STS, trying to understand

[sylverone]

This reason is that STO prefers to exclude "green ray" activity from its own experience

If my understanding about STO as hierarchy is correct, you would ultimately reject any hierarchy you don't control...

I believe you mean STS in the first, and I wanted to point out the second because I'm not sure you typed exactly what you meant. I understand your meanings; I just figured I'd point them out for the benefit of those who may read this in the future.

I believe that tremendous pain is not always necessary to awaken spiritual understanding, and it's certainly not to be sought out for that purpose. Ideally if it does occur, it is used as a spiritual catalyst.

Regarding this issue, I simply do not know. From observation, it seems that pain is one of the primary catalysts within our current circumstance. I have seen many people, including myself, struggling with pain. To cover my perspective on this issue would probably take up more space than I wish to use in this post, so perhaps I should start a topic about it soon. Suffice it to say, I have learned a lot from my encounters with it, and my efforts to understand it and learn from it have been highly rewarding. I have found that the more I learn from pain, the less pain I feel in my daily existance. My experience has been that it cannot be completely avoided, and that it will heal and grant us wisdom and understanding if we make the effort to search for the lessons contained.

Ultimately, green-ray acceptance will be needed for further spiritual evolution. Until then, the great power of hierarchies is also their great weakness: the rigidity of structure and behavior. When an earthquake or storm comes, sometimes a building with a flexible frame, or even trees that are not interlocked, can ride it out. Impressive edifices and precision-gridded structures can collapse from the shock.
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Hierarchy involves the limitation and exclusion of some things. There is no way to reach unity by rejecting some ingredients of unity.

I agree. Ultimately, all must be.

I see that Ra thinks an understanding of the STS/STO choice as primary at this time, because polarization on one side or the other is what leads to the capacity for Harvest. There actually is a lot of material on the subject. I'm not sure why you said there's not much material about this.

Firstly, I must say that I am not actually that far into reading the Ra material. I read up to about session ten about a year or less ago, and much of what I say is my own personal understanding based on my limited reading of Ra and other souces, and the understanding I feel I've gained from "awakenings" that have resulted along the way (and various quotes I have read from within the forums). So when I said that, I was responding hypothetically, based on the premise presented by the comment I was responding to. Perhaps I should have been more clear. I am currently in the process of beginning to read Ra again, and have just reached session 11.
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In general, your perspective on these things seems to match mine, and yes, they do make sense. Concerning the black-hole issue, I have not reached that session yet, so I do not yet know about that. In some cases I use the concept of white-hole/black-hole to compare the STO and STS nature, but I realize that this is oversimplified, and thus not accurate in some ways.

Concerning STS as compared to STO, I believe it is important to remember that in most cases, the entity is only partially polarized in a particular direction. Because STO results in STS, it seems that complete STO polarization is not polarization as much as it is a depolarization into STA, service to All as One. 51% STO means that we are still overtly serving ourselves to a high degree. So that basically means a 51% emobodiment of love, I think, and therefore a 49% view remains of "others as seperate". This is enough to graduate, but it is also a sign that we still have much understanding to eventually gain.

I was just thinking; in retrospect to what has been said in this thread, it seems to me that most mainstream religions, at least in the way they are usually taught, seem to inhabit the "neutral zone" between STO and STS, or the "sinkhole of indifference" as Ra put it. My experience is with Christianity, and I personally found that I had to "grow out of" a completely literal faith-based following of that religion to persue further understanding. I did not know of any Christian sources which could provide me deeper understanding, because they all relied on the Bible so heavily, and at church I was starting to simply hear repeats of things which I had come to understand. There did not appear to be a "next level" within the church, so with the faith I mentioned earlier, I decided that if God was as I believed, I would not be destroyed or imprisoned forever for honestly seeking greater understanding of God beyond Christianity. That choice was pivotal, and has lead me through many lessons over the last few years.

Anyway, it isn't my intention to write my autobiography here ;D , but I think that note about religion is interesting.