March 30, 2011 Cosmic Healing, Ann Arbor Event

March 30, 2011 Ann Arbor Wednesday evening; Aaron on Cosmic Healing,

Barbara: Welcome. We have over 30 people here tonight;  I see many old friends and some new faces. How many of you have never been here before? And how many of you have never heard Aaron before?

The book that I've just finished is now published, Cosmic Healing: A Spiritual Journey with Aaron and John of God. I am delighted to see it. I feel like I've given birth after 5 years of pregnancy. I was carrying this baby a long time!

Aaron will talk as in a normal Aaron night, but he wants to talk about the book and his perspective on the book. I've just come back from 5 days in San Francisco and talking about the book from my perspective, book talks, and Aaron said, “Do I get at turn?” So tonight seems like the appropriate time for Aaron to talk.

As I mentioned in the book and in talking about it, I want to thank L, sitting here in the front row. It would not have happened without her. I can't begin to list, not just hours but weeks and months of editing. She contributed so much to this, and D, who was unable to be with us tonight. No book just comes from one person, but L and D went way beyond the usual effort. Thank you, L.

For those who are new tonight, I am a medium for Aaron. He incorporates literally into my body. I just kind of get out of his way and he moves into the body. He talks about many different kinds of subjects, usually about how we live our lives with more love, how we work with heavy emotion, fear, body pain; how to be present in our loving hearts with these things. He talks about many different topics, but these are special areas of his interest.

Tonight, as I said, he's going to talk specifically about healing. I don't know what he's going to talk about! He'll let us know. But something related to the book.

I'm just going to get quiet now and Aaron will come in and he'll talk. He'll probably talk for about 45 minutes and then speak to questions. I do have a sheet of questions that came from the spiritual inquiry class and some of them were answered briefly by email. But if there are more of them, we're happy to speak to those as well.

Aaron: My blessings and love to you all. I am Aaron. For those who do not know me, I would ask that you not try to figure out if I am real but simply hear my words. Clearly the words are real, there's a voice that's speaking. Don't try to figure out where it's coming from, but ask,  does it speak to your heart? Do the ideas resonate and are they helpful? If so, hold them. If not, release them. It's as simple as that.

I see that we have several generations here tonight, (there are some children present, pre-teen and teen) and I would like to try to make this talk accessible to everyone. The title of the book is Cosmic Healing. What does that mean? What is “healing“? Let's start there.

Do you sometimes have a headache or a toothache, a stomachache or a sprained ankle, body pain? Do you? Yes. If you have a headache, do your feet hurt? No. If you have a sprained ankle, do your teeth hurt? No. So when you say, “Oh, my ankle hurts,” you say, “My ankle hurts,” not, “My whole body is in pain.” You can bring attention to the area where there's pain, and you can bring attention also to that which is not in pain.

Sometimes you feel sad and an hour later you may feel happy. Right there when you are sad you can begin to think about the times that you are happy, what you are grateful for. The sadness is real. We don't say, “No, I'm not really sad.” There is sadness; that's a direct experience. But one doesn't have to drown in the sadness. Instead, one can note the sadness and then ask oneself, “In this moment, what am I grateful for? What makes me happy?”

Perhaps you're angry. In the same way, one doesn't say, “I'm not angry. I won't be angry.” Here is the direct experience of anger, in this mind and body. You feel it in the body somewhere, as tension, contraction. (To someone) Where do you feel anger? Do you feel it in your body? Does your body get tight when you're angry? Yes, okay, so just, tension, contraction. (To someone else) Where do you feel anger?

Q: In the shoulders.

Aaron: The shoulders. (To someone else) Where do you feel anger? (inaudible response) So it's different for each person. There's no one rule, but each of you knows when there's an experience of anger. One doesn't say, “I'm not angry, I won't be angry,” that's just more anger. One acknowledges, “Breathing in, I am aware of the anger. Breathing out, I smile to the anger. I hold space for the anger. And I also look for that within me in this very moment which is not angry.” Right there with anger, can one find some bit of joy, gratitude, ease? It is there. Sometimes the anger is so intense it's difficult to find, but it is there.

We can say the same thing for fear, for jealousy, for greed, for heat or cold or stiffness. Whatever arises, arises because there are certain conditions that have triggered it. It's there, it's real, but there's something else beyond it.

I'd like you try an exercise with me. I'd like you to hold your fingers up in front of your face. Wiggle them and stare at them. Let's call one sadness, one fear, one anger, one a bellyache, one confusion. The human condition; it's all there. Stare at it, keep the fingers moving. Now, while the fingers are moving, look through the fingers up at me. Keep them moving, and you'll see them in your peripheral vision, but you can also see the vast space beyond the fingers. It's real.

Come back to the fingers. When you focus only on the fingers, that's all you see. When you stay with the fingers but also look through them, you see the vast space. So we begin to know what me might call two realities: the everyday reality, relative reality, of the mind and body experiences, and an ultimate reality that transcends the everyday.

Barbara made this visual display to take to San Francisco, and I'm going to make use of it here. (There are 2 canasters, one inside the other. In the smaller one is a small teddy bear) Here we have relative reality. (small canister) Most of us hang out in this little box called relative reality, with the lid on. That's all we see, that's it. We peek out now and then, like your glimpse through the fingers. (letting bear peek out) “Oh, there's more space out there!” But mostly the lid is clamped tight. There we are in relative reality.

Then you meditate and you have a transcendent experience. The mind and body fall away. The ego disappears. Plop! Suddenly there you are in ultimate reality.  (moves bear to big canister, uncovered) Wow! Blissful experience, infinite space. No sense of an ego, no pain, just joy, love, the experience of the divine. But the meditation ends. (back to small canister with lid on)  There you are back in relative reality again. What happened? Where did that go? “Oh, I want more of that!” But the lid is closed and you don't know how to open it.

You keep hopping back and forth, (moving bear) time spent in ultimate reality, which proved to you the reality of ultimate reality, most of the time in relative reality, until one day you realize that relative reality is within ultimate reality, and that you never can lose the ultimate reality. It's right there. But you still experience mostly the relative.

Gradually, and with practice, you learn to have a foot in each side, to stay balanced between them. (demonstrates with teddy bear) You may spend most of the time in relative with just your hand hanging over into the ultimate. (demonstrates) You peek into it now and then, “There, it's still there.” You are hanging on to it; touching ultimate reality but mostly in relative. At times you may spend most of your time in ultimate reality but touching the relative, not losing touch with it. (bear in large canister now, but with a hand in the small one) You have to do that because human experience is not just to experience bliss, not just to experience your divinity and highest truth, but to bring that truth down into the earth plane so that you can touch the world with wisdom and compassion, so that you can “heal” the world.

So we're back to the question, what is healing? On one level, there's nothing to heal. On the ultimate level, everything is already perfect. Nothing has ever been distorted, damaged, or other than perfect. And yet, in every day reality we would have to say things are imperfect. People say nasty things to you. If it rains and your roof is leaking, the car doesn't start, the belly aches; these things are real.

The Buddha said it very beautifully, “We are what we think. With our minds we make the world.” If we think we are this limited human being then essentially that's what we become. There's not much chance to move out of that limitation. But when you realize how big you are, how vast you are, and the power you have from this heart of divinity and truth to touch the world with your deepest love, you see that you can do that.

And you also see that it's terrifying. People think, “What if I do have that much power?” I think you hold on to the concept of limitation, and to the idea that you are here and must heal and go there, because it terrifies you to think that you are already there, already unlimited and perfect.

Now, I'm not saying you're able to manifest that perfection. There's a beautiful teaching song in the Tibetan tradition, called Flight of the Garuda, in which he says,I am paraphrasing, “Cream has the essence of butter but if the cream isn't churned, the butter won't form. Human beings have the essence of realization but if you don't meditate, if you don't do your work, you won't realize that perfection and you won't be able to bring it forth in the world.”

So, healing is an interesting word. In the beginning I opposed Barbara's use of the word “healing” in the title of the book because I said it speaks to people only of the relative path. But it seems to me that it's an adequate title because this is where most of you are. You are in this relative space. You are working to realize your truth but most of you have not fully done that yet.

So there is a need to heal, but be forewarned: don't get caught in the idea, “I am a human being moving through life, and I am healing,” or you're going to become attached to that concept and not let yourself experience your innate perfection and divinity. Keep a foot in each camp. “I am a human being and I am suffering in my body and in my emotions, and I am also,” I call you angels, angels in earthsuits, “I am also that angel.” The earthsuit, the body, the emotions, sometimes there's real pain, and the angel is vast and unlimited. One must keep both in mind.

In the book I teach a meditation practice of which I am very fond called the Pole Meditation. I ask people to start with their feet planted in the earth, feeling the pain of the earth; feeling human physical pain, sadness, grief, fear; feeling the earth's pain; feeling Japan shaking and flooded (this is just after the tsunami and nuclear accident), and other places in the world. Be grounded in this reality, that there is real pain.

Be like a tree with its roots in the ground, touching the earth plane, and then the head up in the heavens connected with God, or whatever term you use for that divine essence, deeply immersed in that Unconditioned. Be the pole that connects heaven and earth; this is the responsibility that each of you has undertaken when you came into incarnation. You did not come just to become lost in the earth plane and somebody who's constantly trying to fix things, and you did not come simply to become conceptually enlightened and space out, separating yourself out from the earth's heaviness and troubles. You came to be an awake being who can stay connected to the divine realm and bring that high energy and vibration, that love, that courage, that peace, down into the earth plane for yourself and for all other beings.

This is the true healing. It's not really healing, it's a... I don't know a word for it. Connecting. Holding the space.

My talk so far may seem conceptual. Let's talk of a very specific example. You're in a situation at work, at school, where somebody says something very rude to you, or perhaps they push you. Hearing those words or feeling that push, anger comes up. It's so easy to identify it as “my anger.” Many things can happen in that moment. First, if there's no mindfulness at all, there can just be reaction, yelling back, even pushing back. If there is mindfulness that is aware, feeling anger, there can almost immediately be a feeling of shame. “I've been on a spiritual path for 20 years and here I am still feeling anger. I shouldn't feel anger.” Shame, judgment.

These are stories. The pushing back is a kind of physical story or articulating. The thought, “I should be better than this. I shouldn't feel this,”  with its judging and shame, is a mental story.

This situation in itself, we call it empty. It simply is the outflow of conditions. If there was a glass of water sitting on the floor and a big truck went by and made the floor shake a little bit so water sloshed over the side, would you say it's the fault of the truck? Is it the fault of the architect who designed the building so it shakes a bit when a truck goes by?  Can you see that it's simply the outflow of conditions? We say it is empty of a separate self.

The area in which you need to heal is in the belief of the stories that come. They show themselves as, “I shouldn't feel this. He shouldn't do that. This is good, that's bad. I want more of this. I don't want any of that. I shouldn't have the toothache or the bellyache. What's wrong with my dentist, anyhow? I'm going to find a new dentist and then I won't have toothaches anymore.”

How many dentists can you go through? These are the stories. This is the core of healing, to begin to see how these stories arise because you are conditioned. It's okay that the stories arise; I'm not saying that they shouldn't arise. But you don't have to believe in the story and make more stories out of it. You can simply note, “Ah, judging, planning, remembering,” or simply, “story.” Stories are not bad. They can entertain us. They can teach us. But we have to know they're stories and not become lost in them, believing them to be truth.

An example that many people find helpful is what I call my lifejacket metaphor. Let's pretend that it's a hot summer day. Everybody has come down to the lake and your friends are all diving off the dock, not staying in the shallow water but swimming 100 yards from the dock. But you don't know how to swim, at least not that far.

I hand you a lifejacket. I show you how to strap it on and help you climb down the ladder, and, wow! It supports you! You paddle your feet and hands a bit and then you swim out to your friends. You have a good time. You feel secure in your lifejacket. The next day you put it on again, and the next, and the next.

The summer goes by. Ten years go by. You've been swimming every day, every summer. By now you have become quite a good swimmer. The lifejacket, on the other hand, is now moldy, waterlogged and mildewed. It has no more buoyancy at all. But you have a belief in it, “This supports me.” So you are tying it on when I come down to the dock. And I ask you, “What are you doing?”

“I'm putting on my lifejacket.”

“Why?”

“I need it. Without it I don't how to swim. I'll drown.”

“Now, wait a minute. Please, do you remember 10 years ago how you went down that ladder, afraid of the water, and the lifejacket buoyed you up? Now I want you to go down the ladder, let go, and not move your hands or feet and see what happens.”

“Oh, it supports me...” Glub, glub, glub, glub...

This rotten, waterlogged lifejacket is pulling you down. You swim up to the surface, try it again. Let's check it out and make sure. Glub, glub, glub. So you come up on the dock, and I ask you, “Are you ready to take it off?” Can you see that there's still going to be a little bit of hesitancy, even after the proof? “But I need it. This protects me.”

Your stories such as “I'm unworthy, I'm unloved; I'm not smart enough; I'm clumsy; I have a bad back and it will never heal; I have chronic headaches and the doctors say they can't heal them;” these are stories. Certainly there's some validity to them. Perhaps you really are clumsy. Perhaps you do have a chronic headache. This is just one piece of the reality.

There are two questions we would ask about the lifejacket. What does hanging on to this lifejacket protect you from? It's an old fear, “This supports me.” In what way does the chronic back ailment or the chronic belief in one's unworthiness, which of course you don't want on the surface, but in what way does it seem to support you? And have you grown used to it through the years so that the idea of releasing it is terrifying?

Barbara lost her hearing suddenly in 1972 after her first child was born. The doctors feel that the blood vessels became constricted for some reason, and the nerves from the ear to the brain and the middle ear nerves that control balance became oxygen-starved and died. It was very traumatic for her. She had a newborn infant. She knew nothing about deafness. She had severe vertigo to the point that she could not sit up and could not focus her eyes to read, so there was no communication possible.

The doctors declared after a few months, “This is permanent. There is nothing possible that can be done. The nerves are dead. There's nothing in our medical technology to restore dead nerves.” All they could do was send her to lip reading lessons and give her some exercises to help her balance a bit.

At the point where Barbara and I made conscious contact, she was struggling with the deafness and with the anger about the deafness. One of the first things that I taught her, she asked me, “Why are you here?” and I said, “You're suffering. Let's start there. Let's look at the causes of the suffering and where freedom lies.”

She began to see that the suffering was not because of the deafness, and she said, “Oh, then it's because of the anger about the deafness.” And I said, “No, it's because of the anger at the anger.” Can you feel the difference? The deafness is just deafness. It arose out of certain conditions, in this case medical conditions, body conditions. The anger is just anger. It likewise arose out of certain conditions, which are pretty normal for the human being: anger because something that you badly want has been taken away, anger at the feeling of helplessness and lack of control, fear. So I pointed out to her that there are two things needed here. One is to relate more spaciously to the deafness. One is to relate more spaciously to the anger.

Tomorrow night at Crazy Wisdom, Barbara's going to be reading some from Cosmic Healing. There are dialogues in there in which I'm teaching her just these things. The book is very much based on voluminous journals that she kept through the years of her dialogues with me, thousands and thousands of pages, from which are extracted just a few pages that are the very precise teachings that I gave her.

When there is anger, one does not have to become lost in that anger. One can note the presence of anger. And without acting out the anger or denying the anger, one can simply be with it and with the space beyond. I taught her, “that which is aware of anger is not angry.” Be present with the anger but also know that which is not angry and give it equal time, so that you are not so self-identified with being the angry one who has to fix or even heal the anger. You also must not deny the presence of anger. The anger has simply arisen from conditions. It's impermanent; it will go. Don't deny it, don't act it out, but find that which is not angry and live there, while still being compassionately aware that there is anger.

The years went by and she finally had real equanimity with the deafness and no more anger about the deafness. She was very at peace with it. Then she was looking at the ways she had healed in other aspects of her life. For example, when I first met her, she still felt a strong sense of unworthiness. She began to see the roots of that unworthiness, that it was a story, that it was a lifejacket. I asked her, “What does this concept of unworthiness protect you from?” She began to see as a child how much it had protected her from the anger that she felt. It was safer to turn the anger on herself and feel unworthy than feel the anger and try to express it towards those adults in her home toward at whom she was angry.  There was no place to put the anger so she turned it on herself and then said, “Well, I'm just unworthy.”

What does an emotion or physical ailment protect you from? What might you be feeling if you were not feeling this unworthiness right now? What might you be feeling if you were not feeling this sense of abandonment or isolation? What might you be experiencing if instead of a bad back that makes it difficult for you to stand upright and walk, if you could really walk? This is not about Barbara but about many people. What if my body was whole? What does the idea of some limits in my body, what does it protect me from?

At this point she heard of John of God and was immediately drawn to go there. For those few of you who don't know about John of God, he is a non-traditional healer in Brazil. Many discarnate beings, entities like myself, channel through him and do quite remarkable healing work. So she went to Brazil and she realized she needed to ask the question, not only, “Am I at peace with my deafness now?” but “What is there about healing that frightens me? In what ways is the deafness a lifejacket? What does it protect me from?”

This again is written in her own personal stories in the book, her investigation and the way she opened into these deeper truths. For Barbara, the deafness-- we have to be careful: she did not say, “I'm going to be deaf so I do not have to experience this or that,” the deafness happened for many reasons-- physiological, genetic, karmic, all different reasons. But when one asks the question, one can find the specific area.

For Barbara, there was a feeling of helplessness that there was so much pain in the world, and she couldn't bear to hear it anymore. So she saw that the deafness protected her from hearing it. She saw clearly into a past life in which she and others had been drowning on a sea after the ship they were on was torpedoed. The hearing is the last sense to go, so as she was losing consciousness, she could hear the screams around her, “Help me! Help me!” It broke her heart that she couldn't help herself and others.

In this life, through various kinds of social actions for peace and civil rights, she saw some very painful things where she was not able to help others. So she realized the deafness allowed her a place to escape.

The Entity channeled by John of God said to her, “Why do you want to hear?” She said, “I want to hear all the beauty, the birds singing, the waterfalls, children's laughter.”

He said, “Go and sit and meditate. Come back tomorrow.”

The next day, “Why do you want to hear?”

“To hear all those beautiful things but also I'm willing to hear the pain.”

“Go back and meditate. Come back tomorrow.”

Finally she was able to say, not, “I'm willing to,” but, “I want to hear it all. I choose to hear it all.”

You have a choice. What happens to you is based on your intention and there has to be that shift, “I choose to hear it all.” Or in the case of some physical disability, I'm going to use an anonymous example, here, of a friend who lives far away who always had to be the caretaker in his family. His parents were both alcoholics. He had many younger siblings. He constantly had to take care of everybody and he couldn't do it. Then he developed, I think it was MS, and his body was no longer strong and he was incapable of taking care of others. And he could say to himself, “Well, it's not my fault. I can't help them anymore.”

So when we talked to him about this and I asked him, “What does the MS protect you from?”, at first he said, “I don't want the MS.”

“No, I know you don't want it, but what does it protect you from?”

And finally he began to see, “It protects me from that terrible pain of not being able to take care of my siblings, not being able to change my parents.” And finally he was able to say, “I choose to be whole. I'm willing to be with that pain. I'm able to be with that pain. I'm strong enough. The pain will not destroy me.” And at that point he began to heal, with the help of the Casa and Entities there.

So, choice is very important here. What does this protect me from? Am I willing to let go of this lifejacket and go beyond? Healing, then, is the growing from trapped in that relative reality box into movement into the ultimate box, beginning to see your true self and honor that self, and then increasingly choosing to get out of the little box of relative reality and move into the bigger box, to make the choice to know and claim your wholeness.

The Buddha again. “We are what we think. With our thoughts we make the world.” When you start to know the ultimate truth of your being, you start to create a different world. The physical body is the heaviest body and it responds the slowest. First there's a spiritual shift, then mental, then emotional, and then finally the shift begins to happen in the physical body.

For Barbara, these shifts have been quite amazing. I told you that she had no balance. At the Casa she was walking with walking sticks and the Entity said to her, “Now it's time to put the walking sticks down.” She said, “I'll fall over.” He said, “You only think you'll fall over. Know that you can stand up. Put the walking sticks down.”

So she walked, feeling very uncertain in her walking, but in a week or so she was feeling more stable. She came back to see the Entity and he said, “Now get a bicycle.” She can ride a bicycle now. And, of course I'm in the body now, not Barbara, but she can walk. She can move around. It's not perfect balance but it's good balance. She can close her eyes and stand. (dancing) She can dance, she can move around with greater ease.

There are no limits other than what you believe in. Your belief in the limits holds you to the limits. Beyond that you are unlimited.

The book, then, is basically a dharma book. By that, I mean, my first words to Barbara were, “You are suffering. Let's look at the nature of that suffering, the causes of it, and the path away from suffering.” Buddhism calls these the Four Noble Truths, that suffering exists, the causes, that there is freedom, and the path out of suffering. It's the core of what we teach here at Deep Spring Center, although we don't necessarily call it Buddhism and you don't have to be a Buddhist to practice it. Barbara has taught the same practice at Catholic centers to Catholic priests and nuns, in Jewish centers, in many different places. It's not a Buddhist teaching, it's simply a teaching of freedom.

So this is one core of the book. One core of the book, and I will say this where Barbara would not, is that for me the book expresses through her story the enormous courage and love that brought her through these 20 years or more-- 1972, almost 40 years. She didn't say, “Oh, I'm deaf, my life is over,” she said, “How can I grow through this and use it as a teaching for others, as a way to relieve suffering in the world?” She was willing to do the hard work so that she could demonstrate the possibilities to others. And I appreciate the beauty and clarity with which she articulates her path. She probably will be embarrassed when she reads the transcript, but I do want to say that.

Third, the book talks at length about John of God and the Casa and the questions that so many people came to me with, metaphysical questions like, how do they do that? Most of the surgery down there is what they call “invisible” surgery, entirely energetic, but now and then, and completely at somebody's free will choice, they do what they call visible surgery. It's all energetic so I don't call it real or unreal, or energetic or not, it's all energetic, it's all real.

But with the visible surgery, for example, an early operation that Barbara watched was a farmer with a very badly mangled arm; he couldn't move it. He was probably a poor Brazilian farmer who could no longer work because something happened to his shoulder. The Entity made a big incision near the shoulder. He does not use any sterile techniques; he does not use any anesthetic; but he is working with a knife that looks like a kitchen knife. But when he holds it, it has such a high vibration that any bacteria on it would be destroyed. He's not really cutting with the knife. The skin isn't solid, it's just molecules.

Picture a big cluster of balloons in a box. If I slash through them with a sharp sword, I break balloons, but if I very gently insert an instrument, I could separate them without breaking any balloons. He uses his high vibrational knife to separate the molecules of tissue, laying them aside. Then he put his hands in, no gloves, just his fingers, and worked within the opening, repaired what needed to be repaired in the arm and shoulder. Then he waved his hands over this almost bloodless incision, and the opening just came together; then he put in a few stitches. I think if the person could stay still for 24 hours, the stitches would not be necessary, but because the person is going to move, the stitches are a precaution so it doesn't pull apart again until it's fully reconnected. But the molecules simply come back together.

I have a lot of explanations like this in the book, where people have come to me through the years and said, “How do they do that?” The point I've tried to make with these explanations is simply that there is nothing miraculous or beyond your capacity, it's simply a deeper paradigm of healing and working with body tissue. It's the direction that your medical doctors are going using laser surgery and other such techniques.

I think it's the medical work that will be prevalent in the world in 50 years. For now, it seems miraculous. And it is, to the extent that so many people who have been declared as good as dead, people with Stage IV cancer, for example, suddenly find themselves free of tumors, that people with spinal cord injuries who have been in wheelchairs for years suddenly can get up and walk; but it's all scientifically logical when you understand how he's working energetically.

Then you can apply that to yourself. What limits am I putting on my healing and believing this can't be healed? So the doctors said to Barbara for years, “There's no way to heal the nerves.” But of course there is. And now she's beginning to hear, and they tell her, down there, “You will hear.” She hears tones now, musical tones, sounds.

There's a beautiful story in the book about her hearing the singing of Amazing Grace. It's all possible, everything is possible. Don't believe in limits. Don't get caught in those stories. That's my primary message and the primary message of the book.

The last aspect of the book is the Cosmic part of the title. Why “Cosmic Healing” and not “Personal Healing”? As you heal yourself, what you do filters out and touches others, and eventually the entire cosmos. Your earth is in transition, moving into a fourth density planet, either with a positive or negative polarity. As you bring love to your own physical and emotional distortions, and release the negative and fear-based stories, you bring your own being into deeper positivity and make that positive polarity available in the world. You are healing the self, the community the earth and the universe. You do have that power. I cherish in you your courage to do this work.   

I'm going to pause here and open the floor to your questions, both about the book and about other areas that you'd like to discuss. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak with you. At the close of tonight's session, Barbara has a box of these books for sale, and she's happy to sign them.

Q: My question doesn't have to do with the book, it's about what happened in Japan. It's hard to believe that they were hit with three tragedies. And maybe it's not a question, it's just that it bothers me what happened, a little.

Aaron: First, my heart weeps for these people who have lost their lives, their loved ones, their livelihood. It's a terrible tragedy. But people are living, as they do in some parts of California, along an earth fault. Barbara saw something on her computer showing the earthquakes that have happened along that fault range in the past 3 years, and just in the weeks since this bad earthquake. It's like watching popcorn coming up. You're watching them as they're programmed into the computer from some kind of seismographic equipment. Of course, they're not earthquakes of that enormity, but still, the earth is shaking there.

People have chosen to live there. People have chosen to build a nuclear reactor there. What makes people stay in those places? There is denial, greed, fear, and simply, “This is where my family has always lived. I'm not going to move.”

The earth, if I could say it in this way, the earth needed to sneeze. It sneezed. This is the way the earth is. If you are carrying a very full glass of something over white carpet, a full cup of tea or coffee or a glass of wine over a white carpet, and you have to sneeze and you do not set it down, it's probably going to spill. If you think you're going to sneeze, don't carry the full cup. When you know the earth is going to sneeze in that area, why do you continue to live there?

Barbara's oldest son M spent a year with a Fulbright fellowship in Chernobyl, the place where there was a nuclear reactor accident. He didn't choose to live in Kiev but to go up to the town closest to the exclusion zone where the contamination is, and live there with the people. He's a photo-documentary photographer and this was his Fulbright project, to talk to these people. It was now 25 years ago next month. So he was there a year and a half ago. He was trying to understand from people, why do they not flee? Why do they stay there when it is radioactive all around them?

He was not photographing the deformities, the birth defects, and so forth, there were plenty of people doing that. He was trying to get to the heart of the human issue: why do people stay? If you lived in a place like that, would you stay? People said, “This is my family's land for 10 generations. How can I go?”

So I think for the people in Japan, there was a choice, conscious or unconscious. What led people to stay there knowing the real danger of earthquakes, of tsunamis, and what led people to the denial to create nuclear reactors along such a fault zone?

I'm not blaming people, what I'm asking is, what can the rest of the world learn from this? I think at some level these people have offered themselves to demonstrate, much as we've talked about this with the Holocaust, that people were victims, certainly, but also at some pre-birth level there was a willingness to demonstrate so that it could be clear to the world: this must not happen again, how can this be changed?

I don't remember how many years ago in a severe San Francisco earthquake a friend there wrote to me, saying, “Why did this happen?” But the building codes were changed almost immediately. The people that died in that earthquake and lost their homes gave a gift so that thousands of others would not die, because immediately it became clear that changes had to be made, that it was not acceptable to be complacent about things that could lead to such terrible loss of life.

We cannot speak to the whole incident for every person involved, but when you think about this tragedy in Japan, I would ask you to express gratitude to each person who was there and lived through it or died, for their willingness to be teachers to the world, that people need to make more careful choice where they live, where they build such possibly destructive things as nuclear power plants. Instead of feeling anger at the earth for sneezing, simply note, “This is how the earth is. It's unstable. It will change. What choices are we making worldwide to create safety and well-being for all sentient beings?”

I want to take this one step further, briefly. Each time you use energy heedlessly, you are encouraging the building of nuclear power plants and other such, let's talk about drilling for oil and gas. Another upcoming major issue is called fracking. Have you heard of this? This is causing a great deal of destruction because people are greedy and once the oil well runs dry, they're putting a high pressure water, I think, or something down into the earth to fracture the earth, to release gases. The people who own the land are making millions of dollars but the ground water supply is being destroyed. There's enormous environmental destruction.

You may feel, “I can't do anything about what they're doing in these parts of the country,” but think about it next time you make a trip to the store and ask yourself, “Do I need to put that gasoline in my car now or could I combine my trips and go later in the week? Could I dial down my thermostat a little bit? How can I personally take more responsibility for the environment so as not to create the need that brings forth these things, like nuclear power plants and fracking? When these things do occur, how can I be part of the public that demands that they be done with deep environmental concern and as safely as possible?”

This is part of having one foot in ultimate reality and the rest of you in relative reality, staying connected to the ultimate and coming back to the relative and having your say about where your nuclear power plants are, where your power comes from, and so forth.

Others?

Q: I'm curious what it might feel like on December 21st, 2012, when the planets all line up. If you were sitting quietly in meditation, what might that feel like?

Aaron: I don't think that a perception is going to be possible from one day to the next, or one hour to the next. It's a very gradual transition. You're already experiencing the transition. You're very deep into the transition. Part of what happened in Japan is the result of that transition. Things must die away for new things to come into their place.

I do not predict the future, this is completely conjecture, but my guess is there are going to be a number of more tragedies involving nuclear power plants in the next year or two, until the public finally realizes something has got to be changed here.

There was an article in the paper recently that two planes were flying into an airport and the person in the control tower had fallen asleep. Human error. When you're working with things as powerful as jumbo jets, nuclear power plants, and so forth, there's the possibility of enormous destruction. How are you all going to learn to be more careful?

As you move further into this transition and more and more beings move from rational to causal consciousness, there's going to be an increasing global awareness, rather than localized awareness. People are going to think much more globally, not, “What's good for me and how do I get what I need?” but “What's good for the whole world?”

But it's not going to happen suddenly one night; this is the transition all of you are moving through. And of course there are many parts of the world that are still deeply mired in magical and mythical consciousness, not even up to the level of rational consciousness.

Just as you cannot reason with a 3 year old who is at that appropriate level of magical consciousness, so you can't really reason with those nations and people who are still there, nor can you force them, any more than you can force the 3 year old. You have to learn to speak in a language that they can hear.

This, then, is your work. When the ego says to the 3 year old, “No, you can't have the cookie,” and the 3 year old melts down and screams, it's just (sound effect). But when you hold the 3 year old and talk to them and explain how much you love them, and they can have the cookie after dinner, and would they like some grapes now, gradually you can speak in a way that they can hear and understand. And I think that as more of you move into causal consciousness and are thinking more globally rather than from the ego, as you learn how to be more present with your fear and anger and so forth, more of you are going to learn how to relate to those parts of the world in which lower levels of consciousness are still predominant. You learn to speak to the child in the self, and then to the child in another part of the world. This is not about your being superior, but being mature and responsible. This is the possibility that I see for the coming decade, that communication will open because enough of you can hold the space and vibration for that higher communication.

I think we have time for one more question.

Q: Could Aaron comment on the healthy relationship between the personal power of self-inquiry, compassion and forgiveness, and relationship to spirit guides, like the Entities at the Casa.

Aaron: I'm getting the words to the question but I don't understand the question, “the relationship.” Self-inquiry leads us into compassion; opening to our spirit guides leads us into compassion. These are all viable instruments that lead us to growth, to discovering, revealing the loving heart, and the infinite capacity for forgiveness and compassion. No one means is the means, but through meditation, through connection to your guides, through support of higher, loving beings, through support of your own human friends and your sangha, all of these paths lead the heart to open and open the possibilities of loving, profoundly intimate relationship. But I do not think that answers your question.

Q: How do you know when to rely on yourself internally and when to ask for help from spirit? When is it giving up on one's own power to ask spirit for help?

Aaron: Daughter, there is no difference. If I had a heavy box on the floor with a handle and your right hand went to pick it up, and it was too heavy, you reach down with your left hand. You wouldn't think, “I should hold it with my right hand only,” or, “I should turn to my left hand now.” They're two parts of a whole.

Clearly, I am not Barbara. Your guides are not you. And yet, on another level nothing is separate; everything is connected. I think the clearest answer I can give is that the choice must come from a place of love and non-contraction rather than fear and contraction. As soon as there's a voice that says, “I should be able to do this,” there's a certain limitation and contraction that closes out something. Equally, when there's a voice that says, “I can't do this, I need to turn to my guides to do it for me,” there's a certain contraction.

But when love simply says, “How do we best find forgiveness in this situation?” and you take it into meditation and you ask for help, the help that comes is not spirit help versus your help, it's simply love. One voice of love coming through whatever source it can come through. There's no need to differentiate.

I think if you read Barbara's and my dialogues in the book, you'll get a good feeling for this. There are many times when I said, “Now take this into meditation. Find it in yourself;” and other times when I spelled out a path. But I am not Barbara, we have 2 separate karmic streams. And yet in both cases we were looking for the deepest voice of love.

Let go of “Who is it coming from?” It's just the voice of love. You can tell when you are tuned into that voice of love because there's not a lot of contraction and grasping. The body energy is open, connected.

Okay, it's 9 o'clock... (The next gathering is May 25th.)

Thank you for inviting me into your hearing and your hearts, giving me this opportunity to share with you and speak to you. Thank you to the young people present for being here, and I hope that what I've said has made some sense to you.

I will release the body to Barbara, she'll come back in. Thank you and good night.

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