The foundation for belief, in this world, is socialization. We believe what we are told. The advertising industry spends billions of dollars a year to attract our attention, tell us what to believe, and, ultimately, control how we behave.
Although we don’t arrive in this world with a blank mental slate, we are nonetheless most influenced in childhood by the rules and judgments presented to us from primary parental figures, authority figures, and peer role models.
Science, with its focus on material proof, has reigned as a standard for believability for a couple of centuries. However, our current modern world is relativizing this standard of truth, with its emphasis upon the dominant role of suggestion in generating belief.
The power to control the narrative, the words used to describe current world challenges or opinions, is everywhere evident. A statement made on X results in a major loss of revenue, as advertisers run for the hills. Books are banned that suggest values or beliefs one disagrees with. I am not making a First Amendment pitch for free speech, but rather giving a neutral acknowledgment of the power of speech upon belief.
Carlos Castaneda emphasized the power of socialization, above all else, to fixate our belief system—and, hence, the world we generate—through shared beliefs with others. Our current world crises reflect a critical breakdown of a coherent belief system. The real current World War is a war of competing beliefs. Beliefs are indeed the deadliest of weapons.
Beliefs are magical spells. Shamans teach that, at a subconscious level, we incessantly repeat internalized beliefs. They call this the internal dialogue that constantly judges everything, most especially the self. The internal dialogue repeats the slogans from our internal advertising agency, which in turn generates our personal truths and how we see the world.
The shamans are consistent with most spiritual practices that encourage arriving at inner silence to suspend the power of fixated beliefs that color our view of ourselves, and the world. From the vantage point of inner silence, we see the relativity and power of belief.
However, as venerable as silence is to spiritual advancement it is not necessary to advance your beliefs. You needn’t even believe in a belief to materialize it. The only requirement is to attract the subconscious mind to a suggestion, even if you don’t consciously believe it. Repeat the suggestion incessantly, like a well-funded advertising campaign. Eventually the subconscious will be influenced and change your world.
Of course, if your suggestion is denying something, like a truth you are uncomfortable to face, though you will experience a shift eventually, you will also generate a latent karma. Karma is merely the outcome of our choices. If we choose to generate an untruth, the effects of that untruth will generate their own suggestions, which will impact the course of our future life. That’s nature’s basic law of balance.
So, what’s best to believe?
Suggestions that promote spiritual advancement experience the karma of fulfillment. We learn how to believe through rote repetition of beliefs that then manifest. As they manifest, even the Doubting Thomas conscious mind gains faith and believes in the power of the subconscious mind to change the world, within and without.
Suggestions can be likened to sperm, whose intent is to impregnate the egg of the subconscious mind, the mother of manifestation.
Suggestions abound from many sources, such as habits, instincts, and the thoughts and beliefs of others. However, the optimal source of suggestion for the growth of the personality is the conscious ego presenting suggestions to the subconscious in alignment with its soul’s mission in this life.
The oddity of this necessary relationship is that the ego has a long developmental process to arrive at the necessary maturity to optimally lead the personality. This challenge is blatantly illustrated in the power struggles currently riddling the Earth. Rather than address the true needs of the planet, the world ego is stuck in greed, or essentially a narcissistic worldview, which obscures the execution of suggestions of right action to resolve crises.
This same limitation applies to the individual personality, whose narcissistic needs and desires can monopolize habits that impact the health of the physical body, as well as the quality of connection possible in relationships with others.
Many of the suggestions from ego to subconscious result in poor health and failed relationships. It often requires the learning curve of a lifetime for the ego to arrive at the optimal spiritual alignment to truly lead the personality.
At the receptive end is the subconscious mind, whose powers are truly supernatural, yet it lacks the reasoning power of consciousness to select the best suggestions to fulfill. Of course, it has the suggestive influence of the whole of human evolutionary history that expresses itself powerfully in the emotions of instincts, yet even these reactions may not fit with the true needs of life in the modern word.
For example, the instinct of self-preservation might insist upon a prolonged war as the necessary reaction to an attack. As appropriate a reaction to this survival threat as this reaction might be, the more conscious human potential to arrive at resolution through negotiation might prove more effective at finding lasting resolution.
In this case, the ego, with its higher capacities for reason and right action might be the better center for decision making, offering better suggestions to the subconscious mind than the deeply engrained instinctive suggestions that were more necessary at a purely instinctive age of human history.
In contrast to the ego, the subconscious mind does not need to undergo a developmental process. It is fully formed in childhood where its power is quite evident in play. A slight suggestion of a peer as monster, in a game of tag for instance, can preoccupy a group of kids for hours, as they are filled with intense emotional reactions to the easily imagined chasing monster.
The subjective mind in childhood and adulthood can equally take charge of one’s perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, and physical actions when a suggestion successfully impregnates it. The subconscious acts as a creative manifester, fully believing and becoming the suggestion it takes in. It remains for the ego alone to reality-test the validity of this activated, or we could even say, possessed, state.
It becomes evident how this odd couple needs each other’s capacities to fully succeed in life. Ego must carefully guard against underhanded suggestions, which abound, from taking root in the subconscious. Energy practices, including stated intentions, can create boundaries against unwanted influences.
The subconscious, in response to ego suggestion, can provide information to the ego similar to the capability of artificial intelligence (AI), which can advance the ego’s problem-solving or knowledge of lived events with its perfect memory. Like AI, however, the subconscious must be monitored and led to exert its influence for the greater good of all. For this, as in all things, one needs a mature adult ego that submits to right action as its guiding principle.
A healthy, intimate relationship between each mind of this odd couple suggests the ultimate evolutionary track for mind during its sojourn in human form. In human terms, it represents the optimal relationship to find fulfillment and individuation in this magical life.
We are all ultimately One, but the structure of this world that we live in is one of separate objects, with distinct differences.
Christian Science suggests we link our consciousness with our core identity, that perfect Oneness, whereby healing the illusion of disease in a non-existent, separate physical body.
Hindu philosophy calls this illusion of separateness maya. Maya spins and directs lila, the creative divine play that results in the current world drama that we personally experience as the fixed reality of our world. To become enlightened, one must fully engage in the current play yet be aware of the limitations of its illusory solidity, and the fact of its impermanence. That’s what is meant by non-attachment.
The shamans of ancient Mexico call assuming this role of non-attachment stalking. In stalking, we fully embody the character we intend to become, sometimes even temporarily forgetting our true essence as energetic beings when we do so. From a shamanic perspective, our world is generated by fixating our consciousness upon a program that assembles our awareness to perceive a world of distinct solid objects.
Carlos Castaneda pointed out that it is sheer magic to be able to conjure this solid world. He called human beings magical beings because of their ability to so fixate their awareness as to generate such a magical event. However, he truly lamented how this single assemblage point of awareness had become the sole fixation of human consciousness. We have forgotten that we are indeed magical beings capable of unlimited possibilities.
In my time in Carlos Castaneda’s world, I once observed him personally demonstrate a physical movement to break this fixation of limited awareness. He was a short man. He turned his back to us, performing a kind of shoulder roll.
He keenly stated that we are magical beings whose wings have been clipped. With that he urged us to literally free our wings, demonstrating with a movement initiated from the wing itself; engaging the fullness of the entire back rather than a shallow roll of the shoulder. I saw the profound movement of the depth of his wing.
It’s a simple movement. Imagine the wing. Feel an impulse to move it. Be led by it.
The maya of the human mind is one of duality. We appear to have two distinct minds. That is the divine lila of life as it is played out in the current fixation of the human form. These two minds are the ego and the subconscious. The dance between these two minds is our true inner soulmate relationship in this life, replete with all the agonies and ecstasies of human relationship.
The ego is our objective, reasoning mind. The ego is the seat of consciousness. The ego greatly identifies with life in its physical body. The ego is the home of personal identity; the ego says, “I am.” The ego exercises the directive power of free will, choice, and decision making. The ego is charged with the responsibility of leadership in its human life.
The subconscious is the home of total memory. Every moment of our life is recorded there. While the ego may retain some memory, the subconscious records it all. During recapitulation we experience the relationship of ego and subconscious, as the consciousness of now is reconciled with the full experience of the past.
The subconscious operates through intuition. The subconscious is the remote viewer that can travel way beyond the confines of the physical body and observe events on the other side of the world, or in the cosmos. The subconscious has access to the Akashic records, the collective unconscious history and accrued knowledge of our species.
The subconscious is the seat of telepathy; it receives and can read the thoughts of others. The subconscious runs all the operations of the physical body. The subconscious houses the instincts and is the home of emotions.
The subconscious is our magical mind. It does not reason; its modus operandi is suggestion. Whatever suggestion it receives, it will fully bring to life. With its vast tools and resources, the subconscious can manifest, to the best of its ability, any suggestion it decides to adopt.
Unknown to us, the ego and the subconscious constantly work in tandem. Thoughts from the ego become directive suggestions to the subconscious, which then turn into a set of habits that automatically control our lives.
The subconscious is also quite receptive to the suggestions of others. We may notice our attitudes, moods and behaviors greatly impacted by our interactions with others. This may largely be the suggestive influence of someone else’s energy upon our subconscious. As opposed to the ego, with its fixed identity, the subconscious does not have a personality. It is an open book that willingly embodies the content of suggestions, wherever they may originate from.
Healthy leadership by the ego, in the quality of its suggestions to the subconscious, creates the ideal relationship between the two minds. This requires the ego to firstly be in alignment with its Spirit as the arbiter of right action. The ego must also accept the existence of the subconscious mind with all its magical capacities. This is often a tall order for the ego to undertake, which clings to its rationality as ruler and dismisses the greater powers of the subconscious mind.
The ego needn’t believe in the power of the subconscious to access it. Merely rotely repeating a suggestion, ad nauseam, is bound to register eventually as a directive to the subconscious. If I notice a headache brewing, I direct my subconscious with the incessant suggestion that the headache is healing, and is healed. If it disappears, as it often does, I acknowledge the fact of the power of the subconscious to heal.
The ego comes into better relationship with the subconscious when it can expand its rationality to include the fact that the subconscious has abilities that appear to defy logic. Exercising the intentional practice of autosuggestion can produce results that broaden the ego’s reason to include the magical potential of the subconscious mind. Rather than dismiss miracle cures as placebo, scientists would do well to study the factual abilities of the subconscious mind to alter physical events in the body through the power of suggestion.
Reconciliation of mind is ego valuing the subconscious, and consciously feeding it suggestions for the greater good of self, other, and world.
When we leave this life in our soul body, our mental body, of ego and subconscious, will leave as one. As we journey beyond the physical body this reconciled mind is our navigator in the great beyond. Use this life now to bring mind into a partnership to truly serve your evolving soul.
Now and then,* Chuck
*I am blown away by the magic of the release of the modernly engineered Now and Then, the Beatle’s final song, which is #1 on the musical charts. The generation of now is claiming their own rightful ownership of the Beatle’s Aquarian magic, as well as John Lennon’s soulful reconciliation of relationship. May its energy further permeate the world and its reconciliation of relationship.
Life in a physical body upon the Earth, at this phase of eternity, is largely governed by autosuggestions emanating from our instinctive nature. Though consciousness is awakening to its power to intend and create its physical reality, it remains largely controlled by hidden, limiting autosuggestions.
Autosuggestions can originate from both conscious and subconscious intent. The ego, employing its thinking mind, can decide upon an innovative change that it then perseveringly suggests to its workhorse subconscious mind to manufacture in material reality. This is an example of a conscious intent derived from inductive, or creative, thinking and presented to the subconscious mind for materialization.
The subconscious mind does not employ the inductive reasoning of ego consciousness. With inductive reasoning the ego can think and create outside the box. Though I have stated repeatedly that the subconscious does not think, this is in fact not completely accurate. The subconscious thinks deductively.
Essentially, the subconscious treats the suggestion it embraces as absolute fact and engages all of its energy to manufacture and prove this commanding suggestion via associations generated from its access to the vast storehouse of human evolutionary history. Thus, the subconscious makes a suggested truth become a physical truth.
Although the conscious mind, particularly through perseverance, can attract the subconscious mind to embrace and manufacture its suggestions, the subconscious mind is mostly drawn to suggestions presented to it by our genetic code, our evolutionary history and, most prominently, our instincts, which have insured the survival of the human race.
If the conscious mind imagines it will be attacked in some way, fear might overtake one’s mental, emotional, and physical state. Confronted with actual danger, the subconscious mind will likely embrace and act upon instructions suggested to it by one’s self-preservation instinct, which can result in the calm clarity and superhuman strength needed to defend one’s self. In this case, the subconscious abandons the suggestion of consciousness, to remain fearful, in favor of the empowered instinctual suggestion to survive.
This overtaking of the ego by autosuggestion from the instinct for self-preservation is favorable in this instance, as it can save a life. However, a family history of a particular disease, rooted in one’s genetic code, might pose the suggestion to the subconscious to automatically activate this latent possibility of disease. This situation may be further complicated by a reigning blocking belief in science, which states that consciousness alone cannot alter physical reality. Consequently, the ego is sheepishly lulled to concur with the disease suggestion of its genetic code, thereby forfeiting its potential ability to create another reality.
To be sure, not all physical conditions can be altered by conscious suggestion. Some programs, such as the inevitable death of the human body, derive from programs that may be delayed but ultimately cannot be overcome.
But clearly, evolution advanced us from the total domination of our animal instinctual mind, to allow for free will and change, because of the creative power of consciousness to alter physical reality and thereby enhance its potential for survival. This is evolutionary innovation via intent versus via natural selection. The golden opportunity of now is to fully embrace and exercise this creative power of mind for the greater good of all.
Advanced disembodied souls, whom have turned their attention to informing and guiding those of us still physically embodied, have shared consistently that life beyond the human body is primarily controlled by the soul’s mental capacity to imagine. Imagination is the currency of nonphysical reality, where one is freed to live in a reality of one’s own mental construction.
This creative activity allows a soul to generate familiar environments, populated with kindred souls, enabling the completion of incomplete residual dreams from one’s prior sojourn in physical life. Completion, at this phase of eternity, enables one to progress ultimately into the more expanded dream of one’s soul group.
This refinement of creative imaginative power, beyond physical life, though largely dormant while living in a physical body, is nonetheless a latent power capable of being activated while in physical life. The shamans of ancient Mexico instruct us to suspend the prejudice of materialism and unrelentingly intend the change we seek. With intent we can awaken the spirit from its slumber in materialist malaise.
To support this awakening, the shamans also recommend that we throw out a line and hook to our future disembodied soul state, and to the prolific potential of this creative facility, stalking it now. By stalking, the shamans mean embodying the full knowing and exercise of intent as the prime creative power in life. To consciously master it in this life is the ultimate intent.
Trust the power of the Spirit. Trust the power of consciousness to change the self and to change the world.
As we live through the destruction of this Fall season of Earth’s life and face the inevitable changes ahead, let us, without fear or doubt, imagine and create, with intent, a new world that reflects the greater good for all.
Without attachment to the outcome, know it will be done. This is the golden opportunity of now.
Most of what we are is either inherited or molded by our formative social experience, essentially, what we brought in with us into this life and how we were greeted when we arrived. The force of these influences can make a strong argument that the course of a human life is predetermined or mechanistically determined.
Nonetheless, as noted existential thinkers and authors Victor Frankl and Edith Eger have demonstrated: Regardless of circumstances beyond our control, we always retain the free will to choose the attitude we will take toward our reality. And attitudes, it turns out, are powerful suggestions that we, as creators, present to our subconscious minds that can completely shift the reality that we live in.
Some of those inherent programs, however, are so powerful that they simply cannot be overridden, like the one the shamans of Ancient Mexico emphasize: We are beings who are going to die. Ironically, this is the one inherent program that human beings refuse to acknowledge and, in fact, spend most of their lives living as though it will never come true!
Of course, the argument immediately arises that to focus on the inevitability of death is morbidly negative and casts too depressive a shadow over opening up to the fullness of life. So what could possibly be the positive side of death?
Death advises us that our time in human form is limited. This impact of limitation allows for a legitimate scientific experiment in the living of a human life. Science insists upon a beginning and an ending to assess the truth and full knowing of something. The awareness of inevitable death keeps us positively on track to discover and test the core hypothesis of our lives. But what is our core hypothesis?
Carl Jung would identify that hypothesis as one of individuation, which entails successfully bringing into realized wholeness the unique combination of opposing parts that we are. Frederick Myers, from his advanced perspective in infinity, would identify that hypothesis as an incarnating soul’s mission, assigned by its Spirit, to answer a question through the trajectory of a human life, which ultimately allows one’s soul group to further refine and thus to advance on its ever-unfolding journey in infinity.
Wholeness must include light and shadow. Individuation is the ability to accept, with equanimity, all parts of self and all parts of the world. Buddha, during his enlightenment, remained utterly calm, as he saw the illusory and transitory nature of all forms. Carlos Castaneda suggested that, as one discovers the specific role one has been assigned in this life, one suspend judgment and live and appreciate it to the fullest, whether it emphasizes the light or the dark side.
The power players on the current world stage are truly playing their parts to perfection, both those who reflect the light and those who blatantly reflect evil. The collective individuation challenge of our time is well represented, with worthy opponents whose interplay is critical to advancement of the soul group of planet Earth’s dream.
Closer to home, we all struggle with these opposing forces within ourselves. We all contend with genetic consequences, which both limit and promote our physical structure, health, and attractiveness. If we can see these effects, no matter how undesirable, as critical factors to our individual and soul group’s need to master, we can embrace the positive side of the negative.
At the level of the psyche, we all deal with forces that can be extremely critical, deprecating and incessantly negative, generating depressed mood states and compulsive behaviors. If we can understand the necessity of these negative forces in our journey of mastery, we can see the positive value of these petty tyrants to help us emerge from the captivity of self pity.
Self pity shapes our vital flowing energy into a rigid negative form that completely clouds the positive potential latent in the present challenge. It’s a dream where many of the stone steps of a narrow circular stairway are missing, as we feel hopelessly barred from ascent to higher ground. Our energy is fully spent on body armor, condemning our innocence and unlived self to the isolation of solitary confinement.
The shamans of ancient Mexico always included powerful petty tyrants in their lives to help them stare down the imprisoning bars of self pity. Being challenged by ruthless petty tyrants frees our energy from the confinement of defending our hurt selves, allowing it to be deployed in focused action in full conformity to what is needed to master the tyrant’s labyrinth.
To achieve this mastery we cannot afford to spend an ounce of energy on being offended. Here, the petty tyrants of this world offer us the greatest opportunity to break through the narcissistic shell of self pity and entitlement.
The success of individuation in the limits of a human life is the achievement of acceptance; complete acceptance for every experience and character one has ever encountered, as well as complete acceptance of one’s self.
The fruit of this acceptance is an even more refined purity of love. And that refined love is what fulfills our lives and advances our soul group another rung on the infinite ladder of love.
Always find the positive in the negative; it’s the truly soulful thing to do, Chuck
