Many of us have a tendency to be extremely critical of who we are that often we create an illusion of our own reality. I would like to share a passage that I have taken from ‘The Tenth Insight – Holding the Vision’ (James Redfield & Carol Adrienne):
“To a greater or lesser degree, in physical life we build our own version of Hell by staying attached to, and unconscious of, our control drama tendencies. When we forget our connection to our divine source, we have to construct a very narrow set of behaviors in order to reduce the world to a manageable level. Living in a defended zone fenced in by fear, we are not open to the full-blown mystery of life. We have become contracted, defended, fearful, and separate. Our language starts to show our fences in statements like, “I’m a rotten person.” “I’ll never make anything of myself.” “No one loves me.”
When we no longer remember that we set up these limitations in our mind, we project the unrecognized constriction into the external world. Let’s make sure we understand this point because it is an essential part of the crux of our so-called problems in daily life. If we have had certain experiences in life, we are going to see/experience/feel our everyday encounters through this filter of past experience. It’s the nature of desire to want what you don’t have. For example, young Juanita was short and round. She thought girls who are tall and thin had an advantage. Frank was bookish and frail. Since he had a rich interior life, but withdraw from competitive activities, he cultivated an outsider image. Shantara was the middle child of five sisters and felt like a nobody, lost in the crowd. At some level of consciousness, we are always worrying about losing control, being lost, losing our livelihood, being a loser without love, success, or happiness. How appropriate that Christ positioned himself as the shepherd, since a basic human archetypal fear is lostness. If we define ourselves a certain way, we entrench ourselves down a certain path. We can be the misunderstood artist or the uncreative blob. We can be the helpless failure or the efficient expert. We paint ourselves into a corner and then tell everybody that God did it.
Once these judgments are entrenched in our mind as reality, the level of fear is so great that we cannot give it up without experiencing anxiety. No amount of positive thinking is going to make us tall and thin. No amount of rationalization is going to make us a football hero. No amount of resume writing is going to make us special. If you’ve been telling yourself that you are a worthless, shiftless worm, you cannot suddenly shift from that story to nothing. We cannot take out a great big gob of Fear without having a gaping hole that has to be filled in with something else – trust, new wisdom, and connection to God.
The roots of dogma and ideology are grown in the soil of fear. Hell is being caught in our own dogma, our own inadequacies, over and over again without the gift of love, compassion, and greater self-understanding of who we really are. A high level of fear over time is like a low-grade fever, permeating our thinking, fettering our perceptions, and hedging our choices. One woman who relived a past-life said, “One [of my lifetimes] was a great spiritual growth, but through isolation, and in that lifetime there was death by torture. It was near Jerusalem. [Because of my religious belief] there was much trepidation and holding back….Fear of violence, fear of speaking her own mind resulted. Fear must be removed. It has to be out of the way, so that the being can venture forth to new growth experiences. More could have been gained from the other experiences had fear not gotten in the way. Stumbling blocks that are self-imposed just waste time. There are enough of them without creating any.” This woman saw how fear had created losses throughout several lifetimes. Maybe we should think of each lifetime as a painting. What the hey. What colors are you going to paint with this time?
In our spiritual existence between Earth lives, we dwell in the true vibration of the universe – we dwell in loving energy. But if we cannot perceive this loving energy, because of our addiction to our false perceptions, we are like the goldfish who, transferred from bowl to ocean, keeps swimming in tiny circles the size of her bowl. True liberation comes when we lose our sense of separateness, our need for control, and our fear of physical death. True liberation is using the full range of the palette – ruby red, alizarin crimson, cadium yellow, yellow ocher, hunter green, purple, terra-cotta, Mars black, blue-violet, gold, silver, and aquamarine. True liberation is being able to smell vomit, sulfur, money, honey-suckle, babies’ necks, garlic, fresh tomatoes, frankincense, peaches and semen, and know that all is God.”
The Fear that we have been living with all of our lives, is nothing but an illusion we have created in our minds, and which has caused us to live of life of separation and duality. Know for certain that we are all One and there is no ‘Us and Them’. A quote from Arthur Ford/Ruth Montgomery in ‘A World Beyond’:
“There is no evil except that which we create, for I have seen no signs of a devil on this side of the veil. We are our own devils, with our own thoughts and subsequent deeds…this evil gathers force as each passing generation leaves its own stamp of evildoing on the force that we think of as a devil…if [evil] is to be destroyed, it will be done through man’s awakening to the fact that even thoughts are deeds and that the ‘devil’ shrinks in size each time we replace an ugly thought or action with loving kindness. Thus we will approach the so-called millennium when good replaces evil in the hearts of those who inherit earth, not only in the flesh but in the spirit, as we are now doing.”
Some of us are blessed to grow up in an environment where giving is a daily process of life, and we pick up this quality naturally. Some of us are taught the benefits of giving through our education and experience with altruistic people in our lives, despite being exposed to less generous situations. Some of us have discovered the joys of giving through our daily encounters as we walk our journeys on earth.
This extract is taken from Franz Metcalf’s book: “What would Buddha do?”, on strengthening a friendship:
Below are nudges from Arjuna Ardagh in his book, “The Translucent Revolution”, for parents, teachers & educators, and teenagers and young adults currently in the education process: