This message from the forward does not need much of an explanation, but I thought it served as a nice bridge in entering our study with this new book.
As the guides point out periodically, the learning we are doing takes place on many different levels. So even though in time as measured by the material world, this book was dictated 5 or 6 years ago, the truth is that the energy, the vibration of the teaching is just as new in this moment as it was then. So we are not just reading an old book and commenting on it, we are opening ourselves up to the deepest reality which can speak to us in this moment. Right here, right now.
“Most of all, though, Paul has caught my heart. He is a gentle, funny, shy, sophisticated, but finally humble man who channels an extraordinary message—that we are always a Divine Being, a Christ, an Incarnated Self who also exists outside of space and time; that everything is God; that our small selves are not who we really are, despite everything we have come to believe or think from our specific religious, cultural, and familial histories. There is no inflation of Paul’s own ego here. Paul only claims to be the channel of this message. He remains a small self all the while, questioning the message, getting more than a little nervous about its implications, occasionally even “freaking out,” as he often says.
Still, it is not quite true that Paul is only the channel. As I write this foreword, I have just finished teaching a month-long workshop with Paul at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. He sent the manuscript of The Book of Mastery to press while we were here, while I read it each morning. Here, in Big Sur, I have seen up close and many times what this new book calls the master manifest through him. I have seen the master work, lovingly and powerfully, with dozens of individuals, “becoming” their significant others, as he did with my own wife, and “stepping into” their own conscious and unconscious selves in order to “read” their emotional and spiritual complexes in uncanny, seemingly telepathic ways. To the extent that he manifests the master in these moments, Paul demonstrates the central teaching of the Guides about mastery: that we have yet to claim who we really are, what we really are, and how we can truly serve.
This is the message of the present book, the fourth in a growing series of channeled teachings. “To be a master,” we are told, means “to change matter through your own conscious manifestation and expression.” This is done through a new personal “alignment” with the higher dimensions of the self “up the mountain” and a particular kind of “out-picturing,” which we might reframe as a kind of Divine imagination whose spiritual and material manifestations are anything but imaginary. Such mastery is not accomplished at the level of the personality. Again, it is not about divinizing or inflating the ego. It is done at the level of the Divine Self and its “union with all.”
Introduction Day 1
To put this very simply, if you are not experiencing yourself as being challenged then you are aligned with a very limited sense of spiritual reality. We are not suggesting that growth has to hurt or make you feel bad, but if you were willing, you're going to be stretched, and stretching is rather uncomfortable to the personality self.
I have spent years looking for the “magic book.” I thought I was looking for a book that would teach me how to be enlightened, but what I was really looking for was a book that would do it for me. Well, alas, this is not it either. We are so much like The Velveteen Rabbit in the story who wants to become real but at the same time does not want these uncomfortable things to happen.
It is interesting when you find yourself in this space of wanting somebody to do it for you and at the same time knowing that they can't. You get a sense of the anger in the frustration that flows from that impossible stance
Each one of us has created an identity, not just as an individual, but also as a form of racial consciousness and we have accepted that created identity as being the truth for this and probably many other lifetimes. We are being asked now to cast off those perceptions of identity that are no longer in alignment but the truth of Who You Are. They don't go away, but we do begin to recognize them as costumes that we are wearing to play out a particular role but not the truth of Who We Are. (Right now I am disguised as a teacher1)
Along with that, we recognize that the ego does not like to be told what to do, and, paradoxically, would much prefer someone or something else taking care of the Trip.
“You don’t like to climb, you see. You want somebody to lift you by the scruff of the neck and place you at the top of the mountain. You want to be told that you are there already and you have no other work to do.”
Which leaves us in this tremendously paradoxical place where everything we desire is right here right now and at the same time we have to work for that awareness. The “going to school” analogy probably fits very well here. Everything you need to know is in the library but you have to go get it.
“What is the work?” Paul is asking.
The work is mastery, and this is the text of mastery, and what mastery means is that you can no longer blame another for your own lives, for your own dilemmas, for your own physical self, for your own creations. It means you claim purview of every avenue of your life and you walk the boulevard that is before you as the Divine One you are.”
So let us look again at classroom Earth, the school you have contracted to learn from this lifetime. All the lessons be they release, surrender, healing or transformation have all already been agreed upon by you before you entered this Physical Realm. So the major question we can ask is “What am I to learn from this?” rather than “Why is this happening to me?”
And if a particular lesson keeps coming back, although the ego thinks we must have done it wrong, the soul realizes that we are being called to deal with this challenge in a deeper way than we did before. There is nothing wrong here you just haven't finished it yet.
“... the assignments that you will be given will come in the form of your lives. Your life before you becomes your teacher and the opportunities to learn are put before you sequentially so that you may attend to your own consciousness as the master that you are.”
REQUIRED TRUTH #1
“I Am Here.” The Divine Self as you who already knows her name, “I Am,” is here, can only be here, can never be anywhere else but where you are. And the Divine Self as you who comes forward in this test of your own availability to see yourself as the master of your life will come to you with the answers you require. But as we teach you—and the teaching, “I Am Here,” will be paramount to this class—you must understand that the one you are who knows her name, the Divine Self as you, will be calling you forward.”
And God will always meet you where you are. Always.
That last line from the paragraph about the “Divine Self as you will be calling you forward.” Please sit with that one. It is not your personality which leads you in trying to create sainthood or to be enlightened, whatever thinks that is. You are being led by the Divine self that you truly are.
An often repeated lesson here is willingness. Willingness is bringing the personality or your ego consciousness into a state which is close to surrender. and when the surrender occurs the Divine Consciousness takes over.
Now for many of us there might be some steps to willingness. I can be willing; I can be willing to be willing; I can be willing to be willing to be willing.
None of that is judged by your higher consciousness but it is essential that you are aware of how you are sitting with your willingness. If I were to accept that I am in a place of “willing to be willing to be willing to release this old behavior”,I need to accept and embrace that state of consciousness. It's not what I want, itI might not be where I think I ought to be, but this is where I am. And it is by accepting that, when we allow ourselves to be pulled into a deeper awareness of essential willingness. Until I finally get to that place where I am willing and surrender takes place on the deepest level of my being.
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