FINDING YOUR TRUTH

Metamorphosis of the Gods—Shifting the Collective Unconscious

Drawing by Carl G. Jung, from The Red Book, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Book_(Jung)

Tao & Zen (image and quotes below from this site)

“Really interesting archetypal illustration drawn by Carl G. Jung. This man who looks like a wizard with wings he called Philemon, a kind of wisdom guide that came to Jung in his dreams, that he would talk to… with flowers blooming at his heart level, perhaps symbolize that he is holding the wisdom of nature in his hands? Buddha has also been represented holding a flower, symbolizing the transmission of the dharma that cannot be spoken, but is found in our connection to Nature…”

“’In his memoirs, Jung reported that he would often converse with Philemon as he strolled in the garden of his lakeside home in Küsnacht, Switzerland. Speaking with Aniela Jaffé, his close friend and colleague, he recalled, ‘Philemon was simply a superior knowledge, and he taught me psychological objectivity and the actuality of the soul. He formulated and expressed everything which I had never thought.’”

Source: Who is Philemon? https://philemonfoundation.org/about…/who-is-philemon/

“’We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a ‘metamorphosis of the gods,’ i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious [mind] within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science. Reason alone does not suffice. You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return.’” ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self (1958)

***

Carl Gustav Jung, “a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology…” (Wiki) was another one of my aspirational heroes (the ‘BIG 3’ for me—Einstein, Fuller, Jung) during my early research on better understanding myself and others; with my favorite Jung book being his autobiography called, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

In his autobiography Jung admitted to being somewhat psychically gifted and extremely intuitive (connected higher to sources of wisdom). Those gifts lead him to developing his own philosophy on psychoanalysis separate from Freud’s at the time; as well as creating his ‘archetype theory’ which was basically this: “(Archetypes) are the psychic counterpart of instinct. It is described as a kind of innate unspecific knowledge, derived from the sum total of human history, which prefigures and directs conscious human behavior.” (Wiki on “Jungian Archetypes”)

Meaning that we unconsciously recognize and naturally react in specific ways to certain ‘archetypal images and situations’ when we encounter them in our lives.

The ‘recognizing’ part is the unconscious aspect of how archetypes affect us, but the ‘reaction’ part is the more predictive human behavior because of that unconscious recognition.

Jung was artistically gifted as well, and loved to create personal ‘mandalas.’ “Carl Jung refers to the mandala as ‘the psychological expression of the totality of the self.’ Interestingly, Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, explored the psychological effects of mandalas, while studying Eastern religion.” (Wiki)

He was a fascinating guy to study.

The Mobius Strip—Mind Beyond Death

A mobius strip is an endless looping band where the separate ends of the band were reconnected after giving it a half twist so the eye travels up and over and back again—right-side up then upside down then right-side up, etc.. You know—like the LIFE/DEATH process itself.

It’s a continuum of sorts—a thing with no beginning and no end.

So I think that was an appropriate image for the book cover of Dzogchen Ponlop’s Mind Beyond Death.

And for some weird reason this book has been on my mind lately so I’m guessing it’s time to share the info with others in case someone out there might be interested in it.

Back when I was seriously studying all that I could find on alternate realities, states of being, and life beyond death, etc., I got hooked on reading about Tibetan Buddhism. (I have a personal library of CDs, books, etc. for each ‘phase’ of learning that I have seemed to travel—even an entire ‘book shelf’ for each phase.)

So back in 2011 I was in this ‘completed the Shamanism phase,’ was still in my ‘Kundalini Awakening phase’ (which truly sucked and still does at times) and was trying to figure out what was actually going on with what I was personally experiencing—you know, trying to make ‘sense of it’ rationally, because my life had become “50 Shades of Strange” nearly all the time back then.

Except ‘rational’ was not a word that applies to the illogical and unpredictable aspects of LIFE; and I just wanted something (more likely anything) to make a ‘kind of sense’ to me even if the context in which I had to view it was totally different from how I had previously considered it.

So one of the info sources I ran across at the time was Dzogchen Ponlop’s Mind Beyond Death, which described the Tibetan Buddhist bardo states of consciousness.

Per Wiki on BARDO:

“In some schools of Buddhism, bardo (Classical Tibetan: བར་དོ་ Wylie: bar do) or antarābhava (Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese: 中有, romanized in Chinese as zhōng yǒu and in Japanese as chūu) is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth.”

Per Amazon books on Ponlop’s MBD:

“…An indispensable guidebook through the journey of life and death, Mind Beyond Death weaves a synthesis of wisdom remarkable in its scope. With warm informality and profound understanding of the Western mind, the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche makes the mysterious Tibetan teachings on the bardos—the intervals of life, death, and beyond—completely available to the modern reader….”

Per the bookcover blurb:

“ Drawing on a breathtaking range of material, Mind Beyond Death shows us how working with the bardos can be used to conquer death. Working with the bardos means taking hold of life and learning how to live with fearless abandon. Exploring the six bardos—not just the three bardos of death—MBD demonstrates that the secret to a good journey through and beyond death lies in how we live.
Walking skillfully through the bardos of dream, meditation, and daily life, The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche takes us deep into the mysterious death intervals, introducing us to their dazzling mindscape.…”

Per me:

“Holy cow! Is that what I actually saw?”

***

Yes, it likely was. Anyway when I first read it, I took pages and pages of notes from the book; and I ran across that old note collection a few days ago realizing that this subject is what I had been writing about in the broadest sense, but without specifics; so I’ll close this current epic with one last quote and if anyone is interested in the book, you’ll know without my going into more depth on it.

Per Mind Beyond Death, page 11:

“The teachings of the six bardos point out the fundamental continuity of mind through all states of existence. From this perspective of what we call ‘life’ and ‘death’ are simply concepts—relative designations that are attributed to a continuous state of being, an indestructible awareness that is birthless and deathless. …That nature of our mind is empty, luminous wisdom; it is primordially pure awareness; it is wakefulness that transcends duality. …”

Holographic Snapshots of the Whole

If you look closely at the image above, you can see a graphic metaphor for LIFE as we know it.

That blurry whitish background is the daisy itself more clearly focused in the lesser dew-drop versions of it on the spider web. As each droplet reflects the object that it mimics, it does so within its own volume capacity to hold the image precisely and in perfect proportion to its own droplet mass.

We are those varied-capacity droplets riding atop the web of LIFE reflecting our image source as the light shines through us. They may seem to our eyes to be greater or lesser degrees of the background image, but that is only due to the limits of our perception and to the angle of our view.

If our perception was unlimited and our awareness was unhindered, we could see that all reflected daisy images are equal and perfectly aligned within each droplet.

Just as we could eventually realize that our own reflected image of Grand Consciousness was already perfect in and of itself.

Examining the Roles That We Play

Eckhart Tolle

“Authentic human interactions become impossible when you lose yourself in a role.” – Eckhart Tolle

Over the course of our lives we learn many informative techniques to advance our personal lives in one direction or another. We may even choose a role in life often associated with our strong need for personal satisfaction or for our sense of inner fulfillment. Or sometimes we seem to fall naturally into a role that seems most necessary for us to adopt at the time.

That was an inarticulate but politically correct way of saying that we often become a facsimile of whomever we need to be at the time most necessary for us to be that person.

We tend to play roles in life. Sometimes we do it automatically—we mother, we protect, we defend, we humble ourselves before others, we lead, we follow, we pretend, we appease, we often do whatever is required of us at the time, even if we don’t know WHY we are doing it.

So why do we play these roles?

We may do so because we feel that we must play a certain role in that scenario to ‘get along’ with a significant person in our life (spouse, parent, boss, friend), or we may feel a strong inner compulsion to ‘act a certain way’ because we need that other person that we are role-playing for to like us—to accept us—or at least to NOT ostracize us from their apparent influence in our life.

Role-playing became extremely important to us when we were dependent on others to provide for our most basic needs—like when we were children and had no other means of supporting or defending ourselves. Childhood is often when we learn the roles most necessary for our simple survival in a more hostile family environment: good girl—mother’s helper—friend to the lonely—daddy’s little girl—caretaker—confidant.

Or there were worse roles that we had few options in choosing as a child because we were forced to pretend that they were ‘normal’ for our family’s living arrangement back then, like the role of: family scapegoat, primary recipient of a parent’s ridicule, disgust, anger, or even parental sexual frustration.

Sometimes ‘normal’ was a strange word to use for what roles many children were required to adopt to simply survive their childhood, so I try to be very careful when I critique role-playing in general.

While we often think of ‘playing a role’ in life like putting on a different weight coat depending on the weather outside—meaning that you don what is required for your immediate comfort—role-playing can actually be a far deeper ‘need response’ than that, and can have primal childhood roots for that particular role’s development.

But when you become an adult and decide to live more authentically as the person that you have the true potential to be, it helps if you can recognize the previous ‘role-playing’ for what it often was: theatrical attempts to appease or placate, or to appear to be more “likeable” than we think we naturally are; or perhaps role-playing was your primary childhood survival-technique to make it through the day or night with what’s left of your sanity intact.

More enlightened folks can talk about showing ‘greater authenticity’ all that they want (including myself at times), but if there is an existential reason for the role-playing, then there will be deeper issues to address than uncovering a relationship’s more shallow, interactive plasticity.

Role-playing is often about developing some form of extroverted demeanor to gain acceptance by others (or at least to not incur their wrath), while authenticity is to stand strongly in your own skin and say to anyone within earshot that, “I have value in and of myself, with or without your personal approval or acceptance.”

Sounds obvious in a way but for whatever reason, not everyone can easily make that simple statement. Sometimes our inner fear or insecurity is too overpowering to allow us the courage of standing strongly on our own without the need for someone else’s approval.

If a ‘strong sense of self’ wasn’t something that we developed at an early age, then role-playing to counter not having it is often a hard behavioral habit to change, so I’m not condemning anyone or criticizing their manner of behavior if my talking about authenticity feels awkward or too foreign to them. Not at all.

But the hardest aspect of making a core personal change—especially when we’ve been relying on a deeply-evolved behavioral standby that has helped us survive to our current age, is to realize first and foremost that we are ‘falling into a role’ of some sort for whatever reason, whenever we naturally do it.

Self-awareness is only one step toward greater self-understanding.

And self-understanding can lead first to self-acceptance and then to self-empowerment, which often eliminates the need for most role-playing in our lives.

Finding your truth means to better understand who you truly are, and to appreciate yourself for being that remarkable person.

The Amazing Verb Called ‘Bucky’

I am such a fan of R. Buckminster Fuller that whenever I see someone else quote him, I stop whatever I’m doing and read it. This 5ft-2 inch intellectual powerhouse was an ‘American engineer, architect, and futurist who developed the geodesic dome—the only large dome that can be set directly on the ground as a complete structure and the only practical kind of building that has no limiting dimensions (i.e., beyond which the structural strength must be insufficient).’ (quote from Britannica.com )

My first awareness of Buckminster Fuller came as a child when I read a “Reader’s Digest” article on how he had turned his own life around from grief, economic failure, and suffering severe depression to become one of the most influential humans on the planet:

“…Fuller contemplated suicide by drowning in Lake Michigan, so that his family could benefit from a life insurance payment.^[11]
(But instead of jumping into the lake…) …Fuller said that he had experienced a profound incident which would provide direction and purpose for his life. He felt as though he was suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a white sphere of light. A voice spoke directly to Fuller, and declared:
‘From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.^[12]’
Fuller stated that this experience led to a profound re-examination of his life. He ultimately chose to embark on ‘an experiment, to find what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity’….^[13] “ (Wikipedia)

***

Fuller was still living when I was in college for my bachelors degree, and one of my art professors at the time required us to read two of his books: I Seem to be a Verb and Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. (The rest I read on my own because by then I was hooked.) So this morning, the Tao & Zen folks actually brought a smile to my face with this re-posting in his words:

Regenerative Cultures

“~The Wisdom of Bucky Fuller~
‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
You cannot change how someone thinks, but you can give them a tool to use which will lead them to think differently.
We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.
If I ran a school, I’d give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I’d give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.
A problem adequately stated is a problem well on its way to being solved. We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.
Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren’t any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn’t be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.
Nature is a totally efficient, self-regenerating system. IF we discover the laws that govern this system and live synergistically within them, sustainability will follow and humankind will be a success.
You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all you experience to highest advantage to others. Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.
It is not for me to change you. The question is, how can I be of service to you without diminishing your degrees of freedom?
The minute you begin to do what you really want to do, it’s really a different kind of life.’
Source of Quotes: https://www.azquotes.com/author/5231-R_Buckminster_Fuller ”

***

He was my kind of guy, and I really miss him.

The End of Victimization

I was listening this morning to a free promo video on Caroline Myss’ “The Mystical Truths Behind Radical Change”. Pretty sure she has an entire course on the subject (“The Great Transformation”), and I can offer you the Myss promo to view to decide if you might want to learn more: https://product.soundstrue.com/the-great-transformation/free-video/

It seems to be on the power of transformation in our personal and collective lives. And in the promo Caroline states: “Truth is the great change agent in transformation.”

I certainly agree with that. But sometimes getting to or even recognizing TRUTH when you do see or hear it is often hard to do.

So I titled this post with something that she stated in the promo:

“Transformation is consciousness—the power of choice and its consequence….We can no longer see ourselves as victims…we can no longer say we are helpless. We have to recognize the power in every thought and attitude that we have.. …This is the end of victimization.”

As a believer myself in taking responsibility for our personal actions and in taking responsibility for the environment that we create around us (the collective situation) I see tremendous value in freeing ourselves from our sense of victimhood, because I believe that we are only victims when we think of ourselves as powerless and victimized. In truth, we have choices—multitudes of choices that we make throughout every day of our lives. We simply need to realize that for the most part, we are making those choices unconsciously.

Our primary task is to recognize those choices as such before we automatically make them to see if that choice is indeed the best possible choice that we could make at that moment.

Now this takes a lot of self-awareness to instantly recognize when you are being offered “a choice” daily among many alternative options, because getting out of bed in the morning is actually a choice. Eating or not at any time, is a choice. Leaving the house is a choice, etc., etc. Most of those choices we assume are required for us to do, when in truth, we are intentionally choosing them for a reason perhaps known only to our subconscious mind.

Who we hang with, who we talk to, who we amorously pursue—these are all choices that we make. What we do in life in general, how we view our lives, where we put our thoughts and energies—are ALL choices.

Now you could look back at your childhood and say, “Hey, I didn’t have a lot of choice in anything that happened to me way back then that contributed to who I am today,” because someone else made the majority of those decisions for you—for better or worse. And yes, maybe one’s childhood could have been more nurturing and supportive or less truly horrific, but you can’t change that past now. What you can change is how you choose to view it, how you currently move through it, and how you reset your life to no longer consider yourself as ‘a victim’ of it. Those are choices you CAN make.

It is very easy to fall into victimhood, especially when others support you in that role. So your biggest task is to stop thinking of yourself in that manner, and then look for supporters who also share that NEW view of you being ‘strong and powerful’ and capable of protecting/defending yourself in any situation.

Get some help from therapists or positive support groups who encourage you to take more control of your life. Take some classes, change your perspective on life, change who you hang with, try different experiences, get out in nature more, be more independent, break old habits, try a new healthier lifestyle, etc., just DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT than what you normally would do. Change it up—shift your thinking—lighten your energy.

But really be honest with yourself about how you are feeling and what you are thinking. I mean, TRUTH is what you are searching for isn’t it?

Per Caroline Myss:

“Truth is the great change agent in transformation.”

“Transformation is consciousness—the power of choice and its consequence….We can no longer see ourselves as victims…we can no longer say we are helpless. We have to recognize the power in every thought and attitude that we have.. …This is the end of victimization.”

Be you—BE strong—DARE to be powerful!

Because that’s who you truly are.

An Encounter with Reality

So what is ‘reality’ saying to you today?

To me reality is saying ‘spring is finally here and new life is popping up everywhere.’

But if I were in deep meditation, that ‘reality’ might appear quite differently.

This is one of the hardest concepts to consider: that what you perceive to be REALITY is simply that—it’s a PERCEPTION.

And although it may be hard to imagine that it is possible to ‘perceive’ in a completely different way, the act of doing so makes ‘reality’ a matter of your focus on frequency (sound and light waves) reception.

We are naturally beings with built-in multi-sense receivers that inform and awaken us to the various stimuli in our environment; BUT (and it’s a large gluteus maximus at that)—what we are often oblivious to is that we choose our ‘focal points’ around us—we choose what we recognize and acknowledge as ‘the composition of our world’; and we tend to choose that ‘reception input’ unconsciously, like when you’re driving the car after someone else has, you automatically tune that radio dial back to your favorite station because you like what it plays—because it feels comfortable to you.

So when you seriously practice meditation—when you go deeply into silence and serenity—when you go beyond the bells and whistles of this world’s many distractions and attention hijackings, then a new world (dimension) opens up to you for further exploration.

And as long as you are in deep meditation and resonating with exploring that ‘new world’, then your ‘reality’ may seem quite different. In fact it may be SO different that you begin to wonder WHICH reality is the one that you actually occupy, and which is the one that deludes you into believing that you live there?

“Meditation is not evasion. It is a serene encounter with reality.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

So then which reality is REAL; and is the whole point being that ‘REALITY is the entire frequency range of the tuning dial’ that you can adjust at will?

And even more importantly, …WHY IS THAT?

Miracles Everywhere

Ecological Consciousness

“Around us, life bursts forth with miracles—a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere.

Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings. When we are tired and feel discouraged by life’s daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there.”
~Thich Nhat Hanh,
Photo by Tri Setyo Widodo

Climbing the Mountain of Consciousness

From Resonance Science Foundation:

“Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting points and its rich environment. But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the mastery of the obstacles on our adventurous way up.” – Albert Einstein

***

This Einstein quote at Resonance Science Foundation is likely in celebration of the newest theories on states of energy/matter and atomic structure that are flooding the theoretical science communities at present—shifting attitudes and raising awareness on massive scales.

And considering that Einstein was at his peak in the early 20^th century—with his ‘Theory of Relativity’ being nearly 102 years old now; AND since we have just landed two additional Mars rovers (5 total so far) about a week ago, I doubt that even Einstein could predict the massive breakthroughs in physics, astrophysics, engineering, medicine, and most of all in technology; including Artificial Intelligence and robotics that we are currently enjoying.

So as we climb that unfathomable mountain of higher consciousness that looms before us, the world we once assumed that we knew so well becomes an entirely different place primarily because our perspectives have massively shifted to a higher plane of awareness, and we can now see through more enlightened eyes than the majority of us did 100 years ago during the last world-wide pandemic.

We as a species have evolved in knowledge and understanding of the world around us—we have advanced in technological leaps and bounds toward something we cannot even presently comprehend—OUR FUTURE as a human species.

“…It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting points and its rich environment. But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the mastery of the obstacles on our adventurous way up.”

Yes we have come SO far in a hundred years; and it is only from climbing higher to then peer further below to gain that necessary ‘broader perspective’ on what is happening to us, that we can even begin to comprehend the scope of this mystery called LIFE.

Now for me personally, I love being high in the air; from standing atop the tallest peak in the mountain range to peering out from the swaying gondola of a hot-air balloon sailing silently across the cloud-doted sky. Love it! It’s like walking on clouds (at least until the burner fan kicks in and destroys the silence).

I crave that panoramic view seen from far above the earth’s floor—where mile after mile of rugged territory is revealed in a single awe-inspiring 360-degree head-turn.

Not sure how I came by this trait—that desire for the ‘omniscient perspective’ obtained from extreme height, but it’s very much a part of me. And that’s also how I view this LIFE experience as well. You can’t really see what’s happening to you and to those around you from the ground-level where you are living it. You have to distance yourself from the situation, from the emotional/tumultuous interactions, and see the entire picture of ALL interactions to give LIFE itself proper context.

To do this you have to gain the high-above overview perspective on LIFE to see the entire valley stretched out below you—to see how the multicolored folds of the earth and the twisting, winding rivers that run through her, work together—to see how the gorgeous blue sky embraces the blinding sun by day and at night the sparkling stars; and to suddenly fully realize how the entirety of this magnificent view shows you—reminds you—how truly small you are to the total picture that you are blessedly witnessing.

You are the ant at your feet—the individual grain of sand on the vast white beach of similar bleached silica particles.

You are but a tiny speck of dust in the whirlwind of eternity spinning ever outward toward infinity and beyond.

And even from this enlightened view of how insignificant you truly are, you are indeed VIEWING IT, which makes you SIGNIFICANT. You are witnessing LIFE as it unfolds in all its complexity and enormity—even if you can’t presently comprehend what you are actually seeing.

My main problem is that I want to know why LIFE is this way, and WHY we are the way that we are—incomplete, evolving, and continually tested in the fires of a master steel forger—where we are indiscriminately heated to a more pliable consistency and then pounded out into a new shape for some future use.

Are we to be ‘future plow shears’ or are we to be ‘future swords’?

I guess we’ll know in time.

You Are the Focal Point

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us Universe… He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ~Albert Einstein

“I seem, like everything else, to be a center, a sort of vortex, at which the whole energy of the universe realizes itself. Each one of us, not only human beings but every leaf, every weed, exists in the way it does, only because everything else around it does. The individual and the universe are inseparable.” ~Alan Watts

“People normally cut reality into compartments, and so are unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see one in all and all in one is to break through the great barrier which narrows one’s perception of reality.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

“Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it… To believe in God for me is to feel that there is a God, not a dead one, or a stuffed one, but a living one… When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion, then I go out and paint the stars.” ~Vincent Van Gogh

“Practice until you see yourself in the cruelest person on Earth, in the child starving, in the political prisoner. Continue until you recognize yourself in everyone in the supermarket, on the street corner, in a concentration camp, on a leaf, in a dewdrop. Meditate until you see yourself in a speck of dust in a distant galaxy. See and listen with the whole of your being. If you are fully present, the rain of Dharma will water the deepest seeds in your consciousness, and tomorrow, while you are washing the dishes or looking at the blue sky, that seed will spring forth, and love and understanding will appear as a beautiful flower.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

“I like to experience the universe as one harmonious whole. Every cell has life. Matter, too, has life; it is energy solidified. The tree outside is life… The whole of nature is life… The basic laws of the universe are simple, but because our senses are limited, we can’t grasp them. There is a pattern in creation.” ~ Albert Einstein

“Learn how to see, realize that everything connects to everything else.”
~Leonardo Da Vinci~

“Stop acting so small. You are the Universe in ecstatic motion.”
~Rumi~

***

Above quotes collected from this original posting: Glimpses of a Creative Living Universe, December 14, 2014 by Christopher Chase

The Human Energy Body

Just to complete my own limited assessment of the human body’s systems of operation, I will show and explain (as best I can) the Human Body Energy System that was absent from the previous body systems posting.

And once again it’s hard to find one image that shows everything. But this Alex Grey image composite comes close.

At least with this image, on the left you can see the chakra locations and the energy meridians running throughout the body.

Then the center shot shows torus flow lines as cosmic energy at large enters through the crown and out through our connection into the earth’s energy field at our feet. The energy then cycles back up to the crown and down again making a toroidal (donut-shaped) path.

And the far right image shows a bit of the overall flow of energy that radiates and pulses out from our physical body through our chakras and main torus flow to encase us in a luminous egg-shaped, energy cocoon.

While this isn’t a perfect depiction, it’s the best I can presently find to demonstrate the “nearly invisible to most eyes” energy field that flows through and around all of us—as long as we are alive.

When we die our energy field consolidates into one cohesive unit (what we often call ‘our spirit’) and leaves the physical body to return to its energy source-point, which can be interpreted by many names depending on the religion, but I prefer to say that the energy body with the ‘consciousness’ that it has experienced/collected in this dimension of existence, moves back to the dimension from where it originated (I personally call it Spirit Home) where it rejoins the greater database of all collected LIFE consciousnesses for our particular Soul Unit called our Higher Self.

Think of the Higher Self as “The Cloud” of collected data storage located in a giant server system “somewhere” out beyond your personal sphere of awareness; except this “Cloud” storage continually interacts with us and supplies us with our key energy connection to Higher Consciousness.

Our Higher Self is a conglomeration of “all lives lived” energetically where consciousness was enhanced or raised in frequency—where awareness was purified and distilled in essence so that the vibrational frequency of our Soul’s collected consciousness over all “lifetimes” grows higher and higher.

And similar to the many previously-mentioned physical human body systems, the function of the Energy Body System is complex, sophisticated, and purposeful.

So back to the chakras and my previously mentioning how they seem to correspond directly to the location of the endocrine glands, as well as to the main body organs.

Those particular colors often associated with the chakras are specific frequencies of electromagnetic light waves that are most beneficial to those particular glands and organs. These chakra sites are energy transducers (filters and distillers) of white light energy in general, that both input and output energy.

They also correspond to the energy “layers” that are projected outward from the physical body, much like the layers of an onion. The 1^st chakra (root) mainly projects the 1^st energy layer out from the skin, while the 7^th chakra (crown) projects the farthest out from the central body in this dimension.

Our energy fields can extend outward quite far from us depending on our ability to “hold” certain higher frequencies of energy, but most of us can extend our arms outward to their limits around and above us, and that would easily depict the outer cocoon limits of most people’s energy fields. So it’s not hard to see that when you are near other people or in a crowd closer than arm’s length with others, you are actually moving around in each other’s energy field.

And as I tell my REIKI classes, it’s important to keep your own energy field as clear and well-functioning as possible to provide the best energy protection for yourself—especially when you are around negative-focused people, because otherwise you will be like ‘polyester pants in a room full of cats’—before long, you are wearing their hair like it was your own. That’s how we tend to pick up a ‘bad mood’ from hanging with others even if we can see no reason for it.

Finally in closing I’ll say that it is hard to make this energy-body subject digestible for folks who have never considered it, but by condensing it into bite-size portions for consumption I hope others can at least begin to realize how amazingly complex and well-designed we human beings actually are.

We are like little miracles unto ourselves—with all systems interconnected and functioning in total coordination with each other—just to experience the physical world for as long as we are ordained to exist here in this dimension.

And when you think about it, that’s pretty amazing.

The Body’s Many Systems

It is SO hard to find ONE picture that covers such an extensive subject as the body’s systems of operation, so this will have to suffice at present.

At first I was only going to describe the Endocrine System and how that related to ‘energy work’ (like REIKI) in general; and then the more I searched for just the right image (since I’m limited to only one in this blog) I quickly realized that I couldn’t limit this topic to only one human body system while ignoring all the other interrelated systems that comprise human body operation.

Besides that I’m pretty limited in my knowledge of any of them, and not surprisingly, the human body “Energy System” of which I am more familiar, isn’t showing in this image. So then I began thinking that it would be wrong of me to isolate any one system from the total interworking mass of them because we cannot function by eliminating a single body system; and it is only through the complete coordination of ALL body systems that we can even exist.

And maybe that is the entire point of what I’m struggling to convey.

Hence this is who we actually are: a collection of independent and yet interdependent “systems” that work in conjunction with each other to provide the substance and mobility of our daily lives. If one of those systems above has a problem, then the entire body suffers to some degree; and that initial single-system problem can cascade throughout other systems until the body fails.

How many actual body systems do we have?

Well that might be a matter of focus and specialty, but overall: “The human body comprises 12 distinct human body systems, and their functions reflect their names: cardiovascular (circulatory), digestive, endocrine, immune, integumentary, lymphatic, muscular, nervous, reproductive, respiratory, skeletal and urinary.” (from Sciencing.com)

Again I’m limited in knowledge here, but I assume that the brain serves as the Central Processing Unit (CPU) of the human body and runs/administers the entire system conglomeration. Think of the brain similar to how your personal computer functions. There is a central operating system that is programmed to control how input is assessed and redirected, and then it ultimately sends orders (electrical stimuli, nerve synapses) to the various interdependent body systems to act or react pertaining to the situation encountered.

Now what I was originally going to say had to do with how interconnected we are energetically to the endocrine system, and that is why energy workers focus on Chakra locations because that’s where the endocrine glands are that secrete the gland-specific chemicals into the blood stream (circulatory system).

Except that I just hit two systems there, endocrine and circulatory; but that doesn’t account for the nervous system that I know is also directly affected by the benefits of energy work because I’ve seen it for myself when I worked on Multiple Sclerosis clients—seen how they benefited from my reestablishing an energy network that allowed their nerve impulses to reach muscles and body parts that were long ago disconnected from their central nervous system routes.

I’ve also seen for myself how when I applied energy directly to the base of the head—the central spinal nerve center, how cancer clients who had lost peripheral feeling in hands and feet due to the side-effects of chemotherapy, suddenly regained feeling for awhile in fingers and toes.

So I can’t just say that the energy work (in this case REIKI) only affects one system or even two systems of the body when I’ve already shown four systems directly affected by energy work: nervous, endocrine, circulatory, and muscular systems.

Oh yes, and add the digestive system’s positive affect also because the MS guy often said how much better his eating and elimination systems were functioning after I had worked on him.

Which finally leads me to my long-labored point: We think of ourselves as this mass of flesh on bone (muscular on skeletal system), but we are an interconnected, interrelated, interdependent conglomeration of separate operating systems that miraculously function together in some unbelievably complex way.

And you think we aren’t intentionally “designed” to function in that manner?

I think we definitely are.