1997-09-16-Altered States of Consciousness

Session

Opening

TOMAS: Good evening, children. It is wonderful to be here with you; it is particularly joyful for us to see your great thirst, your deep spiritual thirst, and as you take the time to drink of the living waters, you bring a renewed strength to yourself and to your fellows. You were thirsty and you have drunk deep.

Lesson

Unity

You are correct, Leah, that the moon is full and that has much to do with the seeming chaos going on around you all in your lives and in the lives of your associates. It is also the end of summer and there are many who are balking against the onset of the cold; not so much for the cold itself, but for the long evenings, the possible isolation, the inevitable adaptation to isolation and/or loneliness that comes when you are shut in.

It is in some feminine vernacular the "nesting time" and this contributes to a sense of agitation. The fact that the hazy, lazy days of summer are ended brings with it a sense of youth passing. It may be just another day to you on the surface, but there are many, many things that conspire to contribute to your day and your perception of it.

These conditions, over which you have virtually no control, are part of the kaleidoscope of your life as an evolutionary creature. As you evolve within your culture and within your set of friends and family, you carve out for yourself a comfortable niche in which you share common humor, common language, common comforts, common customs, common belief systems. It is very big of you, truly, to extend and expand your comprehension of your family to include not only those who share these things with you in the more immediate association, but in the larger scope as well, to include the different cultures, nationalities, races and belief systems.

This is our goal, indeed, this oneness of humanity, that we may all gather around the beloved Sovereign and show our appreciation for His efforts, His creation of us. The ability of you to assimilate those who are different as a beloved brother or sister in the spirit makes evolution easier and makes revelation more effective.

I could go on; perhaps I will. But I would like to step down from my soapbox and be informal for a bit. I am so happy to see you, Ruth, my child.

Dialogue

Ruth: Thank you, Tomas.

TOMAS: I am also heartened to have you return to the bosom of your family, Leah, after your most touching adventure/experience. Your jaunts North are always invigorating and gratifying for you; this one seems to have tapped an altered state of consciousness that surpasses your previous exposures. I would like to talk with you about your experience when we have more time, if you are inclined to confide with me.

Leah: I'd like that.

TOMAS: And my dear Hunnah, how pleased I am that you are preparing to have a holiday with your mate. It is a fine occasion when you can make a date with your partner and enjoy a quality chunk of time in celebration of a quality chunk of time. Happy anniversary, my dear, for both you and Abram.

Hunnah: Thank you. I'm looking forward to opening a package of new days. It occurred to me that I'd be seeing a part of the country that I've never seen before and the majestic mountains and I will be traveling, hopefully, out to angel hangout at Yosemite, so I do not feel anxious about being separated from you. I'm planning to do some journaling and Ruth has asked me to do some sketching, so I think I will be sufficiently prepared to play, but I have a feeling I'm going to meet some people and I'm looking forward to ambassadoring my way across the nation. Like Leah.

TOMAS: Indeed, and enjoy yourself.

Hunnah: Thank you, I will. Be sure to drop by.

TOMAS: I will tell you that it is more than likely that Merium will take advantage of your being away to return to Salvington for a visit. She has not been back since she started this assignment. I am not the one who gets that message, but it wouldn't surprise me if she were to go home for a brief vacation and pep talk.

Hunnah: R & R.

TOMAS: R & R.

Hunnah: She deserves it. (Group laughter) Jasmine will go with me.

TOMAS: Jasmine will go with you. You become accustomed to the fact that you live with spirit entities night and day; they are accessible and your life suddenly takes on another dimension. Not only on Sunday, but every day you have association in spirit. Are you amenable now, Hunnah, to allow our friend Merium to join us?

Hunnah: Yes, of course.

MERIUM: Good evening, everyone.

Consciousness, Stillness

TOMAS: Merium, I tell you that what I was leading into was a mini-discourse regarding what I would call altered states. You recall I made mention of the conditions of the moon and the season that provide an altered state of awareness on some subliminal and some instinctual level of change in pattern. This can be construed as an altered state without your being aware of it, and perhaps part of my motivation in leading into a discussion of altered states of consciousness is bearing upon Leah's experience in Canada as well as, perhaps, Ann's experience in mood change today and others whose behavior has been more excitable than normal. The atmospheric conditions are enough to alter your approach.

All of your lives are so vulnerable it is no wonder you put up barriers, for your sensitivity would be buffeted greatly were you to allow your emotional realms free reign. Each phone call, each correspondence, each news broadcast can impress you with such a deluge of emotional energy and sensation that you are in a constant state of flux, in indeed a constant state of altered consciousness, and even as you seek peace in stillness you seek yet another altered state of consciousness.

As I indicated, you all drank deep of the living water in our stillness. We could feel you as hungry sponges soaking up the quiet and the spiritual focus, as if you had all been running hard in a dusty corral and fell upon the trough and plunged your face in for a drink. This altered state of peace is the most guaranteed and yet almost the most difficult to acquire, for the demands of the material life are so compelling and demanding. The material life is determined to keep you focused on your material existence and your material progress, your advancement in the ways of the flesh, of the world. And yet you will have a hunger and a thirst that cannot be met by any other altered state than the state of peace which comes from being in the presence of stillness with your indwelling God fragment.

MERIUM: Now I would like to have you look patiently at the influences of the atmosphere and know that you are in the world but not of it and that you have learned how to balance your journey and your day by pulling over to the side, you might say, for a little while and allowing yourself to be stilled, that you may be able to pilot on through the turbulent waters of whatever the atmosphere brings you.

If it is a moon that is showing itself as influence or if it's barometric pressure that is bringing you change and you feel uncomfortable, that is simply a signal for you to pull off a little bit and get yourself quieted and centered and come back up. You are reminding yourself that you no longer have to be totally pulled into the undertow of activities of those that you are associating with or in your work place or in your home, whether its dominant personalities or dominant weather.

And this evening it was true that you were all in a different velocity, you might say, and we had some turbulence, but it all settled down because at heart we knew how to do it. I am sure that you are already applying this reminder in many ways. There are times when melancholia will come over you and you will take it, you will see it, you will be in it, you will identify it, rise above it and say "I understand" and you will feel a new patience with your human reactions, but you will be the strong man, so to speak, and you will be the master of your own experience.

I am trying to say that there is new administration in your experience and as you accept your true identity you will find that that is the One power; and that you will not expect people to understand you when they are in a scattered place themselves or you will put the brake on when you are missing the mark of meeting someone else and not allowing yourself to connect or understand that they are reaching out.

This being appropriate and timely in your acquaintance with people and your confrontation with people is almost like having a fine-tuned motor. You will just get so that you know it and you will be allowed to be appropriate for whatever situation arises. It will not keep you separate and it will not allow you to feel that you are above or better than anyone; it will be simply that . .. Oh, I see a wonderful visual helper here to assist me with expressing myself.

Recently Hunnah was in the shop with her husband and he was trying to make something level and it required some brutal force at times because there was something that was not falling in place properly, but it's as if you are given a level, and they come in many sizes, I understand. They come many feet long or they may be pocket-size. So tonight I'm going to ask you all to remember that you have a pocket-sized level and that you can set it into your visual reminder when you are with someone and you will be able to look at the gauge to see if you are centered where you will be the most effective -- not to control an experience but to be appropriate and to bring in the demeanor of this prayer consciousness that is your interest. I like that idea very much.

A visual tool such as this mini-level should be something that you will feel comfortable with using. Someone else may perhaps prefer another example. There are situations where people have a background of yoga or an Eastern teaching and they will take the thumb and the forefinger and bring it together in a circle. They may do this as their own gauge to remind themselves that they can bring themselves into expression for the given moment.

So I will encourage you each to draw upon your own portfolio of experience and allow yourself to have your own little quirk, little tip -- in computer language you have a password -- but it will help you to be brought into appropriateness, and in appropriateness you may spontaneously serve in a more refined manner than you would have if you allowed yourself to be thrown about in a disarray of the varied levels of expression at the moment.

Perhaps there is a question this evening. Is there something you wish to celebrate?

Ruth: Just being back, I miss everybody. I miss Tomas, and my good friends, and it's good to see them.

TOMAS: Yet another altered state. It is nice to see you and feel you drop your defensive barriers. It is a comfort for you all to experience the joy and protection of each other's affection and not feel the innate ego response of defending yourself against unwanted or unknown stimuli. When you can come together and enjoy the warmth of each other's fellowship, in trust of your companionship in this "sacred space," letting down your barriers, your defenses, and allowing yourselves the comfort of each other, is nurturance beyond your imagination.

It is perhaps not something that you even are aware of, how tremendously influenced you are by each other. You have seen some recent studies about physics and how the atoms are constantly moving and your mechanism, your body mechanism in this particular mechanical mold of today's day and age in which you live, is set up to be ultra defensive. It is very difficult for you, for example, to learn to trust or to learn to laugh. These are because of your defenses, your innate survival instincts.

As you come together in company with yourselves under the banner of Michael in these teaching session formats, and allow your barriers down, an aspect of you is permitted to relax, to rest, to enjoy, savor, to know peace, to experience the camaraderie of the atoms, if you will, of your fellows, and not in combat or in defense, but in synchronicity and in choreography.

How marvelous it is to perceive your personalities bask in this molecular condition, without your even understanding what is happening to you. It is a side effect, perhaps, a benefit of the altered state of spiritual consciousness. How you relish the experience and much of it is beyond your conscious awareness. It is also, Ruth, wonderful that you are here to share your composition with these others, for we do enjoy the dance; we enjoy the pas de deux of love that occurs between us and among us here. It is healthy. It will leave you all feeling pink-cheeked and plump in the spirit, a fine and healthy state of mind and being.

I talk too much.

Ruth: Tomas. It's very nice to be here and I've missed you. I know I've asked, at different times, questions of you and I've told you that a variety of people come to me and, well, I changed shops. I was apprehensive and things have gone very well. I am meeting a lot of different people. I've picked up a lot of interesting clientele and I just hope that I can help them, as I need to, and I know I generally do, it's just sometimes I stumble across somebody needing something that sometimes I'm very out of depth for and I appreciate all the help I got. I just talked it out. "Help me somebody!" and then out of my mouth comes all these strange words and I seem to be able to touch upon their bodies what they need. We are limited, very limited, in our manipulation. I do want to thank you for every time I thought of you and contacted you for help, because I know it's come to me.

TOMAS: This is not my doing but the Master's doing, my dear.

Ruth: Oh, I know, I talk to Him all the time, but I, as I say, I imagine there are times you help me.

TOMAS: We are a support system. It is wonderful to see you being of service, being diligently useful, plying yourself to the ministrations of the minds and bodies and morontia potentials of your associations who are brought to you by way of spirit avenues. You are indeed busy. Do not neglect your own well-being. Allow for recreation and diversion, for affection and relaxation, for camaraderie and support of your own pupils.

It is good for you to be of service to those who come to you for help. It is also good for you to offer your support to those who testify to not needing it, those being your brothers and sisters in the kingdom. I realize that is a somewhat stilted phrase, but your peers in the spirit grow weary, even though they gain strength from the same sources you do, in the spirit realms, from Michael, from the angelic aides and the teachers and so forth.

There is nothing quite as heartening as the sturdy embrace of one of your own fellows. A slap on the back from one of your own kind, a laugh, a joke, a camaraderie, is that which makes you feel as if you have a place in the world and co-workers in which to do your work. It helps to bond your friendships so that you do not feel as though you are working alone in the fields. Come more often.

Ruth: I am trying. It's just that -- I asked for this and I have two shops and I have a lot of people . ... I will make it when I can make it.

TOMAS: You are loyal. You are loyal also to your work and there is nothing more important than the work of your realm. Do not feel that I am chiding you, for I am not intending to scold. I appreciate your diligence and your willingness to work so hard at what you do for the Master. We just are saying, as a friend, it is that we miss you.

Ruth: I miss you too, and I will try to come as often as I can.

Comfort

MICHAEL: Is it not comforting to allow yourselves to be still? Is it not comforting to know that you can be lifted up and held? And that you can abandon the limitations of your physicality?

I would like to address the subject of comfort. Comfort will be received and interpreted by the level of the need. Twelve can gather in my name and twelve will receive at the level of their need. Sometimes that need is to have nothing to be said, just a gentle stilling.

The human configuration is so complex that it wearies. It has so many systems working all the time, and they tire. You forget that just because one has developed maturity and physical strength of varying degrees, emotional stamina of varying degrees, that that fine-tuned machine does not need to rest. Not only does it need to rest but it needs to be released in a refined environment that would almost permit it to feel as if it was free of gravitational pull, a need to float, a relaxing of every cell.

I want you to look at your lives and truly take a look at the way you live. There seems an abhorrence of idleness. It is in your culture. There is guilt associated when you are not busy. This need to be a productive machine has gotten out of hand.

If there is an individual present who does not seem to be able to get themselves going, then that is simply a calling for tuning, to be lifted into a new sense of worth and a generosity of intelligent expression. When they come into the silence they will receive at every level.

Your minds are cluttered with talk, re-runs of old thoughts, a continuous cacophony (I love that word; it's used here often), a clatter of an echoed previous behavior. It is very crowded in your mind. This call to stillness is so critically needed in this area.

You are in a wonderful time when there are many helpers to attend to this long neglect. As you respond in consciousness, you will discover the areas within yourself that have gone neglected, like shoes that have ached to be shined, or food that needs to come because it has a living essence within it.

This is a call and an invitation this evening for you to take stock, not externally, but internally, and as this develops, you will not receive a report in the mail, like an X-ray report or a lab report, but it will come gently into your awareness. It may be you won't do this or that anymore, or that you will find yourself allowing more space between activities or conversations.

We know little, here on earth, of what stillness is. The subject has been brought forth as a possible project for this group, but those who gather here this evening have not yet acquainted them-selves sufficiently with the subject of stillness. It is not a medication that you have to choke down.

I am going to encourage a release within your intelligent understanding, of allowing you to receive a new definition and to experience stillness. And I want to also remind you that stilling can come within a new form. I have not come to explain stillness; I have come to announce that you will be experiencing it in a way that your human mind can not possibly design.

It will have a tremendous effect upon your gatherings; it is not a damp gray; it is not a rain cloud. These words have come with difficulty this evening, but as you can feel it in yourself, there is a tremendously powerful settling upon your energies. I am going to cease speaking and ask that you allow this radiant gift to permeate your being, and that you allow every cell of your body to fill with new radiance.

Allow the spirit of God to flow into your bodies and into your hands. Be aware of its descent into your feet. It will girdle you; it will strengthen you. What comes to you in sacred secrecy you must be prepared to accept. It will enter your bones. It will shine through your eyes. It shall be a masterful administration. It is empowered to call you to the highest power. It is the maturity you have long awaited. Do not speak of this to others.

These intimate gatherings that you have attended these past months have truly been without definition. When you are called upon, it will be with no hesitation. There will be no question Who you serve, or why, or doubt that you are capable of response.

Closing

I enclose you each individually in this cocoon of my reality. I fill this room with love.

(Long meditation)

TOMAS: Thank you, Hunnah, for your service. Thank you all for being here. Merium and I wish you happy trails. We look forward to our next gathering. Blessed be art thou, flock. Farewell.