Introduction
In this session Q’uo speaks to the process and the tribulations involved in the task that increasingly becomes central to the aspiring adept: the work of disciplining the emotions. Stress is laid upon the need to integrate work in the daily life with that work which is done in meditation. Q’uo develops in some detail the exigencies of daily work, showing how this fits in with our interactions with other selves. And the point is made that these interactions will not always be sweet and harmonious, even when there is a prevailing intent to make them so. Finally, attention is given to how the harvest of the work done in daily life can be brought into the more focused workings of the meditative situation.
Group Question
We would like Q’uo to expand on the meaning of the following passage from Ra, which can be found in session 64, question 4:
“The principle behind any ritual of the white magical nature is to so configure the stimuli which reach down into the trunk of mind that this arrangement causes the generation of disciplined and purified emotion or love which then may be both protection and the key to the gateway to intelligent infinity.”
Channeled Message
(Steve channeling)
I am Q’uo and we are with this instrument. We have been asked to address yet again a topic which we find is virtually inexhaustible in that it relates to the nature of that which is called love. We do have some quite specific thoughts to share on the subject, as we feel that each here has been prepared over the course of many years of fairly intensive seeking to receive those thoughts which may be able to delve a little deeper into the subject than we have previously done. We would ask, however, that you keep in mind that we come to you as fellow seekers and not as authorities, for it is our understanding that no one individual or group may speak definitively on any subject as fundamental as that of love without taking into account that every individual who may hear what we have to say is also equally an authority on the subject, for there is no defining condition closer to the heart of the being of any than that of love itself.You, therefore, in order to understand our words, must bring forth your own relation to this phenomenon we are calling love, just as we call the phenomenon forth in our response to your query.
We speak now in the context of a white magical circumstance in which ritual is employed to generate love, and do so in a configuration which is focused, purified, and disciplined. In these senses love gets experienced as a kind of emotion in a subjective sense. Now we want to qualify this formulation by saying in advance that the emotion of which we speak is of a very special kind to the extent that it involves what we understand as love. For love itself is both an emotion and an ontological principle reflecting the constitution of the creation. We say it is the second distortion, which the Creator undergoes in giving rise to the creation, second only to free will, and placed such that it precedes what we know as the third distortion, that being light, which is the basis of embodiment.
When an adept or an aspiring adept, as all here gathered are, seeks to raise the level or reach of service in the name of the one Creator, and does so in a situation which is of a specialized nature, such that an attempt is made to penetrate the veil of forgetting, when this happens, we say, a generative act is involved. By generative, we mean that it involves energy, and as you know, energy is of the nature of body, or of light. Embodiment in this context serves as a foundation, if you will, or a reservoir, or a resource which may be invoked and put into the service of seeking in a highly focused way, a way that we call love, in an effort to make contact ultimately with the Creator. And this we have called the opening of the gateway to Intelligent Infinity.
Now, the energy that is drawn into service in the protected environment of the ritualized seeking will register in a way that has a kind of hierarchical geometry to it. And this geometry features a kind of crystallization of energy that has two facets to it, so to speak, or two possible perspectives from which it may be viewed. From our point of view, as we observe your seeking becoming more and more crystallized it appears as a kind of refraction of light approximating ever more closely the brilliance of the white light associated with the opening of the gateway to Intelligent Infinity.
From the subjective side, however, which is to say, from your side, the side of the seeker, the process of moving this light energy into ever higher or more crystalline formations, will come to you as an emotional experience, an experience of what you call emotions or feeling or affects that are more and more regularized, more and more clearly what they are.
Now this means that you will be engaged in a process of sorting through what in third density is inevitably a rather large welter of undirected energy or stray and random emotions. Some of these emotions will tend to a kind of chaos, some of these emotions will tend to a kind of reactive formation, which refuses to be integrated into a structure of seeking which ultimately has the capacity to carry the self of the individual seeker beyond the limits of itself, and leave it open to an energy that is itself of a power beyond comprehension.
Many of the energies you are blessed with, my friends, are undirected. And it is your purpose both as seekers of that which you left behind so many long aeons ago, as you sallied forth as a tiny spark of light in a vast creation, and at the same time, you are one who seeks to serve the whole order of the creation as an adornment of the Creator, as a source of information, and yes, shall we say, even inspiration, to the Creator itself, for, my friends, it is true that the Creator is inspired by the creation, and that the creation itself can be understood as an inspiring influence within the life of the Creator.
The point of the white magical ritual is to entrain the seeker who attempts to participate in this inspirational event, who seeks to both be inspired by and to inspire the Creator in ever more refined ways. The question of refinement is in part a selective process, but in even greater part a process of transformation.
Now were you who dwell in third density in a state of grace perpetually, you could say that the element of selection is no longer necessary, and all of the process of seeking would be taken up into the transformational moment. But you are not as thrid density beings, given the luxury of being in a state of grace perpetually. And so it is that as you begin the process of learning to refine and to purify and to discipline your emotions, there will inevitably be some among those emotions which you perforce will leave aside.. For that is work to be done another day.
The white magical ritual is a means of alerting the deeper portions of the mind, the mind that lurks beneath the threshold of consciousness for the most part, to the nature of the working at hand, and this involves selecting out those elements of your affective life which show promise in the process of seeking and gathering the self together in a one-pointed attempt to communicate with that which lies so far above. The process is selective, we say, not because you wish to leave portions of your self behind, but because you are aware that the transformation which you propose is not something you will be able to do at this moment in a global or comprehensive sense.
The one-pointedness which you seek is a focus which you attempt to achieve as a target of opportunity, gathering together those positive feelings which you have been able to identify as significant portions of your hope for things eternal. This hope is something which may be nurtured. It may be nurtured in an everyday sense with the little disciplines of mind which you employ as you police your thoughts, selecting those that have promise for better days to come, and leaving aside those which don’t. They also have promise in the more focused situation of personal seeking which characterizes the meditative context, and more specifically the meditative context in which you propose to do the magical work of personality transformation.
With this thought, we would end our communication at this time through this instrument, and transfer the contact to the one known as Joseph. We are those of Q’uo.
(Joseph channeling)
We are those of Q’uo and we are with this instrument. We would like to turn to the notion of emotion as a discipline, especially in its relation to love. When characterizing love as an emotion, specifically as the result of disciplined activity, many subjective characterizations may come to mind. It may seem that loving is a matter of performing a certain way and as having a certain feeling in the midst of that performing. Maybe a generosity of spirit and some performance that is perceived as a sacrifice to the self at the benefit of other. Love might look this way, but the crucial thing to keep in mind about a discipline in which the subjective aspect is central in characterizing what the phenomenon even is, is that it’s not known what the subjective quality will be after a transformation in which something falls away. If you imagine to yourself that you know what disciplined love is and then you reach for that, then you close off the possibility of being incorrect and then of course the incorrect conception falling away. On the service to others path, transformations are not something that you can consciously plan out. The mystery on the other side must be a mystery.
Now in attempting to engage in white magical activity in which you desire to contribute to the world around you, perhaps even the globe at large, a more purified energy, a carefully sculpted beingness of self that radiates a genuine longing for the upliftment of others in their advancement along their own service to others path. In doing this there will always be a complex admixture of different feeling states. So attempting to pin down a single feeling state with a particular characterization and then calling that “love” would threaten to overly rigidify or distort the realities of third density. Flux is a central aspect of this illusion. Flowing into one feeling state, out of another, then out of the one into yet another is something you can continue to look forward to. And we would not wish for you to become stultified by a rigid expectation of having but one feeling state.
So, in this context, what can it be to discipline the emotions and move inexorably toward a constancy of love? Well, things that fall away on this path, the service to others path, they fall away because there’s simply nothing more that you can gain from it. It appears as, perhaps not rubbish, but excess in your container. Imagine a cluttered household. It appears as excess and you finally realize this is just not something I need anymore. So the cycles of emotion will often present themselves this way in the process of disciplining the personality, which is why it’s crucial in becoming more disciplined to have a firm grasp of what you most deeply care about. Commitment to the path doesn’t come from a declaration; it doesn’t come from sheer enforcement of a concept upon yourself. It comes from recognition that now, I finally have a handle on who I truly am, and who I truly am is manifested or expressed in terms of my commitments. So the commitments, then, are not enforced upon the self but expressed from the self. The commitment to walking the service to others path trains the attention on the function of the various feeling states, so an emotion can’t fall away unless its function — the act that it performs upon your consciousness; its reason for being there in the first place — is in some way recognized, faced, dealt with, and, ultimately, accepted. Acceptance has its own magical effect on consciousness. It is the foundation upon which love must be built.
So instead of characterizing love as a particular kind of feeling state, though without a doubt it must be warm very often and receptive and generous. Certainly, these are marks of love, but to say that at any given moment they are always present [would be incorrect]. Instead of characterizing the way love always is, we would suggest a characterization of love in terms of the direction of discipline in which your walking the path carries you. The nature of love has to be discovered each for themselves.
Now there is another aspect that comes up immediately in considering the marks of love, which is the idea of harmony among those who through discipline of the personality, through leaving aside the emotions that no longer serve to walk the path achieve among themselves this harmony in and through love. We might suggest that the concept of harmony should be viewed through the metaphor that the word calls to mind. In harmonizing, each sings, plays a different tune and yet those tunes intertwine with one another to produce something more than what each had sung. Harmony is distinct from dissonance, however harmony and dissonance exist along a scale. And we would not recommend thinking of harmony in terms of maximizing one end of the spectrum as opposed to the other. Even the dissonant can contribute to the song if placed appropriately. And even the dissonant can in context register as harmonious. That is, harmony cannot be reduced to the atomic moments in which you might assess whether in this moment, did the note that I sang and the note that you sang happen to be at the interval of a fifth. Harmony is more complex than this, and if you were to imagine harmony merely as always singing the fifth, then your song will not be very interesting. So we recommend, in considering the direction in which discipline of the personality moves, the nature of love, to not take on an overly simplistic idea. Remember, at the other end of the transformation there will be something mysterious that must be discovered.
At this time, we would transfer the contact to the one known as Jeremy. We are those of Q’uo.
(Jeremy channeling)
We are those of Q’uo. We are with this instrument.
If you are to harvest this experience, this taste of harmony, in such a way as to deepen your appreciation for that which you cannot fathom, for that which is a mystery, you must have some kind of exertion, you must have a reach over a line. This is an inherently unstable state of affairs. It is for this reason that we, who speak of love in its majesty and its grandeur, we exhort you to work on the self, not as a piece of art you are creating so much as a friend you are cultivating.
We wish to speak of discipline in this light, for what you struggle with as you wend your way through the many kaleidoscopic colors of love, so various and shimmering that they must feel unfathomable, is that this sense of self that you are becoming friends with is something you will find yourself at times distant from, and then always, my friends, always returning to. If this sounds like the invocation of the idea of patience, then we feel you have met our minds on this. Discipline is necessary in order to walk a path and not, shall we say, have the path walk you. This is how you can take what we might call a kind of spiritual risk in delving into those many colors of emotion that love refracts and reflects into so that you can understand and feel what you cannot think yourself into.
This letting go that we have spoken of is part of a dance, my friends. How the rhythm moves you, how the harmonies modulate melodically; even if you know the tune, it feels different on the floor. You are offering this refined sense of self in more and more purity as you learn to take down the scaffolding at times, the scaffolding that afforded you the chance to work on a small imbalance. And it is for this reason, this priority of reflection that needs temporary structure at times, that you must learn that the adoption of the structure and the letting go of it is the full circle of experience.
This is an aspect that you work on in your daily lives, and the white magical ritual is but a tool in which you open yourself to an invitation from that friend you have made, that friend that is the self you are working on. This self wants to show you the fullness and the richness of the love that is seemingly spread out through an experience of duration. What you should balance, if you care to, in understanding the ambiguous direction of your dance, is the character of the Creator, this fixed point beyond your reach and yet closer than your breath.
It is in this way that working with ritual, working with discipline, and taking the time to view the many colors that the prism that is you reflects and refracts that you deepen the relationship with the self that you continually discover to be the Creator; and yet you must let go of that at certain times to tack in a different direction. This departure and return, the cycle that we previously spoke of, is wearying, my friends. It draws upon all of the resources that you can lay claim to, and yes, more. This is, however, the process of refinement, the process of clarifying experience from a jumble of feelings, thoughts, being states, into the root elements that the Creator affords its Creation, and my friends, when you can avail yourself of these elements at will you will be ready to take that leap in a direction you have not even contemplated.
This is all part of the gambit of individuation, and if it strikes one as dangerous or unsettling, then take that moment of unsettled feeling and offer it to that Creator self who waits in the temple of your heart. You will find there inexhaustible patience will show you the possibilities of consciousness that make this seemingly endless plumbing of the mystery of love an act of joy. Joy, my friends, need not always be a secure feeling; it can, at times, have a sense of unsettledness and incompleteness, for in feeling this variety of love, you partake, in but a small but poignant way, of the innovative spirit of the creative act of which you are both product and producer.
And to continue on this subject we would ask this instrument to release the contact, allowing us to move to the one known of Jade. We are those of Q’uo.
(Jade channeling)
We are those of Q’uo and we are with this instrument.
How does one, then, begin to take this idea of purified love and create it into a manifested state? We believe you know the answer, but we will reiterate that the first step, the first release, is letting go of the conscious mind and turning inward to the deeper self and friend within. As we have noted, all generative emotional experiences have their root in what we are calling love. For what is anger but love that has been thwarted? And what is sadness but love that has been injured? And what is jealousy but love that feels threatened? The human mind is a cumulative product with many years of evolutionary bias towards dressing up the generative love as various aspects of fear. The self loves the self. The self loves the physical experience. The threat of the end of that physical experience can be many layered, but we wouldn’t feel fear if we didn’t feel love for what we could lose.
So this process of purifying the emotions requires turning from the conscious expression and processing of these emotions to more of an internal experience. So while the purified experience of love are those things you have come to know as gentleness and kindness and compassion and this is well your goal. This is why we say to not put love into a box and say “this is love” and “this is not love,” for it cannot not be love. It is just a veiled expression of love from a creature who so loves its own existence that the thought of disappearing can be so limiting.
We ask you to seek to ritualize this purification of love so that when it comes time for a magical working, such as the one you are engaged in, the state of generative emotion can be turned on but rather the state of dressing up love with barbs and fear can be sidestepped for but a brief moment, because while you are human, while you are incarnate, there is no possibility of existing purely in a state of purified love. The illusion in which you exist specifically counters this as a means of allowing those who accelerate their spiritual journey as much catalyst as they are willing to put on their plate. So the purpose of the ritual is to understand the temporary state of purified love, to know where it exists, to know how to reach for it, because that is your main effort. The intention, the reaching, the hoping, that purified generative expression of love, that is all we ask of you and all you ask of yourselves. That you will fail is guaranteed; that you will succeed with greater frequency is a hope like a star in the sky. There are many stars and many hopes and many avenues to reach the state of being when one is radiant and one is receptive and one is able to be that which is needed for the self and other self in each experiential moment.
When you seek to purify that receptive yet radiant nature of love, you have already done the majority of the work; seeking is the work. The pure, generative expression of love is often as temporary as a flower that blooms for a moment and then returns inward to grow and develop and, maybe next time, there will be more buds, bigger petals, and more of you to offer to those who are seeking the inward beauty of the One Infinite Creator.
At this time, we will leave this instrument and return to the one known as Steve. We are Q’uo.
(Steve channeling)
I am Q’uo, and I am again with this instrument.
We would speak to you now as the brothers and sisters of sorrow, for we have for you a leavening to the bread which we have all baked together. We believe that we have offered through the various instruments that have offered themselves in service this day sufficient perspective on the various dimensions of the issue at play and the various facets of the love which we have suggested to you requires discipline and purification to serve as a carrier wave in the process of that magical working which is specifically directed to the opening of the gateway to Intelligent Infinity.
What we would like to address now is the sense in which, as you have all gathered well enough, we believe, the specialized working of the magical circumstance. You must be able to draw upon a growing maturity, grounded in experience of life in the daily life, for in order to be properly selective about that which shall be featured in the circumstance of seeking, you must have some standard or measure by which you can assess that which is more pure and that which is less so, and shall therefore be left aside.
What we propose to do now is to take a step back from the magical working and to view how the process of discipline can be effectuated in the maturation of love and the maturation of the integrating factor at play in the array of emotional experience in the daily life.
So if we may permit ourselves to speak a little whimsically, we would put the matter in this way. There is a song known to some of your peoples that begins with the thought that “April love is for the very young.” And who would deny that it is so? The very young find love to be greatly enchanting. When I am in the first throes of love, my beloved is all the world to me. My beloved changes the very light which brightens my day. My beloved is my hoochie-goochie cuddle kitten, is she not? My beloved makes me feel so warm and lively inside. My beloved transports me. She transforms me in the very core of my being.
But, my friends, April will inevitably turn, as it has done, to May. And as another poet has announced, “Rough winds soon shake the darling buds of May.” And is that an angry word I hear from my beloved? Is that a gesture of disappointment that I discern in her eye, in her manner? Is the enchantment already wearing off? Is this love which has transformed me in the core of my being already losing its magic, already losing its appeal? And even as April has blended in May, surely May will blend into June and July and before you know it I can be staring at the very depths of winter, bereft of all the joys of spring, and burdened with a love which feels like love no longer. Burdened with the memory of something that could not be sustained, burdened with a sense of transformed self more now a sorrow to me than a joy. And yet still there is before me this person I have called my beloved.
How must now be love itself transformed when the transporting enchantment of new love has passed, and I again stand in a condition where I feel within my heart a want of something, and I see in the person of my beloved one who may not be so lovely after all. Each who undergoes such a circumstance, such an experience — and is this experience not all too common? — each who does undergo such an experience, we say, faces a difficult question: Shall I go back to the beginning? Shall I try to find myself a new April, and in a new April, a new love? And shall I risk repeating that age old ceremony of love gained and love lost? Or shall I allow this beloved that stands before me in a bleak December still to be my love, still to be the carrier of my most profound affection, imperfect as I now know her to be, unlovely as it has become clear that she can be, as hurtful as she can be to that little self that I found myself being as her lover?
Do I, in short, allow myself to mature in my experience of love, to see that it is not fundamentally, ultimately, the experience of young enchantment, of transporting self-forgetting, enthusiasm for what has moved me, what has generated within me such an overwhelming joy? To take a mature attitude towards love, my friends, is to allow those emotions which do not necessarily speak so boldly of love itself to be brought into play in redefining how love gets experienced. Now in an everyday sense, this process tends to be rather long and drawn out, and one is faced over and over and over again with misadventures, with interactions which cry out for the need of healing, and an almost constant re-dedication to the generation of a sustainable love in the face of life’s many vicissitudes.
Now, if we might return again for the moment, to the circumstance of the magical situation, where one is working in the element of love more directly. We would suggest that, by analogy, the love that we have been able to generate as a process of a kind of emotional conjuring, embodying what joy we can muster for the occasion, needs to be worked on through a process in which the joy itself is set against sorrow. My friends, it is the friction provided by sorrow which has the effect when being set against that lovely joy, of burnishing the joy to a more and more adamantine quality that becomes, in effect the philosopher’s stone, become, in effect, the crystallized love fit to serve as the refracting agent of the Creator’s limitless light, of the Creator’s unfathomable love.
We wish in our hearts that we could tell you that the path to love and to the purification of love is sweetness and light all the days of your lives, but it is not. Love is that which, in its truer nature, withstands the turmoil of rough seas, of difficult times, of sorrows sometimes beyond anything you ever imagined you could possibly bear. And yet at the end of the day, you find yourself still standing, still proud and erect, my friends. Still loving, still hoping, still reaching for the very Source of all this is true, all that is light, all that is love. And with this thought, my friends, let us take our leave from this instrument at this time, asking whether there might be one final question to which we might address ourselves before the end of this session. I am Q’uo.
I am Q’uo, as it appears that we have no questions to address at this point, we will take our leave. We thank you for joining us and for allowing us to share our thoughts with you. You are our beloved ones, my friends. Adonai.