You control your attitude to life, even when your life is controlled. Others may victimize you, but only you decide if you are the victim. When you get knocked down, you are the one who says whether you belong on the ground or standing up again. You say this by your many little actions and reactions, responses and choices. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been down or how many times you tried to get up before, the next moment is always yours to create, bigger or smaller. Will you join the victims or set yourself free? This is the power of your eternal consciousness: to feel all your feelings and think all your thoughts and go further still, to have access to a larger picture, to take your option to reframe, to say where you’re coming from and where you’re going to. It is so because your eternality is the one thing that you cannot choose, which is good; this is God’s gift to you. No matter how long you’ve been asleep, one day you will wake up again.
- Spirit to Carl J. Schroeder, Monday March 10, 2014; www.HowToMakeHeavenOnEarth.org
Monday, March 10, 2014
Friday, February 28, 2014
Success and Cooperation
SLOGAN OF THE DAY: #1
When you try to improve your internal state by changing your external reality first, then you will meet conflict and resistance.
When you try to improve your external reality by changing your internal state first, then you will meet success and cooperation.
- Carl J. Schroeder, Feb 28, 2014; www.HowToMakeHeavenOnEarth.org
Explanation: I'm going to start sharing the daily slogans that come to me from Spirit, as an obvious way to make this inspirational website even more active, interesting, and helpful. I've been a little too perfectionist in holding back a lot of ideas until I make the complete essay or best poster to express them.
Today's slogan refers to how reality will change only when it needs to, based on the changes you've already made inside. Too many people make the mistake of trying to make themselves feel and think better by changing the world around them. They quickly hit problems, and then conclude that the world is against them. But this is just how reality works, so you don't have to take it personally.
Even when people make the internal changes that bring true peace and liberation, they may be surprised at how long remnants of the past still hang around. They think: "I felt such a big change in me, shouldn't the whole world reflect this overnight?" This apparent failure of reality to respond positively can cause people to doubt their personal transformations. They may even backslide and return to the security of fighting familiar old problems, which is always an option because we do have that free will.
If you find a way to truly feel and think better, then hurray for you, this is real! When you're not reacting to situations the same way you used to, when you're responding with more compassion and insight to all of life, then you can be sure that you have truly changed. The reason why reality might not change as quickly and fully with you is because reality is highly efficient. Nature will not spend the energy of changing until it absolutely needs to, for example because you simply can't take any next step until something moves.
If reality isn't changing overnight for you, ask yourself what really matters anyway. If you're not being stopped from working toward your goals, if there's another way around and more change would just be a matter of pride or convenience for you, then what you're really looking at is your own controlling ego. And if you stay in this place, you'll know, because more and more serious blockages will will start showing up, including people with obvious ego problems. At that point, you'll rest assured that you have not really changed, and you have more work to do to improve your internal state.
Better to be anonymously successful than famously failing; better to have private success than public failure. Reality may not acknowledge you as much as your ego would prefer to feel secure, but you'll be able to continue on your way to ever rising levels of satisfaction with your personal life, which is after all where you really live. By mastering your internal state as the source of your own experience, you will enjoy amazing synchronicities, miracles of support, and the endless variety of great friends who share your deepest values across this garden universe.
(my photo of the Buddha statue in my backyard, warmed by the sun, rising out of the melting snow)
When you try to improve your internal state by changing your external reality first, then you will meet conflict and resistance.
When you try to improve your external reality by changing your internal state first, then you will meet success and cooperation.
- Carl J. Schroeder, Feb 28, 2014; www.HowToMakeHeavenOnEarth.org
Explanation: I'm going to start sharing the daily slogans that come to me from Spirit, as an obvious way to make this inspirational website even more active, interesting, and helpful. I've been a little too perfectionist in holding back a lot of ideas until I make the complete essay or best poster to express them.
Today's slogan refers to how reality will change only when it needs to, based on the changes you've already made inside. Too many people make the mistake of trying to make themselves feel and think better by changing the world around them. They quickly hit problems, and then conclude that the world is against them. But this is just how reality works, so you don't have to take it personally.
Even when people make the internal changes that bring true peace and liberation, they may be surprised at how long remnants of the past still hang around. They think: "I felt such a big change in me, shouldn't the whole world reflect this overnight?" This apparent failure of reality to respond positively can cause people to doubt their personal transformations. They may even backslide and return to the security of fighting familiar old problems, which is always an option because we do have that free will.
If you find a way to truly feel and think better, then hurray for you, this is real! When you're not reacting to situations the same way you used to, when you're responding with more compassion and insight to all of life, then you can be sure that you have truly changed. The reason why reality might not change as quickly and fully with you is because reality is highly efficient. Nature will not spend the energy of changing until it absolutely needs to, for example because you simply can't take any next step until something moves.
If reality isn't changing overnight for you, ask yourself what really matters anyway. If you're not being stopped from working toward your goals, if there's another way around and more change would just be a matter of pride or convenience for you, then what you're really looking at is your own controlling ego. And if you stay in this place, you'll know, because more and more serious blockages will will start showing up, including people with obvious ego problems. At that point, you'll rest assured that you have not really changed, and you have more work to do to improve your internal state.
Better to be anonymously successful than famously failing; better to have private success than public failure. Reality may not acknowledge you as much as your ego would prefer to feel secure, but you'll be able to continue on your way to ever rising levels of satisfaction with your personal life, which is after all where you really live. By mastering your internal state as the source of your own experience, you will enjoy amazing synchronicities, miracles of support, and the endless variety of great friends who share your deepest values across this garden universe.
Monday, February 10, 2014
what happened to this blog and me
I'm going to try a new attitude for this blog, since it's gone evidently fallow in the past year. In the beginning of 2013 I started my facebook project at www.HowToMakeHeavenOnEarth.org, which successfully resulted in a series of inspirational images, slogans, and essays. This blog got less and less attention, occasionally reposting some essays. As 2013 progressed my personal life became increasingly complex and challenging, until my public writing went dormant and I focussed on my own private journals and friendships (always a good refuge for the soul!)
Now we're into February of 2014, and my late new year's resolution is to use this blog more for sharing some personal experiences like dreams and daily insights that I don't have time to turn into full essays. HowToMakeHeavenOnEarth will remain a place for polished presentations, and there have been some new essays in recent months, mostly leveraging on a backlog of inspirational photos and slogans I'd already done. I'll continue to re-post those essays here as well.
My goal for 2014 is to re-establish myself in a new area of the United States to begin the second half of my life, having met my Chiron return (a fancy astrological way of saying middle age, LOL)
Since this may well be a time for everyone to become more centered and focussed on their own life experiences and plans, I wish you all the best in your own process as well. May the blessings of a God-connected life be yours to know and enjoy, and may you find the supports, love, and guidance you need to maintain it through all of your own challenges.
peace to all,
Carl J. Schroeder
Now we're into February of 2014, and my late new year's resolution is to use this blog more for sharing some personal experiences like dreams and daily insights that I don't have time to turn into full essays. HowToMakeHeavenOnEarth will remain a place for polished presentations, and there have been some new essays in recent months, mostly leveraging on a backlog of inspirational photos and slogans I'd already done. I'll continue to re-post those essays here as well.
My goal for 2014 is to re-establish myself in a new area of the United States to begin the second half of my life, having met my Chiron return (a fancy astrological way of saying middle age, LOL)
Since this may well be a time for everyone to become more centered and focussed on their own life experiences and plans, I wish you all the best in your own process as well. May the blessings of a God-connected life be yours to know and enjoy, and may you find the supports, love, and guidance you need to maintain it through all of your own challenges.
peace to all,
Carl J. Schroeder
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Enter the Adult
Here's a major essay on growing up that I posted yesterday to my facebook page How To Make Heaven On Earth, and being so long belongs here in this blog as well. Enjoy!
IMAGINE A LIFE THAT IS REAL: As I get older, I learn more about the differences between what's fantasy and reality, and the differences between what's reality and real. Actually the lessons aren’t all that hard, but society doesn’t make them easy, with all kinds of distractions, misconceptions, and ego fodder to keep us busy for lifetimes with wayward companions. But since society is a product of the self (not really the other way around) I can see how I’m facing my own reluctances to grow up. Old habits die hard, as we tend to go kicking and screaming into that adulthood for which we need to give up on our perfect dreams born of simpler times. A big one: we’re never going to finally get that perfect parent figure who takes care of us, regardless of how much relabeling we do to not embarrass ourselves. “What, me want to be a child all of my life? Don’t be silly! Of course I’m not looking for a mother or father to reward me for being a good boy or girl, that’s ridiculous. No, I’m just expecting that if I follow the rules and do what I should, then government, God, employer, society, spouse, etcetera should meet all my needs and make me so happy. Love me in other words; is that too much to ask for? And if they’re not doing their part, if they’re messing me up, then I have every right to feel betrayed and afraid, helpless and hopeless, throw tantrums and blame, and play or work harder until they appreciate me and make everything better, right? Right? Oh wait. Um, never mind.”
The job of children is to play to stretch their imagination and senses, not to be practical and run a life in a world they can’t yet understand – that’s what the adults around them are for. Unfortunately, most of us had parents who were themselves still children inside looking to be taken care of, with varying degrees of outward display of this fact. They were busy trying to get us to behave and be good for them, with little capacity to understand themselves much less understand us and teach us real self-love and self-care. So in ways that were subtle or obvious, the children had to be parents to the parents, in hopes of getting their needs met someday, and this pattern carries on into the rest of life. We develop all kinds of habits of trying to love to get love, rescue in order to be rescued, blame before we are blamed, indulge and compromise and wait, as we entertain ourselves in extended childhoods that consume the resources of a planet which increasingly needs to be wisely managed by a high-impact humanity that didn’t want to grow up.
Those who act more responsibly than little kids tend to get stuck in the next phase of life, that of the adolescent, whose job it is to enjoy practicing adult responsibilities with no real abilities to follow through, only look good and fake it while they keep growing up. Teenagers can be incredibly sophisticated, able to display amazing talents and skills in theory which fall apart in practice, as they quickly cave in to inexperience, insecurities, peer pressures, and anxious defenses. Adolescents are adults in training, who need more validation, guidance, and love than ever, for a world that’s bigger and bolder than they dared to imagine, as encountered from within their own powerfully functional new bodies to match.
So look around now and ask yourself, how many of those accomplishing people making it big today are really just overgrown teenagers still winging it through their grandiose plans and insatiable desires, able to get by until they can’t, quick to be imitative, rehearsed, competitive, idealizing, idolizing, avoidant, rebelling, judgmental, and compulsive for the attention that might make them feel as good as they hopefully look? Gosh, and what about me, as I go through the motions of a responsible adult life, doing great and enjoying adult pleasures even as I live in secret fears of what’s waiting for me around the next corner, hiding the fact that I’m more needy than ever and half the time wishing I could just be a child taken care of again!? Yes, sad to say there aren’t all that many fully reliable real adults living in the world today, as most people imagine and wish for more of what they had when they were younger, or more likely what they never got and no one but themselves can give it to them now. It’s time to grow up, in ways that will be more fun and satisfying than our hurt younger selves could have ever imagined in the dysfunctional training of the dangerous grups (an original Star Trek term for terminally ill insane grown-ups from whom the children had to hide and fear puberty). But to attain our overdue liberation we have to be willing to become realistic with our fantasies, and discover what was real all along.
I’m reminded of a popular quote from that great American satirist and conscience prodder Kurt Vonnegut, who said "True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country." This snappy little barb is understandably funny and scary as a political favorite. But it’s also more poignant than most people realize, because it’s circumscribing the adolescent panic that each of us needs to feel and then ask ourselves why. It’s not enough to just point the finger of blame, because sooner or later that finger always points back to its owner, and we’re each responsible for our own reformation. We’re each members of any set that to our credit we may be pushing to leave. Vonnegut’s terror was his own at himself, as was dipping in to feel how much he’s been expected to grow up along with everyone else. If he had tuned into this planet’s spiritual adults and the incredible power of human evolution, Kurt would have been far more hopeful and grateful to be alive, but instead he couldn’t relate much beyond his own condemning high school superiority.
Vonnegut’s dead, so I guess from a position outside of the set he can finally see why he felt the way he felt and said the things he said. Unfortunately, healing by dying is incomplete, that's why we have to go back again, to retrieve and relive the rest of ourself and hopefully get to a different end. In his past life Vonnegut was Mark Twain, a nearly identical legendary American author. Check it out, they’re dead ringers for each other, and constitute one of the more convincing no-brainer proofs for reincarnation. So we’re talking about a truth-telling soul here who’s been helplessly brilliant and scared for many lifetimes, not yet revealing his full inspirational potential to humankind. For all the good that he did (and he did a lot), Twain quotes remain the favorite of curmudgeons, atheists, conspiracists, and misanthropes everywhere, because they are so incredibly acerbic and indicting of human downfalls.
I’ll never forget my shock at the degree of seething judgmental rage that a former coworker who idolized Twain would leak out like a trail everywhere he went, or perhaps even more alienating to me, how much everyone else admired this guy for his entertaining tales of world travel, political activism, and cultured knowledge that always ended badly in who was to blame for everything wrong. This quasi-friend of mine was also an incredible mirror to me, as I discovered synchronicities in our heritage going well back to German great grandfathers. The fellow is dead now from cancer, that modern pandemic of sublimated anger which changes us when we won’t change otherwise (Twain by the way died of a heart condition, and Vonnegut of a brain injury from falling down the front steps of his own home). Although he didn’t believe in an afterlife, I trust that my former coworker is learning his lessons now on the other side, with his own best friends and growth companions (they aren’t necessarily the same sets, you know).
So, little kids with little toys play, to imagine the things that aren’t in front of them for some mastery, while adolescents are big enough to enjoy adult gear and immerse themselves in the feelings and thoughts that can blow them away. It’s all good, it only gets ugly when people don’t understand and can’t just keep moving along. God has a plan for us each to fully awaken, so God created nature as a kind of conveyer belt that will take us through the stages of development that we need to arrive into our full divine power. The more we get the help we each need to stay on the track, the more that every step of growing up is a safe, fun, eye-opening experience of love in training. Mistakes are manageable, good mentors find us to tell what things mean, we discover our skills in time to meet the most serious requirements, and change is the magical friend on the journey that always gets better. No wonder a free healthy child is wide-eyed with wonder and love, full of enthusiasm for a life full of learning! “Is that something new? Oh please yes, a new adventure, complete with more friends!”
But the more we are burdened and shamed and attacked through the years by the ones who were scared because they never grew up, the more we have to make coping compromises of our own to survive. We may arrive into adulthood more dead than alive, crippled from reactions born of fear and ignorance, looking and feeling really bad from all the self-preserving defenses that we were advised to construct on the way. We become heavy and buried in our shields and armor: things like the merciless ego that says we're better (or worse) than anyone else, and beliefs that life is a senseless horror show, just take what you can and get out of here. The spiritual intention is to rise out of the muck when we're ready to clean ourselves off (like the lotus, you see), but it’s easy to see only junk and forget who we are. One day we look in the mirror and realize, oh shit, I’m no better than those I condemned for messing me up, and now I’m one of them. Oh sure I’m not exactly the same, I’ve got my own flavor and spin to my negativity. But I’m thinking and saying and too often doing the broken stuff too, and adding to the pain of the world. I’m a grup now, I can feel it; I’m a compulsive disease spreading germ of a human being. First they did it to me, now I’m doing it back and passing it on. I’m not fit to exist - that’s what you will think or feel like in despair - and in this state alone you are right, even if it is not all that you are.
Stop! Stop whatever abuses you can wherever you can, let softness enter, and pray to something greater than you to be saved. Give it a try, dare find out what’s real. When you’re at the end of a long troubled road, the only antidote for so much shame is to start over, with the imagination of a child and the passion of an adolescent and the caring of a parent and the best and worst experiences of all three, but all working together now under the new hope of a spiritual adult. Imagine that God is real, and reality wasn’t just a cruel joke or mistake. There was a good reason buried for everything that happened, and in fact it’s still happening. Imagine that there is still a miraculous seed remaining at the heart of your tattered dreams that kept you alive, something more real and amazing than all of the misconceptions and pain that obscured your vision for most of your days that got you this far. Where there is life there is hope, and thank heavens you are still alive. Begin to imagine a real life, and be willing to be more grateful than surprised when the magic returns to make you divine, when yesterday’s failed hopes become today’s miracles in the light of a new and more real tomorrow.
So, can we say yet what is real? Certainly not this tinker toy building block stuff that we call our reality; it’s so incredibly useful, but too flexible, too easily misunderstood and misused to guarantee that a good will come of it. That has been both the problem and the gift, that people have tried with their reality creations to fix the real outcomes for all participants, and they can’t. Everyone remains free to feel something different, think something different, go their own way - good or bad you can’t stop them from finding what they’re looking for. Reality is an empty container, a vessel waiting to be filled, a basket of props on a stage. What is your play, your theatre, your cue for a line? You make reality do what you want, you create your own reality.
But energy, that's something else. Energy is real and persistent, hauntingly so. The patterns of meaning for you, the emotional experience you get from the things on parade, that is most real and lasting and true. What makes one person happy may make another one sad, or even what triggers happiness for you one day may cause you pain in tomorrow’s context (a most alarming situation for addictive personalities who seek to control their own pleasure buttons), but happy and sad are themselves absolute. It’s funny, people call them abstract, these energy states, and represent them with so-called concrete things that are in fact far less concrete or universal. Each individual passing through the same life situation is coming from and going to their own choices for what they want to experience, and while the degree can vary to which their goals become manifest or made visible for all to see and agree that is that, nobody can take your own experience from you. This means that while you may temporarily feel patterns from the impact of others - overlays of energy that can compel you to do things that won’t feel right for you - sooner or later you’ll let go the false and head for the true, homing in on the center of subjective experience that’s you.
You have your own divine path of true feelings through everything, and that is why people who are discovering their spirituality get really into symbols and synchronicities and talk about incredibly subjective perceptions that are hard to explain to someone who isn’t having a similar experience. Of course, those who don’t get you can think you’re just making it up, because you look like the kids who imagine something that’s not there with their toys. But you know what’s real. The people who don’t understand are just looking at a different emotional experience, they’re in a different real place and phoning themselves in to you, having a telepresence in the shared forms of a reality that's been manufactured for us all to use. Are those people on TV really inside the box or up on the wall? Of course not, but you don’t have to know what studio they’re broadcasting from, or even when they recorded their show, to react and respond and get to know them here and now.
Of course, the more you become real and self-aware in your own reality, the more you can filter out the effects of yourself, to guage and evaluate the consciousness of other people. This is commonly called getting past your own ego, and in the TV metaphor it means you can react less to the actions directed at you, and pay more attention to the broadcast quality, themes and agendas of the show, and whether it’s live or taped. Obviously if you’re yearning for a real conversation, you don’t just start talking to a movie or series rerun. You need a live two-way connection, a video conference that goes beyond watching the prescripted performances that adolescents will favor and hide themselves in. So this is when reality can become real, as you and a friend can both be in the same place emotionally, sharing energies, regardless for how far apart or close by your world says you are. The real universe is not limited to time and space, after all - distance is a measure of closeness in thought and feeling. You can be in the same room or across the galaxy, in the same human bodies or totally different forms, and still be right there together, sensing and touching and affecting each other.
Imagine then, that imagination is where the real journey begins. Not all consciousnesses choose to grow physically, but the ones who do have done so for a very good reason. They know that a physical life was just the right help that they needed, the handle on what is real which they would require to take them all the way Home. So when you’re ready to embrace your own destiny and paradise, start where you are, and trust your decision to be alive at this time. You won’t be done with the set til you can make a good use of yourself. Your life may not turn exactly how you thought it would go, but that’s only because it can be so much better, by some measures of quality and depth that you hadn't considered before. The world is not simply mundane or profane – your every action on this planet is a sacred prayer, a ritual before God, a meditation on enlightenment, a dance of sympathetic magic, a resonant structure in which to become more alive with more love. You will not fully discover this however until you enter into the illusion itself, to make use of the unconscious tools that you buried there, to divinize and spiritualize not only yourself but the world around you. This is the pact that you made with God, this is the plan and the path that you set for yourself as a human being born unto Gaia.
Imagine to find a real life. You conceive of a plan, you start putting together some pieces of your reality, and you see what comes alive to share a part of the journey with you. Keep that part, let go the rest, build upon what is most real and important to you. Notice that accessible reality is becoming much greater than just the current physical time and space that you’re in. The expanded realm for experience available to you as a human being who is in touch with your soul includes the past, present, and future, vast and varied worlds of consistent thoughts and feelings that intersect in some places with you, and other dimensions beyond the reach of your imagination today but which are waiting for you to perceive their effect. Angels are real, so is God, Goddess too. Spirit guides and fairies, dragons, friendly extraterrestrials, demons and devils to be avoided unless you have something to learn, teachers of all kinds and so very much more - all are as real as the next door neighbor on Earth who, by their own use of your shared reality to further their own choices for real energies, is calling into form more influences than they can fully understand but to which they are vulnerable, exposed, and open. You’re doing much the same thing as well, so keep perceiving and conceiving the many kinds and amounts of love around you. Set boundaries, make choices, feel your progress as you change. Don’t underestimate the power of what you can imagine and begin to make senses of, even if at times you must assess and redress the mistakes that you make in sorting through to connect so many ideals and ideas, shapes and forms. To err is human, to forgive and live and let live is divine.
Don’t get sucked into the cults of groupies who say explicitly or implicitly there is no higher power and nothing beyond their own little world, when you can so easily know they are wrong. People for example who insist there is no afterlife or metaphysical realm have their own emotional reasons for saying so, perhaps even good ones as they focus themselves on what’s left to improve. You’re welcome to ride any bandwagons too, you just might want to jump off before they hit the wall hard. All systems have their limitations, which can be experienced as betrayal for what didn’t come or gratitude for what did, that is your choice.
Modern technology is taking humanity for a great ride, and the benefits don’t have to end after the limits are known. There are those who think the internet isn’t just another window on the collective unconscious (when in fact people have always networked in their dreams and synchronicities for example), that cellphones aren’t just a way of focusing telepathy, and happiness and love are only the right mix of brain chemicals that we can and should engineer. Such people even think that robotic bodies will one day make them into immortals and gods, and until then they can wait to be saved by technology (unless it fails them just like all the other saviors they tried). These people don’t understand that they’re worshipping their tools of experience, but any technology can only give you more access to the unconscious spiritual powers you already have. Nothing is real unless it’s symbolic, so tapping into a technique or entertaining a vision is just the beginning of self-discovery. People are already immortal and gods, just not acting from a sustainable understanding yet to choose that much power to love.
So then to balance in reaction come all the people of faith who condemn modern ways, who attack the science of bold humanity and say only God should have so much power, now we are surely doomed. And if you think I’m only talking about religious fundamentalists, think again – the new age has just as much dogma and prejudice against the useful technological realities of Earth’s spiritual evolution as the old churches they loathe to find themselves in (but past lives will take you into so many wonderful subjective places!) Well, now you can know better than all these extremes and more, as you tune into the real Spirit that’s driving the interconnected reality experiences of humanity growing up. It’s all good in the end, just different stages of development still unaware of themselves. There are angels in the cities as well as the countryside; there are devas of the higher orders ready to guide you through the hardest places and the longest detours you may find yourself on. There are ascended masters waiting for you in the heavenly realms, and some of them are even you in your own self-realized tomorrows.
Imagine and begin to discover the truest seeds of what was real all along. It's okay to slip up and fall short, to not get the point for a while. If you can’t imagine a thing in some fashion, then you won’t find your way into the actual experience later. The real road may be winding and long, as what excites you at first may change and evolve, and you turn a corner to realize that you set your sight wrong. But this is the nature of the path that you’re on. From an unseen spark of motivating inspiration that's real and partly felt, you create something in your reality to carry the magic as best as it can, and you build upon that as far as it goes. Did you build upon sand or stone? Walls may tumble down to reveal what was real and lasting - if so, start again with what you can learn. Don’t get discouraged, keep the treasures you find for your next cornerstone, learn to design in alignment with God, keep to that humbling long winding road. Yes, there are some shorter cut paths that many will take, side routes from the truth that run straight to false promised ends, glamorous ways that are wide with indulgent leniency or narrow with harsh discipline. But those are the quick direct lies that sound very good but leave people aching, compulsive, and empty inside. Only the real unpredictable path of a spiritual learning adventure, the reality consequences filled with so many surprises (they’re meant to be good!) will lead you in the end to the end that never ends: your eternal life. Trust and seek, ye shall find. The feelings will grow until you will know, as you learn to be free in good Time itself, that old precious friend you have known for so long on your quest for the heaven in Earth. Sometimes you’re going home. Sometimes you’re coming home. And sometimes, you’re already Home.
- Carl J. Schroeder, Saturday August 10, 2013
www.HowToMakeHeavenOnEarth.org
“Imagination is the doorway to perceiving what's real.”
(This is the phrase that came to me to accompany my photo from the Renaissance faire at Hammond Castle, Gloucester MA, July 28, 2013. John Hays Hammond Jr. was an eccentric genius inventor who also fancied himself a monk so that in the 1920’s he built a medieval castle which he called his Abbey by the Sea (Abbadia Mare) from many real European artifacts to serve as his home and laboratory. Late at night he would sit in monk’s robes and read by candlelight there, his refuge in a storybook life. A close protégé of both Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell (his remarkable family was friends with Nikola Tesla, the Wright brothers, and many more), Hammond is second only to Edison in number of patents, mostly in the realm of radio control which he pioneered (he ran the first radio controlled riderless ghost ship around the harbor to terrorize the local fishermen, which led to the US navy hiring him for torpedo guidance systems), but also in diverse areas such as the first synchronizations of sound and image for the movie industry’s new talkies, and controls for the large 10,000 pipe organ he specially designed to resonate and shake his beloved castle walls (he wrote “nothing can reincarnate their spirit except to walk through rooms in which they have lived” – but no, he’s not the Hammond of pipe organ fame). John remains a controversial figure, as most seriously he was accused of treason when his inventions showed up in enemy hands during WWII (seems an assistant was the spy, but John had compromised his reputation when he dealt with the likes of Mussolini to acquire his castle parts), and furthermore he often fed a large ego that was given to high-tech pranks on his many famous visitors which included presidents, scientists, artists, celebrities, and more (he especially loved it when Gershwin would come play his piano), plus he dabbled in the occult later in life (the castle could use an energy clearing, after thrilling too many ghost hunters from nearby Salem). When my own spiritual growth broke through nearly 16 years ago to a depth of imagination that included our past lives and many simultaneous dimensions, I was called by dreams and intuition to John’s castle for further guidance and inspiration. Eventually I came to understand that John and I are eternal colleagues, and things that he felt compelled to do in his lifetime contained reasons and meanings far deeper than he was able to comprehend, a limitation which people like me and Emanuel Swedenborg work to change (I’m not saying I was Swedenborg, only that John led me next to study with him). It is time for humanity to learn more of the purposes of history for the making of heaven on Earth. We are all in effect remotely guided from our own higher selves, a fact we come to understand and make use of as we move into that higher consciousness position for this New Age of power which John instrumentally assisted to usher and make visible. Thank you, old friend, I finally know which monk you are to me now, assisting me as you did to write my visions down!)
IMAGINE A LIFE THAT IS REAL: As I get older, I learn more about the differences between what's fantasy and reality, and the differences between what's reality and real. Actually the lessons aren’t all that hard, but society doesn’t make them easy, with all kinds of distractions, misconceptions, and ego fodder to keep us busy for lifetimes with wayward companions. But since society is a product of the self (not really the other way around) I can see how I’m facing my own reluctances to grow up. Old habits die hard, as we tend to go kicking and screaming into that adulthood for which we need to give up on our perfect dreams born of simpler times. A big one: we’re never going to finally get that perfect parent figure who takes care of us, regardless of how much relabeling we do to not embarrass ourselves. “What, me want to be a child all of my life? Don’t be silly! Of course I’m not looking for a mother or father to reward me for being a good boy or girl, that’s ridiculous. No, I’m just expecting that if I follow the rules and do what I should, then government, God, employer, society, spouse, etcetera should meet all my needs and make me so happy. Love me in other words; is that too much to ask for? And if they’re not doing their part, if they’re messing me up, then I have every right to feel betrayed and afraid, helpless and hopeless, throw tantrums and blame, and play or work harder until they appreciate me and make everything better, right? Right? Oh wait. Um, never mind.”
The job of children is to play to stretch their imagination and senses, not to be practical and run a life in a world they can’t yet understand – that’s what the adults around them are for. Unfortunately, most of us had parents who were themselves still children inside looking to be taken care of, with varying degrees of outward display of this fact. They were busy trying to get us to behave and be good for them, with little capacity to understand themselves much less understand us and teach us real self-love and self-care. So in ways that were subtle or obvious, the children had to be parents to the parents, in hopes of getting their needs met someday, and this pattern carries on into the rest of life. We develop all kinds of habits of trying to love to get love, rescue in order to be rescued, blame before we are blamed, indulge and compromise and wait, as we entertain ourselves in extended childhoods that consume the resources of a planet which increasingly needs to be wisely managed by a high-impact humanity that didn’t want to grow up.
Those who act more responsibly than little kids tend to get stuck in the next phase of life, that of the adolescent, whose job it is to enjoy practicing adult responsibilities with no real abilities to follow through, only look good and fake it while they keep growing up. Teenagers can be incredibly sophisticated, able to display amazing talents and skills in theory which fall apart in practice, as they quickly cave in to inexperience, insecurities, peer pressures, and anxious defenses. Adolescents are adults in training, who need more validation, guidance, and love than ever, for a world that’s bigger and bolder than they dared to imagine, as encountered from within their own powerfully functional new bodies to match.
So look around now and ask yourself, how many of those accomplishing people making it big today are really just overgrown teenagers still winging it through their grandiose plans and insatiable desires, able to get by until they can’t, quick to be imitative, rehearsed, competitive, idealizing, idolizing, avoidant, rebelling, judgmental, and compulsive for the attention that might make them feel as good as they hopefully look? Gosh, and what about me, as I go through the motions of a responsible adult life, doing great and enjoying adult pleasures even as I live in secret fears of what’s waiting for me around the next corner, hiding the fact that I’m more needy than ever and half the time wishing I could just be a child taken care of again!? Yes, sad to say there aren’t all that many fully reliable real adults living in the world today, as most people imagine and wish for more of what they had when they were younger, or more likely what they never got and no one but themselves can give it to them now. It’s time to grow up, in ways that will be more fun and satisfying than our hurt younger selves could have ever imagined in the dysfunctional training of the dangerous grups (an original Star Trek term for terminally ill insane grown-ups from whom the children had to hide and fear puberty). But to attain our overdue liberation we have to be willing to become realistic with our fantasies, and discover what was real all along.
I’m reminded of a popular quote from that great American satirist and conscience prodder Kurt Vonnegut, who said "True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country." This snappy little barb is understandably funny and scary as a political favorite. But it’s also more poignant than most people realize, because it’s circumscribing the adolescent panic that each of us needs to feel and then ask ourselves why. It’s not enough to just point the finger of blame, because sooner or later that finger always points back to its owner, and we’re each responsible for our own reformation. We’re each members of any set that to our credit we may be pushing to leave. Vonnegut’s terror was his own at himself, as was dipping in to feel how much he’s been expected to grow up along with everyone else. If he had tuned into this planet’s spiritual adults and the incredible power of human evolution, Kurt would have been far more hopeful and grateful to be alive, but instead he couldn’t relate much beyond his own condemning high school superiority.
Vonnegut’s dead, so I guess from a position outside of the set he can finally see why he felt the way he felt and said the things he said. Unfortunately, healing by dying is incomplete, that's why we have to go back again, to retrieve and relive the rest of ourself and hopefully get to a different end. In his past life Vonnegut was Mark Twain, a nearly identical legendary American author. Check it out, they’re dead ringers for each other, and constitute one of the more convincing no-brainer proofs for reincarnation. So we’re talking about a truth-telling soul here who’s been helplessly brilliant and scared for many lifetimes, not yet revealing his full inspirational potential to humankind. For all the good that he did (and he did a lot), Twain quotes remain the favorite of curmudgeons, atheists, conspiracists, and misanthropes everywhere, because they are so incredibly acerbic and indicting of human downfalls.
I’ll never forget my shock at the degree of seething judgmental rage that a former coworker who idolized Twain would leak out like a trail everywhere he went, or perhaps even more alienating to me, how much everyone else admired this guy for his entertaining tales of world travel, political activism, and cultured knowledge that always ended badly in who was to blame for everything wrong. This quasi-friend of mine was also an incredible mirror to me, as I discovered synchronicities in our heritage going well back to German great grandfathers. The fellow is dead now from cancer, that modern pandemic of sublimated anger which changes us when we won’t change otherwise (Twain by the way died of a heart condition, and Vonnegut of a brain injury from falling down the front steps of his own home). Although he didn’t believe in an afterlife, I trust that my former coworker is learning his lessons now on the other side, with his own best friends and growth companions (they aren’t necessarily the same sets, you know).
So, little kids with little toys play, to imagine the things that aren’t in front of them for some mastery, while adolescents are big enough to enjoy adult gear and immerse themselves in the feelings and thoughts that can blow them away. It’s all good, it only gets ugly when people don’t understand and can’t just keep moving along. God has a plan for us each to fully awaken, so God created nature as a kind of conveyer belt that will take us through the stages of development that we need to arrive into our full divine power. The more we get the help we each need to stay on the track, the more that every step of growing up is a safe, fun, eye-opening experience of love in training. Mistakes are manageable, good mentors find us to tell what things mean, we discover our skills in time to meet the most serious requirements, and change is the magical friend on the journey that always gets better. No wonder a free healthy child is wide-eyed with wonder and love, full of enthusiasm for a life full of learning! “Is that something new? Oh please yes, a new adventure, complete with more friends!”
But the more we are burdened and shamed and attacked through the years by the ones who were scared because they never grew up, the more we have to make coping compromises of our own to survive. We may arrive into adulthood more dead than alive, crippled from reactions born of fear and ignorance, looking and feeling really bad from all the self-preserving defenses that we were advised to construct on the way. We become heavy and buried in our shields and armor: things like the merciless ego that says we're better (or worse) than anyone else, and beliefs that life is a senseless horror show, just take what you can and get out of here. The spiritual intention is to rise out of the muck when we're ready to clean ourselves off (like the lotus, you see), but it’s easy to see only junk and forget who we are. One day we look in the mirror and realize, oh shit, I’m no better than those I condemned for messing me up, and now I’m one of them. Oh sure I’m not exactly the same, I’ve got my own flavor and spin to my negativity. But I’m thinking and saying and too often doing the broken stuff too, and adding to the pain of the world. I’m a grup now, I can feel it; I’m a compulsive disease spreading germ of a human being. First they did it to me, now I’m doing it back and passing it on. I’m not fit to exist - that’s what you will think or feel like in despair - and in this state alone you are right, even if it is not all that you are.
Stop! Stop whatever abuses you can wherever you can, let softness enter, and pray to something greater than you to be saved. Give it a try, dare find out what’s real. When you’re at the end of a long troubled road, the only antidote for so much shame is to start over, with the imagination of a child and the passion of an adolescent and the caring of a parent and the best and worst experiences of all three, but all working together now under the new hope of a spiritual adult. Imagine that God is real, and reality wasn’t just a cruel joke or mistake. There was a good reason buried for everything that happened, and in fact it’s still happening. Imagine that there is still a miraculous seed remaining at the heart of your tattered dreams that kept you alive, something more real and amazing than all of the misconceptions and pain that obscured your vision for most of your days that got you this far. Where there is life there is hope, and thank heavens you are still alive. Begin to imagine a real life, and be willing to be more grateful than surprised when the magic returns to make you divine, when yesterday’s failed hopes become today’s miracles in the light of a new and more real tomorrow.
So, can we say yet what is real? Certainly not this tinker toy building block stuff that we call our reality; it’s so incredibly useful, but too flexible, too easily misunderstood and misused to guarantee that a good will come of it. That has been both the problem and the gift, that people have tried with their reality creations to fix the real outcomes for all participants, and they can’t. Everyone remains free to feel something different, think something different, go their own way - good or bad you can’t stop them from finding what they’re looking for. Reality is an empty container, a vessel waiting to be filled, a basket of props on a stage. What is your play, your theatre, your cue for a line? You make reality do what you want, you create your own reality.
But energy, that's something else. Energy is real and persistent, hauntingly so. The patterns of meaning for you, the emotional experience you get from the things on parade, that is most real and lasting and true. What makes one person happy may make another one sad, or even what triggers happiness for you one day may cause you pain in tomorrow’s context (a most alarming situation for addictive personalities who seek to control their own pleasure buttons), but happy and sad are themselves absolute. It’s funny, people call them abstract, these energy states, and represent them with so-called concrete things that are in fact far less concrete or universal. Each individual passing through the same life situation is coming from and going to their own choices for what they want to experience, and while the degree can vary to which their goals become manifest or made visible for all to see and agree that is that, nobody can take your own experience from you. This means that while you may temporarily feel patterns from the impact of others - overlays of energy that can compel you to do things that won’t feel right for you - sooner or later you’ll let go the false and head for the true, homing in on the center of subjective experience that’s you.
You have your own divine path of true feelings through everything, and that is why people who are discovering their spirituality get really into symbols and synchronicities and talk about incredibly subjective perceptions that are hard to explain to someone who isn’t having a similar experience. Of course, those who don’t get you can think you’re just making it up, because you look like the kids who imagine something that’s not there with their toys. But you know what’s real. The people who don’t understand are just looking at a different emotional experience, they’re in a different real place and phoning themselves in to you, having a telepresence in the shared forms of a reality that's been manufactured for us all to use. Are those people on TV really inside the box or up on the wall? Of course not, but you don’t have to know what studio they’re broadcasting from, or even when they recorded their show, to react and respond and get to know them here and now.
Of course, the more you become real and self-aware in your own reality, the more you can filter out the effects of yourself, to guage and evaluate the consciousness of other people. This is commonly called getting past your own ego, and in the TV metaphor it means you can react less to the actions directed at you, and pay more attention to the broadcast quality, themes and agendas of the show, and whether it’s live or taped. Obviously if you’re yearning for a real conversation, you don’t just start talking to a movie or series rerun. You need a live two-way connection, a video conference that goes beyond watching the prescripted performances that adolescents will favor and hide themselves in. So this is when reality can become real, as you and a friend can both be in the same place emotionally, sharing energies, regardless for how far apart or close by your world says you are. The real universe is not limited to time and space, after all - distance is a measure of closeness in thought and feeling. You can be in the same room or across the galaxy, in the same human bodies or totally different forms, and still be right there together, sensing and touching and affecting each other.
Imagine then, that imagination is where the real journey begins. Not all consciousnesses choose to grow physically, but the ones who do have done so for a very good reason. They know that a physical life was just the right help that they needed, the handle on what is real which they would require to take them all the way Home. So when you’re ready to embrace your own destiny and paradise, start where you are, and trust your decision to be alive at this time. You won’t be done with the set til you can make a good use of yourself. Your life may not turn exactly how you thought it would go, but that’s only because it can be so much better, by some measures of quality and depth that you hadn't considered before. The world is not simply mundane or profane – your every action on this planet is a sacred prayer, a ritual before God, a meditation on enlightenment, a dance of sympathetic magic, a resonant structure in which to become more alive with more love. You will not fully discover this however until you enter into the illusion itself, to make use of the unconscious tools that you buried there, to divinize and spiritualize not only yourself but the world around you. This is the pact that you made with God, this is the plan and the path that you set for yourself as a human being born unto Gaia.
Imagine to find a real life. You conceive of a plan, you start putting together some pieces of your reality, and you see what comes alive to share a part of the journey with you. Keep that part, let go the rest, build upon what is most real and important to you. Notice that accessible reality is becoming much greater than just the current physical time and space that you’re in. The expanded realm for experience available to you as a human being who is in touch with your soul includes the past, present, and future, vast and varied worlds of consistent thoughts and feelings that intersect in some places with you, and other dimensions beyond the reach of your imagination today but which are waiting for you to perceive their effect. Angels are real, so is God, Goddess too. Spirit guides and fairies, dragons, friendly extraterrestrials, demons and devils to be avoided unless you have something to learn, teachers of all kinds and so very much more - all are as real as the next door neighbor on Earth who, by their own use of your shared reality to further their own choices for real energies, is calling into form more influences than they can fully understand but to which they are vulnerable, exposed, and open. You’re doing much the same thing as well, so keep perceiving and conceiving the many kinds and amounts of love around you. Set boundaries, make choices, feel your progress as you change. Don’t underestimate the power of what you can imagine and begin to make senses of, even if at times you must assess and redress the mistakes that you make in sorting through to connect so many ideals and ideas, shapes and forms. To err is human, to forgive and live and let live is divine.
Don’t get sucked into the cults of groupies who say explicitly or implicitly there is no higher power and nothing beyond their own little world, when you can so easily know they are wrong. People for example who insist there is no afterlife or metaphysical realm have their own emotional reasons for saying so, perhaps even good ones as they focus themselves on what’s left to improve. You’re welcome to ride any bandwagons too, you just might want to jump off before they hit the wall hard. All systems have their limitations, which can be experienced as betrayal for what didn’t come or gratitude for what did, that is your choice.
Modern technology is taking humanity for a great ride, and the benefits don’t have to end after the limits are known. There are those who think the internet isn’t just another window on the collective unconscious (when in fact people have always networked in their dreams and synchronicities for example), that cellphones aren’t just a way of focusing telepathy, and happiness and love are only the right mix of brain chemicals that we can and should engineer. Such people even think that robotic bodies will one day make them into immortals and gods, and until then they can wait to be saved by technology (unless it fails them just like all the other saviors they tried). These people don’t understand that they’re worshipping their tools of experience, but any technology can only give you more access to the unconscious spiritual powers you already have. Nothing is real unless it’s symbolic, so tapping into a technique or entertaining a vision is just the beginning of self-discovery. People are already immortal and gods, just not acting from a sustainable understanding yet to choose that much power to love.
So then to balance in reaction come all the people of faith who condemn modern ways, who attack the science of bold humanity and say only God should have so much power, now we are surely doomed. And if you think I’m only talking about religious fundamentalists, think again – the new age has just as much dogma and prejudice against the useful technological realities of Earth’s spiritual evolution as the old churches they loathe to find themselves in (but past lives will take you into so many wonderful subjective places!) Well, now you can know better than all these extremes and more, as you tune into the real Spirit that’s driving the interconnected reality experiences of humanity growing up. It’s all good in the end, just different stages of development still unaware of themselves. There are angels in the cities as well as the countryside; there are devas of the higher orders ready to guide you through the hardest places and the longest detours you may find yourself on. There are ascended masters waiting for you in the heavenly realms, and some of them are even you in your own self-realized tomorrows.
Imagine and begin to discover the truest seeds of what was real all along. It's okay to slip up and fall short, to not get the point for a while. If you can’t imagine a thing in some fashion, then you won’t find your way into the actual experience later. The real road may be winding and long, as what excites you at first may change and evolve, and you turn a corner to realize that you set your sight wrong. But this is the nature of the path that you’re on. From an unseen spark of motivating inspiration that's real and partly felt, you create something in your reality to carry the magic as best as it can, and you build upon that as far as it goes. Did you build upon sand or stone? Walls may tumble down to reveal what was real and lasting - if so, start again with what you can learn. Don’t get discouraged, keep the treasures you find for your next cornerstone, learn to design in alignment with God, keep to that humbling long winding road. Yes, there are some shorter cut paths that many will take, side routes from the truth that run straight to false promised ends, glamorous ways that are wide with indulgent leniency or narrow with harsh discipline. But those are the quick direct lies that sound very good but leave people aching, compulsive, and empty inside. Only the real unpredictable path of a spiritual learning adventure, the reality consequences filled with so many surprises (they’re meant to be good!) will lead you in the end to the end that never ends: your eternal life. Trust and seek, ye shall find. The feelings will grow until you will know, as you learn to be free in good Time itself, that old precious friend you have known for so long on your quest for the heaven in Earth. Sometimes you’re going home. Sometimes you’re coming home. And sometimes, you’re already Home.
- Carl J. Schroeder, Saturday August 10, 2013
www.HowToMakeHeavenOnEarth.org
“Imagination is the doorway to perceiving what's real.”
(This is the phrase that came to me to accompany my photo from the Renaissance faire at Hammond Castle, Gloucester MA, July 28, 2013. John Hays Hammond Jr. was an eccentric genius inventor who also fancied himself a monk so that in the 1920’s he built a medieval castle which he called his Abbey by the Sea (Abbadia Mare) from many real European artifacts to serve as his home and laboratory. Late at night he would sit in monk’s robes and read by candlelight there, his refuge in a storybook life. A close protégé of both Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell (his remarkable family was friends with Nikola Tesla, the Wright brothers, and many more), Hammond is second only to Edison in number of patents, mostly in the realm of radio control which he pioneered (he ran the first radio controlled riderless ghost ship around the harbor to terrorize the local fishermen, which led to the US navy hiring him for torpedo guidance systems), but also in diverse areas such as the first synchronizations of sound and image for the movie industry’s new talkies, and controls for the large 10,000 pipe organ he specially designed to resonate and shake his beloved castle walls (he wrote “nothing can reincarnate their spirit except to walk through rooms in which they have lived” – but no, he’s not the Hammond of pipe organ fame). John remains a controversial figure, as most seriously he was accused of treason when his inventions showed up in enemy hands during WWII (seems an assistant was the spy, but John had compromised his reputation when he dealt with the likes of Mussolini to acquire his castle parts), and furthermore he often fed a large ego that was given to high-tech pranks on his many famous visitors which included presidents, scientists, artists, celebrities, and more (he especially loved it when Gershwin would come play his piano), plus he dabbled in the occult later in life (the castle could use an energy clearing, after thrilling too many ghost hunters from nearby Salem). When my own spiritual growth broke through nearly 16 years ago to a depth of imagination that included our past lives and many simultaneous dimensions, I was called by dreams and intuition to John’s castle for further guidance and inspiration. Eventually I came to understand that John and I are eternal colleagues, and things that he felt compelled to do in his lifetime contained reasons and meanings far deeper than he was able to comprehend, a limitation which people like me and Emanuel Swedenborg work to change (I’m not saying I was Swedenborg, only that John led me next to study with him). It is time for humanity to learn more of the purposes of history for the making of heaven on Earth. We are all in effect remotely guided from our own higher selves, a fact we come to understand and make use of as we move into that higher consciousness position for this New Age of power which John instrumentally assisted to usher and make visible. Thank you, old friend, I finally know which monk you are to me now, assisting me as you did to write my visions down!)
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Birth of a Nation, Birth of a World
Well for me the action is mainly at my facebook page now at www.HowToMakeHeavenOnEarth.org, and to demonstrate here's my July 4th posting that I didn't copy to this blog until 3 days later, oops! Personal life is very busy for me, and I continue to get tons of guidance and insights every day to help with the daily challenges. I then do my best to package and process these into the universally shareable inspirational images, quotes, and essays that facebook handles so well. The big breakthrough in the past couple of weeks was in fact to try facebook advertising for a few dollars a day. I just wasn't reaching as many people as my writings deserved to reach, so for the price of a coffee or two a day I'm now getting hundreds of new audience members a week, hurray! This was an easy sacrifice to make since I don't drink coffee (hey, I didn't say I was giving up chocolate). So enjoy and please spread the word, since the format seems to really be working, as I'm getting a response rate far above the industry average for click-throughs and conversions and all that marketing speak. It seems that How To Make Heaven On Earth is just what a lot of people have been looking for, which is a great sign for us all in addition to encouraging me with my writing in particular!
In the following post, I decided to just let loose and spell out the perspective on the founding of the United States to which I have been given some insider insight due to my particular lineage. How many more fabulous stories await to be told and heard out there in the awakening world truly excites and humbles me, because wow, Earth has a very rich spiritual history and amazing reasons for why everything went the way it did and still remains destined to work out just fine! What a great blessed time to be alive we can appreciate consciously now!
REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS: With people and nations, certain beliefs when implemented will be found to advance the freedom of souls to show themselves in human form, as evidenced by explosions of prosperity for all with the joyful abundances of creativity, love, and awakened dreams for an ever-expanding future. We do well to recognize and celebrate such triumphs of Heaven on Earth wherever they are to be found, as well as to not become complacent and superior in the ways that will cause us to neglect and overlook our own further progress to be made. The Spirit of Revolution challenges us all to keep growing, keep going, keep sharing the ideas that might make the world a better place, and keep cleaning the personal house of those limitations that would make all human life any less the miracle of divine presence that truly it is. God is our love, God is our light, and together we always intended to make the God in All proud.
The fourth of July has become celebrated as one of the great watersheds for the progress of human civilization, as a new nation was radically and boldly declared upon principles for equality and democracy which to this day continue to be tested. Looking back now, it was far from a given that the upstart United States of America could or would thrive as it has, and still it is taking hundreds of years to march those founding ideals through the cultural assumptions which threaten to corrode and destroy human grace on the ground. The devil has truly been in the details, as we hitched our wagons to a star only to discover where so bright a star leads. Thomas Jefferson was good enough to pen for all time in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal”, even as he relied upon black slaves in Virginia to keep the home fires burning. Jefferson’s soul was surely foreseeing the freedom for all humanity, but his ego was looking at his white male colleagues of the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and thus Jefferson the man wasn’t about to reach beyond the typical language of his time to explicitly include women in a grander vision for equality in representation, much less clarify the color of equal skin. A precipitous civil war had to be fought and won in the next century, and a suffrage movement in the next after that, for race and gender to secure by constitutional amendments their originally implied voting rights, and still the politics of bias rage on. Where were you born? How much money did your parents make? What’s the name of your God? Which gender do you love? How many handicaps or illnesses do you have in your genes? Questions like these get asked to put shame on the questioned when it is so often the questioner who carries the stain. There is a deep sadness in the soul of those who cannot see the greatness in another human form that differs too much from their own, because truly the refusal to allow diversity comes from the deepest places of self-ignorance and self-loathing. When we fully know, trust, and rejoice in our sacred identities, we cannot wait to share so much love. Each of us has the greatness of a soul that we will be so glad to find out and let out, and that greatness is to be enjoyed in a context of ever more love. It just takes time to open our eyes to the Self that contains the God within All, and how uniquely it does its own job within a world of support and courageous applause.
Thomas Jefferson - who became so famous as the author of his nation’s most inspiring birth certificate, and then succeeded his friend and colleague John Adams as the third president - truly stood on the shoulders of giants for how far he was to be seen, and still by his ego he fell with consequences that resound to this day. I speak in reference to a little known history of these United States, from a lineage of open secrets which wait to be discovered as the tides of time turn back the pages to the roots of our country’s limitations as both a great leader and great intimidator (tides, pages, and roots - aren't mixed metaphors fun?) We each bear a tremendous privilege and burden in this country, to continue to responsibly enjoy and extend a prosperity of the soul which understands the strengths and weaknesses of all human positions. We cannot afford to sit on our laurels for the torch of ideals that we carry. For the dignity of all that we have gotten right, we must also see that much more clearly just what we got wrong, and learn ever more from ourselves in the light of others.
The very phrase that perhaps started it all, the words called an immortal declaration of the most singular importance as predictor for the outcome of the newly United States and indeed for a resulting whole world which so often refers to and borrows the quote to claim more human rights, was not Jefferson’s own phrase after all! He got it from his neighbor and friend in philosophical conversations, an Italian doctor named Philip Mazzei. It is documented that Mazzei said and wrote “All men are created equal” before Jefferson, and Mazzei went on to play key behind-the-scenes roles for the American Revolution, including the dangerous acquiring of arms. But Mazzei is not remembered now with any of the founding fathers, despite his enormous contribution and having risked life and limb for his new homeland. Perhaps because he remained at heart so European, and returned to Europe as a tireless unofficial ambassador for American ideas and institutions, writing a first history of the American Revolution that was published in France before finally he died in Italy, therefore Mazzei remains too complex and cosmopolitan a figure to rank in the popular imagination with such homespun folk heroes as Americans might prefer to align themselves with. But Mazzei’s time yet may be coming for a new global age that embraces its world roots past and present, along with the matriarchal Iroquois nation whose successful confederation, the “League of Peace and Power”, is thought to have influenced the founding fathers as well as any Euro philosophies. The principles of these human rights thrive to this day, for some if not all human beings. In the future, the Great Spirit of All Souls shall be known and freely distributed in the greatness of all humankind, by the kindness of all great humans.
The stories of Mazzei, Iroquois, abolitionists, suffragists and more, are inspiring as objective fact, well understood if not widely known. And still we can go deeper behind the sacred curtains of our shared histories to reveal more of what tomorrow holds for today. John Adams, our second president after George Washington, has been restored in recent times to his fuller place as perhaps the most critical founding father of them all. A Boston lawyer and farmer, Adams established himself early on as a figure of unswerving commitment to unpopular ideals, with tremendous consequences for a brighter future for us all. After the Boston massacre in which the British army fired in panic upon an increasingly threatening crowd of colonial protesters - an outrage which became the most important foreshadowing for the American Revolution five years later - Adams shocked Boston by successfully defending the soldiers and getting most of them acquitted. Yet this principled early position of Adams indicated no love of British rule, and he further amazed everyone by ultimately becoming the most ardent supporter and engineer of our secession from England, as he argued tirelessly in the Philadelphia congress against those who hoped to avoid bloodshed at the cost of liberty. Adams further knew, intuitively and logically, that he was not the right man to pen the Declaration, and so he chose the southerner Thomas Jefferson, in a most fateful move of his personal life. For it turns out that not only was Jefferson the right man for the job, but the right soul as well. What few can understand but someday all people will, is that Jefferson and Adams were twin souls (also called dipole souls), in that phenomenon by which God creates souls in balanced pairs to accomplish the greatest works as needed by their times when reunited in the reincarnating life. Together, the transcendent soul partnership of Adams and Jefferson jumpstarted a fantastic new nation, served as the second and third presidents to follow the country’s first hero general George Washington, and then became bitter political rivals on different sides of their own idealism, a split which echoes in the Republican versus Democratic partisanship that threatens to gridlock and make irrelevant a great nation to this day.
I for one do not believe that the wounds of our country will be healed until the deepest soul level of all that has happened in the chronicles of human self-ignorance comes to the greatest light, and so I speak the unspeakable here. Twin souls are a fact of God’s Creation which must be understood, once and for all, along with reincarnation and the truth of a manifest destiny which NEVER offered the rights of one people to slaughter another. I sing the Ghost Dance in my own special way, I still shed my own tears on the trail of so many. The fact is that twin souls birth nations and universes, and twins who do not know themselves can do both incredible love and damage. This is no airy fairy new age romantic dribble of soulmates in love for which I speak - I’m sorry but this is too real to be misread in that way. Jefferson and Adams reconnected and forgave each other in the last years of their life, and died miles apart yet within hours on July 4, 1826. Now that’s soul romance! And the war on terror we suffer today, for which the two parties pose for political clout at the cost of true liberty? Ah, that would be the legacy of even more divergent twin souls, in the needs and fears of forgiving their karma. Think the nemeses who discover and define each other’s life paths: Bush Sr./Saddam Hussein, Bush Jr./Osama Bin Laden. Yes, this is a hugely controversial subject and many would say wholly unprovable. It is not my life’s work to detail these things after all, but rather the work of John Adams in his current reincarnated form. Dr. Walter Semkiw is the spitting image of our second president, and he is back this time not to found just a new nation for human equality but a new global society built on the justice of all human souls. The good doctor works with his friend and the famous psychic Kevin Ryerson, who began his career helping Shirley Maclaine to go out on a limb (Ryerson is not Jefferson if that was implied, as the Jefferson/Adams rift continues to this day). Together Walter and Kevin are revealing the principles and continuing lineages of reincarnating soul lines, and not for the shock appeal of who might be Jesus or Hitler or even Michael Jackson as so many might want to gossip about, but as I see it to (1) demonstrate and prove beyond any reasonable doubt that reincarnation is real, (2) prod and inspire important reincarnations to work together and step up to the plate of their fullest potentials in a greater aura of public support, and, perhaps most beautifully, (3) make war obsolete and ensure world peace for all time, by teaching everyone that the ethnicity or culture you demonize and slaughter today is, by the laws of karma, where you will be reborn tomorrow. Yes, humanity is great and equal beyond any human measure or abilities to manipulate, so let’s go into that night that becomes a new dawn together.
You can read more about Dr. Semkiw’s work in his books beginning with “Return of the Revolutionaries” and at his website at www.IISIS.net. If you’ve seen the new excellent documentaries on John Adams, you’ll recognize perhaps the same brilliant, stubborn, idealistic, and visionary soul at work who is at times self-promoting but usually not, because all is done for the sake of a cause. Sticking his neck out so far into metaphysics has been tough for a pragmatist such as Walter, so he continues to experiment for the right balance of factual and inspirational presentation, and what impressions you’ll find will be your own. Once, Walter had the distinction of being featured in an article by Newsweek, where all of his efforts to explain reincarnation were turned into an example of what ridiculous things even educated people can believe in today’s America. Still, the publicity worked out in his favor (and Newsweek’s youtube clip is decent, enjoy at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ltq_KE0KCP4). So it’ll be fun to see where Walter goes in the coming years, along with so many other amazing schools of thought and soul institution at work in the world today to which I am not particularly privy. I’m not claiming to see the total picture, and the only reason why I personally tune into and stump for Walter is because he was the head of the church in the 12th century who authorized my abilities to publish and speak when I was Hildegard of Bingen. I have a compatible destiny to Walter, to highlight and educate more of the world for the sources and effects of soul inspiration, so I remain forever grateful to the greater mission for human equality and justice that we can both labor in. We’ve come a long way from the limitations of earlier times and cultures, and overcome many of our own karmic obstacles to seeing what equality can truly mean, so I feel pretty good even in the human doubts for what I must say in the matter.
Please forgive me, or Walter, or anyone else here on this ascending planet of such fearfully hopeful unprecedented times, if good intentions find clumsy implementations for revolutionary ideas. I’m sure it will offend some people to read this my missive that turns from apparent standard patriotism, to revisionist history, to metaphysical speculation, to possible ego promotion. But this is a really big lifetime for us all to take the chances that we can believe in, and to open up to each other’s revolutions of mind, as we find the heart behind the soul’s intent that brought us this far. With any luck and guidance and kindness to cover, we will stand on the shoulders of giants together as we gaze out to the furthest horizons of Heaven on Earth, and contemplate what it still can mean to read, write, and say “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
- Carl J. Schroeder, July 4, 2013
www.HowToMakeHeavenOnEarth.org
(my photo collage of US Flag Backlit by Jnn13 and San Diego Fireworks by Jon Sullivan, courtesy Wikipedia, and the first famous sentence of the United States Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, with the single modification by me to clarify that “all men” is outmoded language for “all human beings”.)
In the following post, I decided to just let loose and spell out the perspective on the founding of the United States to which I have been given some insider insight due to my particular lineage. How many more fabulous stories await to be told and heard out there in the awakening world truly excites and humbles me, because wow, Earth has a very rich spiritual history and amazing reasons for why everything went the way it did and still remains destined to work out just fine! What a great blessed time to be alive we can appreciate consciously now!
The fourth of July has become celebrated as one of the great watersheds for the progress of human civilization, as a new nation was radically and boldly declared upon principles for equality and democracy which to this day continue to be tested. Looking back now, it was far from a given that the upstart United States of America could or would thrive as it has, and still it is taking hundreds of years to march those founding ideals through the cultural assumptions which threaten to corrode and destroy human grace on the ground. The devil has truly been in the details, as we hitched our wagons to a star only to discover where so bright a star leads. Thomas Jefferson was good enough to pen for all time in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal”, even as he relied upon black slaves in Virginia to keep the home fires burning. Jefferson’s soul was surely foreseeing the freedom for all humanity, but his ego was looking at his white male colleagues of the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and thus Jefferson the man wasn’t about to reach beyond the typical language of his time to explicitly include women in a grander vision for equality in representation, much less clarify the color of equal skin. A precipitous civil war had to be fought and won in the next century, and a suffrage movement in the next after that, for race and gender to secure by constitutional amendments their originally implied voting rights, and still the politics of bias rage on. Where were you born? How much money did your parents make? What’s the name of your God? Which gender do you love? How many handicaps or illnesses do you have in your genes? Questions like these get asked to put shame on the questioned when it is so often the questioner who carries the stain. There is a deep sadness in the soul of those who cannot see the greatness in another human form that differs too much from their own, because truly the refusal to allow diversity comes from the deepest places of self-ignorance and self-loathing. When we fully know, trust, and rejoice in our sacred identities, we cannot wait to share so much love. Each of us has the greatness of a soul that we will be so glad to find out and let out, and that greatness is to be enjoyed in a context of ever more love. It just takes time to open our eyes to the Self that contains the God within All, and how uniquely it does its own job within a world of support and courageous applause.
Thomas Jefferson - who became so famous as the author of his nation’s most inspiring birth certificate, and then succeeded his friend and colleague John Adams as the third president - truly stood on the shoulders of giants for how far he was to be seen, and still by his ego he fell with consequences that resound to this day. I speak in reference to a little known history of these United States, from a lineage of open secrets which wait to be discovered as the tides of time turn back the pages to the roots of our country’s limitations as both a great leader and great intimidator (tides, pages, and roots - aren't mixed metaphors fun?) We each bear a tremendous privilege and burden in this country, to continue to responsibly enjoy and extend a prosperity of the soul which understands the strengths and weaknesses of all human positions. We cannot afford to sit on our laurels for the torch of ideals that we carry. For the dignity of all that we have gotten right, we must also see that much more clearly just what we got wrong, and learn ever more from ourselves in the light of others.
The very phrase that perhaps started it all, the words called an immortal declaration of the most singular importance as predictor for the outcome of the newly United States and indeed for a resulting whole world which so often refers to and borrows the quote to claim more human rights, was not Jefferson’s own phrase after all! He got it from his neighbor and friend in philosophical conversations, an Italian doctor named Philip Mazzei. It is documented that Mazzei said and wrote “All men are created equal” before Jefferson, and Mazzei went on to play key behind-the-scenes roles for the American Revolution, including the dangerous acquiring of arms. But Mazzei is not remembered now with any of the founding fathers, despite his enormous contribution and having risked life and limb for his new homeland. Perhaps because he remained at heart so European, and returned to Europe as a tireless unofficial ambassador for American ideas and institutions, writing a first history of the American Revolution that was published in France before finally he died in Italy, therefore Mazzei remains too complex and cosmopolitan a figure to rank in the popular imagination with such homespun folk heroes as Americans might prefer to align themselves with. But Mazzei’s time yet may be coming for a new global age that embraces its world roots past and present, along with the matriarchal Iroquois nation whose successful confederation, the “League of Peace and Power”, is thought to have influenced the founding fathers as well as any Euro philosophies. The principles of these human rights thrive to this day, for some if not all human beings. In the future, the Great Spirit of All Souls shall be known and freely distributed in the greatness of all humankind, by the kindness of all great humans.
The stories of Mazzei, Iroquois, abolitionists, suffragists and more, are inspiring as objective fact, well understood if not widely known. And still we can go deeper behind the sacred curtains of our shared histories to reveal more of what tomorrow holds for today. John Adams, our second president after George Washington, has been restored in recent times to his fuller place as perhaps the most critical founding father of them all. A Boston lawyer and farmer, Adams established himself early on as a figure of unswerving commitment to unpopular ideals, with tremendous consequences for a brighter future for us all. After the Boston massacre in which the British army fired in panic upon an increasingly threatening crowd of colonial protesters - an outrage which became the most important foreshadowing for the American Revolution five years later - Adams shocked Boston by successfully defending the soldiers and getting most of them acquitted. Yet this principled early position of Adams indicated no love of British rule, and he further amazed everyone by ultimately becoming the most ardent supporter and engineer of our secession from England, as he argued tirelessly in the Philadelphia congress against those who hoped to avoid bloodshed at the cost of liberty. Adams further knew, intuitively and logically, that he was not the right man to pen the Declaration, and so he chose the southerner Thomas Jefferson, in a most fateful move of his personal life. For it turns out that not only was Jefferson the right man for the job, but the right soul as well. What few can understand but someday all people will, is that Jefferson and Adams were twin souls (also called dipole souls), in that phenomenon by which God creates souls in balanced pairs to accomplish the greatest works as needed by their times when reunited in the reincarnating life. Together, the transcendent soul partnership of Adams and Jefferson jumpstarted a fantastic new nation, served as the second and third presidents to follow the country’s first hero general George Washington, and then became bitter political rivals on different sides of their own idealism, a split which echoes in the Republican versus Democratic partisanship that threatens to gridlock and make irrelevant a great nation to this day.
I for one do not believe that the wounds of our country will be healed until the deepest soul level of all that has happened in the chronicles of human self-ignorance comes to the greatest light, and so I speak the unspeakable here. Twin souls are a fact of God’s Creation which must be understood, once and for all, along with reincarnation and the truth of a manifest destiny which NEVER offered the rights of one people to slaughter another. I sing the Ghost Dance in my own special way, I still shed my own tears on the trail of so many. The fact is that twin souls birth nations and universes, and twins who do not know themselves can do both incredible love and damage. This is no airy fairy new age romantic dribble of soulmates in love for which I speak - I’m sorry but this is too real to be misread in that way. Jefferson and Adams reconnected and forgave each other in the last years of their life, and died miles apart yet within hours on July 4, 1826. Now that’s soul romance! And the war on terror we suffer today, for which the two parties pose for political clout at the cost of true liberty? Ah, that would be the legacy of even more divergent twin souls, in the needs and fears of forgiving their karma. Think the nemeses who discover and define each other’s life paths: Bush Sr./Saddam Hussein, Bush Jr./Osama Bin Laden. Yes, this is a hugely controversial subject and many would say wholly unprovable. It is not my life’s work to detail these things after all, but rather the work of John Adams in his current reincarnated form. Dr. Walter Semkiw is the spitting image of our second president, and he is back this time not to found just a new nation for human equality but a new global society built on the justice of all human souls. The good doctor works with his friend and the famous psychic Kevin Ryerson, who began his career helping Shirley Maclaine to go out on a limb (Ryerson is not Jefferson if that was implied, as the Jefferson/Adams rift continues to this day). Together Walter and Kevin are revealing the principles and continuing lineages of reincarnating soul lines, and not for the shock appeal of who might be Jesus or Hitler or even Michael Jackson as so many might want to gossip about, but as I see it to (1) demonstrate and prove beyond any reasonable doubt that reincarnation is real, (2) prod and inspire important reincarnations to work together and step up to the plate of their fullest potentials in a greater aura of public support, and, perhaps most beautifully, (3) make war obsolete and ensure world peace for all time, by teaching everyone that the ethnicity or culture you demonize and slaughter today is, by the laws of karma, where you will be reborn tomorrow. Yes, humanity is great and equal beyond any human measure or abilities to manipulate, so let’s go into that night that becomes a new dawn together.
You can read more about Dr. Semkiw’s work in his books beginning with “Return of the Revolutionaries” and at his website at www.IISIS.net. If you’ve seen the new excellent documentaries on John Adams, you’ll recognize perhaps the same brilliant, stubborn, idealistic, and visionary soul at work who is at times self-promoting but usually not, because all is done for the sake of a cause. Sticking his neck out so far into metaphysics has been tough for a pragmatist such as Walter, so he continues to experiment for the right balance of factual and inspirational presentation, and what impressions you’ll find will be your own. Once, Walter had the distinction of being featured in an article by Newsweek, where all of his efforts to explain reincarnation were turned into an example of what ridiculous things even educated people can believe in today’s America. Still, the publicity worked out in his favor (and Newsweek’s youtube clip is decent, enjoy at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ltq_KE0KCP4). So it’ll be fun to see where Walter goes in the coming years, along with so many other amazing schools of thought and soul institution at work in the world today to which I am not particularly privy. I’m not claiming to see the total picture, and the only reason why I personally tune into and stump for Walter is because he was the head of the church in the 12th century who authorized my abilities to publish and speak when I was Hildegard of Bingen. I have a compatible destiny to Walter, to highlight and educate more of the world for the sources and effects of soul inspiration, so I remain forever grateful to the greater mission for human equality and justice that we can both labor in. We’ve come a long way from the limitations of earlier times and cultures, and overcome many of our own karmic obstacles to seeing what equality can truly mean, so I feel pretty good even in the human doubts for what I must say in the matter.
Please forgive me, or Walter, or anyone else here on this ascending planet of such fearfully hopeful unprecedented times, if good intentions find clumsy implementations for revolutionary ideas. I’m sure it will offend some people to read this my missive that turns from apparent standard patriotism, to revisionist history, to metaphysical speculation, to possible ego promotion. But this is a really big lifetime for us all to take the chances that we can believe in, and to open up to each other’s revolutions of mind, as we find the heart behind the soul’s intent that brought us this far. With any luck and guidance and kindness to cover, we will stand on the shoulders of giants together as we gaze out to the furthest horizons of Heaven on Earth, and contemplate what it still can mean to read, write, and say “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
- Carl J. Schroeder, July 4, 2013
www.HowToMakeHeavenOnEarth.org
(my photo collage of US Flag Backlit by Jnn13 and San Diego Fireworks by Jon Sullivan, courtesy Wikipedia, and the first famous sentence of the United States Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, with the single modification by me to clarify that “all men” is outmoded language for “all human beings”.)
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
latest advice on twin souls
Since I made a blog and facebook post on the topic, some wonderful people have been emailing me for advice on the concept of twin souls. They are in anguish, or at least confusion, over meeting someone so spiritually significant to them that they wonder if that is their twin soul, and whether it is supposed to work out (because it isn't, ouch!) I truly appreciate everyone who writes me this way, and because I'm so deep in my own process they may or may not get a quick reply depending on when they catch me.
So first of all I want to say to everyone who writes me or considers writing, thank you, because you're absolutely right to focus on such an emotionally and spiritually important issue that you just know and feel the opportunity to be more alive and real from the depths of your own immortal soul! That you take the space to have some response to the experience, and further allow my writing to help validate and focus you, is so beautiful and important to your growth and the health of the whole world. Really, it's that big of a deal! And because it's such a big deal, you do want to find the right response to move your life forward, and not get caught in the kind of under-reactions and over-reactions that have plagued twin souls for eons on this planet (and others as well!). You have a golden lifetime invitation to handle something with a mastery you have not seen before in your journeys of self-realization, and this feeds directly into why you're here after all, in a body on this Earth at this momentous time. You're here to both love and serve, and to help others love and serve by giving them the chance to give those gifts to you, which are even more of what you need and must first give to yourself. This is the reciprocity of the life divine discovering itself, so it is that you are love's only seed, as you prime the pump, and you begin the process.
(for a most wonderful heart-centering refresher, here's The Rose by Bette Midler)
I invite you therefore to express all you need to express from your soul-love experience without getting overly committed to reactions. You can liberate yourself through reflective activities such as art, meditations, talking to yourself or pets or God, and in many forms of journaling. If it helps, you can absolutely write to me as well! Sometimes having the right audience/listener/friend is just what you needed and makes all the difference. Just be sure then to let that energy of your expression and self-attention settle in, so you can re-read what you write, and you can be the one to immediately benefit from feeling more of your own soul showing itself. Then you can edit your letter and/or hit the send button, and you'll be in a good position to observe the energetic effects of putting yourself out there for someone else to see.
I am very very accepting and appreciating of twin soul experiences, so if you feel something really bad from writing me you can rest assured that I'm not thinking such things of you, but rather it's some invalidating voice from your past, or some internalized critic, or some other psychic pressure to intimidate you from finding your truth. A whiplash from being vulnerable may come quickly or over time, especially if the doubts eat at you because I don't visibly reply to your letter right away, which as I said can happen for reasons that are definitely not about you having made a mistake to write me. As a human being, I'm limited in my response-abilities. As a soul, I have many ways to comfort, befriend, and guide, as do we all. You can for example call upon my "past" life as St. Hildegard, which is not only in the past because she is absolutely active in the world energetically today, and doing far more than me as Carl can do from my current situation (trying to run my life, write a book, things like that).
What I'm suggesting here is a general principle for healthy growth, to be self-observing and self-supporting so you can let a reasonable action be done and invite the reality around you to respond as it will. It's a reasonable action to write to me from your heart on the most precious topic of twin souls and soul relationships, because I have spent lifetimes mapping the depths of those energies to hold the space for human beings to realize their best intentions. You deserve to experience being proud and centered in what you say and do, to know and feel that you did something well, so then you'll be prepared to let the world around you go its own way and see what happens next in response to your solid self-esteem. All of life's events, from the most direct and loving that we want to cherish forever as a springboard to future growth, to the most unloving and challenging that we need to master and leave behind as not worth repeating, can then be richly informative for your total growth process.
Does that make sense? This is the attitude and approach we all need to have in life, to release karma and become free, so the universe can lead us to the most directly supportive places for us, which is where we most belong. So for example, if you decide to indeed send me your emotionally urgent letter, you won't take it personally if I respond quickly or slowly depending on when you catch me in my own process, and you'll be able to feel the soul support that I absolutely and immediately have for you energetically. My soul, just like your own, does amazing things that I just catch glimpses of in the magic synchronicities and sensations of life's infinity.
I get a lot of dreams for example of meeting people who feel new to me, and exchanging some words and symbols before moving back into my own psychic territory. I can see the signs that this person was not just an aspect of myself but someone objective in the outer world, and I may not know who exactly for a long time, if ever. That's the collective unconscious at work, and it has a vast light side as well as that tedious dark side that feeds the nightmares of so many people who are afraid of their own growth. Your energy is your own bubble that always protects and guides you, so you will increasingly operate only on the light side as you cleanse your mind through the lessons of a loving life. Of course I also interact with sides of my own soul (such as Hildegard), but there are solid clues for when I am connecting with someone outside of myself, and that is when I often only know that my spirit was helping someone, and in turn they were helping me. After all, in every true exchange of caring and healing, there is growth on both sides. The best healers know how to receive healing when they give healing, to let the lifeforce flow within healthy limits for everyone, and I am always striving to be both student and teacher of the greater universe.
With this attitude then, I offer below something of a composite form-letter I've written to people who arrive asking for comfort and ideas about their soul twin/mate/flame challenges. I'll probably end up sending this verbatim in future replies along with any specific perceptions I get when I read a letter to me. Having this resource handy now will help me to respond more quickly to everyone, including readers of this blog post who wish to benefit more anonymously and energetically. I felt good from writing this and even better explaining it here now, because it's so much more than just an impersonal form letter to me!
Hope that makes sense, and many blessings to us all on this lovely planet we live together on! Thank you Gaia, God and Goddess cocreating in majestic form!
- (Carl)
Thank you for your email asking for some guidance with your twin soul experience. I apologize for not replying sooner, but I continue to be very busy making my own progress in this and other areas. Human spiritual growth is certainly intense and complex, isn't it!?
Have you read the two main essays I have posted on the topic?
http://newearthlight.blogspot.com/2011/08/surviving-twin-flame.html
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=547907035250147&set=a.50866038\9174812.116965.508632602510924&type=1&theater
(from HowToMakeHeavenOnEarth.org)
I completely understand and sympathize with the intensity of the twin soul experience, especially from the point of view of the twin who is more interested in making the relationship work. Although the souls of the twins will always work together unconsciously and psychically, very few twin souls in their conscious human personalities will be both able and willing to stay together in a cooperative loving way. This is because of their nature, that twin souls are always connected in values but always holding an opposite balance for how to live those values. So for example when one is in a more feminine relationship oriented focus, the other is in a more masculine career oriented focus. Of course the masculine and feminine energies of creation belong together and work best united in harmony, but It takes great maturity for the inner balance of each person to make possible a human twin soul pair who is in outer balance. And even then, that outer balance could reveal the twin soul pair were made to be great friends and colleagues, not necessarily romantic. There are many kinds of love after all, as I discuss here: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=559843474056503&set=a.508660389174812.116965.508632602510924&type=1&theater
The twin soul connection is so amazing and inspiring that many people like to assume it means the ultimate romance, but that is just not true and can cause endless suffering if you try to enforce that relationship. What the twin means is the ultimate reminder of our soul love and mission, which each person then has the free will to avoid, follow or corrupt as they choose. One characteristic of twin souls is just that they define each other and become remembered together, but that connection can take many forms. I only know of one good example of a successful twin soul romantic couple, and that was the 19th century poets Robert and Elizabeth Browning (who did not reincarnate as John Lennon and Yoko Ono even though Lennon and Ono thought they were the Brownings, probably because they wanted to be in that energy). Even the most mature twin souls who might be a couple more often choose to be platonic colleagues in a mission, such as the lifelong spiritual teachers Sri Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa.
Many other twin souls who accomplish great things together will choose differences of age and gender that disqualify them from romantic relationship, such as Jesus and his mother Mary who were twin souls (Mary Magdalene was a twin flame, to be discussed below). John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were twin souls who were vital to founding the United States together, then they became political enemies and only reconnected later in life (they died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826, now isn't that romantic?). Many famous twin souls can't live with each other and can't live without each other, like Liz Taylor and Richard Burton who dramatically created and loved together intermittently. Other famous twin souls spark only hatred and fear for each other's different sides of life, becoming infamous lifelong enemies who drag many others into their personal feud, such as George Bush Sr. and Saddam Hussein, and George Bush Jr. and Osama Bin Laden. Boy, aren't they going to be surprised and embarrassed in the afterlife!
So you see, the twin soul connection does NOT spell ultimate romance at all, and the New Age is doing you a great disservice to push you to think such things. Many many people are destined to experience their twin soul as some kind of huge ultimate wake-up call to remember divine love and grow spiritually, which is especially needed in today's ascending world. This often results in a brief experiment to be together as a couple that ends rather badly with someone running away, even to the point of one person dying just to force the surviving twin to get on with their newly affected life (which will carry the imprinted soul mission of both twins). So if you can always carry with you even some joyful gratitude from having met your twin, and manage to survive the separation with some hope of finding even more meaning and happiness in your life, then you can count yourself lucky, because that was the goal and too many people can't even open up to that possibility!
If you are suffering from romantic longings for your twin soul who has become unavailable in some way, you must look at your own inner balance of masculine and feminine energies. You must become a more complete and whole being in yourself. Remember, even before you entered all of your realities with your twin and became one of a pair, you were a complete image of the creator mother father God, the generative united God and Goddess partnership. You then chose your twin for the energetic support to enter into manifested lifetimes, even when most of those lifetimes would never meet the twin in body and you would only remain psychically connected. Now if you have met your twin in body and felt that original spark of limitless love only to become stuck and unable to create any further with them, then you must dig deeper into your divine origins and choose to create from more sides of yourself, to build your self-relationship which can then connect with everyone and everything with more love.
There is a concept in Theosophy of the Monad which is even closer to the divine All Source than your human Soul, so In effect you have two levels of your soul. There is the outer soul of your human experiences, and this is where you and God began creating yourself with your twin soul as your creation partner. Then there is the inner soul of your wholeness before you ever became human or entered into any realities, and this is the Monad state to which you must return. From this level you can recreate yourself, reinvent yourself, to begin again without depending on your twin's support of you. Your twin will continue to "haunt" you for a while, as deeper memories and feelings are uncovered where you had built up your soul in relation to them. But if you are willing to go forward and discover more of your self, each revisiting of your twin soul connection will result in a beautiful blessing from their spirit to live on and let them go their own way, for the love of both of you. Remember, there doesn't have to be any shame or mistake in twin souls hitting their limits as creation partners - there is no lasting should have, only lingering could have. With God's help, you each simply did your best to start growing with the right individual before you were fully conscious to know what you were doing, and thus free will meant that even after starting from the perfect divine plan you had that potential to grow apart, individually and together, and thus you did. The universe has fundamental unpredictability, called chaoticity, so only the fully realized consciousness can make a guarantee to work with whatever happens to endure with all good intentions manifested sooner or later, in the flexibility of respect for all other life paths under development.
The fully realized consciousness will thus begin your Monad super-consciousness, from which you can become your own best partner even as you seek a replacement for your twin soul. A divinely appropriate replacement for the twin will be someone so parallel to your growth that together you can consciously maintain the decision to go forward together as twin flames, forever dancing in deliberately paced and matching steps for the joys of synergy, that magic of becoming far more than the sum of parts. Your new soul partner will be more whole and right for you than your twin soul ever was, because they will be able to choose you as creation mate with infinitely more commitment and vision than your pre-conscious twin soul could offer you. To find your twin flame, you can in effect enter a period of dating from your soul, as you meet and evaluate twin flame candidates, and this path will take you far beyond your twin into amazing new growth lessons for how much more love there is to discover between you and the entire universe.
This potential to so deeply reinvent the Self for more freedom to manifest the inner soul is rarely hinted at even in the most esoteric literature, but one reference appears to be in the Michael teachings, a collective channeled entity who since the 1970's has been popular for a soul-based personality system that includes seven soul ages and seven archetypal soul function roles. The Michael system's equivalent of the twin soul is called the "essence twin", and in a "grand cycle" our soul can fundamentally reorganize our relationships to other souls in order to explore creation with a new essence twin and other partner types. I can recommend the Michael teachings for comparing the general terminology to your own experiences, but with some caveats including that for some reason even as Michael likes to get very detailed "he" also encourages many people to channel "him" independently, so there is a quality control issue as different Michael sources will disagree over many specifics including individual soul personality charts.
Ultimately, you will know you are succeeding when your twin soul with whom you first thought and felt you could not live without, becomes more and more like the first teen love of your soul's development, with whom you practiced the skills of soul relationship that you went on to master as an adult. You will always treasure your twin soul memories as foundational to your discovery of who you really are, and at the same time you would never dream of going back to them because you've become so much more than they could ever support and sustain. Any desire for a person who isn't right for you, whether your twin soul or some other projection of an ideal, will naturally fade when you really tune into the energy of your needs and see how much more you can be there for yourself, and by extension, someone else could be who is truly matching with your growth and thus able to share your self-partnering experience in a glorious manifestation of both your souls co-creating skillfully in boundless joy and gratitude.
Think about it, watch what happens in your life as you consider these possibilities, and good luck! You can watch my video lecture on how to be more aware of your own feminine and masculine energies here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWK00DSHBCo
Feel free to write me more if that helps you to organize your thoughts, just be sure to read what you write so you can grow from the space and not be dependent on me replying too quickly, which I may not be able to do. If and when you make significant progress in developing beyond your twin, I am certainly interested in hearing what works for you and how things go.
many blessings,
Carl: returnofhildegard/at/gmail/dot-com (spelled out a little to stop spammers)
So first of all I want to say to everyone who writes me or considers writing, thank you, because you're absolutely right to focus on such an emotionally and spiritually important issue that you just know and feel the opportunity to be more alive and real from the depths of your own immortal soul! That you take the space to have some response to the experience, and further allow my writing to help validate and focus you, is so beautiful and important to your growth and the health of the whole world. Really, it's that big of a deal! And because it's such a big deal, you do want to find the right response to move your life forward, and not get caught in the kind of under-reactions and over-reactions that have plagued twin souls for eons on this planet (and others as well!). You have a golden lifetime invitation to handle something with a mastery you have not seen before in your journeys of self-realization, and this feeds directly into why you're here after all, in a body on this Earth at this momentous time. You're here to both love and serve, and to help others love and serve by giving them the chance to give those gifts to you, which are even more of what you need and must first give to yourself. This is the reciprocity of the life divine discovering itself, so it is that you are love's only seed, as you prime the pump, and you begin the process.
(for a most wonderful heart-centering refresher, here's The Rose by Bette Midler)
I invite you therefore to express all you need to express from your soul-love experience without getting overly committed to reactions. You can liberate yourself through reflective activities such as art, meditations, talking to yourself or pets or God, and in many forms of journaling. If it helps, you can absolutely write to me as well! Sometimes having the right audience/listener/friend is just what you needed and makes all the difference. Just be sure then to let that energy of your expression and self-attention settle in, so you can re-read what you write, and you can be the one to immediately benefit from feeling more of your own soul showing itself. Then you can edit your letter and/or hit the send button, and you'll be in a good position to observe the energetic effects of putting yourself out there for someone else to see.
I am very very accepting and appreciating of twin soul experiences, so if you feel something really bad from writing me you can rest assured that I'm not thinking such things of you, but rather it's some invalidating voice from your past, or some internalized critic, or some other psychic pressure to intimidate you from finding your truth. A whiplash from being vulnerable may come quickly or over time, especially if the doubts eat at you because I don't visibly reply to your letter right away, which as I said can happen for reasons that are definitely not about you having made a mistake to write me. As a human being, I'm limited in my response-abilities. As a soul, I have many ways to comfort, befriend, and guide, as do we all. You can for example call upon my "past" life as St. Hildegard, which is not only in the past because she is absolutely active in the world energetically today, and doing far more than me as Carl can do from my current situation (trying to run my life, write a book, things like that).
What I'm suggesting here is a general principle for healthy growth, to be self-observing and self-supporting so you can let a reasonable action be done and invite the reality around you to respond as it will. It's a reasonable action to write to me from your heart on the most precious topic of twin souls and soul relationships, because I have spent lifetimes mapping the depths of those energies to hold the space for human beings to realize their best intentions. You deserve to experience being proud and centered in what you say and do, to know and feel that you did something well, so then you'll be prepared to let the world around you go its own way and see what happens next in response to your solid self-esteem. All of life's events, from the most direct and loving that we want to cherish forever as a springboard to future growth, to the most unloving and challenging that we need to master and leave behind as not worth repeating, can then be richly informative for your total growth process.
Does that make sense? This is the attitude and approach we all need to have in life, to release karma and become free, so the universe can lead us to the most directly supportive places for us, which is where we most belong. So for example, if you decide to indeed send me your emotionally urgent letter, you won't take it personally if I respond quickly or slowly depending on when you catch me in my own process, and you'll be able to feel the soul support that I absolutely and immediately have for you energetically. My soul, just like your own, does amazing things that I just catch glimpses of in the magic synchronicities and sensations of life's infinity.
I get a lot of dreams for example of meeting people who feel new to me, and exchanging some words and symbols before moving back into my own psychic territory. I can see the signs that this person was not just an aspect of myself but someone objective in the outer world, and I may not know who exactly for a long time, if ever. That's the collective unconscious at work, and it has a vast light side as well as that tedious dark side that feeds the nightmares of so many people who are afraid of their own growth. Your energy is your own bubble that always protects and guides you, so you will increasingly operate only on the light side as you cleanse your mind through the lessons of a loving life. Of course I also interact with sides of my own soul (such as Hildegard), but there are solid clues for when I am connecting with someone outside of myself, and that is when I often only know that my spirit was helping someone, and in turn they were helping me. After all, in every true exchange of caring and healing, there is growth on both sides. The best healers know how to receive healing when they give healing, to let the lifeforce flow within healthy limits for everyone, and I am always striving to be both student and teacher of the greater universe.
With this attitude then, I offer below something of a composite form-letter I've written to people who arrive asking for comfort and ideas about their soul twin/mate/flame challenges. I'll probably end up sending this verbatim in future replies along with any specific perceptions I get when I read a letter to me. Having this resource handy now will help me to respond more quickly to everyone, including readers of this blog post who wish to benefit more anonymously and energetically. I felt good from writing this and even better explaining it here now, because it's so much more than just an impersonal form letter to me!
Hope that makes sense, and many blessings to us all on this lovely planet we live together on! Thank you Gaia, God and Goddess cocreating in majestic form!
- (Carl)
Thank you for your email asking for some guidance with your twin soul experience. I apologize for not replying sooner, but I continue to be very busy making my own progress in this and other areas. Human spiritual growth is certainly intense and complex, isn't it!?
Have you read the two main essays I have posted on the topic?
http://newearthlight.blogspot.com/2011/08/surviving-twin-flame.html
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=547907035250147&set=a.50866038\9174812.116965.508632602510924&type=1&theater
(from HowToMakeHeavenOnEarth.org)
I completely understand and sympathize with the intensity of the twin soul experience, especially from the point of view of the twin who is more interested in making the relationship work. Although the souls of the twins will always work together unconsciously and psychically, very few twin souls in their conscious human personalities will be both able and willing to stay together in a cooperative loving way. This is because of their nature, that twin souls are always connected in values but always holding an opposite balance for how to live those values. So for example when one is in a more feminine relationship oriented focus, the other is in a more masculine career oriented focus. Of course the masculine and feminine energies of creation belong together and work best united in harmony, but It takes great maturity for the inner balance of each person to make possible a human twin soul pair who is in outer balance. And even then, that outer balance could reveal the twin soul pair were made to be great friends and colleagues, not necessarily romantic. There are many kinds of love after all, as I discuss here: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=559843474056503&set=a.508660389174812.116965.508632602510924&type=1&theater
The twin soul connection is so amazing and inspiring that many people like to assume it means the ultimate romance, but that is just not true and can cause endless suffering if you try to enforce that relationship. What the twin means is the ultimate reminder of our soul love and mission, which each person then has the free will to avoid, follow or corrupt as they choose. One characteristic of twin souls is just that they define each other and become remembered together, but that connection can take many forms. I only know of one good example of a successful twin soul romantic couple, and that was the 19th century poets Robert and Elizabeth Browning (who did not reincarnate as John Lennon and Yoko Ono even though Lennon and Ono thought they were the Brownings, probably because they wanted to be in that energy). Even the most mature twin souls who might be a couple more often choose to be platonic colleagues in a mission, such as the lifelong spiritual teachers Sri Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa.
Many other twin souls who accomplish great things together will choose differences of age and gender that disqualify them from romantic relationship, such as Jesus and his mother Mary who were twin souls (Mary Magdalene was a twin flame, to be discussed below). John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were twin souls who were vital to founding the United States together, then they became political enemies and only reconnected later in life (they died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826, now isn't that romantic?). Many famous twin souls can't live with each other and can't live without each other, like Liz Taylor and Richard Burton who dramatically created and loved together intermittently. Other famous twin souls spark only hatred and fear for each other's different sides of life, becoming infamous lifelong enemies who drag many others into their personal feud, such as George Bush Sr. and Saddam Hussein, and George Bush Jr. and Osama Bin Laden. Boy, aren't they going to be surprised and embarrassed in the afterlife!
So you see, the twin soul connection does NOT spell ultimate romance at all, and the New Age is doing you a great disservice to push you to think such things. Many many people are destined to experience their twin soul as some kind of huge ultimate wake-up call to remember divine love and grow spiritually, which is especially needed in today's ascending world. This often results in a brief experiment to be together as a couple that ends rather badly with someone running away, even to the point of one person dying just to force the surviving twin to get on with their newly affected life (which will carry the imprinted soul mission of both twins). So if you can always carry with you even some joyful gratitude from having met your twin, and manage to survive the separation with some hope of finding even more meaning and happiness in your life, then you can count yourself lucky, because that was the goal and too many people can't even open up to that possibility!
If you are suffering from romantic longings for your twin soul who has become unavailable in some way, you must look at your own inner balance of masculine and feminine energies. You must become a more complete and whole being in yourself. Remember, even before you entered all of your realities with your twin and became one of a pair, you were a complete image of the creator mother father God, the generative united God and Goddess partnership. You then chose your twin for the energetic support to enter into manifested lifetimes, even when most of those lifetimes would never meet the twin in body and you would only remain psychically connected. Now if you have met your twin in body and felt that original spark of limitless love only to become stuck and unable to create any further with them, then you must dig deeper into your divine origins and choose to create from more sides of yourself, to build your self-relationship which can then connect with everyone and everything with more love.
There is a concept in Theosophy of the Monad which is even closer to the divine All Source than your human Soul, so In effect you have two levels of your soul. There is the outer soul of your human experiences, and this is where you and God began creating yourself with your twin soul as your creation partner. Then there is the inner soul of your wholeness before you ever became human or entered into any realities, and this is the Monad state to which you must return. From this level you can recreate yourself, reinvent yourself, to begin again without depending on your twin's support of you. Your twin will continue to "haunt" you for a while, as deeper memories and feelings are uncovered where you had built up your soul in relation to them. But if you are willing to go forward and discover more of your self, each revisiting of your twin soul connection will result in a beautiful blessing from their spirit to live on and let them go their own way, for the love of both of you. Remember, there doesn't have to be any shame or mistake in twin souls hitting their limits as creation partners - there is no lasting should have, only lingering could have. With God's help, you each simply did your best to start growing with the right individual before you were fully conscious to know what you were doing, and thus free will meant that even after starting from the perfect divine plan you had that potential to grow apart, individually and together, and thus you did. The universe has fundamental unpredictability, called chaoticity, so only the fully realized consciousness can make a guarantee to work with whatever happens to endure with all good intentions manifested sooner or later, in the flexibility of respect for all other life paths under development.
The fully realized consciousness will thus begin your Monad super-consciousness, from which you can become your own best partner even as you seek a replacement for your twin soul. A divinely appropriate replacement for the twin will be someone so parallel to your growth that together you can consciously maintain the decision to go forward together as twin flames, forever dancing in deliberately paced and matching steps for the joys of synergy, that magic of becoming far more than the sum of parts. Your new soul partner will be more whole and right for you than your twin soul ever was, because they will be able to choose you as creation mate with infinitely more commitment and vision than your pre-conscious twin soul could offer you. To find your twin flame, you can in effect enter a period of dating from your soul, as you meet and evaluate twin flame candidates, and this path will take you far beyond your twin into amazing new growth lessons for how much more love there is to discover between you and the entire universe.
This potential to so deeply reinvent the Self for more freedom to manifest the inner soul is rarely hinted at even in the most esoteric literature, but one reference appears to be in the Michael teachings, a collective channeled entity who since the 1970's has been popular for a soul-based personality system that includes seven soul ages and seven archetypal soul function roles. The Michael system's equivalent of the twin soul is called the "essence twin", and in a "grand cycle" our soul can fundamentally reorganize our relationships to other souls in order to explore creation with a new essence twin and other partner types. I can recommend the Michael teachings for comparing the general terminology to your own experiences, but with some caveats including that for some reason even as Michael likes to get very detailed "he" also encourages many people to channel "him" independently, so there is a quality control issue as different Michael sources will disagree over many specifics including individual soul personality charts.
Ultimately, you will know you are succeeding when your twin soul with whom you first thought and felt you could not live without, becomes more and more like the first teen love of your soul's development, with whom you practiced the skills of soul relationship that you went on to master as an adult. You will always treasure your twin soul memories as foundational to your discovery of who you really are, and at the same time you would never dream of going back to them because you've become so much more than they could ever support and sustain. Any desire for a person who isn't right for you, whether your twin soul or some other projection of an ideal, will naturally fade when you really tune into the energy of your needs and see how much more you can be there for yourself, and by extension, someone else could be who is truly matching with your growth and thus able to share your self-partnering experience in a glorious manifestation of both your souls co-creating skillfully in boundless joy and gratitude.
Think about it, watch what happens in your life as you consider these possibilities, and good luck! You can watch my video lecture on how to be more aware of your own feminine and masculine energies here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWK00DSHBCo
Feel free to write me more if that helps you to organize your thoughts, just be sure to read what you write so you can grow from the space and not be dependent on me replying too quickly, which I may not be able to do. If and when you make significant progress in developing beyond your twin, I am certainly interested in hearing what works for you and how things go.
many blessings,
Carl: returnofhildegard/at/gmail/dot-com (spelled out a little to stop spammers)
Sunday, March 31, 2013
an Easter Sunday renewal of Life!
WANTING FROM WHOLENESS: As human beings we have fantastic opportunities to participate in and contribute to the process of divine creation, but oh what a learning curve we face to know and enjoy our own amazing potentials! We are spiritual beings who can remember perfect origins and imagine perfect destinations, even as we may struggle deep within the current imperfect realities that we inherit and continue from our families of conflict. In comparison, nature seems enviable for so much beauty and balance already attained; flowering plants and agile creatures of spectacular grace have all they require from genetic design to belong and thrive within fertile ecosystems, while we hairless vulnerable apes must push and be pushed to survive in clumsy communities of our own ongoing invention. Our animal needs remain embarrassingly close and tangible, even as our soulful desires reach so poignantly high as to depict heavenly ideals not yet seen on the planet. We ache and yearn so tenderly, so urgently, and each in our own ways, as we dream toward fantastic utopias of abundant love, creativity, productivity, and prosperity, for places where we can share the joys of inspiration and well-being that will unleash a more magical nature. As a people we seem made to want so many things that we do not yet have, and to such points of folly and pain, that many have blamed our capacity to desire itself, saying humanity was wrong to long for more than it had, and we should have never left a garden of simpler times. But I have to say no, because I’m astounded at the diversity of talents and dreams latent in people and closer to the surface than ever. There is no doubt in my mind that the human journey will have been worth it when we have attained our divine mastery here, so we must comfort and guide each other as best we can on the way. Understanding how to want from our souls is a key to making Heaven on Earth, and it always has been and will be.
In the Gospel of Thomas it is written that "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." Desires are like this, and they come from our souls. There are dreams that we were born with, things that God and the entire universe have planned for us to have and call our own, but because we are each unique creators in training our dreams cannot be only handed to us. We must be in on the game, we must want enough to choose and believe in ourselves. As we learn to uphold our desires and delight to observe how the process of creation unfolds, we become what we were meant to become, and we discover our love for the design of the ongoing eternally self-fulfilling self. If not, we destroy ourselves in the shame of desires that we cannot stop wanting and yet never have, at least not in any healthy sustainable way. Too many people have made an art of cycling through short-term pleasures that actually oppose their own long-term satisfactions, with dead-end behavior patterns like addiction and manipulation that have given their desires a bad name. Desire is so much more than sexual chemistry for example, yet a host of related terms including attraction, sensuality, arousal, excitation, and passion all get attached to little more than a temporary physical high. Then when people get burned on too many roller coaster rides in the body, they often swing too far in the opposite direction, wanting God and spirit to somehow be impersonal, supernaturally calm, and outside of a too fecund nature. It would be funny if it were not so sad, for how reflexively people have taught themselves to separate Heaven from Earth, and throw the baby out with the bathwater. Theories get made for how creativity sublimates sex for all those creative people who can’t deal with sexuality, when in fact it’s the other way around. Sex sublimates creativity, and the universe is vastly, richly, seductively fertile beyond imagination. You can’t help but desire with abandon more of everything that’s right and good for yourself, as you open up to your very own soul in creation. Rejoining the chorus of infinite celebration will bring you so much bliss and joy from your own synchronistic places of belonging, that you will never want to follow a self-destructive self-abandoning path of aloneness again. Even if repeatedly finding your way back from old habits and falls from grace must become the challenge for a lifetime of healing, sooner or later you will make it Home to having every good thing. You promised yourself this as a soul incarnating for its “last lifetime” on the old Earth, which is really of course just the first lifetime in the new world of love without end.
So the next time you find yourself returning to a dream of desire that you have either proudly or shamefully carried within you for most all of your life, pause to look at how the images of its procurement are making you feel. The wisdom of any true desire is that you cannot want something you do not already have the seeds for, and which you were not made to have more of steadily. You don’t have to work hard to make anything happen to receive your own divine plan and soul inheritance; the way to your fullest joy is full of receiving magical love from the whole universe, which wants nothing more than to see you become more of your true loving self. So if there is a future You who is fully enjoying the best dreams you can have, then the question to answer today is, are you more or less connecting with that future self?
There are two ways to be with your wanting, and one is from wholeness, and the other from lack. All creation is a projection from the present moment of infinite depth, so a future-oriented image of what you need or want to have in your life someday is just a higher octave, a greater extent, a clearer picture, for something that you have available to let in here and now. Your imagined desire is a signal from the future to get on the path now, be alert to what you already have, because this is your destiny starting from your current location. So if a desirable goal brings you pain for how much you want that and yet have no idea how to get there, don’t get caught in the trap of heaven and earth separating. Relax, trust that the future is finding you already, and focus on what’s happening around you right now. Locate your feelings for what you didn’t have, and let the emotional holes become filled until you become whole. It may be hard to believe at first, given how very satisfying the future looks compared to the present which doesn’t have that dream job, relationship, inspiration, opportunity, skill, or whatever else it is you’re wanting so much more of. But the fact is that God is giving you all you need starting now, which is exactly why the desire came to entice you more with its scent. There’s something within your current grasp, a subtle and energetic next step perhaps but concrete in its ability to satisfy you and set you on the path of knowing that everything’s going to be alright and work out. If you can connect 100% with your present moment, then you will become 100% happy and confident, with a bliss that will steadily melt and heal the old wounds so the future will be guaranteed. Always, the present you in your soul center is the one who is functioning at the fullness of your current ability, so that is the giving of 100% that makes all the difference.
This then is the secret to wanting eternally. The old way to want was from pain, from lack, from the stress reaction to get out of a bad place and become happy again. The future was seen as the antidote to the present, starkly different, and this separation consciousness was supposed to motivate us to build and get ahead, but instead it overwhelmed with the need to numb out and disown the self of lost hope. Humanity is burdened with a lot of destructive habits now, for pleasures and escapism which disconnect us from our true future selves. The only real way to want is from wholeness, because then you’re right: that future self you imagine with the dream come true is incredibly happy, and so must you become to get there. Just as the future self is content, so too you can be content in the present if you tune into the fullness available now, and then you will be on your easy self-fulfilling path of the connected continuous self. The way to want sustainably is not about the discontinuity of contrasting future and present, but the continuity of being an eternal soul, here and there, everywhere, balanced and always complete and full.
For too long people have feared that contentment will mean a lack of motivation and consequent stagnation, but this is not so, because that was a false belief bolstered by the false contentment of addictions and numbness to pain (think couch potatoes). The peace of the fulfilled soul is very dynamic, full of growth in the naturally appearing opportunities for ever increasing joy. The secret of life’s abundance is in learning to let it happen, to receive the love that always gives more and thus transforms and grows you from the inside out. Wanting from wholeness is a fantastic fabulous ride, because you are 100% fulfilled every step of the way. Of course then all your future dreams are inevitable and on their way, because they’re more of who you really are as you naturally grow. There is no pain, no anxiety of what must you do to make and ensure the right thing to happen or else you might fail. When you are so busy discovering how good you can already feel as you fully attend to the richness of the present moment, then the unfolding manifesting magnificent presence of eternity is always expanding in all directions and carrying you forward effortlessly. You’ll be amazed at how quickly dreams can come true then, by the letting go of old ill-fitting karmic clothes, and the appearance of miraculous synchronicities of connecting what you’re ready for, with what roles other people have been looking to fill with someone as wonderful as you! A symphony of delight soars heavenward faster than you can say “boo”, or better yet “thank you”, as you learn to trust and not fear the effervescent way of love’s miracles. After all, boundless gratitude for what you and the universe can create together in love has always been one of the greatest hallmarks of who and what you truly are! Love in the flesh, joy in the form, your own uniquely rich, generous, and beloved identity of the All-loving mother father God who creates without end for the eternal wonder of the greatness of Life.
- Carl J. Schroeder, Easter Sunday March 31, 2013
http://www.facebook.com/HowToMakeHeavenOnEarth
“The wisdom of desire is that you can only want more of what you already have. Therefore find and enter your best moments today, to grow the seeds of your perfect foreseen tomorrows.”
(my photo of a common and so uncommonly beautiful barn owl at the local Stone Zoo - taken with my children on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter when Jesus lay in the tomb like the phoenix before resurrection - and the phrase that came to me that evening to crystallize my awareness of a healing reconnection I was being given to rise again from the ashes of another lost love. The wisdom of this magnificent animal came to me in the form of its flying regularly about its enclosure as birds flew overhead in the sky, their shadows crossing in a flock that must have reminded the owl of its lack of freedom to be on exhibit for us. As I felt the presence of a greater power and remembered Athena whose symbol is the owl, the eerily faced creature came to roost and stare at me, so I could lean forward and take some pictures through the gaps in the fence. This week had been a return of Orphic mysteries to me, as the myth of Orpheus has resonated with me all my life, and recent looking back to the past caused yet another hopeful Eurydice to vanish into the underworld. Well, I don’t mean to become too mythic or esoteric here, only to say that the way that this owl flew around its cage to match the freer flight of birds overhead seemed to set the stage for a breakthrough of understanding for how to attain my own dreams of desire. Find and feel a connection to your destiny now, and you will be on your way to that timeless place of soul wisdom from which all good dreams are fulfilled in the steps that make the most of what we have to work with, now and forever. Thank you God, for helping me feel more alive.)
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