Aaron on Dzogchen, Day 5
May 5, 2006, Emerald Isle, NC

(Afternoon on the beach.)

Aaron: So quickly we come to the end of the week. I would that we could spend a month in such a place together, sharing the dhamma in such a beautiful natural setting. Perhaps one day it will be possible, if not by the sea then in the mountains or the forests or elsewhere. For now, we will do what we can with the time allotted to us.

Time is an illusion so it has seemed to be a week by your calendar time, and yet it is as one moment and it is as eternity.

Today I would not offer a new teaching but really hear your questions and invite you to share your experiences with what we have done this week. I open this to you.

Q: I have a question about terminology. In this chart you mention non-dual consciousness as well as non-dual awareness. (Showing Aaron where…)

Aaron: You're going to ask me what the difference is and I am going to tell you that we need you as an editor! (Laughter) We should have caught that and made the two the same. They both should read "non-dual awareness". Thank you, my brother.

Q: So there cannot be consciousness of non-dual consciousness?

Aaron: It depends what articulation we use. The Buddhist articulation does not use awareness but simply mundane and supramundane consciousness. In supramundane consciousness, the lokuttara citta, are open, the citta capable of taking the supramundane as object. The mundane levels of consciousness are only capable of taking mundane objects as object.

Q: So in this chart, everything up to astral template it is all consciousness, and beyond that it is awareness?

Aaron: Consciousness is capable of watching everything within the etheric bodies. Awareness is also capable of watching it. Consciousness is capable of watching the subtle bodies, the astral and celestial body. These are higher states of consciousness but not yet fully supramundane consciousness. And awareness also of course can watch this.

When we come up… within the… causal state, below the cosmic consciousness is the highest level that the mundane level can function. Beyond that only supramundane consciousness, or the synonym "awareness" can function. Only awareness can open to the high causal state. I would refer you to the Abhidhamma. I don't think you want to get into all the precise levels of consciousness in any detail, but there is a book about abhidhamma that goes into more depth about it without being too heavy.

Q: I have a terminology question, also. Awareness—is that the same as the deathless? Deathless as in Small Boat, Big Mountain? The book by Ajahn Amaro on the natural great perfection.

Aaron: The deathless is a way of speaking of the Unconditioned. The Unborn, Undying, the Deathless. The deathless is an object, although supramundane object. Every thing is an object whether it is a mundane thing or a supramundane thing. That which perceives the object is consciousness, mundane consciousness or supramundane consciousness. I use awareness as a synonym for supramundane consciousness. This helps people to understand it in terms of resting in awareness and dzogchen practice. Supramundane consciousness and awareness are the same.

Awareness is not a thing. Consciousness is not a thing. These are active and perceive. So awareness can take the deathless as an object. Mundane consciousness cannot take the deathless as an object.

In your vipassana practice you move through a path, a very clear-cut and viable path, in which consciousness observes the arising and passing away of conditioned objects. The conditioned object falls away and consciousness moves back to the breath as another conditioned object. It begins to see space between the objects on a mundane level. It's not yet seeing the Unconditioned between the objects, it's just seeing mundane space. It watches the whole flow of arising and cessation.

Until there is a certainty, liberation is not yet here. Everything that arises out of conditions passes away. That is a useful insight but it's not yet liberation. The mind then doesn't know where to go. Objects arise and pass away, and the liberation is not yet found. Mind finally breaks through. It's like when you're looking and looking at the optical illusion and you don't know where to go. Suddenly it's right there in front of you. The sought image breaks through.

The various levels of consciousness, mundane and supramundane, are not linear. They are more like the boxes we've described. The big box is supramundane consciousness or awareness. The little box is mundane consciousness. You're always in the big box but you forget you're in the big box. You spend most of your life running around this little box. When you finally decide "The liberation I am seeking is not here in the little box," finally you look out and, "Oh, there it is."

Lokuttara citta - citta is consciousness, that lokuttara is the Pali word for supramundane consciousness - we say it opens. What happens is that you open to it. You still do not hold the Unconditioned as object, only you have moved into that mode of being that allows you to take the Unconditioned as object. You still have to ask, "Where is the Unconditioned?" Of course, it's everywhere but you still don't know what to look for. You hear nada. It's a gateway pointing you in the right direction. You see luminosity. You keep following these signs, relaxing into the presence. Again like the optical illusion, the answer is always right there but there's a certain letting go that allows you to move into that space. You cannot move fully into the space of deep total experience of the Unconditioned until you release all sense of a body and ego. Now in the vipassana path the conditioned realm seems to disappear entirely. You move completely out of conditioned consciousness. We might say you've gone out of this small inner box, closed the lid, and there's only the outer box. The body seems to disappear. Any sense of a self seems to disappear.

This aspect of consciousness is all that can move into the direct experience of the Unconditioned. So there is this profound experience. Then you come back into the conditioned mind. The experience ends. You find yourself in a body again. Awareness may be open but it is no longer connected directly into the Unconditioned. Then the conditioned mind says, "What was that?" and makes an attempt to understand the situation. It has the memory of it, goes through what we call "reviewing consciousness," which is done by the highest level of the conditioned, mundane mind.

Dzogchen takes it a different way. With dzogchen, resting in awareness, awareness observes also the mundane mind and mundane consciousness. Resting in awareness then, in the Tibetan terminology, resting in rigpa, there is no sense of the body and ego dissolving, there is only a deep awareness that they are illusion that has been created on the mundane level and not exist on the supramundane level. Do you want me to say that again?

Resting in awareness, we see all kinds of objects. There's no self. There's no sense of a me, a self, as separate. Let me phrase it in this way. That which you term ego, awareness can shine itself on ego. It can see the whole building up into a self. It can look at the physical body and the whole idea of mind but smile for the human that has created this concept. It can watch conditioned consciousness. Mind is not lodged in, nor believing in, the statements of conditioned consciousness, but they are not fully gone.

The difference with dzogchen is when you open into the Unconditioned, because there is still consciousness as well as awareness, you cannot go as deep into the Unconditioned. Let me rephrase this. There is a further stage of dzogchen of course in which one drops off conditioned consciousness entirely. But at the stage where you have learned it the body doesn't disappear. You know you are able to rest in awareness and there's no sense of "my" body, and yet if a fly lands on the nose you can gently brush it away. Mind just notes, "tickling, tickling," and it may not pull you out of awareness at all, but there's still the consciousness of the body being tickled and the appropriate motion to simply wave it away. Sand gets in the eyes. You gently touch and move it away. You are not moving the sand from YOUR eyes, they are the eyes of love, the eyes of the universe, but kindness says, "Remove the sand from the eyes." So you're not thinking in terms of, "Oh I have sand in MY eyes and it's going to be an irritant." Love just wipes the sand from the eyes. But there is still some degree of mundane consciousness so that there can be awareness of the eyes. In the vipassana experience, if one was in that deep place and sand got in the eyes, there would be no awareness of it until one came out of the experience.

Let me say one more thing. Dzogchen to the degree that you have practiced it cannot go deep into that place, the heart of the Unconditioned, but more touches around the edges of it. It's not a different state of awareness, it's simply whether awareness is still present with body and mind consciousness or has let go of those objects, as it does in the progression of insights in vipassana.

Q: I wanted to know, when we do dzogchen and you tell us to come back, consciousness hears that and responds. Consciousness processes that instruction and comes more into the mundane? Is that correct?

Aaron: Yes. I'm inviting you to come back into mundane consciousness which is able to process mundane vocabulary.

Q: What if we were in the Unconditioned but the pure awareness with body dissolution…

Aaron: If the body dissolved into that pure awareness, there would simply be sound, and the words would have no meaning.

Q: So how does one come out?

Aaron: If one were that deep, one comes out in the same way one comes out of the deep experience of the Unconditioned in vipassana. There is a level of awareness that says, "That's enough. Come back to the body."

Q: But not governed by someone else's verbal instructions.

Aaron: If you're in that deep place, you will not hear verbal instructions, they are mundane level of sound. You may hear them as a high hum kind of sound, sound, pure sound, but not meaningful sound.

Q: In other words, don't go into that level of awareness if you must catch a plane!

Aaron: That would probably be accurate, at least at first. The thing is, the body functions are present. You are in a sense temporarily turning down the consciousness dial and leaving the awareness dial fully open. But, for example, if you were sitting close to the ocean and the tide was coming in, the waves began to wash over you, something, let's call it a body preservation instinct, would respond. It would not necessarily come as conscious thought of, "Oh, the tide is coming in, I'm going to drown!" or even "I'm going to get soaked." There would not necessarily be any contraction. One could still rest in awareness but come out of the deepest level of awareness, note, "Getting wet," probably not even note it as that, just "wetness." No self, nobody to get wet. But out of kindness you move yourself up the beach. You stand up, walk 10 paces up the beach and sit down again above the tide line. There's no self doing it any more than there's a self looking out, seeing. There's no seeing or anything to be seen. There's no water and nobody for the water to touch. And yet body consciousness, I don't know what you would call it in English. Let me see if I can dig out an appropriate translation…(pause)

It's really an awareness at the cellular level at the body. It's not connected with a person or an ego.

Q: Survival mechanism?

Aaron: Not quite. Closer to that than anything else but different than that. The cells of the body have a certain intelligence. They respond appropriately to stimuli that are dangerous for them. The appropriate response is not just instinctive but partly learned. Therefore if the body feels a snake wrapped around it and there is no deepening of sila, one might move to kill the snake, the body moves. With a deep degree of sila, one is simply aware of the snake and if it's a poisonous snake, moving in such an appropriate way to help release the snake. But it's not coming from a level of thought but a level of body consciousness.

John, I wonder if you have anything to add about this from your own experience, to the distinction between that deeper immersion into the Unconditioned, resting in awareness, and awareness taking consciousness as object and responding to consciousness.

J: While in the Unconditioned and the body dissolved?

Aaron: When in the Unconditioned and the body dissolves. If you find yourself sitting in a rising stream bed, at a certain point, you may either move out of the Unconditioned and you climb out or the body will simply move itself while resting in the Unconditioned.

J: I think while in the Unconditioned and the body dissolved that, for example, if the air grows cold and you don't enough clothes on that the body would respond. Without consciousness, without mundane consciousness, the body would respond to wanting to put more clothes on.

Aaron: Or else it will raise the body temperature, bring in more heat.

Q: If one is in this pure awareness, why would it matter if the body gets cold or dies?

Aaron: It doesn't matter from a fear position, but we respect the incarnation and the intention to preserve the incarnation until there is a wisely arrived at decision to end the incarnation. It's a respectful thing to do. You would take care of your brother who was resting in the Unconditioned and whose body you saw being soaked by the rain, would you not? Would you put a shelter overhead?

Q: Yes, if my friend is truly in pure awareness. Is it not a gift to leave her there?

Aaron: I have a better question. Yes, to your answer. Why did you pull unconscious Barbara out of the ocean two years ago? Perhaps she had been resting in pure awareness! (Laughter)

Q: (smiling) She was not resting in pure awareness!

Aaron: Actually she was, as while she was unconscious, there was a period of time when she was resting in pure awareness but she was unconscious. I don't mean that the mundane mind was not functioning but at a certain point in that process of feeling herself drowning, she had moved herself into awareness and was watching the whole process of drowning. But then, yes, she did come to the surface and called for help.

If she had not called for help, would have pulled her out of the ocean? (Q: Yes.) Why?

New Q: You helped her get out too.

Aaron: Of course I helped her get out. I knew the answer! (Laughter)

Q: I have no more questions!

Aaron: Others?

Q: Can you talk about the difference between the experience of the Unconditioned for the stream enterer, the once-returner, non-returner, and fully-awakened arahat, in terms of… I realize that for the stream enterer that the experience of the Unconditioned, there is little if any mindfulness, there is no or very little awareness or mindfulness moving into the experience of the Unconditioned, and that begins to shift with the once-returner. Where does it progress from there for the non-returner and fully awakened arahat?

Aaron: You're accurate. We could take it a bit further, but what you've described is an accurate reflection about the differences. The stream entry is more falling into the experience. It's as if one has been walking endlessly across a desert with never an idea that there was such a thing as a stream. Somebody had told you about it but you didn't really know what it was going to be nor where it was. You're walking through desert and prairie.

As you walk, your eyes cloud over a bit, you don't see where you're going and suddenly, splash! There you are in the stream. There's an observation, "I'm wet." You climb out, you're back in the desert. You've turned your back to the stream and you don't know where it went, and all you can say is, "What was that? It was heavenly. How did I get there? How do I get back?"

While you are in the stream, there's no awareness of being in the stream. You fall into and as you said, mindfulness is closed. It's an almost instant shift. No time to look deeply at the experience, you're in it and out of it. You can remember it but, it's like if you walked into a dark room and somebody turned on the light for just an instant, you'd get the sense that there was a room there but not about the furniture placement or even the color of the walls or anything, just a moment of seeing that room and it's gone. There's no direct experience of it.

For the once-returner there's more mindfulness. You come into that space. It's like crossing the prairie again, crossing the stream and saying, "Ah, here I am again. What are the characteristics of this? See the water, the coolness." There's more mindfulness. There's not an "I" here because of course there's no self, but there is awareness shining its light on the characteristics of birthless and deathless. Seeing some of the expressions like the light or hearing nada within it. There's a sense of being it. While you are there, there's awareness that you're there so that when you come out it's not just a memory of it but the awareness is still with you. You know what it was. It's like coming in the room and turning on the light a bit longer, looking around, getting a sense of the space, the colors, the placement of objects, and you come in and you actually walk around the table. You get a sense of the space with that, and then you come out.

Supramundane consciousness enters the space of the Unconditioned. Mindfulness is strong and is able to note the immersion into the Unconditioned, the presence of the Unconditioned, to know the texture and experience of the Unconditioned. It's even able to begin to ask the questions, "What does this mean in terms of karma?" for example. It's not asking it in a verbal, articulate way; rather, it's aware of the whole energy contraction that it's brought into this uncontracted space, and able to ask about the resolution of it, but it doesn't see the answer yet. It emerges, and it's aware of having moved into that space, aware of the questions that were awakened in that space. Often very aware of a great deal of work that needs to be done on the human level before one is able to answer the questions, because you have to be ready to integrate the answers. You don't just want answers in theory, you have to be ready to live the answers.

So there's often quite a bit of time between that second experience and the third one. The first and second experiences can come on each others' heels or be separated by years, but the second and third experience are usually separated by some length of time, depending on the depth of practice and the practice situation.

With the non-returner experience, one comes in and there's mindfulness. It's like coming into the room and being able to see where the light switches are and what makes everything work. One sees the contraction within the karmic stream, sees what has kept one in samsara, in other words what has kept one returning. One sees almost as if it was laid out, the whole flow of creation of karma and what releases that karma. It doesn't mean there will not be some karmic knots left, only there's enough release that you're not reactive to that karma any more and are not creating new karmic conditioning, not creating new karmic situations, not pulled back into the same thing again and again.

So for that non-returner there is a deep going-in to the whole karmic field and loosening and releasing it. There's a deep insight into the whole nature of the relationship of conditioned and Unconditioned, and understanding that one does not need to follow the old rules of the conditioned mind. So at that point, unless one is to create new karma for oneself that brings one back again, with the coming of that non-returner experience one is literally free.

For the prepared practitioner, this experience may come at transition at the end of the life. As one moves into that transition space, feels the falling away of the body itself and of mundane consciousness, there will be an experience of light, the Ground/Grand Luminosity.

Many terrifying things may also appear. If one is able to hold to that light and know the terrifying things that appear as illusions, not just terrifying but enticing illusions also, so there's no contraction, no aversion, no grasping, but one stays loose and sees everything that appears as illusion, staying with the light, then one opens into that experience of non-returner. One sees the whole flow of karmic conditioning that had held that just-diminishing body and mind into the samsaric cycle, and knows there's no need to continue that, releases it. One is still not an arahat. This is not total liberation, it's simply liberation from that cycle of birth and death in the human terms.

The Buddhist terminology speaks of this a bit differently than I experience it. In the Buddhist terminology, there is the non-returner and there is the arahat with nothing in between. But I experience a vast land in between.

The one who is a non-returner is either in the transition process or during life and then moves through the transition, no need to return. You've heard me speak of the different densities. There's no need then to come back into this third density form, human form. Depending on where you are, there may be need to go through 4th or 5th or 6th density.

The arahat as it's defined in Buddhist terms is what I would call 8th density, gone. But the arahat as I experience it is not necessarily gone but at the upper end of 6th density, but perhaps willing to retain the last vestiges of the mental body in order to serve on this plane. One who is a bodhisattva can also be an arahat. Buddhism would say that one is either a bodhisattva or an arahat, you can't be both. So I'm in some disagreement there, but I don't suppose it matters too much! When you get to that point you can decide for yourself whether or not you are an arahat and whether or not you choose to be a bodhisattva.

Q: I have 2 questions. The first one is, did the Buddha on the night of his enlightenment go through the stages of once-returner, non-returner, and full arahat during the course of the one night? Because what you are describing…

Aaron: I would say he was already within the once returned stage and went through the other two.

Q: And the other question is, what you have been teaching this week with the elements related to… resolving the karmic knots, this sounds like particularly a helpful practice for between the once-returner and non-returner experience.

Aaron: Yes. It has relevance for the non-returner also, and it has relevance even beneath the stream entry because it helps prepare one for the stream entry, helps deepen the resolution to liberation. If one realizes these teachings deeply, one may almost simultaneously experience stream entry and once-returner, because one will move into that space and within that space, awareness will open. If one is not at the stream entry experience, awareness will open and one will be aware of the whole flow of karma and it will be familiar. So one may experience that quasi-simultaneously. I don't want to talk about a linearity, nothing happens simultaneously and everything is simultaneous. It's hard to describe this. May I have the paper, please.

This is here and this is here, and they are in the same place (Aaron is folding the paper so two dots on either end of the page contact each other). The arahat has resolved everything. This may be done on the non-material plane or it may be done on the material plane, so once one is a non-returner, one does not have to come back. Those who do come back, we hear stories from Tibet of beings who express at death what they call the rainbow body. The person dies. The corpse is left lying in a room undisturbed, often in a separate small building, and through about a week's time, lights emanate from the room. You see rainbow lights pouring out of the room. And when the door is opened at the end of the week, instead of finding a rotting corpse, you find just the hair and the nails. That's all that doesn't dissolve.

What's happened here is that the karma is so completely clarified from the cellular level of the body that there's nothing there but light. It just dissolves into light. It's an extension, quite a distant extension of the practice we began this week. Do you have a question?

Q: Ajahn Chah described his night of enlightenment as having three experiences of everything breaking down and dissolving, and each successive experience was, the particulars were finer. The experience of the whole universe dissolving, and each time the pieces were smaller. That is how I remember reading it.

Aaron: So the universe was dissolving to ever-smaller pieces.

Q: Right. So there was a first experience of dissolution, then it came back, then he had it again in smaller pieces, then it came back, then a third time. How does this relate to what you were talking about?

Aaron: I have not read this description so I have only what you just said to go by. I would think that as he went back into it each time, there was deeper seeing into the whole flow of cause and effect, perhaps the second time into the flow of cause and effect as it had related to this particular body and mind. And the third time to the whole flow of cause and effect in the universe and moving himself out of it.

Q: So was he a stream entry the first time?

Aaron: I have no idea. If I read the material I might be able to answer, but I don't know. When we speak of these experiences, remember that one experience can come in waves in the way you just described. So you may go into the experience and come a little bit out of it and go deeper in, or you may go in and come back out. The wave repetition in that way is more likely to happen in the non-returner experience than in the stream entry or once-returner experience.

Q: Once we identify a karmic knot that needs dissolving, would you repeat the process that we take to get to the point of dissolution?

Aaron: Let's use this as illustration, the vase of flowers. If I were to take the bunch of flowers by the stem in my hand and raise it up as if to hit you with it, if you believed it was heavy and solid you would be alarmed. I'm going to hit you with this heavy solid object. You contract. But if you look at it and you see all the light and space, there's nothing solid there, we can see so easily the light and space within flowers, yes? So are you going to be alarmed? No.

This is what you're doing. You see the karmic knot and the way you've related to that karmic knot as something personalized and solid, and thereby perpetuated it. And instead you see the light and space within it. You see the place where it's not knotted, right where with the knot. The whole intention to liberation, the intention to non-harm including of the self, these all are the ground upon which the release comes. Once it's realized there's nothing solid, there's nothing holding it in place and it goes.

I don't know if this will be a familiar metaphor for any of you. For Barbara in working with channeling, sometimes negative entities appear. Not much recently but especially in the beginning. If you are experiencing negativity yourself it becomes a doorway for other negativity. Negativity says, "Oh, here's a tool we can use," and it tries to find a way in. Barbara had to learn that when that happened and she contracted, she created a wider portal for that entity. If she just looked at it and smiled and said, "Ah, come and have tea," there's nothing there, there's nothing solid there. And it dissolves, it goes.

In this way it's almost as if the karmic knots are brother/sister to such negative entities in the external environment. Your own inner negative taints, when you see them as they are and the way the you've been holding them and maintaining them and feeding them, and invite them just to open with light, they dissolve.

The tendency to invite them back still remains. This is part of the habit energy. So this is why this practice is best done with mindfulness and vipassana because then you see the habit energy to move back into that original pattern and make the decision not to do it. If you do it, you'll have to release it again. That's okay too.

The practice that I taught this week I taught for a specific reason. Many of you have worked with me for many years with vipassana and with dzogchen. You have a stable vipassana practice and you've learned to rest deeply in awareness. But some of you are a bit stuck there. Where do we go from here? Where one place to go from here is deeper into the vipassana experience and into these stream entry/once-returner/non-returner/arahat experiences, and I hope that you will all do that.

But even if you have those experiences, you have to come back and deal with the old karmic knots. The non-returner experience dissolves the karma to the point that there's no need to come back into human incarnation to release it but you still have to release it as a 4th density entity. If you've released it here you can move directly into a higher density, probably into 6th density. There's nothing contracted within the whole energy field. Therefore you're able to be of more clear, loving service in the universe. That which remains after the incarnation and the transition being moved into 6th density. There's no rush. If you go through 4th density it's not a problem. On the other hand, if you can do it now, why not?

You'll find this practice is of use even on a more mundane level such as, if you're out walking and you see a snake and old habit energy says, "Ah! Snake!" you contract. Immediately there's awareness of the contraction, not just consciousness but awareness, consciousness at the contraction and that larger awareness noting the human who has contracted. Seeing the whole karmic knot of separation and making at that point the highly skilled and trained shift to just invite light into it. This helps to avoid your going into the more conditioned consciousness mode of judgment, "I shouldn't be afraid of snakes." The immediate response to the contraction becomes, "bring in light." Free it. Release.

When you start to do that in an everyday way about everything which conditions contraction, watching the whole flow of contraction and release, you just bring in light. And on the one level there's nothing to release. As you bring in light you also become more aware of the place of non-contraction where there's nothing to do. There's nothing to do and yet you still do it because you exist on both planes, the mundane and the supramundane. On the supramundane level there's nothing to do but there's still the karmic knot, so we bring in light and release it.

So it doesn't have to be done as a deep profound practice, it relates to everything. Just the ant crawling on your leg and the over-forceful move to brush it off. Seeing the contraction. Bringing light into the contraction and then gently lifting the ant and taking it outdoors. It dissolves the karma. It releases the knots.

You'll find this also to be very true in karma that's stored in the body and creates triggers, body distortion. For example, somebody who has the habitual energy when something comes at them to, I don't mean literally to defend, the body tenses subtly into that stance (stooping shoulders) and they walk around with sore shoulders. The first step is to bring mindfulness into the habit energy, but understanding the habit energy isn't enough to fully resolve even the cellular level of the body. So we stop doing that but the tenderness is still there because it's still held in the cellular level of the body. At that point if we go into it, seeing how the body itself still carries that contraction and bringing in light and releasing it, then the healing can go deep. The body can release that. Sometimes almost instantly, sometimes over a period of years. It depends how much damage there has been already.

Q: One time during a vipassana meditation, I have no words for this, but I was aware of a bright light. It was all energy molecules and I joined it. There was no me, there was no it. The nearest thing I can think of is your description of a drop of rain in the ocean. What was that?

Aaron: Were you aware of the experience while you were in it, knowing what was happening at any level, or only on reflection afterward?

Q: It was oneness.

Aaron: But within the experience, was there knowing of the experience or only after upon remembering it?

Q: In it.

Aaron: When you came out, did you find any changes that it created for you?

Q: I felt great joy. I thought I had always known it. I felt secure. I don't have to go back because I know it's there.

Aaron: Let me begin by seeing that besides these specific experiences that I noted there are a great many experiences that one has in meditation. They are not all part of the stream entry/once-returner/non-returner/arahat experience but many different kinds of related experiences.

I'd conjecture that it was either one of those related experiences or a once-returner experience. I cannot answer you beyond that. It doesn't really matter what it was, it was a unity experience, an experience of the true self. It gave you deep comfort and trust in your knowing of what you are and what the universe is. That's enough.

Q: I get confused with all the terminology. I guess I should just go with what I have experienced.

Aaron: You experienced, I would not call it a gift because you earned it, you worked to invite it. You experienced a deep understanding of the non-duality of self and universe, a deep sense of what you are and what this All That Is is. You experienced the inherent light and love within that. That's enough.

Q: It was incredible.

Aaron: Yes, I'm sure it was. I'm glad that you had that experience. It is a great beacon on the path. It's hard to be afraid after that kind of experience.

I wish all of you many such experiences. The universe is indeed a beautiful, a joyful place. Its essence is light. This is not a denial of the great darkness that does come, but the essence is light and the darkness is only a relative absence of light. And you all are born into this incarnation with the choice to choose light or to close yourself off into darkness. The more you choose light, the more you move into truth. The more you move toward liberation. The more you can support the growth of all beings and the release of suffering, not only in the earth plane but everywhere.

I said yesterday that part of this is about the whole shift into a higher consciousness in the earth plane, moving the earth plane into a 4th density vibration, making higher consciousness more accessible to more beings. It's like a seesaw, as more beings move into this higher consciousness it slants this way, lifting those who are still in darkness also into the light. Inviting them to slide down into higher consciousness. Higher consciousness becomes the norm. People start to relate to that in a different way, not as something odd but as something beautiful and begin to trust it. People will still need to do a great deal of personal work to live in that higher consciousness, but the turn is taken and you begin to move in a very wholesome direction. The whole earth.

So many beings on all planes are working towards this transition in consciousness, toward this move into higher vibration and into a higher density. You have many loving angels looking down on you and happy to assist you in any way they can as you do this hard personal work.

Only you can do it. The transition must happen on the human level. You have free will to choose between darkness and light, between harm and non-harm, between love and hate. It is the power of that choice that creates the shift. Loving entities out here can't do it for you, you are the transformers, literally. You have so much power to choose love.

It is suppertime. Thank you for your attention here and I know that there are many unanswered questions. You may just have to come back! Actually I hope you will take the questions home and into your own practice and find the discernment of your own deep wisdom to give the answers.

I release this body to Barbara. Thank you.

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