Rudolph Steiner identified the dual nature of The Dweller At The Threshold as both guardian and adversary. In trauma, this inner guardian steals away and absorbs the traumatic experience, enabling consciousness to go forward, relieved of the impact of the unacceptable.

The price for this amnesia is an illusory life in the matrix. The guardian dweller plants triggers at the threshold of the truth, explosive emotions that electrify the nervous system and repel deeper knowing. The seeker is led to mistakenly identifying the trigger as the culprit, and to value successful avoidance as the cure.

At the simplest level, the vulnerable ego is protected by mechanisms of defense, as Anna Freud labeled them. Some of these are, at the very least, semi-conscious, such as with suppression, when we knowingly push down a disturbing feeling. Most defenses, however, operate automatically, at the behest of the all-powerful subconscious mind.

The subconscious mind is nature, with its sweeping survival instincts that protect life at any cost. The subconscious represses that which would hurt the ego, regardless of the truth that it blocks from consciousness. The subconscious projects onto others the ownership and responsibility for the ego’s thoughts and actions that, if truly owned, would hurt its self-esteem.

The subconscious is also the Dweller, in both the role of the guardian and the adversary. The subconscious houses unlived karma, that which is yet to be discovered and resolved. The subconscious is like the moon, which ultimately upholds the fundamental balance of nature. Though it can shield at its dark side, it will ultimately reveal all in its fullness. Karma, like the moon, also holds the complete cycle of nature, those personal truths we are all here to work on, to reveal, face and resolve.

The ego is equivalent to the sun. With the light of consciousness at its helm, the ego has free will, to do as it chooses. In fact, via suggestion, that impresses itself upon the subconscious, the ego can override and violate nature’s inherent laws. The Dweller stores the effects of these choices in the form of karma. Although withheld, this karma will ultimately be repaid, by nature exacting its balance.

The ego can fashion its own persona identity, and even believe it to be its true self, but nature’s storms of anxiety, fear, anger and depression will inevitably prevail and breakdown of this fragile identity will occur. For ego to advance in health and wholeness, it must ultimately make the journey to the gate of the Dweller, in the hidden recesses of its shadow, and retrieve its lost soul, its true identity.

Ironically, as the journey into the shadow begins, Dweller as guardian will turn into Dweller as adversary, triggering ego back to the sensibility of its comfortably uncomfortable life in the matrix. Better safe than sorry. To overcome this, the ego must drop its false pretensions, lose its self-importance, and relentlessly pursue the fullness of truth before it can find its way to freedom beyond this stagnant moat of the matrix.

“Yes,” stated don Juan to Carlos Castaneda, “this is a world of solid objects, but first it is a world of energy.” This was the ultimate solution to the paradox that eventually freed Neo from The Matrix. When you lock into a solid definition, you generate your karma in the solid physical world.

In The Matrix, Neo learned to suspend judgment. He refused the story,  the subconscious habit that generated a lethal certainty. His energy was then freed to open to an empowered interpretation of self. The shamans call this shifting the position of the assemblage point, where freed energy assembles into a new reality. To do this one must suspend a fixated judgment.

Present events on the world stage suggest that the karma of WWI is beckoning us for resolution and a new reality. Judge Hatch*, our Astral dimension war correspondent throughout that war, was clear that the spiritual intent for that war was: to make the world safe for love.

Though Christ, as shaman, stalked that position of the assemblage point, the chakra center of the heart, and America embraced it in principle, neither America nor the rest of the world has moved beyond the ego and the personal power center of the chakra located at the solar plexus.

Clearly, the souls on the Titanic continue to draw us down to her depths, where we must face her truths but also her tests. Though two years before the start of WWI, her sinking foreshadowed the challenge that was about to eclipse the world.

The hubris of the Titan sub’s CEO, Stockton Rush, was parallel to that of Captain Smith, who insisted, in 1912, that the Titanic maintain full speed despite the threat of icebergs. Humbling is the lesson that ego—despite its solar-plexus power gymnastics, or inflated reach for adventure—is no match for the Dweller, who can only be approached with utter caution,  respect and truthfulness.

The sunken Titanic, whose passengers included Stockton Rush’s wife’s great-great grandparents, is populated with many souls who sacrificed their lives that others might live. This is the myth that resolves the paradox at the gate of the matrix. Those souls reached the heart center, the spiritual center that puts equanimity over class, gender and race.

The Titan was drawn down to the mothership of the Titanic. Its journey captured the heart of the world. May its fate lead us to fixate upon the truth, humility and compassion of the heart center. To return it to the judgment at the solar plexus would be to misinterpret it as just another competitive loss and failure, missing its golden message.

The Russian Revolution was ignited in the midst of WWI. Stalin and Lenin have either reincarnated as, or exerted influence upon, the cosmic dance between Putin and Prigozhin, once partners in crime, as they now face off with shades of the 1917 Russian revolution coming to life. In their time, Stalin turned on Lenin, whom he had poisoned to death.

In this present incarnation, the deeply ingrained Russian Tsarist subconscious habit, of total massacre of all who revolt, was averted, perhaps for the first time in Russian history. Like magic, the river of energy approaching certain bloodbath in Moscow completely reversed itself, all charges dropped. Strategic or not, this action is utterly unprecedented.

The significance of these events—insinuations of WWI karma emergent in our time—is that the ego has the opportunity to exercise its free will; all is not predetermined.

If the world ego exerts its will in alignment with the truth, with interconnectedness and compassion of the heart center, it might successfully navigate beyond the Dweller at the Threshold of the matrix, who keeps us embroiled in the karma of past mistakes, and instead launch us into heart-centered interconnectedness.

The best training, for all whom embark upon this quest to exit the matrix through the heart center, is the Four Fold Way:

Show up.
Pay attention.
Tell the truth.
No attachment to outcome.

At the Threshold,
Chuck

*War Letters from the Living Dead Man
Also, see Resources section in the left sidebar for links to other related books by Elsa Barker, who channeled Judge Hatch’s messages from the afterlife.