February 28, 2012

• Burdens, emptiness, darkness, negative energy, evil

• Human life is not predetermined

• No soul is evil

• Souls grow in the presence of light

• Difficulty moving forward in the afterlife

God who is the protector, the nourishment, the inspiration, the source of all, blesses you and surrounds your spirits with great light and lightness. We use the term “lightness” to convey a sense of being unburdened.

Your discussions together in this gathering relate most directly to burdens: the burdens of spirit, the burdens of human life as they relate to the spirit, the nature of suffering, the nature of darkness, and the influence of darkness on your own lights. The burden of human existence is clear to each of you, for you are faced with burdens daily in your work, in your associations, your relationships. You are aware of what it means to be burdened, either because you feel it yourself, or you witness it in others.

The natural question that arises is from where these burdens originate—the nature of evil, how strong is it, the influence of spirit presence that may be viewed as negative on your own lives. It is best to begin by stating what we have frequently mentioned and yet bears repeating. There are spirits who find difficulty in transitioning from a human experience to a strictly spiritual one, but we can also say that there are spirits who find it difficult to re-associate with the human condition even when they have chosen to do so.

How many times have each of you anticipated something that you chose only to find either disappointment or disillusionment? That experience is also part of the spirit growth of all—all human beings, all spirits. It is God’s purpose that what you pursue and what spirits pursue in the choices that are made are made with the intention of love. You enter a relationship with the intention of love. That love may be fulfilled or it may not, but the intention is there.

When spirits choose to enter or to reenter the human life-form, there is no predetermination of the nature of that life-form, and yet it is true, the soul knows deeply the lessons to be learned, and the soul determines whether such lessons are best learned accompanied by human life or by other life-forms. Your lives are not predetermined. Your experiences are the direct result of your interaction with others, your interaction with the forces of nature. All forms of the natural world interact with one another. Your lives therefore are not predetermined.

When a soul is attracted to identifying directly with a human form, and that human energy is not long-lived, such an event is not determined by the soul, is not determined by God. It is indeed part of what it means to be human. You experience what you experience, and the soul shares in that journey just as you are sharing in the development of your spirit center. Your lives take on the characters that are appropriate at that moment. When you are unaware of spirit, your lives are appropriately reflecting that lack of awareness, and when that awareness grows, your paths reflect in appropriate ways that awareness.

The conflicts that you experience as your paths intersect are a natural result of that very intersection. Your responses to those intersections are informed by your understanding of spirit, and as you develop through those responses, you enhance spirit. You enhance your own soul’s development.

But there are souls who also find difficulty associating with human life energy, human life-forms. Souls learn just as you learn. Souls evolve as you evolve. Growth does take place, but a soul that has been troubled and is learning and growing and reflecting the presence of God can in the process create an energy that is not actually detrimental or negative, but an energy that needs an accumulation of love, that needs to learn what it means to be even more loving. That lesson is achieved most often through connections with human life. We are not for a moment suggesting that some human beings have unhelpful souls, for all souls bring strength to the human condition. All souls are developed. All souls are most loving. All souls embody compassion. But all souls are still on a journey of development and growth.

No soul reenters our plane of spiritual existence with full knowledge and being total love. It is a process, as we have said before. For some souls, that transition to our form of life is a process that is smooth, surrounded by much light, and engulfed in a love which is fully accepted and embraced. There are souls who join our plane who find it difficult to acknowledge that a wider life is open to them, and for many reasons, may be unwilling to embrace the light that is there. Such souls feel more committed to their human attachments than to the loving light that surrounds them.

It is therefore true that there are many spirits who are in a sense locked, who are in a sense not free to move forward. This condition is not externally imposed. It is strictly a condition of choice. You can choose to move ahead, or you can choose not to accept the light. For those locked souls, those souls who feel somehow restricted, they experience great difficulties, for they have not had an opportunity to fully accept the light that is theirs to behold.

Consequently there are souls who are disturbed by the condition that they choose to find themselves in. There is a negative energy that exists with these spirits. It is not an evil energy, for no soul is evil. All souls are good, but they nevertheless find difficulty in fulfilling the goodness that is theirs. The negative energy is one of darkness; it is one of burden; it is a heaviness. You can walk into a room that is empty and feel heaviness, just as you can walk into a room that is empty and feel great light. You can feel a lightness, a lack of burden. There are places one can visit that are characterized by great lightness of spirit, of great light as well. But the burden we speak of is a burden of darkness. This darkness is the lack of light.

For your spirits, nourishment is true light. Your souls grow in the presence of light. Your souls are strengthened through burdens that may be encountered, but the consequence of that struggle is lightness, a reduction of burden.

Can the negative energy that exists impact your lives directly? Yes, it can. We have said many times that the dark is the absence of light, and it is the absence that creates the burden. It is not what the absence contains. It is what the darkness lacks that has the influence. If you are entering a room and feel the darkness, you are not feeling the darkness. You are truly feeling the lack of light, because it is the light that is needed for growth. That light is love, compassion, affirmation, sacrifice, vulnerability. That light is all that you can imagine that brings attention toward God. The darkness is all that exists that is unaware of God’s presence. The lack of light, the lack of that sense of spirit presence, spirit centrality, is what you can interpret as being negative or evil.

There are no evil human beings. There is evil behavior, but the center of all human beings is spirit, and spirit by definition is never evil. The darkness we speak of is much like a vacuum. It sucks in what is missing. It draws towards itself because it is empty. Air rushes into a vacuum. The movement is toward the vacuum. The vacuum is not drawing what lies beyond its reach, but rather what lies beyond its reach is drawn to fill the vacuum. It is not the power of the vacuum that moves but the power of the light that is moving.

The darkness you wonder about in its impact upon the human life experience is more readily understood as the human life experiencing an attempt to respond to the darkness that is present. That relationship between light and darkness is not a two-way street; it is one-way. Light rushes in to fill darkness. Darkness is not drawing in what lies beyond it. The energy does not come from what is dark.

The question of human response to darkness is an important one. For those who are connected consciously to their spirit centers, the response to darkness is a positive response. But for those who have no concept of their spiritual essence, they too may move to fill the darkness, but what is accomplished is what seems to enhance the human and not to enhance the spirit.

When you see evil, as you define it, around you, you have a choice in how you respond. You can respond with anger and indignation. You can respond with violence. You can respond with patience, with understanding, with compassion, with the loving desire to assist—not a motivation to destroy. You do not have to be fully aware of your spirit centers to respond to darkness, for the natural state of All That Is is to fill what seems empty. And what is darkness other than an emptiness that must be filled?

The movement from what has been created outside the darkness into the darkness is the same whether the intention was for the good to respond to the darkness, or if the darkness had strength of its own, to pull all towards itself. The movement is the same. The direction is still the same—going from light into darkness.

Darkness never spreads. Light can only spread. Light cannot be contained. It is not an energy that can be finitely, permanently, totally contained. The energy of light always expands. It illuminates, it warms, it nurtures, literally and figuratively. Whether we talk about light in terms of its physics or we talk about light as analogy to spiritual strength, both respond in the same way.

Each one of you is a creature containing light. Each one of you is given an opportunity to reflect that, to become lightness, to become someone who is dedicated to reducing burden, to lessening the burden of others. By becoming more aware of your spirit centers, you also lighten your own burdens. Will they go away fully? Certainly not, for human experience always includes burdens. But those burdens can be greatly reduced, and in the process you become a source of additional light, and there is a lightness to your presence, a lightness that nurtures your own lives and also those around you.

You must look to your lives as a process of reducing the burden, of reducing the darkness. This darkness may be psychological. It may be physical. It may take many forms. But dedicate your lives to minimizing the effect of the darkness, minimizing its presence, filling the void with your own light. In so doing, the darkness that exists, the darkness of spirits that may be contained and restricted, lost, reluctant, will also find nourishment. Those souls will be filled with the light of your own presence, and they will be strengthened and given faith, and most importantly, because of the light that you reflect, they will be more capable of opening themselves to God’s Light and to the light of all spirits on our plane.

The spirits of all who join us are given that choice—the choice to find warmth in the illumination, or the choice to pull back and shield themselves. For those who find it difficult to accept our illumination, that choice that they make is never permanent. It is simply a choice they make because it is a part of their pathway, just as you make choices as part of your pathways. The process of growth, the process of welcoming the light, is the same for you and for us. It is that very process that brings us ever so clearly to the center of that light, to God’s presence, and to ultimate love.

Reach out to the darkness wherever you find it. Reach out with love. Reach out with a desire to illuminate, to comfort, and to guide.

You are blessed in your reaching out as you are blessed by our reaching to each of you in all ways and at all times.

Amen.