Amazing Grace, Chapter 28, emphasis mine
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When I sent
Noah to Eva, I wanted her to understand so we could think about plans for “building the Ark”. Her response was less than enthusiastic. While I’d been lost in the Fundamentalist Forest, Eva had become deeply involved in the work of Lama Sing and other New Age channeled sources. Most believed that “Earth Changes” were an easily avoidable problem if people just “harmonically converged” or visualized love and light surrounding the planet and, most of all, focused only on positive things. Thinking about negativity created it, and even learning about it was an act of creating evil. It was easy to see this was just a variation on the Fundamentalist approach of “Jesus Saves” and we don’t have to think. New Age Religion taught believing in the power of Love and Light was the ticket. In the end, the result was purported to be the same - Salvation or Ascension. In later years, Eva more fully formulated this idea of not seeing anything in our reality that was unpleasant in terms she called the “personal myth” and described it as follows:
My thought is that when an event occurs, there is the reality of it. But in the event that an individual has taken part in this event, or has observed it, the original reality is filtered through each involved individual’s consciousness and therefore subject to each individual’s viewpoints, biases, attentive lapses, etc. and therefore each individual's account of that event diverges, either minutely or greatly or somewhere in between, from another individual’s account. It then becomes a part of each individual’s “personal myth”. Then there are the choices each individual makes as to what takes the attention. I usually remark that it is part of my personal myth (when I get up in the morning) that no one is in pain, hunger being raped or murdered etc., because if I let those realities into my consciousness at every waking moment, I would be virtually paralyzed and unable to function because of the horror of it all.
It was popularly posited “those who do not believe in demons will not experience such things.”
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Contrary to popular New Age lore, the presence of evil does not require the permission or belief or thoughts of the host to exist or even to manifest in that person’s life. It seemed there was some sort of connection between belief and denial. When a person undertakes to “believe” something, there is a whole cosmos of other things that they are, by this act of belief, denying. Belief or non-belief seemed to have no bearing on the reality of these “beings”. With limited knowledge, many people are left wide open to psychic intrusion.
I was deeply concerned that Eva was being led astray by such ideas. At the same time, Eva was convinced that I had “created” the suffering in my life by my endless questions about the nature of Good and Evil. She didn’t catch the very important point that it was only when I had given up my questions and had plunged into the “True Believer” mode of existence that all other options seemed to have been closed off. In later years I became able to joke that when I gave up thinking in exchange for Faith in Jesus, all Hell broke loose. But at the time it wasn’t very funny.
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And now, Eva was promoting these ideas as the “cause” for my own troubles - that I had thought too much about evil and darkness in my efforts to understand it and had thereby “created” it. She forwarded to me a reading by Lama Sing which was supposed to “prove this point”. However, what Lama Sing had to say about the matter was quite in line with my own thinking.
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In effect, Lama Sing is saying that
certain souls are in the Earth who have entered into existence for the very purpose of suffering the effects of the darkness in order to learn about it, and to then “seek it out and replace it with light”.
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Aside from the fact that Lama Sing has confirmed that learning about, seeking understanding of, the forces of darkness in order to truly know how to replace them with light, which means that merely “thinking about it” is not what creates it, Lama Sing has also made a certain remark that he repeats a couple more times about the “tenets” of God - that it is violation of these tenets that actually is the thing that contributes to the thought form of darkness. This was, for me, the crux of the matter. [...] How many other pathways seemed, upon first inspection, to be based on goodness, but were, in fact, merely darkness masquerading as light? Just what were the so-called “Tenets of God” really?
At the beginning of his remarks Lama Sing also commented that the forces of light often make use of the forces of darkness to do their work. In other words, as the saying goes: The Devil is in the details. It seems quite evident that not learning about these forces and how they operate is one of the single most important ways that we are tricked into violating the “tenets of God” through ignorance.
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What greater “misuse” of the forces of light can there be than to persuade people to stop thinking, to stop analyzing, to stop learning and growing, whether it is by faith in the salvation of Jesus or by faith in the idea that no evil exists unless you think about it? What greater way for the forces of darkness to enter a person’s life than in the guise of goodness that has been twisted and distorted so that the individual continually does what they think is good and right, but are effectively promoting the agenda of darkness through ignorance?
I was learning that the greatest deception of all is the teaching that there are no real negative forces, and if there are, in any case, we haven’t to worry about them because, if we just think nice thoughts, meditate regularly, and use our affirmations nothing unpleasant will ever enter our reality. I was learning that evil insinuates itself into our lives in the guise of goodness and truth. Evil follows the line of erosion of our spirituality through the erosion of knowledge. What better way to protect evil activities than to deny that they exist?
I was also discovering that the only way to implement the “tenets of God” was to follow the path of learning about the lies in order to perceive the truth. I was learning that the only defense we have is knowledge: to be able to identify moment by moment where we stand, what is going on, and which choice to make. And we cannot do this if we deny, on a continual basis, the existence of darkness in our reality. Lama Sing was saying that it was not true that putting one’s attention on these ideas “gives them energy.” Such a process is only valid if one focuses in this way with the intention of participation. The catch 22 exists in the fact that a comprehensive understanding of these forces is absolutely necessary in order to know how to give them less energy. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
But, to “do something,” does not mean to proselytize or try to “save others” by destroying what they choose to believe for their own path, their own lessons, their own process of experiencing darkness in order to become sufficiently motivated to seek the light.
Indeed, Eva had a point about the “personal myth,” to shield one’s self from the great outpouring of human suffering seems to be an essential survival device.
But it also seemed to me that such a process must be carefully managed, otherwise we will also blind ourselves to the signs of darkness acting on our own lives - and this darkness is not necessarily created within by thinking about it. And that seeing is what ultimately enabled me to be able to make choices based on truth and not a personal myth.
Indeed, we live in subjective realities, but it seems that the purpose of existence is to become less and less subjective, to see as objectively as possible, and not to isolate ourselves because we cannot bear our brother’s suffering. To continually close our eyes to reality is to live in an illusion, and illusion is wishful thinking, and wishful thinking seems to be at the core of subjective experience.
More than that, Lama Sing has said that these
forces of darkness can be thought of as “potential for change” and this change is to be in “understanding ways of thinking, ways of living”. Well, clearly that isn’t going to happen if a person is “fixated” upon a single idea of faith or “you create your own reality by what you think about,” and stubbornly refuses to observe the effects of this thinking in their lives as I was being forced to do. How many people, even in the face of similar events and experiences refuse to let go of the idea that their faith is being “tested?” All kinds of things happen in their lives that are distinctly unpleasant or even tragic and miserable, and they blithely go on thinking that they have to just work harder to either “endure” or to find the key that will “unlock” the right mantra or visualization in order to “create” the “right” reality. Or they become convinced that they have to destroy those who do not agree with them once they have encountered someone who simply refuses to participate in their reality. It’s the same principle working in both contexts: a refusal to examine their thinking, attitudes and intent!
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There is a very tricky point in the above remark:
the attitudes a person focuses on others are what is reflected inwardly. In other words, if you focus “Love and Light” with the attitude that they need to be “fixed,” that they are “broken” in some way, you will experience what you believe - your attitude - NOT what you think, which is merely the result of your beliefs. This is the trickiest point of all. To believe that one needs a “personal myth,” is an open invitation to experience pain and suffering. To believe that it is necessary to choose the focus of the mind on the idea “that no one is in pain, hunger, being raped or murdered etc.” because one believes that to let those realities into the consciousness and will result in paralysis, is to give way to fear of what is, to believe that it can overtake us, and gives power to the darkness.
Yes, there is horror, there is darkness, but it seems that we are in a school where darkness is experienced until we learn to look at it without blinking, to focus light on it in terms of learning about it in the deepest way possible. Indeed, when we do not know what it is and how it manifests, and especially how it operates in the guise of goodness and light, we are subject to being paralyzed and unable to function because of the horror of it all when it does manifest, as it will if we are not guarding against it by learning about it. And that was my experience in Fundamentalism. The belief that I needed to be saved, that others needed to be saved, or that I needed to pray for salvation, or that I needed to just love everyone and everything around me in order to save myself- all of this was predicated on the idea that something needed to be fixed, that there was lack in the universe, that God was “under attack” by the forces of darkness, so to speak, that the world out there was “broken,” and I had to shield myself from it.
What was it that Lama Sing said that we might focus on others? “Compassion and loving attitudes; to think about life in general and to strive to make each aspect joyous, first within self not to be angry with self and not to criticize self, not to quickly judge self, and to understand and be compassionate with one’s own errors and one’s own growth.”
Obviously, determining that we or someone else “needs” to be “saved” or needs to be surrounded with Love and Light, or even needs our prayers without being directly asked is to deny the positive/negative nature of life, to be in a critical mode, to be judgmental, and to be intolerant of errors and the rate of growth in others. If we think we have to “save others” or “transform them” by focusing our Love and Light on them or their situations, then we are living in judgment and we are violating their free will. And the same rules apply to our attitudes toward ourselves.
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The question is about “subduing or binding the forces of darkness” in order to transform them to light. And Lama Sing clearly relates this to a violation of free will. He then notes that to impose their own ideas of how things should be on either the self or another, that this is literally an “asking” for retaliation. To impose the “personal myth” on the self is to deny the will of the soul to do what it is here to do: to learn about all that IS, as it is, and to then choose what force the individual prefers to align with. In short, Lama Sing seems to be saying that closing one’s eyes to the reality of the world, is somewhat of a self-violation and the self will then manifest events in the life in an effort to get the conscious mind to wake up to the lessons at hand.
We suffer until we wake up and learn how not to suffer.
Another point is this: if I try to “change” someone else either by praying for their salvation, or sending love and light to surround or “bind” them, whether it is an individual or a specific situation which can be global, I have “asked” for retaliation. By the same token, if those of darkness seek to impose their will on me in some aggressive or hurtful way have, according to Divine Law, asked for me to “respond” or, at the very least, refuse this domination. I have the right to say no, and to say it in whatever way is necessary to achieve my freedom from domination.
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The fact becomes apparent, [...]
that when we attempt to “save” others because we have judged them to be in need of saving, or even if we attempt to “save” ourselves because we have judged ourselves to be imperfect, or incapable of supporting a realization of the world as it really IS, we literally are opening the door to, and inviting in the forces of darkness.
But what is crucially important in the above remarks is that “you can then use all those forces available to you, which are the forces of God, ...“ Now, of course, even doing this is predicated upon having been directly violated by the individual you wish to “bind”.
It seems pretty clear that to do it on behalf of another who may not have asked for such assistance, or, even if they did ask with words, are not really asking in their hearts, is to invite disaster upon yourself. Moreover, if a human being - or even a group of human beings - seeks to act in this manner toward avery powerful being of darkness wherein there is no ability to either believe or sustain the belief, even greater disaster can ensue. But still, we have here a very interesting clue about the nature of Universal Law.
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Further, he has stated quite boldly that the operation of the forces of darkness in opposition to the forces of light IS the natural function of the realm of Earth and mankind. He states explicitly that the forces of darkness claim the minds and emotions of mankind as their own because the “will of Man” has chosen this. In other words, couching his remarks in terms that won’t scare the bejeebies out of the readers, Lama Sing has said we are in a real situation here!
And the logical understanding of this leads us to the idea that, if it is the “will of Man,” in the sense of the mass mind, mass emotion, that is controlled intentionally and subliminally by the forces of darkness, then for single individuals, or even small groups of individuals, to attempt to violate this will by imposing their ideas of salvation or transforming or destroying or doing away with this darkness, they are, in effect, just asking for retaliation by the very forces they are attempting to overcome. A real Catch 22, you might say.
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In other words, there are creators and destroyers. We live in a world controlled by darkness due to some mass mind choice in the distant “past”. We gave permission to the darkness to rule our minds. And they do not willingly give way that which has been their claim, their kingdom. The “will of Man,” in the sense of the mass mind, mass emotion, is controlled intentionally and subliminally by the forces of darkness. The world is under the control of an Evil Magician!
In the end, after reading through Lama Sing’s remarks on the subject juxtaposed against Eva’s understanding of them, I realized that we were on different wavelengths now.
I had lived so long in the confidence of a rapport between us that this was a veiy painful realization. I could see disaster in her future if she didn’t open her eyes and mind to serious and dedicated searching for the subtle subtext in all these channeled pronouncements she was buying into, but I also knew I couldn’t tell her. I felt totally alone at this point.
As it turned out, I was correct in my predictions about her future, though I never voiced them to her directly. And Lama Sing was correct that people have to experience the results of living in darkness in order to learn.
Nobody can teach what is not ready to be learned. And to try to destroy or change another person’s choices or perspective or work or lessons is to align with the darkness! What a tightrope!