This article by John-Roger was first published in The New Day Herald, November 1992.
“I want you to keep looking at life, seeing what’s out there and seeing what’s in you and how you can contribute the greater part of yourselves.” – John-Roger
You people have hopefully been studying toward Soul Transcendence. We all Soul travel easily; that’s our method of operation. Soul Transcendence is more difficult. We’re going into the Holy of Holies of existence. We are brought before the Elders of the Karmic Board to see if we’re as clear as we say we are. And it’s very interesting because the Board can’t be fooled. If you stand up before the Karmic Board and say you’re clear and something shows up, they sort of look at you and decide that you’re probably not clear.
There’s no way to fool anyone when we’re in the Spirit. But there are all sorts of ways to deceive people here in this world. Yet there’s a key question inside of you that goes, “So what? That’s not what I’m doing anyway. That’s what I participate in because I have to live here, but that’s not what I’m doing.” Have you ever noticed that difference in yourself? You don’t want to do something, yet you end up doing it. That’s not who you are. What you do is never who you are. Who you are you cannot do. Just let that go in, a little bit. Who you are you cannot do. It does you. Who you are breathes you. If you don’t believe that, just stop breathing.
Who we truly are is hidden. And, strange as it may seem, all sacred literature has pointed back to the “You” of “Yourself” or the “It” of “Itself” or the “I am” as being the primordial cause of your physical existence. If that has any truth in it, and my witness to it is that it does, then why wouldn’t we want to know what is running our life?
What is it that pushes from the inside when we don’t want it to push? What is it that calls us forward to something when we don’t want to hear? What is it that lets the body sicken into disease and then brings it out and heals it? What is it that we’re supposed to learn here, anyway? And why does it happen to me? I never asked for it, I never ordered it. I didn’t subscribe to it. I didn’t do anything. Now, maybe not doing anything is part of it. Decision by default is as bad, as a wrong decision. If you get that one real clear, you’ll start to make your choices. When you make them, and somebody says, “You chose wrong”, you can say, “Yes, I did. So what?” At least you made a conscious choice. And hopefully you were watching to see where that choice was leading you so you could course correct if necessary.
If someone says you made a wrong choice and you react, however, saying, “Well, I don’t know, maybe I did and maybe I didn’t, so what,” then you’re into defense mechanisms. Have you ever discovered that when you defend your existence, it builds up inside as pressure? It erupts as headaches, eye aches, backaches, leg aches. Maybe you get very, very heavy, or very, very thin. Certainly something is going on inside of you that isn’t what you want.
The choices we make, right or wrong, are our choices. The more we limit ourselves, physically, mentally, emotionally, or financially, the more we come under a law. That law is the law of limitation and restriction. Sometimes that’s looked at as bad.
Let’s look at it another way. When we were Spirit, we were very big. And when we were born, we made a choice in our beingness – let’s call it the Soul – to restrict our function to the form of the physical body. We chose restriction. Why on earth would we do that when restriction is so painful? Because restriction and narrowing the path is also a form of discipline and mastership. We knew in our intelligence – not in the mental intellect, but in the Spirit, our true intelligence – that by limiting ourselves, we would be purposeful in our life’s direction. We restrict and limit ourselves in order to fulfill a purpose, so we can open back up into the great bigness of it all.
Someplace inside we have a knowing that is so absolutely powerful that we will move all sorts of things in our way to get to this knowing. My Spirit knows the rightness when I can’t perceive the wrongness. Yours does also.
There always seems to be a balance working in our lives. But when we’re on the down side, it’s hard to perceive that balance. We’re not seeing the big picture of our existence. Some people come into this lifetime and have every bad thing happen to them. Someone even wrote a book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. We’re creators. It’s as simple as that.
Yes, we’re divine. We’re God. We’re just not the big one, except for inside of us. Inside of us, we’re decision makers. We’re creators. We’re destroyers. We can hold negative or positive thoughts. We can have a positive or negative focus. And we can go to hell or we can go to heaven. Actually, we can’t, but we can go in those directions. Have you ever heard someone say, “Go to hell,”? When I was younger, I used to say, “I went there, but I continued on, saw your name on the door, so I came back.”
My mother used to say, “Son, if you’re going to tell people to go to hell, don’t smile.” I asked her what she meant by that, and she told me “Well, if you smile, they may ask you to go with them.” Why would I smile? If I told somebody to go to hell and they went, I’d be happy because then I would know where that place is. And then I would know what to fear and what not to fear. What do we fear most in this existence? The unknown. And who are we mostly? Unknown.
So the fear translates into “I am actually afraid to know who I am. What if I find out that I’mev not as big as I thought? I don’t know if I could stand that.” That true part of you will be bigger than you think. Because it also encompasses your thinking, your breathing and your sleeping. No one reading this knows how to digest food, how to circulate blood, or how to breathe. Yet all those things go on inside of us. At some point, that unknown something leaves and the body functions stop. That’s a sign that that unknown beingness left.
We see life in people and we feel joyful and thrilled. Do you know why we really love people? Because when we’re with them, we feel alive and happy. And when we stop feeling that, we stop loving them. Sad to say, we stop loving ourselves also.
Why is it that we sometimes go against the very thing that we love? Because something inside of us propels and moves us. And that, I postulate to you, is the invisibleness of your beingness. That is the bigness and the greatness of your Spirit. It is the tremendousness of your existence. Often, the closer you get to that source, the more inspired you become in wanting to do great things in this world. Some days you wake up and you feel so energetic that you just want to go out and tap dance, write songs, sing musicals, do this and create that. You know you could do it. And I have no question in my mind that you could, then. But I question whether you’d maintain your endeavors, because I know that as soon as you start, you will also separate from the source that initially gave you the energy. Here we have the dilemma: If you want something, you have to go get it. If you go get it, you move away from the source of energy that propelled you to get it. If you don’t go get it, you’re not going to get it. You’re going to be miserable here, or miserable there. What should you do?
Take the source with you as you walk toward your goal. How do you know you’re doing that? Get in contact with it. How? Go back inside and free associate until you find something that keeps pulling you deeper and deeper or connects you to the sound of the voice of God inside of you and ride back on it. Connect to the Light source of the Spirit inside of you and look at it as you walk into it. Put them both together and start transcending all the things around you, second by second.
Your Spirit, who you are, is sacred. Your very essence is sacred. And you can’t touch it. Try to grab the air and hang onto it. You’ve got a better chance at that than you do of grabbing who you are. And yet, I’m speaking to you as an extension from who I am. I’m breathing as an extension of who I am. And if I watch the breathing, the speaking, the thinking, and I observe myself, I become aware that somebody’s observing me observing myself, and that’s another part of me. Low and behold, I find that I’m the observer, and the one being observed.
There is a key here, and that is doing. We grow because we do grow. We sing because we do sing. And we write because we do write. And we do all this in the environment. If we let the environment run us, we’d do it by seeing it as a reference for who we are. I am not a product of my environment and I never have been. If you are, then you’ve done something like this: they didn’t smile the right way, you quit. They didn’t applaud the right way, you quit. If they didn’t say it the right way, you quit. And if they said bad things about you, you quit. If they didn’t sit the right way and smile the right way and look the right way and have the right color skin and the right this and the right that, you quit. That’s the difference in those who do versus those who quit.
Every one of us, God bless us, are really doing the best we can with what we know and with what we’ve got to work with. If we could do better, I don’t think there’s anyone who wouldn’t do better. What’s it going to cost to do better? It costs what it costs. For some of you, it’s simply dropping a negative habit.
You are where you are right now because of everything you’ve done. Everything I’ve done from day one up to right now is a small part of who I am. If I want to have something different, then I’ve got to change something. So it’s obvious that if I don’t want to do something, I don’t go to where it’s happening. Because we all know that if I show up, I’ll do it. That’s a way of saying, if you’re going to do something, do it. And if you’re going to be involved with something, participate in it. If you’re not, don’t go there and pretend you are. Just stand clear of it and let your love flow.
I hope that I’ve given you a lot of things to think over. This information is not intended to be a final statement or a solution for you. I want you to keep looking at life, seeing what’s out there and seeing what’s in you and how you can contribute the greater part of yourselves.
If we all contribute the greater part of ourselves into this life, we will have peace and plenty of it, and a wonderfulness for everybody. We all will have a chance to grow, explore, and be encouraged. And the word self-esteem won’t even be in the dictionary. We’ll all be manifesting that as we do. And everyone will be saying, go for it. Do it. And we will. We won’t hurt anyone, and people will know that if we do, it was never meant to be a hurt, and instantly it’s forgiven. Then we are free again.
Baruch Bashan
WATCH A SHORT VIDEO WITH JOHN-ROGER
[ooyala code=”FiYzhzMjoaeIKmkdUVikMp3JZEaVnJ1e” player_id=”YTY1NzY4MWNjM2ViYWM0ZTM3NWFiOGVh” auto=”true” width=”480″ height=”360″]
