There is a lot of activity in the world that is not conducive to inner calmness and may even disturb the most spiritually proficient. Try to keep in mind a bigger picture, the picture that you know is possible, a world at peace. If you keep this bigger picture firmly in your mind while doing your calming exercises you will enable your body to relax and your mind to stop rambling on what-ifs. Keep that peaceful vision front and center at all moments, especially when chaos looms and the end seems inevitable. Peaceful vision equals peaceful heart.
While both Freud and Jung dabbled with hypnosis, each ultimately abandoned it as a tool to explore and heal the human psyche. Each would go on to offer his individual gifts to psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, but their abandonment of the exploration of hypnosis closed an important door to an essential gateway to knowledge of the anatomy and dynamics of the soul.
In the mid-19th century, an informally educated American clockmaker and mesmerist from Maine, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, abstracted from his hypnotic healing work a metaphysical working model of the psyche. While practicing mesmerism, his fervently inquisitive mind discovered the role of telepathy and the power of thought in creating physical reality, particularly physical illness.
Quimby ultimately abandoned mesmerism and spent the later part of his life as a healer. He would just sit with patients, himself in semi-trance yet also consciously present, thus in two places at once. He would then connect to the subconscious mind of his patient and have revealed to him the beliefs that caused their affliction.
Invariably, Quimby would discover that the root of the problem lay in a powerful belief, which the patient was often quite unaware they held in their subconscious mind. Quimby also discovered that the subconscious mind automatically manifested that belief, both physically and psychologically, as expressed through the patient’s symptoms.
Quimby would then explain to his patient the validity of their current condition, whose etiology was the physical manifestation of their belief. Quimby was also able to show them the limitation of their current belief in defining the deeper truth of their being, which was one of health. Fully embracing this new positive belief often led to a physical healing, largely through the mysterious but definite action of mental thought upon the physical manifestation capacity of the subconscious mind.
Quimby determined that the psyche is filled with powerful beliefs either internalized from significant relationships in one’s life or generated by conscious thinking. Thus, for example, if one believes that they should be punished or limited because of something they have done, they might experience some kind of physical paralysis. Once freed of this limiting or punishing belief one’s paralysis could be lifted.
Quimby came to believe that the power of suggestion was fundamental to the human mind, which he believed to be of divine origin. The conscious mind holds the key to creation through the power of suggestion, while the subconscious mind has the divine power to physically manifest these suggestions received from the conscious mind.
In fact, every part of human life is generated by this dynamic relationship. Though apparently wide awake, we live in a state of constant trance, manifesting physically, at every moment, what we believe to be true.
For Quimby, health was achieved by takingconscious control of suggestions, based upon the truth of one’s divine origin rather than on the errors of opinions or suggestions not in alignment with truth. Quimby emphasized the human power of free will to create either physical problems or health and success, all based upon beliefs.
Quimby discovered a core shamanic truth. For shamans, humans are energetic beings who mentally generate a physical existence through the power of intent, or the power of suggestion. Though our physical life is quite real, it would be an error to say that it is our ultimate truth. Ultimately, we are energetic beings, with unlimited possibilities of physical expression.
Shamans call our physical life an interpretation of energy. There can be many interpretations of that energy, as Quimby points out, that generate physical illnesses. We have the ability to change our belief, whereby interpreting energy in a new physical way, through the manifesting power of the subconscious mind.
Unfortunately, Quimby died young, at the age of 64, in 1866. At that time, he was treating upwards of 500 patients per year. I surmise that his early death was caused by the same technical error that uninformed shamanic healers often make in soul retrieval healings.
Often, it is the shaman that literally takes possession of their patient’s lost soul, which had been caught in the grip of an unhealthy suggestion. The shaman then takes on responsibility for reconciling the tormented part soul within themselves, which they then return to their patient, who is healed through this restoration of their wholeness by the shaman.
The side effect for the shaman, via sympathy, is to also experience the symptoms of their patient’s tormented soul, which takes its toll upon the healer’s health. Carlos Castaneda taught that, in modern shamanism, the shaman is a guide but does not assume responsibility for a patient’s troubled soul. That healing must be fully assumed by the patient’s personal process of reconciliation with their lost soul, in recapitulation, for instance.
Although Quimby died prior to the formal naming of the New Thought philosophical and spiritual tradition, his work is credited universally as the birth of that movement. The ‘new thought’ of New Thought is that human beings are an active part of divinity, evolutionarily destined to discover and exercise their own divine power, in alignment with the greater good for self and all. Thus, in the New Thought tradition, the life of Christ, and other Bodhisattvas and Old Testament prophets, is revisioned as a teacher introducing humans to their divine powers.
Our current world could be characterized as a flurry of divine errors that reflect human experimentation with the power of suggestion to the subconscious mind. These errors are having the effect of the breakdown of civilization, as we have known it.
On the other hand, new life, or new interpretations of energy, require a clearing of old beliefs that must give way for new divine possibilities to take root. The atrocities of now are real, but suggestions are coming so rapidly that nothing in this interim period of transition is likely to achieve permanence. On the other hand, our world is unlikely to ever return to the comfort of a familiar past.
The opportunity for now is for all of us to individually and collectively state suggestions that align with the greater truth and good for all. That is a sustainable interpretation of energy. That is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius that we all share in. It’s why we are here now, to assume divine responsibility for the world dream we are in the midst of dreaming forward. How momentous!
Do think this New Year forward, with New Thoughts of love, truth and wisdom.
Spirit and Matter are inseparably One. Yang, the creative, finds its physical expression in Yin, the receptive. In this moment, as I write, a son of mine texts me that while driving his car last night the word star unthinkingly escaped his lips, and suddenly, a falling star appeared before him!
Every word we say, positive or negative, is spirit, which is then physically expressed, like my son’s falling star. The star is the radiant spirit of pure truth, expressed through the matter of the star, the anima mundi, or the soul, of the world.
Everything that happens in our lives is of divine origin, that divinity being both the mental thought and the subconscious substance that brings it to physical life. We might indeed object to the suggestion that we intend negative events in our lives. In fact, we might argue that we consciously intend only positive occurrences. Yet, we must face the fact that like attracts like, and only what we attract will materialize in our lives.
This brings us to the question, when things materialize not as we intend, “What is the matter with me?” The matter, of course, is what we physically manifest.
If we begin by suspending the judgment of blame and instead assume the innocence of Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, we next pull back the curtain within and identify the true wizard/spirit behind our current manifestation in matter.
Very often, we may then discover that a very old thought that we have long forgotten has taken up residence in the habit section of our subconscious mind, and continues to automatically shape our physical lives according to the instructions imbedded in its belief.
This now unconscious belief acts as interference to the conscious suggestion we are currently seeking to manifest in our lives. Once we are aware of this blocking belief, we become enabled to defy it!
One approach to defiance is to engage the old belief and express gratitude to it for its necessary role in our past, when it shaped our reality to best protect us and secure our growth, however constricted. This belief is then awakened to the changed circumstances of now, where we are ready to advance beyond an old construction of self into new vistas of creative fulfillment.
This approach may neutralize the energy of the blocking belief, which now excitedly joins in the present suggestion of change to the subconscious mind. However, if it remains reticent to change, the conscious mind might aggressively flood the subconscious mind with emotionally charged positive suggestions that, once the energy accrues to the necessary level, causes the subconscious mind to abandon the old habit and manifest the new.
Beyond the issue of blocking belief, is a more basic relationship issue, what I call the Gemini Challenge, as Geminis foundationally confront reconciling polarities, particularly the ultimate relationship between spirit and matter. This is, of course, a challenge presented to all of humankind, but for Geminis this may be the central challenge of a lifetime.
If we favor the spirit personality in the fundamental bipolar oneness of spirit and body, we tend to be dominated by mind, and can tend to live outside the body, in illusory states of inflation or, at the opposite extreme, in deflated states of mental rumination. At times this can devolve into a state of intense mental cruelty, where the spirit weeps for its supposed failures in physical form.
When identified more with the material side of the dual personality, we might be drawn into obsession with physical concerns, or imagined limitations generated by spirit thought. These, of course, are very likely to physically manifest, as body is governed by thought. The Gemini challenge is heightened by, at times, abrupt shifts to opposite perspectives that question what is real and right.
The resolution to this unsettling marital relationship between mind and body lies in mutual respect and equanimity. Spirit is not superior to body; they are full equals, reflections of each other. Matter exists and is real, even if it is ultimately but an interpretation of energy. Beneath a solid interpretation of matter is simply free-flowing energy, without definition. Divinity is dormant if it can’t be experienced in the adventure of form.
The answer to the question, “What is the matter with me?” is ultimately the question of, “What spirit am I manifesting?” If I am under-appreciating or negative toward either my spirit or physical self, I will constellate the spirit of aggression and the matter of an inner civil war.
If I direct my spirit’s attention outwardly, toward the star, and engage my spirit for the greater good of self and other, my physical manifestations will happily reflect such love, for self and other. The matter with me is then confidence, contentment, and fulfillment in the full radiance of physical form.
Find balance, within today, just as you found something else, within, yesterday. Each new day is a new chance to try on something different, perhaps to dress differently but also to think differently. It’s in your thoughts that the first stirrings of change really begin, in how you think about yourself and how you speak to yourself. Are you kind to yourself? Or are you rude and uncaring? Are you encouraging, or are you demeaning? What is the most common word you find that you say to yourself? Is it positive? What do you see when you look at yourself? Are you appreciative and loving when you catch a glimpse of yourself? Are you happy when you think about your life and all that you’ve done? Today offers another chance to upgrade your thinking about yourself, to say something new and unusual to yourself. Today is an opportunity to begin a new journey of transformation. And that is something only you can do.
Circle back around, throughout the day, to your positive affirmations of thanks and gratitude for all that you are given. It’s a great way to reaffirm your commitment to change, to grow, and to become a more positive and happier person. In so doing you open the door for good energy to come your way, in very unexpected ways. So put yourself in the way of good vibrations, within and without.
