Find your calm center and get to know how it feels. Curl into its calmness and learn its possibilities. Retreat into it during stressful times, when fears arise, and when you feel lost. The world around you is rapidly changing and more changes are on the way, but don’t give up hope and don’t lose yourself in the chaos. It’s extremely important to hold a strong center within yourself, a peaceful and determined heart, and an attitude of responsibility, gratefulness and determination. Your own personal inner stability during times of outer instability will make all the difference.
When doubt strikes turn inward to the heart and ask it for guidance. Turn from the doubting mind to the knowing heart and let it strike doubt away with its profound knowledge, intuition, and unbending intent. The mind conjures all kinds of enticements, as well as doubt and fear, but the true and honest heart will not fail to observe and report to you in all honesty. When in doubt there is no greater ally than going to the heart of the matter and waiting patiently for guidance.
Notice how tiny deceptive thoughts can anchor in the mind and blow up into large phenomena. A tiny seed once planted, if constantly nurtured with additional thoughts, can blossom and grow out of control, becoming an invasive weed. Be careful of what you think. Keep a clear mind by doing constant cleaning, ridding the mind of those invasive seeds before they take root. Turn to the heart more often so that invasive ideas can be discerned and discarded, for the heart is the place of truth and a pure heart will not lead you astray. A heart that is turned to often is a heart that is strong, pure and nurtured, and what grows in such a heart is only the most creative thoughts, ideas and visions of a beautiful future. Listen to your heart.
Archetypes are nature’s crowning achievement. Our ability to survive is rooted in the activation of these evolutionarily sound, instinctual patterns of behavior etched in the fabric of the subconscious mind. Before humans had consciousness, with its ability to reason and make decisions, the automatic subconscious mind was the center of human decision making.
The guiding principle for the subconscious mind is association. If my senses detect a loud sound in the woods, images of a falling tree or an exploded firearm immediately come to mind. The subconscious associates the images to the sound, as action hormones are released in the body, which push for cautious investigative action.
With the birth of consciousness I can rationalize, that is, think about, the sound, and talk myself out of the need to investigate. My conscious will can subvert the subconscious story and call to action. Of course, through this suppression of the subconscious, a part of my mind may remain unsettled, but, as compared to primitive humans, I am not obsessively controlled by the absolute rule of the archetype.
Reason’s growing hegemony over the human mind is an evolutionary exercise that has produced mixed blessings. Scientists have proposed that we are now in a new geologic time period, which they are calling the anthropocene epoch, highlighting the overarching impact of human decision making upon the Earth.
It could certainly be argued, as does the Garden of Eden myth, that human beings should never have stolen access to the fruit of the tree of knowledge and instead stayed obediently within the rules and laws of the godly archetypes.
The subconscious, had it remained in total control, would never have allowed the kinds of duplicitous decisions that ego has made during its reign as CEO of the planet. The subconscious rules with the intention of survival. When it acts upon a suggestion, that suggestion has impressed it with its utility, due to its frequency of appearance.
Reason, of course, would argue that evolutionary patterns can be cumbersome and non-related to the challenges of modern life. Despite some truth to this argument, reason itself has been unable to use pure reason as a basis for environmental decisions. In effect, reason has acted like an imperious child, holding the keys to the kingdom in its own self-righteous hands.
The subconscious is the section of the mind where spirit and matter mate. From spirit issues a dynamic suggestion in the form of a word. The subconscious mind opens to receive the word, which it then magnetizes to attract matter and give birth to spirit’s intent in physical form. From this union, the word literally becomes flesh.
The will of ego can, and does, impress its suggestions upon the subconscious mind, subverting its creative potential for its own self-interest alone. The speed of communications nowadays, through social media, flood the collective subconscious with suggestions that are literally generating alternative realities, which are grounded only in the fact of their repetitive frequency.
In the meantime, the archetypes that once balanced the Earth’s ecosystem are flagrantly misfiring, or are being pitted against each other in battles for dominance. Who, for instance, defines modern masculinity? Are ancient archetypal patterns relevant to being a man? Should reason dictate the curriculum of identity?
The subconscious and reason are reconcilable partners. The bridge to this partnership is objective truth. The subconscious might very well be the most powerful section of the mind, but, by lacking critical thinking, it can be manipulated for less than positive intentions.
The ego has free will, its crowning achievement, but it lacks the ethical grounding to do the right thing. The home of truth is the heart. The Egyptian Goddess Maat is the Goddess of Truth, Law and Justice. Upon death, a person’s heart was weighed against her feather. Only a heart weighing less than the feather was a pure heart.
A pure heart, one that tells the truth, can weigh both the appropriateness of ego’s reason and a suggestion posed to the subconscious. Decisions from the heart center elevate the subconscious and the ego to be in alignment with the true needs of the Self, and the planet as a whole.
As individuals, we are most responsible when we bring heart to weigh upon the validity of our thoughts and the appropriateness of our instincts and impulses.
Strive to remain upon your path of heart, the path of balance, awareness and compassion that you have worked so hard to maintain. Each day remind yourself that this is your goal. Let each step you take be with awareness. Let each thought be aware. Let each word be spoken with awareness of yourself as part of the greater whole and thus a loving and compassionate being who is aware of the bigger picture. The world may not yet be in step with you, but stay upon the path of heart anyway in hopes that the world will soon catch up.
