Considering The Beast and Its Numbers

666      the Number of the Beast.

664      the Neighbor of the Beast

999      the Beast doing handstands...

696      ...and back-flips

888      The Beast in corsets

000      The Beast without corsets

111      Skinny Beast

(666) 666-6666      Phone Number of the Beast

Body and Spirit: Why We Can't End World Hunger With Magic

It was recently reported (Scientific American, Sept. 4 2012) that liberalism and conservatism are personality-driven choices.

The more anxious personality seeks the security of rules and order, prefers everyone to follow the same rules, to keep the world more predictable.  Being so fear-based, I see that this is a body-driven personality, where Self is identified with the body's perspectives and imperatives  When such a personality looks to the spiritual for support, it is looking at the Divine, however it defines that, as something beyond and seperate from itself, as greater and distant. It creates the Divine, moreover, in its own image: a Divinity of rules and order, rights and wrongs, goods and evils, a Divinity that is the ultimate arbiter of universal, absolute Right and Good. Then, it wraps that up in packaging of dogma and ritual, to make sure everyone is working with the same information, the same ways of managing it. Through a world-view built around Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, there runs a volatile thread of Love and Hate: passionate feelings, choices, judgements. 

The personality that leans towards liberalism is less concerned with what is safe and sure, tried-and-true.  It is a novelty-driven personality, loving to change things up, try whatever is new, create original things, shape old things in new ways... Prone to casting out bath and baby, soap and tub and sponge, in favor of a new system that promises to solve the problems of today, and sees old as the same as obsolete.  Sometimes that may be the case: that an old solution is now a problem.  But--not always. This personality is a gnostic spiritualist: wanting to touch the Divine, experience it; believes in a Divine so full of joy and love, It can have nothing of the oppressor or meanness in it: It does not impose rules on spirit, though It might offer a few guidelines for what works, or doesn't. Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, are subjective, and a true and absolute Divinity encompasses all things. Cause, and Effect, though far more complex, can be objective and emotionally neutral. Tolerance and co-existence, in this world-view, are the essentials of balance and stability.

Bodies need rules, they need conservatism: caution, patience, tradition, to feel safe in the world. The conservative mind is anxiety-prone, fear-driven. Spirit needs freedom: the liberty to go beyond the bounds of established order, it needs transcendence of tradition. It is risk-prone, novelty-driven. It is important to remember that each one of us, harbors both, and some parts of anyone will be more conservative/passionate/exclusive (this or that) and others will be liberal/rational/inclusive (this and that).

The mind is the place where body and spirit meet.  Mind mediates, establishes the balance between them.  Unmediated, unmanaged, unbalanced, either one is a tyrant.  The Mediator itself, the mind, can't have everything its own way, either: we can't analyze or organize our way to Truth.  We cannot feed a starving child with strong words, or simply observing and understanding the problem.

How we feed a starving child, that's a body problem, and requires physical solutions: producing, packaging and delivering the food that child needs.  It requires physical effort and commitment.

Why we feed that child, is a mind problem,  a question of philosophy and technical creativity, which requires an unencumbered mind.  

That we feed the child, is the spirit's problem: the choices we make to care and commit, or not, that are a measure of our own soul's awareness and maturity.

Ending world hunger is a problem, a test, of what we can do, with being human.

THE PARTS MODEL -- 2

A Part's function is  to remind the Conscious Self of the particular Truth it contains, so you can react appropriately to similar situations without having to go through the whole learning process again. 

Some of these Parts are quite handy: the Part of you that contains the directions for how to get to the store, the Part that holds all you've learned about managing social situations, that knows all you know about how to drive, cook, or walk...  Those Parts of you get those things done, while you go on using your active, conscious mind to think about other things. 

Some Parts, however, through being full of information that you no longer actually believe, make your reactions painfully inappropriate to new situations, creates obstacles to change, or limits the choices you allow yourself. This is because, when you create a new Part to hold a new belief, a new understanding, a new Truth, the old ones don't go away.  

This, by the way, is why the practice of "affirmations" does not actually work, to change a behavior: If you lay new carpet over stinky old carpet, sooner or later, the smell is going to permeate the new one, too.  

Some Parts might be aware enough of your process of growth to go along with it: your new information reaches them, updates their belief systems, and appropriately alters their central Truth.  But many are closed systems: they are dormant, perhaps, or so adamant in their Truth, that no new information is going to induce them to change anything! 

Parts know what they know: besides the Truth, and all the evidence that reinforces those beliefs, because it is a holographic fragment of a whole person, it contains also the emotions and sensations, the opinions and self-image: the personality of that person, at the age it was created.  It is, in effect, a smaller 'person.'  And we all know how stubborn a person can be! 

So, Part of me wants to go because it's adventurous, and Part of me wants to stay because it's afraid, and Part of me wants to go back to bed because it hates deciding, while another Part of me wants to go eat, because food is so wonderfully distracting...! 

This whole personality, created in the image of the original, has the significant difference that it is a copy, and not, in fact, the original.  If a Part is really out of touch with the Consciousness it sprang from, it may not have grown at all since it began. It believes itself to be the Self, it has forgotten that you exist.

Consider the ramifications, if this model is true.  Consider how it reframes your own relationship with your ambivalences and confusions and self-limitations.  Consider what it implies about your choices and free-will, and habits you deplore but seem unable to change!

THE PARTS MODEL

First of all, this was not my idea. It is a model that comes out of cognitive psychology and neuro-linguistics.  I learned about it through Core Belief Engineering, a therapeutic technique for changing behavior through changing deeply-held beliefs.

Parts:  Each part of our consciousness, sub- and aware, that helps us process and balance our lives, is a fragment of ourselves held in the deeps and shadows of memory until called for.  Each such Part contains at its center, a truth,  along with all the evidence that proves it, the strategies that protect and support it and an alarm system to shove it into the forefront when Reality throws us a situation in which this Part's central truth holds a key to our success, well-being, maybe even our survival.

But wait--There's more!  And this is where it gets really interesting: A Part is actually a fragment of the Self, which is holographic in nature.

One of the things that this means, is that when a bit of a hologram flakes off, so to speak, that bit is not just an odd corner or a random-looking crumb; It is a tiny replica of the whole.  It takes a bit of the energy of the whole--Imagine the light of a hologram being the same amount as was contained in the whole, but is now shared also among its fragments--but the image is complete in both the original and the bit. 

That's what happens when you break a hologram. And so, that's what happens when a fragment breaks away from the Conscious Self, the Mind: a Part is a replica of who you were, the moment you decided that something was true.



(to be continued)

Defining Terms: SOUL MATES

What is a soul-mate, and how we can recognize one?  It seems like it should be easy, being soul-mates and all, but with all the perceptual filters of hopes and fears we all have, and the general fuzziness of spiritual terminology, it's by no means a sure thing to get it right.

There is no single, official definition for such terms, and that's why we need to compare notes, to be sure we are on the same page.  

Here's how I understand the concept of soul-mates:

In the earlier post about Past Lives, I mentioned Jane Roberts' novel, THE EDUCATION OF OVERSOUL SEVEN which describes an Oversoul that has several lesser Souls attached to it, like different fingers on one hand.  Each Soul is busy living its one individual life in its own place, its own piece of time. Each soul is experiencing and learning in their classroom in the School of Earthly Reality. The Oversoul, coordinating the knowledge acquired by each Soul's set of life-experiences, grows and learns as they do.

I define 'soul-mates,' based on this model, as the different 'fingers' of the 'hand.'

We recognize each other because we are made of the same stuff, we vibrate on the same, or very close frequencies, and whether we come together as friends, lovers. parents and children, siblings, or even as adversaries, there is an ineffable bond that we know is there.

Just because we meet up with a soul mate, it doesn't mean we will continue down our lifetime's path hand in hand to the end.

Sometimes we meet because we need to check in, to give or get reassurance and encouragement, or to share information.  When the need is answered, we can go on along our own paths again, focusing on our own particular lessons. Or maybe, it just happens that our paths intersect, and we share a moment of recognition over a cuppa, and then go on our ways.

Soul Mates may match with us, but they do not and cannot complete us: One of the lessons we are here to learn is that we are whole already: Incompleteness, like Loneliness, like Death, is an illusion. Convincing, but still illusion.  

Simply saying this and accepting it intellectually doesn't mean I never feel overwhelmingly alone, abandoned, walking about with great gaps in my Self...  But if I am paying attention when such feelings arise, it is within my realm of choices to remember what I believe is true, and to recognize that it is some fearful, lonely Part of myself that is expressing itself. 

MAN AS ONION

This planet Earth is a series of concentric circles: core, mantle, crust, surface, atmosphere. Each layer can be further layered and distinguished: The atmosphere is divided into tropo-, strato-, meso-, thermo-, exospheres; the ionosphere is part of the thermosphere, and the ozone layer is an element of the stratosphere. Even the surface of the planet, the thinnest layer of all, is land and water, and the layers of each of those can be distinguished by levels of depth or altitude.

A human being, likewise, as Hermann Hesse observed, is an onion.  But for here, now, let's keep it simple.

The innermost circle is the Body level: The level of physical reality, of manifestation, of embodiment.  In terms of awareness, it's the layer whose center is "I," the conscious center of the Self that observes and decides:  It weighs and balances the information it perceives from outside, with the influences of beliefs stored within, and makes the choices that propel us through our lives. 

If a human being is a planet where the first level belongs to the body, the physical reality, then the second layer, the atmospheric layer belongs to the mind: It is the level of the unconcious aspects of the self. I call this one the level of "We." The Unconscious is the warehouse, like that one in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK,  that holds the bazillions of crates and boxes that hold our beliefs, our truths. Each container is a part of the Self. (I'll get to the "Parts Model.) Spiritually speaking, this is the level of the "astral Self,"  as thought-form.  In this layer, thoughts are real, rather than physical things.

The outer layer, like the Earth's most outer edge of the most outer layer, where atmosphere meets space, is the layer of a human being that is the most "being."  It is the layer of the Self as Spirit, closest to Universal Consciousness, God, First Cause, or whatever name you know it by....  It is the  level of intent, the idea before the blue-print/thought-form is sorted out, before the thing is manifested physically.

Someone who enjoys sorting and stacking can have hours of fun identifying what the more detailed layers are and how they all relate to one another.  The boundaries of these circles are not firm lines, either, but more like zones of confluence. And you can probably define layers withing those zones, too.

I've had tons of fun with this model!  It has a place in it for just about every aspect of being human.

GOD AND THE CLEVELAND RAIN

I used to believe in Old Man God, the Patriarch of Everything...

But somehow, the image didn't ring true and I kept asking, "Come on, what is God, really?"  I was trying to convince my sister once, when she declared herself an atheist, that God has to exist.  She was 13, I think, and I was 11. I wanted the magic of Because God Wants It That Way to explain all the mysteries of my world, which, at 11, were many!  She had given up on the mysteries, and authority, and trusted no one but herself to see her through life. 

The point is, we were the offspring of a couple of scientists, one of whom was also a mystic, and though she had died when I was 3, somehow, the theme continued quietly in the back of my life-experience... It blossomed when I was 18, but that's another story. The point of this one is that neither magic nor science was sufficient to comprehend the Mystery of Life, the Universe and Everything... (a hat-tip to Douglas Adams!)

At 12, I had a wonderful epiphany that God was Nature!  An impersonal Divine, all-powerful, all-pervasive...  Everything is Nature, even that which seems to be artificial--but  artifice is human nature , and  we make the most of owning opposible thumbs! Everything is God, because, well, that's God, all about being Everything...  This notion sustained me and my need to know, for a time.

But around the time the Mystical re-entered my life, and I quit ignoring it, I was in college in Cleveland, Ohio. I had begun to understand that there were things, persons, even, around me that I could not see with physical eyes: I had begun to witness evidence and  had to revisit the notion of a personal God, rather than God as simply a Force.

It was February in Cleveland.  

It rains in Cleveland in every month of the year.  It snows in the winter, but it also rains.  It was dreary, and I was always wet.  And I was wondering hard about that other thing.  So as I was slogging to class one day,  I said, sincerely, as if Someone might actually be there, "Okay, God, give me three days of sunshine, and I will never doubt again."  Contrary to all forecasts, the weather cleared that afternoon, stayed bright for three days after, and the rains recommenced on the next day. 

I have kept my side of the bargain.

All I had to do next, was sort out the details.