Narrow life down to its simplest needs, desires and wants. On every level of consciousness, mental, physical, emotional and spiritual, decide what you need to be fulfilled. Pull those desires inward and make them the roadmap to your wholeness. Wholeness comes not from receiving without but from finding within. Feelings of wholeness come from deep within, a satisfaction in being well-acclimated, attuned, aware of the self on all levels, contented with what is. Wholeness comes when there is nothing more you need or want except the perpetuation of feeling whole. In finding wholeness within the Self you will find what you have been searching for all this time.
I stood on a steep embankment below a massive felled tree that had been cut into large rounds, ready to be split into firewood. I’d carefully been rolling down one heavy round at a time to a more level spot where I could split the wood. Three large rounds were pressed together at the top of the hill. I reached up, placing my hands on them, and started to rock them. They rocked as a group.
I got excited at their stored energy coming to life and the prospect of rolling the three together, as a unit. A voice inside said, “that’s a bad idea.” Too late. I rocked them and they started to roll toward my head at full force. Somehow I leaped out of the way as they picked up momentum. One crashed into a tree and stopped. The other two speedily descended hundreds of feet to the stream at the bottom of the mountain.
Truthfully, I have not been able to fully recapitulate how I got away. My ego consciousness was instantly supplanted by a more seasoned High Self that took command of my body and applied instinctive knowhow to jump out of the way and survive.
Trauma shifts one into a state of heightened awareness, which records one’s non-ordinary experience and where one is introduced to knowledge and abilities that defy the ego’s rational sensibilities. Oftentimes people have an out-of-body experience during a traumatic situation, as the High Self shields the vulnerable ego from an experience it is ill-prepared to take in.
Four indigenous children were rescued this past week, having survived for forty days in the Amazon jungle after their plane crashed, killing their indigenous leader and their mother four days later. Forty days is the archetypal eon for meeting a great spiritual challenge. In the heightened awareness of their trauma they were surely guided and protected by the spirits of their mother and leader, steadfastly present with them until they were rescued.
Master shamans teach their students in states of heightened awareness. The task of the student is to fully retrieve a memory of an experience, at the level of ego consciousness, in order to be ready and worthy of the knowledge being recapitulated. The same is true in trauma work. When the victim is ready they will become enlightened to the fullness of their previously dissociated experience. That’s when we fully learn our greatest lessons.
It would be convenient and partially true for me to identify an ego inflation, or influence from a parasitic entity, to explain my decision to rock and roll. However, the truth is that I quite knowingly signed up to have that experience. I fully own my impulsive decision.
What wants to be communicated here is that we are both good and evil, devil and angel. To truly become our whole self, we must own and reconcile with all the oppositions within the self. “Resist ye not evil,” said a great Master.
That evil within flirts with adventure, sometimes high stakes adventure. If we never take a risk we’ll be safe, but we’re sure to be saddled with regret. If we don’t approach, we won’t be rejected, but we’ll surely be alone. Everyone is told to be good, but truthfully, good can also be boring.
The human shadow is largely composed of characters and attitudes that compensate for our whitewashed conscious attitudes. So, for instance, if we are shown a highly desirous character in dreaming that we cannot consciously identify with, that character is most likely balancing out a rigid, morally bound, conscious definition of self.
It’s not so much that we secretly are that exaggerated character, but a part of us, that is more honest with the fullness of who we are, resorts to this persona to demonstrate to the ego the depths of its one-sidedness.
Reconciliation of this opposition would be the ego accepting the truth of its fuller self and its fear of living it. This acceptance of the shadow invites the shadow, with all its desirous energies, into a greater partnership with the ego and opportunities to find ways in life to live its fullness. Wholeness is truly a reconciliation with, and inclusion of, all the opposites that we are.
I’m quite certain my crazy stunt with the heavy tree rounds was not a hidden dance with death. Though, at the same time, every moment of our lives might be our inevitable appointment with death. For shamans, keeping this knowing in the forefront of consciousness gives living its fullest realization.
My tale of power and stupidity insisted on being shared to demonstrate that we are all devils and angels. Finding the right balance and creating a working relationship with these component selves is the key to refined, integrated wholeness, and spiritual advancement.
Time to chop some wood, and I promise to be careful, Chuck
Technology is planned habit. Love is nature’s instinct for union. By combining a planned habit with an instinct for union we create a technology of love.
To arrive at key efficiency, love must be employed at its highest impersonal truth: Action in alignment with what is right. What is right is the truth of the Spirit, that quiet whisper that issues from the heart of the Soul.
Love is the ultimate solution for our planetary woes. As one, united human race—the synthesis of all races—we will overcome. Union, however, has its stages of oneness and separation. Witness the evolution of the women’s process in the movie, Women Talking; sometimes love requires separation. Separation invites introspection and a study of one’s projections.
The psychological function of projection is not a function of conscious choice. Projections happen to us through the action of the instinctive unconscious psyche casting its shadow upon our view of the world.
Though we may become aware of this automatic projection and choose to change our behavior toward the actual person we’ve involuntarily projected upon, this has little effect upon the beliefs and emotions of the unconscious. Intentional consciousness must be applied to demystify unplanned projection, the necessary building block for truly responsible action.
A subset of this overarching tendency of the unconscious to make itself known via projection is the psychological use of projection as a defense mechanism. This defense seeks to unburden us of the tensions in the repressed part of our psyche that Jung called the shadow. The shadow houses all the unacceptable beliefs and emotions we repress in order to make ourselves socially acceptable people. This defense creates instability between conscious and unconscious regions of the self.
When our shadow is projected outwardly onto another person, people or situation, we resolve the inner conflict of opposing thoughts and emotions by assigning blame and badness outside of ourselves. We are then freed to outwardly hate our neighbor, who is truly seen and experienced as our enemy. By maintaining separation from, or by destruction of, the object of our projection, we achieve an inner, albeit tenuous, resolution of opposites: we are good, they are bad.
This projective solution is the dominant defense of nationalist forces currently seeking to maintain their security on the world stage. This same defense dominates both the individual psyche and the collective psyche of the human race. As individual cells of that one, collective human race, we are uniquely positioned to introduce the technology of love as a conscious pathway toward world stability.
We all project. Love thy projection. Love thy neighbor as thy self is actually easy, if we accept the psychological reality that what we defensively project onto our neighbor is our own disowned self. To love thy neighbor as thy self is actually learning to love thy self. This requires taking back ownership for the disowned self and loving it. Indeed, this may be painful and emotionally disruptive and require a lot of courage, but it is doable.
To own the fullness of self we must suspend judgment. We all harbor thoughts and feelings that uphold our survival and self-importance. We are all composed of positive and negative, good and evil. Can I objectively acknowledge the depth of my darkest thoughts and feelings? Can I love myself in this fullness?
The ability to bring the light of acceptance to the darkest of thoughts and feelings allows these dark and light opposites to find an inner reconciliation, which shifts outer projection to outer perception as the previously veiled prejudices begin to drop away. This is how we will end the mass shootings we see enacted daily, which are fueled by the veiled projections of the gunman’s own shadow.
This planned action of loving all—all for one human race, one human race for all—has the added benefit of allowing oneness and separateness to coexist. In order to love my enemy, my enemy must first be acknowledged to exist as a separate being beyond myself. This acknowledgment is a step beyond narcissism, with its narrow fixation upon its own reflection.
Beyond separateness is the greater oneness of the human race, with separate parts respecting each other’s value, much the way the liver might view the heart as a different organ working synergistically to maintain the balance of the whole physical being.
The absolute union of self does not obliterate the operationally different parts of the self. For instance, knowing the different parts of the masculine and feminine self allows more fullness of being, in spite of these differing elements. Oneness and separateness are a reconcilable set of opposites.
The technology of love is the Aquarian Age’s greatest artillery. The army of love is the human race, at war with its projected reflections. Basic training begins at home, with each individual learning to love the self and the other, within and without, without exception.
Continue your good work on the self, finding your way through the life you are in, taking responsibility for yourself and discovering, or rediscovering, what brought you here. For everyone has a mission. It is both a personal mission as well as a mission to contribute to the wholeness of the world you live in and the planet as well. To truly awaken is to awaken to these truths. And then the process is a step by step discovery of why you are present in the life you are in and to what purpose your spirit enticed you into life on earth once again.
Continue your search for meaning, balance and purpose. Stay attached to the idea that you are a continuously evolving being and that everything in your life is leading you to clarity, to knowing, and to the unity of self that is the ultimate goal of all. Unity of self is the integration and balance of all that you are. Some days you are there and you know the feel of it, on others not so much. But knowing what it feels like helps you to know what you seek. Keep that feeling in mind and know that it is possible again, or even for the first time. Everything is possible.
