There is a story told of a mother whose son would not come home from playing until late in the evening. She became so fearful and frustrated with his disobedience, that she decided to trick him into behaving.

She told him that there were monsters outside that only came out after dark. This seemed to do the trick as his fear kept him from ever testing the night again. As he grew older though, he became more and more afraid and eventually housebound. This troubled his mother. So she told him another lie about a magic medal she found that would protect him from monsters. He put the medal around his neck, never removing it and once again was able to leave the house and rejoin the world.

Willa Cather in her novel, O Pioneers, wrote, "There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."

Why repeat? Because even our most creative thinking is generated within a limited context of familiar experiences, beliefs and expectations. Our base understanding of the storyour recognition and validation of what we are seeing, its possibilities, probabilities and even the tolerable degree of mystery we're able to entertainkeeps us from seeing beyond or through the box of the story itself. 

"Your reasoning is excellent--It's only your basic assumptions that are wrong." ... Ashleigh Brilliant  

In the mother's story, her son needs to be protected from her projected fears. In the son's story there are no such fears, so the mother sees that she needs to enlist her son in her fear. Without this, there seems no solution. She tells him a white lie. Since he can't believe in her nameless fears, she will name one for him--monsters in the night. And now her story works until she realizes that her lie is creating another problem--more fear in her son than she intended. SO INSTEAD OF INQUIRING INTO THE VALIDITY OF THE WHOLE STORY, she adapts to the story's needs. Imaginary magic that keeps away imaginary monsters. Can you begin to see the movements of politics, religion and relationships here?

This is the story of my ego, that is, who I am pretending to be. I am the Observer of how Full, Universal Wholeness appears fragmently expressed through my perception of the thoughts I have chosen to identify as and therefore project my existence as. By so doing, me, my world and my life can be minimized, rationalized and managed upon a small stage that I hope to understand and control.

I play all the roles--the mother, the son, the monsters and the magic--but to keep playing and working through all the problems, I have to stay on script, otherwise I and those playing with me, might find ourselves off stage, in the audience, or even out of the theater into spontaneously, irrepressible reality.

Believing me to be my mind or ego, I cling to this small platform of life, world and identity that I compulsively attempt to manage, control and be self-responsible for. I block out the whole, unlimited, Universe so that I can narrowly focus on what my mentally-formed psyche needs to support itself.

In this psychic fishbowl, my intention is linearly, I want what I want when I want it. MY STORIES GIVE ME AND MY LIFE ITS MEANING. They serve as my reality and drive my busyness. In this fishbowl (which BTW, is affirmed and shared by a world community doing the same), I motivate by frightening myself into doing or not doing something, with thoughts about what I want or don't want to happen to me. So driven, I will either simply act on what seems obviously familiar or attempt a surface inquire with reasoning or creative thinking that taps THE SAME RESTRICTED THOUGHT POSSIBILITIES THAT SUPPORT MY PRIME DIRECTIVE: STABILIZING THE FISHBOWL WITHIN WHICH I CAN REMAIN SAFELY SMALL. Nothing new, outside of the box comes from within the box.

So does this story turn out well? Of course it does, because even the most horrific story has no power to change the harmonious nature of the Universe it is told within.

Yes, innocently caught within the power of my mind to bring dramas to seeming life, I identified with the story of who I think I should be, deceiving myself into betraying myself. Yes, I unconsciously gave myself false information so as to make love look like fear so that I could continue to play the part I imagined best followed the story line. Yes, I had to, because the story seemed real and believing it real, I like everyone who visits this existence, gave it my best shot at playing it.

And yes, now I begin to see the flaws in the story and my efforts to conceal this from myself. I see now that irrational fear has no bounds, because it is held to no accountability through sane inquiry. The magic I gave myself to protect myself from nothing that exists, only sustains the increase of my irrational, baseless fear of that boogeyman.

"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." ... Rumi  

Now is our time for asking the questions that we don't have the answers for, the ones that can allow our stories to be the adventures that the simplest wisdom of children imagine them as. Instead of asking what will calm or adjust me to my fears? Or what is the right or wrong thing to do? Or how can I make up for this?

Try these questions, no matter what is happening and especially when what is happening seems to really matter. You needn't concern yourself with the answers, they aren't necessary. Just ask the questions. The fact that your ego resists your asking these questions without reasonable expectation for an answer, might give you pause to wonder how powerful these questions are. Lies don't need to have a truth applied to them to free you. Just seeing them clearly is enough to release you from their threat.

Q. Do I know that my magic or medication I'm treating situations with, is even working anymore?

Q. Can I be certain that there really are any monsters or anything wrong with my way at all?

Q. Do I know that what I think needs to happen, needs to happen or that what you or I need to do needs to be done?

Q. Is it possible I might be right as rain just as I am now? And maybe you too?

And ...

Q. Can I be certain that it's not possible or even probable, that the drama I have been living, is simply my ego's last, grand performance, a virtuoso characterization of who I pretended to be within the mystery of my awakening in gratitude to the Love I Have Always Been and now am able to see and feel.

Bravo as the Universe thunders in standing ovation.

April 15, 2011

Over the Edge of Madness

Like it or not, human consciousness is now rapidly evolving, free from the space/time matrix that the human mind has compulsively attempted to limit and control it within. As our Collective Consciousness coalesces into the Collective Realization of our Oneness, our Collective illusions unravel, revealing their insubstantial, impotent nature as they dissolve back into the Nothingness from which we have painfully and compulsively tried to craft and hold their forms.

There is no restoring of this unconsciousness possible, neither as perceived individuals or collectively banded, this insanity is out of the box and there is no putting it back.

If you haven't noticed, please do. The amount of energy it is taking to keep ourselves distracted from seeing this is immense and like all addictions, more eventually proves to apply to the multiplication of frustration and emptiness in place of hoped for thrills and fulfillment.

Technology is exploding all around us and wireless communication and entertainment has become one of the most evident and cutting edge metaphors for our attempt to mediate the rapidly widening gulf between our unconsciously deep desire for authenticity and our compulsively driven denial to mask this with ever more complex sensory overloads of colorful lights, digital tricks and other stimuli.

Is this wrong? Of course not. How could it be? It has evolved and simply is what it is. Everything that happens serves what appears as the evolution of Reality or Oneness. Nothing can lie outside the limitless Spirit that has always been and is now expressing the Immediacy within our Awakening.

The late Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pointed the way back in the 1950s in his masterwork, The Phenomenon of Man. That is, similar to how human thought was born as an evolution of consciousness from within the simple, animalistic observation of Cro-Magnon man or his equivalent, a creature who even now could physically pass as human, save for the one indispensable element that defines humanity--our reflective awareness that allows us to know, say, and realize that I am.

Teilhard further envisioned our Collective Awakening, an evolution of consciousness where together all awareness coalesced into a single, unified reflection of the Whole of Consciousness upon Itself. In other words, a collective realization of not, We are, but I am. He recognized it as the fulfillment of life upon the earth.

And throughout all evolution on this seeming finite sphere, life as forms of consciousness emerges from supersaturated oceans into forming overcrowded land masses, eventually congesting the very ethers with compulsive thought waves. Teilhard saw this consciousness evolving to force such changes from molecules to cells, gills to lungs, and objective brains to reflective thought, as an escape valve from the pressure of norms massing, releasing into higher, freer, more communal creativity. 

He saw the emergence of a Collective Realization issuing from the massing of pressure upon the individuals, who though experiencing greater intensification of physical, mental and emotional commonalities, would still resolutely cling to their more familiar sense of isolation. Think about this pressure. Millions of individuals, living within an increasing, conscious sense of the core affinity they share, yet increasingly continuing to feel more and more compelled and culturally supported in denying this through ever more complex ways of avoiding authenticity, i.e. real communication through eye contact, empathic listening, physical touch and the sharing of vulnerable emotion, the very qualities that support our being fully human, alive, connected.

People's longing hearts, their feelings nearly exposed on their sleeves to one another, text each other while in the same room together, preferring a growing loneliness of common distraction to the unknown plunge into vulnerability. It's no wonder we look at the floor numbers or play with our cell phones when in the close confines of an elevator. We unconsciously suspect that unless each of us is extremely vigilant within the short time frame of our ride together, we might slip and experience the truth of our shared fragility and the whole charade of our guarded isolation would unravel before us into a spontaneous, uncontrollable expression of all the love, compassion and repressed commonality that we have been compulsively denying together.

And yet, this is perfect, for it is within the cauldron of this growing evolutionary pressure, not only in technology but throughout all our earthly formations that the erosion of all the baseless foundations for our shared illusions is NOW taking place. Our psychic ground of false identity and shallow sense of individual purpose is dissolving away. What follows is a freefall collapse into the Perfect Safety, Love and Order of our experiencing Shared Reality: our Collective Realization of the Joy, Peace and Freedom of our Integral Oneness.

This is not an act of will, individual or collective. It is the Realization, scary at times though, it might seem, that the One Perfect Love we were formed within has always been and will always be and that our elaborately, creative and valid layaway plan for putting off our experience of it has come to an end. We are all in this, making the final payment NOW. It is time for us to pick up and utilize the treasure that has always been our birthright, through our Full, Whole, Collective Name and Nature. And this is not a matter for individual discussion or free will. It is our Divine Imperative.

More to follow. Such as: how we can now cooperate in accepting the gifts of our new freedom together, what other collective belief forms are dissolving away and what we are discovering in their absence, how freewill and choice fit in with accepting the path of fulfillment that requires neither, and of course, how the despair of collapsing individuality and isolation leads to expanding joy in community.

Please feel free to join in and ask questions, especially if you are holding on by a thread. It's one powerful way into a new joy and release from what appears as hopelessness and despair. It's exactly what I am doing for me and it feels so good when we do it together. 

Be well,
Dale