The Void Teachings #1

This is the first of a series of silently posed questions (in italics) and answers received in meditation, that date to a period about five years ago, in which my work suddenly dried up for no explicable reason. I knew a major shift was underway, but at the start had no clue what it was about. These messages, which I call “The Void Teachings” began around 1-1/2 months before my father suddenly died and continued for several months following.

September 2, 2003

My dear child. You are not by nature very patient. So you are being given opportunities to practice patience. You can enjoy them, or if you like, you can fight them. But it is so much more fun to enjoy them.

Why does it seem like the cycles of violence world-wide are speeding up?

The cycles of all things have been speeding up. It presents you with an opportunity. With there being so much violence, you can more easily see the patterns and decide what you want to do about those. The choice is always yours. On some level, as a collective, you also made the choice to speed things up and turn your lives into crash courses in learning. So humanity has asked for this acceleration and all that comes with it, though at times it seems totally overwhelming to most of you.

How can we best deal with that sense of being overwhelmed? Lately on both the personal and collective level I have definitely been feeling like that, and a part of me just wants to retreat into my cave and do nothing.

Sometimes doing nothing is a most appropriate response but not one that your culture particularly favors. Remember God tends to favor possibility and choice, so there is never just one right answer or way to dealing with a situation. Generally speaking, what is right for you in a particular moment is what you feel urged to do. What makes it so complicated is learning how to recognize this urge as it is so often overlaid with other voices telling you what you “should” be doing or what is “appropriate.” So you are all pretty much in need of training yourselves to listen to your soul urges since there is so much other noise overlaying those. The best way to listen is to seek that quiet, go inwards and begin to learn how to distinguish between your voice and the others'. This takes a great deal of practice. One method is to notice the body reaction to the different voices as they come up and where you feel a sense of expansion and opening and where you feel the opposite.

Why is it that my work seems to have dried up for now? What does it mean in terms of direction?

First of all, it is a good thing occasionally to fast, especially in a world where so much is moving so fast. Yet few of you are willing to empty your digestive systems even for one day. So can you begin to imagine the resistance to emptying out the other things that comprise your life? It scares you, doesn't it? You immediately want to fill that space. Yet, God loves space and created an awful lot of it. Look at your own bodies, the solar system. There is a tremendous amount of space or what appears to you as emptiness and that scares you half to death. If you only understood how alive that emptiness is, you would visit it much more often often and without as much fear.

You think that your “efforts” to find and create work are basically what brings you your clients? If God wanted to,God could send you lots of work and people in ways you'd never expect and only a very small amount of that has to do with your effort. What really creates your work or lack of it again stems from what your soul urge is. How do you know if right now what your soul urge is is not about becoming familiar with these empty spaces? Basically, whatever one is experiencing is perfect for them in that moment. Yes- including all the familiar curses such as hunger, violence, etc. because each situation carries within in many potential gifts. Emphasis on many. Remember, God loves choice and variety. So even in experiencing hunger, you have a variety of gifts.

Such as?

Experiencing your reaction to deprivation, to fear. Eventually each of you must learn to master this difficult lesson. What if you were told you don't actually need food to survive? You wouldn't believe it. Yet, eventually, when you reach a level of total mastery, you will realize the truth of this. Until then, you master other lessons and gain other gifts on the path: how to deal with fear, the growth of compassion, the urge to take action (of many different kinds.) The list is actually almost infinite in terms of the potential gifts in any one situation.

Anything else for now?

Enjoy the space. It is the hollow instrument, one that is clean and empty, that beautiful music is played upon. Obstructions, dirt affect the sound. Enjoy the cleaning out process.