Plane-to-Plane Memorandum | |
| To: | My Beloved Students |
|---|---|
| From: | Master Djwhal Khul |
Subject: | March 2008 Lesson |
| Date: | February 28, 2008 |
Beloved Students:
As we enter the month that will bring to a close our Year of Service to Earth, it is my genuine hope that each of you has been impressed deeply by our work together and that your service will continue, moving to significantly higher and higher levels of generosity and compassion. May Earth share profoundly in the goodness you have offered, and will continue to offer as you manifest your life’s further purpose. Your individual and collective willingness to be part of the solution for this seemingly crowded planetary home has, hopefully, inspired you to work toward higher and higher goals. Perhaps you have learned the value of “raising the bar” for yourself in all areas of your life. So doing can, indeed, provide for much joy and satisfaction in your life.
In your personal Year of Service, what did you learn about your own mind that is helpful in your cutting-through process that can be dedicated to the progress of all? Have your personal and group experiences fostered within you a greater realization of emptiness? Are you seeing more clearly the powerful results of karma in the world (and your own life, as well)? Are you able to more clearly recognize the flow of cause and effect in both the global issues and the tiny personal areas that need your attention? Have you recognized the little areas at war within your own psyches that need “peace negotiations?” If so, then you have made some remarkable progress toward understanding that you and the planet are really not two separate beings.
Is it becoming clearer to you that in all your interactions, nothing comes to you from its own side of the equation? If so, you are beginning to put all your emptiness training to good work. So doing will ultimately free you from all the suffering to which so many beings are simply resigned. As you recognize that your experiences, what you see and feel, are truly empty, the term “appearances” takes on a much profounder meaning for you. You realize that since appearances cannot arise from nothing at all, and since they cannot simply arise “out there,” then they must be arising from your own side of the experience. This is true both of personal experiences and collective experiences, although the collective experiences are considerably more complex.
As you are learning, the first step in your personal work to dismantle the ego’s stronghold is to recognize the effects of your karma, then through them, discover the causes of the suffering you experience. This is why I gave you the tundruk practice last month. While you can postulate that your suffering does, in fact, come from bakchaks carried from your past, it is one thing to have a general understanding how this flow replicates patterns in your life, and quite another to dismantle the process. This dismantling procedure only becomes possible when you understand clearly just what the causes are, as well as the resulting effects in your life. Thus, you may begin with specific issues that tend to repeat in your life, and use them to interrupt the mental process that solidifies their presence in your perceived “reality.”
For example, let’s say you have the recurring problem of being lied to by people at work, people in your home, or even your casual acquaintances. It is tempting, from the standpoint of the ego, to simply make all those people wrong for what they are doing to you – lying all the time. But if you want to interrupt the process of suffering that you experience each time you are told a lie, you must go deeper. Without memorizing a complicated list of bakchaks and the resulting karma into which they ripen, you can simply assume that at some point in your past, you have lied to someone. In fact, for all you know, you could have had an entire lifetime where you lied and lied and lied. In such a lifetime, the bakchak for lying gets planted and reinforced over and over again. Naturally, it must ripen at some future point.
Thus, because you hold a bakchak (the cause) from past encounters with lying, you cannot avoid the ripening process in your life – the effect. When a situation arises wherein someone appears to be lying to you, there are some choices available to you with regard to interrupting the repeating process. First, you acknowledge what appears to be going on: some person appears to be lying to you. Secondly, you acknowledge that somewhere in your past you must have lied to others, and that what you are now seeing is a result of that, or those, event(s). Without projecting blame toward either yourself or the other person, it is possible to simply watch the event as it plays out, with full recognition of what is going on. You can take a neutral stance (i.e., “watching”) and feel thankful that you are benefiting right now from a positive bakchak, -- that of being able to witness what is playing out before you -- in addition to the bakchak that brought the experience to you in the first place.
When we delve deeply into the matter of those bakchaks, it can feel a bit overwhelming, particularly as we move into subtler and subtler levels of their creative potential. In fact, I have noticed that some of you who took to heart our lesson last month are entertaining the thought that there may be no way out of the bakchak mess. You have begun to see how easy it is to add to the karmic “doo-doo pile,” so to speak. And, unless you are exceedingly mindful at all times (a feat you may not have realized as yet), it may seem impossible to avoid burning more negative bakchaks into your mind.
I remember well my own similar thoughts as I reached this point in spiritual development, and frankly, the “mountain” before me seemed (for a little while) way too steep to attempt the climb. The good news here is that as you begin stabilizing the work of your Tundruk practice, the mind “wises up.” It takes hold of the practice at levels far beyond the conscious, or cognitive, level and not only do you begin experiencing the fruits of your labor, the mind be-comes much calmer. This resulting calmness, particularly at first, seems like pure magic entering the picture. Those old emotional charges (that give away the fact that a bakchak is running the show) abate, and when all those trigger point hot buttons quiet down, you discover you have much more applicable mindfulness than you previously realized.
When this happened for me, I became incredulous, and at first I wondered if my Teacher were playing some kind of trick with my mind. As you can see, that was a bit immature of me, wasn’t it? However, as I came to stabilize the newly found calmness, I was totally amazed at all the elements in life I had previously either not seen, or had not seen through. I will let you appreciate first hand the personal inspiration that arises at this stage of the path. For me, there also arose so much confidence in my path and in my Teacher, that I thought my heart would literally break open with gratitude and devotion.
Thus, as we together explore this deeper level of working with the mind, allow yourself to take full advantage of the successes that all the bodhisattvas before you have experienced. Recognize that if each of them could break through those illusory boundaries erected by the ego mind, so can you. It is most important that you refrain from caving in to the ego’s moments of grumbling and complaining. When you hear the voice of ego whining, “This is too hard,” let go of the thought go immediately. Do not reinforce (or even indulge for a single moment) the bakchak that brought forth that thought. As you begin to see that everything arising in mind as having come from the countless bakchaks carried by the mind, you also begin to get a sense of just how vast that mind is – ego driven or not!
It is important to note here that I would not be giving you this instruction if I felt you could only fail with it. In truth, you have had much training from me over the past few years regarding the mind and its workings at the ego level, and now it is time to test yourself by moving deeper into the process of self-determination. What I mean by “self-determination,” is stepping out of the old roles of victimization and realizing that it is you who is creating your life; there is nobody else to blame for the areas in which you feel unsuccessful or lacking. These notions, too, stem from old bakchaks, and I think most of you will agree that it is time to “clear the air” in your creative mind space, wake up, and see yourself for who you really are. There is none other who can do this for you; you are the path; you are the traveler on the path; you are the destination of the path!
I hope you will join this month in listening to Heart, Mind and Path, a talk I recorded for you to help you make your way to the savoring part of your journey. In it, we will once again begin with noting some the workings of bakchaks, but the real focus of this lesson is to help you transcend the feelings of helplessness some of you are indulging as you look deeply at the ramifications of your own karma. I hope you are able to celebrate with me this stage of your personal journey, and allow yourself to refine your mental process even further into that of your bodhisattva nature.
Your loving teacher,
Djwhal Khul
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