Paradigm Shift 2: Mask vs Buddhahood

I have always felt a need to meditate but didn’t for many years because I couldn’t get myself to adhere to the practice with any consistency.  I felt that it was necessary but didn’t really know why.  I knew what others have said about calming the mind and all the rest but it was all belief and no knowing.

Then one day my wife and I discussed something or other and whatever it was brought up to me again the whole question of the mask and the realization, (again), that we can’t make the mask a part of our perfected being.  Even if our mask, our outer personality, comes to a correct conclusion about something that will forward us on our path it won’t be really pure if we are still functioning from that place.

Imagine for a moment that you are heading from Chicago to Denver and you are a plane.  Now imagine that you have your wheels removed and replaced with train wheels and you are set on railroad tracks.  You are on the right tracks to get from Chicago to Denver but you are taking the wrong transportation.  You are going to get the clickety clack of the tracks.  It is far noisier than it needs to be and there is no station at the end of your journey that is constructed in a fashion that will allow your plane in.  The problem is that you belong in the air.  You are going to have to take off from the tracks eventually or you can’t get there because you need to land at the air field. Those tracks, that environment, is your personality, your mask.  When you are making your journey, you can’t take counsel of your mask.  Your mask will always have its’ own survival as a major part of its’ agenda.  You must leave it behind.

How can you do that?

One issue I have faced on my path has been that when I try to see clearly it is usually still me, the mask, that is trying to see. Of course, it does that from within the mask and that means I am, by necessity, seeing through the clutter of that mask.  We need to let go of the demands of the desire body.  How often have I heard that in one way or another from one teacher or another in one organization or another.  But how do I do it? How do I stop desiring, being attached to things, results, relationships, etc.?

It will help to understand what is happening in order to see our way out of that mental channel.

We tend to be goal oriented in our lives.  We do things with the end in mind as though it is through our efforts that things come to us in a cause/effect relationship.  We treat life like a football game. Every action is taken in order to create some future result and we are always striving for that result to bring us some manifest objective which will bring us some reward.  It might be a real, monetary reward or a simple positive feeling.  Regardless, that is how we view the way things work when we are always focusing on the past and the future and we are always in a state of desire and non-fulfillment. We are thinking about what our present activity will bring and regretting our past actions that have not brought us to where we want to be.

One thing we can do about this is to strive to take each action as though we were dancing a ballet rather than playing football.  It takes concentration, of course.  In ballet, it is not the  ‘goal’ that matters.  What matters is the quality of the dance at that given moment.  When the moment is gone there is no focus on what was.  Before the moment comes there is no focus on the coming moment.  Ballet is focused on doing the dance in the now with as much grace, as much perfection as possible.  When you are doing anything, strive to focus on the action of the moment.  Of course, it is most likely an action that is meant to bring about some result but it will bring about that result whether you are concentrating on the result or the action of the moment.

The way to solve this is meditation. Meditation can help us to step back from the mask and talk to our own real selves. That is where the best counsel comes from.

No one's experience can be perfectly transferred to another

        This blog entry is meant to give you one reason to be careful about the doctrine that you receive.  I think it will help to clarify why I still accept doctrine but also why I take from multiple groups and teachers and am careful about what I accept and don't accept.

        Eckhart, Prophet, Suzuki, Blighton, Rama Krishna..., all that any of them can give you is THEIR experience.  Even if they are 100% right on (I’m careful and dubious about just who is 100% right,) they still have to bring any experience in to themselves through the distorted perception of both their own personality and the limits of the physical plane.  That will certainly wash out some of the colors of the experience, giving it new shapes that it didn't have when it was happening in the etheric, (heaven), and losing some of the clarity and definition of the original experience because it loses definition.  When someone has an experience on the etheric it is in an environment that is far more 'real' in a very true sense, than here on the physical.  In addition, it is not limited to the five senses which is why, when it is related, it is often in the imagery of archtypes.  Even when it isn't we still get only the person's own unconscious interpretation of the experience.  The experience itself is for that adept's soul, often on an unconscious level but we get only what the conscious recollection can give us and that recollection may, in a sense, be without as many pixels as the original experience.

        Then they have to relate it.  Each person is different and so and that means taking the distorted experience of a spiritual event and bringing it back out again through the same personality and paradigm which experienced it in the first place to be expressed through words which only adds to the distortion.  If you have ever read directions that were first written in Japanese and then translated into English by someone whose first language was Japanese rather than English you will get the idea.).

        Elizabeth Clare Prophet said that when she dictated she could only receive and thus communicate what the ascended masters were giving her if she had some understanding of it herself. That is a refreshing level of honesty from someone who was in a position of profound spiritual authority.  That automatically means that unless her understanding was spot on perfect (almost never the case for anyone here in the physical) the translation was not spot on perfect - i.e. it was, to one degree or another, incorrect.  Therefore, even the "Dictations" of the ascended masters contain some distortions of the original clarity.  (That isn’t to say that you can’t take them as the words of the Ascended Masters.  Just consider that you have a translator from one language to another.)

        So we have a minor distortion within the experiencer at the time of the experience, a distortion of the experience when put into words by the experiencer.  Another distortion by the listener when they hear only what they can accept.  These are the basic distortions.  There are other factors that can be included but are not important enough to mention.

        So be careful and parse what you are given by anyone.  This is always good advice.

Preoccupation with the past

               Tonight my wife was feeling irritated about how someone else had responded to a situation she was involved in.  I pointed out that nothing outside of ourselves can really disturb our inner harmony.  In fact, if you look at that statement it will be obvious that it is true.  If it is outside of ourselves, outside of our emotional body, then it cannot have an emotional impact.  It is when something invades our emotional body triggering something that is already there that the emotional body gets out of alignment.  I asked her what it was inside of her that was the cause of her lack of harmony and after some reflection she began to point out how the behavior of this other person reflected her behavior during the same day.  She followed with some examples.

               I didn’t think that she was getting to the core of the issue since what she was giving me as the catalyst for her irritation was only isolated events in her life that seemed separated from the situation we were discussing and further they could be explained away by someone just having a particularly ditzy day.  I suggested that the cause of her irritation may be deeper.  Upon reflection she saw that what was really irritating her was that this other person’s response to events in her life illustrated to my wife that her own children hadn’t learned the lessons as they grew up that she felt that she had learned on her own but not passed on.  The fact that she’d had to learn those lessons on her own but her children hadn’t learned them from her was a source of irritation.  The question still remained: “Why did that irritate her?”.

               Finally, she realized that she felt that she had failed all those years ago as a parent to teach those lessons and was unhappy to see that her children had fallen into traps that she might have prevented.  She was feeling responsible.  It was at this point that I said what I felt was really the issue.  I felt that she was dwelling on the drama, the events of her past life.

               What is it with us humans that we place so much emphasis on the quality of our children?  I suspect that what we want is to vindicate the imperfection of our own past failures, those events that we can no longer change in our own lives, by having our children do so much better.  We may feel that somehow their success means that we finally got it right ourselves.  What we forget is that our children come into this life with their own set of issues, their own karma, their own momentums to overcome.  They may, in fact, have chosen us to be their parents in order to deal with the very environment that is presented to them by that choice.  That isn’t to say we aren’t responsible for what we offer.  They aren’t subject to fatalism in their responses and we are still responsible for our own actions.  But if our children were going to be perfect they would most likely already have made their ascensions.

               Never-the-less, our preoccupation with our past, once we have examined it enough to learn the lessons that we need to learn, is generally ego supported.  That doesn’t mean that the experience will always be enjoyable for the ego.  In this case personal enjoyment wasn’t the incentive for the ego at all.  The ego wanted something to play with, to knead like Playdough, because the act of that kneading gave her ego a sense of self-substance, no matter how uncomfortable, and that is the reward that the ego received, the gratification.  The ego gained a sense of tangible existence from the experience.

               There will be no getting past an ego that we insist on feeding and, if we dwell on the past once that process has served its’ purpose, we’re feeding that ego.

               But I also suspect that our desire to live vicariously through our children is often fueled by our sense of failure in our own lives.  That isn’t to say that a personal sense of failure will automatically lead to a desire to live through them nor would the desire to do so always mean that we had been a failure.  But that there may be a relationship is to me pretty obvious.

        So, once again, the lesson here is to let go of the past.  You learn what you can from it in order to grow but you let your emotional attachment to your past go.

Paradigm Shift 1

        One of the big lies that the fallen ones have foisted off on lightbearers is the concept of guilt.  There are a lot of reasons why they have done this but, in my opinion, one of the biggest reasons is to convince us that in order to make our ascensions we need to purify and perfect the outer man.  There is a symbiotic relationship between these two concepts.  If we approach our path with the assumption that the outer man must meet the requirement of absolute perfection before we can be worthy of admittance to adeptship then it follows that we are constantly faced with our unworthiness which is all our fault.  Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.  We see all of our imperfections as levels of failure and we feel unworthy of the goal and responsible for our own unworthiness.

        That doesn't mean that I reject remorse and contrition for our errors.  We can't make much progress on the path if we don't recognize those places within ourselves where we fall short and, in response, strive to overcome our foilables.  In one very real sense we are responsible for our situation and the recognition of that fact can be freeing rather than burdensome.  When we realize that we made the choices that led to our extended sojourn here in the physical and cut us off from constant communion with God we can see as well that, in that same vein, we are able to make that return journey.  This is evident in the simple fact that we are still here.  If there was no possible way to return then there would be no reason for continued existence.

        With  all of that it is reasonable to ask the question, "If the goal is not dependent on our perfecting the outer man then how do we proceed and what are we to do about this outer man, this mask?" since it seems counter to all goodness to expect that imperfection not only can attain salvation but also that imperfection could stand to be in a perfect environment once achieved.  To put it another way: How much do you think your ego could stand of the presence of God?  To realize the answer of how to proceed we must change our whole concept of who we are.  When we ask that question - Who am I? - we usually come up with an answer that includes our thoughts, opinions, emotions, etc., all of the things that make up what we think of as our 'personality' - how we perceive ourselves 'to be' in our essential character.  But this is not the case.

        Who we are is behind all that.  Who we really are is a soul that finds expression on the physical both inhibited and facilitated by the outer personality.  So it is easy to mistake our outer self for the 'real' person.  This is especially true given that the outer personality would like nothing more than to be mistaken for the real being - and usually is.