Wednesday, September 22, 1993

Barbara: We have a small group tonight. We are going to start with questions rather than a formal talk from Aaron. D has a question based on last week's discussion.

(Reading question.) Aaron has spoken many times on the subject of fear being at the base of many emotions such as anger, greed, jealousy and so on. He has also spoken about fear being an illusion, an outgrowth of the illusion that there is a separate self. This illusion of a separate self leads to the need to protect. There really is no need to protect because there is no separate self.

However, when I am feeling emotions strongly, in fact throughout most of the day, it certainly seems like I am a separate self. My physical, emotional and mental bodies seem separate, albeit related, to those of others. I can more easily comprehend that my spiritual body is connected to all that is. The concept of connected physical, emotional and mental bodies is an interesting intellectual one, but one that I have little direct experience of.

So, my question is this. When I am experiencing strong emotions, I have a tendency to want to avoid them. I sometimes stop and consider that the emotion is stemming, ultimately, from an illusion of separation. But part of my motive for doing this can be to get rid of the emotion, rather than transcend it through the wisdom and/or experience of this ultimate illusion. Will Aaron address how best to use this information concerning the illusion of self that he is giving us?

Barbara: Aaron is suggesting that your questions tie in with one another, and he would like to hear from more of you. It doesn't have to be related to this question. What is the most pressing thing that you fell a need to know tonight? Some of it will tie together and some of it will be answered separately.

Barbara: Four more questions. (Reading questions.)

I still feel guilty and somewhat frightened when I say 'no' to a loved one. Does this change?

How do I proceed in working towards spiritual growth?

Why I am I so angry at work? Why is it that with my talent I am working with 'dumb idiots'? (I do not normally use these terms.)

Because of my depression, I am not able to go into deep sleep or meditation. How can I get back in control of my mind?

Aaron: I am Aaron. Good evening and my love to you all. Anger, fear of saying no, depression, working with emotions and living a spiritual life. What do all of these 'pain questions' have to do with living a spiritual life? What do they have to do with each other? I would like you to toss this back and forth between yourselves for a few minutes. Hear your question and each other's questions. It's not that you need to come up with one group question; we will address them individually. But they are deeply connected. How? I pass it back to you. That is all.

Barbara: H is saying that a lot of the questions speak of the person as being less than they want to be, as if something is lacking. He sees self criticism in the questions.

D: I think that working with these emotional issues is spiritual work.

Aaron: Precisely. Can you see how it becomes twisted when you fight with the emotions so that you are relating to them from a place of fear? It then ceases to be spiritual work and becomes an attempt to get rid of the emotion rather than to learn from it. When the question is one of getting rid of, there is so much tension involved, so much self involved, it is not opportune for learning. Can you accept the fact that throughout life there are going to be times of discomfort? While spiritual work is always happening, catalyst is not opportunity for learning unless there is deep awareness and some degree of willingness to let go, relax and investigate whatever has arisen. The tension and fear limit the breadth of awareness and investigation.

We are getting wonderful responses here, please continue.

L: I don't really want to accept the process of working through feelings, and perhaps even embracing them. Instead I just what to know how soon it will dissipate. How soon can I get rid of it? I don't really allow myself to be in the process and embrace the feelings.

D: I agree with what L just said. It is true for me as well. I wonder why I am so afraid of my feelings? I have gotten through many painful situations in my life, yet I still fight them, despite this experience of having gotten through them before.

Barbara: It's very painful and it's very scary. We get hurt and we learn to protect ourselves. 'Getting through them' can be gritting your teeth and forging ahead. It doesn't necessarily mean being aware.

Aaron: I also see this in physical terms, in terms of your body energy. You know that I see you as light, not as form. When there is love and openheartedness, let us say absence of war with fear (not absence of fear), your energy radiates outward. Fear creates a constriction to that energy. But when you meet that fear with a degree of compassion, it doesn't really confine your energy. The fear becomes a permeable barrier. Energy radiates out through that barrier. The fear is there, but it doesn't hem in your energy. The barrier becomes impermeable when fear becomes controlling. That is, when you become frightened of fear and pain and feel a need to take over and control; to get rid of the situation. Then your energy is confined into you.

I want to add this to what D said. The difference, as I see it, is one of having compassion for yourself. It relates much to self judgment. Let us look a bit at what blocks the natural compassion of each heart.

When there is fear or pain there may be aversion to that fear or pain. I specify 'aversion to' rather than 'discomfort with.' Let me define my terms.

There is discomfort with pain and some level of disliking it. There are nerve endings in your physical body, and there also are what I call emotional body nerve endings. If you touch something that is burning hot, you feel physical pain. That is the discomfort level. It is simply a sense response. The sense of touch having made contact with something hot, there is burning; the body knows discomfort. If you move into a room where there is angry energy the energy nerve endings, let us call them, contact that angry energy and there is discomfort. There is not yet liking or disliking, there is just discomfort; real pain. This is the body's signal that there is danger. You need that or you would freeze or burn yourself. You would ignore the signs of pain that tell you to take care, for example, of a twisted ankle. So you learn that you must attend to your body's pain signals in order to be loving to your body.

Mind and body are in relationship with one another. Your mind knows pain if you've touched something very hot, even though the nerve endings are in your body. When there is angry energy around you, the emotional body nerve endings experience that energy as discomfort and then mind knows that discomfort has been experienced.

You can attend to pain without moving into like or dislike, but usually like or dislike arises. With liking or disliking the mind is brought into play in distorted ways. This is not mind as it experiences in this moment, but what we call 'old' or conditioned mind.

You have six senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch and mind. The five physical senses make contact with a physical object; just sense contact, devoid of consciousness of the contact. The mind must come into play to know that contact has occurred. The contact may be pleasant or unpleasant, comfortable or uncomfortable. The pain or lack of pain, the comfort or discomfort, takes place within the physical sense. The like and dislike takes place in the mind.

When you move to like or dislike there is still not a sense of fear, a sense that 'I've got to get rid of this' or 'I've got to hold on to that,' that is still another step. There is just liking or disliking.

The mind is part of that liking or disliking, and here is where you get trapped. When you see the liking and disliking you are habituated to grasp at that which you like and push away that which you dislike. You are habituated because you have not looked deeply into your relationships with pleasure and pain. You feel helpless, as if you're out of control. This is liking and disliking without awareness. It is awareness that makes the difference. When you can know that there is liking or disliking happening and see any judgment or fear that arises, you don't need to move into that stronger stance of grasping or aversion. There is just liking and disliking. Just another of those clouds that we keep talking about moving through you.

When there is liking or disliking, you can ask yourself, 'Who is liking or disliking?' This is a subtle but very important point. Each time you make the shift from emptiness of self into solidified self you deepen the habit of thinking of yourself as a separate self. Then you begin the war of 'I shouldn't act that way' or 'I shouldn't feel that way' or 'He/she shouldn't act that way towards me.' You get into turmoil about your emotions.

On a relative level, of course there is a self. It is compassion towards that relative self that frees you to transcend the relative self and come back to center, back to the place of connectedness, where there is only comfort/discomfort, or perhaps liking or disliking happening.

Sentient beings that you are will always choose not to suffer; there is nothing wrong with that. But it is only through the perspective of the centered non-self that you can begin to see that there is no duality between comfort and discomfort, pleasure and pain. No matter how you live your life there is going to be pleasure and there is going to be pain. Sometimes that which gives you pleasure in one moment will give you pain in the next moment. Just think of a campfire on a cold night. You move close to get warm; after a few minutes it starts to burn and you step back. Then you start to feel cold so you step forward again. Again it starts to burn, and again you step back. Sense contact of heat and cold. Mind knowing there is heat and cold, sometimes preferring heat sometimes preferring the cold. Liking and disliking arising. Can you just sit back and watch the whole thing? There is no suffering in that, just a smile towards this very human self that approaches the warmth, gets too hot, steps back, gets too cold, steps forward again.

The suffering arises when self criticism comes in, when you start to be an 'I' and say, 'Why can't I get this right, just the right distance from the fire?' Anger arises at the self, the cold night, the too-hot fire. Then there is aversion and grasping; then there is suffering. As soon as you are fighting with what is, then you are suffering. Notice that it has nothing to do with the campfire, the cold night, or yourself. Rather, the suffering grows out of the mind's relationship with these things.

Let's extend this idea to something else that burns: another's anger. When you allow yourself to get close to another's anger and then get burned, you withdraw. Then you feel, 'I'm not dealing with this well.' So, you step back in again; the other is still angry and you feel burned again, so you withdraw again.

Can you see that the emotional nerve endings are getting burned and frozen, that liking and disliking are arising? Can you see that all of this is perfectly normal in a human and just let it go, just watch yourself without owning all these feelings? You bring in so many judgments: 'I should be able to tolerate their anger' or 'I shouldn't have to tolerate their anger' 'He's wrong' 'I'm wrong' 'Who's bad, who's good?' When you bring in all those judgments and duality, there is turmoil, suffering and confusion. Then there is somebody doing all of this. It is that 'somebodyness' that catches you. In 'comfort/discomfort,' 'like' and 'dislike,' there is not necessarily 'somebody.' But in strong attachment or aversion there is a very big 'somebody.'

J: It's is almost like by not forgiving ourselves and feeling what we are feeling, we are clinging to those feelings and can not move on.

L: There is another dimension, though, when you have a major loss. I think of when I got divorced, that wasn't just a day to day type of thing, it lasted a long time. It kind of went into another dimension of feeling that had a lot more depth to it.

Barbara: I'm paraphrasing Aaron who is saying that grief is very different. Grief is one of the emotions that is not based on fear. There's anger in grief that is based on fear, but grief itself is not based on fear. Grief is as connected to love as to fear.

Aaron: Let us consider J's response, that it comes down to not forgiving yourself. One of the things that we need to ask is why we are so hard on ourselves. As you get to be older souls and closer to graduation from this plane you become more demanding of yourselves. You become more and more perfectionist, not only out of fear, but because you truly aspire to purity. This process is so common we have a tongue-in-cheek name for it, 'old soul syndrome.' You see glimpses of the perfection that is real in yourselves and so you become impatient with yourselves, asking, 'Why can't I manifest that in myself all the time? I want to manifest my energy more purely because I don't want to hurt people and I aspire to be loving. I aspire to touch the world with clear energy and not with fear and pain.'

There is much beauty in that aspiration, but it doesn't leave room for the fact that you are human. As long as you are incarnate you are never going to manifest your energy with perfect purity; it cannot be done. This is your opportunity to practice compassion for the human that you are. I'm not saying don't try. I'm certainly not suggesting you turn your back on suffering and say, 'It's not my responsibility, I can't help it.' But be aware that you are going to make mistakes.

If you can not love yourselves when you make mistakes, how can you love another? For those of you who are old souls, and that goes for everyone in this room, at this point in your journey the most important lesson you have to learn is to find compassion for the humans that you are. Until you can do that, your compassion is marred. You can not move past judgment of others until you can move past judgment of yourself. One of you is asking, 'Why can't it work the other way?' Because it's easier to forgive others than to forgive yourself. You are the final place of learning for yourself. Once you've really forgiven yourself, there is nothing left to forgive.

There is another part to this issue. One of fear. All of you have heard an inner voice asking, at some time or another, 'I don't know if I'm ready to be that responsible.' If somebody else is saying things that are making you angry, saying things that are hurting you, what does forgiveness and non-judgment mean in that case? To forgive does not mean to give in to another's inappropriate demands.

Why is so hard to say 'no' to another? One reason is that you do aspire to be loving, as I have just discussed, but sometimes misunderstand what 'loving' means. But another reason it is so hard is that, at some level, you realize that while it is more loving to say no, it also takes much more responsibility, and makes you vulnerable to a different kind of pain, because in saying no to another you are saying no to whatever negative, co-dependent patterns you have set up with that person. In saying no, you are saying to yourself: I will not allow myself to be involved in this dishonesty, fear, or whatever the pattern may be, anymore.

That assertion takes a tremendous amount of courage. I'm not taking about large scale co-dependent patterns, such as drug or alcohol abuse, I'm talking about somebody who is sometimes rude to you. Just something little like that. A friend who is always late for lunch. When do you say no? How have you allowed yourself to be a part of that pattern of behavior? When you say no to it, you are making the affirmation, 'I am worthwhile, as are you. I am going to treat us both with respect.'

For some of you that is terrifying. If you treat yourself with respect, are you ready to always treat yourself with respect? Can you treat yourself with respect and still be self-critical and self-judgmental? In the past those patterns have protected you. When you heap self judgment on yourself it is a way out of facing the reality of your relative, human imperfection, a way out of needing to find forgiveness for that imperfection. The angel in you is perfect, the human can not be perfect.

You want so badly to be perfect, but you can't be. Respect says, 'I am human. I will try with all my heart, my mind and my soul. But I can't be perfect and I accept that. I forgive myself and love myself despite my humanness, even because of my humanness.'

When you say no to another it must either come from that place of self respect or from a place of anger. If you've determined that you're not going to let it come from a place of anger, grown past that, then what do you do with that anger? It's easy to say no from a place of anger. But you know that there is no love in that. When you say no from a place of self respect, what does it ask you to give up? What defenses? What prior notions of yourself? This, then, is another reason why you cling to not forgiving yourself, cling to old, fearful patterns.

(Barbara: While cleaning up typos in this transcript, I asked Aaron to elaborate on what he had said above. He talks about multiple motivations, and only those from a place of self creating unwholesome, adhering karma. How do we say 'no' without being somebody saying no? Also, can you talk more about the 'terror' of being responsible? What follows was channeled at the computer.)

Aaron: I understand your question. Yes, there are multiple motivations. There is that in you which aspires to love, deeply wishes to be worthy of the divine which you experience within and without. There is also that in you which has learned old patterns of fear and reactivity to that fear as a means of self protection. It is not useful to say that 'self' isn't real. Ultimately it's not, and wisdom may cut through the delusion, but fear and wisdom cannot work simultaneously in the human. This is not to say that the fearful person cannot hear the voice of wisdom; the fearful person who is unmindful, owning his/her fear and caught in it, cannot hear the voice of wisdom.

When you are thus caught, then, you must first work within the confines of this relative reality, where there is experience of a self feeling fear, and perhaps greed, anger or other emotions.

Here is where judgment sets in for the old soul who says, 'I shouldn't feel this or that.' With that judgment, self further solidifies, making it all the more impossible to break through into the wisdom mind that knows the whole story is built on the delusion of fear.

Here is where, with practice, you learn to recognize fear, to know with mindfulness, 'Fear is present in me.' Just that knowing frees you from slavery to the fear. Fear is NOT bad, nor is it good. It simply is. Fear can become a catalyst for anger, hatred or greed, or a catalyst for compassion. I would choose not to repeat what is already available in transcript, so I will not elaborate on this idea. (See 'Anger as a Catalyst to Compassion,' in the book Aaron, page 47.)

Then your anger, fear, greed or other emotion is no longer seen as that which you must be rid of in order to be 'pure' but is seen as that which nourishes pure awareness. There is no garbage within you, only that which can best be utilized by turning it into compost. Awareness is the catalyst that makes compost from muck.

As you learn this lesson, you begin to see that it was easier to 'own' your heavy emotions and blame the self, strive to be rid of them, than to become responsible for converting them, which involves both honesty and compassion.

Your past patterns have been to protect the self from pain by playing along with the dishonesty, in terms of finding someone to blame-yourself. That was easier than the honesty of saying, 'I will offer compassion to this being in pain.' Can you see how that works? You want to be compassionate, but that's somebody being compassionate. To allow compassion to flow through you is to drop the ego-identification with the whole story. Then who/what is left? Very scary. It leads to that question, 'What am I trying to do, annihilate myself?'

As you offer compassion to the being thus caught, it is here that you may shift from horizontal to vertical practice. Without the identification of self and ownership of the emotions, wisdom can cut through to know there is BOTH pain, and nobody ultimately involved in that pain. No one to get rid of, nothing to get rid of, but on the relative plane, still a need for compassion which flows unrestricted from the open heart.

Does that answer your question?

Barbara: Enough for now. Thank you, Aaron.

(Continuing from original transcript.)

Aaron: We are identifying a lot of situations that need your loving attention. Now it would be useful to get down to the basic question: how do we work with this? When you want to say no, and do it from a place of respect, but are afraid, how do you work with these confused emotions? Last week we spoke about the horizontal and the vertical in your spiritual practice, the horizontal being that which deals with relative reality and the vertical being that which deals with ultimate reality. At this point you are able to see the difficulty in responding with respect, and have compassion rather than judgment for the human caught in that difficulty. But it has become a vicious circle. You don't know how to respond with respect because when somebody abuses you anger arises and you get caught in it. Then you need to shift to the vertical practice, allowing wisdom to cut through the thought or emotion.

I want to pause here. There are a few questions. We will come back to that space where the horizontal and vertical intersect and talk about the specifics of D's question, 'How do I work with this?'

Barbara: (Reading G's question.) Can we use both the positive and negative to guide us to more harmony and a greater understanding of the guidance that all things, positive and negative, are providing to us and that we are providing to all things? Isn't it all just helping guidance, 'good' or 'bad'? It's not personal but, rather, mutual, isn't it? All one thing uplifting itself by interaction of its parts. Is this an understanding of your message?

Aaron: We're cutting through it all here. There is no good or bad, positive or negative, so you have to use both. Why do you fall into the judgment, 'This is positive, this is negative'?

Do you know the story of the man whose horses got loose? When he found his barn empty his neighbors all said, 'Oh, what bad luck. Too bad.' He just shook his head and said, 'Bad luck, good luck, who knows?' The next day the horses came back, and they brought with them a wild horse, a very beautiful and strong animal. His neighbors looked and said, 'What good luck.' He shrugged and said, 'Bad luck, good luck, who knows?' His son was attempting to brush this new horse and it kicked the boy, and broke his leg. 'What bad luck,' his neighbors said. Again he shrugged, 'Bad luck, good luck, who knows?' This was in a country where armies came through and conscripted men to fight. They came and took all the young men in the town, except this one with the broken leg. Good luck, bad luck; it's all part of each other.

When you stop fighting with what happens in your life, stop labeling it good or bad and just be with it, knowing that there is discomfort if there is discomfort, seeing the fear that is arising if fear is arising, being aware in each moment of what you are experiencing, then you stop owning the happenings in your life. They stop controlling you. You just sit back and watch it, knowing that some of it is uncomfortable and some of it is comfortable.

At this point we are no longer feeling it's 'my' experience. You let go of 'good' and 'bad' and relax. Then you start to be able to greet it with love rather than fear. Even love and fear are not a duality. We are not trying to get rid of fear and hold on to love. This is part of the misunderstanding that I see here tonight. We're not trying to get rid of heavy emotions and bring in loving emotions, we're not trying to get rid of fear. We are simply trying to learn to relate to all of it, the anger, the pain, the jealousy, the fear, with compassionate loving kindness and patience. With endurance even; not an endurance that says, 'I will tolerate this no matter what,' but an endurance that just waits, that allows itself to be vulnerable and open.

This is the core of it-keeping the walls around the heart open-seeing each time that walls are built, and letting them all dissolve again. When you build them again, notice it and let them dissolve again.

The dissolution of the walls is the place where the horizontal and vertical practices intersect. You must work with awareness, compassion and patience, seeing these walls constantly built from the desire to protect yourself from pain. Simultaneously, on the ultimate reality level, you must know that there is nobody to protect, and there never was. But unless there is also the relative reality practice of compassion, of constantly reopening your heart from your pain, the ultimate reality becomes merely another kind of defense, a place of escape. Then the statement, 'There is nobody to protect' becomes a way of disassociating with your pain. There may be nobody to protect, but the pain is very real.

There is a wonderful story of a Zen master whose son was just killed in an accident. He is sitting and weeping when one of his students walks in and, seeing the master, is a bit shocked. He asks, 'Why are you crying? You tell us over and over that it's all an illusion.' The Zen master says, 'Yes. And the loss of a child is the most painful illusion of all.'

When we do not live in denial of our pain, we learn to embrace even the pain, while deepening awareness that there is no self experiencing it. Compassion is what allows us to move deep enough into the experience of our true self, the Christ or Buddha mind, the God self, the angel, to begin to experience non-separation. That doesn't mean that there is no pain, but there is no longer ownership of the pain. That Zen master grieved on one level for the son that he loved, and on another level he grieved for all the human loss of all that we love. This is not a path of freedom from pain, but a path of freedom from suffering-freedom from the suffering that grows with our ownership of experience, our separation into 'my pain,' our resistance to that pain and our grasping at painlessness. Then you are suffering.

I am reminded here of one of Barbara's children when he was very young. His older brother threw a ball, not meaning to hit him, but it did hit the child. He came in the house crying, 'He hit me with the ball.' Barbara hugged him and put some ice on the place he said hurt. After a few minutes it was obvious that it didn't hurt anymore. She was touching him and he wasn't pulling back; there was no sensitivity there. But he was still pointing his finger and saying, 'He hit me with the ball; it's not fair.' There was no more physical pain, but he was suffering because of his anger and desire to place blame for his discomfort.

Can you see the places where you are owning your pain and how it creates suffering? It is a very hard path to walk. There is a very fine line between compassion for yourself on the relative level, and maudlin compassion, ownership. Watch yourself feeling that pain, watch yourself get into 'It shouldn't have happened, it's not fair,' all of those protests. And smile at that pained being as you would with your own child. Hold yourself, figuratively or even literally, in your arms. Give yourself comfort. While on another level, you see through it. It's just another cloud passing through, just another experience. Each time you come back to that awareness you cut through this relative reality. Because you are never going to get free as long as you stay in relative reality. But you are also never going to get free if you dwell only in ultimate reality, because the relative reality is your teacher. You've got to stay in that point where they intersect, seeing both at once.

Barbara: We are returning to the specific questions. (Reading question.) Because of my depression, I am not able to go into deep sleep or meditation. How can I get back in control of my mind?

Aaron: Depression is such a hard thing to work with because of the way it grips at you and destroys your faith. You feel the pain of it and within that pain you so easily forget who you are. You lose touch with that angel, that divinity, within you, and deepen into a 'self' who owns the depression. The further afield you go from that sense of your divinity, the more the depression deepens.

I sense in your question, when you say, 'How can I get back in control of my mind?' that a part of you wants to clamp down on the depression. But I think that what you need to do is very different. You already are in control of your mind if you are aware that you are depressed and that you need to work with it. You can not make the decision, my dear one, to get rid of depression. Depression is not a solid object. It is a building of walls that cuts you off from the light. Depression is not your natural state. Your natural state is lightness, peacefulness and openness; a connection with the light.

If your approach is how to get rid of your depression, it just becomes another fight. Doing so can temporarily pull you out of depression because it gives you a sense of something to do: you can fight with it. But this is just moving from one type of desperation to another. Instead of being depressed, you're getting rid of, hating and being at war with it.

When you really look at the depression, you start to find the human who is feeling pain and fear and who is judging itself, saying, 'I should be beyond this. I should be able to move through this more skillfully,' instead of saying, 'It hurts.' When you can offer yourself comfort and a bit of compassion for your pain, then you start to touch the divinity in yourself. That loving kindness pokes holes in the dark wall of depression and lets light come through. You focus not on getting rid of the depression, but on reconnecting yourself to love.

There are two specific tools that I will offer. One is working with a simple lovingkindness meditation. I believe that your are familiar with this practice. Usually we begin with the self, but when there is deep depression and anger at the self, it helps to reverse the process. Begin with someone for whom you feel love. Just think of them and offer them your love. Offer wishes for their well-being: 'May you be at peace. May you find joy. May you be healed.' Whatever you wish for them. Then gently let them move out of your consciousness and bring yourself in. Can you wish yourself the same things?

Sometimes in that offering there is deeper access to the pain that you are feeling and which you have had to push away. Depression grows out of resistance to pain. It grows out of unidentified anger with the pain, and a sense of helpless victimization by pain. Trust that you can allow yourself to feel your pain without needing to move off into depression, to stay afloat with that pain, not to sink into it and become mired in it. Simply know that this is terribly painful and open your heart to that pain. This is part of where that lovingkindness meditation can take you.

Another practice that, perhaps, you have done with us in that past is a relative of a Tibetan practice called Tonglen. Traditionally in this practice you visualize light and breathe it in through the crown of your head and then breathe it out to some other person or place in the world where there is suffering. Then you visualize that suffering as a heavy, black, tarry mass. Breathe it in through the heart, allowing yourself to hold it in your heart for a breath. Breathe it in, exhale and let it rest there; inhale, seeing the intention to release it. Exhale and release it to God, to the universe, to whatever. Breathe in light. Let it rest in the heart center while you exhale. Inhale again with intention to release it, and then send it out to where there is suffering. That is traditional practice.

What I want you to do with this is to visualize yourself as the object of suffering, so, there will be two parts of you. There is this centered part, which does the meditation, and the hurting, frightened part. Be a channel within this highest self of you. Bring in light and send it out to the part of you that is suffering. Then draw in the pain of that suffering, the heaviness of it, and be a channel for its release, knowing that you don't have to carry it. You don't have to own it. This is not disassociation from it; quite the reverse. You must open fully to the pain, to transcend it. But you no longer feel helpless in the face of pain. This practice gives you a very specific way of releasing it, and of offering love to it.

Barbara: (Reading L's question.) I still feel guilty and somewhat frightened when I say 'no' to a loved one. Does this change?

Aaron: Everything changes. The thing is, my friend, that sometimes it's going to change to be more comfortable and sometimes it's going to change to be more uncomfortable. Sometimes you're going to feel better about saying 'no' and sometimes you're going to feel worse about saying 'no.' Instead of getting into a war with the guilt that you feel, can you just be present with the guilt, but not own the guilt? Just, 'seeing guilt.'

Can you allow the experience of feeling the turmoil and not liking it? Feel the anger towards yourself and towards the catalyst for the situation, because the guilt is so uncomfortable. Just watch it all. How much it solidifies self, this wanting to be guilt free. Can it be okay if there is guilt?

As soon as it is okay that there is guilt, then there is a place of self respect. Then you are acknowledging your feelings without judgment. On the relative level there is guilt, but on the ultimate level there is no judgment. 'It's okay that there is guilt; I'm allowed to feel guilt, I'm allowed to feel angry.' When you're free of reactivity to the anger and the guilt, there's just guilt. There is nothing special you have to do about it; no need to get rid of it. Just a sense of self respect that allows you to feel whatever is present in your emotional body at that moment.

With that drawing in of the light, of self respect and kindness, the sense of respect to the self and the other deepens. The place where the 'no' is becomes clearer. While it may hurt the other to hear that 'no,' it is offered with love and not with anger or fear. If anger or fear were there, that's okay. It reconnects you to the respect and loving kindness which are an equal basis for the 'no.' It helps you to acknowledge that fear is not the full basis for the 'no,' even if it's part of it. Each time you do this you become a bit more comfortable with the guilt.

After a while you are so comfortable with it that you don't need it anymore, and then it dissolves, not because you set out to dissolve it, because you'll never dissolve it by trying to get rid of it. It dissolves simply because you don't need it anymore. Your 'no' comes from a clear space of respect for self and for the other. Does that answer your question? (Yes.)

Barbara: G says he did not mean to emphasize positive and negative, he meant to say that all experiences and processes are guidance, are they not? Aaron is suggesting that I talk about that.

Yes, absolutely they are. Yet we do get into the negative and positive. As humans everything is guidance but we don't want to have to learn through the painful processes. It is much more pleasant through the non-painful. Aaron keeps saying that we don't have to learn with pain; pain is saying, 'Pay attention.' If we pay attention, we learn. If we can learn to pay attention without the pain then we don't need the pain.

What he is suggesting I talk about briefly in answer to this is something that I have been thinking about for a couple of weeks. I was just at a conference where people were talking about the misuse of authority and high position as related to sexual abuse. People at the conference were talking about their pain and expressing a lot of deep held pain and fear.

The issue seemed to polarize. Some people said, 'Those in authority must be more responsible; this is totally unethical. Look at all the pain it is causing.' Some people said, 'If this (person in authority) is said to be (highly aware), can we trust that he/she knows what they're doing in leading the student into sexual relationship, and was not acting for self-centered reasons-that the student really needed that experience?'

I found myself hearing both sides of it, and both sides made some sense. But I felt very angry about it because nobody should be subjected to that kind of abuse. I've been talking to Aaron about it a lot in the past two weeks and I'm starting to see that both views are true and they don't contradict each other.

If people are karmically in a situation where they need to experience certain things, they will find a way to experience them. Simultaneously, even if the teacher is enlightened and acting from the best of motives, nobody should deliberately need to cause pain to another person or their 'enlightenment' doesn't make sense. We see that there is enough pain in the world so that we don't have to create pain for people for them to learn. We just steer them to the existing pain.

So, I think what I'm saying is, all experiences and processes are guidance, but it's perfectly okay to prefer the non-painful, and it's not okay to cause pain to another person under the guise of teaching them something-like a parent who hits a child and says, 'He's got to learn.' There are loving ways to teach and hurtful ways to teach. With each form of 'instruction' there is a multiplicity of lessons. What are we really teaching when we harm another, even from the highest motivation? Is it what we want to teach?

When we seek to learn through hurtful ways, we can learn from that hurt, but it is much more comfortable to learn without the hurt. So how can we allow ourselves to more fully enter into life's situations where we don't have to learn through being hurt, where our lives have a lot more positive and a lot less negative? Are there some thoughts about that? In what ways do we invite the painful situations?

G: I think that when you are more mindful and paying close attention you can learn from positive experiences. But, if you are being closed it may take pain to pull you out.

Barbara: It may take the shock of pain to say, 'Hey, pay attention.' How do we unlearn that pattern? We do sometimes unconsciously choose pain because it is what we need to finally penetrate into what's really happening.

G: Mindfulness.

Aaron: Again, the distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is a given in human form. There is going to be some pain. You can not learn from your pain when you are waging war with it. When you can see yourself waging war, see how much aversion there is to the pain, can you just let go and say, 'Okay, now I'm going to experience this pain.' Then you start to be able to learn from it. That is the first kindness; just to say no more war. It opens the door to more and more kindness, until you slowly become able to shift the pattern from needing pain in order to deepen awareness to being able to maintain deep awareness without the catalyst of pain. It's one of the glitches of being human. Something that seems to be built into the human being is that it falls asleep when there is no pain.

Eventually you may get to the point where you can remind yourself that if you stop paying attention, things are going to get painful, and that if you can keep paying attention, then things don't need to get painful. I don't want to suggest holding a dangling sword over your head, a threat of pain that's going to come and slice your head off if you don't watch out, because that's just another way of living with fear. Instead, can you ask yourself, why am I using pain as a catalyst for being aware? Can joy, peace, contentment and connection become just as much as a catalyst? Part of that is simply habit and self-discipline; you really can teach yourself to pay attention without pain.

Barbara: (Reading J's question.) How do I proceed in working towards spiritual growth?

Aaron: We're going to have a weekend full of that topic. (A weekend workshop.) If I could sum it up in one word it would be awareness, awareness, awareness. Everything we've been talking about tonight is part of spiritual growth. The most important thing is that you see 'spiritual' as inherent in every experience of your life. It is not something outside of this moment towards which you must strive. It is not something to be grasped at or attained.

What is spiritual growth? You're already perfect on one level. I call you angels in earthsuits. What you are working towards is a harmony between the angel and the earthsuits. We call that spiritual growth but that term can be misleading because people think of something outside of them which they have to bring into them. But everything that you ever needed to know is already there. Spiritual growth does not entail growth of the spirit body or angel which is already perfect, but the bringing of the other bodies into harmony with the spiritual body. It is awareness that helps you draw the connections so that the deep wisdom that's already within you starts to manifest in your works, acts and thoughts, thereby harmonizing the angels and the earthsuits. This finally leads us back to D's basic question. I wonder if we could read it again.

Barbara: (Reading D's question.) One line is: 'Aaron has said there is really no need to protect because there is no separate self.' I'm paraphrasing Aaron who is saying, 'But that's on the ultimate level. Can you see that you need to do both?'

Aaron: Can you see that you need to act with kindness and respect to this seemingly separate self on the relative level, a kindness and respect which asks it to acknowledge and smile to its fear? You do this work with all the support practices that we've talked about. But there is also need to acknowledge that there is no separate self and that the fear is an illusion. Both are true. It's a question of balance. You're a tightrope walker. If you lean a little to far to the right or left you fall off. You've got to stay on this thin line, working very mindfully with whatever heavy emotions arise: with courage, with compassion and with kindness.

At the same time you use the sword of wisdom to cut through the illusion of separate self and external object of fear. Mindfulness practice repeated over and over, and working with compassion with all that arises, will deepen the wisdom. But no matter how sharp that knife of wisdom gets, it's useless unless you pick it up and use it each time a thought arises that says, 'Self; anger; fear; jealousy; I want this; I don't like that.' Instead of ownership or getting rid of the thought, ask: 'What is this thought? Where did it come from?'

You will see the illusion of self from which thought arose, not just as an academic seeing, but you will experience it. You'll see how you get caught in it over and over. When you touch it with the awareness that it's just a scratch on the record repeating itself again and again and again, old habit, old mind consciousness, it self-destructs. There is a brief moment then where there is no thought. Nothing to be grasped at, nothing to be pushed away. You enter, even if very briefly, into the experience of emptiness of self and of deep connection. You rest for that moment in pure mind, in your perfection. And then a new thought arises and you do it all again. Mindfulness sharpens the sword, but the sword must be picked up and cut through the illusion over and over. And when the thought dissolves, awareness must know: 'This is pure mind.' We have awareness aware of awareness.

Eventually you move away from the habit of identifying yourself as 'me.' There's still a 'me' that has to take out the garbage and brush the dog, but there is no ownership of that 'me.' There is much more looseness, more space for some of it to be pleasant and some of it to be unpleasant, with no pushing away or grasping. It's a kind of mind training that eventually re-associates your mind into who you really are, not all the ideas you've had about who you thought you were.

The more you rest in that space of who you really are, the more you know that is what's real. You've avoided that, all of you. You keep wanting to be somebody, and in that grasping at somebody you forget who you really are. It's rather ironic that when you finally understand who you really are, that's when you become somebody-but that somebody is nobody. Somebody because it's connected to all that is, manifesting the full empowerment of your being, the full expression of the totality of you. Somebody indeed! The pure reflection of God Itself. But there's nobody in it, in terms of no concepts. Nobody to prove anything or make anything happen. Just complete resting in that peace that knows its divinity and connection.

Barbara: We are addressing the last part of D's question: 'Part of my motive for doing this can be to get rid of the emotion, rather than transcend it through the wisdom and/or experience of this ultimate illusion. Will Aaron address how best to use this information concerning the illusion of self that he is giving us?'

Aaron: This is again that fine place of balance. You see your grasping at the non-separate, at ultimate reality, see the act of cutting through the illusion of self as a way to avoid pain. Seeing that, can you go back and acknowledge the pain? There is great anger, or hurt, or whatever there may be. Can you see the antipathy to the pain, and the desire to push it away or escape it? See the desire to use concept of ultimate reality, not experience but concept, as a way to distance yourself from the pain.

(Tape ended. Rephrased by Aaron for transcript.)

As long as there is concept, you are NOT experiencing pure mind/ultimate reality, only dodging pain with the pretense of ultimate reality. When you allow the experience of that pain and drop the fight with it, 'somebodyness' dissolves and also the conceptualizer. Then the experience of ultimate reality moves in, truly cutting through delusion and allowing the momentary emergence of wisdom mind.

Each time you rest in that pure mind, you are home. There is clear awareness that in that moment there is nothing else needed, nothing to do. Each thought or emotion becomes another opportunity to practice. Fear of painful experience drops as identification with, or ownership of, the experience shatters.

When you have rested in that space of pure mind often enough to stabilize the experience, you will cease to allow yourself to use the pretense of it as escape. This will not grow out of judgment which says 'shouldn't' but openhearted compassion which allows full human experience with equanimity. It is that place of perfect balance of wisdom and compassion, relative and ultimate.

Have I sufficiently answered your question? (Yes.) That is all.