January 23, 1981
Spiritual growth often begins with a desire to become more loving, more patient, and more capable of helping others. Yet that desire can lead us to reject the parts of ourselves that seem inconsistent with our spiritual ideals.
In Session 5, Ra offers a path through this inner struggle: silence, honest self-examination, and acceptance of the completeness within ourselves and others.
The preparation for healing begins with learning to meet our own being with understanding.
The healer is a catalyst
The session opens with a clarification about spiritual healing. The questioner suggests that a healer prepares inwardly and then helps another person heal through example or exercises.
Ra explains that the healer serves as a catalyst. Within this teaching, the healing itself is a form of channeling intelligent infinity—the infinite source underlying creation.
This invites humility. The healer participates in something greater than their individual personality.
For anyone seeking to serve, the lesson reaches into ordinary life. We can offer encouragement, understanding, and compassionate presence while respecting another person’s freedom. Our service may help open a door, but the other person’s journey remains their own.
Silence opens the mind
Ra begins the disciplines of the mind with a memorable statement:
“The mind must be opened like a door. The key is silence.” — Session 5.2
The prerequisite is the ability to sustain inner silence when we choose.
In quiet attention, we can begin noticing what our constant mental activity conceals: an unresolved fear, a defensive judgment, an unspoken grief, or a love waiting to be expressed.
Silence gives these things room to become known.
The practice can begin gently. Sit quietly, breathe comfortably, and let attention settle. When thoughts arise, notice them and return without condemning yourself for having a busy mind.
Even returning to stillness can become an act of acceptance.
The first discipline: recognize your inner opposites
Ra asks the seeker to examine both the qualities they approve of and those they disapprove of within themselves.
Where we find patience, we are asked to recognize impatience. Where we find impatience, we are asked to discover patience.
This challenges the identities we build around selected traits. A patient person still carries the possibility of impatience. A fearful person also carries the possibility of courage.
Our immediate reaction is one expression of a larger being.
In Ra’s framework, the mind contains all things. The work is to discover that completeness and balance the opposing charges within it.
An uncomfortable reaction can therefore become an opportunity for understanding. Instead of immediately pushing it away, we can ask: What does this reveal about me, and where does its opposite also live within me?
The second discipline: accept your completeness
Self-knowledge is followed by acceptance.
We may want to identify only with kindness, wisdom, strength, or generosity. Yet experience reveals anger, confusion, vulnerability, and possessiveness as well.
Ra suggests that selecting certain attributes and rejecting others creates restrictive roles and inner blockages.
Acceptance allows us to acknowledge what is present without letting it define our whole identity.
We can recognize anger and still choose a considerate response. We can acknowledge fear and still act courageously. We can admit a mistake and take responsibility for correcting it.
A practical expression of this teaching is:
I can face what is within me and remain worthy of love.
The third discipline: recognize completeness in others
The same inquiry then turns outward.
When someone displays impatience, Ra asks us to hold both impatience and patience in our understanding. The visible quality is part of that person’s expression; it does not encompass their entire being.
This requires subtle discernment. We rarely know all the experiences, pressures, or wounds behind another person’s behavior.
Remembering their completeness can soften the impulse to reduce them to a label.
The person who frustrates us may also be capable of tenderness. The person we admire may also struggle privately. Seeing both possibilities makes room for a more compassionate understanding.
The fourth discipline: accept the other-self
Recognition is again followed by acceptance.
In the Law of One, another person is an “other-self”—another expression of the same Infinite Creator.
Accepting that person’s humanity can coexist with boundaries, discernment, and accountability. We can respond firmly to harmful behavior while remembering the larger being behind it.
This practice asks us to bring the same honesty and compassion to others that we are learning to offer ourselves.
The fifth discipline: contemplate the relationships among minds
Ra’s fifth discipline concerns the relationships among the individual mind, another person’s mind, the collective or “mass” mind, and the infinite mind.
The session describes these relationships through geographical and geometrical imagery but gives little explanation of how to study them.
As a contemplative reflection, we can consider how our thoughts participate in wider patterns: family beliefs, cultural assumptions, shared fears, and collective hopes.
Within Ra’s spiritual vision, this inquiry extends toward the relationship between our individual awareness and infinite consciousness.
Know and accept the body
Ra next turns to understanding the body, including how feelings, emotions, and biases affect it.
The pattern remains the same: observe, understand its polarities, and accept its complexity. This understanding must also extend to the bodies of others.
We can begin by noticing how the body responds to experience. Where do we tighten during worry? What changes when we feel safe, grateful, or loved?
These observations can deepen awareness without assuming that every physical condition has an emotional cause.
Ra’s example of male and female expresses its metaphysical teaching about complementary polarities. The emphasis is on recognizing a greater completeness within embodied life.
Care is part of service
The session closes with attention to the comfort of Carla, the person serving as the channel, and to the arrangement of the group’s ceremonial objects.
Those instructions concern that particular channeling setting. They also bring the discussion back to a simple expression of service: caring for the person who is offering themselves to the work.
Spiritual attention finds expression in ordinary consideration.
The discussion of the third area of discipline—the spirit—is left for a later session.
A reflection for daily life
Choose one moment from your day when you felt a strong reaction.
Ask yourself:
- What quality appeared within me?
- Where have I also experienced its opposite?
- Can I acknowledge both without reducing myself to either?
- Can I remember the completeness of the other person?
- What response would express understanding and responsibility?
Then spend a few moments in silence.
May I meet myself honestly, meet others compassionately, and offer my presence in service.
Session 5 invites us to approach wholeness through quiet attention and acceptance. As we become more willing to understand ourselves, we may become more capable of understanding others—and more humble in the help we offer. Jesus also taught the same message.
Saying 22, In the Gospel of Thomas closely parallels Session 5’s teaching about recognizing and reconciling opposites within ourselves. The connection is a spiritual interpretation;
In Thomas, Saying 22, Jesus says:
“When you make the two one…”
The saying continues by describing unity between inner and outer, above and below, and male and female, connecting this transformation with entering the kingdom.
Read alongside Ra, this suggests becoming inwardly whole. Ra asks us to recognize patience and impatience within ourselves, understand both, and accept our completeness. Thomas’s imagery can likewise be read as an invitation to reconcile divisions within our being. Its male–female imagery is a particularly close parallel to the bodily polarities discussed in Session 5.
Saying 3 Gospel of Thomas adds the theme of self-knowledge:
“When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known…”
Thomas connects knowing oneself with recognizing oneself as a child of the living Father. That resonates with Ra’s invitation to examine the self and discover its deeper completeness.
Several biblical passages closely connect with Session 5’s themes of stillness, self-examination, and compassion.
1. Examine yourself before correcting others — Matthew 7:3
Jesus asks:
“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” — KJV.
Jesus asks us to examine our own vision before correcting another. Ra likewise begins with knowing and accepting the self. Read together, these teachings suggest that compassionate service grows from an honest heart—one willing to recognize within itself the struggles it sees in others. This closely parallels Ra’s instruction to begin by examining ourselves. Before judging another person’s impatience, anger, or weakness, we look honestly at those possibilities within our own being. Self-awareness can make our service more humble and understanding.
2. Enter the quiet place — Matthew 6:6
Jesus teaches:
“When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.” — KJV.
Jesus is teaching private, sincere prayer. Read contemplatively alongside Ra’s statement that silence opens the mind, this offers a similar invitation: withdraw from outward performance and become inwardly receptive to the divine.
3. Meet others with mercy — Luke 6:36
“Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” — Jesus, KJV.
This resonates with Session 5’s movement from understanding ourselves to accepting others. Mercy allows us to see a person’s humanity beyond the behavior that troubles us.
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