Nighttime on the Emperor’s Road

When we think of leaving all traces of Third Dimensionality behind, we find that three aspects of ourselves naturally act as a contrarium to the spiritual awakening we seek.

A contrarium is something that opposes or prevents something else.

This contrarium consists of our carbon-based body, its thoughts and its feelings. Please let me elaborate if you would.

The Carbon Body

The carbon-based 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 carbon body is like India rubber compared to the etheric body, which is like the down of a feather.

Rather than passing our more delicate feelings along, it slows them down and 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 the greatest part of the knowledge we have within us.

Added to that, we make our bodies denser by unworkable ways of living, thinking and feeling that create muscular tension in the body. These bands of 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’d think, in light of this, we’d make relaxation a necessity, a valued commodity, rather than a luxury in our society. Yet our society doesn’t emphasize it.

The body makes any attempt at staying silent and still difficult at best. It demands that we eat, sleep, and see to its comfort. It keeps us focused on it at some level a good part of the day.

The body’s fears are held at cellular level as tension, a kind of living rigor mortis.

Chief among its fears is the fear that it won’t survive. Viewed through lower-dimensional lenses, the kind we’re leaving behind, the body’s survival is usually a concern. We spend much of our time planning and carrying out actions bent on ensuring its survival, a hapless task.

Meanwhile our survival as the being inside the body was never at issue.

So much of that fear is not situationally-related (the tiger is right there in front of you), but memory-related (a tiger passed through our village, oh, in 1960. I actually saw it).

Little of what we fear is right out there in front of us. If anything, the clearing we’re doing is a healing of the mind, an exorcizing of ghosts, and a general calming down.

Nonetheless, those memory-related or remembered fears have the power to undo our courage and confidence and make us “play it safe.”

Our body’s resistance to the free flow of thought and emotion makes our learning in the physical body small and slow. I once heard a discussion of how much karmic progress we make in a normal lifetime (not this one) and it was unimpressive.

We need to learn how to work with a body that can present such an obstacle to spiritual awakening if we want to emerge from its contrary impact.

Our Thoughts

Inside that body is a mind. Or is it the reverse?

The body acts on the mind and the mind acts on the body

The mind operates on the basis of the truth as it believes it to be. In actual terms, it acts on its beliefs, not on certain knowledge, often not even on experiential knowledge. Most often it works on intellectual knowledge, which we commonly call “beliefs.”

Most of what we believe to be true, as Archangel Michael told Kathleen, is illusion:

“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.” (1)

This body is created on the basis of those illusory beliefs, run on them, and transmuted by them, erroneous or not.

I find it very powerful to get that something invisible, something without weight, something that cannot be proven, and something that can be wrong can have the power to do almost anything to this body – have it starve itself in the name of service, run it into the ground, or spur it on to the Valley of the shadow of death.

Has anyone ever seen a belief? 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 beliefs are part of the contrarium that opposes our spiritual awakening. No belief, on the very face of things, can be so wide as to take in the nature and essence of life. Its real nature and essence exists outside the mind, prior to it, uncreated by it, etc.

Our Feelings

A lot of territory is taken in by the word “feelings” in the Third-Dimensional thinking that we’re leaving behind.

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.

We usually call these “exalted” states of being and they are. But the distinction between them and simple feelings is that feelings come and go and states of being persist.

They await only our tapping into them, but they exist beyond and prior to physical life. They inform every aspect of it and they will exist after it’s gone.

I’m not discussing states of being here. I’m restricting my attention to a lower class of phenomena – the feelings triggered by our thoughts in our bodies, the emotions that regularly come and go.

As far as I can see, our beliefs determine our feelings. Imagine 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 beliefs changed. Insofar as they change, belief is determining feeling.

Our feelings also influence our beliefs. They work on each other.

If we’re having a bad day, we pull up the various sayings stored in our minds under the file called “Feeling Bad.”  Our feelings will influence the words we choose, the interpretation we create of the day’s events, and so on.

Then both thoughts and feelings work on the body and it in turn works on them.

At its worst, this closed system invites from us a degree of automaticity that led Werner Erhard to call us “stimulus/response machines.”

At its best, as far as I know, we escape from it when our carbon bodies transform to crystalline.

Our bodies will then be lightbodies, crystalline in structure, capable of transmitting and carrying the gentler messages from the finer sentiments. We’ll enjoy having a silent mind or an active one. The thoughts we do have will be ennobled.

Feelings will yield to states of being. As far as I know, we’ll exist in love, joy and bliss.

Thought Alone is the Contrarium

Everything is made through thought – God’s thoughts ultimately. My understanding is that love is acted upon and made into forms by the power of thought.

Therefore thought is the primary contrarium. But not all thought is contrary to the divine qualities and Plan.

Thought can be in accord with the Divine qualities. At that point it ceases to be a contrarium.

That kind of thought we call devotion, God-worship, service, etc.

Even though we could probably stop by paying attention only to thought, with the roles we’ll be playing, I believe it desirable to pay attention to the whole system that we “live” in – the body and our body-centered thoughts and feelings.

If we know that system and work with it the way it works, we can speed along the day we transform it – from carbon to crystalline. As a crab moults its shell, we’ll moult the carbon body for a lightbody, with a quiet mind and open heart, colored by the divine qualities, enjoying exalted states of being.

Once we see the system, as we have here, we can set about putting more realistic ways of being in place that release us from the contrarium. Then our bodies, minds and emotions work for us, rather than against us.

The Divine Mother weaves her veil of movement and sound around us, convincing us that we live in a world that’s real.

Meanwhile the Holy Father’s stillness and silence is ever before us. But we cannot see it, hear it, or feel it, and so we don’t 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 fragrant steam into the cool night air.

He tended a pot of weak meat soup while the noodle stand across the highway dispensed warm and hearty food, and interesting news to travelers rushing 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) 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/.