DSC Books: The Path of Natural Light - Part One

Wednesday, December 1, 1993

(We begin by reading an introduction to intimacy in relationship and to the concepts of blending energy and merging energy in preparation for Aaron’s talk. Barbara further clarifies the distinction between blending and merging. A brief sharing of experiences of merging follows with additional questions for Aaron to consider.)

(Barbara reads from transcript 93/12/01P channeled that morning.)

F: When I smile I feel like boundaries dissolve and separation largely dissolves. When I smile down at my body, that dissolves my “self” best.

J: Sometimes with the Sufi dancing, especially when the other person is able to also let the walls down and really look back into your eyes, I experience that sense of blending with their energy, of losing the boundaries of the body.

K: What J said raised a question for me, which is, how is this blending affected by one person’s being open and the other not so open? Is the open person’s energy able to blend even though the other person is feeling fear?

Barbara: Aaron says he’ll talk more about it but, if you can picture this, the person who is less open maintains their boundary but their energy is moving out a little bit beyond the edges, and that little bit moves all through and infiltrates the person that’s open. The open person’s energy cannot push through the boundaries the closed person is maintaining. It’s the other person’s choice whether they want to let go of their boundaries or not. But if one person has let go of the boundaries, it’s an invitation to the other to do so, which is why smiling works and why looking in people’s eyes works … because that’s a very clear statement, “I’m letting go of my boundaries.”

K: I’m aware of two movements when I’m conscious of relating to another. There is a part of me that yearns to let all the boundaries go and blend and be totally open. And there is a part of me that will only go so far and then feels fear of losing myself at some deep level, of total dissolution, of melting into I don’t know what, and losing my intactness.

Barbara: Aaron is asking, does it work the other way, too, when there’s fear of not losing one’s boundaries? Are there times when, instead of being afraid of losing our boundaries, we want to get rid of our boundaries to escape the sense of isolation and separateness, so that blending becomes a kind of “grasping at,” rather than “allowing” and “letting-go-into.” Can you think of times when it’s one way for you and times when it’s the other way?

R: I have an additional lesson with all this in terms of never having known my boundaries and always having been open to everyone without discrimination and learning to … I’m having difficulty finding the words. I’m learning about boundaries and I need to recognize my boundaries, and yet blend within that new understanding.

Aaron: I am Aaron. I want to speak very briefly about the question that’s just been raised about one who has not established boundaries. Your boundaries are both painful confinement and useful tool. You have moved into an incarnation where you’re besieged by constant catalyst. Yes, you are learning to stay open, but there’s a difference between learning to stay open, which becomes an act of free will choice, and never having learned how to close oneself in the first place, which leaves you at the mercy of all that assaults at you.

This learning of boundaries is usually something that comes to the infant as it first begins to distinguish itself from its mother. Very occasionally, for one reason or another, such boundaries are not established. For the individual who has not firmly established its boundaries, that is a necessary first step: not to move into fear and a withdrawal into a boundary because of fear, but learning to identify this illusion that we call self, learning to feel the difference between relating to the world from that place of self known as illusion or a place of none-self. That none-self is a nihilistic denial of one’s own energy born from fear of one’s own energy. It’s only when you are comfortable with “self” that you can begin to experience interbeing in its truest meaning, begin to fully work with the catalysts of the incarnation and learn what you came to learn.

I’m going to keep this bit of it brief. I want to hear what other questions there may be before I go into the longer talk about this. We will touch again on this last question if it’s useful. That is all.

F: To be able to discern between merging and lack of clear identity of small self is a confusing issue for me. Am I giving to others out of true love or insecurity?

Barbara: I’m paraphrasing Aaron who is raising the point he’s made many times that we have multiple motivations for what we do. Aaron is saying that we’ve talked very, very often here about the ways we use our emotional energy-giving to other people from a place of generosity or to solidify ourselves, using it in different ways. What he wants to do tonight is give us a clearer picture from his perspective of what’s happening with our energy fields. He has the sense that we will be able to begin to really see the ways we use our energy fields as gift, as protection, as weapon and that, in any one movement-of giving or not giving-we have multiple motivations. So we’re using our energy field in all of those ways, sometimes at the same time. But it’s part of deepening mindfulness, of moving to such a deep awareness that we really can feel what happens to our energy field.

If somebody came into this room now raging, angry, he wouldn’t have to say anything. He’d get to the door and stand there in the doorway. Is there anyone in the room who doesn’t think they’d feel his rage? If somebody came into the room now just really filled with love, we probably would all feel that, too.

We are already experiencing this. We’re often not aware of it. So what Aaron is hoping to do tonight is to bring us to deeper awareness of the four aspects of our energy field and the ways we use them. He’s saying right now that this is by no means an in-depth survey of it; he’s just touching the surface. It does relate, though, to the light body work we’ve been doing recently.

(Barbara repeats the demonstration of light body purity and illusionary wrinkles for those who are newcomers tonight. She wrinkles a pure white, unwrinkled piece of paper, points out that within the wrinkled sheet, the perfect unwrinkled sheet still exists.)

What Aaron wants to get into tonight is talking about the ways we project our energy is very differently when we think we’re the wrinkle than when we think we’re the perfect sheet of paper. The sheet of paper that’s perfectly smooth projects its energy in a very loving, open way. The wrinkle projects its energy to control. It’s wrapped up in its “wrinkledness” instead of being able to identify with its perfection.

We’re both. We all have those wrinkles. But that’s not who we are. When we project our energy maintaining boundaries, we’re using our energy as a weapon projected to others and we’re losing track of our perfection. Aaron?

Aaron is suggesting enough paraphrasing. It’s time for him to get into this and speak for himself!

A: I think you were touching upon this earlier. I’m interested in the blending/merging of myself with my guides. I notice times when there seems to be merging and then snapping back to self-awareness. Back and forth, back and forth. Also, I’m interested in how the merging process works with the team of spirit guides that work with you (with Barbara) with acupuncture and acupressure and how the ability to merge or not merge affects that healing.

Aaron’s talk

I am Aaron. Somewhat belated greetings and love to all of you. This is by no means going to be the definitive, in-depth talk about energy. We’ll touch on bits and pieces of it, putting it together like a jigsaw puzzle week after week, as we have been doing. This is simply one piece of the puzzle, but an important one.

As always, my prime interest here is not simply a metaphysical one. What I am interested in is helping you to understand how you may live your lives with more love, with more skill and more wisdom … how you may allow your energy to blend with others where appropriate without moving into a, let’s call it an unwholesome, co-dependent blending.

Let me begin by saying that, on the light body plane, you are totally blended and you always have been. It’s like that sheet paper: the perfect sheet of paper is there. It also has wrinkles. The total blending of your energy is there as is the defendedness that asks you to withdraw and put up boundaries.

I am not speaking here of one who has never learned to put up those boundaries. This is a different issue and one that we can touch on again during the question period. Most of you have learned to build those boundaries too well and you’re looking for ways to dissolve the boundaries.

So, the first step is to realize the boundaries are illusion. And yet, within the physical plane manifestation, within this relative reality, the boundaries are real.

As I suggested in this handout, we need to address the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy fields as four related but different areas of energy wherein you create different kinds of boundaries and for different reasons. Let’s simply go through them one at a time.

The spiritual energy field. As J put it, when you look into somebody’s eyes, one soul meets another. You’re not talking, you’re not touching. Those of you who have done this Sufi dance with us, where we look into one another’s eyes, have deeply experienced that letting go of boundaries. There is no aspect of escape there, no desire to flee your isolation by grasping at merging with another. Rather, it’s the allowing of that natural merging so that in physical incarnation you are truly reflecting the natural blend of the light bodies.

For the other three, some of you find one easier than another. Some of you who maintain a defendedness for yourself in your sexuality and in your openness of feelings, can meld your minds with another, move into a very deep mental discussion of philosophy, of values. It’s still separated from emotions. It’s not a passionate discussion but a collected, calm discussion. But there is tremendous joy in merging your mind with another in this way. Most of you have probably known that merging at some time or another.

You can merge or even begin to blend on the emotional level, truly opening your heart to another, pouring out your joy and your grief. You start to feel deep compassion and love, and the compassion that you feel for the other comes also to you. You lose your sense of separateness, feel yourself deeply attuned to the other’s heart. Again, most of you have experienced this at least occasionally.

Your sexuality, when it is only sexual, can never be more than a merging. Your energy fields come together and they do overlap, but you each maintain your boundaries, even through the pulling together of that sex act. Some of you find that you cannot move freely into a sexual relationship with somebody for whom there’s much love. It seems contrary to you. When there is deep love it’s hard to open yourself completely sexually.

As I see this kind of situation, the deep love has allowed that blending of emotional energy. There’s part of you that is still wanting to maintain a boundary for safety, so there’s got to be holding back somewhere. It expresses itself within your sexuality. It may be used the opposite way, too. There may be a complete blending through the physical bodies. Moving out of that sexual union, you may feel your heart closed to the other being with a great pang of pain, wondering “What’s wrong? I really thought I loved this person and suddenly I realize I’m looking at her or him beside me and judging them.” It is your pulling back into boundaries, into defendedness.

Sometimes just understanding what you are doing helps you to see the separation that’s happening in a different perspective, to be able to say, “I’m simply withdrawing out of need to stay safe. It’s just fear.” Being able to label it as fear can help to reopen the heart and reforge the connection.

I want to move back a step. No two of you are alike. You each move into these processes in your own unique way. All of you came into incarnation originally as being that which I call “spark of God,” spark of the Eternal. There was that moment for each of you where you moved from what seemed to be perfect union, no boundaries, into self-awareness and its accompanying sense of duality. Many of you have been searching since that first moment of self-awareness for some way to return to that purest blending of energy and end of the sense of separation and isolation. As long as you are grasping at that, it becomes impossible because there’s someBODY trying to escape this and move into that.

When you begin to allow, to intend connection and allow the manifestation of that connection which is already true on the light plane to move through the physical, emotional and mental bodies, you have a very different experience. It’s the experience of coming to know the perfect smooth sheet of paper, coming to that view of ultimate reality where you really begin to be able to live your interconnection.

That’s where you all are headed. That is not where you are. Let’s come back to where you are and the distorted ways in which you use your energy.

What I’d like you each to do now is to think of some time-today, if possible, or in the past few days-when somebody said something to you that felt a bit threatening. It may not have been anything really negative. Somebody perhaps just said, “Your shoe is untied,” but there was that voice that heard your mother or father saying, “Look at you, you’re so sloppy, your shoe is untied.” You reverted to old mind and you became defended. Or perhaps somebody said, “I don’t like what you just said,” or “We’re late, please hurry.” Something that made you pull into yourself.

What I want you to do is think about that experience. Can you see the way that that perceived threat brought you into a sense of self and other, that you might be hurt in some way or your needs not met, and the defenses came up, even if momentarily? Perhaps you were able to work very skillfully with them and lower them again, reopen your energy. Just observe that moment of perceived threat.

We speak about equanimity with emotion. This does not mean not feeling emotion, but that there may be no defendedness arising around it. Not owning the emotion. Some of you find that you can be undefended on the mental level and on the spirit level. You can make that eye contact and really allow yourself to blend with another’s spirit energy. You can share thoughts. But as soon as it becomes more personal, touching the emotional or physical body’s energy, the walls go up. Other of you, fewer perhaps, may find it works the opposite way. For most people though, it is easier to share mental and spiritual energy. It’s less personal and, therefore, less likely to threaten, so there’s less defendedness about it.

In order to be ready to move beyond this third density incarnative experience and to move into fourth density, there needs to be, not the cessation of arising of emotion or defendedness, but a willingness to treat even that defendedness of energy as just something else that’s happening. “Here I am defending myself, pulling back and creating boundaries. Can I let go?” Again and again and again, seeing how you move into that defendedness and letting go.

The more you practice with this, the less there is the sense of self and other; the more your heart opens in compassion to all of you; the more openheartedly you begin to relate to your own distortions of the use of energy. Some of these distortions are very potent. Your energy is a powerful weapon. If somebody’s energy field is open to you and, out of a sense of righteous anger or desire to defend or for whatever reasons, you take advantage of their open energy to push, stab at them, in a sense, that’s a very powerful weapon.

For example, if somebody comes up to you very open and says, “I’m sorry for what happened. I made a mistake,” they’re really opening their energy to your pain. Sometimes there may be inclination to use that openness as a way to provoke guilt in them or to manipulate and control them. These are all ways of maintaining safety of this that we’ve come to call “self.”

There’s nothing wrong, my dear ones, with wanting to stay safe. The problem is that you get so lost in the illusion that you’re unsafe that you seek to control and defend, to manipulate, all the time. It becomes a habit. The more you habituate yourself that way, the more solid the walls seem. And then you cry out, “Why am I so alone? Why do I feel so separate? Why are they pushing me away?” when you are creating your own separation.

We’ve talked about this in many ways: the different kinds of unwholesome patterns that you get into as humans, how you may bring awareness to those patterns. In order to start to bring awareness to the patterns, it’s very useful to look at what resistance there is, what desire to hold onto the patterns. One of the easiest ways I know to perceive this is to begin to bring attention … (Tape ended.)(to the energy fields and arising of defendedness …)

(Tape begins.) … because it is something with which you are so familiar. If you pay attention, you truly can start to see when you close off. You can begin to ask yourself, “Do I need to defend myself right now?” Maybe there’s a raving maniac out there, screaming at you, cursing at you, and you really don’t want to blend your energy with them. There is a point where it’s skillful to maintain your boundaries. When you choose to maintain your boundaries, know that you are doing so and why.

Some of you may see that by maintaining your boundary against this furious person, you are not letting yourself be used as a doormat by that person and that’s skillful. But you may also see that you’re simultaneously shutting them out of your heart, judging them, condemning them as another way of trying to stay safe … at which point you may find that you can allow some of the boundaries to dissolve in some of the bodies. You may allow the spirit energy to merge, for example, to find what we call that of God within them.

You don’t have to allow the emotional bodies to blend or even to merge, nor the physical bodies to touch in any way. Do you need also to shut off at the mental and spirit level? If you are able to remain open, seeking for that of the divine within the other, allowing a blending on that level, can you then hear the other’s pain better? Allow then a merging of the mental bodies? Might that open your heart to the other so that, instead of feeling threatened by his or her emotionality and needing to create a self-other duality to defend, you begin to hear their pain and your pain as one pain?

What I want you to see is that you can control this at any level, or allow it. You don’t have to shut off all four. What are you shutting off and why? When do you choose to re-allow that merging? The place to start is with noticing, “Shutting down: creating boundaries.” Just that. A very simple label: “boundaries.” See if you can notice this over and over and over through the coming week: “What makes me set up these boundaries? What happens after I’ve set them up, if I try to allow the lowering of them, one at a time?”

If you and your partner have just had a fight, the first lowering of the boundary may be simply taking that person’s hand, allowing a re-merging of physical energy. You’re still defended on the emotional level. Can you then look in their eyes and start to allow, not only the physical merging, but the souls to begin to come together?

Remember that this illusion of separation is not a curse of the incarnative experience, but a gift of the incarnative experience. It’s very different when seen in that way. You are not incarnate to overpower the illusion of separation and get rid of it but to begin to transcend it by allowing the truth of your connectedness to reassert itself, not through force but through very gentle loving and allowing of that connection.

Will you look at this in the coming week? I would very much like to hear from you as to what insights you had.

I also want to say here before I close that every year I share some Christmas stories. Last year we saved them for the last meeting before Christmas and had a snow storm on that day. There were only six or seven of you who were able to be here. And there was other commotion happening as well-a furnace repairman, I believe, coming in and out. We’ll plan on sharing them next week and not the following week, hoping for at least one evening of clear weather. Barbara will have reprints of last year’s Christmas stories available for you next week as well.

I would welcome your questions after the break about what I’ve just spoken of or any other questions. As you have your tea and talk to one another, keep one level of awareness alert to the opening and closing of energy. Somebody jostles your arm a bit. Does your energy close? What allows it to reopen? If you overhear somebody saying something you don’t like, how does that affect your energy? When you smile at another, how does that affect your energy and their energy? Bring as much awareness to this as you can, even now while you have your break. That is all.

I am telling Barbara that, perhaps not next week, but the week after I do want to take this one step further and tie it into the light body work that we’ve been doing. That is all.

Questions and Answers

Q: I’m wondering about one’s ability to move within one’s own boundaries regardless of others’ boundaries.

Barbara: Aaron is asking, to move within one’s own boundaries or to move outside of one’s own boundaries?

Q: Outside.

Barbara: To move outside of your own boundaries regardless of others’ boundaries? (Yes.)

Barbara: (She begins by drawing a picture of energy fields of two beings interacting and explaining the ways the energy fields are affected.) We are always free to move anywhere but within that space which violates the boundaries another has set. We may never intrude upon another’s boundaries without karmic consequences.

Q: What if another is suffering but doesn’t want to let us in?

Barbara: That’s their choice, BUT you need to keep offering. This ties in with Aaron’s statement that not to act also has karmic repercussions. We’re responsible both for our intrusions and our inaction. Aaron will talk.

Aaron: I am Aaron. That space within another’s boundaries is perhaps only one one-hundredth of one percent of all the possible space, but it’s the space to which you’re most attracted. There’s something in you that, as soon as you see a wall up, you want to go behind it. When you try to force your way behind it, you feel rejected. When you can see the other person’s defendedness and it doesn’t create a threat to you-when it doesn’t say “rejection” and thereby pull you back into your boundaries, but simply says, “This person is defended; this person is feeling fear,” and your heart stays open to that person’s pain-it allows your energy to be available but not forcing. The other person, feeling this gift of energy being offered to it, but not feeling threatened by “You’ve got to open!” is often able to open.

This is how you may use your energy as a weapon, or choose not to when you become aware of how painful it may be to the other person to feel that thrust from you. You may not violate another person’s free will decision to maintain their own boundaries. You may offer an invitation, a sense of joy at allowing that inter-connectedness. When the invitation is issued with joy and love, the one who has established boundaries sees it as an invitation to joy and love. When it’s issued with a sense of fear, “I’m being rejected; I must force my way in and be accepted,” or “I must fix this person; his/her pain is too much to bear …” the other person receives it that way and it makes them withdraw further.

We speak about harmlessness. Harmfulness does not only mean pushing your fist or your angry voice into another’s energy field, but pushing your fear of rejection or your discomfort with their pain into another’s energy field. That is also a violation of them.

You begin to refine your understanding of this, to see how every action provokes a reaction and to have deeper reason to look at this sense of rejection you’re feeling, to ask yourself, “Am I really being rejected? What’s really happening here? Am I rejected and need to prove myself by pushing my way in, or is it just this person’s fear? Can I embrace their fear without forcing myself on them?”

Similarly, seeing the desire to fix, not just to offer aid but real, intense need to fix, you may ask, whose pain is it that I so fear? Is his/her pain or fear which I want to fix an uncomfortable mirror of my own pain and fear? You find you do not need to intrude upon their space.

This asking, “Am I really rejected? What is this rejection? Who is being rejected?” works in two ways: you begin to understand that you’re not rejected, that you’ve never been rejected, and that helps you to keep your own boundaries down. It also allows you to move past this duality of rejected/accepted. The entire notion of rejection is seen as a product of old mind and it falls away.

One of you is asking, is it ever appropriate to put up boundaries? This leads me into the whole question of co-dependence. I would like to save that either for the meeting in two weeks-I said that next week we will largely tell Christmas stories and also talk about your experiences with this closer watching of the opening and closing of the different energy fields. In January, I would like to focus on more specific questions into which this foundation I’ve laid tonight may lead us … the ways you use your sexuality, the co-dependent patterns you get into, and how these work with the energy field, how you may become more attuned to the energy field as a tool to understanding the motivations for moving into co-dependent relationships or moving into unhealthy sexuality-by which term I mean sexuality that is a product of fear and not of loving connection.

Does that answer your question? That is all.

(A question that was put aside last week from last week: Words on the subject of friendship would be greatly appreciated.)

Aaron: I am Aaron. I want to talk about two aspects of friendship here. The search for friendship comes from two places within you: that which is motivated to reach out, to touch and to be touched, to blend energy because it’s such a joyful experience, and the part of you that is trying to escape your aloneness and grasping at being understood, being touched-by which I do not necessarily mean physical touching.

For the most part, your friends are beings you have known many, many times before. I don’t mean acquaintances here, I mean those people that you meet and, at first meeting, it feels like you’ve always known one another. There’s a deep opening of the heart. You need not even recognize that there’s been a past life connection.

One of Barbara’s close friends is a person who when they met, perhaps twenty years ago at a party, they sat down and talked nonstop for four or five hours. Everybody else in the room ceased to exist. They had always known one another. They don’t see one another very often-maybe twice a year-although they both live here in Ann Arbor. But they’re both busy with their lives. When they meet they don’t talk about what they’re doing, they talk at a very deep heart and soul level. They really understand one another. Their paths differ a bit, but they have deep respect for one another’s paths.

What’s happening here is that 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 on all four levels, sometimes on two or three, rarely on 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 and, for the most part, even if one of those beings is somewhat irresponsible and untrustworthy in some situations in its life, 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 this kind of friendship is an invaluable help in that it 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 learning really prohibits that level of friendship 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. 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?

Value these deepest friends. Love them. Know that it really matters not if you don’t see them for ten years. The connection will always be there; you don’t need to see them. Barbara has a dear friend in San Francisco who she visited this fall. She had not seen her for seventeen years. They’d had conversations to one another in their heads throughout these seventeen years. They came together after this time as if they had parted yesterday. There was no separation. And yet, if this being lived in Ann Arbor, it’s very probable that they’d see each other very rarely.

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.

(Group sharing of experiences with last week’s homework. F shares an experience of being behind a “bad” driver and watching his anger arise, asking “Who is angry?” seeing old mind come up in the form of feelings about his father and wanting to be correct and righteous, and with this realization, returning to equanimity.)

D: Aaron has been asking us for some time to ask this question, “Who is angry?” or “Who is … ?” whatever. And I have been doing that and 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. They are not all what I am, but they seem to be an important part that deserves attention. I think I am misunderstanding Aaron in that I interpret his suggestion that we ask “Who is … ?” as if I should get rid of this relative self.

Barbara: We’re not disassociating from that aspect of ourselves that’s angry, but we’re making it clear that this part of ourselves that’s fully connected to … let’s say the part of ourselves that’s the perfect piece of paper, the pure awareness aspect of ourselves, that that part isn’t angry … that what’s angry is different old mind aspects that felt threatened.

For example, when I first felt my shoulder hurting, the first thing I did was to feel the strong contraction and sense of fear and anger, “Why did this happen?” It wasn’t that painful, but it hurt. I knew I had injured it; I dislocated my shoulder fifteen years ago and it was very, very painful; this felt very much the same but not as severe. So there was immediate tension, fear and anger. When I asked that, “Who is angry?” and “Who is frightened?,” I could see that is wasn’t me now in this moment. Now there was just me feeling some pain and discomfort and projecting into the future asking what’s going to happen to it. But “who” was angry was the self of fifteen years ago and even beyond that, the child who fell off a bike or out of a tree or whatever and the parent, instead of hugging it, would say, “Well, you shouldn’t have been in the tree.” The child who didn’t get the love it felt it wanted when it injured itself. That’s “who” was angry.

I don’t need to disassociate that part of myself, but I need to be very clear how the anger is coming up out of old mind and how the fear is, and that in this moment there’s really not any anger or fear. There’s just the memories of that old anger or fear, and its reverberations in the present body. When I get that very clearly, for me the experience is that I’m not getting rid of the anger or disowning the part that’s angry, it just dissolves because it’s not present.

When I come back to this moment, there’s just pure awareness seeing the whole process by which anger and fear arose conditioned by old circumstances and by habit … that that’s a pattern that I’ve used over and over again of feeling anger at pain, using that anger to escape my fear because I felt my needs were not going to be met in terms of being adequately comforted and protected from my pain … and that I don’t need to do that anymore. That frees me to just send loving energy to the shoulder and not get into a war with it? Can you see that? (Yes.)

For me that’s what the “Who is feeling … ?” question means. For those of you who have not tried this, I would very much encourage your trying it, both of these questions: Where did it come from? Who was feeling it? You can do it with joy as well. It doesn’t diminish the joy; it brings it more fully into the moment.

Meditation

(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+ 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 … (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 … (pause) …

Worldwide, may our energy be used in such a way that a cure may be found, that healing may be found … May we retain the sensitivity we have developed, no longer needing the catalyst of the disease to urge us to that sensitivity … (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 everywhere find freedom from suffering … (Bell.)

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.)

May all beings find perfect peace … (Bell.)