New Millennium Talk, January 1, 2000

Saturday, January 1, 2000

Barbara:  It's Saturday morning around 11:30. Aaron was speaking to me early this morning and said he would like the opportunity to share his thoughts with a wider group and have me record them so that they could be transcribed.  We have here M, A, M, K, H, me and Aaron.    What he said to me early this morning I found very beautiful, was really very moved by it. So I gather he's going to expand on that. With that introduction I'm just going to be quiet and see what Aaron has to say.

Aaron: I am Aaron. Good morning and my love to you all. It is a great joy to speak to you this morning. I thank you for pausing in your morning schedule to hear my thoughts.

This date of January 1st 2000 is quite arbitrary, of course. The only thing it means is that it's 1000 years since January 1st of 1000, and a 1000 more years since the first January 1st of this Christian calendar. So what you're celebrating is the passage of a thousand years, any thousand years.

The important thing to me about this commemoration is that is brings to the fore a new hope, and the blossoming into manifestation of a rising intention among beings of good will, that all on this globe, - animal, plant and human alike - may live in peace.

Let me explain to you why I feel this intention carries more weight today than it did 100, 500 or 1000 years ago when certainly beings also prayed for peace. The primary work for 2nd density, that is animals and higher plants, is self-awareness. The plant form is self-aware only in that each tree, for example, will seek the sunlight and not worry too much about whether it shades out its neighbor. It is self-aware but does not really have consciousness. The animal begins to have consciousness. Your dogs, for example,  are each distinctly aware of what they experience as a self. They would protect one another if an aggressor attacked one of them, and yet they will also fight each other over a morsel of food. They are self-aware. They are learning the laws of love because of the love in their lives. But they have not yet begun any way to move past fear and to express themselves in ways which support everyone rather than just the self or the beloved. Undoubtedly if one of the humans in their family were attacked, they would defend that human even at cost to themselves. This is part of their growth, part of their learning. But this beloved human is part of “self” for the dog, one human seen as separate from others.

The most primitive humans followed this same pattern, moving into self-awareness. With self-awareness comes fear that the self will be harmed or its needs not met, and with that fear comes aggression. In any being that thinks first of “me” and “mine”, there will follow this whole process of arising of fear, mindless reaction to the fear, or perhaps trained reaction to the fear, as  aggression. With fear, anger will arise. The energy field will become contracted.

This whole pattern of learning had a purpose. You cannot transcend fear until you understand and acknowledge fear. You cannot transcend ego until you acknowledge ego. But the purpose of the lesson was not merely to experience aggression and ego-centeredness but to teach transcendence. The enactment of fear into the world, as greed and violence, was a side path from the main pathway of learning.

Twenty-five hundred years ago a great teacher was born into this world who sought to understand the nature of human suffering. He saw that suffering was the result of fear brought into the expressions of anger, greed and hostility and resultant from the whole notion of separation of self. He was the first to penetrate into the truth that such fear and notion of self were only results of certain kinds of thinking and experience and were not ultimate truths, the first to reveal a path whereby one did not need to react to such fear by closing off more into a self and by expressions of greed and hostility.

The Buddha laid out a beautiful path and was a unique voice in a violent world with the statement, "In this world, hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible”. He was not creating a truth, of course; he was simply revealing the truth of the power of love..

He is not the first teacher of love in the world; certainly not. But he was the first loud and clear voice of love and of truth to follow many millennia of self-centeredness, fear and aggression. Five hundred years later he was followed by the one you know as Jesus. While the Buddha taught people to act in kindness and compassion toward one another, and illustrated this kindness and clarity in his own life, He taught practices whereby man could open compassionately to pain and could master his impulses through wisdom. Jesus took it in a different direction. He taught "Love one another. Turn the other cheek." He was willing to go to his death with forgiveness in his heart. His living example of forgiveness in the face of pain was profound.  The Buddha taught the power of compassionate wisdom; Jesus taught the power of selfless love.  

They planted seeds, these two great teachers, and other great teachers as well. I do not mean to leave anybody out but for the sake of brevity will stay with the Buddha and Christ. Most of you were not ready to enact these teachings 2000 years ago. Some of you had just become self-aware. Your universe still centered upon ‘me' and ‘mine'. You were picking up tools and ideas and you needed time to experience their many facets in the world. Through those centuries, your intention to harmony was heightened.

The power of intention is profound. I was truly awed through these past 24 hours by the enormous force of prayer for peace, for understanding, for kindness, which circled your globe. I do not think there has ever been a greater outpouring of prayer for peace from this whole globe. What I perceive is that so many of you around the globe are ready for what I consider the most Earth-shaking change the world has ever known, which is the shift of consciousness from ‘me' to ‘us', the ‘us' being all-encompassing. All sentient beings, everything from the gnat to the human to the redwood, the seas, the earth, the skies, are in that ‘us.'  

The environmental crises of past decades have awakened many of you to your interconnectedness in ways that might not have come just through spiritual practice.  For there to be a radical shift in the way you live your lives, all beings need to be touched by awareness of interconnection.. Interestingly, the spark for awareness of inter-being is  self-awareness, me-centeredness and fear. It is out of fear that you learn love, for fear is a distorted expression of love. .

Environmental awareness is practical. If you destroy your environment you can't survive. Through that appeal to the self, you learn to treat others first with care, albeit selfishly derived care, and then slowly with respect and finally with cherishing.

I think beings on this Earth are now on the gateway of this learning to cherish, not just to take care of, not just to respect, but finally to cherish. You are ready to move from ‘me' to ‘us', from ‘mine' to ‘our'. I see this as the primary training that must be offered around the globe. Spokespersons, not only within religious or philosophical frameworks, but schoolteachers, scientists, foresters, farmers, people in every profession and of every interest must begin to practice ‘us'. And those of you who understand this ‘us' bear the responsibility to teach it to others. People are ready to hear this.

It is going to change your civilization. I do not suggest that there will suddenly cease to be aggressors who practice hatred and fear, who murder and steal, but there will be real transition. My dear ones, think of your hand. If you have a sore, an infection in your finger, which is red and painful and throbbing, you never really think, "I must cut the finger off. I must kill the finger." You hold that finger lovingly and ask, "How can this finger be healed? How can it be brought back into the light, into wholeness and health?"

The tyrants in your world are the infected fingers. When you cease to think of ‘me' and ‘them' and instead think of ‘us', you will begin to treat these tyrants in such a way as to draw them back toward health, toward sanity. When you treat all the starving and abused children of the world not as ‘them' but as ‘us', they will not develop into tyrants. It's a formidable task. No one says it will be easy. And of course you do not have to do it perfectly. The power is in the intention. If tyranny continues here and there, it will continue and beings will continue to bring love to those places of darkness. The shift is that as more and more of you begin to respond in the world from a place of deep understanding and compassion and the wisdom which sees that  tyranny only furthers tyranny and hatred, slowly the shift will come about.

So I think of this as the "us" millennium. You are here at the dawn of it. I do not think it will take a thousand years for your civilization to learn deeply the lessons of ‘us' because if you continue to enact "me", you're going to destroy yourselves. There is already enough wisdom which understands this that it will not permit it to happen.

You know that I am telepathic and also that I will not read thoughts that are not offered openly. I speak here from the power of this past day and a half, seeing the prayers and hopes of all mankind. Do you know how strongly this message of hope and love over-outnumbers the messages of fear and hate?

You are powerful and it is time for all beings to claim that strength, to create the world you envision. It will not be easy because fear is still present. You know you must begin by addressing that fear in yourself. "Abandon the unwholesome" does not mean to destroy it so much as to refuse to get caught up in it, to see how negative mindstates arise and not take them so personally but have the wisdom to know that they arose because certain conditions were present for their arising, and come back to the centered and loving heart which does not need to enact the fear, greed, and hostility that might arise.

So many of you are ready to do this and to bring these lessons out in to the world. Not ‘me' and ‘mine' but ‘us' and ‘ours'. Cherish every small bit of life, however it expresses itself. Know that the hand cannot be whole unless each finger is whole.

There is more I could say but I have promised a short talk and I think I have already exceeded my allotted time. Cherish one another. Each of you works in different areas. No one area is more or less important than another. People must learn to cherish their environment, to communicate with one another, to find their own spiritual paths. Your teaching grounds are wherever you are, amongst your family and your friends and your workmates. Some of you may feel that your work is more directly pointed in the direction of ‘us' and universal peace, but I suggest that no work is more important than any other.

Be a Buddha, one who is awake. Be a Christ. Have a sense of being fully wherever you are. Teach through your own lives and rejoice in this opening into the millennium of ‘us'.

It will begin globally. You're not ready yet for the whole universe. Once you have mastered this on a global level, those beings from other planes, other planets, other spaces, will be ready to welcome you into a more universal society.

My love to all of you, and thank you for hearing me this morning. That is all.

Barbara: This is Barbara. I'm talking a bit about what Aaron asked me. I was sitting in the hot tub and he was talking to me about me/us, and little things arising like an irritated thought of, "I've got to go do this. I don't want to do it." I think I was thinking about needing to check the chemicals in the hot tub and doing it. I don't want to do it! He said, look at the ‘me' who doesn't want to do it and then think of all the people who might use this hot tub joyfully and healthfully because the chemicals have been checked. He said, in all these little ways, transcend the ‘me', and get out into the ‘us'. He  asked me to keep noting the places of fear within myself and to simply acknowledge the fear, let go of the fear, go beyond the fear, to connect into the whole world out there, and feel the direct repercussions of any choice I make and any energy I send out.

Another thought that I had when I was getting out was, the bird food container has been sitting outside and I haven't filled the feeders. That little, "I don't feel like doing it, it's cold." He says, think about all the repercussions of each act of giving or of each act of closing up. So that was some of his very simple instruction, just picking up on any negative thoughts going by and reminding myself it's okay that the negative thoughts are arising. I don't have to get caught up in them. Note that there's a negative thought and check the tub water and fill the bird feeder. But do it with a deep sense of the interconnection of all life, and how every little act like filling the bird feeder literally changes the world. Don't take anything for granted. He's saying now, “it literally changes the world to fill your bird feeder.”

He's saying that one thing he wants to emphasize is that all the fear and self-centeredness was a necessary part of our process of growth, and not to get into condemning that and saying, "I should not have felt fear." He says that's what we build upon. I want to ask:  Aaron-what is the value-I don't know how to phrase the question-the value of self-awareness and even self-centeredness which arises from self-awareness and fear, that distortion of ‘me'?

Aaron: I am Aaron. I will be very brief. There is a what you sometimes call pure awareness, an undifferentiated awareness. It does not distinguish self from other. It is simply awareness. Such awareness which is centered in the essence of all that is, can serve as channel for the Love-nature of that essence, can know love, can express unconditional love with no subject or object for its love. It is just the movement of Love.  Thus, here is no conscious intention as part of it. It is the most simple, clear and direct expression of Love, which is a direct expression of the Divine.

Through the human move into self-awareness and the distinction between self and other, you learn to offer a differentiated love. But that love  has its limits. It has limits because it is personal. You aim toward unconditional love but the separate person cannot channel that unconditional love. Only through the notion of the person which is then transcended back into the undifferentiatedness of pure awareness, can that previously personal force of love be transmuted back into a very powerful extension of love, this is a bit hard to explain.

I'm seeking for a metaphor and for once unable to find a clear one. Picture a space of no differentiation between land, air and water. All that is necessary for these is available, but there's not yet any distinction, just a mass of earth, air, fire and water completely mixed. These separate, so you have earth, fire, water and air. The water is drawn up into the heavens and rains down upon the Earth. They start to interconnect again. Can you see the difference in power between this undifferentiated blob of elements,  the second phase where you see them separately, each element alone, and the third phase where you understand the interconnectedness and that right there in the earth are the other 3 elements; right there in the water are the other 3 elements; and so forth?

There's an old Zen saying. "In the practice of Zen, first a mountain is a mountain. Then it ceases to be a mountain. Finally,  it becomes a mountain again." So this undifferentiated awareness to which you will return is far different from the original undifferentiated awareness. It is an informed, undifferentiated awareness born of the sum of all your experiences, your joy and your pain. Your wisdom, your compassion and also your hatred and fear. It is an awareness which can be focused, perhaps that is the most important aspect of it. The original awareness was unfocused, and you were born into this undifferentiated awareness. Then through the process of self-awareness you finally return into that undifferentiated awareness, into a true resting in the Unconditioned but with the ability to focus  the pure awareness mind, and with that focus to create intention and truly unconditional love. That is all.

Barbara:  Q has asked, what about the millennium before this? He says all of human history as we know it has been ‘me' and ‘mine' but before that there were places like Lemuria and Atlantis which were ‘us' and ‘our', but more from that first undifferentiated awareness that he spoke of. That there was no sense of self or other in Atlantis. Beings were telepathic, more like fourth density, and there was no sense of separation.  So we had to fall into this sense of separation and then come out of it in order for the ‘us' and ‘our' to be really powerful. Then we bring in different energy into it than they could in different times.

He says he'll talk more about this on Wednesday night.

Q has asked, will the sore fingers continue to have all the power?

Aaron:  I am Aaron. If you have an infected finger, you have 2 choices. You can live your life around that infection, fearing to use the hand, saying "Oh woe is me", afraid to venture out the door for fear it will be bumped or jarred.  In other words, you can live your life in fear that the infection will escalate and eventually kill the body. O you can choose love. You can soak the finger and wrap it in appropriate bandage, and each time pain arises, you can acknowledge the pain with kindness and send loving energy to it. But refuse to be ruled by the sore finger. How are you going to relate to these sore fingers? They are going to continue to exist. That is all.

That is not all.  Who gives...

(side two of tape is blank)