Volume 2, Number 1, January 1994

What is meditation? It is the means to know yourself at deeper levels, which knowledge allows you to be in harmony with the universe. It is the path out of the illusion of separation in which your human form, thought and feelings bind you. Meditation is not an action but a way of being. It frees your awareness from erroneous personal identification and opens you to knowing your true self. It is the way to know your oneness with each other, with all living things and with God. It is your way home.

Aaron

Winter has been slow in coming. This December morning, the first pale light showed a welcome thin coating of snow on the ground. I rose from meditation, pulled on my coat and boots and, with two collies and a blanket, set out into the pre-dawn grayness. We walked through the woods and climbed the hill. While the dogs frolicked, I sat mesmerized and watched the earth turn red, then gold and finally silver as the sun came over the rim of the trees, touching pond, meadow and woods with brilliant light. Each branch and grass stem glistened, a jeweled wilderness. Around me I saw the tracks of deer, rabbits, even fox; the bits of motion in the meadow below me may have been signs of these creatures, but they didn't come close enough to distinguish their forms. For some time I sat transfixed, totally immersed in the unfolding of the down, filled with joy and wonder. Then my mind began to wander. "What time is it?" "What do I need to do today-wrap gifts, finish the baking, go to market, work on the newsletter …

I noted it all, "planning, planning, planning …" and tried to bring attention back to the scene before me, sun now up, sky a brilliant blue. But attention didn't want to stay. Looking at "planning" I saw anxiety. "Anxious, anxious … What is this worry? Who is anxious?" I could clearly see the loving desire to please, to take care of loved ones by giving to them what they have asked for, but also present was desire for affirmation from them. "Am I good enough; can I please them enough? Will I be loved in return?" Seeing all those tensions, I was able to remember the reality, "I am already loved; I have always been loved." The one who felt unloved, who was that? Who was that one striving to please, not out of love and desire to serve, but out of fear and desire for acceptance? Old patterns of thinking, old mind, old stories, they need not distort this moment, this dawn-lit meadow.

Beyond those thoughts of "unloved," a deeper wisdom saw the old mind fears of rejection and unworthiness and knew there is neither acceptance nor rejection, nor has there ever been. It's all tired stories from old mind. In that moment of clear sight, all the old fears of unacceptability and unworthiness dissolved into a present clarity where acceptance and rejection, worthy and unworthy, are meaningless dualities. Mind stilled. Thoughts ceased. Dawn re-lit the meadow.

Walking home later, I reflected on the questions I'm so often asked: What is my spiritual practice like now, after so many years? Do I still get caught in old mind? Do I still experience anger and other emotions? Yes, YES! Not as often, not as deeply ensnared by it all, nor for as long, but yes, I experience anger and fear; I get caught. We are all human. Emotions will not stop. But our perspective changes on that which arises in our experience. We allow more space around it.

When we're swimming on a sunny afternoon and suddenly scattered clouds blow in, blocking the sun, there is a choice. We can focus on the clouds, wishing them away, hating them for the chill they've brought to the day, and suffering all the while. We can pretend there are no clouds and continue to swim and shiver. Or we can notice there are both clouds and blue sky, notice aversion to the discomfort of the chill, and attachment to clear sky. This allows the skillful behavior of wrapping in a towel if one is cold; we don't deny the existence of the clouds. But it alleviates suffering as we cease grasping at blue sky. We open our hearts to our own discomfort. We don't need to fixate on the clouds. Both are true, clouds and blue sky. We neither deny nor grasp.

There are always clouds. There is always blue sky, sometimes invisible because the clouds are so dense. Where do we rest our gaze? Is fixation on the clouds just old habit? We deal skillfully with the clouds, donning sweater or raincoat. We rest in the clarity of pure awareness and perfect light, in ultimate reality which is always cloudless. Both are "real."

For me, this is where spiritual practice takes me, to this fine balance of relative and ultimate reality. There is no denial of anything, only constant remembering to distinguish the realities of this moment from old mind conditioning, remembering always to return home to the clarity and spaciousness of this moment.

I spoke earlier of the practice of asking "Who is angry?" or "From where did this thought arise?" A question about this practice came up in class this semester. Someone said: "I have been doing that [questioning]; it seems like the answer is 'I am feeling angry,' by which I mean the emotions I experience, the memories I have are all part of what I am, not all what I am, but they seem to be an important part that deserves attention. I think I am misunderstanding in that I interpret this suggestion that we ask 'Who is … ?'as if I should get rid of this relative self." To this, I replied:

In a recent meditation class we read the words "Quiet the mind" from the Dhammapada. Yes, we do allow the mind to quiet. This is necessary if we are to decrease our identification with our thoughts. But we don't force the mind to silence. We don't get rid of thought. That's just another activity. Instead we remind ourselves, over and over, to pay attention, to come back to this moment, to ask "What is this thought? Whose thought is it?" Stillness is not absence of arising but equanimity with the arising. We can use this constant arising as tool for deeper awareness. Each thought, emotion or sensation becomes a prod, "be aware, stay awake." The sky is always blue, no matter how many clouds float through it. Where do we rest our gaze? The mind is always quiet, no matter how full of thoughts or emotions. Where do we fix attention? Thoughts may even come faster-more opportunity to practice non-ownership of them. "What is this thought? From where did it arise? Old mind. It is not now …" With each recognition of that reality, thought dissolves and the great stillness of Pure Mind returns.

What if we get lost in the clouds of old mind? Can one get caught and feel the pain of that ensnarement without self-criticism because it has happened, and even be caught without aversion to being caught? Can there be "getting caught" without there being anybody who is getting caught? This is an important distinction. As soon as there is someone trying not to get caught, we're already caught! Who is this "somebody"-just more old mind! But we still must attend lovingly to this somebody who keeps solidifying into a self. Compassionate attention is what allows the letting go.

How often do we need to do this. A friend in Florida, Bill Altork, wrote the following in a recent letter:

Yes, I still get caught. Yes, I still have heavy emotions. Yes, I'm also weary of the old tunes, but can I just watch this boredom with them? No getting rid of anything! I rarely think I own them any more. The space that opens is a gateway to real freedom. I invite you to try it for yourselves. Get out the popcorn poppers …

Wishing you a joyous holiday season and a new year of health, happiness, growth and peace.

My greetings and love to you. I appreciate this opportunity to speak to so many of you and to choose among past tapes those which I feel would be most beneficial to share. It is a difficult choice because no two of you are identical in your paths and your needs. Yet certain questions and Issues do recur frequently. As is familiar to those of you who know me, my first choice of subject is not the myriad metaphysical questions of the curious seeker, but the basic issues that relate to living this incarnation with greater love, faith and wisdom. There Is nothing wrong with those metaphysical questions. I respect your curiosity and there are many fascinating areas to probe. But many of you move off on such intellectual sidetracks and neglect the main focus of the incarnation, or perhaps choose to escape that focus because it has been painful. You are here In human incarnation, not to deny the incarnation but to embrace it. How do you learn to love this imperfect body, and the emotions and thoughts which are often uncomfortable? How do you open the heart that has been closed? How do you move in the direction of deepening compassion for all that you are and hence to unconditional love and non-judgment of others? With apologies to those who are dissatisfied, these are the questions on which I choose to focus in these pages.

As you read my words, please remember that I am not omniscient. I offer my teaching to be truth only as I perceive it. If it rings true to you and helps you gain understanding, use it. If not, throw it away. I thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts. My love to each of you as we walk this path together.

The following pages are transcribed from channeling sessions. They have been edited by Aaron to fit them into the available four pages. Some additions have been made by Aaron for clarity in these adaptations from longer transcripts.

Aaron: I promised you Christmas stories tonight. I was a boy at the time of Jesus' birth, in incarnation at that time, as were many of you. I lived in that part of the world where He was born. When I was an adult, I came to know Him. I was not a wise man, or a teacher in that lifetime, but a simple shepherd. I loved Him with all my heart. I knew, at our first meeting, that was a being that I would follow anywhere, and yet I want to emphasize, I do not consider myself a Christian. I was not a Christian in that lifetime, nor was He. I do not label myself as a follower of ANY religion. I have been of all the world's great religions in one incarnation or another. My talk here is not about the church that evolved around this being, but about the man himself.

Regardless of the facts of His birth, once He took human incarnation, He was fully human. When He was cut, He bled; when He was emotionally hurt, there was pain in His heart. He experienced a veil of forgetting only in small part and not with the opacity most humans experience. He always retained a good deal of clarity about who He was, and why He was here. Why was He here? Quite simply, to teach peace and forgiveness in a world in which those terms had little meaning. It was a world in which there was an attempt at the morality of not stealing, or not killing, but above that moral stricture was the philosophy of an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Not "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," but "do unto others as they do unto you." People thought more in terms of balance-one wrong equals another wrong-not of forgiveness and of healing. It was into such a world that He took birth to teach that there can be healing and forgiveness. And it is ONLY with forgiveness that an end to karma is possible, only with forgiveness that the whole world can begin the process of healing.

Once incarnated He was human and knew human pain and fear. Earlier tonight I spoke about surrender of the small will of the ego self, about the suffering that grows out of attachment and fear, I said that we are each only a thread in the whole tapestry. The thread cannot know the finished design. The brain shakes in fear while the heart moves gently forward. I spoke of letting go of need to control, knowing that you, as human, cannot see the whole picture. This I learned from Him!

I ask you to look at His death, this man who had the power to heal by His touch. Certainly, he did not need to die hanging on a cross. He had the power to choose abundance, power and glory for Himself, but it was clear to Him that was not why He was here. One could well argue that, had He become a king, He could have spread His message far and wide. It is easy for one who is not faced with pain to speak of forgiveness. Far harder for one who is nailed to a cross to say "Forgive them." What would have been the impact of such teachings of forgiveness had He aspired to and attained that worldly glory? Nor did He NOT seek that. He did not AVOID acclaim nor seek it. His focus was not on being powerful nor in being humble but simply on teaching love. Just that. And He trusted His life, that it would lead Him where it needed to. Certainly, He had preferences. Before His death He prayed, "Take this from me, it is too much to bear. But if it be Thy will, I will carry it." He expressed a preference and then said "Thy will be done."

I want to add a personal story here. Please understand that I was a simple shepherd, not a known disciple of His, just a simple man who loved Him. When His travels brought Him near to where I lived, I sought out His presence for a few blessed days. There was a year where the one who had been my wife died. I felt deep grief, for I loved her very much. Hearing that He was nearby, I left my younger children with relatives and, with my eldest son, Mark, walked to where He was. I had an accident upon the way. Walking on a rocky slope, I slipped and my leg was broken. People came to help. They bound the leg, and as I was not far from where He was encamped, they carried me to Him.

This was a man who could perform miracles, who could heal the blind, and raise the paralyzed up on their legs. He preferred NOT to perform such miracles, because He did not want to be worshipped as a god, but known as a man. He understood that it was not my leg that most needed healing, but my heart, which was broken from my loss. What would I do without my beloved companion? I had small children, how would I raise them alone? I knew that He could do miracles, and I beseeched Him "Heal my leg. I must go home to my children, to my sheep." He simply looked at me and said "Mark can tend the sheep." And it was true that the children were well cared for by loving relatives. It was my fear that was pulling me home, and He understood that. It was my fear that if I stayed there with Him, my heart would break, because, being in His presence, I allowed myself the feeling of grief that I had been suppressing.

It took six weeks for my leg to heal. For the first two weeks, I was very angry with Him. I was helpless. I could not walk, only be carried. He saw that I was well tended, but I pushed Him aside. Why would He not heal my leg? I knew He could do this. Slowly, my heart began to soften, and I understood the real reason I was there was not for the leg, but for the heart. His love helped me to let go of her, to trust my life. By the time my leg was healed, I was ready to go back into the hills to my family and my sheep with a confidence and faith that everything would be just as it needed to be. As it was. That is when I learned lesson: "Thy will be done."

My anger did not threaten Him. Not that He found my feelings to be trivial. Simply, He was not afraid of my anger. If I would not speak to Him because He wouldn't heal my leg, that was fine, He knew what I needed. I did not know. Had He been any other lesser being, who could have performed such miracles, perhaps He would have healed my leg, and I would have rushed back to the hills filled with the same fear and anguish with which I had left them. I am only one thread in the tapestry. May I make this thread as beautiful as possible. Thy will be done. Can we all learn these lessons from His life. The love and generosity of His life and His death shine brilliantly on all our lives. Even unto death, I trust your plan. "Lift this from me, but if it be Thy will, I will carry it." I ask of you, as you celebrate His birth, think about that aspect of His message, and ask yourself, "How can I live my own life with deeper love and faith?" That is all.

Aaron: For the most part, your close friends are beings you have known many, many times before. There's a deep opening of the heart. The emotional, mental and spiritual bodies are fully blended. There is a sense, "Through many lifetimes I have come to trust this being's energy so completely that I have absolutely no need to build any walls." It is a deep joy to find those people. Sometimes the blending is in all four bodies, sometimes on two or three, rarely in only one. Because the trust has already been established, you don't move to that defendedness which is usual habit for the human. Assuming that both beings remain trustworthy in this incarnation, you stay open to one another. Even if one of those beings is somewhat irresponsible and untrustworthy in some situations in its life, for the most part it remains trustworthy to this friend because that is such an old habit. Untrustworthiness is a kind of defense; when the energy fields are this open, no defense is needed. The practice of such friendship is an invaluable help in that the open heart reminds you of who you truly are.

This kind of friendship is not always possible with the one who is your life partner. It is very joyful when it is, but many of you are working out heavy karmic situations with your immediate partners. You may find friendship and a closeness to that partner, but there may be much more defendedness than you experience with certain friends. This confuses many of you who come to me and say, "Shouldn't I be that totally open with this one who is my partner or spouse?" It would be lovely, but perhaps what you are practicing makes difficult such total openness with that person. Perhaps, eventually, you will move into that level of friendship after the work is done. Perhaps not.

Those people who are your closest friends seem to be those who offer support, nourishment and encouragement to you, rather than the catalyst to deepen your learning. Value these deepest friends. Love them. With the partner there is more likely to be catalyst for learning. Sometimes those catalysts are very painful so that you ask, "Why am I with this partner?" Well, if there's not some balance, if there's only pain and no friendship, then I would reecho that question, "Why are you with that partner?" But often those who are the deepest friends really don't offer any catalyst. There's no adhering karma between you. There's nothing to be resolved. They are just a resting place, a mirror in which you may see your own soul. Yes, there is plenty of catalyst in the outside world; perhaps you don't need it in your home. But perhaps you do need that constant push to learn. Otherwise, why are you in that relationship? …

A friend can be many things. Sometimes a friend does act as catalyst as well and there is a boundary that comes up when that catalyst pushes against you. That's another aspect of friendship. You are not as open to one another, but you serve one another. So I will not say a friend is only one with whom boundary is dissolved, nor only the one who offers catalyst for learning, but a friend is one who serves you, whether by nurturing or as catalyst, or as both. And a friend offers you the joy of being able to serve. That is all.

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

The ideal path combines the horizontal work of dissolving the fragmentation and the vertical work of moving into true understanding of emptiness of self. Most of you have related to the world from a center of "me." That is the root of so much of your suffering. You have each experienced the difference when you come out of that "me" and move with a truly compassionate heart that experiences its connections with the earth itself and all that is. How do we find that true self within us, not the small ego self, but the Buddha or Christ consciousness, Pure Awareness, the pure mind, that space where all is connected. It is a space all beings experience at times, but you are not taught to recognize the experience. Once you identify that space, stabilize your recognition and become increasingly able to live from within it, the reality of your ultimate, true being consistently penetrates the illusion of "me," so that when you see yourself grasping and afraid you know that is relative reality. The experience of true self enters and say's "There's nobody here to be afraid; there is nothing to fear. It's just old mind doing its thing." Then you begin to know your fear as illusion.

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

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

Let us look at unworthiness in this way. I don't think there is anyone in this room who has not felt unworthy. We don't need to look for original cause; indeed, we can not find original cause. It is not useful to search for it. We simply accept that somewhere along the way, in this and certainly in prior lifetimes, there was a reaction. Somebody frowned, yelled, or even struck at you, or there was a sense of feeling excluded from a group. Whatever it may have been, the mind leaped to the idea: "I am unworthy. I am inadequate to this situation in some way." Probably there was fear and strong emotion. That notion of inadequacy was part of the protective device shielding from the intensity of the emotion. Attention was not paid to that first scratch. It became like the raindrops, eventually creating the Grand Canyon.

Now you come into a situation of feeling excluded in a group and your reaction is that old mind experience of "I am unworthy." On the horizontal level we look, through our meditation, at the experience of feeling unworthy because in order to work with it you must know what you are feeling. You begin to see the ownership of that feeling, "My unworthiness is me," and that it is the perspective of the ego-self. Then you might ask yourself what is really happening in this moment? Who is unworthy? Is unworthiness what's happening? No. People are just talking together; they don't know me. Or, perhaps they are excluding me. That doesn't mean I'm unworthy. The thought, "unworthy," is old mind conditioning. It never was real. Nor is worthiness real. There is no worthiness or unworthiness. There is only being; in this moment, just being.

When we look thus with bare perception, freeing ourselves from mind's old patterns, we see that there is no worthiness or unworthiness in this moment. And there truly is nobody, no self, to feel worthy or unworthy. There is just this mind stream that has gotten caught in the pattern of feeling unworthy. It's just a pattern repeated over and over. Thus, you penetrate that illusion of worthiness/unworthiness, of self. At that moment you find yourself able to truly rest in the pure mind awareness of connection, totally free of fear. Pure mind awareness may only last an instant, but it cuts through all the illusion of worthy/unworthy, good/bad, acceptance/rejection. It cuts through the illusion of "me." Both the horizontal work and the vertical work are necessary. One finds healing through the many practices that we introduce here. One also cuts through this fog of illusion and sees that there was never anybody that needed to heal in the first place.

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

In terms of your human life you must always do everything in your power to attend to suffering. That is the relative reality. The ultimate reality is to approach that suffering without attachment, to know that you can not fix another, or the world, that you don't understand what is really happening. But you still must work with as much wisdom, skill and love as you can in the world. You do not disassociate yourself from the world. As you work, you stabilize a sense of equanimity and letting go, knowing that ultimately it will work itself out as it needs to. Attending to one's own suffering, there is the relative side that chooses to take care of itself, to protect itself. And the ultimate understanding that there is never anything separate from the self, so there is nothing from which you need to defend yourself.

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

(It has been noted by the group that this is World AIDS Awareness Day. We honor this day with a special meditation. The group offers names of friends and loved ones they would especially like remembered or offered light.)

Aaron: I am Aaron. I doubt if there is any of you who have not known someone whose life has been deeply touched by this illness, either one who has become sick, him/herself, or one who is family or friend to such a one.

AIDS knows no boundaries of nationality, poverty or wealth, race or religion. It has brought those of you with deeper sensitivity and awareness together throughout the world as little else has, because those of you with a deepened sensitivity cannot say, "It's their suffering." You understand that it's all of our suffering.

The suffering comes not only from the physical illness of the being who is HIV positive or who dies of AIDS, but from the misunderstandings, the ways beings have been tormented, sometimes by their loved ones, for having developed this condition. They've become this century's "untouchables." Those of you who have transcended that sense of untouchability have truly learned to open your hearts and understand, "This is not somebody else's situation, this belongs to all of us. It is all of our pain and all of our healing."

May all beings who have learned to open their hearts to their brothers and their sisters with AIDS learn to keep their hearts open to all suffering … (Long pause) …

To all those who have died of AIDS, may we who still walk the Earth thank you for the gift of deepening our awareness and sensitivity and opening our hearts … (Long pause) …

Worldwide, may our energy be used in such a way that a cure may be found, that healing may be found … (Pause) … May we retain the sensitivity we have developed, no longer needing the catalyst of the disease to urge us to that sensitivity … (Long pause) …

In your ways, I would ask you each to send whatever loving energy and support you can to those beings whose names were mentioned and to all beings everywhere in the world who are either suffering from AIDS or have a loved one who is so suffering. May the strength of our connected hearts help each being find the healing he or she seeks … (Long pause) …

May all beings find the healing for which they took birth, and in so doing, may they continue also to lead loved ones into deeper healing … (Bell)