Balance remains the most important key to good health on all levels of being, mental, physical, emotional and spiritual. Without balance the whole self is not fully present or in charge to make good decisions, or able to sustain life in an evolving manner. Taking responsibility for the self, as a full-fledged adult is perhaps the most important aspect of maintaining balance. Without balance one becomes a victim. But to override that is simply a matter of deciding that it’s your life, after all, and that you are in change of every aspect of it, within and without. When you let things slide there is no one to blame except yourself and your own decision to do so. Balance, at its best, means juggling everything that comes to you, keeping yourself aloft so that each day begins with the joyous anticipation of a job to be done well and ends with the joyous knowledge that indeed it was!
The question arises: “Who is the You, that never disappoints your Soul?” That you is your personality. And what is the personality?
The personality is a combination of the ego self, which is largely identified with life in the physical body; the subconscious mind, which stores the wisdom of many lives lived; and the High Self, which supports the intention for growth in this life.
The Soul itself is the subtle body that has spawned many lives and many personalities. Each of these has collectively gathered experience and knowledge that contributes to the Soul’s growth. Those prior lives are all connected to the subconscious mind and are reflected, as well, in various ego states and characteristics of the physical body.
The personality’s life in a physical body is the Soul’s investing of its energy in the quest for growth. For growth to happen, the personality must have the free will to set up its own experiments and make its own discoveries in the life it is in, all of which ultimately contribute to the growth of the Soul.
The Soul grows through life experience, not through a personality seeking refuge in simply being good, whereby suppressing into its shadow the fuller spectrum of life’s desires. Although, even such an attempt at a virtuous life is a life of experience that benefits the Soul.
In this case, the Soul discovers that such a one-sided life creates the karmic necessity of another life that can more fully experience the shadow held in abeyance. The Soul does not judge any life to have been a wasted or failed life. All experience is golden and treated with equanimity by the Soul.
Critical judgment issues from the personality. Perhaps its value is to create a restlessness that spurs the personality to stay on point with its core mission in this life.
The ego, however, with its limited knowledge of, and limited connection to, the subtler dimensions of its being, as well as its reason for being in this life, tends to overly judge itself in the context of its achievements and failures in this life. It lacks the richer perspective of its Soul, which appreciates equally all experiences in life.
Growth for the personality requires the maturation of its judging function. The shamans of ancient Mexico were particularly helpful in this respect, in their dictum to suspend judgment. They discovered that self-criticism had the effect of immobilizing one’s vital energy, which is essential to achieve expanded awareness.
It’s not that shamans don’t face the truth of their actions and their consequences; they are in fact ruthlessly insistent upon facing the truth. However, shamans do not define themselves as failures, or as good or bad people. They acknowledge their faults and mistakes and make adjustments in their life to avoid repetition. Or they continue to repeat the same behaviors, accepting the need to finish with a “bad” behavior so that they can then be freed to move on.
Shamans laugh at themselves and are in awe of their blind spots and sheer stupidity. Shamanic wisdom knows that the key to spiritual advancement is complete acceptance of self in every action, thought, and feeling experienced through an entire life. How can we advance to new life if we cannot fully accept ourselves and our entire lives lived?
That acceptance must equally extend to every person who has harmed us in our life. Refusal to accept anything that has happened to us will automatically generate a seed of karma that will attempt acceptance again in another life. Refusal to accept freezes our energy and blocks our advance.
To advance we must free ourselves of any notion of victimhood. Although we may have been victimized, the key is not to freeze ourselves in the self-definition of victim. Acceptance requires full mastery of every fact of our life, however tragic. The Soul does not judge. The Soul values every experience equally. May the personality be guided by this wisdom.
Carl Jung established that there are two ego functions that judge in order to navigate this life: thinking and feeling. Thinking employs the rational mind, and logic, to determine the truth. Feeling uses feelings to actively determine the worth of something. Both of these functions support the ego’s understanding and valuing of life experience.
To exercise these evaluative functions is necessary to navigate life with objectivity. But the emphasis in these functions is to understand and make decisions, not to condemn and define the self with judgments of inferiority, inadequacy, and unworthiness.
The Soul is never disappointed with us. Can we internalize this insinuation from above, and rise to the level of never being disappointed in ourselves and others? This erases no facts or responsibility but does advance us fully in love, through total acceptance of everything.
Keep your eye on the ball, on your ultimate goal. Whatever that may be at the moment, there is the greater goal to evolve in the life you are in, so keep that in mind as well. To evolve is to grow spiritually. So find your spirit, that which you are besides your physical self, besides your ego and your brilliant mind. Begin to live more fully from that spirit self, that kind, compassionate and loving self who waits for you each day upon waking and accompanies you each night in sleep and dreaming. That beautiful self seeks you as much as you seek it. Find each other and learn what it means to be at one with each other, how to be kind to self and others, and how to journey forth, hand in hand.
Ancient Hindu mystics predicted, with precision, the dire circumstances of the epoch in which we now live; they named it Kali Yuga. As the final stage of a repetitive cycle of four cosmic seasons, Kali Yuga is the moral rockbottom for humanity. It is currently expressed in the atrocities we are now living through, replete with loss of life, and lack of compassion and virtue.
The impersonal energetic imperative of this cosmic era is nature’s insistence that our collective shadow, with its destructive energy from all that has been repressed, erupt upon the terrestrial surface of the Earth, deeply wounding and splitting apart life as we have known it.
The intent of this energetic lightning bolt is to break apart our consensus reality—an agreed upon union of opposites of now tenuous solidity—to ultimately facilitate the creation of a more perfect union of opposites with which to nurture and support new life.
At present, our wholeness is being shattered into its constituent parts, which are opposites. The polarization we see and experience everywhere is the emotional state of these opposites. They are vying for dominance, warring to generate a new world order that is controlled by their polarized points of view.
The repressed emotional hot lava, that has metaphorically reached the terrestrial surface from the earth’s core, are beliefs and actions from prior eras of human history. The dynamic of a final solution to the challenge of opposites that gave rise to the Holocaust has reemerged today, with its emphasis on complete elimination of one’s opposite as the only solution to achieve stability.
This dynamic is active in the Middle East and Ukraine, and is certainly at the heart of the great American divide. The heightened tension between polarized extremes has given rise to a self-protectiveness and a self-righteousness that justifies violence and eschews the possibility of peaceful coexistence. At present, eliminating and punishing the opposition is the dominating strategy to resolve the clash of opposites throughout the world.
Social media is a war zone of opposites seeking to vex and destroy each other. Politicians pander to polarized issues and groups, seeking victory and rule through dominance versus a reconciliation that includes a rightful home for all the opposites.
Humans did not create Kali Yuga, but they do have their personal stamp upon the issues it has brought to the surface. How we reckon with what we must reckon with is of human decision making and responsibility. Finding stability rests in the hands of free will. Though one might feel instinctual rage from lethal attack, consciousness allows for the possibility of higher levels of human response and reconciliation.
Stability begins with the knowing that this time of Kali Yuga issues from nature itself. The goddess Kali brings about a time of change that must go through destruction and death en route to renewal and new life. Even the Death card, in the Tarot deck, represents this inevitable stage in the cycle of life; a necessity for transformative change.
The death and resurrection motif in Christianity is central to spiritual evolution. Though concretely symbolized in the form of a crucifix, death symbolizes the letting go of a prior consensus reality in order to allow for life in a new and more stable union of opposites. The process of getting there is indeed a painful process.
No one can escape Kali’s energy. Within all of us is a personal consensus reality that has ruled our greater personality. The destructive energy of Kali is rattling our own ruling belief systems, as the ego is inundated with the energy of the complexes it has suppressed.
Complexes range from primal desires and needs to repressed personal traumas; from unsolved ancestral dramas to one’s soul’s mission for coming into this life.
Often our personal consensus belief system is ruled by an illusion or delusion that favors one pole at the expense of its opposite. Perhaps we are so dominated by rationality that we reject the irrational and emotional. In the time of Kali Yuga, we will not escape fits of passion or depression.
Ruthless honesty, within the self, offers the equanimity necessary to know the truth of one’s fuller self. Self-acceptance, and reconciliation with all that one is, is the prerequisite to individuation, a reconciliation with one’s whole self that gives rise to a more fully inclusive consensus reality to live by. This is how one achieves stability in this time of destruction.
The most powerful spiritual tool now available to all of us is being blatantly showcased in this time of Kali Yuga: The power of suggestion. Politicians boastfully chuckle at their power to exercise the power of suggestion to impact masses of people to bend toward their stated suggestions.
The power of the subconscious mind to heal is unparalleled. The power of the subconscious mind to destroy is equally unparalleled. All rests in the integrity of the one who suggests. Autosuggestion in alignment with the true needs of healing is the key to a more perfect union.
Suggestion is what the shamans call intent. Intent is the creator. Shamans maintain that humanity is asleep at the wheel of their power, unavailable to take command of their intent. When asleep at the wheel, we allow old programs, or the suggestions of others, to rule our personal creative force. That creative force molds our consensus reality.
When we wake up to this power, as the shocks of Kali rock our world, we are offered the opportunity to take back our own power, to mould and create our world, through conscious autosuggestion.
Stability rests in our faith in, and exercise of, our birthright to self-determination in the intent we hold for our lives. Turn your own intent in the direction of a more perfect union, within and without.
State, with authority and conviction, what your rational mind might even doubt is possible. Expand your rationality to include the possibility of a healing solution. Employ your rational mind often to express this intent to the subconscious mind.
Once the subconscious adopts the suggestion, it will become its truth. Fueled by its faith, the subconscious will employ its creator ability to manifest the stated intent.
The soul is our everyday sense of self, a subtle energy body that fits snugly inside the contours of our physical body. The glow, or aura, around our physical human animal body is the radiant energy of the soul within.
The soul houses both our mind and our emotional self. Our emotional self includes our desire body. It is the magnetic draw of the desire body, in conjunction with the subconscious portion of our mind, that initially attracts to it the physical body that the soul will extend itself into to participate in a life in human form.
The soul completely controls the physical body, particularly through suggestions delivered to the subconscious portion of its mind. The soul often drifts out of the physical body, particularly in times of physical sleep. Though it remains connected to the physical body, and can return instantly if needed, the soul is free to travel out of body, where it interacts with its subtle home territory of the astral world. When its cord is severed from the body, at physical death, the soul returns to life in the astral realm.
The soul itself is a vehicle of our High Spirit, that portion of ourselves that lives in infinity and sends the soul on missions in finite time space. Thus, as our soul moves into a physical human life it acquires experience and knowledge that it ultimately brings home to its High Spirit in its afterlife existence. Both the soul and the High Spirit learn, grow and evolve with each lifetime lived.
Karma is generally the leitmotif of one’s next mission in human form, as it reflects the need to further explore and master the consequences of decisions and actions taken in one’s just-completed life.
Upon preparation for new life, the subconscious is preprogrammed by our High Spirit’s blueprint for our soul’s next earthly existence. In preparation for incarnate life, the soul attracts to it the best earthly family, physical body and life circumstance to achieve its assigned mission in its new life.
Of course, genetics do play their role. However, the choice of a specific genetic history and potential is already preset in the desire body’s attractive force, for example in the family we are drawn to be born into. Thus, the human animal body that we are is actually the product of pure High Spirit intent. As above, so below.
The physical body and the soul are not opposites. In fact, they are really extensions of the same thing. Our earthly body is the clothes our soul wears to have its earthly existence. Physical death is merely a shedding of old clothes that once fit so well. At death our soul ascends, taking with it the experiences of our physical lifetime, into a soulful period of reflection and rejuvenation, as well as a reconciliation with our High Spirit.
The human animal body that we inhabit is largely governed by the archetypes that shape our species. These include the core instincts of survival and reproduction. The body is maintained by the subconscious mind, which follows the laws of nature to ensure its survival.
Essentially, we are unconsciously being governed by archetypes and genetics until our blank slate ego matures into consciousness. Ego is actually a part of the soul’s mental body, fashioned to identify with its physical body and social context in what we call our personality. The ego has an imposed amnesia of its true royal heritage—that is, its immortal High Spirit—to enable it to attach to the earthly circumstance it needs to fulfill its mission.
As the ego matures in life it begins to have greater access to its broader identity and divine lineage. These developing realizations offer opportunity for clarity, through greater detachment from personality, as the ego fulfills the goals of its soul’s true mission. As the ego moves beyond its narcissistic wrappings it is better positioned to serve its soul’s and, ultimately, its High Spirit’s intent. Free will eventually is exercised as acquiescence to true need.
The process of ego maturity consumes most of our earthly life. Much of our existence is spent trying to realize our earthly personality’s ambitions. Self-importance, victimhood and entitlement dominate our lives. The resolution and refinement of these attitudes and emotions ultimately accrue to our High Spirit’s enhancement, allowing it to advance as well.
Ego, in the early stages of maturation, exercises its free will from the bondage of archetypes to prove its worth through wealth, accomplishment and fulfillment of desire. Too often does the body, with its animal instincts, get scapegoated as the source of excess and evil. No, the human animal body is the product of the soul’s creation, as well as the soul’s choices. The animal body reflects the true curiosity and necessity of High Spirit.
What High Spirit asks of soul, with its extended physical body, is to master its challenges in time space so that High Spirit can launch further into infinite possibility.
The archetypes are our babysitters until we are ready to assume responsibility for life in full maturity. Foolishly transgressing the laws of nature are a necessary stage of development. Heart-centered transcendence, or refinement of archetypes, is the propulsion for High Spirit advancement.
The chaos of now reflects attempts to restore archaic archetypal laws, or to indulge in the total freedom of narcissistic free will. These are reflections of the collective soul’s current healing crisis, a time of great turmoil and transformation.
Remember: The karma of now will provide great advancement of soul.
But don’t ever blame the human animal body. The animal body is High Spirit’s honest material reflection of its own soul’s journey. As above, so below.
