Look to your dreams to guide you and show you what you are not seeing in the light of day. For in the light there may be less clarity on what lurks within. But at night the darkness is no problem, for the clarity of dreams is assured should you wish to probe them. Learn the language of dreams at night so that you may bring them into your day and utilize them to your advantage, for there is much to learn in bridging the two worlds just as there is much to learn in integrating the conscious and unconscious parts of the self. Mysterious as dreams may seem, you yourself are even more mysterious, for how you truly operate, and why, is a great mystery and surely one to be explored.
Sending you love, The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
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Strive to remain connected to your inner self, to know this inner self at the deepest level and to try and figure out what it is trying to tell you. It speaks in its own voice and language and acts in its own unique way. Sometimes it is direct, sometimes subtle, but always it seeks integration so that body and soul may know the bliss of union. Your body is the vehicle for your journey through life, and your spirit, that deepest inner you, is both the driver and the passenger. Make sure you are driving with alertness and awareness, keeping to the road that lies before you. There are many ways to travel through life but to travel with awareness is certainly preferable!
The typical splitting of body and spirit into a pair of opposites, though useful in contrasting gross and subtle expressions of energy, reinforces a spiritual prejudice against the body, encumbered with its instinctual life. Most spiritual traditions, while tolerant of life in a physical body, place a premium on sacrificing carnal life for the betterment of spiritual evolution.
Furthermore, the physical world is typically associated with feminine energy, which is equally devalued or seen as subservient to the superior masculine spirit. The body, with its instinctual inclinations, is associated with evil and passions, that which must be sacrificed to achieve spiritual advance.
This stripping of the physical body and instinctive mind of divine association has been the prerogative of ego consciousness, which has the ability to exercise its will over instinct and the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Most profoundly has been the explosive growth of the rational mind, with its associated prefrontal cortex, which claims absolute power over the belief systems of modern humans.
It can certainly be argued that the one-sidedness of modern ego consciousness matches the one-sidedness of our early ancestor’s absolute dependence on instinctual guidance. However, this modern one-sidedness has clearly reached the tipping point, as the world is currently being reshaped by the breakthrough of repressed instinctual forces of destruction.
Marie Louise von Franz, Jung’s most valued associate, reflected on a Romanian fairy tale about a 17-year-old princess who was turned into a cat via a curse from the Virgin Mother, Mary. The curse required that both her cat tail and cat head be cut off by a prince for her to be restored to her human self.
This association of witchy behavior with the Virgin Mother is highly unusual. Von Franz believed it represented the repressed state of the feminine by the Catholic Church. Mary’s shadow delivered a curse intended to fully redeem the feminine.
Von Franz associates the cat’s tail with its dominant animal instinct. Symbolically, the cutting off of the tail represents a humanizing ability to successfully handle the threat of being overpowered by one’s instinctual feelings and sensations. Feelings and sensations are a divine gift, but to be received in a fully human way they must be refined from their overpoweringly compulsive control and integrated as part of a balanced self.
Men who struggle with premature ejaculation learn to breathe and get calm to be able to tolerate and savor the feelings and sensations associated with sexual activity. Divine union must include the wholeness of feelings and sensations.
Cutting off the head addresses the one-sidedness of mental control by ego or the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Most times, the experience of anxiety is the consequence of the projection of an archetype onto a person or situation one is confronting. Thus, if one’s boss evokes anxiety, it is likely that one is dealing with the image of the destructive side of the Great Mother, or wrathful Yahweh, which must be cut off before one can have a human interaction.
Shamanic journeys, active imagination, and dreaming all offer venues to heroically confront and ‘cut off’ the influence of these archetypes that overshadow human interaction. Breath work, yoga, and meditation provide pathways to gain control over the central nervous system to again cut off the power of the archetypes to possess human life.
Similarly, romantic relationships can’t progress to true connection if one can’t cut off the control of an Adonis or Aphrodite mental projection onto one’s human partner. One will always feel less than when their partner is experienced as divine. Mythology is very instructive in pointing out the pitfalls of human and godly union.
While fully appreciating the attraction and beauty of each other, a couple can truly communicate in a real, down-to-earth human way. Thus, the intensified experience of a divine connection with another human being is truly possible if one communicates directly with the actual person they are with.
Mental presence, unencumbered by divine projection, in combination with matured feelings and sensations is the key to divine bi-spirituality. Our spiritual essence is both body and spirit equally engaged, equally valued, equally matured.
Our collective world shamanic journey of now beckons us to retrieve the lost and captured parts of our wholeness, in particular, our feminine and animal selves.
The body is as much spirit as the spirit itself. It must be granted its true value and raised to its highest spiritual potential. This is the essence of divine bi-spirituality: as above, so below.
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.
Co-create your beautiful wholeness… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Victor Frankl gave us the freedom to choose the attitude we take toward any reality we are confronted with. Jack Schwarz took us to a subtler dimension, giving us the ability to alter our physical reality through the voluntary control of the mind.
Both Frankl and Schwarz were interned in the death camps of the Holocaust. Both were able to survive and refine their psychic abilities through their encounters with, and mastery of, the pain and suffering they endured. Their gifts are fundamental to healing from trauma and assuming voluntary control of the co-creation of one’s life.
Co-creation implies collaborating with creation. “I am” is a fact I can become conscious of. I might even have access to remembering my prior journeys through infinity. But how “I” was initially created appears to have originated from a source beyond myself.
With consciousness, however, I truly can become a co-creator in that life of “I”. Co-creation is conscious partnership with one’s created self in the evolution and fulfillment of one’s life. Co-creation is assuming full responsibility for one’s life.
The created self is instilled with inborn instructions that control the human psyche, through instinctual patterns called archetypes, as well as through physical laws governed by genetic code. We can live a full life of instinctual fulfillment and a biologically determined physical course without conscious participation, but this would be a life devoid of co-creation.
Under traumatic conditions the archetypes and laws of ordinary life are severely interrupted, leading to experiences of non-ordinary reality. These glitches in the expectations of normalcy awaken consciousness to latent, but previously unrealized, abilities. This is the birth of the potential for co-creation.
Thus, the ability to visualize a loved one or a pleasant scene, simultaneous with being in a condition of torture, can enable one to displace one’s consciousness into an energetic state separate from the physical body. This distancing of oneself into a separate reality allows one to survive one’s physical ordeal in an out-of-body state. The co-creation of this act is the voluntary control of where one places one’s attention.
Of course, the full reentry of consciousness back into the physical body may be delayed for decades, until the mental plane is ready to endure the truth of the emotional and physical pain awaiting it in its body. Nonetheless, the discovery of life beyond the body awakens one’s ability to voluntarily control the placement of awareness in more subtle dimensions beyond physical reality.
Jack Schwarz gained access to what Jung called the “psychoid” dimension, what I call the subconscious mind, where spirit meets matter and directly impacts it. Creation dictates the activation of subconscious default programs to manage the impact of one’s experiences. These might be fight/flight/freeze programs with hormonal releases, as well as physical and mental responses.
Co-creation is consciousness assuming responsibility for creating new programs, or the willful exercise of existing programs. Thus, consciousness might employ the breath and autogenic messages to calm the mind and body as it processes its experiences.
Under strict laboratory conditions, supervised by Elmer Green at the Menninger Foundation, Jack Schwarz was able to push a large sewing needle through his own arm, remove it, stop the bleeding and completely heal, with absolutely no pain. (See video link below.)
This extreme, if not bizarre experiment, demonstrated the potential power of the mind to direct the course of matter, the matter of one’s own physical body, in rationally unthinkable ways!
In today’s parlance, we speak of the the ability to manifest and the power of intent. We all have the latent ability to become co-creators of our lives. However, to access this heightened state of realization, in a balanced integrated way, we must first fully inhabit the body we are in.
To be fully in-body we must process all the trauma the body has held for us while we lived somewhat outside the body. This is the process of recapitulation that enables union of body and mind. This is the night sea journey where consciousness awakens to, suffers through, and gets comfortable with the fullness of all its prior experiences, inside and outside of the body.
Freed of our triggering shadows we are able to explore—without the limitations of blocking beliefs, self-depreciation, or the narrow limits of rationality—the extraordinary abilities of the mind to manifest the physical reality it intends. This is accomplished through intention, mantra, self-hypnosis, prayer, visualization, etc.
Our global reality is priming us for this next stage of evolutionary advancement. Our time is rampant with trauma. We all suffer from it, but we are also all free to assume a positive attitude toward the events we all encounter in our everyday lives, on a regular basis, by grounding ourselves in calmness.
In facing the full truth of necessary changes, we are freed to intend, visualize, and manifest those changes, as we co-create, via voluntary control, the seeds of new life.
Begin with the self. Choose to sow within, and then sow without.
