Aaron: Angels in Earthsuits
11th July 2008
Aaron: My blessings and love to you. You sit there wondering, who is Aaron? Who are you? You have a body; I have no more need of a body. I am spirit; you are spirit. I come to you as spirit to spirit, one soul speaking to another. There’s no denial here of the heavier bodies. There is a physical body, an emotional body, a mental body, but you humans often forget the pure spirit body, and this is the essence of what you are.
I call you “angels in earthsuits.” You need the earthsuit; that is part of the incarnation. If you were already finished with the work you are doing, you wouldn’t need these heavier bodies. So while they are sometimes chafing and uncomfortable, they are also the tools for your awakening. Sometimes you despise them. Try to learn to love them instead, to love the heavy emotions, even, rather than constantly condemning the physical and emotional body.
Each time you come into a new incarnation there’s a strong intention to release some of the old karma, to awaken more fully, to live your life with more love. How many of you have seen the movie Groundhog Day? That’s a good example. He keeps waking up every morning into the same exact scene. He keeps trying, first the same thing and it doesn’t work, then trying something else, then getting frustrated, and finally—ah, an insight, there’s another approach! Then things start to resolve.
That “other approach,” this is the approach to be with the self and the world with love instead of condemnation and negativity. I am not suggesting that there should be or will be no negative thought, but when negative thought arises, it’s just negative thought. If you took a bare patch of lawn out there, added fertilizer, watered it, put in grass seed, had warm sun on it, grass would grow—would you expect anything else? This is the way the world is. So when conditions are present, there will be a certain response.
If there was a tack on the floor and you stepped on it barefoot and it bled, is there anybody here who would say, “I shouldn’t bleed”? This is the way the body is. If the body is punctured, it will bleed. If you stub your toe, that’s a condition, and you feel the pain. But when you stub your emotional toe and anger or judgment of some sort comes up, somebody says something you don’t want to hear, maybe something abusive, or something comes up that frightens you, then most of you have at least some level of self-judgment—“I shouldn’t feel that.” Of course, sometimes anger and fear will come, sadness will come, confusion will come. How do you deal with these?
We are moving from the age of rational man into the age of non-dual awareness, where each of you are starting to know your deepest connections with the earth and with each other.
You are in a process of evolution. My view of the universe and of human evolution is this. There are eight, what I call, densities. The heaviest, the lowest density, the heaviest vibration, is mineral, gas, rock. Second density is vegetable and animal, from the very simplest forms of vegetable to the increasingly complex and finally self-aware animal. With that self-awareness comes readiness to progress into third density. Third density is human.
The span of third density is enormous, it’s everything from the animal who is first self-aware to the human who finally shifts from taking self-awareness as self-centeredness to knowing self-awareness as connection with all that is, so that limits of the self fall away and you find that you’re everything. At that point you’re ready to move on, but you’re still only moving into the 4th of 8 densities.
Most of you have heard the term “New Age.” The meaning is very simple. We are moving from the age of rational man into the age of non-dual awareness, where each of you are starting to know your deepest connections with the earth and with each other. Your third density life experiences give you the opportunity to practice through the body, through the emotions, to watch the recurrent thought of “me against that”, and instead begin to understand that the heart can open in compassion, connect to whatever seems separate, and yet work with it if it’s something unwholesome.
So if there are people doing, let’s use damage to the environment, instead of hating the people or saying helplessly, “Well, it’s them doing it, there’s nothing I can do,” you recognize whatever anybody is doing, you are also doing at some level, and when you hold the whole situation with love, you open the doorway to shifting the situation.
When I say “holding the doorway with love,” I’d like you all to think of something that angers you, something difficult. Bring your attention to it. Perhaps something unfair that somebody said to you, something hurtful. Can you feel your energy close up when you think about this? Tension, tightening in the body, contraction. The angel aspect of you is in a permanent state of non-contraction, and the earthsuit goes into contraction.
Now think of somebody that you deeply love or admire. Think of some exchange between the two of you that brought warmth into your heart… Can you feel the contraction dissolve? Can you feel the heart opening? The energy opens. When you are contracted, you move yourself off into a place of separation and thereby you set limits, because as the personal self you are indeed limited. But in this greater self there are no limits.
I am not suggesting that the personal self is non-existent. There is indeed a personal self and we honor and cherish that personal self. But we don’t ignore the greater self and choose the personal self as the only thing that’s real, any more than we ignore the personal self and choose the greater self as the only reality. How do you hold it together simultaneously?
I’d like you to try this exercise with me. Hold your hand up in front of your face. Wiggle the fingers, move the fingers. One is the body, one is the thoughts, here is emotions, here is planning or judging mind, it’s all there. Stare at the fingers. That’s it, that’s the personal self, constantly rushing around!
Now keep the fingers wiggling and look through them, look right up at me. The fingers haven’t gone anyplace, but look beyond. (pause) Look back at the fingers. When you focus on the fingers, you can’t see the spaciousness. When you open into the spaciousness, you don’t ignore the fingers. If one of the fingers suddenly started bleeding, right there while looking through you still can take a tissue and wipe it.
This demonstrates the simultaneity of the personal self and the greater self. So much of what you are learning in the incarnation is to hold that non-duality. You do that in your personal emotional work, for example if a judging thought, self-judgment or judgment of another, if a judging thought arises, you note, “judging, judging, here is a judgment.” I want you to think hard about my next statement. Some of you will get it quickly, others of you may not get it right away: that which is aware of judgment is not judging. Do you understand what I mean by that? That which is aware of judgment is not judging.
Compassion holds the commitment to non-harm and to not judge another, and it knows how to say no in a loving way.
When anger comes up the body tenses. There is heat, pulsation. Here is anger. That which is aware of anger is not angry. Now you’ve got to be careful. There’s no denial of the anger. The anger is the direct experience of the moment. There’s also a commitment not to enact the anger in the world, but in order not to enact anger in the world you don’t have to combat the anger or defeat it, but rather to open your heart to this human that’s experiencing anger in this moment.
When there can be kindness for the self and the experience of anger, there can be kindness for another. Then there can be kindness for terrorists across the world. Maybe compassion is a better word. Non-judgment, non-hatred. Compassion is strong, compassion doesn’t simply say, “Okay, if you want to terrorize the world, I’ll just step back and let you do it.” Compassion holds the commitment to non-harm and to not judge another, and it knows how to say no in a loving way. As you practice in this way, you develop the ability to relate in your personal lives in a kinder and more openhearted way.
Let’s look at an example where you’re walking down the street and you see someone walking toward you with whom you’ve had a very difficult relationship, a person who seems chronically angry and frequently takes out that anger on you, with verbal abuse. Your first instinct is to cross the street—let’s get away from him. But even as you start to step to the curb, he starts to step toward you and clearly he’s going to intersect with you. Uh-oh.
Picture these two different possibilities, radically different possibilities. In one, you bristle, “Now what are you angry at!” What are you inviting with that response? What if you say to him in a softer voice, “You look angry today. What’s going on?” It’s a very different response. His answer could be, maybe he’s your neighbor, “Your dog littered on my front yard again!” Rage. “Okay, I hear you, I’ll work hard to make sure the dog doesn’t do that again, and I’ll be glad to come over and clean it up.” Or maybe he’s got a completely irrational reason for his anger. Or maybe he says, “My boss just fired me.” You tend to take it personally. You see the anger. The stories build up and you believe, “This is about me and our old angry relationship with each other,” and there’s no compassion in it.
The primary lesson of the human incarnation is compassion. It’s as simple as that. In order to practice compassion, you need to be aware of two things: the times when your response to the world is not compassionate but is caught up in the old stories of “not fair,” “why me” and “how do I keep myself safe?,” and that the compassionate heart does not have to be created, it’s already existent.
Let’s look at windows. These windows are not a good example because they’re sparkling clean. But what if they were covered with mud? Would you believe you needed to break away the glass and install new glass? The ever-perfect window is there, it just needs to have the mud washed off.
When there’s strong anger or any form of negativity, the loving heart is still there. If you forget that the loving heart is still there, you make a different effort, which is to try to get rid of the anger, to try to get rid of something, to use force, contraction. But when you can remember, “Yes, this is here but that’s still there,” the loving heart is still there, is always there, then you can relate to what has arisen from a much more openhearted place. The more you practice this, the easier it becomes.
It really begins with a commitment that I think all of you have or you would not be here today, to learn how to live your lives with love. Once that commitment is in place, then very gently you begin to look at the places that seem less than fully loving. This may be for many of you especially about yourself. How many of you frequently judge yourselves? You don’t have to put your hands up but I would guess that most of you do.
Just the reminder—I like the term, when a judging thought comes up, “Is that so?” “I should have been able to do this better. I’m not good enough.” “Ah, is that so?” You start to see this thought is just the judging mind, is habit. What does the loving heart say, the angel in the earthsuit? Can we let the angel come through more fully and express this innate capacity for love?
When you relax and get to know this divine radiance of being, you learn that there’s nothing to conquer.
Dharma students ask me, they’re looking for liberation. How does karma end? As long as there’s a self trying to fix this or that, you’re giving off this message that it’s all coming from a self and that somehow, somewhere you’re going to conquer this thing we call existence. There’s no freedom on that route.
When you relax and get to know this divine radiance of being, you learn that there’s nothing to conquer. The move into fourth density, for the human--we said that 4th density, this “new age,” is really a shift in consciousness in which the whole earth is involved, non-dual consciousness. In this state of non-dual consciousness, every being is telepathic. If everyone in this room was telepathic right now, would that be okay with you? Any problems with that? (smiles and nodding yes) So we have thoughts that we have a bit of shame about or another’s thoughts that we might feel uncomfortable with.
As compassion develops and we no longer judge ourselves, we no longer judge others, there’s clear understanding, these thoughts, they’re just—back to that patch of grass. One dandelion seed fell into it so up comes a dandelion. Okay. That’s the way it is. That’s what’s growing in this moment. I don’t have to hate the dandelion but I can get out a trowel and dig it up by the roots. I can attend to it.
The way we dig up the negativity in ourselves by the roots is with kindness, deeply opening our hearts and knowing, this, the dandelion, didn’t just appear and it’s not trying to do me in. It’s here because some dandelion seeds fell on the earth and that happened because the wind blows. Would you stop the wind from blowing?
We simply attend to conditions with an ongoing resolve toward loving kindness, toward compassion. And we watch the mind and its stories with the intention to soften ourselves, to uncover this loving heart, wash away the dirt, in effect, so the clear radiance of being comes forth.
This is your work. All of you are involved, consciously or unconsciously in this shift to a higher consciousness. The Earth has been evolving through consciousness through many millennium, from a more of a magic and mythic consciousness many thousands of years ago into the rational consciousness and now it’s evolving into non-dual consciousness.
If you did not intend to participate in this work, you would not have incarnated. Some of you may not believe that and some of you may not feel comfortable even with the idea of reincarnation and that’s okay. For whatever reasons, you are here. And so we stay with that basic question: how do I open my heart with love in each moment with whatever physical, mental, or emotional catalyst presents itself?
The second part of Questions and Answers with Aaron will be published in the October issue.
About the Channel
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Barbara Brodsky is the channel for the spirit, Aaron, a sixth density entity who has evolved through the earth plane, and beyond the need for further incarnation. Eight books of Aaron’s teachings have been published. The newest is Presence, Kindness, and Freedom. She is also a dharma teacher in the Buddhist and non-dual traditions, and an Interfaith Minister. Barbara and Aaron lead meditation retreats and spiritual inquiry workshops worldwide. In Ann Arbor, Barbara is the founding and guiding teacher of Deep Spring Center, www.deepspring.org which offers non-denominational spiritual teachings and practice. She has been practicing meditation since 1960 and teaching since 1989. Her teaching draws from dual roots in the Buddhist and Quaker traditions. Her Buddhist training is in the Theravadin and Dzogchen traditions. She became totally deaf in 1972; living with silence has greatly influenced her life and teaching, as have years of active involvement in nonviolent action for social change. |