This entire session is fantastic, including H’s opening (likely Hal Price through whom Hatonn is talking about harvest in 1976) as well as B’s closing. I’m also omitting Carla picking up on an unanswered question which I considered making the focus instead of this excerpt, but I think this is more valuable to the seeker if I have to choose. You don’t have to choose – go read it!

What I found notable about this session was the connection between effort and fruition, something I’ve often considered not only from a Confederation point of view but also through other spiritual works. The message amongst the best of them is very similar: that there is a time for exertion, for stretching and striving, and a time for being and listening and receiving. Learning how to oscillate between these two states is natural but not trivial, and Hatonn places a great deal of emphasis on the cultural and social impediments to thinking in the proper way (the proper manner of thought is something H discusses).

So when we ascribe to ourselves the responsibility for our own seeking, we are not doing so because we are in charge of the conditions that can frustrate or sour it. It is merely that we are responsible for understanding how our point of view is a choice, a choice that we make continually and can always revise. That’s how we can look at a very broken world full of heartache and hurt and see that as something that can teach us and not something that threatens our true beingness. That’s how we can be a light reaching out to serve instead of a hermit in the sinkhole, dulling our senses and minds with distractions.

My friends, to accomplish that which you wish to do, to gravitate, shall we say, upward on the spiritual path, may seem many times to be a very great effort. And we say to you that your will and your desire and your efforts are all-important. We cannot repeat too often to you, for truly you will get what you desire. Therefore, desire carefully and constantly. We wish to assure you, however, that it is not expected or at all natural that the effort alone will give you wisdom. For mankind can work and work, but without the spirit, the soul that is within him, that is his higher self and that is the spark of the Creator, he will achieve nothing but weariness. And many who have beaten their heads against the wall seemingly hopelessly have become heartbroken and convinced that there is no Creator and that there is no reason for living and there is no hope beyond the present physical existence.

Effort is only the seed, my friends. The fruition comes in meditation. The fruition comes when, in your desire, you stop talking and begin listening. Truly, those upon your planet are understandably bad at listening for your physical ears are beset day and night by noise and more noise, and most of it not at all important, on any level. Therefore, in order to protect yourselves from this constant noise you yourselves are constantly thinking, constantly generating a defensive wall of selfhood. But, my friends, as long as you are thinking and talking you cannot contact that wisdom that is within you, that is sleeping. You may meditate for a long time before you feel consciously that you have contacted wisdom. You may meditate for a long time before you begin to feel warmed by the presence of love. That is how hard it is to open the door that those of your people who live in this civilization have begun to experience as closed. It is a thick door. Many of your peoples do not even believe that such a door exists and that beyond it there is a reality. So we say to you, seek, and then in your seeking, meditate.

The great secret to, shall we say, getting out of the rat race, is to realize that you and only you are responsible for yourself. Let us draw you a small picture, my friends. You are an entity that has lived forever and will live forever. You are whole and you have a form that has been building and shaping itself and you are a certain way and you think certain thoughts and you are dwelling in a tiny little ball that circles a sun in a very small corner of a totally infinite universe. And you are in a classroom that is much like a circus with many things to see and many things to behold, and you are observing and you are attempting to learn. People may have attempted to tell you that this is a perfect world and that all things are of love. And you have said, “How can that be? There are horrible things in this world and they are not of love.” Both are true, my friends. Your illusion is made up of many vices, some of which are so strongly on the negative side that in them exists the thought forms of what you call Satan. You know and you have felt horror and despair at the more negative of those things that those upon your planet do to others and to themselves.

This is your classroom, my friends. And we say to you that the energy that created all of these wrong thoughts was originally love. And those who were conceived in love by their free will have chosen to separate themselves into thoughts that are not of love, but are dark shadows across the face of love. But you are there, my friends, and you are to learn. See yourselves as the generators of your own destiny. If you will see your life as a work of art, you may think that life is something that happens to you, that you are the recipient of various good and bad things, but this is not so, my friends. And when you begin to take new responsibility for the way you act, no matter what happens to you, for what you are putting out, when your emotions and your words and your gestures and your actions begin to form a harvest of that which you are learning in your meditation and in your reading, then you have made the great step, my friends.

Then you may begin to become more confident of graduating from this school, of getting out of this rat race, as you would call it. When you leave your physical form, as you all will, and when you look back, you will see this life that you have lived just as you would see a work of art. And you will see whether you have written badly or well. It matters not if you make mistakes; you can but learn. And each attempt to show what you have learned will sound a chord within your lifestream that is very sweet.

The days may seem to move very slowly and many hours may seem to go on forever when you feel as if you are under fire by a hostile world. But your life is short, my friends. You are standing on a ball and you are learning. Connect with that source of love, a source which is rich in humor, a source in which you can relax and trust that there is no power on Earth, no matter how dark or dangerous it may seem to your physical eyes, that is as great as love. Your body may die and evil forces may cause you harm, but the harm is illusory. For that which you give from your inner spirit is the only reality for you. And no power can aggregate that of love within your spirit.

- Hatonn via Rueckert: September 19, 1976

Originally posted on r/lawofone_philosophy.