning to dawn on me that my perception is not the truth. What I see or feel or taste or touch might be a limited aspect of the truth, but it is certainly not the whole thing. And that especially is true when I apply that to my “perception” of myself. 

“I am a Divine Child of God but I don't always perceive myself that way.”

I'm reminded of the Zen fable of The Five Blind Men encountering an elephant and attempting to describe or define what they are experiencing. One holes the trunk and says, “This is an animal like a snake;” another holds the ear and says, “This is an animal like a gigantic fan; another is embracing the leg and says “This is an animal that is like a tree trunk; another has its hands on the sides of the of the elephant and says, “This is an animal like a wall; and finally there is one holding the tail saying, “This is this is an animal like a rope.” Each one of them is convinced that she/he are correct and in a very limited way they are but none of are close to the truth.

So I look in the mirror, how do I perceive myself. I see a body; I see a body that is aging; I see a body that is not quite as strong or as flexible as it might have been even a day ago. If I look deeper than the physical, I see a person who is concerned about this or that; upset about this upset about that; grateful for this grateful for that. And if I were to look in the mirror and just look at my eyes, I would begin to know beyond my seeing that there is more to me than all of that. I might not be able to define it or describe it and yet I know it is the truth. Whatever I perceive, I am more than that.

So what we are saying here is “Do not be limited by your perception. Your perception can only embrace that which it has already known. In words we have heard before, the only way I can define the present is from the past.

Now what we are being asked to do here is through our willingness and our intention to go beyond the limits of perception, to embrace possibility, even though we might not be able to define that.

Is it possible for me to know my true self? Is it possible for me to live out of the truth of my divine nature? Is it possible for me to see you beyond your disturbing personality?

Now my perception today would say something like, “I desire that possibility I desire to be in alignment with that possibility,” but if I were to follow that thought, I am also saying that “Even though I desire that possibility, I am not there yet.” Do you see how that perception or my of myself can be a limiting belief that keeps me in a box?

A suggested prayer:

“I am willing to open myself up to the possibility of knowing beyond my perception. I am willing to be willing. I step back as far as I need to step back and allow my willingness to be open to the possibility to be in my Truth.” And then as we have spoken many times before, I surrender; I allow my Divine self to take over. I allow my vision to be expanded to the highest level of possibility I can hold at this moment. Knowing that as I stretch, I can continue to stretch even more. In fact, there are no limits to what I can embrace and encompass in my eternal sense of Being.

“When you have a new ideal, a new thought, a new possibility that has not yet been claimed or made manifest in form, you idealize the possibility—“There may be great things in the ethers that I do not know yet”—but you do not align to them as a reality because you do not have the tools and the ability to claim them.”

I hope I am not being presumptuous about this one but I really sense that the above paragraph from the book is not quite complete. I believe that each one of us has, in one way or another, “tasted” or felt or experienced alignment with our Divine Nature. We might not have been able to stay in that space, but we knew and we know the truth of that. So even though I continue to seek that knowing or those “great things in the ether” that I don't seem to remember all the time, I do know them. I would not be here unless I carried within me, a sense of that deepest truth. I do know the truth of who I am, and as we mentioned earlier, when I recognize that truth within Myself then I recognize it in you as well. There are no limits to my understanding. None.

I might still have a difficult time getting past your personality self and getting past my personality self as well. At the same time I can know that neither one of those is a definition of who you are or who I am. 

“If you held the level of perception that would help you understand this, to call this into your being, to know it as so, we promise you this: You would have done it already. So what we are responsible for now, as your teachers, are lifting you to a new vantage point where this new understanding is possible, where the limitations you have used to keep yourself at bay no longer serve you and you move beyond them to a new acceptance of what is there always. And we say this with emphasis, what is there always.”

Here is simply another form of surrender. I recognize the limits of my perception. I recognize there is more to me there is more to you there is more to Creation then I am able to grass from my limited point of view. I allow all beings who are leading and walking this path with me, some with bodies, and some not to help raise me up. I do not condemn; I do not judge. I simply let go of my grasp on my perception as being the truth. I recognize the old beliefs, the old attitudes, the old definitions of life that no longer serve me. I bless them; I thank them for being here. I thank them for serving me, for being my teachers, even though some of the lessons might have been painful. I release my perception, open myself up to the realm of possibility, through my willingness in my intention that I can see beyond all illusion, see beyond  all created barriers, all that might get in a way from my recognition of the truth of who you are and the truth of who I am. 

Lovingly grateful for the higher energies and vibrations we create together.

If you want--explore the next couple of pages and it will make what we have talked about here much more clear.