Christmas Memories from Aaron

December 20, 2000

Barbara: We're gathered here tonight for Aaron's Christmas stories. Aaron has asked me to begin tonight by reading aloud from the first Christmas stories, December 5, 1989. It's one and one quarter pages.

Aaron: I would like to talk to you about that Teacher you call Jesus. You are in the midst of your annual celebration of his birth. Do you understand what that birth really means, who he was and what was truly given? I see much confusion between the true gift and church doctrine that has grown up around it. I do not mean to offend anyone here. Your private and group myths are important to you and must be deeply respected. Yet the beauty of this gift is such that it needs no other myths to support it.

I have told you that you are all sparks of God, evolving slowly through your many lifetimes to perfect light and to mature compatibility with your Creator. Since the dawn of time a few beings have so evolved as to become pure and radiant light, filling the universe with their luminescence. Such beings truly sit at the side of God, and the power of their light and love are inextinguishable.

Such a being is the spirit of the man you call Jesus. For God, this spirit was the proof of His divine plan, the perfect example of what all mankind could become. As such he was deeply beloved, the son of God as you are all sons and daughters of God, and yet especially cherished because he was among the first to reach this divine perfection.

Your Earth in those days was full of war, of misunderstanding, of hatred, of chaos. There were those who believed that God taught that one being should avenge himself on another, and one nation avenge itself on another. Such bloodshed was enacted in the name of God. There were those who taught that God's laws were a matter of convenience, that murder was permitted in His name. These were not people meaning to do evil, but beings filled with misunderstandings. Many of you were there. Ask your higher self's memories if this is not how it was.

Seeing the misunderstandings that filled the world, God grieved for His children. So he asked His Son, who stood by his side, to give a great gift to mankind, to take it unto himself to return to that human plane to teach lessons of love, compassion and forgiveness. The gift was no less God's, for He was giving this beloved Son unto the pain and chaos of the physical plane.

The spirit of the man you know as Jesus agreed to God's request, with gladness that he might serve Him. He fully understood what he agreed to, that in returning to this physical plane, in agreeing to incarnate in human form, he was taking on all the pains of human birth. He agreed to the forgetting of his true self. Although this forgetting did not reach the level it reaches with most humans, there were to be times of deep doubt and despair. He agreed to the physical pains of the human body, of the frailty of the human form. Do you think those nails that penetrated his flesh at his crucifixion were painless? Out of love, and to give love, he gladly accepted whatever agony he might face.

He came to teach God's true messages of love and peace to a weary, chaotic, pain-filled world. This is the true gift of his birth and his life. He had free will, as have all beings. He could have said no, and God would not have loved him any less. Do you understand what it means to freely and willingly leave that perfect Light and Love? Can you understand how much this Holy Spirit loved mankind and God, to accept this mission of teaching. Only perfect love could have made this choice, and only perfect love would have been able to teach such love to others. Had he said no, the world would have continued on in darkness until another being was so evolved as to be able to perform this task.

The other gift of this season's is God's. Which of you could send a beloved child to a place torn by war and hatred, to certain agony, to teach others?

As you think about his incarnation this season, to become the teacher known as Jesus, as you think about the teachings of love and peace and forgiveness, think also about the gift that was given-the gift of love. Let all your gifts that commemorate this birth be gifts of love and forgiveness, each to another, so that he may see that his lessons are truly being learned. This is the greatest gift you can give him, the way you can best honor his gift-to love one another.

I love you all and wish you a happy Christmas filled with peace and the beauty of God's and Christ's love.

Aaron: Good evening and my love to you all. I am Aaron. As always, it is a joy and blessing to gather with you and share these memories of the one you know as Jesus. I thank you for bringing yourselves from your busy lives, these days before the holidays, and for braving your icy roads to come and sit with me tonight.

I asked Barbara to read that story because of the emphasis that he had to put aside the veil of forgetting. He had to be truly human, to feel physical sensations as a human, and to feel emotions as a human. Yes, he was awake and he could see through the veil, and yet at the same time he was caught into it, not a slave to his emotions, not a slave to fear, but nevertheless, fear, the desire to be loved, all of these human experiences were present in him.

If they had not been present in him, no one would have followed him. If they had not been present in him, his teaching would have been hollow and not spoken to the human condition.

I'd like to look with you tonight at what it means to have an ego, to think of the self as a self in any way, and how he dealt with this. There are stories told about the various temptations that he faced, such as of that personification of evil coming to him and saying, “Bow down before me and I will make you all-powerful." But he did not seek power. He knew what he had come for. He knew what he came to teach. Yet certainly to have power, to be loved, not to suffer an agonizing death, all of these would have appealed to the human in him.

I have told you numerous times that his strong preference was not to perform obvious miracles. He had the power to heal. Why did he exhibit that power at times, and at other times not exhibit it? When he was starving in the wilderness, why did he not turn rocks into bread? When he hung in agony on the cross, why did he not save himself?

When he was a child, it is told, sometimes he would heal small creatures such as a wounded bird, rabbit or other small creature, or even find a dead one and bring it back to life. I'm not talking about an adolescent Jesus, I'm talking about a baby. There was no self in doing this. His heart opened in compassion to this injured or dead creature. There was no thought of, “With my power I will bring it back to life." He really didn't differentiate his power and divine power in his baby heart. He didn't know that everybody didn't have such power. It was just the movement of compassion in him.

There was no problem for that baby. It was just divine will working through him. But then when he became a man, he saw that he did have power that others did not have, and the ego went to that, of course. Here I speak from conjecture. I never spoke to the young man Jesus directly of such things. But he did speak of this once with me and others when he was more mature.

When he was asked why sometimes he would heal so he was clearly the instrument through which healing came, and other times he healed indirectly so that it was not obvious that it came from him, he said simply, “If the ego does the healing, everything is tarnished. I can only allow that healing when there is no-“ I'm translating his words, of course, from the language in which he spoke, I'm trying to give you as accurate a translation as possible, “-I can only allow that healing when there is no self." These words indicated to me that he still faced the issue of “self," did not struggle with it, but needed to acknowledge that “self" arose.

There was another issue. He was very sensitive to when an act was appropriate in order to bring people to believe not only in his divine capacity but in their own capacity, and when such working of miracles would separate him from others.

So when he was young, like any human he was aware of a sense of self and a need to resolve that sense of self and know himself as not separate from God. He had to recognize the existence of the ego, of the desire to be safe and happy, of the desire to be loved, even worshipped, and to come to know that he did not have to act on those desires, that he could trust himself.

There is a story told in the Gospel of St. John of how, at a wedding feast, he turned water into wine. This was among the first miracles that people saw. He really didn't want to do this. He said to his mother, “My time is not yet come." He didn't want to bring that attention to himself, in part because he was uncertain about his own readiness to be thus worshipped and not have it go to his head. What does it mean if you have that capacity, that expressed power?

But he also saw that it was time to take responsibility for his divinity. He could not teach others of their own true nature and divinity unless he were willing to acknowledge his own, and to acknowledge his own demanded nothing less than a full acknowledgment of his power and presentation of that power into the world.

He once said that the difficulty for him at that time was the sense of shame because he liked the attention that he got. And yet he knew that attention, that worship as it were, was not for the human self but for the divine. And so as part of his own spiritual practice he had to be willing to let go of shame, to surrender shame. The more he surrendered, the clearer he became and the more he became able to do whatever was required of him from a place of emptiness of self.

Most often when there was a situation in which he might heal a being, he would do it in such a way that the healing seemed natural and could not be assigned to him and his own power. I think he wanted to make others also aware of their powers, and that while he had the capability to heal another, he could not heal another against their will. It was their acceptance of that healing that created the healing, not his own work.

This awareness of the ego self and the need to work sensitively with the ego self stayed with him his entire life. At the time of his death he knew that he had to make a choice. He knew that he could have remained alive, indeed could have chosen to be proclaimed King of the Jews, could have had power, including power to do good. Certainly that must have appealed in some ways to the human. The decision he made could not have been made by the very young man Jesus but only by the one who had spent these years learning about the fearful side of his nature. He had become so clear that he could see fear, preference, desire and more arise in himself, and stay focused in on his own primary intention and on God's will, which were the same.

Many of you come to me and ask me, “How can I know what the plan for my life is?" But my dear ones, the plan is always clear. What gets in the way of following that plan is that the shouting of the ego is so loud and it distracts you, and you have not learned to listen to the spirit.

He truly learned to listen and rest in that place of center, and so he was able to do what he came to do. Freedom came not because he was free of human physical sensation and emotion but because he had so deeply mastered it, mastered it not by suppression of it but mastered it through love, through the open acceptance of the human. By this acceptance he was no longer enslaved by these human characteristics but truly was able to express his divinity.

This is the potential for all of you. I think it's very useful to reflect on this at any time but especially in this season, that all of you have this same divine potential. All of you can touch on this heart and spirit within you. Perhaps you cannot enact it in the world so clearly as he did, but you can enact it in the world. And you can make peace with your humanness and not be ashamed of it but truly embrace it, because it is through that humanness that the divine is expressed. Who would have followed this man if he had just been a light with no human characteristics? You can worship a light but you cannot love a light.

How did he invite our Divine potential by example? Here is a story. Walking through the hills, a boy came to greet him on the path carrying a lamb whose leg appeared broken. The boy was crying because he was afraid he would lose this lamb, and because of its obvious pain. Jesus took the lamb into his arms. There were some shepherds about and also a group of people walking with him. He said to the boy, “Come walk with us. We'll see what can be done."

Certainly he could have healed that lamb instantly, straightened the leg and handed it back to the boy, and a great word would have gone up, gone from this small group out to all, about how he had healed this broken leg. Instead, he held the lamb in his arms and we walked. Dusk came. He asked the boy, “Stay with us. Have supper and sleep here with us. We'll see how the lamb is in the morning."

The lamb was fed. Its mother was there and it drank from its mother's milk. It was laid on the ground. We all went to sleep. In the morning the lamb was found standing and sucking from its mother's teat, standing squarely on its four legs. The boy was filled with wonder, “Look what you did!" And Jesus said, “No. It is not I who have done this but the wonder of life has restored itself in this lamb."

What he was saying was simply, “I am a channel through whom the divine has worked, bringing this lamb to its own healing." He neither took credit nor denied credit. He didn't say, “Oh, I didn't do it." He didn't say, “Oh, it wasn't really broken." He just said, “The wonder of life has restored itself in this creature and he has found his healing."

Here I see several factors which have matured sequentially. First, when he was young, there was a wariness of his own ego and concern that if he participated in any such active healing with any desire for acclaim as a part of it, it would disfigure that act of healing and create more darkness instead of light. Second, once he had grown past any fear of his own ego desire for acclaim, the concern was simply to keep himself as clear as possible, to make it clear that we are all instruments for healing when we all have that.

Only after this clarity was opened came the third stage, to do miracles in others' sight. In the situations where he did heal, seemingly miraculously, where he touched lepers and cleansed them, healed the blind and those who could not walk, he finally did this in front of people who looked in awe. He did not wish the awe for himself, but to command attention so he could teach. And he also healed, of course, out of his immense compassion.

There was a blind child who was brought to him. The child had lost his vision in an accident, had literally fallen into a fire as a baby. His face showed signs of the burns and his eyes were blinded. The boy was brought to him, put in his arms, a lad of 6 or 7 years. Jesus simply asked him, “Do you wish to see again?" “Yes." “Do you believe I can heal you?" “Yes."

He held him in his arms so tenderly, put his hands over the boy's eyes and face, and in a few moments when he took his hands away, the terrible scars were healed and the boy could see.

Those who had accompanied the boy, some of them were outlaws, brigands, who made their livelihood upon others' pain. They were very frightened when the boy was returned to them healed. They looked at this man Jesus and you could see the unwritten question on their face, “What of us? Will we also be healed of our fear, our hatred, our inclinations toward self-service and ways that harm others? What if we do not ask this healing? What if we wish to hold on to our fears? And what if we do ask this healing? “ There was no verbal articulation of either question. But there was kindness and acceptance from him. Those who had brought the child were traders who were used to trading in their own favor. They asked Jesus, “What do we owe you for this?" “Oh, nothing, nothing." His “nothing" upset them because it put them in his debt. And then he invited them to sit by the fire and talk, as it was dusk. He treated them courteously, respectfully.

What he was doing was showing them his own divinity and power, not that he could lord this power over them but trying to awaken them to this aspect of themselves. They sat by the fire and talked. He asked them questions and heard their responses. He led them to look at the choices which created harm for themselves and others, but he did this so gently that it was as if the questions had arisen in themselves, as indeed they had. The boy was a doorway through which he found access to their hearts.

So in this third phase when he no longer feared his own ego he could choose appropriately when it was skillful to show his power and when it was skillful not to show it. Certainly he would have healed the boy in any case, but in a different situation he might have simply suggested the use of certain herbs. Slowly the boy would have regained his vision and they would have just said, “Oh, he's very wise. He knew just what to use for healing," rather than experiencing it as a miracle. But that would not have invited them to hear him, nor empowered them. They would have thought, “He is wise. He knew which herbs to use." What he did here was to startle them, to make them aware through his own infinite power and divinity of their own divinity, to wake them up to that seed in themselves, even if the seed was not brought to fruition in this lifetime, he woke them to it.

What I find especially meaningful here, what I have found meaningful in my own various lives, is the awareness that one must acknowledge the ego, get to know the ego, really open one's heart to this aspect of oneself before one can bypass the ego. We must accept ego before we can transcend ego. Eventually it doesn't matter. We have skin that bleeds when it's punctured. We have an ego aspect of the self. Eventually it doesn't matter. But only once he had mastered the ego in this way and fully acknowledged it without fear was he able to transcend it to the point that he could work with complete skill with others, making the appropriate choice in each situation.

Most humans have not thus mastered the ego and yet you can still choose wisely and appropriately. To know desire, the desire for power, the desire to be loved, the desire to be safe, this is a major step toward not enacting those desires in ways that are harmful to oneself and others. Just the naming of these desires begins to create a transparency to them. That which observes desire is not desire but clarity, and clarity is not a slave to desire.

When the ego is mastered, we can return to innocence. One more small story. He knew that I was a shepherd. In many places where he went there were many flocks of sheep. Walking a path one day, a different boy came to us, recognized this master and said, “My sheep, which is giving birth, is in difficulty," and indeed we could hear her crying. We went to her. The boy who was in charge of this flock was young and no adults were near. I knew what to do, and reached into the birth canal to see if the feet were caught in an awkward way. And what I felt as I reached in was a lifeless mass. This baby was dead within the mother. I removed my hand and said to him, “The lamb is dead," at which the boy began to weep.

“I'm not so sure," Jesus said. He held his hands over the mother's abdomen, just sat there focused for a few minutes. And then the mother began to move again, pushing in labor and delivered a live lamb. I looked at him and asked, “But I was so sure it was dead." He just smiled at me and said, “He was not yet alive, but now he is. Let's leave it at that."

I didn't understand this then. I already loved him and I already had seen his power and recognized that it was not his power but simply divine power that moved through him with his will and permission. I was not a learned man; I just let it go. But as I reflect back on that moment, that small smile, I see the baby Jesus who did not know that other beings didn't have the same power, bringing some baby animal back to life out of his deep compassion. It was almost as if his smile said, “There's no one here but us; I'll do this for this boy, this lamb and its mother." There really seemed not to be thought to it.

He did not have to weigh what effects that compassion might have because there was no one else there. The boy did not know the lamb was dead so he wasn't surprised that it was now alive. But in this act there was also the quality of pure compassion, pure love.

We come back to his death. Can you imagine what it would mean to die in an agonizing way when you could so easily prevent it? This was the supreme test for him. Had he fully embraced the ego self and transcended it?

In that transcendence he points the way for all beings. The human form is not something to negate. The human emotions and mind are not something to negate but to offer to the service of the divine and the only way that can happen is if they are embraced, seen as the gift that they are, so that one may use them in service of the divine and yet not be slave to them. It is his mastery of this in which I stand most in awe. Even the realized meditation master that I was 500 years ago did not have that mastery. The being that I was reached the level of non-returner but not yet fully realized. Yet here was a being who had that full realization and yet still walked the earth. He came into the incarnation from that full realization, and he was able to maintain it and express it on the earth. It is such an inspiring statement to me of human potential.

I feel so much gratitude to him for what he taught and for his being, his willingness to be in human form. I request you to think of this when your own ego voice becomes predominant and you have difficulty hearing the spirit voice. Instead of waging a war with that ego, can you open your heart to it? Open it with the firm conviction, “The divine in me does not need to be a slave to this ego" and in this way you also can begin to more fully express that divinity in all of your life. This is the greatest gift you can give him and give all beings.

My love to you all. That is all.

Barbara: Aaron is saying his Christmas stories are a bit different tonight. Some stories, but more contemplation. But he felt because of where so many of us are in our meditation practice, looking at this ego that makes all these pronouncements about how I want it to be, how I shouldn't want this or that-the arguments we get into with ourselves-he felt that focusing on this aspect of Jesus might be a useful teaching for us. He says please go in and enjoy your tea.

(Break)

D: I would like to get rid of ego, yes, but my experience is that when I do something, I notice I'm doing it. Vipassana almost sets me up to notice what I'm doing. So when he spoke of the child Jesus who acted without thought of “me" or “mine," I think we all acted when we were children without thinking, “I'm doing this." But after sitting and noticing, I'm noticing more than ever, it seems, what I'm doing.

Barbara: Aaron asks if you have ever played tennis.

D: I love tennis.

Aaron: I am Aaron. There could have once been a little child who held a child-sized tennis racket and in a completely uneducated way, simply swung at the ball trying to hit it without much attention to where it would go. It was just a game to hit the ball. Then someone came along and said, “Try holding the racket just this way. Try hitting the ball just into that space." Then the child worked on perfecting certain skills. There was an extreme level of consciousness. At some time along the progression of learning, hours may have been spent just learning how to serve, or how to switch the hand-grip for backhand. Only then were you able to move past all of those hours of mechanical learning and just play tennis. For the adept tennis player there's no thought process in it, there's just movement that's been trained into the body, no thinking about movement. Do you see where I'm going, D? I pause.

D: Yes.

Aaron: I am Aaron. So vipassana is a practice which brings you to awareness. But then you let go of the noting. When you're fully present you don't need the labels any more. The labels are a reminder to stay present. After awhile there's just breathing happening, just cooking happening, gardening happening, kindness happening. There's no doer any more. If somebody is confused, there's just confusion happening, and clarity. If somebody is angry there is just anger, understanding and kindness happening. There's no attachment to making it happen a certain way, there's no thought about it, it's the spontaneous expression of the deepest part of the being. I pause.

D: I can see that in gardening or cooking but when I'm caught in an argument and I'm being as skillful in my responses as I can, then I'm paying real attention to my words …

Barbara: You are still learning the skills of the tennis game. But is the I still there as strongly? Is there always somebody doing it or is it sometimes just kindness, awareness, intention to non-harm …

D: No, because when it's over I'm often glad I got through it skillfully or I'm noticing how unskillful I was. I'm stuck in “I" when things are difficult.

Barbara: It will change.

D: Oh good! (Laughter)

Barbara: Sometimes I experience that. Sometimes I experience it just, “confusion or clarity happening," or whatever. In a heated discussion the ego may still come up. But not always. Sometimes it does. If it does then I just know that it has come up. No big deal!

More and more one is there in that place of center and for me it's like both perspectives at once. I can see the somebody who wants to get it right or who wants to be able to explain it well to others or who wants to defend myself if someone is blaming me. I can see that somebody present but there's nothing solid to it. I see it just as a conditioned reality and it comes and it goes. There's no identification with it.

D: Sometimes when I'm driving home from having done something I'm rather proud of having done, I wonder how I could not be connected to it. I know I did it.

Barbara: There's a difference between being proud and being somebody stuck in being proud. Pride arises just like shame arises. Anger arises, kindness arises. We see those things arising but freedom is not in that pride has not arisen so much as one doesn't get caught up in the stories of pride. Pride would then start to tell stories, “Oh, I did good and now they'll like me. And next time they see me they'll be so kind to me. And they'll spread the word to others …" Awareness just notes, “Ah, stories. Here's pride and here are the stories of pride." Coming back to the experience of pride, it's just pride. And then there can be the skillful decision to let go of the stories, just to be there with that story of expansiveness which might change the next moment when suddenly there's a memory of something you said or did that you had a lot of doubt about. “Oh! Is that okay, that I said this? What will they think about this?" And suddenly where did the pride go? There's a feeling of shame, guilt, regret. It all comes and goes. Each one has its stories. The shame has its stories, the pride has its stories. Mindfulness reminds us the stories are coming up; just don't get caught. If they come up, that's OK, you don't have to stop them. Just say, “Here are stories," and know them for what they are. Don't perpetuate them.

Of course there's going to be pride sometimes, there's going to be shame sometimes, gladness, sadness. I'm paraphrasing Aaron, he says this is what he was saying, that Jesus was able to let these states arise in himself. He says if he had been totally beyond the arising of these states we could not have identified with him. He would have been something else, not really human. But the states of fear, for example, written in the scriptures, the words implying, “This is too much. I don't know if I can do this. Take this from me but if it be thy will, I'll do it …" feeling fear, not really sure he can handle this. But not caught in the stories. Aaron is saying the feeling of fear didn't lead him to have to turn into something else. He was just able to be totally present with the fear and move through the fear and still know with clarity what was asked, what he needed to do. Not getting caught in the stories.

Barbara: (Asked while reviewing the transcript.) You said above he still had these emotions. Yet according to the Buddhist teachings the arahant, the fully enlightened one, is beyond such emotions as pride, shame, greed, anger. I had thought he was fully enlightened before this incarnation as Jesus.

Aaron: He was fully enlightened. But coming back into form, he still had to learn to deal with the body, mind and emotions again in this lifetime. This is just my point, that he was such an effective teacher because he was not beyond the human experience and yet not lost in the human experience.

K: Obviously Jesus could have done all his healings by long distance. He could have waited a couple days and gone to another town and then in retrospect offered the healing to that other being.

Barbara: Aaron says, and he did that quite often.

K: Because it could not be so directly attributed to him the human, right?

Barbara: He's asking you to permit him to say something here. Please forgive him for interrupting.

Aaron: I am Aaron. This is offered as an aside to those of you who were not with us last week. We spent quite awhile speaking about the question, how did he decide what to heal and what not to heal? Moving through the world there was an infinite progression of beings seeking healing, whether they came to him directly asking for the healing or whether he merely passed them on the road and noted their suffering. So it's useful to understand how he might have chosen what to attend to and what to let be.

That is just an aside, please continue your question, K. I pause.

K: Since he clearly chose at times to publicly do these healings, and Aaron said in part it was because he had to embrace his divinity in order to teach us to embrace our own, was it not also useful for people to observe some sort of differentness about him in order to hear him better?

Aaron: I am Aaron. That also, K, yes. But he was also very careful with that. His concern as I understand it now was that his intention was to empower people to express their own divinity. His words were less important than the way he was in the world. He would use words and actions to capture their attention so they would turn and listen to him and would consider new ideas. But that was a very limited part of it for him because he did not wish to teach people on a conceptual or intellectual level but really to reach their hearts. I think there was something else happening, which is that in this moment of seeing that he could heal, that he could do miracles of many sorts, capturing their attention, there was a moment of awakening the pure awareness mind, a moment of surrender for that observer of the ego self. This is akin to the use of the Zen koan. Even if the ego self came right back with doubts, “Hmm, how did he do that?" such as bringing Lazarus back from the dead while those who doubted him said, “Well, he wasn't really dead," for a moment there was that surrender. This is the movement into the non-discursive mind in the self. In that space one is aware of the full power of all beings and of the interdependence of all that is, how everything reverberates with and from and to everything else.

So I think this is what he was most seeking to awaken in people, not knowing so much as unknowing, letting go of knowing which is really a way of controlling. Knowing comes from the ego, “Oh, I know this." When you know it, you control it. It doesn't have any space in it for unknowing. But from that pure awareness level there is unknowing. It is only when we let go of knowing how things should be and how to make them thus that we can see deeply into how things really are. It is only then that the full depth of the compassion and wisdom minds are awakened. I pause.

Barbara: I'm paraphrasing Aaron, he's saying he thinks that this was more important to him that “being heard". That was a small part of it but more important was this moment of waking up, even if they sank right back into the doubting or discursive or ego mind.

K: So is working skillfully with ego the same as mastering life in the not-knowing?

Aaron: I am Aaron. The ego self can master many skills. It can know, for example, how to plant seeds, what kind of soil conditions those seeds do best in, how to nurture the seeds so that rich crops will grow. This is not co-creating, then. This is using power to control the world. He was more interested in that level of experience we come to where there is no self and we are co-creating, aware of the divinity in everything. Knowledge is still useful. Pondering, “How much water do these seedlings need?" you speak to the seedlings and ask. Maybe they need more water than the seedlings of the same variety needed last year. Who knows? You can't just say, “I know." You ask them. There must be no preformulated concept there, so knowing has to go. As long as you are stuck in knowing you're not receptive to new information. This place of divinity in the self can only deeply be accessed when one is aware of the divinity in everything. This is what he sought to awaken: the ability to recognize and rest in that divinity while still acknowledging the experience of the human self in its physical and emotional and mental bodies. Because only there can one truly express love, unconditional love into the world. And it's important to recognize that unconditional love is enhanced by the human experiences of fear or doubt. Because when there is this human experience of limitation, and one recognizes it for what it is and refuses to be caught in it, this further empowers the intention of the expression of the divine self. Can you see that? I pause.

R: I had an experience with a client today … (Personal details deleted. Talking about a client in a difficult relationship situation who was getting in touch with anger.)

Now, my feeling was that it was good for her to get in touch with those feelings because before that she was never in touch with those feelings and it got expressed through the physical. But now I wonder, was that a good thing to do? I guess my question is, you become “spiritual" without respecting the human feelings of the ego. And I think that's what was happening to her. And I tried to get her to really respect those feelings and to have mercy on those feelings. So in a way I encouraged the ego to express itself rather than the spiritual aspect.

Aaron: I am Aaron. I think you're correct, R, that in denying the anger one may bring that anger into the body and that may be one of the conditions to create distortion in the body. “Spiritual" is never in denial of anything. Spirit is the clarity which sees the human experience, be it physical, emotional or mental, pleasant or unpleasant, understands it, and yet does not suppress the human reaction.

A saint who is put to death, burned at the stake, still screams out in pain. When nails were hammered into Jesus' hands he cried out in pain. He did not hate those who hammered the nails. There's a difference. When one's beloved deserts one for another, anger is going to come up. The human feels anger. The human may experience that anger. Just because there's anger doesn't mean there has to be hatred. The anger is not limited by compassion, the anger may be immense. But there's no need to enact that anger. It's very clean; it comes through and it's energy and it's released. Perhaps not immediately but much faster than it would be if it were practiced as hatred and desire to harm those catalyzing the anger. But suppression and judgment also lock in the anger and hold them into the body. Knowing it as anger and watching it move through, there can simultaneously be anger and compassion. This is the voice and clarity of spirit. I pause.

Barbara: It's 10 o'clock, let us stop there.

D: Was the being that was the Buddha, did he come back as Jesus?

Barbara: Aaron says no.

Aaron: I am Aaron. They are so close in their spirit level realization as really to seem to be one being. But these are like two threads in their origin braided together. That specific energy that came as Jesus was in its early evolution of a different energy than the one that was known as Buddha. I pause.

(Tape ends.)