Be dependable. Be someone to trust, share and be safe with. If people know they can depend on you they also know that you can be trusted with even their deepest secrets and experiences. But to become dependable you have to first learn to trust yourself, to become for yourself a trustworthy being. Do you show up for yourself when most needed? Do you hold yourself responsible for your choices and actions? Do you trust yourself to hold sacred your most important issues and to work with them until they are resolved in a fruitful manner? To be dependable is to be selfless in a loving way without losing yourself in the problems of others. In this manner you learn that you can also count on yourself to maintain your energy for what is really needed.
In flight in life, grounded in death, beautiful nonetheless… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Carl Jung recognized the psyche’s insistence upon balancing itself out in some way. Thus, if we consciously live a one-sided attitude in waking life, our dreams will balance it out with characters and dramas that engage us in the exact opposite attitude. Freud captured this principle in describing sexually promiscuous dreams as balancing an individual’s sexually repressive waking life attitude.
Psychic researcher, both in human life and in his soul’s afterlife, Frederic Myers, teaches from infinity how this law of compensation extends into the life of the soul after its completion of physical life. Myers channels, through Geraldine Cummins, his observation of the soul’s residence in the Plane of Illusion, the immediate world we encounter after a brief adjustment phase subsequent to physical death. (See both The Road to Immortality and Beyond Human Personality by Geraldine Cummins.)
Similar to the Buddhist description of a personalized bardo, Myers describes how the soul’s imagination creates a world uniquely suited to fulfilling its unlived earthly dreams, or to feel fully the pain it caused others, as it compensates for the cruelty it delivered during its earthly sojourn.
Souls live and reside in these personal environments until they achieve the completed balance to further their soul’s journey at higher, more subtle and objective levels of infinity. Thus, the Plane of Illusion enacts the life necessary to compensate for and balance out the life just completed in human form.
On Earth, presently, we have two distinguished nonagenarians, Noam Chomsky and Sir David Attenborough, reflecting to us how this law of compensation is exacting its present toll upon our planet’s survival. In a recent podcast with Ezra Klein*, Chomsky states, without hesitation or reserve, that humankind has twenty years left to radically change its environmental behaviors before it faces definite extinction.
This deeply reflective 92-year-old scholar is bluntly pointing out how significant this time on Earth is for humanity. Within our current lifetime, decisions and actions now taken will determine the near immediate fate of our human race and planet Earth.
How much greater a wakeup call could there be? How awesome to be a participant in life, on this planet, at this moment in time! Such the opportunity to awaken to a world unfiltered by blurry narcissism!
Attenborough is gentler in his challenge to a humankind that has doubled its world population in the last fifty years, seriously squeezing out other life on the planet. In his Netflix series, A Life on Our Planet**, Attenborough invites us, in graphic detail, into the beautiful yet tenuous balance of all of nature, deeply interdependent and perilously impacted by human habit. He remains optimistic, appealing to our love and awe for our home planet to curb our attitude of entitled excess.
Much of the human population is reacting aberrantly to this intuitive knowing of the precarious state of the planet that both these distinguished sages affirm. Addictions of many kinds reflect a mass of humanity seeking to remain comfortably numb in the oblivion of a soothing, fanciful, materialistic womb. Staggering gun sales reflect the fantasy of survival in a post-apocalyptic world of diminished resource.
The objective truth is that humankind is emotionally and cognitively at a narcissistic stage of development. Narcissism represents an early developmental stage of the imagination, filtered and constrained by the needs of self. From the vantage point of narcissism, the purpose of other beings and resources is limited to serving the self, the boundary of the known world.
Decisions and actions stemming from this narrow view are often to grow and hoard as much as materially possible, to be able to move about as desired, and to continue to survive and thrive upon a dying planet. Migrants are often seen as aliens, trying to take what is not rightfully theirs, rather than as people seeking refuge from an increasingly uninhabitable planet.
The issue is not ultimately about caring for the less fortunate, however noble such a cause. The deeper issue is about facing and taking right action to save the planet. And right action is the willingness to sacrifice, to set limits upon the supposed sacrosanct right to more, more, more.
Very early in my college days, I ventured into an economics course, which insisted, as its sacred dogma, that humankind’s need for more was innate, and that the world must be irrevocably organized to meet this human demand. Who ever questions the given that the economy, jobs, the human population and the stock market must continually grow?
The world emerges now from its yearlong pandemic retreat. Already, CO2 emissions are climbing back to “normal”. All envision expansion as recovery. And yet, as Attenborough’s graphic display of the melting of Antarctica portends, the compensation for expansion will be the continued unleashing of endless viruses upon the world stage.
Chomsky points to atomic fusion as the likely safe antidote to our ever-growing world energy demand, but states that such a solution is decades beyond our twenty-year survival limit. But I ask, why do we accept, without question, this supposed absolute imperative that we accommodate our energy appetite?
Beyond this materialist fixation upon energy expansion lies the final frontier of energetic expansion into the province of our soul. The energy body, our subtle soul that innervates our physical body during the physical phase of our immortal life, is ripe for discovery and exploration now, while we reside in human form.
This is literally the stuff that dreams are made of. To open to this dimension of spiritual life is to direct the human felt manifest destiny for more into sustainable evolution. To awaken to this spiritual unfolding is to stretch the imagination beyond its narcissistic constraints, to take in the deeper reality in which the self is a participant but not everything.
The current initiatives to address climate change, at the highest levels of world governance, are laudable but likely to suffer the sad fate of most New Year’s resolutions. More likely, are continued attacks from nature herself—from viruses to earthquakes—to assist humankind, via compensation, to learn to curb and redirect its insatiable appetite for more.
Nature can take down our energy infrastructure in a heartbeat, teaching us how to live small and interdependently. The law of compensation insists that we will find our way to balance. All individuals are empowered to address this inevitable fate by squaring with the imbalances in their own lives.
Taking an honest accounting of one’s habits, and willingly sacrificing excess, in whatever form, is both the individual and the planetary imperative. All excess, voluntarily sacrificed, results in the accrual of energy for spiritual advancement and planetary survival. All individual sacrifice of excess additionally accrues to humankind’s growing account of energy for necessary attitudinal shift: from narcissism to right action.
The law of compensation is the truly sacrosanct law that governs this world, and the beyond. It will help us to grow and find fulfillment through mastering the art of sacrifice. We can aid this natural and spiritual law by voluntarily taking a personal inventory of habits and aligning with right action and true interdependent need.
Start small; all donations, of whatever size, are equally appreciated. Choose one small act of sacrifice today and notice its subtle appreciation by physical body and energetic spirit. Ask for help from the unseen and experience the synchronistic material response.
Put the law of compensation to best use: let material sacrifice be compensated by spiritual advance.
Chuck starts off with our first blog of the New Year, restating the intent that we embody, to take full responsibility for who we are and how we choose to participate in the dream of this reality. It’s what we at Riverwalker Press are all about. As the New Year begins we invite all of you to participate in dreaming a new dream with us. Happy New Year!
Warmly, with love and gratitude from us both, Chuck and Jan
This is the dream we are in today… What does your dream look like? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Every cell in our body has a life of its own. It is challenged daily to obtain necessary resources for its survival, maintain balance, rid itself of wastes and spawn new life. Little does that single cell know that it is actually part of a much greater integrated whole, a human body.
The interdependent reality of our wholeness escapes us as we focus daily, like every single cell within us, on our individual tasks of survival and fulfillment. Nonetheless, if we contemplate our greater cosmic reality, perhaps we might glimpse, through reason or intuition or experience, the oneness of everything. And, from that place of oneness, all of us are responsible for the dream we are in and where we are going to take it. We are all empowered, through consciousness and intent, to advance the dream, that is, to change the world we live in.
Over the past couple of days, the stock market has been in a downslide. Why? Because the price of oil has been plunging rapidly. Meanwhile, the auto industry has had its best year in sales in decades, due in large part to increased sales of gas guzzlers, the consequence of cheaper gas. Meanwhile, many, whose economic survival is dependent upon the stock market, are faced with threatening losses as “safe” investments like oil plummet in value. Behind all these challenges to daily survival lies the reality that fossil fuels are a major contributor to the rapid destabilization and destruction of the planet that feeds and houses us.
We, as individuals, are empowered to decide where this dream will go next. Many are so focused on personal survival that they feel obliged to make the best investments, irrespective of environmental consequences or the total destruction of lives and cultures outside of their own. Gas guzzling cars are one of the things that most of us use daily and yet most people can’t afford to switch up to hybrid vehicles or they are drawn to the perks of less fuel efficient cars, while still others have much more basic needs of daily survival, putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads.
If we look to government to solve the greater issue of climate change we are confronted with the likes of today’s headlines: Big Threat For Obama’s Climate Efforts From GOP-Run Congress.* It’s easy to indulge in powerlessness and point fingers at the GOP, but to be truly responsible we must examine the GOP within ourselves. No one can separate themselves from deciding which way this dream will unfold; we’re all part of the same whole.
The GOP reflects an old dream that insists that the world is ours for the taking, that consideration beyond the needs of self and ours is unnecessary. That dream downplays the interdependent reality and the global concerns that effect us all and instead focuses on the individual’s responsibility to ensure survival of the personal dream. That dream has been given full latitude to play itself out and now finds itself approaching nightmare, as that dream and the world it has generated are unsustainable. This nightmare has caused many to wake up and face the facts, but still many others, reflected in the newly elected American Congress, remain staunch champions of the supremacy of the old dream; self above all.
The truth is, we are all living cells of the same dream, each empowered to decide, within the context of our own lives, which way the dream will proceed. On a concrete level, if I refuse to invest in fossil fuels, I am changing the dream. If I choose to buy a fuel-efficient car, regardless of other sales’ enticements, I choose a different dream. If I choose to replace my light bulbs with an expensive, highly efficient LED bulb, I choose a different dream. There are even simpler choices we can all make, such as to recycle or to be less wasteful overall.
How powerful a little pocket of intent is! – Photo by Jan Ketchel
When Jeanne was in this world—as the Hindus say: at the gross level of reality—she strongly preached the power of the purse to effect change. Now she resides fully in the astral plane, the next, finer dimension of reality that houses our soul or spirit, guiding us to exercise the power of intent to effect change in our lives within and without. Though the main fuel of the astral dimension, intent is equally effective in the gross dimension of our reality, awaiting our discovery of its power.
When we pray, when we state our intent, repeat our mantras, send love and compassion, we are transforming the dream world we are in. Everyone who loves their enemy reconciles with their own divided wholeness and advances the dream.
If I can love the GOP within myself—the part that demands individual responsibility but is also so susceptible to self interest—exploitative and greedy—I can make responsible choices in the myriad of decisions I make today to advance the dream in a new direction for all living beings. Such a decision might be as simple as where I choose to place my awareness, how I choose to think or spend my personal energy.
If worry and fear beckon, I might shift to some moments of intentional release of tension in my body, into calm, deliberate breathing. This simple act changes the energy I bring to the integrated wholeness of the one dream that we all live in and are dreaming together.
Imagine if each of us decided to awaken to the power of intent and bring it into the gross dimension that we all live in in such a calm and nurturing way. It might just be a strong enough intent to course-correct the orbit of the dream we are now in, sending us into a new dream of sustainability. We are never powerless.
