Tag Archives: recapitulation

A Day in a Life: Turning

November 14, 2012 Jan Leave a comment

Photo by Jan — Worry like heavy stones comes…

Between us, Chuck and I have five children, his three and my two. All in their twenties, all on their own journeys, we worry about them nonetheless. Some days we hear from them as they express deeply painful challenges. On other days they call with good news, glowing in their accomplishments, bubbling with happiness and self-confidence. At other times we hear nothing at all for weeks on end. One of our greatest challenges as parents is to let them all go into the world and have their experiences, whatever they may be, knowing that they are learning how life works, deciding how they want to live their own lives, just as we’ve done.

During my intense recapitulation period, which spanned three years, I received hundreds of messages of guidance. They came from many sources—from dreams, from the signs and synchronicities I’d encounter in everyday life, from otherworldly sources, from the ever-deepening recapitulation process itself—as I dove deeper and deeper into my past and discovered what I harbored in body, mind, and spirit as a result of that past. Last night, as I was drifting off to sleep, a familiar voice came to visit and delivered a message from my days of recapitulation.

“Just turn away from that which comes to occupy your mind, turn away from worry, for worry is nothing more than a cogitation of the mind,” the voice said. “Turn away and you will see that it is nothing; it only exists if you let it.”

And so I turned. Each time I woke during the night, I’d automatically turn, and in so doing I left whatever was seeking entry behind. Without thought, I’d turn away, instinctively knowing that it was the right thing to do. But I did notice that each time I turned something seeped away from my awareness; I could feel it fall away from my head and land on the pillow behind me. A thought that was just about to anchor, easily flowed out of me, for I would not allow it to get a grip. And I realized the truth of worry, that it’s like air, flowing through the universe looking for a crack to seep into, looking for an opening. In turning, I refused it. “Nope,” I said, “you can’t land here.”

For some reason lately, worry has been seeking me out. I feel it coming to me, asking me to engage it. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico, from the lineage of Carlos Castaneda, talk of worry as an entity, seeking to attach and siphon our energy, and that is exactly the way I feel it, as a foreign entity looking for a way in, seeking sustenance. I feel it tickling me, asking me to please let it in.

As a clairvoyant, I’ve made a concerted effort to not let certain “knowings” in, to refuse to accept some of the things that I intuit. There are things that it just isn’t right to know and so I turn away from them as soon as I sense them trying to occupy my psyche, for they too will siphon my energy. In the past, I’d get clear messages of knowing, seeing the unfolding of events, seeing deaths. Such insights aided me in trusting my psychic abilities, but now I don’t need such things, for I accept where I am and who I am. I understand that this “knowing” is natural, part of being human, and yet it must be carefully considered and utilized in the right way.

In addition, I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter what I know, that the most compassionate thing is to just be present for people as they go through their lives, to be available when sought out. The Buddhists say that it isn’t right to interfere with another person’s life, and I understand that, that we may be interrupting a process many lifetimes have been spent perfecting and is perhaps on the verge of being resolved. I’ve learned that you can’t tell anyone anything either, no matter how clearly you see. I believe that people will get what they need when they are ready, and only when they are ready. And they will get it in their own way.

And so, last night, as worry about others came to tease me, asking me to attach and give it life, I paid attention to my message of guidance and turned away. For I also believe that in attaching to worry my energy would feed it, grow it, and perhaps even manifest it, when in reality I know that in the lives of others there are so many possibilities, so many outcomes, so many paths to unfold.

And so I refuse to influence another’s choice, another’s life in that way, even energetically. By attaching my worry to another, to their decisions, I believe that my energy will interfere. Instead, I choose to send positive energy out into the world, loving energy that says, “Take your journey!” At the same time I continue to train myself in compassionate detachment.

I learn compassion as I step back and let others live their own lives, learning as I once learned, by living my own life. As a teenager and young adult, the only thing I wanted was to be freed of others, of my parents and the life I’d had with them. And yet my father was a supreme worrier and so—clairvoyant that I was—I sensed his worry and his fears, and they burdened me. With all that I carried inside me, his burdens were the last things I wanted, and so I was forced to reject him, turning from him so many times because I could not bear his thoughts. I told myself I would never do that to my own kids. I would never burden them with my fears and worries. And so each day, I energetically send them off on their own journeys, freed of my worries.

I know that we all have to live out our lives as we must. I cannot change another’s path, make their choices for them, or direct the outcomes of their lives. I can only work on my own. And so I continue to turn.

Compassion enfolds me at every turn. Love embraces me at every turn. Life fully expressed asks me to come into its arms, receive it, and keep going with it to a new level of understanding and growth. And so I turn and turn, night and day, finding my way to energetic freedom and compassion for myself and others. No matter how much I love the others in my life, I must let them go so that they may fully live, as I too wish to fully live.

Turning,
Jan

And yes, it was the voice of Jeanne that came to me last night, in a deeply loving and compassionate way, so reminiscent of my days of recapitulation.

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Two Tales Of Meaning

October 26, 2012 Jan Leave a comment

We switched things around this week, so Chuck’s blog appeared on Wednesday and here is mine today. Have a great weekend, I’ll be back on Monday with a message from Jeanne!

I’ve been hard at work on the next book in my Recapitulation Diaries series. Today I publish a couple of excerpts from the Prologue. One about an encounter with an ostrich, the other, in keeping with Chuck’s theme, is about an encounter with a coyote. These two animal omens not only predicted events in my life, but also bracketed the fifty-year pact of silence that I unknowingly upheld before beginning my recapitulation—information that remained hidden inside me until I was ready to receive it. I invite you to read on. My intent is that the new book, On The Edge of the Abyss, be published in January. I’ll keep you posted.

An Ostrich Bite

As the story goes, I was about a year old when my parents pushed my stroller up to the ostrich exhibit at the Bronx Zoo. Without warning or provocation an ostrich simply poked its head through the bars of its cage and bit me on the arm, only releasing me after being whacked repeatedly over the head. I received a nasty pinch, but other than that little damage was done. This curious tale was told often during my childhood, though the retelling was always brief, the details left to the imagination. “An ostrich bit you!” my parents would say, in the same dumbfounded tone they would have used had a dragon bitten me.

“But why?” I’d ask, seeking deeper meaning. “What does it mean?”

“An ostrich bit you!” they’d simply say.

By the time I was twelve this story no longer intrigued me; in fact, I was rather bored and embarrassed by it. I’d often wish it had been some other bird or noble creature, or that it had happened to some other girl. Why couldn’t a handsome peacock or beautiful swan have bitten me, why the ugly ostrich? And why did this have to be the only story my parents ever told about me as a baby, and why did they have to tell it so often? I was never satisfied by their presumption that it was just a plain and simple fact of my life; I knew there had to be more to it. Now, after all these years, the possible significance of that bite emerges.

Both an omen and a warning, I believe the ostrich was marking me for the journey ahead, for shortly thereafter, by the time I was two, my trials began. Perhaps, with that nip on the arm, the ostrich was saying: this child will be challenged, but this child will also find the means to transcend the ugliness of those challenges. Perhaps the mark of the ostrich signified strength and groundedness in this world, but the severing of all ties to this world as well, for only in having experiences of transcending this world would the innate abilities of the spirit self find reason to emerge.

I believe the bite of the ostrich was preparing me for what was to come, predicting the encounters with the sexual predator and the lessons I would learn during my life. And so began my solo journey, ritually initiated by the ostrich at the zoo, stamped by the keeper at the gate so that I would be recognized in the dark and dreary world I was soon to enter. I believe I was guided as my journey transgressed from the world of protected infancy into the unknown, into the shadows of a forest filled with dangers more fantastical and abhorrent than that meager nip on the arm.

Within a few months of that ostrich bite a new baby brother took my place on the lap of our distant mother, my brief year of maternal tenderness over. I was sent out into the world to play, to explore, to gain sure-footedness, to become self-sufficient and strong, worthy of the bite that had been placed on my arm by that ostrich at the zoo.

A Coyote Tale

I began my life encountering the bite of the ostrich and much later, a few years before beginning my recapitulation journey, I encountered another animal totem, another sign of life’s potential unfolding. I was in the midst of change, having experienced a brief moment of clairvoyance that had precipitated a move the year before. I was living with my then-husband and our two young children in a farmhouse on the edge of ten acres of land, our backyard enclosed by a white wooden fence and a rush of tall pines. One early spring day I walked back to the compost pile in the corner of the fenced area farthest from the house. Surrounded by open fields, I was just about to empty my bucket of compost onto the pile when something caught my eye. Looking up, I saw a coyote standing no more than five feet away on the other side of the fence, an enormous groundhog hanging limply from its mouth. Catching sight of me at the same moment, it dropped the dead animal. Our eyes locked.

Unable to break the intense scrutiny of the coyote’s eyes, the world around me dissolved and I was pulled into a different world by its stare, a world that was timeless, dark and silent. I had the sense the coyote was assessing whether or not I was a threat, while I silently sent it the message that I would not harm it, nor challenge it for its prey. After what felt like several minutes, the coyote shifted its eyes, breaking the spell, and the ancient silence between us dissolved. The world reappeared and I dared to breathe again.

I watched as the coyote slowly bent down and picked up the large furry animal in its powerful jaws, tossing and juggling it to get a good grip, before it slowly turned away. Taking one last look at me over its shoulder, it pranced off through the field at a brisk pace. I stood there for a long time, looking after it, amazed at what I had just encountered. We had stood so close, both surprised to find the other creature intruding upon our private space, our private thoughts, our private experiences, yet we were simultaneously caught in the same state of utter calm knowing, ancient and unthreatening.

So what did this mean? At the time I was uncertain, but I took it as a good omen. My spirit uplifted by the experience, I felt sure it meant something important. A shaman friend told me it was an unusual occurrence. “The coyote rarely shows itself,” he said, “especially rare to see one on a sunny afternoon.” So, why did it show itself to me and what was I supposed to learn?

Although its message evaded me, the magic of the moment stayed with me, and I gradually allowed myself to envision positive change coming my way. Within a few years the fragile world I was attempting to uphold would crumble, not through anyone’s fault, it was simply done. There was nothing left to be gained by staying there. Similar to my experience of moving on from infancy, after receiving the ostrich bite and being released from my mother’s lap, it was simply time. Moving on this time meant discovering that it was time to recapitulate my childhood, to rediscover the world I had lost, the world I had blocked out, the secret world of the predator and its prey.

Art & photo by Jan — Coyote howling at the moon, awakening what lies within…

In recalling the encounter with the coyote, I began to wonder what it was hinting at, for I knew our encounter was deeply and personally meaningful, even more so as time went on and change did happen, much as I had dared to foresee. Was the coyote hinting that I had once been locked in a battle with a predator like itself and that I would only rediscover this by going into the dark past and reliving it? This seems likely to me now, though at the time it would have been a far-fetched idea. At the time, I had only a vague awareness of the shaman’s world, and yet I was deeply struck by the encounter with the coyote, a significant shamanic symbol, and I could not let it pass as mere coincidence. I had learned a long time ago that everything was meaningful in some way, though that meaning could be as illusive as the memories that lay hidden in my inner darkness. Or was I just a fool, tricked into thinking I was being offered something by the wily coyote? Only time and hindsight would tell.

Indeed, what I could not have imagined then has transpired. Warning of what was to come, what was to be reawakened, the coyote signaled that I had the strength to go back into the predator’s world, telling me not to be afraid, not to flinch at what I would see and experience. It was telling me not to fear or back down when I went back into the past and looked the predator in the eyes. It was telling me to use my own adult eyes to gain clarity about what happened to me in that world and to pay attention to everything I encountered along the way. In utter silence, the coyote told me these things.

Though these two tales bracketed the first fifty years of my life, I made the choice to remove the brackets, to let in memories and experiences that would transform my entire world, and me along with it. My books are about taking such a journey, about finding meaning and purpose in even the most dire of circumstances and discovering a direct connection to that ancient self that the coyote briefly reconnected me with. It became my job to allow that knowledge to fester, to remain in my awareness, and then to elect to go inside, taking the inner journey of self-discovery, reawakening it more fully. Glimpses of meaning must be taken seriously and allowed to fester, for they are what lead us to real change and transformation.

Everything is meaningful,
Jan

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Person-in-Situation

October 19, 2012 Chuck Leave a comment

Person-in-situation is a phrase coined by one of Social Work’s greatest contributors, Florence Hollis, in her 1964 book Casework: A Psychosocial Theory. Person-in-situation captures the interconnected nature of reality. To know reality is to know the full mosaic of person-in-situation. Figure removed from ground cannot be known in entirety; the picture is incomplete. Deprived of context, we are clueless.

In recapitulation, we relive the full context of our experiences in situations from the past. Full context includes the experience of our physical body, as well as that of our energy body. Frequently, in traumatic experiences, these two bodies separate. While the physical body absorbs the physical sensations of an experience the energy body watches the experience from a detached vantage point, above and beyond the physical body. In addition to the physical and energy bodies, the emotions and cognitive perspectives of person-in-situation are critical components of the experience being recapitulated. Finally, all the characteristics of the environment in-situation, most especially the words and behaviors of all the characters in the experience, must be included to fully return to and fully relive a moment frozen in time.

Too often we remain stuck, unable to fully free ourselves from a frozen moment from the past because some component of the experience eludes our direct retrieval. That component remains present in our current lives—often symptomatically—either in the body or in a distorted belief or perception of self or reality, but its true meaning remains incomprehensible until we can place it in the mosaic of the past where it really belongs.

Carlos Castaneda suggested that we suspend judgment to deepen our experience and direct knowledge of reality. When we recapitulate it is often judgment that bars our full access to the truth. Judgments we make about ourselves, judgments we have internalized, block our full access to the truths of person-in-situation. Judgment holds us in check. If we deem ourselves bad or scandalous because of the actual experiences we have had, those experiences cannot be fully known and released. Instead, they become energetic powerhouses that emotionally and cognitively control our identity and freedom to be in the world.

In the 3-hour-long extended version of the movie Margaret, currently available only on DVD, a sixteen-year-old girl engages the attention of a bus driver who drives through a red light, hitting and killing a pedestrian in the cross walk. So begins a story of person-in-situation. As the movie progresses we must constantly ask ourselves: What is the true reality of this experience in-situation? Where does responsibility lie? What is the process of recovering all the fragments of an experience? What judgments preclude resolution of this traumatic event?

The release of this movie was delayed for four years because the director fought to deliver the full mosaic of the story. Modern sensibility allots 90 minutes as the maximum story time for consumption in the digital age. The trouble is, edited reality becomes just that, a quickly formatted, judged story that condenses and skips over the full mosaic of person-in-situation, i.e.: Reality.

In Margaret, we are treated to the challenge of finding resolution amidst a field of judgments. And just as in this movie, we too, in every experience of our lives, are responsible for the fact that we are a person-in-situation. This true and actual fact cannot be separated from our personal history. If we want to fully know ourselves, we must let ourselves know the full truth of our experiences, unedited by judgment.

When we allow ourselves to take in the full unedited person-in-situations of our lives, our experiences can be fully digested, completed, and released. Resolution de-powers the myths we have had to carry about ourselves, myths that secretly code edited fragments of truth, myths that have awaited debunking, for the time when we could allow ourselves to fully recapitulate.

Experience, once recapitulated, recycles energy previously frozen in the past, revitalizing it and allowing it to proceed deeper into life, deeper into reality. We emerge from the recapitulation as a whole person-in-situation, ready to fully live in the true reality of every moment.

Person-in-situation,
Chuck

NOTE: I highly recommend watching Margaret. The version I am referring to is only available on DVD, released in July of this year, and not the film version released into theaters. The iTunes version is not the same version either, so if you look for it be sure to get the extend version, 3 hours long, released in July 2012. Here is a Wikipedia link to information about the movie.

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: It’s Time To Live!

October 10, 2012 Jan Leave a comment

I am with a person who is angry, her anger like a brittle encrusted shell. I note how grumpy she is, having overslept, and now she is angry at the world. Nothing is right. In everyone there is something to criticize. In every situation there is something to be angry about. In every idea there is something to condescend to. Every attempt to be positive is negatively dismissed.

During my time with her, I wonder if I should say something, as her anger becomes increasingly uncomfortable to those around her. The Buddhists say that one should not interfere with another’s process in life, that everything they encounter is necessary for them to encounter, even if one sees the foreshadowing of great difficulty or even death. It is not right to alter another’s path. I also know that we cannot tell another what is so clear to us, for they will not get it until they are ready and, as the Buddhists point out, this may take many lifetimes. I encountered my own states of anger, denial, and unawareness, during my recapitulation, as I wondered over and over again why I had never been able before to understand my own psyche and what it was trying to tell me. It was only then that I understood what it means to be ready to face ourselves and our deeper issues. And so I elect to study this angry woman instead of saying anything to her.

I see how she holds her anger back, keeps it under her hard shell, but there comes a point when she just can’t retain it any longer. Suddenly, she lets loose a barrage of angry words, stunningly harsh and mean, directed at a person whom has asked a simple caring question. Again, I want to point out to this angry woman that she is being inappropriate, that she is hurting the other person, yet I hold back, for I know that my pointing out her mood will have no effect, and may perhaps incite yet more anger. I also know that there is something to be learned in such a situation, for all involved.

As I observe this angry woman, it becomes very clear that her anger has nothing to do with the person she spews it at, but that it has only to do with what is brewing and stewing inside her. Projection is clearly illustrated here. This woman woke up angry. Perhaps she went to bed angry too. Perhaps she has always been angry. But what is so clear to me, as I observe her, is that she is blaming people and situations outside of her. They are making her angry! She even says this to me later: how angry such people make her, how angry such ideas make her, how angry certain platitudes make her.

Later, as I ponder my time with this woman, as I again feel her anger boiling inside her, I wonder how long she will allow herself to be controlled by this fire within. For I saw how it consumed her, as she was unable to enjoy a moment of reality. Encased in it, everything just made her angrier. She fed this fire within constantly, giving it enough fuel to last a long time, and yet she confessed to me how tired she was.

It was clear that she desperately needed something to shift her out of this fire zone that she had parked herself in, yet I knew I could offer nothing. I am sure she was receiving many signs that might help in that shift, yet so consumed by the flames was she that she could not see. She could not see offers of kindness, she could not hear words of concern, she could not accept gentleness. Nothing that was offered was going to change how she interpreted the world, or how she projected her inadequacies onto the world, and the people she encountered there. Until she was ready…

She has to be ready to withdraw her projections from the world and face the angry fires within, and find out why she is being consumed in this manner. She has to ask herself why she is so angry all the time, why so rude and condescending, why so unhappy. Just as we all must do, at some point in our earthly existence, she too has to ask herself when she is going to stop blaming everyone else for her misery and face the reasons for it within. When she is ready…

And so, I too, must ask myself to find that angry woman inside myself and find out what she has to tell me. I do a little inner work around this angry woman as I go about the rest of my day. I find that my angry inner woman is pretty well known at this point. I’ve dealt with her many times over the years, dismantled her bonfires over and over again, put out the flames, and taken her aside to have a chat. I could only do that when I was ready, when I no longer wanted to be ruled by her, when I no longer wanted the world to be a place of fear and misery. And when I was finally ready to take back my projections, the world did change.

And so yesterday, as I did my angry woman inner work, I discovered that she has softened to a mere inkling of her old self. She carries very little fuel these days, for she has learned over the years of deep inner work that anger is nothing, that it only exists when fueled. Instead, I have learned to face the fires of anger as they flare up and question them on a deeply personal level. Is this anger justified? Does it help me? Is it worthwhile, does it help my evolution as a spiritual being? Is anger ever appropriate?

In the past I have used anger, a good friend to me at one time. It often helped to shift out of a bad situation, as I would get angry at myself for staying stuck. And so I can truly say that anger can be useful, but only if utilized on the self in a positive fashion, not to remain stuck in blame, but to catapult to a new place along the path of life. If directed outwardly, in projection, as the angry woman in my encounter used it, it does nothing positive, for anger burns up good energy, keeps the focus on blaming others rather than asking the self to be a fully responsible evolutionary being.

What I finally found out about myself yesterday, as I faced that old angry woman inside me, now shrunk to the size of a teeny tiny specimen of her old self, was that she has very little to complain about these days. In fact, I turned to her and told her that I didn’t need her anymore at all, that I only want to live and embrace the life that she held me back from fully living and enjoying for so long.

As I took back my projections and used my energy to learn how to live the life I had decided could never happen—because I was too angry at the world to engage it—I changed, life changed, the world outside of me changed, inner and outer reality changed. Now my energy is my own, and freed of old issues, such as anger, that energy just wants to live! I am no longer willing to be held back. This is what I encourage my children and those closest to me: Don’t let your fears or your anger hold you back. You are alive now and there is so much to explore and experience. Find out who you are and don’t ever hold that true self back. Live!

I see anger rising across America, falsely taking its place in the minds of so many. As we go into the next month of preparation for big changes in our country, and the world, perhaps we should all look within and find out what makes us so angry without. In so using our anger and our energy differently, we may impact the results of the election.

As the Buddhists say, all energy is interconnected and every decision we make about how we use our energy affects everything and everyone else around us. If our energy is directed at changing ourselves, we change our reality—our personal present life and that of our world. I did it—in recapitulating my childhood—and it worked and continues to work for me.

Now I intend that my inner work energetically impact the world outside of me as well. I may not be able to directly influence every angry person I meet, but I sure as heck can rev up my energetic intent to do so!

I’ve set my intent to live totally unafraid, open to life in a different way, energetically connected.
Love,
Jan

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Into The Hologram

October 5, 2012 Chuck Leave a comment

Are we ready for enlightenment?

“How far down the rabbit hole can you go, Alice?”

“The red pill or the blue pill, Neo?”

How far can we travel into the truth before lights out, black out?

David Bohm—considered the preeminent quantum physicist of the 20th century—gifted us with the hologram as the most apt metaphor to capture the true nature of reality. When a holographic picture is splintered into fragments, the whole is still contained in even the tiniest of those fragments. Human beings, like a cut up sheet of holographic film, are all fragmented beings, who—no matter how fragmented, however cut up the slice may be—still hold within the wholeness of the truth of everything. Shine a light on any fragment of holographic film, and the whole picture will appear.

When Jung gifted us the metaphor of the collective unconscious, he captured the same reality. At the deepest level, we are all the same—one interconnected whole being, present and interconnected in the collective unconscious. At a certain level, we are all the sum total of the Akashic Records.

The other day, I randomly opened the ancient Bhagavad-Gita, The Song of God, to the following description of holographic, collective wholeness:

“Die, and you win heaven. Conquer, and you enjoy the earth. Stand now, son of Kunti, and resolve to fight. Realize that pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat, are all one and the same; then go into battle. Do this and you cannot commit any sin.”

On another day, I opened Rix Weaver’s The Old Wise Woman to a description of a woman’s dream, the exact same dream repeated many times throughout her life. In the dream, the woman always finds herself in the same room with seven doors; three doors to the left and three to the right, facing each other, and a seventh door at the far end of the room. Each time she dreams this dream, as she attempts to pass through the room, a dark presence descends like a cloud and forces her back.

In a waking dream of active imagination—where the conscious ego stays present and interacts with the contents of the dream—this same woman fights the dark presence and is able to access valuable truths about herself behind each door. Finally, she opens the seventh door only to encounter a man with a Book of Rules plastered to his forehead, the true puppet-meister behind her construction of reality.

Jung identified this rule bearer as the Animus, the male counterpart inherent in the psyche of all women. This character functions autonomously in the psyche of woman as the discriminator or organizer, but all too often becomes a dictator—the dark presence that the woman sensed countless times in her dream—with all its rules and judgments, restricting and crippling life.

In this woman’s conscious interactions with her animus in active imagination, she transforms the relationship from one of foe to that of friend, whereby honoring her true feelings and broadening her capacity for articulation through positive collaboration. Had her ego not stood up to the dark cloud, she never would have known the deeper truths of her hologram, which enabled her to move more fully into life. Instead, she would have remained a prisoner to her inner ruler as he constantly dictated a safe world that she could exist in.

Men suffer a similar gatekeeper at the deeper level of the hologram. Last night, after reading Rix Weaver’s account of the woman’s dream doors, I dreamt of a house with several rooms, a woman in each room.

My dream suggests that man must encounter his inner anima—the feminine counterpart of the male psyche—showering life with moods and sensitivities that construct a reality he believes should exist, that he is entitled to. Under the influence of her vexations, man cannot know the true nature of reality, and certainly can’t know woman as person, devoid of anima’s spells of projection.

The true nature of reality—contrary to the popular belief that women are moody and men are rational—is quite the opposite. In truth, the background of a man’s psyche is dominated by his anima in all its moodiness and emotions, and a woman’s psyche is dominated by her animus with its rigid rules and rationalities. Both the anima and the animus are inferior forms of feeling and thinking that lead to hair-brained battles and are the source of many a conflict and breakup. Unless a couple or an individual delves deeper into the characters of the hologram, within or without, these characters dominate life from the darkness, and true reality never experiences the light.

As we move beyond the once highly defended confines of our ego selves, deeper down the rabbit hole of the hologram, we discover other characters quite willing to communicate and share their world. In recapitulation, for example, we frequently ask or are asked by the body self to re-experience, through our senses, a past experience from our lives. The results of this request are often quite dramatic, as we may be taken, quite physically, through the sights, smells, sounds, temperatures, and touch sensations of deeply forgotten experiences.

At other times, we might find ourselves conjecturing about the accuracy of a memory only to have an immediate physical sensation, a channeled body communication, authenticating the validity of our thoughts. In fact, the language of body communication can evolve to a fluid real time dialogue, to a kind of advanced kinesthetics between ego and body self.

As we go deeper into the hologram of the collective self, we might open channels to past lives and to entities beyond this life, though fully part of the same interconnected hologram we all exist in and, ultimately, are.

Truly mind-blowing as these ideas are, that’s what happens when you put down the Book of Rules! The real challenge is to continue to journey ever deeper into the hologram, keeping the lights on—indeed, the true meaning of enlightenment.

Lights on!
Chuck

Riverwalker Press