Spirit is always present and always available, and you choose the time, the place and the extent of your participation with Spirit. The more you choose for Spirit, the more you bring upliftment to yourself and to everyone around you. It’s called integrity. It’s called “beingness” and “oneness.”
– John-Roger, DSS
This article by John-Roger was originally published in the Movement Newspaper, November 1980.
People get caught up in negativity and one of the main ways to get caught in negativity is to “run it” rather than to let it go. “Running it” might look like this: you have a disagreement with somebody because they have been saying bad things about you or restricting you, somehow, from doing something that you want to do. You don’t like their actions, so you have this negative feeling inside of you about them. And you think about what they said or what they did, and you think about the injustice and perhaps their “malice.”
Then you find someone sympathetic to talk to, and you tell them about this; you tell them what you wanted to do and you tell them how that was thwarted and you tell them about your negative feelings. Then, later, you think about their reaction to your story; and maybe you embellish the story a little in your mind so that when you tell it to the next sympathetic person, it will be a little better — you’ll sound a little more “right” and the other guy will sound a little more “wrong” so you’ll be sure and get your listener’s sympathy. And so on.
It’s a good bet that all this may come under the guise of “trying to understand what happened.” There are a lot of ways that “running your negativity” can be made to look justified and even made to look like you are sincerely attempting to “get clear” on the matter.
You don’t understand negativity; you eat it. And if you keep throwing it back up on yourself, you get to keep eating it. You do not get negativity clear when you keep bringing it back up and bringing it back up and bringing it back up. Maybe you bring it up to see if it’s like it was the first time. It’s not. It’s got more stuff attached to it. It gets more on it all the time. It’s got all the time you’ve spent rehearsing your lines in your head, about what you said and what they said, what you should have said and what they might have said. It’s got other people’s reactions on it, then your reactions to their reactions. It’s got a whole series of “heavies” attached to it.
“Running it” becomes a pattern that cannot be completed. It perpetuates itself endlessly. The way to walk free of negativity is simply to walk free of negativity. It’s simple, but it isn’t easy or every one of us would have already done it. To be free of negativity, you let it go. You don’t go back and “re-run” it in your mind. You don’t think about it. You don’t share it with all your friends and acquaintances.
You focus on what you can do, on the things that you can accomplish. You go within and rediscover your own worth, your own joy, your own completeness. When you do this, the negativity moves away in a natural process, because it does not have any energy with which to maintain itself. You have moved your energy into areas that you can complete, into areas that will bring you fulfillment — and the negativity just falls away.
The same process is the key to your success in dealing with patterns of greed and lust (and for the purposes of this article, I’ll just use those two words synonymously because greed is often just lust for money or material possessions). Most people think of “lust” in terms of sexual fulfillment, but its meaning is really much broader. Lust is that desire and that search for fulfillment out there in the world — whether it’s sex, money, power, fame, food, clothing, or whatever. Lust has an obsessive process connected with it. You go out into the world helter-skelter attempting to fulfill your desire, and you just don’t seem to be able to do that, regardless of the energy that you put into completing it.
If the lust is for food, you might feel like that desire has you by the throat and is dragging you down to the local pastry shop. Or if the desire for money has gotten ahold of you, you might feel that you spend all your time chasing around, involved in schemes to get money. If the lust is for sex, you might find yourself thinking about sex all the time and in a constant search to find a sexual partner. When these actions of lust are upon you, the action of fulfilling them pretty much equates to attempting to put out a fire by throwing gasoline on it. It doesn’t put it out; it makes it worse.
There is one type of logic that says, “If I put on enough gasoline, it will burn up and burn out and there will be nothing left.” That goes along with the idea of, “If I could really totally fulfill all my lusts, then I would be through with them.” Theoretically that might be true, but it just happens that lust and desire don’t work that way. They never fulfill themselves; at best they are sometimes temporarily satiated.
It’s like drinking water. Maybe you want to fulfill that craving to drink water, so you say, “I am going to drink all the water that I will ever need and fulfill that.” So you drink 14 or 15 tons of water and you think that’s it except that you wake up one day and you feel thirsty. So you get a glass of water and you drink that, and it goes into that great cavernous body that you have created by drinking so much water at once, and it doesn’t even begin to satisfy. So then you get the hose and put it in your mouth and turn it on. I know it’s a ridiculous example, but often when we take concepts out to a ridiculous point, we begin to get some clarity on the pattern.
When you attempt to fulfill any desire or lust by going into the pattern in an extreme way, you generally tend to simply expand your capacity for it, rather than to fulfill it. Let’s say that your lust for prestige keeps you running around buying new cars, new clothing, new gadgets and your lust level in this area is a “23.” After awhile of maintaining at “23,” you feel that you’re not really fulfilling that desire for prestige anymore. So you go out and buy a sailboat and that pushes the level of your lust up to “28.” You feel really good about that for a period of time but pretty soon “28” starts to be a little boring — it starts to feel the same as “23” did when it stopped working for you. So you go out and trade in the sailboat for a yacht, and that pushes your parameter of lust up to “45.” Now you really feel prestigious. But in a little while, that wears off and you again experience that lust to gain more prestige in this world (by whatever standards determine that for you).
Then one day you say, “My lust and my greed just seem to be pushing me around all the time. My life feels so terrible inside. I don’t have any willpower, and temptation is around me all the time.” The illusion always is that the next “purchase,” the next push, the next achievement will fulfill the desire. It doesn’t work that way; the desire is never fulfilled.
The way to get rid of lust is to stop participating in it. When you stop participating in your lust, it starts extinguishing itself and starts moving back to the normal place where you can live in peace. And within that, you will find that there is still lust and greed and that it is your choice whether you move into that or whether you don’t.
In terms of sexual fulfillment, save your lust for those occasions when you are going to be involved in an intimate relationship with someone who is noble, uplifting, who has integrity and who is going to be with you in oneness. Through that one partner, who is also your love, you can fulfill your lust and they can fulfill theirs with you in a cycle of completeness.
The completeness comes when that partner is with you, staying with you, living with you, and when they are with you as a form of identification and as a mirror of your beingness. Then the energy that you are, as a spiritual person, comes into balance and, rather than dissipating itself in terms of expanding cycles of lust, it becomes centered and available to lift into a greater and greater awareness of Spirit.
Spirit is always present and always available, and you choose the time, the place and the extent of your participation with Spirit. The more you choose for Spirit, the more you bring upliftment to yourself and to everyone around you. It’s called integrity. It’s called “beingness” and “oneness” and within that choice you will know more and more of your own reality.
Inside of you resides the messianic force, the Messiah. And you are waiting for that promised one to appear — we all are. You wait and you wait; you prepare a place for the Beloved to appear, and you do all that you can, in terms of creation, to bring that forward. And then one day, when you’ve just about given up, you find that the Beloved appears inside of you as you. You feel the joyful upliftment of being the promised one unto yourself. All creation becomes one in you, and not second to you. You see things take place around you in perfect harmony and integrity. And in that integrity, you become involved in your own living.
Before the Messiah appears in the world, before the King of Kings lights up the world, he must first appear in your heart and light up your world. And that happens only when you prepare the place inwardly for him to reside. When the Lord can appear and live in you, as your guiding Light, then you become present in the greater expression of your beingness. You do not become subservient; you do not give up your intellect; you do not become less in any way.
You enter into such devotion and such oneness with the God within that you enter into greater and greater depths of learning and understanding and loving than you ever knew were possible. You give up nothing except the negativity, hurt and suffering of the world and you enter into such a complete oneness with the spiritual form that you live in an ecstasy which becomes a process of spiritual enlightenment.
Baruch Bashan.
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