Melora through Joanna Neff (Jyoti Alla-An)

S.: Jyoti wants to know whether Ascension and addiction are incompatible. The example she uses is Alan Watts, who was an alcoholic but a brilliant writer about Zen buddhism. She wants to know if you could elaborate on that: Ascension vs. addictions. I think it goes back again to one of the questions I had earlier, which was "Who's in charge?" I guess it's all kind of interrelated.

MELORA: Yes, and of course the questions that our Jyoti usually asks have very complex answers, but tht is what makes it interesting to the mind when we give our perspective on that, as we understand it. All right. So before we launch into the more precise answers, the more detailed answers, two things come immediately. That is to remember that your current lifetime is not the end-all and be-all. Your current focus of consciousness is not the only thing that's going on.

Oftentimes, when hyper-sensitive and spiritually adept individuals incarnate, it is so painful to be in the body that they will choose substances to filter out the excess stimuli that they are unable to process. The second thing is, is that in the case of people like Alan Watts the ability to tune-in to Core consciousness has been refined, and so there is that seeming dichotomy of the addiction (which is low-vibrational, as you know and which brings the frequency of the body down--the BODY down--) but then the co-existing ability to tune-in to Core consciousness: what you would consider the unified consciousness of all of your selves, so to speak.

So the generic answer would be: You are not going to ascend in consciousness from that specific lifetime in which you are addicted, but that does not preclude moving on to another lifetime with higher-consciousness wisdom values. Does that make sense to you?

S.: Well, it does. It just raises a whole bunch of questions. If I understand it, when you first started with Alan Watts, saying that the alcohol helped keep him grounded here . . . Is that correct?

MELORA: That is not the way we would put it. [The alcohol] filtered out excess stimuli, so when there are too many stimuli, the person short-circuits and they look to substances to mask their discomfort with these. For example, smoking suppresses the Central Nervous System, and so it keeps out the excess stimuli that people like schizophrenics are totally unable to handle. Thus, we wouldn't call using these substances keeping you grounded; we would call it masking or dulling the number of stimuli and the intensity with which they are felt. Sort of masking the array of stimuli, and then the individual still has the ability to focus on Core consciousness. Actually it helps them focus better and it feels less painful to them.

The problem is that you don't ascend, no matter how much wisdom you have gained. (We would call what Alan Watts "accomplished" as wisdom rather than "enlightenment"--sort of as in the expression: "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." So Alan Watts was a great teacher and had the wisdom, but we would say he was not really "enlightened." We're saying that when there are so many impurities in the body, and when there are those "crutches," the person cannot ascend from that individual lifetime. But that doesn't mean that the person hasn't gained wisdom. In fact, that person may go on to another incarnation in which there is more evolution and no bringing down of the vibration of the body.

S.: This is interesting because I had a lot of resistance to this morning's call, and I was trying to go into it to see what was happening. I love cigars . . .

MELORA: [much laughter]

S.: . . . and I like to drink alcohol. And they do different things to me, and obviously keep me numbed, to a certain degree, in a number of areas. I guess these could be seen as addictions because without them things seem to be falling apart.

MELORA: Yes, and understand that there is no judgment from Higher Beings about this, because the issue is that the more sensitive you are . . . you agreed to come into this density and to (as our Jyoti says) "this God-forsaken planet" . . .

S.: [laughs]

MELORA: . . . to try it out, to explore challening issues, whatever; and the more sensitive you are, the more difficult it is. So there is this intrinsic act of heroism in the more sensitive beings' incarnating that we would suggest energetically counterbalances whatever judgment there might be about the addiction part of it.

S.: Well, I think that's important--that's the idea that if someone does feel guilty, that compounds it, makes it worse.

MELORA: Yes.

S.: I'm not meaning to do that.

MELORA: That's right, and that's why we emphasized that there is no spiritual judgment if you can understand this from your Core Soul. This is what we meant when we started--that there is an overall balance among your incarnational expressions: past, concurrent and future. There may be lifetimes in which you're just a "mediocre," of-average-intelligence family man--"God fearing" but not people-judging. Where you're just a sort of "average Joe," anchoring, energetically, other aspects of you expressed somewhere else. Do you see?

S.: I do. Yes. But I'm wondering also: We pick embodiment; we pick our parents, and looking back on it, for me there's a history of alcohol. I don't know, again, if this is something in the DNA, whatever, that has come through in the line that I chose to be in to embody. That was one of the other things I was wondering about. If I, or if anybody, no longer needs addictions, would that affect the lineage?

MELORA: We sort of explained this before when you asked about what aspects of your DNA would affect your son, [R.]. We said that your DNA changes according to impressions made on it by your life experiences, but if those changes take place after the birth of the progeny, then they do not affect that progeny's DNA. The same would be with the predisposition to "loving" alcohol. We're not saying that it's hunkey-dorey if people have their addictions because, intrinsically, such addictions are self-destructive. However, we're saying that there is not the judgment "above" that people would suppose that might be coming from their High Selves, their spiritual core. It's more that your Core spirit looks at all aspects of itself as a tapestry or as a unified thing and then gets energetic impressions from the balances or imbalances of all of those together--not just one lifetime expression.

But there is, individually, your consciousness, for example, in incarnation on Earth at this time, a responsibiilty to your physical body. So certain expressions of truth that have come through scriptures, like "Your body is a temple" are accurate in the way one should relate to one's physical being. That is a matter of individual responsibility, individual choice, but we're saying that it is not to be thought of as this horrible thing from the perspective of your Core soul or that you're a failure or "What's wrong with you that you're doing this?" It is you, in that consciousness, in that body, in the current reality--your choices regarding how you relate to your own body. Does that make sense?

S.: Well, it does. But, as usual with most of these questions and answers, it seems a little more complicated than that. If we think about family, if think about people we're associated with, we seem to be in our own particular, little sphere, where everybody is interacting and there are spheres around that we do not interact with.

MELORA: It would probably be better to ask more specific questions about aspects of this, and so if you would guide us in what you're really trying to get after here, we could answer you better.

S.: I think I was just trying to work with Jyoti's question. So, basically, Ascension and addiction are--

MELORA: . . . are incompatible. Ascension in that lifetime in which the addicitons are expressed . . . but that does not preclude coming to wisdom or tapping in to higher information coming in.

S.: Thank you, Melora.

MELORA: It is our very great pleasure to serve you in the Light, and we are Melora.