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Monday, May 25, 2015

They Burn Witches Don’t They?

Once upon a time, we burned witches at the stake. Or killed them in any number of other ways. But what were “witches?” Healers, mentally ill, outcasts, people with birth defects or deforming diseases? People, especially women, who seemed to know more than they were supposed to? What is the difference between a “wise man” and “witch,” other than the observer’s point of view? All that really doesn’t matter anymore because we are so enlightened. Or are we?

Today, we have Science, and that is the touchstone whereby all assertions are weighed and measured, and only the provably correct make the cut and everything else is discarded. Really? It only takes a few minutes studying the controversies around climate change, anti-depressants, vaccines, GMOs, birth control, and any number of other issues, to see that “Science” is treated as a matter of opinion by the vast majority of people in the world, scientists included. I can point to any number of controversies, for instance the age of the Sphinx, where one group of scientists has been pitted against another for fifteen years, in a sometimes, nasty, bitter battle. I can’t help but wonder, what’s the big deal? So what if the Sphinx is older than you thought, get over it. Conventional wisdom has been overturned many times in the 200 years, there’s no reason to expect that it won’t keep happening.

There’s one thing you have to keep in mind when dealing with debunkers, their job and passion is to debunk, not to confirm, and they have way too much of their ego on the line to ever confirm some controversial discovery. Go through the history of science, and you will see that the debunker as always the last to fall in line whenever a controversial discovery turn out to be fact. Sure, there’re plenty of nutty ideas, and lots of misinformation out there to keep debunkers busy, but they are human, just like the rest of is, and do they really want to risk their credibility by coming down on the wrong side of some issue that everybody knows is crap?

Yes, we still “burn” our “witches.” We still ruin careers and destroy livelihoods of people who say something we don’t like. Take the Fleischmann–Pons, “cold fusion” debacle: The made a discovery, some marketing idiot slapped the name “Cold Fusion” on it, and for that, they were forced to leave the country to find work. Since then, the effect has been confirmed and research is ongoing, but not one of the jerks that ripped apart Fleischmann and Pons has apologized or admitted they are wrong. The funny thing is, while the battle rages on, the technologists are quietly turning this “impossible effect” into real products: Black Light Power, Brillouin Energy Corporation.

Being truly objective can be really hard. I know the pain of have to give up a treasured idea. But you can’t always be right, nor can you always know all the facts. Sometimes you just have to say “I don’t know,” despite the pressure to come down on one side or the other. As far as “debunking” goes, it’s always easy to make fun of something, just watch any schoolyard bully, but the hard part comes when you are watching pundit tear apart some piece of “psudoscience:” Do you have any real idea of what’s at stake, or are you just one of the crowd, cheering on the bully who’s beating up that nurdy kid who just might be building the next FaceBook in his bedroom?

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Fear and Shadows

I’m thinking about fear. Fear is sneaking up on me again. I’m taking a big risk by not working and trying to build a hypnotherapy practice. It has taken time for training, and to figure out what I am going to do, and that time had eaten into my savings. Now to the point where I am beginning to wonder if I have a chance at this at all. Logically, I have another few months before things get critical, but try telling that to that to that little part of myself that nibbles away at your confidence whenever you’re alone. Logic be dammed, it just looks at my shrinking bank balance and keeps pulling the twin strings of panic and hopelessness, “Do something now!” it screams. 

What should I do? I could give up and get a job, but then I wouldn’t have much time for clients. I could make that work, but should I? Things could pick up at any time. I am looking at four clients this week and, perhaps, three next week, which would be great if they were all paying, but they’re not. Therein lies the conundrum: I do need the experience of working with clients, and I’m really not so busy that I can’t spare the time for free and low cost, clients, but it just feels bad to not be getting the income I need. The actual reality is that free clients are not a problem, and they won’t be unless they start to eat into time for paying clients. I’m told that it takes two years to build a workable practice, and at this point I’ve only been at it for a bit less than a year. I do feel that I’m starting to get some traction, but I can’t really see the future, I don’t know if I should wait it out, or give up and start working now. In reality, if someone offered me a job right now, I’d take it.

It’s like playing a video game, or one of those movies about someone who accomplished same great feat. You know the movies, where they have some great dream and they struggle and struggle and then, just when all seems lost, something happens and he is vindicated and everybody is saved at the eleventh hour. In video games, at least the story ones that I like, you never know how close you are to the end. You keep working, what seems like forever, finding clues, solving puzzles toward whatever grand goal the game has for you, and then, almost without warning, you’re done. You’ve finished the last task, solved the last puzzle, uncovered the last secret and it’s all over. Afterwards, your whole perspective changes and you see how close you were all along, you just didn’t know it. And in those movies, you want to cheer the characters on, “don’t give up,” you say, because you know that they are going to make it. But real life doesn’t always work like that. Maybe one day I will look back at this time and tell it as a great story, how I stuck it out, against the odds, and made it in the end. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll give it my all, throw everything I have into the ring and still come up short, it happens all the time. So, the question becomes, how close am I willing to cut it? How close are *we* willing to cut it? 

Most small business fail. That’s what statistics say. I’m not going to come to any firm decision right now, or tomorrow, but I will have to create a hard stop soon, know when enough’s enough, make up my mind and draw that line. And do it before I reach that point of no return. It’s what they always say “It take money to make money,” and I could probably generate more leads if I sunk a lot of money into advertising, but that’s were the fear comes in. When you don’t have a lot of cash, spending hurts. I’m seeing that it’s getting harder and harder to pay for things, even though I know I need them. Like the Chamber of Commerce, everything tells me that I need to join and get myself out there, but it’s so hard to pony up that cash. Thus is the dilemma of risk, it wouldn’t be a risky if it was easy. 

You probably hear the same stories I do, about the serial entrepreneurs who start and fail thee or four times before they succeed. I have to wonder, how big a risk did they take, if they can just start up a new business in nothing flat after the old one falls apart? It seems to me that if they can turn around so fast and find the capital for a new company, they must not have put a whole lot into the last one. It must be nice to do all your risking with somebody else’s money. These are held up a wonderful examples of examples of tenacity, but I wonder: Just how dedicated and tenacious is it, to gamble with some else’s money? Or with so much money that the loss doesn’t hurt. Don’t get me wrong, these are talented and hard working people. I just don’t think that they are displaying anywhere near the balls they are given credit for. They are nothing like the guy who sinks his life saving into some business, laying everything on the line. If he goes under, no angel investor or venture capital firm is going to hand him a pile of cash to fund his next idea. He’s going to have to dig his own way out with no help from anyone. How can you possibly compare the two? The second guy is taking a much bigger risk. He’s putting a lot more on the line than just his ego, which is more that these “serial entrepreneurs” can say.

So, here I am. I clearly have work to do, and I need to get at it. I have worked for years to banish those inappropriate feelings that ruled my life and kept me small, but some fears are true and appropriate, and I need to acknowledge them, and balance them against what I know to be true without letting them paralyze me. There is a path forward, as long as I don’t let my fears undermine my efforts. This have given me some clarity. Isn’t it funny how writing something like this can me feel somewhat better, somehow it blows away some of the shadows off the future, and that’s all anyone can ask, right?

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Graduation

A few days ago, I graduated from HCH Institute with my certificate in hypnotherapy. Cool! It’s been an amazing journey. I needed to plow through a lot of self-doubt, and other issues, that came up throughout the process. Fortunately, we were constantly working on each other so that there was ample opportunity to process stuff. I know now that if you decide to take on this kind of work, it’s always best to have issues to work on. Nothing beats personal experience with each technique from the inside!

We had a graduation ceremony on the last day. As you might expect, it was more spiritual than ceremonial. And I have to add here the qualification “spiritual but not religious,” because the things you learn and deal with in this course of study simply cannot be completely contained within any of the religions that I know of. From my point of view, all the mainstream religions have dumbed-down their metaphysical aspects to the point of simplistic absurdity, then imply that any evidence or experience or philosophical idea that doesn’t fit should be ignored and discarded. I don’t know, call me crazy, but where I come from, if the evidence doesn’t fit the paradigm, it’s time to change the paradigm. I have witnessed and experienced many things that don’t fit into any materialist or religious framework, and they are simply to practical and useful to discard simply because certain people find them unacceptable.

To complete the graduation ceremony, the head of the school lead us in a guided, group meditation. This meditation is known as the Crystal Cave meditation. It takes you on a  journey to a round cave with a fire in the center and the walls lined with crystals. Once in the cave, you are invited to study the flickering firelight dancing through the crystals, looking for inspiration in the ever-changing patterns and colors of light. This time, we were invited to all enter the cave together and form a circle around the fire. Once there, we each had the opportunity to share whatever we wanted about the class and our time together, over the past four months.

I was the last one to go, which gave me plenty of time to consider what I wanted to say. Actually, there wasn’t really many options for me. As soon as we settled into the cave, an image came into my head, and my only options were to either share it, or not. I chose to break from my usual paradigm of questioning everything and keeping all the weird stuff to myself, and tell everyone what I saw.

What is saw was each one of my classmates standing around a fire, each one was a avatar that, I suppose, represented them to me. 

The first person was a female figure dressed in black and white that I knew was Quan Yin, a Buddhist deity that I know little about, I just knew that’s who it was. The next was a cross between a leopard and tiger: fierce, protective, clever and tenacious. The next was a bear: strong, yet gentle, loving and, perhaps, a little clumsy, not yet in full control of her power. The next was a female figure I still didn’t recognize: She had dark hair, was dressed in robes of red, orange and yellow, reminding me of fire, and held a thin, golden staff with a ball on the top, which spoke to me of power, guidance, leadership, and intuitive wisdom, still trying to find her way. 

At the time, I skipped myself, having no idea what I looked like. Looking at it later, I just get the impression of a mineral with black, white and brown streaks, and a sense of licorice, whatever that means.

That covered all the people in the class, but there was one more figure in the circle, a tall figure of light. There were no real details, it was too bright for that. As I talked, it seemed to me that the figure had it’s hands open and, from them came a circle of light that passed through each of us, binding us together through experience and support, from now on. 


I’m not generally the kind of person that “sees” things or usually speaks in this fashion. But times and people change. I know now that it’s time to speak my truth, and let the chips fall where they may.

Friday, May 8, 2015

Fear and Dying in the Old West

Today I decided to explore the source of an on-going issue with another person. The other day I noticed that it seemed to go back a along way, and it came to a head yesterday, when I felt that I just couldn't stand any more of their negativity. An then, this morning, it all came up again while I was reading the text book for my next class. So it seemed appropriate to do a personal regression to look into where all that angst came from, and I found the Old West.

I first saw myself as a boy, about 10 years old, in a classic western saloon, in a hot, dusty, town. I had on boots, pants, a shirt and a vest. Nothing fancy, just standard garb for the time. I was sitting at an empty table, waiting for someone. It was about midmorning, judging by the light, and the place was pretty much empty and completely quiet, except for some conversation, too low for me to make out. I just stared at the table, knowing I was in trouble, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The next thing that happens is my father arrives. He is big, dark and threatening, and fills the doorway. He may have been wearing a dark shirt or I just saw him that way. In any case I was very scared. From my point of view, he was mean and unreasonable, and beat me. I had no idea what I was going to do. There was no way out.

In the next scene, it's now dark. I was staring at the wood floor, in what was probably the same saloon. But it's now filled with people, hot and sweaty, and they are all laughing at me. In an nasty way. My father is at the bar making all kinds of cruel jokes about me and making them laugh. I hated him. I was still seated at an empty table, head down, shoulders hunched, filled with rage, feeling betrayed but not really surprised.

Then it's morning again, and we are on our way back to our ranch. My father kicks me out of the wagon and tells me to walk the rest of the way. He says nothing else. It's a long way. Later, it's mid afternoon, it's extremely hot and I'm just standing, staring out at the horizon, not thinking. There seem to be bluffs behind me, but where I'm looking it's completely flat to the horizon, except for a thin rock spire. It could be small and close or large and distant. I can't tell.

My mind is completely blank. I just stare and feel at peace with everything and have no need to do anything but just stand there. After a while, everything starts to slowly fade to white, and the next thing I see is my body, sprawled face-up on the ground, eyes open, staring at nothing, as though I'd just fallen backwards. Then the body grew smaller and smaller as white closed in from the edges until there was nothing but white.

Looking back on that lifetime, I noticed that my father was the person I'm having issues with. I also got that the purpose of the lifetime was to learn trust. In that life I saw things and knew things that most people didn't, and I wanted to help people. My father told me to keep quiet about it, but I didn't listen and that got me into big trouble with the townspeople. My father didn't like my gifts any better than everybody else, but he did his best to defuse the situation by making me into a harmless, bumbling fool, rather than an instrument of the devil. His punishment, for disobeying his orders to shutup, was to walk home. But I suppose that he didn't realize that being shut up in town overnight without food or water had left me too weak to make it back.

Did this help? Well, I feel somewhat less upset about the whole business. My feelings have changed, somewhat, but there is still some residual anger. I'm going to need to spend more time on this, for I suspect that there is more to the story than just this one lifetime. I have more history to uncover before I'll be able to be a peace with it all.

Nobody said that growth was easy or fun, but the rewards are great and the alternative is to remain stuck in the same old cycles of resentment and revenge, forever.

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

The Smaller Part of Me

I had an insight when I was reading the textbook for my next class, Spirit Releasement Therapy, by William J. Baldwin. I was reading a section that talked about how a soul prepares for it’s next life. If you heard anything about reincarnation, you’ve probably heard that souls actually design their next life. Some people are uncomfortable with that idea: Why would anyone create a life of suffering? I don't pretend to have all the answers, but consider: How would Mother Teresa have become a saint if there were no suffering? And there's the simple fact that things don't always go as planned. With hundreds of lives intersecting on a daily basis, it should surprise no one that a certain amount of chaos throws things off track, from time to time.

The preparation of each life can be a very elaborate affair. In a way, I bet it has a lot in common with designing a video game: There's an initial world to design, then the characters, with their strengths and weaknesses, and then the plot, full of twists and turns, and branches where each choice take you down different path. Some people say that you work with a coach, and perhaps a small group, to develop a proposed plan, which you then present it to a board or counsel for approval. Approval isn't easy. There can be a lot of back-and-forth, if they think you are taking on too much, or not enough, or for any number of other reasons. You also need to recruit people to populate your life and play the major roles. Yup, you need to "cast" all the important players in your life in a way the serves their goals as well as your own. I bet you never considered that those people you can't get along with actually volunteered for that position, and are acting as you requested them to. As you might imagine, designing a life is not a trivial affair.

I have read about all this before, but this time I saw it in a new light, and this new light is a bit uncomfortable. It hit me that the "between life me" is probably a much wiser, more expansive, more spiritually aware and masterful, version of me than the version that's writing this. By comparison, my current personality is probably more like a splinter, a sub-personality created for the purpose of experiencing the life that the greater "me" designed.

I don't know about you, but that makes me feel a bit, I don't know, diminished? I have just gotten used to the idea that I'm a much larger being than I am currently aware of, and that I expect my awareness to expand over time, and over death. But it kind of just hit me that everything I am now, everything I have, that all the growth I have achieved, is just a small portion of "me." That somewhere, off in another dimension or plane of existence, there is a much wiser, a much more enlightened and greater part of me, that is waiting for this me to complete my education and return with the latest set of lessons to be added to the whole.

I keep seeing this greater, wiser, me creating this life full of turmoil and … challenges … and then giving "splinter" me the job of actually living it. I get to take this mess and make it work Ug! I suppose that if it was too easy, there would be no point. And I also get that personal growth has nothing to do with the accumulation of facts and skills, but the uncovering and acceptance of the wisdom that can only be acquired through experiences that test your very soul. While I may be the smallest part of me, I contain the essential awareness and values necessary to meet the challenges I have set for myself. That doesn't mean I can't fail, but that it's within my power to succeed, brilliantly.

Friday, May 1, 2015

Triple Threat

This morning I was reading the textbook for my next class “Spirit Releasement Therapy,” when I noticed that I could not focus on what I was reading. My mind kept wondering back to an exchange with a relative. I kept replaying alternate endings and imagining different conversations. Why couldn’t I let it go and concentrate on my reading? I kept looking at the words in front of me and thinking how I could use them to support my arguments, while I also knew that nothing I could present or say or do would make any difference. The I got it! I wasn’t fighting with my relative, I was fighting with myself! I was fighting with that image of him that I had inside. That was a fight I could never win, a fight that would never end, unless I ended it.

When I looked at it, it was so obvious. It was also really powerful. This thing I had inside of me, what I was really fighting, was a dark, cloudy angry mass that would give no ground and take no prisoners. That’s when I decided to try the Feeding You Demons technique. Hey, what could I lose? So I set up two chairs, facing each other, and sat in one.

First step: Locate the demon in you body and describe it. It took me a while to locate it. At first I saw a pale yellow cloud-like pole, sticking upwards out of my chest. Examining it a bit more revealed a dark mass about the size of a basketball, half in and half out of the center of my chest. The yellow thing passed right through the mass and exited out my  back, curving upward. It seemed like the mass and my body were impaled on an enormous fishhook. I was really only interested in the mass, so I focused on that: It appeared to be a soot-black, lumpy, cloud that was in constant motion. Inside there was an angry red glow, that I could glimpse through small breaks in the outer cloud cover. There were also little bolts of lightning sparking between the different lumps, and it felt angry. Now I knew what it looked like and felt like, it was time for the next step.

Now I projected the demon out from my chest into the other chair, and took a look at it. It looked pretty weird. It was still an angry, black, mass, but it had a head that appeared only as an outline, lit from behind. It had two, glowing, pinpoint eyes, but the rest of its face was featureless. The shape of the rest of the body resembled a jellyfish, a kind of lumpy, deflated-ball shape with indistinct things hanging down. It had some resemblance to paper Halloween decorations that have accordion-like arms and legs, but the appendages were not friendly at all. Not tentacles and not arms and legs, but a cross between the two.

Now I knew what it looked like, I looked into its eyes and asked it three questions. Then I switched places and “shape-shifted” into the demon and answered the three questions, then switched back. The point of the questions is to find out what the demon needs. Then I imagine my body turning into whatever the demon says it needs, and feeding it. As much as it wants. As it ate, I noticed it had almost robot-like arms with pincer-shaped claws on the ends, which it used to grab the stuff I was feeding it. After a while it turned white, but still seemed angry. So I did the whole, switching places and asking questions process, again. This time it became lighter and more fluffy, which meant that it had turned into an ally. So I took the next step of recruiting it to my side, as an ally, and then pulling it back into me. When I tried to pull it back to me, most of it came, but a bit remained. That bit looked like a charcoal sketch. It was stubborn and wouldn’t move. So I did the whole process again.

This time, after the feeding, a beautiful golden while star appeared in the center of the charcoal sketch. This was another ally. So I recruited it and pulled it inside. But, still, some of the sketch remained. Unfortunately I was out of time, so I had to leave it at that. I don’t recommend leaving things unfinished like that, but sometimes you have no choice, and no harm seems to have been done. And, on the flip side, when I look at the things the were annoying me this morning, I don’t react to them nearly as much. Almost not at all, and that’s nice.