There are further clues as to what these lessons are:

Many people have written to ask me about "wanting knowledge." It seems to them that the gaining and gathering of knowledge is an STS activity.

Then, of course, there is the question of making "leaps" as described above - wanting to "skip over" the 3rd density part and go right back to where all is wonderful and happy and peaceful. One has to realize that this sort of thinking is more deeply STS than it might at first appear because, in the end, what is wanted is to escape the hard work of learning the lessons of this density. What is wanted is "ease and comfort" and no work. They want to sit in circles, contemplate their navels and chant "ooooommmm," while bombarding the planet with their "unconditional love and light" so that everybody else will get with THEIR program, and we can all go home NOW! (Note that "their program" contradicts the "unconditional" nature of the love and light they send!)

But still, we must talk about what it is we are supposed to be DOing here. What is the point of communicating with the Cassiopaeans or any other source, for that matter, if we are just supposed to be here and learn and do until we have learned and done it all?

This idea of being on a "learning cycle" and the progress being determined by events and circumstances is made a little clearer in the following:

This seems to be a crucial key to our understanding of the events and manifestations of our lives. "Once one is aware, ALL conforms to that awareness." What does this mean, really?

Colin Wilson wrote the introduction to Linda Moulton Howe's book Glimpses of Other Realities in which he noted:

Like Colin Wilson, my own introduction to the UFO phenomenon was a powerful experience (described in Amazing Grace). I was not only a skeptic about folks seeing "little green men" in strange craft that could appear and disappear - or even appear to only half of a given group of people at the same place and time - I was perfectly contemptuous of it!

But, I don't want to get sidetracked onto that issue just now; I want to deal with the learning of the lessons of 3rd density, or the "simple understandings" that the Cassiopaeans have noted as the "prerequisite" for "graduating" to 4th density.

Colin Wilson noted above that "Our narrowness hypnotizes us into passivity." Is that really the case, or is our narrowness the result of a sort of hypnosis? The Cassiopaeans say this: that we have been "programmed" through DNA manipulation, to be able to only perceive a limited band of the reality in which we live and move and have our being.

As noted on another page on this website, there is a funny thing about hypnosis that illustrates this point and I will include it here:

I have received a number of curious reactions to this story, one of which is that people understand it to mean merely the "presence of spirits" in the world being "masked" from us by our belief systems. This is a sort of "partial awakening" to "other realms," as Colin Wilson described above when he made his remark about psychic phenomena. But the implication is far deeper than that. If you take away the scene in which the story is portrayed, leaving only the "third man" and the observer, you can extrapolate that this represents ALL of the phenomena of our world. We see a flower, but we are hypnotized as to how to perceive it. We see clouds, but we are hypnotized as to how to see them. We don't really KNOW what the true reality is. We don't really know what an "essential flower" looks like. What we are seeing is OUR interpretation of a series of waves or fluctuations of the MEDIUM of our reality, which we interpret according to our "program."

The next important thing about the story is that, depending on the program, different people can attribute different "hidden forces" to the phenomena presented, according to their belief systems. But, what is the OBJECTIVE reality?

Each and every human being perceives the Third Man according to their programming which activates or is activated by their belief system. This is their "State of Awareness." They can only be aware of what they BELIEVE they can be aware of, and all else becomes either "invisible" or "anomalous" and disregarded or covered up by the survival program of the subconscious mind.

As one continues to think about this problem, one realizes that there is a possible HUGE gap between what we perceive as real and the actual objective reality... and no matter how we try to be objective, we can never be sure. The only thing that seems to offer a way out is to simply observe the phenomena and compare the perceptions with a lot of other folks and try to narrow down the "constant" that is present in all of them. In this way, we can have a closer idea of what the Third Man REALLY is, and what he is REALLY doing, and what then, should be our best response. And, of course, "observing phenomena" means, in its most literal sense, to gain and gather knowledge of every form and sort so that one has a sufficient database from which to draw conclusions about observations of one's environment.

But, this is difficult to do because one's beliefs are intimately tied to emotions! Remember: our beliefs are formed in emotional situations of interactions with our parents and other "authorities" of our infancy and childhood! It is very frightening to even contemplate breaking free of this safe, inner "environment."

But, that is exactly what we must do.

Otherwise, we find ourselves in a reality where all sorts of anomalous things will be going on around one... observable in classical and quantum terms... but the objective raison d'etre will be unavailable for contemplation. One will be UNABLE TO SEE the "Third Man," and will then be subject to the whims and inclinations of said "personage," whoever or whatever he REALLY IS!

So, it seems that the REAL problem is the conflict between SUBJECTIVE and OBJECTIVE reality. On many occasions the Cassiopaeans have remarked about the nature of Service to Self - the tendency to live in "Wishful Thinking." This is discussed in a most interesting way in the following extract:

We note in the above extract, a very clear distinction between Service to Self and Service to Others in terms of SEEING. The former is SUBJECTIVE and sees only what it wants to see, the latter is OBJECTIVE and sees ALL.

What can this really mean? What about all the teachings of the present time that "You create your own reality?" The Cassiopaeans have just said:

I have tried to convey to many people the amazing changes in my own life as a result of the change in my awareness - the burning away of what I had believed, or wanted to believe about our world for so many years.

What I have had difficulty describing is the completely NEW feeling that the universe has for me. It is truly like I went from a completely different universe to the one I presently occupy, and all the rules are different - commensurate with my awareness. As I gained more and more knowledge about the way things worked, I began to apply it to all that I experienced in my daily life. This brought about many changes because I made different choices about things than the choices I would have formerly made. Yes, many of these choices were based on "things unseen," things that went against the standard, indoctrinated cultural view of our world with which we are brainwashed by our society, and many of these choices were simply incomprehensible in ordinary terms. But, the fact is, I made them, acted on them, and the results were nothing short of amazing! I was learning to read the "subtle clues" about the world and the interactions of people that are "veiled" from us. And these clues were well beyond the usual "psychic impressions" of your standard metaphysical maven, I can tell you!

So, what I want to do here is present some of the material that helped me to understand about the "clues" and "signs" that our environment gives us; the "signposts" that point in different directions which constitute our moments of decision; and our decisions based on what we believe to be true at a given moment; all of the things that helped me "change my reality," so that I truly understood what the Cassiopaeans meant when they said:

One of the first things that happened to clue me in on some of these things was a strange incident that occurred while I was waiting to pick up my daughter from school one day. I was sitting in the car in the parking lot of the high school and watching all the kids pour out of the building and do all the things that kids do when they get out of school. I had been following this schedule for some time, and every day I was witness to these strange rites and rituals of American Teenagers.

One thing I was aware of by the many things my daughter had talked about regarding the kids of today, was the extreme factionalization, or cliques that form in the schools. This has always been the case to one extent or another, but in today's world, it seems to be even more pronounced than ever.

In my high school, it was more or less an "economic" division that led to a social structure and manifestation that then led to a social "designation." This> was pretty easy to understand and it had its reflection in real life, to some extent.

But, today, it is all different. Nothing is so clear-cut (which is not to say that the "clear-cut" system of the past was desirable!) The groups and cliques that form in modern highschools are something else altogether. I was fascinated by the changes and curious about why it was so, and what were the essential, underlying dynamics.

My daughter informed me about the gangs, the "Crips" or whatever; the "style groups," such as Preps, Jocks, Loadies, Gothics, and so forth. One thing that seemed clear to me was that economics had very little to do with any of it. A child of a well-to-do family was as likely to be a member of a gang, or a "Gothic" as a child of a poor family. Drugs were common across ALL of the groupings. And, being a virgin didn't seem to be one of the things that made you belong to one group or another as it did when I was in high school. The number of kids doing well in school also seemed to have dropped to an all-time low level.

So, there I was, watching these kids pour out of the many entrances to the school, forming groups and cliques - each gravitating to their own "kind" to hang out and exchange - what?

What were they REALLY doing?

In the weeks prior to this event, I had been having some interactions with people who presented themselves as "lightworker" types, but who were later revealed through funny coincidences to be quite the opposite. Through these experiences I had thought of the idea of "turning off the sound" and just LOOKING at the dynamics. They were so busy saying this and saying that and trying to make a good impression by convincing me and others of their good intentions with their words, yet when you looked at the effects they had on the lives of other people, as well as the dynamics of their own personal lives, something was just wrong! It was sort of like the saying: "They talk the talk but don't walk the walk," only it was much deeper and more subtle than that.

Then, one day I was reading some primate studies - you know, Jane Goodall and all that - and I realized that the methods of observing chimpanzees might be very useful for observing human beings. By watching and not being confused by words, one had a much better chance of actually figuring out what was going on.

So, there I sat, watching these kids and I thought about applying these primate study guides to them. I noticed some funny things about their body language, who touched who and how and where, how they positioned themselves in relation to one another, and suddenly I realized that I was watching them FEED on each other! It was one of the most truly bizarre insight I have ever had. I could actually see a sort of "pecking order" and that energy was being transferred from one person to another to another - and there was always one, in every group of 5 to 10 kids, who seemed to be the "dominator" in terms of all the energy being transferred to that one person in the end.

Not only that, but after so many minutes, I noticed that some of the kids in the groups, small and weak looking ones, would be sort of "tossed aside," or rejected as "sources of energy," and they would slump as though all the "juice" had gone out of them, and drift away looking tired and defeated. And, I noticed that the "dominator" actually seemed to SWELL and stand taller and look wider and fuller after a few minutes of being fawned over, touched and so forth. There were also "selected" persons who the "dominator" would fondle in one way or another, as though tapping a battery and taking the juice out of it. Shades of The Matrix!

Well, that was a pretty interesting revelation. So, I started doing this a LOT. I would watch people interact with one another to try to determine what the dynamics actually were. It was always better if I could hear NOTHING that they were saying, just observe them from a distance without them knowing that I was watching. And, sure enough, it was a pretty standard thing. In every situation, there was a sort of "feeding" of energy going on.

Then, I started observing married people, trying to determine who was the "dominator," not in OUR terms, but in terms of who was getting the energy. Curiously, as often as not, it was the one who might have been thought the "weaker" or more helpless of the two - the one who evoked the most sympathy! I then started to think about sympathy and pity in different terms altogether. I was seeing that it was truly a manipulation to get more "juice."

Was this evidence of some STS hierarchy? Do the dominators dominate their little "groups" and absorb energy from the members and then get abducted and "milked" for the juice they have collected? It is an interesting conjecture of how these things actually might work.

At any event, these observations led to some interesting thoughts that I will share, though remember that they are just conjectural. I have never, in a conscious, awake state, seen an alien - either a Gray or a "Lizzie." I HAVE seen a UFO, a 300 foot wide black boomerang, directly over my head while I was in the pool with the kids who also saw it. I DID suffer very strange physical symptoms for almost a year after this sighting which were later suggested to me to have been radiation poisoning, but at the time I was such a skeptic that I was convinced that I was just suffering from severe allergies and overwork.

It seems to me that the majority of humans neither know nor suspect anything about a "deeper reality"; they are, for all intents and purposes, hypnotized. They lives lives of "quiet desperation," providing a "feast" for other people, or even "aliens."

They seem to have "pre-programmed thought loop implants" that, no matter how much logic or reason you use to persuade them to open their minds, they hold strongly to an emotional, subjective agenda and belief system. "Debunkers" and "disinformation artists" fall into this category. They don't even realize that they are "agents" and would be utterly horrified if one could ever convince them of it, or even show reasonable circumstantial evidence that it was so. The fact is, they are "programmed" with their belief systems about the "Third Man" and they believe it because the WANT to. And that "wanting" is, of course, their choice.

There are others who have the potential and inner nature to become aware. The aliens probably abduct these also, but, because of some "law" that must exist in their realm, they cannot just kill them to eliminate them as a threat. So, they implant them with devices designed to direct their thoughts toward self-destruction, or into useless pathways and senseless speculations, and also to manipulate their emotional states so that when they begin to get close to a truth or to some knowledge formulation, they can be obfuscated by their own emotions. Breaking through these control programs is an enormous task.

A lot of things can happen in these situations. Either the person learns to move through these states of obfuscation, or they become fixated in them and are lost. These emotional states can involve likes and dislikes, positive and negative perceptions of an emotional sort that have nothing to do with any true reality.

People can be emotionally driven to marry inappropriately so that the marriage partner becomes the controller and energy vampire; people can be emotionally driven to desire something so much that they completely are lost in their desire and will create all sorts of mental rationalizations that they use to convince themselves that what they are doing is appropriate and leading them to knowledge when it is really just another illusion.

Seemingly synchronous events can be created and presented to the individual to persuade them that what they are doing or thinking is along the correct path because the very universe has "confirmed" it for them thereby.

The manipulations and variations are endless, incredibly deep, and cunning beyond all understanding. And, it was a HORRIBLE thing to see! I understood that nearly all of humanity is merely FOOD. They are controlled and manipulated from birth to the grave just as depicted in the movie The Matrix, only they are not "batteries" for some computers that have run amok and taken over the world - they are literal physical and energic food for beings at higher densities . And, because of their ignorance, they can do nothing. Because they are not awake, they have no free will.

What is more: I understood that our culture,our religions, our philosophies, our sciences, all contribute to, and are controlled by, this vast, complex "feeding mechanism" - this hierarchy of Service to Self. Even most of the "new" New Age interpretations are merely another layer on the onion of deception to further deprive us of free will.

What happened to "love?" What happened to "oneness," goodness, unity, God being in His heaven and all being right with the world? What happened to all the consciousness raising that was supposed to be going on all over the planet? What happened to being "safe" if you surrounded yourself with "love and light" and positive thinking? Over and over again I was shown that these things were merely masks of the "feeding machine." There is layer after layer of illusions.

Of course, the question arose: had I studied the darkness so long that I had fallen into it? Was my effort to eradicate the lies and confusion really an admission of their existence that then caused them to manifest in my life? Was I seeing a mirror of myself? At that point I read in William James' Varieties of Religious Experience:

"At our last meeting, we considered the healthy-minded temperament, the temperament which has a constitutional incapacity for prolonged suffering, and in which the tendency to see things optimistically is like a water of crystallization in which the individual's character is set. We saw how this temperament may become the basis for a peculiar type of religion, a religion in which good, even the good of this world's life, is regarded as the essential thing for a rational being to attend to. This religion directs him to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on occasion, by denying them outright. Evil is a disease and worry about evil is a disease in itself. Even repentance and remorse.. may be but sickly impulses.

"Let us now... turn towards those persons who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil, but are congenitally fated to suffer from its presence. ...there are different levels of the morbid mind... there are people for whom evil means only a maladjustment with things, a wrong correspondence of one's life with the environment. Such evil as this is curable... by either modifying the self or the things or both at once. There are others for whom evil is... a wrongness or vice in [their] essential structure, which no alteration in the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy. On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former way of looking upon evil, ...while the Germanic races have tended rather to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of something ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and never to be removed by any superficial piecemeal operations.

"...we speak of the threshold of a man's consciousness in general, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low threshold would be immediately waked. Similarly, when one is sensitive to small differences in any order of sensation, we say he has a low 'difference threshold.' His mind easily steps over it into the consciousness of the differences in question. And just so we might speak of a 'pain threshold' a 'fear threshold,' a 'misery threshold,' and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be reached by their consciousness.

"Goethe [expressed] 'I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at the bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.'

"And Martin Luther said: 'I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith and carry me hence... rather than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of Paradise.'

"The only relief that 'healthy mindedness' can give is: 'Stuff and nonsense! Get out into the open air! Cheer up, you'll be all right if you will only drop your morbidness!' But, to ascribe spiritual value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment is but the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality. Our troubles are that we CAN die, that we CAN be ill, that we ... need a life not correlated with death, a health not laible to illness, a good that will not perish... said a friend: 'The trouble with me is that I believe too much in happiness and goodness and nothing can console me for their transiency.'

"[And so those who experience] a little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little descent of the pain threshold, brings the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turns us into melancholy metaphysicians.

"Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you and try to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, without your favorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our world may appear endued with are pure gifts of the spectator's mind. [For example] love transforms the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment. [So with our emotions] if they are there, life changes. [This alone should tell us how easily our emotions can be used to control or hypnotize us!]

"In Tolstoy's case the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for a time wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation in the whole expression of reality. When we study the phenomenon of regeneration, we shall see that a not infrequent consequence of the change is a transfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes. ...An urgent wondering and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity, and in the desperate effort to get into right relation with the matter, the sufferer is often led to a solution...

p>"Tolstoy writes: '...I was neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I possessed a physical and mental strength which I have rarely met in persons of my age. I could mow as well as the peasants, I could work with my brain eight hours uninterruptedly and feel no bad effects. And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid jest was being played upon me by someone. One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life but when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply. But perhaps, I said to myself, there may be something I have failed to notice or to comprehend. it is not possible that this condition of despair should be natural to mankind. And I sought for an explanaton in all the branches of knowledge acquired by men. I questioned painfully and protractedly and with no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence, but laboriously and obstinately for days and nights on end. I sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself - and I found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing which was leading me to despair - the meaningless absurdity of life - is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.'

"The only thing that need interest us now is the phenomenon of this absolute disenchantment with ordinary life... when disillusionment has gone as far as this, when one has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never comes again... the only happiness that then can come is something vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its elements. The sufferer is born again as a deeper kind of conscious being than he could be before.

"Having arrived at this point, we can see the antagonism that must arise between the 'healthy-minded' optimist and the morbid-minded who take the experience of viewing evil as essential. To the latter, 'healthy-mindedness' seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the former, the latter seems seems unmanly and diseased. They believe that there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth. And, if religious intolerance, hanging and burning at the stake, were still in vogue, there is little doubt that the 'healthy-minded' would advocate the destruction of the morbid minded rather than the other way around.

"The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. ...yet there is no doubt that 'healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and these evil facts may be, after all, the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

"The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination - they seem too much like museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum skulls that did not daily hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to the victims fill the world about us today. Here, on our very hearths, the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles, pythons and rattlesnakes are vessels of life as real as we are; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which the morbid minded feels is the literally right reaction to the situation.

"...Since the evil facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones, and our philosophic presumption should be that they have some rational significance, then systematic failure to accord these things active attention is less complete than those systems that attempt to include these elements in their scope. The 'healthy-minded optimists only need to be born once, but the 'sick souls' need to be born twice to be happy.

"In the once born, the world is a one-storied affair... whose parts have just the values which they appear to have... [to the twice born] the world is a double-storied mystery. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. It keeps us from our real good and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other."

The question now becomes: was I suddenly seeing the 3rd density world as IT REALLY IS? Was I seeing the OBJECTIVE reality?

I asked the Cassiopaeans about this and you can note that it was just prior to the "gravity wave" sessions:

"The natural predator of the psyche is not only found in fairy tales but also in dreams. There is a universal initiatory dream, one so common that it is remarkable if a person has reached age 25 without having had such a dream. The dream usually causes the person to jolt awake, striving and anxious. The dream usually involves being in a house with danger outside or darkness outside. The dreamer is frightened and frantically tries to obtain assistance. Suddenly, they realize the danger is virtually on top of them, or right with them, or cannot be overcome or avoided, or that they have lost. The dreamer awakens instantly, breathing hard, heart pounding.

"There is a strong physical aspect to having a dream of the predator. The dream is often accompanied by sweats, struggles, hoarse breathing, heart pounding, and sometimes crying and moans of fear. We could say the dream-maker has dispensed with subtle messages to the dreamer and now sends images which shake the neurological and autonomic nervous system of the dreamer, thereby communicating the urgency of the matter.

"The antagonists of the 'dark dream' are, in people's own words, 'terrorists, rapists, thugs, concentration camp Nazis, marauders, murderers, criminals, creeps, bad men, thieves.' There are several levels to the interpretation of the dream..."

"Often such a dream is a reliable indicator that a person's consciousness is just beginning to gain awareness of the innate psychic predator...."

"The dream is a harbinger; the dreamer has just discovered or is about to discover and begin liberating a forgotten and captive function of the psyche.

"The dark man dream tells a person what predicament they are facing. The dream tells about a cruel attitude toward the dreamer. Like Bluebeard's wife, the dreamer can consciously gain hold of the 'key' question about this matter and answer it honestly, and can then be set free. ...

"The dark man appears in dreams when an initiation - a psychic change from one level of knowing and behavior to another more energetic level of knowledge and action is imminent. The initiation creates an archway which one prepares to pass through to a new manner of knowing and being....

"Dreams are 'portales,' entrances, preparations, and practices for the next step in consciousness.

"Dark man dreams are wake-up calls. They say: Pay attention! Something has gone radically amiss in the outer world. ....The threat of the 'dark man dreams' serves as a warning to all of us -- if you don't pay attention, something will be stolen from you! The dreamer needs to be initiated so that whatever has been robbing her can be recoginzed, apprehended, and dealt with.

"In the Bluebeard story we see how a woman who falls under the spell of the predator rouses herself and escapes him, wiser for the experience. The story is about transformation through knowledge, insight, voice, decisive action. We must unlock the secrets and use our abilities to be able to stand what we see. And then, we must use our voice and our wits to do what needs to be done about what we see. When instincts are strong, we intuitively recognize the innate predator by scent, sight, and hearing... we anticipate its presence, hear it approaching, and take steps to turn it away. In the instinct-injured (i.e. nuts and bolts person) the predator is upon them before they register its presence. We have been taught to be nice, to behave, to be blind, and to be misused. [We have been hypnotized to give up our flesh and skins.]

"The young and the injured are uninitiated. Neither knows much about the dark predator and are, therefore, credulous. But, fortunately, when the predator is on the move, it leaves behind unmistakable tracks in dreams. These tracks eventually lead to its discovery, capture and containment.

"Wild Ways teaches people when not to act 'nice' about protecting their souls. The instinctive nature knows that being 'sweet' in these instances only makes the predator smile. When the soul is being threatened, it is not only acceptable to draw the line and mean it, it is required."

What does this mean in practical terms? It means that in every event and relationship of our lives, regardless of our subjective likes or dislikes, we are to learn to perform that which is "felicitous," or objective, and to avoid performing that which is "forbidden," or subjective.

Our minds, enveloped in the "veils of the secondary causes," or the "material reality," often do not know the root of a thing. On the contrary, our reason often tells us that the thing is the substance itself. If we encounter something that is beautiful and pleasant to the senses, we may mistakenly think that it is beautiful and pleasant at its root. An example is the contrast between rich, fattening desserts as opposed to healthful, nutritious vegetables. The same rules apply to events and relationships in our lives. Affairs and personalities interpenetrate and mix and mingle so that it is difficult to separate them in terms of our perceptions and the roots. But that is our task.

Again, we need to ask the question: what are these "simple karmic understandings?" What does it mean to "give each thing its due?"

When I was seeing the darkness, the horror of the reality in which we live, I was seeing a Face of God.

In Arabic, the "face" of something signifies its essence or reality. To say that God turns His face toward someone means that He manifests His reality to that person through self-disclosure. If the only Face of God you CHOOSE to see, is the "Good and Loving" face - then the other will manifest in your life in other ways. It is a little like being "in love" with someone who has certain characteristics that you decide to try to change, or to "put up with" (often by changing some essential thing about yourself). You don't REALLY LOVE THAT PERSON AS HE/SHE IS. And the same is true of our "Love of God." How can we possibly LOVE Him, if we deny fully HALF of His being? If we set ouselves up as judge and jury as to what part of the universe, what part of existence, what part of GOD, is acceptable and "okay?"

To live in a condition where one denies the right of the so-called "base character traits" to exist, to consider them an "error" or a "rebellion," a "Satanic delusion," is to deny fully half of existence, fully half of God - to reject Him, to NOT love him; to love only those parts that the limited human mind consider to be "acceptable" and to "hate" those parts that are not "pleasant" and desirable to fleshly comfort - and it is to love subjectively only the part of the self that is "acceptable." And this is a crucial point. To ACCEPT one's own self, in all its many parts. That does NOT mean that one "manifests" every negative character trait, it means that one accepts, loves, and tries always to choose to manifest the noble traits and to channel the base traits productively. To love objectively, all that IS, unconditionally, both the light and the darkness, and to NEVER interfere with the Free Will of another to choose to do or be as they see fit is one of the keys; one of the "simple understandings."

Of course, at the same time, it is to refuse to have one's own Free Will violated. You don't have to act "against" another, you merely act "for your own destiny" in such cases. And here, we have another little illustration from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna:

God creates the good and the evil, the ugly and the beautiful, the straight and the crooked, the moral and the immoral.

Now, HOW do we acknowledge ALL; how do we LOVE GOD in all his many parts; how do we give each thing its due?

Do we manifest ALL these attributes? The answer is "yes and no."

And between that yes and no lie all the dangers that face us on the path.