Today, we switch things around and publish Chuck’s blog. Jan’s blog, which normally appears on Wednesdays, will be published this Friday instead.
What is that?
En route to errands, Jan asks: “Did you bring the DVDs for return?” I hadn’t. It was time to turn around, a familiar theme for us these days, as in the past few weeks we have noticed a propensity for making the same trip twice in a day, something always needing a redo. And actually there were two DVDs to return, though we had only watched one. “What is the unseen story?” I ponder, not wanting to get caught in frustration or be disheartened by this unnecessary waste of time, and so I stalk a different attitude as we turn around and slowly drive back home.
“What will we see that we wouldn’t have seen had we not had occasion to retrace our steps? What will we be shown?” I wonder.
Within seconds my questions are answered. Off to the right, deep in a field, I notice what appears to be a German shepherd on its own, standing alertly, sniffing the air. We turn the corner and pull to the side of the road. The animal slowly makes its way towards us, an unmistakable coyote, low to the ground, long bushy tail, triangular face. Barely breathing, we watch as it prances out of the field and cautiously crosses the road right in front of us. What a thrill! But what does it mean?
Coyote is a night hunter. What brings it so boldly into daylight for all to see? Coyote is trickster, a shapeshifter, who teaches folly and wisdom. We are tricked where we are fools, yet through facing our folly honestly we acquire wisdom.
In earnest, I watch the third presidential debate between Obama and Romney. Suddenly, I get it; shapeshifting coyote trickster stands before us in the bright light of scrutiny. Romney has become Obama, adopting nearly all his positions, many of which he disputed but a week ago. Romney has transformed into calm statesman, touting the wisdom of WORLD PEACE!
It’s shapeshifter!
This shapeshifter actually transforms into a being who in a non-lucid moment doesn’t seem all that bad, actually appearing presidential! Oh what fools we mortals be!
After watching the debate, I am awakened twice in the night by dreams that seize me with fear. In each dream, a psychopathic killer seizes power and is unstoppable. In the morning my waking mood is tense, worried. Not wanting to attach to fear, I penetrate the dreams and the synchronicities of now. Now awake, I clearly see the trickster, come in my dreams to play me, letting me in on the folly of where we are now poised in our world. If we fall for the fool we will eventually get to wisdom, but how rough, how necessary, will that journey be?
Presidents and presidential races attract our projections because they concern our destinies in this world. As well, like kings imbued with divine right, they mirror our inner relations to our own higher powers. As mirrors we must ask ourselves: Are we allowing ourselves to make decisions and take actions in our lives based on our deepest truths, or on foolish illusions we sell ourselves in order to live a safe and complacent life?
The fool will always indulge our weaknesses, but are we willing to out the fool who caters to our inner greed and avoidance of truth? If we refuse inner truth, we certainly will delude ourselves with outer fool, who caters similarly to our greed and fears. We cannot really expect more from our leaders than we do of ourselves. Do we stay mesmerized by the coyote within or the one that walks amongst us in broad daylight? Or do we awaken and heed its warning: Nothing is hidden; it’s right in front of us!
What really matters, the truth, or what we want to believe? Either way, we are led ultimately to wisdom. But the journeys will be very different.
When worry comes remember that it is but a figment of imagination, that it does not exist except in your mind. If you attach to it, it will grow and fester, it will absorb your energy and become an enormous weight, it will burden you and make life difficult.
When worry comes visiting, do not let it in. Instead scan the body for issues and reasons for its presence, for normally worry arrives when it is time to shift. When it is time to take the next step on your journey you can expect your fears to manifest in some way. Keep in mind that issues that arise when you are flowing nicely along in your life are most often related to unfinished business within the framework of your human self.
Aside from the human self, however, is the energy self, the self who knows all, who sees all, and who pushes you to evolve. This is the self who teaches detachment and the process of growth, as its main purpose is to evolve.
Find your worries as signs of growth, asking you to go to the next level, to deepen your evolutionary task—in reality, your spirit requesting fearlessness and a deepening acknowledgement of the truth of the self as a being of infinite possibility.
When worry attaches, draw inward, and without worry guide your awareness to take you beyond your concerns to the truth of your spirit. You are being shown something important each day of your life. What is it today?
The answers lie within, waiting for you to discover, accept, and move on toward greater fulfillment. It takes work, this spiritual business, but the journey itself is most amazing!
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” So said Pierre de Chardin the French Jesuit priest and philosopher. The first time I read this quote, I knew that he was right. It explained everything to me; my very existence suddenly made sense. I was here on earth to have a human experience, but I really was that spiritual being that I always sensed I was. I felt I no longer had to apologize for being gentle and loving, for wanting peace and love in the world, for my so called naiveté or simplistic views of how to solve the world’s problems. I knew that only such idealistic views embodied the real nature of reality and that only they would work to resolve conflict and achieve worldwide peace.
De Chardin also said these words when the Nazis were fast advancing in Europe during World War II: “Peace cannot mean anything but a HIGHER PROCESS OF CONQUEST…The world is bound to belong to its most active elements…But no spiritual aims or energy will ever succeed, or even deserve to succeed, unless it is able to spread and keep spreading a fifth column.” In essence, he was letting the world know that the Nazis were the “most active element” at the time, the kind of energy that had the potential to spread like a wildfire, and it was imperative that the spiritual rise to the occasion and conquer it. It was a dire warning that we too, in our time, must pay heed to.
John Lennon once noted that Gandhi and Martin Luther King, both proponents of peace and nonviolence, had been assassinated for their efforts. He didn’t understand why people wouldn’t “just give peace a chance,” and then he too was assassinated.
Yeah…
We are at a point in our lives, in the life of our planet, when the imperative to give peace a chance is at its most crucial, and for spiritual consciousness to dominate and spread like wildfire. For that is the only way that real change will happen, by good once again becoming the dominant force, the HIGHER PROCESS, as de Chardin suggests. De Chardin also spoke elegantly about love being the most powerful of all forces that we as human beings could employ for ourselves and our planet, the same love that John Lennon, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King embraced.
When you are in a room of peaceful people you notice how peaceful and calm the atmosphere is. When you are in a room of happy people, you notice happiness. When you are in a room of angry people you notice anger, you feel anger, it takes over. When you are in the midst of evil you can smell it. Which kind of room would you like to be in?
As simple as it sounds, the only way to make change happen for the better, is to change the way we think, act, and react, the way we treat each other, the way we treat the planet. To become a peaceful Self is the first step in enacting change outside of the self, to learn to take responsibility in the world and inside the self, to really be the spiritual beings we are, to stop blaming and judging each other, to realize we are all the same.
Flower power…
If I set an even greater intent than usual to be peaceful, gentle, loving and kind for the rest of my life, toward myself and others, I will be part of a new spiritual consciousness. The more who are engaged in this new peaceful and loving consciousness, the more powerful grows a movement of real change, soon a spreading wildfire. Many of us are children of the 60s, still idealists at heart, gentle souls still hopeful of peace in our life.
I support the movements started by Gandhi, King, and Lennon—among the many others I have not named, men and women of peace and real caring—who knew that we are all indeed spiritual beings having a human experience. A new peaceful and loving existence requires taking both a personal journey and a badly needed universal journey, each day being different as we go out into the world and interact with others, as well as in our innermost thoughts. If we all decided that love of each other and love of the planet was the most important aspect of our human existence, how quickly change could happen and perhaps a new national mood would prevail and spread like wildfires around the world.
Choice matters. Making the right choice, knowing the right choice to make, may at times appear impossible, as in certain circumstances the right choice may remain unclear no matter how much the mind attempts to make a decision. However, once a choice is made it becomes the right choice, for no choice is ever wrong as it leads one along the path of life.
The issues you must confront in life will appear in front of you not matter what choice you make; no matter what path you are on your core issues will arise again and again. So, rather than focusing so much on the choice to be made, on choosing what is right, focus instead on discovering your life’s core issues and work instead on resolving those.
In so doing, your choices will become clearer, for once you know what your core issues are, and once you begin the process of changing the self by addressing those issues, your choices will appear with great clarity. The choices that now cause such distress will appear as distinctly different choices, one as absolutely right and others as old and unappealing. Once your inner work is in progress you will find, almost immediately, that as core dilemmas are revealed they will direct you to what you must do next to really grow and change your life. And growing and changing, facing fears and resolving the deepest pain, woundings, and struggles, is how life evolves for everyone.
As one faces the inner self and resolves the cores issues, life begins to flow more easily, like a meandering river naturally taking the journey it is meant to take, en route to connecting with all other sources of water, meeting and joining, flowing around the world. So is life, a continual flow of energy constantly seeking connection will all other sources of like energy.
So you see, as regards choice, the ultimate choice may seem selfish in comparison to choices regarding the needs of others in your world, but in resolving ones core issues one resolves far more than just the problems of the self. One becomes part of a healing energy that is so badly lacking and needed upon that earth at this time.
I am with a person who is angry, her anger like a brittle encrusted shell. I note how grumpy she is, having overslept, and now she is angry at the world. Nothing is right. In everyone there is something to criticize. In every situation there is something to be angry about. In every idea there is something to condescend to. Every attempt to be positive is negatively dismissed.
During my time with her, I wonder if I should say something, as her anger becomes increasingly uncomfortable to those around her. The Buddhists say that one should not interfere with another’s process in life, that everything they encounter is necessary for them to encounter, even if one sees the foreshadowing of great difficulty or even death. It is not right to alter another’s path. I also know that we cannot tell another what is so clear to us, for they will not get it until they are ready and, as the Buddhists point out, this may take many lifetimes. I encountered my own states of anger, denial, and unawareness, during my recapitulation, as I wondered over and over again why I had never been able before to understand my own psyche and what it was trying to tell me. It was only then that I understood what it means to be ready to face ourselves and our deeper issues. And so I elect to study this angry woman instead of saying anything to her.
I see how she holds her anger back, keeps it under her hard shell, but there comes a point when she just can’t retain it any longer. Suddenly, she lets loose a barrage of angry words, stunningly harsh and mean, directed at a person whom has asked a simple caring question. Again, I want to point out to this angry woman that she is being inappropriate, that she is hurting the other person, yet I hold back, for I know that my pointing out her mood will have no effect, and may perhaps incite yet more anger. I also know that there is something to be learned in such a situation, for all involved.
As I observe this angry woman, it becomes very clear that her anger has nothing to do with the person she spews it at, but that it has only to do with what is brewing and stewing inside her. Projection is clearly illustrated here. This woman woke up angry. Perhaps she went to bed angry too. Perhaps she has always been angry. But what is so clear to me, as I observe her, is that she is blaming people and situations outside of her. They are making her angry! She even says this to me later: how angry such people make her, how angry such ideas make her, how angry certain platitudes make her.
The fire within…
Later, as I ponder my time with this woman, as I again feel her anger boiling inside her, I wonder how long she will allow herself to be controlled by this fire within. For I saw how it consumed her, as she was unable to enjoy a moment of reality. Encased in it, everything just made her angrier. She fed this fire within constantly, giving it enough fuel to last a long time, and yet she confessed to me how tired she was.
It was clear that she desperately needed something to shift her out of this fire zone that she had parked herself in, yet I knew I could offer nothing. I am sure she was receiving many signs that might help in that shift, yet so consumed by the flames was she that she could not see. She could not see offers of kindness, she could not hear words of concern, she could not accept gentleness. Nothing that was offered was going to change how she interpreted the world, or how she projected her inadequacies onto the world, and the people she encountered there. Until she was ready…
She has to be ready to withdraw her projections from the world and face the angry fires within, and find out why she is being consumed in this manner. She has to ask herself why she is so angry all the time, why so rude and condescending, why so unhappy. Just as we all must do, at some point in our earthly existence, she too has to ask herself when she is going to stop blaming everyone else for her misery and face the reasons for it within. When she is ready…
And so, I too, must ask myself to find that angry woman inside myself and find out what she has to tell me. I do a little inner work around this angry woman as I go about the rest of my day. I find that my angry inner woman is pretty well known at this point. I’ve dealt with her many times over the years, dismantled her bonfires over and over again, put out the flames, and taken her aside to have a chat. I could only do that when I was ready, when I no longer wanted to be ruled by her, when I no longer wanted the world to be a place of fear and misery. And when I was finally ready to take back my projections, the world did change.
And so yesterday, as I did my angry woman inner work, I discovered that she has softened to a mere inkling of her old self. She carries very little fuel these days, for she has learned over the years of deep inner work that anger is nothing, that it only exists when fueled. Instead, I have learned to face the fires of anger as they flare up and question them on a deeply personal level. Is this anger justified? Does it help me? Is it worthwhile, does it help my evolution as a spiritual being? Is anger ever appropriate?
In the past I have used anger, a good friend to me at one time. It often helped to shift out of a bad situation, as I would get angry at myself for staying stuck. And so I can truly say that anger can be useful, but only if utilized on the self in a positive fashion, not to remain stuck in blame, but to catapult to a new place along the path of life. If directed outwardly, in projection, as the angry woman in my encounter used it, it does nothing positive, for anger burns up good energy, keeps the focus on blaming others rather than asking the self to be a fully responsible evolutionary being.
What I finally found out about myself yesterday, as I faced that old angry woman inside me, now shrunk to the size of a teeny tiny specimen of her old self, was that she has very little to complain about these days. In fact, I turned to her and told her that I didn’t need her anymore at all, that I only want to live and embrace the life that she held me back from fully living and enjoying for so long.
Now I live!
As I took back my projections and used my energy to learn how to live the life I had decided could never happen—because I was too angry at the world to engage it—I changed, life changed, the world outside of me changed, inner and outer reality changed. Now my energy is my own, and freed of old issues, such as anger, that energy just wants to live! I am no longer willing to be held back. This is what I encourage my children and those closest to me: Don’t let your fears or your anger hold you back. You are alive now and there is so much to explore and experience. Find out who you are and don’t ever hold that true self back. Live!
I see anger rising across America, falsely taking its place in the minds of so many. As we go into the next month of preparation for big changes in our country, and the world, perhaps we should all look within and find out what makes us so angry without. In so using our anger and our energy differently, we may impact the results of the election.
As the Buddhists say, all energy is interconnected and every decision we make about how we use our energy affects everything and everyone else around us. If our energy is directed at changing ourselves, we change our reality—our personal present life and that of our world. I did it—in recapitulating my childhood—and it worked and continues to work for me.
Now I intend that my inner work energetically impact the world outside of me as well. I may not be able to directly influence every angry person I meet, but I sure as heck can rev up my energetic intent to do so!
I’ve set my intent to live totally unafraid, open to life in a different way, energetically connected.
Love,
Jan
