New Age Spiritual Movement Frustrations

[Diana]

From my perspective, the New Age movement is as it ever was. It's just that today, after the Internet has expanded exponentially, enabling anyone to publish anything, more and more people are taking advantage of a digital platform from which to do business of any kind and share anything they want to share.

I would make two points regarding this phenomenon:

1. Because of the flood of digital "information" coupled with the massive growth in online (much amateur) business, the need for discernment has generally switched from filtering systems (such as traditional publishers who used to verify credentials, edit the works, discern content) to the end reader/user. This is probably a good thing, but in the meantime there is a morass of stuff out there to slog through if one is inclined to seek there.

2. The desire to learn from, or follow, someone else (gurus, teachers) be looked at. This is not to suggest there is anything wrong with following a guru. The idea of teach/learn may be seen as a construct within which an individual exists, where everything is in relationship to everything else (just as there is no one static point in the universe—everything is moving in space relative to everything else), and we constantly interact with each other and all things and conscious evolution is born out of the complexity. The traditional guru/teacher/minister is more like a linear one-way construct where the teacher is showing the way which has already been determined and the student is following an already-determined path.  

I read your article now, because you have criticised that i have posted something without reading it completely.
Your article is a good summary, offering some new aspects i didn't recognize, specially the exact details what happened with Don.
To be clear - i don't want to judge the story about Don, Carla and Jim in any way!

I agree that it is helpful to understand the story about the channeling team, because the situations did influence the content of the Ra channelings.

But i cannot understand how this relates to "New Age Spiritual Movement Frustrations" ?

I think everyone should know the story of Don's death in relation to the Ra material. Not only is it a cautionary tale for those who claim to want to work with high magic, showing how easily small distortions of the ego can become huge problems when you become the focus of a negative entity, but it also shows another victim of our intensely violent police state.

This is true, but at least all suicides are affected by distortions that come mainly from beyond the self, the reasons can be very different.

Referring to the above post i want to say, that it is better to concentrate on the content of the learning and not on the teacher.
Whatever happened to the channeling team is very tragic, but has no influence to the content Ra has teached.

It is the same to every other source of knowledge - please learn to distinguish.
There are sources with teachers who have an attitude that can only be rejected, but who can still provide essential knowledge.
So i will end here quoting Q'uo:

We ask you that perpetual favor: that you utilize the words and thoughts that we give you that you feel are important to you at this time, and for those that do not speak to your heart, that you leave those behind. We, appreciate this gift of your discrimination, it allows us a wider range of response to your query.

It is the same to every other source of knowledge - please learn to distinguish.
There are sources with teachers who have an attitude that can only be rejected, but who can still provide essential knowledge.

The fact that you cannot see how all of this is connected, makes me feel like you are the one who might be having troubles distinguishing what is worth knowing and what is not. I have no issues seeing the connections, as they are everywhere and in every situation within this spiritual movement and throughout life. I understand the Law of One deeply as I have been living it since the day I came to this place, and this stuff matters. How it effects you physically, emotionally and spiritually matters deeply.

This will be my last post on these boards. Good luck on your journey forward, I hope one day you can learn how to live from your heart and not just your mind. But I am running out of hope for this place when even the wanderers are having difficulties discerning how to live from a place of unconditional love. Love is the most powerful magic in the universe, yet everyone wants to skip over their hearts. That is what the service to self polarity does and I want no part of it.

I read the Reddit article, which was very well written and did seem to have a very balanced perspective on the original team and their story. However, I did have to ask how that person knew some of the details as (s)he had been studying the material for only seven years, at which time Don had already gone. Some of the details may be discerned from the writings of Carla and the last Ra book, but I imagine some assumptions were made. Some assumptions may actually have made by Carla and Jim. 

There is no way at all that any of us can know what was going on with Don. And I agree with Tadeus that I do not wish to canvass it. 

What matters to me is that the material is here, and that it be of use to us. 

@Spiritualchaos: The idea of repressing emotion and being stoic or sheltering oneself with intellect is a valid concern. We all, every one of us, has parts of ourselves hidden from the conscious mind that trigger us and would be best brought into the light. But this also goes the other way—being in touch with emotions without wisdom is also out of balance.

I would add that we all try and accept each others' views as we are all different and at different points in comprehension of this very mysterious existence. I do think that frustration arises out of a need to be understood. In communicating ideas, I don't think blame (and I speak generally, not to anyone specifically) is very helpful, and the burden of being understood must at least in part be the responsibility of the person attempting to be understood.

I personally work on my ability to clearly communicate all the time, and this is one of the reasons I have stayed here for many years. It is very difficult to articulate spiritual ideas which do not lend themselves to words. We all just keep going forward the best we can in this veiled existence.