January 20, 1995 Friday, Private Session
Project Expand: The Non-Dual Nature of the Birthless Divine; Lucifer and the Origination of Polarity; The Foundations of Religions
Barbara and K began with some discussion of giving/receiving as non-dual. Expressing concern and question over some seemingly distorted teaching from a book of Kabbalah.
Aaron: I am Aaron. We cannot cover the entire history of religious ideology in 45 minutes. What I wish to do is lay a foundation upon which we will build, perhaps exploring the different religious beliefs which have exploded from this foundation.
Every telling of this story is biased. I state here my bias as highly positively-polarized discarnate energy.
In the beginning, there was no beginning! We speak here of the Birthless!
I was not here. I do not speak from personal experience. My understanding of it, from my present experience and my teachers, is that the infinite truly is infinite. God did not begin with a “big bang.” There has always been energy. One can conjecture that that energy was neutral in its polarity and through its increasing experience, moved toward positive polarity until it became the model of positive polarity.
There was no duality within this infinite energy. Precisely because it had begun as neutral, it contained within it both positivity and negativity. One could debate philosophically whether or not negativity is contained in positivity. But certainly both are contained in neutral. You have heard me talk of both light and relative absence of light; here all concept of duality is voided. When this energy has moved into perfect positive polarity, the expression of negative polarity merely manifests as a decrease in light.
This is an important point. Had this energy originally manifest as absolute light, one could then conceive of its essential nature as dualistic with darkness. Another important factor: because its first expression was as neutral, expansion, change and flexibility are part of its essence. The principles of giving and receiving not only are not contradictory; in a non-dual energy they must both exist.
We have here-in the core of the dilemma. If this energy contains all light and darkness, “good” and “evil,” positivity and negativity, giving and receiving, the human struggling to reflect only the positive becomes entrapped by its own humanness with arisings of greed, anger and various arisings of ego-based fear.
As K suggested, it comes to a question of responsibility. If my urges toward greed and hatred are “evil” and antithetical to God, then my work would be to smother those urges, perhaps through practices of austerity, or through strong focusing of the mind which instantly cuts off and denies fear-based arising. Doing so does not make me a more loving person or a wiser person, only more in control. Thus, control and power are viewed as the attributes of the Divine most highly regarded by persons of this bias. Judgment is predominant.
On the other hand, we have the view of Divine as non-dual. Here one does not need to subdue the arisings of fear-based ego, but to draw those arisings more strongly into the heart of love. Just as this Supreme Energy was drawn increasingly to express Itself as positive polarity until It became the perfect model of positive polarity, so is the human who embraces non-duality drawn along this path.
Within every religious tradition which I have ever encountered in any incarnation, this schism exists. There are those who will distort the teachings of any tradition into a statement of the dual nature of the universe, and will state that “evil” must be destroyed. There are those who will focus on the non-dual nature and simply understand that darkness must be invited into the light.
It seems to me that this schism reflects an individual bias, a psychological bias perhaps. It reflects a lack of maturity. Every religion attracts both old and younger souls. Younger souls are simply more fearful and less ready to be responsible.
Some distorted teachings that Barbara read about the Kabbalah are not true Kabbalah any more than a certain, what you label fundamentalist Christian slant is the essence of Christ’s teaching. Nevertheless, because these teachings are ancient, where fear has been present, fear’s slant and the concept of dualistic God and dualistic relationship between unconditioned and conditioned has profoundly influenced your Earth.
We move backwards historically to Ariel’s story of the origins of negativity on Earth. Those guardian angels of Earth were highly positively-polarized and mature beings. Already we see that they carried within themselves the seeds of this schism. The one whom you call Lucifer or “fallen angel” had entered into that bias that negative energy was to be destroyed. While others who did not “fall” noted the arisings of their anxiety around the extra-terrestrial probings of Earth, they made space for that anxiety, not seeing it as dual, not needing to be rid of it. The archangel whom you call Lucifer judged itself for those arisings, needed to be rid of those negative arisings in itself and thereby thought it needed to be rid of negativity in the universe.
If negativity is non-dual with positivity, you cannot be rid of one without being rid of the other. It became so entrapped that it needed to investigate the nature of negativity at ever greater depths. To some degree what it does is merely to continue this investigation to see if it can find a place where negativity finally is separate from positivity and may then be extended far enough out that it over-balances and becomes more powerful than positivity. Of course this cannot be so, but the exploration does lead to great suffering.
This is the foundation upon which every religious system has drawn. I would especially like to explore in depth with you what this has meant to the Judeo-Christian traditions and the Buddhist tradition. In exploring it in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we will come to more fully understand the timing and reason for Christ’s life. In exploring it in the Buddhist tradition, we will be led into exploration of what this instrument considers Buddhist fundamentalism, of which it in prior lives has contributed a part. We will also need deeply to penetrate the dependent origination teachings to understand how the understandings therein finally transcend this schism, and the immensity of this contribution, that there is at last a path in which the schism does not exist.