Sadly it does not surprise me, all the reports coming out about so-called “spiritual gurus” shaming, dehumanising and even sexually abusing their students… and often in the name of ‘Truth’. (What kind of ‘Truth’ could make people so unkind?)
I’ve been saying this for years:
The more ‘perfect’ and ‘calm’ and ‘transcendent’ someone appears to be on the outside, the more internal chaos and mess they may simply be repressing, hiding from view.
You see, all that is unhealed, unconscious, unseen and unloved and unmetabolised within us, will inevitably end up pulling the strings in our lives and hurting our loved ones and those closest to us. All our repressed humanity, all the silenced voices of shame and fear within us, all the rage and grief we numb in order to maintain our image of “the nice one”, or, worse, “the enlightened one”, all of this material will end up making us cruel and unkind and manipulative if it’s not acknowledged, if we don’t take full responsibility for it.
All of our unmet trauma, all our squished ‘darkness’ will lead us to overpower and control others, shame them, call them names, blame them, and invalidate their pain, in our search for relief.
We will simply stop listening.
No matter how “enlightened” we are.
No matter how many followers we have, no matter how many ashrams we run, no matter how high up we are in the spiritual lineage.
We will run from our own loneliness and doubt, and play “The One Who Knows”.
Until we discover our true spiritual power:
This open, vulnerable, tender and honest, messy and achy and mostly broken, brilliantly and completely whole human heart.
The heart that connects, the heart that forgives, the heart that cares.
If you sit just long enough with sadness, fear or longing or some strange energy or urge you can’t even name if you sit in a place of no hope and no expectation if you open your heart wide in meditation the sadness eventually softens the fear becomes intimate its imagined edges and boundaries dissolving into the vastness and it reveals its deep intelligence and benevolent nature for at the core of everything we run away from is everything we long for but we’ll never know if we keep running.
– Jeff Foster
Jeff shifts from the old ideas of Awakening which focused on Gurus and their cultish ideations. He is certainly a refreshing voice in Presence and Meditation.
As channeled from the Beings of Light Through Liesel.
“You have a natural tendency towards merging, a natural tendency towards unity instead of separation. This is a wonderful gift. In fact, you are the precursors of a humanity that is yet to come in which all humans feel their connection with one another. Your innate gifts as an empath give you a powerful advantage in more easily merging your awareness back into Source energy. The challenge is that like everyone on the planet, you have been taught and essentially “brainwashed” into perceiving that the third-dimensional world of surface form is reality. You have been conditioned (as all have) to place your attention and awareness only on this tiny layer of true reality. Therefore, because what your awareness is concentrated on is where the energy flows, you are currently most likely to be primarily or solely merging on this surface layer that some call the horizontal dimension.
Viewed through a very fitting analogy, this surface layer of reality can be thought of as the very top layer of the ocean where the varied and often tumultuous waves of the ocean are felt. Other people may only experience their own personal waves (in the form of their thoughts, emotions, and sensations that arise in response to their life experiences); however, as an empath you often experience your waves as well as the waves originally generated in others. To build on the analogy, if you were to visualize a ring around each person as they float on the surface of the ocean, then the waves within each ring are what each person is experiencing. Empaths tend to have a ring with a much greater diameter than other people do, and the diameter of an empath’s ring can fluctuate quite dramatically. An empath’s ring often encircles or overlaps the rings of others.
Yet, there is an amazing blessing hidden within your natural impulse to merge. You can instead choose to merge in the vertical dimension by simply bringing your attention and awareness to this dimension more and more. You can merge deep within and access the depths of the ocean that are beneath the surface. These depths are not subject to those churning waves. When you dive into the ocean of your true being you begin to realize the calm, still, loving peace that exists there, regardless of conditions at the surface. From this deeper level of your internal and eternal ocean of being, you can also expand back out in the horizontal direction and realize that this deep peace made of the essence of love and light is actually beneath the surface of all others too. You begin to realize that beyond the surface emanations of others that you have previously been tuned into that you are also capable of tuning into and receiving the emanations of their true selves, their Source essence, which is ultimately inextricable from the one boundless ocean of infinite love-light that you and they are.”
“Always know Our love is truly with you, because Our love truly is you”
A side note from Sydney Lynn:
When you SEE others deeply as their Source Selves, they too begin to sense the depth of love which they truly are. This is the awakening process, a profound gift you can offer much like being the flame that lights their match. This can easily be done without interfering with the surface layer personality’s behavior or actions. Easily done without judgement and this SEEING OR MERGING is safe because as the observer boundaries are never punctured, preventing the precious leakage of each Soul’s Signature within the One.
As channeled from the Beings of Light Through Liesel.
“There is much that is arising on your third dimensional plane that triggers fear in people. This is actually the opportunity for a great blessing, because for some people this intense fear will cause a release and a surrender to evolution from within this sense of the overwhelming. That which you feel may destroy your world, can actually provide the impetus for the ultimate point of your world: awakening. Just as the heightened anxiety and fear within a nightmare can bring the dreamer out of the dream, so too, can the apparent chaos in your world and the fear that it elicits, contain the potential jolt that serves to encourage the personality to surrender to the vastness, and ultimately, the true safety of the depths of the Oneness within. There is much that is being ‘drawn out’ in your world. Just as a boil may come to the surface of the skin, or poison may be drawn out of a wound, the human collective mind is awash with many poisons which Spirit is currently attempting to draw out. However, many of you forget this bigger picture and instead only focus on the poisons themselves. Indeed, the very fact that these poisons are so prevalent in your world is positive evidence of the collective body of humanity purging these poisons from within itself. If you perceive poisons within the world, realize that they cannot be remedied with adversarial energy. The only antidote is love. Adversarial energy always creates more of the very thing it opposes. So, be very mindful of how you, yourself, may be introducing poison into the world. If you perceive darkness in the world, do not fight the darkness, as the fight itself will inherently contain elements of the darkness. Instead shine light intensely, bravely, and with relentless love. Create so much illumination around the pockets of darkness, that it is clear for all to see what those pockets are, and they will dissolve in the power of this glaring brilliance. Also, allow for grace and forgiveness for yourself if you are temporarily overcome by the ego during this collective process of purging, and remember that to judge yourself is the same as to judge others, as there is really only the One. And finally, a dear part of Us who you some of you call Jesus has this to share: ‘I did not teach the people by rooting out the darkness within them. I taught the people by seeing even the faintest spark of light within them and nurturing and fanning that spark, until they, themselves, could begin to perceive it and continue to stoke the fire from within.’
“Always know Our love is truly with you, because Our love truly is you.”
I don’t like the word Ascension because I see life in spirals, orbits and curves but from the 3D viewpoint and experience it will suffice to use terms such as “rise”, “ascend”, “lift”…lol. ~SydneyLynn
A few years ago, during a conversation with Chrisoula about my study and practice of A Course in Miracles, and how it affected our family, I said that God was my priority. Remembering my identity in Love was my only function.
see the teacher? see the student?
Chrisoula replied, “I am more important than God. Your family is more important than God.”
I was shocked by that. When I told some ACIM friends about it, they were shocked.
When I told the Holy Spirit about it, the Holy Spirit said, “God agrees with Chrisoula.”
I am a very slow learner.
If we are walking around praising God, and anybody around us feels ignored or slighted because we are walking around praising God, then we are tragically confused – about what we are, about what others are, and, critically, about God.
I first glimpsed this thirty some odd years ago when U2’s Achtung Baby came out. The first time I heard One I wanted to be the narrator but I wasn’t. I was the other; I was “you.”
You say love is a temple, love a higher law Love is a temple, love the higher law You ask me to enter but then you make me crawl And I can’t be holding on to what you got When all you got is hurt
Chrisoula was not asserting any privilege in opposition to God; she was speaking for God. She was refusing to accept fear and hurt in place of Love, no matter how eloquent I was. She was reminding me how God appears in our living, and what kind of response that appearance calls for.
God appears as the other with whom we are in relationship, and asks us to love them without qualification or condition, as best we can. It is a process, not an event.
A Course in Miracles teaches us how to no longer mistake the appearance of separation for actual separation (e.g., T-18.IX.6:2). It shows us that separation is a thing we are doing to ourselves (T-27.VIII.10:1). And it invites us to no longer fear the Love that appears when separation is undone (T-31.V.16:7).
U2 again, same song: “one life / but we’re not the same / We get to carry each other.”
Carrying one another is our privilege because it is the end of hurt and loneliness, ours and everyone else’s. There are no exceptions to this expression of love. The absence of exceptions is what Love is.
Love is incapable of any exception. Only if there is fear does the idea of exceptions seem to be meaningful (T-7.V.5:7-8).
Love holds everything.
So A Course in Miracles invites us to commit to relationship as the site of learning what we are and what the other is. In relationship we learn once and for all that nothing real can be threatened and nothing unreal exists (T-in.2:2-3).
The form of this relationship will shift; its function will not. You can dump blood on missiles, you can get a divorce, you can write poetry and grow roses and the underlying function doesn’t change: you are learning what you are in truth, which is learning what the other is in truth, which is learning what Love is.
This is revolutionary. It is terrifying. Love does its own stunts; Love is always all in. Dachau isn’t theoretical; Tyre Nichols isn’t theoretical: you are not theoretical.
Salvation is not an individual matter. It entails saving, delivering, rescuing an entire civilization . . . The salvation of the entire planet requires a total risk of everything – of you, of me, of unyielding people everywhere, for all time (Lynice Pinkard Revolutionary Suicide).
Pinkard’s vision of collectivism is related to the biblical Jesus’s admonition that those who seek their lives shall lose their lives but those who surrender their lives for the sake of God, who is Love, shall find life.
In the world, “surrender rather than seek” sugars out as living nonviolently and creatively together without fear. There aren’t any maps; we make it up as we go. All that matters is learning how to hear the Holy Spirit and listening to nothing but the Holy Spirit.
There are no blueprints. And there is no space of purity from which to act. We must begin imperfectly from within the messiness, in ways that respond to and engage with our concrete and particular contexts and circumstances (Pinkard).
A Course in Miracles teaches us to accept reality. Reality is this: this this. The Course teaches us to accept that our relationship with each other is given for no other reason than to remember we are Love Itself. It takes commitment, devotion, tenacity, willingness. We have to be humbled. We have to show up. And what we show up to is literally right in front of us, crying out for love.
Pinkard again, same essay.
Human life lived in God’s image, lived fully, is found in the crossing over from ourselves to the well-being of others – that is what love is. When we cross over from power to weakness, from strength to vulnerability, from inside to outside, from up to down, we rise above ourselves, we transcend ourselves. In other words, the descent into death of our own self-interest – this revolutionary suicide – is actually a rising, a resurrection.
The point is not what is God or what does God want or what offends God or can God even be offended – those were never the point. I was confused. God lies beyond our understanding; we don’t have to work that out. We have to work on remembering what we are – which is to remember what reality is. Which we do here, now, with the ones who are given us.
We serve them by allowing them to teach us what we have forgotten about Love.
one
Chrisoula is my teacher not because she has some nuanced understanding of A Course in Miracles. She could care less about A Course in Miracles. Yet by calling out my spiritual blindness – which is always an effect of fear – she invites me to be accountable to Love. She calls me back into the practice of Love with her. She says “choose again,” and shows me what to choose, and so I do. This is my witness.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture. Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever. ~Mary Oliver
Wahatoya Dreaming 