Wednesday, November 10, 1993

Barbara: Aaron is asking me to do something rather different tonight. He's asking me to start by telling a story, by talking about something that I've been working with. I assume he's going to connect it into what he's going to say. Most of you know we are working on two fronts here, tearing the old storage shed down, building a new shed, actually a garage-size building, and emptying the garage so that we can convert it into a meeting space, meditation hall, office, whatever. Also, people are working on the paperwork to become a non-profit organization. I'm just sitting back watching this all flowing.

It seems wonderful that there is all this energy and enthusiasm, but I'm also feeling some fear. It's a lot of money. I did buy a shed this week, but as I was buying it there was fear: it's a lot of money, I don't have that much money. Also, what if neighbors complain? Right now we're just a group of people getting together; we're not doing anything illegal, in so far as zoning; we're just a bunch of people sitting here together. But if we become a non-profit organization, then what if neighbors complain? There was fear coming up about both areas.

Part of me was asking 'Is all of this necessary? Is there any of my ego in it,' that I want a bigger or nicer space, or I want to have this become a non-profit organization for some ego reason? There's got to be some ego in it, but as far as I could tell there isn't a lot. It just seems to be the way to keep this moving, spreading and available to more and more people. But I kept gravitating back and forth.

So, Michele had made many phone calls and had tracked down what seemed to be cheapest, right-size shed for the money at a lumber yard. On Monday I went there and went through the list of all the parts and what it was going to cost. Hal and I had been prepared to spend a certain amount of money, which was all that we had to spend and was really emptying the bank account. The shed was more than that. So, I came home and Hal and I talked about it. We just kind of sat with it for a while and decided, 'Have faith; just let go, trust, do it. The extra money that we need will turn up from somewhere.' Tuesday I went back to the lumber yard, signed on the dotted line and bought the shed (gulp), putting myself in debt. I came home and there was a wonderful note and check in the mailbox which will cover the balance above the line on the shed plus beginning a fund for the meditation hall. Trust!!!

Then this afternoon Cassie and I took a walk and talked about the fears about the neighbors complaining and about the non-profit organization issues. Just sitting here tonight I was remembering a poem from Karen's grandmother:

I am the place that God shines through
For God and I are one, not two
I need not fret, nor will, nor plan
He wants me where and as I am
If I'll just be relaxed and free
She'll carry out her plan through me.

Thanks to Karen's grandmother. So I was thinking about that just now as I was sitting.

There's a quote that comes from Eastern teaching: 'Trust God and tie your camel.' We've got to work with God, not just trust God and barge ahead. As I was thinking about that I realized that, yes, trust God, and it would also be very useful to go next door to my neighbors and tell them that we have a group that meets here every week, that they've probably noticed cars parked here. That we are many different religions and we get together to talk about spiritual things. That's what we're doing here. Just to tell them what we're doing and why there are all those cars.

As I was sitting here before everybody came I felt such a sense of relief. I've just been going about this wrong, with so much fear, trying to manipulate and control and make it all work out, instead of just giving love to it, trusting, and knowing I'm not in control; just trust and let it go. But work with it, lovingly, by speaking with love to the places where there may be friction. Aaron says thanks. Okay, on to Aaron.

Aaron's talk

I am Aaron. My greetings and love to you all. I'm going to work my way back to what Barbara has just shared, rather than starting with it. I want to start in a very different place, with some basics that we got into two weeks ago. I was talking then about the light body. We got into many questions about this bewildering array of bodies that you seem to have. The first thing I want to do, then, is to try to explain them so that we are all working with the same vocabulary. The suggestion was given two weeks ago that Barbara find the old transcripts from several years ago dealing with this material. These were transcribed at a time before the current computer was purchased, which is able to index transcripts and find any specific term. Although she poured through a thousand pages of transcripts, she was not able to turn it up. So, we will start fresh.

We start with light. You may call it God, the absolute, emptiness, All That Is or the Source; it doesn't matter what you call it. There is a line in John 2 of the Bible that says, simply, 'God is love.' So we might call it love. There is a Buddhist scripture, called the Udana Scripture, in which the Buddha is speaking to a group of monks. He says: 'Oh, monks, there is an Unborn, Undying, Unchanging, Uncreated. If it were not so, there would be no reason for our work.' This stating what it is not, seems a good way to speak of it, since we cannot say what it is. It is that which is totally beyond your human concepts of beginning and end. We can not even call it infinite because infinite is balanced with an opposite of non-infinite. Even to call it infinite bounds it in some way. This of which I speak completely transcends any duality or concept.

The core of this essence is energy, which manifests as light. When I say that you are a spark of God, what I am essentially saying is that you are a small bit of that infinite and perfect Light. I can not tell you what prompted your move, but at some point the individual energy that each of you are broke off from that Light, or at least had the illusion of separating. Truly, you can not be separate from it. But the illusion is necessary. I once said that you are like children camped in your parent's backyard. The child must go through the sense of independence and even of danger in order to mature. It can not mature if the parent always keeps it within its arms, inside its house. It must step out on its own. The parent is always watching from the window, always there, ready to help. But the child must feel independent. It has wonderful adventures. It thinks that the squirrel that it heard crackling the leaves while it slept in its tent was a big, black bear. It finds the courage to deal with that bear! Wonderful adventures! And this is how it grows.

Each of you came to that time of self-awareness when you become aware of this energy within the perceived self and thought it different, or separate, from what, for simplicity's sake, I am simply going to call God. We all know what I mean here. You've all heard me talk of the four bodies, the physical, emotional, mental and spirit. That was the beginning of what we call the active mental body, that first thought of separation.

The spirit body is almost synonymous with the soul. The mental plus the spirit body is what we call the higher self. When you move into incarnation there is, of course, a physical body. The emotional body begins to form before the incarnation but it is not fully shaped until you reach the catalysts of the incarnation. It is resting dormant.

That which I have called the light body is not synonymous with the soul, or spirit body. The spirit, mental, emotional and physical bodies are on a different plane than the light body, which cuts through all these other four. Lets look at these four as transparent overlays. Spirit on top, then mental, emotional and physical on the bottom. The light body is a brilliant light that burns through them all, which means that the essence of that light body is within each part of you.

We could do with some fancy lighting equipment here to make this all clear. Barbara and I discussed it and decided to keep it simple. What I had suggested to Barbara was a brilliant flashlight and four transparent overlays. When the flashlight beam is perfect and clear the light that shines through each of those bodies is perfect and clear. If you were to take a piece of uncolored cellophane and hold it over that flashlight, the light coming through would still be perfect and clear on each level. The light body is the totality of light source (The Eternal) and cellophane (projection of the Eternal).

Several weeks ago we took a piece of paper and wrinkled it. I asked you to tell me if you could still see the pure, flat, white paper in that wrinkled sheet. You agreed, it's still there. Here we take the cellophane, we wrinkle it, and then we hold it between the flashlight and these four bodies. The light body is still 'perfect' the unwrinkled sheet of cellophane is within the wrinkled sheet. But the wrinkles are also visible. The places of wrinkle are going to show up on each transparency. We may call them the scar tissue on the light body. These are largely the products of old karma.

May we have a sheet of plain paper please. Let's do this again. Look at the perfect, smooth piece of paper. (Barbara crumples the paper and then flattens it out again.) It's wrinkled now. Can you see the perfect white sheet? The wrinkles are real on one level and illusion on another level. They are real, but the perfect smooth piece of paper is there none the less. It has simply become distorted. This is very hard to phrase in words. The light body, in ultimate reality terms, is never scarred or distorted, but there are wrinkles. The perfect light body is still there. What reflects through to each of these four bodies contains the wrinkles.

This fact has different implications on different levels. The scar tissue of the light body is karmically induced. It creates the contractions that offer the potential for places of disease, weakness or distortion in the physical body. Those wrinkles also offer the contractions where you get stuck in the emotional body. Likewise for the mental body. I'm not going to talk about the spirit body here. We'll save it for a different talk. But, yes, the spirit body can become distorted. We will hold that for another talk.

Part of the problem in understanding all of this terminology is that we are using the word body, as if it were equivalent everywhere. I've stayed with these terms that are conventional, but it would be far easier to understand if we gave them different names.

There is one other set of 'bodies' we need to bring in. These are what are called the etheric, causal, astral and physical. Again, they don't correlate. They are on planes that do not intersect, so we can not talk about the emotional and mental bodies and the astral and etheric bodies in the same breath. Let me simply explain these four.

The physical is obvious. It is the combination of bodies of the physical plane. The astral body is essentially the combined spiritual, mental and emotional bodies. These are the bodies that one finds on the astral plane. The physical body is a manifestation of the astral body, in a sense. It is the solidification of all the elements in the astral body.

Beyond what we call the astral plane, which is the plane where you rest between incarnations, is what is called the causal plane. The relationship between the astral and the causal planes is that of grade school and university. On the causal plane one is still subject to the laws of cause and effect, but one has largely moved past reactivity. However, for one still on the causal plane there is still an idea of a self, even if one is free of identification with that self. As long as there is an emotional body there remains the possibility of that identification with self. Lowest sixth density is the end of the causal plane.

Higher sixth density beings have moved beyond the causal plane. They retain a mental body in order to be able to communicate with one another, such as I who retain that body to teach. But there is no identification with it as 'This is me' nor is there danger of such identification since the emotional body which creates identification has dissolved. So that is what is meant by 'beyond the causal plane.' At that point one enters the etheric plane. The ether is simply the heaven. It is a plane beyond causality.

I am offering you far more specific, technical, wording tonight than is usual. You do not have to know all of these terms. But many of you have been asking me, 'Aaron, how does all of this go together? How does all of this interrelate?' If what I am saying makes sense to you, that's fine. If not, just dismiss it, you don't need most of it. We will come back to that portion that you do need.

Tonight and in past weeks I have been describing the light body and its correlation with the physical, emotional and mental bodies. We need to understand this because we are beginning to move in a new direction. For some years we have focused on the wrinkles in the physical, emotional and mental bodies, and how to work skillfully with these. Now we begin, increasingly, to practice working not only with the distortions in relative reality but with the parallel, illusory wrinkles in the light body. Seeing the physical plane distortion and the template for that distortion in the light body, knowing that distortion was never owned by you but simply arose because of conditions present for its arising, seeing furthermore that the notion of the distortion was an illusion because you can know/experience the perfection of the light body, then we simply let go of the distortion.

This is a capsule description of the work we will be pursuing, probably until summer. I have lost some of you tonight. I apologize for that. I think that as I speak further tonight and on other nights, it will come together.

Let me give you one more illustration and then let's put this aside and go on from terminology to meaning. Feeling yourselves sitting just as you are, feel your physical body. Just above this physical body ('above' is a linear space term. By 'above,' what I mean more precisely is in a dimension just aside from your physical body) is what I call the higher self. This is the pure mental and spirit body. It is the very highest aspect of you that is still a self-very wise, very loving-but still participating in the duality of self and other. Even if it knows that duality to be illusion, it still uses it as a reference point.

Now I ask you to visualize or feel this higher self presence and your own physical body presence. As I see you, all of that (higher self and physical incarnation) rests within a cylinder of light. Again using your linear space term, just 'above' that higher self is what I would call the light body. The cylinder of light does not flow from the light body but through the light body. The light body is the perfect carrier of light, like a magnifying glass which takes the greater light and focuses it into a brilliant point. That point becomes the cylinder that wraps around you like a cloak. This is your aura. As some items absorb light and then give off that light as their own glow, thus the light body does give off its own glow, but the light that it glows with is not only its own, but comes from whatever we wish to call that which for simplicity sake I will call God.

So, from that divine light, the light flows into each of your light bodies and through it. Being focused by the light body, it surrounds the higher self and the physical incarnations. There are a great many different physical incarnations, one after another after another. ('After' here is another term of your incarnative experience; on my plane time is non-linear and 'after' has no meaning.) No physical incarnation can contain all of the energy of the light body. The soul itself can not contain all of the energy of the light body. The incarnation can not contain all of the energy of the soul. So it keeps getting stepped down.

I give an image which is more poetic and concerned with overall pictures than precision of detail. Picture an infinite sea, no shores, infinite. There is also an infinite Spring which is that which we have called God, and which feeds this sea. They are really one and the same-the source and the sea. Rivers flow from the source into the sea. Each river is an individual being's light body. The light body focuses and brings that light to a very precise, very strong, energetic pinpoint of light. Let us call that the spirit body. As the river gathers itself tight, then spreads out, then gathers again, the soul moves into one incarnation after another, but it is never separate from the source or the sea. There is only the illusion of separate parts.

A different image: I am attempting to give each of you some tool for understanding these interrelationships. The water from the Source pours into a hot water tank; we'll call that the light body. Each lifetime is a cup out of that tank. Each cup of water is no different in its purity and perfection than the Source itself. But because it has come some distance from the Source it has picked up impurities. The potential for perfect purity is there. The water itself is always pure but scattered through it are impurities picked up along the way. How do we strain out the impurities? And how do we come to understand that we are, and always have been, that perfectly pure water? This last is vitally important; it allows us to stop blaming our misunderstandings on the impurities we have picked up along the way and understand our true nature You are not striving to be perfect, you already are perfect. But because you do not yet know that perfection you act out your misunderstandings and distortions. Your delusion wrinkles the paper!

Much of our work in the past has been a matter of learning to work skillfully with those distortions, to understand our responsibility for our choices. You have learned to meditate, to move into deeper awareness of who and what you are. You are learning non-reactivity to the catalysts in your life, learning to create a more spacious and open heart that can deal more lovingly with the world. This is work in progress for all of you. None of you have finished that portion of the work yet, and some of you have barely begun it.

Simultaneously we can begin to work with the light body itself, coming to see how the contractions that we feel are reflections of the scar tissue in the light body. We may then work on two fronts. First, finding non-reactivity to those contractions in the physical being, you stop practicing the wrinkles. Second, seeing through the distortion that we thought was 'self' and releasing it, you will learn to see the perfect piece of paper instead of the wrinkles. When you know the piece of paper is perfect you will no longer identify with the wrinkles.

I've been talking for a long time. If you will forgive me for extending your patience a bit further, there's one more thing I want to talk about. Each of you who comes to incarnation has experienced the deep pain of the illusion of separation from the eternal. You each experienced it in your own unique way. What I would like to ask you to do is to sit here and meditate for some moments and, as much as is possible, invite in love and light, and allow yourself to sit enfolded by that love. Just do that now for some time. If visualization is possible for you, allow yourself to see and feel brilliant light, as if you sit in the most brilliant sunbeam. (Silence.)

Now image that it's (Hands clapping.) cut off. A dark, black cloud cutting you out of that light. Cold, harshness, darkness. Without getting overly intellectual or analytical about it, see if you can feel contractions in all the bodies. You may or may not be able to discern the contractions at the physical, emotional, mental or spirit level. They may all come together, that's okay. Feel whatever is to be felt with that contraction. There may be sadness, or even real pain. You may experience it as a real wound, a place in some or all of the bodies that is suddenly tender and vulnerable. Think of it as a wound in the heart.

There is a pain in the heart. Can you feel how you will bend over and curl yourself up a bit to protect that wound? If this is difficult for you to visualize, think of it simply as a sore on your arm. A place that was burned and is very tender. You're walking in the woods and bushes brush past it. It hurts and you withdraw the arm. As you walk down the path and see more underbrush, instead of moving your arms and allowing them to swing at your sides, you hold that arm back, defending against perceived future pain.

In the same way you each learn, in your own unique patterns, to protect that tender heart, that tender place of pain. Some of you move into patterns of greed and clinging, afraid that your needs won't be met. Some you move into patterns of jealousy perhaps, or of anger and distrust. You lose track of the original wound. You become so contracted, trying to protect yourself; each time you contract it further distorts the light body and the energy body. (By the term energy body I simply mean that part of you through which energy travels. The energy body is an interconnector of all the bodies, in a sense. We need not go into it in detail.) Can you see how you've lost track of the original pain? It has multiplied itself a thousand and a million times. But each distortion was simply an attempt to protect. That's all fear is. It is the distortion that says 'I am separate and I need to protect myself.' It is built on, literally, thousands of deluded incidents where you moved into that same pattern. Each time it happens the paper is creased a bit more and it becomes harder and harder to see that perfect, white sheet, and to live as if that perfect, white sheet were the reality.

We can not always trace it back to the experience of the original separation. Some of you may be able to see it in your meditation and others may not. What we can come to know is that it was all delusion. That first pain was based on delusion because you never were separate, you were just out camping in the backyard. The more you let go the more you come to know who you really are, and to rest in the truth, beauty and wonder that you are. To rest in pure mind. To rest in love.

Feel this tension of defendedness within you, the way I've asked you to imagine catalyst coming towards you and your curling up and holding your arms over your chest to protect yourself. What I would like you to do is look at what comes towards you by whom you felt threatened. Take a deep breath and tell yourself 'I am not threatened. It has all been part of the delusion.' I want you to open your arms and hold your head erect. Actually move into this posture. Chest out, head erect, exposed, open. If there is any fear just breathe it out. Allow yourself to touch and be touched by the universe. Breathe in light. If there is fear release it with the out breath. Not getting rid of it, just seeing you don't need it. Let it go.

I want you to try this through the coming week. Each time there is fear, even if your body does not actually move into that curled and defended posture, feel the contraction that leads to desire to defend. Come back and rest in this cylinder of light. Literally open your arms as a reminder, raise your head. Breathe in that light and feel the need to defend dissolve. Please work with it and share with me next week. I would like to hear your experiences.

I thank you for your attention. I will end here for your break and then be glad to hear your questions. I also hope that you will share some of your own experiences. That is all.

Discussion

Barbara: This is Barbara. Aaron says that two weeks ago he did a guided meditation in which he asked people to breathe in, pause and find that space of 'now,' breathe out. Then to take that into your daily life and, at a place where there was tension, see what happens if you breathe that way. He is wondering if anybody did that and if you have anything you would like to share.

F: I've been finding that I've been doing that a lot, it's really coming quite naturally to me, and it's just been probably the best tool that I've had for centering and just awareness building; mindfulness of whatever. It's been a very helpful tool.

M: I've found it quite natural. I think I've tried this before.

K: I've found that it's making me very aware of my thoughts because when I'm really agitated and I do that pause I can feel the thoughts come rushing in to cover that empty space. It's helped me to notice them more clearly than any other practice. Sometimes it's hard for me to do anything other than just watch them come crashing in. They're almost like waves, pounding on the shore. Other times it is great. It just depends on how agitated my mind is at the time.

M: Feels like sitting in the light. Same spacious place, quiet.

Barbara: I've been working with it a lot these past two weeks, too, and I'm finding that it really clarifies for me when I'm slipping into old mind and into distortion, and brings me back to this moment. In this moment is there really whatever the distortion was? Is there really anything to be afraid of or is this fear old mind? It clarifies that question so much for me.

D: I have noticed that when I am angry, and when I remember to do it, I can see a little easier how much I want the anger as protection.

Barbara: This is something that Aaron was talking to me about this week. He says he talked tonight a little bit about the way we take that 'original wound' and magnify it so that what we are defending against, ultimately, isn't that wound at all but all the places where we have defended in the past. So we do want that anger because it is the way we have always handled our pain. But there never was any unmanageable pain that we needed to handle. We did it that way the first time and so we've kept doing it. Questions?

D: Aaron spoke tonight using the terms 'energy' and 'light' quite often. When I was in college I studied physics, where energy and light have specific meanings. Does Aaron mean those conventional meanings when he uses the terms 'energy' and 'light'?

Aaron: I am Aaron. Essentially I mean the same thing, but the energy and light of which I speak are the archetypes from which physics draws its terminology of energy and light. There is light with a capital 'L' and light with a small 'l,' energy with a capital 'E' and with a small 'e.' Does that answer your question?

D: It raises several questions. One is, what is energy with a capital 'E'?

Aaron: I can only offer this in metaphor. Think of the sun, think of a very powerful laser light and think of a flashlight. Now, think of the light of a billion suns, not just one. Infinite! That infinite number of suns represents energy with a capital 'E' manifesting itself as light. The light of one sun is the light body. The light body is your own bit of the infinite energy, also manifesting as light. The light moves through it. Each one gets stepped down. You come to the flashlight or candle, the individual. Does that answer your question sufficiently?

M: I was wondering about the unwrinkled light body. How can there be an unwrinkled light body which perceives itself as separate from the source? Does it perceive itself as separate if it's unwrinkled?

Aaron: I am Aaron. The light body does not perceive itself. The light body is nothing but a projection of the 'sun.' It expresses through those aspects of self which have self awareness, but the light body has no self awareness. Do you understand?

M: At the level at which the light body is perceived as unwrinkled, is there a self to perceive it?

Aaron: I am Aaron. There is simply pure awareness which is aware of its perfection and which willingly enters into the illusion of self to provide itself with the tools for self awareness and perception. Does that answer your question?

M: When the awareness moves into this sense of self, at that point must the light body become wrinkled? In other words, is our identity … does it come from the wrinkles or does it precede the wrinkles?

Aaron: I am Aaron. Awareness picks up the tool of self much the way you pick up a screwdriver when you wish to set a screw. You have no problem knowing that you are not the screwdriver. You don't carry the screwdriver with you after the screw is tight; it has done its work. Pure awareness picks up the illusion of self, knowing it to be illusion, in order to do its work on this plane of relative reality. As long as there is no ownership of that perceived self there is no adhering karma; there are no wrinkles. The wrinkles arise when the illusion solidifies so that awareness forgets and hangs onto the screwdriver, owns it. Then there becomes a self that is doing, and then we move into adhering karma. The attachments and aversions within that illusion are what create the wrinkles. But remember they are both real wrinkles and not real. The paper is perfect.

I would ask you think about a scar, this is why I use the image of scar tissue. Imagine a razor cut. It is brought together imperfectly, creating a raised edge of skin, a lip. In order to hold the cut together it is joined so that there is a raised edge. Every time that edge gets rubbed and creates abrasion, more scar tissue forms over the top. At some level beneath the scar tissue the skin is perfectly healed together. I'm tempted to say that at some level the cut never happened; I'll toss that out to those of you who want to play with it. But on the relative reality plane the cut did happen. You could perhaps visualize cutting off the scar tissue, simply holding the torn ends together perfectly, so that they healed without scar. This scar tissue is the manifestation of delusion that there is something awry which needs to be mended.

I am struggling to find words within Barbara's mostly English vocabulary to express this. The English language has not concerned itself with this type of question to the extent that it has formed adequate vocabulary. You are limited in your ability to move into the concepts because there are no words for it. Some of you may remember Doran from Israel, who worked with us several years ago. He told us that in the Hebrew language there had been no word for the emotion of frustration until five or six years earlier. You could be angry, you could be bewildered, you could be challenged, but you couldn't be frustrated. There was simply no word to express it. It's very interesting to understand what happens when you broaden your vocabulary and find new words that do express a concept. I am not going to try and teach Sanskrit, which is perhaps the best language for explaining all of this. Rather, we will try to work around it with English equivalents.

So, pure awareness loses its mindfulness for a moment, gets stuck in the illusion of having been somebody doing something. Within that space of separation and the duality of self and other, fear arises that it may be hurt or its needs may not be met. The energy contracts with that perceived threat to the perceived self. When the energy contracts two things happen. Adhering karma is created by the response to the catalyst, whatever that response may be, and there is a correlating scar tissue, or wrinkle, that forms in the light body.

This 'scar' is simply the reflection of the contraction. That contraction has moved through the energy bodies. It comes to rest lying on the light body, rather than being an intrinsic part of it. Let us say that it is a shadow of a wrinkle on the light body rather than a substantial wrinkle. Nevertheless, the next time the light moves through, that shadow of a wrinkle shines through the spirit, mental, emotional and physical bodies and becomes a place of blocked energy within the whole system. Through many different tools one must release the shadow of the wrinkle.

I said several weeks ago that one can roller skate over rough concrete, but one must constantly be struggling for balance. At some point it becomes skillful to smooth the concrete; then the skating is much easier. So, what we have been talking about in the past is learning to skate on rough concrete. What we are presently talking about is smoothing the concrete. You can not always count on smooth concrete; you must learn to skate on rough concrete. You must also learn that it's skillful to smooth the concrete. One hopes not to be attached to smoothing the concrete, to know that you can skate on rough concrete, but where it's smooth-able to smooth it. Does that answer your question? That is all.

M: So the sense of self can arise before the wrinkles, but the solidified …

Barbara: I'm paraphrasing Aaron. The sense of self arises immediately upon seeming separation from God, but it's not solidified at that point. One knows this is an illusion. The difference here is the wrinkle doesn't form until you start to believe in that self as 'reality.'

M: The solidified sense of self is the wrinkles, but the wrinkles do not create identity, that comes before. But the identity is seen as illusion as well until the solidified self comes.

Barbara: Aaron says almost. He says come back to the metaphor of picking up the screwdriver, using it when you need it, then putting it down. I'm paraphrasing Aaron here. The mental body, the higher self, chooses to work within the illusion because it needs to move into relative reality if it's going to learn. But sometimes it gets lost in the illusion and that's when the wrinkles happen.

M: The unwrinkled self exists only in ultimate reality then?

Aaron: I am Aaron. No, the unwrinkled self exists everywhere! It is right here in this room within you in this moment. You are all perfect, you are all angels. It is this that you must come to know. (Tape turned.)

Aaron: I am Aaron. Put one foot down, that foot is in relative reality. Feel the rug or floor under your foot. Perhaps there are some sharp places, or it's cold. Put the other foot down, that foot is in ultimate reality. Follow your two legs up, they come to one heart. There is no duality between relative and ultimate reality. Relative reality is a part of ultimate reality, one aspect of it. This is just the point. If you were not already perfect then you would be having to attain something, to fix something. Yes, of course there is unskillful behavior grown out of your fear, grown out of the ownership of this illusory self. But there is nothing to attain, there is nowhere to go. You are angels, you have always been angels. You have the Christ or Buddha mind already here. You are perfect. But you are not yet awake to that perfection. Do you understand? That is all.

Barbara: Aaron is saying he is not addressing just you in that, M, but others who are confused. Other questions?

CM: The individual body vs. the body of society. Our society is a combination of bodies of each individual. The society is losing the ability to love. I feel it is getting lonelier and lonelier. This society has more and more problems. If so, can we explain this by what we have learned today, that the mental and spirit bodies of each individual are separated and losing the ability of love because they are separated from the 'lower body' or 'lower self.' Is there a pulling apart, or separation, occurring between the higher self and the emotional and physical bodies that is responsible for our losing our ability to love? I'm from China, which is a family oriented society. Each individual does not have that much privacy, does not need that much privacy. The space between is not as big, physically. People are, maybe, too crowded or whatever, they don't claim this as my privacy, this as my space, there is no such thing. People feel weird if you say too much about this being my, my, my space. That society does not have this lonely feeling for each individual. Does the lower self need more and more privacy, but the higher self actually doesn't need this and so the lower self is pulling away?

Aaron: I am Aaron. I am always intrigued by and enjoy your questions, my friend. There is some separation of the bodies in the way that you are asking. Many people have cleared the upper chakras but not the lower. They live their lives 'a small distance from their bodies,' as an author once put it. There is different learning within each body. The emotional and physical are more joined, as are mental and spirit. The emotional and physical bodies desire privacy at times, often out of fear and the seeking of escape and protection, and the mental and spirit bodies dwell more in connection. But these pulls are not responsible for the cultural differences which seek privacy and create loneliness. Rather, beings have incarnated into one or another culture to give rise to the catalysts that will best serve to stimulate the areas of needed learning. This 'lower self' is the small ego self. There will be choice to incarnate into a society where that loneliness serves as incentive for learning to move the weight back to the higher self …

(End of tape. Time was out and Aaron did not speak at length to the question, just answered briefly.)