February 9, 2014 Sunday, Brazil

Barbara: Aaron just spoke for a few minutes. We sang the song, “Here I am, Lord.” Aaron spoke about light and darkness, our plan of service, and we did the guided meditation of retreating into a dark but safe cave and then coming out. I forgot to record it. So let's pick it up from here with Aaron, conscious channeling.

Aaron: The Buddha said, “Be a lamp unto yourself.” This doesn't mean you don't rely on other lamps, but each is lighting the darkness. Picture yourself with a group of friends climbing over a high mountain range, perhaps escaping an enemy. You started in moonlight, but as you climb, the moon has gone behind the clouds. The path is dark. Imagine the light of your heart shining illumination on the path, lighting the way, and how as each of the group allows their heart light to come forth, the way grows brighter. That heart light, heart lamp, is always there. Rumi speaks of such heart light often in his poems. If you close the window shades, the light cannot be seen.

I want you to clench your fists, tighten your body, contracting. Can you feel how that shuts you down? Now open your arms—ahhh. Feel your expansiveness. Feel this light that's always burning in the heart. Feel how it feels to let it shine forth. Contraction, less light. Non-contraction, more light. I don't mean here the spontaneous pattern of contraction and opening that comes with each breath, but unbalanced contraction.

Here at the Casa you are in a place where the portal of heaven is very open, the high energy, so powerful. You begin to allow these long-held, really ancient contractions of body and mind to dissolve, to feel the possibility of living in the light. It's almost like looking out a doorway on a very foggy morning, and as the sun rises and begins to burn away the mist, suddenly you can see further and further into the landscape. You are the mist; you are the sun. And your reason for this work is primarily, as the song has said, “Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord? I have heard you calling in the night. I will go, Lord, if you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart.” How can you hear the call when you're closed into your cave, contracted with old habitual patterns?

Here at the Casa so many of these old patterns at least briefly dissolve so that you begin to see new possibilities. Now most of you are within a week of returning home, out of this radiant portal connecting heaven and Earth. Thus your work is to not slip back into the cave when your plane lands, but to hold the portal open for yourself, and try to help others see the truth that there is light, to begin to bring themselves out of darkness.

That's enough of a talk. I'm going to simply open the floor here to questions about what I've just been speaking of, or about anything. I know some questions on different topics came up at the table the other day. I welcome anything.

Q: How do you hold the portal open at home if you have little support?

Aaron: First, find more support. It's there. Many of you live near each other, and with your modern technology, all of you are in each other's backyards. Meditate daily. In Cosmic Healing I explain the pole meditation. When you become that pole, literally reaching up into these heavenly realms and reaching down into the dark realms, you feel the simultaneity of them, and there lies the portal.

Work with everyday practices like gratitude, forgiveness, compassion. Whenever something comes to you that brings a contraction— you're driving and a driver cuts you off with very poor driving, talking away on the cellular phone— contracting. The first impulse may be to curse at them; they almost caused an accident. Stop. Right there with anger, that which is aware of anger is not angry. Right there with anger is the open heart. Compassion for this person who has no idea what he or she is doing, dashing along lane to lane cutting off people, chatting away, probably hurrying somewhere—such a limited life. Can there be compassion?

You settle down in your favorite chair, put your coffee on the table, and it's not stable and it spills. Contraction. That which is aware of contraction is not contracted. It takes effort. It takes a willingness to remember your intention to be of service to yourself and all beings so as not to get caught in the stories of contraction, to keep the heart open.

If you keep practicing in this way, you'll find that the portal remains much more open. Your daily meditation periods are an important means of re-entering that light, on a daily basis, so that you don't so easily forget. Your mind and physical body are of much heavier density than the spirit body. They serve as obscuration, so it does take effort to stay connected to this high spirit vibration. But you can do it.

Most of the retreat into darkness is simply old habit. So the willingness to observe the outplay of that habit, and just repeatedly, in a gentle and loving way, to say no to the manifestation of the habit, will lead you through.

Others?

Q: You just said something that I hadn't heard you say before, though you probably have. The simultaneity, like in the pole meditation, is the portal. Can you say more?

Aaron: Let me phrase this very precisely. The portal is filled with light, but if you create a duality between light and darkness and believe that you must disperse the darkness to have the light, that effort contracts you and cuts off the light. Knowing the simultaneity of light and darkness, of heaven and hell, literally, you will become more able to rest in that portal and increasingly can bring the light through into the places of darkness. Thus, the KNOWING of the simultaneity is the portal.  Does that clarify it?

Q: We were talking at dinner about a lot of the releasing of old energy that happens here.

Aaron: When you say old energy, old patterns?

Q: Yes. And also then about not just leaving the door wide open for any energy to fill that, but having intention about what replaces that. Can you speak about that?

Aaron: There is always negative and positive energy around and within you. Sometimes you may pray to God, “Protect me from the negativity,” but God does not protect you. No being out there protects you. Your love and your intentions protect you. The more deeply you are willing to look at the unwholesome tendencies toward self-centeredness, greed, and so forth, and to do the gentle work to release them—not force, just seeing and asking—I keep returning to the practice of clear comprehension. It's such a useful practice. “Is this contracting into self-centeredness suitable to my higher purpose? No.” Then you don't say, “Well then I won't contract,” because that's just contraction. But simply, “Ah, this is not suitable. Right here with this self-centeredness can I find that which truly aspires to be of service to others? That which is already open and radiant? Which truly aspires to be that lamp, to bring forth love?” It's right there.

So you shift your attention to that which is radiant and positive and beautiful. It doesn't mean that you take sticks and beat away the negative, you just let it lie there and it will dissolve. It's not receiving any energy.

When you do this as part of your ongoing daily spiritual practice, gradually you more strongly align yourself to positive entity support. That which is negative will come knocking on the door. (Barbara pauses to phrase Aaron's thought; Aaron: “It is much harder on Barbara's body and energy  to channel in this way than when I simply speak through. We can do it, but sometimes we need to pause and re-center.”) As you work in this way with your own negative tendencies, and all of you have them, with kindness, with firmness that's willing to say, “No, I'm not going to perpetuate that negative tendency. What do I bring in to replace it? Where is the compassion, the open heart, the forgiveness, the delight, the joy?” As you do that for yourself, you find your capacity increases a thousand-fold to do that with others, whether those others be human or spirit.

Then when you open the door and something negative wants to come in, you know how to deal with it, because it's no different than dealing with that negative in yourself. Gradually it becomes, I don't want to say such a firm habit, simply the only way to live your life. The old patterns just fall away.

I think of Gandhi's death. Of course many of you have seen the film Gandhi; I think that the scene here is fairly accurate to his death. The man drew the gun and Gandhi saw it. He saw that he was about to be shot, and at that moment of being shot, he didn't scream at the man. No anger came up, just “God.” Can you reach the point where your dying thought is simply love?

I was told a story some years ago about an elderly woman in her 80s, who had been a spiritual teacher much of her life. The neighborhood in which she lived had deteriorated. Her students urged her to move, but this was her home and she wanted to stay there. A man broke in. She was home alone. He wanted whatever money, jewelry, etc.; she told him to take everything, but he grabbed her around the neck and choked her. She felt her energy start to contract, the mammalian reflex to fight, and she said, “No. If I'm going to die, I will die with love.” And she just held loving energy and wishes toward this man and toward herself. She passed out. They found her not too long after the man had fled. She was taken to the hospital. They said the only thing that saved her from dying, from having a broken esophagus, or whatever the airway is, from having that destroyed, was her complete muscular relaxation. It was such a strong habitual pattern for her that at that moment when she was approaching death, she just relaxed and held her heart open. It is very powerful.

Other questions?

Q: I asked about the cells of the body...

Q: We don't remember a question...

Barbara: Aaron is saying it was a question about the simultaneity of mundane and supramundane consciousness. He did not get the exact question at the breakfast table, but that was the general topic. He says if it's no longer a question, then we don't need to ask it!

Q: I was wondering, what is citta? I know that mundane citta takes mundane objects and supramundane citta take supramundane objects, but what is citta?

Barbara: Citta is simply the Pali language word for consciousness. In the Abhidhamma it's translated to mean consciousness. Lokuttara citta is supramundane consciousness. Kuttara citta is mundane consciousness. Consciousness is one of the foundations of mindfulness, but the Five Foundations of Mindfulness does not immediately differentiate between mundane and supramundane citta. We get into that distinction when we start to observe dependent arising and how mundane objects do arise and  dissolve and supramundane objects do not arise or dissolve. When something that's an expression of the supramundane, like nada, arises, it's always been there and attention just turns to it. If there's a car backfire, you hear the car backfire as mundane sound, hearing consciousness. And the inner nada continues. In the same way, luminosity continues and is not destroyed by a flashing light.. Each sense has its own supramundane aspect, like luminosity to vision, nada to sound, scent, taste and touch.

The Unconditioned, how do we talk about it? It's simply the ground. This is what we've been working with, with the akashic field. In the Circle of the Sun they use the term “All Ground,” and getting to know the experience of that All Ground. We're calling “akashic field” this field and everything arising from it. Some of you have read “The Bright, Boundless Field” from Hongzhi who was a 12th century Zen master. His book is, Cultivating the Empty Field. So there are many articulations of this Field. One way of phrasing of it in very non-Buddhist terms is simply, what remains? When everything has dissolved, what remains? In the very deepest meditation, when the self seems to dissolve, all thoughts dissolve, there remains no sense of a body, and yet there's something that remains; this is also citta. It's lokuttara citta. For ease, Aaron and I have always substituted the term “awareness,” using “consciousness” to refer to mundane consciousness and “awareness” for supramundane consciousness. But citta is simply a word that means consciousness, in all its aspects.

The Bright, Boundless Field

The field of boundless emptiness is what exists from the very beginning. You must purify, cure, grind down or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits. Then you can reside in the clear circle of brightness.  Utter emptiness has no image, upright independence does not rely on anything. Just expand and illuminate the original truth unconcerned by external conditions. Accordingly we are told to realize that not a single thing exists.  In this field birth and death do not appear.  The deep source, transparent down to the bottom, can radiantly shine and can respond unencumbered to each speck of dust without becoming its partner.  The subtlety of seeing and hearing transcends mere colors and sounds. The whole affair functions without leaving traces, and mirrors without obscurations. Very naturally, mind and dharmas emerge and harmonize.  An ancient said that non-mind embodies and fulfills the way of non-mind. Embodying and fulfilling the way of non-mind, finally you can rest. Proceeding you are able to guide the assembly. With thoughts clear, sitting silently, wander into the center of the circle of wonder. This is how you must penetrate and study.

Q: The supramundane consciousness, is that what is aware of the Unconditioned?

Barbara: Yes. Lokuttara citta, or awareness, is able to perceive supramundane objects including the Unconditioned and the expressions of the Unconditioned. Kuttara citta, mundane citta, can only experience mundane objects. You phrased the question accurately. Every citta takes and object. Supramundane consciousness is able to perceive the Unconditioned itself, as object, and also the expressions of the Unconditioned.

The place where we often get off track is to think that there's linearity to it. Here I am in mundane consciousness and somehow I'm going to do all these right practices to get myself off into supramundane consciousness. This view misunderstands the simultaneity of it. In every moment, right there with mundane consciousness is supramundane consciousness. Gradually we can train ourselves to be in both at the same time. That allows us to function in the world, because if we move into a place of ego and body dissolution, it's pretty hard to then wash the dishes from that place, take out the trash, drive the car. But if we rest in that simultaneity, we can do those things.

One dharma teacher tells this story. He got in his car and was starting to drive home after a month of retreat. He was driving down the highway and he saw a police car pulling up behind him. “Uh-oh, what did I do?”

The officer pulled him over and said, “Do you know how fast you were going?” “Do you know how fast you were going?”

He thought it was under 60, but if he was pulling me over, “65?”

“No.”

“70?”

“No.”

“75?”

“You were going 20 mph!”

So we need to be able to connect all of this. The dzogchen trekchod teachings divide the practice into the three parts of view, meditation, and action. Seeing the view, awaking into awareness. Just catching glimpses of it. And then the much more involved meditation practice in which we stabilize awareness until we're ready to take it out into the world.

It's really the same thing within vipassana. We have profound experiences of body and ego dissolution, of access concentration, spaciousness, stillness, bliss, but we can't really take it out into the world. Gradually we start to find the simultaneity where, right there with the cars honking around us, there's heart-opening, and we rest in this vast spaciousness, with joy. We're still aware of the cars honking around us and the traffic jam and people's impatience, but we're not caught up in the story of it at all. We're both resting in awareness and engaged in mundane consciousness, able to move appropriately and drive the car, as is necessary. So that's the view/ meditation / action, as translated into Theravada practice.

Does that answer it? (yes) Others?

Aaron wants to say something here. He says that this small being (speaking of Shanti, the kitten) is very adept at resting simultaneously in awareness and mundane consciousness. Because she has not learned that there could or should be any difference, she just sees them as blending together. Part of her learning will be gradually to start to create a distinction so that she can finally break through the distinction and come back where she already is. But she'll come back there from a place of intention and the power of her intention to hold it together. Now, he says in some ways she's still in the Garden. She's realized self-consciousness and free will, but she has not really thought about how her actions affect others, and so forth.

Q: Could you contrast her/ Shanti's beingness with Aaron's kitten energy that he described, that is around you every now and then?

Aaron: It's much the same thing. These, what I think of as my kittens, these are small immature balls of light. They know themselves as balls of light, but they can also turn into balls of darkness if enraged by something. Q was speaking about how Shanti reacted to the Siamese cat—with rage! But there's no consciousness, for either my small balls of light or this small ball of light. It doesn't understand, “This is the arising of anger.” It just goes with its... call it instinct or just emotion. you push the buttons and this comes up. It doesn't understand that just because it comes up doesn't mean you have to get caught up in it.

So my balls of light are like this kitten, but not incarnate. My work with them is, when a contracted energy arises in them, to lovingly, not accusingly but lovingly, point it out, and remind them of the presence of their light, and to bring forth their light again. In this way, they are moving through what is necessary to move into a third density experience. Sometimes they may actually incarnate as animals, but at other times they are simply moving through their learning on my plane as energy.

And they are dear. They follow me around; they sit on my lap and purr. I enjoy them very much.

Barbara: Aaron, you talk about kittens, your cats. You never talk about your dogs. Do you have dogs?

Aaron: They are a very different life form. A dog, I don't want to offend preferences here, but a dog who is a mature soul of a dog is very often much more advanced in its self-awareness, self-consciousness, and truly willing to give its life for ones it loves. It has moved to a place where it can make that kind of heart-centered connection that helps it transcend personal ego, helps it transcend all the mammalian characteristics of putting itself first.

The cat is evolving in a different way. Keep in mind that sometimes a being will incarnate as a dog and then the next incarnation as a cat, and back and forth. They're learning different skills. There are what I would see as dog energies all around me and they are very loving, but they are usually more dogs in transition, passing through here and preparing for a new incarnation, rather than ones that attach and stay with me for a length of time.

Barbara: Thank you, Aaron. How about horses, cattle, pigs?

Aaron: Each is at a different level of consciousness. Some can be very evolved. Dolphins, for example. Horses can be very evolved. Chickens and pigs are usually less evolved. They're learning to experience survival. One has to come into a sense of personal consciousness to become self-aware. Note my word, “usually.”

The flower, one flower on the vine, is not self-aware. There's an overriding deva of that flower that has awareness, but the flower doesn't. The fish in a school are not really self-aware. They experience themselves as part of the school. The baby chicks just hatched experience themselves also as part of this whole chick-dom, or the baby birds in a nest. But the baby bird who opens its mouth and pushes away its nest-mate is moving into a self-centered consciousness, which is a necessary part of its evolution. First to open to that and then to see the damage that can be done holding only to that identification. Then to work one's way through, through means of higher evolved animals like the dogs and cats. And gradually into the human where one can see the remnants of those lower forms of self-centeredness and be ready finally to release them. That does not mean they'll never come, but one ceases to enact them strongly. I pause.

Barbara: That's interesting, Aaron. Thank you.

Q: What about (inaudible—elephants?)?

Aaron: Each animal is learning in its own way. Each has certain reason for coming into that particular life form, certain learning it can make through that life form. Elephants form strong attachments in their families, care for their young for a long time, so they're learning a certain kind of love that a mother bird and baby bird do not establish between them.

Barbara: He's saying, what does that soul need to learn? What life form is best suited to that learning? And then it will come into that life form. Second density, eventually third density.

Q: I'd say I'm new at the idea of someone seeing my energy. Aaron chose a crystal for me, saying it was, I'm not sure of the word, good for my energy. I'm not real sure what that means, “for my energy.”

Aaron: Each of you has a distinct energy field, a much more distinct sign of you than your fingerprint. Fingerprints can change. The energy field slowly evolves, but you have a set energy field. That energy field has strengths and weak points. When I look at a crystal, I am looking for a crystal that's most harmonious with your energy field a sit is today and in the direction I see it growing..

If you walked into a flower shop, there might be many beautiful flowers, but you'd be drawn to one specific species of flowers, yes? Why? A year later you might be drawn to a different flower. It's not just its physical beauty, but something energetically is calling you to that plant. It resonates with you.

So when I look for a crystal for you, I look for something that is very harmonious with your energy field, and also has qualities in it that will help support the weaker places in your energy field and help to bring them into more strength.

Each crystal is an individual. Each crystal is really a sentient being, expressing energy and thought, expressing love. Each has different patterns within it, a different history. So I look for that within the crystal that resonates best with your energy field. And often there are many suitable crystals. So if you want one that's 20Reais or 100R or 200R, we can look in the appropriate price range. We don't have to say, “Oh, here; just this one.” But “That's too much money, let's try this one.”

Q: If possible, these next few days, when people leave, I would like to get a piece of kyanite because the crystal lady tells us it was good for auric field, the third eye...

Barbara: Kyanite? What does it look like?

Q: Blue with stripes, but it's not <>. Rough, layers...

Barbara: Have you seen it in any stores? (Q: Yes.) If there's a store that has many pieces of it, I'd be happy to go in there with you and see if Aaron can help you choose one. I don't know what it looks like. I'd be happy to help you with it.

Q: Thank you.

Q: I'm not sure what my question is. I've been experiencing different things in my body. And the entities told me that I need help with kundalini. I know nothing about this. And I know I've been dealing with it for years.

Barbara: Are you experiencing kundalini opening, or you are not experiencing that energy?

Q: I'm experiencing it moving, and sometimes it feels like it's stuck in my head.

Barbara: it would be a useful practice to work with each chakra. You can buy seven crystals; they can be small, 5 Reais, 10R size crystals, but one that's suitable for each chakra. Simply lie down on your bed, placing one at each chakra. Then bring your attention to each point in turn; put your hands at each chakra. Feel the energy come up the spleen and the solar plexus and see where it feels blocked. Simply inviting, picturing the energy moving up. Then as it comes up the solar plexus to the heart, try to feel the linkages. What's happening is the chakra is spinning, and if it spins well, it sends energy up, and the next spinning chakra is sending energy down, so they link. But if one chalkra is not spinning the energy flow goes around it.

In meditation you can begin to feel any places of blockage and then ask the entities for help to release that blockage. Do some reading (if you give me your email address, I can send you something) about the function of each chakra. Begin to reflect on what might be holding this chakra closed. What would it mean to open this chakra? What does it mean to open the heart, to open the throat, to open the belly? What does it mean to open the body in this way? To open the third eye?

So you begin to see where it's not fully open. You can also use a chakra meditation that I think is in Cosmic Healing. Just bringing in light, bringing it into each chakra, then letting it explode out as a rainbow.

Sometimes if there's a chakra that's closed you can spend months with it, begin to get glimpses of past lives, or just see issues of this life, what's holding it closed. And begin very gently to work with the intention to open it.

As the chakras open and the energy field opens, then the kundalini energy will naturally move. We don't start by saying, “I want to open the kundalini field.” Simply, which chakras are at all blocked? And doing the inner work, not to fix them but to invite them to open. Okay?

Q: Thank you.

Q: Can you talk about the fine line between inviting change and fixing?

Barbara: The fine line between inviting change and fixing is simply seen in contraction. As soon as I try to fix, there's contraction. Inviting is so openhearted and filled with light. And there may be fear—what's going to happen if I really invite this change? But the fear is not a held contraction, if we use our practice and note fear, “That which is aware of fear is not afraid.” Inviting ourselves back into that place of openhearted fearlessness because of the intention for healing ourselves, healing the world, for service. Holding the space, and then allowing ourselves to see the area of distortion. Acknowledging that there's also a place where that distortion isn't, and I choose that. Inviting, letting it emerge. Does that make sense?

Q: It seems that the key is recognizing the place where the contraction is not.

Barbara: That's why the vipassana practice is so vital. I'm sure there are other practices in other traditions. But vipassana really shows us both the presence of the contraction and the non-contraction, and how there may be attachment to the contraction, habitual attachment to it. What does this protect me from? If I move into the place that's free of contraction, what am I afraid will happen? We've all spent so many lifetimes armoring ourselves and closing ourselves, and bringing ourselves out of the light. And that's why it's so powerful here with this strong energy coming through. Here at the Casa it's very hard to close ourselves off into that dark place.

I would love to do a month-long silent vipassana retreat here in Abadiania. It would be very, very powerful! It's not going to happen, but it would be wonderful.

Does that answer it? We can take one more question.

Q: Along those lines, talking about contraction and non-contraction and the story about the woman who relaxed when faced with death. So when the entities are doing the surgeries, do they bring such a high vibration of light that our bodies naturally don't have contraction when they're raised to that place?

Barbara: Aaron says, Exactly. He says, and this is your natural state. This is why we're asked to stay in our rooms for 24 hours, because the energy field is so high and open. Can you imagine what it would be like to live in that state? On the earth plane we really don't live there. But we do learn to live in a more uncontracted spaciousness. Aaron says when you make a transition from this plane, wherever you are 10 minutes before your transition is where you're going to be 10 minutes after. Your state of consciousness doesn't change dramatically. What is normal for you? Here “normal” has a higher vibration.

When you've learned to hold your heart open and not close down into a contracted place, then as you make the transition, it's like coming into this high energy. The next realm is like Abadiania, very high energy. Some people look at it and burrow underground because it's overwhelming and others say, “Ahhhh! Home at last!”

Q: When I had the visible surgery, I had a moment of spaciousness where I thought, “I think this might be what it's like to pass from the body, like to die.” It was just calm and spaciousness and with no attachment or contractions.

Barbara: Consciousness is completely outside of the traditional ego self, temporarily, because of the high energy. But that high energy is always there. We generally pull ourselves back from it. And for most of us, we can't really live in it 24/7. We do live in a world where there are bumps and bruises, things that cause us pain and things that cause us to contract. Aaron says the vital thing we're learning is, just because we contract, not to get caught in the story of the small self, but to simply notice this mammalian reflex to contract and open back up into the spaciousness, so that increasingly we're living from that place.

Aaron: On the other hand, because of the very strong energy brought in with the visible surgery, there is no longer really a sense of free will. And part of your work on this human plane is the exercise of free will. So you don't really want to live in that complete state of surrender or you lose the opportunity to practice what you came into the incarnation to practice.

Barbara: He says it's very useful to see the contrast, and to note when you're pulling more into a tight ego place, “I want it my way,” versus just watching: “I want it my way,”—oh, is that so? Opening the heart to the self that wants it that way. But that's different than the, “Ahhh, there's no more ‘my way'.” Because you can't practice with it.

Okay. It's 8:30. Let us end here.

(announcements, singing, session ends)

10