Unearthing old feelings brings up more than just those old feelings. Everything attached to them is unearthed as well. Healing takes time and investigating what has been unearthed thoroughly and completely brings one closer to healing old wounds, old thoughts, whether true or not, and old feelings that may or may not show themselves repeatedly throughout life to be more cantankerous than supposed. To heal from the old is to heal deeply, and to heal deeply is the good work of the soul, for it is the soul’s journey that is just as important as the one physical life you are currently in. Healing is a multidimensional process best engaged in one step at a time, one day at a time, one issue at a time.
In the play of light and dark, in the shadows of the self, find the inner you that calls out for acknowledgement and healing. You are all complicated beings with many sides, many issues and many agendas. Get to know all these sides, issues and agendas so that as they arise and ask for time and attention you are able to give them what they need. Acknowledge them, question them, listen to them, get to fully know them, accept and integrate them. In this manner, reconcile with them so that they do not rule you but still have their place, so that they do not blindside you over and over again but become so known that you see them coming from miles away. In knowing yourself fully and reconciling fully, life will begin to take on a calm, more focused agenda, with truth in the fore and illusion put to rest.
The greatest challenge of all, in this life of physical form and beyond, is accepting the truth. For one thing, truth is relative.
In childhood we believe we are responsible for everything. Mature adulthood allows us to accept the separate existence of others, including their contributions toward our difficulties.
Wisdom, the next level of truth, takes us full circle. Reflecting objectively upon life, from the pinnacle of spiritual acuity, we see ourselves in everyone. From this perspective our oneness is restored.
Our evolutionary journey requires that we traverse successfully these developmental stages of truth.
The Buddhists suggest that we reincarnate into bardos, into dreams of our own construction, until we are at peace with the full truth of the lives we have lived, which then enables us to be open to life beyond them. This is the true achievement of detachment—the freedom to move into new life, fully resolved from dilemmas of previous lives lived.
Frequently, loyalty to unresolved issues results in counter-suggestions to the subconscious mind around changes we intend to make in our lives. For example, if one fundamentally maintains the belief that they are unworthy, a suggestion for prosperity may be cancelled by this blocking belief of unworthiness.
In this case, the subconscious may generate incidents to reinforce one’s loyalty to the felt undeservedness. Detaching from this belief will require recapitulation of formative experiences that reinforced this belief. This may expose distortions that were formerly needed to protect a significant other, or a part of the self.
This recapitulation may also lift the veil of narcissism shrouding the belief that dates to the primary narcissism period of childhood. From this view, one is able to assign responsibility for events where they should be truthfully assigned, unseating younger interpretations of reality. From this perspective one is able to accept the fuller truth of self and other.
Ultimately, one might reach a perspective that once again assigns one full responsibility for the life one is in. This might include realizing one’s decision to enter life in the time period, and family constellation, one was born into, as one’s contribution toward one’s greater soul’s journey of infinite growth and awareness.
This does not absolve a perpetrator from responsibility for their behavior. However, it might explain the choice of a victim-experience as part of one’s spiritual growth.
Accepting the truth also requires that we face the ulterior motives within the self. From a holographic perspective we are comprised of the same everything as everyone else. If we attempt to solve the polarities that live within the self via projection onto others, we lose the thread of our fuller inner truth.
Fuller acceptance of our shadow self, with all of its desires, manipulations, cruelty and greed, allows us to be in full truth with ourselves. Acceptance requires that we live our wholeness as responsibly as possible.
Every day we are offered countless opportunities to be in truth with ourselves. We just need think about the world and our relationship with others; what truths are we being asked to face each day, in each moment, as we live out our lives.
From a place of higher truth, we are quite likely to manifest the kinds of experiences that will bring us fulfillment, as we eliminate negative counter-suggestions from an unknown shadow self. And then we can fully own our whole, integrated and wise self.
At some level of our multidimensional being we decided to enter the life we are in to fully explore and master a specific issue. Carl Jung would ask people to discover the myth they were living, alluding to this deeper dimension of being that ushered us into the drama of our life.
Typically, we are so absorbed by the drama we are living that it can take the lion’s share of a lifetime to arrive at a detached enough perspective to begin to unravel the mysteries of our lives and to discover our true mission in coming here.
Often, we are so caught by the compensatory defenses that protect us from the vulnerability of our core issue that we mistake the troublesome defense for the root issue itself.
The psychic channel for Seth, Jane Roberts, was a prolific author who demanded of herself that she spend several hours every day at her writing table. Her eating habits were highly restrictive, definitely qualifying for an eating disorder diagnosis. The longterm impact of these compulsive habits eventuated in near total paralysis.
Those who knew and loved her prayed that she might free herself from these fatal defenses, that she might enjoy the physical freedom of a fulfilled life.
When Jane’s mother died in a nursing home in 1972, of advanced rheumatoid arthritis, Jane was 43 and hadn’t seen her mother in 15 years, largely due to the unresolved trauma she had suffered at her mother’s hands as a child and young adult, and which haunted her throughout her life. At this point, Jane was already well into having symptoms of the same debilitating disease.
Jane was riveted by her mother’s death and writes in her journal of her fear that her mother would continue to actively haunt her, not only emotionally but also somehow embody Jane with her paralysis while she finally went free.
Ironically, Jane, fully in possession of herself, clung to the rigid defenses that led to her own debilitating paralysis and her eventual death, at the age of 55, from the same disease. In effect, she was haunted by her mother for her entire life.
Clearly, for Jane, it appears that her core challenge was mastering her feelings for her mother, which she failed to complete during her lifetime, and which accompanied her on her journey into life beyond human form. And yet, as a pioneer in transpersonal psychology, her contributions are fundamental, as attested to by fellow pioneers, Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson and Louise Hay.
From a multidimensional perspective, the primal trauma of her childhood dissociated her from human connection, while at the same time it launched her so deeply into subtle reality that she energetically was able to make contact with a highly evolved teaching being who mapped the deeper dimensions of the psyche and shared the tools for human evolution, which are still so crucial at this stage of our collective development.
In the role of a wounded healer, Jane channelled the material to enable spiritual seekers to discover and interact with their soul while they navigate the meaning of their lives. Though she could not fully use the insights to help herself heal, I suspect that Jane chose this extreme imbalance to be energetically available to deliver this invaluable gift.
Carlos Castaneda, another wounded healer, delivered to the modern world the shamanic tool of recapitulation to fully master the kinds of trauma at Jane’s core. With recapitulation, we fully reclaim our energetic selves to explore transpersonal reality with balance and confidence.
Trauma appears to be a precondition to human life, as clearly delineated by Stan Grof’s documentation of universal birth trauma. Nonetheless, the root of trauma can be fully neutralized and the thrust for spiritual exploration be one of innocence and wonder, instead of being one of compensatory defense.
Many a masterpiece is the product of an extreme compensatory defense. But continued spiritual evolution requires that we ultimately master the deepest root of why we are here. And from there, our possibilities are unlimited, in this life and beyond.
Every person alive in this extraordinary time is part of a major world transition. The question is whether this is a nightmare that must be completed or whether it’s time to choose a new dream.
The gods have unequivocally made certain that world events reveal the truths for all to see. And so it appears that what’s being asked is for humankind to assume full responsibility for deciding what comes next. Nightmare or regenerative dream?
Behind it all is the very real clash of opposites, inherent both in wholeness and in all of us.
Jane Roberts, who delivered to the world the epochal teachings of Seth, spent the last year and a half of her life confined to a hospital, her body completely locked in a fetal position, incapable of independent movement.
Jane’s mother had suffered and died from rheumatoid arthritis. Jane never saw her mother walk and spent her childhood and early adulthood at the beck and call of her mother’s bedpan. In her very early childhood, Jane spent two years in a repressive Catholic orphanage due to her mother’s inability to care for her. Her mother largely blamed Jane’s existence for her own medical woes.
Similar to many other extraordinary psychic adventurers, Jane’s traumatic childhood dissociated her into the largess of subtle energy exploration. She published short stories, science fiction novels and poetry before she ultimately met, and channeled, the wise, evolved human being, no longer in human form, who called himself Seth.
The opposites that riddled Jane’s existence were the part of herself that she designated the sinful girl of her childhood, who needed to be punished, and the adult channel she became, with access to the wisdom, critical in our time, to keep the human dream alive and evolving into deeper balance.
Jane had compensated for her neglected and abused beginnings with a spiritual drive that was intent upon discovering the deeper truths beyond everyday existence. It was not until later in life, fully frozen in her hospital bed, that she was forced to recapitulate the experiences of her neglected younger selves, with their limiting negative beliefs that had driven her discomfort with being a woman in this life.
Her total dependence upon nurses, and her husband Rob, allowed her to experience maternal care at a near infantile level, challenging the deep-seated unworthiness of her childhood. In addition, by embodying her mother’s limiting disease she was able to experience deep love and empathy for her mother’s frozen self, freeing herself of the burden of resentment.
Jane’s heroic journey of ego compensation for traumatic beginnings is the heroic journey of most human egos. It represents the competitive solution to the problem of the opposites. In this scenario, heroic compensation defeats the legacy of trauma, at least temporarily.
Many a successful adult can trace their current good fortune to the one-sided discipline they brought down upon themselves to escape the fate of their origins. As successful as one-sided solutions may be, eventually, often by midlife, the knock of the spirit insists we retrieve the opposites we have left behind.
The extremes of Jane’s life required that she literally experience her mother’s full body paralysis in order to relive her childhood and face the depths of her own self-hatred and the negative beliefs she carried about herself.
Throughout Jane’s hospital stay, as she encountered the fullness of her night sea journey, Seth guided and supported her healing. Her devoted husband, Rob, would often massage her arms and legs, and at times Jane experienced her steeled muscles softening, permitting significant movement.
Generally, however, the physical and emotional pain resulting from such release of defensive tightness would rebound into redoubled resistance to movement by the next day.
This scenario is a reversion to a competitive solution to the problem of reconciling the opposites inherent in our wholeness. Given an opening, the habitual solution to go to defense to ward off the pain and fear of true freedom reasserts itself with abandon.
On a practical level, the use of self-hypnosis to introduce to the subconscious new suggestions to old habits was freely employed by Jane and Rob, often with great success. However, the resource of new beliefs cannot override the necessity of recapitulation. We can never fully progress beyond where we are if we are not ready to bring all of ourselves with us: the good, the bad and the ugly.
As Jane discovered, and as her story reveals, no one else can heal us. No one else has lived our life and no one else knows the depths of our most painful experiences. Only we know what truly needs to be reconciled. Thus, only through our own exploration of our opposites, through the process of recapitulation, by taking a deep and thorough dive into our darkness, can we succeed in bringing ourselves into the light of full regenerative healing.
Of the many gifts that Jane Roberts left behind, I appreciate the full transparency of her offering of the complete annals of her life to the Yale University Library. What they, and Rob’s uncensored notes of the last year of her life reveal, to all of us, is how tenacious the problem of reconciliation of opposites truly is. Even a direct confrontation with potential death itself can fail to avert the well worn habit of a one-sided defensive solution that precludes reconciliation with one’s whole self.
Beyond this competitive solution of opposites is the full acceptance of all of one’s life experiences. This advances one to full self love, as well as love for everything and everyone else.
Everything and everyone is part of our own wholeness. With that level of truthful acceptance we are freed from the bindings of competitive solution, freed to choose the regenerative dream. It’s the obvious right choice, and it includes the welfare of all.
Thank you, Jane, for pointing out the true depths of the challenge of recapitulation. Thank you, also, to all of you scouts, who have done the work and are stalking the regenerative dream beyond the eclipse.
