Does the caterpillar blame itself for where it finds itself?
Keep in mind that to struggle is human. Keep also in mind that a struggle is just that: a struggle. No judgment or blame, no condemnation or shame need be attached to the human struggles, for no need of such domination by the mind exists. Accept struggle as a human condition, yet also as the spirit in conflict with the human world. The greater advantage of struggle is that it eventually leads to growth.
Without harm one may struggle and advance, without fear for self or others, for all struggle has at its core the needs of the spirit to grow. For this is the essence of struggle within the human condition: fulfillment of the needs and the purposes of the spirit—to evolve.
Life is a teaching tool. Investigate how your own life teaches you each day. Accept your lessons and without blame learn from them, so that eventually you may move along at a quicker pace toward greater balance and openness to the evolutionary meaning of your life.
Acceptance must be learned, how to accept the self and the world you live in must be achieved, and then will you be led to a new level of understanding about the self. But only in being able to accept where you are now as the place you need to be, will you learn from your situation, understanding that it is most necessary for you at this moment in your life. Struggle, you will find, will guide you if you let it.
You are all students, your life and your higher self your teachers. You are student and teacher both. You see? Everything is perfectly set up for you to learn the most valuable lessons for now, for who you are and who you are to become. You are in the perfect seat in the classroom.
Embrace the wholeness of the self to guide you, as you ponder what to do next. Accept the lessons of the good teacher that you are, but also learn to be a good, attentive student as well. And that means learning to pay attention in the everyday classroom of life. Without judgment of self and others, without blame or self-defeating thoughts, accept your struggles as your daily lessons. But the main thing now is to wake up and notice that you are in the right class, the only one you could possibly attend at this moment. Wake up class!
Channeled with love and appreciation for all struggling beings.
How far can we travel into the truth before lights out, black out?
David Bohm—considered the preeminent quantum physicist of the 20th century—gifted us with the hologram as the most apt metaphor to capture the true nature of reality. When a holographic picture is splintered into fragments, the whole is still contained in even the tiniest of those fragments. Human beings, like a cut up sheet of holographic film, are all fragmented beings, who—no matter how fragmented, however cut up the slice may be—still hold within the wholeness of the truth of everything. Shine a light on any fragment of holographic film, and the whole picture will appear.
When Jung gifted us the metaphor of the collective unconscious, he captured the same reality. At the deepest level, we are all the same—one interconnected whole being, present and interconnected in the collective unconscious. At a certain level, we are all the sum total of the Akashic Records.
The other day, I randomly opened the ancient Bhagavad-Gita, The Song of God, to the following description of holographic, collective wholeness:
“Die, and you win heaven. Conquer, and you enjoy the earth. Stand now, son of Kunti, and resolve to fight. Realize that pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat, are all one and the same; then go into battle. Do this and you cannot commit any sin.”
On another day, I opened Rix Weaver’s The Old Wise Woman to a description of a woman’s dream, the exact same dream repeated many times throughout her life. In the dream, the woman always finds herself in the same room with seven doors; three doors to the left and three to the right, facing each other, and a seventh door at the far end of the room. Each time she dreams this dream, as she attempts to pass through the room, a dark presence descends like a cloud and forces her back.
What’s behind the door?
In a waking dream of active imagination—where the conscious ego stays present and interacts with the contents of the dream—this same woman fights the dark presence and is able to access valuable truths about herself behind each door. Finally, she opens the seventh door only to encounter a man with a Book of Rules plastered to his forehead, the true puppet-meister behind her construction of reality.
Jung identified this rule bearer as the Animus, the male counterpart inherent in the psyche of all women. This character functions autonomously in the psyche of woman as the discriminator or organizer, but all too often becomes a dictator—the dark presence that the woman sensed countless times in her dream—with all its rules and judgments, restricting and crippling life.
In this woman’s conscious interactions with her animus in active imagination, she transforms the relationship from one of foe to that of friend, whereby honoring her true feelings and broadening her capacity for articulation through positive collaboration. Had her ego not stood up to the dark cloud, she never would have known the deeper truths of her hologram, which enabled her to move more fully into life. Instead, she would have remained a prisoner to her inner ruler as he constantly dictated a safe world that she could exist in.
Men suffer a similar gatekeeper at the deeper level of the hologram. Last night, after reading Rix Weaver’s account of the woman’s dream doors, I dreamt of a house with several rooms, a woman in each room.
My dream suggests that man must encounter his inner anima—the feminine counterpart of the male psyche—showering life with moods and sensitivities that construct a reality he believes should exist, that he is entitled to. Under the influence of her vexations, man cannot know the true nature of reality, and certainly can’t know woman as person, devoid of anima’s spells of projection.
The true nature of reality—contrary to the popular belief that women are moody and men are rational—is quite the opposite. In truth, the background of a man’s psyche is dominated by his anima in all its moodiness and emotions, and a woman’s psyche is dominated by her animus with its rigid rules and rationalities. Both the anima and the animus are inferior forms of feeling and thinking that lead to hair-brained battles and are the source of many a conflict and breakup. Unless a couple or an individual delves deeper into the characters of the hologram, within or without, these characters dominate life from the darkness, and true reality never experiences the light.
As we move beyond the once highly defended confines of our ego selves, deeper down the rabbit hole of the hologram, we discover other characters quite willing to communicate and share their world. In recapitulation, for example, we frequently ask or are asked by the body self to re-experience, through our senses, a past experience from our lives. The results of this request are often quite dramatic, as we may be taken, quite physically, through the sights, smells, sounds, temperatures, and touch sensations of deeply forgotten experiences.
At other times, we might find ourselves conjecturing about the accuracy of a memory only to have an immediate physical sensation, a channeled body communication, authenticating the validity of our thoughts. In fact, the language of body communication can evolve to a fluid real time dialogue, to a kind of advanced kinesthetics between ego and body self.
Time to break the rules?
As we go deeper into the hologram of the collective self, we might open channels to past lives and to entities beyond this life, though fully part of the same interconnected hologram we all exist in and, ultimately, are.
Truly mind-blowing as these ideas are, that’s what happens when you put down the Book of Rules! The real challenge is to continue to journey ever deeper into the hologram, keeping the lights on—indeed, the true meaning of enlightenment.
The other day, as Chuck and I walked in the early morning, a strange sight greeted us. We had just arrived at a “T” intersection when to our left a commotion arose.
Out of the treetops a strange creature appeared. Squawking and flapping, it came towards us, a phoenix or some other mythical beast. On second glance it appeared to be some manmade object, whirring and clunking along in the sky, much like a Leonardo da Vinci flying machine. As it drew nearer it changed again, into a hawk with two small birds clutched in its claws, the birds flapping and shrieking wildly in an attempt to free themselves from the clutches of this, indeed, mythical beast.
As we watched, one of the birds did free itself. Somehow able to wriggle out of the grip of the sharp claws, it quickly flew off into the woods with nary a backward glance. The hawk flew over us, and though its tasty meal still struggled frantically, it seemed that its fate was sealed.
Much startled by this sight, we turned to the right and continued our walk, our thoughts and discussion turning too. We had been talking about our deepening practice as spiritual beings on a journey in this world, of constantly having to balance the magic of other worlds with the duties and needs of this world. And thus, we could not help but wonder what this sighting could possibly mean.
Our kind hearts immediately projected onto the poor little birds. And two of them! We thought in terms of loved ones. Who was at risk; who would be confronted with some terrible trauma today or in the near future? What did it signify for us, the first thing to catch our attention on this day, and so early in the morning? What did it portend in our own lives?
As we watched the hawk fly off down the road ahead of us, the siren cries of blue jays—the birds I interpret as the police force of the skies—alerted other creatures to be aware that a predator was in their midst. But there was really nothing to be concerned about, for the hawk had gotten what it wanted; its only intent now was to consume it.
Who’s the predator?
My thoughts turned away from my projections and fears, for self and others, and instead began to look at the reality of what had occurred. The hawk began to lose its predatory role and take on the role of life itself, doing what it needed to survive in this world, much as we all do in our own lives, consuming and taking what we need. The two birds lost their roles as poor creatures of circumstance and instead became the choices we all make each day: the choice to live one way or another, the choice to do one thing or another, the choice to come into this world at all.
“You know,” I said to Chuck, “one bird is going to live and it looks like the other will die, but who’s to judge which one got the better deal. Do I feel sorry for the one that’s facing death? Perhaps it’s being given the opportunity to go deeper into its evolutionary experience? The very thing we seek all the time.”
As I pondered the significance of the event, I realized that we all get carried away by predators in our own lives, by our compulsions, addictions, attachments, our fears, our psychological makeup, by our very nature, and by the very energy of life that is as unstoppable as the predatory hawk simply searching for sustenance to survive. We are all both the hawk and the two birds. Often enough, we are caught unaware, taken from our perch and thrown into turmoil, forced to fight for our lives, to make a choice that will take us on a new journey. Even in the most mundane of circumstances our choices matter. As we plod along in our daily lives it becomes increasingly necessary to train our awareness to stay upon the path of growth, intent upon a life of meaning and evolution, no matter what our circumstances.
I could not judge the outcome of the event, for I saw the potential for growth in both life and death. I see the potential for growth, for going deeper into the life we are in, no matter where we end up. I cannot judge another for where they are in their life, just as I do not wish to be judged for the choices I’ve made in my own.
We all have the same choice to make: How are we going to deal with where we are now? Are we going to be the evolutionary beings we are meant to be, conserve our energy for our journey and go deeper into our experience, no matter what it is? Or are we going to succumb to the predator, our energy consumed by another, by everything from worry and fear to mental illness and disease?
As the shamans of Ancient Mexico point out, we are beings who are going to die. I see death as offering as much choice as life. As I saw what was happening to the two birds, I knew that one chose life and the other chose death, but also that both were worthy choices, both presenting evolutionary opportunities. The opportunity—and this is what we are training ourselves for as we recapitulate, and as we seek connection with our deeper spiritual selves—is to remain aware of our evolutionary potential at all times.
The journey matters…
Recapitulation offers us the opportunity to practice the skills necessary to maintain our awareness. Each time we recapitulate we experience a little death, a loss of our perceived self, while we simultaneously regain a part of our lost energetic self. This involves remaining aware that we are in two worlds at once, both in the energy of the predator and simultaneously the victim of our circumstances, like the two birds in the claws of the hawk that flew over Chuck and I the other morning. Recapitulation is as much practice for how to live this life as it is practice for facing the moment of death from this life, two evolutionary paths of equal value and potential.
We all stand at a “T” intersection every day of our lives—we have choices to make, and those choices matter. No matter what our fate, whether we are the little bird that gets away or the little bird that goes to its death, we always have the opportunity to go deeper, or not.
Today is a day of reconciliation within the self; a day for reflection on all you have learned about the self over the past days, weeks, months, and even longer, for the energy of change has been in motion for quite a long time.
Awareness of self at all times remains key. Awareness of self entails keeping abreast of the changing self, of the changes that have already taken place. With those changes in your cognition, make new choices in alignment with the constantly changing and growing self. Awareness entertains all possibilities, but it also remains fixed on the path of growth that you chose a long time ago.
All who exist upon that earth already chose a path of growth. Life asks you to wake up to this fact, and to force negation of life away, as you embrace the positive aspects of your life. Life is energy and how you view, use, interpret, and allow that energy to flow through you and unfold is really up to each one of you. As an individual you do have ultimate control over your life and so that is what the energy of now asks you to fathom and take responsibility for. The energy of now asks you to proceed on your life as if you were in perfect control, accepting everything as necessary, asking that each day’s tasks and unfoldings be totally acceptable and necessary as well. However, choices matter, and this is where your power lies, in making choices that lead you along your evolutionary path.
You know what is right. Be what is right for you to be. Be open to the energy that now aids and abets you as you take your journey. With awareness, make positive choices as you work your way out of your old self and into your new self. The energy of now fully embraces you on your journey.
Every step of your life is meaningful. Keep this in mind as you continue your journey today and every day. Greet life with the same openness with which it greets you. Deeper work now awaits, yet does it gift you greatly to deal with all aspects of life that still hold you to an old routine.
Break away from the old self and open wide to the new self. You already know who that is. Don’t be afraid to live this new self. There is no reason to hold back. It’s your life after all! Don’t you want to live it to the fullest? Approach it gently, thoughtfully, compassionately, but do embrace this energy that now seeks to release you from your old self and catapult you to a new self.
Each one of you must make personal decisions now. That’s just the way it is. Every little decision is important—know that. Each step, each day, is meaningful. Find the truth of that and you’ve found the key to life.
Be aware. Make choices in awareness of the greater meaning of your personal journey, reconciled with the truth that you chose that life and that journey. That is how to evolve.
