When destruction seems to be the norm do not despair but look upon it as the necessary sacrifice that will result in new life. There cannot be real change without something being lost or given up. Though it is dark now this is the sacred moment before the return of the light, bringing with it the first hints of new life. Remain heart centered, upon a path of heart, so that love, kindness and compassion are at the core of that new life soon to come.
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.
Is your spirit hiding from life? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
As the world is roused from its global pandemic pause, it must confront the intensity of demand it receives from its very pregnant desire body. The restraint imposed upon that desire body has, for some, resulted in a refinement of spirit, as sacrifice has opened the door to calm and connection at an ethereal level.
For others, the hunger for life in the dense physical plane has thrown caution to the wind, as they reengage the Earth, and enjoy the fullness of her physical bounty.
Both attitudes reflect the journey of spirit. The big bang of the esoteric world begins with the One, that is, the wholeness of everything, deciding to manifest, fragmenting into the many in this world of time and space. The One chooses this diaspora to get to know itself in a finite drama.
All humans are parts of the One, launched to Earth to have a lifetime of experience and to offer the results of that life experience in the form of a life review or completed recapitulation at the conclusion of life in human form. This contributes to the One growing in knowledge of itself.
Thus the journey of spirit initiates from the One, as the many travel through increasingly dense dimensions of expression until they reach the shores of physical manifestation, at birth. The subtle dimension, just prior to the physical, is called the astral plane, the home of the desire body.
The function of the desire body is to attract the incoming spirit to involvement with the physical body through primal animal drives, emotions, and sensations. The desire body engages the physical world in life. Life in time and space ends, however. Thus, the journey of spirit, that once leaped into involvement in physical life, must ultimately reverse course, as it resumes its spirit journey back to its source, the One.
To achieve the necessary lightness of spirit for the journey back to source, spirit must become quite subtle, shedding all of its denser attachments. We can call this a Buddhic maturity that no longer bites at the showcase of desire, as presented by Maya, the weaver of projected illusion on the astral plane. Disciplined spiritual traditions capitalize on sacrificial practices to dispel these attachments in order to reach the higher spiritual planes.
However, if one has not fully seeded one’s spirit in the fertile soil of this Earth, one may be checkmating one’s spiritual evolution. To refuse desire before one has allowed for the actual experience of desire, is to hold back life. This would be a life in-body where spirit remains, at least in part, out-of-body. The challenge at this stage is to let go and fully enter life in the body, with all its vicissitudes.
For others, life becomes frozen in a round of repetitive habits where the desire body continues to rule the personality at the densest level. Here the challenge is to repeat every day the same regretted habits until one is satiated to completion, or finally ready to let go to sacrifice.
What is sacrificed is attachment to the lower instincts for the benefit of the higher. The higher is the subtle spirit, reached through the shedding of physical attachments. This is energy redeployed to the benefit of the energy body’s evolution in its journey of spirit.
Sacrifice is critical to obtain the energy for this journey. But sacrifice can only be initiated by the will. To obtain true transmutation of energy, one needs the support of one’s highest self, who sees through the veils of illusion and can provide direction on one’s path of heart.
Finally, there are spirits who both see the necessity of, and are ready to evolve their desire body while in dense physical form. Those are the leaders who will square with and spiritually raise humankind’s current relationship with the Earth.
Thus, the many—all who inhabit the Earth at this time—find themselves at different stages of their spirit journeys. With equanimity, we must grant all their place in the Oneness of this current drama. This is acceptance, not resignation.
We don’t know how this drama will unfold. Perhaps there is a preponderance of desire body energy waiting to ravage the Earth. We don’t know the karma of that action; we simply observe that it appears unstoppable and must be played out. As a conglomerate, we may not yet be ready for the global sacrifice needed to sustain the Earth.
Perhaps the pause has already manifested a different karma. Perhaps the transmuted energies of a significant many will no longer fund attachment to desire in an old way. Perhaps that intent has been deeply seeded with this pause. We must wait to see how it unfolds.
Avoid judgment. We are all in this together, the many of the One. Where we take this drama is our offering to the One getting to know itself in a particular constellation.
We can’t go wrong as we complete this finite chapter of infinite knowing. Whether coming in or moving up, be sure to follow the bliss of your own spirit!
In order to change the self something may have to go. Something may have to be sacrificed. In order to live a more balanced life something may have to be left behind, for if you take it with you it will continue to interfere and progress will be slow to impossible. To move on quickly it may be time to finally shed that which you adhere to, love, and treasure above all else. And yet, what is it really but an attachment? Is it time to finally let it go so that you can really change and become what you have dreamed of? A dream is just a dream until you do something to make it real. Ready to step into the true reality of your dream? It’s up to you. You have the power, only you.
All newborn babies turn their heads toward the nipple and make sucking movements. This is an inborn program called the rootingreflex that prepares the baby to procure nourishment in the form of milk from the breast. Jung called these universal inborn mental programs, that orchestrate such necessary adaptation and survival behaviors, archetypes. At nature’s insistence newborns are born with an entitled energy to suckle nurturance from the breast.
Entitlement has its roots in nature itself. The energy that the archetypes are naturally endowed with is the energy of entitlement. When an archetype is activated it is potentiated with powerful energy, the energy of entitlement, that allows it to achieve its fulfillment.
The entitled energy of the hunger instinct fuels our ability to work and accumulate goods, property, and money, allowing us to meet our most primal of needs. This instinct is quite primitive and has its roots in narcissism, with the primary focus given to the satisfaction of the body’s primary survival needs.
As we grow, our narcissistic fixation naturally enlarges to include the family, a unit dedicated to survival as a group. The family carves out its ownership of its living space, not to be transgressed by non-family members without an invitation. The family is poised to accumulate for itself and defend its ownership against the competing needs of others. Thus, there is a legitimate basis for entitlement in human physical existence: survival.
Jung observed that archetypes also give rise to spiritual values in humans. This spirit instinct in human beings often comes to life as a result of sacrifice. The initiation rituals of yesteryear that brutally tore the young from their entitled dependence upon family and sent them off to experiences outside of the known and familiar—the world of mother, father, and extended family—are one example of such sacrifice.
Through the archetype of ritual sacrifice, youth became adults and took on greater responsibility for the group beyond family of origin. Vestiges of theses archetypal strivings are seen today in the stylized piercings, tattoos, and drug adventures of young people seeking to cross the bridge to adulthood through some kind of self-initiated ritual sacrifice.
When spiritual values emerge they signal a maturity that takes into consideration the needs of others, beyond the narcissism of me and mine, awakening an energy of compassion that extends to all living beings. This spirit entitlement employs its energy to consider and care for everything beyond the self. Spirit orientation is in opposition to the hoarding attitude of the narcissistic orientation. Spirit employs its personal energy to care for the greater whole and accepts itself as part of that greater whole. Spirit orientation acts to extend entitlement as a broader human right.
Narcissistic orientation bemoans having to give away that which it needs and wants. Spirit, on the other hand, can tend to neglect, negate, or even denigrate the needs of the physical body, its working vehicle for this life.
I would propose that we are presently in an energetic World War between these two instinctual orientations: body instinct and spirit instinct. The current world leader, our own President, exemplifies entitlement at a very primal level. That is, its inherent right to consider only the needs of itself over the needs of the more inclusive world. The degree of support accorded this leader reflects how accurately he taps into the narcissistic underpinnings of survival at the primal, animal, level in all human beings.
What has given rise to our current state of world affairs is a breakdown in the application of the technology of sacrifice to effect spiritual transformation. At one extreme is a failure of the institutions of the modern world to provide effective rites of initiation at key stages of life. Without these rites many people fail to individuate into true adulthood and thus remain fixated at a child’s level of orientation toward the world, entitled and demanding.
At the other extreme is a total renunciation of the body for the benefit of the spirit. One example is the requirement of celibacy in the Catholic priesthood; sacrifice the lower for the sake of the higher. Though this technology of sacrifice was successful in establishing a life oriented toward altruistic concerns, it has created a tremendous body-shadow backlash. Just look at the incidences of sexual abuse among the ranks of the Catholic priests. The entitlement of the repressed sexual instinct has emerged from hiding, deviously preying upon the young and innocent.
In the political arena we see a similar eruption of repressed primal instinct asserting its entitlement to accumulate resources for itself only, casting out the unfamiliar ‘other’ to fend for itself. This is the shadow of American altruism, bursting forth now with a vengeance.
The determination of this entitlement is expressed in its blatant use of lies, misinformation, and manipulation as a necessary and acceptable means to care for its basic needs. No amount of reason or scientific proof can shake it from its deeply seated conviction that it is entitled to care only for its own needs.
At present the lines are firmly drawn between body and spirit, it’s either one way or the other. There is no room for compromise, as each side is absolutely in touch with their inalienable right of entitlement. And they are both right; we are animals and we are spirits. Perhaps the ultimate solution is encoded in the axiom: asabove so below. The needs of the body are as important as the needs of the spirit, the needs of the self are as important as the needs of the planet.
Where might there be adjustments to bring these two into better confluence? As the Pope laments the abuses of his church he might consider the fact that nuns have probably almost never committed sexual abuse, despite their same commitment to celibacy as their priestly male counterparts. If the technology of celibacy is to be maintained, perhaps nuns should be invited into the priesthood to lead the way.
On an individual level, we are invited to truly tune in to the wants and needs of our animal selves, as well as our spirit’s longing for greater wholeness with the universe. For instance, the practice of sacred sex joins body, spirit, and other, in joy, pleasure, and union at a physical/spiritual level.
On a planetary level, the Earth’s body has taken the lead. We are in the beginnings of massive transformation at a planetary level that will force us to be more in step with the true needs of the Earth’s body and atmosphere. For humans this is a spirit/body reconciliation. Respecting the body of the planet is both a spiritual love, moving beyond just the narcissism of self, as well as a deep connection to the physical: self and planet.
The key to reconciliation of our warring instincts is recognizing the legitimacy of entitlement for both body and spirit. Behind the off-putting extremism of today’s headlines are individuals identified with either one orientation or the other.
Can you outwardly appreciate the one-sidedness of your neighbor, but also its legitimacy, in some form? Can you inwardly recognize the one-sidedness of your own orientation and, yes, validate it in some form too? Can you give value and a place to the opposite side, whether it be body or spirit? That is the way to become an integrated, balanced whole being.
