Q&A
As these writings have progressed, it has become more apparent to me that they have certain limitations created by my own resistance to information outside my frameworks. I am learning, slowly, that if I assume that I already know the answer, I am closed to learning anything new. This is teaching me to listen and to honour the realities of other people. Doing that stimulates me to expand my reality and that is what this whole exercise is about.
This section of the book is devoted to questions posed by the people closest to me. Some of them will be more connected to the ideas already discussed than others. My intent has been to open myself to other perspectives and other frameworks and thus expand the box of my framework. Kuthumi has proven more interested in the big picture than in the details of individual lives. The answers will be broadly sweeping examinations of larger issues. They are like that after all.
You are invited to participate in these discussions by forwarding questions yourself. I would consider it an honour to receive them and be involved in addressing the issues that are most primal in your lives. If you wish to do so, please send your questions to me via e-mail to: info@flightoftheeagle.ca
Perhaps your question will wind up in the next book.
Thank you.
Timothy Finley
Question #1
In these books, you have repeatedly alluded to humans regarding people and things outside themselves as somehow more real than themselves. Please explain this statement in more detail.
Indeed, when it comes to views of reality, much of your perspective is focused outside of yourself. Rarely do you doubt the evidence of your senses while you often doubt yourself, your own worth and your deservedness to have the rich fullness of your whole experience, inner and outer. Throughout your life you have, when not ignoring it altogether, relegated your inner experience to the category of fantasy and delusion. Meanwhile, you have consistently labeled the world you perceive outside yourself as real, an objective fact.
On an emotional level, you have consistently measured your self- worth against the affect you have on the outside world. Being of service, creating wealth, raising a family, all represent this motion toward self-acceptance. Unfortunately, such efforts are inherently self-limiting. Like all manifestations of the spirit, none can contain the wholeness that you truly seek.
Our intention throughout these works has been to direct your attention toward the vast richness of the subtle, infinitely growing worlds inside your heart and mind. It is from that huge source of thought and energy that your physical experience springs. Your attention has been tightly fixated on the worlds of sight and sound, often to the exclusion of the genuine source of your actual experience. This fixation must be broken in order for you to take over the reins of your life and choose your life experience consciously. You must turn your attention inward to perceive the patterns of thought and feeling which are at once larger and more powerful yet more subtle than the manifestations they project outward into physicality.
Consider the way you have lived your life until now in light of the statement that: You are a spiritual being having a physical experience. Does running in the rat race express that statement? Does striving to give your kids every advantage you can reflect your spiritual intent? How about brushing your teeth? The next time you sit down for a meal, instead of focusing upon the food on your plate, its taste and texture and smell, focus upon the part of your experiencing the food. Who is tasting this? Where is the experience taking place? What force moves your body to pick up your water glass or chew each morsel? You will notice that none of the pleasure of eating is lost in this effort and so much more is gained. Indeed, as you get better at focusing upon the real, inner you instead of the world outside you, your life experience grows more sharp, bright and full. The intensity of every sensation, every feeling and every thought grows as more of your attention comes to bear upon them.
We are urging you to become consciously aware of who you really are. We are urging you to consistently choose to fulfill the inner being that feels your life experience anyway. By being aware of your inner desires and willingly choosing to fulfill them, you step merrily into enlightenment and joy.
Question #2
How do I know if the desires I feel come from my soul and not some neurotic impulse or even some inner demon?
Thank you for not asking about Satan!
It is truly challenging to re-align your beliefs about life and your self to the perspective that your experience of the world is entirely your own creation. The real challenge is to consistently stay in that thought stream. Wandering back into the beliefs that almost everything in creation exists outside of you gives you so much to be afraid of and to protect yourself against. It is no wonder that believing in Satan or some being like Satan is so widespread in your world. As you become more centered in your universe, such dis-empowering ideas will consume less and less of your attention and experience.
As for the inner demons (read fear here) there is a simple test. How does it feel? If an idea smacks of fear, "Run Away! Run Away!" that is the signal to question and investigate more fully. Giving in to the fear inspired impulses doesn't bleed them of the power to influence and run your life. Giving in to fear perpetuates and feeds it. The fear is itself a red flag informing you that you have conflicting beliefs about life that could use conscious attention. Look, then, for the desire beneath the fear, which you can only do by accepting the experience of the fear. In that desire you will find those conflicts and be able to sort them out. Apply your new beliefs to the conflicts and see how things then appear and feel.
Take the example of the child being dared to jump off a bridge. The idea of jumping is frightening even to the very young. If the child looked at the fear honestly, he/she would be able to find the desire to please their friends and belong to their group which powers the experience. Seeing the conflicting desires, belonging and survival, allows the resolving of the fear and conflict and a choice can be made. If the choice was more complex, like the myth of the lion and the Lady, many conflicting desires play a role and decisions become more difficult. The process, though, is the same. Move through the fear by being open to the experience of it and see what lies beneath the fear. You can expect that acting upon your deepest desires will inspire your fears. Learning how to deal with that effectively is vital to reaching your most cherished goals in life.
It is important, too, to remember that the entire gamut of what you know of the human experience exists within you. That is how you came to know of it in the first place. "Evil", insanity and obnoxiousness are as much a part of the wholeness of you as kindness, compassion and brilliance. Oh yeah! And joy. What you perceive as madness or neuroses is simply the very same flows of thought and belief that you experience regularly being blown out of proportion, activated and maintained by fear. Everyone has the potential for high anxiety, compulsiveness and schizophrenia. How you deal with the mental and emotional impulses determines whether they grow or not.
We began this book by suggesting that the only way past your fear is through it. It is your resistance to experiencing your fear that causes you pain and suffering. That resistance also feeds the fear with all of the passion you invest into it. The work we suggest is to focus that passion upon thoughts and feelings and actions that you really want to experience. The very idea of such experience will evoke an answering chord when you think about it. The pleasure of delicious healthy food, a relaxing massage or a warm bath are very clear to you when the thought of them comes to mind. Along with such pleasant thoughts may come fear and argument generated by some conflicting belief that states that you must not. Only by looking directly at that belief behind the fear can you come to decide on a course of action that will fulfill you. That wonderful salad that makes your mouth water may be too much for you to eat right now and may leave you with painful cramps. Choosing not to indulge your senses may prove the more fulfilling. Then again, the salad may spark a deep seated fear of lettuce. That too deserves to be explored.
The more powerful the desire that pours through you, the more likely it is that you will have conflicts to move through. Opening to love is among the most terrifying choices known to humankind. It is also among the most satisfying and soul-feeding. Keeping your sights upon that desire and the richly fulfilling experience of that desire in motion can power you through many, if not all, layers of fear that spark you to fight or flee. Accept your fear as it comes up, just like an errant thought in meditation and go back to your desire to love. You will find that your desire will grow and your fear will diminish, all very naturally and easily.
Finally, we suggest you assume that every whim, inclination and hunger has a spiritual source. Even the desire to pick your teeth after a meal has its source deep down inside you. Look for that source in every swell of wanting or craving. Come to know the spiritual links to every drive that moves you through life. Your simple actions, like brushing your teeth, express feelings, beliefs and spiritual intents that deserve to be consciously experienced. Then, in the full flush of conscious awareness, you can be the one who chooses. You can be the creator of your experience.
Question #3
Help! I'm stuck!
A: This is such a common experience in human life. It feels like being trapped in a revolving door, endlessly recycling the same experience. Whether that experience is a recurring dream, a phobia or a cycle of potential lovers with the same lousy attributes, the frustration and self-recrimination are the same paralyzing force. These repeating experiences take place on the subtle levels of awareness too. Those are the levels that create and drive your physical experiences.
Perhaps our friend here can illustrate this for us one more time. His first marriage contained many moments of feeling stuck in the mire of repeating cycles of anger and pain. Even though he was aware of the idea of self-created reality, he struggled unsuccessfully to grasp how he created his experience of violent acts and feelings. He could not even recall how or when they began much less know how to make them stop. He was stuck fast and it felt to him completely hopeless. He was focused entirely upon stopping the pain instead of moving into joy and peace. When he finally suffered enough, he was ready to do anything to create change. That was when the marriage ended but not when his suffering ended. He was ready to recreate that relationship with someone new. Only becoming more self-aware would make it possible to choose a new and happier path.
The process that brought our friend here and his partner into the quicksand of repetitive cycles of anger and hurt was very simple and very subtle. They blamed! It was easy, knee-jerk and reasonable. It took little energy to rationalize that the other person was responsible for their hurt and self-righteous anger. As we discussed in Chapter 1, distancing self from fear and pain is pervasive, pernicious and very common. Assigning blame denies responsibility and thus denies the power to change. By refusing to own their pain and fear, our friend here and his partner committed themselves to repeating their experience almost endlessly.
Resistance to experiencing who you are, be that hurt or happy, sets up the hamster wheel of revolving cycles of experience. By denying the energy of feeling in this way, you bind that energy into your electro-magnetic field. This field is what shapes and chooses the life experience of your body and world. You cannot release this bound energy until you acknowledge and accept it. Until then, it remains inside you, shaping and influencing your life. Unconsciously, you project it outward into your life, setting up circumstances which afford you new glimpses, from different perspectives, of this denied feeling. You remain stuck in it until you embrace that this feeling, too, is part of the infinite wholeness that you are. If you repress the experience of feeling well enough, it will become so well hidden that its effects will be all but unidentifiable. Many of the internal conflicting beliefs we have spoken about, the ones that muck up your attempts to get what you consciously desire in life, begin with just such refused feelings. Our friend's refusal to own his pain, the pain of rejection and disapproval, translated unconsciously into every facet of his life. All of his relationships took on a tension that was like the wallpaper in his living room; never really noticed but always there, affecting his perceptions. He became acutely aware of rejection while oblivious to his own lack of self-acceptance. Only when his pain reached the unbearable was he willing to proclaim, "I deserve better" and begin to allow his life to change.
It certainly is not necessary to force unbearable pain to be the power which drives you to change. You do not have to become miserable enough in the known to become willing to step into the unknown. You can, instead, practice simple self-love. That will lead you painlessly into your aspirations.
Your experience of feeling stuck, wanting to change but finding the same circumstances over and over, has the same source no matter what those circumstances may be. Whether you are continually fighting with your partner, cheating on your diet, trapped in a job you hate or at the seeming mercy of fear and anxiety, the remedy is always the same. Acceptance of who you really are. In each and every instance the cycles of experience become repetitive because you refuse to embrace the experience in its wholeness. It can start subtly with only a small amount of repression and denial. You can push away your pain just a little at first, say "I'm not going to go there," but over time, that habit allows the development of a large and unnoticed barrier causing real anguish. Any and all of the myriad ways of avoiding feeling your fear can be used to create this condition you suffer under. From anger to withdrawal, from psychotic rage to catatonia, you can find temporary relief from fear by refusing it but that only creates larger and larger explosions of feeling, reaching toward crescendos of pain and suffering. Makes being stuck in a boring job seem pretty easy doesn't it?
Obviously, the truly paralyzed with fear need plenty of time and attention to return from their forays into fear and trembling. For most of your experiences of being stuck, though, the remedy is fairly simple and direct. Accept your experience! Assume your situation is your creation, even though you do not know the how's and why's of it. Assume that it is safe to truly, fully open to the experience and begin to explore it. Notice your thoughts about it, how certain thoughts repeat more than others. Especially notice thoughts like, "I can't," "I should," "I must" and their ilk. When you feel fear or pain, watch carefully for how you tend to ward that off and refuse to experience it fully. Begin to allow more of your feeling experience to happen unopposed. As your confidence grows, open more fully to it. Once you completely accept and embrace your feelings connected to the circumstances that you are stuck in, you will be free to choose a new path. As long as you refuse those feelings, your circumstances can only change in superficial ways.
Take, for example, being stuck in a job you dislike. All of the rational arguments you hold for why you stay there, the money is good, it is so hard to find a new job, you have a routine that works for you and it is hard to create a new routine and so on, are smoke screens for more basic feelings heavily tinged with fear. Look for those deeper feelings whenever you find yourself arguing against what you really want; a more fulfilling job. Become open to your fears and articulate them. Talk about them with others rather than repeating the same old saw about how you are stuck. Explore these fears as you find them and share them. That is what counselors are for. That is what friends are for. That is what intimacy is about. If you deny your fears in any way, you commit yourself to repeating them. Along with each willful experience of your fears, remind yourself that it is safe for you to have what you want, that you deserve to have what you want. With some practice, your affirmation will become tied to the experience of your fear so that, whenever the fear comes to the surface, so too will the thought that encourages and supports your aspirations instead.
On the other side of the coin, practice your affirming thoughts and the feelings they generate often and forcefully. Use your imagination to conjure a richer, more complete inner experience of what you want. Then, when the fears surface once more, you have an even more powerful base upon which to stand and face them. Do not wait until you are under pressure from your fears to affirm what you really want. Practice it in times of quiet and peace. Become fully conversant in your feelings of what you want and how it feels to have it. Use the practices in this book to guide you into making new decisions about your life and putting them deeply into your feeling experience and you will find the experience of feeling stuck will become a rarity indeed.
Our friend here consistently refused to open to his partner's experience and her world. Her pain and anguish terrified him and inspired guilt that he refused to feel. Only years later has he allowed himself to understand her point of view and her suffering during their years together. By not facing his fear of her anger, walking on eggshells around her instead, he condemned himself to repeating, for years, cycles of rage and remorse and guilt and anguish. Using our techniques, he has built a new life on a very different basis. However, by refusing his new partner's honest perspective out of fear, he could easily recreate another round of experience much like his first marriage. After all, his partner is not going to like everything he says and does. Often, too, she will have a point of view which will expand his own and bring much joy. Stepping through his fear of her disapproval to reach that expansion will support his becoming the being he truly wants to be.
To summarize, then, the process of coming unstuck is one of opening fully to the experience in which you feel stuck. Do not refuse the fear and pain while opening to how much of what you want is already there. You have created the situation by projecting a combination of what you want with what you fear might be. Open to the experience of both the desire and the fear and you become free to choose between them. Then, let go of the details and focus upon how you want to feel. Practice that feeling and learn to remain there while your situation changes of its own accord.
Question #4:
I find it hard to follow your discussion about birth and the world through the eyes of an infant. Please elaborate.
First of all, you struggle to set aside the perspective you have now. You spent a lifetime building that projection to express your beliefs about the world. Of course you would see babies as a physical, biological phenomena. Our descriptions of the world through the perceptions of a burgeoning self-aware consciousness will be difficult to share. Even our friend here struggles to embrace the information we offer. His struggles are expressed in the awkward wording and missing pieces to the puzzle.
Our purpose in the attempt to describe a newborn's perspective is to stimulate your inner vision, your third eye so to speak. Having this "eye" open allows you to perceive the inner structure of your world even while you look at it with your physical eyes. This form of sight is more primal and basic than your physical eyes in spite of seeming more complex and mysterious. Temporally speaking (therefore figuratively) your inner eye opened before you ever had physical eyes. Your perception of life as self was seen through this eye that perceives patterns of thought and feeling that underlay the physical creation before there is a physical creation. You conjured physical creation to express what your inner eye perceived.
First, there was THE WORD, the primal thought, essence. Then the God that you are created the Heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was void and without form. Heaven and Earth were the principles that were the basis for all of the creation to follow. They were the Yin and Yang. "Let there be light!" began the expression of these principles, driven by THE WORD, the primal desire to expand. HE saw that it was good and He was glad. The God that you are embraced creation, the moment of pure self-acceptance, the source of joy. When you had conjured the representation of your individuality, you plunged into it with total acceptance of your creation. This is not a forgetting of your spiritual basis. That is not possible. Your acceptance of your creation did become tinged with fear little by little. Your identity became focused upon your creation and a conscious self developed seemingly divorced from your spiritual essence. Your creation became more and more complex as your conscious self-identification continued cycle after cycle. As your creation grew larger, your identity grew more focused, more separate and more fearful. You came to conjure aspects to your world to assuage your fear while simultaneously projecting your fear into the world you created. Thus did Mother grow into an identifiable being from an icon designed to provide security and protection and sustenance. She warded off your fear of destruction and pain. In turn, each new piece of your world grew from such cycles of fear and desire. You sought to expand your identity and remain safe from your fear in cycle after cycle while your creation grew.
When we speak of your perception in the womb of existing within the life of another, we speak of the projection of your individuality which began before your creation of a body. The womb is a metaphor for the gestating identity. Your imagination had conjured the idea of beingness, projected into a kind of form, mental at first, then emotional. Before identifying with this idea of beingness and forming a body as your own, you set into motion the ME and the NOT ME and this shaped your creative process. For there to be a You, identifiably self-aware, you desired a corresponding Thou. That is the principle of Heaven and Earth, formless and void, I and Thou. Your innate drive to expand and express, turned inward into identity and experience, toggling back and forth, is the Beginning. Your birth from the womb is a metaphor for the explosive realization of self into form. Your individuality was born, expressed into form. Of course if you have a form, your first physical exploration, there must be form outside of your form. The rest of the world is born after you. As you explore that world, your consciousness becomes more complex. Then the world outside you becomes more complex. This growth process is incredibly rapid, fueled by an infinite consciousness beneath your burgeoning identity and conscious awareness. It moves at the speed of thought. It is pretty easy to leap to the conclusion that the world was already there when it fulfills every thought conscious or otherwise. Keep in mind that you do not actually remember what the world looked like as an infant, how it functioned or even what you thought and felt about it at the time. Your consciousness was growing along with the world which results from your consciousness.
The true wonder of this description is how it can affect every thought you have entertained about your world as objective fact. If your entire universe has been a construct of consciousness, like a dream, all along, then none of it exists outside of you. None of it is separate from you or out of your creative power and control. The rules are entirely up to you to choose and act upon. You truly are free to create a world of joy that supports and maintains your highest aspirations.
As it always was and always shall be.
Question #5:
I want to understand about miracles. What does enlightenment, Nirvana, Christ Consciousness, etc. look like? How do I know where I stand on my journey towards that?
Let's take the last of those questions first and work backwards.
Living in relativity as humans do, comparing yourself to other people, physical or imaginary, is a great temptation. While it can be extremely valuable to motivate your efforts to grow in self-awareness, the other side of that coin can be equally dis-couraging. The end result of any comparison, be it to other people or to some arbitrary standard drawn from your study or imagination, is judgement. Whether you judge yourself as a failure or as a success, the very act of judging stops the flow of awareness of who you are in your wholeness. The standards that you apply in your measurement of progress do not reflect the wholeness of you. They reflect a good versus bad dichotomy which, for however long you dwell within it, separates you from genuine self-awareness.
You are not in the process of becoming! You are a being!
The best way we know to be aware of who you are right now is to willingly open your consciousness to your infinite wholeness. Accept unconditionally everything that you are, the "good" and the "bad". Embrace the saint and the sinner unreservedly. Neither is the more sacred. Neither wins the favor of God over the other. The true point of morality is to come to know what feels really, wholly joyful to you. Do you like your self more by doing this instead of that? That is not God. That is about your relationship to your self.
Much of the conundrum from which your question arises revolves around the doing of life. You seek a prescription which always works. What can you do that always proclaims your spiritual status as an enlightened one? We suggest that everything you do is an expression of who you are in the moment. Every action expresses your saintliness as well as your inner psychopath. Focusing upon your state of being in the moment instead of your state of doing makes it possible to touch your enlightened self. Your actions will reflect that wholeness and any change in your behavior will be effortless and painless. Accept your innate wholeness and every expression becomes acceptable as well.
When you are looking at the actions of others, your every perception is the result of your consciousness impinging upon your self-created reality. You only perceive the portion of the infinite potential you are immersed in that your awareness will accept. Your are never experiencing the reality of another person. There may well be points of intersection but those points of agreement are a drop in the bucket. Far more points of divergence in perceived reality than points of agreement exist between you and even your closest companions. In others, you can see your aspirations and your fears in action so that you can choose which to embrace and live within. You have spent most of your life focused outside of your self, looking for icons to follow and imitate in order to achieve the states of being you desire. This has been the norm for you. It is still your imagination, your inner world which has created those icons and authorities, those people and the actions which you emulate. We urge you now to go directly to the source of those aspirations, within. It is the inner saint that you seek after all. Most importantly, it is not the actions of a saint or how a saint looks that you truly seek.
You crave the feeling of sainthood. You want to be enlightened. You want to feel the safety and security of having done the right thing. You want to feel the undying and unlimited love which a saint feels and lives within. Instead of asking what enlightenment looks like, ask how it feels. Go inside your self and ask how it feels to be rapturously happy, loving unconditionally, knowing with absolute certainty. Ask how total safety feels, what feeling completely loved by the universe is like. Refuse any fears which stand between you and those feelings. They will always be there but you do not have to give them power with your attention. Just go back to your focus upon being open to your enlightened self.
You see, you are enlightened already. You have always been so. You pick and choose what portions of that wholeness of self to experience from moment to moment. By looking within for what you aspire to instead of looking outside yourself, you can find fulfillment. That is where it lives. Looking for it outside in the actions of self and other is like seeking a deer by following its droppings. It forever remains just beyond your reach.
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Miracles are topics which can be as complex as you choose to make them. You are the arbiter of their definitions. A miracle, to you, is an everyday occurrence to another. If you construct your universe to include telepathy or clairvoyance or mediumship, for example, your experience will, at first, seem miraculous indeed. As your experience of thee iconic state adds up over the years they become "normal". They cease to be miracles to you while others may marvel still. The trappings of spiritual achievement are no different than indicators of status in other fields. They are traps for the attention which do not describe how deep your joy in life is, your self-awareness or your ability to love unconditionally. As traps for your attention, they can hold you in place, like heavily weeded waters holding fast a boat on a river.
If you consider that every physical object you perceive is a manifestation of your consciousness, like the things in your nightly dreams, miracles become a very common occurrence. All that differs between the chair you sit upon, reading these words and the conjuring of a pencil in your upraised hand is your willingness to believe in your creative power and your right to wield it. Neither is more miraculous. Neither is more sacred. The only difference lies in your definition of who you are. Our suggestion to you has always been to cast your aspirations as high as you can reach with your imagination and scramble to expand your identity to match. Put that definition of self into action as a symbolic gesture, let your feelings explore that state of being and be new in every moment. Revel in insight and adventure. Open to the joy of life.
You can only imagine making miracles and being enlightened because such states are already extant within you. You are already enlightened. You have miraculously created a vast and complex world which you constantly hold stable yet constantly changing and expanding. Look at how much larger your world is today than it was a very short time ago. You are more aware of life in other cultures, other continents with every passing day. You add new things, new people, new possibilities and new ideas to your world every day. How arbitrary is it to insist that you conjure objects from thin air in the palm of your hand to prove your spiritual power? The only reason that creation follows the rules that it seems to is that you have insisted that it be so. Believe in a new model of creation with all your heart and mind and it will be so.
What you presently see in the world around you is a statement of what you believe is possible. If you see war, death, pain and suffering that is because you "know" that to be true. You also know peace, life, joy and love to be true. You get to choose which to feed with your attention. Create a miracle by feeding with your conscious attention a world which fulfills your dreams. Create the peace and love and security you crave by fostering your belief in those attributes filling your world. Look for them constantly and appreciate any sign of them that you find. In a twinkling, compared to the age of your soul, you will find your world transformed as if by miracle.
Love Always,
Kuthumi
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