Let yourself be guided by nature to find your way to stillness, calmness, and a heart centered path where not only you flourish but all others do as well. It’s not that hard to get calm and remain calm. Practice how nature gets calm; the winds die down, the storms cease, the waters lie still, the critters sing their natural songs of life. Let all within you do the same so that nature becomes you and you become it. In this manner let yourself be guided to remain calm as much as possible. It will do you good.
The body says, “I’m tired.” The mind pushes sleep away, and carries on. This simple example illustrates the core training of life in human form: the ability of mind, which is spirit, to shape the physical world of matter, with intent for the greater good.
At present, our world, wherever you look, is of two minds. The lines are fairly evenly divided. Take, for instance, the issue of vaccination. One worldview credits vaccination with a decline in infection. The other worldview disavows the need for vaccination to avert infection.
Rather than argue the merits or deficits of either view, I draw attention to the phenomenon of mind over matter, activated in both views. Mind is generating both one’s beliefs and intentions. Matter is the body. How will the body respond to the mind’s intent?
The placebo effect is the universally accepted phenomenon of mind impacting matter. Many a disease has been cured because of the power of one’s belief in the treatment, even if the treatment was nothing but a sugar pill. Of course, if one’s belief shifts so does the magical effect of the placebo. Wise to have beliefs grounded in truth.
Hypnosis is another well-documented case of mind over matter. Mind, with a clear intention suggested to it in trance, will manifest in the body of matter its entranced command at the appointed time and circumstance. Again, however, though a subject might temporarily manifest suggested behaviors, if the suggestions don’t resonate with one’s deepest truth, they won’t have duration.
Matter is the material of all nature. The minds of humans are free to manipulate and transform nature for food, shelter, recreation, travel and industry. Matter is pliable and compliant, but if nature’s laws are not respected in human design, nature’s compensation will ultimately prevail.
Take the rising ocean on the coast of Florida, with condominiums constructed on reclaimed wetland. Apparently, nature is reclaiming her wetland, unwilling to support the human intent that imposed its will upon it.
We are currently experiencing the intent of conflicting mental belief systems attempting to market radically different constructions of reality. These belief systems strengthen their appeal to citizens through well-funded messaging strategies, seeking to find resonance in the minds of consumers.
The world is being asked to choose between alternative realities. Whichever version gains majority consensus will become the mainstream reality, whose intent is materialized in the thoughts and policies that govern that reality.
However, as we see with the fallen condominium, only materializations that are in accord with the laws of nature will ultimately prevail. Nature always compensates for human deceit and error. This is the essence of the Tao: all actions, however extreme, will be brought into balance with equally extreme counteractions. Actions founded on balance stay in balance.
When mind acts upon matter from the place of truth, matter is firm and long-lasting. When mind acts deceitfully upon matter, meteoric rise leads to devastating descent.
Our major opportunity, while residents in this Earth plane of physical matter, is to learn how to live by truth. We are treated to the solid manifestation of our mental intents in the physical world and in our physical bodies. With this observable feedback we learn and grow.
Through mastering right action in physical form, we are best prepared to be truthful spirit beings, capable of navigating the more subtle challenges of energetic life, and remain in balance.
To be able to align mind with truth will lead to a more fulfilling and meaningful life, and best prepare one to advance into the more subtle challenges of life beyond the physical body.
Find in nature’s awakening and progression reflections of your own awakening and unfolding, for nature is spirit in action, doing the things that come when it’s time to do them, neither too early nor too late. Even disasters in nature come when the time is right. Let your own life’s unfolding be natural to you. Times of illness or depression just as times of joy or celebration come when the time is right, for all of nature and all in natural unfolding equates with change, the great equalizer and the great destiny of all. Embrace your own change. It’s natural!
Change may happen slowly or it may happen all at once, abruptly and unexpectedly. Just as Nature exhibits both the slow and steady progress of change so does it exhibit how abrupt change comes and changes irrevocably. Know that both kinds of change are in every life, that even your own contains the slow and the abrupt, that the Universe is taking care of you so that change is always underway. When you are ready the abrupt will come to catapult you forward. When you are ready you will know what to do, and great changes will produce the new fixtures in your life, until the next changes come, for change is a constant you can count on. Remain aware that everything is possible, that your path of heart is indeed unfolding each day in slow and steady as well as abrupt and unexpected ways. Such is life. There is always something new on the horizon.
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.
