Focus your attention inward more often, getting to know not only how your body speaks to you but also how your spirit speaks to you. Often it is easy to override both body and spirit with ideas that are habitual, unrealistic and perhaps even harmful. If you ask your body to respond to a question it might give you the opposite answer than what your mind, your ego, or your emotions think. Likewise, your spirit may have totally different answers as well. Get to know yourself, all your parts, those you can see and those you can’t see. Wholeness involves such knowledge. For how can you be whole if you do not know what makes you whole?
Unusual are the ways of the Universe in how it connects with Spirit and creates for the greater good. Open your eyes more often to the synchronicities in your life, those meaningful coincidences that make no sense yet are so important. Pay attention to the inner voice that correctly guides you so that you are safe, that gives you insight and helps you navigate the world. You are an integrated part of that wholeness that you perceive as the world around you, not separate but an informed part that when once more alert and aware will begin to see the finer, more intricate subtleties of life in and around you. There is a greater plan of which you are a part and which you impact on a daily basis. Watch more closely for the signs that guide you and show you the way.
We are always whole. The question is not whether or not we are whole, but rather, how are we currently living our wholeness? Our lives might currently reflect balance or chaos. Each alternative generates its own configuration of our same inherent ingredients of wholeness. Whether in balance or chaos, we are always whole.
If I long for something that I don’t currently have, the suffering I feel, whether as sadness or anxiety, holds the emotional place for the wholeness I seek. A depression might hold the place for a missing or lost relationship.
The law of compensation is nature’s law of wholeness. Elsewhere known as karma, compensation insists that we fulfill our wholeness by living the natural consequences of our actions. If, for instance, we attempt to keep a trauma at bay through repression or willful suppression, the compensation may express itself in physical symptoms or triggers, which now serve the function of holding space for the unprocessed experience.
Many communication issues in relationships reflect this imperative for wholeness. If one partner presents their interpretation of reality the other partner might automatically see and feel compelled to express the other side of the argument. Wholeness insists upon both sides being represented.
Of course, often couples, or friends who share one’s point of view, will need to project the opposite point of view upon a person or group, outside their personal circle, whom they fervently dislike. In some form, wholeness insists that a one-sided point of view be compensated for by its opposite, which is then lived and owned inwardly, through emotional attachment to one’s projected antagonist.
Hate is a powerful expression of emotional attachment. It’s often very hard to not be obsessed with thinking about someone one hates. Once we can accept that these projections actually reflect aspects of our own wholeness, we can take the first step in shifting the volatile state of balance that our wholeness is in.
Wholeness includes everything. We are riddled with pairs of opposites that comprise our wholeness. Once we outwardly withdraw and take ownership for a hated projection, we can begin the process of reconciling the oppositions that comprise that opposition within our wholeness.
First we must bear the tension of holding this opposition within. Once contained, we can appreciate the value of our formerly hated other. Perhaps, for instance, this hated other reflects our own disdain for the limitations authority figures have imposed upon our lives.
By acknowledging this part of our wholeness, our heavily rational prefrontal cortex can come to appreciate its aggressive limbic counterpart, and those two parts might come to accept their complementary roles and find acceptance and room for each other. This is how we shift the balance in our wholeness.
Accepting and finding room for all that we are allows for a more fulfilling wholeness. When the Rainmaker went into his hut to restore the Tao in the village riddled with drought (see last week’s blogpost), his effort reflected a rebalancing of the oppositions within himself, which then triggered greater balance in the outer world.
Wholeness is the same wholeness, whether it be in drought or rainstorm; the difference is in how we do our wholeness. Finding a compatible relationship between the opposites within ourselves is the key to balance.
The difference in personalities among us is simply that which is emphasized within our wholeness that then results in the state of balance we live with. That which is not emphasized is still part of our wholeness and must still be lived in some form.
If I am a true introvert my wholeness requires that I include extraversion somewhere in my life, even if it is only fulfilled by obsessively hating what I judge to be shallow extraversion in others.
Our journey in infinity, beyond this life, may comprise many lives, where different aspects of wholeness are emphasized. This allows for an ever-deepening knowing of wholeness by exploration of it from many different perspectives. In fact, this is how we truly change the past, which completely shifts the balance of our present and future selves.
Trauma freezes our perspective in the past. Beyond the release of previously frozen emotions in processing trauma is the greater perspective of the present self that frees long-held limiting beliefs and definitions of self. Our wholeness then has the opportunity to come into new balance, which allows for greater exploration and expression of our innate potential in the present.
Ultimately we are all part of the same wholeness. The separateness we experience in this life is all a journey to truly know the self and advance our personal and collective evolution through the achievement of a broader perspective, which can’t help but result in the attainment of refined love, for all.
Keep in mind that everything is connected, thoughts, ideas, people, nature. Nothing is not part of the whole. Notice how your thoughts can take you far, how creativity can take off and develop, how things get written and spoken and held together by everything in the universe. One person is never alone, for connections are vast, spanning lifetimes. Reach out to understand more fully how everything is connected, how everyone is connected, and how you are part of that everything.
I spent a training weekend with a virtual Susan Brown, LCSW and EMDR psychotherapist. This event coincided with my reading the book Seth, Dreams And Projections Of Consciousness, published posthumously in 1986, two years after the death of its author, Jane Roberts.
Susan Brown addresses the integration of sub-personality parts work with classic EMDR therapy as applied to treating addictions. For her, the multiplicity of fragmented parts that we become when separated from our wholeness of Self, through traumatic encounter, continue to serve our healing quest for connection with, and restoration of, our lost wholeness of Self.
Susan counsels that we value, accept and respect all parts of Self with equanimity, regardless of their apparent dysfunctionality. Wholeness, once again, requires acceptance of everything that we are. Her intent could be characterized as a modern day shamanic soul retrieval, where the adult self is brought into living connection with its lost parts, as the overall personality is restored to healthy balance and cooperative oneness.
Carlos Castaneda highlighted this shift in modern shamanism by insisting that we are now all our own redeemers. We must all become our own Naguals, or High Selves, as Susan Brown might characterize them, and assume central responsibility for the healing and individuation journey to our true wholeness of Self.
The therapist or shaman is a facilitator but does not assume responsibility for retrieval of a lost part in the underworld of the unconscious. The evolving relationship between adult self and High Self, and its variety of part personalities, is the magic and centerpiece of healing in this empowered journey of recovery.
Seth, the entity whom Jane Roberts channelled, explained that probable selves represent living permutations of the life we are currently in. These sub-personalities, or parts, are intimately connected and interactive with the life we are currently living, though they are completely autonomous and may be functioning largely outside of our conscious awareness.
For instance, Jane Roberts, and her husband Rob, had once travelled to Maine for a vacation. One night while there, they went to a night club and were drawn to sit opposite a couple whom they experienced as bitter, disgruntled versions of their future selves, miserably shut down and disconnected from their creative cores.
Seth explained to them that their present selves had created, or birthed, these versions of themselves from the shadows of their fears. As opposed to mere psychological projections, these beings were actual entities, with lives of their own, seeking their own resolutions.
This synchronistic encounter with their probable future selves served all four beings well, as their connection spawned many possibilities and reflected knowledge extremely useful to the making of decisions that would go on to change their future lives.
We all have our personal astral network of probable selves that we interact with, largely in dreaming and through the practice of, what Jung called, active imagination. These connections are real, living connections that exist as parts of our greater wholeness, regardless of our awareness of them. Just as we have neural plasticity networks in the brain, we also have, what I would term, the astral-plasticity to grow through greater awareness and connectivity with our probable selves.
Astral-plasticity utilizes lucid dreaming, where present selves volitionally encounter their probable other selves, meeting with the intent of respect and offering the opportunity to share and gain knowledge gleaned from their separate lives lived.
Astral-plasticity also generates the merging of healing intentions, wherein separate lives move beyond being unconsciously, compensatorily related, to being joined in similar healing intentions at different dimensions of Self.
I have suggested, in previous blog posts, that our current world crisis is reflecting a chaotic macro-encounter between the presently embodied World Self and the probable shadow self of past generational decisions, still alive and well on the astral plane, all demanding a physical replaying to reach a higher level of global Self-realization. We have at present slipped into a probable World Self that resembles Gotham City of Batman ilk. The advanced prefrontal cortex of current world civilization is becoming increasingly entranced by its limbic ancestors, all seeking a new world order.
Rather than pass the buck, through solidarity with the repression of prior generations, we are being called upon to live with the misery and lament of what appears to be irreconcilable differences. Accepting the role of taking the hit for the greater whole, by embodying these epic challenges, offers us the very real option of once and for all healing the deep splits that have perennially haunted human history. It also requires that we fully experience and reckon with the genuine threats to our current world’s survival.
Our best opportunity for healing rests in our capacity to summon our adult Self, with its ability to exercise its free will in the service of the greater good. Furthermore, we have the resource of our probable part selves, alternate selves who appreciate our efforts and contributions toward their own evolution and whom support us in ours. How critical it is that we get to know and make peace with all our parts. Ultimately, as Susan Brown points out, all parts matter!
Where to start? Set boundaries, but treat all parts with compassion and respect. Every part has a story to share that weaves together the mystery and wonder of Self.
