Your generosity can sometimes get you into trouble. Be generous with self and other but with established guidelines so that all may not be overwhelmed. For generosity is good if kept in balance, part of a life of caring and kindness, of humility and acceptance, but over giving creates imbalance. Remember the Middle Way, not too much in either direction, neither too strict nor too generous. Give appropriately, but don’t over give.
-From the Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
It is time to pause. Just as the long road eventually leads to mastery, the quiet path will lead to knowledge and the still mind will lead to right action. No matter the circumstances, true right action comes from deep within. Though it may sometimes seem as if right action comes from a quick, natural impulse or reaction, more often than not true right action will only come after deeper contemplation, for true right action is an act of the heart not of the mind, not of strategy and manipulation, conniving and posturing but the setting in motion of something called love. That is right action, decision based in love.
-From the Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
I have been dreaming again. Last Saturday, we published the following dream with our Soulbyte for the day, after the Paris attacks, as it clearly foreshadowed what occurred in Paris on Friday night. Here it is:
On Thursday night, I had a numinous dream in which a huge energetic force sucked all energy from the earth, destroying all of nature, revealing what lay buried in the depths of the earth, a large coiled cobra. Then a giant tidal wave came and washed over everything, bringing a new order. I stood calmly as all of this took place around me. After the tidal wave I calmly walked away, followed by the cobra, to higher ground, but all that had been was transformed. The valley that had been a river was now the ocean, transformed from the personal to the universal. This is what I understood as important now: the new world order is universal love and compassion.
Last night I had another dream in which I heard a loud booming voice say: Kill the cobra in the bathtub! At first I thought it ridiculous, there was no cobra in the bathtub! And secondly, I couldn’t kill anything, let alone a cobra, the symbol of spiritual awakening and universal consciousness in my earlier dream!
Upon reflection, I realize that is exactly what must happen. We must kill the cobra in the bathtub. Not to be misconstrued as killing the enemy, but as per the following meaning:
If we are all spirits living a human existence our challenge is to bring spirit fully into our human lives. To do that we must suffer. There must be sacrifice. Think of Christ on the cross, Buddha under the bodhi tree, Jesus in Gethsemane, all examples of suffering leading to enlightenment.
Marie-Louise von Franz, in Shadow and Evil in Fairytales tells a tale of a white horse that guides and protects the protagonist. The white horse tells the protagonist that in order to be saved in the end the protagonist must cut the horse into pieces and throw its severed parts to the four directions. The protagonist is horrified at the idea of killing this beautiful horse that has been its savior and companion, but at the crucial moment does the deed and all is well. Now, back to the cobra in the bathtub.
In the first dream, the cobra followed me and now it’s in the bathtub. It went from the ocean, the collective unconscious, to a small body of water, a bathtub. It’s in too small a container. The bathtub is personal consciousness, a small body of water over which man has control. The cobra in the bathtub is under control of the ego, though its real home is the ocean, the deeper, uncontrollable unconscious, which it longs to return to. Thus, a cobra contained is madness bursting to be free. It is the urge to go to war.
When the cobra followed me out of the ocean in my first dream, it was foreshadowing what was to follow if the natural balance was not maintained. In the first dream all was as it should be, nature restored to balance, though greatly transformed. The cobra, in following me, was hinting that there was more to come.
The truth is, the cobra doesn’t belong in the bathtub, it belongs in the ocean. In its containment it is going mad and thus has to be killed. Out of the sacrifice of the cobra will come healing, for the snake is a symbol of healing, yet it is also a symbol of destruction. The cobra specifically has a helmet-like mantel that when expanded means it is about to strike, so watch out!
The cobra is like the Goddess Isis that Chuck wrote about in his blog this week, a symbol of the dark and the light, life and death, destruction and healing. The lesson is that these contrasts must be kept in balance. And the greater unconscious does not belong in a tiny bathtub, as the human ego is quickly overwhelmed. It can only take in the fullness of what lies in the collective unconscious a little at a time or it will go mad. This happens to people who experience true reality in visions and overwhelming insights, they often go mad.
So what does this have to do with ISIS and world events? The lesson is that we must rid ourselves of the ego attitude that the cobra in the bathtub signifies, it is too powerful and unwieldy. We are kidding ourselves if we think we can contain this madness. We must sacrifice its deadly urge to strike, its dark side of hate and destruction and find the healing answer in love. We must all kill, within ourselves, the urge to go mad with hatred. We must overcome our passion for destruction.
Yogananda’s teacher, Yukteswar when confronted by a deadly cobra that rushed angrily at him, with hood expanded, conquered it with his love.*
The ego continues to toy with the cobra, wondering how it will tame it, but we must remember that the cobra is deadly. It will not be contained and nothing the ego comes up with will subdue it. Kill the mad cobra by seeking refuge in love, which releases the healing power of the snake, and then the Goddess energy returns to natural balance, as shown in my first dream.
The Soulbytes and the Message from Jeanne this week have all been about stabilizing the ego and remaining focused on what is right. Monday’s audio message implied that those who pray are innocent at heart, i.e., it is not Islam that is the enemy but the disenfranchised, misguided and misdirected youth unable to find meaning in today’s world.
As Hermann Hesse stated when the German youth were being drawn to antisemitism preceding World War II: “…the form of [antisemitism] with us now among misled German youth does a lot of harm, because it prevents these young people from seeing the world as it is and because disastrously it encourages the tendency to seek out a scapegoat on which to blame everything that goes wrong.” **
We must keep in mind that we are spirits living a human existence and as such we must each create our own bridge from the spirit realm to the human realm. I bring what I learn in my channelings and my dreams, daring to speak of what comes through me.
Much as I would rather just recoil back into my own little world, I feel the obligation of these dreams and messages as they ask me to leave my comfy quiet and put out what comes through. I have, after all, resolved to walk this path of spirit more fully. It is what we must all decide to do now.
The messages are clear: Love, which will only fully release from the the healing power of sacrifice, is the answer.
Jan
* Autobiography of a Yogi, p. 98.
** Portrait of Hesse, Bernhard Zeller p. 98
Who does not feel they have the answer? Only the innocent heart knows, and yet often even that is not enough to convince.
Where has love gone? Not too far. It is where it always is, in the loving hearts of all good people. That’s the answer; love is.
And who does not know what love is?
It is not the coiled asp ready to strike but the soft moon’s glow.
It is not the sword drawn to quarter but the golden sun’s light.
It is not hatred in the eyes but sweetness in the heart.
That’s what love is.
-From the Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
Compensation is the action of balance. In everyday life, we work—we give of our energy and are compensated with wages. Hence our efforts are compensated or balanced by stored energy—money—that we are then freed to use as we see fit.
Psychologically, compensation operates as the balancing agent of the unconscious to our conscious decisions and actions. If we spend our day studious and bored, our dreams may compensate by taking us on faraway adventures. In this way our conscious life is compensated—balanced—by our unconscious adventures.
The more extreme our conscious attitude, the more extreme our unconscious compensation. If we insist on keeping ourselves in flighty behavior, the unconscious might compensate with a bad mood, a depression, or a physical fall, bringing us back to earth.
This same compensatory mechanism operates on the world stage. When the ruling attitudes become extreme in any direction they are compensated by a counter movement of equal and opposite energy that reacts in its own destructive wake.
If we accept the premise that the world is an interdependent whole, then outbreaks of behavior, such as the recent horrific tragedy in Paris, should be explored as a powerful compensation for an equally imbalanced ruling principle, not necessarily within Paris or France but within the prevailing governing attitudes of our times around the world.
I have often proposed in my writings that ISIS is not simply a coincidental acronym for the Goddess Isis, but in fact has become an agent of the dark side of that Goddess, constellated from the depths of the collective unconscious. This would suggest that the ruling powers of our world have gone so far from valuing the sacred feminine Mother Earth that she is now activated, from her destructive side, to bring down the ruling order.
As we face the reality of the condition of our world, where the earth and the environment—the purview of the Goddess—have been completely denigrated, threatened with extinction, it becomes clear how a wrathful Goddess might invoke such ruthless destructive retaliation upon civilization itself.
Of course, this compensation cannot be allowed. ISIS must be stopped. But how? The outrage evoked by the destruction caused by ISIS sounds an appropriate battle cry. Nations will join forces to defeat this devil. But how? Seal the borders? Too late and, furthermore, ISIS infects many homegrown disenfranchised youths who can find no meaning in the world as we know it, though they do find meaning in bringing it down. What battle plan for this insidious entity?
Every individual is a hologram of the entire world. Each and every one of us, in the microcosm of our lives, has a ruling ego attitude that is being compensated by our unconscious forces. Each and every one of us must study our conscious decisions and behaviors. Where are we neglecting the true needs of the Goddess? How are we out of synch with Mother Nature?
Are we so obsessed with the digital world—which is a purely masculine abstraction—that we have lost touch with our physical bodies, our true nutritional and self-care needs?
Have we so abandoned our instinctual selves and instead turned ourselves over to the Goddess Amazon.com?
Have we so abandoned human eros and squeezed it into Match and Tinder?
Do we listen to the wisdom of our birthright—our dreams—or have we completely shifted our connection to wisdom to the great god Google?
Are we so enamored by the glitter of consumerism that we cover over true need with empty objects?
We must study the nature of compensation in our own lives. If we are ridden with anxiety, fear, compulsions, and moods, these are compensating clues as to the problems in our conscious ruling attitudes. If we can humbly see the one-sidedness of our ruling attitude and change it, we will change the wrathful compensation of the dark side of the Goddess within.
If the truth is that there are very painful feelings or inconvenient truths that our ego has been avoiding, resulting in dastardly unconscious compensations, if we then turn around and face the unfaceable—mourn a deeply imprisoned feeling, for instance—then we completely shift the inner balance.
If the ego can align itself with the true needs of the self, the Goddess Isis can usher in a renewal, a new stage of fertile creation and meaningful life.
That’s the compensation we must seek now, the compensation of renewal over destruction. We are all empowered, and charged, to arrive at proper compensation within ourselves. This is how we will change the world for the better.
Of course, there will be necessary responses to the intolerable violation of innocence in Paris. But if we are not careful we might find ourselves drawn into a purely scapegoat compensatory reaction that actually plays into and empowers the reach of the collective shadow that now threatens us.
If we collectively face the compensatory relationship within ourselves, we can shift the balance of the forces that threaten us and restore calm to the world. Ultimately, love is the key. Love rejects nothing. Love faces the truth, Love restores proper balance. Love is always the answer.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité,
Chuck