Chapter Four

Getting Peaceful

There are certain problems that will predictably distract and metaphysically impoverish one who wishes to become an instrument. To explain why they have such a devastating effect on your work and on you, regardless of context, takes a bit of examination of some of the basic assumptions with which I have learned to work. As with the entire handbook, everything in this chapter is my personal opinion and if anything does not seem to ring true to you, please disregard it without a second thought.

I’ve come to picture myself as a field of energy, manifesting itself to me subjectively as both my consciousness and my body. Any number of ever-flowing circumstances affect my consciousness, distorting it with moods. The energy field of the body, which many call the electrical body and some term the aura, seems to have centers within which are located the emotional and physical nerve endings that go with each particular kind of energy.

When the infinite light of the Creator flows from the universe to us, I believe it enters at the feet and encounters the first energy center at the base of the spine. If that energy center is not blocked by conflicting or abnormal energy patterns, the Creator’s light continues to move upward, through all of the energy centers, leaving the body above the crown of the head and flowing back into the creation. The concept is an old one as is the concept of energy centers or “chakras,” both terms being part of the Buddhist tenets of faith.

There are seven energy centers within the body in my scheme of things, starting with the energy center located at the joining of the legs. You could see this, for the sake of easy remembering, as the color red, and each of the other energy centers as moving through the colors of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, with the white being an impersonal eighth color and chakra located above the crown of the head.) The red-ray energy center is the controller for your basic survival mechanisms. A strong red-ray energy center is necessary for any kind of healthful living. It deals with matters of survival and sexuality, and its welfare is important to channels.

The orange-ray energy center is located a bit below the navel. It is the center of personal relationships, the energy center which one uses in sharing experience with another person.

The yellow-ray energy center, often called the solar plexus center, or chakra, is located right where you would fold up if someone hit you in the stomach. Assigned to it are the energies having to do with society and all of society’s groups, everything from armies to church congregations to teams that you may watch or be a part of. These first three centers constitute the all-important basic personal triad of energies which tend to keep us from getting peaceful.

The green-ray energy center, also called the heart chakra, is the seat of unconditional love. It is not to be confused with romantic love which often has energies having more to do with the desire to possess another person, and, therefore, imposing conditions on a relationship, which is an orange-ray energy, or with “you owe me” feelings about your mate which is an energy connected with our society’s laws of marriage, and is a yellow-ray energy.

Green-ray love imposes no conditions and the compassion that it generates is unconditional. Perhaps you remember times when you have sung the old Christmas carol, “The Twelve days of Christmas.” One was never really sure of most of the other gifts that the song’s hapless swain was giving his true love, but one was always sure of the “‘five gold rings.” The heart chakra is much like that; central, as love must be to our experience. Unconditional acceptance is usually something that feels tremendously good to us and we react to its presence by flowering and growing.

It is not easy to awaken that energy within ourselves. Without embarking on that process I encouraged in the last chapter, that of accepting the fact that progress in spiritual evolution involves deciding what manner of person we are, choosing our path, and then learning more and more about how to be faithful to the path and how to express love to others as the fruit of what we are learning on that path, it is almost impossible to accomplish. Meditation is a tremendous help, because the nature of consciousness, left in total balance, is peaceful, serene and joyful.

We seldom experience this because we are filling our minds up almost all of the time with daily business, which is no bad thing were we able to retain, in the midst of mundane activity, the consciousness of love. We seldom do that, however, and so we are constantly distracting ourselves and thereby removing our attention from our native disposition, which is a happy one.

Even when we are alone, we distract ourselves with thoughts of what could have been or what should have been, scolding, praising and judging ourselves and others, sometimes over and over, instead of enjoying the opportunity for solitude. Sometimes, too, our minds are taken up completely with planning for the future, rehearsing conversations that we have not yet had and may never have, calculating financial progress for the next five years, wondering how to put aside the money for our child’s college education, or any number of other perfectly respectable concerns.

Whatever our reason for not perceiving the joy of the moment, it is so that we seldom do perceive it, and that it is always there, close at hand, ready to be perceived. We must look for it, however, and to do that we must first have the firm impression that we are looking for something that exists.

Consequently, without analysis and meditation to feed our wills, it is often very difficult to get started on activating the green-ray energy center, or, to put it another way, on opening up the heart chakra. It is this chakra which must be functioning well in order for the service of channeling to run smoothly in your life. Centers higher than that can be very helpful if they are also activated, but it is not necessary for them to be activated for you to be a productive (and healthy) channel.

The blue-ray energy center, located at the throat, has to do with communication that is freely given with no expectation of return.

The indigo-ray energy center or brow chakra is located at the “third eye” location and has to do with metaphysical work in general and our ability to manifest our true inner beingness, and the crown chakra or violet-ray center is basically a summing of all the preceding energies, the last expression of personhood before the Creator’s energy dissolves again into the uncolored white light that is the first manifestation of the Creator known to us.

Although it would seem centrally important to open the heart chakra, if you wish to channel, it has seemed to me that more emphasis also needs to be placed upon removal of blockages in the first three energies, red, orange and yellow. The reason for this is that it is perfectly possible to work hard in opening up your compassionate energies, and do a very good job at it, but run into serious problems because you have left undone work which first should have been completed in the lower energy centers.

Channeling is an activity recommended for those who are stable and who have come to the conclusion that they wish to be of service to the Creator and to humankind. A person who is merely curious, but who, unknown to himself, may possess a highly sensitive psychic nature, may be propelled into opening the green-ray energy center because of all the experiences that begin happening to him while he is satisfying his curiosity. It can happen very quickly. As always, the key seems to me to be balance. One puts one’s foot at the first place, gets a good balance, and then moves on.

By jumping from lessons still not learned in the first three centers to opening the fourth center with the first three still unbalanced, the way is opened for any problems that you do have of a personal nature to be greatly distorted and intensified simply because you are a channel, involved in offering inspiration and light to others, and so attracting the attention of the principle which is antithetical to light, the principle of darkness. As a channel, you’re transmitting on one level, yet as an individual you vibrate at a lower level.

This is inevitable, yet the distance between the two levels needs to be as little as possible. For, metaphysically speaking, you are responsible for living at the highest level of which you’ve been made aware. If you are a new channel and begin thinking that you have outgrown your mate, that you must have someone who believes in you, that you “have your rights,” and so forth, you may be heading down dangerous streets.

OK, you say that you don’t want your marriage to break up, you don’t think, but you are having trouble with it or with something else having to do with personal energy. What do you do about it? You know I would be foolish were I to think that I could put down on paper something that would be helpful to everyone. For writing that inspirational, you had better go to records of channeled lives such as Jesus the Christ, and see what He said! However, I can give a few opinionated pointers and hope that they may be of some help to some of you.

Dealing with sex did not used to be a great problem at least in terms of what men and women were supposed to do with their sexuality. It was understood that men could choose to be either promiscuous, monogamous or celibate. Conventions for each of these three lives were known and understood. Women had one less choice, unless the choice was to become a prostitute; women married and, if fertile, bore children, or they did not marry and lived a celibate existence, perhaps functioning as mother’s helper for a sister or another female relative, living perhaps alone but certainly not promiscuously.

This century has been one of fairly rapid social revolutions, beginning with the free love propounded in the 1920s, snapping back into a demi-prudery during the Depression and war years, and gradually opening up into the increasingly measured “free love” and serial relationships of the sixties. By now, men and women seem to have achieved a large measure of sexual equality, with both men and women being far more interested perhaps than they ever have been in the quality of relationships.

A woman’s sexual morality is measured these days not so much by the number of her partners as by the quality of relationships that she has developed with those who are or have been her lovers. Consequently, it seems to me that people as a whole are doing less blocking of the red-ray energy than they were used to, letting most energy move directly into orange-ray activity.

However, there is still in all of us that vulnerable part that gazes somewhat askance at the power of the red-ray drive. When I was close to thirty, for instance, I found myself, for a period of two or three years, thinking constantly about having a child. My health history was such that it was out of the question for me to conceive, and yet I wanted a baby with all of my heart and couldn’t get it off of my mind. It was not until I was about thirty-two that the last irrational and potentially self-destructive attack came and went and I was delivered over to the comfortable, though sad, feeling that it really was too late to set about having a child in my condition of health. That is the power of red-ray instinct.

We need to take any feeling of embarrassment that we have about that very vital energy and get rid of it, replacing it with good feelings towards the energy that keeps us alive. The survival instincts to breathe, to reproduce, to eat and so forth have bailed us out of many a situation by quickening our reflexes and plunging our body into a rapid dispersal of blood and oxygen when we need them the most.

The sexual energy as such needs to be seen and appreciated as part of what keeps us alive. The romantic preoccupation with the sexual experience of orgasm as a kind of death has so influenced our culture that it makes us feel negatively about the very energy that made it possible to be living now—what in the world would we have done if everyone in the world had decided that sex was not an acceptable moral expression of our natures!

In running through your unconscious biases about sex, there are certain key points to check. One: have you chosen to see sex as a positive thing? Do you ever say, “I wish I were a man” if you are a woman or “I wish I were a woman” if you are a man? If you have any kind of negative feeling about sexuality, work on your perceptions until you have found a way to embrace the idea of sex.

This is not to say that it is necessary for your spiritual growth to be sexually active. The records of history rather indicate that this is not a relevant consideration and some doughty souls would indeed say that sexuality was just one more distraction. Note that people who say that sex is a distraction from the spiritual life are giving a bad opinion about sex.

Whether or not you have any sexual activity going or planned, try to wrap your mind around the idea that sex is a distraction from the spiritual life only for those who have not yet gotten their sexual energy center clear and unblocked. If the sexual energy is clear it neither helps nor harms but is its own expression, its own energy, and the light that gives energy to every pattern that we have enlivens and blesses that kind of energy and then moves onward.

This next bit is of information is probably not intended for those of you who are carefree, dating lots, or a little, or not at all, but quite un-mated at the present, for the personal miseries of jealousy and possessiveness afflict those of us in relationships already, for the most part. Nor is it meant for any who are in happy agreement with the limitations and responsibilities their personal relationships require. But for most of us, life does not consist of relationships which are perfectly satisfactory, and you may find yourself in the paragraphs below.

Have you ever said, “Not tonight, honey. I have a headache,” when you really mean, “I’m too upset with you to be able to make love?” If you have, you are certainly not alone. However, you are using sex as a bargaining chip. This is not using sex as a clear energy. A clearer expression would be to say what you mean, that you are upset and so cannot share love.

Then you have opened the way for honest, two-way communication. Once the talking is done, you may find your sexual energy flowing well once more. This, by the way, is why making up can be such fun, for communication opens the heart chakra, and it feels so good for energy to be moving freely again. Whatever you are gaining by sexual bargaining, you are losing the ability to funnel light through to the heart center, and so are setting yourself up for very unsettling experiences in the context of your spiritual life and especially your channeling.

If you cannot deal with the thought of making love to your mate because there is no love in this moment for you with him or her, then you need to say that, and then move the emphasis from sex to where the trouble really lies. Usually in a situation where you have feigned a headache, the real problem is either that your mate is clinging to you, wanting you to possess him or her, or you feel that your mate is ignoring you and attempting to put separation between him or her and you.

Either distortion causes the same effect—alienation from your mate and a tendency to use sex to express your hurt feelings. There is also the tendency of some people to use sex as a reward. This is used more by women than by men, although both sexes have their proponents of this tactic. This also is an unclear use of sexual energy. Try to ally sex in your physical experience with love so that you either discover how you love the unlovable mate, and give yourself in that spirit, in the interests of prolonging the relationship until you have found a way to fall in love again, or explain carefully that you need to be celibate until you have learned to love again.

Sex is not, in my opinion, in itself an excuse for the severance of a bad relationship. It is something that is a symptom of unclear energies between two people, because all sex is good sex to the red-ray chakra. Thus, if you are having difficulty with sex and it is not organic, that difficulty is likely a mismatch of orange-ray energies.

Turning again and again to the ideal of unconditional love in your sexual life is highly recommended, for if you offer yourself in that energy, you are vibrating a clear red and orange ray, and the energy then is moving upwards on schedule, heading for the all-important green-ray heart chakra. This is your goal. You very much want to make the path of light free from obstruction so that in full force it may reach the heart chakra and activate it fully. Your greatest ally in achieving green-ray activation is your enthusiasm and will to seek clear and unconditional love. The energy of the Creator is pulled upwards along the spine by the seeker’s desire for ever-purer realizations of love and wisdom. It is in the deep intention of the meditator and in conscious intention to a lesser degree that the will to seek is honed.

Let me take a moment to square off and talk about a very central problem for so many people who have started off on the path of spiritual seeking. Whether it is orthodox or heterodox, this seeking will change you. If you are in a relationship, but you cannot coax your friend, lover, mate or spouse to join you on this path, you will be walking a new path all by yourself in no time at all. Meditate for two months, and you will find yourself a person with a different mind, a different point of view.

This does not do anything good for your relationship, for you will perceive that you have “grown apart,” that your mate does not any longer understand you and may not even approve of what you are doing. The further and faster that you go, the more obvious this difference becomes. Far too many marriages break up because of the catalyst encountered on the spiritual path. Many bitter words have been said by those who are attempting to become more compassionate. Many words of judgment have been cast at a perplexed and uncomprehending mate who is struggling to understand your new beginnings with his or her old ideas.

The spiritual path seems so fresh, new and wonderful—which it is—that any sacrifice seems little enough to make in order to become more securely “on the path.” And so many a relationship ends, unfinished, forever a source of frustration to both parties, who wonder despite words to others whether the right decision was really made.

If you are in this position, you are no doubt uncomfortable, and I do not want to minimize the validity of that discomfort. However, in my very human opinion now is a good time to keep your head and try to see things from the largest perspective available to you. There may be a lot riding on this decision, in terms of your responsibilities and commitments.

In the first place, if you are married you made a contract. Look at it for the moment as a business contract. You agreed to sell goods and services to a corporation, the marriage, in exchange for nothing whatsoever, except love. There is nothing in a marriage contract about what a person will get from the relationship but rather two people’s promises of what they will give to the relationship.

At the time of the wedding, presumably, both parties to the contract feel that they will be recompensed by society and by each other, by the fruits of marriage, such as a house and children, if indeed they thought about it at all. However, the actual contract, unless you have made a marriage agreement, is unequivocally a contract of giving with no expectation of return. What else does “for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health and till death do us part” mean? There are no guarantees. The first casualty of a broken marriage is your word.

As I have described in the previous chapter, the deciding of what you think is right, and then being faithful to it, is very important in your preparation of character for the service of channeling. Does breaking your word strike you as something that is “right”? If it is not “right,” why are you doing it? If you are not being abused either physically or emotionally, but are merely finding life uncomfortable because you can no longer talk to your mate, I urge you strongly to consider carefully whether or not you wish to break your word. I have seen people who stayed together for a long time, and actually began making inroads in communicating with each other again.

I have also seen seemingly hopeless relationships in which both parties stayed with the marriage because it was the “right” thing to do. It is true that the two couples that I have in mind are both unhappy in their personal relationships. However, it is also true that each of the two has, because they have made peace with the primary relationship, developed tremendously strong and helpful activities on other levels, and has become a much more powerful person, a person that she probably would not have become had she turned away from what she felt would be the “right” thing to do.

It is a high price to pay for believing in your ideals. But in the long run, the majority of these things do in the end work out in a very comfortable manner. Perhaps the mate who is trying to hold you back because he is afraid of what you are doing decides that it is not worth it and leaves. The decision has been made for you, and you may go in peace. Perhaps the mate comes to understand you, or at least feels unthreatened by you, learning to see your activities as crazy, maybe, but harmless.

If you can live with being misunderstood, which is not as difficult as it sounds, your problems are at an end, and you can go back to loving your mate as you loved that person in the beginning, without stint. At any rate, for the sake of the opening of the pipe which you are to become in order to be a channel for those concepts of heart and mind which may inspire others, it is very well to choose to relate to people as if they did not threaten you but as if you wished only to be of service to them. Far from being less important the more intimate the relationship, the principle becomes more important the more intimate the relationship is.

How important it is to choose to see someone intimately important to you as positive, to see the relationship as positive! If you experience any difficulty or trouble in the relationship it is well to apprehend that trouble as an opportunity for learning. Judgment does not have any part in a clear expression of unconditional love, although it’s always a good idea to use your usual powers of discrimination in evaluating hurtful words that may be said to you in anger. If they are not true, discount them, but try not to hold a grudge.

Nothing makes energy stop dead faster than that kind of negative emotion. Try to notice the good times that you may have even in a bad relationship. It is very easy to underestimate how valuable your mate’s presence is to you if that person is getting on your nerves. Let your mate go away, and you have a lot of opportunity to re-evaluate your judgment, but a diminished opportunity to save the situation that you have created by allowing separation to occur.

Is this your situation: you have been a good mate, have given your all to the relationship, have been as good a parent as you could be and are now working to become more spiritually aware, but your mate has seemingly lost interest in you and is chasing after others? You are ready to chuck him/her out on his/her ear because he/she is rejecting you and being unfaithful. Now your mate is exhibiting symptoms of having orange-ray blockage—a fear of being possessed by you, and a desire to be possessed by or to possess another.

OK. That is your mate’s problem, not yours unless you take it personally. It very likely has nothing to do with you. Do you want to end the relationship because your mate is in emotional trouble? Maybe you can’t take it, and then I say, “fine,” but do not try to learn to channel during this period of your life. Things are not settled enough for you right now.

In order for your energy to be clear in this situation, you need to settle down, take a deep breath, and actively, prayerfully love your mate. He/she needs you right now. It is time for your marriage contract to be reviewed. Note that there is no small print. This goes for the mates of those who are drunk, insane, homosexual, drugged or otherwise difficult to live with. In order to preserve your own sobriety and sanity, you may have to effect a physical separation.

Try not to effect an emotional one as well. Relationships are your life sustenance, in that they give in your you the most intense and satisfying catalyst of any force within your daily life. Because the universe is kind, you are allowed to learn through hardship how to become unattached to hardship—how to embrace the opportunities for learning more about love that are implicit in every bit of difficulty that the relationship is causing you.

As you attempt to clear up this orange-ray energy, also attempt to keep a vision of yourself as powerful in your mind’s eye. A powerful person can afford to give freedom to a mate or a friend, even if that freedom leads the other person to do something that you do not like. If you are powerful enough, nothing will make as much difference to you as your own opinion and your own perception.

A powerful person can always choose to go the extra mile—exhaustion is unknown to you if you are strong enough. And if you are strong you can choose to honor commitments even if that choice seems a Quixotic gesture. If another wishes to end the relationship, while it is impossible to generalize, it seems to me that the other person’s wish is paramount, and the rule of free will is higher than any other consideration. This is my own idea—I put free will at the top of the list of ethical considerations. If you think differently, please do that!

Game-playing in general is a muddying energy, and at whatever energy level you are playing games you will block the flow of energy through that center. It is difficult to play red-ray games, although people who starve themselves to the point of anorexia nervosa are certainly managing it. It is very easy to play orange-ray games, though the anger and other negative emotions this causes result in much illness.

And in dealing with society, the frequent user of yellow-ray energy, it is easy to play games. By the time you begin consciously working on your orange-ray center, you have undoubtedly done a good deal of preliminary unconscious work already. None of us escapes being blocked in orange-ray in one way or another, and we make mistakes in judgment time and time again, blocking ourselves until we perceive the problem, communicate about it and clear it up. If we attempt to work on societal games before we have eliminated personal games, we will find ourselves working on games within games.

The passions people feel for groups are a kind of extension of the ways that people feel about each other. If you are using people to get ahead in your job, for instance, you are expressing your opinion about a societal question: how does one get ahead in the world? However, if you had unblocked your relationships so that you did not allow yourself to attempt to use other people, you would not have been tempted to use that societal game to block the yellow-ray center.

It is remarkably easy to play games without recognizing them, so any care which can be taken in removing games that you already know about from your palette of thoughts and actions is a good thing. To be remembered in every circumstance is the basic credo of one who wishes to be working on channeling: keep the heart chakra as open as possible, full of compassion and undemanding, unconditional love. The desire to be of service to other people is what will tune your receiver and empower it, so it is well to treat this basic frame of mind as your attitudinal goal. Of course the true goal always is to express yourself in your experiences as you really are, not to be insincere for the sake of appearance.

So, what if you have real disagreements with friends or co-workers and find it almost impossible to achieve green-ray compassion with regard to them? Whoever the difficult person is, he is a mirror of you. Sometimes it helps to step back and take a good look at what is bothering you about someone else. Quite often one can see in one’s self at least a shadow of the exact characteristic that you have found irritating in someone else.

This realization not only makes it possible for you to go about the process of forgiving the person who has functioned as a mirror for you, it also offers you a new opportunity for contrition, self-forgiveness, amendment of life, learning and growth, as you hear criticism that you have made of the mirror of yourself, apply it to yourself and take in the lessons that you have given yourself.

There will be, at least in many cases, an extremely small remainder of persons whose critical faults bear little or no resemblance to any characteristic of yours whatsoever. There are some people who are seemingly unfortunate, who have almost an instinct for being undesirable persons. Usually, these people have serious mental or emotional problems. Realizing this pulls the sting, at least for me, and makes the acid quality of the relationship leach away, so that my heart’s sweet again, for why would I wish to heap further problems upon the head of one who is already greatly troubled?

It is likely that whatever unfortunate person of this kind you know would not prefer to be pitied; most would rather arouse anger than truth. But for you, if not for your negatively emoting friend, pity is by far the better emotion, as compassion is a far more gentle service to offer another than anger. If you are using this reasoning for more than one or two people in your life, you need to polish your glasses.

There is one characteristic you will need to watch as you continue learning and growing as a seeker and as an instrument: beware of becoming a fanatic. You will have more and more to share with people. You will be full of one enthusiasm and then another as your mind takes in all that it can of the spiritual literature available to us now, that body of books and other media being the largest it has ever been in our written history, due to the preserving of older books in libraries, and the constant deluge of new offerings as time moves on. The accumulation will leave you in many different moods at different times.

At more than one point in your experience you will feel that you have the answer. Live with that, but try not to evangelize. This practice is one more means of the imposition of your will upon another, and what this whole chapter has been talking about is the supremacy of that most primitive of qualities, free will. It is of utmost importance that both other people and you shall have freedom of choice at all times. You cannot make anyone but yourself choose, nor can you tell people what their choices are. Each person is the center of his or her own creation. Although all choices are fundamentally between separation and unity, darkness and light, in one way or another, each person’s perception of the choices and the times of necessity for choice, will be different.

If a person comes to you and says, “I’m fascinated by what you are talking about. Let’s talk about it.” then you are being given free rein to engage in conversation of whatever length. Here you may witness to your own search and your own findings. But in the arena of everyday life, those who buttonhole you, whether on the street, at work, in your home or at church are not likely to be appreciated.

It seems everyone is aware of the fundamentalist Christian groups who solicit contributions and interest door-to-door. Most are polite in telling their stories, but the common experience is that the visits are not welcome, at best. Perhaps many have also had the experience of relatives or friends who attempt to convert you to whatever religion they are purveying. The more usual reaction is a further emotional separation away from whatever bias your friend has attempted to force upon you.

Especially in the free world, we are not accustomed to being told what to think, even by friends. And while we are susceptible to hints, advertising, teasing and other disreputable encroachments on free will, we usually have the sense to resent others’ attempts to change us when we are not ready for it, and not asking for it.

Please know that in no way do I wish to suggest that you who cannot live any more with a husband or wife should force yourself to do so because of what I say, or that indeed you should do anything that I suggest. I am trying to expose, for what they are, the factors in sex, love, marriage, relationships with people and relationships with society that keep a person who wishes to be a channel from the relatively stable practice of that service. If you are working with difficult relationships, and your life is pretty torn up right now, by all means do what you must, or do nothing if you do not know what to do yet, and accept living in confusion for a while.

But it would be recommended by me that you avoid the practice of channeling during this difficult period in your life. I say this especially strongly where marriage is concerned. It seems that for the most part people who live together without having gone through the marriage ceremony have a fairly realistic idea of the supremacy of the rights of the other person. This is not always true, but there is a tendency for it to be so. The married relationship, on the other hand, largely because of the pressures of many centuries of social distortion of the ideal marriage, is likely to be one in which unity has been broken up into two separate entities, the party of the first part and the party of the second!

Husband and wife treat each other to some extent as adversaries rather than yoke-fellows, and instead of thinking about how to please and serve the other, number all the grievances which the other has committed against the self. As the relationship grows more stale the two mates may not even be communicating any more, although both feel that they have tried their utmost. Perhaps sexual promiscuity is an excess troubling you or your mate; perhaps impotence or frigidity has characterized you or your mate’s experience but not your own.

Perhaps the fights about money have become too painful. Perhaps pride has been damaged too often. And frequently, the children that you have produced together are a most confusing responsibility, having become separate from rather than a part of the original love you and your mate had for each other. All these considerations are terribly stormy, and in any of them you will be experiencing negative emotions.

Please note that I didn’t say evil or bad emotions. There is an important difference. A negative emotion is bad for your channeling because it blocks energy from moving through to the heart chakra. A person in the grips of negative emotion by definition does not have a totally open heart center.

Unconditional love and negative emotion are as much opposite as the negative pole and the positive pole in the battery of your car. If you want your battery to work, so that your car can start and do its work, you must have a negative and a positive charge. If you want to do work in consciousness you must have chosen whether you are going to be working on raising the negative charge or the positive charge.

You know that the life led without conscious thought is pretty much a zero: one fairly positive thing done on impulse; one slightly negative thing done carelessly; another negative thing done by omission; another positive thing done because of helpful circumstance, the sum total being no polarization. Channeling while angry will put you into a very untuned situation. Your basic state of mind is positive, but your mind tuning’s less positive, because of the negative emotion.

Therefore, you are far more liable to embrace distortions of more positive thoughts in less positive clothing. In other words, you will be channeling the equivalent of a nonpolarized life—a mixed message. A good example of a mixed message is the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament. Moses was dealing with a very demanding populace who kept asking him for more and more specific information.

He had a good contact, but all this specific information was very draining. So when his people asked for rules of life he received, not the positive “do this and do that and your life will be blessed,” but instead “do not do this and do not do that, and you shall not be unclean.” Negatives are built into this basically very positive set of suggestions, which certainly are inarguably just.

Further relatively untuned communications can lay you open for many difficulties simply because you as a channel are not protecting yourself by living as you believe. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of a parent saying “Don’t do as I do; do as I say.”

I do not recall that argument ever making any sense to me. I railed bitterly against it, in fact, and was much disillusioned when I saw that good advice was not followed by good behavior on my parents’ part. In your own life, when you decide that something is true, and then you do not act on it, you are nullifying that truth within yourself. You are taking the power of the knowledge from yourself and from your consciousness. Your consciousness, your violet-ray summing up of instantaneous self, is your ever-present gift to the Creator.

When you rob your consciousness you are robbing the first fruit of your incarnation. When you are in that situation, and come to realize it, it is time not to think badly of yourself, but to attempt to smooth out the difficulty and pain that you are feeling until your life is once again your God-given creation and not something that happens to you.

Only when your life is once again largely a product of your conscious thinking, should you go after servanthood as a vocal channel. This is just to cut down on the odds of your running into real difficulty in your work and in your life. So get peaceful insofar as it is possible for you. Even if situations are difficult, if you can find peace and serenity within yourself as you look at these situations, you are in good shape.

And so, onward to channeling itself.
 

Back to Contents