Chapter Six

Temptations

We would all like to think that there are no such things as temptations. It would make life easier, for the nature of temptation is such that often we do not recognize what is happening when a temptation is skewing our judgment or perception of a situation. However, as a responsible channel you are a polarized person, a committed seeker who has a clear personal metaphysic and ethic. You offer yourself wholeheartedly in the service of the general spiritual and philosophical point of view, and, therefore, will be privy to many temptations to act athwart of that stance.

Polarity does not equal a passion for the polarized point of view, but it does imply it. When you behave in a polarized fashion it is logical to assume that you are to some extent attached to the outcome of what you are doing. If it is a speech, you are attached to the outcome of being understood. If it is channeling you are dedicated to the messages’ being inspirational.

Unless you work on your balance every day, YOU will find your point of view being skewed frequently by the temptations of attachment to outcome. When you know people very well it is especially difficult not to be able to communicate your point of view. The miscommunications that always occur almost inevitably will bring up negative emotions, which can only be balanced on a daily basis, as close to the event of imbalance as possible.

The overly-zealous “I can prove it” mentality is typical of the faithful and committed philosopher or metaphysicist, and the spectre of religious twosomes flogging pamphlets door-to-door haunts each of us as we move along our spiritual path attempting to avoid temptations.

I’ve written already about the importance of straightening out blockages and problems we have in our relationships. After you begin channeling you will find that the extent and intensity of the temptations with which you must deal are linked directly with how troubled and blocked the red, orange and yellow-ray energy centers are. Any advocate’s position will by its very nature leave a dynamic vacuum which attracts its counterpoint.

Thesis calls antithesis into being. Anything that is not internally balanced within you in mind, body and spirit is fair game for temptation. It is well to work every day on balance as well as on polarity. One tool for working on both of these things is (surprise) meditation, though polarity is probably better worked on by the intuitive mind, in deep and silent meditation and in prayer, whereas one’s power of analysis may usefully be brought to bear on questions of internal balance.

Each day as you enter meditation, or are leaving it for the night, look back over your day, and when you perceive that there has been an imbalance in your day—say you have been very impatient with a person—you return in mind to that situation, feeling again the intense impatience you felt earlier. Then, take the time to allow the antithesis of impatience, patience, to fill your mind gradually, replacing impatience in a natural flow. Then accept that patience as being part of your earlier impatience, and forgive both yourself and the person with whom you were so impatient for the incident, seeing it as a balanced act rather than an imbalanced one. As of that moment, your bad opinion of that person has been rescinded, and you no longer have the temptation of judging that person in a biased manner.

Temptations which affect channels are usually problems of excess or ego. The red-ray energy center, or the root chakra as it is sometimes called, is the seat of appetite and desire. If you find yourself reacting to the stresses of channeling by overeating, talking too much, indulging too much in alcohol or any other such indulgence of appetites which seems excessive, you are either expressing a blockage of the red-ray center, in which case you need to get in touch with your body and get it to begin feeding you accurate signals, or an orange-ray blockage which has caused disturbance against which you are shielding, in which case you need to re-read the material on getting peaceful.

(One other cause of indulging among channels is the need for earth-heavy food while channeling high energies. If you are losing weight while eating normally, you’ll need to eat meat, the redder and rarer the better. Sorry.)

Temptations of excess are not the worst that you will ever face as a channel, but if you are dealing with these temptations and failing, it may be that you need to practice moderation in order to have that behavior in place when dealing with orange and yellow-ray blockages, which many people call ego-problems. Although it would be difficult to name all of the signs of the overly large ego in a channel, I can point out some of the bigger categories for you, and you can draw your own conclusions about anything that is not covered here.

Excluding people who don’t think as you do is using ego instead of compassion to relate to other people. The notion that you have something that everyone will find as helpful as you do is to be avoided at all costs, and I believe this even speaking as a committed and most grateful Christian. I have seen conversions, but I have only seen them occur when the time was right and when the witness was requested. It is difficult to walk around with answers and not expect everyone’s questions to match them.

But I have never seen any justification for this frame of mind, because everyone’s question is somewhat different in shape, even though we all want to know precisely the same truth. The problems of clouded perception are almost infinitely subtle. Thus, thinking that you have the answers is incorrect thinking in my book. However, many people go through their lives with a relatively narrow point of view, and are extremely good, giving and productive people, because the view that they embrace is one that is held by a satisfactorily great number of other people in the same community.

The simpler the social structure, the more this is true. This is why people who have lived long in the country may well find far more things unacceptable than people who live in a big city, and have for a significant portion of their lives. Living with a crush of other people nearby teaches one quickly that almost no one thinks as you do. It is a sobering thought for many, and it probably has a lot to do with the popular resurgence of a simpler form of Christianity in this country, because a lot of people do not want to have to be that broad-minded—it is comfortable to have things spelled out: what to believe, what to think, what to do.

Although living by the law is not something that has ever been shown to work, since people always break laws, it is one of the great temptations for people who would prefer not to think. Try to be a little better than the narrow-minded people who condemn those who do not think as they do. Withhold judgment and listen to what people have to say regardless of what it is.

Things that make your channeling sound better are a great temptation, especially to the beginning channel. The great glut of specific information involving cataclysms that are just waiting in the wings is due to the quite logical demand for this kind of information. Say that you get a good philosophical source and are putting out a lot of inspiring material. You receive something about the coming of the New Age. People immediately want to question that.

They want to know when it is all going to happen and whether in the birth of that New Age any part of their particular geographical vicinity is going to be made unlivable. People want to be able to survive the cataclysm of the ending of this age, if there’s such in store, so that they can enjoy the age to come. Being within the illusion, we all ask questions of our contacts based on the premise that we will have to be living incarnate in a physical body on this planet in order to be able to enjoy the coming age. We forget about the incredible ease of dropping a body and picking up another one. We forget about the logical shape and rhythm of life and death and we want to hang onto this life, regardless of the rightness of the destiny we have programmed for ourselves through the use of our own desires and experiences.

One confusing cross-over which makes egoic temptations more difficult to detect is that the process of choosing what you believe, what you would die for, and, therefore, what you are going to live for makes you a more powerful person. The manipulation of your channeling makes you feel more powerful than you are, as does any situation in which you’re telling another person what is what. If you like being a more powerful person, you may at first deem it a positive thing to feel more powerful, as well, not realizing you can fool yourself.

The passionately opinionated person is always more powerful than the disinterested one, simply because the advocate has a motivation for saying something, while the truly disinterested person is likely to go his own way without bothering to set anyone straight, from his point of view. However, when the temptations of ego hit, it will still feel as if you are becoming more powerful, when actually you are attempting to create, or half-create, your channeling for the consumption of the audience, which is a no-no! People are always going to want more and more specific information. It is possible that they will want information too specific for your contact to provide on a regular basis. Let’s look at that a little bit.

You know that I feel that free will has supremacy as being of the greatest ethical value after the acknowledgment of consciousness itself. I find love an acceptable substitute for the word “consciousness”.

However, free will is a more important thing to me, when deciding whether or not to do something, than considerations of love. If I am going to infringe on someone’s free will by what I say or do, I have to ask myself what right I have to intrude. I have the right to influence my family, my friends, perhaps even my neighbors, if there is some public wrong that needs righting that comes to my attention. Because I am an inhabitant of planet Earth, I have a right to influence others.

However, entities whom I may contact are not inhabitants of planet Earth unless they are discarnate entities who used to live here. Oddly enough, many people do not believe ghosts exist. I’ve seen quite a few, and will testify as to their apparent reality within my illusion. If you are channeling a ghost, which you well may be doing if you are working with a Spiritualist tradition, the ghost may give specific information, and it may well be that your contact is reliable and that the information will not disintegrate over a period of time, for ghosts are indeed inhabitants of this planet and do have the right to influence others here. If your contact is not a ghost, and you are still getting specific information, beware.

The “good guys” abide by the Law of Free Will to an amazing degree, pretty much out of necessity. Part of their desire to be of service is reflected in an attitude so polarized toward service that it is literally impossible for an entity to intrude more than a certain amount on any other entity’s free will. Proof is not at any time attempted by metaphysical channels, since each must be free to make each and every choice concerning what to believe and how to live, for himself.

However, negative contacts are very happy to give polluted information, polluted in the sense that the original positive message has been taken and edited so as to include additional information, which may or may not be true, but which is by its very nature going to depolarize the contact, making it gradually more negative and less positive, until the balance turns and the light which you have begun generating by acting in a polarized manner in service to the Creator goes out. To avoid that just keep looking for the highest and most informed contact and know that that contact will be unwilling and even unable to violate the dictates of free will. And so be warned when you begin to get an excessive amount of specific information.

Your group, given that you are already channeling for a group, may well want specific information whether you want to channel it or not. If your chosen field of channeling is outer-plane, a “cosmic” contact rather than an inner-planes master, teacher or other discarnate but once embodied spirit, you may have to set group policy and say “No specific questions, please.”

If you wish not to limit people’s imaginations by such a blanket disclaimer, you may simply allow yourself to sound silly fairly often, as you channel the explanation that you cannot answer that particular question because it would be an infringement on free will. We are talking about temptation, and the temptation to supply information that is requested is one of the trickier egoic temptations.

You really want your channeling to be good, and to be received as good. One doesn’t like to be criticized, and when all one has got for one’s pains is a series of “I can’t tell you, because it would violate free will,” the listener may be somewhat less than stunned by the excellence of your channeling. I advise you to live with that! The potential of giving in to this kind of temptation is the end of your contact and of your use as an instrument by positive contacts.

It is a temptation to stay with one of the great misconceptions of every new channel, and that is that it is not really happening. The activity of telepathic reception has been studied, and one day will be documented, I am sure. But for now, our instrumentation is not enough sophisticated for the reliable documentation of this activity. When you begin to channel, it is inevitable that you will think that you are the author of everything that you say, that there’s a great conspiracy of people who are pretending that channeling is real when, of course, it isn’t real.

As each new channel gains experience, the subjective case for the source of information as being outside of the waking consciousness gets more and more persuasive until finally the channel no longer has very many qualms about working in any situation where the atmosphere and environment seem conducive to a peaceful session.

However, the unconscious assumption that it really isn’t happening somehow remains at the bottom of every channel’s mind and when a difficult question comes up the channel will tend to search his own knowledge, his own stores of accumulated conscious lore for the answer instead of leaving the mind free for whatever may come through. The longer that you have been channeling, the less excuse you have for this kind of lack of discipline, for the more confident you should be in the reality of what you are experiencing as an instrument.

If you fall into the category of one who truly believes that one is generating one’s own material rather than channeling it, I would like to know why you are reading this book, and why you are interested in channeling. It is true that it is easier to separate people from their money when they think that they’re paying you to function as a channel than when they think they are paying you for your advice.

People often underrate good advice and overrate religiously oriented pronouncements, not trusting in their own powers of discrimination but rather in the power of someone else to know what is best, if that person is a religious or spiritual figure. Now, I really think that if you are reading these words, there is something in you that is saying the phenomenon is real. It has been a real experience to me and, I think, to many others.

Try not to give in to the temptation to answer in your own words or in any way misuse the power of channeling. If you receive nothing, channel nothing. Every once in a while this will happen to you. Think of it as a test. If you are committed to your point of view you will not use your channeling ability in the service of a lesser ideal than your highest and best.

If it is more important to you to produce something for your group than to channel well, channeling is not your area; being an instrument is not your forte. Turn instead to something over which you have complete control, at least in the sense of all your tools’ being in the world of objects. A typical social worker, for instance, must fight a great deal of red tape, ingrained behavior patterns and the emotional biases of many people in order to be of service, but at least he or she does not have to depend on unseen and invisible emanations which are available only unpredictably.

An instrument works closely with uncontrolled energies; that is, energies not under the conscious control of your waking personality. Always look at your personality and at the personality of each student, as you set about the work of channeling, for if you are not comfortable with the concept of being overshadowed by a force greater than you, or at least other and different than you, you will be miserable as a channel, and you will undoubtedly find the temptation of using your own information to the exclusion of awaiting the unpredictable contact too much to bear.

People are often all too easy to impress, right now anyway, channeling for the last several years having come into fashion. While it is chic, people that wish to experience everything that is out there to experience will be listening to anything that claims to be channeled information with an uncritical ear, curious and eager to learn more. If a person of whom you think a lot asks you a question to which your contact does not reply it is very easy to fall off the channeling wagon and give your own opinion as part of the channeled message.

You can say to yourself that you are actually just saying what the contact would say if you were channeling and, therefore, are not misleading anyone. This isn’t true. If someone’s opinion is more important to you than your own knowledge that you have channeled honestly, again, you should be in a line of work in which you do not have to depend on unseen friends whose situation you cannot control. If someone whom you do not know asks you a personal question, you will likely not know the answer.

The human temptation is to give the ego a little bit of room and make a comment that would indicate neither that you knew or did not know the information, but did indicate an appropriate attitude. It’s called saving face. Tell it as it is, to yourself and to everyone else. People have only your word that you are channeling at all, much less producing material in good faith from the best source you can contact.

This whole business can be a con game, because a confidence game is based on other people’s trust whether you deserve it or not. Don’t be a con man. Deserve the trust that people will inevitably put in you. You’re not responsible for the information itself but only for the production of that information, by your preparation as an instrument of integrity, by the tuning you have undergone and the challenges you make before you accept contact. Think of yourself as the village philosopher, if you want a handy slot in which to put yourself.

That philosopher has often been a drunk and when not a drunk, often an idiot. You are merely upholding a long-standing tradition of people whose minds have been upset and overshadowed by a force greater than their own, obviously rather weak minds. Let your mind be called anything, but let your faith in the overshadowing of a benign and kindly universe capable of communicating to us furnish you with enthusiasm and respect for the channeling that you have set out to do.

Here is a situation for you: you start getting information from a Lord Joseph, or a Commander Umgawa. You know that names of contacts are often somewhat similar to the sounds that young children make when they are trying out the language—lots of exotic consonants and a liberal supply of vowels. The title may not at first mean anything to you. Be warned.

The title is a kind of temptation; a name that makes your channeling seem better serves to aid the perceived elevation of the contact. Mind you, this is not something you have consciously done. In part you are responding to childhood training perhaps, a childhood in which a Jewish or Christian service you attended filled your ears full of Lords and titles such as Almighty, Everlasting, Blessed, Holy, Omniscient, Omnipresent and Wonderful.

It sounds natural to have Lord Hatonn, for instance, instead of Hatonn in terms of spiritual talk that you have heard previously. Also a factor is the inevitable respect which you will develop for your contact or contacts, causing you unconsciously to give them honor in your own mind. However, it has not been my experience that it is common for even the most far-advanced positively polarized spiritual entity to offer praise on its own behalf or use a title.

The typical contact is attempting to get out of the way of the message itself which the contact considers its only reason for communication. Contacts do seem to take an almost childlike delight in meeting with the people who sit in a session or in meditation. However, they make note of their delight by blessing those whom they have met, not by talking about their titles and honors.

When you hear such a title, as you inevitably will, challenge the contact again in the name of the highest and best that you know. Lesser contacts flee from you if you ally yourself with a matchless point of view with every fiber of your being. Mind you, there may yet be an entity who is Lord this or Commander that, who happens to be a good source of very interesting information. Your contact may be the exception I have not yet run across. However, the odds are against it.

The final temptation is a simple one, and I have talked about it already: the temptation to progress too fast. Try to remember at all times that what you are working on is basically not your channeling but yourself. It is yourself that you bring to channeling, and only yourself. All your work is interior. All your advances are invisible.

You are disciplining your mind and your personality in order that it might be turned over to the highest and best source that you can contact for purposes of information giving. If you attempt to add phenomena to your little list of achievements too quickly, while disregarding and not dealing with the matters and concerns of daily life, you may well cause a real weakness in your being by allowing blockages in the lower energy centers to occur, severely limiting the amount of light that is available for use by the heart chakra.

Respect yourself enough to be yourself, whatever the temptation to improve artificially or beforehand upon the person you truly are, right now.
 

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