SELF AWARENESS means knowing about one’s idealized self in terms of aspirations as well as a sense of your presence at present. A component of self-awareness is knowing how one is perceived by others. The Johari Model is a graphic model invented in the 1950’s which aids in the interpretation of self-awareness. This exercises involves psychological communication and the diagram is fairly self-explanatory.

What’s involved:

• Apply a list of words to yourself.
• Have others apply the same list to you.
• Note the similarities
• Note the differences.
• Act on the insights

Do I have the courage to take a test in my blog? My personality is warm, upbeat, artistic, curious and engaging. I am interested in the arts particularly photography and design. I also like the politics of the Civil Rights Movement. I prefer to be generous but have tamed down that impulse over the years. I am happily married to a smart, kind, successful gentleman. We have two dogs and no children. I avoid close relationships because I find them stressful, time consuming and counterproductive. I have never been a team player and I probably will never be although I know “team dynamics” are a crucial business  skill to develop.  I am interested in marketing and working with small entrepreneurial businesses permits me the latitude to leverage my core communication skills.

I am also obsessed with learning new skills and improving existing ones. Right now I am reading four books and have at least 8more piled on my night table:

1. Web Analytics 2.o new by Avinash Kaushik [he was an author@Google - and donates the proceedes from his two book to charity]
2. The Art of SEO by Enge Spencer, Fishkin and Stricchiola [fuzzy logic and semantic intent]
3. Eyetracking Web Usability by Nielsen & Pernice [heat maps & gaze plots]
4. Search Engine Optimization for Dummies by Clay & Esparza [anyone can do a redirect]

The need to learn  appeared early in my childhood because my parents rewarded me for being a good student. Their praise and approval motivated me to constantly strive for “very good grades.” Now I learn for the pure sake of love of learning. Coworkers think that I have a high energy level and am focused and determined. Sometimes I am impatient with others because I want things done immediately. The good news is that it is never too late to change and learn new things. My husband thinks that I am focused, motivated and smart but he also thinks that I sometimes allow myself to get sidetracked by unimportant details and people with difficult personalities. He is 100% correct.

Shifting gears and seeing connections: Carl Jung identified four psychological archetypes: thinking, feeling, sensing and intuition. Understanding how other people relate has always helped me to create compelling visual communication. SWOT analysis, a classical marketing exercise involves determining an organizations internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats. Holisitic Marketing also has four components: Relationship marketing, integrated marketing, internal marketing, & performance marketing. Our Product Positioning Map also has four quadrants:At this point I am really wondering why the above tests, models, models and maps all have four components and if there is something about the underlying structure of four components that becomes visually and literally compelling?

“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”

Carl Gustav Jung

What is 2010 going to look like?

Are you setting new goals with a new anticipation of what a new decade will bring?

Is 2010 the year that 25lbs of weight will be lost?

Will 2010 be the year that a new career is begun?

Will 2010 be the year that a family relationship will be restored?

In 2010, will it be the year that new friendships are made?

What will happen for you in the year 2010?

Will it be the year for adventure, romance, restoration, revelation, seeking, finding, keeping, building or stabilizing?   What do you want 2010 to be?   Will it be the start of something new?   Will it be the time you say, I can and will?

Will 2010 be the best year ever?   Will it lead to prosperity for the decade?

What happened between 2000 – 2009 in your life that made a positive difference?   What significant changes were you able to make that improved your life?

What happened in the world … ?   What happened in your decade?

What will your goals be for the decade?

What will your goals be for the next five years?

What will your goals be for 2010?

What meaning do you want to add to your life?

What will keep you from achieving your goals?

In many cases the only thing stopping people from achieving their goals is the self.   The excuses will form on the tip of the tongue why such-and-such couldn’t be done.     “I didn’t have time”, “I didn’t have the money”, “I had to do”, “I couldn’t find …”, and on and on.

Write down your goals.

Focus on your goals.

Create weekly measurable goals that will help you reach your target goal.

Have someone help you stick to your goals (anyone who will be able to work with you week after week).

It is your life; the life you create, the life that you desire can be exactly what you want if you want it to be.

Make 2010 the best year ever, make the decade the best decade ever.

I don’t know what it is but lately I have a feeling like I’m a volcano waiting to erupt! I used to be such an angry child, what happened?! Where is my mean bone? I miss that tantrum throwing rebellious girl who loved to ask people to go where they belonged. Its almost like I moved to England a completely different person, may be it was the pressure of being alone and not wanting to upset anyone but now that I think about it all, I was always a peoples person who just didn’t know how to control the temper switch.

BUT

I am convinced only 1% of the population I interact with are like me, the rest are just rude, moody people who think being kind is a sign of weakness. I am obsessed with personality tests and have taken Carl Jung’s personality test a zillion times and am clearly an ENFJ (Extroverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Judgement)

If you read what the test results say, ENFJ’s are freakin cool people,

” ENFJs are the benevolent ‘pedagogues’ of humanity. They have tremendous charisma by which many are drawn into their nurturant tutelage and/or grand schemes. Many ENFJs have tremendous power to manipulate others with their phenomenal interpersonal skills and unique salesmanship. But it’s usually not meant as manipulation (* yes I’m not a manipulator, amazing how all personality tests say I am…bitches *)– ENFJs generally believe in their dreams, and see themselves as helpers and enablers, which they usually are. ENFJs are organized in the arena of interpersonal affairs.

ENFJs know and appreciate people. Like most NFs, (and Feelers in general), they are apt to neglect themselves and their own needs for the needs of others. They have thinner psychological boundaries than most, and are at risk for being hurt or even abused by less sensitive people. ENFJs often take on more of the burdens of others than they can bear. (My situation explained in exact words!)”

Freakin Barack Obama is an ENFJ Jedi! (EDIT: Just found out Oprah is an ENFJ too! How can being an ENFJ be sucky if all the cool people are them! Uh oh…some random site states Cristiano Ronaldo is one too mwahaha)

In simple, ENFJ’s are people who love people (genuinely!), want to live life to the fullest and without interpersonal stress, are fabulous with communication and planning (might manipulate others into doing stuff but atleast in my case it is only for the person’s advantage) also make excellent listeners (my friends will HAVE to agree ‘cos over 25 years I have heard every single person go on and on about stuff & I still remember most of it!) So I have glossed over all the awesome qualities of being an ENFJ but there is one major sucky bit, “always wanting to fix everything just so that we can hide it under the rug and move on!”. I think the other problem is also that ENFJ’s love to dump everything on emotion than logic. There is also a third major drawback, “Attention Deficiency Disorder!”. I like to see texts and missed calls on my phone everyday, see friends send me messages/emails, to be honest, it doesn’t matter who its from, I just want to feel wanted and liked! It is very easy to make me feel unliked, just ignore me for a day!

From the bottom of my heart, I love being an ENFJ.

The Jung-Myers-Briggs test (link here http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes1.htm). Everytime I take it, I secretly hope it gives me ENFJ for result. I like the idea of being the extroverted, intuitive, feeler who is great with judgements.

Back to my problem, so I want to express serious anger and I can’t. Thanks to the lovely  snow I can’t go run and put the energy to productive use either. I’ve just finished doing crazy push-ups/crunches/air punches just to let off the steam but I am still so mad inside. It is almost as if I want to go and shout at everyone who is upsetting me lately, show them the finger and ask them to go where they belong!  The probability is, I wont explode until someone really cuts me up, only a unlucky few know how I tend to disappear out of their lives when I am insanely mad, for now I could deal with some chocolate pudding…oh and someone texted! I feel loved already!

PS: This seems like the only ENFJ group on facebook!

I’m in the kitchen of someone’s house [it's unfamiliar to me as are the people in the room].  A group of us are all standing around the perimeter of the smallish, cozy kitchen talking and eating as if this is a party of some kind.  It’s an older home with a linoleum type floor and wood cabinets.  It looks like all women in the room ages ranging from about 30 down to 10 or 11 and they seem to be mothers and daughters.  It appears I’m the oldest one here.  I’m standing in the doorway of the kitchen…which means I’m partly in the room and out of the room at the same time.

A woman (30ish) standing across from me makes this weird face to be funny and when I look at her eyes, she’s inserted some kind of fake lense that makes her whole eyeball look like red plastic with just a very small opening in the center for her to see out.  It gets a laugh from everyone.  Some other women are also playing around with fake lenses.  Some are red and some are yellow.

The party progresses with more conversation and more eating.  Every once in a while someone, usually the woman across from me, does the eyeball thing again.  However, each time she does it she’s able to figure out how to adjust the lens.  It’s as if it’s a multi-faceted toy that the more you use it the more you have access to its many features. At one point the lens looks like a swirl of yellows and reds.  Sometimes the lens looks smaller and where the whites of her eyes are, lines of wavy colors go from the lens to the edge of her eyeball.

Later in the party the group appears to ignore this woman as she continues to play with the lens and show what she can do.  She continues to work at it and learn how it works, the rest have given up and stopped playing with their lenses.  Finally she exclaims…I got it…look!  It took her a minute or so for people to pay attention to her and when they did they and I saw this very complicated eyeball lens that seemed to light up and even curved outward as if in 3D.  It is covered in wild colors and the opening for her to see out of is wider so that she can see better and yet have all this stuff going on on top of her eyeball.  All are amazed at what she did.

She has a bowl of food in her hand…looks like hot dogs and beans.  I tell her I want to try some, thinking that I could somehow have access to what she’s doing by eating what she’s eating.  She holds the bowl while I move the spoon through the food to find a wild lens to try, thinking that she gets it from the food.  I say “there’s nothing left” and see only the food.  I take a bite anyway and put what was a spoon and now a fork back into the bowl.  As she walks away I realize that I shouldn’t have put my fork back into the food.  I’m heading over to her when a fork falls on the floor.  I’m thinking it’s my fork but when I look at it I see it’s different.  I put it back in the bowl anyway.  At the same time a man steps from behind the women standing in the left corner of the room with his own fork and he’s heading towards the bowl. He appears to have a fancy feathered mask on…something you would see at a Mardi Gras ball or party.

In Conclusion

Wow this is interesting.  My first impression of this dream is that it somehow represents different levels of existence.  I can continue like most of the women in the room, eating and talking or I can be more like the crazy-eyed woman exploring this eye/sight toy/tool.  Some of the woman dabbled in it and it was fun at first but then they went back to talking & eating.

My participation in the dream as me was minimal.  Mostly I observed what was going on and I had a clear, straight-on view of this woman who continued to explore and be fascinated by what this eyeball lens could do.  After she did the wildest eye-thing, I wanted some of that.  It reminded me of the deli scene in the movie “When Harry Met Sally” where “Sally” had just finished doing a fake orgasm and woman at another table says “I’ll have what she had.”

It occurs to me that I’m trying to access this tool via a bowl of food…the term “spoon fed” comes to mind.  The bowl of food has only food in it.  If I want to do what this woman is doing I need to do what she’s doing.  The thought that comes to mind is how reading books only gets you so far…I need to put what I read into practice.  It’s like a doctor who thinks she’s going to become a doctor by reading books.

What the crazy-eyed woman has is a tool that she is learning how to use.  Others dabble in it for a time but mostly give up…it’s either too much for them or they could care less about exploring how they can further themselves.   It reminds me of my mandala coloring books.  I’m really excited about creating and coloring them.  Other people seem interested at first and then their interest seems to wane.  Lately I’ve been feeling like ‘why bother’ to continue making them.  If I understand this dream correctly, I’m to continue to explore them for myself.  Learn all about what they can do and how I can expand on them.

Just last night I was flipping through the channels on tv and stopped on this one channel that I normally ignore.  It’s a local station that was purchased by a Christian organization.  I was annoyed when I first found out about it…just what we need another Christian station.  However, what’s wonderful and different about this station is that rather than preaching at you 24/7 they instead play beautiful videos of nature with equally beautiful music in the background.  So last night I stopped at this station because they had a scene with a antlered elk eating in a wintry scene while snow is falling.  The antlers on this elk were amazing.  In looking at them I saw a pattern that I thought would work great in mandala.  I turned off the tv and went to my drawing table and, as if possessed, I began drawing out a mandala based on these antlers.  One part of my mind was saying ‘enough…go to bed’ and yet I felt obsessed to keep going with it until I felt like it was done or that I captured it enough to be able to stop.

One side note…the one thing all the lenses have in common is that they are all round, like the iris of the eyeball is round.  Mandalas are round.  Iris are round.  Aha!  It’s interesting that the ‘mandalas’ are on the eyeballs.  Eyes have to do with sight, how we see, how others see us.

On another side note…For the last two weeks I’ve been reading Carl Jung’s book “A Man and his Symbols” which turns out to be all about our dreams, our subconscious,  our unconscious mind, the undiscovered self and how it uses dreams to communicate with us.

I want to explore this dream some more, especially the significance of the ‘lenses’ being on the eye and apparently I’m to explore mandalas more

Update 12:25:09

While walking with my husband and the dogs yesterday, this dream kept playing in my head.  Why the eyeballs?  Then it dawned me…the eyes are the windows to the soul.   The lenses in this dream are my mandalas which tells me that the mandalas are a window to the soul, the higher Self.

Update 12:26:09

The lenses earlier in the dream were flush to the eyeball.  The one that the woman had on at the end of the dream, has a convex shape to it.  I’m now remembering that I had a side view of it and it looked more like a marble that was cut in half, projecting from on top of her eyeball.  Here’s the significance of this…when I started creating mandalas in 1999 and up until recently, I sketched them as 2-dimensional shapes.  When I colored them I gave them a 3-d look however the designs themselves are flat.  Now I’m creating hyperbolic tessellation mandalas that look more spherical, 3-dimensional…as if a ball was cut in half and sitting on top of the paper.  I have yet to finish coloring any of them.  I’m about half way through one.  Instead I’ve been creating 1-2 designs a day.  Based on this dream, I’m understanding that I’m in the exploration phase of creating these new mandala designs.  When I finish coloring some of them, they will be better received by the general public…at least that’s how this dream translates for me.

• My elders said we learn through living, through experience of the truths of life. We also learn through listening to stories. The imaginal world and the “real” world provide experiences from which we learn. The truth of our discoveries is either confirmed in our interactions with others or not. If the story resonates with our inner being, we adopt it as our own. Each tradition explains phenomena in ways consistent with the people’s environment, with their experience on the planet.
• I am no different from anyone else. But my genetic inheritance is multi-cultural and hence multi-faceted. We were more like gypsies abandoned by our tribe, living in Idaho’s Magic Valley, where irrigation made the desert bloom. Growing up without a close connection to our indigenous roots was hard. It made me feel disconnected, like I was alien, a wanderer in a strange land. Even my nuclear family felt a little foreign, like it wasn’t really mine. I knew I must be my mother and father’s son, I looked exactly like my dad, but something was different about me. I talked a lot, just like my grandfather. I was very spiritual, like my grandmother, whose ancestors came to Turtle Island in the first wave of the invasion by the boat people. Through grandmother Theodocia’s blood the Dream Gift came. But she never talked about our Native American Tribal heritage and blood line, in those days it was best to keep secret about such things lest we lose our advantages in the dominant culture.
• Gifted by my ancestors with powerful dreams, I grew up wondering why the dreams were always part of every sickness and why I felt so different from everyone else. Why did I imagine lives lived in the past, lived in the dream world of my ancestors? My teachers were mostly women, my mom, my aunties, my grandmother, the women I worked with as a teenager. They were all warm, kind and intelligent. College brought the men into my life, especially the fraternity brothers and the fathers and grandfathers of the philosophy department. My dad was very warm, sensual, and loving until I went through puberty, when he distanced from me and my brother. His musical talent and charisma, his social ability to charm people into listening to his stories was his gift to me. Consequently I became a teacher early in my life, a teacher of the wisdom literature of the dominant culture, a philosopher. I loved wisdom and found the (mostly male) wizards were very supportive and appreciative of my prodigious gifts to understand, teach, and intuitively relate a wide variety of thought systems to others. It wasn’t until I married and had children that the slumbering genes of my ancestors awoke and became ascendent. That’s when I found the traditional lineage for which I now speak to you.
• In most esoteric religious traditions there is a bi-sexual aspect in all humans. The alchemists referred to it as sol-luna, sun-moon; the gnostics called it hermes-aphrodite, or andro-gyne. Whatever is on the outside has its opposite within. Essentially we have the opposite sex within us. This is a psychic fact which is discoverable through experience. But that’s not all that is within us either. We have all the gods and goddesses of all the planet’s history, all the matrices of the psychic patterning. Plato used the word “archetype”, which means ancient form or pattern. Carl Jung wrote all of this down and connected all the dots of human psychic history. Most of his early colleagues were women. They taught me. Although everything is within, the only way to experience it is by magically projecting it onto the environment. This is not a conscious process of our ego awareness, we do not know the magic communication is coming from within us. It is experienced as “out there” in the world, in the people, created relatives of all the animal and plant kingdoms, in the sky and the ocean. In some sense it is out there as much as it is within us, so when we use language to talk about these things paradox is the result.
• Women are the maiden, mother, and the crone, all the feminine energies which bring forth life and take it away. Our Celtic ancestors put the symbol of this, the mother with her open legs and vagina, through which we come into the world and return in death, on the walls of the earliest Catholic Christian churches. They practiced their ancient ceremonies and allowed the new cult a place to grow. It was much later in the ninth century of the common era that the male Christian priests of the Roman Catholic church forced the people to remove the symbols of the great mother. Somehow they missed the carvings of her male counterpart, the Green Man and his vines, which decorated the rafters high above the worshipers below him. Even the Cathedral in Chartres (the ancient center of Celtic religion) has him above and the great mother’s labyrinth below.
• In England the Druid wizard Alban protected a Christian cleric by taking on his persona, his robes and regalia, and sacrificing himself to protect the future of the people. Under Roman law Christianity was punishable by death, de-capitation to be exact. Alban was baptized by the prelate, whose lineage was traced to John the Baptist and Jerusalem through Joseph of Arimathea. Celtic tradition expected the chief to sacrifice himself for his people; he was the consort of the goddess who never dies. Her human lovers returned to her in death and among her many gifts were visionary experiences. It is easy to see how the self-sacrificing god/man of the Jewish Christians, whose mother is a form of the goddess and whose father is the sky god, could be embraced as the Celtic “mother’s son” in a new form. Alban lost his head only two years before the Council of Nicaea, when the Roman Emperor Constantine embraced his mother Helene’s religion and made Christianity the religion of the Empire. That was seventeen hundred years ago. Are we any different really?
• Many of us come from Celtic and Native American roots. What resonates is the mythic patterning within us. The circle of relatives around the fire, the singing and stories of the tribe, the ceremonies and magic of life, these are all part of us. And so is the goddess. Every man has an unconscious feminine aspect. Every woman has an unconscious masculine aspect. These aspects act out behavior in order to get us to become conscious of our true nature. Often we talk about men possessed by their feminine and women possessed by their masculine. Why use the expression “possessed”? Because we are not conscious that our behavior is coming from an autonomous source. First we must become conscious how beautifully complicated our psyches are. We have to become conscious of our contra-sexual opposite within. When we allow that archetypal energy to act through us, our ancestors and their connection to the Divine speaks through us. God is both within us and in all things. Yes, it is paradoxical. So all humans are connected to the Divine and expressions of Her/Him. Women are just as close to the Source as Men are. We have all within. Creator gave us a dual nature. Our physical bodies provide our original orientation to the environment. Our inner psychic structure makes communication with the opposite sex possible. We just have to allow ourselves to understand and have empathy for others, including the plants and animals. Peyote teaches us that. All the Medicines teach us that if we are open to them.
• So what matters is whether or not, and to what extent, we are able to embrace ourselves as Creator’s children. Whether we are embodied as men or women, we are all children of the One Source. We stand upon the Earth under the same sky. We drink the same water and breathe the same air as our ancestors did. We have the genetic inheritance of a common ancestor, who was a child of the Creator herself. The only thing which stands between us and the truth is what our elders have believed, what their experience taught them. Perhaps their way was best for those times. I cannot make a judgment about that. We have inherited the ceremonies of our ancestors and they must be alive for us and the next seven generations or they will die. We see that happening all around us. Things are dieing rapidly, species, cultures, tribes, religions, forests. Will we adapt or will we disappear? That is the question we all need to entertain. Whether women or men do what they do ceremonially seems to be irrelevant. Times are changing. We have women ceremonial leaders within the Christian tradition occupying the places traditionally held by men. Maybe the old ways are coming back in new forms. What can I do? What my elders have told me to do: Teach the Stories of Life. So that is what I am giving you all, my best rendition of life’s stories. Good luck. May the Great Spirit guide your steps.

Grandpa Talksalot

The natural virtues of the Goat Sign

I don’t write much about Astrology anymore. I leave the scribing to those who plot aspects and progressions. I am still wedded to the idea of Astrology Archetypes (like Carl Jung) and so it is that I pay homage to Capricorn – very much a Sign of and for these difficult Times. (Dec. 23- Jan.20).  What better archetype than the goat – the sure-footed animal who can climb over rocky obstacles, no matter how difficult.  Goats also can make do with very little (a diet of brush, bark, weeds and grass is really all they need). I like the fact that Capricorns I have known have lived within their means. This is not to say they have not also  been stubborn – determined to reach their goals, no matter what (often this does not involve a need for money) . I also have always been able to count on my Capricorn friends and family, so I make a gentle leap to assume loyalty is also a Capricorn characteristic.

Capricorns generally seem to have gotten through these past difficult years, intact.  The goat-minded Zodiac Sign has kept climbing – eyes glued to the goal; sure-footed and true-hearted, despite the dark days of the here and now.  Capricorns also seem to have a wicked (off-center) sense of humor – another necessity during troubled times.

My darling niece, Emmy, was a Capricorn. She tackled the hard problems of animal and human abuse, dedicating her life to the protection of endangered species, both two and four-legged. Typical Capricorn, Emmy found a tarantula an appealing pet, and posed for her high school photograph with her pet climbing up her lovely face.  Like other Capricorns I’ve known, Emmy also had a secret life and she was very good at keeping it a secret.

Dawn, a close friend in my 30s, could fix a car engine, unjam a printer, sew a party dress in 24 hours and drink anyone under the table. I think there was nothing she could not do. Because she was so adept,  no one knew she had a drinking problem. She was very good at hiding her bottles at home and at work (eventually showing her hiding places to me). One day, she sought help from AA and, after a while, turned to a good life without the sauce.

Some times Capricorns and Aries do not get along – they both have a tendency to ram their way through life. But there is always the Moon that can make a difference. allowing these Signs to bond. Some of the people I’ve cherished most in my life have been born under the Sign of Capricorn. Following their lead upwards, I have often found a way.

A number of years ago, a book I was reading had a quote from Carl Jung in it that struck to my core. The book referred to a quote from Dreams, Memories and Reflections, “if god were conscious of himself [or herself or themselves] he would not need conscious creatures.” That one quote started me thinking and set me on a new path of discovery, which has evolved into my beliefs today, and was reinforced when I read a piece on C.G. Jung’s Answer to Job by J Marvin Spiegelman.

My belief and thinking on this is that there is an unconscious Creative Intelligent Energy that is the Source of all creation. It knows all about what it creates, but it cannot experience it. Thus, souls are created containing the essence of the Creator.

Souls are the consciousness and essence of this Creative Energy, and are the experiencers of creation. As such, a means is needed to fully experience creation and the effects of the interrelationships within creation.

The physical form, human or otherwise, is a means. And to make it more interesting, free will is a component passed on from Source to soul to human, in our case. I will stay within the framework of Earth for this discussion.

Earth is the equivalent of a school in which the soul with in the human form consciously experiences the physical reality of creation. The lessons are life, and the countless possibilities and potentials that exist.

Souls learn from scratch, progressing to perfection, and as they progress they come closer to the Source from which they came and return.

The lessons are primarily each soul’s alone. Karma is the effect of both good and bad management of the experience of life. I don’t see an overlord judging those effects from an award and punishment standpoint. Rather, it is simply the effect of actions that creates the karma. In the classroom context, we are the students and life is the teachers. The individual soul, through life, assigns the grade to their behaviors and effects. Sometimes we (as souls) determine that we need to repeat the course. Sometimes we pass with a higher grade, or even skip a grade. Depending on our soul’s evaluation of how it managed that partnership with the human means, and the results, the soul repeats or progresses in its evolution to perfection. In my belief, it isn’t about award and punishment. It is simply experiencing and learning. “Lessons” isn’t even adequate to explain a process of bringing all into balance and harmony through love. I see no judgment other than that which assists us in our learning process, as opposed to a judge holding us to account for our actions. The soul is its own judge because it is the consciousness of its Source. From a logical sense there can be no judgment outside of the soul itself evaluating itself.

The purpose of the souls role is for the unconscious Source to experience creation through the conscious soul, who ultimately becomes completely One with its Source and all that exists in reality. Knowledge and experience of the reality of creation completes is enjoined in One.

For me, there is such a close and intimate relationship between Source, soul, human, and a life that is full of dichotomies that need to be experienced and reconciled, brought into balance and harmony. I see the primary tool to be perfect love, and from that all things are reconciled and brought into a harmonious union. The closer we come to realizing this harmony I speak of, the more bliss the soul experiences. As each soul evolves into that perfect love, there is nothing that separates, all enjoin into Oneness of All.

Well, that is how I see it. Others may have their own awareness and process. This is what is the inspiration of my heart and soul, at the moment. I’m OK with this understanding for my life. I keep in mind I am still evolving.

I think that sometimes we must experience the deepest misery in order to give birth to a renewed self. Self-renewal is not a concept that has merely been promoted during the past couple of decades, when the self-improvement industry has overwhelmed the world with a plethora of books and audio programs that have been both worshipped and ridiculed. Renewal of ourselves—of our souls, our bodies, our minds, and our spirits—is a concept that dates back to both the Bible and the ancient philosophers of the past. German author extraordinaire Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said, “We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden.”

In a way, I think that life attempts to force us to renew ourselves when we rebel against the idea of doing so.  Why doesn’t it occur to us when we experience the tempests that overwhelm our spirit that if we but hold on and ride out the storm we may well sail more smoothly than we ever have before? At the moment when our souls seem to be screaming in pain, we have the ability to either fight the turbulence or to find a way to use that tidal wave of grief, depression, and/or unhappiness to rediscover ourselves. You can either reclaim your power or you can give it away to those people or circumstances who attempt to take it from you. Unhappiness is, in many ways, a circumstance. It can also be a choice.

I know I have a reputation of being somewhat controversial in many of the ideas I share and promote. But I want you to stop for one second and see if I may not be onto something here. If we have the ability to choose our thoughts and we’re feeling unhappy, is it not possible that we are making a choice to be unhappy? Don’t be upset with me if I’m rocking your boat or turning your world upside-down.

I was recently told by a friend who is a Carl Jung devotee that she is uncertain that we choose our thoughts at all. Well, being a deeply inquisitive person by nature, I couldn’t help wondering . . . if we don’t choose our own thoughts, who or what is choosing them for us? Is it a reincarnation of us? Or is some unseen force putting various thoughts in our head at random? And, if you think any of these scenarios is a possibility, I must ask you this:  how will you ever be able to take control of your own life? If you don’t possess the power to control your thoughts, then you must not have the power to control your actions. Thus, you are at the mercy of a mysterious “fate” . . . or of  The Fates . . . or of mere chance . . . or of other people and unforeseen and unexpected circumstances.

For me, the idea that I do not have control over the thoughts that enter my mind is unacceptable. But hey, if you want to believe that somebody else is putting those thoughts in your mind, that’s obviously your prerogative. However, I do question whether or not you will ever be able to design a life worth living. I also think that reclaiming your power won’t be possible since you are already giving away a large portion of it to unseen forces and random events. But still, the choice is yours.

When I think about circumstances, I tend to remember the words of the witty and brilliant playwright and author, George Bernard Shaw. How do you like this quotation? “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.”
I realize that it is much easier for us to lie to ourselves and blame other people, past experiences, and events in our lives for the fact that we are miserable, unsuccessful, and/or unfulfilled. But what possible benefit comes from not accepting responsibility for ourselves? I don’t know how it would work for you, but taking ownership of my life has given me more strength and power than I have ever experienced before.

One of the first steps in reclaiming your personal power is letting go of your dependence on the approval and acceptance of other people. In my opinion, this may be the hardest accomplishment of all, and yet I suspect it’s the most crucial. The world really is made up of a lot of foolish and ignorant people, and, if you allow these people to mold your thoughts, your actions, and your decisions, you will be living someone else’s life instead of your own. People actually choose to remain ignorant of that which they do not choose to understand. Such manipulation has been used by those in power for centuries, and, even now, conformity is encouraged as opposed to seeking knowledge and forming our own individual views and opinions. If the opinions of others are more important to you than truth and wisdom, then you will find yourself receiving the approval of others yet living without the approval of yourself. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

What saddens me a bit is that nearly everyone has the power within himself or herself to transform his/her life and to create an authentic self that he/she is content with. However, many people get into the habit of giving their power away and/or denying that they have it in the first place. Thus, after a while the power seems to diminish and, at least, that little spark of energy is lost amid the ashes of conformity and mediocrity.

Although, the legendary phoenix bird rose from the ashes, it is very hard to resurrect your spirit and soul from a heap of what is essentially dust. Do your realize that, in a way, those who are living the lives that others tell them they should be living are already half-dead? They are only one step away from being cremated, and, rather than living freely outside of a box, they are enclosed in a vase of their own ashes. Have you allowed the divine essence of you to be turned into ashes?  If you have, would you prefer to continue to exist only partially from now on ? Or do you think you might consider taking a lesson from the phoenix bird who resurrected itself from its own ashes? It’s your call, and I suspect you know that.

I enjoy reading philosophy, as you might have gathered, and I have noticed that some of the concepts that philosophers promote are antithetical to the very idea that any of us can achieve happiness. I both agree and disagree with this theory. I don’t think that happiness can be achieved. Rather, I think it is a choice. I did caution you that you might not like what I was going to be telling you. The situation is, I would prefer to upset those reading this blog post than to compromise myself by not sharing my true beliefs.

While I was nursing my mother through advanced stage ovarian cancer, I happened to pick up a book by Barry Neil Kaufman called Happiness is a Choice. If you wish to stop reading this article now, go right ahead. I promise I won’t morph myself into some familiar spirit and try to cause chaos in what is undoubtedly already a rather miserable life.  Whether or not you subscribe to any of my ideas is  your choice alone. At the same time, if you wish to be challenged to examine your life and your vantage point towards life, you might want to keep on reading.

Barry Neil Kaufman’s book is not for those who wish to remain in their comfort zone. At one point, he actually is straightforward enough to say, “We become our beliefs. We get stuck in our heads.” He even suggests that we do not have to be miserable to be intelligent. Now, this will come as a blow to the intellectuals who believe that faith and hope are only possibilities within the minds of those who do not “understand” life. If we want to be “smart,” we are told that we must be atheists and existentialists. Science transforms faith into merely “wishful thinking”, and those who reason are supposed to see that hope, rather than being “that thing with feathers that perches in the soul” (as Emily Dickinson so eloquently put it), is on the same par with God, whom I recently heard referred to as “the pixie in the sky”.

So, what are we left with? If there is no God and we don’t have power over ourselves, who does have all the power? Could it be the politicians? But, wait, being human, like us, they wouldn’t have the power to control their thoughts, either. Goodness, I really don’t know who has all the power on this planet, but I am suspecting it could be Santa and his crew of frisky elves. No wonder people do all they can to convince children that there is no Santa Claus. If the truth came out, where would any of us be? Speaking of Santa, I think that December is the ideal month for us to be examining all these things since it’s the last month of the year and so many people like the idea of making New Year’s resolutions.

I have just one quick question about those resolutions: what happens between now and the first day of January? If you wait until then to reclaim your power, won’t you have a few extra pounds to lose and a few more unwise choices to bounce back from? I realize that we’re nearing the end of December, and many of you probably don’t think a few days of letting other people and outside forces control you could possibly do much harm. However, if Santa has all the power in the world, won’t he be at the height of his power on December 25? If so, it seems that reclaiming your power right now might be the smartest move on your part.

Even though many of us have a habit of putting off what should be done today until tomorrow . . . or next week . . . or  next year, I tend to think that taking action now is still the best policy. I was listening to portions of Jim Rohn’s audio program, “The Art of Exceptional Living” over the weekend, and he says that a combination of faith and action is what will give us a life that is fulfilling and satisfying. Yes, I realize that the word, “faith,” is going to make  you cringe if you’re an atheist and/or an existentialist, but if you convert the concept of faith in a God or a “Higher Power” to faith in yourself, I think it still works out. 

As I said before, I’m not here to “fix” your life. Even if I wanted to do that, I wouldn’t be able to for we are the only ones who can “fix” ourselves. If our wounds require stitches, we are the ones who must make a choice to get those stitches. And this is true whether we are speaking of physical wounds or psychological injuries. Applying bandages is not what I’m here for. If you want bandages, you’ll have to fetch some from the store and apply them yourself.

I’m here to offer you my thoughts and ideas, and you make the decision as to whether or not you’re open to receiving them. It’s sort of like a spiritual conversion, in many ways. When someone converts to Christianity, for instance, they make a choice to do so. God doesn’t tap them on the shoulder and whisper in their ear, “Believe in me.” Nope. He has better ways to spend His time. And even though I’m not comparing myself to God or even a goddess (all right, I’ll admit that is a beguiling idea, and I recently blushed to my heart’s content when someone referred to me as “The Goddess of Facebook”), I also have better things to do than to ask you to believe what I’m saying. As Barry Neil Kaufman so aptly points out, “No one can be inside our heads pulling our strings. We do that for ourselves.” To me, this is encouraging news as the idea of some invisible puppeteer pulling my strings for me makes me feel like I’m nothing more than a wooden marionette.

What I do have time to do is to challenge you to think through the beliefs and thoughts you are holding in your head right now. Which ones were adopted by you from other people and outside sources? If you had spent all of your life on a deserted island out in the middle of nowhere, how many of the thoughts that you are currently subscribing to right now would have ever entered your mind in the first place? You understand my point, I’m sure. In order to reclaim your power, you’ve got to be willing to be honest with yourself. Even if you lie to everyone else, the one person you need to be completely honest with is you. Are you willing to do it? Is reclaiming your power worth it to you?  Food for thought, is it  not?

Until soon. . .Live Without Limits, SuccessDiva style!

Your SuccessDiva

I dedicate this blog post to my friend, Kate Anderson, who has given me the support I have needed to reclaim my own power. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, beautiful Kate. ~your Diva

This page and all written material at the SuccessDiva pages is written by Alexis Wingate. All Rights are reserved. (C) Copyright by Alexis Wingate. The SuccessDiva

The second part of Song Of Shadow. The “Sung” in the title alludes to Jung, as in Carl Jung. He had a lot to say about the Shadow (:

Video with the unedited audio, Adobe Premiere and Windows Movie Maker are conspiring against me

My heart is singing with joyfulness today as we launch this site for the Mind, Body and Soul Experience. I am delighted to be a part of this healing community.

The mind/body/soul approach to health and healing honors the individual as a “whole” person.

Disease is the result of imbalance…too much or too little—i.e. too much cholesterol, too little exercise, too much stress, too little relaxation. The intent of holistic healing is to place emphasis on the natural state of “ease” and wellness of our bodies and not give too much focus to a particular ailment or dis-ease. The body, in its own infinite wisdom, knows how to heal itself. Our systems function with a deep intelligence and miraculous sense of balance and wholeness.

Through mind, body and spirit returning to balance, lasting change and healing can occur. As healers one of our tasks is to empower you in your own journey of self-healing. We offer holistic and complementary therapies to help you in your journey to healing and balance.

My favorite form of healing is the healing force of love, particularly self love. We cannot get to that state of wholeness without loving ourselves. My journey of self-love brought me to a place of balance and healing in my life.

Drunvalo Melchizedek conducted a study of 100 healers, using many different techniques, to see if they had anything in common. They had a computer-enhanced microwave receiver, to see where the various healers were centered in their bodies while they were doing healing. It was discovered that every healer was located in the same place within the body, in what is called the universal heart chakra—just above the sternum. This center is a focus for universal love, or unconditional love. In conclusion, it was shown that love is a very important ingredient in healing…whether it is ourselves, or another person.

True healing is not just the absence of disease, but the presence of a life filled with joy and aliveness.

I look forward to seeing you at our Mind, Body, Soul Experience events and to working with you on your path to wholeness and wellness.

From the heart ,
Linda

“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams.  Who looks inside, awakens.” –Carl Jung

By Linda Beal

Rubin Museum of Art chief curator, Martin Brauen, left, and Felix Walder, great-grandson to Carl Jung, inspect Carl Jung’s “The Red Book” (Photo: Rubin Museum)

The Rubin Museum exhibit (and accompanying lecture series) that features The Red Book by Carl Jung has been on my mind since I first saw the show a few months ago. (I have referred to it previously here and here.) What is this oversized Bible-like tome that Jung used to record his personal journey over a number of years? I have never seen anything like it, particularly from someone whose primary contribution to the culture of ideas and concepts is as strong as Jung’s. On the content itself, I am not in a position to respond and evaluate as expertly as many Jungian therapists have done. But the meticulous calligraphy and polychrome illustrations (which he refers to as “mandalas”) are striking and reveal Jung’s strong visual orientation. Can it be approached as an art object? No, not for me. It feels like an intimate diary—more of an artifact—of one soul’s journey into the deep space of the subconscious. It is curious, peculiar, intense, and a bit haunting.

That’s the reason I have continued to follow the reviews and discussions around this event. I’ve included a few salient reviews, some laudatory and some very critical. It’s everyman’s call.

***
Do the decades between the completion and publication of “The Red Book” render it less potent or interesting? Not at all. As Shamdasani observes, “in a critical sense, ‘Liber Novus’ does not require supplemental interpretation, for it contains its own interpretation,” and so it is at last possible to begin a study of Jung with the work he held above all the rest. “The Red Book” not only reminds us of the importance of introspection, but also offers a guide to separating the self from the spirit of a time that would have astonished and offended Jung with its endless trivial distractions, its blogs and tweets and chiming cellphones. The creation of one of modern history’s true visionaries, “The Red Book” is a singular work, outside of categorization. As an inquiry into what it means to be human, it transcends the history of psychoanalysis and underscores Jung’s place among revolutionary thinkers like Marx, Orwell and, of course, Freud. The dedication — the love — with which it was assembled makes “The Red Book” as beautiful and otherworldly as a medieval book of hours.

Kathryn Harrison
New York Times

***
But what is particularly strange about this book is not its pretense or pomposity but its talismanic power. It was stashed away in a cabinet for decades by the family, then jealously withheld from scholarly view because of its supposedly revealing nature. Since being brought into the open, partly through the efforts of the historian and Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani (who is also curator of this exhibition), it has become a sensation.

Edward Rothstein
New York Times

***
Jung, shaman of the collective mind games that are supposed to give healing significance to the average person’s deepysleepy land, was one of the inventors of modern intellectual celebrity and its egomaniacal constructs. The Red Book is nothing more than a projection of his giant vanity and, observing the book in the flesh, so to speak, one cannot help but view it more as a manufactured testament than the spontaneous recording of Jung’s nervous breakdowns that it is purported to be.

Charlie Finch
Artnet

***
Was he going mad? After World War I broke out in 1914, Jung decided with relief that his disturbed imagination had actually been sensing the coming conflict. He also concluded that he had entered what we would now call a midlife crisis, a period in which he was being compelled to re-examine his life and explore his deepest self. To do this, he recorded some of his dreams and visions in what were later called his “Black Books” (which have been available for some while). But he also began a remarkable visionary text, illustrated with his own bizarre paintings: “The Red Book” or “Liber Novus.” This he composed during a state of “active imagination” — that is, of reverie or waking dream. As he said, he wanted to see what would happen when he “switched off consciousness.”

Michael Dirda
Washington Post

For those of you who are not near New York, the show is coming to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (from April to June) and then to the Library of Congress in Washington.

I was recently browsing an on-line forum at which I read a post by a young female acquaintance who has been spending time in India helping a woman take care of children at a makeshift orphanage. This young woman related details about one boy, who appears physically to be about seven years of age but is actually closer to thirteen, who has been the victim of a brutal rape. Although she clearly offered a certain amount of solace to the boy by holding his hand, helping him bathe, and spending time with him for several hours, she scoffed at the idea of being anybody’s savior. “I have a whole problem with the thought process that assumes somebody needs saving and I’m the one to do it,” she declared.

But wait, I wanted to say, isn’t the truth of the matter that half of the world’s population at least feels that it needs saving? Even those of us who have the advantage of a comfortable home to live in and plenty of food to eat oftentimes allow ourselves to succumb to feelings of hopelessness and despair. In fact, one of the problems is that not only do many of us feel that we need saving, but also there are some of us who actually do. Yet, inherent in this problem is also the means of solving it.

The renowned Danish physicist Niels Bohr once said, “Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution.” The solution to this problem is simple. We have to accept responsibility for our lives and, in a sense, be our own saviors for there will never be any one person who will manage to fulfill us on every level. One of the reasons that our world is overcome by such a sense of disillusionment is because so many of us have looked towards presidents and other leaders to guide us out of the tunnel of darkness and despair and into the light of hope. We want to feel that there is someone who will help us bear the heavy burden of our personal crosses. And when we are let down by these would-be saviors whom we have turned to in our hour of need, we feel bitterness, resentment, and sometimes even a certain amount of hostility.

If you’ve turned on the news at all these past several days or picked up a newspaper, you’ve probably heard about the scandal involving golf legend Tiger Woods. From all indications, Woods would have seemed like a man who had everything he could possibly desire—an opulent lifestyle, a beautiful wife and two healthy children, and a golf career that has continued to be incredibly successful. What more could anyone ask for? Well, Woods clearly wanted a great deal more. Yet, instead of giving any significant amount of thought to what issues might have led Woods to shame himself and his family by behaving in an inconceivably reprehensible way, most people are content to simply label Woods a “wife cheater”, a “womanizer”, and “an adulterer”.

But let’s stop for a minute and consider this situation carefully. Is Woods that different from many other people who have found, after reaching what others would consider to be the apex of success, that they are still hungry for more?  What Woods seems to suffer from is an insatiable desire to fill the emptiness within himself. The fame and all the accoutrements that have come along with it haven’t been enough for Woods. There’s still been a void inside him. 

Rather than facing his inner dissatisfaction and taking appropriate measures to deal with it, Woods opted for the easy path to contentment— short-term gratification that involved little commitment on his part and even less critical thinking. Like those who pursue the objective without carefully considering the possible consequences, Woods blithely carried on affairs with multiple women over the course of his married life, apparently never imagining that his escapades would at some point become public knowledge.

At this point, Woods has become fodder for the gossip magazines, and his wife undoubtedly feels humiliated. But as much as anything else, I suspect that the public who so adored Woods feels betrayed by the fact that he tainted the glowing image that they had of him. In a way, it takes us back to the days of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, a time when Americans both snickered and wept at the realization that their president was every bit as human as themselves.

Why is it that so many of us seek a role model to place upon a pedestal and naively expect this role model to conform to our idealized standards of acceptable conduct? In a way, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment and disillusionment, for, alas, no matter how famous or renowned someone is, he or she is every bit as much a mortal as you and I are. Thus, that person is capable of the same mistakes and privy to the same vices. While I’m not saying that there is any justification for the conduct that Tiger Woods has demonstrated, I am challenging us to examine why we are so utterly bewildered and shocked at his indiscretions.

Rather than pointing fingers and casting aspersions on Wood’s character, let’s stop to figure out what our reaction to his behavior says about us. Is it possible that we are almost as disappointed in ourselves for idealizing Woods to such an extent as we are with him for his reprehensible actions? Do some of us, on some level, feel that we have been made a fool of? And if so, when are going to cease to regard our fellow mortals as objects of hero-worship and adulation? When are we going to see that celebrities and those in positions of power and/or leadership are only presenting to us the sides of themselves that they want us to see? Much of the time, if we ripped off the masks that people wear and looked beneath them, we would be appalled.

One of the last blog articles I wrote, “The Authentic You”, was about the masks that so many of us hide under—the masks that prevent us from revealing our authentic selves. When I look at Woods, who presented the sugar-coated family man image to the public while  leading the life of a promiscuous playboy on the sly, I cannot help but think of how important the concept of authenticity is. Although Woods will have a difficult time living down the scandal his behavior has created, I believe that in order for him to ever grow into the person he has the potential to become, the details of his private escapades needed to be disclosed to the public. How will those of us who are living a lie ever cease to do so unless we’re exposed for the frauds that we are?  Oftentimes, it takes what some people call a “defining moment” for them to gain clarity about themselves and the personal issues they may never have taken the time to come to terms with.

In my SuccessDiva work, I have already traversed many paths, all of which are leading to the same destination, but with many twists and turns . . . and, yes, even a few roadblocks. I started this blog with the intention of instilling hope in those who felt like giving up. Since I have felt like giving up so many times in my life, I felt that I might be able to speak with a voice that others could relate to and perhaps even find to be a source of strength. Yet, somewhere down the road, I realized that I needed to refine my objectives and be honest with myself about how much it is possible for me to do.

When you are only one person, you must always remain aware of the fact that your influence is going to be vastly limited, no matter how committed your efforts may be. This undeniable truth has frustrated me so greatly at times that it has taken a considerable effort for me to push forward. However, I never forget what Helen Keller once said, “I am only one, but I am still one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.”

I suppose, to a certain extent, each of us, who wants to make a difference in this world, must have faith that what we do will create a ripple effect. And that our willingness to look outside of ourselves and our own personal lives will inspire others to do the same. Although we should never regard ourselves as being more successful or better than we are, what we also must keep in mind is that to be all that we can be we sometimes have to believe in our ability to accomplish things that we haven’t yet done.  In order to pursue anything wholeheartedly, we must have some faith in ourselves.

A life without passion and a sense of purpose is only an existence, and, when we limit ourselves in our own minds, we are actually removing the possibility of doing all that we can. We’re deciding how the game of cards is going to end before we even start playing. This being said, perhaps it was better that I overestimated what I would be able to achieve at the start of my SuccessDiva work. Maybe it would have been difficult for me to withstand the amount of criticism and ridicule that has been lavished upon me if I hadn’t had an innate belief that I was doing something meaningful and purposeful.

At this point, I don’t need critics to tell me that trying to fix people’s problems isn’t ever going to work. The young woman, whom I spoke of earlier who finds the idea that people might need “a savior” to be personally distasteful, admitted to me that she had the impression that I was trying to heal people’s wounds with Band-Aids (TM) when what they really required was stitches. What I happen to know is that many of those with wounds that require stitches actually prefer to wrap bandages around them so that will not be forced to deal with the harsh reality of their situation. If this were not so, why would people be drowning their pain in drugs and alcohol? Why would people need to take sleeping pills to get adequate rest? Why would so many marriages be ending in divorce?

We are a world in which the quick-fix option is what we turn to first instead of as a last resort. Rather than true faith in an all-powerful God or Divine Creator, many people use religion as a way to escape the chaos in their souls. They are so afraid of having to face their inner torment, that they will latch onto anything that brings them some feeling of security. But, is this any way to live?

Rather than naively imagining that nobody in the world needs a savior, what we need to do is realize that the majority of the population feels a desire to be saved, whether that desire is consciously acknowledged or not. At certain times of our lives, we may have experienced this desire, too. And, until we can separate a desire from an authentic need, our perception of reality will be much more real to us than actual reality ever is.

The brilliant psychologist Carl Jung once admitted, “The whole world has a savior expectation; you find it everywhere. The savior complex is certainly not a personal motif; it is a world-wide expectation, an idea which you will find all over the world and in every epoch of history. It is the archetypal idea of the magic personality . . . and image of the collective unconscious. ” Doesn’t this explain why we look towards everything from food, drugs, and alcohol to celebrities and material possessions to bring us personal fulfillment?

We want to be saved from the void that exists within us—we want to find some way to bear the emptiness we feel inside. If we can find someone or something to cling to in our hours of doubt and despair, perhaps we’ll manage to get by. But what happens when we give up drinking or using drugs or overeating? What happens when the person whom we’ve been looking up to does something completely unforgivable? How do we go on then? In a way, aren’t we worse than we would have been if we had simply taken responsibility for ourselves and used our own inner strength to make the most of our lives?

It’s important that I make it clear that I’m not suggesting that merely visualizing our “ideal” lives or adopting positive thinking patterns is going to change anything. These concepts, though widely promoted by those in the self-help field, are only as reliable and/or effective as the person making use of them wants them to be. What I do believe, though, is that each person has the tools within himself to create a life that is at least reasonably satisfying. Even if years of therapy and/or psychoanalysis are needed, a person still ultimately chooses whether he or she lives a life that is meaningful and fulfilling. There is no psychiatrist or psychologist in the world who will be able to provide more help to someone than that person is willing to accept.

Gandhi may have summed up a profound truth when he said that we must be the change we want to see in the world. But what he neglected to mention is that we have to want to be that change. Nothing will ever change in your life unless you want it to. So, you can either continue looking for salvation from some outside source or you can turn your vision inwards and accept the knowledge that nobody besides you can transform your life. Which choice will you make?

Until soon . . . Live without Limits, SuccessDiva style!

Your SuccessDiva

This page and all written material at the SuccessDiva pages is written by Alexis Wingate. All Rights are Reserved. (C) Copyright by Alexis Wingate, the SuccessDiva

I have taken this photo before.  It became one of the “Tunnel Vision” photos late last spring.  Every time I drive to the city I see these two buildings as part of a larger farmyard that had been abandoned long before I came to this part of the province.  There is no doubt in my mind that they would fit well into the scenery of any dreamscape.  Dreams are funny things aren’t they?

Lately I have been a fair bit of dreaming, dreams that defy reality as we generally know it, dreams that are filled with improbable people.  I know that these dreams are busy informing my psyche of various issues that indicate some conflict between my conscious intentions or lack thereof, and what the psyche is expecting.  These are dramas that centre around various complexes that rule my inner and outer life.

The prime players of these dreams have myself as the leading man, a role that I am yet unsure of as being either protagonist or antagonist in these psychodramas; and in co-starring roles, a host of archetypal characters.  Archetypes have an autonomy as well as an intentionality that defies our conscious intentions or desires.  We can wish them away, deny them, or try to distract them; but, they continue their missions in spite of these strategies.

As Hillman says, archetypes are:

the persons to whom we we ultimately owe our personality.  In speaking of them, he (JUNG) says that “we are obligated to reverse our rationalistic causal sequence, and instead of deriving these figures from our psychic conditions, we must derive our psychic conditions from these figures … It is not we who personify them; they have a personal nature from the very beginning.”  (Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975, p. 22)

Hillman quotes from Jung, CW 13 par 299).  It is here we see that archetypes exist out of the individual psyche.  Somehow, the individual psyche taps into the bigger image.  Here “mother” becomes more than one’s mother, more than our experiences of other mothers.  The “great mother” becomes the source of motherness that becomes acted out in each individual mother, all connected yet still separate.

We might disown, abandon and forget these archetypes, but they refuse to be forgotten and abandoned.  They will find a way to make their presence known and their power felt.

I took this photo looking out of my dining room window to the south-east.  The skies at dawn and at sunset are typically spectacular.   With a lack of hills or mountains or forests, the rising and setting sun find little to block the light show.  I love these light shows as they are magical.  They talk to me of myths, of human stories that transcend time and place.  They are visions of a dream world made concrete.  At moments like these, I feel present with the “little people” that live within my psyche.

A bit of explanation is needed here.  “Little people” is a term given by CGJ to the archetypes, the cast of characters that are bigger than the costumes they wear in dreams and in our heads, yet so small as to defy ever being seen directly – “little people.”  Hillman has a curious way of talking about these “little people.”  Listen:

In Jungian practice the words Shadow, Self, Ego, Anima, and the like refer to the structural components of the personality.  These basic structures are always imagined to be partial personalities, and the interplay between them is imagined more as in fiction than in physics.  Rather than a field of forces, we are each a field of internal personal relationships, an interior commune, a body politic.  Psychodynamics becomes psychodramatics; our life is less the result of pressures and forces than the enactment of mythical scenarios.  (Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975, p. 22)

These “little people” are the archetypes.  As I read these words of Hillman, I realized that this explains why I am different from others who shared similar socio-economic backgrounds, the same type of dysfunctional family.  It explains why my brother just fifteen months younger who grew up in the same house with the same lived experiences is so different from me.  We lived different inner stories and became significantly different people.  Knowing this, there is no place for blame on others for how my life has turned out, for my own “stuff” that has negatively spilt out on others.  I do not need to forgive others as they were also lost in their own psychodramas, their personal myths on stage with powerful archetypes.

“The Mind’s I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul” is an anthology of writings on the nature of self and consciousness. Its editors Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett (who have also contributed to this anthology) reflect upon the issues expressed in each piece. Their major take on the issue is on how the physical brain creates the metaphysical mind or soul. However, each essay, since it is centered on a theme of most central significance to humanity, can be read at many levels: psychological, spiritual, social, and neurological.

Borges on self

The anthology begins with a translated version of Borges’ short story piece called Borges and I, which was originally published in his short story collection titled The Maker in 1960. Jorge Luis Borges was a famous Argentinean writer known for his fictions on matters of philosophical and metaphysical significance. In the story referred above, Borges explores themes that are in fact near to all of us by focusing upon his ’social self’ as ’someone different’.

Personal vs. the Social self

All of us can experience two distinct sides of us. One is our inner nature, the true us, that only we have real access to.  This is the inner side that God refers to when He says:

وَلَقَد خَلَقنَا الإِنسٰنَ وَنَعلَمُ ما تُوَسوِسُ بِهِ نَفسُهُ ۖ وَنَحنُ أَقرَبُ إِلَيهِ مِن حَبلِ الوَريدِ

 Translation: NOW, VERILY, it is We who have created man, and We know what his innermost self whispers within him: for We are closer to him than his neck-vein. (Sura Qaf, ayah 16)

The other is the more public side, composed of our outward behavior, our appearance, our sayings and doings, open for all the observers. This is the social self and our social self varies according to each different context that we enter in our lives.

This distinction also relates to a more basic subject-vs.-object distinction in nature. A subject can be said to be an observer, a being that is conscious, that knows. Whereas, an object is simply a thing that is observed.  Thus all subjective beings themselves are available as objects for others’ observation. Here, Borges is treating his own ‘objective’ side as something distinct from him, the subject.  

The Persona

As you will read the essay, you will see that Borges is aware of the ‘empty’ and ‘artificial’ quality of the social facade to which others react with awe and admiration given that this social facade belongs to a famous person. Even though, most of us are not famous, still we can related to this feeling of discomfort when we are the focus of others’ attentions. We can feel the essential distance that remains between the real us and the ‘presentation’ we are giving before others. This presentation rarely matches the original inner story as it is. In simple words, there may be only a few rare relationships where we are able to interact spontaneously and genuinely without any distortion or gaps introduced. We have to mold our urges and impulses into behavioral patterns that will be acceptable in the situation we are in.

Carl Jung  in his analytical psychology, called this ‘medium’ or ‘the point-of-contact’ between the real us and the society out there as persona. He literally described the persona as a mask. Borges seems to be painfully aware of the empty and fake nature of his mask and feels averse to it.

But the story of self is not this simple.

The Shadow

Persona is a reality of life, a process that is necessarily there, that cannot be by-passed. Most of us do feel uncomfortable more or less when our persona is activated but still we accept it as a necessary compromise. The fact that Borges is feeling so averse to this persona hints to other things.

Our self-awareness is never complete. At birth we have been born with a myriad of tendencies, not all of them have had a chance to come out in the open yet. While one reason for our full potentialities not being conscious is that we have not encountered the environment which naturally evokes and instills those latent capacities; another important reason is the discouragement and punishment we receive from our elders in our up-bringing when our skills and tendencies are expressed in forms that they consider as undesirable. Urges and impulses arising from these hidden potentials then remain unconscious – what Jung had called as the personal unconscious. There was also a more colorful term to reflect this layer of the self: the Shadow.

The word shadow has a negative connotation. It is so because of the negative feelings often associated by our repressed/suppressed tendencies: the original shame, embarrassment, or hatred caused when we received our punishments, whether verbal, physical or nonverbal.

When we confront those same tendencies in others (other ‘objects’ so to speak), we react negatively. In a way we ‘project’ our own ‘weaknesses’ on to the objects around us and feel averse. Since Borges has treated his persona as an object, he now projects his shadow onto it and feels averse. Notice all the negative qualities of that other Borges he cites in the short piece.

When he says things like: “I am giving over everything to him” he shows that he is more and more realizing that the real source of all the attributes of the shadow is his own unconscious. He cannot conveniently shoulder the blame on to the ‘demands of the social situation’.

However, the interesting point is that even where he acknowledges some valid accomplishment by this Borges, he is humble: He attributes his creations as a writer to ‘the language’ and ‘the tradition’ and says: “what is good belongs to no one”. Why is he saying so? Herein is actually a reference to a much more deeper and broader level of unconscious that Jung also conceptualized:

The collective unconscious

If what is good belongs to no one to whom does it belong then? Where does it come from then?

Borges is showing the sophisticated awareness that those ‘breezes’ of thoughts and ‘waves’ of feelings that we attempt to transform into words are rooted much deeper inside us than we may think. The range of our self-awareness is very short: at surface we think so and so, we are impressed by so and so. In reality, we have no idea what is the rootcause, the real source of that idea that urge; what was it in some external provocation that held us so strongly in its grip that we were stunned or awed or else were moved so gravely by it.

According to Jung, this deep source of everything, that cannot be consciously traced by us is actually the treasure-house of the whole range of human potentialities that we bring into this world, and that is common across all of us. If you think, every single bit of thought, inspiration, motivation, fear, desire, need, that we have had is not ‘originally ours’, not experienced by us and only us in the world. Thousands of people have experienced the same thing before. The unique combination of our experiences may indeed be ours but not the ingredients. This is what Borges means when he says what is good really belongs to none and this is the same idea that we encounter repeatedly in the Quran…

The universal Self

Jung identified several distinct ingredients (he called them archetypes) of this collective unconscious, the one most relevant here is the concept of the Self (or the objective psyche). Self actually is the harmounious human totality, in which all our diverse, and often opposite tendencies come together. As our Ego (the plainly conscious self, in Jung’s theory) comes to realize over the course of years, that the same people, objects and institutions often evoke very different and ambivalent responses in us: love hate, dependence independence, acceptance rejection, trust suspicion. To a more or less extent, the maturing Ego comes to understand and accept these apparent discrepancies, to resolve them or to reach and bring out in the open the complicated causes leading to such complicated responses. As this happens, we can say that the Ego is now more in line with the universal self. In Jung’s terms the Ego is becoming more and more individuated into or identifying with the Objective Psyche.

But this process is not easy. There are lot of anxieties on the way, a lot of fears to be encountered. The most significant fear is the threat of losing one’s individuality, realizing that one is nothing more than a human, nothing above and beyond a human, just that. I personally feel that it is this same fear that stops many of us from fully identifying with our God and from realizing our essential smallness and nothingness in His Omni-Presence.

With the fear of being nothing is tied the fear of ‘ending’ or ‘perishing’. What is a drop in a river? The river will keep flowing, but a drop…. might ‘not exist’ the next moment.  It is these fears that make the fictional Borges run away from the ’shadow’ – the shadow which is actually a doorway, a threshold onto the much deeper layer of the collective unconscious in which resides the universal self… It is the same fear that makes Borges say: “my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.” (from the translation in the Mind’s I).

To sum up:

 وَجاءَت سَكرَةُ المَوتِ بِالحَقِّ ۖ ذٰلِكَ ما كُنتَ مِنهُ تَحيدُ

Translation: And [then,] the twilight of death brings with it the [full] truth – that [very thing, O man,] from which thou wouldst always look away! – (Sura Qaf, ayah 19)

Notes:

A nearly identical translated version of Borges’ piece along with the orginal in Spanish can be read here.

A different, more elaborated and somewhat scholarly version of this essay I wrote before this post which I am considering for publication. If it was published, I would share the link. JazakaAllah for your constant readership.

by Giordano Bruno
Published: Dec. 09, 2009 – Pak Alert Press

Mind Control” is a loaded term, often associated with science fiction and the fantastical by people who are not aware of its very real history. Images of Orwell’s “1984” or Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” are conjured; dystopic nightmare landscapes assumed only possible in pulp literature. What many people do not know or realize is that these books were based on actual ideas and theories that had been put forward by social and scientific elites for decades, and in some cases, centuries. The desire of the “ruling class” to understand the mechanics of the human mind has left a trail of misery dating back to earliest recorded history. It was not enough for them to subjugate the masses through force; the Elites wanted the people to accept their slavery, to integrate it into their psyches. They wanted us to be “thankful” for our servitude, for only then, would they truly be in control of the world.

To understand where this obsession with mind control comes from and how it works, we must first start at the beginning…

The Genius And The Horror Of Babylon

Babylon was the first of what we would now call “urban centers” or city states. Until Babylon, most of the human world lived in closely knit tribal societies composed of several families or “clans.” The Sumerians had set the first foundation stones in the formation of a new political and social architecture–the empire–but this architecture was not fully realized until Babylon.

Babylonian society achieved several things in the process of mass mind control, but its greatest accomplishment was taking the first step towards “centralization.”

With the construction of Babylon, the sovereignty and relative independence of the tribal system ended. Before this, many tribes were nomadic, laying claim to no specific plot of land, and surviving by hunting, foraging, and some animal domestication. This method of life is considered by most of us today to be highly primitive and ineffective (perhaps because most people know nothing about it), but it also had many merits. With Babylon came the centralization of tribes into the faceless and careless recesses of urban life. Agriculture on a large scale was introduced, not necessarily because it increased food production, but because it tied the people to the land indefinitely through an early form of feudalism (some scientists and historians question whether forced agriculture actually helped or harmed human society).

Instead of the tribal council of elders; a system of leadership based on experience and trust, Babylon gave rise to the first vestiges of “Royalty”– leadership based on nothing but heraldry and bloodlines. Ever since the Babylonian model was established, societies have deferred authority to centralized governments composed of men that have little if any legitimate respect or connection to the people they govern (with only a few exceptions in history). The rulers became almost faceless deities that cast laws and lightning bolts down on the masses from some unreachable Olympus, floating high above the toil and worry of the serfs and slaves. This mentality in regards to our government continues today.

Babylon also introduced the centralization of religion. Instead of a rich tapestry of many different tribal belief systems, all people absorbed into Babylon were indoctrinated into a single religious system. This religion was built on a “pyramid structure” in which the priests held incredible social sway. The secrets of their religion (often termed “mysteries”) were reserved for only those priests at the top of the pyramid. All others in the priesthood were carefully chosen and inducted through a series of “tests,” mostly psychological in nature.

This system of compartmentalization was the key to the priesthood’s control over the minds of the masses. Knowledge in fields such as mathematics, navigation, astronomy, and other early sciences, were kept from the commoners and slaves, giving the priesthood and the royalty incredible power over their subjects.

These methods were carried on by elites in various empires to come, and perfected by the ancient Egyptians, who found a way to combine the centralization of Royalty and Religion into the creation of “God Kings”; human leaders who were also treated by the masses as living gods.

The startling allure of early Christianity was probably in part due to the priesthoods of these empires and their abuses of the people. Christianity (at first) destroyed the paradigm of the pyramid structure in religion. It claimed no “mysteries,” and said that there should be no hidden and exalted order of priests, that all the beliefs and knowledge of religion should be open to everyone. Of course, this changed centuries later when Christianity was co-opted by the same elites they were trying to fight, but we will cover this in a later article.

The root methods of mind control were born in the ancient mystery sects of Babylon and Egypt. This is where symbolic structures in the unconscious, now called “Archetypes,” were first studied and utilized. This is where tactics such as “Pageantry” and early forms of the Hegelian Dialectic were first practiced. These same techniques designed thousands of years ago are still used today, but with new and frightening technological efficiency.

Archetypes: A Map To The Mind, Or Perhaps Even The Soul

Archetypes are structures of knowledge inherent in the human mind from the moment we are born into the world. They were first fully explored in a scientific manner by the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Jung found during his decades of study into the unconscious mind that there within existed a series of symbols with built in psychological implications. These symbols were adapted by various archetypal structures that exist in our psyches from birth, and they are common to every human being regardless of environmental conditions, historical background, or cultural background, meaning they are universal. They make their home in our unconscious minds and are most visible in our dreams, art, and religions. In fact, all successful religions are built upon Archetypal Symbolism.

No one knows yet where archetypes come from, and how they are present in our psyches at birth, but the fact is, they are there. Here are some interesting articles explaining more on specific Archetypes and what they represent:

http://www.stenudd.com/myth/freudjung/jung-archetypes.htm

http://www.tnnweb.com/mds/majorarchetypes.html

Jung found that these symbols are deeply effecting when a person experiences them in their daily life. They tend to evoke intense emotions and personal connection. Those who are not aware of how archetypes affect them can be easily swayed or manipulated by archetypal events or imagery. Jung’s form of psychology was based around the idea that these inborn structures of information could be used to cure mental illness if patients were forced to examine themselves and their unconscious more closely. To this day, Jungian psychology remains far more effective in treating imbalances such as schizophrenia than any pharmaceutical ever marketed by mainstream psychiatry. However, Jung was startled early in his work to find that he was not the first to utilize archetypes as keys to opening doors in the mind. There had been others long before him…

A Scientific Basis For The Occult?

Jung continued to return to two ancient belief systems when looking for clues on how archetypes operate; Hermetics, and Alchemy. These systems existed in pre-biblical times, yet shockingly, seemed to employ the same methods of examining unconscious symbolism that Jung would stumble upon thousands of years later.

When the ancient and exclusive priest sects of Babylon and Egypt were practicing their rituals and symbolism to influence the masses, were they actually using an early form of Jungian Psychology? Was it possible that occult groups and their “magical” qualities were not really magical at all, but the expert use of archetypal symbols to manipulate the minds of their followers? Was this the great secret that they were trying to hide from the commoners?

A close examination of occult belief systems is very revealing. Occult symbolism matches and catalogs many of Jung’s archetypes perfectly. In fact, looking through the Arcana of a tarot card deck (and their meanings) is like looking through a list of symbols and themes Jung found to be common in the dreams of every human being:

http://www.schuelers.com/chaos/chaos7.htm

http://www.intuitivetarot.com/majorarcana.html

Imagine having the knowledge of archetypes and how they effect people emotionally 3000 years ago. Your ability to influence the minds of others would certainly appear to be nothing short of “wizardry!” Of course, just because the elites of old used archetypal symbols doesn’t necessarily mean they knew exactly what they were doing or why it worked, so let us jump ahead to the middle ages and the renaissance for more evidence…

Freemasons And The Use Of Archetypes

The occult practices of ancient Babylon, Egypt, and Greece, did not disappear after the deaths of those empires, but were carried on by secret societies throughout the Middle Ages, including the Rosicrucians, and the Freemasons. It is hard to say whether or not these societies are directly descended from the mystery schools of old, or if they simply adapted the same beliefs centuries later. However, the Freemasons themselves declare that they and their practices are directly descended from the religious orders of Babylon and Egypt:

“Masonry stands in this tradition; and if we may not say that it is historically related to the great ancient orders, it is their spiritual descendant, and renders much the same ministry to our age which the Mysteries rendered to the olden world.”

–Joseph Fort Newton, 33″ Mason, from his book “The Builders”

“Study of spiritual realities found in Masonry reveals that we have perpetuated and increasingly activated the essential principals of the ancient Mystery Schools which have existed from the very earliest times.”

–Foster Bailey, from his book “The Spirit of Masonry”

When entering Freemasonry, initiates must take the “Oath of Nimrod.”  Nimrod is purported to be the first king of Babylon.  This is admitted in their own literature, which you can see here:

http://www.freemasonrytoday.com/36/p12.php?printnice=yes

Oath of Nimrod
Apprentice Degree (1st).
I, _______, do in the presence of El Shaddai and of this Worshipful Assembly of Free Masons, Rough Masons, Wallers, Slaters, Paviors, Plaisterers and Bricklayers, promise and declare that I will not at any time hereafter, by any act or circumstance whatsoever, directly or indirectly, write, print, cut, mark, publish, discover, reveal, or make known, any part or parts of the Trade secrets, privileges, or counsells of the Worshipful Fraternity or Fellowship of Free Masonry, which I may have known at any time, or at any time hereafter shall be made known unto me.

The penalty for breaking this great oath shall be the loss of my life.

That I shall be branded with the mark of the Traitor and slain according to ancient custom by being throtalled, that my body shall be buried in the rough sands of the sea a cable’s length from the shore where the tide regularly ebbs and flows twice in the twenty-four hours, so that my soul shall have no rest by night or by day–
(Candidate Signs the O.B.)

Given under my hand and sealed with my lips, this day of 1913.
So help me El Shaddai and the holy contents of this book.

There are indeed many reasons why the present volume should be generously circulated among all classes of students of the Occult and Mystic, especially the members of the Masonic bodies.

The vast majority of Masons smile with derision when the term “Occult Science” is used in connection with the Mysteries but, despite this, if it had not been for the Occult Fraternities, Masonry could not have existed.

…

“All Masonry of the past dealt largely with the ethics and symbolism of the Ancient Mysteries. If the Masons of the present age will but seek for the spirit of the symbolism upon which the degrees are based, the grandest achievements in the knowledge and reconstruction will be possible and the mysteries concealed in the Greater Mysteries of Antiquity will be recovered to them.”

–Mason R. Swinburne Clymer, M. D., from his book “The Mysticism of Masonry”

“The universal sentiment of the Freemasons of the present day is to confer upon Solomon, the King of Israel, the honor of being their first Grand Master. But the legend of the Craft had long before, though there was a tradition of the Temple in existence, given, at least by suggestion, that title to Nimrod, the King of Babylonia and Assyria. It had credited the first organization of the fraternity of craftsmen to him, in saying that he gave a charge to the workmen whom he sent to assist the King of Nineveh in building his cities.

That is to say, he framed for them a Constitution, and, in the words of the legend, this was the first time that ever Masons had any charge of his science. It was the first time that the Craft was organized into a fraternity working under a Constitution of body of laws. As Nimrod was the autocratic maker of these laws, it necessarily resulted that their first legislator, creating laws with his unlimited and absolute governing power, was also their first Grand Master.”

http://www.lafayettemason123.org/pages/education.htm

The point here is, the Freemasons follow the teachings of the ancient mystery sects, and these sects dealt deeply in the use of archetypes. Therefore, the elites of today, many of whom are heavily involved in Freemasonry, would also be steeped in archetypes and their influence on the human mind. Here is an interesting article written by a Freemason on Masonry’s relationship to the symbols of the Tarot, which we discussed earlier:

http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/major_arcana_tarot.html

The best example of Elites using an archetypal image to manipulate the masses is also the most recent. The 9/11 false flag attacks present a highly organized and deliberate use of symbolism to force a particular emotional response from the majority of Americans.

I have often heard the question; “Why didn’t the elites just allow the planes to hit the towers? Why also use nanothermite (military grade thermite) to cause a near uniform demolition?”*

There is a very good reason for the use of demolitions on 9/11, but it is primarily psychological, and not strategic.

The Tower is itself a very powerful archetypal symbol. In dreams it represents a striving for knowledge and wisdom, or an accomplishment or progress in one’s own psychological development. The collapse of a Tower in a dream can represent a severe psychological break, a feeling of failure and disappointment, or even herald the formation of a mental illness such as depression or schizophrenia. In dreams, the archetype takes shape and then affects our mental state in our waking life. But what happens when an archetypal event is created right in front of our very eyes?

This was the main purpose of 9/11, and the need for demolitions to cause a total collapse. If demolitions had not been used, the WTC would have only partially collapsed, as it was designed to do in the event of an airplane strike according to the men who engineered the towers themselves. If a partial collapse occurred, the psychological effect would be muted. American’s reasoning and psychological defenses would not have been broken down, because the “Archetypal Event” would not have been complete. The towers had to collapse completely in order for the archetypal symbolism to be successful, allowing for easy manipulation of the masses. In fact, if the towers had been hit and they remained standing, I do not believe Americans would have been at all susceptible to the idea of war, and we would certainly not be in Iraq today, nor would we have accepted the formation of the Patriot Act, which gives the Executive Branch wide ranging and nearly dictatorial powers. This is the influence of archetypes when used by skilled practitioners for ill purpose.

But this is only the beginning…..

Freemasons And Sacred Geometry

It has been proven that our minds are hard wired with not only archetypal symbols, but mathematical and geometric understanding as well.  We covered this in the first episode of our film series Sons Of Darkness, Sons Of Light.

Amazonian tribes in Brazil have been shown by recent studies to have inborn knowledge of geometry and mathematics their cultures had never been exposed to before.  Also, in studies of baby’s emotional reactions to faces, it has been found that newborns recognize and prefer those faces which are mathematically symmetrical in bone structure.  Meaning, babies who have never been taught mathematical concepts are born with the ability to recognize geometric shapes, and are affected emotionally by them! This inborn sense of geometry can even cause us to view some people as “physically attractive” and others as “physically unattractive”:

http://www.viewzone.com/faces.html

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but in fact, it would appear that our unconscious is already predisposed to gravitate towards mathematically sound forms.

Enter Freemasonry, and the practice of “Sacred Geometry.”

Sacred Geometry is one of the foundations of Masonry, and is the “spiritual” practice of mathematics.  Made prominent in the time of Pythagoras and Euclid in ancient Greece, geometry and other mathematics were practiced as a form of religion, instead of science as we know it today.  The shapes inherent in calculations like Pythagoras’ “Golden Rectangle” are used often and deliberately in Masonic buildings and even in art, like that of Leonardo Da Vinci.  Here is an article written by a Mason on the subject:

http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/geometry_masonry.html

Freemasons are well aware of the psychological effect that certain geometric structures and images can have on the human mind, and these shapes and forms are present in all their buildings.  Entire cities have even been designed by Masons using sacred geometry.  For example, Washington D.C. was designed by the Freemason, Pierre L’enfant, and the deliberate Masonic symbolism used is obvious:

http://home.hiwaay.net/~jalison/after2.html

A good example of a building constructed using sacred geometry for psychological effect is the Christ Church, Spitalfields in London, made famous because it lay exactly in the center of the murders perpetrated by the infamous “Jack the Ripper.”  It was designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, a Freemason:

From an architectural point of view, the church is very imposing and emotionally affecting, even frightening!  It seems to draw the life out of its surroundings.

Imagine now the use of sacred geometry in other visual arts, such as media and film.  Could certain geometric principles be used in media to evoke a specific emotional response from viewers, just like Hawksmoor’s churches?

Actually, they already are!  Just read any book on visual marketing:

http://www.gmarketing.com/articles/read/147/Winning_Colors_and_Shapes_for_Your_Company.html

The use of archetypes and geometric symbols in a subliminal way brings us to another form of mind control, and yet another Freemason…

Mesmer, Hypnosis, And Subliminal Messaging

“…the real origin and essence of the hypnotic condition, is the induction of a habit of abstraction or mental concentration, in which, as in reverie or spontaneous abstraction, the powers of the mind are so much engrossed with a single idea or train of thought, as, for the nonce, to render the individual unconscious of, or indifferently conscious to, all other ideas, impressions, or trains of thought. The hypnotic sleep, therefore, is the very antithesis or opposite mental and physical condition to that which precedes and accompanies common sleep…”

James Braid, Founder of Hypnotism

Hypnotism, as discovered by Scottish physician James Braid, is a not necessarily a drifting of the mind into unconsciousness, but an extreme focusing of consciousness to a single point.  This focusing of consciousness caused all other information gathered by the senses to be “overlooked.”  Meaning, a person under hypnosis is so focused on a single point that their consciousness is unable to recognize other stimuli, making them highly suggestible.  Because their entire consciousness is focused on one point, they do not realize that messages are being implanted, or information is being extracted by the hypnotist.

Braid’s work was directly influenced by the studies of Franz Anton Mesmer, a Freemason.  Mesmer used a form of hypnotism, mainly as a method to make the sick believe they had been healed or cured.  An entire school (some would say cult) of thought built up around Mesmer’s practices, and the term “Mesmerism” was born:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Hypnosis+-+Franz+Anton+Mesmer-a01073990642

http://psychicinvestigator.com/demo/Mesmr2.htm

The use of hypnotism is directly linked to the study of subliminal messaging.  Creating a state of hyper-focus on a simplistic point in a person’s mind allows for numerous messages to be sent into the brain without that person being aware:

http://www.mindpowernews.com/Subliminals.htm

Most people have heard of subliminal messaging in advertising, and the “25th Frame” tactic, which hides an image in the 25th frame of a video or film broadcast.  The frame moves by so quickly that the message does not register consciously, but subconsciously, it is imprinted in the brain.  Some people are easily influenced by this method, while others are not.

Television is perhaps the greatest hypnotic tool ever devised, allowing for intensive subliminal manipulation to occur.  Think back to the last time you watched television.  Remember any moments in which you lost all track of the world around you?  Remember a family member trying to get your attention, yet you were “mesmerized?”  Television causes the mind to settle into a narrow focus, much like hypnosis, making the mind open to suggestion.

This suggestion does not even need to come in the form of hidden images or reverse audio messages.  It could be a carefully chosen talking point repeated several times in the same news broadcast.  Even the scrolling “ticker” at the bottom of a FOX or CNN news program could be used to insert manipulative messaging.

Projects, government and commercial (same thing), still exist today which seek to streamline and perfect the use of subliminal messaging to control the human mind.  In September of 2007, Wired Magazine published an article on Semantic Stimuli Response Measurements Technology, or SSRM Tek, being studied at the Psychotechnology Research Institute in Moscow.  The laboratory’s stated goal is experimental use of subliminal messaging and suggestion to control the human mind:

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/09/mind_reading

Note the image below of the room used to experiment on subjects.  Notice the symbolically geometric design, very similar to Masonic architecture:

The Psychotechnology Research Institute has been linked closely with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the DHS has even announced plans to award a sole-source contract to conduct the first U.S.-government sponsored testing of SSRM Tek.  Their stated reason for wanting mind control technology:  “to defend America against terrorists.”

Pageantry

One of the favored methods used by elites to effect people on a mass scale is Pageantry; the ability to create an entire environment that overloads the five senses and the unconscious mind with subliminal and archetypal messaging.  The most successful example of expert pageantry is probably the formation of Nazi Germany, financed by elites from around the globe, including the Rockefeller Family through their company Standard Oil, as proven by the “Von Knieriem Documents” discovered during the Nuremberg Trials:

http://www.mazal.org/archive/nmt/07/NMT07-C001.htm

The entire Nazi ideology was founded on principles supported by the Rockefellers and other elites, along with the archetypal mythologies touted by the Theosophical Society.  Numerous symbolic images like the Swastika (black sun) or the lightning bolt-like symbol for the SS (a rune symbol) were taken directly from occult history and used masterfully to build an environment rich in archetypes.  Jung, who witnessed the transformation of Germany, despaired at the use of archetypes in the destruction of Europe:

“If thirty years ago anyone had dared to predict that our psychological development was tending towards a revival of the medieval persecutions of the Jews, that Europe would again tremble before the Roman fasces and the tramp of legions, that people would once more give the Roman salute, as two thousand years ago, and that instead of the Christian Cross an archaic swastika would lure onward millions of warriors ready for death — why, that man would have been hooted at as a mystical fool.”

–Carl Gustav Jung
 

Note: The video above proposes a German opposition to Masonry, however, the Thule Society of Germany and its symbolism is heavily linked to Masonry and this connection should be taken into account. Not all branches of Freemasonry are involved with the NWO, and not all Masons are aware of their organization’s dishonorable ties to the Elites. Some branches have even rebelled against the Elites in the past, such as those in the colonial U.S., who fought against the tyranny of the British monarchy. We will more thoroughly discuss Freemasonry and how it was co-opted by the Globalists in an article soon to be released.

Another purpose to pageantry and ceremony is to influence people to experience what Jung called the “Collective Unconscious,” an intuitive psychological network to which all people are unconsciously connected.  Most of us are only vaguely aware of this connection, but the evidence of its existence can be seen in the identical archetypal symbolism of every culture at any point in history.

Almost every religion uses symbolic ceremony to create a collective experience of the unconscious.  These ceremonies can help people to better understand themselves, and their relationship to humanity as a whole, however, such pageants can also be used to enslave the minds of an entire group through a collective sense of fear, guilt, and rage.  This is why many of the ancient mystery sects of Babylon and Egypt used human sacrifice during ceremony.

It is normally written off by historians as zealotry and lunacy, but there is a very tangible purpose behind sacrificial ceremonies.  The act of collective murder is incredibly invasive and can put an unbreakable stranglehold on the psyches of those who participate.  Often, these ceremonies are meant to create a rift which allows people to ignore conscience; the intuitive and inborn force which helps us to find peace and balance.  The witnesses and perpetrators of such an event are often bound emotionally for years or even decades after.

That is why the Global Elites of today still portray sacrifice in their pageants, like the “Cremation of Care” (cremation of conscience) ceremony at Bohemian Grove in Northern California, which many U.S. presidents have attended, including George W. Bush.  Take note of the numerous references to Babylon in this ceremony, as well as the stone statue of Moloch, the Babylonian god of death and sacrifice:

Another elitist group that still uses sacrifice in effigy (perhaps real as well) is the Skull and Bones Society which holds in its ranks such well known politicians a George H.W. Bush, George W Bush, and John Kerry:

The idea that our world leaders even pretend to commit acts of human sacrifice should be extremely disturbing to anyone who understands the psychological implications of pageantry and mind control.  No leader of men should be separated from his conscience.

MK-ULTRA

Perhaps the pinnacle of all exposed government sponsored mind control programs was MK-ULTRA, a multifaceted project spread across several countries utilizing every method of psychological manipulation mentioned in this article, as well as others not mentioned.

MK-ULTRA was a CIA based program started officially in 1953 and continued at least through the 1960’s.  It employed scientists (some human rights criminals and murderers) smuggled from Nazi Germany after the war through Operation Paper Clip.  The experiments of MK-ULTRA, under the supervision of men like Dr. Sidney Gottliebb and Dr. Ewen Cameron,  often used unsuspecting people as guinea pigs, exposing them to forced drugging, subliminal messaging, and even torture.  Some believe these experiments continue today under a different name.  Here is a very well made video explaining the history of MK-ULTRA:

In the early 70’s, victims of these experiments began to come forward, and in response, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK-ULTRA files destroyed. Only a bare skeleton of files remain to help us understand what really happened.  You can view all of those documents here:

http://www.michael-robinett.com/declass/c000.htm

Project MK-ULTRA was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 as Congress was forced to acknowledge the numerous victims coming forward to tell their story.  The resulting government “investigation” was mostly for show, and was organized by the Rockefeller Commission.  No member of the CIA or any doctor employed by them was ever prosecuted for their crimes.

Defense Against Mind Control Methods

The first step in defending against manipulation is of course to first understand the methods used by manipulators to get what they want.  After careful study, you should be able to easily pick out key phrases, archetypal symbols, subliminal messages, and other devices when you are confronted by them.  It is interesting to examine these methods in depth and then go back out into the world of media and propaganda.  You may be startled by what you see on the T.V. and in the streets that you did not notice before.

The other defense against mind control was actually realized by Carl Jung.  Jung found that those people who used Archetypal Psychology for good, those who used it to understand themselves and their inborn qualities, were actually incredibly resistant to manipulation and subversion.  They could not be caught in the fervor of an archetypal event, because they knew their own unconscious so well.  These men and women were psychological mountains, immovable spires of mental strength that could not be changed and controlled by others.  For those not yet self aware, the mind remains a subtle and mutable form, a delicate instrument that expresses the contents of the spirit, but hard to predict and defend.  Knowing one’s self is the key to breaking from the poisonous circle of psychological manipulation, and to expel the habit of apathy that settles human beings into tyranny.  To win liberty back from the clutches of elites, we must first WANT to be free, and the path to freedom begins in the minds and the hearts of men.

“Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.”

–Adolf Hitler

*Note:  This article’s purpose is to move beyond the debate of 9/11 and elitist involvement in the attacks.  Numerous engineers and physicists have found more than enough evidence to suggest demolitions were used to facilitate the total collapse of the twin towers and building 7, which was not even hit by a plane.  All of this evidence can be found readily on the web, however, we highly recommend Dr. Steven Jones’ paper published by “The Chemical Physics Journal” and peer-reviewed by scientists around the world.  Jones proves beyond a doubt that military grade nanothermite is present in large quantities in the dust left by the WTC collapse. http://www.journalof911studies.com/

Source: http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/controlling-the-minds-of-the-masses-how-it-is-done-and-why/

Related:

DOCUMENTARY – The New Phoenix Program

The Occult Origins Of The American Nation

The New World Order (NWO): An Overview

DOCUMENTARY – RIDDLES IN STONE: Secret Architecture of Washington, D.C.”

Who Are The Illuminati?

The Skull and Bones secret society of Yale University

History of the New World Order

Mankind Held Hostage by Satanists

DOCUMENTARY – History of Freemasonry (2005), by Juri Lina

VIDEO – David Icke exposes Bohemian Grove

VIDEO – Global Mind Control Through Crisis Creation – TAVISTOCK INSTITUTE

DOCUMENTARY – Esoteric Agenda (Spanish Subtitles)

Aurora borealis or Northern Lights

We will. That’s the point: we’ll get there.

But there is something else. Somewhere deep in the collective unconscious (thank you Carl Jung) there is an unfounded fear that when the shortest day arrives, the sun will not only stand still but may never rise again. That may sound crazy to someone who doesn’t look up at the sky much; who sees ‘light’ as something akin to the strange offerings on Photobucket under that search item: a neon tube.

But there are others among us, myself included, who look to the skies in these fast diminishing days and wonder if the light will return. I miss it so. In the so-called temperate zone, we lose the light at a rate of roughly four minutes per day until December 21st, when the sun ‘appears’ to stand still. And then it turns round and light increases at the same rate until equinox. I blogged last week about how the light-deprived Scots celebrate solstice in Burghead at the latitude of Alaska. No Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) for them

The Norwegians, too, know all about that latitude: over half their huge country lies north of the 57º parallel. In Murmansk, on the White Sea, they keep the street lights on from October until April. They’re not just street lights either, they are specially formulated UV, designed to trigger serotonin in the SAD population and offer some hope to a city starved of sun for five months of the year.

Yes, serotonin is the hormone secreted by the human brain in the process of joy. It’s what we as a species need to keep going. Joy and light. And at this season when all the shops are declaring it is time to be ‘merry’, joy may be hard to find, unless we consciously engender it.

So it may be relevant to fostering a little joy that I give you a small ditty which appeared in today’s Daily Mail and one which the people of Norway are still pondering over.

I won’t add the comments from the unbelievers (failed Russian spacecraft, holographic searchlight); the positive view is that it is – in the middle of Arctic winter – a light in the sky. Not exactly aurora borealis, but something electromagnetic and atmospherically-unusual. A spiral of light in the sky. There’s hope.

Light over Tromsö, Norway

Aurora, now. That’s another delight we may witness at our latitude if we’re lucky, at this dark time of year. It might even be seen as a magical mechanism devised by solar wind and earth’s magnetosphere to whisper awe into our unresponsive consciousness.

But to stand on a hill on a starlit night, hot water bottle wrapped round kidney region, three scarves and wool hat in place, furry boots and six layers of woolly jumpers over frail human body, and watch as the firmament wheels for an hour in cathedrals of light, is something not to be missed.

For that I will go through another dark winter in this wild northern latitude.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5qvas_alaskaorg-aurora-borealis-northern_travel

On January 12 last year the population of Siguida, Latvia experienced the light equivalent of an ice storm: over the city’s streets hovered a cloud of light which then descended into pillars. Scientists attributed the columns of light which hung suspended in air for more than five minutes to frozen crystals of water or minute particles of ice. But to a child it must have looked like a winter fairy’s magic wand had waved.

Ice pillars of light over Latvia last January

There will always be the view of the jaded reporter, the overworked NASA scientist, the prosaic explanation of a failed Russian nuclear test to write off phenomena like these.

I fancy the childlike fairytale explanation myself.

In the dark days of what amounts to a period of hibernation for humankind in the northern hemisphere, isn’t it wonderful to know that the Cosmos is still bringing us its own version of Son et Lumière? Those unexplained shimmering beams of light bent by electromagnetic forces relatively few of us yet understand, spinnning constantly round our Blue Planet.

You thought Crop Circles were cool: in midwinter, Light is even Cooler.

I took this photo during our visit to Sechelt where a good number of our extended family lives.  Like our visit to Vancouver Island and to Vancouver, the rain stopped when it was time for a bit of exercise.    Most of the time on the coast was spent listening to stories of the past, particularly stories of men who worked felling trees, a work that required a keen sense of not only the environment, but an inner awareness that relied on intuition.  These men were hard-working guys who played hard when their shifts were done.  One brother-in-law in particular seemed to have been born under a lucky star, as he avoided serious injury and death way too many times.  This same brother-in-law has been the life of the party for all family gatherings.  He would best be described as having a personality that is predominantly that of an extraverted intuitive.

The intuitive function is represented in consciousness by an attitude of expectancy, by vision and penetration; but only from the subsequent result can it be established how much of what was “seen” was actually in the object, and how much was “read into” it. (Jung, CW vol. 6, par. 610)

My friend, the Celtic Raven, reported the dark lords of the Internet are using a linguistic trolling program to see what people are frightened by and excited about.  Interestingly the only positive interest is in The Self.  Evidently there is a growing tendency toward awakening.   If  The Matrix is interested in human consciousness and the Self or the God Image, then they should get the information direct from our grandmothers and aunties. Here’s what these elders had to say many years ago in the 195os.
The Grail Legend (1986 2nd ed.) by Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz. Boston: Sigo Press.

“Psychologically the term “Self” denotes the psychic totality of the human being which transcends consciousness and underlies the process of individuation and which gradually becomes conscious in the course of this process. The psychic totality which comprises the conscious and unconscious parts of the personality is naturally present, as an entelechy of the individual, from the very beginning. In the course of the process of maturation, however, the various aspects of totality enter the field of consciousness, thus leading to a widening of the continually changing horizon of awareness. Beyond this there is often a numinous experience of this inner psychic wholeness. This experience is usually accompanied by a profound emotion which the ego senses as an epiphany of the divine. For this reason it is practically impossible to differentiate between an experience of God and an experience of the Self. The manifestations of the Self, arising from the unconscious, coincide with the god-image of most religions and, when not personified, are distinguished by circular and square forms and very often (statistically considered) by quaternary formations. Jung, making use of an Eastern term, has called these structures mandalas.” (pp.98-99)

Referring to the Self we read, “In the dreams and fantasy pictures of modern man this hidden, invisible something is occasionally depicted as a meaningful and numinous void. There is one picture in which an egg-shaped void, from which rays stream forth, forms the center of a world or of a mandala with an empty center. . . .A nothingness, a void, is therefore the inescapable condition for the emergence of the Self. The Self is not already present from the beginning in a comprehensible form, but manifests itself only through the outer and inner realizations of a life lived to its end. For this reason Jung has likened it to the crystal lattice present as a potential form in a solution but which first becomes visible in the process of crystallization, although crystallization does not necessarily take place. The Self is therefore not complete, but is present in us as a potentiality which can become manifest only in the course of a specific process. Certainly, the Self is not invariably realized through the unfolding of the natural biological life processes. There appear to be many lives where this does not come to pass.
Then how and by what means can the Self become manifest? It is realized to that extent in which it is lived in the experience of daily life. It is not achieved, however, when it appears in symbolic form in dreams and inner images, nor is it when consciousness acquires a specific degree of clarity, nor yet when a psychological function has attained a high degree of differentiation. Important as consciousness undoubtedly is—and rightly utilized consciousness is an invaluable means of help for the realization of the Self—it is not by itself the determining factor. For it does not depend so very greatly on knowledge and ability or upon some degree of intelligence, but rather upon the use which is made of these attributes and above all, on the psychic attitude a person adopts in the face of the various circumstances of his life and fate. As the threads of fabric are woven into a pattern, so the Self as the living garment of divinity is woven out of the many decisions and crises, in themselves possibly insignificant, by which we are affected in the course of our lives. Such occasions present themselves at every level of life and intelligence and in every milieu. Whether or not they lead to a manifestation of the Self depends solely on our own response. Many of us have observed that children, even small children, when faced with some difficulty, possess an attitude which many adults could only envy. That “something,” the lack of which we experience as soullessness, is a “someone” who takes a position, who is accountable and who feels committed. Where this higher, responsible ego is lacking there can be no Self. Ethos and the Self are therefore mutually interdependent.
From the foregoing we can see that a fascination can emanate from something empty. It longs for completion like an invisible form which calls out for substance; the individual is conscious of the existence of this summons and of the growth of this attraction, but without knowing what it is that calls to him. The influence emanating from the hidden Grail could be likened to such a summons.”
(pp.133-134)