When worry comes remember that it is but a figment of imagination, that it does not exist except in your mind. If you attach to it, it will grow and fester, it will absorb your energy and become an enormous weight, it will burden you and make life difficult.
When worry comes visiting, do not let it in. Instead scan the body for issues and reasons for its presence, for normally worry arrives when it is time to shift. When it is time to take the next step on your journey you can expect your fears to manifest in some way. Keep in mind that issues that arise when you are flowing nicely along in your life are most often related to unfinished business within the framework of your human self.
Aside from the human self, however, is the energy self, the self who knows all, who sees all, and who pushes you to evolve. This is the self who teaches detachment and the process of growth, as its main purpose is to evolve.
Find your worries as signs of growth, asking you to go to the next level, to deepen your evolutionary task—in reality, your spirit requesting fearlessness and a deepening acknowledgement of the truth of the self as a being of infinite possibility.
When worry attaches, draw inward, and without worry guide your awareness to take you beyond your concerns to the truth of your spirit. You are being shown something important each day of your life. What is it today?
The answers lie within, waiting for you to discover, accept, and move on toward greater fulfillment. It takes work, this spiritual business, but the journey itself is most amazing!
Person-in-situation is a phrase coined by one of Social Work’s greatest contributors, Florence Hollis, in her 1964 book Casework: A Psychosocial Theory. Person-in-situation captures the interconnected nature of reality. To know reality is to know the full mosaic of person-in-situation. Figure removed from ground cannot be known in entirety; the picture is incomplete. Deprived of context, we are clueless.
In recapitulation, we relive the full context of our experiences in situations from the past. Full context includes the experience of our physical body, as well as that of our energy body. Frequently, in traumatic experiences, these two bodies separate. While the physical body absorbs the physical sensations of an experience the energy body watches the experience from a detached vantage point, above and beyond the physical body. In addition to the physical and energy bodies, the emotions and cognitive perspectives of person-in-situation are critical components of the experience being recapitulated. Finally, all the characteristics of the environment in-situation, most especially the words and behaviors of all the characters in the experience, must be included to fully return to and fully relive a moment frozen in time.
Too often we remain stuck, unable to fully free ourselves from a frozen moment from the past because some component of the experience eludes our direct retrieval. That component remains present in our current lives—often symptomatically—either in the body or in a distorted belief or perception of self or reality, but its true meaning remains incomprehensible until we can place it in the mosaic of the past where it really belongs.
Carlos Castaneda suggested that we suspend judgment to deepen our experience and direct knowledge of reality. When we recapitulate it is often judgment that bars our full access to the truth. Judgments we make about ourselves, judgments we have internalized, block our full access to the truths of person-in-situation. Judgment holds us in check. If we deem ourselves bad or scandalous because of the actual experiences we have had, those experiences cannot be fully known and released. Instead, they become energetic powerhouses that emotionally and cognitively control our identity and freedom to be in the world.
In the 3-hour-long extended version of the movie Margaret, currently available only on DVD, a sixteen-year-old girl engages the attention of a bus driver who drives through a red light, hitting and killing a pedestrian in the cross walk. So begins a story of person-in-situation. As the movie progresses we must constantly ask ourselves: What is the true reality of this experience in-situation? Where does responsibility lie? What is the process of recovering all the fragments of an experience? What judgments preclude resolution of this traumatic event?
What is reality?
The release of this movie was delayed for four years because the director fought to deliver the full mosaic of the story. Modern sensibility allots 90 minutes as the maximum story time for consumption in the digital age. The trouble is, edited reality becomes just that, a quickly formatted, judged story that condenses and skips over the full mosaic of person-in-situation, i.e.: Reality.
In Margaret, we are treated to the challenge of finding resolution amidst a field of judgments. And just as in this movie, we too, in every experience of our lives, are responsible for the fact that we are a person-in-situation. This true and actual fact cannot be separated from our personal history. If we want to fully know ourselves, we must let ourselves know the full truth of our experiences, unedited by judgment.
When we allow ourselves to take in the full unedited person-in-situations of our lives, our experiences can be fully digested, completed, and released. Resolution de-powers the myths we have had to carry about ourselves, myths that secretly code edited fragments of truth, myths that have awaited debunking, for the time when we could allow ourselves to fully recapitulate.
Experience, once recapitulated, recycles energy previously frozen in the past, revitalizing it and allowing it to proceed deeper into life, deeper into reality. We emerge from the recapitulation as a whole person-in-situation, ready to fully live in the true reality of every moment.
Person-in-situation,
Chuck
NOTE: I highly recommend watching Margaret. The version I am referring to is only available on DVD, released in July of this year, and not the film version released into theaters. The iTunes version is not the same version either, so if you look for it be sure to get the extend version, 3 hours long, released in July 2012. Here is a Wikipedia link to information about the movie.
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” So said Pierre de Chardin the French Jesuit priest and philosopher. The first time I read this quote, I knew that he was right. It explained everything to me; my very existence suddenly made sense. I was here on earth to have a human experience, but I really was that spiritual being that I always sensed I was. I felt I no longer had to apologize for being gentle and loving, for wanting peace and love in the world, for my so called naiveté or simplistic views of how to solve the world’s problems. I knew that only such idealistic views embodied the real nature of reality and that only they would work to resolve conflict and achieve worldwide peace.
De Chardin also said these words when the Nazis were fast advancing in Europe during World War II: “Peace cannot mean anything but a HIGHER PROCESS OF CONQUEST…The world is bound to belong to its most active elements…But no spiritual aims or energy will ever succeed, or even deserve to succeed, unless it is able to spread and keep spreading a fifth column.” In essence, he was letting the world know that the Nazis were the “most active element” at the time, the kind of energy that had the potential to spread like a wildfire, and it was imperative that the spiritual rise to the occasion and conquer it. It was a dire warning that we too, in our time, must pay heed to.
John Lennon once noted that Gandhi and Martin Luther King, both proponents of peace and nonviolence, had been assassinated for their efforts. He didn’t understand why people wouldn’t “just give peace a chance,” and then he too was assassinated.
Yeah…
We are at a point in our lives, in the life of our planet, when the imperative to give peace a chance is at its most crucial, and for spiritual consciousness to dominate and spread like wildfire. For that is the only way that real change will happen, by good once again becoming the dominant force, the HIGHER PROCESS, as de Chardin suggests. De Chardin also spoke elegantly about love being the most powerful of all forces that we as human beings could employ for ourselves and our planet, the same love that John Lennon, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King embraced.
When you are in a room of peaceful people you notice how peaceful and calm the atmosphere is. When you are in a room of happy people, you notice happiness. When you are in a room of angry people you notice anger, you feel anger, it takes over. When you are in the midst of evil you can smell it. Which kind of room would you like to be in?
As simple as it sounds, the only way to make change happen for the better, is to change the way we think, act, and react, the way we treat each other, the way we treat the planet. To become a peaceful Self is the first step in enacting change outside of the self, to learn to take responsibility in the world and inside the self, to really be the spiritual beings we are, to stop blaming and judging each other, to realize we are all the same.
Flower power…
If I set an even greater intent than usual to be peaceful, gentle, loving and kind for the rest of my life, toward myself and others, I will be part of a new spiritual consciousness. The more who are engaged in this new peaceful and loving consciousness, the more powerful grows a movement of real change, soon a spreading wildfire. Many of us are children of the 60s, still idealists at heart, gentle souls still hopeful of peace in our life.
I support the movements started by Gandhi, King, and Lennon—among the many others I have not named, men and women of peace and real caring—who knew that we are all indeed spiritual beings having a human experience. A new peaceful and loving existence requires taking both a personal journey and a badly needed universal journey, each day being different as we go out into the world and interact with others, as well as in our innermost thoughts. If we all decided that love of each other and love of the planet was the most important aspect of our human existence, how quickly change could happen and perhaps a new national mood would prevail and spread like wildfires around the world.
Choice matters. Making the right choice, knowing the right choice to make, may at times appear impossible, as in certain circumstances the right choice may remain unclear no matter how much the mind attempts to make a decision. However, once a choice is made it becomes the right choice, for no choice is ever wrong as it leads one along the path of life.
The issues you must confront in life will appear in front of you not matter what choice you make; no matter what path you are on your core issues will arise again and again. So, rather than focusing so much on the choice to be made, on choosing what is right, focus instead on discovering your life’s core issues and work instead on resolving those.
In so doing, your choices will become clearer, for once you know what your core issues are, and once you begin the process of changing the self by addressing those issues, your choices will appear with great clarity. The choices that now cause such distress will appear as distinctly different choices, one as absolutely right and others as old and unappealing. Once your inner work is in progress you will find, almost immediately, that as core dilemmas are revealed they will direct you to what you must do next to really grow and change your life. And growing and changing, facing fears and resolving the deepest pain, woundings, and struggles, is how life evolves for everyone.
As one faces the inner self and resolves the cores issues, life begins to flow more easily, like a meandering river naturally taking the journey it is meant to take, en route to connecting with all other sources of water, meeting and joining, flowing around the world. So is life, a continual flow of energy constantly seeking connection will all other sources of like energy.
So you see, as regards choice, the ultimate choice may seem selfish in comparison to choices regarding the needs of others in your world, but in resolving ones core issues one resolves far more than just the problems of the self. One becomes part of a healing energy that is so badly lacking and needed upon that earth at this time.
Some beliefs, like a catechism, are handed down as a prescribed description of reality to be memorized, recited, and believed. Other beliefs assemble inside our minds as we strive to understand why things happen as they do. Beliefs are descriptions that create order and ascribe meaning to our world. Once a belief sets in, whether through the internalization process of socialization, or through some introverted process devoid of outside messaging, beliefs themselves become hardcore “facts” in our minds. And these believed facts are highly impervious to change.
Beliefs constructed in childhood, at such an impressionable time of our young ego’s development, can take up residence in our minds for a lifetime. Our beliefs, positive or negative, become our security blanket; they keep us safe and familiar as repetitive thoughts that comfort and guide us through the maze of life.
Ironically, the belief “I am ugly” can be as equally comforting as the belief “I am beautiful,” from the point of view of inner security. Security rests upon a known, familiar, redundant, predictable interpretation of reality. Consistent beliefs, positive or negative, build stability.
If one has held a lifelong belief that “It was my fault,” the liberating realization that “It wasn’t my fault” can feel more destabilizing than liberating, as it sends us into a deconstructed free fall of feeling that there is nothing safe to hold onto. This free fall, however, is a free fall of the ego alone. Ego is not Self. Ego is a part of a greater self, a Self to which it must awaken.
Twice born Self—beautiful Atman…
In Hindu philosophy the Atman is the true Self, the inner Buddha or Overself of Buddhism, the inner Christ of Christianity, the inner Nagual of the shamans of Ancient Mexico, the inner spirit in all of us. The ego is a functional tool of Atman, the tool of conscious discrimination, the decision maker that aligns action with right action. Right action is action in alignment with truth, with Atman. When ego uses conscious discrimination to deconstruct a false belief, ego goes into free fall, because the world it clings to is outed as a world of false beliefs, which must be surrendered.
Ego must allow the truth of Atman to manifest. To do this means relaxing defenses once dearly needed to construct a “safe world.” This construction is now identified as an anachronous artifact, a young ego’s construction of an illusion needed to create safety. The ego must allow itself to be reborn with Atman in the true nature of reality. This is the real meaning of being twice born—first time as an infant that grows an ego identity through accumulated beliefs, but more importantly grows an ego capable of conscious discrimination.
This exercise of conscious discrimination by ego leads to the collapse of its false beliefs and the birth, however traumatic—and all births are traumatic—into the Self, into the truth of the Atman. This is consciousness and Self reborn in second birth. This is the ultimate goal, to be twice born, with the opportunity for growth in this world, as enlightened Self.
