Compassion benefits giver and receiver.
September 3, 2013
God is with you now. The now’s of which we speak are the now’s you see as yesterday and the now’s that you see as tomorrow. There is only now. All that you are concerned about for the future is actually in the now, is actually in the past. When you agonize about the future, it is like agonizing about the past. If you worry about the future, you are worrying about the past as well as the present.
Worry and anxiety, while natural for human life, have absolutely no meaning. If you wish to plan for the future as you know it, that is of course appropriate. But if you worry and have anxiety about the future, then you are not planning. You are being limited in your perception of possibility. No human being, regardless of location or stature, lives a life that is hopeless, that has no value.
No human being lives a life for which there is no future as you define that. Every human has a future, just as every human being has a past. But yesterday was the tomorrow that caused you anxiety. Such anxiety doesn’t help for it is negative, but if you view what you perceive to be the future as opportunity—opportunity for growth, opportunity for experiencing and reflecting God—then there is really nothing to cause worry.
You express concerns about the future—the future of decision making, the future of national priorities, the future of existence, the future of the earth, the future of the solar system, the future of the universe as you perceive it—but those futures are areas of potential, and they are potential awaiting fulfillment. Every human being has the potential capacity to fulfill those goals that reflect the reality of who God is.
When you find yourselves wracked with worry and concern, cast those away, for such worry, such concern, such anxiety is in truth your choice of response, and those responses can serve to deplete your strength, your attentions, your capacities and leave you as victims of the very items that cause you the anxiety, the worry, the grief.
You can be assured that the leaders for whom you pray will make a decision that in some eyes is correct and for some, wholly inappropriate. But you pray in your own ways for wisdom to be exercised. No human being has full knowledge of all that is. You operate on the basis of your understandings, not just of actions but consequences. There are many viewpoints that are held by those in authority, and those viewpoints are not consonant but oftentimes dissonant. But nevertheless, the decisions that are made, while having an effect on outcome, will not mean that one outcome is benign, the other a source of great suffering. Whatever decisions that are made by your government contain what is good and what is not good. Whatever decisions are made lead toward peace and lead away from peace. But ultimately the decisions that are exercised will draw many into a commitment that is for the good of all and therefore reflective of God’s presence in all that happens.
If you have concerns, those concerns are shared by countless others on all of the sides that are a part of the international dilemmas that you know to be present. You ask for them to be guided in their decisions. You can be assured that that guidance is available, but everyone involved in whatever happens can choose to benefit from that guidance or may choose to ignore its presence. You are dealing with fellow human beings and each carries a history that is unique but always present. As you said earlier, no decisions are predetermined, but there may be a predilection to move in one direction or another based in part on their own experiences even prior to their current human condition. You pray for wisdom in your own decisions, and that wisdom comes to you in moments of quiet clarity, not hysteria. It is our suggestion that hysteria not belong to the mixture of decisions being made.
Human life is but another vision of the acute situations of which you are aware. You ask for guidance, you make decisions, and you pray that they are correct. But it is important that you not ask to be perfect in all decisions, because that type of perfection of judgment is not a humanly achievable goal. Decisions at their very best are a combination of main highways and secondary roads, of clear passages and uncertain detours. Regardless of whether the path is clear of not, your prayers for wisdom and insight are constantly present and constantly responded to. You do not pursue your human lives in a vacuum. You move along your paths in the company of other souls, and those paths provide intersections that help give further meaning to the journeys you are engaged in.
Part of your discussion this evening centered essentially around life after life. What does it mean to be compassionate from our perspective? Are we compassionate because you individually or collectively are in need of compassion, or are we compassionate because of our own experiences within the pure life of spirit? The truth is that both exist. We are your guides. We are accompanying you every moment of your lives. You are with us, we are with you at all times. We know your challenges. We know your fears. We know the prayers you offer up. We know what gives each of you great pleasure. We know your individual needs. We know your capacity for response. We know your thoughts. We know your lifestyles. We know your joy, your ecstasy, your sadness, your despair. We know each of you far better than you know yourselves, and as your guides, we cannot exist without the expression of compassion and the assurance of love. What you experience becomes in its way what we experience. The compassion we feel for you is a natural outgrowth of the love that we have for every human being. We feel the compassion because we know of your need, whether spoken or not.
As you discussed, we know the application of compassion can be and often is given to those souls who have recently joined our lights and our lives of illumination. We exercise compassion toward elements of spirit. It makes no difference whether that element of spirit is human or whether it is a manifestation of spirit through your own efforts, your own realities. Our compassion is a function of our love. We experience at a level more intense than anything human what compassion really means, what suffering with another means, what love with another means. Passion has many implications in the English language, and compassion is really the exercise of those many aspects.
We love each of you because you are a part of us, because you are a part of God, because each of you is given the opportunity of reaching out and grasping another’s hand and holding it to the heart, to the light. Compassion for us is not feeling sorry for someone. Compassion is recognizing the strength, the light of another, and allowing yourselves to be drawn into that light. That’s what compassion does. With compassion you are drawn in, you are drawn in with intention, you are drawn in through love. True compassion is never a duty. Although we are compassionate, our response is not, “Oh, once again we must step in.” The compassion we experience is this being drawn inward, and we accept that magnetism with great joy and with boundless love. Our compassion is never a duty. When you are truly compassionate, you are renewed, you are strengthened in the exercising of compassion. It is never a negative response. The interesting point of compassion is that all benefit—the individual offering it and the individual receiving. Compassion unites. Love unites. Light spreads forth. Warmth always moves outward away from the source.
Our experience in spiritual form is such that we do welcome souls who are filled with confusion or disbelief, souls who are filled with regret for what was left behind, souls overcome by guilt, souls filled with great remorse, souls filled with anger, souls filled with love, souls filled with peace. No spirit presence arrives to our plane the same as all others. Everyone is different just as every human being is different. Every set of life experiences is different. If two people observe the same event, each will have different impressions. Your perceptions of what happens are never the same for all, and therefore your understandings of life are never the same in two individuals. And yet it must be emphasized that the wisdom and strength and peace that is God ensures that all who enter this plane of spiritual life have within them the seeds of continued growth and development, the seeds of love, the seeds of compassion.
You learn because you live. You learn because you are a part of our lives. You learn because you are a part of God. We learn for exactly the same reasons. Our lives consist of many levels of spiritual understanding. There is no level that is better than another or higher than another. It is only different from another. The letter B is no more important that the letter A. The letter C is no more beautiful or filled with impact than the letter D. There is no human being whose soul is more valuable than another’s, but each soul does learn from experiencing life as you know it and life that exceeds your imagination.
Decisions you make in your lives are directed primarily through your awareness of who we are and what God really means. You choose your associates, you choose your friends, you choose your family. These choices are always individual and filled with an impact of all you are, all you are to be. You must live your lives with confidence, confidence in opportunity and not despair. Avoid worry, but be engaged in the process of life. That engagement can be active, it can be prayerful, it can be thoughtful, but it is never passive. When you are concerned about the decisions others make, have faith in your own abilities to control your own experience of life. You can pray that another responds in wisdom and understanding, but giving them light so that they may see a way of opening the window is all you can do. Decisions will be made as decisions are made. In the end you will never know in your own heart if a given decision made by another is correct or not, for all decisions have consequences, and all consequences contain within them what is positive but also what is negative. You can debate for a lifetime whether a decision was correct or not, but you will never know because you cannot understand one hundred percent of the outcome of all other decisions. All you know is the outcome of a decision that is made. When you pray that the right decision be made, you can be assured that the presence of the wisdom for which you pray is indeed a part of that process.
Apply the same understandings to your own decisions. As you pray to do the right thing in your own lives, you will always have options and you will never know the outcome fully of all options, only the option that was chosen. But in praying that you make the right choices, you can be assured that you are open to what is best and that you will make the right decisions. This is an assurance built on faith. It is not a statement that you can prove, it is not a statement that you can disprove, but it is nevertheless correct. You pray for wisdom; wisdom is present. You pray for health; health is present. You pray for love; love is present. You pray for understanding; understanding is present. You pray for compassion; compassion is present. All that you pray for through your understanding of God is present for you. Accept that presence and you’ll be blessed.
Rejoice in your light and in your praying.
Amen.