December 8, 2010 Wednesday Night with Aaron, Christmas Stories

Aaron: I am Aaron. I celebrate with you the beauty of the light. (It is the last night of Hanakuh and we have just lit the candles on the menorah) It's always a joy for me to light this menorah because the story behind the menorah is a celebration of the miracle of light. Historically there was no more oil for the lamps. It would take time for oil to be gotten and brought but the holy lamp continued to burn.

There is such a holy lamp inside of each of your hearts. Sometimes it feels like the oil is depleted and the light is wavering, but the light can never go out because the source of light is the divine essence of you. It's always there, radiant, glowing, enormous! But you have to pay attention to it.

If they had looked at that little bit of oil in the lamp and said, “Ah, it will never burn. Let's not even bother to try,” then that everlasting light, as it's called, could not have been kindled. Somebody had to have faith and say, “Let's just light it and see what happens.”What happens when you trust the light in your own heart, when you allow it to shine and trust its presence? And then that radiance can come forth into the world. Each of you is a holy lamp, a radiance and divinity, precious. Each of you.

The menorah is an object from the Jewish religion. Jesus was Jewish. This was the religion of his birth. He grew up within this tradition that recognized the divine light within each being, but most people on Earth had forgotten that truth by this time. Religious rituals were simply mechanical rituals whose meaning had been lost. The earth's people in those days lived in an eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth kind of mentality, everybody grasping, subject to their own greed, hatreds, and prejudices.

Jesus saw and understood the divinity in each being, and his mission was to awaken each human to his own divinity and to help each bring that divinity into expression on the earth plane. This is all he came to do, to demonstrate the divinity of each being, and that each of you has the potential to choose to live that divinity.

Often you forget. You come into the human incarnation and you agree to forget who you are. Wordsworth says, “...Trailing clouds of glory, do we come.” 1And yet, you forget. You wake up suddenly and you say, “Who am I and how did I get to this place? What is this earth plane? What are these beings walking around me? Who am I? What am I doing here?”

You agreed to this forgetting. It's part of your learning because you are not here simply to grit your teeth and say, “Okay, I'm in a heavy density earth environment right now and I'll just bluster my way through;” you are here to practice with faith and with love.

If there was not forgetting then faith would not have much meaning. So as the earth human, there is rarely long-term clarity about your true nature-- occasional sparks of that clarity, and then you come out of the meditation and you say, “Oh, that was nice but is it real?” and you doubt it again. But of course it's real, it's the essence of who and what you are. Without absolute ironclad knowing, can you still live your life as if God is in everything, including yourself, with that degree of reverence and respect to every sentient being and to the Earth?

You are presently moving into a new consciousness, a higher consciousness. You are beings in transition, as you have always been in transition. At one point you had a very archaic, magically grounded consciousness, believing in some external god that ruled everything; if you just said the right prayers and did things right, God would answer your prayers and you would win the ballgame, so to speak.

Gradually human consciousness has evolved from archaic, magical and mythical consciousness more into rational consciousness, and then into what is sometimes called vision logic consciousness. This is the level of consciousness that's still grounded in the rational, the logical, but it also is visionary, so there's room for exploring wider possibilities beyond that which you can know from your physical senses.

All of you have some ease with that or you wouldn't be here listening to a discarnate entity! You're willing at least to entertain the possibility that I'm real, or at least that somebody, something is forming these words and thoughts.

As you continue to mature you move beyond the belief in separate self. I'm not saying you don't exist but you are not separate from anything else. Watch the snowflakes coming down. I'm told each snowflake is unique, that no two snowflakes are alike. Each one is its own perfect and beautiful crystal. When they fall on the ground and make a big blanket of snow, can you distinguish the individual snowflakes? Maybe at first you can, the ones that are lying on top, but pack them into a snowball-- are there still individual flakes? Of course they exist or the snowball couldn't exist, and yet you can't say here's this flake and that flake. You exist. Each of you is unique and beautiful, and yet you are completely inter-related with everything, nothing separate. This is the basis of non-duality.

Jesus, or Jeshua, as I prefer to call him as that is much closer to the articulation of his name as I knew him, Jeshua came to teach the simultaneity of the radiance of each individual spark of God, or snowflake, and the non-dual summation, everything integrated, everything together and part of each other.

It's the simultaneity of the ultimate and the relative. On the relative plane, separate beings; on the ultimate being, nothing separate. (demonstrating with fingers) Separate beings. We put faces on each one. Ah, 4 separate beings there, waving themselves. Is there anything separate? And yet this finger is this finger, and this finger is this finger.

I first had the joy of knowing Him as a baby. I was a young shepherd boy named Nathaniel, and the day after his birth I had the great gift to be able to bring him a baby lamb. So beautiful to see this child, not crying as the usual baby might and not even asleep but wide-eyed, looking around, radiant. My heart opened to him completely.

My father was a shepherd and also a teacher in the Essene school so he was a colleague, you might say, of Joseph and Mary, a friend, so we came down from the hills bringing the lamb to celebrate his birth. And then as you probably know from the story in your Bible, he was taken away for his own safety so he was a few years older when I next saw him. I was about 6 years older than he was, but in many ways he was always older than I was. He understood things that I was only beginning to glimpse.

Each year I've focused on some of the primary things he has taught me. This year I'd like to especially focus on the ways that he taught me to know my unlimitedness. This has been a theme for Barbara and me in our teaching this year. Barbara's book Cosmic Healing will be released in March and it's about knowing and living your unlimitedness. It's about living that simultaneity of which I spoke, knowing, for example with Barbara, the relative reality of the deafness and choosing not to be caught in that relative reality as a self-identification, not to just say, “I'm deaf. All the doctors have told me for 40 years I will never hear again; therefore, forget it.” Also not to deny, with “I'm not deaf.”

On the relative plane these ears are deaf. Barbara is not deaf at her core but the body is deaf. And on the ultimate level the body is fully alive, fully functional. She's been pursuing this through her meditation and with the help of John of God in Brazil, and is beginning to hear things, things that were predicted by the doctors that she could never hear.

I smile at L here who has a wonderful story of Barbara's hearing her laugh when Barbara stood behind her with her back to L.

L: This was in Abadiania in Brazil. Barbara was sitting at a table talking to a visitor. I was sitting some distance behind, as were other people. We were having some little discussion while Barbara was talking to the person. I laughed out loud, and Barbara turned completely around because I was some distance behind her, looked at me, smiled, and turned back to her conversation. Someone was signing for her while she was talking with the woman so I knew that she had heard me laugh. And I couldn't wait to tell her that. She heard me from behind herself.

Aaron: Thank you. Everything is possible. If you live with the belief, “I cannot do this, I cannot do that,” then indeed you cannot. When you know your unlimitedness, divinity, Buddha nature, Christ consciousness, however we want to phrase it, your innate perfection, you trust your ability to express that perfection in the world, whether this is about knowing your physical wholeness or your emotional wholeness.

People walk around with the myth, “I'm unworthy but I'm going to work hard and conquer all my negative tendencies so that I'll become worthy.” No matter how hard you try you're never going to be satisfied. But what happens if you let go of the whole idea of worthy and unworthy and simply know your radiance and beauty, and acknowledge, “Sometimes I do unskillful things. I will keep working toward resolving those unskillful tendencies.” To carry those tendencies doesn't make you unworthy and to resolve them doesn't make you worthy, because there has never been worthy or unworthy.

So let's go back to what Jeshua taught me about these things. The first is a story that some of you have heard before. We were boys, Jeshua perhaps 5 or 6 years old, me 11 or 12, and I had permission to take him up into the hills with me for a few days to be with the sheep. It was a cold, rainy night. I was attending the classes at the Essene school, studying the trainings. Jeshua at his young age often sat in but he was not so much a participant in the classes. So I'm the one who was supposed to have been learning these skills.

It was sleeting and raining and cold. We had checked to make sure the sheep were all comfortable and safe, and returned to where we were camped, with a small shelter.  Jeshua said, “Light the fire, Aaron.” Jeshua's 5 or 6 years old, he doesn't play with fire. “Light the fire.” So I tried to make the spark to create the fire-- tinder, a flint that would drop a spark on the tinder, and light the kindling. It was so wet and windy I couldn't do it. Every time I got a small spark it went out.

Jeshua watched me for a few minutes and then he said, “Aaron, just light the fire!” I looked at him. I handed him the flint. He pushed it aside. He just looked at the fire. --This is why people were laughing when the candle went out. Barbara reached for the lighter to re-light it, but-- “Light the fire!”  (earlier this evening while lighting the menorah, Barbara lit the center candle and held it in her hand to light the others, and the flame went out. A few seconds passed; she reached for the lighter to relight the candle when the flame burst forth again.) The fire is always burning. Find that ever-burning flame and simply invite it to express itself. One doesn't need a flint or other such tools. If you're going to light a fire, just light a fire.

He saw the good in everyone. He understood that we could focus on the negative or on the positive. There was a time when I had the opportunity to travel with him for several days, this when he was an adult traveling and teaching. A very scruffy looking man joined the small group of us who were walking. There was one pack that held 2 simple Sabbath candlesticks. Jeshua did still follow the rituals of his religion and on the Sabbath he would light the candles and offer a prayer.

Somewhere around noon of that Friday we noticed that that man had disappeared. As evening came we stopped to make our camp,  have our meal, celebrate the Sabbath. We opened the pack to bring out the candlesticks and they were gone. Others in the group became incensed. “That man must have stolen them. Let's go after him.” Jeshua said, “No, don't bother.” He took the candles, made small indentations in the ground and said, “The earth shall be our candlestick.” We lit the candles and said the Sabbath  prayers.

Several days passed. We obtained new candlesticks. Later in the week that same man appeared again. Jeshua approached him. People were angry, they said, “There he is! We should confront him.” “No,” said Jeshua. So he approached him and said, “Welcome. We're so happy to have you traveling with us again. Please join us for our Sabbath dinner.”

The candles were lit. We had our meal, and then in the middle of the night the man got up and very slyly came over to where the now-burned-out candles and candlesticks sat and went to take them. And suddenly Jeshua was behind him. And he said, “You don't need to steal them, brother. If you have need, just ask for what you need. What is mine is yours.”

The man was so ashamed; no one had ever offered him this kind of love before. He began to cry and he said, “But I stole your candlesticks 2 weeks ago and I sold them, and I don't have the money to give you back.” And Jeshua said, “If you had need, I trust you took them to fulfill that need. But next time don't steal; simply ask for what you need.” What he was doing was helping this man to see his own radiance and goodness, that he had the capacity to give and to receive, to ask for what he needed and to give what others needed.

The next day the man was still with us, almost like a wakening from some kind of a deep slumber. His eyes had never met my eyes before but suddenly he began to look me in the eye. When a meal was ready, he jumped up and went to help serve it to others. There was one man walking with us who was quite lame. He prepared a plate for him and asked him, “What else can I bring you?”

Suddenly this man who had been so closed and afraid, living so deeply in a sense of his own narrowness and limits, saw his infinite capacity to give and to offer to others, and that he could choose to live from that radiance and divinity instead of from fear. He continued to travel with us. He was transformed. He became a very radiant and loving being, frequently offering himself in many ways to others, in service and with material goods, caring for others.

Whenever we look at another, we can see their beauty and radiance or we can see their negativity. Jeshua told me a story when we were boys, a story that he liked very much. Some of you may have heard different versions of the same story.

There were two wealthy landholders who had many people who lived under them, for whom they were political figureheads. One always spoke of the people in his lands as being so good and loving, and the other always spoke of the people in his lands as being mean, narrow, and angry.  The one who claimed that his people were always narrow and angry attacked the other man and his people. It's hard to describe the political boundaries here but let's think of these as small townships and a higher king who became aware they were fighting with each other, and who called them both into his presence.

And he said, “Why are you fighting? Why are you making war on him?”

“I want to take over some of his lands because he says some of his subjects are such loving people and I don't have any loving people in my lands. So I want to bring his territory into mine so I can meet these loving people.”

So this wise king said to the one with mean people in his town, “I want you to go to your neighbor's town. I want you to find a loving person. He says his town is filled with loving people so it shouldn't be hard. Find a loving person and bring him back to me. And you whose town is filled with loving people, you go to this man's town and find a mean person and bring him back to me. It shouldn't be hard; his town is filled with mean people, evil people, he says.”

So the 2 men went off and in a week, as directed they came back, but empty-handed. The one whose villagers were all loving said, “I did find angry people in his town, frightened people, sad people, but nobody who was evil. At their heart they were all good.” And the one who claimed his town was filled with evil people, he went into his neighbor's village and he said, “People there are just like people in my village. They're filled with hatred, they're filled with greed. I didn't find any loving people there.”

“What do you see when you look around you?” Jeshua would ask. “Can you see that radiance and love?” Everybody has both the capacity for love and the capacity to live in limitedness and fear. It's up to you to draw to you what you want. So if you are seeking beauty in another then let go of the negative that they display and focus on the beauty and nurture it, and soon that's all that will manifest. Keep watching that beauty. He was a master at this.

After 20 years there are not so many new stories to tell! What comes to me and perhaps I told this one last year-- I try to not repeat myself from one year to the next, at least, but  sometimes I can't help myself.

Again he was with me in the hills, a bit older now. He was perhaps 8 and I was 14. Boys my age and a bit older came and started to push us around. They said, “We want one of your sheep.” If it had just been me I would have fought with them, I would not have allowed a sheep to be stolen without resistance. They might have beaten me up and taken one but I would have protected my sheep.

Remember, I'm 14, I'm tall; the others were 14, 15, 16-- tall. Young Jeshua walked in front and said, “Why do you want a sheep?” They said, “Because we are hungry. Because our families have no food. One lamb will feed many of us.” Jeshua looked at me and said, “Nathaniel, can we bring them back to our campfire and feed them?”

I was hesitant to do this. I knew that they were bullies, filled with negativity; they could take all of our goods, our shelter and food. I didn't know what they would do. I saw the negative in them. Jeshua saw the divinity in them.

We brought them back to our campfire. We had just come into the hills 2 days earlier with enough food to last for the week, so there was quite an abundance. We prepared a meal, fed them all, gave them all of our leftover supplies, what we had for a week, because as Jeshua and I both reasoned, it was easy to go back into my father's home and get more food. We could be hungry for a day; it would not be a problem. So we gave them all that we had.

They were startled. They said, “Why are you being so nice to us?”  Jeshua replied, “Because we trust you that you in your heart do not want to be violent. Because we trust your innate goodness.” These boys went back home and they were changed by this encounter. They found a widow in their town who had very little food and they began to help her. They helped her with her gardens. They helped her to milk the goat she had. They simply began to help her. They brought her firewood. They found more blankets for her children. Their giving transformed them. For the first time in their lives somebody had treated them with deep kindness and within themselves they found the ability to express that kindness out to others.

How often when people come up to us angry, we react with anger and we see only the negative in them? I'm not saying that you should enable their anger and negativity, I'm not saying you simply let yourself be a doormat for another's negativity. But compassion knows how to say no with love. What if you say no to another's negativity but not to them as a human being? Instead of cutting them down as a human being, what if you deeply love them and see their divinity and invite the deepest expression of it?

At another time, traveling with him, we heard a voice cry out from the hills above the path on which we walked, and the adult Jeshua being who he was, immediately turned up the narrow path to see from where the cry came. I followed him and there were several others with us. My son Mark was also with us.

We came through some rock crevices and around a bend into a somewhat open area where there were some caves; it was a small leper colony. There was a young woman who was a leper and whose cry we had heard, giving birth. People were trying to help her but nobody really knew what to do as the baby was not presenting itself in the correct way.

Jeshua immediately turned to me. I was a shepherd. I knew how to birth lambs, even lambs that are in a difficult presentation. He said, “Will you help?” I had hung back; I was afraid. I did not want to touch this, what I thought of as, unclean woman. Jeshua asked for hot water, soap, clean cloths. I felt he would never lead me directly into danger so I decided it was safe. Part of me was afraid and the deeper part of me trusted him.

I don't think he needed me to do what I did. Inviting me, asking me to help was for me, not for him or for the woman giving birth, but it helped me to trust and move past my fear and simply act in service, to not see a leper but simply a woman giving birth. So using my skills I was able to literally reach in and correct the malpresentation and help draw the baby forth.

He walked around to speak with all the people, took their hands, offered an embrace. They asked us to share their meal. I didn't want to eat; there was still fear. I was especially afraid for my son. But Jeshua joyfully sat down with them and shared their food. How could I not join him?

It was dark by that time so we slept the night there, saw this new mother in the morning, now comfortable and holding her infant. The infant of course had no sign of leprosy at this point and the mother said to Jeshua, “Please take him. I do not want him to die.” And Jeshua said, “He will not die. See his perfection. He is healthy.”

We went on and several weeks passed as we traveled. Coming back that way on that same trail, Jeshua said, “Let us go and see how they are.” These had been people who were quite sick, maimed, showing all the disfiguration of leprosy. As we came up the path, what greeted us was a fully different picture. There were still some signs of leprosy, people who had lost digits on their hands had not re-grown them, but much of the scarring of the skin and other such signs of the disease were gone. People seemed radiant, much more healthy.

This mother came forth with her now 3-week-old baby, held him out to Jeshua. “You're right,” she said, “he's perfect.” And her disease was clearly healing-- not fully healed but healing. I asked him later, “Did you do this?” because of course he had the capacity to heal. He said, “No, I do not heal. God heals. That of God within each being that comes to know its own perfection, when that perfection is reflected into it by those who see it and speak with it and relate to it, when that knowing of your own perfection is awakened - that allows you to heal. These people were reflecting their own disfigurements and disease to each other, feeling a sense of despair and helplessness. All I did was to remind them, ‘You are divine, you are perfect. Don't be the leper, be the radiant human being who is at a passing phase in which this disease is manifesting and then let it go.' ”

So they were all healing. He awakened that in them, he reminded them of their truth. This was the core of his work. When he said such as, “The only way to the Father is through me,” he did not mean through me, this personal man that you see, but through the Christ consciousness, by which I mean simply awakened consciousness, that I AM, Buddha nature, that which is awake. When you know that you are that, how can you think of yourself as anything less? So when he said that, “The way to the Father is through me,” he meant, through knowing this awakened consciousness, this divinity that you are, and living it.

His message has perhaps even greater meaning on Earth now than it had 2000 years ago because you are all within this transition to the expression of divine man, to the highest expression of your being, non-dual consciousness, unconditional love. This is the future of your Earth. I know there are terrible wars and brutality and despair throughout the Earth. You ask me, “Aaron, how can you speak of unconditional love when people are so brutally killing each other and with so much hatred?”

I do not deny that there is strong negative polarity on the earth. That which is strongly negative, it exists. It is not ultimate evil, there is no such thing as ultimate evil, but it is that which is deeply entrenched in negativity or what we might call service to self, deeply contracted. It fears the light, it fears love, and it fights with all its might to hold its own negative contracted self-serving space. It adheres to the old myths: “Only our religion is the path to salvation. No other religion. Only our country. Only our beliefs.” That old archaic consciousness is the voice of fear. The only answer is love, compassion, and kindness. But compassion knows how to say no. It doesn't say, “Walk all over me; kill me.” It says no, but it doesn't hate while it says no.

This insight is what your Earth so badly needs right now. All of you are here learning this lesson, how to relate to that which manifests as negative around you, with lovingkindness and compassion that's able to say no to negativity but without hating the negativity. When enough of you learn how to do this, it's going to bring about the change you seek. This Earth has the potential to be the Eden that was promised, to be a place of true peace and plenty. That which you seek cannot coexist with the perpetuation of fear and separatist consciousness. Each of you have the work to find this nondual awareness in yourselves. Each of you have 1000 opportunities every week to relate with kindness to negativity, and you're not going to do it perfectly. Do it as best you can.

Here is one more story. Again, we were traveling, a small group of us. A group of very rough-looking men, a larger group than we-- we were 4 or 5, they were 8 or 9, perhaps-- as we came around a bend in the path they were suddenly there before us. The first thing that we heard before we came around the bend were screams. What we saw was that they were beating one man, hitting him with sticks. He was badly hurt, bloodied.

Jeshua walked up and said, “What are you doing?”

“He stole from us,” they said. “He's a bad man, an evil man, and he stole from us so we're beating him.”

“But you will kill him.”

“Perhaps; he's evil.”

Jeshua pushed his way in. He put his arms around this man. He said, “If you're going to beat him, you're going to have to beat me, too.” We who were with him were aghast. We did not want him to be hurt and we feared they could kill all of us. But there was no telling Jeshua what he could or could not do.

So he fell down on the ground and covered this man with his body. The men who were beating their victim said, “He'll probably die anyhow; let's go.” As they left, Jeshua bathed this man's injuries. We fed him. We stayed with him, camped by him for several days until he gained enough strength to walk.

About 2 days into our caring for him, one of the men who had been in the group beating him crept up through the brush. Jeshua said, “Come; come,” and he came very shyly. Jeshua did not confront him in any way, he simply said, “How can I help you?”

“Why did you save him?” the man said.

“Because he has that of the divine in him. Because he is a brother.”

“But he is a bad man,” the other said. “He stole.”

And Jeshua said, “And you hit with intention to kill. Are you bad?”

The man thought about it a moment and said, “Well, I don't see myself as bad. I was protecting my people; I was protecting my property.”

They talked for awhile. Jeshua helped this man to see that there is nobody who is good or bad but all people reflect that which is positive and loving and that which is negative and fear-based.

Jeshua invited this man to stay with us and he said, as a second day passed, “Please, will you help feed this man,” this man who had been beaten so badly. One arm was broken, the other cut, so he could not feed himself easily. “Will you help feed him?” So one of those who had so badly beaten him now was feeding him. Later that day another one appeared. They didn't all come back. I said there had been 8 or 9 of them-- 4 of them came back during the week we stayed there. Each of them was transformed. Each of them could not do enough to help. Each of them said, “I can't believe you're treating us with such kindness, we who threatened this man and threatened you.” Each of them began to see his potential for goodness that had never been reflected to him, and that he could choose to express that goodness just as he could choose to express negativity, and that he had a choice.

So no, all of them did not come back, half of them did. If half of the negative people in your world today are met with kindness that allows them to see and express their own goodness, it's going to enormously transform your world. We don't need 100% of those negative people to be transformed instantly. What if you are kind and loving to one negative person today and help them to see their own potential for goodness? And what if they, tomorrow, are kind to one negative person? And on it goes?

Love one another. Forgive. Open your heart. You are divine; you are beautiful; you are love.

Thank you for hearing me. Usually we open the floor to questions but on this night with the Christmas stories we like to instead have some social time. There are some delicious treats in the library, a chance for you all to talk and visit together.

The menorah candles have gone out. Please carry the light in your hearts. Keep it burning. Don't ever let it fade.

I'm going to close here and return the body to Barbara. We do not meet in January or February. Barbara will be in Brazil with John of God. The next meeting will be in March, then monthly...

So I wish you a blessed holiday, whatever you are celebrating—be it religious commemoration or the solstice, the return of the whole earth to light. My blessings and love to you all.

(session ends)

1 Intimations of Immortality Ode 536 by William Wordsworth, partial...

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting

And cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

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