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 through the publisher or directly via e-mail to: shaman@fundy.net
Perhaps your question will wind up in the next book.
Thank you
Timothy Finley
Question #1
What, exactly do you mean by the word “soul” and how does it differ, if at all, from myself?
We have used the words, soul, spirit, your self and yourself throughout our messages without offering explicit definition. This has been an intentional device to stimulate your questing. By making some of our message implicit instead of explaining every detail, we have challenged you to fill in the blanks. Words cannot hold all of the truth about anything, be it object, feeling or idea. Because you will interpret our words within the framework of your conceptual gestalt, the most meticulous effort to make our words concrete and explicit will have obvious limitations. As the concepts beneath our words are far less limited, we ask you to follow the words into this larger terrain.
Still, we will respond to your question by offering more detail which you can work with as you wish. We have walked the tightrope of communication by differentiating between the wholeness of your being and its various parts. It is an arbitrary distinction however. Each of your parts is intimately linked to the whole and is never out of that linkage. Each part has access to the whole to the extent of its ability to embrace it. Each part has certain abilities to communicate its contents to each other part and certain limitations and there is where you sometimes struggle.
Now, the soul differs from the self in only the most subtle ways which would be well beyond you in your human form. The self is infinite in size and scope, expanding always into the vastness of God. It differs from the soul only in terms of identity. The self has identified itself and thus stands as the first representation of individuation or separation from God. The self knows its wholeness and the soul knows God. At this degree of universality, the distinction is very minor to you. From the soul’s point of view, it is an immense distinction and so we mention it.
The soul, and thus the wholeness of you, pulses into and out of existence. Of course, you will not notice this as only existence is recognizable to you. The soul, intimately connected to the Allness of God, experiences not-being directly by releasing identity. The self is affected by that experience even though it does not entirely share in it. The experience ripples through your wholeness and draws you into a more complete experience of oneness. Just as you yearn for a more complete experience of wholeness, the self aspect of your wholeness yearns, too, for completion. The yearning there is passed along, permeating every aspect of you.
Yourself is a term we use in much the same sense as you use it. Yourself is what you, consciously, call yourself. It is a tiny flake of the wholeness of your self. It is quite sharply experienced as separate from everything, inner and outer, that you choose to define as not yourself. That choice, which is made anew in each conscious moment, including those moments in altered states as your conscious mind interacts with other states like the dreaming mind, is completely arbitrary and subject to change without notice. We urge you to become even more fluid in your definitions so that yourself will grow to approach your self.
In between yourself and your self are organizations of awareness that you can come to know intimately. Indeed, intimately is the only way to know them. They are levels of awareness that function deeper within than the awareness you have attached your identity to. Coming to identify with your emotional body, for instance, is a more subtle activity than identifying with your physical body and its experience of emotion. Each of the senses in the emotional body can be opened and explored to show you aspects of your self that cannot be experienced by your physical senses. The same is true for your mental body and your spiritual body. As you explore the input from these more subtle senses, more of the wholeness becomes available to your identity. Also more of the details of these and other layers of consciousness become available to your conscious mind and included in your identity. Remember that these organizations of consciousness are not physical. They have no position in time and space that you can measure or put your finger on, literally or figuratively. Your soul does NOT reside inside your body, for instance. To look for it there reflects your belief that the physical world is all there is. And yet, there is this soul thing...
While your soul includes you, it is so very much more that you doubt you could ever comprehend it. We sympathize with your plight. We offer this program to lead you in that direction despite your doubts. Keep in mind that you have the resources you require for this work always at the ready. They will appear as if by magic when you call upon them with your questing.
Question #2
Questions such as this one come up daily in pretty much everyone’s life. We all wonder how to decide on what to do next or how to make our lives work.
as for questions, I still have a major problem in figuring out what exactly I’m supposed to be doing day to day. here I am a desktop publisher. but my calling midwife, herbs, bodywork what about all my impulses toward healing (and Kevin just raises the itch, we don't actually have an opportunity to learn anything together because our lives are at cross purposes and it doesn't look like we'll join forces in the physical everyday world)? and what about my art? what's my mission here on earth and why don't I see it clearly enough to take that leap of faith? why when I keep asking god for loud do I get a crescendo that then fades into silence without any resolution? (and what's going on with the Volvo station wagon I asked for?) I’ve abandoned going to Oregon because I saw the same progression in going to Taiwan and what's the point if anywhere but here will do (trap number one 'anywhere but' is the term that sets off the alarms), and now I’m full of doubt that I’ll ever accomplish what is only a dream to take me away from the ordinariness of the life I lead desktop publishing. that's my question all one (except for the Volvo), and all about what the hell I’m doing here on earth and how can I complete my assignment properly when I can't see any road signs. can you ask your guys about that for me?
The details are ridiculously under important. The point is not what you DO but the spirit which underlies your actions. The significant thrust of life within you is toward self acceptance. You struggle on this battleground often. Each event in your life has an element of this struggle in it for you to see and play with. The steps you make toward what brings you pleasure draw us nearer to you in spirit and in fact. Your relationship with yourself is absolutely primal. Every other relationship springs from that. They all display your advancement in this primary relationship. As we are your self, we have a vested interest in this activity. Because you reject our movement towards you, you reject any seemingly vested interest you see outside yourself. This message comes to you through not only one such medium to show you glimpses of who you have projected yourself as being. Embrace all the aspects of yourself that you see outside you. You grant them more pleasure than you grant your own lovely self. We support each motion towards happiness that you make and though we neither hinder nor stop the motion towards punishment, we do not applaud them so loudly.
Each specific question of what you "should" do next proclaims you less than worthy unless you DO something laudable in your own eyes. We say that all you do is laudable. Every portion of your human identity is beloved. Please understand that while you see every choice as one between this mixed blessing and that one, we look in you for the pleasure the choice will bring. We follow all choices into matter and play in them joyfully. We wish you to do so as well. Each movement towards us in this way brings us closer to you as well. Be assured that part of you (us) is gone to Oregon. Part of you (us) is in Europe and part is driving a limousine (just for fun). Part suffers in marriage and part revels in freedom, enjoying the company of men and children.
We follow all possibilities that you contemplate. You are free to follow whatever you choose. We hope you choose joyfully. Recognize that these words belong to the medium of exchange so to speak. We see you in terms of nearness and farness. When you choose to punish yourself or languish in indecision with your conflicts over your worth, we are held away from your immediate presence. When you choose what brings you pleasure, we are drawn to you. That choice is to follow our greatest desire for you, to act on our love for you. If you want a car, go shopping. If you want to go to school, go find a school to go to. If you want to move, go find a place to move to that fills your needs. If you want a man, go find a man to love. We are here to support you. Because we are quite simply identity in awareness, we do not need complex answers. We simply flow with the power of love and joy. You can do this as well and we will be together again.
Remember that the experience of love moves from within to without. It pulses and both pulses need be allowed by you for the experience to be complete and whole. You can follow this pulsing from the inside with your relationship to us (you). We pulse toward and pull away. You feel our presence and then you don't. This does not represent that we are not there for you. It represents the natural flow we urge you to accept and allow.
This medium suggests you give yourself permission to heal. We feel this is sound though you may want to use words less threatening to you. "I deserve pleasure in each moment," might be better. Look inward and really feel your body, not just in special moments of concentration but in all those moments when you ignore your senses. Feel each rhythm of your body as a loving flow in and out. Feel the call of each cell one at a time until you know them all. This is not as hard as you think. In fact you think too much for your own comfort. Feel more and you will find that happiness is within your grasp always.
Thank you for asking.
We acknowledge that these are not new datum. We offer you these thoughts in many ways and repeatedly and often. Look at your life circumstances and see these thoughts expressed both in positive and negative ways (we pulse) and recognize the love inherent in them. Love is the only word you really know for this identifying. We are you and wish you to be us. Think of yourself as us often. Notice that all you have in your life is us. Lay aside the thought that this world you live in has some foreign source. It is you!. Again this medium speaks to say you will think it is him. No matter. The message is sound. You are loved in so total a way that no harm can be yours without your choosing.
Question #3
What difference does the content of a dream make to reality?
Though it may seem like splitting hairs, we would take exception to the implication that your dreams are somehow less real than your waking consciousness. From our perspective, they are, if anything, the more fully real.
Let’s look at the experience of life as a continuum with your conscious mind, fully in charge and conversing only with itself in a circular fashion, replaying its own contents constantly, at one end of the continuum. At the other end, for the purposes of discussion only, we’ll put everything you could experience but which is presently unconscious to you. As we have discussed, the creation of your life springs mostly from the unconscious. Its contents, then, are simply vast beyond your reckoning consciously, at this time. In order for you to have a conscious experience, of course, you must have a degree of conscious mind input. Otherwise, you would not recognize experience. So too must there be a degree of unconscious involvement or you would not have an experience to be conscious of. The extreme end of conscious mind input only is not actually achievable. At the other end of the continuum, if you only had unconscious experience, you would have no identity through which to be aware of your own experience. Sort of like the deepest sleep.
Now, you do indeed bounce off of both extremes occasionally. You simply cannot recognize this in action. These will be moments of blankness to you. That is, if you notice blankness, which is rare. You spend far more of your existence at the far reaches of the unconscious than you are aware of, for obvious reasons. Such experience comprises the bulk of your soul’s experience of life. This can become your experience as well should you so choose. This is where dreaming comes into play.
As we express in our discussion on after-death states, the dream experience provides a doorway through which your conscious mind may gain entry into the far larger realms of the soul. This will happen as a result of your questing, though. It does not happen without your conscious participation. You will be moving along the continuum of conscious to unconscious as an act of will by expanding your conscious awareness into new areas. Many people are unwilling to remember their dreams and thus close off to the intrusion of new perception, choosing instead to replay their storehouse of beliefs about reality. This provides them with a sense of security and is perfectly valid. If you choose to make your reality larger than it was a moment ago, you can choose just that instead.
We reiterate, remembering your dream experience is more vital than comparing it to your waking experience. Often, the contents of your dreams are not about your waking life. Indeed, the vast bulk of dream experience is removed sufficiently from your conscious constructs that even remembering these dreams is virtually impossible. It is the overlap which we suggest might benefit you at this time. Much of your dream life, which you do remember vividly, is a conversation which your conscious mind has with itself with only a little input from the unconscious. This, of course, does not suggest that such experience is without meaning or value. We merely imply that it is more limited than your quest for truth may be satisfied by. Your preoccupation with your daily life can hold you to this level of dream experience. Trying to interpret every nuance of a dream into physical, human terms sets a powerful intent that will structure both the dreams you remember and how the input from the unconscious will be limited and expressed. This approach is perfectly valid but again, more limited than your quest for truth may be satisfied by.
By dropping the need to interpret your dream experience, especially in physical terms, you accomplish the same shift in perception that releasing judgement provides you in waking life. You open yourself to a broader experience of life. Strangely, such a new approach will produce dreams whose contents seem to make more sense. This is the result of becoming open to more of the layers of experience taking place within a dream. A dream situated within your workplace, for instance, will have meaning relative to many levels of your life. It may speak to your work life, or your family life ( where life feels like work), or address your life’s purpose or your spiritual commitment. It may address the issues which your soul experiences relative to you specifically or your interactions with alternate versions of you and so on, ad infinitum. Interpreting the experience on one level only closes off the potential you have in this moment to experience more, indeed all, of your soul’s experience.
In more specific terms, the contents of your dreams can play a significant creative role in your daily experience of life. The more open you are to the less physical layers of meaning, the more those layers can help to broaden your experience of daily life. There are opportunities for spiritual experience in every moment of your existence. By choosing to allow such experience to be included in your conscious awareness, either waking or dreaming, you expand into those spiritual opportunities. Such expanding is happy making stuff. Holding back your spiritual awareness by focusing tightly on your life as a physical being will keep you recycling old thoughts, old beliefs and old pain.
Much of the modern approach to dream analysis comes from the stance that you need help to live your life more effectively. Dreams then, are used to heal you or to teach you. They are touted as messengers from your soul about how to live better and happier. We suggest that this is an attitude which, while more open than discounting the value of your dreams altogether, assumes that your present moment awareness is somehow wrong and in need of help or healing. So, we refer you back to chapter 4. We suggest an open embrace of your dreams. Inflict your conscious mind upon them only to remember them. Meaning will come of itself as some of your experience will make perfect sense to you. Other dreams will be foreign and mysterious. Accepting that unconditionally will encourage more such dreams. The landscape of other aspects of your self will become visible. Assume that your physical life will take care of itself and unfold in perfection. That will allow it to actually do just that. You will be released from the need to control every little aspect of life and to colour every moment with a tinge of fear. Your life does unfold as smoothly as your dreams do. It is created with remarkable panache. It is just more highly structured and thus more limited than your dreams. Trying to impose the same limits onto your dreams may not satisfy your quest for truth.
Question#4
Why doesn’t everyone seek peace? What prevents us from achieving peace?
As this question implies something useful about the nature of questions, we will run at it kind of obliquely. The way you go about asking about life speaks loudly about the way you perceive things. Questions themselves state both what you assume you know and what you assume you do not know. Both assumptions create serious limits to the answers you may then generate. “Why doesn’t everyone seek peace?” is fraught with assumptions which describe your beliefs more than it describes your desire for truth. Such a question holds assumptions about peace and what that might appear to be. It holds assumptions about seeking peace and what that might look like. It also assumes that what everyone else does can affect what you do or how you live your life. This is, at least partially, why your search for answers can be so frustratingly complex. This may well be why the answers you do get satisfy you so little.
That said, let’s play a bit with this question. Firstly, we would speak to the nature of seeking. Growth and expansion is the result of the desire of the soul. Desire at this level is directly experiencing the nature of what is. It does not assume anything nor is it based on a projection that growth and expansion is “not.” The soul does not seek growth. It desires what is. Hence, it constantly experiences what already is. It desires and is satisfied in its desire in the same moment. Were the soul to seek growth and expansion, it would first have to experience that growth and expansion is “not.” This is where you came in.
You experience things a little differently. You experience desire as separate from experience. You imagine you desire something that you lack. You actively and consistently imagine yourself separate from the wholeness of your self and then go seeking that wholeness. Eventually, each experience in creation reaches a turnaround point in the flow from spirit into matter and back out again. All of creation begins to express the wholeness more than the separateness. As this trend grows, seeking is replaced by being. The assumption that you lack that which you seek is replaced by the experience of being that which you seek.
So, when it comes to seeking peace, if you are focused on the seeking, it is because you are looking for how much peace you lack. You notice the feeling missing from your present moment more than you notice being peaceful. Since you do get to choose how you feel, you can decide to be peaceful. That decision is the turning point at which you will have more peacefulness than turmoil. You then begin to focus upon peace instead of focusing on the lack of peace. By looking for peace, you make peace grow within your life. It was always there in the wholeness after all.
The judgement that others are not seeking peace may be as simple as assuming that what is on the surface is all that there is. By freezing your perception in time and space (the linear point of view), you limit your experience of life to what lies on the surface. If you perceive someone pursuing their internal drama and all of its turmoil, you may judge that to be all that they are about. It is just one turning of the wheel of life though. It is the turn of chaotic excitement fraught with conflict and pain, but without that experience, the deep faith of inner peace would be unimaginable.
To make your way to the experience of your wholeness, you will come to imagine all that you are. This, you would do by embracing all of the complimentary opposites that comprise your expression of self into reality. This imagining is constantly growing and expanding by moving into and through experiences of first one side of the coin and then the other. Choosing a preference for one side or the other slows the movement down considerably and, actually, limits your expansion of both realms of experience. Becoming open to whatever is allows you to cycle more smoothly through your growth so that the wholeness becomes your norm more quickly.
By definition, resistance prevents achieving your desires being fulfilled. Resistance is a choice. Whenever you find resistance, let it go. Replace it, first with faith, then with trust based upon your faith rewarded and finally with your sure knowledge that you are safe to exist.
Question #5
This one comes from the members of our Monday night group. We have met every week for more than two years as this writing project continued. Without the help of all of those who have joined in on the fun, I would not have been so sure of the value of this work.
As our group activities continue, we seem to be doing fewer exercises and moving forward less in our work together. Where we once did energy exploration we are doing more meditative exercises. Why is that?
We do appreciate the efforts you have made as individuals and as a group. We do not measure your progress or hold expectation that our suggestions will move you on. You have come together to grow spiritually. Such growth is not a coarse phenomena. It has few bells and whistles. It is not about the definitions you once held such as mystical experience, psychic visions and seeing auras or reading the future or doing energy healing and so on. Spiritual experience is about opening to the subtlety of essence. It is intensely quiet, not brashly loud and dramatic. It is a realm as far from the physical as you can imagine it to be. The farther you can imagine, the more of it you gain access to.
To make gains in your spiritual growth as you might in financial programs or exercise regimes is a bit of a red herring. You are placing the parameters of human experience onto spiritual phenomena. This sets some rather small limits onto your experience. Such limits leave you feeling dissatisfied. Remove those limits and you will immediately see how much “progress” you have made. It is not a matter of how much experience you have but of how much of your experience you are actually aware. Within the most mundane life experiences, brushing your teeth for instance, there is an infinite awareness available to you. Such moments can provide you with an entire universe of experience. You just block that off with the approach you now take.
As difficult as it is for you to become vulnerable to your world, that is what will bring you the deepest spiritual fulfilment. You presently look for experience that brings you control and the appearance of power. That is why psychic phenomena are so compelling. These experiences are based on the unconscious assumption that you lack control and power. You assume that having psychic experiences would offer more of that control and power over your life’s circumstances. Therefore, they cannot bring you what you believe you lack. Becoming vulnerable is based on the assumption that you are safe and powerful in your universe, that you belong and that you are loved and able to receive all blessings. Because you assume this, it shall be yours. The spiritual experience that you have been looking for is based on the assumption that you have NOT been having this experience all along. Therefore, you will not find it available to you. You may project all the bells and whistles that you imagine are the marks of spiritual experience. You will not notice the real thing though. You have been living the real thing all along and not noticed.
Search for the subtle then. Find the feelings beneath the feelings. Find the beliefs beneath your perceptions of the world around you. Assume that you are safe enough to be open to whatever experience comes your way and more surely shall. When you have fear, open yourself to it. Really feel it, in all its nuances, as much as you can. Connections will begin to be made as you sit with your feelings. Integration of your thoughts, feelings and experiences takes place all by itself. You do not need to force it with analysis. The more willing you are to experience what is, the more sense it will make. That is, after all, how your conversation with us is taking place. You have chosen to open to a layer of information that may run counter to your training and present deductions about reality. That opening allows us to offer alternatives.
Opening to spirit is not pried or blasted or in any way imposed. It is a release. When you release judgement or suspend disbelief or surrender your willfulness, then can wisdom grow. If you relax your definitions of reality, you can open to new and larger ones. Relax those definitions and more growth of experience takes their place. Don’t assume that your present concepts and beliefs are wrong though. That too is a trap for your attention. Assume that it is safe to grow and relax. Assume that you can access your own wholeness and the infinite resources that are who you really are. Assume those resources are constantly expanding, not set in stone, and let them change as you go along.
Question #6
You have used such phrases as “the fabric of the universe,” and “as life unfolds.” Please explain these references.
These metaphors are an attempt to bridge a very wide gap. They are most challenging from both your end and ours. The issue in the middle is the perception of time which acts as a significant barrier between your individuated conscious identity and the wholeness of your infinite self. For you to contemplate all eternity as an integrated whole from the framework of the ever changing realm of appearances is at best an academic but relatively meaningless pursuit. At worst, it is thoroughly unthinkable. From the perspective of your soul, living out your infinite potential in the spaciousness of the present moment is not a logistical problem at all. Still, we can only jump that chasm with metaphors and allusions to tempt you to leap it with faith and intuition.
Imagine your life as it moves from moment to moment as though you were in a huge library. With each decision, you select a scroll from the library’s shelves and unfold it to view the description of you that your choice has led you to. You peruse that description of your reality internal, check it out with your reality external and then make another choice which leads you to the next moment. You pluck another scroll down off the shelf and move along through life in this fashion. As this process continues, you expand your reach and bring selected scrolls to describe your past and ones to forecast your future with each choice of a present moment reality. All of these possibilities are built into this vast library. You merely choose what you wish to read and unfold each scroll as you go along.
If you can relax your projections of three dimensionality onto a universe of infinite dimensions, you might be able to consider the potential for limitless numbers of physical realities co-existing with yours. These other realities, which include versions of you to which your soul is source, are connected together through that source. In three dimensional terms, they would appear as of the same cloth, gathered in masses of folds through which your infinite points of self identified awareness, of which you are but one, move from moment to moment. To you, it might seem like moving over the face of the waters with a high powered beam of light (your conscious mind) shining down and illuminating the folds of your choice as you go. Those and only those will you be aware of in the moment. Such folds would hold your entire conscious contents, past, present and future for this moment. There are ripples which propel you from fold to fold which are the movements of the fabric itself. These movements invariably influence your choice of which fold to participate in. This movement is the flow of desire of your soul. It has a general direction relative to your perspective. Its powerful motion cannot be long opposed. The details, however, the specific choice of which fold to move through, while narrowed by the soul’s motion, are responsive to your desire.
And so, moment by moment, you travel small sections of the fabric of your whole self. It appears to you as though that section unfolds and you move in a straight line. From the view of your soul, you dive, pell-mell, into each fold where you may well entangle yourself or perhaps move smoothly through, following the flow of your soul’s desire.
From your soul‘s point of view, all of your infinite possibilities are there, tucked into its folds to be explored at all levels of awareness. Your soul knows every detail in its oneness and yet, at another level (yours), it experiences far more of the details as individual separate units. From the perspective of individual atoms, molecules, cells and so on, your soul explores other modes of experience. On into emotional and mental and spiritual layers of awareness. Your soul explores each within its own framework of reality. Each layer of awareness has its own definitions of such things as time and space and self. Your place in that scheme makes it possible to achieve awareness of many layers that do not know you. There are layers of you that you, in turn, do not know. All are in process to expand.
Your ability to step back out of individual folds to view more of the fabric is growing noticeably. It is a joyful motion and we encourage that expansion. Because all of the fabric you explore is of you, you are ever safe to look in all directions. You cannot wander off of this fabric or into anyplace where you cannot shine your little light onto a glimpse of your self. You can always choose the familiar. Choosing the adventure of exploring new territory will only add to the volume of the familiar until you approach an infinite acceptance of what is. Then you can flow with the ripples of your soul’s force and embrace the wholeness of your self.
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