Here’s an excerpt that means a lot to me. To other readers it likely appears to be a case of Carla’s Christian passion reaching through the contact again, and that’s certainly going on. But what I want to put a fine point on is the emotion conveyed here, one of utter hopelessness and appeal to the Creator for salvation.

What is the transformation we seek? It is in some ways the annihilation of the personality, that token of our existence we cling to in terror. What will release us from the prison walls will at first seem like an attack on us. To be lost and confused is to be much, much closer to the truth of the illusion than to be well adjusted to this mad culture and even madder compulsion we have to affect this personality we call the self, this imposter we offer as an agent for the world.

It’s not that the personality is bad or wrong so much as we keep identifying so fixedly and relentlessly with it, ignoring our capacious nature and infinite elements of selfhood available. Because of this, the darker hues of consciousness are often the harbingers of redemption in that the break our total selves out of the ossified shells we use to make sense of the world, to interface and serve and bumble about in confusion. And the deeper you seek, the more you will run into this.

I’m sure as a child I had bouts of sadness and disconnection, but in my adult life I never experienced depression until I started seeking spiritual in earnest. This requires spending a lot of time with oneself, one’s own equipment and thoughts and motivations, and seeing over and over again how helpessly we are trapped in the same cycles that, when projected into the illusion, seem so obvious. That those appearances are reflections cannot help but trick us again and again and again. So when Hatonn speaks of embracing this affect of brokenness and contrition, they are showing us the path we need, not the path of which we wish to hear. And it was from one of my favorite seekers, Peter Kingsley, that I first asked for the Creator to show me my brokenness, which I believe was prompted by reading this passage:

Growing up from the deepest region inside each of us like a weed is a fake existence, a counterfeit spirit, that takes the greatest care to force us to forget what we are and confuse us into thinking we are what we aren’t. Right from the start it throws us off the scent, creates and shapes a perfect copy of our soul that faithfully imitates each single one of our best intentions, fakes our aspirations, takes every last drop of our energy and robs us of our longing, then pretends it wants to wake up.

And to understand this as it deserves to be understood is to realize that nearly all the spiritual discipline most people engage in under some teacher’s well-intentioned guidance isn’t having even the remotest genuine effect on them.

It’s nourishing, then multiplying, that weed inside them: awakening their fakeness.

There is just one remedy for this—–which is to return people to their brokenness. The problem is that, even then, they simply have to look away for the quickest moment and their brokenness will have been shifted into its opposite; only have to stumble onto something true and their counterfeit spirit will instantaneously strip it of its truth.

- Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

I asked to be shown my own brokenness, and a few months later the glimpse was complete. But my friends, we can build community, lives of service to our projected selves out there, and sit in meditation for all the hours of our lives. But the sector of awareness we occupy is one that cannot deliver happiness or unity. We are not our own instrument; we are somebody else’s. And to undergo the series of intense initiations necessary to be useful to our one infinite Creator will necessarily entail suffering, the catalysis of contradiction between the love and joy we seek and the low condition we inhabit.

If my words strike the reader as needlessly and indulgently dramatic, please understand: I approached this philosophy intellectually for fifteen years before I first was broken. Being broken is good, because nothing that can be broken is truly who we are. But for it to be a break, it must be one that you feel deeply, and you can always avoid the pain if you wish. It is the emotions that hold the deepest connections between mind and spirit complexes, I believe, and we experience them in purer and purer flavors as we continue seeking.

Ask yourself honestly: are you willing to walk in the valley of the shadow of death? Is your faith testable? The awakening we seek is one of breaking through the slumber, and like the lightning-struck tower depicted in the Potentiator of the Spirit, it is love perceived by the personality as a piercing, smashing power that has no compassion for the convenient thoughts and conclusions you have reached about who you are and where you stand. However, it is the beginnings of freedom to acknowledge one’s perception and expression of this cosmic love as distorted, confused, and that you don’t see enough as a conscious self.

You are not able to rescue yourself from falling in the cravass. You can only go limp, let the Creator connect you to the cable and hoist you, and allow It to place you in a different consciousness. Then your past hurts and confusions become the very means by which you can relate to and minister to others — not from a place of conscious understanding of the task, but as an instrument clearing the way for the Creator to perform Its love in the way it will distortedly appear this time.

As we were saying, a broken spirit and a contrite heart, my brothers and sisters, seem to be things that would sadden an individual, but in truth, a spirit which is not broken, a heart which is not contrite on its own behalf cannot forgive the infirmities of others, cannot be gracious and kind when compassion is surely needed. How can you break a spirit? With love, so that you do not become sad but rather joyful. How can your heart become sorry for all that it may have done or thought or felt, without feeling guilty, for sadness and guilt were never required by the Creator, only love my friends. But a broken spirit and a contrite heart are the gifts of love. For in love, we know that all things that move and have their being in our illusion and in all illusions are part of us. Whatever you see, whatever you hear, whether it be bad or good, whether it stem from your thinking or the thinking of someone halfway around the circle of your globe, all of these things are part of you. The spirit of love is alive in every man and every woman but its expressions are often distorted.

Thus, the beginnings of freedom is the acknowledgment that your own expression of love may be distorted. When you commit yourself to an examination of your thoughts so that you may more nearly mirror the thought of love which the Creator formed you in, then you begin to have a broken spirit. For you have become a person who is not proud. You have become a person who is not ego-centered, as you would call it, but is, rather, capable of understanding the pain and suffering of those about you. When you walk through a forest, my friends, what does the wind require of you? The grass and the path under your feet, what do they ask of you? The trees as they bend to the breeze, do they require aught of you? The creation of the Father, my friends, is one of service. And it requires nothing from any of its parts but that each part be who that part is. You are becoming yourself in each moment. You are not finished, you are growing constantly and each thing that you learn adds just a bit to the quality of understanding of the original Thought which is harbored in your infinite and ever-living spirit. Your pride and your vanity you will leave behind. These, my friends—pride, vanity, boredom—these are the things that make men sad. When peace and joy are all about you, when heaven surrounds you, there is no need for you to dwell in the tattered rags of a worn-out illusion.

Thus, we ask you to drop your pride, your vanity, your thoughts of self-worth as if they were old garments and take on the armor of light. For you are a creature whose essential nature is love. You were born to serve; it does not matter whether the service is great or small. It does not matter whether you may even feel successful. All that matters, my friends is that you attempt to serve, that you attempt to love. You will make many errors, you will make mistakes, you will find yourself lacking self-confidence and at those times we ask that you call upon us, upon the Creator, upon your own guides, upon your higher self. All of these resources are about you at all times. Comfort yourself and surround yourself with love so that once more you may go your way rejoicing. We want no eye to be sad and no tear to be shed. The illusion is difficult; reality is simple.

- Hatonn via Rueckert: December 2, 1979