Self-Inquiry: Cha’an China
Three aspects of ourselves can act like a contrarium to self-awareness and realization. A contrarium is something that opposes or prevents something else.
They are our human body, our thoughts and our feelings. Let me look at these.
The Human Body
The human body is a contrarium insofar as it’s a non-conductor of the finer sentiments in life that would uplift us and guide us. The body is like India rubber compared to the etheric body, which is like the down of a feather.
Not much of our finer nature gets through it.
Rather than passing our more delicate feelings along, its slows them down, gives them mass. To feel a higher sentiment in the body is like walking through molasses.
Such is the body’s density that simply by virtue of entering it, we lose access to a great deal of the knowledge that we innately have within us.
Added to that, the body’s bands of muscular tension restrict our awareness and memory. As tension goes up, awareness goes down. The more tension we hold in our bodies, the more our awareness decreases.
You can see that all of this would make relaxation a necessity, rather than a luxury. Yet the way our society is designed right now means relaxation is not emphasized.
Self-Inquiry: Enlightenment Intensive, White Rock, B.C.
The body makes any attempt at staying silent and still for long difficult at best. It demands to eat, sleep, and pee and keeps us focused on it at some level.
Moreover, the body’s fears, held at a cellular level, often undo our courage and confidence.
Its survival being always being a concern (based on Third-Dimensional illusions), we spend much of our time planning and carrying out actions bent on ensuring its survival, a hapless task. Meanwhile our survival as beings was never at issue.
I’m not sure whether we’re aware of the amount of fear we feel that isn’t situationally-related (the tiger is right out there in front of you), but memory-related (a tiger went through your village in 1960).
Little of what we fear is right out there in front of us. If anything, in the clearing we’re doing, we’re healing our minds, exorcizing our ghosts, and generally calming down.
The mind stores all this remembered fear in the body at the cellular level as muscular tension, a kind of living rigor mortis.
The consequence of our body’s resistance to the free flow of thought and emotion is to make our learning in the physical body small and slow. I once heard how a discussion of how much karmic progress we ordinarily make in one normal lifetime and it was small, unimpressive.
I think we only derive a fraction of the overall benefit of any experience while in this dense body.
It’s our machine-level of consciousness, and it’s a part of the world we can’t avoid living in.
Our Thoughts
Inside that body is a mind. Or perhaps it’s the reverse.
The body acts on the mind and the mind acts on the body
The mind operates on the body and everything else on the basis of what it believes to be true. However most of what it believes to be true, as Archangel Michael told Kathleen, is illusion. (1)
Nevertheless, this body is created on the basis of those beliefs, run on them, and transmuted by them, erroneous or not.
Self-Realization
I find it very powerful to get that something invisible, something without weight, something that cannot be proven, etc., has the power to do almost anything to this body – starve it, run it into the ground, or spur it on to the Valley of the shadow of death.
Has anyone ever seen a belief? Ever heard one? Touched one? Does it have weight? Is it here now?
And yet something as intangible as that decides the fate of something as tangible as this body. When I really get that, my beliefs become real to me.
Our Feelings
A lot of territory is taken in by the word “feelings” in our Third-Dimensional thinking, which we’re moving away from.
It takes in feelings proper, which I’m going to be speaking of here. But it also takes in states of being like bliss, love and joy. I am not speaking of states of being here. I am restricting my attention to a lower class of phenomena – the feelings that are triggered by our thoughts, in our bodies.
As far as I can see, our beliefs determine our feelings. Just watch someone who’s just been given tragic news, only to have it modified to better news, only to hear worse news again. That person would probably go up and down with emotion as their belief changed. So belief determines feeling.
But our feelings also influence our beliefs. They both work on each other.
If we’re having a bad hair day, we pull up the various cliches and idioms stored in our minds under the filename,”feeling bad.” What to say and do on a day when we’re feeling bad. Our feelings influence the words we choose to say, what we make of the events of the day, and so on.
Then both thoughts and feelings work on the body and it works on them.
The system can become a closed system, giving us a degree of automaticity that led Werner Erhard to call us “stimulus/response machines.”
Thought Alone is the Contrarium
Ultimately, thought alone is the contrarium because ultimately thought creates the body and its feelings. Thought has primacy as the chief and ultimate contrarium.
But we exist on this dimension and we see the whole system at work as the contrarium. It opposes our knowing who we are, remembering our latent capacities, and moving into higher dimensions right now.
The Mother weaves her veil of activity and sound around us, convincing us that we live in a world that’s real.
Meanwhile the Father’s stillness and silence is ever before us. But we cannot see it, hear it, or feel it, and so we do not step outside the old and familiar.
Lao Tzu sat beside the Emperor’s road at nighttime, across from a noodle stand that sent out large clouds of steam into the cool night air.
He tended a pot of weak meat soup while the noodle stand across the highway dispensed generous warmth, hearty food, and interesting news to travelers who rushed by.
No one wanted Lao Tzu’s weak meat soup. Everyone sat at the noodle stand, listening entranced to exciting news of what was happening up and down the land.
Footnotes
(1) “The human collective, the people of old Earth, have built up many, many false illusions, many paradigms that became so strong in their belief systems that they formulated into structures and institutions, practices and societies around them.
“These illusions are familiar to you, such as lack, limitation, death, destruction, disease, greed, lust, control, and power.” (Personal Reading between Kathleen W. and Archangel Michael, Jan. 21, 2012; cited in “Clearing Our Social Vasanas” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/building-nova-earth-toward-a-world-that-works-for-everyone/social-vasanas/clearing-our-social-vasanas/.