 Hello everybody. Welcome to this live call here with me and Orland and also some others who are working in the background to make the call go smoothly. Patsy and Marshall and Shabani. And I'll introduce you to Patsy in just a minute, but first I just want to thank everybody for submitting all of your reflections and your questions. As we suspected, there were way, way more than we could possibly field in our time here together. We're planning to go for 75 to 90 minutes. So over the past couple of days, I've collected the questions and gone through them and tried to tease out different themes. And then last night I sent a bunch of them to Orland who said it kept them up at night. So I'm really looking forward to seeing where his contemplations of these questions have taken him. And yeah, I'm really excited for this. And I will, maybe I'll introduce Orland again in a minute or so. Oh yeah, and I also want to say that a lot of questions came in after I reached out to Orland and sent him the list of questions. So if you submitted your question just in the last 24 hours, we'll try to get to some of those too, but we may not. But perhaps the provocation of the field that your question does might maybe it'll bring an answer somehow anyway, even if we don't get to it. So let me just turn it over to Patsy for a minute to go through a little bit of logistics or anything else she wants to say. Patsy. Hi, welcome. And thank you for being here. And I want to acknowledge our chat room support when I went on to connect the live streaming and I saw cherry and Justin and a lot of participants are already chatting and warming up with each other. The energy was great. So thank you. And I want to introduce you to Marshall quickly. He's our sacred moderator in our home community and Savani. She's one of our sacred facilitators at the course forum. So please say hi to them. And I think that's it for now and enjoy your session. And if you are watching the YouTube streaming and not able to chat, it's because you have to walk into your Gmail or YouTube account. Thank you all. Thank you. Thanks, Patsy. So before I start to get into the questions, Orlan, I just want to welcome you here. And thank you for taking the time knowing how important the work you're doing is. So just, yeah, welcome. And thanks for being here. Thank you, Charles. Yeah, so I mean, I guess everybody, well, most people listening to this call are quite familiar with Orlan because we've done this first part of a two-part series together here. And so many of you are familiar with his words and the teachings that he carries. Some people might have just randomly tuned into this, but Orlan and I last January recorded two days of conversation that I then made into kind of a course with a little study guide and and a little structure in a forum around it. And, you know, that was before COVID-19. A lot of changes have happened since then. So the course, not everybody is through all the material, but it's, we've come to a maybe a watershed now that where we can ask Orlan some questions. So maybe I'll just dive right into it. Yeah, the first thing I want to ask about, so here we are in the U.S. just a few days from an election that is so bitterly polarized, like I've never seen in my lifetime. And it's, and the division of the electorate into two or more than two, even it's almost like separate bubbles of reality that are barely communicating or not even communicating across the divide, not even agreeing on what constitutes a fact. There's almost no basis for agreement. And Orlan, your so much of your teaching is about the power of our agreements. A lot of the questions actually some that came in last night were also about like, what do you even mean by an agreement? But anyway, here we are in this moment of intensely clashing worldviews and value systems and beliefs. So maybe I was going to bring on in a minute or two, I'll bring on Joyce to ask a question along these lines. But maybe if you just have any initial thoughts about our current political moment, I'd really love to hear hear them. Thank you, Charles. You know, thank you for the invitation to be on the call today and to support the questions that this community are asking. Since I received those questions last night, and I said I went into contemplation, I stayed up quite late to prepare for how to share into these questions. And I'll tell you, it's on characteristics of my day that it is now 4 37 p.m. here in California. And my phone has not did not ring all day. And I just wanted to emphasize that when you say, you know, you know how busy I am. Yes, things take over my day when I have to make available my will effort to support different conversations. But when I make my time and my will available for what my higher contemplation is, it prevents the disruptions of the normal day to day reality. It is, I will say, uncharacteristic of my life that my phone did not ring all day. So let's speak something to this space that we are holding and hosting right now because it allows me to understand the collaborative reality behind human destiny and human intention for what we are truly available for. In our political life, we are not, we have not really given the available consciousness space for mutual agreement around what this constitution represents, what the sacrifices have been in service to, and what all the losses of life and community and culture has gone through to make America a probability field for a higher expression of human potential. And so the critical thing is that our politics are driven by the need for more power, more privilege, and not more purpose for holding a larger construct of meaning towards life as it is needed to be expressed on the planet. And only because we have determined that the decision making process will fall into the categories of, of politics we call one side or the other, and not in the wisdom of the fundamental needs, the basic needs that support what human beings live from and create from and strive to attain. We've forgotten those needs and we have shifted to the insatiable wants. And when we organize life around what we want and not what we need, a lot more divisions happen because the forces that then can occupy human consciousness become attached to self-interest at its highest level. And when people keep gaining more and more power or through their self-interest and not through the collective intention of, of engaging what is needed for life, we keep losing the ground of the common good and the common goodwill in making life meaningful. So I would just say that, that the politics is very different from what it used to be in relationship to what the governance of a democracy and to vote only for power and not for purpose is something that we've lost. Yeah, that rings true, like the phrase, the common good, I mean such, such like a basic concept that seems to, like you say it seems to have been lost. I mean people certainly give it lip service but it looks like, because both sides assume that their victory automatically represents the common good, that therefore the most important thing is to fight for their side's victory, which basically means to take power, which is just like George Orwell described in 1984 where the goal of the party is power itself. And an ideology says that our power automatically equates to the public good. But in fact, when you put power first, what suffers the most is the public good. And I think that regardless of which side wins, because winning is more important than anything else, we're going to see a continued erosion of the public good. And I sure hope I'm wrong. Let me bring up Joyce now just to take another angle at this question. And yeah, Joyce, you could just do your original question or maybe whatever is flowing through you right now. So you're welcome to speak. Thank you. Before I ask my question, if I may first express my gratitude, Charles, for offering this to us on this conversation and my gratitude to you, Orland, for sharing your wisdom and granting us this space and then holding this space for us both of you and your whole team of helpers. So thank you very much. My question was originally around the notions of the focus on individualism and self-sufficiency that are so prevalent in this culture. I like the way you're speaking about self-interest versus the needs, the common needs. And my question is in some of your videos, you talked about individually how we might approach this, which is asking how can I be or what is needed of me for this person where they are. But as we move up to a more collective societal level, and we're approaching these conversations, how do we begin to build a common ground for communication around a notion of community and group without falling into the self and other and those issues? How do we begin to speak differently when we're talking at these these group or societal levels? Thank you. Thank you, Joyce, for inviting the question into our conversation. Part of the part of democracy, part of the role of society is to create a space for dialogue, for even discussion, for conversation, even for debate and argument. The idea of me and the other was not to distance myself from, but to create a space for potentizing a center. So the periphery was not so much to be away from the relational objective. The opposition was necessary for cooperating in co-creating and co-tangibilizing a kind of emergent space. It was not doubt of the capacity of the other or willful hate of the other. Dialogue was for the refining of the other, the supporting of the other to come to inspiration. These are things that have been lost in the tradition of dialogue. As it was given to the western mind through the Greek cultural potential that we inherited for a democracy and for certain kinds of western societal frameworks. But we have lost the inner practice of what our words could hold. We've not yet given ourselves permission to hold truthfulness in a way that it will be a source of inspiration for the other to reveal something more of themselves. So part of every person, every individual, why bring it down to the individual level? Because we are the host for a certain kind of reality beyond ourselves. And we magnetize the collective consciousness by being personally responsible for it. I mean in that I am a representative of society from the inner virtues that I developed in my life because those virtues then become a kind of collective dream. If I don't hold it and no one else does, we kind of are left with an awakened space in the collective aspiration. And so part of the power of the mind is that it's a magnifying, amplifying, but it's also a kind of magnetic space which attracts people who are looking for companionship for the same virtue. We are developing the beingness of society in our own inner life. And this becomes felt and it used to be the reasons for festivals. Festivals were a kind of celebration of the common virtue of a culture so that people don't forget that over the centuries and over the many generations, we are inheriting the fundamental purpose for what those who came before us knew. And so the festival life, which is a certain kind of enthusiasm for the greater good that could be, must be felt, must be in a certain way what the founders of this country call self-evidence truth. It's self-evidence that I am the host for the collective consciousness experience. Now we will begin to interact differently. The fact that every human being will interact with someone at some point and that inner preparation of the virtues, which rebuilds a kind of inner resilience to begin to temper and prepare and invite and invest in what could then be shared when the opportunity comes and the opportunity will come. The feeling is that if I'm not prepared then some other force will occupy the space between me and that other human being. The critical part of our institutional life is that when we are interacting, what are we actually engaging to create? And we start with, you know, in our homes and many years ago, you know, I shared in, I was studying human rights, I still do, but when I was studying, they said the person that's most likely to violate your human rights lives in the home with you. Meaning that we even, the ones we love, do not understand the fundamental right to becoming ourselves. People still want to influence us one way or the other, even if they think it's good for ourselves, you know, for us. We don't allow the human being to be in touch with some fundamental needs, which is freedom of thought. Fundament, the first level is, can I be allowed to think who I am and can become and then dedicate that towards society? We do interact and we do have to share, you know, our disagreements from time to time with certain expressions of life. But the purpose of coming into society or societal collective aspiration is that we have to become the hosts for it and it has to be carried through how we live in the day-to-day interactions with others. There's no other way to build society. It's not a big plan. It's our shared experiences. And I have to, in a certain way, invest everything, every time, with everyone that I interact with. I hope that helps. I can't put it beyond myself because I can't control what other people think and do. And I have to have a certain kind of respect for that space. Yeah, I think, I'll be curious to actually re-listen to that, to your words there, Orlin. But one thing that's apparent to me is that the key to unlocking what you said and what you're speaking to is to understand that, in fact, any interaction we have always is with another person. So this distinction between the personal level and the societal level and what do we do, you know, what does it actually mean to say what do we do? Who is asking that question? Even if you're, even if many, many people are asking that question right now, you, Joyce, are asking that question, or I am asking that question. And one thing that Orlin said is that our asking of it is, in fact, asking as a representative of something much larger. So, yeah, anyway, I'll just add that to what Orlin said. Yeah, thank you. And then maybe move on to the next topic, which I planned. The other thing, besides the election, that's on everybody's minds, and has been for quite a while is, of course, COVID-19, which has ironically become another very polarizing issue. One would think that this would be an occasion for all of humanity to come together in solidarity against a common foe. But that hasn't happened. And in fact, the underlying divisions have intensified in the COVID era. So I think actually what I'll do is our friend Whit, Whitaker, he posed a question. And if he's on the call, maybe Marshall, you can put it, or Shabani, maybe you can put them on. And because I thought you, Whit, I thought you expressed an aspect of this question quite well. So why don't you bring that on and yeah. Hello. Yes. Hello. Thank you, Orlin, for putting this together. It's been a great pleasure to engage with the program and then also to enjoy this dialogue. But yeah, my question, well, it's been with me for many months now. But yeah, at the beginning of this in February, I felt this great hope rising in me that we were on the brink of some great turning or an initiation, as Orlin might describe it. And I was very hopeful that there was going to be some big change. And then I felt a great, you know, a couple of months went by and I felt an imperceptible, but a great change and a loss because the narratives hardened and people made up their minds about what was going on. But I wasn't ever convinced that I really knew what was going on and so not so. Anyway, I was wondering if Orlin could speak a bit about the cultural moment here that we are in and get his perspective on that. And then maybe on a much smaller level, I'm just beginning to start to digest what he's been saying about the blood and things on a much smaller level. And I was wondering if he might be willing to speculate a bit about what's actually, you know, perhaps what may going on with, you know, what is this virus that everyone's talking about and our brother COVID or however you want to refer to it and how it might be interacting with us and influencing things in ways unseen. So thank you very much. Willaker, your question was most profound and I had to give it a lot of contemplative time. And one that let me start first with the blood. The human blood is a continuity of the ancient mysteries, meaning that what works within the blood is something far beyond the human being as we know ourselves to be in this form. Right? Our blood is constituted by a kind of wisdom of the power of life in the form that we know it, light in the potential to expand and radiate from the internal power of will and love to carry a shared willingness to make sacred the domain we live in. The domain of existence that we occupy is to become a space of shared experiences. And so ultimately, all of the human potential could become a pandemic, meaning that we will continuously become willing to share more and more of the things that affect the individual. Why? Because the shared space will become the most sacred aspect. It will become our religion in the future. We are far from it now. Religion now separates people because we think we still carry a kind of inheritance in our blood for preferences, for different inner pictures of who we think ourselves to be. But this thinking is becoming more and more refined by what we call the consciousness soul. And outside of the intellect that can give all kind of justifications of how to withhold the agreement powers and the shared understandings that we could refine our realities with, the preferences that we're choosing now is to move towards individuality, to move towards the kind of incarnating of more and more of our self-conscious processes. That is only to go deeper into the unconscious. So the more that I separate from the greater good, I fall more into my unconscious. And there the human being has to now take up initiation. Initiation takes place when we forget the higher aspiration or it occurs when we are separated from the thing that we value the most. One way or the other, on the vertical, on the horizontal level, meaning that if I'm in a space where I'm accustomed to projecting my own needs further and further and further out into the world, at some point that will effort will not be sufficient. I cannot take over the whole world. There is no way possible. The consciousness soul will not allow it. The super conscious will not allow it. However, yes, groups of people could take over large resources of the world as they have. They can take over domains of other cultures as they have. But at a certain point, the initiation reality will occur, meaning a kind of disruption will occur. Whether it occurs as a cultural revolution or it occurs as an inner crisis. That process will happen. From time to time, humanity enters into these states of consciousness that we call pandemic now. At a certain point, these forces that live in our collective unconscious rises up and occupy our blood and occupy our bodies and minds and affect us collectively. But this is a cultivation of a certain kind of predisposition for another stage of evolution and development. Our immune system within the blood communicates far more intelligently than the internet of things. It's not data. The human being's internal mechanisms that work in the blood is not data. It's beingness. It has a collective purpose. It lives within and beyond the reach of the information technology processes that we predict life around. When the collective consciousness or collective unconscious gets stirred, these events emerge into our culture. Then we confront it and we design ways to meet it. We discover new steps in our humanity. That's if the pandemic is naturally evolving to the nature of our blood from the internal mechanisms of consciousness. We know now in cultural stories that we have the technology and we have the data to manipulate nature and introduce into the human consciousness field illnesses that did not arise out of its natural potential. Now the question is, is this one of those unnatural introductions? Because all science says that when it was named the novel coronavirus, when it was discovered to be a new strand of the SARS virus, the world was paying attention in a very different way. When it was given the name COVID, we stopped giving it the level of attention. Now the critical thing in the distinctions of when it was called the novel coronavirus to when it became COVID, meaning that COVID is more a campaign than a virus. It is more the collective intelligence to determine what happens from the time the virus became known to when society begins to organize the response. And do we want to control the response politically, economically, culturally, socially, or do we want to understand the natural predispositions for what the body and the culture can do to grow from this experience into a more resilient expression? Now it is important that people understand when a campaign is added to a natural phenomena and the campaign become the illness and not the virus anymore. So these are the things that as a scientist I look at, more than natural scientists, but I'm also a metaphysician that look at the pattern of things over long periods of time. And one can make the distinction on when something has a natural predisposition and when it has a cultural imposition for what are different purposes that they can serve. And so I'm still asking the questions, when are we going to deal with the virus at a level in which the science that informs what these different kinds of viruses, how they can be treated and what are the best means to protect ourselves. So yeah, it's so complex because now we have different frameworks of culture imposing mental attitudes upon what we should think and feel. The critical thing about fear is that it's a disease of the blood. And if you can keep making people fearful, the blood becomes vulnerable, our immunity becomes suppressed, and different things not only thoughts that could actually create panic, a kind of inner fluctuation of our heart and mind impulses towards the real immunity of our lives. And we then become subjective to suggestions, suggesting suggestions that then become the illness images that then are projected into consciousness. So I've witnessed that there are people who tested negatives but carry all the symptoms of this virus, meaning that they have more a psychological illness than a physical one. And this illness has a tremendous psychological space that it occupies because of the different procedures that have been propagated around it. I'd like to add a little bit to what Orland was saying because it's so consistent with something that I was actually just saying today on an interview where someone asked me the question, what can we learn from previous pandemics to inform our policies in this pandemic? And much like Orland is saying, I spoke a bit about how the significance of this pandemic is as a mirror to our own fear. And it's interesting what Orland is saying also about the blood because COVID-19 is very much a disease of the blood, not fundamentally a respiratory disease as was initially thought, but a lot of the respiratory problems come because of blood clotting and so forth. So basically I said, okay let's look at some past pandemics. The most recent one was the Hong Kong flu in 1968 which killed per capita two to five times more people than COVID-19 has. And what was society's response to it? There weren't masks, there weren't lockdowns. What there was was Woodstock where half a million half-naked hippies got together under very unsanitary conditions and had a gigantic not socially distanced party. So I'm not saying that that was good or bad or that we should do that again or anything like that, but what I'm saying is that the real pandemic here or the real initiation is not actually a function of the virus itself because in light of previous pandemics it's not actually that dangerous, but it is showing us the level of our fear and our willingness to put risk minimization above all else as a society. So it's showing us how fearful we are and so it's really interesting what Orland is saying that fear is a disease of the blood, COVID is a disease of the blood. So yeah it's really interesting to see these different pieces come together here. And I'm just going to move on now to the next question, really shifting gears because like the questions were all over the map. I mean some of them very practical and timely others very esoteric. So here's a few metaphysical questions that I kind of grouped together Orland like to hear your response. I'm just pulling a couple quotes here. One was how do we reconcile an extremely traumatic event if we are living in a world of incomprehensible intelligence, meaning, and love. For example the sudden death of a young child in a freak accident that shatters the lives of those around them. I mean how does that fit in with a loving intelligent universe? Whereas someone else said why is pain part of our experience? And then I'll just throw one more little provocation in there for you. Slightly related the question as a soul in non-human form, why would we be lining up to come to earth for the human experience and you know all this pain and all this trauma like why are we here Orland and what's the meaning of suffering? 10 words or less. Oh wow this is a whole doctrine of response. Appreciate the questions and those who asked them. Let me first talk about speak to the the individuality that comes to earth. What do we come through to arrive born on earth? We come through the wisdom of the the wisdom of the soul meaning there are things that we carry in ourselves that have not yet been revealed even to ourselves that is just part of the agreement structure of the eye. The eye as a host for existence does not live only in existence it lives between existence and nonexistence meaning I'm not my body and not my thoughts I'm not my feelings. I could witness them and at the level of the witness I could arrive at a kind of truthful understanding that I'm here to serve something beyond the form that I am there's a continuity that the witness could come into understanding of that has become the basis of ancient religion and even contemporary transcendent contemplative understandings of reality. So birth is necessitated by a willingness to bear the eye the logos that being which embraces everything from birth and willing to become human to carry the world as it is a child has the predisposition at birth human child at birth has the predisposition for every language every art every science every religion and there's a universal being whose wisdom it is to sensitize it's becoming with those that express love towards it and so the human being at birth becomes aware of another eye and believe that I is expressing the truth and so we have to be honest with ourselves when we give birth to a child in our culture in our community in our family what are we committing to what we are committing that child to dream into if we're clearly transparent and and and honest we will first begin to tell them all of our secrets so that they become truly awake to the responsibility to navigate with us as adults they hire potential because they're closest to it and they're living out of that freedom but we withhold so much from those who love us the most the innocent child who gives pure attention and pure acceptance of its own becoming to be part of our collective this is who the human being is at the heart willing to sacrifice its wisdom and truthfulness to belong to even the hate that we can teach them and so we bear the responsibility with those two actually are born into our own closest intimate space first and that's why yes if that child is taken out of life apparent or a loved one will feel the tremendous tremendous loss why would this innocent being be taken away from life but what would it also mean for that person to live a long long life absent of the full potential of our love full potential of our truthfulness full potential of our own willingness to sacrifice to make a space for the full wisdom to be born these are the these are the the paradoxes around the mind soul process and and we it used to be that all initiations understood that the human being is always in the on the edge between life and death we we live with that mystery in times gone by and now we live with more of the willingness and the hope and the striving to protect life at all costs to prevent dying at all costs and to eliminate the mystery from our lives at all costs and to only deal with the fact and this this you know separation from something that has wisdom in it death our culture can grow a lot more by by holding some kind of not answering because there's no way to answer why that's not that's not so much the purpose of the death the purpose of death is to invite a person to go beyond that with with the awakening of the of the grief process and at the end of appropriate grieving is a kind of joy a kind of insight a kind of revelation of having touched into the continuity of that being on the other side this is the gift of death when we mature our cultural understanding of it it's not a loss as we have always felt it and that feeling can grow I'm just saying don't limit it to the feeling of loss the other side of it is that the human being on this plane of existence is awakening we are awakening and maturing through the blood through the etherization process of the breaking down of the chemistry of what we take in from this planet and what we produce by by good nutrition and and and good exercise and good encounter with each other we transform something that is extremely difficult to live with on earth and it it it if it takes over ourselves it then becomes evil it becomes what we call evil our the light forces the the the forces that that allow us to create the will power to be able to to create what we call miracles to to express through the word all the powers of creation when we only become matter and in certain cases just illness in matter the unconscious habits and such then we don't honor the earth we don't honor the cosmos we don't honor each other because those things are lost so the earth is actually a school as still an initiatory school for consciousness to be able to mature the word that can become every substance meaning the things that we eat has a word nature to them and when the human brain breaks down food we actually you know totally annihilate food and distribute the energy of that food to ourselves the substances most of the substances pass out as ways the energy however in separating all the molecules this is how it's totally extinguish and reconstituted by the word nature of the human being this is what happens in the blood when we eat something it leaves the world and come back as the word makes flesh we can't see into that if we take something and take the blood out and try to look at that the mystery is gone the blood cannot live at its spiritual entity outside of the human beings nature and so there's no science in it natural science for that it has to be spiritual science meaning we have to observe it working in the human being and not outside of the human being and so even our nutrition is misunderstood to a degree that we don't know why we're trying to protect the environment and we can speak back into the environment the things that are being lost but we have to become the magician again we have to become the magi again we have to become the miracle worker again because just thinking about it in the way that we think would not protect this earth well thank you Orland I wouldn't try to paraphrase all that but one little tidbit that comes to me is simply that to try to explain the reason for suffering like why is there suffering in the world is in a way a repudiation of the gift that suffering can bring it's not about coming to an understanding of it in conceptual terms but it delivers a an energy much like food does that is metabolized through the blood and releases light and I've seen you know some of the most radiant people that I've encountered have been people who have suffered terrible loss and and gone through a lot of suffering and some people seem to be broken and destroyed by it and and a shell and other people seem to be full of light after those experiences even including even losing a child okay let's see how are we doing on time okay well we're moving through it slowly um you know there's there's enough people okay gosh wondering which ones I should maybe skip um okay boy there's some really delicious ones I'm gonna skip a little bit though um to um there were there were a lot of people who were kind of curious about about your practices Orland um and and just in general uh one question was was what tools or processes do you do you use Orland when you're not feeling so hopeful what worked and what didn't work uh and I'm not going to ask to answer that right away because I also want to call on Amazon if she's here um because she had a version of that question that felt especially poignant to me so um let's see if we if someone can bring on Amazon from uh coming to us from Costa Rica yes yes yes thank you Amazon yeah let's uh the forum is yours um namaste Orland and blessings to everyone that's here um I've been just gobbling up the conversation with you and Charles and each time I listen to it it sounds familiar which is good um when I wrote this question since I've been listening to the tapes a memory did come back to me and when I was a very young child I used to be able to do what I thought were remarkable things and in fact they were so remarkable I was seeing a psychiatrist by the time I was five because my parents thought there was something really wrong with the child that could think outside of things she was taught so when I began to see it was safer to forget I can't remember a time after about five when there has not been pain in my body and in my soul and the memories that I have I've heard the term D and A sensatory memories so to speak I think of my ancestors and the older I've gotten and try to push the pain down or try to make sense of it that I'm bigger than my body I've become exhausted exhausted because part of me knows that this is not it but the other part of me is like bought into that this is a battle that I have to be part of so I spent a lot of time in meditation and in prayer I do a lot of movement because my body hurts a lot and I spend a lot of time in retreats just retreats I set up for three days for my own just in silence to try to make sense of why I can't be separate why I feel so a part of something that I have been told that I am part of and so it's draining me of my energy how do I reclaim who it is that I am how do I let go of that pain that dogs me all the time every day Amazon it's a great honor to witness the expression of this consciousness that you speak from and carry when I read the question actually I understood the quality of the words to be that of an impact someone who carries not only the feeling predisposition for other people suffering but a kind of resonance field for what could be invoked or evoked to bring in realities that are not yet in this world the empath is not only to carry the suffering in the world but a certain way to prepare for the higher vibrancy of the world and the critical part in this experience is to be in dialogue with those who can help you remember the the the inner wisdom that can allow you to live a little bit beyond the body that suffers so the suffering occurs when the astral penetrates into the physical and the etheric body the life body is not able to carry the creative power that is required to live in a world where there's so much suffering and so this is this is a stage of life that comes in at adolescence most adolescents and of course you you express it at a much younger age so did I at five I witnessed the suffering that I would have to endure and I created a protection for it I created a word process for it very early and observed that if I could keep my prophetic mind awake of the world that is actually trying to become I can be there from time to time and forget this world where everybody suffers so it's having this this process with Dr. W. E. Du Bois called it second sight the capacity to see into beyond the veil where another kind of body carries the hopefulness the joy the vision the prophecies the potentials and then you you learn to build the the the consciousness field to move between the two if you stay in this world conception all the time you will carry the pain because the pain body is the fact that this astral energy that you're able to into it becomes too much carried into physical and the nervous system cannot carry that much future without a relational context or say a kind of preparation of how you will share into the world what your visions are and so adolescents try to to numb it or give it away drug it down but this is a thing about the suffering when you say I feel the pain the person that's saying that is not in pain there's a level in which who is speaking is not suffering the pain you're witnessing the pain and the body is suffering the pain and so there's a way in which the practice is how to move between the witness and the reality that is has inherited the pain to begin to nurture the creative power to overcome it and so part of of the practice that I would do is to say I nurture my creator I nurture the body that creates the power to recreate the body and it only is nurtured by saying I am not my body or saying I am my body and I accept this responsibility to carry it so this is a thing about about which side you can choose the you know the super conscious to say I'm not my body but then when you come back to it the pain is still there or you can start from I this is my body and this is the path of be developing the power to transcend it from its existence level it's the most powerful practice it's actually is the it's supposed to have been the very doctrine of the deep belief of Christianity that you carry the body because it carries the world and that's the willingness to learn how to bring love and light and life into it by using the eye using the spiritual bodies to recreate it this is not belief it is actually a cognitive feeling and it's a discipline that most people are coming to because it's our future more and more people are feeling it at different stages of life but some people choose to forget it some people choose to to numb it with other kinds of experiences and yet it's knocking at the door of humanity's future and we have to let this soul consciousness in but our ancestors have prepared it we're gonna say ancestors the experience of those who were enslaved Africans who were enslaved prepare a body that can actually carry this predisposition for a certain inner intelligence for empathy and in order to divine certain futures we we have to learn how to move the feeling all the way to the witness it's far more complex than I'm sharing now but I hope we can keep some communication with you because the pain is real and it's not a recommendation to avoid it it has to be learned how to be carried thank you thank you very much Amazon yeah yeah there's a lot in what you said that's going to really stay with me just that observation that the eye that says I feel pain is not the same that is feeling the pain just to to contemplate that and to apply it to all kinds of pain physical pain emotional pain I could see how that would already give birth to a lot of practices and I also resonate with your description of of the empath and empathy not only for the pain of the world but also an empathic resonance with positive futures like if you can feel the pain of the world you can also feel the pain of the future or the joy of the future like it's all available it's I would share that this is the more of a on an everyday social level you know being around friends who who want to get high you know they're smoking weed and and some of them begin to tell me orland you're like you have to stay away from being close to us because we can't get high with you around because at a certain way my witnessing attention to to they're not being high bring them there they're inspired you know like the inspiration is so it's higher than the high and they can't get high and so I used to be banned from from hanging around them when they want to just have their social time because it's a reminder that there's something more than that for the reality that we're in and so yeah it's it's it's just this is just the way of of empathy is that we allow people to carry the higher expression of who they are okay so let's see um yeah there's there's one uh let me go get to that let's see let me let me go back to uh there's there's there's quite a few people who asked what might be called more esoteric questions and they're basically asking you to comment from the perspective of especially of West African and South African Gnostic traditions um about like popular esoteric topics like angels ascended masters extraterrestrial intelligences um uh Atlantis people have asked you know is there any notion of Atlantis Atlantis in these traditions um and what are the differences maybe or even more importantly the similarities between European Gnostic and African Gnostic traditions uh just like is there anything I know I know you looked at those questions last night so was there anything that you wanted to share about um in answer to those questions yeah I I reserve some of these these discourses for um people who are practitioners of those kinds of explorations one because when you make contact with any conception of an entity the qualities of that entity gets released because contemplation or or even speculation is access to them and one has to be careful how you conceptualize um entities whose powers could reach the human mind just by thinking about them and talking about them without the right preparation in order to protect ourselves from them it's important don't think a youtube live youtube live stream is enough preparation well are you given the fact that they're hanging out with you child I would take the risk to say a few things in that the the human being is a host for powers far beyond our say reality of identity and so those who are called ascended masters or those who are avatars for certain other states of consciousness that that have been protected from the the everyday kind of encounter unless you're training to be these typos of these pathways of development but now that we yes as you said we have the internet everything is accessible in terms of information and then we could actually discern from there whether that could become a practice in our lives but yes these realities are there for human beings to interact with when we we're guided by some invisible impulse it used to be what we call the imagination so imaginative knowledge was the first level of of access to these realms that we call the mysteries right um they were always important to know that that unless you were an artist you could not go to the next level of of um apprenticeship with those who are choosing to be invisible because of the powers that they hold and the imagination was the first level of willful or say um creative expression to be able to go there and everyone has you know imaginations for so many things that um for some still remains beyond the real they only have images and then the impressions that those images reveal to us but beyond that is the realm of inspiration and so when we give imagination to these realms towards the mysteries some being in that realm occupies our imagination and provides inspiration they now become able to guide us towards this inner feeling of truth that it can then lead us all the way to the revelation of that being in full full presence and but the first stage of before that revelation is a kind of intuition the signature gets revealed to the heart mind that this is who is guiding you to universal truth so unless we get to the intuitive level some of these beings are not um accessible in the full power of their reality and so no sys was the procedure by which we become familiar with the beings who could guide you to the highest level of initiation and um often it's prepared by elders of a community of memory who know the the protocol for building the imagination mostly through stories and through fables and through different kinds of mythos to prepare the mind to believe in states of consciousness that we have not yet understood and then the inspiration is that you already have to do certain tasks and do it willfully and willingly to to build a kind of inner fire um or say to build to bring into the blood the the processes that will allow those inspirations to not affect our organs in any let's say negative way and so the the body had to be prepared to receive certain levels of substances because when those beings are revealed they're revealed to our organs not only psychologically or mentally but physically as well we become a host now for them being in our lives and that process then gets developed more intuitively in being able to call on them through their esoteric the esoteric code that is then in only in the truthfulness of our aspiration and not only our speculation yeah this this is um bearing a lot of parallels to chinese Taoism and Taoist alchemy uh we have a book around the house about the eight immortals and they're these um so there's on one level there are like these uh broadly propagated folk tales that Patsy in fact heard growing up as a child in taiwan that are maybe the first stage of a preparation and then in the the folk tales you'll have these in these stories of of encounters with essentially ascended masters Taoist immortals you know who were once human or in some sense still are but they are only accessible if you yourself are in a certain state of sincerity and then they'll give you practices that are sometimes literally about as you were saying about building an inner fire and bringing substances into the organs and there's it's it's it's all um very very much parallel to to what you're describing in you know in here's a totally other hermetic tradition of china and yet there's still a lot of similarity to what you're describing and this kind of leads me to i hope i haven't misrepresented anything you're saying here yeah yeah but it leads me to to another question here and then after that i want to bring another person on um but maybe this one won't take too long to answer but it's related you know the idea of well you need a teacher and and so there's a question here um you know what do you sense and think about the phenomenon of master and student in times of profound transition like we are experiencing especially given all of the recent debacles and and fallen gurus and like yeah what what do we need to know about a teacher and that relationship on the path of development in these times yeah yeah i i think that that that path is pretty much complete one because we no longer just developing um and nor from a level of knowledge that has to be transferred from someone who has gone ahead and have learned enough about the path no that can still work if if we're if we have the reverence for the path and not the person and the critical thing about the two is that they they um the pupil is to support the teacher from to reach further in terms of their own process of development so the teachers never finish learning and becoming and the student was they was the certain way the the one who reminded the teacher of the next phase of the teacher's development so the student is also a teacher this is how the intellect was developed as a pathway for knowledge here is now we're developing a pathway for truth the pathway for truth is that we don't require knowledge in the same way because the the the precondition is actually for futures to come and give us realities that we we are too far too complex to be taught how to do it is a kind of improvisation creation out of love for that future and love actually has the the the valence of a level of creativity that we have not yet demonstrated in our civilization to be able to to do because we think it's just for the sentiment of receiving something yes but we receive powers far greater than than self interest and so the path is hidden until we love it enough then it's revealed itself so the the the being that that now has to be the source of teaching us meaning that we have to bring a certain humility to ourselves that we're not seeking it we're sourcing it very different feeling because the the sourcing it becomes that at any point given the circumstances I could decide for something that I don't know I don't know and it it often occurs with those who really willing to make a sacrifice for someone else's well-being and then they're given how to do it right you don't need a plan uh at the outset and in fact the the kind of things that we can do according to plan none of them are actually big enough to accomplish what needs to be accomplished right now right and and most who could teach so much are actually doing it anonymously because they prefer the the freedom of the other to be intact more so than they being revered for some profound knowledge yes it's important that the freedom of the other be supported just as much I heard a beautiful story from a man who is just down in the dumps and walking down the street really grumpy and and down on life and he's walking down the street and this this uh aggressive panhandler says hey can I borrow your phone and just like you know really rudely asking him to borrow is like like you know since when do you take your iPhone and hand it over to to a panhandler you know but the guy for some reason he did it he hands it over to the to the disheveled uh you know a beggar uh homeless person and the the the guy takes looks at the phone hands it right back to him and says right on brother live live brother doesn't even use the phone it reminded me of these fairy tales where a beggar woman comes up and asks the third sister or something for for her piece of bread and she does so it's like there's and then this beggar woman turns out actually to be a holy being and so this is kind of maybe an example of these anonymous teachers that take a guys very different from the you know guru and his white robes and it's like the the the guru function has been diffracted out uh into the person of of millions of humble people on this earth and maybe all of us at some moment embody that in a particular relationship to somebody else where there's something speaking through us that we're participating in that in that moment we are actually serving that distributed guru function okay let me uh um just move on here um yeah there's one really touching um uh an honest question um uh I did not write down her name but but let's see here so maybe she didn't want to be maybe I didn't write down because she didn't want to come on well I'll read it out loud to you and yeah yeah then then we'll yeah I think it's a good timing for this she says I would love to know if you intend your words to be shared or felt on a felt heart level and if what arises for that in me is valid like it will be different for each person perhaps uh uh are you concerned to get one meaning across when I'm listening to you I'm not quite sure if I really understand what you were saying exactly like the communication requires a different kind of synthesis then again I worry that perhaps I'm just lacking in intelligence to fully understand which makes me feel like the cripple child who got left behind in the story of the pied piper sad sorry I feel like I haven't quite nailed the question but I think it's about communication because your message is not talking about tangibles and absolutes I feel like I will start to unravel a little as I am listening emotions are stirred but I'm not sure understanding is or may more more specifically the same understanding that you have does that matter so um yeah I I read that was the most beautiful question and um is that Rachel was that you Rachel yes yeah hi okay so yeah sorry I just said your question hello do you want to add to that well thank you first of all um and I'm actually really relieved that you read it out because I've been sitting here feeling like I'm I'm on a different planet from the time when I wrote that question only two days ago and I I think that what has been happening and I've been speaking to a dear friend of mine who when I spoke about the question with her she really resonated and had the same experience as a child of listening to people and feeling your brain kind of sending out tentacles expanding to understand and then snapping back and ending up feeling like you couldn't tell what the person had said but you know that something has changed in you that there's a real felt emotional communication and so I just I think wanted to ask all and if um it's important to understand the incredible intellectual component of what you say because I've got to listen to everything 10 times um to feel like I understand but at the same time I know that there's I feel like I've been changed in some way from the heart feeling level and if that's okay if that's if it's important to understand the words as well if that makes it yes thank you it makes all the sense in the world to understand but that will come from your effort meaning I am not transferring an understanding to you I'm actually creating a gap in the space that's often the intellect occupies so that the heart could become engaged there's in this process of gnosis that I've been initiated to carry the the field from which I speak is not limited to this world so to speak this framework of referencing knowledge I'm speaking to the knower that you are I'm speaking above knowledge yeah I even after I speak it I've actually relieved myself of it that is no longer necessary for me to even repeat it because I can find other words for it and always find other words for it um for myself that is not even important for me to repeat my understanding it's a sacrifice to let it go so that the human being could be free in recreating it in their own image and likeness of understanding and in freedom to be able to use it above and beyond what I knew I was speaking about and so you will do more with what I said than I could in your understanding of it because it comes with love for your understanding of it as well which often I can't give to myself I get to myself the freedom to relieve myself of it but it's in service for a capacity in you that will recreate it not only in understanding but in the wisdom of your hearts knowing and in the truth of your soul knowing something new comes into the world that I did not say and it's important that that step happens because reverence for the human being on this level allows this light field that we carry in our soul interaction to become the host of something that is above we call the wordless understanding the wordless space and this is where I you know I mentioned earlier the infant human child when the child is looking into your eyes the child is speaking a language that is not heard but felt and every parent knows how to communicate with the child beyond word every parent knows that intuitive playing because it is actually so much a kind of intuitive certainty that this human being is meaning to communicate and then we grow up and we become dependent upon words with specific definitions and specific you know and I I try to dissolve that part before I even speak it the ideas I imbue it with a sense of reverence for how it would be recreated in your understanding how I do this I forgotten because I did it since I was a child you know I kept that purpose of it and you know I practiced poetry since I was a child practice reading and reciting poetry because I did not want to finish the poem by giving it a meaning and so I could read it all day and it's new every time and so my mind poeticus poeticus is this level where I I hold myself responsible for making what I say new all the time but it's not new like just you know another phrase it is because my spirit is witnessing the interaction between you and I and yes in your thing you said everybody every person experiences it different that is the nature of what in the christian tradition called pentacos the the wits and when in which the holy spirit distributed a field of energy in which people who spoke different languages also experienced a shared understanding and so I I did it when I was in high school with with friends who were speaking only french I would just sit among them and I would communicate wordlessly and they got me they got the fact that I understood them without language and and and it didn't matter that we did not speak even if in the silence we've shared more if we could just get to the real silence and maybe that's best for for our political discourses that we just go and have a tongue-all in silence and figure out if we say more than when we speak well I'm just giving it some some levity there but in a certain way it's profound the profound space and it's not that you know and I sometimes people feel what I don't understand you know what you said in a certain way well the contemplation of it will bring far richer understanding yeah but thank you so much for asking Rachel if there's any consolation to you often I have to also listen multiple times to particular clips to understand them and what I experience is what exactly what Roland is saying that the effort I put into understanding it is itself a kind of a ceremony actually that bears fruit that may be totally independent of what Roland consciously intended to communicate so basically take home message is just do your best and and there will be treasure yeah thank you so Roland we're kind of we we're at about 90 minutes now just just want to know if you do you want to answer one more or do you want to wrap it up what's where how are you doing yeah I'm I'm I'm good to go if if there's one more that that makes sense for you yeah I think there's one more just to take it back to something a bit practical uh yeah I maybe would invite Shivani on to ask because a lot of people have asked this like you know can you give me a practice what should I do how do I work with this what is how do I do ceremony better there's a lot of really interesting questions that we didn't have time to get to but Shivani has a little bit about that so Shivani do you want to pose your question yeah thank you first I just want to deep bow to both of you for being here and the sangha because we're calling you forward yeah so my question Erlen was about moving from doing attentiveness to actually being attentiveness and in my reflection around this I realized I practice a komi which is like mindfulness somatic psychotherapy and with clients I started to recognize there was something really different happening in the relational field between myself and the client that I wasn't experiencing anywhere else and when I sat and contemplated it I recognized oh it's attentiveness but it felt like attentiveness like sourced from compassion there was just such I had such a deep caring that somehow I was able to leave sort of leave me and just completely deeply care for them and so then my question came about like you know like as in ceremony sometimes I could like be attentive and just sort of mechanically do the rituals versus really being there and being embodied in the intent attentiveness so the question is like how do we do go from doing attentiveness to being attentiveness and is that like moving that attentiveness through the heart yeah thank you the question leads to a framing around consciousness that is called metamorphosis and so you don't move from one step to the other it's one thing that becomes the other so when we give attention attention reveals its own nature to us which is receiving intention so attention then when given becomes intention and then that intention becomes attention on a higher level and then that becomes intention on a higher level and so the being becomes available through the giving of attention and it incarnates into its host which is attention all the powers of intention the nature of a being is intention it's always itself in expression but without some receiving vessel which is human attentiveness we don't become human at the level in which we're purely intention even without effort and so the critical practice in the stage of consciousness that we have evolved to in the western tradition of mind is that attention heals all that we have inherited as the mind bringing higher soul forces into access and higher spiritual forces into access and so this is a path of development that Gerta introduced and he shared in many many respects the science of observation of the eye becoming revealed through attentiveness hosting it and so there is no big practice other than giving attention to the everyday things in the world whatever you're doing do it with reverence and this being will the beings between you and the thing that you are engaging with will be revealed and it's important to allow this dialogue between the what's given and what's not given which is in the eye we give ourselves permission to enter into the eye that gives itself freely to become a being in the world and this fundamental practice could lead to becoming human at a level in which we are not carrying in the inherited world as finish but we are coming into a place of real beginnings yeah this this material yeah I would just say that that compassion is what's been the recommendation by the Buddha to say if we if we hold in contemplation the suffering of the world and it's it's it leads us completely to a being who whose wisdom it is to know how to support that suffering yeah this is some of the core material that's in the yeah I can't remember which session it's in but this this this idea that has come up a few times in the material that the world is not made by which Orlin means not already made but that the process of creation is ongoing and through the animating force of attention which is on some level the only power that we have and the only choice we can make what to pay attention to so to recover that power is as Orlin was saying fundamental I can't remember the words you used but like fundamental basic practice underlying everything else and that was in one of the questions that I read with Charles in which I think was Amazon's question where there's a feeling of powerlessness and in that say in that space is actually all levels of freedom to to to actually imbue a level of creativity that does not require power it's a space in which which the the inner preparation is actually more prophetic that I will I will live beyond my given form and knowledge so Orlin do you have I do want to respect your time and everybody else's time but is there any anything that we didn't get to everything is there anything that was that's present in your mind that you really were hoping to share with us that you haven't gotten to and would you like to wrap up with any any final message yeah I would say something about this election time coming in it's not it's not an election only of of a president of the United States what what what this voting what this showing up process is generating because at the beginning of this year in the phenomenal from a phenomenological study of what what is what are the energies of the world feeling like as as Whitaker had shared earlier other beings are working towards what we are aspiring to host as world destiny and so exercising the vote is not only for this country's part in the world but also to to become quite aware that we are trying to liberate creativity to be able to meet the the global challenges that are very complex but we are here to do it and one of the questions pointed that you know the the the regenerative power requires you know the earth can only sustain two billion people well that is not so if we if we're calculating it with data our data might tell us that but the earth is not about data the earth is about powers that that's far more creative than we are allowing it to to host but we have to begin to experience inwardly that when we decide to exercise our will effort that it has to go towards the greater need and not towards self-interest or or for political preference and this is an opportunity this is really an opportunity in this year to bring more into our creative will for what this planet could be in sacred hospitality for yes thank you um I uh um trying to get myself back on here um yeah so much to say I agree with you about the um capacity of the earth I wrote about this in my climate book that everybody on earth lived in North American lifestyle then two billion is already too many and if everybody lived like a traditional Bangladeshi villager then 15 billion could be supported and even more if we are aligned with the forces of life on earth instead of fighting them all the time um and yeah thank you for those words about the election and um for affirming the feeling that I think many of us have that they're the forces at play here are well beyond mere political forces that there are in a way uh dueling archetypes or even dancing archetypes and just so many ways to to because because if I get lost too much in the strictly political level of it things feel pretty hopeless so um yeah I'm grateful to you for for pointing that out and um any uh any final words uh deep gratitude to Shivani and and perhaps for yeah giving giving support to our conversation and Charles thank you this has been um tremendous year to to begin the year in conversation with you the way we did and I'm glad that it could be shared in this community so thank you for hosting me yes thank you so much Roland um thank you Patsy and everybody thank you everybody for putting your attention uh onto this call and onto our our online course um so hopefully we'll have you back at some point uh yes for for more other so yeah blessings to all blessings thank you thank you so I just want to let all of you know that our streaming has officially ended much yeah yeah we had more time Patsy I would have asked you to ask a question because I know you really want to but oh actually I don't I actually you were wrong at this time again oh that it was so rich you know thank you yes yes thank you so Marshall thank you for hosting and yeah thank you have a beautiful night good night everybody have a good night yeah thank you