Abhorrence is to be Abhorred, Part 1- 28th February 1996

Question:
Dear Teachers,
I have a pressing question: The Black and White Christians (God Bless them) react with abhorrence to the threat of 'occult' powers - for example, Red Indian Devas (but also etc. etc. etc.)
This contrasts with our approach of sympathetic firmness.
What are the actual negative effects with respect to:

1. The Christ Impulse
2. The Devas
3. The adherent
4. The communicator - be him Red Indian or no
5. Others?

We have answers with our teachings, but I was thinking that perhaps a warning against abhorrence would complement our package on this subject?
-J.W.

ABHORRENCE loathes, it is repulsed and repulsing; born of a hatred within he who recoils and abhors. It is more than just a simple and innocent reaction within the man or woman, it is active and disabling, destructive and demeaning, it is insultuous and unvirtuous, even though it becomes habitual to some who thereby go on to profess their own worth thereby.

Contempt dwells within us when we are caused to will an immediate disassociation of ego. The abruptness which accompanies our displeasure helps our beings to summon all forces inwardly and draw back, the man then becoming contracted and most shrunken, withdrawn in the literal sense of the word.

There are men who by habit of such are most shrunken etherically. Were one to perceive their emanatory bodies, they would find that what should have been a light-filled man has been hardened into but a shadowy darkness, largely contained in a bubble of thought which persists with a repetition, dirge-like and monotonous.

The monotony of this constant but lifeless thinking strengthens the man's ego in one respect, whilst in another he has lost his elasticity as it were. He has forgone in time, the capability of excelling any further than he has already gone. So he may well have become an icon of frozen thinking perhaps sublime, perhaps just fixed. However paradoxically, unless a man is open to fresh and new thought and 'lives' his thinking, then he loses the ability to live out and experience the sources of thought he holds important. It is not enough to become a mausoleum to ideas and ideals, for the thoughts shall expire if not given renewal by release, to decease and then return, reborn.

Furthermore, a man clearly cannot embrace any thought with life if not with love also. So there are decrees by the thousands one may discount on that criterion alone.

Here we are brought to abhorrence, an issue from Man which goes further than contempt, as it is indeed a stronger poison, assuming it knows when clearly it does not, for it has not the light of love to illumine the wisdom. It is then a falsehood, and being such yet experienced and entertained by the man, requires self-justification to offset the uncertainty then produced in the disdain.

If I have a sewing box and am asked for a certain hue of thread to match a cloth, but have not that color and know this to be so, and my spindles are few to begin with, I am likely to look nonetheless and compare, busying myself with an impossibility. More often or not it is human nature to actually go ahead and pluck one of their spools of color and offer it up, with a half-hopeful-helpfulness which says "Perhaps this is more or less right?"

Well, it is less and could never be more now can it? "Perhaps the cloth is wrong" or "the color is to be complementary?" they suggest - and so it goes. If the ideas and concepts of a faith do not match with their own shades and color, then there develops an antipathy for anything varied or different as a result of entertaining an impossible match.

It would be unreasonable to expect a man to accept something of which he has absolutely no experience. Our first question to attend to here is to ask how it is that certain men may embrace the esoteric concepts, whilst others have not the experience to make their way into such recognition. One must wonder why, particularly when the esoteric thinker maintains that even the materialistic man has a soul and qualities which are undiscovered by him.

The steps up into higher development are achieved when an individual has himself made the transcension from suffering and sorrow through to striving, enduring, and then culminating in further won ability. If difficulty has been met with and then embraced, a man may choose denial, bitterness, anger or resolve. He may go on in further years when coming up against the very hint of the same difficulty to respond with either abhorrence or with peace; and the way of his nature so responding shall make way for his future development also.

It is understandable that most men should not react with joy to that which has been known to them to be most painful. Physically a man may partially excarnate into shock when he has not the capacity to meet with the conditions he is placed in. Sudden death because of great bodily injury is shock of a kind also, and in this instance the consciousness of the man as removed cannot make the connection back to the body he so loved. The condition of all shock is the extreme of an unnegiotiated circumstance, and this may take place also in our thinking or our experiencing the ride of manifold emotions and responses in the world. But shock breaks coherency. Once it has been arrived at - the 'safety-gate' you may call it - then there is no returning in consciousness to that upset, it shall have to wait until the review after death, when it may be dispatched then with a measure of separation.

So in the first instance we have covered what is to many the only 'reliable' reaction to that which they do not like. It may describe the action of an insolentry whereupon the man does not want to know and verily cannot know, for the threat and the grief and the pain and the pressure has caused his escape so sealing the ego even from the memory until a future lifetime, when he will assuredly be placed with exactly the same set of conditions, given all the pains and the difficulties, in the hope that he may be capable of absorbing the experience in a further try.

If we ever tell ourselves "I do not want to know" and it is something that we already do know, then we are asking for shock to overcome us and lift us up and out of that which is making us uncomfortable in that knowledge. Yet this is a miniature suicide every time, for we forfeit a little of ourselves when we forego a knowledge that is part of ourselves. When we bury our understandings, no matter how painful they may be to us, we bury ourselves into the bargain.

The second response to pain, as discussed, is abhorrence. If we are stirred to reminisce some sense of former suffering, or forewarned perhaps of some impending condition, it may be that our primary reaction is one of abhorrence.

In the beginning of this talk we suggested quite gravely that abhorrence is both insultuous and aggravating in its nature and manifestation through Man. If men were to realize the demons that they do conjure continually they would certainly think twice before unleashing them into the world. The prettiest dinner parties are often full of them. It is surmised that the indignant and the angry are entitled to their upset when it is born of social interest, affliction or simply on behalf of the rest, as a corporate anger as it were. However anger itself, when expressed from any individual (developed or undeveloped, civilized or uncivilized) is an act of hostility and of violence.

Any individual who has been overswept with their own personal sense of self enough to be enraged, uses their own etheric vitality in the process, and quite often is found to become very sleepy after the dramatics for this reason. Anger cannot be sustained indefinitely, it demands much more from a man than it often affords (except in instances of defense when a man may be endangered).

The will of a man sometimes outgrows his character. In other words, he may be very good at exerting his will, particularly over other men; but he may not be very good at applying himself in ways of restraint and self-discipline. Character building requires both. We must know when to be willful and when to relax our egos and concentrate our efforts into spiritualizing an otherwise taxing event.

When a man has altered his conscious response from such anger or abhorrence into a paradoxical peace, then he has defied the demon of the difficulty and transformed it into a little angel - redeemed the demon of sad circumstance with a pity and a mercy and a supplication asked and received from God. This in turn brings the man his spirituality consciously won. From this he shall receive a clarity and attention which increases his perception of the heavenly worlds and their aspect; he has befriended Christ in league for a love higher than anger or residual bitterness.

The awareness of the higher worlds from this vantage does come from the inner senses derived from metamorphosed sadness and suffering. One might explain the martyrs’ trials in the light of this edict. Certainly one can say that there became a sweet compensation; and yet remembering also that each one forgoed his 'escape-gate' of shock too, that they entered into their persecutions past the limit of any ordinary endurance encountered, and sought willingly to retain their consciousness and remain for as long as was possible, connected within their circumstance, within their afflicted bodies, all the while denying any 'well-earned' anger, giving it all up to God.

Conversely there are many aggravants which overstimulate men - situations need not be found so obviously difficult as to cause upset. The more a man is inclined to anger, the easier it shall be for like demons to grip at his heart for little for no impending reason. The reasons themselves can become manufactured, and all the while the surge of vitality enjoyed by the angry man turns to become a pleasure whereupon he feels more alive than ever, even though his 'aliveness' is causing certain aggravation within his world. His temporary surge of etheric charge encourages his activity and fires his liveliness, whilst yet of course he shall bear the karma of this aggravation and also come to expire himself far earlier, losing mind, body, or both to deterioration. Negativity looks after its own, as they say, in the way it knows best! 

The many devas associated with this world are, for the main population, alike to children. They are beloved to us, and are as innocent to the eruptions of Man. Being made of goodness their consciousness lives in the light and the water, and the tree, and the sounds which come from the water's falling and the tree's rustling; and the shades of light often bring about their mind's intensity also - that they are so responsive to nature that they are that nature! They are as the trees or the ethers or the waters or the fires personified. Some are so imperceptibly close to their kin that one might well fancy them to be that which they inhabit. 

Equally also, there are lowly beings whose spinderly frames live in darkened places with odorous deposit; and these creatures are once again remonstrative of that part of nature that they live and know and dwell in upon. By and large they are creatures of association and wherever there is earthly life there shall be devas to accompany it within its etheric counterpart.

Equally so, there are those who are responsive to man and to angel and to alien. Some would be worthy counselors and good friends to have, whilst others are wicked, attached to evil thought. The highest in their development are independent of man and plant, and although have not the keys into death and rebirth in this world, they are as dear to Man as Time's memory is itself. For these beings have watched many men come and go and then return again. Dispassionate as they may be for the incumbent worries of Man, they are ever curious as to the sublime and divine workings within all systems which cradle him.

Men have 'crossed worlds' and met with all forms of these beings. With direct vision (moreso in former times), in the imaginative powers they have been called also to sense behind sense. The first-born Christians acknowledged the unseen realms and associated powers, teaching a man to differentiate the true natures, within himself, the unseen worlds and the present work-a-day world.

On the subject of spiritual gifts let us read:

"There are varieties of talents, but the same Spirit; varieties of service, but the same Lord; varieties of effects, but the same God who effects everything in everyone.
Each receives his manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. One man is granted words of wisdom by the Spirit, another words of knowledge by the same Spirit; one man in the same Spirit has the gift of faith, another in the one Spirit has gifts of healing; one has miraculous powers, another prophesy; another the gift of distinguishing spirits, another the gift of 'tongues' in their variety, another the gift of interpreting 'tongues'. But all these effects are produced by one and the same Spirit, apportioning them severally to each individual as he pleases.
As the human body is one and has many members, all the members of the body forming one body for all their number, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we have all been baptized into one Body, Jews or Greeks, slaves or freemen; we have all been imbued with one Spirit. Why, even the body consists not of one member, but of many.
If the foot were to say, "Because I am not the hand I do not belong to the body", that does not make it no part of the body.
If the ear were to say, "Because I am not the eye, I do not belong to the body", that does not make it no part of the body.
If the body were all eye, where would hearing be?
If the body were all ear, where would smell be?
As it is, God has set the members in the body, each as it pleased Him. If they all made up one member, what would become of the body?
As it is, there are many members and one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you", nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you". Quite the contrary.
We cannot do without those very members of the body which are considered rather delicate, just as the parts we consider rather dishonorable are the very parts we invest with special honor; our indecorous parts get a special care and attention which does not need to be paid to our more decorous parts. Yes, God has tempered our body together with a special dignity for the inferior parts, so that there may be no disunion in the body, but that the various members should have a common concern for one another.
Thus if one member suffers, all the members share its suffering.
If one member is honored, all the members share its honor.
Now you are Christ's Body, and severally members of it.
That is, God has set people within the church to be first of all apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly teachers, then workers of miracles, then healers, helpers, administrators, and speakers in 'tongues' of various kinds. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Are all workers of miracles? Are all endowed with the gifts of healing? Are all able to speak in 'tongues'? Are all able to interpret?
Set your heart on the higher talents. And yet I will go on to show you a still higher path.

"Thus I may speak with the tongues of men and of angels but if I have no love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal; I may prophesy, fathom all mysteries and secret lore, I may have such absolute faith that I can move hills from their place, but if I have no love, I count for nothing; I may distribute all I possess in charity, I may give up my body to be burnt, but if I have no love, I make nothing of it.
Love is very patient, very kind. Love knows no jealousy; love makes no parade, gives itself no airs, is never rude, never selfish, never irritated, never resentful; love is never glad when others go wrong, love is gladdened by goodness, always slow to expose, always eager to believe the best, always hopeful, always patient. Love never disappears. As for prophesying, it will be superseded; as for 'tongues' they will cease; as for knowledge, it will be superseded.
For we only know bit by bit, and we only prophesy bit by bit; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will be superseded.
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I argued like a child; now that I am a man, I am done with childish ways.
At present we only see the baffling reflections in a mirror, but then it will be face to face; at present I am learning bit by bit, but then I shall understand, as all along I have myself been understood.
And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love."
- Corinthians 12:4 – 13:13

Thus "faith and hope and love last on, these three", but the greatest of all is love. Make love your aim, and then set your heart on spiritual gifts.