Wrapping the Garden

I must admit this picture did make me chuckle, and while I don’t think it personally applies (others might) I can certainly relate to its inference. I’m not Methuselah, but I’ve been around long enough to know the workings of the world myself by now.

Anyway, it’s late August here—nearing fall in the northern hemisphere, and gardens are still plugging away producing the essentials for a long winter’s abundance before the first killing frost in early October.

As a kid I can remember the immensity of my parent’s orchards and gardens on two acres filled with fruits, berries, nuts, and all possible vegetables that were then processed for long-term storage by them (and me eventually) in our kitchen. My grandmother had the greenest of thumbs, and under her tutelage my mother and I learned to can, freeze, pickle, and cold-store everything we grew on our own lands so we always had food to eat during the coldest of months ahead.

My parents and grandmother had gone through the Great Depression of the 1930’s, also World War II where growing Victory Gardens was encouraged to stem national food shortages, and to help support your family and neighbors. I arrived later in their lives (adopted) so that they were more financially stable and emotionally solid in dealing with the world at large by then, but they also knew what it took to survive the toughest of circumstances as they were battle-hardened from their own life experiences.

So from my parents and grandmother’s training I learned the importance of self-reliance and self-determination. You didn’t wait around for someone else to do your work for you or help you with your tasks—you just DID them. Don’t whine—just DO. Strong work ethics always kept food on the table so get off your rear and get it DONE now. That was probably their greatest gift to me, and no doubt where I learned to be so self-sufficient.

On our current 10-acre property, my spouse and I still garden which means we can, freeze, and pickle a variety of crops and even cold-store butternut squash in the basement for months. Old habits die hard and serve you well if they advance your longevity. There is nothing like pulling out a quart of stewed tomatoes or Bread and Butter pickles or frozen green beans, corn, and beets mid-February that you picked yourself from your own garden. And since I like to cook, it really isn’t work to create a meal with whatever we were blessed to harvest during the heat of summer. It is actually very satisfying to do so.

This leads me to the eventual point of all this reminiscing: We are who we are for many reasons—some genetic, some ingrained, some later-learned. I can’t link my genetics to my parents and grandmother, but I can link my strong sense of independence and self-determination to the lessons that they taught me—to how they showed me to be—in other words, how they showed me ‘to be like them.’

That is the legacy we can offer those who come after us—to be the model of how to live and love and treat one another. To show others by our simply doing and being.

You don’t have to grow “older and crankier” to claim your space here now—you can claim it by ‘good example’ just as easily—by being generous and compassionate—loving and giving. It’s the same amount of effort.

If you want to be of importance to this world, then BE THE CHANGE you want to see around you. Let future gardeners harvest fruits from trees of your ‘good intentions’ planted long before their time—offer them ‘the best of humanity’ intentionally planted now by YOU.

Give them future sustenance from your hard-earned wisdom and the depth of your experiences. Show them. Teach them. Mold them to be hardy souls who stand strongly for their freedoms and independence. But show them also what it takes to get along well with others—then to reiterate to others later what they in turn learned and lived.

Above all else, show them how to share their abundance and to sincerely care for others besides themselves.

In other words, you don’t have to get crusty with age—you can get creative instead.

The Akasha

Alberto Villoldo was pushing a new book or course, and just sent out a newsletter that really explained the ‘cosmic energy environment at large’ better than he had previously, so I’ll lift a few sentences from that to share here:

“…Clearly the indigenous people of the area (Amazon) knew something about health that we Westerners didn’t know. What was their secret? I returned home with an empty backpack, but with something I thought more valuable—insights from the Amazon healers who had taken me under their wing.

I learned that there were two magical ingredients to health: The first could only be found in the invisible matrix of the universe—what I call Oneness. The second was the plants that promote health, yet do not treat specific disease. (He lists turmeric and resveratrol that are Nrf2 activators, but I’m focused on the Oneness field in this post.)

The ancients knew all about the invisible world. In the Hindu Vedas it’s referred to as akasha, or the vastness of space; the field of wisdom that is the foundation of the cosmos. While Western science holds that the cosmos is made up of dead energy and matter, indigenous peoples consider the cosmos a living, intelligent field they know as Spirit. …”

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Now why does this matter to us?

It matters because the akasha—the living, intelligent field of all possibility is where all acquired information, experience, emotions, and knowledge is stored. I personally believe it is first stored through our High Selves—our accumulative database of all lifetimes and learning environments for each individual; and then all High Selves are networked into Spirit itself—the greater overall field of Oneness.  And we can tap directly into Oneness if we access it through our High Self.

So when psychics say they are “reading your akashic records,” they mean they are tapping into the database of your experiences, emotions, and learning through all lifetimes of your existence in whatever form you inhabited, and in whatever state of being you might have experienced it—physical or non-physical etc..   

When shamans or energy workers in general (like REIKI) work on someone, they are not so much dealing with the person’s physical body as they are working in the energy field and the surrounding energy matrix of that person. The energy matrix is layered like an onion with specific functions per layer.

I think according to Barbara Brennan, the 5th layer out from the body is the blueprint layer from which physicality is projected, so often to heal or change some aspect of the physical body one goes to the ‘blueprint layer’ first to detect where a problem has arisen.  Here is an explanatory quote from Wiki:

“(Brennan’s book) Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy Field, is considered a “classic”[10] in the field of spiritual healing, with reputedly over one million copies in print in 22 languages. Brennan claimed to receive intuitive information about her clients during sessions, and to see repetitive patterns in the energy fields of her clients indicating common roots underlying their difficulties.[6] Brennan’s books contain drawings of auras and energy fields, and descriptions of how human energy fields interact with each other. She popularized a seven-layer model of the energy field, each layer being structured of differing frequencies and kinds of energy and performing different functions.[citation needed] Brennan viewed the chakras as transformers that receive and process universal energy, as well as enabling expression and healthy functioning of the individual’s own consciousness and psycho-physical make-up. She was best known for taking a methodical approach to energy healing.[6]

Brennan created a type of energy healing techniques that she called ‘full spectrum healing’ to work on the seven layers of the human energy field or auras.[4] Brennan claimed that the technique she called spiritual surgery works on the fifth level of the human energy field using the power of a spirit surgeon. …” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Brennan#Ideas_and_theories )

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Hands of Light is a great book; and it explained energy layers and healing problems in the energy field to me better than my own REIKI teachers ever did, so I give credit where credit is due. And I also suggest that students in my REIKI classes buy her book to better understand how what we are doing In REIKI actually works.

What I found during my years of using shamanic, REIKI, or even hypnosis techniques to help clients in some way was that each specialty area had a slightly different focus. Each used different tactics and methods to reach similar positive results, and each was basically working in the energy matrix—even hypnosis—to achieve the same goals.

We are all a part of the Oneness—the akasha—Spirit. So when you decide to ‘manifest’ something into your life, you are tapping into that same ‘field of all possibilities’ to bring it into your consciousness.

All is energy—all is frequency—all is possible.  Hold the intention for manifestation strongly and purely, and then raise your personal frequency to match your intention, and it will eventually appear.

It’s not woo-woo thinking. It’s an actual phenomenon we don’t fully understand yet. But we will, because it works.

Enlightenment on a Stick

Hey it is county and state FAIR season where dusty fairground aisles, so over-crowded with multi-food vendors, are hawking everything edible skewered on wooden sticks (and likely deep-fried to boot) for your epicurean exploration.

And since I won’t be attending that precarious gastronomic adventure this year, I notice it has generously come to me instead in the form of ‘food for the soul and the mind,’ rather than for my more delicate stomach.

From my decade-ago shaman apprenticeship friends offering their own class version of Peruvian shamanism complete with a visiting Peruvian shaman guest teacher in temporary local residence; to Alberto Villoldo’s online Shamanic Class offer of “Time Masters: The Practice of Infinity; Revealing the Wisdom of the Jaguar Priests” (for $700 no less!!!); to an email from a friend who was a disciple of the female yogic saint Sri Anandamaya Ma—Mother of Bliss (1896-1982), who offers a new book of translations of Ma’s holy satsangs (“a gathering in the truth”) and conversations—or basically it’s a book of her teachings from 1960 through 1981; to Alicia Power online offering weekly high-frequency transmissions to help raise your personal energy vibe into the higher realms of bliss consciousness (and I’m sorry that I missed this last one); to a couple intuitive-empath/astrologers who describe the month’s current energy environment and predict this month’s likelihood for challenges or easy rides, personally and collectively.

It’s been a veritable cornucopia of“enlightened” clickable choices lately.

And just to note here that even though I am poking a bit of fun at what I’m currently receiving in my email, I am also very thankful that the world has shifted high enough for these options to now appear there.

 A few years ago, those email invitations for raising your awareness and consciousness would have been few and far between, so I think we are collectively progressing higher in species awareness in general, even though you’d never know it if you watched the national news channels.

If anything, it gives me hope for a better tomorrow for all of us.

So enjoy your summer fare, both physically and otherwise, and if you are looking for something hopefully digestible on a stick, you have many options available right now.  

Cycles and Patterns

The more days that accumulate behind me, the more patterns in my life I can discern.  

I recognize that like the image above, our life spans flow not in neat straight lines from the moment of birth to our eventual demise, but instead they flow in spirals slowly circling round us like the earth annually revolving around the sun.

Our timelines, while moving constantly forward away from this moment and the next, are also continually cycling back near to where we once began to allow a more educated perspective shift for the next revolution around our limited existence here.

The effect of this perpetual spiraling allows for an increased awareness perspective that permits us to observe ourselves slowly evolving through each growth experience, along with the hopeful goal of gaining greater understanding of our capabilities and limitations while we are encased in this restrictive human vessel.

Example being: If you made a noticeable mistake in a previous unpleasant experience, then when a similar experience again presents itself before you, you now have the advantage of your past action’s memory to reconsider its effectiveness or lack thereof; and you can use that hard-gained knowledge to make a better decision moving forward in THIS current situation—rather than simply repeating the same mistake a second time. 

That’s great isn’t it?  To get a second chance to get it right.   Well maybe it is, because while yes, we all have that ‘learn-ability from past mistakes’ advantage if we use it, learning from our past mistakes is not broadly utilized individually or collectively.

And that is one of our largest problems both as self-aware, evolving beings and as a progressing society in general.  To an overwhelming degree we, individually and collectively, just keep making the same mistakes over and over except with different people and in slightly different environments.  

Unfortunately it often takes a lot of cycling back around a few additional times into similar situations or experiences before we comprehend ‘the lesson’ from them so we can then move forward to a new learning opportunity and to gain even greater awareness of ourselves and our primary intentions.

Or as Yoda might have quipped: “Creatures of habit are ye. Dense and slow to comprehend ye be.”

So as age and time play-out in your life, stop for a just moment or two and sit yourself down intentionally to witness both where you’ve been against where you currently are; and if you don’t like what you see before you in your present life, then take an entirely NEW path forward away from your comfort zone—away from your standard behavior patterns—away from your self-imposed restrictions—and breathe NEW air in a very different environment with better intentions for increasing your knowledge-base and mental acuity.

Observe, assess, reflect before you auto-react, and then walk a different way from this day forward. Be a different person. Shift your perspective on life and yourself and on everything around you, so the next time all those years hurry past and you eventually reevaluate where you are, you can say with certainty, “Yes, I evolved.” And know that it is true.

The Power Is Within You

Evidently Savonn is in a more expressive philosophical phase lately that aligns closely to my own beliefs.  I’ve been following him for a few years, but he hadn’t previously shared these sentiments quite as eloquently as he is doing so currently. And because he is saying it all so well and providing another perspective beyond my own opinions, I’ll share another of his postings here for others to also see. 

Now compare these statements below to the previous post-share here from once evangelical Jim Palmer (“Harmful Beliefs”).  Pretty similar, aren’t they. They are two very different people, different backgrounds and personal journeys.  And yet they both arrived at the same conclusion.  “The Power is within YOU.”

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“The problem I see a lot of people having is they’re approaching their Spiritual Journey through the lens of “Christianity” and you have to reconcile that by letting that go. You are God whether you want to accept it or not but you feel guilty, afraid and weird saying it because you were told it was blasphemous. You were taught that so you’d be controlled by FEAR. All that Source is who YOU ARE, and you have the potential to experience it all while being in the body. You can’t do both because of the contradictions of foundational truth that exists on each side.

One says God is outside of you—you are born in sin and have to be born again to receive the blessings of God. Bad things happen to you because you sin and through your sins you invite satan into your life. You are only worthy of a Gods love if you follow conditions.

The other says you are a unique replication of Source, expressed out of love made into a Soul having a human experience. You’re a powerful co-creator with the Universe. All that is, ever was and will be, lives within you. You have capacities, capabilities, gifts available to you waiting to be expressed through your being. You are the messiah, the healer, the gift giver and bringer of light—it’s all within you; and no other force, deity, entity anywhere in all of existence is more powerful than you. It’s through your belief, thinking and feeling nature that you activate the power within you. The Light of the Creator lives within you, and there’s no place where it isn’t except for the shadows of illusion you believe are real.

The power is within you.”

Spirit Medium Savonn Champelle

www.savonnchampelle.com

Shedding the Costume

Lots of pure truth in this statement below.  He also offers ‘spiritual readings’ if you are interested.

 “…Before we are our bodies and constructs we adhere to and live from, we are energy first. We are pieces of God incarnated into a body. When you accept this as truth and live from this… you can learn to attract what you want and live in flow. You are the source to what blocks you and the source to your freedom & flow. It’s not the govt, a group of people, or society… it’s within you.

Unfortunately we let what’s outside of us: our parents, family, religion the govt, the media, false narratives, racial & gender constructs, sexual constructs, ‘reptilians’ etc. infiltrate our minds and the subconscious takes this in as truth and gives this to us as a reality. So we don’t know we are the ones creating it until we start to question everything, and wake up from the matrix. What you think is real isn’t? We’re all manipulated into thinking this, but it’s a lie. The sooner you let go of your attachment to labels, identity, and form that’s when you’ll find your true joy, happiness, sovereignty and freedom.

I’m attracted to and drawn to people by their light and frequency not race, gender or their physical temple that’s always secondary. It’s Soul to Soul connection and my mind is no longer in the way of what I’m attracted to. Why be defined by a human label as opposed to the infinite light that I AM? There’s nothing and no one more powerful than you, but you don’t believe it and still think the God you’re praying to is a Man up in the sky when it’s an all knowing all powerful presence that has no gender, race or rules to follow living inside of you.

You are governed by the laws of your own consciousness, and the hell that exists is one of your own beliefs. You are just light that’s all… everything else is a costume.”

Spirit Medium Savonn Champelle

www.savonnchampelle.com

Small Victories

Hadn’t thought about it much until this morning when noting my own small victory that in itself seemed nearly insignificant until I compared it to what had become a too frequent occurrence to ignore.

We all have these inconspicuous ‘small victories’ daily but we are usually too focused on the day’s larger issues and requirements that we push those lesser daily challenges aside as ‘no big deal’ and plow forward to the next necessary task at hand.

But for one short moment maybe we should stop and acknowledge that ‘small victories’ are what keeps us going when the world at times seems too much for us to carry by ourselves.

Small victories are the decent night’s sleep for the frequent insomniac, or the fruitfully full inhalation of life-giving oxygen for the asthmatic or chronic lung congestion patient, or a moment’s appreciation by the semi-depressed person for the lilting robin’s song at daybreak that gives a fleeting sense of joy if allowed.

Small victories are happily witnessing the successful struggles of your physically or mentally challenged child mastering the smallest task like walking a few steps or eating a few bites, or even offering you a reciprocal smile when you wonder if even that is too much to hope for from them.

Small victories are the parent with dementia suddenly coming out of the perpetual mental fog and momentarily recognizing who you are and what you meant to them both then and now.

Small victories by their very presence are the optimist’s evidence that God, in whatever form, does exist, and the pessimist’s new doubt in their long-standing theory that every bad turn of events is preordained to happen to them.

Small victories, despite their ephemeral nature, keep us going when the going gets really tough and we are so darn tired of the near constant turmoil everywhere we look.

But the thing is, you really have to watch for them—those small victories—because without acknowledging all the usual minor life challenges in and of themselves, you might completely miss suddenly being victorious over them.

I think this ‘acknowledgement’ of successfully navigating LIFE’s daily gauntlet is the precursor to tackling the tougher challenges we will inevitably face; because without savoring those occasional ‘small victories’ both mentally and bodily, how do we know that we stand a solid chance against a greater foe or a tougher situation?

Without some evidence of our true self-determination and confidence in our own psychological stamina, how do we even attempt to face down the larger dragons in our life?

We do so by recognizing and celebrating our winning those smaller tests of character strength, because they are the ones that have successfully prepared us for those larger LIFE challenges ahead.

Harmful Beliefs

Ran across this lengthy explanation/exposition on the shadow side of religious beliefs from Jim Palmer, a former evangelical megachurch pastor who no longer subscribes to the same doctrine that he once did. Just for noting my own opinions on the subject matter, anything that I STRONGLY agree to in his comments I will bold.

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“ Jim Palmer

As you know, I once was an evangelical megachurch pastor and my pastoral career stretched over many years. Eventually, I could no longer teach Christian doctrine with a good conscience and realized this teaching was not truly changing people’s lives… and so I walked away from the whole enchilada.

Below are 14 things that the misguided religious establishment doesn’t want you to know. Speaking for myself and my personal experience, I was not able to see or admit these things to myself. I truly got into ministry initially because I wanted to make a difference and help people, and I relied upon the belief-system I learned as the proper framework to achieve this. It took a lot of post-religion reflection to see the ways this belief-system was hurting people.

I offer the below list in hopes that you might disentangle yourself from harmful beliefs and attitudes impacting your life.

14 things the misguided religious establishment doesn’t want you to know:

1. Toxic religion is rooted in fear, especially fear about the afterlife. It leverages the false doctrine of hell to win converts and demand holiness. The fear of God’s disapproval, rejection, abandonment and punishment is another hallmark of toxic religion.

2. Clergy have no innate authority. Holding a church leadership position or having a theological degree does not imbue a person with special divine authority or superiority. The terms “anointed”, “called”, or “chosen” or titles such as “pastor”, “priest”, “bishop”, “elder”, “evangelist” or “apostle” do not confer any innate authority on an individual or group.

3. We hold sacred what we are taught to hold sacred, which is why what is sacred to one community is not sacred to another.

4. The stories in our sacred books aren’t history, nor were they meant to be. The authors of these books weren’t historians but writers of historical fiction: they used history (or pseudo history) as a context or pretext for their own ideas. Reading sacred texts as history may yield some nuggets of the past, but the real gold is in seeing these stories as myth and parable, and trying to unpack the possible meanings these parables and myths may hold.

5. Prayer doesn’t work the way you think it does. You can’t bribe God, or change God’s mind through obedience, devotion, or groveling. The underlying theistic premises of prayer are untenable.

6. Anything you claim to know about God, even the notion that there is a God, is a projection of your psyche. What you say about God—who God is, what God cares about, who God rewards, and who God punishes—says nothing about God and everything about you. If you believe in an unconditionally loving God, you probably value unconditional love. If you believe in a God who divides people into chosen and not chosen, believers and infidels, saved and damned, high cast or low caste, etc. you are likely someone who divides people into in–groups and out–groups with you and your group as the quintessential in-group. God may or may not exist, but your idea of God mirrors yourself and your values.

7. Nobody is born Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Protestant, etc. People are born human and are slowly conditioned by narratives of race, religion, gender, nationality, etc. to be less than human.

8. Theology isn’t the free search for truth, but rather a defense of an already held position. Theology is really apologetics, explaining why a belief is true rather than seeking out the truth in and of itself. All theological reasoning is circular, inevitably “proving” the truth of its own presupposition.

9. Becoming more religious cannot save us. Religion is a human invention reflecting the best and worst of humanity; becoming more religious will simply allow us to perpetuate compassion and cruelty in the name of religion. Because religion always carries the danger of fanaticism, becoming more religious may only heighten the risk of us becoming more fanatical.

10. Becoming less religious cannot save us. In fact, being against religion can become it’s own fanaticism. Becoming less religious will simply force us to perpetuate compassion and cruelty in the name of something else. Secular societies that actively suppress religion have proven no more just or compassionate than religious societies that suppress secularism or free thought. This is because neither religion nor the lack of religion solely nullifies our human potential to act out of ego, greed, fear, hostility, and hatred.

11. A healthy religion is one that helps us own and integrate the shadow side of human nature for the good of person and planet, something few clergy are trained to do. Clergy are trained to promote the religion they represent. They are apologists not liberators. If you want to be more just, compassionate, and loving, you must do the personal work within yourself, and free yourself from the conditions that lock you into injustice, cruelty, and hate, and this means you have to free yourself from all your narratives, including those you call “religious.”

12. Religious leaders claims that their particular understanding and interpretation of their sacred books should be universally accepted. Religious leaders often say, “My authority is the Bible.” It would be more accurate for them to say, “My authority is what they taught me at seminary the Bible means.” People start with flawed or false presuppositions about what the Bible is, such as: the Bible was meant to present a coherent theology about God or is a piece of doctrinal exposition; the Bible is the inerrant, infallible and sole message/”Word” of God to the world; the Bible is a blueprint for daily living. Too often religious leaders make God about having “correct theology.” There are a lot of unhappy, broken, hurting, suffering, depressed, lonely people in church with church-approved theology.

13. If your livelihood depends on the success of your church as an organization, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that you will mostly define and reward Christianity as participation in church structures and programs. Christian living is mostly a decentralized reality or way of life, not a centralized or program-dependent phenomenon. Church attendance, tithing, membership, service, and devoted participation, become the hallmarks of Christian maturity.

14. You are capable of guiding your own spiritual path from the inside out and don’t need to be told what to do. You naturally have the ability, capacity, tools and skills to guide and direct your life meaningfully, ethically and effectively. Through the use of your fundamental human faculties such as critical thinking, empathy, reason, conscience and intuition, you can capably lead your life. You have the choice to cultivate a spirituality that doesn’t require you to be inadequate, powerless, weak, and lacking, but one that empowers you toward strength, vitality, wholeness, and the fulfillment of your highest potentialities and possibilities.

Jim Palmer “

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Relearning

The new literacy?  Maybe in a ‘retraining for a new vocation’ sense, but to ‘learn, unlearn, and relearn’ are actually personal survival skills developed over the years as one faces every new dawn while striving to see the sun peacefully setting at that same day’s end.

We all know that life is tough for those not sheltered from its harshness.  For everyone actively pursuing their own dreams and ambitions there will be both good days and bad ones, including the knowledge that what works well for you one day may not work so well a week from now because in reality that’s just how it is—the only true certainty in LIFE is change.

For some folks just when you think you’ve got the hang of living—finally got that ‘living thing’ all mapped out and you are feeling relaxed and comfortable with your labors, something or someone will throw a stone into your efficiently-turning “my life” cog and derail the entire gear while twisting the gear-bearing shaft in the process, so that your once smooth-flowing operation never quite works the same way again.

When that ‘cog glitch’ happens to you your entire LIFE mechanism is now broken and unfortunately nothing short of a complete machinery overhaul will get it functioning properly again.

So in effect what you had once learned as the KEY component or attribute to successfully living your life (your charm, your intelligence, your looks, your inventiveness, your intuitive guesses, even your unwavering work ethic), now lies broken on the cement step of your home’s threshold awaiting your entrance, and suddenly you can no longer unlock that same familiar door to reach the inner sanctity of your personal domain—it’s like being locked out of your own house with a “Foreclosure” sign staring you in the face and feeling clueless as to how it happened.  What once worked so easily for you, now no longer does; and those who once supported you, now turn their backs when you arrive.

This means that your life has drastically and horrifically changed in some unexpected way that requires YOU in turn to change to meet the NEW challenges that you now must face.  The emotional/psychological effect of such sudden change can be devastating to anyone. It can literally break you unless you toughen up quickly to the new standard now required for you to simply survive, let alone thrive, under its deconstructing pressure.

But in time you learn that if what you once did no longer works for you, then you must now unlearn what had become your second nature—those ‘slipped into’ auto-pilot behaviors once used to live your life. You must unlearn the habits of your previous day-to-day existence because they simply no longer apply to this new situation and this vastly different operating environment.

Suddenly you must UNLEARN all your previous habits and beliefs that have brought you to this momentous change point, and RELEARN how to start life again in some new way because there is no other choice among your current life options.

Your final recognition of the necessity of this restart moment affects you like a ‘shakeup to your internal makeup’—meaning you either rebirth yourself in some productive manner to start a new and different way of living, or you self-destruct into oblivion along with the remnants of your old life—remonstrating in self-pity to any audience along the way.

When you can finally get your head around the severity of your current condition, you are then forced to ask yourself this question: Do I want to remain as a stinking, smoldering ash pit in the memory of what my life once was, or do I want to rise like the fabled phoenix slowly lifting itself from the lapping, searing, all-consuming flames—rising slowly out of the smoky haze as you pull yourself from these old-life ashes until you can fly free once again?

That decisive moment when you define your true intent becomes an inflection point—a direction change: To either die ingloriously here in the ruins of where you once learned to be, or to rise freshly reborn into an entirely new way of being—which means developing new habits, new living patterns, and maintaining a new perspective on your reconstruction endeavor.

But while you are still hunkered down in the ash pit you must face the true decision to go one direction or the other, because you can no longer be the same person that you were the day before the situational change; when the earth suddenly shifted under your feet forcing you to no longer follow the same path as before or even to walk in the same manner that you once did.  While you may prefer the old way of living and being, you simply can’t do that now because that life is no longer an option for you.

So your only other choice available is to unlearn what you once knew that had worked so well for you, and then relearn what now might work for you since the world took such a drastic turn away from what had once been your comfort level and certainty.

You must relearn how to live your life.  And relearn how to shift your perspective on everything and everyone around you, including to relearn how you view yourself as a loving and compassionate human being; and most importantly, you must relearn the true value of your own self—you must relearn how to believe in yourself again.

Quite simply: You must RELEARN how to live your LIFE, and maybe even relearn what LIFE means to you now that your perspective has so drastically shifted by those life challenges.

It might not seem easy to think of in this manner, but relearning is actually a natural evolutionary process across all species.

Relearning is what we do every day. We daily input, assess, and react to the world around us, and when that input changes, then we adjust our internal assessments and gauge our reactions accordingly. It’s just that normally our input changes are fairly minor or of minimal consequence to our lives; but when those inputs are seismic and possibly life shattering (major losses like deaths, divorces, illnesses or injuries, job elimination, relationship endings, etc.) that’s when our minds can’t register how to assess them properly and that throws us into mental chaos—that’s when that randomly tossed pebble breaks a cognitive gear-cog and our lives seem to uncontrollably wobble or to even spin out of control because we can’t quickly determine how we actually arrived at this ‘ash-pit point’ where most of our efforts now involve fighting off the overwhelming smoke threatening to suffocate us.

As dire as it may now seem, keep in mind that this happens to everyone at some point in their life—just in different ways. It may be hard. It will truly suck—no doubt about it. But it still happens; and you have to move through it as carefully as you can, and then move beyond it in time. This is how we grow in consciousness. We move beyond the challenges we must face.

So as disconcerting as this might sound, don’t fear relearning.  We all have to do it. You are not alone in your struggles.

To survive the worst of the worst in your life, you quickly learn to spray your wings with fire retardant before the flames engulf you, and eventually when the challenge lessens in intensity, you will learn to first strengthen your resolve to survive, and then rise again from the ashes of what you once were. 

Remember: Smoldering ash pits are everywhere around us, and phoenixes are the only true survivors of this world with its perpetual challenges.

Now your main NEW goal is to become a phoenix.

“Whether summoned or not, God will be present”  – CG Jung

I’ve been a long-time fan of Carl Gustav Jung after reading his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

So basically here I’m just passing along info sources and helping others to see that ‘beliefs’ in general  are important to how we think of ourselves and consider our purpose in the world, or even more so in how we plan and conduct our lives; but that “beliefs” as a whole are not necessarily reliant upon religious organizations or to specific religious doctrines.

In fact, many religions can do more harm than good to a child’s primal inner development by demanding that all practitioners adhere to specific claims made by that particular religion. J Krishnamurti would frequently lambast organized religions for that very thing.

This was today’s post from the site Carl Jung:

“Jung had a religious upbringing, both sides of his family made up of pastors and theologians. This Christian background permeated his life’s work and psychotherapeutic approach, inspiring a lifelong phenomenological and hermeneutic interest in the influence of religion, mythology, and spirituality on the psyche of the individual.

While he considered himself a Christian, he felt at odds with Orthodox Christianity which he believed never adequately dealt with the question of evil. He believed that a truly spiritual or religious person was not blindly faithful but found their way independently to God and the experience of God. Thus, he lived not by the Christian myth but by his own personal myth, seeking inward to find his father’s external God.

Jung believed modern society was in a state of spiritual crisis, for the veneration of rationalism, objectivity, and science in place of nature, myth, and ritual (that which was coveted by our ancestors) had dire psychological and societal consequences.

‘We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend… But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the ‘discontents’ of civilization’ (Jung, MDR).

To him, the domination of critical reason made for an impoverished life, which should be counteracted through an exploration of the unconscious, from which the more mystical side of man could be drawn and his life enriched.

‘Small and hidden is the door that leads inward, and the entrance is barred by countless prejudices, mistaken assumptions, and fears. Always one wishes to hear of grand political and economic schemes, the very things that have landed every nation in a morass. Therefore, it sounds grotesque when anyone speaks of hidden doors, dreams, and a world within. What has this vapid idealism got to do with gigantic economic programs, with the so-called problems of reality?

But I speak not to nations, only to the individual few, for whom it goes without saying that cultural values do not drop down like manna from heaven but are created by the hands of individuals. If things go wrong in the world, this is because something is wrong with the individual, because something is wrong with me. Therefore, if I am sensible, I shall put myself right first. For this I need—because outside authority no longer means anything to me—a knowledge of the innermost foundations of my being, in order that I may base myself firmly on the eternal facts of the human psyche.’ (Carl Jung, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man)

Jung believed that optimal psychological health was not possible if one had consciously rejected his or her intrapsychic connectedness with the regulating religious aspect. He was a phenomenologist of the psyche, examining the healing function of numinous experiences and their role in the development of human consciousness and in the process of individuation. He believed that our spiritual needs – at their core, the desire to find meaning and purpose within our lives – are ‘as real as hunger and the fear of death’ (Jung, 1928, CW para. 403).

He was not interested in God as a transcendent reality beyond the psyche, but as inbuilt and always present within it. To Jung, God exists as a psychic reality, his Zurich house inscribed with the following message ‘Whether summoned or not, God will be present’(‘Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit’).

Art: Peter Birkhauser”

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What Is Normal?

“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.” – quote Vincent Van Gogh –Image: Android Jones

Nassim Haramein                

What is it like to be considered ‘normal’ or to live a ‘normal’ life?

Pretty boring, I’ll bet.

That doesn’t say much for us as a collective does it that we prefer boring to non-boring?

But NORMAL is how most societies function.  When social behaviors waver and go awry, that’s when societal dysfunction occurs—that is when societies either fall or are torn apart.

However individually how much forced NORMALITY can we stand before we crumple into a corner heap defeated?

When Krishnamurti describes TRUTH as a “Pathless Land”, how do you then register Van Gogh’s comment of “normality is a paved road?”

Taken together I’d guess that continuing on with Van Gogh’s thought would be a pretty accurate assumption: “…It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.”

So if you want flowers in your life, you may need to veer off the ‘normal’ pavement and start forging your own way through the underbrush. You’ll have to ‘find your own truth’ in a way that feels right for you.

You can be normal to want happiness in your life, but how one defines happiness may not be the same for everyone.

So do we crave “normality”—fitting in to the group at large—or do we crave feeling happy and purposeful about our own life direction?  And is there a difference?

Only you can answer that question as best it describes your personal situation.

Example: In an argument do you ‘go along to get along’ with your partner or your social group, or do you ‘butt heads’ to stand your ground and get your way especially when you feel strongly about the issue at hand?

And is that the normal behavior for your situation? Is that behavior right or wrong either way?

Take the time to examine your NORMAL to determine if that particular mode of operation is in your best interest or if it’s time to change things up a bit.

Who knows, maybe you’d prefer a leisurely stroll on a hard level surface to cover the distance faster, or maybe you’d actually accept a rougher terrain if you can enjoy flowers sprouting all along the way.

Or maybe you now crave variety in your travels and ‘normal’ just doesn’t do it for you any longer so you’re looking for a completely different geography that GPS doesn’t even cover.

It is YOUR choice because it’s YOUR life. You decide what works best for you. You will FEEL it when you find your preferred mode of operation.

And you will know if it’s right for you by how peaceful it makes you feel inside.

The Pathless Land

It’s been decades since I last read Jiddu Krishnamurti’s books, but they are still around and well worth perusing.

J. Krishnamurti was an astute and interesting soul. Discovered at adolescence in south India by the occultist Charles Webster Leadbeater of The Theosophical Society who upon seeing him sitting on a bench near their compound, recognized “the purity of his aura,” and approached him to inquire of his origins and intentions.  

Willingly Krishnamurti  was then unofficially adopted by the society of Theosophists and culturally cultivated to become their own messianic spokesperson, which he later denounced and declined to be.

But by that time in his mid-30’s he had developed his extreme spiritual gifts and had indeed become a premier philosopher and intuitive in his own right, who then toured the world giving lectures on all aspects of the ‘LIFE’ experience.  (My kind of stuff.)

His books and memoirs are always interesting and thought provoking, so just to sample his documented comments, here is an excerpt on TRUTH from his parting lecture with the Theosophical Society in 1929:

“I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path. … This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth. I am not concerned whether you pay attention to what I say or not. I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.” (Wikipedia)  [64]

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