find wholeness in unity…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
What is it that you really seek? Today, Jeanne suggests that it’s really pretty simple. We are all seeking the same thing: Our other self, our spiritual self. How do we find that self? Listen to today’s channeled message to hear more.
We live in a time of information overload. We are saturated from without by a constant flood of communication, from the latest news of everyone’s experiences to world events and an environment rapidly and unpredictably changing. Inwardly, we are flooded with images, thoughts, feelings and sensations, all vying for our attention that they might share their own stories.
The challenge now is how to stay grounded and manage this high intensity flow of data while simultaneously figuring out what is real, meaningful, and deserving of our attention.
There is a growing consensus, from many fields, that the ancient meditation practices of the East provide a technique that enables us to manage this overwhelming flood of data that we perceive or generate in such a way that we are granted the freedom to decide where we will place our attention. The simple ability to notice a thought or news item but be able to then choose to bring our attention back to the present moment, to our breath without interruption or a further development of the thought, goes a long way toward calming our central nervous system and providing the grounding to navigate daily life.
Carl Jung long ago identified two psychological functions, intuition and sensation, that are relevant to deepening our ability to navigate the flood of stimulation we encounter from within and without each day. Simply put, intuition is a psychological function, a sixth sense, that perceives what might be behind a door we are about to open, for instance, or “sees” some event in the future. Sensation operates through the five physical senses; it perceives what’s “actually” here and now.
These two functions are extreme opposites; one focuses on concrete known reality, the other on a future reality, unknowable in concrete terms. Often our minds are inundated with thoughts, feelings or images that if left to run freely would generate a story we might then contend is real. Suddenly we imagine a look on someone’s face or a call not returned as a definite snub. We feel rejected. We become frightened, anxious, and worried and before we know it we are living out that drama as if it were real.
Meditation might aid us here to lift us from the intensity of this inner drama and ground us in the here and now through focus on our body and one of its physiological functions, breathing. Here meditation couples with the sensation function to ground the ego and enable it to take back its energy from the drama. Afterwards, once centered, the ego is in a position to determine whether the germ seed of the drama was an actual intuition—that is, an actual perception of a future reality for instance—or merely the spinning of an illusion by a thought or some other trickster character in the personality.
Intuitions generally occur spontaneously, presenting a definite picture, feeling, or knowing of something unseen. The experience might be compared to a flash of lightening. It’s powerful. Inner dramas, by contrast, though they might build in emotional intensity as the drama deepens in the mind, are more like soap operas spinning endless tales than sudden and powerful shocks of knowing. A grounded ego, detached from the drama, is in a good position to determine if it’s dealing with drama or intuition and can decide more clearly what to give attention to and what to discard.
Of course, even when dealing with a legitimate intuition there is still the possibility that a perceived future does not unfold along the lines intuited. Once again we do well to exercise the tool of mediation that helps us to stay grounded in the present moment, suspending judgment of what might happen as we watch life unfold as it will.
In developing a dedicated meditation practice we are provided with the grounding in sensation that enables us to delve into and explore the unseen without being captivated by phantom dramas that consume our vital energy and distract us from real life. Meditation provides the bridge to unite the seemingly irreconcilable opposites of sensation and intuition, allowing us to deepen our meaningful presence in life, in all its dimensions.
Sitting in calm sensation,
Chuck
Once again, I share a YouTube video of a very simple and easy Korean meditation method: Son Meditation.
Here is Chuck’s blog for this week. The dreaming Soulbyte we published this morning on our Facebook page reflects one aspect of aligning with our multidimensional self!
I pause in this moment to connect with my multidimensional self. The sound of energy is steady in my ears. High pitched vibrational tones deepen and intensify as I give it my awareness. I intend it to spread. The vibration begins to radiate throughout my entire body, a unison of sound and vibration.
I reassert my physicality with a deep breath and notice my musculature at rest. The vibrational state recedes from my body at large but intensifies in my inner ears, reminding me of its ever-presence. At night the situation is reversed. The physical body goes increasingly dormant to a state of catalepsy, a temporary paralysis, as the higher vibrational self lifts off to worlds of adventure and discovery.
We are multidimensional beings with a variety of energetic possibilities. The physical world is the outer crust, the densest of our energetic possibilities. In that world our senses govern our experience. This is “in-body experience,” the full presence and sensory awareness of being in our body.
The mind is the energetic experience of abstraction. The mind operates in the field of thought, a non-substantial subtler energy that constructs its own world separate from the physical world. We indeed can find ourselves lost in the stories of our thoughts, worlds apart from the world of our physicality. Even thought completely focused on the physical world is still a mind of abstraction, creating models to approximate the denser physical world it observes.
Emotion is another dimension of our energetic being. Emotion is a magnetic energy that attracts and repels. It draws us to deep union, keeps us in seclusion, or mobilizes us to change. Emotion is a world of energetic intensity, the fuel of rapture. How often the world of emotion can misalign with the physical world! Emotional worlds of extreme intensity are often projected onto others who feel nothing in return. In this case, we are fully enraptured in our own emotionally vibrant world, devoid of actual connection.
Our evolutionary challenge in this life is to align with and deeply realize our multidimensional self. It is our higher vibrational self that journeys into transpersonal realms.
With intent we can extend our dreaming awareness, training it to stay present during those nightly journeys into infinity. When we write down our dreams upon return, we open the door to recapitulating those infinite journeys, good practice for future adventuring.
When we practice mindfulness in the waking state of the physical world we extend our awareness to be fully present in the journey of our physical everyday lives.
When we meditate we teach the mind to be calm, to allow for thoughtful presence that we can extend into other worlds, rather than stay encased in abstract stories.
When we bring our awareness into full alignment with our emotions, we allow ourselves the richest experience of life’s intensities. However, adult presence is required as we must learn to ride the waves with both awareness and detachment. Here detachment means being open to the fullest experience yet separate from it at the same time. We must become the observer who will not get overly attached to anything.
The common thread to deepening and aligning our multidimensional self is the intent of awareness. We must intend our awareness to be fully present in our physical body, as well as fully present in our thought body, emotional body, and ethereal body simultaneously. Once in alignment, we are set to fluidly experience the fullness of multidimensional living and we open to being fully present to our evolutionary journey as well, both in this world and beyond.
True multidimensional living is really all about preparing for the definitive journey when all of our energetic bodies consolidate for the last time, at death, and leave the physical realm. Death is the unifier of all those energies. As we take the journey into infinity we “burn from within,” as the Shamans of Ancient Mexico say, all our energy combining in a single energy of fire. On to new life!
Happy Beltane!
Chuck
We are out of danger. The “Storm of the Century” is heading out to sea. We are not being impacted this time. Last night I dreamed that it would become windy today—it is—but that the storm would turn back toward land and we would bear the full brunt of it tomorrow. I have to look at this dream in the context of reality.
It looks fairly unlikely that the storm will turn back to land, but today’s winds rattle the house every now and then, each gust asking me to ponder what it all means on a deeper level. Rattling inside my own head is the truth of my being here in this country. My ancestors came here, like just about everyone else’s, seeking freedom of some sort. In that seeking of freedom, whether it was sparked by oppression or famine or the desire for adventure and new life, lives an indefatigable energy. It drives us still. I must accept that the energy that came here in my ancestors lives on in me still, and I must accept what it once did if I am to turn it in a new direction and use it for the greater good. If I am to truly live as a balanced spiritual being, I must constantly confront the darkness within myself, ancient or otherwise.
We came into this country like the wind. And like the wind we blew through it, ravaging, destroying and taking, with little regard for the traditions and cultures of centuries, with little regard for the sacred earth and the animals that roamed it. When the buffalo were gone, the Native Americans knew they would have to go inward; they would have to sit and wait for the buffalo to return. They would have to protect and hold the spirit of their people inwardly until it was time for that spirit to reemerge and roam the plains once again. They have waited a long time.
Now the ancient traditions are coming back and we, the invaders who destroyed the buffalo—as well as the other sacred animals of the tribes—all want a part of it. We see the animals returning, the spirit of the land revitalized, and we want it too. How ironic is it that we turn to the learned men and women of the ancient tribes to teach us now, the same people we once found heathen and uneducated, the same people we caused such destruction to. We want to learn the secrets from the shamans: how to connect with spirit, how to do a soul retrieval, how to find our path of heart. They oblige us, but the real secret is in doing what they did. We must hold our own spirits in check and wait. Even as we turn to the shamans, asking them to lead us out of our discomfort, we must sit still within our own discomfort if we are to truly be free.
We have turned outward in all directions seeking the knowledge that we know exists out there somewhere. We’ve turned to the yogis of India, to the Zen masters of Japan, to the Buddhists of Tibet, and yet if we sit still we will discover that we have what we need inside us. If we sit still and wait, just like they do, our own spirit will return and guide us on our journey to the freedom we seek, and have always sought.
The ancient shamanic practice of recapitulation asks us to do this, to sit still and bear the tension of what comes to us from our deepest inner selves. That’s really all it is, taking on the process of sitting still and waiting, and then withstanding what comes. It asks us to become the shaman waiting for the return of the buffalo. It asks us to sit under the bodhi tree like the Buddha and withstand the desires of the world outside of us so that we may meet the real spirit inside. It asks us to turn inward and meditate if we are to experience nirvana and enlightenment, the blissful states of non-attachment. We must sit still and work through all that keeps us from attaining these energetic states of consciousness. If we are to truly understand our adventures in non-ordinary reality, we must prepare ourselves to withstand the deeper truths they bring to us. If we are to experience the transpersonal in any real and lasting way—if we want to change the world—we must first change ourselves.
The ancients, the practitioners of sitting still, are trying to teach us that it really is time to sit still, to let the wind blow outside of us without attachment. If it destroys something then we must accept its power, yet we must also accept what we too have destroyed by our own power. We must let the wind enter into us if we are to transform ourselves. In sitting still we let the apocalypse come. We withstand the destruction of all that we think we are, as we take our own shamanic journey to retrieve our own soul. This is what recapitulation is. This is what freedom is.
Recapitulation comes stealthily, creeping up on us like a cat, or it comes like a storm, blowing us over with its ferocity so that we are knocked breathless and bleeding. Either way, it asks us to accept that we have in us the freedom-seeking energy of our ancestors. It asks us to face what we have done in the past. It asks us to face what was done to us as well, just as the ancients did, by turning inward and sitting still. In time, the truth will be revealed. If we are to evolve, our best strategy is to sit still, within our own bodies and minds, and bear the truth of who we are.
Our freedom will come. In sitting still, our own spirits will return just as they are returning to the Native tribes.
Sitting in the wind,
Jan
The borders of the world are swiftly evaporating as we swirl ever so rapidly into our One World family. This transformation has been heralded by the diaspora of formerly-cloistered knowledge and practices of the world’s most ancient spiritual traditions.
Tibet is a regular at the White House now, in the form of the Dalai Lama’s chats with the President. Mindfulness has infiltrated into the core of brain research at major universities and is at the heart of modern psychotherapeutic treatment. The technologies of the Upanishads and the wisdom of the ancient Hindus is available in most adult ed programs, and in storefronts in most cities in the world, in the form of yoga practice. The energetic medicine of the ancient Chinese, in the practice of acupuncture, is now covered under most health insurance plans. The knowledge and methods of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico are readily available, to anyone seeking to deepen their energetic evolution, through the published works of Carlos Castaneda.
The age of exclusive godly gurus and saviors is over, at least in projected form. Even the Catholic Pope admitted to his human frailty when having to prematurely retire. The Dalai Lama’s successor is dubious; Carlos Castaneda ended his shamanic line; India is steeped in desecration of the feminine, and China has forgotten the I Ching.
The legacy, the deepest gold of these ancient fading traditions, lies in their technologies, offering pathways to the soul. These methodologies, stripped of their proprietary and ritual wrappings are now available to anyone who chooses to engage in their practices. It is true that we still need teachers and guides as we experiment with these ancient practices. For instance, Kundalini, the powerful instinctive energy that lies coiled like a snake at the base of the spine in all of us, once activated, can wreak havoc with the central nervous system, such as triggering a physical recapitulation that may confusedly land one in the emergency room! It is wise to proceed with caution and seek out experienced guides and helpers for these practices.
But, by and large, our greatest guide is our own resonance. The teachers and teachings that are synchronistically drawn to us and resonate with our own energy are most likely to be trusted. We are all guided now by our own inner Naguals—the title afforded, in earlier times, to the leader of a shamanic party. No one else’s rules or resonances necessarily apply to our own journey. And that journey can take many different roads.
Many people value the concept of meditation. In fact, it’s at the top of many a New Year’s resolution scroll. Most, however, find its actual practice daunting or frustrating. When TM, Transcendental Meditation, was the rave in the 1970s, Dr. Herbert Benson, in his lab at Harvard, discovered the Relaxation Response, a simplified, demystified 10 minute practice that achieved the same physical and emotional benefits as the ancient esoteric mantras of TM. There are many simple roads to meditation, like washing the dishes with full mindful presence.
The ancient Tibetans and Navaho Indians used sand paintings of mandalas to heal and commune with deep spiritual forces. Carl Jung had his patients paint mandalas to connect with the healing support of their own deep unconscious during analysis. When I seek such a connection, I will simply walk slowly in a circle, then in a square, touching four points of that circle. In this simple gesture the energetic pathways to the deeper self are opened. A calm walk on a simple labyrinth can facilitate a similar experience.
The other day, Jan offered a recorded hypnosis to easily shift awareness and access deep calm from the sacred within. Hypnosis is one of those ancient practices: “En arche en ho lógos (John 1:1);” “In the beginning was the word.” And with words we construct our worlds and commune with our deepest spiritual forces. When we choose our words wisely, the words we take in and the words we exhale can invite in benevolent and compassionate energies to support and guide our journeys. It’s all in the word. A simple calm word can change the structure of water and what it does to us; it can become healing balm.
Partake in the simply sacred with the guides and practices that resonate. Trust your inner Nagual. Peace.
On the simple path,
Chuck