Today is a day of reconciliation within the self; a day for reflection on all you have learned about the self over the past days, weeks, months, and even longer, for the energy of change has been in motion for quite a long time.
Awareness of self at all times remains key. Awareness of self entails keeping abreast of the changing self, of the changes that have already taken place. With those changes in your cognition, make new choices in alignment with the constantly changing and growing self. Awareness entertains all possibilities, but it also remains fixed on the path of growth that you chose a long time ago.
All who exist upon that earth already chose a path of growth. Life asks you to wake up to this fact, and to force negation of life away, as you embrace the positive aspects of your life. Life is energy and how you view, use, interpret, and allow that energy to flow through you and unfold is really up to each one of you. As an individual you do have ultimate control over your life and so that is what the energy of now asks you to fathom and take responsibility for. The energy of now asks you to proceed on your life as if you were in perfect control, accepting everything as necessary, asking that each day’s tasks and unfoldings be totally acceptable and necessary as well. However, choices matter, and this is where your power lies, in making choices that lead you along your evolutionary path.
You know what is right. Be what is right for you to be. Be open to the energy that now aids and abets you as you take your journey. With awareness, make positive choices as you work your way out of your old self and into your new self. The energy of now fully embraces you on your journey.
Every step of your life is meaningful. Keep this in mind as you continue your journey today and every day. Greet life with the same openness with which it greets you. Deeper work now awaits, yet does it gift you greatly to deal with all aspects of life that still hold you to an old routine.
Break away from the old self and open wide to the new self. You already know who that is. Don’t be afraid to live this new self. There is no reason to hold back. It’s your life after all! Don’t you want to live it to the fullest? Approach it gently, thoughtfully, compassionately, but do embrace this energy that now seeks to release you from your old self and catapult you to a new self.
Each one of you must make personal decisions now. That’s just the way it is. Every little decision is important—know that. Each step, each day, is meaningful. Find the truth of that and you’ve found the key to life.
Be aware. Make choices in awareness of the greater meaning of your personal journey, reconciled with the truth that you chose that life and that journey. That is how to evolve.
The great value an exhaustively repeated negative behavior pattern offers is the irrefutable evidence it provides for learning the law of cause and effect. At a certain point, after finding ourselves in the same place, after repeating the same set of behaviors, we can say to ourselves with confidence and certainty: “If I say, do or think such and such, I will feel frustrated, disappointed, angry, hopeless and depressed.”
Of course, as St. Paul humbly admitted, knowing the law of cause and effect is no guarantee that the same demon compulsion won’t steal the show again and again and again!
Nonetheless, realizing the law of cause and effect with respect to a behavioral pattern is the first step in overcoming ignorance, what the Buddists call avidya. Overcoming ignorance is the only way to change our karma, if we understand karma to be the inevitable outcome of repetitive behavior. It might feel like punishment, but in truth karma rests completely in our own hands as the law of cause and effect demonstrates: repeat the same behavior, cause the same outcome.
If we remain ignorant of the outcomes of our behaviors we stay glued to them. Each day we wake up to our revitalized, reincarnated selves, still bound to the karma of the ignorance of the self we went to sleep with. This endless round of repetition is, however, essential, as each revolution of the wheel accrues irrefutable evidence of the karmic law of cause and effect.
Some day, in some life, it will serve to awaken us from our sleepy repetitive selves with knowledge and a readiness to change. We will simply know too much to be fooled once again. We know where it definitely leads and we don’t need to go there one more time. We have too much experience to take the bait. The tasty morsel or seductive promise of the entity—the devil behind the compulsion—is no longer interesting. The entity is dismissed, freed to move on to new life, mission accomplished, and so are we. Ironically, the entity is a slave to our own awakening and remains bound to us until we can honestly tell it to leave.
These devils, or petty tyrants as the shamans of Ancient Mexico called them, are actually our liberators. Those shamans sought to come under the influence of such devilish petty tyrants so that they might shed any vestige of self-importance, a critical component of achieving total freedom and fully awakening to our true selves and fullest potential.
Our petty tyrants…
Petty tyrants come in many forms, visible and invisible. Visible tyrants are those in our lives—family members, bosses, politicians, abusers, etc. Invisible petty tyrants show up as compulsions, overwhelming moods and emotions, limiting beliefs, and spellbinding projections that land on people and objects in the world.
What all tyrants have in common is their ability to force us into repetitive negative behavior patterns—they bind our lives; they control our karma. They attack our most vulnerable selves, the core of our self worth, without mercy!
We feel stuck, worthless, hopeless, out of control, overly in control, helpless, frozen, fatalistic, or even suicidal/homicidal in reaction to our tyrants. How can we possibly evolve in such a circumstance? How can we ever be free? So begins the cycle of repetitive negative behavior in thought, word, and deed that begins our training in the law of cause and effect. These negative patterns of self-hate and hate of others, of self-imprisonment and imprisonment of others, might last a lifetime or perhaps many lifetimes, however, our wheel of repetition is ultimately our wheel of liberation.
Once we learn the law of cause and effect, we are freed to detach from our devilish tyrant that has lost its power over us. Detachment means that our power is withdrawn from the tyrant; it can no longer hold us in check. We are then freed to fully move on to greater fulfillment, karma erased.
If we don’t feel compassion for our disempowered tyrant/devil that has held our power for us until we were ready to claim it through choice and change, we are caught in another permutation of the same karma, negative pattern revisited. Anger at the tyrant binds our energy to it, and so we are still not free.
True freedom means no attachment whatsoever to the energy of the tyrant, only gratitude for a job well done. Ultimate freedom lies in sympathy for the devil, as we both part ways and move away into new life.
Sympathizing,
Chuck
Here is a rendition of The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil by Rickie Lee Jones.
I found these Laws from old Tibet in a book I’ve been reading, The Third Eye by T. Lobsang Rampa. Here are two of the seven laws that struck me as pertinent to where we stand now, I’m sure you’ll figure out why.
The Law is hard on the rich to teach them understanding and equity.
The Law is gentle with the poor to show them compassion.
Sleep is a time of rejuvenation, of quieting the mind, but also of spiritual exploration in dreaming. And so, for the past two nights I have set my intent according to the advice of the channeled message on Monday, which you can read here. I ask my body to acquiesce to sleep as a healthy and invigorating necessity, to accept the cyclical nature of it. I ask my mind to shut down but my awareness to keep tabs on the lessons of my dreams. And then I allow my spirit free reign to take me on journeys.
The first night I dreamed of being in old places, in the house I grew up in, but I was there with Chuck. Men were outside the door, telling us we had to leave for 24 hours while new gas lines were installed in the street and into the house. It was demanded that we leave immediately so they could get on with their assignment. There was an infant in the house with us. We were not allowed to take her with us, and so we prepared to leave her to her fate, to be euthanized by the gas that would surely leak into the house and kill her. It was simply taken for granted that we must do as told; without question we simply acquiesced. We did give the baby a sedative though, to soften the blow, and arranged for one of the men to give her another in a little while. As we prepared to leave the house, I saw the gas men standing outside in their white lab coats, with their clipboards and their hoses ready to hook up, and suddenly I knew we couldn’t leave.
“No, this is wrong,” I said. “We have to go back in, we can’t let this happen, it’s wrong. It’s also wrong to leave the baby to this fate.”
And so we turned back into the house, roused the baby, and sat down with her in our laps, both of us realizing that we had almost done the unthinkable; we had almost let our baby be killed because someone told us she could not live. Magically the gas men disappeared at this point, no more outside pressure was applied, no need for us to comply.
As I pondered the dream, I began to understand that everything in the dream was about changing from an old to a new way of listening, thinking, acting, and reacting, and for taking full responsibility for what we know is right. New methods of energy must be invested in if we are not to kill our spirits—individually and collectively—the spirit of our earth, as well as our inner spirits. I understood that what we do with our minds and our bodies, what we allow our governments to do, as well as what we are doing to our planet, is at a crucial point. If we are not alert, everything we care about will be destroyed. On many levels, my dream was telling me that we must think differently now; we must refuse the missives of the petty tyrants, and move forward in completely new directions. Nothing that is old is acceptable anymore. It just isn’t going to cut it.
I refused to be sabotaged by outside energy in this dream, and in refusing it so abruptly it turned away without further incident. We were no longer bothered; the petty tyrants of the world could not budge us. At the end of the dream, Chuck and I were left holding a happy baby, eyes bright and focused, letting us know we had made the right decision. All that matters now, in the dream and in reality, is that we continue to focus on our spiritual selves, making decisions that are right in advancing the vibrant life force in all of us, so full of real potential.
The next night, last night, I set the same intent, to let my body rest while my spirit took me dreaming. I dreamed all night long and when I sensed it was just about time to wake up I asked my awareness to tell me of my dreams, for even while still asleep I sensed no recall. Suddenly I found myself standing on a bridge, a small bridge that crossed a desolate gray landscape, murky and swampy. I knew that my dreams of the night were out there in the swampy landscape. I could see them, including some wooden wagon wheels, sticking up out of the mud. I knew that the details didn’t matter at this point, that everything I had dreamed, the messages of the night, were already inside me. I knew that the only thing that mattered was the bridge I was on.
“This is the only awareness you need,” I said to myself. “You’ve learned what you need to learn, it’s all inside you. It’s time to take it forward now, to cross the bridge, to leave everything else behind and make the crossing.”
No view of what is to come…
I had no view of where the bridge was leading me, into darkness as far as I could see, but I had no doubt of the necessity of crossing the bridge. It’s time to cross the bridge. This was the imperative of my awareness, as it instructed me to leave the details behind and go forward.
As I took my first step across the bridge, the horizon lightened, and in the next step it lightened some more. By the time I woke up I had walked to the middle of the bridge and the sun was just beginning to rise. I could see that I was making the right choice. It is time to cross the bridge!
We’re all standing on the same bridge, it’s 2012 after all, and the energy of this time of change is undeniable. It’s our responsibility as beings of awareness, as seekers of what is right, to take what we’ve been learning, in waking and dreaming, and cross the bridge, knowing that everything we need is inside us. Our teachers have taught us well, our inner teachers and our outer teachers. Now they are asking us to become all that we have worked so hard to become, to become the teachers now too and lead the way to a new world. It’s time to stop listening to the gas men, to the pundits and the old guard knocking on the door, telling us that we must do as they say. We must listen instead to our hearts. We must refuse the old ways, the old thoughts, the old ideas that are no longer viable in today’s world, and turn to what is right for now. We must all accept responsibility for moving us forward.
We must accept that we are the student, the teacher, the infant, and the bridge too, but we must also acknowledge that we are the gas men and the old guard as well. But the energy that we channel and our dreams are telling us that we must live through our spirits now, accepting full responsibility for them, allowing them to grow in the real world by taking them out of our dreams and taking them across the bridge that now lies before us.
Crossing the bridge means living out that spirit to the fullest, telling it like it is, refusing the old, waking up—even at the last second, as we seem to be doing at this critical time in the evolution of our world—and accepting the grand opportunity that lies before us: to enact real change. One person at a time, by refusing to live our lives according to someone else’s plan, by taking a path of heart, we can change the world.
We do all stand on the same bridge now. It’s time to take all that we’ve learned is wrong and turn it right, not by looking back or going back, but by moving on to something new and totally different. With compassion for all living beings, we must do what’s right.
I take my dreams seriously, for I know they are my deeper self, my ancient self, speaking words of wisdom and truth. I have been trusting their guidance for a long time now and in my own life I can say that taking the bridge to change has indeed led me on amazing, transformative journeys. In fact, I am living in a totally different world now. By aligning with my spirit’s intent for life and taking the path that appeared before me, I changed my entire world. Now it’s time for all of us to take it to the next level, I see that in my dream.
I treasure you…
I must personally take the next step, the same step that we must all take. I am not only me, an individual, but I am also you, and what I do impacts you. This is the lesson of the ancients, the lessons of my dreams, and the lessons I have learned as I have traveled the paths of a seeking life.
Cross the bridge now for self and others. Don’t stop. Each step lightens the way.
Change is happening now. Don’t you see it? Don’t you feel it? In your own lives change is happening.
If you decide that you are stuck, then you will miss the exuberant energy of change that has come to visit you. However, if you decide to embrace the energy of change, no matter where it may take you or what it might mean in the long run, you will be greatly surprised and relieved of your constant issues of discord.
Discord, of spirit, comes with being human, for human body and spirit will fight each other, even to the death. Yet, keep in mind that spirit and body both never give up, for they are married to each other until a new level of understanding is reached. Only then will they relinquish their grip upon each other, a grip that is both loving and adversarial. This is an ancient bond that will determine the evolution of each one of you.
Do you fight your spirit?
Find the means of communicating with your spirit throughout the day. Ask it to guide you. And yes, your own spirit will guide you; speaking to you in terms you will understand. The only thing you need to do is listen. Pay attention often enough and finally you will get the clear messages that are being directed through your human self, your body, for this is the language your spirit speaks: Body Speak. Once you understand this, it will become easier to communicate with your spirit, and you will understand your body/spirit discord as your greatest asset.
Keep in mind that spirit self resides in body self, so most often spirit will speak through body self. This means that you must start listening to how your body reacts. Investigate what it tells you. Take your first assumption, which will most likely be a mind/thought/worry/fear reaction—perhaps even full of self-loathing or deeply self-effacing—and go deeper, beyond the mind and into the body alone. Eventually you will get the deeper meaning of the signs your spirit is communicating through your body.
For instance: If you eat too much you might get a tummy ache, bloating, gas, etc. This might make you feel bad about yourself, leading to thoughts of gluttony, inability to control desire, neediness, self-hatred, etc. But what is your body really telling you? It is really telling you that it speaks to you! In very simple language that you can actually feel!
What does your headache tell you? What is your spirit telling you by your inertia? What is your spirit trying to alert you to in your vigorous energy today? What is your spirit trying to tell you, as it speaks through the wall of your human body?
Some Body Speak is easier to understand than others, such as sleepiness, hunger, thirst, but there are deeper signals behind each and every sign you receive.
Take sleepiness for instance. Okay, my body tells me I’m tired. What do I do? Fight it? A good reaction would be to pay attention and get some rest; without resentment, anger or worry, simply acquiesce. Take it to another level as you acquiesce. With care of self in mind, allow rest to be what it should be: rejuvenating. Ask spirit self to let the body rest for so many hours. Ask dreams to guide you as you sleep. Ask awareness to remember dreams upon awakening. Use sleep time on many levels, with the first intent being care of body, and second being spiritual work.
This is what body and spirit desire in human beings: constructive cooperation, enthusiasm, and commitment to growth. This is what life itself desires, life as an evolutionary project, for each one of you is a work of art. Each one of you is the inspiration and the artist, and the project itself. Each one of you has all that it takes to create a beautiful artistic creation: The Self.
Requirements for such creative work are simple: willingness, perseverance, and openness to the possibilities that you are constantly being offered to do the work of the self. All of you have the materials and tools within.
Don’t be so afraid of life. Life is yours; within you it seeks expression. Begin there. Stop looking for it outside of you and look inward. This is where your creative energy awaits, where spirit resides, in your own body. The two, spirit and body, are inexplicably aligned, even when you don’t think they are.
Ask them to teach you, and then wait, with the sure knowing that they will. Be ready to receive your guidance. Learn how it comes. It may take some time to figure it out, but just remember this: everything is meaningful. Do not dismiss anything that comes to you, for you may be missing the guidance you so desperately seek.
Life itself shows you the way to enlightenment, fulfillment, wholeness, connection, and all else that you seek. Be open. Be kind to self and others. Learn impeccability. Learn these things and what they really mean each day that you live your creative inner life.
Work on the self is the most unselfish of acts. Find the means to begin a new project: evolution of the self, ergo evolution of the world. Resolve the discord between body-self and spirit-self, for the self and for the greater good. You can’t go wrong. Listen to your Body Speak.
