Hold yourself accountable, and without blame move into a new pattern where the only goal is spiritual. Without regret or sorrow, and knowing that you have done all you could do, move on. To hold oneself accountable means to be accountable to the self on the journey of the Self to wholeness. All circumstances in life require taking responsibility, for there is nothing you do or that has been done to you that is not part of the unfolding of the life of your spirit. A spirit is never damaged; it only ever looks forward. Even when it has to wait a long time for you to catch up, it is never sad. It just waits.
I spent a training weekend with a virtual Susan Brown, LCSW and EMDR psychotherapist. This event coincided with my reading the book Seth, Dreams And Projections Of Consciousness, published posthumously in 1986, two years after the death of its author, Jane Roberts.
Susan Brown addresses the integration of sub-personality parts work with classic EMDR therapy as applied to treating addictions. For her, the multiplicity of fragmented parts that we become when separated from our wholeness of Self, through traumatic encounter, continue to serve our healing quest for connection with, and restoration of, our lost wholeness of Self.
Susan counsels that we value, accept and respect all parts of Self with equanimity, regardless of their apparent dysfunctionality. Wholeness, once again, requires acceptance of everything that we are. Her intent could be characterized as a modern day shamanic soul retrieval, where the adult self is brought into living connection with its lost parts, as the overall personality is restored to healthy balance and cooperative oneness.
Carlos Castaneda highlighted this shift in modern shamanism by insisting that we are now all our own redeemers. We must all become our own Naguals, or High Selves, as Susan Brown might characterize them, and assume central responsibility for the healing and individuation journey to our true wholeness of Self.
The therapist or shaman is a facilitator but does not assume responsibility for retrieval of a lost part in the underworld of the unconscious. The evolving relationship between adult self and High Self, and its variety of part personalities, is the magic and centerpiece of healing in this empowered journey of recovery.
Seth, the entity whom Jane Roberts channelled, explained that probable selves represent living permutations of the life we are currently in. These sub-personalities, or parts, are intimately connected and interactive with the life we are currently living, though they are completely autonomous and may be functioning largely outside of our conscious awareness.
For instance, Jane Roberts, and her husband Rob, had once travelled to Maine for a vacation. One night while there, they went to a night club and were drawn to sit opposite a couple whom they experienced as bitter, disgruntled versions of their future selves, miserably shut down and disconnected from their creative cores.
Seth explained to them that their present selves had created, or birthed, these versions of themselves from the shadows of their fears. As opposed to mere psychological projections, these beings were actual entities, with lives of their own, seeking their own resolutions.
This synchronistic encounter with their probable future selves served all four beings well, as their connection spawned many possibilities and reflected knowledge extremely useful to the making of decisions that would go on to change their future lives.
We all have our personal astral network of probable selves that we interact with, largely in dreaming and through the practice of, what Jung called, active imagination. These connections are real, living connections that exist as parts of our greater wholeness, regardless of our awareness of them. Just as we have neural plasticity networks in the brain, we also have, what I would term, the astral-plasticity to grow through greater awareness and connectivity with our probable selves.
Astral-plasticity utilizes lucid dreaming, where present selves volitionally encounter their probable other selves, meeting with the intent of respect and offering the opportunity to share and gain knowledge gleaned from their separate lives lived.
Astral-plasticity also generates the merging of healing intentions, wherein separate lives move beyond being unconsciously, compensatorily related, to being joined in similar healing intentions at different dimensions of Self.
I have suggested, in previous blog posts, that our current world crisis is reflecting a chaotic macro-encounter between the presently embodied World Self and the probable shadow self of past generational decisions, still alive and well on the astral plane, all demanding a physical replaying to reach a higher level of global Self-realization. We have at present slipped into a probable World Self that resembles Gotham City of Batman ilk. The advanced prefrontal cortex of current world civilization is becoming increasingly entranced by its limbic ancestors, all seeking a new world order.
Rather than pass the buck, through solidarity with the repression of prior generations, we are being called upon to live with the misery and lament of what appears to be irreconcilable differences. Accepting the role of taking the hit for the greater whole, by embodying these epic challenges, offers us the very real option of once and for all healing the deep splits that have perennially haunted human history. It also requires that we fully experience and reckon with the genuine threats to our current world’s survival.
Our best opportunity for healing rests in our capacity to summon our adult Self, with its ability to exercise its free will in the service of the greater good. Furthermore, we have the resource of our probable part selves, alternate selves who appreciate our efforts and contributions toward their own evolution and whom support us in ours. How critical it is that we get to know and make peace with all our parts. Ultimately, as Susan Brown points out, all parts matter!
Where to start? Set boundaries, but treat all parts with compassion and respect. Every part has a story to share that weaves together the mystery and wonder of Self.
Stay present in the truth of your life so that each moment counts, so that each moment is fully experienced and explored. Running off into fantasy or false ideas may relieve you of stress but also relieve you of taking responsibility for where you truly are, thus taking you from acceptance of the truth. Each day look to the truth of your life so that you may make the changes that are most helpful and beneficial to you, so that in every moment you may experience life in all its glory and as it truly is.
Alice Miller’s books, on the impact of child abuse and neglect, evoke deep compassion for the wounded inner child. Healing from childhood trauma requires deep sensitivity and respect for dissociated child parts, along with their experiences of abuse and neglect.
Ultimately, complete healing requires full acceptance of everything one has experienced in life. With trauma, this includes releasing the full sensory and emotional discharge of stored reactions to the traumatic experience. With healing, those memories are no longer traumatic; they trigger no emotion or sensation. They are completely neutral.
Mentally, one is challenged to dispel beliefs that one was responsible for causing the traumatic encounter. Here one truly needs to accept that indeed they were a victim in an experience that was not of their making.
Healing also includes a vastly enlarged perspective of the experience, which includes the motives and circumstances of others involved in the traumatic experience. Ultimate healing also requires complete emotional neutrality toward one’s perpetrator.
To acknowledge one’s victim status is critical to healing and, yet, one cannot heal if one holds onto the victim status as an enduring identity. An enduring identity as victim reflects a personality construction with the wounded child in control of, what Winnicott called, the false self. This self is seen as false because rather than mature through the normal developmental stages of childhood, it mimicks adulthood while secretly dedicating itself to adaptive behaviors that protect the child from anxiety.
The false self is a commandeered adult ego state whose charge is to defend the child from any discomfort. The false self employs its resources to bury, in the physical body, the memory and impact of trauma, as well as to develop a rigid body armor to stave off the challenge of the outside world.
The false self often develops competency in a profession, which provides security for the child, but behind this seeming successful adaptation to life is a sense of self as a phony, threatened to be discovered at any moment.
I refer to this child state that controls the false self as the uninitiated child because it has failed to complete its rite of passage to advance beyond its victim status. Rites of passage are purposeful traumatic practices that societies once used to help children successfully advance into real adulthood. All trauma requires full recapitulation to complete passage into real adulthood.
Failure to advance can fixate the child in a narcissistic worldview of entitlement, protection and revenge. In her book, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence, Alice Miller describes Hitler’s horrifically abusive childhood, that, left unprocessed, was projected outward in a ruthless quest for revenge.
These same dynamics are blatant in the cult of the child that serves the power drives of uninitiated charismatic leaders, who promise revenge upon the reigning adult authority figures in the present world. These extreme childish expectations of entitlement and protection have opened the floodgates of legitimization for the uninitiated, who blindly support these irreverent child heroes.
These extreme examples simply underscore how this developmental challenge of achieving true adulthood is the salient issue for the human race today. The hallmark of true adulthood is the acceptance of full responsibility for one’s entire life, including all experiences of victimization.
This in no way takes responsibility away from those who have victimized others. They must and will be held accountable for their actions. They will never be able to advance spiritually unless they fully feel the pain they caused and recapitulate all the pain of their own lives. These are the prerequisite rites of passage.
Ultimately, like Job, we are faced with accepting the fact that life is not fair, despite the echoes of our childhood socialization.
Ultimately, we are challenged to accept Buddha’s assessment that life is suffering. Earth School is a playing field for the suffering of attachment and loss.
The full mastery of Earth School is to arrive at the place of love, most especially for all those who had roles in our traumatic rites of passage.
Become the child acorn that advances beyond its protective shell, delivering its vitality to the mighty adult oak it was always destined to become.
Ultimately, the child’s destiny is to grow up and into its adult self, who awaits beyond its rites of passage. To that adult, bring a matured innocence, willing to journey freely in and, perhaps someday, beyond this predatory universe.
Stay grounded in truth, in what is real, in what is right, and in what is going to aid you on your path of growth. All beings are on a path of growth. That is the universal objective of life, to grow, evolve and become more than you were when you started. To grow and evolve entail learning kindness, compassion and love, what they mean personally and what they mean universally. Learning to be kind, compassionate and loving toward the self often precedes the ability to be kind, compassionate and loving towards others, but often it is the other way around. To be honest and truthful with yourself is a big step on the road to kindness, compassion and love. Stay in truth, and before long the other attributes of an evolving life will fall easily into place.
