Wednesday Evening with Aaron
June 18, 2008

Note: This document has not been reviewed and may contain errors:

Primary keywords: Relationship, Learning through challenge

Aaron: Many familiar faces and many friends that we have not met consciously in this lifetime before. Welcome to you all... (greets Michael)

There are so many possible things about which to talk. I received a question by email from somebody who lives far away, and I think it would be a good starting place. This is a man with a strong vipassana practice and a deep intention to live his life lovingly and caringly.

He has a lifelong history of difficult relationship with his father. He's coming from far away to, not to Michigan but to another state, from a state far away to another state farther out, to visit with his family, to visit his father. He'll be living in separate quarters but will be in close contact with his father for a month. It's a vacation for them all.

He says he's never been able to communicate about anything of importance with his father. They talk about sports a bit. They try to find some common ground. But he feels his father has constantly, for decades, been critical of him. So he wonders what's the best way to handle this? He asked me would it be appropriate to just try to avoid him for the most part, and when he's with him, to try to be as polite as possible, but try to spend as little time with him as possible. He suggests that he can do metta, lovingkindness meditation, perhaps more easily when he's not in his father's presence.

I'm starting with this question, not because all of you have problems with a father but because all of you have difficult relationships and all of you, like our friend who wrote this email, have some intention to live your lives as lovingly as is possible. The question is, how do you do that? When somebody or some situation deeply irritates you and brings up a lot of anger and tension, how do you live lovingly? What would that look like?

I would ask you first to remember that you are angels. I use that term quite literally. Yes, you are humans, of course you are humans, but you are also spirit. When the body ceases and you are no longer human, the spirit continues. This is what you are. You come into the incarnation as a learning experience. Within each incarnation there are different challenges and if we went around the room, I'm sure each of you could tell me a major challenge. I'm not saying there's no joy in your lives, but there are also challenges.

The challenges are not problems. You have karmically co-created these challenges because this earth is your schoolroom and you are here to learn. If you had no intention of learning, you would simply have stayed on the spirit plane. There wouldn't be the same challenges there. But coming here into this physical body you forget who you are, and within that forgetting, you begin to take yourself simply as your physical body, your emotions, your thoughts. And when they are in conflict with somebody else's emotions and thoughts, you're sometimes stymied as to how to resolve it.

The first thing to remember is that you are spirit, divine spirit, and that this challenging person is also divine spirit. Have you ever played an intense tennis game against a very capable and somewhat fierce partner? Or maybe a baseball game–I used tennis because it's a one-on-one. When people play sports, if the opponent is playing fair, not cheating and being careless with rules, but if the other is playing relatively fair, but plays strongly, competitively, fiercely, you don't think they shouldn't be playing that. I used tennis but I could use chess or backgammon or gin.

When you play a game like that as a human, you're usually playing with the idea that you want to win the game. You respect your opponent, and if they have superior skills to yours, you might learn from those skills, observe how to do it.

If you were to play a game, chess, perhaps, and your opponent pushes your piece off the board, do you get angry? That's what the game is about. In the emotional game of life, people have different perspectives and it's hard because you don't have a clear-cut set of rules like you do in chess or tennis. So sometimes you're not sure what they're playing. It's always helpful to step back and remember, this is also a spirit here in incarnation to learn, and we've been brought together for some reason. Therefore I don't want to avoid this person but to welcome this person into my presence and to be as mindful as I can of the difficult emotions that arise in me–the anger, the fear.

Sometimes I realize that's impossible. Somebody just brings up so much anger simply by the way they are that you cannot bear to be with them. Okay, if you have to step back from that situation, do it. But understand that you both, you and the other person, are losing an opportunity to do the work that you came into the incarnation to do.

What do we do, then, when somebody or some situation brings up so much anger? First is simply to note the presence of anger. Anger is arising in me. Breathing in, I am aware of my anger. Breathing out, I smile to the anger. I'll make space for the anger. I shake with the anger and I'm aware that I'm shaking. I want to punch or scream, and I'm aware of that impulse. It doesn't mean you're going to act it out. Anybody here punched somebody in the nose this week? Anybody here felt like they wanted to? Probably. Give yourselves credit–just because the impulse arises doesn't mean you're going to do it. So often it's fear that you're going to be reactive, that's the real issue-- not the anger but your relationship to the anger.

So if a person or situation brings up a lot of anger, the next step after recognizing your own divinity and theirs, is to ask, "How am I relating to the anger that's coming up in me? Am I judgmental of it? Am I afraid of it? Do I hate it?" My dear ones, that which is aware of anger is not angry. I'm going to say this again. That which is aware of anger is not angry. What does that mean?

Somewhere deep inside each of you there is access to this divine spirit that watches the everyday self, the ego, move into the experience of anger. But this divine essence of you, this awareness, is not angry. It watches, it observes. It doesn't disassociate from the anger, it doesn't judge the anger, it simply experiences, "Here is anger." And then it watches how much aversion there is to the experience of anger, how much fear there may be of it. Anger is uncomfortable, it's fiery, it's prickly. It's an uncomfortable energy. But it's just anger, it's just energy.

This person or situation will arouse an uncomfortable emotion in you because there is old conditioning. That conditioning may relate directly to the person or situation or it may simply be something that reminds you of the person or situation. For example, you've all met people with whom you immediately find a discomforting energy and when you think about it, you've never met this person before but they remind you of somebody else who is difficult in your life. This person may have done or said things that were hurtful to you 10, 20, 30 years ago. In this moment, is this person doing or saying those same things? Your answer may be yes. The friend who sent the email said the father was constantly critical. Now he hasn't seen the father in how long, I would suspect months or even a year, maybe several years. But he's jumping into the project that the father is going to be critical again, so the tension is coming up before he even takes his trip.

But what if he gets there and the father is critical? We respond to challenge from two places, the centered place of lovingkindness and compassion and from the more ego-centered place of fear. It's important to know where you are, and it's also important not to judge yourself if fear or ego is predominant–everybody wants to be safe. When fear is coming forth it's because you're not feeling safe. But if instead of judging yourself for that and projecting that judgment onto the other person you can open your heart to yourself, with the awareness, "I feel threatened here. For years, even decades, I've felt unsafe with this person, unloved," you start to feel compassion for yourself and for the other person who especially if it's a father, a mother, or a sibling, a child, they're in a difficult situation, too. They would like to feel close to you but they don't know how.

I highly suspect that this father knows no other way to express his love for his son than to be critical, and it's very sad. Why would somebody do that? He has his own fear, probably a strong fear that the son will not be safe, wants to control, wants to make it right so the son will be safe and successful and so forth, and it comes out as criticism. When you can hear the other person and that they're speaking from a place of fear, and hear yourself and that your response is from a place of fear, there can be an enormous shift.

One of you, presumably, in this situation of the friend who emailed, needs to say to the other person, "I really want to have a loving visit with you but I'm feeling criticized by you. I don't know what's happening with you, but how can I work with this in a way that we can hear each other more fully? When you speak such critical words, what are you really trying to say to me? Because I suspect that underneath you do love me." There's no guarantee the other person will be able to open the heart and respond, but we would hold that possibility.

If you simply back up, if as our friend says he simply spends as little time with the father as possible over this month, what kind of healing can happen? You've got to go into the situation. But of course, you go into as you are able and without forcing yourself, keeping the heart open to the self, to your own discomfort, to the other person's discomfort.

Compassion is strong. Compassion is not afraid to say no, "No you may not criticize me, that's not okay with me. You may not speak abusively to me. You may not judge me, lie to me, or certainly hit me or physically harm me–no!" But compassion does not say that no from a place of fear but from a place that truly sees both your own discomfort and the other person's discomfort and seeks healing.

One person needs to initiate this opening to healing. You can open the door for another. You cannot force them through. At first when you initiate in that way, the other may feel even more threatened, may become even more abusive. At that point, if you speak to the other and say, "I hear your constant criticism of me. What's happening? It hurts me, it makes me feel sad when you're constantly criticizing me." And the other comes back and says, "You're just imagining it. It's all your fault, it's always been your fault." What do we say? "I hear you feel it's been my fault, but I do care about you and I do want to heal our relationship, so I'm asking you just to consider what you feel we can do that will heal the relationship." The other might say again, "It's all your fault." At this point you may feel all you can do is withdraw but at least you have tried.

I suspect that if I said this to our emailing friend he would say to me, "I've tried it a hundred times, a thousand times." And yet I would ask him and each of you, have you really tried it? Have you tried it with the intention that healing happen or have you tried it with the intention to say, "Well, I did my part, now it's his fault."? Can you feel the difference? What is it you really want to bring forth, here? Is it healing or is it self-righteous justification that says, "It's not my fault anymore."? Sometimes you don't really want to heal the relationship because it feels like it's going to be too much work so you want an excuse to maintain distance, but that's not where healing happens.

So the person may become more belligerent at first because they feel threatened. You're changing the scenario. You're changing the script. They no longer feel in control. You need to be willing to step back and give them some time and space to be angry. This is the heart of Gandhi's teaching of satyagraha, soul force. When Gandhi did non-violent demonstrations, he knew that his demonstrations were going to provoke people, even to greater violence. When you provoke somebody in this way by changing the script, you've got to accept ahead of time you are in a sense sticking a stick into a wasps' nest. This person you're provoking is not going to be happy with what you're doing, even if it's a step toward peacefulness and harmony.

So at some level there must be a pre-forgiveness of the person, knowing, "If I do this, this person is going to become angry, more angry. It's okay. I don't need to take it personally. I said something that made him uncomfortable such as, 'I feel you are constantly criticizing me.' I stopped playing the role that he expects me to play. Now he's angry. Can I just hold space for his anger?"

Now, this human has a month with his father so he's got many days to work this out. The next day he can say to the father, "When I spoke yesterday, I saw that it upset you but I wonder if you've had a chance to think about it because I really would like to deepen the love between us in this month that we have together. Really would like to feel heard by you and to hear you on a different level than we've ever been able to do in our lives. This would be very precious to me."

Again, the father may deny, but how many times do you think this scenario can happen before the father does start to think about it? Remember, we're talking about a father and son here, not two people who have been sworn as mortal enemies for decades but people who really want to love each other.

It's harder with somebody, let's say a neighbor with whom there have been constant boundary issues. The neighbor letting his dog move his bowels on your lawn, run through your garden, he runs his lawnmower at 6am, he's loud, he drinks beer in the back yard and screams at his kids. It's constantly encroaching on you. This is harder because one doesn't start with the base of presumed love and desire to love. And yet anybody, any human being does want to be liked. Any human being does not want to be condemned by others. His personally may be such that he's very quick to condemn others, becomes even louder and more abusive, starts the lawnmower at 5am, gets 3 more dogs and <>s them through your back yard.

The question for you here is, what am I learning in this situation? Sometimes what you are learning is to use the voice of compassion in a strong way to say no. Perhaps at that time it's time to build a 6' fence between your yards and to call the police at 5am and declare a noise nuisance. This is not necessarily a negative act. It depends where the impulse comes from. If it comes from anger, that same fence will simply promote hostility. If it comes from a deep place of compassion that sees that this person is really just angry at the world, unbalanced, wants to control, wants power, will take over anything he can be permitted to take over, how can we not have compassion for the suffering of such a being? From that place of compassion, one says no and builds one's fence. No more dogs in my yard.

So/some situations are very different. Sometimes it's a person with whom there's a base of love; sometimes not. You are here in incarnation to learn lovingkindness and to learn to dissolve the boundaries between self and other, to begin to interconnect with others as if they were oneself. One does not wish more for the neighbor, or less, but whatever one wishes for oneself. One does not wish more for the father or less. To hear and be heard, to love and be loved.

I'm not saying it's easy. You are literally here in incarnation as a part of a raising of consciousness through many centuries. You have been in what one might call rational consciousness. It was that old "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" kind of consciousness. There is a change happening in the world today and you are all part of it. You would not have incarnated now if you did not intend to be a part of it. The change is a shift to higher, what we might call non-dual, consciousness. Some of you, especially the younger ones of you, are deeply aware of this, perhaps amazed at the world around you and how people seem to fight with other people. Why do they do that?

For those who are deeply grounded in non-dual consciousness, that constant conflict in the world is a complete enigma. But those of you who understand this, it's your responsibility to help carry others along, to recognize some people are still stuck in the dualistic consciousness, which thinks, which believes, "either I get it or she gets it." Not "we share."

How can there be some nations that have so much and others that have so little? On the front page of your newspaper this week there was an article about CEOs who make many millions, 50, 80, million dollars a year, and another article on the front page about families who are struggling to feed 3 or 6 children on a few hundred dollars.

All of you are in this shift to higher consciousness. As you open into this new consciousness, it's going to be threatening at first because fear will come up. If I have less, somebody else will have more. Yes, but what will I do? I'll have less! Fear comes up. Do you really have less?

If everybody in the world were fed, if everybody felt safe so there was no more need for the heavy weapons and wars, would you have less or would you have more? It seems to me that it's very beneficial to each of you to support the well-being of others.

So there is this shift to higher consciousness. That is what you came into the incarnation to learn, and the difficult relationships, these are part of the ground for the learning. Without these challenges, how would you learn? How would you learn to take care of others? How would you learn not to be afraid of your own or others' difficult emotions?

My dear ones, you have nothing to fear, but fear does arise because you are human and conditioned, habituated to fear. How are you going to relate to this fear? However you relate to fear in yourself, that's how you relate to fear in others. When you are able to relate to this fear in yourself in a more openhearted way, then you're not so alarmed by others' fear, which might express itself as criticism or angry words. Then you can bring forth the compassionate heart and voice to say no in appropriate ways, to ask, "Exactly what are you criticizing? What are you angry at? Can we talk at a different level about this and hear each other?" And then there can be healing.

I'm going to pause here, give you a chance to stretch, and then we'll gather back in our circle and I'd like to hear your questions. Thank you for hearing me today. My love to you. I'll remain in the body during this break.

(break)

We're open now to questions about what I have just spoken of or any other question you might have, personal or universal...

Q: I want to know, what is it in myself that sometimes doesn't want to resolve anger or work harder on relationships, when there's something in me that just feels, I don't know, maybe righteous wrath, maybe just some stuckness where lovingkindness is the furthest thing from my mind? Sort of like, almost as if feeling as a counterbalance to the anger to use it for power, maybe, rather than hold that much tension in my body.

Aaron: You've really just answered your question, Q, haven't you? (Q: I don't know...)

This is so much born of habit, that as humans you're mammals and you have the instinct of the mammal and you want to feel safe. When there's a feeling of threat, it calls up adrenaline and energizes the body. It helps you to feel powerful. There's a real ambivalence to letting go of that power, as you stated. I think the question is not, what is it that brings it up, you understand that, but what do you do about it? Whatever is predominant in your experience, bring this deep inner awareness to it.

Let's use a metaphor for this, first. There might be a strong itch, an itching sensation on the arm. First one is aware of the sensation of the itch and then one is aware of wanting to scratch. Wanting to scratch and the itch are two different things. The itch is a physical sensation and the impulse, wanting to scratch, is the habitual way to get past the itch. But if you have poison ivy, for example, and you scratch, it makes it bleed. It doesn't really resolve the itch. You know that but you still want to scratch. So what do you do if you have poison ivy? Do you scratch yourself until your skin is raw and bleeding or do you note how strong the impulse is to scratch and that it will be harmful? Just because you have impulse to scratch doesn't mean you have to scratch.

This is the miracle of the human. The animal wants to scratch and it scratches. The human has the capacity to understand that the scratching will do harm. Now let's equate this to a situation where there's anger with another person.

At one level you want peace, but at another level you want to be strong, you want power, you want to control the situation, you want to be right. And this impulse comes up, either to fight back or to subtly sabotage the dialogue, to remain in control. You can learn to watch that kind of impulse. If you watch it with judgment, "Wanting to control–I shouldn't want that, I'm no good," it just creates more tension.

When you can open your heart to yourself, feeling discomfort... (turning tape) I like the simple label "tension, tension." You're in an argument with a person. Maybe you legitimately feel you are right, but you understand that it would be helpful to say, "I hear that you disagree. I hear how strongly you feel about this," but you don't want to. Watching that "I don't want to," coming up. Ah, here is "don't want to." We call it the inner 2-year-old. Don't want to, no. Can there be kindness for this inner 2-year-old?

As you open your heart and note, "This is the voice of fear. This is the voice of habit, maybe I don't have to do it that way right now," slowly you can step back from that urge to take control, to be powerful, to be right, and make more space around it. That opens the door to real dialogue. Does that answer your question?

Q: Is there such a thing as evil?

Aaron: No. There is no such thing as ultimate evil, but there certainly is great darkness. We must understand the distinction between what one might call ultimate evil and darkness. You live in a non-dual world. There is only light and relative absence of light. Beings that have pulled themselves into darkness can be very hateful of others, very cruel, very self-centered. But ultimately even these beings, through many lifetimes and much suffering, will shift into the light.

So one must live with the realization there is no ultimate evil and yet there are very negative beings, and one must learn to say no to that kind of negativity with compassion, not with fear. Because when you say no to negativity with fear, it simply feeds the negativity. Negativity feeds on fear. When you are able to say no firmly but with kindness and without hatred, that begins to open the door for this being that's so entrenched in negativity. It may take a million such door openings before that being is ready to walk through at all. We just keep saying no to negativity with as much kindness and as much firmness as we can.

Q: Sometimes maybe it's better not to do dialogue at all?

Aaron: It's better to not talk if you know that talking is simply going to lead into anger that you cannot control. If there is a lot of, let's use a simple situation. If you're walking down a dark street on a dark night and you see a furtive looking person creeping along on the other side of the street, you just want to mind your own business and walk on, you don't want to say, "Hello," or "Who are you? You look frightening." You just mind your own business and walk on. You don't have to dialogue with them.

However, if they cross the street and walk up to confront you, if they're trying to engage you, you basically look at them, nod, and walk past them. What if they grab you? Each of you needs to decide for yourselves at what point you will react to physical confrontation. If this person screams atrocities at you, you can ignore them and walk on. But if they grab you and they are holding a knife, what are you going to do?

For myself, my solution through many lifetimes was to become an expert in those martial arts that were capable of stopping a person without harming them. So that I did not feel the need to pull a knife and knife somebody else before he knifed me because I was very sure of my ability to knock the knife out of his hand. I would only use that in self-defense or in defense of one weaker than myself, and I would never carry such action to a place where it did harm to another.

We get into some complex thoughts here. To violate another's free will is a way of harming another, so if I incapacitate him my knocking the knife out of his hand, perhaps creating enough of a shock to his hand that he can't use it for a few minutes, I'm violating his free will, but I'm only doing it when he is attempting to violate my free will by robbing or killing me or just stopping my free passage down the street. He has no right to do that.

You do live in a world where there are beings who are deeply ensconced in negativity. As long as the world's response to such people is one of violence, it promotes more violence. As long as it's one of hatred, it promotes more hatred. I repeat, compassion is strong and not afraid to say no. Think here of how powerful Gandhi's work was. And yet he never raised a gun or weapon at another. Not only that, but what he did worked because he trained people around him to see deeply into the pain of the opposition and not hate the opposition. When that opposition experiences being not hated, we're back to Q's question, in a sense it robs him of power. They're not able to instill terror and hatred in you any more. That may make them fiercer for awhile. Are you willing to live with that to help them make the shift they are engaged in making from negative polarity into a more positive, or at least neutral, polarity?

Q: I feel that this lifetime for me is important as a time to help other people in a spiritual way. What steps can I take to find the best ultimate path to use my talents to help others?

Aaron: My sister, you are an old soul and you have indeed come into the incarnation with a primary intention to service to others. What I would suggest you do at this point in your life is simply to get to know yourself, to understand how you respond to challenge and catalyst and how to respond in a more centered and loving way. You need that foundation. You're an old soul but you're still a young human, so you need that foundation. Once that foundation is in place, the universe will bring you the work that you seek.

Of course, continue to deepen those skills in areas that most interest you. But there is no one special thing that you are called to do other than simply to be a model of living the non-dual life, living with deepest compassion and respect for all beings including the self. Especially take note of the times when you put the self last because non-duality means there is no first or last. We put others in front of ourselves but not to the point that one martyrs the self. So watch that in yourself.

Q: Thank you...

Aaron: You're welcome. Other questions?

Q: It's good to meet you again. I'm at a point where I can recognize when I'm afraid of something or someone and I can hold that, but I'd like to know what I can do to take the next step.

Aaron: Right there with that which is afraid is that which is not afraid. The next step is to see them simultaneously. In other words, let there be no denial that at one level there is fear and full recognition that at another level there is fearlessness, absence of fear.

You must not disassociate in any way from the fear experience in order to feel stable in the non-fear experience. And you must not enhance the fear experience to the degree that you lose the non-fear experience. How do you hold both?

So I think at this point you are stepping back from fear and finding that which is not afraid, but there's a subtle denial of the fear rather than a full embracing of the human that was experiencing fear. Can you feel the difference?

So practice that bringing together. We've done this exercise, looking at the fingers. Relative reality–fear, anger, different feelings. Looking through the fingers. Hold the fingers up. Wiggle them. Right in front of your eyes, wiggle them. These are the relative experiences–body pain, fear, anger. Now look through the fingers. The fingers don't go away, do they? But you can see through them. But you can't deny the fingers are still there. How do we relate lovingly to the fingers while holding that vast space?

So right now what you're doing is folding in the fingers and seeing the space, but there's a tension to that because you must hold the fingers down, so to speak. So there's a separation from the emotions and a tension, tension of holding that separation. But as you open more compassionately to the human that's feeling fear or pain or confusion or whatever, you can begin to do that AND keep the space. Hold the space and rest in the space. So practice with that.

*** added from cassette:

So, we have no more digital recording but I'm still here and you're still here, so what are your questions?

Q: I've wondered if some of those that are carrying what seem to me and to a lot of others as a lot of darkness, I've been wondering if they have chosen a lifetime to play a role to push many of us at the same time to a different level by playing sort of a trickster role in the consciousness of the world, making it so bad a vision that we get it starkly clear in our minds...

Aaron: I understand what you're asking, but no being that is not basically negatively polarized can act throughout the lifetime in ways that create pain and harm to others. In a lesser sense, for example, in a relationship where both beings are not beings of strong negative polarity but more neutral polarity, working out an issue between them, resolving some karma between them, they may have come together into reincarnation with agreement that they would each serve as catalyst to the other, helping the other learn by-- let me try to give an example...

Helping the other learn by... let's use an example where one person wants badly to be loved and so offers what you call enabling behavior to another who is sometimes angry and abusive. They keep thinking, if only I do it right, they'll stop abusing me. Neither of them is strongly negatively polarized. Each of them came and came together with a potential each to help the other. The one who is enabling learning to say no and the other one opening themselves because there is true love for the other <in stopping being> harsh and critical to the other. But these are not beings of darkness.

Deeply negatively polarized beings simply delight in creating havoc. They do not come to teach, they come to create pain, to draw more beings into their negative polarity. And your work is to say no to it.

Q: Are you still learning, yourself?

Aaron: We're all always learning, my brother, always. My work with you teaches me compassion, deepens my compassion. No matter on what plane, I am what you would call enlightened in that I have no more karmic need to return to the human experience. I am what might be termed a 6th density being so I've gone just beyond the human experience <but> the levels that come after the human experience. But there is not end to learning. This is what is so beautiful because there's no upper limit to love, no upper limit to compassion.

Q: What place does contemplation of love have in relation to, rather than being controlled by emotions but rather being the observer of emotions? How does focusing on love help to assist one to be more compassionate, and does it?

Aaron: Does contemplating love help you to be more loving?

Q: I'm having difficulty actually articulating what I want to say, so I'm not really articulating as best I could... Sometimes I feel like, can I bypass these emotions if I just focus on love?

Aaron: No, my sister, you cannot. There is a balance. It's very good to work with, very helpful to work with reflections of lovingkindness, on caring for others and compassion, wishing others well. But you cannot do this in denial of the heavy emotions. The heavy emotions must be resolved. This is part of the human experience.

You have 4 bodies, a physical, emotional, mental, and spirit body. Between lifetimes the physical body is no longer there but the other 3 are intact. When you come back into a new body, the emotional body is as clear in the new being as it was at the end of the last lifetime, no more clear. You keep coming back into the incarnation to clarify the emotional and mental bodies.

You are not incarnate to stop emotion, nor is the stopping of emotion necessary in order to resolve karma so that you do not need further incarnation. What is called for is not the stopping of emotion but an openhearted relationship with emotion, where there is no longer contraction around the arising of emotions. No need to act them out, no need to deny them. Equanimity with emotion.

It will still arise, less and less, but sometimes. When you cease to be reactive to the emotion except to feel greater compassion for the human in which that emotion has arisen, then the emotion is no longer creating new karma that pulls you back into a new lifetime. At that point, one is ready to move from the 3^rd density human into 4^th density, in which compassion is deepened still further, and 5^th density will be <> deepened. Only at the end of 5^th density does the emotion body fully resolve. In 6^th density there is no emotional body.

So this is a progression–the 2^nd density animal who simply snaps and acts on its emotions. The 3^rd density human who is learning to find equanimity with the emotions. 4^th density where there is that equanimity but the emotional body is still there. And finally into 5^th density, where the emotional body, there is nothing bringing up emotions any more. There equanimity goes so deep that emotions–not all emotions, there is still joy and sorrow, but what you think of as reactive emotions such as fear and anger, greed, and so forth, these just fall away. There's nothing to support them anymore.

You are 3^rd density beings. Do your work. Don't be afraid of the emotions. Do continue to work with lovingkindness and other such practices that support the intention to be loving, but not as a denial of emotion.

Q: I'm sitting here wondering if there's any humor along the way, in this.

Aaron: I should hope so or everything would fall apart! Humor is a backbone of the human tools to growth, developing a sense of humor. A sense of humor in the whole play of the universe, cosmic humor.

People ask me about linear time and I say there is no such thing as time, and yet we have to stop soon!

Everything is absurd but we have to take it all seriously. There was a theatrical tradition, theater of the absurd. I don't know if some of you are familiar with that tradition. It's basically a play on the absurdity of the universe and yet the need to take it all seriously.

There's one play I remember in which the doorbell rings. The <> answer, there's nobody there. It rings again and there's nobody there. The third time, the character says, "The doorbell rings, there's nobody there." That's the meaning of it. That's the meaning of the doorbell ringing. What's the meaning of heavy emotions? Is there anybody there? When anger comes up, is there somebody there? Who's there? Who's angry? Who's afraid? Nobody, but anger has come up. One has to be kind to the anger, take care of the anger, but there's nobody doing it. The whole thing does become absurd, and funny. Keep that sense of humor going.

I think we'll stop here. Enough for tonight. Thank you all for joining me tonight. Remember you are divine. I call you angels in earthsuits. Cherish the angel that you are and the angel in each other, and respect the earthsuit and the lessons that you find within this body, mind, and emotions. If you did not come to learn, if you did not wish to learn, you would not have come into the incarnation. So don't hate the teacher.

My deepest blessings to you. Remember you are not alone. Each of you has guides and teachers who are accessible to you. Reach out to them, ask them for help, listen to them.

Thank you, good night.

(taping ends)