 2 Nov 2006 @ 09:10, by Alana Tobin
Gosh and I thought her last newsletter was powerful! This is rich!
I wrote Caroline about her last newsletter, and I know that my words had an impact - I can feel it in the words she shares this round...the truth ever more powerful than previously. I feel her words fortifying me in terms of a deepening trust in the power of love as it expresses more potently through certain of my brothers and sisters in support of more light present to meet the dark night that is intensifying, especially in America. Wow! Goon on ya mate!
Enjoy!
Heart Blessings,
Alana
Website Heartstory
A Message From Caroline Myss
October 2006 Newsletter:
A PASSION FOR DISCERNMENT
We’re in it again – election fever. Even though it is only a mid-term election, the psychic tension is once again thick as a fog. Adding to the national miasma is a growing tension over the Iraq war and the never-ending stories of corruption emerging from behind the carefully drawn curtains of the Texas White House. If the election machines don’t jam the process, the Democrats might just take back Congress.
Negative ads are loading up the airwaves with one party attacking the other like bullies on the playground. Never mind stating what they could accomplish if voted into office (as if either party ever intends to keep campaign promises); the destruction of reputations is the weapon of choice. What does that tell you about what the people running these campaigns must think of the people watching the ads – namely us???
Just stop for a moment and think: Am I supposed to be swayed one way or the other by these lies? By these sound bites that have been conveniently clipped here and there to spin a message? Am I supposed to make a decision about the whole of a person’s career for four years based on a fifteen-second ad designed to destroy a person’s reputation? Are you the sort of person who could be influenced by such trash?
Meantime, as I observe the buildup of tension in the air because of what’s at stake in these upcoming elections – namely, that the Republicans might lose control of this country (not that they haven’t already, but it would become official if the Democrats win the House) — I will never forget a few incidents that happened as the frenzy of psychic madness over the Presidential election arose two years ago.
At a conference in Florida in November 2004, just a week before the election, the tension was palpable, much more so than now. Yet no one was speaking politics at this conference, which was a little like not speaking about elephants walking through the lobby of the hotel or the spaceship that had landed in the parking lot. It occurred to me that we had been forced into silence by some type of contrived social-spiritual etiquette.
The ironic subject of the conference was consciousness. They should have been holding discussions on topics such as, “Is our nation conscious at all?” or “How do we apply the principles of consciousness to world crises?” or “How can the individual be of service in times of war?” Instead, any mention of politics was treated with hostility. “I didn’t come to this conference to discuss politics,” was a common response. “You didn’t?” I thought. “Well, you should have. Where else should you go to discuss the future of your nation and the future of your children? Shall you practice avoidance instead, as if that is a way of being of service during these times of global crises? Would that approach help things along?”
Clearly people were stressed, as was evidenced by the following experiences:
During one seminar (not mine, thank heavens), a participant threw his cell phone at the seminar leader and hit him directly in the head. No, the topic was not politics, but he was boiling over with rage and frustration. Was it all aimed at this teacher? I doubt it. It was a sign of the times, a build-up of the tension in the nation’s air coupled with an inability to express that tension through thought, ideas, or words.
His action reflected that this man had been silenced.
In another workshop, a participant returned from lunch inebriated. Never in my career have I had to confront a participant who was drunk. Apparently, alcohol brought out an aggressive side to this person and he was eventually asked to leave the workshop; however, he did not go quietly. Instead, he became verbally abusive, yelling that the country now had a gag order in its mouth. Security was called and he was asked to leave the conference.
I taught a workshop that was scheduled to end at 5 pm on Saturday, as they usually do. A half-hour afternoon break was scheduled but I ignored that and kept on teaching until 4:30, at which time I shifted topics – PER THE REQUEST of the participants. Most of them had expressed an interest in the Sacred Contract of America, a book that I was in the early stages of writing at that time. (I have since decided to record that material in an extended CD series this coming January through Sounds True. It’s my winter project – yeah!). America’s Sacred Contract seemed a perfect topic for the close of my workshop, particularly since we were days away from a highly charged presidential election.
The Sacred Contract of America is, as you can appreciate, a complex topic. It is not easily communicated in a few minutes, no more than the whole of your Sacred Contract on this earth can be reduced to a few minutes. Your soul’s journey is so complex and extraordinary. The same complexity that exists for your individual Sacred Contract holds as truth for America’s. You need to be able to think, perceive, and ascend into symbolic thought to understand the language of a Sacred Contract. Documents of the Sacred, whether Holy Scripture or documents of the soul, are never to be taken literally. They are symbolic and require that the reader refine his or her soul into a vessel capable of transcending the judgmental mind and learning the art of discernment, which means to see through the obvious, illusions, and distractions to glean the truth that is hidden or disguised.
All of you have wandered into situations, perhaps with your children, and said, “Okay, what’s really going on in this room?” You knew the moment you walked into the room that regardless of the fact that everything appeared normal, it felt abnormal. In that instant, your sense of judgment shifted from using your five senses to review a situation to discernment – shifting to your higher senses to assess the psychic field, at which point your intuitive skills kicked in.
Alert parents immediately trust their powers of intuition and act discerning; that is, they begin to look around for clues in the physical world to match up with the alarm signals being transmitted by their intuition. Perhaps they need to check out what’s on the kid’s computer, or look under the mattress for drugs. Had they relied on their fives senses alone, they would have never found drugs or whatever.
Again, the judgmental mind relies only on what the five senses can glean from a situation. The underlying posture of the judging person is generally one of fear and an agenda to maintain control over an external base of power. Therefore, you judge who and what you fear can change your life, regardless of how big or small the change. Fear does not measure size – fear measures authority and power and responds to all targets on the outside as forces that can overturn or influence one’s base of power.
A new kid on the block, a new employee, or a new state senator – doesn’t matter what the object of “newness” is to the five senses. All they perceive is a new source of external power that is a threat to them and therefore must be judged accordingly. Judgment is an effort to hold that individual in his or her place, to contain or isolated their power within the parameters of your authority.
Discernment is the ability not to be held prisoner by your own fears, and to recognize the wisdom in change, because change is constant and includes the ongoing stream of new ideas and people into your life. Remaining open-minded is a wise position; learning discernment then becomes essential, as you are able to shift through new ideas, deciding which have merit and which lack substance. You are able to maintain a clear intellect.
Becoming a discerning person is your greatest protection from becoming possessed -- and by that I mean coming under the control of hysterical thinking, such as fundamentalism or social fears and mass-produced propaganda. (I’ll leave you to discern the reasons why I included that.) Such control by group thought-forms is a kind of social possession, just as shadow propaganda and alarmist material is very much a form of spell-casting.
Okay then, back to the main topic, which was my introducing the Sacred Contract of America for the last thirty minutes of my workshop. As I discussed the archetypes of America (don’t ask me to go into all those now; I’d be here all night, but it’s a DELICIOUS subject, I can promise you that), naturally the participants wanted to apply those archetypes to the hot topic of the upcoming presidential elections – particularly the archetypes of the Judge (begging the question, where has the wisdom of this nation gone?), the Slave (is America enslaving other nations now instead of liberating them, which is its true Sacred Contract?).
There were other questions, but you can tell just from these that the discussion became quite animated. I had already explained to the group that they had to assume the position of an audience capable of a discerning discussion, as opposed to going into attack mode. Everyone laughed a bit—BEFORE I INTRODUCED AMERICA’S ARCHETYPES—and promised to be on their best “spiritual behavior.” America’s archetypes lead to controversial discussions, and one has to remain in a symbolic frame of mind to pull out history and examine the influence of an archetypal pattern on the formation of an event, much less see the unfolding of cycles of pain and suffering, triumph and glory.
And these people were giving it their best shot. These wonderful people grasped the meaning of discernment as if they had been dying of thirst. Finally they had an option, a way to speak about what was unfolding in their disintegrating nation. And then one woman – and it only takes one to spoil the party – bellows out, “I did NOT take this workshop to listen to this political babble. A workshop is no place for politics.”
That’s all that needed to be said. Instantly the exciting and free discussion that was unfolding at lightening speed hit the ground and battle lines were drawn. As if someone had shot arrows into everyone’s hot air balloons as they were hovering over the chaotic grounds of America, participating in discussions of the symbolic influence of archetypal patterns in this nation’s struggle, suddenly everyone’s balloon crashed.
The harshness of her judgment coupled with her tone was like an organic cry to battle that bypassed the soothing skill of discernment, traveling right through the loins of every person in the room, who then responded with various degrees hostility or silence. Her eyes were filled with fire as she locked onto me, saying that my workshop had completely disappointed her–she was pulling out her big guns now.
Finally, I walked up to her and in a steady voice I looked at her and said, “While I may disappoint you as a teacher, which is something I can easily live with, you are a far greater disappointment to your nation and every worthy American patriot. You think silence while your nation is screaming to have its principles stay alive is a worthy course, but that is the coward’s path. You are a coward and a disgrace to all that is good about the history of this great nation, a nation that is, even as we are gathered in this room, on life-support, because its citizens refuse to face that the Republic is dying. Live with that.”
She stormed out of the room, to no one’s surprise. You could have ignited a fire in that room from the tension, but it wasn’t a tension brought about through our exchange. It was tension brought about through the much deeper frustration of the imposition of silence on thinking people. Americans are a thinking people. We are an expressive people, a celebratory people, a happy people. But we have been silenced because we have forgotten or maybe we have never learned to appreciate how to communicate through the art of discernment – through dialogues that rely on the power of wisdom, insight, and the capacity to listen with respect to what the other person is saying.
Now, more than ever before, in this global psychic climate so ready to explode with hatred, the only tool that can get us through is our capacity to communicate with each other. We must transcend our need to be right, to judge the other, and begin to call on the gifts of the soul. We must use the tools we have been refining in ourselves for these past decades. This is the time we have been preparing for. And every single discussion counts. We must open ourselves to the sharing of ideas and discussions of how to lead our blessed nation through these dark times, lest dark forces stay in control. And I don’t care if they are Republican or Democrat; when it comes to dark forces, I am opposed to whatever disguise they wear.
Every one of you descended upon this earth carrying a Sacred Contact within the “walls of their soul,” a phrase Teresa of Avila was fond of using. One of my great frustrations is finding words sacred enough, magnificent enough to communicate to you all that is involved in a soul’s contract. It is not as simple as “this is your job on earth.” How could that possibly be the case? If it were, every unemployed person would be “contract-less.” Your Sacred Contract holds the key to the route through which your soul intends to awaken you?
I could wrap myself up in the depth of that thought for a lifetime. How does my soul intend to awaken me? Or, at our age, the question should be: How is my soul awakening me? All questions should be in present tense for none of you reading this is a child waiting for your life to begin. Just tapping at the door of that question allows you entry into wondering, “What is my soul? What is that force within me?” I can tell you briefly that you will not find the answer to that question in your mind, though your mind will produce an answer for you.
That is your “trick” answer. My workshops on Sacred Contracts were created precisely because unlocking a person’s interior life is no small task. And now that I have come to understand so much more about the nature of the soul after living, breathing, and working with Teresa of Avila’s legacy while writing my new book, ENTERING THE CASTLE, adding the dimension of the soul’s journey to my work has made the meaning of “sacred” in Sacred Contracts holy to me. And each of you has a spiritual obligation to be more than your ego; you have an obligation to yourself to develop a discerning mind and soul.
Let me offer you these suggestions:
1). Judgments come quickly for all of us. Following a judgment, remind yourself that you judge from fear that the object of your fear has more power over you than you do. Even when you judge a new idea, the same rule applies. Immediately shift your thinking to your inner theology: does the divine command your life or that person? Or that idea? Where is your real power?
2). Practice discernment: always ask yourself, “What is the TRUTH” in this situation, in this conversation, in this idea?” Your object is truth and wisdom. Those are your guides.
3). Seek out wisdom texts. For example:
The hour was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew. How can you ask me, a Samaritan and a woman, for a drink?” (Recall that Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans.) Jesus replied, “If only you recognized God’s gift, and who it is that is asking you for a drink, you would have asked him instead, and he would have given you living water.”
John 4:6-10
How do we know who it is we are meeting? How do we know who is occupying the seat next to us on a plane, or the homeless person whose eyes we often try to avoid as we walk down the street? Wisdom of the heart dictates that we assume the posture of the soul – that we look beyond the physical form, especially when that requires effort.
And then there is the universal wisdom hidden in the Kabbalah, the way of the heart:
“The Kabbalah is illustrated as a Tree of Life, made up of 32 paths of wisdom composed of the ten sefirot plus the 22 paths that interconnect them. Thirty-two is the numerical value of the Hebrew letter lev, meaning heart. At the same time, lev is deeply associated with the Torah, for it is the word formed by connecting its last letter, lamed in the word “Israel” (Deuteronomy 34:12), with its first letter, bet (Gensis 1:1).
This connection is made when its end is linked to its beginning in a never-ending cycle. The Torah is thus, “a tree of life to those who grasp it” (Proverbs 3:18), and it brings nourishment which derives from roots planted in the higher plane of wisdom. Learning the ways of the Tree of Life is identified with activating the heart in order that the heart may become a subtle organ of spiritual discernment.” (from The Essence of Kabbalah by Brian L. Lancaster: Chartwell Books, 2005).
Explore the wisdom hidden in the Kabbalah. There is a part of you that is seduced by the mystery of the very idea of 32 paths of wisdom that ascend through the very same path as the chakras. The template of ascension is in our bones, in our blood, in our psyche, and in our soul. We are called to a path of ascension and our only choice is, “Which one?”
Teresa of Avila described her path in her brilliant classic, The Interior Castle. My book Entering the Castle explores the seven mansions of ascension in contemporary language, taking the reader into the rooms of each mansion, leading you into the exercises of self-reflection that deepen your relationship with the power of your soul.
This is the voice that must be awakened in you now; this is the source of discernment and wisdom that is so vital to each individual as the external world spins evermore into the madness of chaos and illusion.
The Buddha said:
“With everything, whether it is above or below, remote or near, visible or invisible, you shall preserve a relation of unlimited love without any animosity or without a desire to kill. To live in such a consciousness while standing or walking, sitting or lying down till you are asleep, is Brahma Vihara, or, in other words, is living and moving and having your joy in the spirit of Brahma.”
4) Take time for self-reflection, contemplation, and prayer.
These are my offerings to you as the foundation steps toward developing the power of discernment and a passionate love for the wisdom-bearing mind. It is a great comfort to know that you are able to withdraw from the grip of fear and transcend that force in order to think clearly with discernment, uncontaminated by panic. Part of the blessing of learning to enter your Castle, which is the metaphor Teresa of Avila used to describe the deeper state of consciousness within your soul, is that the sojourner accesses wisdom.
Till next time, bless you all. I hope this Newsletter has been an inspiration.
Love,
Caroline
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