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Newsletter 8
4th January 2011 |
Happy New Year!
Looking both backwards and forwards, Janus is the god of endings and beginnings. The pivital month of January is named after him. Such transition times can arouse anxiety in us - especially when accompanied by prophesies of doom. The world seems in a precarious place right now with forecasts of economic, climatic and societal disaster. In a letter recently posted on Facebook, Hal Stone meditates on our changing times and how we handle our vulnerabilities in the face of these uncertainties. I was moved and inspired by his words and reproduce them below.
For me 2012 brings the excitement of launching the new Voice Dialogue Online Program. It has been a year in the making and has finally come to fruition. To celebrate, I am making a special offer to readers of this Newsletter. See below to find out how you can participate for less than half of the regular price. I look forward to meeting some of you on the Online Program!
Warm wishes, John |
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Hal's Thoughts about Prophecies
We live in a time of great fear and insecurity as well as a time of great excitement. Old forms are breaking down and this creates a sense of chaos around us. The more chaotic we feel the more the selves come in; the selves that try to restore order. The hardest thing is to live with our vulnerability close to us all of the time. We must learn to carry the tension between our vulnerability on the one side and our use of work, activity, and the many ways we find to make ourselves feel better on the other side.
We must learn to pay attention to - and to be accountable in - our relationships. In this way we begin to use relationship as a teacher and we surrender to the process of relationship itself.
We must learn to surrender to higher powers that are available to us and we must learn to ask them for guidance in bringing us the insight and clarity and direction that we so yearn to have. The Organizing Intelligence of the Universe that becomes known to us primarily through the dream process has provided me with this guidance for many, many years. This is only one of many paths that are available to us to secure this guidance.
We must remember that the Mind is just one of our selves, even though it is one of the most significant tools we have to lead an effective life on earth. For too many people, the Mind remains the One God; these people are denied access to the worlds of feeling, emotion, spirit, and imagination because the Mind cannot experience these other worlds that lie within each of us. The Mind can conceive of them but it cannot experience them.
We must learn to listen to our dreams and to share them with friends. With time, the dream process begins to express the Organizing Intelligence that lies within each of us and we have a new kind of base to stand on and from which to receive new ideas and guidance and revelation.
We must learn to pay attention to our judgments and use them as teachers. Whoever and whatever we judge gives us a direct picture of those elements within us that have been disowned. Judgments come from our primary selves and they have much to teach us once we learn their underlying meaning and teaching.
We must keep in mind that knowledge comes to us primarily through our primary selves. Wisdom, however, is a product of the Aware Ego Process. Wisdom comes as we learn to stand between opposites and feel both sides of each of the many, many opposites that live within us.
We must learn to dance with life and to dance with death. We must learn to feel and move to the different beats and rhythms of life just as later on we have to learn to dance with the different beats and rhythms of death until one day we feel the continuity of what happens "here" and what happens "there".
One of the ways that many people have of not living with their vulnerability and insecurity in their life and relationships is to write and re-write warnings about the end of the world and then to tell us how to behave. Many of these writings have the ability to totally de-stabilize us and create a feeling of mass hysteria and anxiety.
Writing such prophecies may make the writer feel secure and non-chaotic for a time. Since indeed none of us knows what is going to happen in the world, we ultimately come back to the need to live life as fully and as simply as we can, to feel this amazing journey we are all on together, and to go on living with an ever-increasing development of consciousness. In traveling this path, we must always make sure that we stroke our cats at appropriate times and remember to floss our teeth when we realize that the appointment with our dental hygienist is only a few days away ;-)
There is one final thought - final at least for the moment. Most spiritual teachings ask us to become more loving and more compassionate. We are led to believe that trying to become this kind of person is the only way we can really solve the problems of the world. I give to you opposite advice. Do not try to be loving or compassionate. When you try to become loving, you disown the parts of you that are not loving. When you try to be compassionate you will disown the parts of you that are not at all compassionate. It is in this way that we create the "garbage dumps" of the psyche; "garbage dumps" that are probably invisible to us, but likely to be seen clearly by people outside of us. If you don't believe that you have these garbage dumps in your own psyche, I suggest that you pay attention to your dreams and daydreams for a period of a few weeks. I think there might be some surprises in store for you!
If we separate from our primary selves and embrace those parts of us that are disowned then we embrace the world of all energies. It is all in us! All good and all darkness are inside of us. As we embrace all of who we are, we cannot help but become more loving and compassionate because we have met the outer villains of our life and have come to realize that they are all a part of each of us.
So I say to you to love when you love; hate when you hate; be irritable when you are irritable; be in grace when you are in grace. The key is to not be married to any of them. The key is to learn to dance with each of them and feel the tension of all these opposing energies.
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