Pioneering Mystic Lectures, 2005

False Gods and Graven Images

Linda Mihalic, October 10, 2005

  Today’s graven images consist of each soul’s collection of distorted opinions and prejudices, which most have stuffed into their own personal Pandora’s box, ready to fly out at a moment’s need for fuel in an overwhelming emotional eruption. Edna Lister warned me about my own personal Pandora’s box and the need for emptying it before it could fly open. The best advice ever given me on this “stuffing it in the closet” habit of denying emotional reactions was the “great mistake” in believing that the way things are is the way things will always be. All things change eventually and they will change more quickly when you decide to let them change! Letting is freeing what is stuck. Living a life in which your are “stuck” in too many areas is insane. When I realized that, I realized that my own definition of ascension had become one of “getting sane.”
  Living in your emotions will invariably lead to anxiety and depression, which the world advises that you treat with drugs. That’s like using a Band-Aid to treat a severed artery! Edna Miriam said that allowing yourself to feel depressed is swallowing the “tail of the dragon,” which is the beginning of letting “it”—whatever it is—get to you until you become paralyzed, unable to effectively deal with the problem on your own. If you don’t deal with an emotional issue in this life, it forms another layer over the old “buried treasure,” which means you’ve buried it that much deeper, making it that much more difficult to uncover and heal in another life. This creates a self-reinforcing “vicious circle” where cause becomes effect becomes cause… This, in turn creates other problems. For example, if you permit depression to mesmerize you, to capture and hold your attention, you can’t find God. You begin to wonder where He went when it’s you who have turned away to worship a graven image of self!
  Anxiety, so often the twin of depression, works in another way that is just as effective in mesmerizing you—racing thoughts that turn you into a hamster running its wheel! This isn’t thinking; it’s self-torture! You can’t hear yourself think when you’re trapped in this sort of mental cage, a prison you have constructed and locked yourself into, recreating it moment to moment because you have allowed anxiety to paralyze your will! Edna Miriam warned that it’s impossible to enter the Silence while living in a boiler room of noisy “self.”
  Anxiety starts with the stress of living with some condition that you fear will only get worse—unemployment, a broken relationship, the illness of a loved one. It’s fed by loss and the fear of more loss that you can’t control. When you find yourself fearing that the way things are is the way things will always be, the trap has closed on you—you’re trapped, you can’t escape—your fear increases. This is the vicious circle.
  What is the answer to all this? Give it up! Give it all up! Give up holding onto the fear instead of loving God. Give the amount of self you’ve invested in worry, anxiety, fear and depression UP to God! Life is a dynamic system and your response to it must be dynamic also, not paralyzed in fear. It’s difficult to stay plateaued for 18 months while you kid yourself that you’re okay. “Time outs” are expensive. You lose so much momentum and the resulting inertia is a deadly depressant. You want to graduate and move on but you can’t see the way ahead.
  Fear swamps you. Fear is a chemical reaction triggered by remembering what you believe you must fear. As with any of the body’s chemical reactions you have about five seconds warning that it’s in the pipeline before it overwhelms your basic chemical metabolism. The worst fears produce flashbacks. You can ward this off using a rapid eye technique—shifting your visual focus as fast as you can while saying something like “Master, hold my hand!” or “Here it is, Father—it’s Yours!” This is how to escape the “gravity well” of fear and panic.
  In ascension terms, conquering fear is called “crossing the abyss.” You face an abyss every time life presents you with some old paralyzing instance of fear, one you have carefully hidden from yourself, perhaps for ages. When you decide to cross the abyss, others, usually those who love you most, will react in several ways—they will abandon you to your fate, try to stop you, or follow you—they may react in one or more of these ways alternately. Your best action is to remember that you must cross this abyss alone, unaccompanied by anyone of earth. The fear is yours to conquer, so ignore their responses to your struggle. Listen to no commiseration for it only weakens your resolve. Depend on God alone, and the Master’s company while you persevere until you gain the victory over self, which is the source of all fears.
  One common source of fear is great pain. People fear suffering pain, which in turn paralyzes them into inaction—again the vicious circle. Two of my mentors, women old enough to be my mother, taught me a great deal about pain—Jessica Davis and Lotus Landis. On our way to lunch one day, Jessica stopped, suddenly staggering to a building wall as I rushed to take her arm and support her, fearing she would fall. She was white as a sheet and seemed unable to breath for a few moments. Then she steadied herself and straightened up—I heard her murmur “Eat the pain…let me eat the pain Father. Let this be taken out of the world.” It didn’t know what to think, but she said, “Let’s go,” and we continued on our way to lunch.
  After we were seated and had ordered, she explained what had happened. She was born with a congenital heart defect that periodically produced severe angina—heart pain. Lacking modern diagnostic technology, she was age 50 before being properly diagnosed, too old and a poor risk for corrective surgery. Edna Miriam had taught her that she could use the pain as her “food” for conquering its effect, had suggested the statements to use, especially that the pain be taken out of the world so that it could not add itself to the world’s “thought form” of ideas that would increase the fear of the pain and the pain itself. This insight gave me a great deal to ponder.
  A couple of years later I was diagnosed with a terrifyingly rare “terminal illness” and told that I should get my affairs in order because I had only a 2 percent chance to live three years. I analyzed the situation with great care because my life literally did depend on my response. I had to choose whether to live or die. I knew that, but what could I do about it? I was a typical adept and absolutely sure I could do something for myself. All adepts do that before they go to God in prayer. The results of my pondering I would sum in this realization: Fear contracts your consciousness to the exclusion of all else. Love expressed as joy expands your consciousness greatly enough to let God in, knowing that He has all the answers and will shine the Light on those answers, which you already know in the highest facet of your mind, the Christ mind of Oversoul. That’s when I first understood that I had to become greater than the fear. My approach to conquering the fear of dying was to run up and down the stairs at home declaring “I love You, God! I love You, God!” until I shouted down the voice of fear—until my voice was louder than the fear.
  My cherished mentor, Lotus Landis, my mentor from 1971 to 2002 (when she passed to the other side), taught me the “enduring value of pain,” which she had learned through knee injuries and arthritis that left her with no cartilage at all. She valued her non-mechanical mobility, especially when evaluation for knee replacement revealed that she would no longer be able to move around unaided in her three-story house or kneel for gardening. She loved her freedom and independence too much to permit such restriction! The enduring value of pain is this, she said: “Such near-constant pain keeps you focused on God because being in prayer and communion with Him is really the only effective pain relief there is. Once I finally saw that as the outcome, it opened a new universe of comprehension. I finally realized what being a pioneering mystic really meant—seeking God first and always is the only way to lift the ugly dregs of self once and for all!”
  The next time Lotus and I revisited this topic, I shared how I had sought a way to phrase the “ugly dregs” of my own remaining self, and that I had settled on this request: “Father of all Light and Glory, please put Thy Light on what I need to see.” And later, regarding the enduring value of pain, I added, “If I must feel this pain, let me use this pain as an offering to lift it from the world!”

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