October 4, 1995 Wednesday Evening with Aaron
Living in Balance: Relative and Ultimate Reality (In and Outside the Box);Pain, Love and Compassion and the O.J. Simpson Murder Trial;Drawing Darkness Into the Light;A Comment on Violence
Aaron: Good evening, and my love to you all. I am Aaron.
We have been talking here about the balance between relative and ultimate reality. Last year we talked about it in a more conceptual way, helping you to find the experience of ultimate reality in your every day life and learn to rest there. This year we have been focused on a more practical need. How do you live in this balance?
As we start tonight, I want to update an image. We’ve talked often about your having one foot in the relative and one in the ultimate, that you must realize that you are spirit and live from that spirit, but not with any denial of the human, of its body, of its thoughts, of its emotions. Rather, the human must be embraced. This image has given some of you the sense that relative and ultimate exist side by side and are dual, even though I keep saying the relative resides in the ultimate.
I want to give you a new image, then. Here is a box, a cube. It rests inside a larger cube. Actually there are infinite smaller cubes inside this infinite sized larger cube. This cube that you are in, would you put both feet in it and squat there? At times you may pull the flaps closed over your head. Here we have much the situation we described a few weeks ago, with the dirty refrigerator. You’re stuck in it, busy being the angry one, the righteous one or the good one, identifying as that small aspect of the self.
You can climb in and out of any of these smaller boxes. At times you are angry. At times you are loving. At times you are fearful. At times you are giving. Each is a small cube of relative reality. But when you pull the lid closed, you lose perspective and believe there is nothing else. Put your head up! Look around!
Perhaps you decide not to be in this fear box any more. Fear, planning, control. I don’t like this box, I’m going to get out. Well if you are in a body, you’re going to have to get into some other box; actually you will clamber through many of them. A foot in one, a foot in the other, as you walk across the earth plane. But the whole is in this larger container of ultimate reality.
You don’t like that fear box? Stomp it to little pieces. I won’t be that. Are you then going to put on another costume? Who will you be? Are you next to be the one who conquers fear?
You are spirit, you are the absolute aspect and the relative, you are the angel in the earthsuit. You do not have to trample fear or any heavy emotion in order not to be stuck in it. There is nothing to conquer. Just put your head out of the box. Remember your true nature. You are spirit.
Many of the questions coming to me this fall have been about the pain you have in your lives. People are asking me, “Aaron I have begun to recognize my true nature, to know that I am that angel. And yet I keep getting stuck in creating painful manifestations in my life. Painful expressions. Why is this happening?”
Let me take you to a fun house, one of those with a hall of mirrors. The angel enters and sees its reflection. Ahh! It is wondrous, it is beautiful! What does it see? Does it see the small self? No. Does it see what appears to be an angel? No. It sees the universe in all its infinite diversity. That is what the angel sees reflected.
When you first move into the incarnation, you see with the eyes of that angel. You see around you the universe with its magnificent diversity, all expression of the divine. You learn quickly that some of those expressions are painful to yourself and to others, and some are joyful. As you get increasingly caught in the illusion, you forget that it is all expression of God, and you begin to relate to it as “other than”, choosing this and casting away that.
And so you figuratively walk further into the fun house, into this mirrored maze, trying on that which you see, the angry and the loving, the selfish and the generous. And no surprise, the mirrors around you reflect back what you express. Have you seen a small child trying on a behavior to see how it fits? Perhaps it’s seen an older sibling have a temper tantrum, and watched in some fascination as this child a year older kicked its feet and screamed because it did not get the cookie it wanted. One day when this baby is told no, you can see its thought: “Ah, I remember when big brother or sister did this.” It may not be verbally thinking it, but you can see the mind moving. It sits still and thinks, “how do I do this?” It begins to kick its feet and cry. Slowly gets into the action, ceases to imitate a temper tantrum and fully expresses that temper tantrum. Clearly it’s trying it on to see how it feels, and what will reflect back to it when it does acts thus.
Very often you try on different moods and being in the world, different self images, to see how they feel, how they fit. When you send out angry energy, angry energy comes back to you. All the mirrors reflect anger. You may think its another’s anger but it’s your own anger bouncing back, changed slightly in form by the other’s energy. It is your way of learning about anger.
If you have your head out of the box, so that you do not grasp the mind state of anger and say, “This is me,” but can simply say, “here’s anger moving through,” then you can observe anger. You can learn about it quickly, and understand how it comes back to you. You may even be able to see it on an energy level, to visually see your energy moving out, this piercing point of angry energy, and feel the piercing points of angry energy coming back to you. You observe how they penetrate your aura, make you feel invaded and thereby lead you to call up a defendedness that further pushes you into your box.
One who is suffering in that anger box might ask me, “Why then do I repeat it?” Because you are learning, and part of that learning involves the courage, the faith, the love, to peek out of the box and see the larger scale. To peak out of the box you must first feel stuck in the box and know you feel stuck.
Then you begin to know, “When anger arises in me, I don’t have to throw out at others. I can honor the relative human in all this fear or painful emotion as a risk. I can increase the human. The human caught its head? in the box, banging against the walls, feeling entrapped. But power of that emotion, and at the same time I can look above and see all the space around it. Compassion for the human who is angry, who feels threatened or frightened in some way, and a sense of spaciousness that ceases to own the anger. Just anger moving, just an energy, that’s all anger is. Jealousy, pride, greed, no different. Different forms of energy. You cannot climb out of the box and disown the box without then eyeing the relative human experience. But if you close the lid, and forget that you are spirit, you don’t allow the necessary perspective that makes space around this pain.
Why must your learning be painful? Why can’t you keep your head out of the box. Illusion is your teacher and you have agreed to the experience of it. It deepens your compassion. It is like the experience of watching a play. You know it’s a play and yet you must believe in the story if that story is to teach you. You surrender for a time to the illusion.
Why do you allow the expressions of physical distortion, of emotional distortion, when your head is above the surface and you think you’re seeing clearly. We talked about this a bit last week. The ways that one aspect of your being has a learning in mind. The spirit knows but what direction it is moving. When you are not deeply open to the movement of the spirit, you do get snagged, caught into less wholesome patterns of learning, certainly less pleasant patterns of learning.
I gave an example last week how this instrument was seeking at the highest level to learn its harmony with all that is. How it moved into an expression, an experience of pain because it could not state its need to another, to a son. And how the son moved into an experience of pain because he could not state his need. In the situation, each was contracted, pushing against the other, and feeling a pain that the other was not giving what was needed. As she moved through this pain, this one saw that it was the perfect grounds for the lesson it needed. Listening deeply to self and to the other. If hearing is filtered through fear, knowing hearing is filtered through fear, and being able to listen the density of that fear and to begin to hear, so that one starts to flow in harmony. My point here is not to emphasize the lessons that this instrument was learning. Only, the conscious self had an agenda to get certain work done. The highest self had a different plan, which was to learn lessons of harmonious co-creativity. Working in tandem and not pushing and pulling other energy. Because the conscious ego self was so intent on getting what it needed, it completely lost touch with the higher plan. Its head was in the box. If it had come out of the box and looked around, it would have recognized this has been the lesson of the whole summer. It would have seen that it was so encased in its need that it was not hearing nor communicating, but demanding. If it had simply communicated, not just, “Here is work you can do,” but, “I really need this done, please help me,” the other, who loves his mother, would have said, “Of course I’ll do it.” Can you see that she needed to create that experience of nope of feeling pushed, feeling shocked and hurt, in order to step back and see the bigger agenda. This is not about getting certain work done, this about working in a more wholesome co-creative pattern. It is about opening the self to others and hearing the other. Dropping the walls that separate. You cannot know the highest self’s agenda when your head is buried in the box, in your box of isolation, of being, of manipulation. You cannot connect with the myriad physical, emotional and mental movements of the relative human, if you consider the boxes dirty and refuse to touch them.
I want to add here about what is happening on an energy level. Those who are newer to our sessions may not fully follow this, that’s OK. Simply listen and take what is of meaning to you. We spoke a lot last year about the contraction around the contraction. You step on a nail, your energy field contracts. Somebody yells at you– your energy field contracts. When you get involved with a fight with that contraction, or an over-identification of it, I have called that the contraction around the contraction. The secondary contraction is not around the pain of the tack in your foot, but relates to the way your energy field closed up with that pain. It is not about that tack but about your relationship to the pain. The same with the person who has yelled at you. The primary contraction is a very natural movement of the energy field to close itself up when attacked. The secondary contraction is about your relationship with being the one who was attacked. The self-image, there may be judgment that you have closed up. There may be self-righteousness. Many different moods are possible.
I want you to see how this contraction around the contraction is very literally a pulling yourself into the box and closing the lid. When you step on the tack and there’s pain, Ouch! Your energy field closes. Sometimes there are going to be tacks. Literal and figurative. There’s nothing bad about the energy field closing. Furthermore if your head is out watching the whole process, stepping, shock, pain, contracting, removing, touching gently, pain dissolving, there is no adhering karma in any of this. It’s just energy moving through in its own pattern. The adhering karma grows out of your relationship to that pain. If you’re pleading it, angry at it, judging it, even thinking I deserved that, I’m careless, it is that secondary contraction that creates the adhering karma.
If you start to think of yourself as the careless one, then that’s the costume you put on, and you look in this hall of mirrors and everything reflects carelessness back at you. You start having one accident after another, the child trying on the temper tantrum, until you relax and begin to let that energy flow past without contracting around it. Simply seeing how it has arisen, that there is a spaciousness in which it can move. Clouds floating across a vast sky. Then you cease to send out signals to reflect that carelessness and its repercussions back to you. In essence you take off the careless costume, or the judging costume, or the blaming costume, and then those situations begin to dissolve. You are no longer inviting them in with your karmic field on any level: emotionally , psychologically, mentally. Then your head is out of the box. You begin to understand the spirit’s agenda, and to greet what happens in relative reality with a much more open-hearted compassion. And in that spaciousness you find a part of this pain in your lives. It really is as simple as that.
I would like to speak to your more specific questions, so that we can have some illustrative examples of how this works. I would also be happy to have you share any stories that may illustrate with myself and the others. We’re going to stop here and let you stretch and get your cup of tea. Come back in here and we will attend to your questions.
I want to say to our new friends, and remind old friends: I speak as best I can from my own perspective. I do not claim what I teach to be absolute truth, with a capital T. It is simply what I can give you from my own heart and experience. If it rings true to you, take it into yourself and make it your own. If it is not useful, simply discard it. My love and blessings to you all, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts with you. That is all.
Barbara, reading question: I find myself grieving deeply for all those involved in the Simpson situation, and for all who have been victims of violence and perpetrators of violence. There seem to be many lessons that can be learned from this situation. The first that is filtered through for me relates to detachment and love. The detachment the parents of Nicole Simpson are displaying is almost unfathomable to me. They love their grandchildren so much that they’ve refrained from saying anything negative about their son-in-law. Unbelievable in light of the probability that they knew he decapitated their daughter. They must be very high beings, as they seem to be experiencing a lot of pain, but can still put enough space around it to act lovingly to their grandchildren.
Aaron: I am Aaron. Not a direct question here, but I would like to comment on several parts of this statement. Yes, it is a powerful lesson that loss and grief do not need to engender regret. But the power of love is stronger, that one can keep one’s heart open even to that which has offered one great harm. Their love for the grandchildren helps to keep their hearts open. But also for many beings, and I am not assigning this characteristic to these people specifically, but for many beings, being open to one’s own pain allows you to be open to the pain of another. Sometimes it is only through formidable pain within the self that that opening occurs. So that it ceases to be my pain or your pain and becomes our pain.
I am not offering any statement of who actually committed this murder, and yes, people have been asking me endlessly! Look in the Akashic records, Aaron, what really happened? Shhh! Privacy! But for an act of violence to have been committed by one against another, not only the victim but the perpetrator has had to experience tremendous pain. The pain may not be around that act of violence. There are those in your presence who seem to assume a nonchalance about their violence. But at a certain deep level they have been badly hurt, perhaps by the violence done to them. When a victim can begin to see the deep pain is not its own pain but the pain of the world, then real compassion is possible.
I’m not really fond of the word “detachment.” Attachment is an owning of something, detachment is a pushing away. In both there is a strong Self, one to attach or one to detach, to hold it at a distance. Detachment does not come from a place of love but a place of fear. I prefer the word “spaciousness.” Spaciousness comes from a place of love. Very different than detachment. Perhaps I’m being overly picky on the use of words. I’m not criticizing the writer of this statement. I only want to use this as an opportunity to express the difference. Does the spaciousness come from a place of love or a place of fear? When it comes from a place of love, it deeply opens the potential for compassion instead of hatred. To grow out of the anger and pain, to be fruit of the anger or pain.
Do you wish me to speak further about this entire Simpson situation? Are there further questions? I pause.
Q: I had strong feelings about it until the verdict was read. I was practicing compassion for OJ before. Then when the verdict was read, I became aware of an intense hatred for not really him but what he represented. So I’m still working with that, trying to understand its origin.
Aaron: I am Aaron. Fear demands regress. Fear feels betrayed. Fear is self-righteous. All of you are human and you have so many experiences from this and past lifetimes in which you have been victims of injustice, in which you have suffered severely at others’ hands or seen those you love suffer. You cannot say to yourself simply, “old mind conditioning.” Yes, it is old conditioning. Anger that one who may be assumed to have perpetrated an act of violence has gotten away with it. Identification with the victim against the perpetrator. But if those thoughts are arising, that’s what I call the first contraction. In Julie’s case, feeling anger. How does that anger increase itself into hatred for this now-acquitted man? Or if not for him, for that which he symbolizes. The one who gets away with it. Let us look briefly at how anger becomes hatred.
First of all, compassion and forgiveness are your natural state. An openness that is inclusive. Yet, for the human, fear is also natural to you. When you do not permit yourself your fear, when you dread your fear and say, I should be kind, I should not be judgmental, I should not ___, what are you going to do with your fear?
Fear is not the problem. One’s relationship to one’s fear is the problem. See in your contractive energy, your identification with the victim. Instead of trying to convince yourself, I should outgrow this, I should put this aside, acknowledge your fear, acknowledge your anger. Anger is a very powerful catalyst for compassion. Anger is energy. And it feeds compassion, just as it feeds hatred. Find out what you are really angry at! Is it at all the perpetrators of violence in the world? Or is it at your own potential for violence? What are you attacking? Perhaps it’s for both. But do not neglect the force of your own potential for violence. Can you open your heart to yourself, and in so doing, open your heart to all those, who, driven by the delusion of separateness, driven by fear, greed, and neediness, grab what they want without thought to who they may harm. This potential is in all beings. This is also an expression of God. I know I knew some of you that. But it comes back to our basic teachings. There is Light and there is relative absence of Light. That relative absence of light will grow into the Light. This that we call the divine is non-doing. This is not to condone violence. We cannot say that violence and harming another are a way of acting, expressing our deepest divinity. No, they are a distortion of that divinity, of course. Fear is a distortion of self. The whole delusion of self is a distortion.
But nothing can exist which is not expression or distorted expression of the stability. If it is a distorted expression, it’s useless to hate it, just draw it back into the light. Your own distorted expressions of fear that lead you to act in ways that you wish you did not act, that create harm and sadness for yourself and others– draw them into the light! Open your heart to the pain that gave rise to that distorted expression. You begin with yourself, as you offer it compassion to yourself, in a very simple way, noting why judgment may arise. You see somebody, a stranger walking down the street and say, their clothes or their hair are ugly. Why did that arise? Why am I feeling threatened by the way this stranger expresses himself? You don’t even have to answer that, only to know, I am feeling threatened in some way. I don’t have to know how, just feeling threatened. And that mind is playing its games, moving into a pattern of judgment. Can there be compassion for the being who so habitually, when it feels threatened, closes up and strikes out. With compassion you begin to end this habitual pattern. To move into a mindfulness which, instead of needing to strike out, simply notes feeling fear, feeling threatened. Finds compassion for the one who feels threatened and equal compassion for the one who seems to threaten. And in this way, your anger becomes a hatred, a reminder, a powerful reminder. “Keep my heart open.” You cannot stop the mind movement of hatred by judging it. That’s also a teaching. But you have moved through fear and anger and into the sense of hatred. That’s a time to stop and ask yourself, who or what am I hating? Can I attend to the fear and discomfort from which this hatred sprung? Without further judging it. Just offering it kindness. Feeling a fear. I very much like that practice: breathing in I am aware of my fear, breathing out I smile to my fear. Making space for it. Hatred will go when it’s ready. It’s just another cloud flowing through. It’s nothing you need to get rid of. Or fight against. Just watch it. It’s a very dark storm cloud that we’ll make when certain conditions are present for its growth. Just as the sun is always there when the clouds dissolve, compassion is always there. When the clouds of hatred dissolve. That is all.
Barbara: Are there further questions?
Barbara, reading question: Time and Karma. Karma seems to be based on a linear system. Lessons learned are also based on sequential pattern. None of this makes sense to me if it’s all happening simultaneously. (So, is the second question part of that? No? OK.) Aaron is laughing. He says he loves these questions about simultaneous time!
Aaron: I am Aaron. There is an absolute condition to your being, and a relative condition. In absolute or ultimate condition, there is no time. There is nothing arising or dissolving. Everything and nothing are always present. The body, of course, exists in sequential time. The learning processes exist in sequential time because the relative plane is your school for learning. You really don’t have to figure it out. It’s the same image, keeping your nose and eyes out of the box. Inside the box there are snakes crawling over you. One of them starts at your foot and you feel it crawling up your body. Movement, time, space. The emotions around that snake are arising and changing in a flow of time.
But the eyes outside the box understand that there are no snakes or body or anything in the box. That absolutely nothing could have arisen because nothing ever arises or ceases. It’s all simultaneously present. This must be an experiential and not a conceptual understanding. You must come to it through your meditation practice. In small ways you begin to experience the truth, the deepest truth of your being. Resting in this infinite space, you start to see, for example, what I just described: the sun is always shining and when the clouds move, the sun is back. For example, loving kindness, or generosity, express themselves naturally as fear dissolves. So you start to know this deeper truth of your being when you’re not being fearful, to rest in this space where loving kindness does not arise or dissolve but is constantly there and shining. Because of the veil the human wears, you’re never going to fully experience this simultaneous everything. While on the human plane you’ll get glimpses of it. When you bring those glimpses mindfully into your daily life, you can remind yourself when the figurative snake is curling around your body, climbing up your legs, give it space, it’s just a cloud. But also if it’s skillful to reach in and take the snake and drop it off on the ground, you’re free to do that. All that in a seemingly linear pattern of the relative human. It’s simply part of the balance of both, ultimate and relative. Do you wish me to speak further on this question, or is this sufficient? A pause.
Barbara: D says, it will have to do. Aaron says, ___ He says rest in that ultimate space and then you will know. Questions?
I have a new computer which David spent hours last night setting up for me. He said, the next step with your computer could be to get you going on America On-Line and the Internet. Aaron is simply saying, he’s looking forward to this! He says, can we call it Aaron On-Line?
Are there other questions? He says he’s never been able to speak to you via a computer before. He had thought there were no more novel experiences left! And he’s saying the Internet is kind of everywhere at once in a central location. Aaron says, that’s where he finds the beauty of it. It is a perfect model for ultimate reality. With its relative voices.
Q: I was going to say I can see why it appeals to Aaron.
Aaron: I am Aaron. It also appeals to me that it is working so directly with energy. In a sense, the Internet is a form of channel. You send your thoughts out, and others interpret them in their own way. I think it especially intrigues me because of the opportunity to become acquainted with many like-minded beings. I have no discomfort certainly about my state of being discarnate. I gather that one need not identify oneself over the Internet. That I need not express my present state, although I certainly would be honest enough to bask. And my opinions might raise eyebrows, and ask people to say, How do you…? So it may be that I would be quickly lead to discuss that I have no body, and see from that perspective. <comments lost, sounds like, on the other hand> I don’t have to be anybody special there, not a discarnate teacher, not one who people put on a pedestal and think he knows it all. Which is indeed all that I am. I think people may be able to hear me better that way. Just seeing me as another voice. From this/its entanglement with it emotionally. That is all.
Barbara: We have time for one more question. Aaron wants to know how you feel about these little boxes. And the big box.
Q: I was going to share my own reaction to the OJ trial earlier. I also had a very angry reaction to the verdict. I also noticed how I was right present with that anger, here’s the anger <makes face> and then I realized that I was being completely involved in the anger so I backed off from it and then it was like hearing <low noise> to <high squeak>.
Barbara: Aaron says put the radio in another room.
Q: And I realized that we humans have much maturing to do and that I was seeing myself separate and then seeing myself as part of… And this perspective was described to me by my guides some time ago as being either in the tip of the nerve ending or back off from it.
Barbara: Aaron asks, do you and others see the difference between that backing off and detachment?
Q: Yes.
Barbara: He says he doesn’t want to get into semantic issue of exactly how we define detachment. But seeing detachment as non-attachment, as he explained, as, I’m going to push it away, versus just giving it space.
Q: I think the difference was seeing we, all, us humans, are, rather than “They’re wrong” or “I’m right” or that separation, instead of the separation there’s an understanding of “we’re all part of each other” and whether we understand or don’t understand, we’re still all part.
Barbara: Aaron is saying, Group karma.
Aaron: I am Aaron. Much of this OJ Simpson issue is group karma. I find it fascinating that so much of your society has been so deeply engrossed in this on-going– Barbara and I are having a debate over the proper description. I offered the word drama, whereas she offered the word soap opera. And I asked her to please regard the negative emotional connotations to her label, to this on-going drama.
It’s not just that he’s rich or famous. All of you are involved in forms of violence in your life, as victims and as perpetrators. All of you are busy judging yourselves, being jury to yourselves and each other. The whole question of violence in your society has gotten so out of hand because you are all being 2-year-olds trying on temper tantrums. If you are not violent, you’re violent against violence, because it frightens you so much. The human has violent instincts within it. Very old patterns have allowed it to survive in times past. Certainly my greatest desire is to see an Earth where all beings of any species live in non-harm with one another. You cannot come to that place of non-harm until you cease to hate the violent arising in yourself and learn to find a kindness for the fear that inspires that violence. So for now as a society you are fascinated by violence and will continue to be so until you learn that the impulse for violence is just an energy moving through. It does not have to be obeyed. If we were standing in a window on a high floor of a building and I say, Jump! would you jump? If somebody says something rude to you and your own self irritably says Jump! Strike back! Perhaps not physically but verbally, must you jump? Why are you so afraid of that voice that says, “Strike back?” Just hear it as fear. When you individually learn that you need not be reactive to the voice of fear, you will lose your fascination with violence, and the society itself will begin to heal the wounds that it has created.
Barbara’s energy is running low. It is time for us to end the session. Once again I thank you for allowing me to share my views with you. Please take what is of use to you and discard the rest. My deepest love to you all as we walk this path together. Namaste. That is all.