We would like to know why suffering is necessary, and, in light [of the fact] that so many people in the world suffer so much, how is it that suffering is a service either to the people who suffer or to the Creator who watches the suffering as part of Itself?

(Carla channeling)

We are those of Q’uo. Greetings in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator. We are grateful for your call to us. As always, we answer this call as your brothers and sisters of the path. We are fallible and make errors. Therefore, we ask that each listen and chose those thoughts of ours which appeal, leaving the rest behind. Always we would ask those who appreciate our council to use and value the personal discrimination within. This is not easy to do when the seeking is for a mystery and a purity that seem impossible to reach without help from outside. However, both past and future are within you, and no amount of reaching from without or outside of the self can ever be equivalent to those truths which are realized internally through the process of discovery.

We consider ourselves blessed to be able to function as those who remind you of truths you already know. We do not bring news. That is, we have nothing new to astound you with. We are simple, and our message is simple. To achieve the simplicity of nature we now have has taken a great deal of work or suffering or experience, whatever name you wish to call it. The truth that we see is that the process of spiritual evolution is slow beyond your wildest imagination. Yet, this work remains fascinating. And we do not regret one iota of the time and energy we have spent in reaching this place. Nor do we quail before the challenges we now face, for we are eager to learn and hungry for that source which is our and your all in all.

In speaking with you about suffering, we would begin by looking at what we just said. It took us a long, long time and a great deal of careful work—work of the mind, work of the heart, and work of the intuition—to achieve the awareness which we now enjoy. We have removed brick by brick the walls between us who are of Q’uo. We have removed before that brick by brick the walls within ourselves which kept us from allowing ourselves the surcease of that suffering which we so needed to experience. Suffering is a word biased substantially in the negative sense. When one suffers one is considered to be bearing pain, difficulty, and trouble. Yet to suffer is actually to allow, and what is allowed in suffering is fear. Any experience may be suffered or allowed to occur, yet it is the experience which is not resisted which brings a lack of suffering.

We do not speak of the suffering of hunger and nakedness and imprisonment when we say that suffering is a choice. In those cases also suffering is indeed a choice, but we would deal at this moment with the normal suffering, day by day, which strikes at the heart of most entitys’ life experience: the suffering of a self which is resisting the flow of that which is occurring in front of the eyes, the suffering between people, the suffering at a job, or doing some work, the suffering because of what one does not have, the suffering because of that which one has and cannot be rid of. These are a measure of the resistance the seeker has, usually subconsciously, to the drift of that destiny which always lies before one, which one spins out as does the spider its web from the nexus within which experience is recorded.

Let us look at the suffering of the rock. First, it becomes rock by being cast out of the fiery molten core which is beneath that which is rock upon your planetary sphere, flung into space, tossed away by that which was its home. It now thrusts upwards through an atmosphere of air. Nothing is as it was, and through your time this rock is worn, slowly and steadily, eroded, pitted, roughened and crevassed until little bits of earth cling to its surface, and gradually it is covered by earth which then grows plants whose roots reach down into the rock, breaking it, further wearing it away until perhaps this rock is upheaved by another burst of molten energy, becoming broken, falling down in splinters and shards, rolling perhaps into the bed of some stream and washing, century by century, until it has become a million pebbles, a billion grains of sand. The rock has a long life; from its first identity as rock until its last dissolution, it is constantly worn away, broken and re-broken that earth may come to it, that it may support growth and blooming, and that it may eventually dissolve.

Because the rock has no self-consciousness, it does not suffer. It experiences. It is not that rock accepts the erosion which eventually dissolves it. It is that its nature is as it is and that which occurs is that which occurs.

For the animal, the life is that which is, for, again, there is no self-consciousness except that which is implanted within it by its human caretakers. If it has the cut or the lame paw it simply has this. It endures it without suffering. It experiences the pain, the discomfort, but it does not suffer, for it does not reflect within itself but rather seeks the sleep which frees it to dream of days when it was chasing game and being that which it is as a young one.

However, within third density lies that great gift and that great burden of self-consciousness. You, also, as the rock, as the animal, from the first moment of being thrust out into the atmosphere to that last moment when breath expires, experience and suffer through every change, every new discovery, every phase and stage of development, both physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, and insofar as the experience is not resisted and is entered into faithfully, there is not the suffering. Few there are among your peoples who have achieved a lack of fear sufficient to claim no suffering from fire, torture, sudden death, or a million smaller mishaps of circumstance. For the great millions suffering is a fact. The resistance to discomfort and pain on whatever level is instinctive. The creature seeks comfort. This is an instinct.

This instrument was reading this morning concerning those who chose not to suffer less but to increase suffering in order to pay homage and worship to the one infinite Creator, for these ascetic individuals, often called saints among your peoples, felt such great love of the one infinite Creator that the desire was to ignore any and all impulses of the body which kept the soul from thinking on the one infinite Creator. We do not say that these saints are correct in the lengths to which they take an embracing of suffering. This was their path. It worked for them. We do not suggest it for any except those for whom it is desirable.

However, we do encourage each seeker to gaze without fear at the troubles of the day. When resistance is felt, when the suffering occurs, this is a puzzle for later contemplation, not to stop the flow of suffering but rather to allow a portion of the self to observe it so that it may be accurately remembered. When there is a distinct lack of suffering it is well also to take note of that which constitutes the enjoyment experienced, for there is much to learn about the self from the simple reactions or responses which the self has to various stimuli. The path to self-knowledge is one in which reflection and contemplation upon one’s own inner workings does bear a substantial part.

Why is suffering necessary? We would change this question to “Why is experience necessary?” For as we have said suffering is not necessary, even for those who starve, for those who are naked, suffering is not necessary. The experience, the pain, be it ever so deep, does not necessarily bring suffering. For entities to turn and embrace their troubles it requires much, much learning, much grasping of the true nature of experience. The experiencing is necessary because you have chosen to manifest and to manifest one must accept space and time in a structure which creates a process through time or through space and in that process through time and space the reason for manifestation develops itself, which is to say that as each experience is processed within choices are made which advance the uniqueness of that entity’s identity. These experiences are as necessary as the text books of your classrooms. There must be some way of learning the lessons which are given in the school of life, for your incarnation is, indeed, a school, and it is a school which you enter in each incarnation with great hopes of achievement. Yet when the semester begins the work is hard, painful and inconvenient, and it is only natural for the student to protest that inevitable grind of one project after another after another. Is there no end to learning? No, indeed, there is not.

This school of incarnation is most generous in offering as much experience as you wish to take on and as deep a probing into the nature of it as the seeker has the resources to mount. The Creator wishes to experience Itself. Insofar as each of you suffers, so the Creator experiences as suffering. The Creator is most grateful for these experiences and does not judge or condemn an entity for having a hard time with the subject. It appreciates the effort. It appreciates the experience.

In truth, we might say that the goal of the suffering seeker is not the end to suffering but, rather, an increased or enhanced sense of the sanctity, the hallowed nature of these processes of learning, of changing, of evolving through experience. Each seeker chooses the degree to which it shall suffer as it resists or does not resist the beckoning call of its own destiny. Each is co-creator of that destiny. Each has chosen the classes it is in in this school of incarnation. Therefore, all is well, metaphysically speaking, whatever the suffering looks like, for it is simply a portion of experience allowed to be suffering through the resistance and fear of the changing that the learning creates.

When one steps back and thinks again of the rock, one sees that if the rock were self-conscious it would suffer, for it is blown into manifestation and eroded and perhaps blown again into smaller and smaller pieces until it is ground down completely and disappears into sand and dirt and elements.

The nature of living is that it is fullest in the first instant of life and is steadily eroded until its end in death. It arises. It falls away. That is the nature of incarnation. Seen from this standpoint it may be clearer why suffering is the common lot. Each arises on the Earth scene full of a life and the nature of that life’s manifestation is that the coin of time, the treasure of attention, is spent and eventually the personality is completely bankrupt and out of time, out of treasure, out of lessons, and out of school. And the incarnation ends. Loss upon loss, limitation upon limitation until that final expulsion of breath and the ceasing of existence within third density.

The Creator does not need your suffering. The Creator wishes your experience, and if suffering is involved the Creator may gladly take that also, for that is your truth. It is accepted without judgment. It is loved. It is blessed. It is not desired. All that is desired is that the unique spark which is yourself do as it pleases to find out to the deepest level possible what that essence of self is. The journey of discovery lies within and it is a long voyage.

We would, at this time, transfer this contact to the one known as Jim, as this entity runs low on energy. We leave this instrument with thanks, and in love and in light. We are those of Q’uo.

(Jim channeling)

I am Q’uo, and greet each again in love and in light through this instrument. We have felt a great deal of sympathy for those of your peoples who must move through this third-density illusion fraught with so much that causes suffering, for we know from our own experience the difficulties that are inherent within your illusion. There is no obvious unity which binds all entities in a supportive community upon which to call for most of your peoples. There is instead the seeming fragmentation of all that is unified into the manyness of a creation which seems most of the time to be at odds with itself. We feel a great deal of sympathy for those who are in the midst of famine, of disease, of loneliness, and of that dryness of spirit that turns to bitterness in the view of life. Yet, we are comforted in our feeling of sympathy by knowing that each of these experiences shall make a mark upon each entity which is one stroke of the artist’s brush upon an eternal canvas of complete harmony.

There is the offering of each entity laid at the feet of the Creator by the very nature of the illusion, that which begins and ends, that which you call the life and the death, and each entity shall give over to the Creator the harvest of each incarnation which shall allow the Creator to experience that which has been experience by the entity and so enrich the Creator by the choices made and the joys and sorrows known.

At this time we would offer ourselves in the answering of further queries which those present might have for us. Is there a query at this time?

Concerning the truth, absolute and relative truth. Most of the time what we experience seems to be of relative truth. What is the relation of relative truth to absolute truth?

I am Q’uo, and am aware of your query, my sister. In this great octave of experience which we all share there is that which can be seen as the ultimate or absolute truth and that which is relative, and we would utilize the portion of the deep mind which is called the archetypical mind as an illustration of that which is, for this octave, an absolute truth, for it is the architecture of the process of evolution. It is the journey upon which we each find ourselves moving upon. It is that which we all shall fulfill, each in our own way, which is that which we would call that relative truth.

As we move through this pattern of expression of the one Creator we do so in a way which is a function of our unique choices, a way which is a function of memory and experience. The archetypical mind is not affected or changed in any way whatsoever by memory or by experience of any entity moving within its patterns and opportunities. Thus, each entity provides an—we search for the correct word—interpretation of this journey which is relative to all other entity’s choices. Yet the architecture of the Logos, that source of Love, is absolute. In truth, there is one great Absolute as far as we are aware and that is the unity of all things and all entities, for even the archetypical mind is that which is expressed by an infinite number of logoi throughout the one creation.

Is there another query?

We as individuals seem to be the builders of the archetypical mind, so aren’t we the builders of absolute truth?

I am Q’uo, and am aware of your query, my sister. In the deepest sense, that which recognizes each entity as the Creator, this is so. But in the sense of entities which move through the illusion as portions of the Creator this would not be so, for there is no choice which you can make as an individual entity that changes any portion of the archetypical mind. This is given by the Logos. You may choose an infinite number of manners to move through this mind, but it is ever and always the same.

Is there another query, my sister?

No, thank you.

I am Q’uo, and we thank you once again, my sister. Is there another query at this time?

I am curious. What makes you sometimes come up with a little joke in the end? Is it the energy that we put together at that moment?

I am Q’uo, and am aware of your query, my brother. We are those who have blended vibrations of those of Ra and those of Latwii. Each of these social memory complexes have an appreciation of that which you call humor. This group is well aware of the humor of those of Latwii. Humor, as we are able to see it, is the view of a situation with a sense of proportion about it. As one looks at the entirety of a situation that may, from one point of view, may seem difficult and distressing, may when seen from its entirety or when the entity experiencing it is seen in a more full view there is often the opportunity to balance the situation by seeing another characteristic which, when taken in comparison characteristic, adds a sense of comic relief, shall we say. The difficulty is relieved by the larger view, and we feel that humor is an excellent means of restoring the larger view to entities who are perhaps a bit over-stressed by one portion of a picture.

Is there another query, my brother?

No, thanks. I appreciate that.

I am Q’uo, and we thank you, my brother. Is there another query at this time?

[Pause]

I am Q’uo, and since we observe a lull in the querying at this time, we shall assume that we have, for the nonce, spoken to those areas of concern and we are grateful to each entity for presenting us with these opportunities to share with you that which is our experience and our opinions. We are most happy to do so and can always count on this group to query in a thoughtful and profound manner.

We shall at this time take our leave of this instrument and this group, leaving each, as always, in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator. We are known to you as those of Q’uo. Adonai, my friends. Adonai.