When things are difficult and clarity does not easily come, turn to the heart, to the truth it speaks, to its honest voice, so different from the chatter of the busy mind. The mind is a great conjurer while the heart is pure, and though the mind may have good intentions nothing compares to a truthful heart. What is your heart telling you today? Listen and it will whisper to you what it knows to be true, in its own way. And in your own way, listen and accept.
Wintertime is a time of silent preparation for what is to come, new life preparing to burst forth in spring. Weather patterns show possibilities, how day to day things change. One day there is snow, the next rain. One day is cloudy, another sunny. But underneath it all things are busy slowly being born. So is it with the life of the human, things are always waiting to be born. The spirit waits for its chance to live, to become known and to express itself. Notice its creative urges each day. Look for it each day inside you too, your own spirit hinting at what it is truly capable of.
Life can sometimes seem like the ocean on a rough day, full of swells and treacherous decisions and then the next day it’s calm and flat as a still lake. Steadiness is being able to withstand the changes. Steadiness comes with practice, with setting intentions that are doable and promote a forward pattern of growth. Steadiness comes with maturity too, in learning the ways of the world, but also the ways of the self, setting a plan and sticking too it, reminding the self often of dreams to come. A simple dream of steadiness is a wonderful dream in itself.
Notice how your good intentions need constant reminders to remain viable and in your consciousness, how easily they slip away when you take your attention off them. Like water they flow away. Like the wind they are gone. Turn them into substantial reminders so that they do not flow away like water under a bridge or blow away like the wind, so that they remain in the mind as mantras to change. Change is good, but don’t forget that even change must be constantly engaged if it is to have the desired effects. Keep your intentions alive and well and all will be well with you as well!
As a child, I figured out how to play The Impossible Dream on the piano. It moved me deeply and I played it for years. In retrospect, I see my young self reaching for my Soul, as expressed in its lyrics: “This is my quest, to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far…”
That Aquarian star first landed for me when the Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. On that Sunday evening I caught the disease of the love generation, a disease I’ve never been cured of. Like Melanie, who just left us, I still believe, “there’s a chance peace will come in your life…”
The impossible dream actually preceded the 1960’s, in the idealistic post WW2 decisions to create a just world. The creation of the state of Israel was one such decision. Ultimately, as don Juan Matus pointed out to Carlos Castaneda, the White House became “the site of power of today’s world, the center of all our endeavors, hopes, fears…”*
The impossibility of all these dreams is their underappreciation of their shadows. For the Middle East, there has always been the shadow of the displaced Palestinians. For America, despite its stated heart-centered spiritual values, its bulging shadow of greed and self-interest has fully broken through its polished veneer, unabashedly threatening to bring down civilization itself.
Beyond the ego and the shadow of the individual, and civilization itself, lies the power of the astral world, the subtle plane that first houses souls who have shifted out of physical life. In the recapitulation of their physical lives, from that plane, many souls seek interaction with the living to satisfy the unanswered, unredeemed and unresolved issues of their lives. Those unrealized dreams from the astral plane interact with, and influence, current life on the physical plane.
Jung, in his soul retrieval journey, as documented in The Red Book, was forced into interaction with departed souls seeking answers. Jung opens his First Sermon to The Dead with these words: “The dead came back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought. They prayed me let them in and besought my word, and thus I began my teaching.”**
The heightened clinical interest today in Family Constellations, as developed by Mark Hellinger, has its roots in tapping the living connection between those in human form with ancestors living in the astral planes and beyond.
The focus of these constellations addresses both receiving support and guidance from the ancestors, through channeled group experiences, as well as healing of ancestral trauma by those in the lineage still extant in human form. Current humanly-experienced diseases might have their origin in ancestral trauma needing resolution on the human playing field.
Collective ancestral trauma, like that experienced during the Holocaust, moves en masse into the astral plane, where it casts a huge shadow upon human interaction and unsettledness. The ideologies defeated in WW2 also took up residence in the astral plane, where they too continue to seek expression and redemption on the human playing field.
Despite the positive intent of impossible dreams to bring balance, healing and wholeness to the world, the shadow of self-interest, over the needs of all others, haunts human resolution. This, coupled with the impact of deeper unresolved issues of human ancestry, leads us to our present, inevitable dream of now.
Cherokee commentator, Joyce Sequichie Hifler, observes: “Peace at any price is not peace. Sooner or later those who have no honor will find another way to break the treaty.”*** How obvious this became in the attempts to appease Hitler’s expansionist dreams, before and during WW2. Consider the influences of these astral forces on the expansionist impulses in the inevitable dream active on the present world stage.
The evidence of astral influence is apparent in the trancelike state of many humans, seemingly controlled by hypnotic suggestion of illusions that defy obvious factual truth. With regard to interactions with those such afflicted, Hifler goes on to suggest: “Tread water when necessary, avoid confrontation with those who love turmoil, and never be so self- sufficient as to not be able to say an honest prayer when needed. Cultivate peace, but do not give in to darkness.”*
The inevitable dream is the combined constellation of present human and astral turmoil. It is our responsibility to self, other, and ancestor to resolve, head-on, the questions put before us. Can we, as a species, advance to the heart chakra, where we will inhabit the truth, and honor the rights and needs of all? Or will we choose to remain on the cutthroat battlefield of competitive self-interest, where winner takes all?
The uniqueness of now is the inevitability of this dream to play itself out with maximum drama and consequence. The opportunity of now is to humanly choose an outcome that defies the catharsis of conflagration and instead advances the greater good. Human history and human evolution have gifted us the ability to choose. It’s our evolutionary moment to choose wisely.
Don Juan Matus stated that what we believe to be choice is really ego acquiescing to Spirit; that is, doing the right thing. All things must be lived, but all things must pass.
Yes, Melanie, I honor your impossible dream that peace will come in your life. That dream becomes possible as we seek conscious solution to our inevitably constellated dream of now. Let’s complete it and, regardless of outcome, be of good cheer.
Consciously choosing, Chuck
*Magical Passes, Carlos Castaneda, p. 37-38
** Memories, Dreams, Reflections, C. G. Jung, p. 78
***Quotes by Joyce Sequichie Hifler from A Cherokee Feast of Days, Volume II, p. 28.
