Casa Journal – Part 2, March 2-2017

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Casa Journal – Part 2, March 2, 2017

2017 Casa group – missing 4.

I’m sitting at my table, a Chocolate Acai smoothie beside me; my writing fuel.

I was in the revision line yesterday morning, waiting on the side with the wheelchairs, when the Entity came out to do visible surgery. The Casa surgery line had just entered. He looked up at the 8 or so wheelchairs there, (my scooter is considered a wheelchair at the Casa) and said, “All wheelchairs to operation now”.  It’s Thursday afternoon now and I’m just getting out of bed. After the surgery I immediately felt shaky, and wondered if I could ride back safely. Some talk about maturity and responsibility. We must ask for the help we need; to pass out is an inconvenience to others. But we also need to truly know what we can do and do it. Aaron agreed yes I was stable enough to ride, so I picked up my herbs, signed the slip of where I will be for next week’s revision, and rode back, and straight to bed, and into a deep sleep, but also with dreams and awareness that the surgery continued; shoulders, back, legs, eyes. Seems like they were working everywhere. Then into oblivion for a few hours. Someone woke me with lunch. I ate and went right back to sleep. But about 3, I woke up, used the bathroom, then lay in bed with eyes closed, not asleep or awake, an in-between state, somewhat of an altered consciousness.

Aaron began to talk about a topic that has been ongoing all month, about which I’ve written only a little.  Several related topics really: co-creation; surrender; power; humility and pride. It wasn’t so much talk as, that in this altered state of consciousness, I was being shown things that we had talked about previously and of which I had intellectual understanding. This went much deeper.

In meditation, all month I have found myself sometimes resting in a cylinder of radiant light. I’ve also been watching even subtle held contractions (as opposed to those that arise and release, as does the heartbeat). When I rest in the Light, in Awareness, the contractions simply release, with nothing to hold them. There are no stories about a contraction when it arises, just awareness that it arose out of conditions and will pass; there is no “self” to it, just the outplay of conditions. I put Light and Awareness together here, as when resting in Awareness, the primary experience for me is intense and radiant Light or Luminosity.  Awareness is citta (consciousness) and Light is an object of that consciousness. It’s not the Unconditioned itself but is what we call a direct expression of the Unconditioned. It’s always there so Awareness can touch on it when Awareness itself is open and able to connect.

I don’t want to get too technical here; I’m simply differentiating between mundane consciousness and Pure Awareness. Mundane consciousness can only perceive mundane light and not Luminosity. Much more about this on the Deep Spring Center archives. Look up “citta”.

So this past month there has been much resting in Pure Awareness, and the sign of Luminosity has been strong. I experience it energetically and visually, just fully resting in Light, Light everywhere; and with the high energy of that Light. When I contract back into the small self, I lose the Light, and become aware of a “somebody” pushing and pulling, trying to do and fix and control. It may be subtle but still there. This is NOT our natural state, but is our (or at least my) habitual state!

The habit is so deep. On Tuesday I observed myself trying to figure out how to “do” this week, to have surgery if it was recommended and to also sit in Current. I would go to revision (surgery review) Wednesday morning, one week from the past surgery. I would sit in Current Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning. Then I would go through the line Thursday afternoon and if he sent me to surgery Friday morning, I’d still be okay for my flight Saturday night! Ha! Aaron asked me teasingly if I had it all figured out? Yes, actually! Then he asked me what I wished most to co-create. The deepest possible healing of this body, mind and spirit. Could I feel the contraction as I shaped a plan and tried to push it forward? Yes.

He suggested to just state my intention for healing and trust that this is also the Entities’ plan, and Divine will. How it happens is not yet known. Send forth the intention and let go. And, of course, at 8AM Wednesday he came out to the Main Hall and said, all wheelchairs to surgery. This is just one example.

Through these weeks, the planning mind/ controlling mind jumps in. But how do we co-create? How do we offer our intention and trust that the Universe WILL support it if it is for the highest good? This ability seems to be at the core of healing. It’s not even an “ability” but a “non-ability”, a profound trust and letting go that is only possible from Pure Awareness. Ability is a learned skill; this “knowing” is the fruit of being, innate to us. This is not to say there is no ego presenting, but it is seen for what it is, just arisen from conditions and empty. When this is deeply recognized, it no longer has power. It keeps returning and Love keeps saying to it (to contraction), “sit by my fire and have tea”. It does release as the heart invites opening; kindness asks the question; it doesn’t try to chase away the contraction or its causes. Eventually the energy winds down. It just consumes itself and goes.

So I have been watching these patterns for months (for decades!) but they came into special focus at the Casa this month as Aaron and other Entities spoke about held contraction as a source of physical distortion/ illness. For several months, they have been asking me to watch the spine and the ways subtle contraction is held there. When observed, there is deep breathing into the spine, contraction releases, and pain resolves. I don’t want to oversimplify; there are many causes of illness. This is just one.

I could write for pages on this and will not. Tomorrow is a Casa day. I just want to get the basics written.

Lying in bed yesterday afternoon, I was offered an image of many little tornadoes, each spinning along in their own path, battering into each other, each pushing their own agenda.  Embracing all this chaos, there was an all-encompassing cylinder of radiance. The tornadoes have free will, to continue to spin out in their own paths, or to rest in the core energy that enfolds them and allows them to co-create with each other and the Core. When they know themselves as part of each other and of the Core, they have the power (not their own power but the shared power, of co-creation for the highest good and harm to none. Unbalanced contraction ceases. Everything flows. As soon as one tornado contracts and wants its own way, it throws the whole system into temporary imbalance. But the system is greater than any part and rebalances. The renegade has a choice, to spin into its own orbit or to release self and rejoin the flow. There is no pressure on it to do so. It has free will. It loses nothing to join the flow; only gains in power and luminosity.

It moves into contraction when it opposes the highest good to separate and support only or primarily the self. This seems like an expression of fear. Aaron, is this the beginning of negative polarity?

Aaron: We cannot name an original cause. This separation of the self from the divine is an expression of negative polarity and enhances it. It takes the entity further from knowing its true self. That means it takes it further into isolation and fear.

BB: thank you. So this distortion, for lack of a better name, then further manifests as dis-ease in the body?

Aaron Yes. Please use the word distortion with care. As we have discussed, a distortion is not negative, just a “bend” in the flow.

BB: Thank you for that reminder.

And an essence of healing is in simply resting in the Light, the energy, the flow of creation and destruction in which nothing can ever truly be destroyed?

Aaron: and nothing created; it already is. If it did not exist, it could not become.

BB: So in this way, when you say that what we seek is already there, just to rest and allow it, this is your meaning?

Aaron: yes. And yet you do have free will, and are Creators. You co-create, from this space of divine energy and love, holding forth that which is for the highest good, always willing to release the fear based contractions that spin into distortion.

BB: But we can also create from fear?

Aaron: Yes, but not co-create with the Infinite Creator, which only creates from the Love vibration.

BB: But fear does co-create within itself, from a much lower vibration.

Aaron: yes, and this is what you are seeing in the world today. The Love vibration simply offers to hold the space for fear until it changes its polarity. But if you apply force, fear/contraction uses that energy to enhance negative polarity.

This is enough for tonight. Please rest, and reflect further on this tomorrow, not with the mind but with the heart.

March 3, 2017: Friday morning: I sat by the triangle outside the surgery room for an hour, had a double crystal bath, sat at the overlook, and am back in my room, It is an exquisite Brazil day, maybe 80 degrees but with a breeze, clear sky with small puffs of clouds. The foliage seems illuminated from within and without, radiating light.

A lot of information came through this morning and a suggestion I might write about it if I choose; it’s partly related to what I wrote above, but also moving in a different direction. It was all so clear during meditation and crystal bed. Now I can’t remember any of it!

Surrender: let’s start with that word and see where it takes me. To surrender is an act, doing. It involves a “somebody” surrendering, and someone, a more powerful being, perhaps, to which we surrender. This is the conventional view. What is really occuring?

From an ego’s perspective, we all want control, and feel that to surrender is to give away our power. This is our conditioning. As third density beings, we believe we do need to develop an ego to survive. It is part of the whole path of awakening we’ve agreed to enter, evolving from lower to higher consciousness. (or awakening to the already present awakened consciousness that always was!)

We teach children to have a strong sense of self. But here we’re already creating a duality, because that “self” is perceived to be separate from everything else. Then we wonder why we, as humans, feel alienated and alone.

In my teaching, unworthiness is a constant theme for students. Feelings of unworthiness come with human experiences of abuse and neglect. Not feeling loved by the parents, there is a cry, “how do I get back into God’s good graces?” But it also comes from people who had loving parents and stable homes, yet still feel unworthy. It seems really to be an existential issue. Perhaps we have not lost the God out there, but the Divine within the self.

Instead of considering feelings of unworthiness and alienation to be a problem, we can recognize it as a teacher. Assuming we never were unworthy (and of course, no one ever was unworthy; it’s just a concept) can these feelings of isolation, aloneness, estrangement from the Divine, lead us back into the direct experience of the Divine so we know we have never been separate?

We must be willing to ask, what does holding this idea of “wrongness’ protect me from?” Then we may begin to understand how attachment to such an idea was our way of allowing ourselves to hold on to negative thoughts, pulling ourselves further away from the Light, from our true being. What if we come to know that we ARE that Light we seek? It becomes a vicious circle. We’re afraid to know ourselves as that Light because of the fears that we are flawed, or will fail, so we set ourselves up to fail by enacting the negative emotions, or chastising ourselves that they have arisen, or just denying that we are essentially Light.

Increasingly, I find that all the manifestations of distortion of mind and body at least have some roots in this conundrum. I cannot be what I truly am because i don’t believe it’s what I am, and because i won’t let myself experience self as that divinity, I cannot transcend the pain of not being that. Which way out?

Here at the Casa that veil between planes is so thin. There is so much high energy, Light, and love. People do experience it, even those with little prior meditation experience.

March 11 now, back home. Today marks a week since I returned. Hard to believe. Days have flown past.

It’s much harder to rest in awareness within that cylinder of light from the heavier vibration of the non-Casa world. Sometimes there is the full experience, more often just memory of the experience.

Distortion is the word of the week.

Aaron: May 27, 1998 excerpt: Please note that when I use the word distortion, I do not use it in a negative sense. If you have a straight line upon the paper and then create waves in that line where it goes up above the line and dips below, and above and below, each dip up and down is a distortion (of the line). There’s nothing bad about these distortions. If you have water in the sea, and the force of tide and wind and current push the sea as waves against the shore, the force of the wave building up and crashing down upon the shore is a distortion. And (gravity) pulling it back into the sea is another distortion. There’s nothing bad about distortion.

Aaron has also used the illustration of a flashlight hitting water at night, the way the light beam seems to bend because of the density of the water. This is a distortion. It’s also an illusion. The light does not actually bend.  Such a seeming bend is an example of a distortion.

Sept. 3, 1995 Barbara’s private journals

Aaron: The Unconditioned is the intrinsic core of everything. Its Unconditioned core does not cease to exist when that phenomena enters the realm of conditioned. Both exist simultaneously. The Unconditioned does not create the conditioned, but invites the conditioned as expression of itself. The conditioned is simply voice or manifestation of the Unconditioned.

Barbara: How does the conditioned begin? …

Aaron: The entire conditioned realm is illusion arisen from a distortion of the Unconditioned.

Barbara: Then we’re at the same place. What gave rise to the first distortion?

Aaron: Here is where we must move into your understandings of Light. Think of that pure heart/mind, or Pure Awareness if you prefer. This is the primordially perfect light, and is the essence of everything that later is “arisen.” It is the deathless core. Within that light, there is nothing to arise or cease. When pure awareness first becomes aware of itself, it creates self and other. Perhaps this is the primary distortion. It is not useful to ask what served as catalyst for its arising, but at that moment where awareness looks in at itself, it sees duality for the first time. If the potential for that expression of illusory duality were not part of the nature of the non-dual, it could not be experienced. It is inaccurate to say that non-duality created duality. Rather, you see that duality and non-duality MUST reside together within non-duality. They are two different expressions of the Non-dual. Thus, the Unconditioned does not create duality nor serve as condition for its arising but allows the expression of that which was already intrinsic to its nature. Do you understand?

Barbara: Yes. This is the meaning of “everything that manifests is expression of Rigpa (or pure heart/mind).

Continuing today March 12.

When I am in that cylinder of light, there’s no possibility of distortion. In class Tuesday night we spoke of the three kayas, and the place where the sambhogakaya emerges from the Dharmakaya. We have to emerge to be part of this relative reality, one foot resting in Dharmakaya, yet active in the world. When we move too far out and lose touch with Dharmakaya, we easily lose our center.

I think of a pure spring. We can’t go into the spring to get the pure water or we pollute the spring. We take the water just as it emerges, where it is still very pure, not a half mile downstream where the cattle are wading in the stream. So I find that when I can rest in that place of emergence from the ever-perfect, I’m best able to carry that high vibration, uncontractedness, and Light into daily life. The further out I go, the more I carry “distortion.

The reverse is true too. When I‘m caught inn distortion and recognize that I’ve been swept downstream, so to speak, and in meditation, return to source, then the distortions release. It’s much easier for me with emotional and mental distortions because the physical body is heavier and releases the contractions slower. But looking at my leg and veins, for example, fear and distrust on their ability to heal keeps them distorted. When I KNOW the ever-perfect right there with the distortion, and relax, “surrender” the fear (going back to earlier in this journal for ‘surrender’) and rest just at the space of emergence from the ever perfect, I can see/ feel/ know both the ever-perfect and the distortions and relax back into the ever-perfect. Then the heavier physical body can begin to move in that direction.

I’ve been doing this all month, practicing with guidance from Aaron and the Casa Entities. There is such a strong habit to contract, without mindfulness. I find the easiest path is to remember to stay connected to Rigpa, to keep up that inquiry, “where is Rigpa in this moment?” In past years, this has been more cerebral. Now it is becoming more organic, really feeling it not thinking about it.

I’ve noticed that when I do the Feldenkrais movements from this organic resting in awareness, there is very little tension anywhere. When there is a Barbara who tries to do anything, even just to be present, then contraction returns.

 

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