Don Juan Matus explained to Carlos Castaneda that, yes, our world is a world of separate objects. However, beneath that world of separateness, we are all in a state of one interconnected energy. In that state of oneness, love is the energy of cohesion, that which holds together and welcomes all of its neighbors.
Don Juan also explained that we live in a predatory universe. Indeed, all life feeds upon life, and yet, at a soul level, energetic life is never lost, it merely changes form.
Survival, in our separate human form state, requires an instant ability to judge safety and danger. That which we judge to be dangerous we come to hate. Hate is the emotion that allows us to dehumanize and destroy that which we judge to be different and threatening to our survival.
Oneness and separateness are a pair of opposites that constitute a core challenge to life in human form. It all begins with the symbiotic oneness of mother and embryonic fetus, in pregnancy, that ends in the separation of the one into two distinct beings at birth. The challenge to become a fully realized separate being, who can open to the oneness of love, is the art of human life.
We are drawn to relationship in a quest to reunite with our lost oneness. Union is driven by the natural attraction of opposites for each other. This is love in energetic motion. When these opposites unite there is frequently a honeymoon phase, where opposites relish the relief and ecstasy of restored oneness.
However, as relationships progress, one’s separate, differentiated self reemerges and finds itself in opposition with its soulmate. This reemergence frequently leads to competition and opposition of viewpoints in the relationship. The couple is then challenged to make room for their differences in the wholeness of their relationship. Far too often, bearing the tension of these unreconciled opposites results in the solution to hate one’s partner and end the relationship.
The solution of hate, devaluation, and demonization of the other is the frequent outcome of attempting to bear the extraordinary tension of differences necessary to reach a reconciling of opposites. This is evident in the wars that plague our world. The underlying energetic imperative to embrace all parts and peoples of the world in the oneness that we truly are is the evolutionary and karmic challenge of our time.
Beneath the opposites of love and hate is the oneness and separation phases of human and cosmic evolution. The separatist, hateful stage of human interaction must ultimately acquiesce to the greater harmony and love of energetic reality, which, like day turning into night, will naturally reassert itself.
As we live through this stage of human evolution, which emphasizes separateness and hate in human relations, may we bear its tension and find the path that will lead us to our underlying wholeness, with renewed balance. This is the path where love and hate meet in a union that makes room for all.
The foundation for belief, in this world, is socialization. We believe what we are told. The advertising industry spends billions of dollars a year to attract our attention, tell us what to believe, and, ultimately, control how we behave.
Although we don’t arrive in this world with a blank mental slate, we are nonetheless most influenced in childhood by the rules and judgments presented to us from primary parental figures, authority figures, and peer role models.
Science, with its focus on material proof, has reigned as a standard for believability for a couple of centuries. However, our current modern world is relativizing this standard of truth, with its emphasis upon the dominant role of suggestion in generating belief.
The power to control the narrative, the words used to describe current world challenges or opinions, is everywhere evident. A statement made on X results in a major loss of revenue, as advertisers run for the hills. Books are banned that suggest values or beliefs one disagrees with. I am not making a First Amendment pitch for free speech, but rather giving a neutral acknowledgment of the power of speech upon belief.
Carlos Castaneda emphasized the power of socialization, above all else, to fixate our belief system—and, hence, the world we generate—through shared beliefs with others. Our current world crises reflect a critical breakdown of a coherent belief system. The real current World War is a war of competing beliefs. Beliefs are indeed the deadliest of weapons.
Beliefs are magical spells. Shamans teach that, at a subconscious level, we incessantly repeat internalized beliefs. They call this the internal dialogue that constantly judges everything, most especially the self. The internal dialogue repeats the slogans from our internal advertising agency, which in turn generates our personal truths and how we see the world.
The shamans are consistent with most spiritual practices that encourage arriving at inner silence to suspend the power of fixated beliefs that color our view of ourselves, and the world. From the vantage point of inner silence, we see the relativity and power of belief.
However, as venerable as silence is to spiritual advancement it is not necessary to advance your beliefs. You needn’t even believe in a belief to materialize it. The only requirement is to attract the subconscious mind to a suggestion, even if you don’t consciously believe it. Repeat the suggestion incessantly, like a well-funded advertising campaign. Eventually the subconscious will be influenced and change your world.
Of course, if your suggestion is denying something, like a truth you are uncomfortable to face, though you will experience a shift eventually, you will also generate a latent karma. Karma is merely the outcome of our choices. If we choose to generate an untruth, the effects of that untruth will generate their own suggestions, which will impact the course of our future life. That’s nature’s basic law of balance.
So, what’s best to believe?
Suggestions that promote spiritual advancement experience the karma of fulfillment. We learn how to believe through rote repetition of beliefs that then manifest. As they manifest, even the Doubting Thomas conscious mind gains faith and believes in the power of the subconscious mind to change the world, within and without.
Suggestions can be likened to sperm, whose intent is to impregnate the egg of the subconscious mind, the mother of manifestation.
Suggestions abound from many sources, such as habits, instincts, and the thoughts and beliefs of others. However, the optimal source of suggestion for the growth of the personality is the conscious ego presenting suggestions to the subconscious in alignment with its soul’s mission in this life.
The oddity of this necessary relationship is that the ego has a long developmental process to arrive at the necessary maturity to optimally lead the personality. This challenge is blatantly illustrated in the power struggles currently riddling the Earth. Rather than address the true needs of the planet, the world ego is stuck in greed, or essentially a narcissistic worldview, which obscures the execution of suggestions of right action to resolve crises.
This same limitation applies to the individual personality, whose narcissistic needs and desires can monopolize habits that impact the health of the physical body, as well as the quality of connection possible in relationships with others.
Many of the suggestions from ego to subconscious result in poor health and failed relationships. It often requires the learning curve of a lifetime for the ego to arrive at the optimal spiritual alignment to truly lead the personality.
At the receptive end is the subconscious mind, whose powers are truly supernatural, yet it lacks the reasoning power of consciousness to select the best suggestions to fulfill. Of course, it has the suggestive influence of the whole of human evolutionary history that expresses itself powerfully in the emotions of instincts, yet even these reactions may not fit with the true needs of life in the modern word.
For example, the instinct of self-preservation might insist upon a prolonged war as the necessary reaction to an attack. As appropriate a reaction to this survival threat as this reaction might be, the more conscious human potential to arrive at resolution through negotiation might prove more effective at finding lasting resolution.
In this case, the ego, with its higher capacities for reason and right action might be the better center for decision making, offering better suggestions to the subconscious mind than the deeply engrained instinctive suggestions that were more necessary at a purely instinctive age of human history.
In contrast to the ego, the subconscious mind does not need to undergo a developmental process. It is fully formed in childhood where its power is quite evident in play. A slight suggestion of a peer as monster, in a game of tag for instance, can preoccupy a group of kids for hours, as they are filled with intense emotional reactions to the easily imagined chasing monster.
The subjective mind in childhood and adulthood can equally take charge of one’s perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, and physical actions when a suggestion successfully impregnates it. The subconscious acts as a creative manifester, fully believing and becoming the suggestion it takes in. It remains for the ego alone to reality-test the validity of this activated, or we could even say, possessed, state.
It becomes evident how this odd couple needs each other’s capacities to fully succeed in life. Ego must carefully guard against underhanded suggestions, which abound, from taking root in the subconscious. Energy practices, including stated intentions, can create boundaries against unwanted influences.
The subconscious, in response to ego suggestion, can provide information to the ego similar to the capability of artificial intelligence (AI), which can advance the ego’s problem-solving or knowledge of lived events with its perfect memory. Like AI, however, the subconscious must be monitored and led to exert its influence for the greater good of all. For this, as in all things, one needs a mature adult ego that submits to right action as its guiding principle.
A healthy, intimate relationship between each mind of this odd couple suggests the ultimate evolutionary track for mind during its sojourn in human form. In human terms, it represents the optimal relationship to find fulfillment and individuation in this magical life.
We are all ultimately One, but the structure of this world that we live in is one of separate objects, with distinct differences.
Christian Science suggests we link our consciousness with our core identity, that perfect Oneness, whereby healing the illusion of disease in a non-existent, separate physical body.
Hindu philosophy calls this illusion of separateness maya. Maya spins and directs lila, the creative divine play that results in the current world drama that we personally experience as the fixed reality of our world. To become enlightened, one must fully engage in the current play yet be aware of the limitations of its illusory solidity, and the fact of its impermanence. That’s what is meant by non-attachment.
The shamans of ancient Mexico call assuming this role of non-attachment stalking. In stalking, we fully embody the character we intend to become, sometimes even temporarily forgetting our true essence as energetic beings when we do so. From a shamanic perspective, our world is generated by fixating our consciousness upon a program that assembles our awareness to perceive a world of distinct solid objects.
Carlos Castaneda pointed out that it is sheer magic to be able to conjure this solid world. He called human beings magical beings because of their ability to so fixate their awareness as to generate such a magical event. However, he truly lamented how this single assemblage point of awareness had become the sole fixation of human consciousness. We have forgotten that we are indeed magical beings capable of unlimited possibilities.
In my time in Carlos Castaneda’s world, I once observed him personally demonstrate a physical movement to break this fixation of limited awareness. He was a short man. He turned his back to us, performing a kind of shoulder roll.
He keenly stated that we are magical beings whose wings have been clipped. With that he urged us to literally free our wings, demonstrating with a movement initiated from the wing itself; engaging the fullness of the entire back rather than a shallow roll of the shoulder. I saw the profound movement of the depth of his wing.
It’s a simple movement. Imagine the wing. Feel an impulse to move it. Be led by it.
The maya of the human mind is one of duality. We appear to have two distinct minds. That is the divine lila of life as it is played out in the current fixation of the human form. These two minds are the ego and the subconscious. The dance between these two minds is our true inner soulmate relationship in this life, replete with all the agonies and ecstasies of human relationship.
The ego is our objective, reasoning mind. The ego is the seat of consciousness. The ego greatly identifies with life in its physical body. The ego is the home of personal identity; the ego says, “I am.” The ego exercises the directive power of free will, choice, and decision making. The ego is charged with the responsibility of leadership in its human life.
The subconscious is the home of total memory. Every moment of our life is recorded there. While the ego may retain some memory, the subconscious records it all. During recapitulation we experience the relationship of ego and subconscious, as the consciousness of now is reconciled with the full experience of the past.
The subconscious operates through intuition. The subconscious is the remote viewer that can travel way beyond the confines of the physical body and observe events on the other side of the world, or in the cosmos. The subconscious has access to the Akashic records, the collective unconscious history and accrued knowledge of our species.
The subconscious is the seat of telepathy; it receives and can read the thoughts of others. The subconscious runs all the operations of the physical body. The subconscious houses the instincts and is the home of emotions.
The subconscious is our magical mind. It does not reason; its modus operandi is suggestion. Whatever suggestion it receives, it will fully bring to life. With its vast tools and resources, the subconscious can manifest, to the best of its ability, any suggestion it decides to adopt.
Unknown to us, the ego and the subconscious constantly work in tandem. Thoughts from the ego become directive suggestions to the subconscious, which then turn into a set of habits that automatically control our lives.
The subconscious is also quite receptive to the suggestions of others. We may notice our attitudes, moods and behaviors greatly impacted by our interactions with others. This may largely be the suggestive influence of someone else’s energy upon our subconscious. As opposed to the ego, with its fixed identity, the subconscious does not have a personality. It is an open book that willingly embodies the content of suggestions, wherever they may originate from.
Healthy leadership by the ego, in the quality of its suggestions to the subconscious, creates the ideal relationship between the two minds. This requires the ego to firstly be in alignment with its Spirit as the arbiter of right action. The ego must also accept the existence of the subconscious mind with all its magical capacities. This is often a tall order for the ego to undertake, which clings to its rationality as ruler and dismisses the greater powers of the subconscious mind.
The ego needn’t believe in the power of the subconscious to access it. Merely rotely repeating a suggestion, ad nauseam, is bound to register eventually as a directive to the subconscious. If I notice a headache brewing, I direct my subconscious with the incessant suggestion that the headache is healing, and is healed. If it disappears, as it often does, I acknowledge the fact of the power of the subconscious to heal.
The ego comes into better relationship with the subconscious when it can expand its rationality to include the fact that the subconscious has abilities that appear to defy logic. Exercising the intentional practice of autosuggestion can produce results that broaden the ego’s reason to include the magical potential of the subconscious mind. Rather than dismiss miracle cures as placebo, scientists would do well to study the factual abilities of the subconscious mind to alter physical events in the body through the power of suggestion.
Reconciliation of mind is ego valuing the subconscious, and consciously feeding it suggestions for the greater good of self, other, and world.
When we leave this life in our soul body, our mental body, of ego and subconscious, will leave as one. As we journey beyond the physical body this reconciled mind is our navigator in the great beyond. Use this life now to bring mind into a partnership to truly serve your evolving soul.
Now and then,* Chuck
*I am blown away by the magic of the release of the modernly engineered Now and Then, the Beatle’s final song, which is #1 on the musical charts. The generation of now is claiming their own rightful ownership of the Beatle’s Aquarian magic, as well as John Lennon’s soulful reconciliation of relationship. May its energy further permeate the world and its reconciliation of relationship.
Ancient Hindu mystics predicted, with precision, the dire circumstances of the epoch in which we now live; they named it Kali Yuga. As the final stage of a repetitive cycle of four cosmic seasons, Kali Yuga is the moral rockbottom for humanity. It is currently expressed in the atrocities we are now living through, replete with loss of life, and lack of compassion and virtue.
The impersonal energetic imperative of this cosmic era is nature’s insistence that our collective shadow, with its destructive energy from all that has been repressed, erupt upon the terrestrial surface of the Earth, deeply wounding and splitting apart life as we have known it.
The intent of this energetic lightning bolt is to break apart our consensus reality—an agreed upon union of opposites of now tenuous solidity—to ultimately facilitate the creation of a more perfect union of opposites with which to nurture and support new life.
At present, our wholeness is being shattered into its constituent parts, which are opposites. The polarization we see and experience everywhere is the emotional state of these opposites. They are vying for dominance, warring to generate a new world order that is controlled by their polarized points of view.
The repressed emotional hot lava, that has metaphorically reached the terrestrial surface from the earth’s core, are beliefs and actions from prior eras of human history. The dynamic of a final solution to the challenge of opposites that gave rise to the Holocaust has reemerged today, with its emphasis on complete elimination of one’s opposite as the only solution to achieve stability.
This dynamic is active in the Middle East and Ukraine, and is certainly at the heart of the great American divide. The heightened tension between polarized extremes has given rise to a self-protectiveness and a self-righteousness that justifies violence and eschews the possibility of peaceful coexistence. At present, eliminating and punishing the opposition is the dominating strategy to resolve the clash of opposites throughout the world.
Social media is a war zone of opposites seeking to vex and destroy each other. Politicians pander to polarized issues and groups, seeking victory and rule through dominance versus a reconciliation that includes a rightful home for all the opposites.
Humans did not create Kali Yuga, but they do have their personal stamp upon the issues it has brought to the surface. How we reckon with what we must reckon with is of human decision making and responsibility. Finding stability rests in the hands of free will. Though one might feel instinctual rage from lethal attack, consciousness allows for the possibility of higher levels of human response and reconciliation.
Stability begins with the knowing that this time of Kali Yuga issues from nature itself. The goddess Kali brings about a time of change that must go through destruction and death en route to renewal and new life. Even the Death card, in the Tarot deck, represents this inevitable stage in the cycle of life; a necessity for transformative change.
The death and resurrection motif in Christianity is central to spiritual evolution. Though concretely symbolized in the form of a crucifix, death symbolizes the letting go of a prior consensus reality in order to allow for life in a new and more stable union of opposites. The process of getting there is indeed a painful process.
No one can escape Kali’s energy. Within all of us is a personal consensus reality that has ruled our greater personality. The destructive energy of Kali is rattling our own ruling belief systems, as the ego is inundated with the energy of the complexes it has suppressed.
Complexes range from primal desires and needs to repressed personal traumas; from unsolved ancestral dramas to one’s soul’s mission for coming into this life.
Often our personal consensus belief system is ruled by an illusion or delusion that favors one pole at the expense of its opposite. Perhaps we are so dominated by rationality that we reject the irrational and emotional. In the time of Kali Yuga, we will not escape fits of passion or depression.
Ruthless honesty, within the self, offers the equanimity necessary to know the truth of one’s fuller self. Self-acceptance, and reconciliation with all that one is, is the prerequisite to individuation, a reconciliation with one’s whole self that gives rise to a more fully inclusive consensus reality to live by. This is how one achieves stability in this time of destruction.
The most powerful spiritual tool now available to all of us is being blatantly showcased in this time of Kali Yuga: The power of suggestion. Politicians boastfully chuckle at their power to exercise the power of suggestion to impact masses of people to bend toward their stated suggestions.
The power of the subconscious mind to heal is unparalleled. The power of the subconscious mind to destroy is equally unparalleled. All rests in the integrity of the one who suggests. Autosuggestion in alignment with the true needs of healing is the key to a more perfect union.
Suggestion is what the shamans call intent. Intent is the creator. Shamans maintain that humanity is asleep at the wheel of their power, unavailable to take command of their intent. When asleep at the wheel, we allow old programs, or the suggestions of others, to rule our personal creative force. That creative force molds our consensus reality.
When we wake up to this power, as the shocks of Kali rock our world, we are offered the opportunity to take back our own power, to mould and create our world, through conscious autosuggestion.
Stability rests in our faith in, and exercise of, our birthright to self-determination in the intent we hold for our lives. Turn your own intent in the direction of a more perfect union, within and without.
State, with authority and conviction, what your rational mind might even doubt is possible. Expand your rationality to include the possibility of a healing solution. Employ your rational mind often to express this intent to the subconscious mind.
Once the subconscious adopts the suggestion, it will become its truth. Fueled by its faith, the subconscious will employ its creator ability to manifest the stated intent.
