Have you checked out the daily guidance on our Facebook page? If you haven’t gotten into the habit of reading our Soulbytes, we offer this reminder. They come from our reading of the energy of each day. Posted early in the morning, they offer focus and intent for the day ahead. It’s always interesting to reflect at the end of the day on just how well they set the stage.
Offered with gratitude. We hope you enjoy!
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico were definitive in their designation of the mind as an outside entity that has become a permanent member of the human being. In modern biological terms we might view the mind as a symbiotic partner that both preys upon and contributes to our human experience.
The parasitic quality of the mind is most evident in the experience of worry. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico observed how the mind generates empty concerns that are fueled by the fires of obsessive worry. This fiery fury excites the central nervous system and generates an energetic intensity that actually serves as the food for the parasitic entity.
Earlier this week Jan’s dream of the loud knocks on the door reminded me of living on West 86th Street in New York City in my early twenties. I’d lie in bed at night and toss and turn, terrified that someone was going to attempt to break in. We lived in a very secure 24-hour doorman building, yet my fears culminated in my getting up and barricading the double-locked and chained front door with several chairs.
In the light of day those nightly terrors would easily be forgotten or dismissed, but the residue agitation in the central nervous system could lead to attaching to many daytime concerns. The truth is, however, that worry is a product of the mind. Its conjurings impact the body’s central nervous system to generate an excited energy for its own consumption. This action by the mind is similar to a cancer cell that seeks to enter and feed off the energy of the cells around it with little concern for the well being of the host it is destroying.
Interestingly, another function of the mind, rationality, actually provides the necessary tool to counter and overcome the deleterious impact of worry. From an existential here and now place, the rational mind can take responsibility for where we place our attention. In the face of the extraordinary pull to fixate on the conjuring creation, the rational mind is free to decide to shift its attention, i.e.: “I can choose where I put my attention.”
I can choose to place my attention on my breath. I can choose to place my attention on a chakra, to tune into the state of sensation in my heart. I am free to breathe into and expand my heart center, my solar plexus, my throat, my head. I am free to say the words of a prayer. I am free to repeat a mantra. No one and nothing can take away my right to place my attention where I want it. And with that I can effect a shift in my central nervous system. I can restore the calm that the predator seeks to disrupt. This may take continuous effort, but if I am persevering the predator gives up.
And so, like most challenges that we encounter, there is a valuable polarity to our divided mind that offers excellent and immediate opportunity for evolutionary advancement. The predator instigates trouble through its worrisome conjuring, yet simultaneously it offers us the awareness of freedom of choice through the rational mind. If we use this tool of choice to subdue the predator we reclaim our power of attention, and a calm central nervous system to boot. Longterm results are increased consciousness and control. With this powerful mindset firmly in place we are prepared for deeper journeys into the ever unfolding mysteries of life, and beyond.
With mind set on infinity,
Chuck
I dreamed last night. In the dream I was waiting for something to arrive, a delivery was going to be made. Suddenly I heard loud knocks on the front door, two vigorous raps as loud as gunshots followed by two more, equally loud. When I heard the first two knocks I imagined that it was the delivery that I was awaiting, but as I heard the second two I woke up, sure that it meant something else.
I lay awake in bed wondering if someone was indeed outside the front door in the middle of the night. I waited to hear more rapping but none followed.
As I dozed off again I remembered that loud knocks in dreaming are often an indication of spirit calling, such knocks the precursor to going out of body. I also sensed that the dream was a premonition of something to come, that some news would come in this manner.
I acknowledge that my spirit is preparing me for something. Perhaps it’s asking me to allow myself to go out of body, to not get startled by the knocks in the night but to allow them to take me to a higher level of dreaming. Perhaps it’s letting me know that change is coming, or that I will be startled by the arrival of something, expected but unexpected as well, for the loudness of the knocks was startling.
I’m not too concerned. I refuse to let myself worry over something that is only fiction at this point. Instead I’m determined to let life unfold as it will, for I know I have no control over what happens, in fact I believe that it’s wrong to interfere with life’s unfolding. I am, however, focused on maintaining my awareness of this dream message, for I believe it is a message. It might not be at all what I think though, and so I am open to what unfolds over the next few days and weeks.
I have had premonitions many times before in dreams, things that eventually unfolded just as I had dreamed. Sometimes our dream messages are very specific and sometimes they are metaphorical. It’s hard to know which they are until life’s unfolding shows us the answer.
Training our awareness, reminding ourselves to remember and to document our experiences, is a good way to connect our dreaming experiences with our living reality. They are connected, but we only realize this as we dare to ask ourselves to remember and stay alert, to value our dreaming experiences, allowing them to enhance our waking experiences.
In the end, I choose to take my dreaming experience as true on all levels. Yes, it’s a premonition, but it’s also a call from my spirit because I know that my spirit is always calling. It called me to do my recapitulation, and it continues to challenge me to be fully present and aware, whether I’m dreaming or awake.
Awaiting the delivery,
Jan
Here is the channeled message for this week, brought to you by Jan and Jeanne! Have a great week!
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder can be viewed as the psyche’s attempt to achieve its wholeness through the ego’s encounter with its projections upon the outside world. On the surface this might appear contradictory to the debilitating impact of obsessions and compulsions, but a deeper understanding of the psyche’s drive for perfection, through the challenge of sorting through this disorder, may serve to redirect the focus of these powerful debilitations toward the far greater opus of achieving wholeness.
Carl Jung spent much of his professional career rescuing the archaic texts of alchemy from obscurity and through channeling alchemical information from the Akashic Records through various alchemical characters of his active imagination. Many astute clinical scholars have been utterly perplexed at the clinical usefulness of these musings. Jung never cared much for making his discoveries easily understood; he was an avid explorer of the unconscious who left for the future the task of discerning their pragmatic utility. Hardly a scholar, I find myself nonetheless tasked with making some of his discoveries relevant. And so, with OCD I find incredible alchemical relevancy.
Alchemy was, in an outer sense, the precursor of modern chemistry. But at its inner core, alchemy was the mystical tradition of many renowned scientists—Sir Isaac Newton among them—who sought to experience and resolve the mysteries of the soul. The opus of the alchemist was to take matter and transform it through a series of processes into gold, the symbol of ultimate value. These processes involved the differentiation, purification and synthesis of opposing elements into a cohesive whole. Similarly, the goal of human life is to reconcile the great polarities of living in this world with the energetic dimension beyond this world to achieve a golden wholeness of completion.
The alchemist started with matter in all its impurities—called the nigredo—that is, matter in its completely contaminated, mixed up state. It was then subjected to a series of alchemical operations to reach the full purity of gold. These purification processes included such functions as solutio, the dissolution of matter in water, as well as calcificatio, the burning off of impurities by fire. Jung saw these steps in the process as the alchemist’s projection of their own psyches onto the matter, and their ultimate art as a process of transformation. Transformation requires a sealed container where these operations can be securely housed.
In OCD, the psyche frequently projects the impurity of its internal polarities onto the contents of the material world. This intermingling is analogous to the mixing of the contaminated material at the beginning of the alchemist’s opus. In OCD, powerful compulsions elicit behaviors to separate out this contamination through ritual practices. An individual under the influence of these powerful projections is tormented by the potential danger of contamination and frequently engages the alchemical function of solutio—excessive hand washing, for instance—to rid the self of the impurities of contamination. Eventually, these unconscious projections inundate and ultimately overwhelm and severely restrict even the simplest of functions in daily life.
The opus for OCD treatment becomes one of detaching from the control of, and the automatic infliction of, the projections onto the outer world. The ego cannot control the projections, but it can take a behavioral stand against the compulsions that issue forth from the unconscious. Thus, although an obsession insists that “I’m contaminated” after a handshake, I can refuse to do the cleansing behavior that the compulsion insists upon as a means of relief. The true cleansing, the true purification process rests here, in the ego’s stand for reality over the projective veils of illusion. Here the ego acts as the sealed container for the alchemical process by bearing the tension of the urges of the projective psyche through not following its commands.
In its contained retort, the ego seals in the energy of the projective psyche and bears the mounting tension of its energetic pressure. This mounting pressure, seeking release, is the fire that then burns through the veils of the projective illusions. The substance is clarified and true reality is readied for synthesis into gold. The ego, thus having passed its test, accrues a piece of its lost wholeness. The Opus of OCD meanwhile moves on to its next mysterious projective challenge.
Eventually, the energies of the psyche transform OCD itself into a fact of a former life, no longer an energetic determinant. When that happens, the clarified energetic awareness thus achieved moves forward, freed to see and be in the world as it truly is.
Everything matters,
Chuck