Take care of yourself body and soul, so that each may find a home with the other, within the entity you call Self. Get to know each of these selves intimately so that their union may be successful. In knowing the self, the greater Self may find its way to balance without issue, merely finding home to be the natural union of these two aspects of Self. Find solace in knowing that you contain all you need—it’s just waiting for you to discover it.
Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
I spent last night in dreams of renovation. I awoke several times in the night, my body feeling the physical download of great effort. The house is an older home, with good bones, purchased from people of positive intent, who never got to the renovation of the back half of the house. Under their care it remained a potentiality, dark and unexplored.
The project is huge, the materials are modest and the effort is great. There is no sense of inflated expansion, but the expansion is solid and will serve the needs of all who will inhabit it.
Awakening to the headlines of today, legitimacy is being granted, despite reservation. The momentum of change is fully apparent. The country has spoken and chosen a new dream. The dream we have been living challenged us to take responsibility for our future dream. It truly became necessary to consent to the reality we would live in.
Consciousness, as expressed through the collective ego, has risen beyond the stage of pure narcissism to address the true needs of the whole. This has been a developmental process of necessity.
First, the purely self-serving ego needed to be lived and given full rein, so that the impact upon world survival could be felt and consciously assessed. All of the ego’s manipulative machinations had to be fully lived and experienced before it could acquiesce to a higher cause, the welfare of the greater whole. Though leaders mirror this ego, they merely reflect the internal process of us all.
We have all encountered the impact of allowing the desire body to rule the ego. The thrill of that ride, the bliss of excess, is a legitimate dream, but it burns out quickly through its unbridled appetite, leaving us all exhausted. We have now chosen continuance and evolution over the fascination of Armageddon. We know now that we can indeed go out in a blaze of glory that we have caused, but we have chosen not to exercise that option.
We have learned, as well, that the repressed in all of us can emerge with a self-destructive vengeance. We’ve all witnessed it acting out. To regain balance, we must responsibly find a life for all that we desire.
The Earth teaches us to move away from exploiting her bounty. We must follow her example. The future of desire is to turn this human spirit of manifest destiny to exploration of the energy body, away from rampant ego desires to the world of spirit and out-of-body travel and all that it offers. At this subtle level of the Soul, thought alone is the fuel. How’s that for clean energy!
As my dream portends, the dark unknown half of the house is ready for discovery and renovation. Despite the labor involved, it promises to solidly house all that we are. We must all begin with the self.
Take up the challenge of the repressed and the desired within the self. Bring light into the darkness. Be conservative yet daring. The time of transition has arrived.
In gratitude, and with love to all,
Chuck
Carl Jung defined a psychological complex as a ‘feeling toned idea’ that acts quite autonomously in the human psyche. When Jung was performing his word association tests he observed that certain words triggered delayed reaction times and emotional reactions in his experimental subjects. Something ‘else’ was interfering.
This led to his discovery that there are autonomously functioning parts of the psyche acting outside of consciousness. Jung called these influences ‘complexes’. Freud spent his entire career highlighting the Oedipal complex, which he considered the greatest unconscious influence upon the human psyche.
Today we have terms like alters, ego states, fragmented parts or archetypes to depict these autonomous influences upon consciousness. Robert Monroe took Western psychology a step further with his research into out-of-body (OBE) states, where consciousness discovers non-material parts of the self that regularly influence consciousness from subtler planes of existence.
Monroe’s discoveries concur with Hindu science with respect to the emotional/desire body as the first to be encountered in an OBE state. Many OBE explorers report an encounter with excess sexual desire in their early explorations. Monroe also discovered a preponderance of sexual preoccupation by many travelers who had left human form through physical death, as they remained fixated on sexual activity, though lacking a physical body.
Monroe’s discovery certainly lays credence to Freud’s emphasis upon the overarching significance of sexuality for human beings. Sex may be the major karmic issue that sends disembodied spirits back into human life. Monroe also reported encounters on the astral plane with the energy body of sleeping human beings, equally preoccupied with sex in their dream states.
Beyond sex are the many emotional attachments that humans, in their energy body OBE states, are found to be preoccupied with. Civilization, with its emphasis upon reason, uniformity and conformity, has suppressed and repressed the spontaneous living of impulse. What we previously considered as repressed and contained within the psyche in the physical body may be very actively living on the astral plane outside of human consciousness.
The current polarized attitudinal split in the human race might actually reflect this polarized split within the human psyche, manifesting as an outer collective opposition. If we distill this opposition, it could be reduced to, simply, reason vs impulse. Resolution of this opposition is fundamental to unified progress.
Shamans introduced the practice of recapitulation as one’s individual soul retrieval journey. If one can bring consciousness and reconciliation to all of one’s parts, one can achieve wholeness while in human form. To the extent that this remains incomplete will determine one’s karma. After all, how can one go forward as a fragmented soul. One must first discover and gather together all of one’s parts.
Elmer Green served as his wife Alyce’s shamanic guide in her journey through Alzheimer’s disease. Alyce had spent her entire adult life immersed in the highest of spiritual principles. As her energy body journeyed into the astral plane, as she went the course of Alzheimer’s, she encountered her shadow self, the repressed and unloved side of herself, for the first time.
Besides her memory loss, she became paranoid and rageful much of the time. These experiences were largely driven by her encounters with her unknown self. With extreme patience, Elmer helped her to get grounded and reconcile with her fuller self. This enabled her to enter infinity at an advanced level, well beyond the shadow bardos, when she physically died in this world.
Jung’s choice of the word complex to denote autonomous parts of the psyche truly holds up. Humans are complex beings! The key challenge in human form is to resolve all of one’s complexes and become one’s true wholeness. With wholeness one’s energy is fully united, as everything becomes possible.
From complex to unity,
Chuck
“To seek freedom… be like the flame of a candle, which, in spite of being up against the light of a billion stars, remains intact, because it never pretended to be more than what it is: a mere candle.” – Don Juan Matus, from The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
It’s a mighty challenge to be born into this life as an ego, a limited point of consciousness, separated from its greater wholeness. This limitation is the price we pay to exclusively explore one facet of the fuller diamond we are, in a life that begins and ends in space/time.
Ego has risen beyond the control of its own instinctual nature into a being capable of making its own decisions. This evolution beyond the strict control of its subconscious programming has given rise to civilization and human domination of the Earth.
This moment we are now living in is the ultimate exploration of ego’s freedom to consider only itself —its wants and needs— as the basis of its governing decisions. The sky is the limit for the ego of now, much like Icarus, whose intoxication with flying on his wax wings drew him higher and closer to the sun.
It’s inevitable that ego test the limits of its power. Simply observe the toddler testing its newfound powers of locomotion. Caution is thrown to the wind in the thrill of discovery and autonomous movement. This same excitement of power and mastery accompanies ego at all stages of life.
Truthfully, however, underneath it all, ego knows it is inherently inadequate. How could it be otherwise? Ego is but a fragment of its greater wholeness. Ego’s underlying instinctual programming has heralded evolution, devoid of consciousness. Ego’s now conscious ability to negate that programming is a tremendous feat, but ego also lacks the wisdom packed into those archetypal programs. Managing the survival of the planet requires more wisdom than ego can possibly amass in its limited time on Earth.
The evolutionary challenge now posed to ego is to rise above its egoism and discover a higher authority within itself that can teach it the path of right action. Ego must silence its own internal dialogue that incessantly attempts to keep it secure in its knowing of everything. In the silence beyond that chatter is the voice of wisdom that resides in the mature heart.
Ego needn’t feel ashamed of its objective inadequacy. Ego has the unparalleled gift of consciousness, but it must discover how to exercise its powers in the service of the greater whole that it is but a fragment of. Ego is not yet convinced it can’t simply go it alone, hence, it is currently testing the hypothesis that it is all that there is.
After the fall of this experiment, ego, like Icarus will come down to Earth with the humility proper to its status. This is the ego that will accept that it is indeed but a solitary candle amidst the light of a billion stars. However, this acceptance of its smallness, lacking any illusory inflation, is the attitude that will protect that flame from perhaps ever blowing out.
May we all find our way to the smallness of a single candle flame. With such humility, we connect to the wisdom awaiting us all in our mature hearts.
Holding space means being with someone without judgment. Holding space means being fully present without seeking anything in return. Holding space means bearing the tension of opposition. Holding space means unconditional acceptance of all that is.
Trickster is the child in all of us who simply refuses to conform to civilized expectations. That child will undermine our ego’s best intentions, as we find ourselves breaking our deeply fought for resolutions at trickster’s instigation. In a heartbeat, trickster will concoct a reason to open the refrigerator or peek at Facebook. Later, defeated and guilty, ego contritely starts anew on its road to self-improvement.
Before we completely demonize trickster, let us ponder a koan from Jesus. In Matthew 18: 2-4, Jesus is quoted as stating, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Clearly, the suggestion, on some level, is that, holding space for trickster is fundamental to spiritual evolution.
Trickster is a character that appears in the mythology of all cultures. Phil Jackson, of immortal basketball coaching acclaim, bestowed upon one of his star Chicago Bulls, Dennis Rodman, so called “best friend” of Kim Jong-un, the role of a Heyoka, a Lakota Indian trickster spirit, who both crossdresses and does things backwards to challenge the prevailing order of the tribe.
Phil Jackson recognized the necessity of holding space for this most unruly of characters, who would at times cost his team games and at other times help teammates to get over their self-importance and just have fun playing basketball. Like noted physicist David Bohm, Jackson knew the value of bearing the tension of full wholeness, over merely expecting goodness, in elevating a team to a higher level of play.
Jackson stressed the practice of patience in allowing another person to be who they were going to be, and while not protecting them from the natural consequences of their actions, not excluding them from the team either. In fact, he stressed the critical necessity of all-inclusiveness, including even the most vile trickster, in the building of a whole team.
David Bohm insisted that the way to advance civilization’s survival was to bring together all disparate characters at a roundtable of dialogue. All would commit to suspend judgment and merely express themselves and get to know their neighbors. The objective is not to advance one’s view over another’s, but simply to be part of this living wholeness.
Bohm predicted that this full presence alone, devoid of any attempt at convincing, would in itself give rise to the necessary resolution of difference. Perhaps his vision is similar to a Quaker service where, in the presence of the wholeness of the group, guidance spontaneously emerges in a channeled message. This was his social equation for human resolution, as he realized that at the most quantum subatomic level, only through the removal of subjective prejudice could science arrive at the fullest truth of energetic reality.
The trickster in all of us is our inner hero in the rough. Trickster is the ultimate Freudian slip, where the truth is most uncomfortably revealed. Perhaps that truth has laid bare one’s pretentious host at a party, or exposed one’s own most sensitive sore spots.
Trickster is daring, indignant, irreverent, ruthless, charming, hilarious, playful, spontaneous, sensitive, insensitive, attention-seeking, and highly self-centered. Trickster disdains reason and is far more driven by impulsive opportunity to shock and disrupt. Don’t expect trickster to be good at the party. Trickster is already eyeing the desert when you first walk through the door.
Don’t shut out trickster’s truth. Be patient and suspend judgment upon the full truth of the self. See what might emerge as you bear this tension. If trickster appears outside the self, in the person of another, recognize its value as petty tyrant. In Carlos Castaneda’s shamanic lineage, trickster as petty tyrant is the person who most deeply offends us.
Typically, these are the characters one would prefer most to not have in one’s life. But, from a spiritual advancement opportunity, petty tyrants require one to completely relinquish the ego’s self-importance by not engaging in a defeatist argument in a futile attempt to defend oneself. Trickster also lays bare any proclivity to self pity, which in itself depresses the ego into immobilization.
Alternatively, if one can contain one’s anger and hurt within the cauldron of self, and travel down the rabbit hole of holding space beyond one’s hurt ego, one may be led on a journey of enlightenment to hidden memories and attitudes, which reveal previously veiled truths about the self.
Trickster may never mature, but trickster will challenge one to get beyond the limitation of self-importance that burdens all egos. It may very well be that trickster’s irreverence persists only until ego truly grows up to the truth of right action, and assumes appropriate leadership. From that accomplishment trickster moves on, in its own mercurial way, to force attention upon another of ego’s many blindspots.
Most importantly, trickster offers us the opportunity to recover our lost innocence, the awe that leads to spiritual advancement.
Holding space for trickster,
Chuck