It’s easy to say that you are a spiritual person but much harder to actually be one. To be spiritual is to live according to hard-earned and hard-learned insights, to hold fast to the true fact that you are more than mind and matter, and to operate fully and unconditionally from a place of love, compassion, non-judgment, and kindness, to fully express yourself from the heart, to let your spirit speak and teach you about yourself and to accept what it has to tell you. A lifelong journey of truth seeking and acceptance of self is a spiritual journey indeed, and well worth a lifetime’s probing. To know yourself is to know more than yourself and that you are more than that, for you are indeed a part of everything.
Focus on what is going right in your life rather than on what is going wrong. Incline toward the positive rather than the negative. Lean toward looking ahead rather than looking at what you did not get right, do right, or say appropriately. Everyone makes mistakes. Accept your role in the unfolding of your life and look forward to playing a new role in the days to come. It will do you good to be humble.
Continue the good work on the self, seeking balance, moderation, and the kind of awareness that only comes from getting to know the self on the deepest level. Ask the self often: What is right to do today? Am I furthering myself in a good way? Seek adventure and experience that is nurturing for the whole self, offering a good balance of spiritual pleasure as well as physical, for you are more than just a physical being, you are an infinite being as well.
Center yourself in knowing that you have within you all that you need to live a life that is fulfilling, meaningful, and stable. You might not figure everything out at once but the capacity does lie within you. Learn from your own life, and from the lives of those around you, what you want to do and how you want to spend your time. Look to nature to guide you as well, to its unfolding seasons, to the coming and going of night and day, to the play of light and shadow. You may not get everything right at first, but give it your best effort and before long you will find your way to what is right for you.
The appearance of a penny on the street in a dream is a healing trail marker. Follow that coin! A four-sided rectangle, a box, or simply the number four showing up in waking life, or dream, may be another communication from our High Soul that we are involved with something that furthers our intrinsic unfolding of Self.
The circle and the square, separate or in combination, form a mandala, the archetype of wholeness. Our individual mandala blueprint, at the core of our Soul, attracts to us the raw material circumstances and relationships needed to fully realize our wholeness in this life. The mandala archetype is the central organizing archetype for all life.
Jung pointed out that the primary atom for all organic life is carbon, whose outermost ring has a valence of four electrons that form the chemical bonds to create the basic building materials of life. Thus, at the material level of existence, the mandala is the central organizing blue print for physical life.
Our inner mandala, operating at the spiritual dimension of our life, accentuates activities we are engaged in, with synchronicities or images of mandalas, as suggested in the dream images mentioned above, when we are heading in the right direction or when we need a course correction in our decisions and behaviors.
Sometimes a broken, messy, round public toilet of a mandala appears in a dream. In this case, we are shown that our path to wholeness requires that we face that which we seek to flush away and be rid of. Our mandala of wholeness forces us to face that which humiliates us, as it refuses to allow us the release of repression. The mandala will insist that we claim and own all of our wholeness, regardless of how bad it smells!
The precursor to the number four, on the number line, is three, which, as a geometric image, forms a triangle. A triangle has integrity but is a volatile energetic force of change, like the Bermuda Triangle.
In the shamanic lineage of Carlos Castaneda, the leader, or Nagual, was always a human being with four energetic compartments, until Carlos came along. Though he was pointed out as the next Nagual, he had only three energetic compartments, foreshadowing the coming of great change for his shamanic line.
In fact, Carlos ended his shamanic line’s traditional transmission of knowledge to simply a new generation of selected leaders and apprentices. Instead, he unwrapped the secret, sacred technologies of his lineage and freely offered them to anyone interested in learning them. In Carlos’ new world, everyone needs to become their own personal shaman, taking the soul retrieval journey of their lifetime.
Carlos correctly read the energy of the need for total transparency as our evolutionary destiny. The days of the witch hunt and the need to hide shamanic knowledge from the Conquistadores has ended. The modern era needs all the sacred knowledge of yesteryear to correctly navigate the profound changes of our time.
Carlos’ decision allowed me access to the practice of recapitulation, with its ancient shamanic roots, as a complement to the use of EMDR in modern psychotherapy in the treatment of PTSD. Carlos, with his energetic configuration of three, freed ancient shamanic wisdom, allowing it to find new manifestations in the healing of our world.
The number three seeks its mandalic completion. The Christian male God triangle of Father, Son and Holy Spirit points to the need for Mary, as Goddess, to square its mandala. The struggle to achieve this configuration, in many spheres, is the story of our time.
The Catholic Feast of the Assumption never granted Mary true Godly status. The best it could do was offer Mary continued existence in physical form in heaven. The masculine gods of our time continue to devalue, control and exploit the feminine.
The feminine, in the energetic manifestation of the energies of Kali and Isis, are agents of change, using nature and climate change to point humanity toward squaring the mandala, with the inclusion of the feminine principles of relatedness and interconnectedness, to restore order and balance to the world.
Masculine and feminine energies are present in all life. Jung called the feminine energetic compartment in men the anima and the masculine energetic compartment in women, the animus . As individuals, we are all tasked with squaring the mandalas within ourselves by integrating these primal masculine and feminine energies within our own psyches into fruitful evolution.
Women can be animus dominated and as devaluing of the feminine as abusive, controlling men. Men can be anima dominated, overwhelmed by moods and resentments that dominate impulsive decisions.
All people are charged to follow the way of the mandala now, as it seeks resolution, inwardly and outwardly, in true integrated wholeness.
