Colorado Springs Circle Third Channeling Intensive Session 1 Thursday, October 6, 2022

Q’uo on Recognizing Service

Colorado Springs Circle Third Channeling Intensive Session 1 Thursday, October 6, 2022

Introduction

In this first session from the Other Selves Working Group’s third channeling intensive, those of Q’uo discuss the nature of the service to others path, providing commentary on both the outward forms of service as well as the metaphysical and spiritual foundations of such service. Emphasis is placed on the connection between polarity and the individual self lived as so separate from the Creator. Those of Q’uo introduce a concept of atmospheres or auras surrounding these centers of focus constituting individuality, imputing to these auras many of the less tangible, more universal feelings that accompany individuality. The session ends with a discussion of the role of sacrifice in the expression of selfhood along both paths of polarity.

Group Question

What, in general, does it look like to live a balanced life in service to others while consistently attempting to further polarize toward service to others? How significant to such a life are obvious, outward activities that we associate with spirituality, such as meditation, energy healing, group worship, or anything at all that is expressly “spiritual”?

Channeled Message

(Claire channeling)

I am Q’uo and I greet you in the abundant love and blessings of the One Creator, of whom we are all a part. I am most grateful to be welcomed into your circle once again. And I wish to reinforce to you the enduring nature of a relationship such as we enjoy with you, that our contact with you is not of an instant, as in this particular moment in which you serve as instruments for our messages, but that we are with you always and you in our hearts. And even amidst catalyst and changes both to your circle of seeking as well as your own personal inner configurations or even your outward circumstances, that these changes, to us, are as the changes of your diurnal cycles: the rising and the setting of the sun. They are small in the scheme, as you might say. We encourage you not to dwell too much on such changes. There will be more changes yet to come, and in looking back you will see that something yet endured in our communion with one another. And that what endured was really what was the heart of the experience all along.

We also remind you, as always, to take our words, our offerings into your internal guidance. We are not to be seen as the providers of dogma, as authorities about the nature of your inner experience or what it would be appropriate for you to do in your lives. We emphatically and wholeheartedly support the responsibility that you have to fashion your own lives for yourselves. We merely offer ourselves as an opportunity to take into consideration another perspective that may or may not be helpful to you. So, whatever we have to say that strikes you as fitting for your current experience, may it help. And whatever we have to say that may not be fitting for your current experience, please do not dwell too much on it.

You have asked us this lovely Autumn day about the balanced life of a spiritual seeker, about the picture or the, shall we say, maybe even stereotype of service to others seeking on third density. And notice that as we use the word ‘stereotype,’ we mean to imply that whatever generalities we may describe to you will surely fail to capture all instances. The truth, my friends, is that the service to others path is unique to each individual. There is no way to paint the general picture that could do justice to your experiences. So we will attempt to capture the heart of the experience of walking this path and we hope that our descriptions of manifestations of the experience will not be too stereotypical.

In the first place, remember that the service to others path is so named for a reason. Here, it would perhaps help to be careful about terminology. It is easy to think, and in fact those in this circle are familiar with the thought, that service to others implies that one deny the self what it needs. So we should be careful in the distinction other and self, where service to self is the opposite polarity. In the first place, these names identify paths of seeking, viable paths, paths by which one might grow and become a being of a kind of energy signature that is prepared for another experience, that is ready to move on to something else. So along the service to others path, what is at stake here is an orientation toward the other. And this orientation, following the Law of One, reflects your own orientation toward yourself. Within yourself, there is a self and an other, as it were. And indeed how you treat your own resources will be in some way reflected in how you treat the resources of others. To serve the other, then, is a reflection of the service that you perform to the other within you: the hidden, the inaccessible, or at least the only partly accessible, the mysterious nature of yourself. And in this way, the service to others path is a path of regarding this mysterious nature as sacred, as valuable, as worth encouraging just as it is. It is a path of discovery. It is tempting to think that one knows oneself and then to impose that image upon oneself. It is so tempting that it characterizes or it punctuates experiences of third density even among seekers such as yourself. This in fact is the reason transformation is such an important part of your third density experiences. One must discover the ways in which one was attempting to dictate to oneself what one ought to be, and that discovery comes slowly and often in surprising ways. So service to others is not a denial of self. It is a reflection of a relation that one already has to oneself.

Now, having said that, what might a service to others life look like? What characterizes the everyday activities of such a person? Well, in the first place, it is difficult, you may have noticed, to go about one’s life without interacting with others. It is also difficult to go about one’s life without interacting with oneself, and not merely in terms of the inner dialogue, but in terms of the kinds of things that you do throughout your day that either affirm or deny the needs of the mysterious self. Just as you go about your life either affirming or denying the needs that others communicate to you. Do you look in the mirror and see someone who is loveable, who deserves the support of the Creator? Do you look at your partner and see someone who is loveable and who deserve the support of the Creator? These acts alone, should you in fact master them, would take a lifetime.

So we say the in the first instance, a balanced service to others life and the pursuit of further polarization along that path is not complicated, though it is difficult and subtle. Renewing your commitment must happen moment to moment in each instance, especially when recognizing the value of the other or the other within the self, despite its inconvenience. That is when it is most important to renew that commitment. Moreover, we remind you, you will not always succeed. Perfection is not part of the nature of third density. Your world is simply too busy with activity, too replete with catalyzing instances, and your vehicles too fragile, your lives too short. Perfection should not be the goal. And if it is, then you set yourself up for constantly being disappointed with the other within yourself and the other beyond yourself. And this, my friends, would defeat the entire purpose.

Now, we would speak to the relationship between this sort of attitude toward self and other and the common outward marks of what you might call spiritual seeking. In the first instance, many of these outward marks are offered to you by ourselves or by various people within your third density illusion as tools to achieve the heart of the experience of walking a service to others path. Spirituality is not about meditation. That puts the cart before the horse. Meditation is a method or a mechanism by which you might find it easier in some ways to manifest the heart of a spiritual life. Likewise, energy healing, to use another of your examples, is yet another mechanism by which you might find it in some ways easier to manifest the heart of this experience. We would warn you against confusing the trappings of spirituality for the essence. There is, of course, more to say on this topic, but we would now like to transfer the contact to the one known as Steve in order to further discuss these features. We are those of Q’uo.

(Steve channeling) 

I am Q’uo, and I am with this instrument., greeting you, once again, in the love and in the light of the Infinite Creator.

Service is a concept which is universal in its application. There is no way, as we understand the term, for you to fail to serve. And, in a related sense, there is no way for you to fail to be spiritual in your service, because, as we understand it, spirit is constitutive of your very being. And so that does leave us, and you, facing a conundrum that is fundamental, which is to say: What could it possibly mean to aspire to becoming more spiritual or serving in a better way? What means this distinction “better or worse”? What means, in fact, any distinction at all in a creation which, as we have repeatedly reiterated, is one of unity? What possible sense could there be to wanting to be more, when you already belong to all that is, and all that ever there could be?

Well, wrapped up in that query is the mystery of the creation itself. And at the core of the mystery of the creation is the mystery of the Creator. My friends, it is through participation in this vast unfathomable mystery of the Creator that one creates what was previously not in existence. One augments the creation in ways that are not easy to understand. Every act which you undertake parts the waters of infinity in some particular way. Every attempt you make to fulfill an aspiration is made on the basis of some parting of these infinite waters.

Let us give you an expression favored by one of your poets: it is that exclamation and lament that says, “O what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive.” And, my friends, truer words, we would say to you, have never been spoken. But we would add to that thought another, and that is that, particularly in your third density, but even beyond your third density, every practice by its nature does deceive. For every practice in effect condenses the infinite ocean of beingness into a finite stream. This could be thought to be antipathetic to the nature of the Creator itself, and yet we say to you, it is not. For the Creator, in order to find Itself, must first lose Itself. We who are the creatures abiding within the creation, are those that make it possible for the Creator to lose itself so that it may come back to itself as the One that is found.

So, again and again, those of us who seek to serve others will find that we have lost ourselves in these tangled webs. It is not that we are deliberately deceiving others, for we are allowing ourselves to be deceived into thinking that we are something separate from the Creator. We allow this process of separation to unfold within us so that it may engage in these very tangled webs, and return to the Source with that odd quality we have called “experience”.

Now there is much to reflect upon in the nature of experience, and we will not detain ourselves on this point except to put this context to that thought:  Experience requires an atmosphere for it to register in a resonant fashion, so that it informs both the life of the creature and the Creator that lies within, without and at the Source of that creature. An atmosphere you are familiar with is the aura which surrounds each individual mind/body/spirit complex. You are aware of the rays which are the constituents of the aura: we speak of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and that which lies beyond the violet which you often experience as a white light.

Now, these rays come together in ways you might call tangled: in intricate webs  woven as a portion of the self-hood you create for yourself in the context of the incarnation it is given you to enjoy. But we would also like to suggest to you that there is a larger atmosphere in which the auric atmospheres live and have their being. This is the atmosphere which you may call your group. And groups, as you well know, exist on many different levels. There are the immediate groups sometimes arranged in family structures, there are groups of like-minded individuals who seek to serve together in the context of the various functions available in your society, whether they be teaching, or artistic expression, or the making of things, or of other modes of service. There are the groups that constitute society as a whole. And there is a larger group yet, which constitutes your planetary Being.

 All of these levels of groups have what you might call atmospheres of their own. The atmospheres blend with each other in various extremely nuanced ways, the study of which would require many, many of your lifetimes.

Now, the reason that we bring this image before you for contemplation is that we would like to suggest that the great decision that you must make is the decisive portion of third density service, namely the decision whether you will serve primarily the self or others. That decision is best understood with regard to the way it functions in relation to these atmospheres of which we speak. And when you conceive of the matter in this light, you can see that,while there may well be, for those who have chosen the path of service to others, times when your focus is entirely directed to the atmospheres shared by all as a portion of a group aura, there are also other times in which your contribution to the group aura requires a rather intensive focus on your own personal auric contributions.

The ideal of service to others relates to an integration between those two dimensions, the personal and the group or the societal, or the harmonization of those dimensions. And there is no formula which we can offer you which decisively speaks to precisely how that should unfold at any particular moment in time, or the way that should occur within a given individual.

One must think of these matters as currents constantly flowing into one another, blending and un-blending, so that a current which formerly was one thing, having blended with other currents, becomes something else much larger, perhaps, only once again to resolve itself into a series of more individuated currents. That flow and inter-flow is occurring incessantly, and there is, as we say, no way ultimately, to disentangle the webs of energic life from one another, so that one can say one’s individuality begins or ends precisely here and not there.

So there is a sense in which no individual could be said to be strictly individual.

Now, against that thought we must also place another thought, which seems to be in contradiction to it. There are nevertheless those who wish to serve only themselves. And it is often useful, even for those who wish to serve other-selves, to contemplate the nature of service-to-self so that one might see in contradistinction to the service-to-self orientation what it might look like, or perhaps better said, what it might feel like, actually to attempt to polarize by serving others. How, then, might service-to-self even be thought in such a way as to make sense in this vast panoply of atmospheres? Well, my friends, that is a troubled thought, is it not?

And  we will not attempt to think that thought thoroughly through this instrument, but at this time, we will transfer the contact to the one known as Jeremy.

(Jeremy channeling)

We are those of Q’uo, and we are with this instrument at this time. 

This interpenetration of atmospheres that makes up an instance of distinct service needs to be appreciated by the practitioner of polarity for what it is and is not. For as you weave these webs, you are informed by their expressions of truth as well as the negative space that the fibers leave exposed.    

My friends, the light travels through all of the space. It fills up the auras that orbit and envelop those areas of focus with which you identify through the graduations of love and light that you are attracted to pursue. Polarity, then, is merely an orientation relative to the expansive nature of consciousness, the sense in which we all contribute to the ongoing and articulated sense of being a self, or in some instances being not a self.

We seem to be straddling a fence, obscuring a distinction that is critical in your minds to make. But what we wish to point out is the aspect of otherness that creates a particular experience. These experiences are necessary so that experiments in beingness can register in the record of the Creator’s project. 

You reinforce the distinctions between self and self and self and other self when you give in to the calling of your heart and see in that calling a glorious opportunity to express an aspect of consciousness, for we must remind you: this is about consciousness. It is not about separate beings. These centers of focus are a means to an end. The end is an exploration of the Creator’s nature which we have long described with the pithy term, “consciousness”; three syllables that pick up eons of purposeful seeking. 

The limits of these auras around centers of focus are made up, as silly as it may strike this instrument or those hearing this instrument. It is actually that arbitrary. And it is in this arbitrariness, this lark of expression that the true nature of service reveals itself. Your service, whether intended as such consciously or not, provides a temporary demarcation by which a narrative of otherness can unfold, and it is this otherness that is of novel interest to the Creator. 

These atmospheres interpenetrate each other. You draw the lines, we have said before; you decide where the story alights upon exposition or climax, and we look upon this in a similar sense as you would watch a garden grow. So many little melodramas playing out, and yet, the dramas are not the object. They are the unfolding process, stretched out through the concept of time, to give insight, to give penetration into the Creator’s nature. So we can observe what service, to put it simply, looks like, what it feels like, and what it seems to bring up into awareness, and just as much, obscures from awareness.

If you are participating in these streams of expression in a manner which turns inward, which sees the further articulation of an individual creativity that then pulls what is seen as other self into self, my friends, you have seen what that service looks like, and we dare say (with all due respect to the instruments involved) that you also know what it feels like. It is still service that is part of the contrast that the service to self polarity brings into vivid expression. It is service because it provides the canvas upon which a work of art can be dreamed up. You are entitled to you opinions about this work of art, because it still touches you, it still announces the priority of the Creator’s exploration of itself. 

This is part of the polarizing process; as you will recall, those of the complex of Ra describe transformation as an oscillating phenomenon. The single vector towards a pole can only be fully energized when the immediate environment in which one finds oneself transforming is properly mapped out. This requires some swaying to and fro. The point is to achieve the vector of acceleration; it is not to simply polarize and be done with it, but to prosecute this polarization over the long run. 

Similarly, the auras and the distinctions between them may also dissolve into each other; they may speak to the illusion of the tangled web as simply the substrate of unity and the reaching across the distinctions, the borders, so that consciousness can experience two or more foci as constituting, in their regularized and respectful recognition of one another, a new center. This is what is so mysterious in your groups, and it is in this mutual recognition that we see the service oriented towards the other as a reflection of the powerlessness of deception to fragment the Creation in perpetuity. 

You ask how those outward, express acts of service realize what you feel in your hearts and see in the eyes of your brother and sister. But you have already gotten ahead of yourself when posing this question, for you have already served. And in those cases in which you judge, you have already judged. When you have felt the love, the love has already been given, received; it has echoed across the substrate of consciousness.

If the purpose is to evaluate oneself, let it be an evaluation of one’s honesty, one’s sincerity, an opportunity to perhaps not weave but forge [in] the fires of confusion, of despair. In other words, in the wake of the challenge of the will freed, freed from what seems so obvious about your nature as Creator, unleashed to be as it will – in this sense, you learn to recognize all of these distinctions you have created as constitutive of a tone in the Creator’s scale, to be blessed, appreciated, to refract your love in a new way, and for you to not fear it for its newness, its novelty and singularity of experience. 

Instead, what you learn to appreciate is the instrumental nature of the distinctions, the usefulness of temporary boundaries, because all of these focuses are tools for consciousness to express itself. And the aura that envelops and perhaps seems to expand the self outward has no end; it may thin with distance from the center, but it never fully dissipates. For my brothers and sisters, you have your being in the other, and the other in you, and it is a gift, a truly benevolent and poignant gift, when you can polarize your consciousness in light of that expansive mystery. 

This can occur on both sides of the scale. That you have an affinity for one pole is not designed to give you an aversion to the other side of the pole. It is simply and only your level of awareness, your position in the evolutionary timeline that gives you different levels of belongingness. Again, if you need us to say it, it is no more real than you give it reality to be. 

And you are fully endowed with a sense of judgment, not so you may judge what is good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, though you may make these judgments, but so that you can orient your portion of the Creator in the way that seems right to you. We only ask that you never forget how your expression of this orientation provides other selves and the Creator at large with opportunities to orient themselves, and in this way, perhaps you can see this expansive panoply of auras and atmospheres as simply the way the illusion plays out the narrative of realization. 

Consciousness, judgment, separation, and realization. You are painting with these colors. The Creator is painting with these colors. We want you to feel free to paint what is in your heart, and when you serve, look for those colors, and focus less on the outward details. 

You must feel, my friends. Feel first, analyze second, and you will find your analysis, the intellectual nature of service, to flow freely as an act of creation and not an act of rendering aspects of affect reductively. You have enough reduction; the next step requires expansion. 

And to continue this expansion, we would now transfer this contact to the one sister instrument that is Claire. We are those of Q’uo.

(Claire channeling)

I am Q’uo and I am again with this instrument.

I would be remiss if I did not at least attempt to bring my answer around to the practical spirit of your question. Though I have strongly discouraged you from focus on the outward manifestation, even so there are some features that bear mentioning. In the first place, remember that a life lived in service to others and devoted to further polarizing in one’s attempt to be of service to others is not going to be characterized by a consistent or baseline experience of pleasant feelings. We have emphasized feeling states of service, but now we remind you that those feeling states are not always going to be happy. And, in fact, there will be times when there is nothing within you that is willing to come forth that is happy. My friends, sorrow is part of the creation. Let yourselves be sorrowful and let yourselves respect the sorrow–honor the sorrow of others, or the anger, or the frustration, or the feelings of betrayal. All of these things have their place, even along the positively polarized path.

Now, you might find yourself worried or concerned about your spiritual calling; concerned that if you do not pursue your spiritual calling, you are not adequately serving others or you are not living up to your potential. We hope it has become clear by now that your spiritual calling will pull you along as you wander through your life, without your needing to know what that calling is. If you are attempting to crystallize consciously within your mind a calling that has a particular name and maybe even an identifiable career path within your third density, we suggest that you might be thinking too narrowly about a spiritual calling. After all, if you are living as a consciousness overlapping and sharing in the consciousness of others, if you are living in a willingness to let go of deceptions, despite the inevitability of always deceiving and being deceived, then your spiritual calling will manifest in the way you live your life, whether you know it or not.

Having said that, if you are asking yourself the question, “How can I further polarize? How can I be of greater service to others?” then the question itself suggests dissatisfaction with the service you have rendered. What is the nature of that dissatisfaction? Have you in fact attempted to impose a concept of service onto your service as it is? In which case, it might be well to find a way of being satisfied. Or, are you disappointed in your own devotion? In which case, it might be that you have been spending too much time thinking about yourself. You might need to devote yourselves to others in moments such as this, to find some opportunity to pull yourself out of your own self-reinforcing patterns of thought.

The service to others path is a communal path. And there are countless ways to be of service to others, to engage in the ongoing effort to live as the Creator and to encourage others to live as the Creator in love and support. These ways do not need to involve churches or meditation groups. Trust yourselves. Trust the environments that strike you as opportunities for not only growth within yourself, but also opportunities for you to add something. The extremely complicated nature of these overlapping auric fields makes it impossible for us to give you a detailed description of the features to expect from the environment that would be most suitable for you in a moment when you wonder, “How can I be of best service?” which is why we so strongly emphasize the feeling or affective states. You do not need to understand how it works, for the signal is there within you. A life of service to others well-lived, a life of pursuing the further polarization along that path in the hopes of devoting yourself as deeply as possible to those you might serve is one that must be guided by faith.

Now I do not want you to evaluate your own capacity for faith as if now I am adding upon all the other dimensions of evaluation by which you might fall short yet another by which you may fall short. Rather, we encourage you to look for the source that you feel you can trust, the source within yourself, and also the source in communities that appeal to you, and the source at the origin of the Creation, if such a thing does not seem too abstract. And with that, we feel that perhaps our answer has gone on long enough.

Before we depart from this instrument, we ask whether there are any questions that we might speak to.

Steve: Yes, Q’uo, I do have a question. I feel that there was an indication or clue that we did not pick up on and that was that within these flow of atmospheres, there was a distinction between participating in the flow by way of serving others as opposed to participating in the flow by way of service to service to self in which a contemplation of the latter would inform the nature of the former was offered as a fertile subject of reflection. Now as I think of that possibility, I wonder if you might speak to the role of sacrifice in making that distinction.

I am Q’uo and I am most grateful for your question, my brother, for you are undoubtedly correct that the juxtaposition of the two paths can bring each into further relief. In fact, it may surprise you to know that sacrifice is a feature of each path. Or maybe it will not surprise you. But what is sacrificed is a mirror image between the two paths. Along the service to self path, each transformation offers the opportunity to abandon the sources of comfort that one had taken, whether those sources of comfort are the comfort others provide or the comfort that one might take in one’s own inner resources. For, along the service to self path, the dominion of the conscious will must be near total. One must find in oneself no need for comfort. One must extend one’s aura as a nexus of influence as far as possible. And in doing so, bring others under the self-conception, bring others under the vision of what it would be like for the universe not only to be a better place, but also what it would be like for others to live well. In the service to self polarity, one sees others as the opportunities for self-expression. Each is an object to be placed where it would be most aesthetically appealing to the self for it to belong. And in so doing, one begins to discover a flow state of continuous projection of the aesthetic picture or vision one has out into the world, without regard to any outer influence at all. One must develop a pure concentration, a capacity to remain focused on the creative act in which one is always engaged. And to open oneself up to influence from beyond, to allow another’s will to overtake one’s own is to lose this focus. And for this reason, one must sacrifice all those influences, for they come at the cost of one’s own vision.

And now, of course, the mirror image also obtains. For the service to others path, in your flow state, which you attempt to realize, you dance with one another. You empty yourself of these visions that you consciously held for how things ought to be, for who others ought to be, for who you ought to be. And so emptying yourself, you allow yourself to become an instrument for something beyond and within. You discover a deeper self that had awaited your attention and your affection. And in discovering that deeper self, you find yourself co-mingling with the deeper selves of others, allowing others to influence to you, insofar as what comes from the other as genuine, as resonant, as well-intentioned. In allowing yourself to be so influenced, you also allow yourself to develop a deeper contact with what is mysterious and awaiting within you. These deeper selves are connected with one another in a way that your conscious, your smaller selves, if you will, are not. Or at least struggle to be. And so the sacrifice is just the opposite. At each moment, you must sacrifice what it was that you expected your life to be, that you expected yourself to be, what it was you expected to feel in this moment. Which is why we so reinforced the importance of letting go of your expectation that all of your feelings will be happy. Is this a satisfactory answer to your question, my brother?

Steve: Absolutely, Q’uo. I think you hit the nail on the head, thank you very much.

I am Q’uo and I am most grateful to have had the opportunity to answer this question. Is there another?

Steve: Not from me.

Jeremy: Nor I.

I am Q’uo. In that case, I will for the time being take my leave from this instrument, but remain present to your circle of seeking, encouraging you, as always, to perhaps deemphasize the significance of striking moments where it seems like it is in fact a spiritual time or a spiritual event and to expand your sense of the sense of the spiritual, to diffuse it throughout your lives, for we are there with you throughout your lives. So we take our leave in the love and the live of the One Infinite Creator, of whom we are all a part. Adonai, my friends, and godspeed. I am Q’uo.