Find your center, your place of peace and calmness within. Anchor yourself there, in the known self that is solid and permanent so that you may equally anchor yourself in the other known self, that which is ethereal and infinite. These two selves require equal attention so that they may both have room to grow and explore. Don’t neglect one for the other but strive always to give each the time and space they need.
Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
Polarity is the essence of life. Electricity is the intimate dance between positive protons and negative electrons. Likewise, magnetism is the energy of attraction between opposites.
The interplay of these opposites are the ups and downs of life. When we jump up in the air we are drawn down to the earth. Though we are light spirit beings we reside in a dense physical body. This bipolarity of our beingness is the essence of life. Our ability to reconcile these opposites is what brings balance to life. Harmony is balance generated within the interplay of opposites.
Governments reflect the interplay of opposites. Generally there is polarization between left and right viewpoints. Governments seek harmony of governance through reconciliation of these opposites. Our world today reflects extreme polarities that resist reconciliation through the integration of opposites.
The extreme polarities of now are deeply enhanced by a third factor: the pervasive extraction of human data through the internet. This extracted data allows corporations and special interests to manipulate consumers and citizens to buy and believe. It can now be argued that the internet has created its own world governance that rivals and controls both reality and elected governments.
This current state of affairs has led to an extreme world bipolar disorder. Nonetheless, this, even in its extreme imbalance, is part of the Tao. Humans are challenged with the reconciliation of these extreme opposites that are insistent upon remaining one-sided, fueled by morally indifferent special interests. Human beings must restore the balance of opposites to return the world to harmony. But how?
In Jan’s recent dream, a group of Mennonite women knocked on the door with the message, “God is a lymph node.” A group of men were down the driveway arranging stones to create a waterfall. The water was filtered as it flowed over the rocks. End of dream.
The action of the waterfall personifies the function of the lymphatic system. The lymphatic system is our body’s filtering system. If the dream is assigning this system the rank of God, then the ability to properly filter is being given the highest spiritual value.
The algorithms of the internet target the subconscious mind to influence human emotion, cognition and action. We are all being catered to, both positively and negatively, by algorithms tuned to our personal habits or virtual footprints. For instance, in a recent blog I discussed wrenches on my workbench. Within the hour of it being published an email selling wrenches appeared in my inbox! Make no mistake about it. Everything we research, write or purchase is extracted as a datapoint on how to influence us.
Jan’s dream brings the highest value to the ability to filter. The internet, for all its wonders, is filled with toxicity. When we are catered to we tend not to recognize this toxic implant. For instance, if it is known I have a specific point of view I might be sent news articles or supposed studies that validate my perspective to influence my thoughts and feelings, as well as stir my emotions and actions.
Filtering can best be achieved by seeking the truth of the heart. If I am excited and feel self-righteous about an issue, my heart will tell me the truth: I am being inflated and attaching to a one-sided truth. As I cling to one pole of my bipolar being I throw myself out of balance and lose the harmony that is maintained through reconciliation of opposites.
Humbly incorporating this truth prevents nefarious internalized programs from taking root in my subconscious mind. I am now freed to incorporate the value of views opposite to my own. This reconciliation of opposites restores inner harmony.
May we all embrace the filtering and immunity-boosting benefits of our body’s lymphatic system. On the mental plain, let us utilize the cleansing system of the heart to arrive at both inner and outer truth. The heart, without prejudice, will lead us to harmony in polarity.
Filtering,
Chuck
Interesting reading: You Are the Object of a Secret Extraction Operation
Learn to go with the flow of life no matter what comes to challenge you. Keep yourself calm and steady and know that this too shall pass. Attend to everything with equal measure of attention and seriousness, keeping in mind that life’s challenges are your greatest moments to learn, explore, and grow. To go with the flow is to accept but not acquiesce, to accept the challenge but not acquiesce to old behaviors—to accept the challenge to change. For that is life in its essential wholeness, a challenge to change.
Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
My Spirit informs me every morning that yesterday is a past life. Deeply appreciative of that life lived, now is the time to pay it forward by meeting new life without attachment. Attachment is actually an emotional investment in an outcome.
There is a governor’s race of significance happening in Virginia on the day this blog is published. I believe I know what winner would represent the better outcome for being in the Tao. I voted, yet intend to have no attachment to the outcome.
The challenge is to achieve equanimity. The shamans of ancient Mexico taught that to truly be open to what infinity presents we must be free of expectation and prejudice. They discovered that the best training ground for that level of receptive attitude was in one’s encounters with the petty tyrants of this world.
A petty tyrant disregards all the rules. A petty tyrant has no consideration for the needs of others. A petty tyrant uses and abuses to satisfy their own selfish needs.
When we encounter petty tyrants we may be deeply hurt and offended by their actions. Ironically, this helps us, as we are shown where our egos have become personally attached and identified with the actions of others. Our emotions flare, as we are thrown off balance, and are drained of our energetic reserves. Our egos become deeply offended, requiring palliative care.
Sidelined by deflation, negativity pours in and we become slaves to our wounded feelings. The shamans recommend that we refine our egos by releasing all attachment to expectations of fairness and the consequent reactive emotions.
Ego, freed of these attachments, becomes a highly tuned unit of navigation, capable of adjusting to anything it encounters. It needn’t spend any of its vital energy defending its self-importance. The refined ego identifies fully with the values and intents of its Spirit, and adapts itself to what is possible, in any given situation.
Thus, if ‘the other guy’ wins the election, the ego will waste no time feeling sad, frightened or angry. If ‘the right guy’ wins the election, the ego will not indulge in feeling happy or hopeful. Equanimity imposes no judgment upon what is. Equanimity says: suspend judgment, await guidance from Spirit as to the next right action.
At the soul level of being—that is, life beyond the physical dimension—it is evident that powerful influences are engaged in the current struggle upon this Earth. As evenly divided as the legislatures of this world are, so are the positive and negative energies impacting this world. We are all engaged in a multi-dimensional dance between the forces of good and evil, no matter how attached or detached we are.
The I Ching frames this as the time of Coming to Meet (Hexagram #44). We are warned of the danger of such powerful clashes. Nonetheless, if we use such encounters as opportunities for shedding the heaviness of self-importance, we advance in spiritual lightness.
Spiritual lightness is our evolutionary destiny now, as we release yesterday’s attachment to material obsession and ego importance. This lightness of being allows us to be supremely in the Tao, now, irrespective of the world’s dance. We simply go with the flow, with abandon.
The most oppressive petty tyrants we face reveal themselves in our own inner prejudices. Ironically, they are also our greatest blindspots. We tend too quickly to project them upon the many tyrants of the outside world.
Nonetheless, if we track and examine our passionate emotions we are sure to be led to inner attachments, those attitudes that resist the new life of each new day.
As we are all holograms of our subtler interconnectedness, know that all personal progress in detachment advances our greater whole along its evolutionary path. Appreciate, as well, those who so tightly cling to yesterday. Yesterday’s last stand is but the prelude to today’s unfolding.
Going with the flow,
Chuck
Carlos Castaneda said that if anyone opened to the energy of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico they would be inundated by their influence. The modern day shamans of his line acknowledge that all their knowledge comes from this ancient heritage; what has changed is their intent in how they use that knowledge.
The ancient shamans coveted power, and their ability to perform such supernatural acts as defying physical death itself, by remaining in physical form, for centuries. The modern shamans saw this intent as binding one to the physicality of the Earth rather than allowing one to move completely into the energy body and evolve into the subtler dimensions upon dying. Freedom to evolve is the intent of these modern-day shamans.
Don Juan Matus was concerned, throughout his mentorship of Carlos, that Carlos’s nature was too infused with the predilection of the ancient shamans. He foresaw that Carlos might become a Nagual partial to the sorcery ways of the ancient shamans. Those shamans trained their apprentices with the full-on ruthlessness of sorcery.
Sorcery has absolutely no morality, nor compassion, in its training manual. Jan’s Recapitulation Diaries document her, at the time, unknown early life apprenticeship with a dark sorcerer of ancient tradition. The training was brutal, yet her survival and recapitulation advanced her to a complete equanimity of consciousness.
Jan’s early life of abuse was the journey with the ancient shamans, whose throw ’em in the deep end predilection was later completed with the modern shaman’s road to freedom via recapitulation. Being shattered is forced psychic awakening; recapitulation leads to psychic wholeness and keen functionality.
Jan’s journey reflects the pervasive journey of our time: incessant trauma. Complex PTSD is the natural human response to the events, human and environmental, of current life upon the planet. Gaia is challenging us now with full-on sorcery, crushing our left brain’s fantasies of control. She expects a total recapitulation, and right action, for us to be ready to retake the helm with integrity.
Sorcery takes no prisoners. Petty tyrants are not fair. To survive, the ego must learn to be a keen observer, taking action only as absolutely necessary and appropriate. Demanding fairness and entitlement from a petty tyrant depletes energy and puts one at risk. Trauma forces entry into to the subtler dimensions, but even there one must not dally in the safety of dissociation. Mindful presence is the necessary ego state of survival.
Mindful presence must be cultivated out of defensive vigilance, which, if unrefined, depletes energy reserves and forestalls the necessary ability to go with the flow. Edy Eger in her memoir, The Choice, documents the impeccability of her mindful presence during her time in Auschwitz. Nonetheless, her journey remains a work in progress, as the full retrieval of her energy from the traumas of her life is still a work in progress.
As long as the sensational and emotional imprints of trauma remain charged in the central nervous system—in the form of triggers—present life remains partially frozen in the past. A fully clear and present life requires the complete experience of everything, and full detachment from everything, that has ever happened to us.
I experienced the modern shamanic side of Carlos Castaneda. The tools he offered are tools of freedom. Recapitulation is the tool of freedom from the trappings of trauma. I did not experience the fully ancient sorcerer side of Carlos that Amy Wallace documents in her memoir, Sorcerer’s Apprentice: My Life With Carlos Castaneda.
I know too many characters from my time in that world to doubt the validity of her journey. The cognitive dissonance between her experience and mine, made me keep her book at bay for years. She documents experiences that are so anathema to everything I stand for, that if Carlos were still in this world I believe he should be imprisoned.
At the same time, the validity of the tools he passed on have cracked the nut of total healing from PTSD. Certainly, Carlos ensured, by his extreme polarized ego states, that he would not be venerated beyond this life. The value of his tools are in their utility, not in their association with him.
Buddhism has its own brand of sorcery. Chogyam Trungpa, Tibetan refugee, teacher, scholar, founder of the Shambala Training method and Naropa University, had a similar shadow life to Carlos Castaneda’s. This included sexually abusive and inappropriate behaviors.
Many in the Buddhist world have been so positively impacted by Chogyam’s teachings that they accept the cognitive dissonance of his shadow behavior as “crazy wisdom”, essentially appreciating his sorcery activity as a deeply challenging but valid form of teaching.
As with Carlos, if Chogyam were still alive in this world, he too should be prosecuted for unlawful behavior. Tricksters have their value in teaching but they are not above the laws of this world. At the same time, spiritual advancement requires that we totally accept every experience we have ever had, regardless of how beautiful or horrific it might have been.
Though we may subscribe to the highest level of morality, life itself is amoral. Though rising in the subtler dimensions requires progressively deeper refinements of love, we will not progress on that journey if we cannot accept every experience of our lives with equanimity. If we can’t find our way to love with that which is most horrific, its mastery defines our karmic destiny.
Sorcery and crazy wisdom are indeed expressions of the dark side of the force. Encounters with the dark side are required Earth School courses. Achieving wholeness—the coveted diploma from Earth School—requires that we know and accept everything we have ever done, or that was done to us, with equanimity.
With gratitude to the dark and the light—the wholeness,
Chuck