So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (12)

Shaping Ourselves

This post may be one of the better Christmas presents you’ve ever received. At least, I hope so, because here we enter more closely into the question of how we should live; what the possibilities are. The easiest way to convey this is just to pass along the contents of this session with the guys upstairs. As usual, paragraphs in italics represent me speaking (or, in this case, writing), while the words the guys provide me are given in Roman text.

They begin:

Perhaps we should begin to tie together what it is we intend you to accomplish with our help. As we told you yesterday, your job is less to tell people how to do it, or even in a way to do it yourself, as to encourage and inspire them to find out for themselves how to do it. For of course everyone has guidance! That’s the point of finding guidance — is it not? — that everyone has guidance! You will remember addressing this question in Muddy Tracks nearly at the outset, in which you asked us for a description of how to safely proceed.

Everyone has guidance that will guide them to discovering how to contact guidance. You know? Your lives are mostly response to unconscious guidance moment by moment. Some respond freely, some resist, some respond freely in one area and resist in another. It is your guidance that shapes your life,  necessarily and for no one’s benefit more than your own! So the trick is not to develop new access. It is not to come into contact with forces or beings who may be requested to aid you.

It is simply to do more consciously what you cannot help doing in many ways, in many times, unconsciously.

You breathe. If you did not breathe, you could not live. Yet you may go to a self-development class, or a meditation class, and find that the first step is to learn how to breathe properly.

That is – how to breathe consciously.

The process, the necessity, the reward, is similar here. You live in guidance. Now, learn to do it consciously.

Now when your teacher taught you how to breathe consciously, did s/he have to move your muscles for you? Was it necessary to give each person individual, highly detailed, instruction? Was it necessary to study the subject? Wasn’t most of the instruction accomplished when the teacher pointed out to you that you could and should breathe consciously?

Techniques can be important, but we say this flatly: Technique is detail.

No one ever became a great artist or a great saint or a great intellectual or a great anything by mastering technique. Greatness does not inhere in technique but in inspiration. Craft, skill, proficiency, relate to technique, and the truly great were not deficient in technique, but no one has ever done or ever will do anything great and lasting and important and soul-lifting on technique alone.

This is where religions may go wrong. Their hearts may be in the right place but their confidence may be misplaced, thinking that technique – rules – the following of rules, the doing a certain thing in a certain manner – is the way. It is not. It may be the method to be followed along the way, but it is not the way.

This is where art goes wrong. One proficient in technique and not in touch with guidance produces soul-less (literally!) trash. One who is connected may produce soaring art even with defective technique – in fact he will create his own technique as a by-product of expressing that inspiration.

Similarly, your readers. It does not matter how guidance is made conscious, provided that the heart is pure; that is, that the intent is pure.

But having said that, we need to take back a bit of it – even though what we just said is true. And the reason to modify the statement is the existence of fear. Fear is the great distorter.

All we have to offer was offered by Jesus and could be restated in those words. It is a matter of interpreting into modern language.

Some conventionally religious people will respond to this message with fear. It is the fear – the fear of making a mistake that will damn them, not a negligible fear, as you know first-hand from your Catholic boyhood – that may lead them to lash out against what would be a message of hope and promise. That fear needs to be recognized and honored; their own internal guidance will do its part.

We are not saying that opposition stemming from fear may always be overcome; neither do we suggest that guidance will always lead people along similar paths. As odd as it may seem to you, other paths that may seem utterly inconsistent with following guidance have their place too. God is not necessarily agreeing with you and disagreeing with them! Each person’s path has been chosen – is being chosen – and for you to convert them is the same process as them converting you: good intention but perhaps an invasion. God is at Gateway courses [at The Monroe Institute] – but he is equally at Baptist church services, and Muslim mosques and – though you may hate to think it – Pat Robertson’s television broadcasts.

We are straying from our point which is that all have access to guidance but that fear may prevent some of you from making that access more conscious.

Treat that fear as you would treat any obstruction in the flow of energy: Make it conscious (that is, bring it into awareness), dwell in it (that is, absorb the character of it; feel it and feel its nature) and reason with it (ask how it is serving you, listen to the response, and either tell it that you don’t need that protection or, if appropriate, suggest another way that the same kind of protection may be provided without interfering with your development of greater access to conscious guidance).

Make it conscious.

Dwell in it.

Reason with it.

That is the way to deal with all obstructions, be they physical, mental, emotional or energetic.