November 1, 1992

  Samuel: Well, greetings, dears.

Hello, Samuel.

S: Or should it better be [Samuel uses a phrase in an unknown language]? [Pause] What do you think it means?

Happy New Year?

S: Aye. You look at me like “he said something very strange.”

Happy New Year, sweet souls. Do you feel like a new being? Do you feel ready to begin again and to get the lecture of your soul tonight? Starting new, beginning fresh, taking care of yourself—ready for it? Good. Then let’s go.

This is an incredible time—not only because this has been a year of—literally, truly—miracle after miracle. You didn’t know to look at it that way, did you? Miracle after miracle. It’s been a year of your working to re-create yourself. It has been a year, at any rate, of your being aware of endings, conclusions, finishings. It’s been a year of stunning change.

Tonight I hope I’m not too very scattered for you, because there are so many points I wish to make that I need to do it very quickly. I need you to put on your speed gear so that you can keep up, so that it won’t seem too scattered. There is much going on.

So the very first thing I want you to do this night is to think “eight,” because the next eight days, beginning tonight—you can’t get away with it—the next eight days are going to be eight days of mastering change, bringing into your life exactly what you want. Eight days—think “eight,” all right?

We’ve got to begin first with just the smallest reminder about why this is [the beginning of the] new year. Why?

The Celtic New Year—only historians call them Celts, you know—the Celtic New Year, Samhain, the earth holy day of renewal, regeneration, is actually within this week. For your calendar, it would probably go around the sixth, but it’s considered the midpoint of this particular sun sign, not actually the thirty-first or the first. It is a celebration—I’m not exactly sure what ghosts and small children have to do with it—it is actually a holiday of death . . . death, honoring the dead. Sounds good, don’t you think? Not what it has become—again, not ghosts, not goblins, but a realization of what within you has passed away and is ready to be reborn. It is recognizing who in your life is no longer a part of your life, and how that “who” has touched you, and—being able to see in the larger picture—helped you.

Can you think of any experience in your life that, at the time it happened, you thought, “Good grief, this is terrible,” and right now you are able to look at it and say, “You know, I see how that fits.” Sure, every one of you can. Every one of you has a death experience or situation—a past life in this life, a past self in this life, individuals perhaps, beliefs probably—that is dead to the person you are. Power comes in being able to see how everything in your life has added to making you who you are now. And, because it doesn’t end right there where many would like to end it, it is not enough just to see how who you were and what you did made you who you are now; there is another step to it. What’s that? Being thankful and appreciating who you are now.

Pretty easy to say the miserable life I grew up with had made me the miserable adult I am now. That is not so hard, is it.

Tonight I am talking about death and rebirth and choice, and I intend to be lecturing, and political. And fairly short . . . which has nothing to do with the form I choose to use. And hopefully the jokes will get better.

So, many cultures, many of them, consider this particular time a time of ending and renewal. The particular earth holiday represents final harvest—unless you live in Florida, of course—and a preparing to renew. You’ve come to learn, after all of this time we’ve spent together, that there is no death without a rebirth. I want to talk to you tonight specifically about the time to renew, that space between what is old and what you are recreating, because that is where you tend to fall off the wagon.

This holiday is the celebration of the time in preparing the ground, the awareness of the need to rest, and the planning for next use. That’s where you are right now—preparing the ground, the rest, and the plan.

Let’s talk first about the ground.

Essentially, for you I’m going to relate the ground to your foundation, your foundation to your belief system. A major issue that I talk about over and over is being aware of your beliefs, because your beliefs may fit who you are right now—and as a result you feel happy and secure and content and whole—or they may not, in which case you tend to feel lost and detached, not connected to the planet or anybody, your relationships tend to be difficult, and you tend to have a hard time manifesting. (All of these things are sounding ominously familiar, aren’t they?) When your beliefs don’t fit who you are right now, essentially there are major parts of you that are dead, so this is your holiday. It’s time to put some life back into the system, all the way round, all of them.

The way to know a belief is to look for an emotion—that simple. The way to find a belief is to look for an emotion. A couple of thousand years ago, humanity was being taught to negate emotion, to learn to become water, to have no extreme. A wonderful teaching for individuals who are only beginning to use their minds, but as you, who know how to use your minds well know, a calm surface can be deceptive if the river is deep. The calm surface may hide great movement far under that surface. The deeper you are—the more aware you are—the more you are able to control what that surface looks like. And that’s good. I encourage you. Know the mask that is needed for the entertainment of the moment; be able to take off and put on the different versions of you as they are necessary. Don’t ever believe any one of them, though, and don’t ever neglect to oil the mechanism that gets them on and off.

The more capable and—I’m going to say the word—advanced you are, the deeper your flow is, and the more you are able to put forth what is needed for the moment. So, for an advanced soul, to simply say, “Negate emotion, have a calm surface,” is baby food. It’s not enough. And instead, what is the Piscean example? That’s still not the teaching for this particular time, but it is the most recent one. What’s the Piscean one? Anybody flowing enough with where I’m going to be able to pop out with the example I’m thinking of?

How about I send it to you? Ready? . . . Did that do it?

I just came back from Atlanta, dears. You know in Atlanta they have a real need to shiver and feel the quiver of spirit moving through the body, so that you kno-o-o-ow that something is happening there.

Aye?

That’s kind of like a saying that your still waters run deep.

S: Aye. Let’s talk about Jesus as an example of having no emotion.

The money changers in the temple.

S: There you go. You’ve got it! What emotion was He careful not to display?

He was careful not to display anger.

S: Good. Or passion. Moving from a still lake to permission for passion. Now I tell you, with your permission for passion, some of you have gone off the road into the lake of passion and have learned to be very easily angry, very dramatically sad—no one here is dramatic, are they?—ecstatically happy. And I am saying, look for an emotion if you want to find a belief, because the emotions aren’t a problem, unless, of course, they are controlling you. And that’s a whole other talk to get into, controlling emotions where it is necessary and proper expression. My point simply is, you’re aware of it. You can’t help but be aware of it. Some of you are led by them. They are the way to find your beliefs.

The beliefs that work in your life generally make you happy. The ones that don’t, don’t. (It’s getting real tough, isn’t it; this is the hard stuff.) And of course it goes into greater detail than that, because there are many different versions of happiness—There is joy, ecstasy, passion. You can just have a good smug feeling within you. You can feel guilt; you can feel pain; you can be unhappy; you can be destitute, at loss, hopeless. The point simply being: Look for the emotion to find the belief, and determine if the beliefs are allowing you to live as you desire. Expressing yourself as you want, happily, with satisfaction, a sense of wholeness—or constant turmoil. And if you are finding that you have beliefs that, while you are in the midst of functioning in the world you find yourself all of a sudden feeling really depressed, look to see what that belief is and create a tombstone for it; bury it properly. Say goodbye to it.

Quick question: How do you truly get rid of something?

Replace it.

S: You replace it. Very good. To simply let go causes you to feel deprived. You’ve got a hole in you all of a sudden. You must replace; you must replace. And for eight days that’s what you’re going to be doing—replacing, consciously putting forth what it is you want to be, as a reminder, every time you catch on to what you don’t want to be.

Beliefs are the field. We’re talking about the final harvest. Harvest what is good, and till under what is not. What are you doing in the fields these days, David? Pulling out the last of the crops?

[David (still healing an injury):] Not much today.

S: You’re right. Paula, darling, what are you doing out in those fields these days?

[Paula:] Tidying up, pulling out the last weeds, making things ready for spring.

S: Excellent. Which leads to the next stage—you, too, could be doing these things—which is preparing rest. Wait a minute—preparing rest? All of the gardeners, all of the farmers in here know that you prepare the field to rest, you clear. You don’t leave the old growth in it, do you? You clear it. There may even be a need to put in some nourishment, eh? You prepare it to rest. And that, too, is a part of your process. Rest, for a spiritual individual, tends not to be a backing off and doing nothing. In fact, more often than not, it has to do with literally stopping for a bit and tending to physical business. Individuals of spiritual awareness tend to do less for their physical selves than anyone else. Do you know why? I’m going to give you your excuse, but I’m going to warn you it doesn’t work: because the more aware you become of your spiritual self and the more you begin to experience parts of your own power, the less aware you become of the conscious working of the physical body. When you just wake up, the physical body is all that you pay attention to, pretty much, isn’t it? When you first wake up, the physical body is where all of your lessons are: learning to discipline it, to heal it, learning to quiet it so it will stop trying to take over. And as you continue in the path of growth and you learn how to handle the security issues that are attached to form and the issues of form, you tend to forget the sort of care it needs. When you first wake up, one of the best things you can do to show that you love you is doing nice things for the form, and you do. You take nice long hot soaks, and you say, “I love me,” and you exercise it, and you tell it you love it. And as you continue in the process of growth, that hits the side road. Therefore, preparing your field to rest, particularly at this time, when this year has been so incredibly intense and so filled with change, particularly now, you need to rest the form. It needs a break; it needs some attention; it needs some love. Maybe it needs some exercise, some discipline, so that it doesn’t have to scatter and delude itself just to be alive. It needs you thinking about it.

And finally, what’s going to happen to the field next? The rebirth, the planning for the new. Well, you know, in the winter come the flower catalogs, correct? Because that is the time you plan what you are going to plant. You’re drying the seeds from the last crop. Maybe you’re even starting them. You’re planning. You’re determining what would be the best use of the ground and what you want to create. And that’s the third part of that process that’s happening right now. It won’t happen if you don’t plan it, and it won’t happen if you don’t plant it. It won’t happen if you don’t plan for it.

What do you want? What do you want? And here is where I’m going to move into a bit of politics—oh, just ever so slightly—because you’re coming to a time where you have choice ahead of you. And my political statement is: Make choices; be heard. But you can’t do that if you don’t know what your issues are. You can’t plan for tomorrow if you don’t know what you think about anything.

“Oh, I don’t know what I want to do.” Sweet souls, without your raising hands—you can just give your usual nervous giggle if you’re bold enough—how many of you have been asked by me, “What do you want?” and sat across from me and [shrugged]? And my response was, this is sad, isn’t it? You don’t know what you want because you don’t know what you think. You don’t think about things. How do you feel about—name me an issue, any—I’ve got it: Whom do you choose to vote for? If you don’t know, why don’t you? And if you do, what is your reasoning based on? Why? What issues are important to you. What’s happening in your life that is reflected on the planet right now. How do you feel about it? What do you think? What do you do to get more information, to know your mind, to know the truth? Or do you prefer just to be fed it? And if you prefer just to be fed it, how do you get that feeding? From just one single source? What do you think?

And based upon that question, I would like to put forth a challenge to you. (I know, darlings, that you just hate it when I suggest this.) I would like for you to give yourself a particular period time—oh, how about eight days? Be bold if you wish and say two weeks, a month, three weeks. Three months? Only turn on your television when you know ahead of time, because you planned it at the beginning of the week, what you’re going to watch. And if you can say goodbye to it altogether—all of you who have not watched television in a long time are glowing in your smugness right now, darling—”It doesn’t apply to me. I don’t even have one.”

One of the greatest reasons you don’t think anymore is because you don’t have to. Your work is a routine. You’re so good at what you do, that it’s not a challenge anymore, and so it doesn’t cause you to think. You go home, you relax, you turn on the television, you watch news, and then what comes on after that, and then what comes on after that, and then what comes on after that. Or you stay away from it, and when you go to bed you turn it on, and you watch the news and what comes on after that and what comes on after that.

See what happens, see what you replace it with. It might be socializing, goodness. It might be literature. I would suggest trashy novels.

So I encourage, challenge, suggest, that as a part of your being able to plan for the new, that you start cleaning off the old slate, and one good way to do that is to let go of a few of those ruts. And television is a fast, easy one, a rut. I didn’t say get rid of it altogether. I said, be conscious about how you use it, instead of it using you. And one of the things you’re going to find is you start getting a feel for your own thoughts. It’s so important. Whatever happens in your upcoming election, which is going to affect the whole planet—don’t think it’s not—do you realize the glorious opportunity in front of you right now? You have an opportunity to do a simple act that is going to affect the whole planet. For those of you who have been thinking maybe you were here to do something that was going to affect the whole planet, this could be a way of telling the Universe, “Look, I choose to be responsible for where I know I can have an effect. I would be responsible for more.”

I encourage you, however, if it is at all possible, to base your vote upon issues that you know your thoughts on. And it might be to your advantage definitely not to use the television as your guide.

Rebirth at Samhain is surrounded by the word “responsibility.” Don’t tell the form I’m cursing—isn’t that a curse word, “responsibility”? The word is the ability to respond; the word is choosing to act—response-ability, isn’t it?

“Oh no, Samuel, it means drudgery that you are required to do.” No, it is a glorious word that means choice. You get to choose the ability to act. Rebirth is an act of will; renewal, re-creation, rebirth, responsibility. Responsibility to know your beliefs so that you can take out the ones that aren’t helping you be who you wish to be. Responsibility to know what you are about, what you choose, plan, prioritize. Responsibility to act.

This room of enlightened beings—and you’re from a far scattering; you’re not just from here—and you have access to even more. You can change things, beginning with yourself.

Eight days. Eight days of daily rebirth, renewal, recognizing the new.

Every day, beginning today, choose something that you want to emphasize in your life, because it’s eight days of replacing. So what is it you want to harvest next year? What is it you’re going to plant? What is it that the field needs?

One easy way to do it might be to divide your life up into eight sections, and for each section think of one thing you wish to accomplish or see brought in. A section might be for work, a section for a personal relationship, a section for relationships for family, a section for your spiritual life, a section for your physical self. And for each one of those areas—I’m sure that wasn’t eight, was it?

Five.

S: All right, you come up with three more. Give me three more.

Mental.

S: Mental. To learn, to grow. More.

Sexual.

S: Sexual. Your sexual self, sure. Good.

Money.

S: Money. Your financial arena. Good.

Those are all good ones, but of course you have your own, something that you want to see, something that you want to bring in. Perhaps another way you would choose to do it is to think of the physical, the mental, and the spiritual arenas of your life and come up with eight things in each one of those. And then every day for eight days you’ll be consciously doing something such as taking a walk—I like that one, you know—and reading an article of interest in a different sort of publication, and saying, “I love you” every day out loud to someone you care for, including yourself. Perhaps you want, for eight days, to make a point of bringing one particular habit into your life. Every day for eight days you’re going to smile and say hello to people that you pass on the street. Every day for eight days you’re going to consciously work on pulling your energy way up and being really happy and feeling good. Maybe eight consistent days of exercise.

Eight days of responsible rebirth.

Finally, you know you’ve got it, whatever it happens to be, when you can be thankful. Plaster that on your mirror so that you’ll see it every day. It’s over when you can say thank you and mean it. You’ve got it. Thankfulness.

It’s time, darlings. Be thankful for the ghosts of your own past. Give them a proper burial if they’ve never had it. Look into your own life, and allow yourself to flow with the energy of this time, a celebration, a celebration of what has passed and the expectation, the joyful expectation, because you have made it happen, of what is to come.

Your choice, after all. Make it happen, sweet souls, make it happen.

Happy, happy trails, glochanumora, and happy New Year. Aye, good group.