2023-05-18

I did the Morning Offering and then got myself ready for the day. Today the 102 quote comes from Chapter Four and the concept of religion:

Religion

There is to each religion the revealed or outer aspect, and the inner, occult, or mystical aspect, and we find that it is in the mystical aspect that the religions have the tendency to unify and to harmonize, so that a mystical Buddhist can speak to a mystical Christian, a mystical Jew, or a mystical Oriental worshipper and have very few communication problems, because mysticism focuses on essence and not on detail.

It is in the revealed or outer aspect of each religion that we find the bulk of the challenging material for those who seek to be inspired by religion. For in each religion you will find in the outer or settled church aspect of the religion the tendency to be dogmatic. The advantage of dogma is a simple and vital one, and we find that many among your peoples have the necessity for a dogmatic type of belief system. In such a system there is a certain list of things that are believed and are held to be true and a certain list of things that are specifically not believed and are held to be untrue.[1]

Q’uo said that most world religions share inner and outer aspects, and that the outer aspects can be quite opposite in their manifestation and ability to harmonize with other religions. The outer type of manifestation of most religions tends to be what Q’uo called “dogmatic.” The dogma of most world religions consists of a set of basic tenets. These are created by the religious institutional hierarchy and tend to be simplified beliefs that tend to divide one religion from all other religions. Such dogmatic beliefs are often the beginning points for arguments between the followers of each religion.

The inner or mystical nature of each religion has the opposite effect upon the believers. Those who follow the mystical way are experiencing what turns out to be the unifying aspects of spiritual seeking and finding some portion of the one Creator within themselves. These are transformative experiences which tend to occur in similar ways for any religious adherent, and those who have had such experiences feel a broader point of view that reveals the unity of the creation and its manifestation in all people who are seen as equal children of the one Creator.

In the following quote from Ra, similar information is given regarding the Hebrew faith that was connected with the Ark of the Covenant and the negative influences that the Orion group sought to promulgate as their dogma.

Questioner: Was this a device for communication then? You said they also drew power from it. What type of power? How did this work?

Ra: I am Ra. This was charged by means of the materials with which it was built being given an electromagnetic field. It became an object of power in this way. And, to those whose faith became that untarnished by unrighteousness or separation, this power, designed for negativity, became positive, and is so to those truly in harmony with the experience of service to this day.

Thus the negative forces were partially successful, but the positively oriented Moishe, as this entity was called, gave to your planetary peoples the possibility of a path to the One Infinite Creator which is completely positive.

This is in common with each of your orthodox religious systems which have all become somewhat mixed in orientation yet offer a pure path to the One Creator which is seen by the pure seeker.[2]

Here, Don asked Ra about the Ark of the Covenant which was apparently designed by negatively-oriented entities during the time of Moses. It was meant to be a source of power that could control the followers of Moses. However, because Moses was such a positively-oriented being, he was able to use that positivity in a manner that created a purely positive path to the one infinite Creator. Ra also said that even thought all the major religions on Earth have become “somewhat mixed in orientation,” each one also offers a purely positive path to the one Creator for the pure seeker. I take this to mean that a pure seeker would be a more spiritually mature person who would be aware that the concepts of love of all and unity with all are the qualities of any religion to be valued above any dogma.

I believe that the term “pure seeker” would be a person such as Carla who considered herself a mystical Christian. What this means in the practical sense is that, in her own words, she “did not do dogma.” She said that she concentrated on the red print of the King’s James’ version of the Bible because, as these words were said to have been spoken by Jesus, she believed them to be less distorted.  Carla sang in the church choir from the age of four, and throughout her life she participated in the Episcopal Church services with her whole heart as she felt that singing sacred music was food for her soul. She could sing either alto or soprano, and her ability to come in on time whenever the music called for it helped the rest of her section do likewise.

For Carla the Holy Communion was truly a magical event in which the wine and the wafer became the blood and body of Jesus. In 64.4, Ra spoke to this point in particular and to Carla’s need to attend weekly church services in general:

Questioner: Thank you. Could you explain the basic principles behind the ritual which we perform to initiate the contact and what I would call the basic white magical rituals—principles of protection and other principles? Could you please do this?

Ra: I am Ra. Due to your avenue of question we perceive the appropriateness of inclusion of the cause of this instrument’s transitory vital-energy distortion. The cause is a bias towards the yearning for expression of devotion to the One Creator in group worship.

This entity was yearning for this protection both consciously in that it responds to the accoutrements of this expression, the ritual, the colors and their meanings as given by the distortion system of what you call the church, the song of praise, and the combined prayers of thanksgiving, and, most of all, that which may be seen to be most centrally magical: the intake of that food which is not of this dimension, but has been transmuted into metaphysical nourishment in what this distortion of expression calls the Holy Communion.

The subconscious reason, it being the stronger for this yearning, was the awareness that such expression is—when appreciated by an entity as the transmutation into the presence of the One Creator—a great protection of the entity as it moves in the path of service to others.

The principle behind any ritual of the white magical nature is to so configure the stimuli which reach down into the trunk of mind that this arrangement causes the generation of disciplined and purified emotion, or love, which then may be both protection and the key to the gateway to intelligent infinity.
Carla’s love of Jesus and her devotion to weekly church services, as I mentioned earlier, was developed when she was only two years old and began to have her spiritual experiences with Jesus on her journeys to her Magic Garden. She felt that the church services gave her more ability to be of service to others and feel the love of Jesus coming through her heart for all others. She was able to see people more at the level of the soul rather than simply personality shells as she used to say.

 During the Ra contact Carla very much appreciated Ra’s suggestion that we put the Bible, incense, candle, and chalice of water at her head for each session as these were the items with which she dressed the church altar. In 3.4, Ra explained how these items aided Carla:

The incense acts as energizer to the physical body of this instrument, signifying its humanity. This is, therefore, a necessity that the wafted smoke is perceived from the same relative angle as the instrument perceives the opened Bible, balanced by the lighted candle signify[ing] love/light and light/love and, therefore, give the mental and emotional, shall we call it, distortion complex of this instrument the sight of paradise and peace which it seeks. Thus energized from the lower to the higher, the instrument becomes balanced and does not grow fatigued.

In the overall sense Carla felt that the Law of One was an internally consistent philosophy which totally supported her religious beliefs and her desire to be of service to the One Infinite Creator and any person that might give her an opportunity to be of service to them.

When I was researching Q’uo sessions regarding philosophical beliefs I came up with the following channeling which impressed me with the depth and breadth of some of the most inspiring information I have ever read. It covered the areas of philosophy, religion, and the One Creator. So I have copied it in order to share it in its entirety without further comment:

February 18, 2007

Group question: The question this week has to do with the various religions that we have on planet Earth. They all seem to have a center of truth, but each religion also seems to have a number of adherents who interpret it their own way and who become fanatic in one way or another, trying make the religion into a dogma, to say this is the way and the only way. Is this a human trait? And how can we really know what is the true path for each of us? It seems like each of us has that spark of the Creator in us that recognizes truth and we are more reminded of truth than informed of truth. Can Q’uo give us some general principles as to how look at the various religions and how to find what is “the way” for us?

Q’uo: We are those known to you as the principle of Q’uo. Greetings, my friends, in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator, in Whose service we come to you this day. Thank you for creating a circle of seeking. Thank you for inviting us to join that circle. Thank you for the excellent question concerning how each seeker may find his own way amidst the welter of seemingly disparate theories of who God is and what the nature of creation is. It is our privilege to share our thoughts with you on this interesting subject.

As always, we would ask that each entity listen carefully for resonance, not only in the things we have to say but in listening to all opinion from whatever source. You are fully able to feel that resonance and that spark of interest and we would encourage you to wait for that resonance and that spark rather than taking everything that we have to say as being equally useful. We thank you for this discrimination on each of your parts. It allows us to speak our thoughts to you without being concerned that we will inadvertently infringe upon your free will or disturb your sacred process of evolution in mind, body and spirit.

You ask this day concerning how to wend your way amidst the amazing array of religious and philosophical opinion concerning the nature of the godhead, the nature of creation, and the nature and purpose of human life. In former days we would not have been able to have such a simple beginning to a discourse upon this subject. The progress of your science has enabled us to have a fairly straightforward entry into the doorway of the nature of the created universe.

Investigation has shown that which seems to be solid matter is actually made up largely of a plenum or a space in which there is no mass, very thinly populated by energy vortices. These energy vortices are the atoms and molecules that make up the cells of your body as well as the material of all other things that you can see, feel, touch, taste and smell.

These energy fields cooperate together and nest within one another in various ways according to the nature of attraction and repulsion, forming the universe that you see. Scientific inquiry has proven that all parts of the universe communicate and are connected with all other parts of the universe, so that the universe is one thing. This is not given to you by priests or prophets but by your scientists, who have become the priests and prophets of your culture, if we may give it that name.

What is the nature, then, of these vibratory patterns that arrange themselves hierarchically so as to create orders of magnitude, creating everything from the atoms and molecules within the cells [of] your body to the star systems within your galaxy? We of the Confederation of Planets in the Service of the Infinite Creator have identified the nature of these hierarchically unitive and harmonious energy fields as being that of love. The energy that created the stars is that of love. The energy that created you is the energy of love. That does not define love, for if love is all that there is, there is nothing to which to compare it. There’s nothing from which to contrast it. In its undistorted form it is forever a mystery, unable to be plumbed by centers of consciousness which are aware of themselves. The truth of the universe lies most profoundly in the unknowable reaches of the mystery of the love and the light of the One Infinite Creator.

Yet the universe is unitive. And it is unitive in a certain way. It is unitive holographically. Any one spark of the infinite Creator contains the entire nature of the One Infinite Creator. Every cell of your body sings the song of the One Infinite Creator. The suns in their courses sing the song of the One Infinite Creator. There is fullness to the universe that is intense, as if every particle and iota of the universe were stuffed to bursting with the love and the light of life. You experience life as you breathe in and breathe out. And you ask what this experience is, for you are aware of yourself. And certainly you have many, many voices in your ear, happy to explain precisely what life is and how to live that life in a good way.

Please understand, as you look back over some of your more difficult experiences with authority figures who have attempted to tell you what to believe, that every entity who seeks to serve the Infinite Creator can fall into what the one known as T called “the trap” of teaching in such a way as to constrict the energies of those listening to his words. Let us look at that energy of the authority figure who wishes to teach well, in order to come into a more compassionate and charitable understanding of what drives such an entity.

An entity who is moved and inspired by whatever agency, personality or inspired writing becomes aware of himself in a special way. He becomes aware of how alive he is, and he thinks, “I must give this gift, this wonderful life I feel, to others! I must pass on this wonderful inspiration that is given to me!” There is generally no intention of doing anything other than the purest of good. However, the trap of dogma is always waiting for the teacher.

It is a wise teacher indeed who is able to differentiate between his personal experiences with the divine and that which is helpfully expressed concerning seeking the divine. In a world that wishes to codify, organize and arrange life in an orderly manner, the mystical view, which is found at the heart of all religions and many philosophies as well, while greatly appealing, is found cumbersome and awkward to teach. When you’re speaking of something that is indescribable and ineffable, words fail.

The human tendency, then, is to apply an organization to the mystery of the one Creator. And different religions have had different reasons to create different structures of belief, which have hardened into dogma. If the Creator is infinite love and infinite light, and if the creation is evolving continuously forever, then there is continuously more of truth than there was before. Consciousness is continuously expanding. The problem with any dogma, then, is that it cannot re-form itself to hold the new truth that is flowing forth at every moment from the creative principle.

As the seasons change, as the grass blooms and withers again and again, so the consciousness of humankind evolves and grows. You are a point of that consciousness. You have access in your very nature, in every cell of your body, in every thought that you think to the one infinite Creator in its undistorted form. Yet that truth lies deeply protected in you. It is protected from your casual thoughts. It is protected from the stormy seas of your daily, conscious experience. It is protected by its placement within your heart. The mind and all of its intellectual forces cannot storm the bastion of the open heart.

Entities, then, seeking to share bits of their truth with others, become invested in this codified, formalized, organized structure of thoughts that add up to a way to seek the one infinite Creator. With the gift of hindsight, scholars have often pontificated as to where a certain religion went wrong or how a certain religion has everything right. Yet as soon as the seeking for the one infinite Creator becomes codified and organized beyond a certain point, it can be a delimiting influence rather than an expansive influence.

Many churches and many different religions decide to bypass the intellect and rest upon the opening of the heart. They engage in song after song that praises the one infinite Creator within the language and clothing of that particular religion. Their members are perhaps encouraged to pray out loud and to become ecstatic. And in the surging of the rhythmic cadences of the songs, in the prayers and the praise, the love and light of the one infinite Creator seem palpable. And therefore the experience of those seeking the Creator in these ways has a certain amount of purity to it which is missing from those more intellectually organized religions where the mind is the tool used to probe at the meaning of life, of what it is to be a human being and what it is to serve the one infinite Creator.

Interestingly enough, love is the one great force that all entities know intimately, but which resists definition completely. And indeed, to attempt to use words to describe love is to attempt to build a great edifice out of pebbles. Love is all that there is. That one Thought is the creation. And you have a port on the ocean of that Thought in your heart of hearts. Therefore, you are as equipped as any entity in the universe to seek the One Infinite Creator. You have primary access to the direct experience of the Creator.

And indeed, it was for that purpose that you came into this illusion. You are gathering information. You are working with that information according to the biases of your personality and your desires. And as you gather your life experiences, each of you makes choices which open to you a way to move forward and to progress. And each of you has had this experience of awakening and coming to the realization that you are a truly powerful entity, able to question and able to seek. Once an entity has awakened and has begun to ask the deeper questions, a rhythm begins to occur between Creator and created. The asking and the answering becoming as entwined as a heartbeat, in and out, pulsing, pulsing, pulsing, so that as you ask, so you receive; as you ask, so you receive.

It [is] instantaneous and constant in your life. You have at each heartbeat, at each breath, the opportunity to ask and the opportunity to receive an answer. The sticking point here is that that answer comes within the mystery of silence. And it oozes up into your conscious experience almost as a surprise to you. You have learned by osmosis. You have soaked up the truth. And as you live out your life you discover what you are learning as it shows up in your thinking. And many are the epiphanies and “aha’s” of a spiritual life in which the seeker is content to let this teaching occur mostly in the silence of meditation, contemplation and the deep resting in whatever practices create for you personally a sacred chamber in which to tell the secrets of your heart to the loving ears of the One Infinite Creator.

You are consciousness. It is not something you possess. It is not a characteristic of you. Consciousness lives your life to the extent you can get the details of your personality out of the way. And yet the details of your personality are all valuable. Therefore, the perfectly natural desire of the intensely devoted student to cast aside the personality and devote the self entirely to the silence is, for most entities, a solution that shall not be satisfying. For most entities, each coloration and quirk of the personality is there for a reason. Each seeming challenge, difficulty and sorrow that occurs in the life has been placed there not to make you stumble but to help you learn.

Entities who give themselves over to a religion and accept its dogma simplify their path in a certain way. And if they are able to dwell within that simplified structure of thought without falling into the trap of judgment of the self and other selves when they do not believe as you do, they are very likely to be able to use that religion as a way to the infinite Creator that works well. For each religion teaches the basic love of other people and the love of the one infinite Creator. And if an entity loves the Creator and loves the neighbor as the self, however that is put, the path to graduation from third density is clear. The choices to serve others has been made. The work is good.

More and more, however, as entities have matured after many, many incarnations within third density, entities find themselves unable to restrict themselves to the dogma and the canon law of a particular religion. And when entities find themselves unable to do this, then they are set on a new path, a path of their own choosing, a path which they will create themselves. Any entity can create within himself a way, a truth, and a life if he begins and ends with love.

We would not for all the world criticize or undermine those who are in any religion or believe any philosophy. The paths to the One Infinite Creator are as many as the self-conscious beings who seek that Creator. Your way will be unique to you, just as everyone else’s way is unique to them. It helps to see religion for the kind of powerful influence that it is. If you may see the forces of religion to include that of the world as well as that of the starry heavens, then you may see how quickly the energy of a new religion can become heavy and bogged down with dogma and politics.

Look at the religion that this instrument understands the best, for it is her own: the Christian church. It began in the mysticism of the Essenes. The one known as Jesus the Christ was trained and trained in the Essene way as well as in the scholarship of the Jewish religion. This entity’s stories and parables were about simple things: being a peacemaker; understanding that he who loves the prisoner, the orphan, the widow, is loving Jesus the Christ; understanding that he who feeds the hungry is feeding Jesus the Christ.

Jesus asked entities to care for each other and to hold all things in common. There was not in any of his teaching instruction on making a church. Indeed, this entity had no home, and during his peripatetic ministry, he walked on dusty trails with very little of worldly goods at all. In his name, and in his memory, humankind has created a monstrous, rich, arrogant, political organization with many beautiful buildings which reach to the heavens with their spires and their crosses. Yet within them there is no virtue, except in the hearts of those who still seek the Infinite Creator and use those sacred spaces to do so.

Look at any new idea and it is alive! It has a dynamic energy to it that excites people, and people want to capture that and pass that on to their children and their children’s children. And so they make another building, another religion, another code to try to capture that which cannot be captured. At the same time you must appreciate what religion has done for entities on planet Earth. It has given the intellect something to gnaw on. In many different ways it offers people a chance to meet the Creator.

Whether you seek within the bounds of a religion or whether the path upon which you walk is one you have created yourself, your very nature demands that you will meet the Creator, again and again. Things will happen to you that are meaningful to you personally and that move your consciousness from one point to another. Whether you are an indigenous entity that has never read a book, an auto mechanic, a college professor, or the most rarified mystic meditating upon the roof of the world in Nepal or Tibet, you have an equal opportunity to meet the Creator upon the road of your everyday life.

Appreciate religion for what it has offered, to you and to all. In the mystery of the One Infinite Creator there are no roads. There is no way to think upon the sacred. The only opportunity you have is to be the sacred, and therefore to know it from the inside out. Within churches and temples and synagogues and mosques the world over, you have entities and groups of entities who are dedicated to preserving a certain structure which has been helpful to many entities in their search for the infinite Creator. This instrument, for example, chose long ago, in her childhood, to live a life of faith within the Christian church as the path of her life.

As she understands it—as she understood it then and as she understands it now—there was a particular virtue to dedicating her life to Christ. This entity was a devotee in a religion that does not usually have devotees, of that particular kind which this entity is. That is, she was not hungry to soak up the dogma, but rather hungry for the mystery that she felt bursting the bonds of dogma. And she understood that, in any sacred writing, there is a database of inspired thought which bursts the bonds of words when heard again and again in different circumstances of life. And so this entity lives her “rule of life.” She continues to study the same database, the Holy Bible, which she has studied for her entire life. And yet she has rejected all dogma by conscious decision.

Now, each entity can make this kind of choice for himself. And indeed it is necessary to look carefully, and with the artist’s eye, at how to live a rule of life. We do recommend that each entity create a kind of rule of life for himself. What we cannot recommend is how that rule of life goes. You need to walk your own path, paying attention for that which the moment brings to you. Some entities are drawn irresistibly to the Christian faith. Some entities are drawn just as irresistibly to the Buddhist faith. There is a path for just about every personality type. And yet all of these paths hold the barest skeleton of truth in its ineffable and mysterious form. All of those structures of thought that religions represent fail. None of them satisfies that thirst to know the truth.

This instrument is informing us that we must stop this discussion at this point, so we would end with this thought: you are the possessor of truth, but you do not know that you are. However, the Creator is generous in arranging for you within third density an illusion in which nothing can be known, and yet in which you can come to know with a particularly resonant awareness what your path is or what your truth is.

You cannot make it happen. What you can do is to set yourself up in an environment which is capable of holding gnosis, or knowing. Therefore, trust in your own senses, sensings, thoughts and feelings. As you seek to awaken, to seek and to serve, listen and look for the resonances that tell you that you are on the path that is for you. Once you start looking for resonance, you will find that the creation is full of information for you. And the more that you practice listening, the more that you can hear of the voices that are speaking to you in every moment.

We lift you up and honor you in our thoughts and in our hearts. For you have the courage to probe the darkness, knowing that there is nothing but light. We wish you well on your seeking, and thank you for the opportunity to share these humble thoughts with you as you go upon your way.

This morning I ran errands with my first stop being at Thieneman’s Nursery where I bought two flats of Hypoestes. My second stop was at Feeder’s Supply where I bought some cat food and some bird seed. My last stop was at Walgreen’s where I picked up two prescriptions.

This afternoon I transplanted the Hypoestes along the parking area out front and intermingled them with the Portulaca, which are not doing very well in that they seem to need more sun than they get in this location.

From A Book of Days, channeled by Carla L. Rueckert:

May 18

Turn From Your Books

I am of the principle of the spirit of Jesus the Christ and I greet you in the full consciousness of love.

Behold, my children! There is a boundless curiosity in you, a drive to know the wisdom and understanding of the universe. And to this end you bestow many long hours on study and contemplation of the divine mysteries.

And yet the language of the spirit is not wisdom but love and it is through ecstasy that teaching is done. Thus turn from your books, you students of the consciousness of life, and stretch out your arms to joy. Moved by the infinite rejoicing echoing throughout the creation, the seeker will finally come to know wisdom by being that which wisdom is, whole and complete, in the consciousness of love.

We leave you in the peace of that love, now and always. Amen.

I said the prayer at the Gaia Meditation tonight:

We come in the name of love and open our hearts, minds, and souls to send love, light, and healing energy to Mother Earth as she brings forth a new Earth in the fourth density. We ask that the infinite love, light and healing energy of the One Infinite Creator heal the hearts of all souls in pain on Earth tonight. May all souls on Earth feel our love, light, and healing energy in their hearts, their minds, and their souls. Amen.


[1] Q’uo, February 11, 2001.

[2] The Ra Contact: Teaching the Law of One, 60.18.