When tensions arise, reground yourself by actually putting your feet on the ground and feeling the energy of the Earth. Reconnect yourself to that grounding Mother. Let yourself be held in her grip for more than just a second, and feel how she supports and nurtures you. Let yourself be in her energy long enough to find that you also have her grounding ability within yourself. Let yourself admit that you have this within at all times. You always have the energy to shift yourself out of one place into another, out of one mood and into another. You have, at all times, within yourself, the ability to ground and nurture. When you ground yourself, you help the whole world get more grounded too.
I had the great good fortune to attend a heart centered retreat this past weekend at the Monroe Institute’s Robert’s Mountain Retreat, located on a mountaintop, in the former home of Robert Monroe.
The Monroe Institute employs the use of sound technology to facilitate participants reaching brainwave states that open them to experiences of non-ordinary reality, where they may gain clarity, guidance and connection, as well as an ability to journey safely in transpersonal levels of being, beyond the physical body.
Participants are sequestered much of the time in private units, where light is blacked out and they are freed to comfortably lie on their beds, listening through headphones while they take in sounds of different frequencies, often combined with music and verbal guidance and suggestions.
In between exercises, participants gather as a greater group where people may share their experiences. I liken this group component to a shared lucid dream and am amazed to see people’s individual experiences truly become components of a greater separate reality.
To support the sanctity of both individual and group experiences, outside contact is discouraged during programs. However, the nature of my work, as a member of a helping profession, does require that I occasionally open to the outside world during a program.
Here is guidance I personally received this weekend:
Listen to your dreams: In a dream on the first night of the program, I found myself, at night, on the shore, near a tenement complex of the Bronx, in New York City. I was interacting with a very elderly woman, who lived in a cottage by the water. She shared intimate information with me. Later, when others came, I freely shared her stories. She, in turn, acted as if she were in deep dementia and had never had a conversation with me at all, casting a huge shadow over the validity of what I said.
I awoke from this dream on Saturday morning to the news of the attacks on Iran. A pervasive sadness overtook me and I was moved to tears. It’s not so much that I was surprised but that I was struck with the deep knowing that the inevitable was unfolding.
I encountered our group facilitator early that morning and shared the news of this outside energy. She suggested holding that energy within and that our process during our program on the mountain might be helpful to the greater world. Her guidance touched, for me, on two principals: containment and the holographic universe.
Containment: In retrospect, my dream had already highlighted the necessity of not sharing outside information at this stage. Of what value would it be to excite the energy of others with the outside information I had received? I was already infected with the impact of knowing and the consequence of deep sadness. What was necessary was a genuine transformation that required a sealed container to achieve.
Water doesn’t boil if you keep lifting the lid. Cakes don’t rise if you keep opening the oven door. Chicks aren’t born if mother hen doesn’t stay put. This is alchemy. Seal the container, let the heat rise, let new life come forth.
Holographic Universe: Michael Talbot’s classic book explores this deeply. When you shine a light on the minutest part of a hologram the entire hologram appears. This metaphor speaks to the human condition: shine a light deep enough on any one of us and the whole of humanity—all of its parts—will be found. We, at a certain level, are all one. Therefore, change the self and that change becomes part of the whole.
Our group facilitator suggested just that: contain the energy, allow for a transformative process that will impact the whole.
Coexist: In the first exercise we did on Saturday morning, we were taken to different levels of consciousness. As I travelled, the intensity of my sadness magnified, until my consciousness was so far beyond my sleeping physical body that I reached a transcendent perspective and landed at peace. The sadness was present, but I achieved being at peace with being sad.
All that is must be loved: This guidance arrived immediately around a question of opening the heart. The heart can’t open if we maintain walls of hate. The heart can’t open if we dissociate. That which is kept separate won’t allow us to love our wholeness.
Love your neighbor as yourself: This goes beyond accepting your disowned projected shadow. This is loving exactly what is, without changing it, without giving it excuses; this is the only way to truly know it.
Sympathy: In one exercise, my consciousness noticed my heart racing, to the point of possible concern. However, I noticed that I was not a participant, that my heart was, of its own choosing, taking the ride of a frequency it had picked up on. I chose not to interfere.
My current mentor, P. P. Quimby, was a 19th-century healer who would sit with a patient and allow his body to feel the exact feeling his patient felt. He called this “being in sympathy”, or same feeling, with his patient. Having the feeling, he then knew the cause, or mental belief, that was made manifest in the physical complaint. If the patient could then take in the truth of their error the physical condition often disappeared.
As my consciousness relaxed with my heart’s sympathetic journey—I believe, with the current outside energy of the world—I came to peace. It is abundantly clear that many errors are manifesting current destruction, but I do know, at a deeper level, that we are in the cosmic season of Kali Yuga, the grand destruction that clears the way for new life, the rising of the Age of Aquarius. This deeper truth transforms the sadness into calm anticipation.
Anchor: In an exercise designed to shift one, on a dime, to heart-centered love and calm, the guidance came to me to use every disturbing thought as an immediate trigger to return to the calm of the heart. This paired association, or neural pathway, is deepened every time we make the shift, sometimes several times a minute!
As our weekend retreat ended, and the messages I received continue to resonate, I express deep gratitude to the Monroe Institute for preserving the core of Robert Monroe’s gifts for journeyers like myself, for his gifts still have relevance today. And I also express deep gratitude for the Monroe Institute’s continued evolving of those gifts, as they take their own journeys with Monroe Sound Science.
My personal and collective journey this past weekend greatly aided my internal process and enabled the simple guidance that I offer in this blog.
With Gratitude for all the gifts we are given,
Chuck
When things in the outside world turn chaotic, turn inward to your heart center and remind yourself of your infinite self, of your basic energy self, of your eternal being that knows all, sees all, and understands all. When you step back into this Higher Self, you give yourself the opportunity to reconnect with the larger picture of your own life but also with the larger picture of life on Earth. What is really going on when life on Earth gets chaotic? The answer to that question is simple: change. Change is being called for, outside and inside, which are really one and the same. You are a microcosm of the whole, the whole being the world around you, all the people and living creatures who inhabit the Earth with you, and the Earth itself and the greater cosmos as well. You cannot separate yourself from all that is, nor can you separate all that is from you. Keep this in mind as your day-to-day life unfolds and as you have things to deal with. What you are dealing with, the world is dealing with. And what the world is dealing with, you are dealing with. If you set your intentions to get right within yourself, you will also be setting the intention for the world to get right too. It’s that simple.
The term scapegoat had its literal origin in instructions outlined in the Old Testament for a practice on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16:8-10). An actual goat was chosen for practitioners to, literally, project their sins upon that would then carry those sins away from the community as it was sent off into the wilderness.
The relief afforded by this ancient ritual, of assigning the weight of one’s committed sins to another to carry, was defined in modern times by Sigmund Freud, as the ego’s defense of projection.
The action of this defense is the ego protecting itself from the negative judgment of its conscience (superego), for wrongful thoughts and actions, that would otherwise result in the consequences of shame and punishment. Thus, in scapegoating or projection, an innocent person is blamed for the very actions and thoughts one seeks to disown.
Both Freud and Jung emphasized that projection was not a conscious choice, it happened unconsciously and automatically. Jung went on to broaden the function of projection beyond a psychological defense only. He identified that the unconscious mind reveals its fuller self to the conscious mind by projecting its contents, or complexes, like through a movie projector, upon the outer screen of our daily lives, replete with all its characters and dramas.
Through its projections upon other people in daily life, that snare us in emotional reactions and entanglements, the unconscious mind communicates with us by drawing our attention to people who mirror our own hidden selves.
Our conscious ego is then offered the opportunity to individuate, that is, to welcome home its unknown and disowned parts. This requires extreme moral courage while we face and reconcile with our shadow, or unknown self.
A more advanced technology than scapegoating, to redeem our sinful selves, has been attributed to Moses in Leviticus (9:18), via the commandment, to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This exact guidance was reaffirmed and highlighted centuries later by Jesus Christ, to “Love your neighbor as yourself”, as a core ethic of his teachings. (Matthew 22:36-40).
The wisdom of this biblical injunction, to love your neighbor as yourself, is in its practicality and scope of healing potential. This is a technology of true love.
In order to love our neighbor we must retrieve and love our disowned, or unknown selves, completely, particularly the parts of our projected shadow that we loathe and have scapegoated in our projections onto our neighbors. No scriptural exceptions are made to this commandment. All neighbors, and consequently all parts of the self, must be loved.
The refusal to love and assume responsibility for the true self, with all its flaws and prejudices, results in the living of a false self, which creates illusion and dysfunction, both within and without. As psychosomatic medicine reveals, very often our physical ailments reflect the soul mirroring to ego consciousness the error of its judgments.
A physical ailment may reflect the unconscious mind using the physical body as its projective screen. For instance, digestive problems might be the unconscious mind symbolically communicating to the ego the ego’s refusal to accept a truth, as mirrored in the physical body being unable to properly digest food. In this case, acquiescing to the truth at the mental level might resolve the physical symptoms. Love of truth promotes physical vitality.
The shamans of ancient Mexico discovered that the wear and tear of living our illusions causes our vital energy to be dispersed to the periphery of our physical beings, compromising the efficiency of our vital energy centers, or what the Hindus call chakras.
Some of these illusions are traumas, stored in the body, whose life experiences have yet to be individuated into our wholeness. To access the abundance of our fullest potential, we must fully accept and love every aspect of our selves, including our entire lived life experiences.
If we scapegoat any life experience, or anyone in that life experience, we are a fragmented, divided wholeness. We must love it all, unconditionally, no exceptions.
Gay Hendricks, in his classic book, Learning To Love Yourself, taught the practice of declaring love for every challenging or disagreeable part of the self, as it emerges. For example: “I love the part of me that feels hate. I love the part of me that objects to me admitting it feels hate. I love the part of me that hates that I hate. I love the part that judges me harshly…” With love comes acceptance. With acceptance comes abundance.
Out of sheer love, Carlos Castaneda gifted the world the fruits of his shamanic lineage before he closed the door and ended that lineage. One of those gifts was the magical pass of recapitulation, where one fully restores one’s energetic wholeness through reliving, and ultimately fully loving, every aspect of oneself and one’s life. This is being in the abundance of total love.
Love is the energetic vibration that opens us to the experience of our oneness with everything, the ultimate abundance. From this place of wholeness we are best positioned to suggest to our subconscious mind to manifest outwardly our heart’s desire. As within, so without.
As a new day greets you, greet it in return with a big smile, a big hug, and a big jump for joy! Let yourself feel happy today. Happiness left all alone will help no one, but happiness felt, expressed, and shared will help the multitudes. For you are already well aware that emotions that are locked in just fester and deplete energy, while emotions that are expressed have the potential to steer life in a new direction. Don’t keep your happiness down and repressed inside you, let it out!
