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.