What Did She Hear Cont'd-3
This is the third monthly installment of eight of our ongoing fanciful story about the Estes Park Assembly.
(We left off with, “One day Ramey would look back and decide if there were ever such a thing as a “calling”, then on that day, at that hour, Ramey was called.”)
And now she found herself sitting in a seminar, listening to the most extraordinary words she had ever heard. These words were so large, they broke the boundaries of all she had ever believed about life.
As the week progressed, Ramey experienced herself rumbling and grumbling and shifting as though something didn’t set right in her stomach, although she knew it wasn’t physical. She ran the gamut of human emotion, from fear to confusion to elation. And yes, she felt sick at times. What she was hearing was so unnerving that something almost solid felt expunged from her soul. She felt it go and stood on the nothingness it left behind.
By the end of the week, she felt obliterated, beaten up, beaten down, rearranged. She couldn’t see the tectonic plates shifting in the deepest, most secret part of herself—tectonic plates that were about to move in a very profound and fundamental way, causing Ramey to lose her footing in life. But in the process of finding balance once again, she would finally know the truth—that she was more than what she thought she was. In fact, she was not even fully human. No one was. One day, Ramey would earn a greater ease of access to that “more” as a regular source of guidance. And the idea of humans as demigods greatly appealed to the Leo side of her nature.
But no matter how she thought of them, it took her breath away every time she brought to mind the idea of this “more”, causing a thrill to simultaneously race up her spine—and she brought it to mind often—like trying to relive some sexual act participated in with someone for which mad love, for a time, steals all your thoughts and dreams, all your hopes and wishes and tucks them squarely in the back pocket of mad love’s obsession.
The people who attend this school, Ramey discovered, had a different take on human endeavors which strive for their highest expression. He (Jesus) told them, 'The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables.” This applies to human conduct also. While the outside world hears, “Don’t steal” as “Don’t cheat on their taxes, don’t steal from work, etc”, the people in this organization read the same words but they bring them inside. What happens out there is secondary. They look to find the real thief—the one that steals vitality with repetitive thoughts, vindictive thoughts, petty thoughts. They do their work in the dark. And while her church had told Ramey “what”—what she should be, how she should act, this organization gave her the “and here’s how you do it”—how to get there. One day, any attribute you would apply to a great person would apply to Ramey. She would come to express many attributes in her life such as “honor”, “dignity”, “character”, that her mother’s world professed to be the proud expert representatives of.
Sacrifice, also, took on a whole new picture. There are martyrs that sacrifice their lives for the sake of others. Holy men and women sacrifice comfort for hardship and service. Our movies depict heroes who save the world but die in one flamboyant gesture of sacrifice. But the sacrifice that goes on here in the dark is much more like tending to a constantly running snotty nose. It’s a daily grind, a thankless job of watching thoughts, of relentlessly inquiring into one’s own motives, rooting them out and burning them on the altar of sacrifice, of using the methods taught here to revamp their universe. The achievement is “NOT” to effect some sacrifice that’s hard where you force yourself through will power. The achievement is when sacrifice disappears and the task is accomplished with ease. And Ramey always did like “easy”. She discovered that if you ARE honor (not honorable— but “honor”), it is easy to express honor.
She understood this to be another one of those paradoxes. However, this one was explainable by the influence on perception of preconceived ideas. She understood her classes to be telling her that when her viewpoint becomes less and less personal, what is regarded as aspects or attributes of truth, consciousness or being cease to be aspects and begin to meld into one another, making them indistinguishable from each another. Just as white incorporates the entire color spectrum, truth or consciousness house all the aspects of themselves as one beingness. At a certain level, emotion is just one version of thought and thought but one version of being. At that point, behavior will be honorable because nothing else is possible. Ramey didn’t think you had to have a perfect soul to reach that level of ease, either, or to stay there—only a sufficient enough connection to the good internally. Perfection was a childish concept that ego used to demand of others but never itself.
(Check back next month for the next installment.)