On The Balance of Wisdom and Compassion

This talk was given by the discarnate spirit, Aaron, and channeled by Barbara Brodsky. The talk was originally presented in September 1993 at our Wednesday Open House.

Aaron: I am Aaron. My greetings and love to you all. What I would like to do here tonight is to define our work together, as I understand it, offering many leads of directions that we might take on these Wednesday nights. Those of you who know me, know that I am willing to talk about metaphysics, but that I do not consider metaphysics of primary importance in our work together. Of far greater import to me is the fact that you are here in incarnation for a reason. This earth is your schoolroom and you are here to learn.

What is that learning about? How can we help it on its way? There is not a human on this earth who does not suffer fear, pain and bewilderment at times. Pain disorients some of you more than others, but there is not any incarnated human who has not experienced some degree of fragmentation, and who is not seeking healing and wholeness.

I have spoken about the four bodies, physical, emotional, mental and spirit bodies. I'm not going to go into details about this now; it's readily available in transcript. (See "The Universe According to Aaron.") Your work as a human is not to get rid of the emotional and mental bodies-not to stop thought, not to stop emotions-but to cease your reactivity to these, so that you may function more fully from the spirit body, which is non-separate, which understands its inter-being with all that is. It is the reactivity to the emotions and thoughts that leads you into a deluded sense of self and separation.

We are working in two directions, the horizontal and vertical, as I will explain. On the horizontal plane we are dealing with each human, its suffering, neurotic tendencies, fears, dreams and hopes. We regard each being trying to find the healing for which it took birth. And yet if care is not given one can create a more solid sense of self and separation as one does that work. There is so much "somebodyness" in being the one who is mindful, who is suffering, who is healing.

So the ideal path combines the horizontal work of dissolving the fragmentation and the vertical work of moving into true understanding of emptiness of self. Most of you have related to the world from a center of "me." That is the root of so much of your suffering. You know that. You have each experienced the difference when you come out of that "me" and move with a truly compassionate heart that experiences its connections with the earth itself and all of the beings that reside on the earth. How do we find that true self within us? Not the small ego self, but the Buddha or Christ consciousness, Pure Awareness, the pure mind. Tibetans call it Rigpa. Call it what you will, that space where all is connected. It is a space all beings experience at times, but you are not taught to recognize the experience.

Once you identify that space, stabilize your understanding and become more and more able to live from within it, the reality of your ultimate, true being consistently penetrates the illusion of "me", so that when you see yourself grasping and afraid you know that is relative reality. Then the experience of true self comes in and say's "there's nobody here to be afraid, there is nothing to be afraid of. It's just old mind doing its thing." Then you begin to know your fear as illusion.

I want to give you an example of the power of old mind. First I ask you to visualize an image with me. Picture a brand new, totally flat plane of earth that has never been marked in any way. One raindrop falls. It must go somewhere. It runs downhill, from high ground to low ground, etching just the very finest scratch on the surface of that new earth. A second raindrop falls and hits in the same place. It also runs down, deepening the scratch. Fifty, one hundred, one million raindrops. First you have a stream, and then eventually the Grand Canyon. That canyon was carved not by an atomic blast, but by a series of raindrops, each one making just the slightest deepening of the present indentation.

This is how karma works. There is a reaction to some catalyst and it creates a scratch. If there is not attention to the forming of that scratch it becomes a tendency to react that way. And then a habit. Then the habit hardens into character and will grow into our neurotic patterns, the ways we relate over and over to one another.

Let us look at unworthiness in this way. I don't think there is anyone in this room who at one time or another has not felt unworthy. We don't need to look for original cause; indeed, we can not find original cause. It is not useful to search for it. We simply accept that somewhere along the way, in this and certainly in prior lifetimes, there was a reaction (if you're not comfortable with the idea of prior lifetimes, that's fine: just in this lifetime). Somebody frowned at you, or there was a sense of feeling excluded from a group. Whatever it may have been, the mind leaped to the idea: "I am unworthy. I am inadequate to this situation in some way." Probably there was fear and strong emotion. That sense of inadequacy was part of the protective device shielding from the intensity of the emotion. Attention was not paid to that first scratch. It became like a record with a scratch, where the needle catches in the groove, each time deepening it and eventually creating the Grand Canyon.

Now you come into a situation of feeling excluded in a group and your reaction is that old mind experience of "I am unworthy". On the horizontal level we look, through our meditation, at the experience of feeling unworthy because in order to work with it you must know what you are feeling. You begin to feel the ownership of that "unworthiness." "My unworthiness is me;" the perspective of the ego-self.

Then you might ask yourself, in the vertical direction: what is really happening in this moment? Who is unworthy? Is unworthiness what's happening? No. Those people are just talking together; they don't know me. Or, perhaps they are, indeed, excluding me. That doesn't mean I'm unworthy. The unworthiness is old mind conditioning. It never was real. Nor is worthiness real. There is no worthiness or unworthiness. There is only being; in this moment, there is just being.

So when we look with bare perception, freeing ourselves from mind's old patterns, we see that there is no worthiness or unworthiness in this moment. And there truly is nobody, no self, to feel worthy or unworthy. There is just this mind stream that has gotten caught in the pattern of feeling unworthy. It's not me; it's just a pattern repeated over and over. So you penetrate that illusion of worthiness/unworthiness, of self.

At that moment you find yourself able to truly rest in the pure mind awareness of connection, totally devoid of fear. Pure mind awareness may only last an instant, but it cuts through all the illusion of worthy/unworthy, good or bad, acceptance or rejection. It cuts through the illusion of "me". Both the horizontal work and the vertical work are necessary. One finds healing through what I am calling horizontal work, through the many practices that we introduce here. Through the vertical work, one cuts through this fog of illusion and sees that there was never anybody that needed to heal in the first place.

What we have here, essentially, is relative and ultimate reality. You must live in both. You stand astride a threshold; one foot in relative reality, one foot in ultimate reality. When you begin it is as if there is an infinite wall spread out from that door frame. You think you see relative reality when you look this way and ultimate reality when you look the other way. Light and darkness, white and black, but there is a wall that separates it. The wall is illusion It is built of the illusion of your fear. Much of our work here is to come to know that wall as illusion, to come to know that you can stand with a foot on each side of this doorway, and that there is no wall at all. The darkness and the daylight meet at dawn and dusk.

In terms of your human life, you have heard me say many times that you must always do everything in your power to attend to suffering. That is the relative reality. The ultimate reality is to approach that suffering without attachment, to know that you can not fix another, or the world, that you don't understand what is really happening. But you still must work with as much wisdom, skill and love as you can in the world. You do not disassociate yourself from the world. As you work, you stabilize a sense of equanimity and letting go, knowing that ultimately it will work itself out as it needs to.

Attending to one's own suffering, there is the relative side that chooses to take care of itself, to protect itself. And the ultimate understanding that there is never anything separate from the self, so there is nothing from which you need to defend yourself.

I see our work then as finding that balance between relative and ultimate-the horizontal plane of healing and the vertical plane of knowing there was never anybody that needed to heal. With wisdom and pure awareness, that whole sense of self dissolves. When you find that Christ or Buddha consciousness, that higher self, within you, you know it was never in need of healing to begin with. It has always been perfect, always been whole. The whole notion of fragmentation was an illusion, but it is the illusion of the relative reality, and the suffering within that illusion must be attended to. The human manifestation needs healing.

Copyright © 2000 by Barbara Brodsky