It came to me to write about the silence as I worked with that silence for long hours this past two weeks. I am recovering from pinched nerves in my spine and left arm and have not been able to work at my desk as usual.
There are times in the far past, when I was a librarian and run off my feet, when the leisure I must now keep would have been an unalloyed pleasure. At this point in my life, this is emphatically no longer so. I have brought myself, again and again, in the reaches of the night and in the golden, autumn light of noonday, into the silence, to take tutelage from it, to draw from its deep well and to find rest for my soul.
This dawning, I turned yet again to Holly, my name for the Holy Spirit, and asked, “Holly, talk to me about weariness.” For severe pain, in which I have been dwelling as in a well of fire through a month of days now, has created increasing weariness in me.
Holly said, “Of course you are weary. It has been a long and dark night for your body. In the wee, small hours of the morning, dawn seems to be forever coming. Rest back as you are able, dear one, and wait for the morning, just as the watchman waits to herald the dawn. Let your angel hosts help your soul rest.
“If you are wakeful, offer prayers of thanksgiving and praise. Think of every blessing, and treasure each one separately. Spend those watchful hours in loving, grateful and happy thoughts.
“Remember, you are not alone in this watch for morning’s sweet and healing light. Christ is with you. Feel His presence. Say His Name. If needed, say it every minute, and let that be your prayer. Jesus! Feel the healing come as you even think upon His Name.”
How grateful I was for Holly’s words! Please know that I do not wish to thrust Christ, or my belief system, on you who read this article. What I wish to share is the measure of powerful intensity in these words. For I am not by any means the only person experiencing a dark night of the soul. And if you are my companion there, I hope for you to feel that you are not alone. Call that Presence what you will, but in that silence, you are practicing the Presence of the One Creator, by whatever Name you know. In that silence, the healing we all can experience is of one ground of being, one Creator, one love, one Logos.
L/L Research is kicking off its fund-raising campaign for year’s end this next week, and it is time for me to write the begging letter. This exercise always causes me to reflect upon just why I would have the temerity to ask those who appreciate our work for funds. Money is tight. Needs are many. How can I justify asking seekers to open their budgets and share their hard-won bounty with us?
The answer came to me with a letter from a reader in which he proposed sending us some new equipment so that we did not have “those annoying little breaks in the transcription where the channel has to pause while the tape is flipped.” It is a most generous offer and I hope that he will, indeed, send us that equipment.
However it got me to thinking about the silence in the sessions. That silence does not only show up when the audiocassette tapes are turned at the ninety-minute mark. There is silence between many sentences and sometimes between words in every session. And I feel that there is tremendous value in those silences. I believe that when I am channeling, far more information is being transmitted than ever shows up in the words. It is being sent in the silences between and surrounding the words.
To test this out, you have only to read from a transcript of a session of ours, silently or out loud. Sense into the atmosphere or aura that energetically surrounds the channeled words. The deepest gift of such channeled material is not in the words but in the silence surrounding and informing the words. You might try this using the session from which I quote below.
I believe that my channeling is not the same kind of information as my writing is. In order to take in the channeling deeply and completely, the reader or listener needs to carve out a bit of silence for himself, a potentiated space for allowing that work – the words and the silences between them – to be received. This is why I am so enthusiastic about our present effort to create audio downloads for our seekers. So many of us have windshield time as we commute, and that gives us the perfect chance to enter the silence, listening to a session as we drive. Stay tuned! We’re working on that!
I love what Q’uo said about silence in the session linked above:
“This communication of ours is bound in silence. It is silence that fuels the channel, silence that fuels the desire of those present, and silence that enables that desire to be honed. It is silence that enables the self to be known to itself. It is in silence that trust and faith abound. It is in the shared silence of prayer that miracles happen.
“Each of you is a temple and a priest within the temple. The temple is that body and that personality and those gifts. The priest is the consciousness within that directs that building and its stewardship, the disposition of the talents and treasures of the temple and the use and aid of those faculties of being that fuel the ministry.
“Each priest needs to spend time in that sanctuary that has to do with no one but the self and that connection that is sacred between the self and the infinite Creator, between the loved and the lover, between the spark and the source of that spark, that great fire, that great light, that great love, that great Thought that is the one infinite Creator.”
You may ask why I would presume to suggest that you are a priest! You may well feel that to say this about yourself would be wrong, or at least presumptuous. Yet this very self-perception is at the heart of why I can honestly and humbly ask for the substantial funds which L/L Research needs to continue this work.
For I do not do this channeling in a vacuum. In order for me to be free to work as I do, my husband devotes his working days to a lawn and gardening service, working dawn to dusk to pay the bills of the household.
In the seventies, I used to answer the letters that came in to us, one by one. I did it with great joy and absolute love for each soul. Gradually our circle of readers and seekers has grown. In 2006, we added an administrative assistant. This last year, we added an assistant for him! We are still answering each and every letter with the same joy and love, but it takes more and more time for us to connect with those who contact us and to be with them, as they need it, for support, encouragement and conversation.
To prepare channeled sessions for our archive site, www.llresearch.org, dozens of transcribers spend thousands of unpaid hours transferring sound to text. I spend more hours editing those transcripts. Our web guy then spends more hours preparing the copy for the web, producing it into PDFs for easier reader use and placing the material on our site. His faithful service has continued well into a second decade.
To give our readers the chance to converse about their mutual points of interest, our web guy for www.bring4th.org has also piled up countless hours of volunteer work, getting chat rooms, forums and a safe on-line store in place.
Other volunteers create such beautiful offerings as a newsletter for prisoners who want to learn more about the Law of One and our very first video interview, which came out on YouTube recently.
I could go on! But I know you get my point, which is that L/L Research sees you differently, treats you differently, values you differently, than organizations which are bent on giving you the news of the day. For instance, other organizations may talk with you prophetically about 2012, either with hope or with gloom-and-doom. The channeled material on this subject from L/L Research, on the other hand, gazes at the subject from the attitude and standpoint of eternity. I believe there is an enormous amount of value in that infinite point of view.
If this article prompts you to donate to our campaign, I rejoice! I can promise you that every penny will go to serving our seekers. My husband and I take no salary. We never have. The people who man the Inbox and TCB for L/L Research are paid far below what they could get for the same work elsewhere. And our volunteers, the backbone of our service, give all their hours as labors of love. This organization really is special. It deserves all the support you can offer it. And we have substantial bills to pay.
One very strong point about the Confederation channeling is that it works with the spiritual seeker in a way that is not cloying with sentiment or sticky with religiosity. Here is what Q’uo has to say about the time you spend in silence, later in this same channeling session:
“Even a tiny bit of allowing the heart to become open and golden and flowing creates a joy and a blessing that is often startling. It is not that you are going in search of joy. It is not that you are attempting to create bliss. It is simply that you are attempting to line up the energy body, balance it, open it and ask it to work.
“Each of you is a crystal instrument and truly it is not necessary to know precisely how you are creating the melody of love, how you are shaping that instrument which is your crystal being so that it is able to transmute, intensify and anchor into the planetary vibration the infinite light and love of the one Creator. It is only necessary that you surrender to that intention.
“In terms of the metaphysical, the clumsy and awkward attempts of sincere people are far more persuasive than the sophisticated, easily spoken and roundly shaped phrases of faith that do not come from the heart. It is not necessary to be clever, articulate or even to have words. What is necessary is that there be a process that is passionately being pursued whereby the seeker is seeking along the path of spiritual evolution. The desire to serve creates the opportunity to serve. The opportunity to serve creates the means to serve. The means to serve flow through the instrument and out into the world. Thusly, the main focus of the crystal is to be a good crystal, to open the self as a crystal, to give the intention of service, to give the intention of placing time in the silence for this service and to be persistent about offering this service.”
This week, my time of outer service has been tiny. Compared to my usual output when my body is working well, I have hardly been helpful at all. Yet, resting in Q’uo’s words and Holly’s encouragement, I can see myself as whole and useful! I can know that I am fully functional as a crystal each time I enter the silence and set my intention to serve. I am so grateful for that vision of myself – of all of us.
I open my arms and embrace your spirit. Let us hone our desire to serve, which creates the opportunity to serve, the means to become crystals that sing in the silence with the infinite love of the One. I rejoice in our shared gift to a world in need of love. May that love pour through us, now and always!