Growing Through Facing Lower-Self Energies in the Field of US

Coffee Time Friday, July 26, 2013

The previous evening had begun harmlessly enough. I had arrived home from my writing group around 7:15 and Pat was sitting on the deck waiting for me. I had opened the sliding glass door to join her. AND I had left the sliding door open. Pat was agitated that I had left the door open and expressed her agitation.  And I resented her bossiness and made some comment to that effect. Pat: Let’s look at our disharmony last night. This morning I realize that it was cooler outside than inside, and we had the AC on, so it was OK to leave the door open. But your leaving the door open triggered me. Your action had an energy, a negative charge about it that I sensed. Gary: I was not in the best of moods when I arrived home from writing group. Pat: So why was this “leaving the door open” turn into such a big disharmony for me when in fact there was nothing inherently wrong about it? The story I told myself was, “Gary, you deliberately left the door open to irritate me. That you wanted to irritate me brings up resentment in me, and as a woman I have no right to speak up.”

Gary: My mood was one of irritation when I came home. The group of women I had been with for three hours had felt controlling to me. So when you then objected to my leaving the door open I blew up inwardly. The story I told myself was, “I’m living in a tightly run prison being totally controlled by your every thought. How could leaving the door open bring up such a share rebuke! This is a very tight rule-based environment.” I was blowing up on the inside and didn’t know how to let all that negative energy out. And I resented that I was powerless to do anything about this situation. Women control my world, and I don’t like it.  Pat: I could feel your negative energy coming at me in your reaction to my criticism about your not closing the door. Energetically I could sense your anger, resentment, and sense of powerlessness behind your words. Energetically your response was so unusual. I am not used to you being that angry with me.

Gary: My “nice guy” mask was off and you were witnessing lower-self energies of rage and hatred in the field between us. Pat: It was chilling! You were laughing and had a smile on your face, sinister in a way. It was gripping. And I was not wanting to be the cause of all that negative energy coming forth in the field between us, so both the strong negative field as well as my role in evoking it doubled the impact on me. My lower-self energies awakened your lower self energies and they then lived in the field between us. The harm of these lower-self energies in our field is frightening for me to see!

Gary: Yesterday morning after our session with Sage and Anthony on Wednesday afternoon Sage sent us an email that I didn’t fully understand at the time, but perhaps it applies here. She wrote, “The work you and Pat brought yesterday reminded me once again how the lower self in all it’s forms ultimately is a defense again our human grief, which always brings us back to our divine center where love lives.” Pat: These negative lower-self energies need tending to or they erupt in the field. My resentment is of the rules required for safety.

Gary: We are brought right back to the illusion that we are to live by the rules of life. I am reminded of Hofmann’s painting of the twelve-year-old Christ in the Temple that I have been working with – the young Christ was the Light in the room that was in the face of the “old farts” and their many rigid rules for life. So my grief is to have lived so many years by rules set down on the outside on every side of me – rules I took on as they were set by parents, church, school, business, culture, and the like. Living by the rules led to strong resentment building up in me. Eventually I could not stand a life with such restrictions. This resentment festered and other lower-self energies arose – rage and hatred, for example. These rules are from the world of darkness, of blindness. We come to see that there is no Light other than the Christ Light to shine into the darkness and reveal that a life by rules and beliefs is not the True Life we are destined to live. Yes, as children we need rules, beliefs and archetypal myths to guide us, but as we mature our authority shifts to the authority of our own inner Christ Light and our life is then free to manifest from its beautiful Essence, not always constrained or aligned by external rules that were more necessary when we were young.

Pat: I’m still feeling the grief that Sage spoke of. My experience of grief is the Great Grief that encompasses everything. This is what Sage sees. I am thinking of grief “in time,” but Sage sees more. Gary: Yes, she sees Existential Grief or Archetypal Grief that comes from having lived so long in the illusion of our separation from Source. Pat: Yes, the Existential Grief that living a separated life is.

Gary: So perhaps what Sage is saying is that the grief comes from our living in the illusion of separation from Source – or separation from Love. Our lower-self energies – pride, self-will, and fear – are our defenses built in response to our misconceptions about being separate from God and, in particular, from God’s love. One of the Guide’s early lectures (Pathwork Lecture 19 – Jesus Christ, ¶7) speaks of jealousy as being a fundamental cause for the fall of the Angels. How is this so? In this lecture the Guide says that God gave the lion’s share of his essence to Christ. Some of the other spiritual beings God created were jealous of Christ. But the Guide says that behind the jealousy the deeper more fundamental issue was that these other beings were not trusting the capacity of God’s love not trusting that God loved all beings independent from the level of “Godness” in their respective individual divine essences. If they would have understood the nature of God’s Love there would have been no reason for jealousy – they would have seen that they all live in the fullness of God’s love no matter what. That is the nature of God’s Love.

So thinking they were not loved as much as Christ was loved (since Christ had the greatest amount of “Godness” bestowed upon him) they separated from God and tried to earn more of God’s love than Christ received through their own efforts as separated beings. Hence the origin of Pride, Self-will, and of course Fear. So as a participant in the fall in some way we too, with the illusion that we are separate from God and with the added illusion that God could not love us unless we were as full of “Godness” as Christ is, we set up a set of rules patterned after Spiritual Laws and concluded that obeying these laws perfectly or believing certain doctrines fully would be our ticket for earning God’s love. But since on some level we know that our pride and self-will, energies that are separate from Source, won’t “earn” God’s love, we live in Existential Fear.

So Grief comes from recognizing our choice to try to live separate from God, separate from Source and all that comes from that choice to be separate from God. Realizing that this choice was wrong and having genuine remorse for all the pain and suffering that has come out of this wrong choice brings us to a deep level of Existential Grief.

Pat: You lost me way back, Gary, because you have such fluency with setting context and with words. I’m still just sitting in the Great Grief that encompasses everything. That’s all I can bear. Perhaps everything you have said is true, but I’m not able to take it in.

Gary: Perhaps my words are not true. However I notice that giving consciousness and voice to these words brings me joy and pleasure – getting a glimpse, possibly, of the Puzzle of Life. Pat: There is beauty there, beauty in how it all is, the beauty in the Plan of Salvation. But maybe this understanding, even if it is true, keeps you away from the FEEL of the Great Grief.  Gary: Pat, this definitely could be so – that I am using my mind – its intuiting, thinking and expressing – as a defense against feeling pain, against feeling my grief, against feeling the Great Grief that is all around us.

Pat: This is a paradox in that if we humans didn’t have a capacity for expression, words to inspire and to try to understand ourselves and life, then we humans could get caught in our grief and confusion. How else except through our intellect do we move out of our grief, out of our overwhelming emotions, out of the overwhelming grief brought on by our choice to stay in the illusion of our separation from God and God’s love? Here in the short space of our morning time your words brought the Light into the dark place which we were bringing in with us in our morning time together. Gary: Perhaps the words have their origin in Source, our solar plexus, as the Guide says, and not in the brain alone. Perhaps it is the energy behind the words that is the Light, and not the words per se.

Pat: This reminds me of Margaret’s quote from Jack Kornfield: “Learn to see with the heart, which loves, rather than the mind, which compares and defines.”

Pat: Our morning coffee time brings sanity and brings us out of insanity. In the other parts of our lives I feel the insanity. Gary: The insanity of separation is all around us, perhaps most visibly in wars and acts of terrorism, but less visibly (and hence even more dangerously) in our competitive nature that drives so much of our lives, including yours and mine.

Pat: This morning has felt like deep excavation work. Gary: Fortunately we love deep excavation work. And to think that so much could be revealed from such a seemingly innocuous beginning of our tension over my not closing the sliding glass door last night. Yes, every little disharmony can be a jewel, opening us up to deeper levels of consciousness.

Gary: BUT in all things we must seek balance. Pat: In the balance of things we have to tend to our humanness and find lightness. Our humanness, our manifestation in human form, can’t tolerate the higher levels and frequencies of energy. Our spiritual practices enable our bodies to tolerate the higher energies and frequencies of Light. No wonder we slept in this morning – so that we would have the energy for all of this. So now, “Good morning. Good to see you.” Gary: “Yes, good morning … And I could feel our parting kiss. Yea.

Shared in love, Gary