2002-2-21 02:24:00
You who did respond as to how you found "the Immortal" and the Keys warmed my heart. Thank you very much. I am fortunate to be in the midst of true friends.
Here's another chapter for you:
In your next life you were born as the son of a religious leader. He put on a very pious face and was big on teaching about loving your bother and sexual purity. In your last life your father showed physical hypocrisy, but in this life your father was a spiritual hypocrite.
You noticed that when he did help someone he always bragged about it and if an opportunity came to help one in need that did not offer him some recognition then he passed them by as if they did not exist.
He also had affairs with numerous female followers even though he taught against this.
Because of this and other hypocritical actions you again dropped out of religion when you became an adult.
You spent quite a number of lives in this cycle of either being a devout religious follower or a rebel of some kind. In reality, you were a follower in both experiences. In one period you followed what the religious authorities told you to do and in the other period you merely took what they said and did the opposite, or followed an anti-social leader. You still had not learned to think for yourself. Your actions were always determined by what other people thought, even though, in your rebellion, you thought you were thinking for yourself. Instead, you merely followed the direction your feelings pointed you. If religions made your feelings feel good, you followed it, but if the teachings, the leaders or the people made you feel bad you rebelled.
In some lives the authorities came down on you too strong and you just could not measure up to the perfection they expected. This gave you another reason to either rebel or withdraw. In this case it was usually withdrawal rather than rebellion. This created a vacuum in your life and you were tormented with guilt. You felt like a ship without a rudder. This should not have been surprising to you. The authorities told you that you would be lost and condemned without them.
It was never long (from a holistic view) before you returned to an authority to give you guidance. Sometimes you returned to the one you deserted in a past life and other times you sought out new authorities and had new experiences with them.
This long period where your actions were determined by an authority is the "Sheep" period. That is the name the Bible gives to it. The blind followers are always called by this name there. Its scriptures stress the importance of feeding the sheep with truth and righteousness because if the sheep get bad shepherds they will follow them as readily as they will a good one, just like the animal sheep do. Therefore, the sheep will only follow the correct path when they have a "good shepherd."
In most lifetimes during early Class Two you seemed to get yourself a bad shepherd. You rarely thought he or she was bad, however, for the teacher always seemed to keep his distance. Everyone in the group always considered the shepherd to be inspired of God and you accepted this no matter where the shepherd was taking you. The infallibility of your shepherd set well with your feelings, however. It made you feel safe and stable.
There were several lifetimes that you had a good shepherd. Unfortunately, you failed to recognize or appreciate them. Nevertheless, these persons of light planted seeds in you, which later matured and bore fruit. I'll cite one example:
This particular lifetime may have been on the earth, or it may have been on another world. I will not say. You were in a land wherein there existed a great struggle between the forces of light and darkness. The higher lives who oversaw the land had decreed that if darkness prevailed then the land would be destroyed, but if light prevailed then a greater age would be ushered in.
You had not yet reached a state of evolution where you could judge between the light and the dark. You thought you could recognize the difference, but you could not. Instead, you were still a sheep and merely followed the program that friends, family and authorities had placed in your mind.
You were born in a religion that supported the brothers of darkness, but had your feelings hurt and rebelled against it. During this period of rebellion a friend asked you to come with him to meet a great teacher. You went to a meeting and listen to the teacher speak. Something about him was different than any leader you had followed in any other lifetime. You felt a strange peace that was unlike any you had ever felt, but it scared you and you did not allow yourself to feel the fullness thereof.
The teacher talked much about freedom; both physical and spiritual freedom. He identified the dark brothers and all the organizations that supported them and pointed out that one of the major differences between the two sides was that the brothers of Light encouraged individual freedom whereas the dark brothers claimed to support it but subtly fought against it.
You accepted this teaching and began to believe the Teacher was right not because you were able to discern truth, but because you were in a state of rebellion against your past teachers. Your hurt feelings toward them made you receptive to the next pleasant voice your heard. This next pleasant voice could have been a selfish teacher or an unselfish one. It just happened to be your turn in class to receive some tutoring from one who loved light rather than darkness. Also the strange peace you had when you met the Teacher solidified your decision to abide with him.
Even though the Teacher was very wise he did not have a large following. This gave you an opportunity to establish a personal relationship with him. You were very excited about this at first and tended to dominate his time more than some of the others.
He was quite accessible and friendly and always tried to teach you when you were together. The main seed-thought he planted in your mind was that you were to learn to think for yourself. He said that if one merely follows the thoughts or teachings of others without understanding why then he is not free. He is the slave to someone else's will. You must know why you do something and achieve the ability to initiate action through your own will if you are to be free.
You thought you understood what he said, but you did not really understand this or most of his other teachings. Nevertheless, they sounded good to you and you dedicated yourself to the Teacher. One day you told him how much you loved and admired him and that you would give your life for him if necessary.
Now the authorities from the religion of your birth would have been happy to hear a statement like this, but the Teacher was not. He instead disturbed you with his reply to your apparent dedication. He said: "There are two Selves, the lower Self and the Higher Self. You are dedicating yourself to my lower Self. You have not yet acquired the vision to see my higher Self, but when you do you will realize that you and I are brothers and are one. Since we are all one we can only dedicate ourselves to all there is. Of myself I am nothing. It is the teaching that is important. Find the truth in what I say and dedicate yourself to it. He who dedicates himself to truth alone consecrates himself to the good of the whole with an eye toward a glorious future. I therefore return your dedication back to you and together we serve truth as equals."
As time passed your Teacher taught more and more about the equality and brotherhood of man, that both you and he were in the same boat and you merely had to figure out how to correctly sail to the winds so you can skillfully steer yourself home.
This was the first teacher you had that would not let you set him on a pedestal and it almost made you uncomfortable. You did not understand why then, but it was because he was making you responsible for your actions and you were not ready for this yet. You were yet programmed to have everything be black-and-white.
Because the Teacher threw you back upon yourself you began to feel as if you were in that vacuum again. You looked within and found Self. This was not the Higher Self that the Teacher talked about, but the Lower Self, the self which made you Self-aware. Self had never deserted you, but ever since you had entered Class Two he had been trying to understand how to use emotional feeling to his advantage as he had Instinct earlier on.
Self found Emotion to be a generous new playground with even more opportunity to exalt itself than Instinct had been. Slowly, over the lifetimes during this second class, he had been establishing a foothold, but now he saw a new opportunity unfolding as he heard you listening to the Teacher. He knew you needed an authority to lean on or you would feel out of balance so he whispered a message to you. "Here am I. Lean on me. Exalt me and I will bring you glory and honor forever."
Your Teacher left you with no other authority to lean on so you decided to do as Self directed. You trusted him with all of your feeling. You exalted Self at every opportunity and, in turn, Self rewarded Emotion with pleasant feelings.
In the beginning you wanted to exalt your teacher and think of him as more than a man. You were searching for the same type of infallible guide that you thought you had in lifetimes past. Your teacher disappointed you and stepped down from the high station in which you wished to place him.
This left you in a very insecure position. Your consciousness was in a state that required some infallible guide. If your teacher wasn't to be your infallible guide then where was he? Was it a holy book? Your Teacher said that no book is infallible. Was it another teacher? The wise man said no. The only thing that is infallible is your God-Self which is sometimes called the Higher Self or Holy Spirit.
You had not yet fully got acquainted with your lower Self let alone your higher so you naturally assumed your lower Self was the higher. In fact, you could hardly tell the difference so you just attributed all transmissions from Self as if they were from the higher, but you had as yet to learn about this higher part of yourself.
As you leaned on the lower Self you tended to also look upon the lower Self of your Teacher. You began to see that he was a regular man in many respects and in other ways you were even his superior. After time passed you felt that you had absorbed his teachings and began to feel that you knew as much as he did. When you reached this point you began to notice numerous errors in judgment that he was making. Finally you reached a time that you could barely agree with anything he was teaching. You felt that he had something good when you met him, but now he was letting it all slip down the drain.
One day he came to you and said: "You are experiencing an effect that many others have had with me. You are looking on my personality instead of my soul. You must look upon my soul, or my higher self, and see only perfection, for if you do not raise your vision and continue to concentrate on what you see as my imperfections you will betray all that which is true and you will become an enemy to the holy teachings I have espoused."
You assured the Teacher that all was well and that you supported all truth, but that it was necessary that someone watch him and set him straight at times or he may lead many people astray.
He replied that we must watch ourselves first, but this meant nothing to you. You kept watching for iniquity in your Teacher and you always seemed to find what you were looking for. What really seemed to anger you, though you would not admit it to yourself at the time, is that the teacher was attached to no authority as you were and now you were accepting Self as the ultimate authority it angered you that the Teacher did not accept all the criticism that your Self hurled toward him.
This Self was now your authority and your God. How dare the Teacher reject that which was infallible! Then you reached to the point that you demanded apologies from your teacher. He did apologize for offending you but he never apologized for the error that you believed he was now teaching.
Your disagreements became sharper and all the illusion that you found yourself in you saw reflected and magnified in your teacher. All of us who remember this part of the Class Two period are somewhat embarrassed when we review these memories. You will almost feel sorry for yourself when you look and see what you did here. You criticized and criticized the one who was trying to help you and every cutting remark you made was a projection of what was in yourself.
Your Teacher saw that this was true, but you did not. You began to blame him for all the problems you had as well as all group problems. You started to fear him because you feared your Self. You accused him of seeking for power over you because you were seeking for power over him. You accused him of making mistakes because you were making mistakes. You accused him of being an authority because you wanted to be an authority. You accused him of being selfish because you were selfish. You thought he was proud because you were proud. You thought he was in his lower Self because you were in your lower Self. The list goes on and on.
This is a time you do not want to remember because a loving brother of light, whose personality faults were largely in your imagination, were not only rejected but condemned by you, and in doing this you symbolically crucified the Higher Self within and rejected and condemned him. You thus set yourself up to be beyond the reach of the higher spiritual energies for lifetimes to come.
This was part of your schooling. You had to learn, one way or another, the futility of depending completely on Self and treading the Selfish Path. Unfortunately, you chose the hard way. Before you could enter the Self-less service of God you had to learn the virtue of discarding Selfishness.
You received a D minus in this life, however, because you were given a slight glimpse of the peace from the Higher Self when you first met your Teacher, you did take with you a valuable seed of truth. Your main test in this life was whether this peace would affect your actions in a positive way. You recalled the peace numerous times, but ignored it and settled completely in the lower Self acting as if the peace had never been.
You searched out people in the group who were thinking critically toward the Teacher as you had been and planted seeds of negativity in others who may have reached the Higher Self in that life if not for your influence.
Finally, a leader emerged from the negative group and you and the others eagerly supported him. It turned out that about half of the original group supported the negative leader and half the Teacher. It would not have been so bad if you had left well enough alone, but you and the others did not. You took every opportunity possible to discredit the Teacher and slander him and many people were enraged at him because of you. In the end the Teacher was stoned to death by an angry mob. Fortunately for you, you did not participate with the actual mobbing. Several others from your group did. Nevertheless, you were partially responsible and you inwardly felt that the Teacher had received his just reward.
If not for the negativity that you helped to spread, the Teacher's life would have been spared, and the tide of evil that eventually destroyed your entire land may have been pushed back.
As it was you spent the rest of this life in Selfish endeavors and eventually lost your life with the others in the great destruction of the land which met the demands of karma and justice.
In between lives in the spirit world you suffered much anguish as you reviewed your life in the Hall of Memories. You could not wait to go back to mortality and prove yourself and make right some wrongs you committed. For this opportunity you had a long and painful wait because the destruction caused a major reduction in the population of the planet and those souls who had major problems with negativity, or in any way contributed to the destruction, had to wait over a thousand years before they could be reborn.
This was not a complete waste of time, however, for you did some mighty reflections on your past and contemplated deeper than ever before your future.
The seed thoughts planted by your Teacher had matured to the point that you were ready to take some responsibility. In the next life you were going to attempt the burden of leadership.
If you had been aware of how difficult the path of true leadership was you probably would not have ventured. It was a good thing you did not know.
-- End Of Chapter Six --
Go To:
Next Chapter
Previous Chapter
Index Of Chapters
Copyright 2002 by J.J. Dewey, All Rights Reserved