October 3, 2001 Wednesday Evening with Aaron
911: How Does Loving Energy Relate to Fear?
Aaron: Good evening and my love to you all. I am Aaron. It has been many months since we have gathered to speak in this way. It is a delight to feel your energy and presence.
You in this group are attempting to walk through your lives with love. Do not be reactive to your fear. Notice I did not say not to fear, because as humans you will fear, but, not to be reactive to your fear. This is truly the path of your growing maturity, to learn how to let any emotion arise and pass away without getting overly caught in the story of it.
We’ve talked a good deal about emergence into 4th density and what that means, how the 4th density human will be, first, telepathic, able to communicate without use of words just by sharing thoughts, and, second, within that telepathic communication to have equanimity with emotions that are received and transmitted.
You are not developing telepathic abilities nor equanimity as ends in themselves. Telepathic ability is a catalyst for deeper wisdom and compassion, or the ability becomes an enormous burden. Wisdom and compassion are the conditions out of which equanimity may develop. With equanimity, judgment and fear are seen just as they are, the results of conditions. You cease to give them energy, cease to be reactive to them. When they are no longer fed, gradually judgment , hatred and fear diminish and fall away.
When judgment does arise there is clear seeing of how it arose triggered by old consciousness and so you don’t buy into the story of it. Without judgment, without buying into the story of fear, hatred falls away. Then, as though a dark storm cloud dissipated, allowing the sun to shine through it, the light of your lovingkindness, your goodness and compassion, shine out into the world, into the universe.
Combined with this direct expression of your innate goodness is your free will. And with that free will, the ability to co-create, I would not say your world but your universe, because you are infinite. But in the beginning, at least to co-create your world.
Now, of course you co-create your world now, or believe that you do, and to some degree you do that. But the work is on a very different level when you attempt to co-create through the ego self. The Ground of Being from which Self expresses is a bit like the force that would create a tidal wave, and the ego self is on the very top scooping out teaspoons full of water.
You are unlimited. That which would co-create with the divine is not the ego self but is the Creator within you. It works for the good of all beings, grounded in deep wisdom and infinite compassion. When you co-create in that way, tuning in to the needs of beings, tuning in to all the available resources and with the ability truly to envision and manifest that vision, then you are expressing your true being. .
All of you inherently have this unlimited power. But with some wisdom, you chose not to use that power in its fullest extent because you are aware there is still distortion. As positively polarized beings, at some level you have made the decision not to enact your power fully until you are more capable of resting deeply in this space of love. As you deepen in your spiritual practice you find increasing ability to act without distortion and increasing trust of that ability. Then you begin to act more from that unlimited aspect of being.
You know that there are negatively polarized beings in the world, in the universe. Such beings thrive on fear; the fear vibration feeds them. They may be very much consumed by hatred and greed. They may delude themselves that their choices are made for the good of beings, but positive choices cannot be made for the good of some beings and still cause great harm to others. There is always a path free of such harm, if one is willing to seek it.. Beings of intense negative polarity usually do not make the statement that they are trying to avoid harm. But occasionally they have become blinded to their own inner activity and so they make the statement, “I must do this to protect people” and if this causes great harm to other people, that is their doing. . Thus, they justify such actions. They may deny that they get any nourishment from creating fear but my experience is that such beings always like the experience of power, and power and fear are always interwoven. .
So, you live in a world in which there are positively polarized beings, neutral beings, and negatively polarized beings. The negatively polarized beings are not evil. There is no such thing as absolute evil. Rather, they are suffering from an enormous distortion.
There is sometimes misunderstanding in thinking that beings are either positively or negatively polarized, to the extreme, that is, that they can only practice fear or love. Positively polarized beings have begun to learn an equanimity with fear and have made the deep free will decision not to enact that fear in the world. But there is still fear. Negatively polarized beings also have a core of goodness but their “sun” is hidden behind a dense cloud. Their light has become so screened by fear that it cannot break through the clouds. The actions of fear become predominant. But such beings are not evil, they are simply locked into old mind conditioning and the habitual ego desire for power for self, or those perceived as connected to the self. In this defending, they may truly believe in the righteousness of their cause. But they don’t yet understand that the cause can only be advanced with non-harm to all. I’m not defending such beings only trying to explain them a bit to you.
There is and has been for many decades, centuries, a (certainly the word is not war, even struggle is not quite accurate-contest might do), an opposition, a very intense contest, sometimes with dire results, between positive and negative polarity in the universe. Those who wish to express the most positive polarity, these beings on all planes, support positive polarity on the Earth plane. Those who would support negative polarity on all planes support the negative polarity enacted on the Earth plane.
On the Earth plane, the being enacting negative polarity may try to justify it and truly in his heart think he is doing right. When he searches for justification, my experience is that he may become a pawn of some greater negative polarity, something there behind him whispering in his ear, “Yes, kill them! Kill them! Yes, you were right. You have to protect your people that way.” Urging him on. Occasionally there is one of intense negative polarity in incarnation who does not use such justification for hate. But for the most part, those of negative polarity on the Earth plane truly believe in what they are doing and that it is for the good of at least certain beings.
Regarding this contest between positive and negative polarity, in the long run it is my firm conviction that positive polarity will win out because negative polarity can only go so far. Negative polarity can only go to 6th density. It can be a very powerful 6th density but it cannot move into 7th and 8th density. It holds itself at that level, reverts instantly, or must move all the way back and run through the densities again as positive. Of course, because of the pain involved in that process , it holds all the more firmly to its 5th or 6th density negative polarity. Such beings on a material or non-material plane can do great harm.
I don’t think I need to explain why you are working to enhance positive polarity in yourselves and the world. The goal here is the end of suffering for beings, peace, happiness, deep lovingkindness, so that each being may fully express its full divine potential.
And so we come to September 11th. Many of you have asked me, “Aaron, what happened? How did this happen?”
Let us talk first about what I see about that question, how it happened and then about what it means, what you can do from here.
The more that positive polarity opposes negative polarity with negative reaction, the more it feeds negative polarity which wants to be empowered, wants to control, and does thrive on fear. The events of September 11th were created, designed, and enacted by humans. Yet, to my understanding, those humans were prodded on by non-material negative beings, by negative energy. I do want to avoid being esoteric here. Wherever the negative energy derives, the question is, how to respond skillfully. But you need to understand that this issue is larger than one of this or that political system, larger even than one of worldwide terrorism and putting a stop to it. It touches the essential issue, how does loving energy, grounded in wisdom and compassion, relate to fear? .
I think the attack fell where it did for very specific reasons. When I say, “where” I don’t mean the precise location; it could have been a different building. But on this country, for specific reasons. In no particular order, there is a national karma. All of you here in this country were drawn to take birth in this country with a fair degree of well-being compared to people in very poor and unstable countries. Many of you are old souls. And yet there has been an isolationist policy in this country, even for those whose meditation has taught them the interdependence of all beings. There has been a withdrawal behind a curtain of sorts, the ostrich hiding its head in the sand.
How many of you received very disturbing e-mails about the conditions of women in Afghanistan a year or two ago? Women starving, not allowed to work, their children starving, women shot and even literally buried alive by a very oppressive government? Other than signing a petition in your e-mail, how many of you did anything about it? How many of you said, “These are my sisters. This may not continue.” If your birth sister was in Afghanistan, would you have acted differently? Would you have become more involved?
So many of you, especially in this country, have tended to look away from the suffering in the rest of the world and for this reason you are hated in parts of the world. It’s not a matter of “fault” and you did not create the situation single-handedly. . Please do not misunderstand me. A good part of this hatred comes from lies and propaganda and misunderstanding. But those lies and propaganda could not get a foothold if there was not some degree of truth in it.
It has been easier for you in America to separate yourselves because of the oceans that protect you and separate you from the world. You have created a basically loving and stable system of government. Your government was sorely tested last November by the indecisiveness of the election results . And yet, unlike what would have happened in many countries, there was no war. There was no violence. Discontent, took a form of letters to editors, friends speaking to friends. But nobody tried to kill anybody. Do you have any idea how wondrous this is?
And yet, even here, others in other nations look at you and they can’t understand because in their countries there would have been death in that situation. Sometimes there is great jealousy of this stability. Often they misunderstand and see not stability but apathy, and I don’t think there was apathy in the November election. But in countries where there is constant political foment they see this peacefulness as apathy.
I cannot begin to go into the variety of reasons why in some places there is hatred for this country, only to repeat that it entails a good deal of jealousy, misunderstanding, propaganda, and that you have helped to create that misunderstanding through your own withdrawal from the world beyond your boundaries.
So, here’s one reason the terrorism was directed towards the United States. There’s a second and equally important reason. We come back to the conflict between negative and positive. Negative energy is always seeking to create havoc in the world. Positive polarity counters that seeking to whatever degree it can without infringing on free will and without resorting to the hatred employed by the enemy.
What I am about to say some of you are going to find difficult, as you have found difficulty with my statements about the Holocaust. I have said about the Holocaust that those who died at some level offered the sacrifice, both related to their own personal karma and as a way of resolving and balancing that karma, but more importantly, as a way of teaching a certain lesson to the world, which is, that one must always say no to hatred and abuse. They died to wake you up, and indeed they did wake up the world, at least partially awakened it. If more of you were more fully awake this present event would not have happened.
Again, we came to that place where the world needs a wake-up call. There are those who would abuse, murder, and do such in the name of God to justify it. There have always been those in the world. From time to time they gather strength and the way the world responds to them is extremely important. If the world turns its head and chooses not to see acts of hatred they will gain more power.
What does it mean to say no to hatred, to say it with love, and to say it with an absolute authority, “No!” How do you learn to do that in your personal lives and as nations?
So I think those who died at some level agreed to participate, offering their life as part of this great lesson. And the response is quite extraordinary. Yes, we see letters to the editor talking about keeping touch with one’s hatred. Well, of course, there’s always going to be some negativity. But far more people than I would have dreamed have come forth with statements of clarity. The situation really is perfect because there’s no nation that you can attack to seek revenge. There is no one religious group that you can attack. And people are seeing this. People are asking the important question, the urgent question, “How do we say no to terrorism, to murder, to violence, in any form anywhere in the world, and say it without getting caught up in hatred ourselves?” This is what these people died to teach.
Of course, there was not a conscious decision, somebody looking at his watch at 6 A.M. and thinking, “Well, in 2 hours there is that situation and I’m going to die.” But at a deeper level there was some understanding and agreement. It’s a big sacrifice and yet, – forgive me, I do not take human life lightly, but it is just a lifetime. So what? Ten years, 50 years, 100 years; just a snap of the fingers. They will be back. Hopefully they will come back to a world that is more awake to its interdependence and more awake to the need to deal with pain with presence and compassion, a need to deal with hatred with a dynamic compassion which says no to abuse, and yet listens and hears the pain in another’s heart rather than confronting angry beings with hatred..
This is really the only hope for the world, that you learn this. And these beings gave of themselves that you might have the situation to learn it, all of you throughout the world. Do not let their deaths be in vain. I know I don’t need to tell this group that, but go out and teach it to others. Teach lovingkindness. Model lovingkindness in your lives. Teach compassion. And teach that compassion is strong.
There was a very difficult letter on the final page of a special Time magazine issue about September 11th. He said, I do not quote him exactly but something to the gist of, “We must be strong. We must hold on to our hatred. Those who speak of forgiveness, they are the weaklings.” I’m sure there are people who read this and agreed. But because his statement was so strong, I hope it also woke some people up, seeing how that voice could be in them and that this is the voice which must be attended to, the voice of fear. Because, of course, it is far easier to hold onto hatred and use that hatred as a lever for revenge than it is to find understanding and compassion and to say no to further abuse from that place of compassion. It’s harder because it forces you to look deeply into your own anger and the way you may tend to hold onto that anger and use it for power and safety.
This act of hatred also came to the United States through another karmic stream, which is the deep intention for the good of beings. You are perhaps the one country, – let me rephrase, there are other countries who could create a container for such violence and hatred but they are not big countries and do not speak with a loud voice. – You are the only major country who had the ability to sustain those blows without immediately striking back in ways that would have created great harm.
Your whole country together, in some ways drew this energy here both to balance your national karma and also because you did have the strength and compassion, the wisdom, to handle it and to be models to the whole world of this strong compassion. There is some determination that you will not be used or misused by terrorists, nor will you hate terrorists. You will not hate nations. You will not hate religious groups. This is part of the ground of which this country grew, and while it is not perfected, there is a deep resonance to this direction. You attempt say no to violence while deeply understanding the pain of those beings who gave off such violence.
I see this event as a potential turning point. What your country does in response in the next 6 months will set the course of the world for centuries, I think; either pulling the world more deeply into negative polarity where beings will continue a cycle of killing and more killing or into a turn toward true sanity and maturity.
You have heard me speak about the idea that there are guardian angels around the Earth, that your free will may not be violated, and also that there is a non-intervention policy. Negative polarity does not obey that policy. Positive polarity cannot break it or we become what we guard against, and violate free will.. All we can do is teach love. It is up to you to use that love to change the way the whole world reacts and relates to negativity. You are ripe for this work.
You know that there are many places where material and non-material sentient beings exist. There are many planets that have life. Perhaps not life as you would recognize it, not humanoid-looking beings, but life and intelligence. There is a brotherhood of positively polarized beings who communicate throughout the galaxy, throughout the universe. Part of the reason there is a non-intervention policy around Earth is that you must do this for yourselves, and part of it is that you had not yet reached the maturity where the majority of this brotherhood, or council, felt that you could be trusted with the power that would come with communication with such beings from other planes.
If somebody makes you angry and you decide, “We’re just going to have to wipe them off the planet,” then how could you be trusted to have the power to knock out entire planetary systems? So in some ways your knowledge and power have been limited, limited by your own ignorance which was partially maintained because some of what would be available to learn from others was not offered to you, because you still needed to prove yourselves mature enough to enter into this inter-galactic council, if I may put it that way. So beings are watching to see what you will do. I don’t usually speak of such things but I think it’s important that you understand the whole situation here.
Beings, many of them very loving beings, are watching you carefully. You are indeed very beautiful beings. You have the unique ability to be with the physical, mental and emotional bodies together with the spirit body., and are gifted with this veil of forgetting so that you must relate skillfully to the heavier 3 bodies with faith and love. That situation is unique in the whole universe. Earth was originally created with the idea of bringing all 4 of these bodies together in a basically positively polarized environment; many have watched to see the extraordinary development of compassion in this plane. So you are being watched.
I could liken it to a child who comes to an age where he may get a license to drive a vehicle. The parents allow him to start to train for that driving but they watch him carefully to see, does he have the maturity to handle that much power? You already have awesome power in your nuclear weapons. What if you had the power to destroy without weapons, without biological, nuclear or chemical weapons? What if you could focus your hatred on something and destroy it with thought? Are you ready for that kind of power? Is your compassion developed enough to ground in compassion and create a container for that degree of power, because it is with that kind of power that you also become the co-creators you were intended to be.
The primary work for all humans as I see it, and especially for those of you who understand this situation, is the practice of compassion. Since you are not the ones making the political decisions, your arena of work is to nourish compassion for all the beings who died on September 11th, the passengers, building residents, pilots and the planners. An equal arena for the practice of compassion is in your everyday life. How did you relate today to the driver who cut you off while you were driving? How about the person who cut in front of you in the supermarket , the co-worker who played his radio too loud or who said unpleasant things to you during the work day, or the family member who took you for granted or hurt you in some way? How did you respond? How can you respond?
What do I mean by dynamic compassion? This is not a wimpy compassion that says, “Whatever you like, whatever you like.” It takes extraordinary courage to say no from a place that is connected to the deep power of the soul rather than from a place of ego power, to say no from a place of love.
Gandhi was a master at this, perhaps more than any human in the past hundreds of years. It would be very helpful to humans today to study exactly what Gandhi did and said in difficult situations. In his teachings of satyagraha, soul-force, he truly understood harm and non-harm. He did not ask others to be where they were not ready to be and hold them accountable for not being ready, or judge them. But he did ask them to grow by presenting the choice, making it clear that their choosing negativity was a choice, and that they did have an option, even when fear told them there was no option.. He understood that voice of fear, did not judge them, really forgave them for their fear and the acts committed in fear’s name, yet held them accountable for such acts.
If your toddler is sucking on a lollipop and you realize that she will spoil her dinner, you take it away. You expect that she’s going to cry and be angry. You don’t say, “Well all right, if you need it that badly you can have it.” And you don’t slap her on the face when she cries. You hold her and wait out her storm. You understand that you provoked that storm because she is only 2 years old and she doesn’t understand why she needs to give up the lollipop.
True compassionate non-violent action is willing to absorb fear and hatred, to hold it in an embrace, to help to prevent it from doing more harm by creating a container for it and yet, to be persistent in lovingly saying no. I challenge each of you, how can you do this more fully in your lives? How can you teach others also to do this? Because if each of you teach 2 and they each teach 2, it will spread around the world.
I do want to acknowledge on the human level the enormous suffering caused by these events 3 weeks ago. It is important to offer your prayers and especially to offer your loving wishes to those who died whether victim or perpetrator because in a sense they’re all victims. They all died a violent death, planned or unplanned. Your gratitude to these beings, your statement to them in prayer, “I’ve caught the lesson. I’m working on it. I promise to continue to work on it and I thank you. I open my heart to you with tremendous gratitude and I wish you well” will indeed be heard by them. Please offer this prayer daily to all of those who died.
Hold deeply in your hearts the intention of co-creating a universe and world where beings truly are happy and at peace with well-being, are heard and loved. Only you can do this with your world. No beings “out there” can do it for you. And you CAN do it.
I thank you for hearing me tonight. I will be happy to answer your questions. That is all.
Aaron: I am Aaron. I want to direct your attention somewhere very briefly, before the question period. Many of you have been very caught up in thoughts the past three weeks trying with your brains to figure out what happened, what to do about it, wanting somebody to blame for the situation or some way to fix it. .There is anger and sadness you would prefer not to feel. Then, for some of you, as you see that blame is not helpful, you want to get rid of the blaming mind. Your energy keeps contracting around these thoughts, and this belief in a somebody who is caught in them.
Just a reminder; don’t get caught in the cerebral process. . Stay in your heart. All thoughts are conditioned and impermanent. Let them be. Someone gave Barbara a shirt recently that says “don’t believe everything you think.” I tfind this to be excellent advice.
Q: I have retired recently and therefore during this process after Sept 11, have been alone a lot on a type of retreat. When I have gone to a public place, I’ve noticed my feelings toward people of Middle Eastern descent. I have one specific event to mention. I was working out at Bali’s and there was a young Middle Eastern man there. I noticed my feelings toward this young man. That was the day they had released the pictures of the hijackers. Most of them were young men about this fellow’s age. I felt myself contract around this person. I felt myself almost staring at him with a scowl, a subdued scowl, but nevertheless a type of scowl. That was kind of the end of it. As I was walking to another part of the club, I thought, “Well, have I been working at spiritual growth for the last 25 years or not?” And felt that I had really totally failed to display any compassion for this young man who, I might add, looked terribly troubled, as I would assume he’s probably received harassment or some kind of ostracism from people because of his obvious Middle Eastern background. I thought, “I really failed.”
Well, I went to another part of the club. I was taking a sauna. In walks another young Middle Eastern man. I thought, “This time, I’m going to try it a little differently. I’m going to make an attempt to be friendly to this person.” And I did. And this young man seemed really relieved to have someone talk nicely to him. We ended up having a very pleasant conversation. So, maybe I am growing a little.
Barbara: I’m paraphrasing Aaron. He points out that the fact that fear triggers a reaction does not mean that there’s no spiritual maturity, it simply means that you are human. The fact that you note, “This is conditioned” and question it rather than believing the story that fear has brought up is proof of your spiritual practice and maturity.
He is saying, eventually one will get so on top of it that fear usually won’t arise. But as long as it does, the work is simply to note that it’s fear and not get caught in that story. He’s reminding us of the tee-shirt, “Don’t believe everything you think.”
Let Aaron speak directly.
Aaron: I am Aaron. At a certain point, there is such deep clarity and compassion that almost nothing triggers negative thought. But this happens for very few humans. Even beings like Gandhi at times experienced anger and negative thought. Mother Teresa experienced anger and negative thought. These are beings who would not act on that negative thought but of course they experienced it.
The arising of the negative thought is not a problem, it is simply the opportunity for spiritual practice, Gurdjieff’s “yeast for the bread”. Watch the thought; watch your reaction to the thought, “judging; I shouldn’t have these thoughts.” Just “judging.” Watch clarity arise. “Here is a negative thought. It just shows how afraid I am, how said I am. But I’m not going to get involved in the story of this thought.” Then come the different ways that you may choose not to get involved, such as in talking to the man. If another man had not walked in during the sauna, you might have done some metta with the first situation. There are different skillful means of helping the heart to open.. It sounds like you’re doing that. I pause.
Barbara: I was on a plane last Friday. When I got on the plane, a Middle Eastern looking man with 3 or 4 days’ worth of beard sat down next to me. He was very restless, just very agitated, squirming in his seat. He opened a newspaper and looked at it like that, folding it up, pulling it open again, looked at it. Moving around, very restless, and it was making me very nervous. I finally decided what I needed to do was just introduce myself and say hello, where are you going? Are you traveling for business or pleasure? Are you going home or going away from home? Do you live in Detroit? If he had said, “I don’t want to talk” I’m not sure what I would have done, but he was happy to talk. It turned out he had a 12 year old daughter dying of cancer in North Carolina and was on the way to the hospital. Had been there all the week before; had gone home for a day to be with his other children and was going back to her.
Q: When you work with a family, and one son becomes a lawyer like his parents want him to be, and the other son is somewhat shiftless and maybe a jazz guitarist or something like that, doesn’t quite know what he wants to do and gets into trouble a lot, it’s almost like the prodigal son story – so I always felt like if that one person didn’t become the lawyer, the other person wouldn’t have had to be shiftless. It’s almost like a division of energy. Sometimes I think that the nicer we think we are as Americans, the more other countries or other people have to be the bad guys. If we could more recognize our own evil in ourselves, maybe other people wouldn’t have to be so bad. Does that make sense?
Aaron: I am Aaron. Thank you for this insight, R. I think you’re right. I think this is part of the ‘ostrich with his head in the sand’ situation of the United States. It’s not only that people don’t want to see what’s happening beyond your borders but you don’t want to see what’s happening within your borders. I wish to note that the last major terrorist attack in this country was perpetrated by Americans. You have one of the highest murder rates in the world. There’s a lot of anger here. A lot of pain.
In some cultures, people don’t talk a lot about emotion, such as in an Oriental culture. And yet there is an unspoken acknowledgement, without your talking about it, that you, as all beings, are suffering. It’s simply part of the national awareness. In America you have a pretense, “Of course everything’s fine. How are you? Fine. Oh, how are you? Fine.” If you say, “Well, I’m sick,” people don’t want to hear that. “I’m sad; my son died; my daughter’s sick” – well, too bad. Change the subject.
In eastern countries, when somebody says, “How are you?”, “I’m sad today” – a pat on the shoulder. There’s no big talk about it. Just an acknowledgement of these human feelings. But I think in this country there is so much pretense in order to try to keep suffering at bay.
So it’s not so much that you are the good ones, rather, that you are among the ones buried in deception. But many beings in some countries buy into that deception with you and think that America is the place where everything is fine. They don’t see the pain because you won’t acknowledge the pain.
There is a subtle but real difference between not breaking down into maudlin sentimentality but expressing your fear, and having your heart open to another’s fear and pain, and the excess in either direction, needing to talk about it forever, or burying one’s head in the sand and refusing to acknowledge it. Because many of you cannot acknowledge it [in yourself, you cannot acknowledge it in another.
So I think that it’s this separation from yourself which angers people in other countries the most, because you give off the pretense that everything’s fine, and it makes them want to say, “Why don’t you be honest? Everything’s not fine.” I pause.
Barbara: He says but that doesn’t mean we have to sit and cry about it, just in touch with that place of real pain in ourselves and know this is the pain of the world.
Q: Why does Aaron suggest that there has been an intensification of this contest between positive and negative polarity in the past several decades?
Aaron: I am Aaron. This comes back to R’s statement of the angry brother. But a slightly different slant on it. If you’re muddling around thinking about being more loving and caring and connected in your lives but not really doing much about it, negativity can relax. They see you’re not really getting anywhere. But in the last few decades, really since WWII, there has been a tremendous move toward positive polarity in the world. Many old souls are coming into birth, especially in the past 30 years. Here are many beings really intent on finding a way to live with love in the world rather than with an ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’ doctrine. Negative polarity looks around and says, “What’s happening? This is getting out of hand! Look how loving they’re becoming. Let’s toss in some opposition here.” This, for you, can be a gift, an oppotunity to practice how to respond to negativity! If you relate to that opposition as catalyst in a loving way, then you defeat negativity because you do not get caught up in negativity, which is their wish. You only use it for more positivity. But if you react to that challenge by saying, “Kill negativity,” they’ve won. I pause.
Barbara: He says, we within our natural lifetimes may not see the changes in the world. He says, when you live for a long time you see the overall trends of change.
From me, some of the much older people that I’ve talked to in the last weeks, people in their 80s and above, they say, “It’s terrible what happened on September 11 but we’ve seen that kind of thing in the world many times before and the world has come through. And it’s a kinder world now. I think we’ll be OK.” I’ve heard that a lot from older people.
Aaron says, it will be OK if we take the lesson to heart and do our work.
Aaron: I am Aaron. There is something else here. Let’s say that you have 2 companions who are very immature and truly despise each other. Whenever your back is turned they start hitting each other. They’ve pulled knives out on each other. They say and do spiteful, terrible things to each other.
Each time that you see this happen, you step in. “You can’t do that. No. No.” They start to pick on you because you’re trying to stop them. At a certain point you would need to recognize, they are stuck here. They may even kill each other, they’re so stuck. I can hold a door open for them but I cannot push them through. My responsibility is to hold that door open, that is, to keep myself as clear and kind as is possible, to keep reminding them when they’re abusive to each other, “Is this abuse necessary? Where is it coming from? Look at the suffering you’re creating for yourself and the other?” Just to keep reminding them of that.
But my responsibility is not to be a watchman, constantly stopping their abuse to each other. I may need to step back and let them hurt or kill each other. This is a question of understanding karma and where responsibility lies. It is my responsibility to say no and to hold open the door. It is not my responsibility to control the other or to try to make the other to be someplace where he or she is not. I can’t do that.
This, again, is a difficult statement for some of you. You must hold the door open through your own model of kindness, through your words and your courageous willingness to speak out against violence and abuse, even at risk of harm to yourself. And yet, you must also understand that people are where they are. If people respond in a negative way which enhances the violence, even to the point of a terrible war, millions and millions killed, can you experience even that with love, with kindness, even your own deaths with kindness? Not with blame. You must always respond in whatever ways are appropriate to preserve peace, happiness and love. You must not harm another to move in that direction. There must be equanimity. You are co-creating the situation; you’re not controlling it. Beings will create what they need to based on their own karma. In this situation hopefully enough of you have clarity and are holding enough doors open that those who are wavering on the threshold will move through into this space of more compassion and lovingkindness. Hopefully. If it doesn’t happen that way, no matter how terrible it might become, may there be equanimity, compassion and a willingness not to lay blame or harm another out of your own anger and frustration. I pause.
Barbara: He says, you can see how difficult this is.
Q: I’d like to ask for just a little clarification. Aaron used the example of the women in Afghanistan and how we did not respond, we did not say, ‘No, this cannot continue.” How does that fit with Aaron saying that we can’t force people to be where they are not? How can we stop abuse without some sort of something beyond holding a door open?
Aaron: I am Aaron. This comes back to ahimsa, active compassion, and satyagraha, soul force. When the first reports of the Taliban’s human abuse came forth into the rest of the world, the world had a responsibility to respond. For example, a thousand or 10,000 women from all the nations in the world, had they all gone to Afghanistan bringing food and aid to their sisters there, risking their own lives, certainly, but committed to taking that risk with a commitment of non-violence, what might have happened? The terrorists of the world can only kill so many others before the whole world turns to them saying, “Murderer! No!” They have to live in the world,. politically and economically. They cannot completely cut themselves off. At that point it seems very likely to me that yes, there probably would have been some violent fighting, some deaths, but most of those responsible for running a government based on principles of abuse and murder could have been apprehended in a stance of justice. Given a fair trial, perhaps imprisoned. A world would say to them, “You are free to run your government any way you like except to murder innocent beings. If you do that the whole world will step in and say no.” This is not just in Afghanistan but in pockets throughout the world where the ruling government is terrorist in nature.
We need not to confuse economic systems, capitalism vs. communism, with democracy vs. a totalitarian system where a leader is not chosen by the people. People have the right to form their own economic system and their own way of continuing the government. As soon as the practices fall into the realm of human abuse, the world has to say no. The only way to say no without perpetuating the violence is for people literally willing to risk their lives and go in, as Gandhi did, and say no. This is also what was done in the southern US in the places where the technique of dynamic non-violent action for social change was understood. It was very powerful because people with that kind of negative polarity who want power are malleable in that when there is tremendous public opinion in the world against them, they’re likely to change their policies. Not to change limits their power. It’s in their self-interest to do so. I pause.
Barbara: I want to add here that for several years as those emails came in and it got to the point where we’d just shrug and say, “I signed this one already,” Aaron kept nudging me and saying, “Well are you going to do anything about it?” And I would say, “Well what can I do?” And just kind of push him away. Of course, Aaron being Aaron, he doesn’t keep pushing. If I don’t want to do something, that’s my choice.
Q: I like the term “soul force”. I recently heard a portion of a radio program that was reviewing a conference the Dalai Lama had been involved in. The purpose of the conference was to bring together the Dalai Lama and high-powered people who can effect social and political change. They were discussing how to free Tibet. One of the major suggestions was economic sanctions and pressure on China. The Dalai Lama disagreed with this. He said it might cause someone, an innocent person, pain and perhaps even death, were they to pursue that.
So to cut it short, the conference ended up being all of these people agreeing that the best thing they could do would be to free the Tibet inside themselves. Some of the people were very angry at the Dalai Lama for not wanting to pursue a more aggressive approach. (Barbara: But they came to understand it?) Yes.
Q: We talked about positive and negative beings. What are the neutral beings all about?
Barbara: K and I are laughing because in meditation class last night we were talking about the chain of dependent arising, contact, and consciousness of the contact, and feelings of pleasant, unpleasant and neutral. I challenged them last week to come in this week and tell me if they had had a neutral feeling. For the most part nobody could find neutral feelings. They might be neutral for a moment and then they shift and become pleasant or unpleasant. Let Aaron talk.
Aaron: I am Aaron. Polarity is different than feelings and yet similar in that there are very few neutral beings. However, what I find is that given the spectrum of 99% positive to 99% negative, there are few beings who are 50% or what we’d think of as neutral. There are many beings who are perhaps 49-35% + or – , that broad spectrum tending toward positive but yet not yet grounded enough in positive, tending toward negative but not yet grounded in negative, this large spectrum, perhaps 60% of all beings; these are neutral. What I mean by neutral in terms of polarity is beings that can be easily moved either way depending on what they encounter. At 25% you are more grounded in your polarity, less easily influenced. But even at 30% you’re still pretty easily influenced. At 35 or 40%, very easily influenced.
These are the people to whom you must talk. They are your neighbors, your coworkers, your parents and children. Beings with good intentions who want to offer positive polarity but also are still so grounded in their fear that when something comes along and shakes them, they react. These are the ones who must begin to learn they have a choice, and if they react from fear and it causes harm, they are responsible. And you must be their teachers, you who are beyond that neutrality, more grounded in your positive polarity. I pause.
Barbara: He says, does that answer your question? He says, please be humble. Realize that at 30 or 35% toward positive, there is still a good bit of negative influence in there. This is why we must learn to relate to our own fear and anger and our negativity with kindness. It is that practice that dilutes and dissolves the negativity. He says, if there was no negativity there would be no place to practice. He says, bow to your fear, bow to your anger, bow to your sadness and other contracted experiences. He says, but don’t take them so personally. Don’t think that you have to fix them, conquer them, destroy them. Just bow to them and go back to that place in your heart that’s deeply loving and centered. He says, do it again and again and again and again.
My clock says 9:59, let us stop with a moment of silence..