Tuesday night I attended our monthly Professional Women's Network meeting - a wonderful, eclectic group. We've strayed from more traditional topics the last few meetings, wild conversations ranging from energy fields, to intention, to the significance behind the political battle between Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. And some wonderful questions that I'm happily pondering.
Coming Clean
By Jeanne Supin
Ever been to meetings that seem civilized but feel dead? People discuss things, share reasonable opinions, make rational decisions. But everyone knows it’s a hoax. Instant the meeting ends, the real conversation begins. Folks cluster in the hallway or the parking lot, later gabbing on the phone or over drinks. And suddenly the truth comes out. People say what they really believe, grow lively and animated. Then more intuitive, better answers soar.
This
sort of sums up my life the last few years. I have all these normal conversations … funny newlywed
stories, tales of adolescent angst, how my house is a mess, I need more
exercise, or I’m worried about the economy …
But thing is, although true, these conversations don’t tell my whole story. So I’m coming clean; I’m on-lining my off-line life.
I believe the world is changing … fast and huge and irrevocably. Some of it’s like a parlor game. I follow my “gut” instincts to slow down, and the hidden cop is revealed two bends down the road … I make a spontaneous marketing call that morphs into six lucrative contracts just when I need them … I email a friend out of the blue who said she had the exact same impulse … these serendipities are now so commonplace I barely register surprise.
Sometimes it’s bigger, and I can literally feel something rumble through every cell in my body. I once had unexpected closure with a long-gone lover, and I subsequently felt every romantic abandonment drift permanently away. I swear – it was like I re-did my past. One moment I was simply thinking how nice the conversation was after so many years, and the next moment sensory images of one bad experience after another cascaded through me, each disappearing like vanishing debris from a defragged computer. Absolutely gone, without a trace. Leaving space for something brand new, which happened to be the first phone call – within seconds – from the man who would later become my husband.
I’ve seen occasional ethereal shapes move across my bedroom. I’ve watched features in a painting change size and color. Once in a famous Japanese Garden I actually felt miniature fairies and sensed the flowers so intensely it still makes me tremble years later. I know people who routinely see energy swirls throughout a body with absolute clarity. They can identify color, direction, and the type of physical or emotional congestion it blocks. They can move those swirls, too -- whether they call them chakras, channels, meridians, auras, or energy flows – and lift away my back pain, sinus infection, or depression.
I also believe things are shifting far beyond my personal experience. It is my understanding the world is merely tangible evidence of energy manifested: e=mc2 implies energy and matter are just different expressions of the same thing, and energy comes first. Energetic frequencies shape matter – not the other way around. Our world and our experiences are just functional representations of our collective imaginations, formed over millennia of human evolution. And I believe our imaginations are changing, even if we don’t all consciously know it yet.
Here’s the condensed story best I can decipher it. For evolutionary eons life was cool. Then at some point we humans got scared, and we began to see everything as enemies – other species, other humans, and every “unseeable” chord nestled in nature and divinity. So we started to fight, which led to more fighting, which caused destruction, hatred, and injustice. Which sparked genocides and annihilation. Our collective imaginations have trembled at that frequency, like some really rank note on a mangled tuning fork. We created our world to match that vibration. The horror sprang straight from our imagination.
But suddenly there’s a shift. More people than in human history believe living out of fear (and its offshoots like anxiety, greed, or domination) is absolute madness. Not everybody. Not even a majority. But enough. Enough of us have imagined a different enough world to raise the earth’s vibration. And so human-created garbage of lower vibrating frequency has to go. Things like war, global warming and economic systems based on resource degradation. Things like anger, worry and being mean to each other. That doesn’t mean humans are destined to survive, mind you. If we collectively don’t change our own thoughts and behavior, relentlessly jamming lower frequencies items -- like corporate greed or species superiority -- into the earth’s new vibration we’ll quickly obliterate ourselves. But this shift in the earth’s vibration means the earth will survive regardless. And if we get rid of our own crap, we can, in fact, live here in joy, peace, and love.
Why a shift now? There are a zillion proposed reasons, to name a few:
- The Mayan calendar mathematically foretold a cosmic shift in consciousness in 2012.
- The earth’s magnetic poles are showing signs of repeating a long-ago reversal.
- We’re moving from the Age of Pisces to Aquarius.
- Humanity is demonstrating a natural immune response to the lethal destruction of its host, the earth.
- Since the 1987 Harmonic Conversion new bands of light (i.e. frequency) have been able to penetrate and reconfigure the earth’s vibration and our DNA.
- Crop circles depict consciousness-raising symbols.
- Human’s own efforts to raise consciousness, like meditation or open-heart exercises, have created the right proportional critical mass to make the change.
- More conventional things, like the millions of people erasing poverty, oppression, and environmental disaster, have sparked the shift.
- God has said “Enough!”
Maybe I sound crazy, but I no longer care. I’m illuminating wide all those conversations I used to have in the darkened parking lot after those boring meetings. And I’m not the only one. I’m talking with people all over the place, in all professions and locations, people I never would’ve suspected to go “woo-woo.” People looking for personal fulfillment who found enlightenment instead. People recovering from cancer, alcoholism or a nasty divorce and quietly discovered cosmic love. Artists searching for their muse who realized it was God. Religious prayers that became spiritual conversations. Parents who notice their children seem far more tapped in than mere intuition explains. And over a million people from 139 countries watched Oprah’s online course with Eckhart Tolle. We’re everywhere. So I say forget the boring meetings. Let’s move the conversations from the parking lot to the boardrooms, the classrooms, the living rooms, and make a difference.
I'd like compliment you on a very articulate and beautiful essay. I am one of those skeptical anti-woo woo people. Despite that, I have been very impressed and affected by Toole, Buddhism, and some new age metaphors for subjective reality. I do not discount their ability to affect our subjective realities and by extension, our self created social realities. However, having a scientific background, I often require more evidence to justify a belief. In the end, beliefs are as only as useful as they help us to influence and control the matter around us - even the beliefs of our proper human relationships. So, many beliefs are just not required, but are a waste of life energy. Stillness and mindfulness encourages conservation of life energy. However, since we are going into "beliefs" here I'd like to present some facts (interjected with opinions) that that forms a complimentary view of what is happening in regards to our changing "vibrational frequency". I don't believe these ideas are contradictory, just couched in scientific terms. In particular, I highly I have always bristled some at Toole's description of "vibrational frequencies" somehow driving enlightenment. I wish their were some research that can somehow measure the correlation between mind activity and the vibrations of our atomic structure. Perhaps, in the end this will be proved. But for now, I think that this a beautiful metaphor that represents some real research-based psycho-spiritual changes that are happening in the world. Right now, I'd like to present a long summary of what I believe is happening in our collective consciousness. I hope you have the patience to read it carefully and attempt to get the "spirit" of its "truthiness".
1) We are animals first, humans with imaginations second. We live in a dangerous world, in an unsure world where death is just around the cornor. Try to remember your own anxiety as an infant or notice the fearful stages of growth in your children, especially when they realize how dependent they are on the adults. Humanity was also in this state of anxiety in our early history. Tigers were big and all we had were spears. Part of us feels this all time. We feel vulnerable in our animal natures and limited. We strive for growth, mastery and propagation just like every living thing that has ever existed. We crave and greed for anything that represents more abundant and secure biological life - even when it is actually taken care of in our advanced civilization. In the following essay remember we are animals. Thinking animals but animals nevertheless.
2) However, we are social animals - like some herd or pack animals but not at all like big cats, sharks, or hawks. We need each other and the group to compete against other animals and nature. But we also compete with our fellow humans for mastery and status. Knowing our place allows us take on specific jobs in the group and to feel purpose and meaning. We test and gauge our status wihin the group. We constantly compare ourselves (and judge others) by cultural standards of mastery. Early in history and our physical skills were the important measure but that soon turned to social skills. The function of out direct perceptual senses is guage our level of security, protection and worth within the group. Getting our fellow humans approval and esteem enhances this protection because somebody is literally watching your back. In a sufficiently advanced civlization, when the food supply, healthcare, shelter and education are taken care of the impulse to grow - to have more abundant life - does not go away. That is because the emotional part of us knows we are still limited and vulnerable without our cultural and group protections. So we unconsciously compare worth, significance and power in our society - to find our place in it and to gather as many protectve affliations around us as possible.
3) As our brains evolved and abstraction and symbolic abilities developed we imagined we could be gods! Our situation was so perilous in the wild we tended to make false correlations in nature, thus creating "magic" to allow us to feel more in control. Eventually, our egos created complex systems of symbols representing physical skills. We created institualized ritual to control the environment and its ceremonies to control each other. Magic turned into religion. Religion turned into divine states. Divine states turned into secular society and political philosophies. Thus, magical ritual, religion and its decendent instutions allowed for defined heirarchy, castes, classes and organizational efficiencies. Our egos do not like to hear we have weaknesses or are simply competing status seeking animals, or we are the cause our own suffering or that we are vulnerable, limited and will one day die. So we seek ways of removing our guilt and feelings of vulnerability by latching on to anything or anybody who can make us feel secure, safe and confident that all will be well, and in their care that we will prosper, grow, be significant and live a much fuller life. This is the "heroic impulse". It is pervasive within all cultures except the most simple and egalitarian. We value and acknowledge those symbols (not reality) that which will make us feel safe or make us feel like winners. Of course, this had loads of survival value in the forest because some did have real heroic skills - as hunter gatherers - but the impulse to affliate with the "heroic" has been distorted to an absurd point. Acquisition of possesions, titles, status, large families, and attachment to symbols far and long divorced from actual survival needs is what drives our culture and politics. The impuluse for more, more, more drives our economic systems. In fact, it is OUR need for MORE LIFE and our unconsciousness of why we desire MORE LIFE that creates the economic system - a system that depends on 4% growth per year despite that fact that we live in a finite world with finite resources. Unbridled and un-reflective thinking in service of the fear of death is what makes the human animal insane in comparison to other species. The fundamental confusion is taking mere words or concepts to be reality.
4) Biologically, abstracting egos arise from the left hemisphere of the brain. The symbolic processors of the left brain take fear arising from the amygdala and rationalizes an insulating symbolic defense - many of which are words or concepts. The left hemisphere also tends to mask perceptual realities of the right hemisphere since this holistic part does not harbor linguistic processors. The right hemisphere cannot argue for itself even though it harbors many intelligences! This effectively removes feelings of vulnerability and fear from our thinking selves but it also veils broader realities and perceptions that could have survival value. This is a necessary condition for mental health and negotiation in a highly symbolic environments which most people live in. Cultures are systems of symbols that reinforce a consensual strategy against this fear of death. Or, at least, a "social symbolic death" with insignificance or loss of approval among our fellows. Cultural values change as the demands of survival from the environment change. We create complex symbolic absolutist views and cultural sanctioned rituals, rules and behaviors that institutionalize the strategy against death because total faith brings the most confidence. That is why suicide bombers say they love death as much as we love life - they are assured at place in paradise. These emotional displacements provide order and sense of meaning to our world and provide confidence. The value of the concept of immortality, gods and single great hero, God, has provided the greatest sense of relief for many cultures.
5) Furthermore, We create conflict and suffering through mutual exclusive competing symbols within and between our arbitrary rule-bound cultures. Thus, individuals will constantly compare who's up and who's down, one street gang will fight another over graffiti, how clothing is worn, territoral encroachment; soceer games will erupt in violence over a game, republicans and democrats will demean and "symbolically" fight each to other's social death (the inability to influence others). Our egos constantly strive to strengthen its stature compared to others. Our egos are willing to defend, belittle or even fight to the death any symbol or person who threatens our unconscious immortality symbols because our ego's imaginary life is at stake. The impulse to prove oneself right and the other wrong is simply the defense of the ego against imaginary death.
6) Whether it be God, Nirvana or our imagined legacies on earth, or our political philsophies our egos find something to latch on to, no matter where we live. Cultures, religions and all absolutist philosophies exist to provide approval-seeking humans ways of organizing, encouraging, coping, prospering, staving off fear of death and moving civilzation forward toward some imagined good life - even at the expense of present happiness. We are social beings that create our own environments whose need for a sense-of-belonging and self esteem is universal so convienently adopt the prevailing notions that imply worth. The need for human-connection and approval is primary and real, cultural values are secondary and imaginery. This is a very important point!
7) Our egos can be exploited, controlled and abused by those who use our needs, hopes and dreams to suit their own agendas or by those that insist to withdraw their respect unless we tow the cultural line. We all, quite naturally, give our loyalty and our lives to those who best can communicate to our emotions the symbols that promise security and strength but most importantly - a sense of belonging. The sucess of leadership is proportional to the level of alignment of culturally adopted values to the real demands of the environment. Blind following often leads to disaster. Following, a worldview, hero or personal expression is only useful to the extent that it actually haromonizes with the reality of others, other cultures and the physical environment.
8) So, we only contribute more suffering in the world when we allow the ego unbridled comparison, identification and power-seeking or when we let our egos get competitive, huffy and violent over whose coping mechanisms, behaviors, opinions are best. Judgment and negativity is the primary diagnostic of absolutism - whether it is ubridled praise or criticism. Acceptance (tolerance), enjoyment and enthusism is the primary diagnostic for awareness of the extreme comparative activity of the ego. I believe this has been the main antidote as offered by the enlightened teachers. The cultural context in which these ideas are presented often distorts this main message.
9) We could spend our time much more profitably by recognizing more when our ego's comparative and defensive functions operate and instead look to our fundamental common needs - food, health, education, need-for-belonging and personal expression. So, we could look to our common problems and working together to make a difference, rather than defending our egoic coping belief systems or sense of status and worth or defending out-dated cultural systems and pet idealogies. We should allow space of personal belief that does not tramp on the fundamental needs. I believe that the competitive principle is being challenged by the cooperative principle in our institutions. That is why, all things seem to changing. Comparison of status and worth of individuals and groups is the root of all evil. The secondary affect is greed and inability to share.
10) Ultimately, all human activity is "religious" or "political" in that any activity that provides a sense of mastery of life over death tends to held on to. But this balanced by our need for expansion of sense of belonging and We must be vigilant in the tendency for our human psyche to attach to absolutist concepts or worldviews. So, letting of go useless beliefs and remaing The unconscious denial of death is the primary motivation for humanity. This irrational motive lies behind science, art, technology, politics, philosophy and culture.
Posted by: jasciu | September 19, 2008 at 11:36 AM