Shock'n'Awe

A Maui Vacation?

Joanne and I recently spent a couple of weeks in Maui on vacation where the tiger sharks come in to feed this time of year. They consider humans a natural part of their diet, and have been known to eat license plates and tire parts. It’s not like they discriminate much about what they eat. So when I snorkel I have a humble feeling that I’m just part of the food chain. I keep my eyes peeled, stay around others, and monitor the fish and turtles. If they’re around, the odds of a shark being nearby are small.

On the second day of our trip our friend Mary, who lives in Kihei, left a message about a “shark attack.” It turned out that a woman writer on vacation was bit in the leg within a mile of where I swam that day. She didn’t lose the leg, so she considered herself lucky, but it was still front page news.

On our third day, the trade winds really picked up in the early afternoon. We had a relaxing morning, and I sat on our lanai and watched the wind line approach from the north. I could see white-caps and turbulence on the north side, and calm flat water on our side. When that line came through it was like someone turned on a switch, the winds gusted and the water churned.

Jo and I finished lunch and went to Wailea beach where the water and wind were so rough I could only manage a short swim. When we returned, Mary had left another message about a drowning on a beach just south of us! Four people got caught in a rip tide, and rather than ride it out, they tried to swim directly to shore, exhausting themselves. People on the beach helped by instinct, as there are no lifeguards there, but a 29-year old man drowned. He had been there for his wedding later that week, instead it became his funeral.

At this point Jo and I began to joke about what might happen next? It was very dark imagery and a somber way to start our vacation. In hindsight, these events also reflected what Jo and I were going through with the latest addition to our family, the Essence of Rose that Jo began to channel in April. We were in our first month and still didn’t know what to make of the situation. Was it real? Was there any pathology? How do we verify this claim?

Further, Rose had begun to put Joanne through a kind of “boot camp,” or rigorous training, that included getting up between 5 and 6 AM, and practicing her autotyping and voice channeling. So we were going through a bit of a transition to say the least during that time. However, this vacation was my first opportunity to interact with Rose/Joanne in detail. Part of me just wanted to have a vacation, but another part of me was fascinated by what was unfolding.

The Mysterious Laptop

Joanne also brought the laptop along, a definite no-no on vacation. But given the extraordinary circumstances we thought, “why not?” The interesting thing is that my laptop is now eight years old, a dinosaur whose screen had become intermittent, meaning that sometimes the LCD display would work, and sometimes it wouldn’t. Jo had gotten used to a morning Ouija and autotyping routine before vacation, and wanted to continue if possible. I wasn’t really surprised that the screen didn’t work during the first week.

 

Amusingly, around the fifth morning Joanne got up before me and turned on the computer to no avail. When I got up, however, I was determined to make it work. I used every trick in the book to cajole that damn screen to life. At one point, Jo was talking about her desires and wants, something we always discuss during our vacations, and something that Rose had been challenging us on, and the screen began to flicker to life! Naturally we got excited, and Jo played off that and continued talking out loud, as though she could somehow will the LCD display to work.

This time the screen just blinked, flickered, and acted in a way we never saw before. It was sputtering, trying to wake up, but then it just died. It was a lost cause, and I briefly considered driving to Kahalui to buy a new one. At which point I reminded myself that I was on vacation, just lighten up, and go with the flow.

So we concentrated on voice sessions during that first week, since knew we’d spend our second week in the remote town of Hana. And Rose said that she would dictate her agenda at that time, and make the computer work so not to worry. To which I thought, “Yeah right! That computer is hosed.”

Week 1 Voice Sessions

I want to share some of my notes, as this was the first time I really got a sense of what Joanne had been going through in the preceding weeks. It became clear that Rose was indeed here to stay, and not a plateau experience. She was putting us both through a kind of boot camp, though much of the focus was, and continues to be, on Joanne who is being state-trained to access deeper areas while awake, trained to discern the difference between her intuitions and Rose, since they sometimes merge, are sometimes distinct, trained to see how gullible she is at times and needs to use her inner skeptic to discern between fact, fiction, probability, and intentional contradiction used by Rose. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

During this time Jo was like a kid in a candy store. She is able to access Rose at will, and held ongoing conversations in her mind. I was very concerned initially, but it became clear that this voice was inside her head, not projected out there like John Nash (A Beautiful Mind) who wrestled with severe pathology. Still, it takes getting used to having a third personality in our marriage! When Joanne reaches a deeper state, her voice begins to get deeper, and a little raspy. We call it the Julianne Moore-as-Elias-cult-member voice (referring to a classic Saturday Night Live skit called Red Bliss Farm).

A sense of awe gradually dawned on us, after the initial shock of facing something so new. This seemed to be “the real deal,” to quote our friend Mary Ennis who channels Elias. We coined the term “shock’n’awe” on the third day of vacation because it aptly described what had become our daily experience, which was far from routine at that point, but was a mixture of fear, uncertainty, and delight.

In session 36, May 8^th, a Maui sunrise voice session, Rose stated that three categories of material will be given: 1. morning sessions with Paul and Joanne to be voice/video recorded, 2. Jo’s autotyping and notes that capture the dialogue that goes on between them, and 3. spontaneous dialogue (pop-ins) that need not be recorded so as to nurture the spontaneous, creative nature of the phenomenon.

I pieced together a summary of the Rose agenda that had been mentioned here and there: 1. to serve, 2. to not be intrusive, 3. to throw curves, test, keep us on our toes, and 4. provide practices to help us connect directly with Essence through seedling, sapling, tree stages. I also noted Rose’s sense of humor that takes a little time to get used to! This important trait helps take the edge off whatever curve-ball she might throw next at us (more on that at a later time).

In session 38, May 9^th, Rose outlined the titles for Joanne’s book series on “the Judea focus” or time of Christ we’ve discussed with Elias and Kris over the years. Rose and Joanne will collaborate on this book project. We also came up with the title to Rose’s blog, which we called The Rose Garden, but Rose later referred to it as “In the Rose Garden” and we thought that sounded perfect. The reason I mention this is that Rose is not giving us or anyone commandments here, but engaging a collaborative, creative process and partnership. She is also weaning us, especially Joanne (the kid in the candy store), of the tendency rely on her for answers to everything.

Rose suggested that my Integral Conscious Creation blog should remain as is—more technical, per my interests in integral theory and practice—but that her/Joanne’s blog would be more of an attempt to “spread the word” to a larger audience just as scientists attempt to translate complex ideas to a wider audience.

In session 39, May 10^th Rose stated she would dictate her agenda through autotyping in Hana. Again, I was skeptical because we had not been able to make that damn LCD display work yet! She also stated that she would welcome any number of choices by Joanne and me moving forward, writing books, holding private/group sessions, seminars, radio—the whole nine yards. Rose also stated that her agenda was in line with my Integral Conscious Creation work, which will complement her work – “we serve others in their exploration of consciousness, assisting them in connecting with Essence.” I found that quite beautiful and reassuring though who knows what curves this contrary “nun” will throw my way futurely?

Can’t We Get Rid of that Nun Thing?

In session 39 we did an amusing exercise to replace Rose’s use of the word “nuns,” which I had strong initial resistance to. And boy did she set me up! Rose challenged us to come up with a better term, and the more we talked about it, the more we finally understood why she is using it: to bring some much needed restoring of the GREEN worldview’s BLUE law & order subsystem, which opens the flood gates to the shift to the integral or YELLOW worldview.

As Don Beck says, “GREEN sees YELLOW as BLUE,” that is GREEN will misinterpret a YELLOW “channeled nun” as a less developed BLUE worldview because its own BLUE sense of judging, discernment, moral compass has been blinded by its RED (egocentric, narcissistic, boomeritis) subsystem.

In other words, the Rose information will take on the “mean GREEN meme” that sees through “Rose colored glasses” but refuses to judge any color better or worse than any other, which is itself still a judgment. This performative contradiction riddles conscious creation groups and actually prevents people from shifting to the integral YELLOW worldview. This is the integral way of defining what Elias calls the shift in consciousness. (For more info on these worldviews see Emerging New Worldviews.)

Other Reflections from Week 1

Session 39 was another magnificent Maui sunrise. We made our tea, hung the voice recorder around Jo’s neck, and began. But Rose asked me to turn off the recorder, and instructed both of us to listen to the birds chirping away outside in order to go deeper within. She said we’d intuitively know when to turn the recorder back on. We weren’t sure exactly what to expect, so I practiced vipassana or witnessing meditation with eyes closed. Jo sat on the couch with her eyes closed and “rested in Rose,” a version of savikalpa samadhi, or subtle realm mergence. This practice is helping Jo to develop the waking dream state (see below). After ten minutes or so, I intuitively knew it was time to turn the recorder on. Rose returned and we continued with Joanne in a deeper more relaxed state.

In session 43, May 12^th, I made a note about the “gossamer thin” feeling-tone of the energy exchange at this stage. It seems like such a wisp of a connection to Jo’s inner self, so fragile in which way it could go. I also noted that when Jo returned from a bathroom break, Rose picked up in mid-sentence where she had been interrupted. This was another positive metric of the authenticity of the phenomenon, as I have observed this with Elias/Mary Ennis.

Will Jo’s trance state deepen? Will we be able to discern clear state-stages? I believe so, but it’s still too soon to tell. Rose has alluded to three distinct states, each successively deeper, that will be involved down the road: 1. waking, 2. resting in Rose, and 3. waking dream. Getting to this third state is the goal of Jo’s current state-training.

Session 43 was our final sunrise session. Rose closed by saying she would greet us in Hana some fifty miles away, and we’d continue our vacation adventures there.

Week 2 Reflections

The drive to Hana was long and beautiful. It’s 36 miles of winding road through rainforest, mountains, and features over 50 small bridges, many with waterfalls. It took us about two and half hours.

Sunday, May 13^th was Mother’s Day, and our 18^th wedding anniversary. We had a relaxed, wonderful day.

On Monday, I knew that Jo would get up, and try to autotype on our lanai overlooking beautiful Hamoa Bay. I was almost hesitant to check on her when I got up, because I knew that computer was a goner and we both were looking forward to getting the Rose agenda. However, when I saw her typing away on the laptop, I just smiled to mySelf, and shook my head. Coincidence? Synchronicity? Miracle? Just another event beyond my ability to comprehend?

In session 45, May 14^th, Rose dictated her agenda after giving Jo five pages of notes, which is a usual part of their process at this point. Rose challenged and trained Jo as she continued to autotype in the mornings all week long. The laptop had cast out its demons and been healed by the power of…? It even worked the first day back when Jo needed to retrieve some files from the hard drive she forgot to back up. Too funny! In hindsight, it’s clear that Jo needed the break from typing during our first week, and that also allowed us to do some intensive voice sessions, which complement the autotyped sessions.

Now that we’re back from vacation and have settled back into some semblance of a routine, we are getting used to having Rose in our lives, and also continue to explore this budding phenomenon. Speaking of buds, our two new rose trees planted just before Joanne began this energy exchange grew their first new set of buds when we returned from Maui, more imagery that our family, along with its new member, continues to flower into this shift in consciousness. No doubt there will be more shock’n’awe to follow, but Zen, Rose has also begun to provide us with practices to face things with equanimity and acceptance of what is, and what will be. More on that futurely.

A Rose by Any Other Name

I love this time of year. Spring has sprung, and the air is scented with a mixture of wildflowers, rosemary, and sage. When I got up to feed the cats this morning, I was greeted by the pink and white roses that Joanne had bought the other day in our kitchen. Outside our kitchen window I could see our neighbor’s red and yellow roses. Across the street a five foot wide white rose tree is exploding, along with our rose garden.

I’ve just finished my second semester at The Fielding Graduate School/Integral University in the Integral Certificate program. I wrote an 80-page draft of my “Five Phases of Wilber” paper, plus and a shorter version that’s more introductory. So my writing process was an intense nine day retreat with seven of those days writing for eight or more hours. I meditated for close to two hours a day and switched between basic Witnessing or vipassana, and mantra meditation led to many insights into Wilber’s AQAL-5 model.

During this period, Joanne began to work her Ouija Board, as she has on occasion. She wanted to obtain essence family names (Seth/Elias) and orientations (Elias) for coworkers and friends. She began to make some progress in moving the planchette without thinking about it, and evolved her own method of spelling. At some point the essence of Rose (Elias) supposedly came through, and since I was in the midst of concentrating on my paper, I was only peripherally interested, but encouraged her as best I could.

In one of the earlier sessions, she came out of the bedroom and announced that our girl kitty, Maya, has been a pig in a previous life, or something to that effect. I was very skeptical, sort of rolled my eyes wondering at her accuracy, and if she was just going off the deep end. It has been a busy year for us! But to her credit, she continued to work the board for nights at a time, and I gave her some space and support.

So I got my paper in last Monday, and immediately had to prepare for David Tate’s arrival to record four piano demos for his and Jo’s musical in process The Game of Life. But Jo had already begun telling people about her breakthrough, and I still hadn’t had any time to read her journal. Jo kept me informed, of course, but began to do some practice readings for several friends, and learn what’s involved.

She posted initial info on Ellen Gilbert’s NewWorldView forum (Inner Visions Journal) on a topic called Nun’s Ways. Rose, it turns out, had started from Day 1 to use a metaphor from Jo’s Catholic background, but a redefined version that seems more aligned with the authentic contemplative traditions of women “nuns.” So I’m struck by the feminine connotations and its potential to express the rising Divine Feminine principle that is part of the current edge of evolutionary unfolding. In other words, we are not talking about dried up old virgins clueless about the ways of the world, but those who were deeply involved with Christianity’s esoteric traditions, and earlier. Rose’s definition of a nun is not limited to female gender, as she considers me a “nun” as well (much to my amusement). So it seems to be a much broader definition. These are only initial impressions and it will take some time to get used to her word shadings and other idiosyncratic behaviors.

Still, it became quite clear by last Tuesday that we were dealing with a new “member” of our immediate family; Jo, Rumi, Maya, myself, and now Rose. That is, it wasn’t a temporary plateau experience that would fade after days or a week. Like a little energizer bunny, or should I say, nunny , this Aspect seems as though it’s here to stay. So we’ve begun a transitional period of adjustment for all three of us.

We know there are no accidents, and we have both been working hard to understand what this development may involve. While Jo began on the board, just a week ago today (Monday) she began autotyping at her computer, and last Thursday night she began her first, though very limited, voice transmission.

Just last Friday, Jo got up and autotyped four new pages of material, she was resting on the bed, and she air-typed and spoke for 6-7 minutes. By air-typing, Jo puts her hands on her thighs, and just types the words, and can then speak them slowly. So what appears to be happening cognitively is based right now on her auto- or air-typing, and she is just able to rapidly give voice, but is still very present and reacting to the flow, which is a whole other process to watch unfold.

The wonderful thing is that we both have access to the precedents set by Jane Roberts and Rob Butts, Stan Ulkowski and Michael Steffen (in terms of using the Ouija board), Mary Ennis, Serge Grandbois, Emmy Van Swaaij, to name a prominent few that form quite a gestalt, or “lineage mind” that outlines how this phenomenon may unfold. So Jo and I have a roadmap of the stages of development that we can use to guide us as her abilities continue to blossom.

While it feels like it is happening very fast, we are still very much in the “Frank Withers” stage (or early Seth/Jane light trance). Even though Jo can voice the words, she is still mentally typing and translating what she gets through her fingers. Sometimes they move, sometimes they don’t, but the cognitive, translative process is pretty much the same. So this Rose/Jo is still has a long way to go before we can determine what’s really going on. But all initial indications are very positive, and authentic.

It’s been interesting to watch her begin to relax, either sitting or lying down, and try to get out of the way, get deeper so that a light trance state develops. So we expect to see some state changes down the road.

Jo has been writing up notes and gets new Rose info the past few mornings, which I then read to start my day. For example, there was information given about dietary changes we can make, that we’ve been considering for some time, and will try out gradually at our own pace. There are other things too, that will verify her accuracy with simple predictions. As I was reading Saturday morning’s info back to Jo, at one point I raised a question about integral conscious creation, and Jo said Rose wanted to come through, so I grabbed the recorder and we had our first 25 minute session during which I mostly listened and observed.

Jo sat upright on the couch, closed her eyes, had her hands on her legs, as if to air-type, but they didn’t move the entire time. She just spoke slowly, and carefully. Afterward, Jo said she was mentally typing out the letters still.

I have to engage my active listening process during this early phase, as I told her several times that my thoughts are moving ten times faster than Rose/Jo’s. So I have to be patient, and allow the process to unfold. Still, it’s fun to just Witness the process. Interestingly, Rose caught me off guard and actually stopped and asked me if I had any thoughts. This was really our first conversation, and I mumbled something about taking the process in slow steps, finding it amazing, and how deeply appreciative I was.

So along with my semester ending paper, David’s visit, and Rose’s joining our family, it’s been an intense, yet marvelous two week stretch!

I also want to mention that I reread the first half of the Rose Digest a couple days ago, and was reminded that Elias claims that Rose has an ability to manipulate all birds. I thought back to last Tuesday, when I went out onto our deck to enjoy some down time, and saw a big bird sitting on our ash tree. We were both startled for a moment, and stared at each other for several seconds. As this bird majestically flew away, I saw it was a red-tailed hawk. I can see them circling above the house, and even hear their piercing cries on occasion. But I’ve never seen one that close before. A coincidence?

Last weekend Jo shared her news with Mark and Serge in Toronto, and Kris confirmed that this is an energy exchange (he had mentioned in a private session that a dream ancestor, as he calls them, had been trying to contact her in her dream state).

So we’re taking it one day at a time and will see how things unfold. Since we are blessed with Elias, Kris, and Defrene, there won’t be any private or group sessions right away, as Jo, Rose, and I get to know each other, understand the phenomenon better, and learn what the potentials may be. In the mean time, we are taking it all with a grain of salt. Jo is just beginning, and there’s a lot more to come.

I also want to acknowledge Bill Ingle, a long time Seth reader and proponent of channeling who provides information and practices for anyone interested. I printed out one of his missives 6-7 years ago for Joanne, as she has expressed interest in learning how to develop this intelligence for a long time. So those seeds have been gestating for years.

I’d like to close with one of my favorite Seth quotes from The Early Sessions whose wisdom has guided me for years, and informs our movement forward as the Rose of Joanne develops further:

“Truth contains no distortions, and this material with all my best efforts, and with yours, of necessity must contain distortions merely in order to make itself exist at all on your plane. I will never condone an attitude in which either you or [Jane] maintain that you hold undiluted truth through these sessions.

“Any material, to exist on your plane, must to some extent don the attire of your plane, and in the very entry to your plane it must be somewhat distorted. I must use phrases with which your minds are somewhat familiar. I must use [Jane’s] subconscious to some degree. If I did not take advantage of your own camouflage system, then you would not be able to understand the material at this time.

“Inner data, even this, must make its entry through some distortion. We must always work together, but you must never consider me as an infallible source. This material is more valid than any material possible on your plane, but it is nevertheless to some degree conditioned by the camouflage attributes of the plane.

“... I want to make it plain that we are certainly not setting up a new dogma.” ~ The Early sessions: Book 2 of the Seth Material, session 47.

By “new dogma” I should add that “this material is more valid than any material possible on your plane” doesn’t mean “the only,” “the best,” or “the final say” so I continue to take this initial phase with a grain of salt, and read between the lines.

Finally, roses are a double-edged sword; they have thorns as well as lovely, fragrant flowers. Jo and I are taking our time, getting used to a new member of the family, and learning to handle “her” with great care. More information will be posted on Joanne's new blog In the Rose Garden as it becomes available.

The Integral Leadership in Action Conference, March 23-25, 2007

Joanne (my partner-in-time) and I just spent three days with a diverse group of over eighty people in Westminster, Colorado, just outside Denver. While I can’t do justice to all those amazing individuals, I want to reflect on some of the people and sessions that stood out.

Like any gathering, you never really know what the group energy is going to be like until you get there and dive in. But after the first day, we knew we were experiencing something very special and unique. The conference was a mix “church” and “state,” Spiritual and secular, pleasure and business all wrapped into one.

The conference was MC’ed by Cindy Wigglesworth whom we had met at the Spiral Dynamics Dallas Confab in 2004. Cindy runs her own integral spiritual business practice and is part of the Integral Leadership in Action User’s Group to plan the conference in partnership with Integral Institute (I-I).

During group introductions we each took sixty seconds to introduce ourselves and what we are passionate about. I had the chance to meet Natalie Zeituny who is a member of the Fielding Graduate School integral certificate program. When I asked if other Fielding students were present, I was disappointed to see that it was just Natalie and I (since several others had indicated they’d be going). But Natalie, Joanne, and I hit it off quite well, and after a day we felt as though we had known each other for lifetimes.

I also got to meet Randy Martin and Sean Hargens, two of our instructors. All I can say is that spending “face time” really helps to connect with their energy. They were energetic and incredibly present. Several years ago Randy almost succeeded in getting AQAL approved in the University of Indiana, Pennsylvania. But the university wasn’t ready for it. Doh! And Sean has been involved with JFK University and runs the only AQAL-powered integral psychology department in the world. Both are extremely dedicated and passionate about all things integral.

Next, Susann Cook-Greuter and Beena Sharma, a protégé, presented an adult development framework derived from Jane Loevinger’s work on ego development, but tailored to a business and management/leadership framework. Susann’s model goes all the way into transpersonal stages, but for practical purposes she and Beena focused on the five main stages that apply to 95% of the adult population.

I had a chance to briefly talk to Susann later about her view on channeling, which I approached from a multiple personality angle. Ever the scientist, she acknowledged that this was not her area of expertise, as I asked if she knew the work of Jon Klimo (she said, “No.”), one of the leading academic researchers of channeling. Essentially, her work has focused on a model of single body, single primary personality (proximate self), and just about anything else is considered pathology.

However, Susann acknowledged a middle way in that as long as the secondary personality doesn’t begin to dominate, overly confuse, and fragment the primary personality, it can’t be considered pathology. We both understood that when the primary self splinters into fragments, serious pathology occurs. But I told her that I knew of three cases (Jane Roberts, Mary Ennis, Serge Grandbois) in which that was not the case, and they could access at will, any time, any place their secondary self (or what Klimo calls a source). Unfortunately, time ran out, and we agreed to continue the conversation another time. Still, I hope to follow up and my own work in this area continues.

I took away the sense that Susann’s working paradigm, a state of the art stucturalist approach, did not yet include channeling because the kinds of dissociative states and fully formed secondary personalities not often encountered and likely to appear as trace elements. For instance, Jane, Mary, or Serge would not have their secondary sources take Susann’s test in the first place! They would answer her sentence completion tests based on their primary selves.

Susann is an incredible woman, funny, intense, loves her work, and includes the transcendental stages in human development. I recognized a bit of Scottish and German in her accent, and she said she had grown up in the German speaking section of Switzerland and attended the same high that Albert Einstein did!

The next morning highlight was the Big Mind practice led by Diane Hamilton, the Dharma successor of Genpo Roshi’s white plum Buddhist lineage here in the USA. Dianne has a raptor-like intensity to her gaze when leading the group through this sophisticated practice that is a unique blend of Western gestalt and Eastern meditative insights. Essentially Big Mind helps to objectify different aspects (in Jane Roberts’s terms) of self, so we can begin to understand the many subpersonalities we hold, and how they interact.

Once we can begin to identify Big Heart (feminine) and Big Mind (masculine) and blend them into Big Heart/Mind, we begin to understand and identify that aspect of self in which all experience arises, constructs, creates, and manifests. It’s also called The Witness or Atman in the Vedic traditions.

Big Mind is a nondual teaching intended to point out “what is” always already “just this.” Put another way, it’s that aspect of awareness that never changes in any state, waking, dreaming, or deep formless sleep – that essential Witness of all experience, the simple feeling of being. Learn to identify as just that, and rest as just that, and we begin to understand that which is immortal, eternal, and indestructible within us.

This is a good example of what I meant earlier by the mixture of church and state. The fact that we were doing a spiritual practice in the context of business leadership was a unique and enduring experience for us. This is what gives Integral Institute and related integral partners such an amazing advantage, because it’s practical and promotes a more holistic approach to any pursuit. As Sean recently mentioned, the integral operating system (IOS) provides a common linguistic and conceptual framework that allows engineers, politician, musicians, soldiers, really anyone to build bridges between any discipline. Amazing stuff!

After lunch Natalie, Jo and I had the good fortune of being invited to spend 2.5 hours with Ken Wilber at his new Denver loft along with Randy Martin, Sean Hargens, and twenty or so JFK students. We all piled in, and Ken took five or six main questions and follow ups. The first question was about Excerpt G on subtle energy research as it might relate to reincarnation. Ken presented a detailed twenty-five minute answer in which he articulated three or four main areas of concern, but acknowledged that while there wasn’t enough or conclusive evidence to date, reincarnation was a very real possibility. It’s just that we don’t yet have a postmodern scientific method in which to better explore it, though this is what Wilber’s AQAL-5 science has the potential for down the road.

(Click here for a group picture.) 

Ken also mentioned that was why he has written so little on occult or parapsychology topics because it’s a quick way to have scholars reject all his work. And it’s hard enough to get materialist scientists to understand that everything, every thing, has interiority and awareness at any level.

Ken also detailed his near-death experience in December where he had twelve Grand Mal seizures, three heart restarts (with those wired paddles), and an experience with Big Mind and small Ken and horrible pink and blue curtains. He’s detailed this on his blog, but when the audio is made available (the whole session was taped), it will make a poignant reflection on what he went through.

Given all that, Ken was continuing to recover (he looked thinner than when we had last seen him in April 2005). His energy perked up as he talked about his work, and he could have gone on for a while longer, but there were other people there to see him (including Tony Robbins). He also introduced Robb Smith, the new CEO wunderkind of Integral Institute to the group.

The session ended with a group photo and a surprise birthday card signed by all for Sean. It was clear how much the JFK cohort loves Sean, and how much he has contributed to the integral endeavor at JFK University and Fielding. There was a lot of love and deep appreciation as we acknowledged Sean’s ongoing effort to get AQAL on the academic map (Sean is also the chief editor for the new AQAL Journal).

We returned to the conference hotel and caught the end of Michael McElhenie’s presentation on using AQAL in third world countries to introduce condoms to help with the HIV pandemic.

Rob Smith then spent an hour reviewing his strategic plan for I-I. Rob comes from a venture capital background, so it was clear that he wasn’t doing this to make more money than he already has, but to help bring integral to a world that sorely needs it. His vision is to make I-I a “second tier Disney,” which means a high quality set of products and services that use all available technologies and distribution channels to get integral ideas out there.  There is no working model of a fully integral business yet, though there are many emerging examples (see: Brian Robertson of Ternary Software and holocracy).

Rob is recruiting an executive team and noted the problems of matching experience with altitude, or an understanding of the AQAL map and robust spiritual practice, with experience in the business, marketing, education, techhology, and fund-raising fields.

I-I is a 501(c)3 non-profit, but he also holds out opportunities to work with partners to spin off for-profit ventures. I found this very encouraging, though I-I has been through a difficult Fall with the departure of its temporary CEO, a leading donor, and support staff. So our overall impression was “this sounds great, but we’ll wait and see.”

Rob said one immediate goal was to get a portal going that is easy to use like the NY Times site, instead of the hodge-podge of websites that currently are next to impossible to navigate or grasp as a whole by 95% of the population. He hoped this would be available in first quarter 2008, and would feature content “channels” (Jo and later joked about providing content for the channeling channel).

Rob also said that Ken’s role going forward would be to serve on the Board and as the senior editor to insure AQAL compliance and focus moving forward. An integral business seeks to understand the strengths and weaknesses of all individuals in order to tailor job functions that promote greatest growth. This will in turn to more effective growth for the company, so I was glad to hear that Ken wouldn’t need to manage areas of the business that are not his forte.

The final thing that I saw as a key, was Rob understands that Integral Spiritual Center is a crucial area to support since its core to fulfilling their vision of “promoting moral growth.” So promoting the Dharma (wisdom teachings) in its many splendid forms is a high priority moving forward.

After dinner Willow Pearson led a second generation Integral Life Practice (ILP) on the shadow. I realized yet again how crucial ongoing, diligent shadow work is to all growth toward enlightenment. Willow had this mellow goddess intensity that led the group through what she called a work in progress (as I-I is developing next generation ILP modules).

Sunday morning we had breakfast with Skip Shuda, the fellow who had asked Ken about reincarnation and subtle energies. I was able to outline a Sethian view on reincarnation that included simultaneous time, probable selves, counterparts, I-I-I create my own reality. His eyes lit up at the possibilities, though we agreed these were metaphysical assumptions mapped by Seth that can serve as a basis for additional research down the road.

Then we joined Natalie at her Conscious Business Open Space, essentially a jam session on a subject. People can come and go (vote with their feet) and choose from three concurrent sessions/themes. Natalie outlined her present business interests and how she’s working on a center to help businesses become more conscious through “five P’s”: people, profit, planet, purpose, and pets (she added the last two based on group input). Natalie showed herself to be bright, present, caring, business savvy, articulate, and passionate about making a difference while making a profit. Jo helped to take notes that Natalie presented to the main group later, and will be distributed to all attendees.

I was pleased to see that “integral feminine” was radiantly abundant in all the women mentioned thus far! I-I has been criticized in the past for focusing too much on the masculine side of this typology.

I should also mention Victoria Wilson who led morning yoga, and several excellent spiritual practices and contemplations throughout the weekend. I was able to sit next to her at a group lunch on Sunday and it turns out she had recently been getting impulses to reread the Seth books by Jane Roberts. Turns out she knew a lot about the Seth Material. So I got to tell her about NewWorldView, our integral conscious creation portal based on the Seth/Jane Roberts “lineage.”

We finished the afternoon with summaries of all the Open Space sessions, a group shadow practice, and the reading of a poem by Reggie (whom we had met in Dallas) that was spectacular. We said our good-byes, and made our way home to two appreciative kitties and a warm bed.

Looking back a day after the event, I realized that we had spent the three days in a TEAL We-space. (1) It feels like GREEN on steroids, but was a new group synergy I had not experienced before.

(What do these colors mean? They represent worldview stages that are very fluid, wavelike probability zones of finding certain behaviors, values, systems, etc. Research has shown that if 50% is focused in TEAL, then 25% is still in GREEN, and 25% in TURQUOISE. So when we say TEAL we really mean a spectrum centered in TEAL with GREEN and TURQUOISE wrappers. So it’s not cut and dry, but very fluid.)

Another characteristic of TEAL is that business and Spirit exist side by side, there are no longer the constraints of ORANGE rationality, whose intuition of Spirit is bounded by logic (e.g., Logical Deism). The room was dripping with awareness and appreciation of Source throughout, this is what I meant in my intro about a “mix of church and state.” At TEAL we can no longer separate them into different value spheres because they are re-integrated. It literally becomes a moral imperative to take all actions from an awareness of our multidimensional nature, connection to each other, and Source.

It gives Jo and I hope of what a second tier organization might look like down the road. I had a question that I didn’t get to ask Rob Smith, but wanted to include here. As I-I moves forward and designs a second tier business model, TEAL at least, it will strive to include a radical transparency at all levels of the organization. Well, as much as possible. For instance, current non-profits have to make the top 4-5 salaries publicly available. So there’s a legal process where you can contact any 501(c)3 and obtain the top salaries of its President and top execs. That’s the traditional ORANGE version.

However, a TEAL organization could also make the psychographs of its entire executive team and board part of the public record. They could be updated every 3-5 years and would show general trends in growth, arrest, or regression. My point is that if we’re calling on all second tier researchers to include psychographs as part of their research (using some form of AQAL integral methodological pluralism), then we must call on all second tier executive and board members to include their psychographs as well.

Ironically, the psychograph is still vaporware in this now. There is some work being done, but nothing has crystallized in any standard form yet. I asked Ken Wilber about this back in November on a telcon with other Fielding students, and his answer is here (How Close is Your Consciousness to Being One with Everything?).

If you have a problem with the notion of measuring or ranking people in stages of widening awareness, that’s your GREEN at work, and a healthy GREEN to boot! The only problem is that GREEN does not yet understand the difference between actualization hierarchies and dominator hierarchies. Actualization hierarchies are the natural hierarchies all around us. They are easy to spot. For example, the stages of acorn, sapling, and tree are normal stages in any healthy tree realizing its full, physical nature.

Dominator hierarchies do the opposite, and are often found in human groups. They serve to limit, repress, marginalize, and stunt growth. Stalinist Russia and Maoist China are two extreme forms at the societal level. Many businesses are still run by dominator hierarchies, which is a characteristic of first tier worldviews (see endnote 1). Healthy TEAL organizations strive to use natural designs that promote growth by matching people to their ideal jobs. They make a profit, but are aware of their impact on the ecosystem, local community, and member’s personal and professional growth.

If you’re still bothered by the idea of ranking, try this: take a couple deep breaths and relax your awareness. Say the following three sentences out loud and observe what happens to your self-sense. Do you stay contracted or do you expand?

The world is getting worse all the time.

The world is getting better all the time.

The world is always already perfect in every way.

Now, try it again but hold all three perspectives in awareness. You should begin to feel an expansion, a relaxing of your egoic contraction and sense of separation. It is from that I and We-space that any TEAL worldview seeks to act, privately and publicly. It’s a beautiful thing.

Finally, I highly recommend anyone interested in integral business and leadership to attend the next conference. It’s a great place to meet birds of a feather, network, share, embrace Spirit, and make new friends. Thanks and deep appreciation to Cindy Wigglesworth (is that a great name or what!?), the planning committee, and support folks from I-I that pulled this off!

Endnotes:

(1) For more information on the general use of colors to represent worldview stages, see: Emerging New Worldviews.

The Secret’s Little Secret: A Review

The Secret, a DVD and book about the “law of attraction” (LOA), is the latest New Age fad to make a big media splash. The producer, Rhonda Byrne, and five participants recently appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote it.

The central premise is that if we learn “the secret,” then all our dreams will come true. At its best, it’s a highly simplified version of perennial truths found in all the major wisdom traditions. At its worst, this made for prime time version can easily be misunderstood by those groomed to consume the latest “pop psychology” quick-fix. Such is the nature of daytime television.

A Fractured Fairy Tale

Interestingly, the original project and DVD featured Ester Hicks who has channeled Abraham for over twenty years and explored the LOA in bestsellers like Ask and It Is Given (2004). This “little secret” was edited out of the final DVD now making the Oprah rounds, because the original contract was changed when the original show wasn’t picked up for TV in Australia. That forced the producers to take a new marketing angle that didn’t include the Hicks. (Ester and Jerry Hicks’ version of the story is available on the director’s website: Drew Heriot.)

While the project claims that there have been many teachers of the secret from Aristotle to Winston Churchill over the millennia, the producer’s version of “the secret” was formulated by a channeled source, namely Abraham. It’s based on the idea that “like attracts like,” a variation of “you reap what you sow.” There are three basic steps: 1. ask, 2. believe, and 3. receive. Ironically, Oprah also mentioned Jane Roberts’s New Age mantra, “you create your own reality” (YCYOR), without attributing the source. I wonder if she knew that mantra was coined in The Nature of Personal Reality (1974), a book written by Jane’s channeled source named Seth?

Why is it that the phenomenon that produces these ideas still can’t be authentically attributed on prime time TV? The Secret’s appearance on Oprah reveals a trend we saw in What the Bleep?, another New Age success story based on a channeled source, J.Z. Knight and Ramtha, that refused to address the channeling phenomenon in the movie (see my review in the NWV Library).

To suggest that the ideas are important by themselves and that the source doesn’t matter is intellectually and ethically dishonest. In academic writing when you don’t properly attribute the primary source of ideas it’s called plagiarism. Or if you found out a $10,000 donation to your favorite charity originally fell out the back of a Brinks truck, would you demand its return? We cannot separate the two without ultimately fracturing the holistic integrity of All-That-Is.

Thus, the source and the ideas have an intimate relationship that, when separated to pass muster on prime time TV or elsewhere, inevitably tells an incomplete story – a “fractured fairy tale” where the ideas are made public, but the source is safely tucked away in the closet. That’s why it’s important to cite the primary source, particularly when Oprah mentions YCYOR, or Rhonda Byrne promotes a project originally designed around the teachings of Abraham.

What is Channeling?

To discuss channeling with any integrity raises some very thorny issues, especially in light of how traditional religious and modern scientific worldviews currently understand it.

Jane Roberts’s three Aspect Psychology (1) books are filled with first-hand accounts of how traditional and modern theories were unsatisfactory to explain her transpersonal experiences with the Seth Material. For example, the Judeo-Christian traditions call channeling “speaking in tongues” or glossolalia. In the Bible, God “spoke” through various prophets. In the Qur’an, an archangel “spoke” to Mohammed.

On the other hand, modern scientific worldviews consider channeling a dissociative identity disorder. It’s labeled a serious pathology because it violates the integrity of the individual defined as one ego-one body. So it’s very easy to get lumped in the same camp as Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggert, Osama Bin Laden, and others because religious traditions also deal with metaphysical assumptions that modern and postmodern sciences have shredded and rejected.

However, research shows that various forms of channeling have existed for over three thousand years. Psychologist Arthur Hastings points out in With the Tongues of Men and Angels (1991) that channeling occurred in the cult of Astarte in eleven hundred BCE. In Channeling: Investigations on Receiving Information from Paranormal Sources (1998) psychologist Jon Klimo outlined many socially acceptable contexts for non-pathological dissociative states:

“Throughout history and among various peoples, channels have been named according to what they do. Besides the term ‘medium’ and the more recent ‘channel,’ other names have included shaman, witch doctor, healer, and medicine man in native cultures. They have also been called fortune-tellers, oracles, seers, soothsayers, savants, and visionaries. In religious contexts, they have been known as priests, gurus, prophets, saints, mystics, and holy ones. And in the esoteric schools they are called light workers, initiates, teachers, adepts, or masters. The majority of mainstream psychologists and psychiatrists would probably regard the channels as hallucinating, delusional, suffering from dissociative identity disorder (once called multiple personality disorder), schizophrenic, or simply as persons with runaway imaginations, or even as downright frauds.” (2)

Still, there’s no working model of how to best proceed. What if, as a hypothesis, channeling is simply another “developmental intelligence” similar to music, emotions, morals, mathematics, linguistics, interpersonal, spiritual, and many others identified by research scholars like Howard Gardner, Lawrence Kohlberg, Jane Loevinger, James Fowler, and many others?

The Science of Channeling

We need an authentic postmodern science in which to better explore and demystify the channeling phenomenon: one that occurs within acceptable rational, empiric-analytic parameters, but one that includes data verified by what the perennial sages knew as inner senses, deep intuition, or the eye of spirit. The integral theory of Ken Wilber outlines a method to do just that (Kosmic Karma and Creativity, still in pre-publication). So we may see someone who can explain channeling on Oprah some day without an over-reliance on religious metaphysical assumptions, defined as “thoughts and beliefs without any direct experience or evidence to back them up.”

In the long run, one of modern science’s enduring strengths is that all data is open to verification or falsification, and anything less is really just dogma in disguise. So we very much want to include the best of modern scientific methods while at the same time acknowledging their limits. Postmodern theorists like Teilhard de Chardin, Huston Smith, and Michel Foucault have shown that modern science has its own form of metaphysics and dogma called scientism that now form a “religion of science.” They showed that we are never able to avoid all metaphysical assumptions, for example, an explanation or acknowledgment of who or what preceded the Big Bang. Therefore, we must seek to minimize them and at the same time articulate them as best we can, because when we try to eliminate all metaphysics, we end up with yet another fragmented, incomplete scientific method that doesn’t embrace and include some allowance for the very mystery of its own Source.

Wilber’s integral theory outlines an integral post-metaphysics, one that is based on a scientific method open to verification and falsification but requires the use of outer, mental, and inner senses. Interestingly, this is very similar to what Seth calls high intellect in relation to dream-art sciences in The “Unknown” Reality, Vol. 1 (1978). This method holds the promise to better explain what channeling is, who is really coming through, and what their native reality may or may not be like. However, that could require years of research, and millions in funding. But if the National Institutes of Mental Health budgeted only five million dollars a year for ten years, imagine what insights could occur? That’s just a fraction of what the Bush Administration has spent on its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s a question of ongoing social, political, and economic priorities.

The Secret Goes Mainstream, or Does It?

So where does that leave us? Very much in the closet, as far as channeling goes, I’m afraid. On the bright side, the ideas are beginning to find their way into the mainstream and are here to stay. The Secret has successfully commercialized the LOA into a consumable form. But will it spur authentic transformation, defined as a push into wider stages of overall development, in a large segment of the population? Or is it just the latest New Age fad? A little of both perhaps? Time will tell.

Meanwhile, back on Oprah, spiritual entrepreneur James Ray identified three important elements to “the secret” – thoughts, feelings, and actions. This represents the individual’s interiors (thoughts and feelings) and exteriors (actions or behavior). If you just sit on your couch potato butt imagining your soulmate, financial independence, ideal weight, etc. and take no action, then your desires won’t manifest. That’s right on, because he included the interior and exterior factors in reality creation. He also had a sense of the individual in relation to the collective, and came closest to articulating key elements of “the secret.”

Ray also mentioned that the spiritual traditions and science were now in total agreement, though he didn’t really clarify. Daytime TV doesn’t really allow for great detail after all. If you check the landscape, however, science and religion are still in the midst of their centuries old battle for domination, not integration! So he still needs to clarify just how this “total agreement” works. It turns out to be one of the central issues in moving from a modern to postmodern, metaphysical to postmetaphysical science, as we saw earlier.

Oprah then went on to show how “the secret” works. There were three segments that included successful testimonials on how we can all gain financial health, great love lives, and lose weight. But at no point was there any detail provided for any sort of collective application to, say, politics, education, economics, social issues, etc. This formulation of “the secret” is “person-centered” – designed to appeal to individual problems and not collective policy issues. In that sense, it’s mostly pop psychology designed to fit between sound-bytes and commercial breaks, but one that introduced the concepts and planted seeds to motivate those ready to explore further. That part is a plus, but I would like to see more applications.

All the panelists were successful business folk, so by implication “the secret” is involved in that, which is well and good. Healthy business practices are very, very important. Just learn basic business practices, and you can use “the secret” to create your own business. But that’s a loaded statement, and wasn’t really explored by Oprah. Why not do a show on using “the secret” to allow people to create their own small businesses? Obviously, that begins to get away from a person-centered approach and moves into collective-centered approaches. They are more complex, and require more complex solutions and relationships that may not fit the format.

While several folks on the NWV forums expressed delight at the ideas we explore from Seth, Elias, Kris, and others were going mainstream, I am still underwhelmed. It is a step forward for the ideas, but the source that produced them – the channeling phenomenon – still remains in the closet. So don’t get out those party hats just yet. It’s a positive sign, but there is still much work to be done.

Different Worldviews Have Different Versions of the Secret

Decades of research in developmental psychology have discerned eight main worldview systems common to all human beings (3). They unfold in hierarchical fashion similar to acorn, sapling, and tree stages, and each worldview stage “transcends yet includes” its predecessors. As such, the acorn is still present in the sapling, though the tree is not yet present. Tree-ness exerts a “pull” on the sapling, but doesn’t appear full blown overnight. The growth process includes forays into tree aspects as they gradually emerge, and like all growth, occurs in fits and spurts with occasional regressions based on overall life conditions. Thus, no one is simply at one stage and all stages overlap, because they don’t manifest in strict linear fashion.

Together, the dynamics between these worldviews – seen from a systems view – creates all the collective human politics and conflict we see on the world stage. By definition each worldview stage develops different abilities, which in turn develop different belief systems. (4) Some agree, some conflict. In this context, we begin to discern acorn, sapling, and tree versions of “the secret.” Each believes their version to be true, and within the limits of its current worldview it is. Therefore, there isn’t a single, absolute version of “the secret.”

So what we saw on Oprah mostly reflected a modern worldview (ORANGE in Spiral Dynamics/Beck and AQAL/Wilber). ORANGE beliefs include a strong, grounded rationality that rejects metaphysics and channeling because it relies on five senses only methods. Since we still can’t explain it all yet with modern rational methods, as we saw earlier, it’s easier to sanitize that part of “the secret” in effect, becoming The Secret’s little secret.

The focus on material wealth as “evidence of success” is another core value of ORANGE “strive-drive” worldviews, and The Secret is a healthy expression of that. The next wider worldview is postmodern GREEN. It focuses less on the importance of material “trophies” like SUVs, supermodel wives, big houses, bling-bling, etc. than ORANGE worldviews. But GREEN still focuses on wealth creation. It is less ostentatious and more aligned with many ideas in the Seth Material. For example, GREEN worldviews were the first to promote and legislate ecological, civil, gay/lesbian, women’s, and animal rights, multiple spiritual paths, and more.

The Law of Attraction

Let’s return to and examine The Secret’s version of the LOA, because the scientific explanations on Oprah were not very compelling. For example, Bleep physicist Fred Alan Wolf pointed out recently on his blog that in terms of quantum physics and the LOA, “opposites attract and like repels.” (5)

So what’s really going on with the “birds of a feather” aspects the LOA attempts to describe? In physics terms, it’s more like sympathetic resonance. For example, if you hold down the keys of a C Major chord at middle C on a piano, and then hit a loud C in the left-hand bass, when you damp those left-hand strings you’ll hear ALL the keys of that right-hand chord making a sound without having been struck! The acoustic energy has been transferred because those same tones were already vibrating as harmonics on the left-hand strings.

Put into human terms, like the characters in The Wizard of Oz, the qualities for success are already innately present in us all. However, we may need a jump-start to get own “strings” humming that song of success. In all cases, we will define our personal and collective success through the lens of our overall stage of development.

In physics terms, the “Law of Attraction” is really a kind of energetic transference that makes our innate tone/beliefs/behaviors resonate more strongly. It is our own ability to amplify them from within. So it’s not an attraction in physics terms (opposite forces attract, like force repel). Calling it a “law” makes it sound scientific, and yet the physics are clearly contradictory.

All of which points out that the Law of Attraction is really a misnomer, and more accurately could be called the Law of Resonance because we’re not really attracting anything outside of us, we’re simply tuning up, harmonizing, and playing our own natural tune. When played at sufficient positive volume, we will find others playing a similar tune, and that synergy often leads to totally unexpected breaks, insights, solutions, growth, and fulfillment.

The counterpart, and here’s the rub, is when our tune has sufficient negative volume we find others who synergize in negative ways. So “the secret” cuts both ways. Essentially, the tunes are neutral. It’s our intention, beliefs, and behavior in relation to social and cultural factors that conspire to co-create the positive or negative outcomes. Either way, once we really get jamming, we’re actually transferring, resonating, and helping others to jump-start their own Kosmic symphonies in harmony with our own.

It’s always our choice whether we wish to play a negative or positive tune. That’s the horrible beauty, the double-edged design inherent in “the secret.” There is a shadow side that we also need to fully acknowledge and embrace within all worldviews. Therefore, the more we “face up to the abilities of consciousness,” the more we wake up and confront the shadow elements that act as roadblocks and detours from realizing our deepest desires. That’s another key part of learning to effectively use “the secret” that didn’t make it into Oprah’s show.

Still, “the secret” seems to work, so what’s going on?

First, we need to stop using pseudo-physics to validate “the secret” and focus on the psychological, behavioral, cultural, and socio-economical sciences behind it. Clearly more research needs to be done on how stages of development factor in. Do neonates, infants, children, juveniles, adults, and seniors all use “the secret” the same way? What are the common elements? What are local cultural differences and what are universals to all people?

Second, we’re trying to understand the mechanics of reality creation, the how. While there may never be a modern scientific model that is adequate, there are emerging postmodern methods as we saw earlier with the potential to shed light on the mechanics of “the secret” down the road. We need to support their continued development and funding as best we can.

What is Seth’s Version of The Secret?

In the meantime, without calling it a science of any kind, we’re left to explore Seth’s version. Clearly he taught a version of “the secret,” but how would you define it? Through the lens of The Nature of Personal Reality (1974) or the forty-plus books Jane Roberts and Rob Butts wrote taken as a whole? I take the latter approach because I find most definitions based on NPR very limited. All too often they focus on person-centered creation to the exclusion of collective co-creation. And that’s something we need to avoid. With that in mind, here’s a condensed version of “the secret according to Seth”:

We create our realities, all of them, through a combination of personal and collective knowing, being, and doing.

Ø    In terms of knowing, “you get what you concentrate upon, there is no other main rule.”

Ø    In terms of being, we are multidimensional, spiritual beings creating a physical experience, one of many.

Ø    In terms of doing, “the point of power is in the present.”

In other words, all conscious creation is action in the moment point by individuals within a collective.

How Do We Define Success?

“The secret,” then, is how to focus specific actions necessary to achieve success, and we will define that from the developmental limits within a spectrum of worldviews. Your definition may be quite different than mine, but just as valid as long as it works for you.

Various testimonials on The Secret DVD, Oprah, and elsewhere generally define success in terms of strongly focused desires properly aligned with innate intents, beliefs, behaviors, cultural, and social factors that create what we need.

Mick Jagger said something similar, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try some time, you just might find you get what you need.”

In my experience with “the secret,” the universe always provides what I need, not always what I want. The difference here is learning to align with my innate intention. How can we better learn to do that? One way is to explore the typology of intention Seth called “families of consciousness.” Elias has greatly elaborated on them, too. (6) They help us identify with our own innate purpose and meaning in life. Once properly tuned up our strings of success will hum away. Guaranteed.

However, because our innate intents – there are nine of them – are “different but complementary” each will define success in unique ways that may, at times, result in conflict within the same worldview stage. So not only is there a vertical disconnect between developmental worldviews at different stages, but also a horizontal disconnect based upon “different but complementary” intention. So “the secret” will never scale up into collective co-creation that produces Utopia. This a naïve Utopian view, because it doesn’t adequately factor in how stages of worldview development and intention work on a global scale.

It is only at the TEAL worldview where we finally understand there will always be worldview dynamics and conflict to some extent due to the fact that six-plus billion people are simultaneously creating their realities through different worldview stages and intents. And that’s when success is defined in positive terms! Add the complementary shadow and negative aspects, and you begin to sense why the collective creates so much conflict at times. Moreover, TEAL is an emerging worldview, a new worldview at this time, embraced by only two percent of the global population. But it is beginning to outline new solutions to current problems. As Einstein said, “The significant problems we face can never be solved at the level of thinking that created them.” So it will take some time. (7)

In the meantime, until we develop postmetaphysical sciences to better explain “the secret,” we can still explore the basics of personal and collective knowing, being, and doing. Eventually, as we begin to take full responsibility for everything in our lives, we cease being the victim of McDonalds, banks, spouses, bosses, children, the oppressor, the environment, weather, and on and on. Only then can we manifest forms of personal and collective abundance, fulfillment, and remembrance that will help minimize the inherent conflict within the dynamics of differing worldviews and intents. By learning to use “the secret” we can make it easier for those who follow. This is the essence of what Seth called a practicing idealist (8), but that’s yet another part of “the secret” you won’t find anytime soon on Oprah.

Other Versions of The Secret (With a Dash of Tongue-in-Cheek ;-)

Elias: “It matters not.”

Teddy Roosevelt: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”

Rene Descartes: “I think therefore I am.”

Werner Heisenberg: “The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.”

George W. Bush: “Stay the course!”

Ken Wilber: AQAL-5 (All Quadrants, Levels, Lines, States, & Types)

Teilhard de Chardin: “The whole of life lies in the verb seeing.”

Rumi the Cat: “Is it time to eat yet?”

Kurt Gödel: “Any theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete.”

Heinrich Zimmer: “The best things cannot be told.”

Douglas Adams: “42.”

Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Yogi Berra: “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

Proverbs, 23:7: “As we think in our hearts, so we are.”

Emily Dickenson: “The only secret people keep is Immortality.”

Yiddish proverb: “Love thy neighbor, even if he plays the trombone.”

Albert Einstein: “Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.”

Shankara: “The world is Illusory; Brahman alone is real; Brahman is the world.”

Scarface: “Secrets? We don’t need no stinkin’ secrets!”

The Fourfold Path, Zuni People: “Show up. Pay Attention. Tell the truth. Stay open to the outcome.”

Bhagavad-Gita: “Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.”

Nick Helfrich: “All-That-Is is All-That-Is.”

Basho: “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.”

Alfred E. Newman: “What, Me Worry?”

Endnotes:

(1) Adventures in Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology (1975), Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981).

(2) Klimo, p. 103.

(3) For more information on the science behind them follow this link to an article on Emerging New Worldviews.

(4) For those interested in how Elias’ ten foundational belief systems relate to stages of development, they form a horizontal dimension or typology found within each major stage of development. So we will be able to track the ever-increasing vertical embrace or widening awareness that occurs within each worldview system by examining the specifics of these ten belief systems in each stage.

(5) According to Dr. Wolf, “... regarding the movie The Secret and the LOA talked about in that movie. Do like things really attract each other? Actually in quantum physics we find that like doesn’t attract like, and if you notice I never made that point in the film. Like charges repel each other (+ repels + and - repels -) and unlike charges attract (+ attracts -). The better metaphor might be resonance, that two things that vibrate together have more energy as compared to two things that vibrate out of phase with each other in which case they have no energy.” Retrieved February 07, 2007 from http://fredalanwolf.blogspot.com/2007/01/update-to-those-who-blog-012707.html.

(6) For more info, see Seth’s nine families of consciousness and Elias’ essence families; an overview.

(7) Interestingly, this is also a way to imagine what Elias calls “the shift in consciousness,” a mass event to be completed by the year 2075 that propels humanity into a new collective worldview stage. For more info, see Elias’ shift in consciousness; an overview.

Seth’s version includes a transition or shift in collective human consciousness toward greater use of inner senses and a more individualized type of spirituality – without “outside” mediation – by the year 2075. This is one of the few predictions in the Seth material couched in terms of a religious and spiritual reformation intended to push calcified translative religions toward authentic transformational formats. Seth Discussed in detail in Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul (1972).

(8) Seth combines the insights from The Nature of Personal Reality (1974) and The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events (1981). Taken together, they include four moral imperatives:

1. “Thou shalt not violate” (Nature of Personal Reality)

2. “We have never told anybody to do anything, except face up to the abilities of consciousness.” (Mass Events)

3. A call to Practicing Idealism (Mass Events)

4. “The ends don’t justify the means.” (Mass Events)

The first and fourth are the innate, natural deterrents that let us know when not to repeat behaviors that violate. The second and third are clarion calls to personal growth, realization, and transformation toward worldcentric and postmodern worldviews. The former entreat us to act in harmony with natural law, the laws of the inner universe, and the latter to avoid fanaticism, murder, and other violations to achieve our goals in life. Scale that up to six billion people in varying stages of moral development, and we have a frothy mix indeed.

Seth does not provide a complete moral theory in these two books, because he couldn’t possibly explore every variation, but instead presented a general outline. However, when we integrate his cosmology (involution/evolution in physical, subtle, and causal fields), knowing (high intellect that combines physical senses, reason, and inner senses), being (I-I-I), doing/moral imperatives, along with research on moral development, we find a broad framework in which to adequately outline a moral and ethical approach.

Careful What You Ask For!

I recently commented that I was getting bored with the whole "blue flash" part of communicating with Elias' energy tone. I can validate that for me, I have been experiencing these blue dots for many years now. They are very clear, vivid, and UNsubtle. They always make me take notice of what I was just thinking, seeing, sensing, feeling, etc. It's a fun game actually. But recently I've been wanting more than just a dot. I know, careful what you ask for, you get what you concentrate on after all, yes?

Still, after having a nice tea with Defrene, Emmy, and Gert-Jan a while back I was struck by this new energy tone that was quite familiar. So much so, that I began to associate the "white/gold flash" I also experience with Defrene's energy. Still, I wanted more. So last week, in no uncertain terms I mentally SHOUTED "In plain English please!" every time one of those flashes occurs.

In other words, it's fine to have all these subtle essence energies hanging around us, communicating in terms we don't find intrusive or conflicting, but I am now ready for more. "In plain English please!"

Several mornings ago, I had a lucid dream where I was lying in a dream bed, and I started hearing words in my head coming right through my crown energy center. They were crystal clear, and in a female voice. The sentences actually made sense, and that startled me so much that I woke me up! For many years, I have observed words forming on various dream surfaces (walls, tiles, fences, doors, etc.) and attempted to read and remember them. But this was "In plain English!" And audible to boot.

I was pissed that I was startled out of the dream state. Well, I asked for it and got it, but couldn't handle it. And then I just had to laugh! The joke's on me. As I mulled over this brief energy exchange, I realized the wisdom of Elias' little "blue dot" game for now, because it's what most of us can handle without thinking we're losing our minds.

In hindsight, that clear channel opening up and just pouring through my head with information startled my dreaming self-sense into a state change. Imagine how my waking, more contracted, ego would react! And yet, I realize as Jane Roberts points out over and over, we are neurologically wired and ready. We've just learned to ignore those avenues of communication and they've atrophied.

This is also a small example what this postmodern evolutionary shift is all about. It's what Elias calls widening awareness, but it won't happen on any mass scale without the potential for trauma, hence his agenda to lessen "the trauma of the shift" in offering his information.

I now have a better sense of what this trauma may potentially involve through this brief, but direct experience. If we look at the world's population, all six-plus billion, in terms of general acorn-sapling-tree stages of development, then according to current estimates some 70% are still at traditional, religious, superstitious stages. 70%!! If all of a sudden people are hearing voices, seeing dead people, accessing reincarnational memories, vast libraries of experience, etc. they will interpret, translate their experiences from these prerational, superstitious STAGES or centers of worldview gravity (thinking of the Wilber-Combs matrix).

The results are unpredictable ranging from apocalyptic, suicidal, genocidal energies across the Mid-East and fundamentalist areas of North, Central, and South America and Europe to some kind of awakening, remembrance, and renewed vitality. Obviously, we all hope for the latter, but have to take Elias' "trauma" seriously. Some people have criticized Elias for this part of his teaching, claiming it's unnecessary and puts the focus on trauma. I now realize that it does just the opposite and those critics mostly deny, repress, and marginalize ("human ostrich syndrome") the potentials of trauma as we collectively deal with the mounting pressures of this shift, like a fault before an earthquake.

As the saying goes, "Careful what you ask for, you just may get it!" But that doesn't mean repress, deny, and marginalize all thoughts of potential trauma. It means make them conscious, bring them into awareness where the light of consciousness will dispel the shadow elements that have the potential to play out AS trauma.

There's a wonderful article in the February Sethnet Journal by Paul Levy that explores the Jungian shadow in a way we can relate to Elias' potential for trauma of the shift. Essentially, it points out how beliefs in evil, and thus evil as a physical construction, are the result of repressed and fragmented shadow elements projected onto others. Jung saw how this played out in the collective unconscious in terms of mass events like genocide, witch hunts, ethnic cleansing and the like. So this potential for trauma or evil is quite legitimate in my view, and something we need to better understand in light of our widening and opening to new avenues of communication.

As such, learning to hear our inner voices speak "In plain English please!" may go a long way to help lessen that trauma. But we need to be sure that we are widening awareness or transforming into higher stages of development with the cognitive, emotional, moral, spiritual, etc. capacity better interpret those inner communications symbolically and not as the literal world of God, Archangels, or whatever. NWV Forums like the Inner Visions Journal, Seasons of the Soul (It's Midwinter), Seth Material Coursework, and Psychic Naturalists all provide avenues to explore and develop our inner abilities, and share what works and what doesn't so others can learn. 

A Tea with Defrene

Emmy van Swaaij is twenty-four years old, currently lives in Barcelona, Spain, and has been channeling Defrene for less than a year. This is a relatively young age for this “intelligence” to blossom. Jane Roberts (Seth) was thirty-four, Mary Ennis (Elias) was forty-one, and Serge Grandbois (Kris) was twenty-five respectively. So Emmy is still in the very beginning stages of the energy exchange and is finding her way through the process. She is learning to deal with issues of personal responsibility for anything Defrene says and how it may impact another person privately or publicly. It takes time to build trust and confidence in this newly emerging “voice.” While we’re glad to share these notes publicly, it’s important to realize that she’s not yet ready for prime time. So we ask that you don’t contact her for a session, guidance, etc. at this point, but give her your support in whatever way works best. (See Defrene’s comments about “the road under construction.”)

In the mean time, Emmy and her boyfriend Gert-Jan have graciously decided to hold an ongoing series of “teas” or introductory sessions with family and friends that are well versed with the channeling phenomenon. If you don’t get to speak to Defrene at one of these teas, it just means that Emmy is more comfortable in this present format, and needs time before sharing her gifts with others in any larger, public way. Thanks!

January 19, 2007 

Participants: Gert-Jan, Emmy, and Noa doggie in Barcelona, Spain, and Paul, Joanne, Rumi the cat, and Maya kitty in Castaic, CA.

Emmy phoned around 12:05 PM PST, which was 9:05 PM in Spain. She was using her Skype Internet phone. We talked for a long time and caught up on various things, the last part of which we began to discuss the Defrene phenomenon and how it has been slowly developing over the past year. As session time approached, Emmy mentioned that her arms were tingling in a way that’s hard to describe (she’ll add more about this in her blog).

Defrene (pronounced de-free-nuh) arrived at 12:56 PM. She began speaking slowly and signing. (We learned in the earlier discussion that Emmy knows two sign languages – Dutch and Catalan – but Defrene uses a unique type of signing that is different.)

Defrene began by stating there were several topics that she would like to discuss. She mentioned that Emmy, and Atin-Khum (her “essence name” as as given by Kris), was being prepared in steps to manage this energy exchange, and there were many levels of communication involved. All take time to develop.

She said that there was a “need for practical tools to be able to integrate various sources into every day mundance use,” and that we at NewWorldView share a similar goal with her approach, that is, integrating various sources (thinking of the Integral Conscious Creation work Joanne and I have been developing for the past ten years). Also, it’s important to “balance our inner experiences with every day physical life, using both not excluding one over the other, as happens from time to time.”

The next topic area was dreams, dreaming, and methods to work with dreams without being too rigid. We need to learn our own personal dream “language” and “symbols,” and that requires study and effort. Bridges need to be built between the waking and dreaming selves, to better “understand the connections between both aspects of reality. We need more leeway and a playful approach in the disocvery of who we are. Seriousness is fun, but we need to value and appreciate what we’re doing in these pursuits.

Defrene mentioned that she is using types of communication not well known presently that have existed in our past (she was referring to her use of signing, which is a fascinating aspect of this particular energy exchange).

She mentioned “families” of languages exist and they overlap in the way they employ sound and gramatical structures to represent meaning, ideas, concepts, etc. The signing is “part of a family of languages that existed in our past, but that got lost due to more focs on the spolken languages.” The language she uses is part of that family of languages. “So languages in the past show much overlap” as the language she uses.

Defrene’s sign language includes a lot of passion and feeling (we could only can hear it, but Gert-Jan could see it.) She asked Gert-Jan’s help in making a short video that would help explain her use of signing in more detail (a picture’s worth a thousand words as we say.)

Defrene also revealed her sense of humor in saying that the video would include no cursing and no taking cloths off (which I found very funny, because it never crossed my mind, but maybe it crossed someone else’s? ;-)

She also used a pseudo-deep voice to pretend like she was some all powerful Wizard of Oz type, but assured us that this kind of “abrakadabra stuff” was not part of her style.

Defrene said that she would take a break and then come back and we could ask questions (I had made a sincere effort to just listen and allow Defrene to talk. I better understand the patience involved on her end in wanting to say so much once given the precious opportunity to communicate in this fashion!)

Break at 1:12-132 PM.

During break we talked about the first part and reviewed the topics. Emmy realized that Gert-Jan couldn’t hear us during the first part, and turned on her speakers. We will check out using Skype and a video link the next time because Defrene’s signing is such an important aspect of the energy exchange.

As we were waiting for Emmy to “step aside” and allow Defrene through, Gert-Jan made a joke that cracked her up, which she shared. He had cracked, “hasta la pasta” – a reference to a Dutch kid’s show they used to watch that meant, “see you later alligator!”

Jo and I looked at each other and smiled because this is the same expression that Mary Ennis sometimes uses as she’s clearing her mind to “step aside” and engage her energy exchange with Elias.

As Defrene returned she mentioned that this was a new format, in terms of Q & A, one that Emmy had some anxiety about earlier, but apparently was ready to engage with us. I asked a question about a lucid dream that popped into my mind earlier when Defrene first mentioned the topic of dreams. I had been meaning to ask Kris about it, but the opportunity had yet to present itself, so I thought it would be a good way to gauge Defrene’s approach at this point.

The following is from my dream journal:

12:23 AM April 14, 2002: We went to bed at 10 PM and it was more like 10:30 until I settled down. I was sleeping lightly, I recall waking up around 11 PM, checking the clock and feeling like I hadn’t fallen asleep yet (meaning deeply asleep). So I’m guessing that somewhere around 11:30-45 PM I entered the vibrational state – that familiar tingling in the spine with a focal point in the medulla oblongata region of the brain stem.

There are two main dreamscapes that I recall, each one marked by a return to or awareness of being semi-awake back “in body,” yet not being able to make a time check due to sleep paralysis (this doesn’t bother me at all, in fact, it helps me stay in the vibrational state and project again and again. This is just the opposite reaction of people who don’t have a framework in which to appreciate this special state and are freaked out by it).

I did finally manage a time check at 12:16 AM, but that woke me up enough so that I did not continue, as I wanted to record and reflect on my experiences up until that point. I also noted that my memory was extremely sharp and detailed, in fact as I type this over two days later the memories are as clear as any waking memory during that period of time.

The first projection occurred in my childhood bedroom (in Elkins Park, PA), a familiar projection dreamscape over the years, and one that I use because I’m so comfortable exploring the “unknown” reality of my subconscious there.

Joanne is sleeping in the bed to my left, as opposed to my older brother Nick who was my childhood companion. So that mirrored my contemporary sleeping arrangement as Jo has always preferred to sleep on my left side.

So I became “awake” in the pre-projection, vibrational state, and it was not as difficult to pierce to veil. Yet, I felt that familiar resistance to projection that elicits an intentional effort to project. So I concentrated on my medulla area, tensing my projection body neck muscles, and this greatly intensified to vibrations, opening the way to a projection. I remember lifting up my right projection form arm, but still being “in body” in the vibrational state.

I mentally chided myself, thinking, “well, are you going to just lay here or are you going to get up?” So I told myself to “get up!” and I did! Poof! Piercing the veil, forming and projecting a body double, ALWAYS feels pleasurable, like a strong resistance just before breaking the sound barrier, as an analogy, and increasing pressure and resistance and then, voila! You are through!

The vibrational state CAN be rough though, particularly when you are just stuck there, not focused enough to “get out.” It feels like you are plugged into an electric outlet. Though in this experience, the intensity was relatively moderate and didn’t bother me at all.

Once out, I walked to my left, over toward where our dresser door was, and then I walked to the right, over to the window by the radiator that overlooked our back yard. An interesting thing happened during this sequence.

When I was at the first location, the dresser, I was curious to see my physical body, so I looked back and saw it laying in the bed under the covers in the darkness. As I watched, I observed another body double, a body triple, project out and walk right toward me by the dresser. There were three MEs in the room at that moment. It was very amazing to observe my projection form emerge from my sleeping body.

Again, when I went over to the window, I stopped and looked back and this body-triple again, just followed toward me in some strange sort of instant replay. I was intrigued to say the least as this is the first time I have observed anything like it.

I continued my walk, back through the bed back toward the dresser near the bedroom door and waited again. At this point, as my body-triple approached (my awareness or the memory I’m recalling was from the body-double) I stuck out my hand to touch it/me. The body form was warm, fleshy, and quite solid! The delay was about 7-8 seconds throughout each of the three observation points, and it was very cool and trippy to observe in the dark room. The body-triple was not ghostly or illuminated, just fleshy, just a regular looking projected body. I couldn’t interact with it or engage it in conversation, nor did the thought or impulse enter my mind.

This entire scenario happened in a matter of seconds, and yet it is the first time I recall anything of this sort. It was unusual for me to have to interest (courage?) to look for my body on the bed. But in recent months I have set an intention that, if and when I project, I want to observe my sleeping body and learn more about its energy anatomy and attempt to observe the energy centers (or chakras, which reminds me that I had a dream about observing my energy body this AM, actually it was the little focal points in my fingers that I saw).

Anyway, this body-triple kept just following me and was observable whenever I stopped and looked back. In hindsight, it feels more like some kind of time shifting, since I did not have split awareness (as suggested in the Robert Bruce book Astral Dynamics). It was definitely the inner sense of differential time that allowed me to create this perception in this state, though I did not image it in those terms during the experience.

So I had this in mind when I asked for Defrene’s interpretation. She mentioned that my clear 3-D imagery was an insight into what actually happens “in the background” but was displayed (or translated) in a way that I could grasp. She used the analogy of standing inside a rolled up film and seeing all possible events or probable variations at once. She referred to blinks (which I assumed was a referernce to the Plank speed that Seth and Elias have discussed in terms of physical construction/creation). But in my case I focused on one probable series and “saw” its structures. It was unique that I could experience this directly “from the inside out” like a living diagram of sorts of physical reality creation, but seen from the focus or egoic perspective. I saw in 3D experience what is always happening in physical terms.

Her explanation made great sense, and was an experience that has only occurred once. It was very unique and always puzzled me as to what and why I was doing this. My dream journal entry didn’t trigger any further recall or issues that I was exploring at the time, though I know the experience was triggered by whatever I was reading and exploring at that time.

Defrene also mentioned that LSD can have a similar, yet traumatic effect, which kind of took me by surprise. (I have written about those experience online, so Emmy may well have read them in the past 6-7 years that I’ve known her.) I commented that I had done some intense LSD and other psychedelic experimentation back in the 1970s and early 1980s, and that the 3-D trail effect was indeed similar to the visual hallucinations that so fasinated me in my teenage years. I could see how large doses of the drug without any conceptual framework to explain the altered-focus could be traumatic and is something to be guarded against. But interestingly, the effect was similar! Defrene also mentioned that this dream could help me let go of some of the negative aspects of some of those early experiences (nothing specific immediately popped into mind, though I did have some intense, fearful experiences, which I am re-imagining based upon this dream interpretation).

In hindsight, this projection experience was a beautiful way to stretch my egoic consciousness in the safe confines of my dreaming body and obtain a direct taste of how my inner self is co-creating much of what goes on “behind the scenes.” I had always wondered just what the hell I had created in that experience, and the idea that I was directly conceptualizing space-time, probabilites, physical creation, etc. makes perfect sense. The “triple-body” effect was fascinating and unique.

Jo then asked a question about taking on other people’s energies in relation to a recent event in which a neighbor and friend’s 18-yr. old son was in a horrific car accident, had severe head trauma, reconstructive surgery, and is still in a coma as I write. Defrene suggested a lovely exercise tailored to Jo. She loves to take showers, and Defrene suggested she take one and imagine the flow of emotions, feelings, and thoughts just dissapate, do down back to its source with with water. Let it gradually go! It’s important to visualize this process, too. Imagine you’re “turning down the volume on a radio.”

Defrene also mentioned that our feelings are a communication, and we need to pay attention to them.

Jo thanked her and then asked if she was willing to offer any information on Blaze’s status or intent in creating such a horrific experience. She said the situation was still “very flexible,” which I interpreted to mean that the probabilities were still very fluid in terms of just how severe and affecting his injuries will be in terms of his recovery. Defrene said, “it’s a very major turning point that affects many people. It’s important to take some special time for giving this person the space to sort this out, to trust that he is able to sort this out. Even though everyone wants him to wake up as soon as possible, it’s important to trust it will take the pace it’s supposed to take, even though it’s difficult to wait. It’s nerve-racking!”

Defrene then said, “we could offer some singing to help in relieving some of your cropped up emotion, if you are comfortable with that.” And that it may take some time because she “has to access a different layer of communication.” (By the way, I just have to mention here positive, balancing impact of FINALLY having a “female tone” communicating in this energy exchange, the energy is definitely colored more by a feminine archetype: more receiving, flowing, feeling, manifesting, birthing, etc.)

She then sang a two minute song (estimating) in a minor key, with a lilting, flowing, expressive tone that was very soothing to my relaxed mind, and brought tears to Jo’s eyes. It definitely released some cropped up emotions from the past 24 hours for both of us.

Jo asked if the song was a general healing song or was specific to Blaze’s situation and she said it served both functions. Jo also asked if we could make it available online on NWV, and Defrene said, “yes.” She also wanted us to offer a disclaimer that one should not listen to this song absentmindedly or capriciously. That is was meant to release emotions and could produce some unexpected results if listened to properly (I had the joking impression to add “don’t operate heavy machinery or drive a car while listening to this,” like some medications do! :-)

Defrene said it works on multiple levels and will cause emotional responses (no accident that it’s in a minor key, though I distinctly heard at least two altered tones that make it more on the dorian or phyrigian side of the modal musical scales.) She also said we could hold hands while listening to it (is that the goddess speaking or what!?)

Jo thanked Defrene and said she was glad to meet her and looked forward to a long and fruitful relationship, which I seconded. Interestingly, Defrene responded that this was in objective terms only and that the relationship was “already well established,” to which I shared my earlier impression that this energy personality essence was indeed an “ancient friend,” much like I feel about Elias and Kris. It’s all in the family!

Finally, Defrene told us to take a drink (I was sipping on home-made red tea) and get some rest! She said she might make a return (and it was good to know that Defrene was willing to continue). End at 2:08 PM.

We talked with Gert-Jan and Emmy for another twenty minutes, and told them how pleased, proud, and supportive we were of their work with this energy exchange! And to continue to take it one day at a time and explore all the many nuances of what’s involved. For example, when Emmy came back, she said she was very emotional, felt like she had just finished a long crying spell, and we explained all the events relating to our friends and their son Blaze. So it’s clear that Emmy’s still learning how to deal with the many nuances of the energy exchange and other people’s needs, situations, and challenges.

Emmy made a comment that Defrene had called me the “enthusiastic professor” some time ago – a label that I gladly accept! What strikes me most at this stage is that there is no obvious pathology that I can find in the dissociative state, the inclusion of hand signing, feminine tone, and “Sumari” singing also make this a rare phenomenon at such an early stage. I have to remind myself that even though I’ve been involved in channeling for thrity years overall, and ten years full-time, it always takes time for this “intelligence” to flower. And we have a wonderful front row seat to observe Emmy’s growth in the years ahead.

We also told Gert-Jan that he has a very, very important role to play in how this phenomenon develops, and that he serves a kind of grounding role to help Emmy deal with the changes of entering and exiting trance, dealing with emotions and other related aspects.

Finally, after we say our goodbyes, Emmy called back and said she had forgotten to hit the record button! Ironically I had an impulse to tape the session, but we couldn’t find a clean tape (which spurs me to finally buy a digital recorder). So the session and the song exist in our memories. Emmy recorded another version of the song and sent it along. We’ve make that available in the Downloads section.

(I also requested that she go back and number her sessions and add times to the beginning, breaks, and ending to add to our knowledge about the phenomenon. I would also like to add a request that she and Gert-Jan record all audio at CD quality [44.1 Khz, mono, 16 bit], and all video at the highest resolution available!)

(Emmy’s characteristics at this “acorn” stage of the phenomenon include:

Ø     Defrene has a feminine translation in tone

Ø     Arms and hands “tingle” as Defrene makes herSelf known

Ø     Eyes mostly closed

Ø     Speech rate is slow, de-lib-er-ate

Ø     Hand signing

Ø     “Sumari” Singing

Ø     Aware that Defrene tailors content to her audience

Rose-Colored Glasses

Introduction

This original Topic occurred on the Kris Chronicles Forum on the "old" NWV software. When we upgraded in September 2006, all previous Topics were archived, but no longer available because there is still no software tool to easily port from the old platform (Unix) to the new (Windows). However, since this Topic captures an array of important ideas, we are happy to make it publicly available once again.

What follows reflects the real-time nature of our Discussion Forums. As such, there is a raw, spontaneous, yet vital quality to the posts. You can draw your own conclusions, too, but in hindsight it's clearly a time where I finally had took a public stand on what I feel are very important issues within our conscious creation community, however broadly we define that, issues that I feel prevent collective development, evolution, and widening into the next worldview stage, which goes by the name of integral, vision-logic, centaur, autonomous, integrated free-functioning human being, and many others.

Rose-colored glasses became a flash point where several currents became very clear, first, how we all interpret the information offered by Seth, Kris, Elias, Wilber, and others from the "center of gravity" of our own overall development (there are egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric, and wider worldviews). Second, that discernment and critical thinking are necessary to adequately put this material to practical use on any social, collective scale (many people, particularly Boomers, are stuck in a narcistic I-Create-My-Own-Reality interpretation, and have yet to fully widen into the We-Co-Create-Our-Joint-Reality interpretation). Third, the performative contradictioncategory errors (when we confuse different Aspects [Jane], Quadrants [Kris], Frameworks [Seth], Regional Areas [Elias] of consciousness) riddle many New Age interpretations of conscious creation. Fourth, and central to this Topic, that extreme moral relativism exists and in the long run perpetuates the very issues, beliefs, and worldviews it ends up marginalizing, repressing, and denying through its hypocritical use of absolutes to deny all absolutes (e.g., saying, "there is no absolute good or evil" still employs an absolute value judgment of "better and worse"). (a fancy word for hypocritical arguments that violate their own logic) and

What follows, then, offers a snapshot in the history of the NWV Forums in which a better understanding emerged of human development and how that applies to the I (create) and We (co-create) interpretations of conscious creation. While Seth often spoke about our "stage of development" in collective terms, he offered precious little in terms of details. While Elias talks about widening awareness, and its complement of narrow awareness, he also offers little in terms of detail (though he did agree that humans beings develop in three general stages: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional in session 1357,May 29, 2003). Kris has outlined some developmental schemes, but has yet to fill in the details to any great depth. In the mean time, we can find these details in the research of scientists like Jean Piaget, Jean Gebser, Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, Jane Loevinger, Clare Graves, Robert Kegan, Abe Maslow, Howard Gardner, Ken Wilber, and many others who've extensively studied various human stage models in individuals (creation) as well as cultures (co-creation). All of which is to point out the glaring weakness of the incomplete views put forth when we take only what Seth, Elias, or Kris have to say "in-a-vacuum," and conveniently ignore all the rest.

Before or after reading what follows, you may wish to read the Kris session that precipitated this Topic. It stemmed from a heated discussion of the London subway bombings that occurred in July, 2005. It's titled, appropriately, Rose-Colored Glasses. Next, you may wish to read my notes on that session titled Dinner and A Dead Guy #23 - August 01, 2005.

Follow this link to read the Rose-Colored Glasses Topic from the NWV forums.

Dinner and a Dead Guy #47 ~ January 7, 2007

We held our 47th Dinner and a Dead Guy. We were late because we had to watch, OK, because we chose to watch the end of a very exciting football playoff game between the Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants. The Eagles won on a field goal on the last play of the game!

Our twenty-year old niece, Margot, was visiting from the Philadelphia area, so that completed the attendance of every Helfrich niece and nephew at our cozy little gatherings!

In Castaic, CA, myself, Joanne, Margot, and Rumi the cat. In Wilmington, DE, Ellen, Cathy, Brian, and Biscuit the Ewok. In Toronto, Mark, Serge, John, Joshua, and Myrna. Rounding out the group was Tom in Oahu, HI, Lisa in Eugene, Oregon, and Emmy in Barcelona, Spain (late for her!).

Serge sent the audio file afterwards and we only missed a few minutes of introductory material dealing with our theme of 2007: meaningfulness.

Life has meaning in and of itself. Suffering results when meaning is lost. Some people choose to live in areas of the planet where meaning is less achieved, where meaning is denied, setting up conflict, which leads to situations that eventually create unhealthy patterns of behavior. (And while some may imagine parts of the third world where dis-ease, famine, material poverty, and the like prevail, I was also reminded of the millions of people in my own country who can choose areas where these life conditions prevail, like parts of New Orleans affected by Hurricane Katrina as a healing action, inner cities, poor rural areas, etc.)

We can then create conflicting belief structures where we come to believe that life has no real meaning, purpose, or intent except for procreation (which describes our modern, materialist, flatland worldviews).

Nothing outside us can bring ultimate meaning to our lives. If we can’t accept ourselves, our own meaning, then no matter what we profess to accept (e.g., murderers, rapists, saints, or sages) we don’t.

(There were some comments and questions on the Toronto side that weren’t picked up by the phone connection.)

Kris responded to look within and we will find the very meanings we seek.

Ellen commented on the modern creation myth, the Big Bang, and it’s complement of chance, random, meaningless mix of quantum fields…. To which Kris responded that we fear what is within us (i.e., Source), so we seek to sublimate it with external sources that end up being merely distractions! If we numb ourselves sufficiently we will forget our inner life (the effects of what Ken Wilber calls the “disaster of modernity”). Then, we will only experience our physical senses as primary reality, forgetting that they don’t translate inner experience.

Kris reminded us that our purpose as a species was to experience within a certain set of physics, the world of material comfort, and to share on a collective level a different manner than through our inner senses (which have atrophied!). However, over many eons – cycles – we’ve forgotten the meaning of our material nature. “You’ve mistaken the props for the real deal!” (In other words, we’ve confused our physical senses and their constructs as the only absolute experience of reality, losing touch with our dreams, inner senses, and other inner experience.)

Kris gave a funny analogy, it’s as if we buy canned goods at the food store, eat the labels and throw the rest away!

Kris defined depression = when the meaning of our lives escapes us. It’s why anti-depressants only numb, but can never address the real issues (which is why we need a more integral approach to health care! One that treats both interior and exterior aspects of Self, and seeks their balance, inclusion, and harmony.)

Break: 5:23 – 5: 26 PM.

Kris returns and mentioned that the irony is that we are meaningfully exploring meaninglessness! (To much laughter.) He reminded us, again, to not get too caught up with confusing the props for their Source (i.e., our consciousness, our be-ing).

A question was asked about “the God concept” as a way to explain what we can’t know in physical terms. To which Kris replied that we lost track of the internal principles that underlie all physical experience… in other words, we’ve gone senile!

If we don’t understand what is meaningful inside our Self, then ultimately we can’t understand what is truly meaningful (again and again, Kris is pointing us to our inwardness, our is-ness, the simple feeling our innate being, of Source, of consciousness in all its many guises.)

When we can acknowledge that the Source of all meaningfulness is internal, THEN, we project our perception outward, and others reflect it back. Causality is innate within us, not without.

Kris queried the group: “What kind of meaning to you create?” He made a reference to those of us who had just finished a wonderful 21-day practice called the “appreciation game.” The idea was to pick one quality or attribute about ourselves that we appreciated and concentrate on just that throughout each day, for 21 days.

When we reflect on what is deeply meaningful to us, we can take a moment and tap into the FEELING of meaningfulness, and pay attention to how our body responds, what it feels like in that moment, in that state of meaningfulness. The response may be subtle, but Kris encouraged us to seek that feeling out, that meaningful feeling and identify it, make it an object within our awareness. Then just let it go….

Pay attention and begin to notice that inner state. During a future time, notice when we have misplaced our own meaning, and then REMEMBER that bodily sensation or feeling and it will come back us! (This is a variation of the lovingkindness, metta, Big Heart, tonglen, etc. type of practices. They are very, very effective over time!)

The session ended at 5:59 PM.

We chatted a bit, and Margot had listened intently and followed the discussion. I would burn a CD for her to listen to on her own so she could mine some of the gems at a later time.

We said our good-byes, and moved onto dinner! For hors d’oeuvres we had three different kinds of humus and pita bread. The main course consisted of veggie lasagna, garlic bread, extra sauce, and peanut butter chocolate chip cookies with a variety of teas for dessert.

In Memoriam – Anu B. (Onkaru)

I only knew her as Anu B. She joined Sethnet Classic on Yahoo! on August 9, 2005 and quickly began to build relationships with many there. When we moved Sethnet to NewWorldView on September 7, 2006 she was one of the first to join (as we had no way to move every email address into new accounts). Her last visit was recorded as November 22, 2006, two weeks before her passing.

Anu lived in what used to be called Bombay, India (now called Mumbai). Her bio listed her occupation as a Risk Manager. Her interests were Akido, writing, and painting. She was also one of our “list poets” – people who regularly share their thoughts and feelings through the magic of the written word.

I was shocked when I first heard the news of her passing in a car accident. Anu was so young and vibrant. Her posts reflected her passion for life that she saw in the beauty of a sunset, a beggar’s smile, or the smell of rain.

I don’t even know how old she was, but she struck me as an “old soul.” She initially shared her feelings about her breakup with the boyfriend that introduced her to the Seth material. Once she found out about Elias and Kris, she quickly opened her fertile mind to their possibilities. She joined other email lists, and networked into the minds and hearts of those who took the time to know her.

She had a kidney ailment and was on regular dialysis treatments. She had been set up for and got out of an arranged marriage, as still is the custom in many parts of India. She had an abusive boss but would soon replace him in her company. She was heart broken over her boyfriend but was intent on moving on. She was passionate about everything it seemed.

There was always a bright light that shone in her posts, her feelings, her thoughts, her caring, her need to know more about herself and others. The Seth material provided fertile ground for her growth. And did she ever blossom! I’m sure others will attest to that.

Anu was a shooting star! She lit a bright path across my virtual worlds. She will be sorely missed, and I can only hope, pray, and trust that she got everything she needed from her short journey with us this time around.

Anu’s presence, or should I say, absence, began to play an important role in my efforts to solve the database problems we experienced in late November on NewWorldView, just before her death. I had one hell of a time isolating and finding the exact cause, which took me more than a month to figure out. Well, that’s the rational explanation. On the magical side, the transrational side, I went through an amazing process. I could have solved the problem very quickly by simply deleting that damned database and starting from scratch!

But it became a Donnybrook. I spent weeks trying everything in my power to fix it. Got a new webhost, paid for a higher level of technical support, tried dozens of experiments, all of which ended up with a dead and confused database, not to mention confused and frustrated members who periodically checked in on our progress.

By mid-December I was ready to throw in the towel, had exhausted all options, or so I thought. But something had become very, very precious about that database. It became a living link to Anu’s presence on NewWorldView. If I deleted that database, I would delete her account, her avatar, her posts and somehow this became a rallying point for my efforts.

December days became weeks. On December 22, 2006 I was on my last legs. I re-installed two separate versions of the database for one last attempt. I was optimistic when I went to bed that Friday night. But when I woke up Saturday, the first database had failed again! I was crestfallen. Forget the second database. It was no use. I had tried everything! It was time to let go and move on. I hoped that Anu, in her new home, and those who might miss her presence in the archives would understand.

I remember laying back down in bed and telling Jo the news. And she said, “We need a Christmas miracle,” but I was pessimistic. Though we had just watched The Secret several nights earlier and were both inspired by its conscious creation message, I was finally ready to let Anu and the old database go. It was hopelessly corrupted.

In hindsight, it was that surrender that opened the doors to a possible fix. I say possible because as of this writing it is still not a 100% sure thing in rational terms. It could still break. But in magical, transrational terms, interesting things began to occur. I got up from a nap and created a third, brand new database from scratch. I was now ready for a fresh start.

But once I had crossed this Rubicon, I decided to play with that second restored database just for yucks. Perhaps I was still avoiding the finality of moving on? But it didn’t matter, it would probably break and that would be that! But my little changes seemed to work right away. Within an hour I was making headway, and things kept working, so I just kept on playing with it. I had nothing to lose!

When I went to bed December 23 this last remaining version of the database was still working. The next morning it was working. On Christmas day it was still working! It seemed as if Jo’s Christmas miracle had indeed occurred. I did nothing significantly different from my earlier attempt on the first database. But for some reason, this last version refused to go gently in that good night!

As I write this today, December 28, 2006, it’s still working. It’s been five days now….

I believe my intent to preserve Anu’s memory in the living archives of NewWorldView somehow helped. I had asked for help from all inner sources for weeks to help me find a solution and no matter how hard I tried, the solution eluded me.

I still don’t have a fully rational explanation for why this last database is still working, but like to imagine Anu and her inner self are both lending energy to her remembrance in our minds and hearts.

So I would like to dedicate this last database to Anu’s loving memory. She was a bright light that added tremendously to our online community. She will be sorely missed. Joanne and I send her family and friends our deepest sympathies and hope she is doing well in her new life. Keep a safe eye on us here at NewWorldView and we will always remember the times we shared!

In her last private message, still in the database, she said, “And congratulations, your forum has taken off superbly and I am so glad to say to you that I enjoy this place much more than our good old Sethnet.”

“Cheers.  Maybe we should have beer together some day.”

“Love,
anu”

Indeed! I hope to take you up on the offer some day. A nice ale or stout perhaps?

Dinner and a Dead Guy #46 ~ December 17, 2006

We held our 46th Dinner and a Dead Guy last evening. In Castaic, CA, myself, Joanne, Gordon, Ester, Catherine, and Rumi the cat. In Wilmington, DE, Ellen, and Brian. In Toronto, Mark, Serge, John, Joshua, and Louise. Rounding out the group was Tom in Oahu, HI, Lisa in Oregon, and Odette in Quebec.

The session began at 4:44 PM. and Kris opened with some thoughts on the theme for the year ahead announced on his radio show this past Friday: The Year of Meaningfulness. He then posed some questions:

“What are the things that make you who you are?”

“What do you appreciate about yourself?”

“How long or short will your list of positives and negatives be?”

“Which will outnumber the other?”

Participants then offered some of the things they appreciate about themselves:

Jo: has a list, but acknowledged she focuses more on the negative!

Brian: has 101 things!

Kris then said the we could attempt to push our list of appreciative qualities or quantities to the front burner.

(I realized that Kris was already delving into next year’s theme: how to create meaning in our lives? Because when we do, we naturally solve problems, generate health, abundance, fulfillment, compassion, and maybe even enlightenment. I was reminded of the vipassana lovingkindness or metta practices, as well as tonglen, and Elias’ appreciation practices. These are all variations of methods to generate healthy, loving FEELINGS, which in turn generate healthy, loving meaning). 

Kris then challenged us all to offer some things we appreciate. (And it’s difficult intitially because we are trained culturally to not brag or flaunt or be arrogant, but to be humble, self-depricating, suffering/denying the flesh is spiritual, don’t be flashy, and on and on.)

Brian, Mark, Ellen, Jo, John, Odette, Tom, and Lisa all offered things they appreciated about themselves (I like John’s ability to make 2+2 = 22!).

Kris then offered an appreciation practice: to write down one thing that we appreciate about ourself each day. Throughout the day, find ways to express that particular quality (remember: we get what we concentrate on. This penetrates the subconscious mind and opens doors eventually that allow us to identify blockages, issues, etc.).

The more time we spend each day cultivating appreciation the less likely we are to concentrate on (the usual?) negative things that perpetuate conflict, dis-ease, bad relationships, etc.

(Then our phone blinked out! POOF! Dead….)

(I redialed and Ester and Catherine came in. They had driven all the way down from San Luis Obispo, about 2.5 hours to the North to attend our Seasonal Celebration. We missed perhaps 45 seconds.)

Kris was finishing his thoughts on the appreciation game, as Mark called it.

John asked about the power of one positive thought vs. one hundred negative thoughts. And Kris responded, in effect, saying that it’s relative. In essence, thoughts are really neutral. Our beliefs and contexts give them the power of positive and negative (this reflects Elias’ belief system of duplicity, one of the ten core belief systems, and why it’s SO important to cross-compare Seth, Elias, Kris, Wilber, and whomever shows up for dinner).

John summarized nicely by saying that thoughts that “run against the grain” reflect more negative beliefs vs. thoughts that move “with the flow” reflect more positive beliefs.

Kris riffed that appreciation’s core is reflectd in our civilizations, cultures, nations, etc. and reflect what we do best.

Break: 5:20-5:24 PM.

Kris continued…. EFT (emotional freedom technique) and AAA (acknowledge, address, accept) complement each other and a daily appreciation practice!

(This forms a kind of “triangle” or three-pronged approach in terms of how his Avatar Yoga practices synergize over time. Mastering this “triangle” is very important moving forward with these practices. That is, in getting transformative results that move us beyond our current STAGE of development, or help us to widen awareness in the context of the shift.)

Kris added a sentence: “ As I discover ___________ (the quality we are to concentrate on for a full day), I appreciate and accept myself deeply and completely.” Go through the EFT process to see what comes up. (If EFT is new, check out the July-August- September 2006 Kris sessions where these techniques are explored.)

“Have a Field Day with your appreciation!” (Go for it!)

I asked about Kris’ opinion on ways to deal with our enculturation that represses and marginalizes expressions of public appreciation. I noted the several people had not yet offered what they appreciate about themselves during this session, and while there are several unabashed extroverts in the group, there are also introverts. So I wanted to hear Kris’ advice to help those folks come out of their shells, and find ways to get comfortable with expressing these “selfish” feelings publicly in a group setting.

Kris said the we need to put our words into action (thinking of Seth’s “the point of power is in the present.” and Howard Jones’ song Putting A Dream into Action). We need to DO and SHARE our qualities with others!

He mentioned the sanscrit word “acharya” or one who leads by example.

(The Wikipedia definition is: An acharya is a prominent guru, teacher and scholar who teaches by his own example (from Sanskrit 'achara', behavior). Often head of a sampradaya, philosophical school in the Indian tradition. It is given as a title of respect, often added at the end of a person's name, as in Advaita Acharya.)

(I was also reminded of the core teaching of Elias: acceptance 101 (self) and acceptance 102 (others), and his classic aphorism of “the straight little sapling.” It sets an ideal for all of us to walk our talk in ways that generate natural, spontaneous, creative, healthy, abundant, fulfilling, appreciative, compassionate, and lovingkindness energies. In other words = MEANINGFULNESS.)

(So we need to DO, take action, and yet be in the world. That will lead to ways to feel comfortable about expressing ourselves publicly in appreciative ways that don’t marginalize, repress, or demean others in the process. The latter is a very important distinction.)

(I was also reminded of George Leonard’s and Michael Murphy’s ITP or integral transformative practice. In the Esalen workshop Jo and I attended in June 2005, we did a circle exercise with the group in which we all took turns going into the center and publicly expressing something great about ourselves! This was essentially the same idea, that we need to raise our self-esteem through appreciating the many, many things we do well that we often take for granted or sublimate when we compare ourselves to others, and feel “less than,” as though there is some absolute metric of social and personal worth dictated by our official or consensus reality, when nothing could be further from the truth!

(I was also reminded of an Elias gem taped on Jo’s monitor that inspires her to self-appreciation that I had read several times earlier in the week when I installed a new hard drive for her:

“Your worth is not dictated by the expression or opinion or perception of any other individual. Your worth is not dictated by your actions or your experiences. Therefore, your worth is not dictated by what you create. Your worth is YOU, and this is not reflected by what you create or your experiences or the opinions or the perceptions of any other individual. It is not even dictated by your own perception!” [session 427, July 19, 1999]

Kris also offered a direct approach that can be used with the AAA practice. When our inner critic says “who do you think you are for doing such and such or thinking such and such about yourself…?” simply respond with, “Today I choose to listen only to what I appreciate within myself! I choose to turn the volume on your voice down!” (In other words, I am not going to put mySelf down today, because I really am awesome in this way.)

Kris said to give that inner critic the boot!

(As an aside: this aspect of Self is now well known to modern schools of psychology. It’s called the “Top Dog” by Gestalt [Perls] and the “Parent” by Transactional Analysis [Berne & Harris] – two modern schools of Depth Psychology that trace their lineage to Freud. It also deals with Shadow Projection:  aspects of Self that get disowned, marginalized, and dissociated. These are then projected onto “other” [e.g., you’re a bad lover, bad writer, bad person, etc.] when in fact, what we’re projecting onto “other” are our own qualities that we dislike in ourSelf. Only when we re-own these fragmented aspects do we become fully integrated human beings who can then transform into a wider awareness or new STAGE of development. Our shadow fragments can lock or arrest us into cycles of unhealthy, even pathological behavior until they are re-owned. Kris’s AAA and Elias’ NIRAA are two excellent techniques to help with shadow elements. Also, recall that this is one of the three parts of our Avatar Yoga “triangle of practices” that synergize over time!)

Joshua then asked some questions that we couldn’t hear because he wasn’t close to a microphone. But Kris responded with another part of the appreciation game practice. Namely, to make our appreciated thing (quality or quantity) The Habit of the Day (we get what we concentrate on!) It will take 5-7 days to “take root” and 21 days to complete the task (or create new habits of mind, new beliefs).

(Again, we’re not eliminating any beliefs, but reducing the energetic presence and impact of certain core beliefs by concentrating on different ones repeatedly throughout the day, each day, for twenty-one days. And this is not as easy as it seems. This is a great time of year to reflect on New Year’s resolutions and how long they last [typically 2-3 days for most]. This is a twenty-one day practice that requires persistence, dedication, and resilience.)

Kris reminded us that the amount of time we spend on this practice over twenty-one days is actually much less than the time we spend reinforcing those beliefs that create and maintain many of our problems, challenges, and issues.

Kris referred to the various “programs” (or what Depth Psychology calls “tapes” = core beliefs) that we learn in infancy and childhood that play over and over for so many years we’ve normalized them. So it will take twenty-one days of practice to situate new habits of mind through appreciation to help deal with those. Of course, we need to add Kris’s AAA along with this practice to attend to issues that finally surface, issues, beliefs that have been subconsciously accepted, but finally, through acknowledging and addressing finally come into objective awareness (i.e., making the subjective objective). So Kris’s appreciation practice complements his AAA in this way.

Kris began winding up by reminding us that his agenda is simply to “promote a systematic and practical approach to the tools inherent in our consciousness.” But we have to DO the practices, take action and that will establish new belief patterns (again, the point of power is in the present = Seth 101).

Kris also instructed us to make our own twenty-one day calendar and chart off each day, as a device to help our minds concentrate and DO the practice throughout each day.

He wished us all a Happy Holidays and Happy New Year, so he was winding up his 2006 International sessions (as he wrapped his radio show on Friday). Next year is The Year of Meaningfulness. And Kris certainly set the stage for a vibrant, creative, and fulfilling 2007.

Kris left the building at 5:59 PM.

We chatted just a few minutes, and wished everyone a Happy Holiday!

Jo had cooked up a storm and decorated the house for the holidays. So we moved onto our own Solstice Celebration. Jo’s menu was impressive last night. Hors d’oeurves included a cheese bake with antipasto with assorted bread and crackers. The main course included glazed ham, Florentine spinach tart, salad, and sweet rolls. Desert included specialty teas, cream puff, and assorted holiday candies.

We had some great conversations with our neighbor Gordon and Ester, whom we hadn’t seen for months, and Ester’s friend Catherine who is a family, marriage therapist and was very interested in Ken Wilber’s work. She was new to the whole channeling/conscious creation world, but had a very intuitive understanding of its possibilities that moved beyond conventional pathology (dissociative identity disorder in allopathic circles). She also had a lot of experience in the Wiccan tradition, and there are many similarities with Jo’s seasonal celebrations based on the solar calendar. I told Jo that she was a “closet Wiccan” because she resonates with much of their “natural time” approaches to the seasons.

Jo did a couple of group activities to begin testing out her new book Seasons of the Soul: A Year of Fun and Meaningful Celebrations. We opened poppers that had trinkets inside that foreshadowed important personal themes for the coming year. We all picked randomly. I got the same one as last year – a little cellophane fish that when put on my palm curled a certain way.  My fish portended that 2007 would be a passionate year. Jo’s was empty and she took that as imagery of simply concentrating on emptiness (shunyata or the simple feeling of being). There were little paper crowns that we all wore that made all look very silly. Jo was the last to take hers off!

I also want to note that the poppers were wrapped paper covered in an archetypal symbol found in all human cultures – the spiral. In Elias’ imagery, it’s the memory tile, or the remembrance of essence. This is his version of “enlightenment.” So it was an appropriate reminder for this time of year when the sun sets low on the horizon in the Northern hemisphere, and the New Year begins, that we begin by contemplating our true nature – The Source that exists in our awareness always already, and now, and now, and now….

Jo did a short reading that focused on our divine nature, love, light, and importance of individuals and community. And we all enjoyed it! We even sang a couple verses of This Little Light of Mine. It was interesting that a group of strangers, I mean Jo and I knew everyone, but Gordon, Ester, and Catherine were all meeting new people last evening, would feel comfortable enough to do these activities. Of course, Kris had set the stage by engaging us to share, with other “strangers” our feelings of self-appreciation!

Dinner and a Dead Guy #45 ~ December 3, 2006

We held our 45th Dinner and a Dead Guy last evening. In Castaic, CA, myself, Joanne, and Rumi the cat. In Wilmington, DE, Ellen, Brian, and Jen. In Toronto, Mark, Serge, Myrna, John, Sylvi, and Joshua. Rounding out the group was Tom in Oahu, HI, Anya in Salt Lake City, UT, Emmy in Spain, and Jim, and Mavis in Calgary. A BIG group!

The session began at 4:47 PM. and Kris opened with some thoughts on allowance, the idea that leaps in awareness and consciousness occur when we simply allow, or get out of our own way.

Kris briefly referred to the Who Are You? sessions and the backpack practice from the very first one, and then opened the floor to questions. This was somewhat unusual as Kris has pretty much used the first segment of the session to deliver material for a long time. But similar to the Elias forum, in time, once the source gives enough material they eventually start to let the group ask questions, even putting people on the spot, to see where they’re at.

Rather than detail the blow by blow, we’ll save that for the transcript, and add some summary thoughts and impressions.

Brian asked about the hypnogoigc state, that state just before we fall into a theta or beta sleep where the outer ego greatly loosens to all sorts of imagery and feeling tones. Interestingly, Kris referred to this as a Bardo, or in-between, state. And suddenly that made great sense to me. I have gotten much better at being able to return from this Bardo with a snapshot of the imagery, and more often than not, it’s surprisingly mundane (of late) and abstract, but dives right into my Dreamer Aspects. So I have been getting a lot of more narrative dream snippets when I rise back into a waking state (usually due to a noise or some similar disturbance, but again, my “dream camera” is taking more snapshots that are getting translated into outer ego memories).

Kris also mentioned that this Bardo, once stabilized (an that’s the rub!) can be used as a launching pad. So early the next morning, after I woke up to pee around 3:30 AM, I did a mantra practice (“now I’m out of body”) to try and catch mySelf falling asleep. The mantra simply focuses awareness in the present as the body/mind drifts back into sleep.  I had three short snippets where I entered the dream state awake, a lucid dream, and tried to focus on the environment. But in each case, it only lasted for several seconds, I couldn’t hold it and fell asleep. Still, I reinforced what Kris said and that Bardo is what you pop out of and into a dreamscape, and if you can maintain awareness, you feel the body dissolve, or else suddenly become aware as attention shifts into the first dream body (thinking of Seth’s three astral forms. But this isn’t a projection form, it’s a dream form, and they’re different).

Joshua asked about spontaneous remission cases as examples of human potentials and Kris’ answer shed some light. He said that at this “stage of development” our belief systems don’t support this en masse. Obviously, some individual cases are reported and treated as miracles (religious belief systems) or anomalies (scientific belief systems). But I was mused on how many folks I’ve seen come into our conscious creation email lists and look for a quick-fix to problems they may have spent years manifesting, all the time not yet understanding how they created their dis-ease in the first place (and I’m not suggesting this was Johsua’s situation, he didn’t really speak enough for me to discern what his interest was).

There was  a break from 5:21 – 5:32 PM.

Break was quiet, and there were a lot of side bar conversations. So Jo and I just kind of relaxed a bit. We were tired from a long week that saw Jo’s 86 year old mom (Esohna) stay with us, Jo’s 49th birthday, getting the house ready for the holidays, and several trips to the airport on Friday and Saturday dealing with canceled flights home.

Still, Brian’s question made me wonder about the Quadrants in Kris’ cosmology (different from Wilber’s, Kris’ are nested “levels” and Ken’s are horizontal perspectives). I wondered how the “primary focus of attention” within any perspective works in Kris’ Quadrants, and more importantly, how we can learn to access them in waking, dreaming, and altered states. I sketched the following in my notebook:

Essentially, the idea is that in Quadrant 1, or physical reality, the “primary attention” is what we’re familiar with in terms of present evolutionary development. But simultaneously, in the Subtle or Quadrant 2 reality, essence (inner self, soul, psyche, oversoul, entity, etc.) is the “primary attention,” so it transcends yet includes all Quadrant 1s (assuming a massively parallel series of Q1s) into its “native focus of attention.”

So relatively speaking, what is Q2 to us is really Q1 or primary to the essence perspective. And so on inwardly toward nondual Source. Therefore, in what we perceive to be Quadrant 3, in the “primary attention” of what Kris calls the cluster level of consciousness, our native focus of attention transcends yet includes what we’d consider Q1 and Q2 as its “primary  focus” (remember in Q3, there is still some form of duality or separation from Source). So relatively speaking, again, what is Q1, Q2, and Q3 to us are all included in the “native focus of attention” (or Q1) at the cluster perspective. I believe Kris uses these distinctions in what we can call species of “primary focus” to discern his Quadrants.

So relatively speaking from that perspective, what we consider Q1, Q2, and Q3 are all included in some BIG-ass “primary focus” at the cluster level. (If your head is spinning, that’s because the Self we’re part of is that BIG!)

Notice that as we move attention toward Quadrant 4, each Quadrant transcends yet includes the more outwardly focused Aspects of All-That-Is.

This diagram also relates back to my earlier musings on the nature of nested, holonic “species” of free will and enlightenment. So that each Quadrant has some kind of form and fullness, or dual and nondual potentials expressed as choice and potentially enlightened awareness.

Moreover, when we talk about who is the “you” who creates 100%, who is 100% Causal, we need to include these relationships for a more complete view of our multidimensional nature.

Finally, notice how the chart simultaneously converges (evolution) and yet radiates out (involution) from  Quadrant 4 or what Kris calls Brahmajyoti (similar to the Dzogchen “clear light”). Well, that’s the impressions I was getting but I didn’t have the energy to bring it up because it is rather esoteric and could require a lot of discussion.

Kris left the building at 6:10 PM. We chatted a bit and said our good nights.

Jo and I had lightly snacked this evening, so this was our first time without any gourmet cooking! We’ll make that up on the next session on December 17th when Jo hosts our annual Seasons of the Soul Solstice celebration.

Dinner and a Dead Guy #44 ~ November 19, 2006

We held our 44th Dinner and a Dead Guy last evening. In Castaic, CA, myself, Joanne, Paul Tews, and Rumi the cat. In a very quiet Wilmington, DE, Ellen, and Jen. In Toronto, Mark, Serge, Myrna, John, Catherine, Dorothy, and Joshua. Rounding out the group was Tom in Oahu, HI, Odette in Quebec, Ella-bella in New Jersey, and Jim, Nicole, and Mevis in Calgary. A BIG group!

Paul (Antolian) was visiting from Seattle, home for the holidays to see family in Santa Clarita. Actually, he has been working there for a year now, and is selling his home here, and settling into his new condo in Seattle. His kitties now live there, so that makes it official in my book. When Paul visits, we usually meet at the best sushi bar in Southern California – Love’s Sushi. But we had to compromise because of this evening’s session. So Paul picked up a sushi tray full of delicious treats: yellowtail, shrimp, ahi, salmon, and albacore sushi, octopus (I don’t eat that, but Joanne loves it), and various cut rolls: spicy tuna, crab, tuna, and goddess knows what else.

We indulged before the session, and washed our meal down with plentiful quantities of heated Gekkeiman saki. So we were in a rather festive mood. We signed onto the conference call around 4:31 PM. and gabbed for a bit.

Kris entered the building at 4:46 PM and did something unusual, he opened with advice for our guest, essence name Antolian, which got his attention right away! Kris mentioned recent changes in Paul’s perspectives and that certain “desires and dreams” were going to take shape in the coming weeks so he should pay more attention to Self and flows of energy. We’ll follow up in the coming weeks and see what transpires.

What makes this exchange humorous is that Paul and Kris share a lifetime in ancient China, ca. 1,400 BCE where they are two curmudgeons who indulge in regular checkers and mahjongg. Paul is known for having bits of rice and who knows what else in his beard, which Kris teases him about. I found a picture in the LA Times that says it all, just have to imagine the beards!

Kris then sequed into the rest of the group and brought up the Who Are you? theme of the past four sessions. He confirmed that it was an ancient question used in the Vedic system, so much so that the individual is NOT considered a human (or mature adult) until they begin to ask these kinds of question. (In other words, it indicates a certain stage of over all development, perhaps even a metric to discern being in this stage from my developmental perspective).

Kris mentioned that certain aspects of the Vedic belief systems were extreme (and I immediately thought of the extreme denial and ascetic approaches the demean the flesh in all cases, and make the goal transcendence and getting out of body as much as possible), but shifting perspectives (i.e. development in Framework 1 terms) is necessary to begin to ask the deeper questions and reflections on our nature.

The intellectual approach is important but not enough. Direct experience is required to make the connection between the concept and their deeper meanings. We need to question the official line of consciousness (a Seth/Jane concept) and move “over the fence” toward the UNofficial line of consciousness. By questioning, our experience becomes the foundation for the new experience of Self (thinking of Elias’ shift and widening awareness).

Kris encouraged us to leave no stone, physical or metaphysical, unturned. All the info we hear or read is just a best attempt, a translation of, but never the experience of be-ing. As such, the last four weeks have been an attempt to directly experience who and what we are, and not just read about it second- and third-hand (I saw this as a call to practice, to embrace direct experience of the concepts through the various Practices and Adventures being given as part of his Avatar Yoga). This way we can begin to experience the vastness of Self (I-I-I or All-That-Is), and those experiences will help awaken us to our own greater potential.

Kris said yet again that doing one practice for 3-5 minutes and not getting instant results (like instant millions, health, soul mates, etc.) means this yoga of his is not to be approached as a magic bullet or quick-fix. We need to take our time, and allow for changes and awakening to take root.

The Who Are You? inquiry practices will set up cascading waves or sequences of awakenings in such a gentle manner that our perception will not only continue to widen but so we continue to grow with new found perspectives. (That’s quite a promise!)

Again, the question has been used as a method of awakening for thousands of years (I was reminded that Ramana Maharshi, one of the great Hindu sages of the 20th century who used this method to push deep into an understanding of ever-present Self). All the world’s great religions use this method of inquiry (or yoga).

The answers we get at the waking level through belief systems and language are only partial (thinking of the postmodern “true but partial” perception of all knowledge). The words can never provide a full definition because they are not the experience of be-ing, of consciousness in its human expression. (This is Kris’ way of reminding us that “the map is not the territory” though we need good, accurate maps!).

Words like soul, source self, inner self, oversoul, essence, entity, and the like are only words that attempt to describe the “much greater action and process” of what we are (as consciousness, sentient beings. I was also reminded that the maps serve a purpose, but as we grow and widen, we eventually leave the maps behind).

Kris made a reference to a theme from last Friday’s Kris Radio (Nov. 17th) show: we experience physical reality to better understand the dynamics of transformations of energy into our personal reality as we answer this question, “Who am I?” Further, this may be the common question between ALL our lifetimes, this is what we, as essence, seek to discover.

He riffed on causality, and I’ll wait for the transcript to comment on those couple of sentences, but he said that space-time itSelf may be the result of these kinds of fundamental questions, and the very motivation for essence to create.

(This hints at what are called “involutionary givens” and “blueprints for reality” – the “intelligent design” that guides all creation in our universe. But this is NOT to be confused with the fundamentalist Christian attempt to use pseudo-science to prove that the Bible is literally true. Ironically, the conscious creation sources promote a version of Intelligent Design that says Eternal Consciousness is directly involved in all physical constructions and evolutionary patterns).

BREAK 5:24 – 5:39 PM.

During break we discussed the opening comments geared towards Paul Tews, and the group from Calgary mentioned that they had heard about the sessions at the recent Elias group in Brattleboro (Ella also attended that event) and through the NWV newsletter. I waxed about “the call to practice” and the transformative potentials that Kris has been exploring all year long. (These are all pieces of his Avatar Yoga that he’s been presenting since the February workshop in the context of the year’s theme of enlightenment through compassion.)

Kris returned and said that we should put all answers aside that we have so far because the “main dish is yet to be served” (and while I don’t want to compare that kind of sentiment to some kind of reward and bliss in a heavenly after-life, I do intuit that there must be continued challenges and rewards to be reaped in this life and well as whatever comes after. So that was a nice carrot to dangle).

Kris then led us through yet another in this series of Practices & Adventures (good title for CD don’t you think? ;-). I can only describe this as being bathed in the light of Source and tuning deeply into our deepest layers of consciousness as a kind of energetic booster, as I felt quite good afterward. I noted that I briefly fell asleep during the practice, but Kris’ voice snapped me right out. Afterward I also noted that this reminded me of the Buddhist metta or lovingkindness practice in which we bath ourSelves and “others as Self” in the light of lovingkindness with wishes for safety, good health, abundance, and effortlessness.

BREAK 6:02 – 6:10 PM.

I was struck by how quiet the group becomes after these practices. Even certain rowdy groups! But I realized last night that it had to do with the power of introspection and Kris’ skill as a hypno-therapist.

Paul Tews talked about Genpo Roshi’s Big Mind practice, an integration of Eastern (Zen) and Western (developmental) psychology, and his sense of the Witness (The One in nondual teachings).

Kris came back and reminded us that there is no single right way to DO these practices. Our own experience is valid and we should not discount it. He then opened the floor for questions.

(I was pondering the Wilber-Combs Lattice, a simple grid that ballparks various types of altered states humans have recorded for thousands of years, but seen through the lens of developmental stages. This can help to situate our interpretations of altered focus as we go forward with these Practices and Adventures, because we interpret based upon the “center of gravity” of our combined intelligences (Aspects). I raise this issue because on the one hand, we very much want to open the door widely and say, “don’t discount ANY of your experiences.” But on the other, we also don’t want someone who believes that they are now Christ, or were told by God herSelf to go kill the Jews or her kids, etc. to claim to be acting from anything other than their overall stage of development.)

(What I like about this matrix is that it acknowledges STATES in relation to STAGES of development. It is very thorough, and includes waking, dreaming, deep dreamless, and nondual [the union of all] STATES, but also shows how STAGES come into play. It helps to explain why a Christian evangelist may encounter what they perceive to be an arch-angel or burning bush in a vision [Mythic], and why a more postmodern person may perceive something more like Oversoul Seven, Cyprus, or Avelokiteshvara [all are One-Made-of-Many]. But the differing perceptions and interpretations will be based upon the belief systems inherent in each stage of development. Mythic beliefs, in this context, are less complex, NOT less valid. But they are less formed, not fully formed. The basic idea is that we get closer to fullness or fully formed perception as we widen awareness. So widening, as Elias defines it, is the same as higher or wider stages of development, which means higher or wider belief systems that can integrate more perspectives, more complexity, more fullness when engaging an altered state.)

(So this was on my mind, but the time was not right to bring it up, as it contains a rather complex set of ideas. But I bring it up here, to share my own internal musings on what Kris was talking about all in the light of my own experiences with the lovingkindness meditation we just did.)

So the floor was opened to questions, and it’s funny when Mark automatically puts the call on mute, and Kris immediately asks him to unmute (he’s just doing his job moderating!). Again, Antolian asked about Witnessing, and Kris went into a Zen hall of mirrors by imagining ourSelves witnessing ourSelves witnessing ourSelves witnessing.

(If THAT doesn’t short-circuit the rational mind right out of the perception, nothing will! But it speaks to getting the intellect, thoughts, and feelings out of the way to get down to that which Simply Is Witnessing all that is arising in our awareness. Further, the litmus test of the Witness is what is constant in our awareness in ALL STATES, waking, dreaming, deep dreamless sleep, meditation, drug induced, other altered-focus. That sense of is-ness permeates ALL STATES. Just THAT is "the Witness," our gateway to The One.

(So what Witnessing practice does is to “push back” in awareness so that we begin to differentiate our thoughts and feelings from the “Thinker of the thought” to the Witness of the Thinker of the thought. At some point, if the mind quiets down enough, there is just Witnessing perception, just is-ness. And this is a direct connection to ourSelves as The One. It’s really simple, and ultimately doesn’t require long treatises, fancy charts, maps, or equations. I simply AM. I AM I. AUM.)

(Interesting, this IS a nondual teaching, but Kris doesn’t sell or teach it in linear terms as the end all point of development, since there never was a beginning! There can be no end to Consciousness. Kris also talks about differentiation and nondifferentiation and has confirmed that there are “species” or relative types of nondual experience all along I-I-I, from focus to essence to primary pyramid gestalts, so it’s not a singular experience anywhere within I-I-I. Kris reminded us that there are many kinds of “essence bodies.” So it is clearer to me that the focus personality is the first physical manifestation in evolutionary terms to be able to hold multiple perspectives. Rocks don’t do it, bacteria, plants, fish, and horses don’t either. Only focuses of essence begin to manifest this ability. This is what Teilhard de Chardin characterized as the noosphere, or the ability for self-reflexive awareness that takes on more and more perspectives, seeking unity with or remembrance of The One.)

Kris closed with a nice ocean metaphor to answer Ella’s question about the nature of essence, saying that from one perspective the ocean is One, and yet from another there are many creatures that live in it, many different kinds of waves, temperatures, consistencies of salt concentration, etc. (We’re BIG!)

Kris left the building at 6:35 PM. and I had a lovely case of after-glow, very mellow, very quiet, very introspective, and enjoyed the playfulness between Paul T. and Kris. Mark asked Kris Antolian’s “essence age,” and he said four cycles. That’s four BIG BANGs worth. That’s old! That’s BIG! We joked about the implications and vastness of it all.

Finally, I mentioned that the next big addition to the NWV website is going to be a Practices section that indexes ALL the Seth, Elias, and Kris practices within a larger framework called Integral Life Practice that provides a menu for cross-training that is tailored by each individual via self-guided practice. The role of community is to share results and compare notes, but the onus is on each person to DO the work and reap the benefits of transformation. Folks were open to explore that and see how it could work.

Paul, Jo, and I chatted over tea and pecan sandies for another couple hours. Good times!

Dinner and a Dead Guy #43 ~ November 5, 2006

We held our 43^rd Dinner and a Dead Guy on Sunday. In Castaic, CA, myself, Joanne, and Rumi the cat. In Wilmington, DE, Ellen, Jen, Brian, and Cathy. In Toronto, Mark, Serge, Myrna, John, Joshua, and Jason. Rounding out the group was Tom in Oahu, HI, Odette in Quebec, Lisa in Eugene, and Ella-bella in New Jersey.

It was Cathy’s BIG six-oh birthday, so the Delaware group was its usual boisterous Self. We signed on around 4:30 PM Pacific time, and chatted, waiting for Ella, and when she arrived, Kris followed shortly thereafter at 4:50 PM.

Kris said that he would continue in the same vein as the previous three “Who Are You?” group sessions. His larger goal (or agenda) was to offer other perspectives and choices about who and what we really are.

We get our stories from other people who strongly influence us (thinking of the power of parental role in passing on social beliefs or memes to the young, and how long it takes to break out of the gravitational hold of those “stories,” roles, conditioning, etc.) The purpose of these recent sessions is to help us “release” the energetic hold these stories have on us, so we can continue to grow (more unblocking imagery).

The previous three sessions (Who Are You? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) make it clearer what we are and are not, in physical terms, in terms of inherited stories (social roles of son, daughter, brother, sister, grandson, grandaughter, etc.). We can use the dungeon practice from Part 3 to help free ourselves from the belief structures surrounding these stories.

We need to stretch our imaginations to grasp that our “personality structure” extends before birth and after death. Human personality is nested within a larger structure (essence, soul, psyche, etc.). Who and what we are is not limited to the physical perceptions of the focus personality (again I was reminded of Elias’ perception wave, one of the ten founational belief systems the collective is currently exploring en masse.)

We play with choices that can lead, IF WE ALLOW, to a much more exapanded vision of who and what we are in this lifetime. The more we explore, experience, and practice the easier it gets to see new choices in our lives and remember our state of essence (I was also reminded of Elias’ remembrance of essence, a similar definition of enlightenment, and Kris’ Avatar Yoga which is a tool to accomplish this in our lifetime, and also the large amount of material that Elias has given regarding choices (focus) and agreements (essence)),).

It sounds simple, and it is! But we make it difficult because we create conflict and opposition instead of allowance.

(I’m reminded of Elias’ effortlessness, and I note the similarity of these themes between both Kris and Elias. We can also throw in Seth’s magical approach and Kris’ recent Internet radio riff on The Magical Power of Choice. Same thing, and when seen through integral “eyes” – the eyes of flesh, mind, and spirit – we realize that there’s a spectrum of this magic that ranges from acorn to saplng to tree. All are magical, but the more mature forms move toward the transegoic, transpersonal, transrational side of perception, the less mature are pregoic, prepersonal, prerational).

The remembrance of essence occurs through allowance (effortlessness, magical approach). As we become more practiced in the art, our perspectives change and become less prone to kneejerk responses (thinking of Elias automatic responses, something at the heart of his info on choices/agreements.) We begin to act more consciously, with greater awareness, purpose (intent), and conscientiousness, which is ALL a natural expression of the remembrance of essence (enlightenment, again, it’s the year of “enlightenment through compassion” in the Kris Chronicles. So Kris has been riffing on this, and related themes all year).

When opposition (conflict) is neutralized we have allowance (effortlessness). It’s a meta-practice, and we can become aware of the choices we made before birth (but this takes practice, and we would get one shortly). We can look at our actions and backtrack to understand the many choices we’ve made in our lives, and further, become aware of the opposition we have set up (this where AAA/NIRAA come into play as a DAILY practice, because this opposition is deeply ingrained in our subconscious minds so as to be mostly invisible in our conscious minds!).

Through noticing we can become aware of the many choices AS WE MAKE THEM during each day. This is a type of contemplative awareness to help bring “kneejerk psychological defense mechanisms” (i.e., invisible beliefs, automatic responses) into our conscious awareness. (I also thought of Buddhist vippasana or insight meditation practices geared to enhanced simple awareness, is-ness, be-ing so as to see more deeply into our subconsciously held core beliefs.)

BREAK at 5:16 PM.
RESUME at 5:30 PM

We were made ready for yet another Practice and Adventure. Kris instructed us to sit upright in a comfortable posture with hands resting on our laps. This was funny because Joanne had melted into the LoveSac with Rumi, and had to get up!

Kris led us through “The Cinema of the Mind,” a tool to help us become aware of the many choices we have made (and like all tricky teachers, his defintion of “we” or “I” includes the essence perspective, so it’s quite BIG!). Kris guided us back to before we were born, and brought us forward bit by bit. I enjoyed seeing my parents and grandparents as youngsters, growing up to be come adult and having their own children. Though I can’t say I had any big epiphany of remembering WHY I choose these parents and grandparents, which Seth, Elias, and Kris are very clear and consistent that “we” do just that. So this Practice and Adventure is another tool to engage the remembrance, another module in the arsenal of Avatar Yoga practices that Kris has been presenting all year.

I spent much of my time coaching the young Paul to have confidence, don’t accept any adult answers as absolute truths, work hard, and go the extra mile in the various childhood scenarios that arose in my awareness during the movie part of the practice.

BREAK at 5:52 PM. (Discussion of what people experienced.)
RESUME at 6:00 PM.

Ella had wondered why she didn’t have any major AHA! and Kris came through saying there is no need to second guess our experiences, there is no single right or wrong way to do these, they take time and practice, and we each are so unique that there are many factors in what we may or may not experience (I realized that this is still a group situation, and my own defenses are still held quite strongly. I usually get deeper results during my private meditations.)

Kris said the point is to develop an awareness of our capacity to choose.

(I came up with a simple equation to express the three basic elements of this session and practice.)

                        OPPOSITION <==> ALLOWANCE
                                          [CHOICES]

The more cognizant we become, the more we remember, the more power we have to create (more perception wave imagery, this deals with the mechanics of perception, which by Elias’ definition is HOW we create our realities). It CAN be this simple!

Ella asked a question about her perception that some people read Seth, Elias, Kris, etc. for years and still have some many challenges, and yet there are those who don’t avail themselves of this information and seem to manifest everything they need. To which Kris responded that some people use conscious creation material to further deny, repress, marginalize (and generally stay arrested I would add) and never get anywhere, because the DON’T DO the work required.

(I also wondered about those people in Ella’s perception who seem to have it all figured out, because in my perception they don’t, and are likely quite unaware of who and what they really are in the terms that Seth, Elias, Kris, and Wilber talk about. Still they may be quite content in their relationships, finances, families, etc. These are important translative elements and are not to be marginalized.)

This game of remembrance requires persistence, some more than others, as we are each so unique. But just doing one or two exercises and expecting a magic bullet is a mistaken notion.

(We NEED some kind of personal practice, something we do every day to some degree, whenever possible. Atheletes don’t perform at peak levels without any training and workouts. They work for years to attain the heights we see, the same is true with piercing the veils of the subconscious mind, bring those invisible belief into awareness and addressing to them, eventually accepting and neutralzing their effect. But this isn’t a one shot deal, you’ve AAAed and that’s all, because we create in the moment, and life conditions are always changing, evolving, regressing, arresting, and transforming. No rest for the weary, sorry! So we must make our practice to include AAAing every day. This is a type of introspection and contemplation, so it doesn’t need to be done more than 5-15 minutes a day, but doing it daily keeps the wheels well oiled, and doors open between conscious and subconscious Aspects as the wheel of samsara spins on).

Kris also coached us to “let go of our perceived failures.” ALLOW, move on, choose something different. (It’s that simple in the long run, incredibly simple.)

Kris closed with challenging us to play with allowing and soar like an eagle, spread those wings and FLY!!

Kris leaves the building at 6:17 PM.

The Delaware group, which had been sipping Tequila this evening (or so they claim ;-), broke out in a chorus of Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle”. Then we all sang Cathy a Happy Birthday, and imagined what her cake tasted like! We chatted a bit, and wished one and all a lovely good evening!

On the Castaic end, we had cheese, crackers, honey mustard and Merlot for hors d’oeuvres. For dinner Jo cooked a potroast, German noodles called spaetzle, creamed spinach, and mushroom gravy. She couldn’t finish her plate, but I devoured mine, and washed it down with a glass of Roibos Iced Tea (red tea). I helped Jo with the dishes, and settled down to watch the rest of the football game between the New England Patriots and Indianapolis Colts (and saw what had to be one of the greatest touchdown catches I’ve ever witnessed by Marvin Harrison in the 3^rd quarter, a virtuostic feat by a kinesthetic genius).

Dinner and a Dead Guy #42 ~ October 22, 2006

(Note: this is a continuation of my session notes that I began began posting in July 2004 on NewWorldView Forums. I recently added three webpages of D&DG notes into the NWV Library.)

We held our 42^ndDinner and a Dead Guy on Sunday. Since Joanne was on a business trip in Orlando, "we" consisted of Rumi and I in Castaic. Also present were Lisa P. in Eugene, OR, Odette in Quebec, Tom C. in Oahu, HI, Anya in Salt Lake, UT, Brain, Ellen, Cathy, and Jen in Wilmington, DE, and Serge, Mark, John, Joshua, and Sylvia in Toronto, ON.

Kris arrived at 4:50 PM and stated the title of the session as "Who Are You? - Part III - Sugar and Spice, Love, Hate and Everything Inbetween." (What was instantly apparent to me was that even though it has been almost three months since I last participated, it felt like an old friend and just picking up where I left off back in July.)

He mentioned that we might need to strap ourselves in for this session (and I just chuckled, as I've been strapped in for the ride since Elias cautioned Jo and I do so when once we decided to move out to Castaic to pursue our interests in the channeling phenomenon.)

Kris used the metaphor of a thimble as a local point of action to describe our limited perception (Jane Roberts used the term "prejudiced perception" in a similar fashion. Ken Wilber uses the term "true but partial" to describe the same thing.)

Kris alluded to our "thimble worldviews" and how we sometimes mistake what we know for understanding IT ALL. He reminded the group of the Rose Colored Glasses session from August, 2005 (who's aftermath was one of the most controversial and interesting Topics on the old NewWorldView forums).

(As a recap, we explored the difference between GREEN and YELLOW worldviews in relation to the July 2005 London bombings. Essentially, unhelathy GREEN goes to extremes with it's love of egalitarian ideals and rights for all, and becomes blind to the pathological nature of terrorism. For example, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." This reflects an extreme form of relativism that causes more harm than good in global terms because it wears "rose colored glasses" that blind it, and serves to promote the very thing it pretends to ignore and rationalize away.)

(So I was strapped in for the session, and reminded of my own "rose colored glasses." Hey, just because my YELLOW can see the performative contradictions of GREEN doesn't mean I have all the answers. But I can now address to the kinds of problems that GREEN worldvies create, thinking of Einstein's quote, "The significant problems we face can never be solved at the level of thinking that created them." So my YELLOW  isn't off the hook, by definition it will, in turn, generate issues and problems that I become blind to unless I develop into TURQUOISE.)

Kris went on to say that Seth, Elias, himself, and others often skim and present their conscious creation ideas to our "thimble worldviews" (meaning that they present information that is often just a little bit ahead of our present stage of development, but refrain from providing more than we can digest).

As such, many people in our conscious creation community read a few words out of the thousands presented (Seth/Jane has over 40 books, the Elias Transcripts and Digests cover over 25,000 pages, Kris Chronicles over 2,500 pages of published material), and think they have it all figured out. (This really applies to all of us. It means that these sources can only present "true but partial glimpses" of any big picture cosmology, and we need to take it all with a grain of salt.)

(I was also struck with the sync that Elias had just given new information the day before in a group session in Brattleboro, VT. The latest wave in consciousness now focuses on the belief system of perception, one of the ten core belief systems according to Elias. So Kris is talking about our perception and putting a proverbial burr under the saddle once again!)

Kris criticized those who reduce everything that Seth, Elias, Kris, and others talk about to "it's all about beliefs." (This implies is that beliefs are NOT 100% causal. They do NOT create 100% of our reality. They are very, very important over all, as Seth pointed out in The Nature of Personal Reality, and all his books, but in and of themselves are only local constructions to Framework 1.)

Yet, many who spout "it's all about beliefs" continue to face challenges, large and small. Kris went even further and stated that some folks speak only to the most surface level aspects of the over all body of conscious creation material (he talked about the whole, not just his material, this in itself is a crucial step forward in my view).

They don't pay attention to the transformative aspects of the material that demand doing the work and penetrating deeply into the subconscious aspects of mind. This is quite prevalent, more so than anyone is willing to publicly express! (And yet he just did that... quite the provocateur this evening!)

He reminded us, yet again, that we must AAA (his variation of Elias' NIRAA) our issues to penetrate into the subconscious layers and aspects of Self.

He also made a distinction between ordinary "adventures and practices" and DEPTH "adventures and practices" (he's been delivering these all year. Recall that it's the "year of enlightenment by compassion" and he began delivering Avatar Yoga at the February 2006 Workshop here in Castaic, CA. So these recent "adventures and practices" are all tools in the toolbox of Avatar Yoga, designed to penetrate into the depths of the subconscious mind, and directly to essence).

Again, "it's all about beliefs" in not the magic bullet many believe it to be. There is a very important kernel of truth ("true but partial," so he's not dismissing it, just redefining it in the context of his Avatar Yoga).

Catch phrases like "the point of power is in the present" (and I'd add "you create your own reality"), and others can indeed be effective when used properly. However, they can and have also been used to actually further marginalize, repress, and deny issues (people say one thing, but actually BELIEVE something else in their subconscious, so they are at cross purposes and wonder why they still have issues and challenges! So people use conscious creation buzzwords to actually perpetuate their issues, and remain fragmented and disconnected from their real subconscious issues. This is basic Western psychology 101 in my view, though Freudian and Jungian lineages don't go very deep into the subconscious as Seth, Elias, and Kris define it.)

(So there are energetic blockages held tightly within the subconscious that need to be brought to the surface, back into objective awareness. This is the purpose of the AAA (and NIRAA) practices. They help to unblock various limiting belief structures that allow the outer ego to continue to grow and transform.)

Kris restated "The present is the interpreter of the past, and the weaver of the future." (A clarification of "the persent in the point of power" since it spells it out! The present is also the point of repression, denial, and marginalization! It's a double-edge sword.)

The Now is a "portal of freedom" (and also a portal of repression!), "a threshold of awakening" (or further forgetting!) to dissolve these energetic blockages. Kris also used a dungeon metaphor (thinking also of Elias' oubliette) to describe the power of these subconscious constructions (also thinking of Elias' shrines).

Kris challenged us to drink from "the cup of freedom," and "get drunk on joy" by addressing to our issues through various adventures and practices.

Break at 5:13 PM. (General discussion on the previous. Anya asked about how long belief work goes on, and I said, "until we die," meaning that it's an ongoing practice that we can benefit from.)

Resume at 5:30 PM.

Kris reminded us that the Seth saying, "the present is the point of power" has been used to suppress and misinterpret things. He used the example that "a clown with a red nose who puts on an orange nose is still a clown." (In other words, the change is superficial, and didn't penetrate into deeper layers of the psyche.)

He then presented three stages of "influence" on our over all development by our parents (which is an interesting way of saying that our parents play a crucial role in co-creating our realities. Reality creation doesn't occur in a vacuum. Our space continuum, to use a Sethian concept, exists nested within other space continuums.)

The fetus begins to "record" all the thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations, etc. of the mother. So this is a crucial aspect of the first stage. There is a deep influence (a dominating influence or co-creation, note that I'm defining differently than Elias' definition of co-creation) of the matriarchal figure in our lives until age 8-10 (I later asked about what if the mother leaves or dies, and he said that the next closest female influence plays this role, e.g., aunt, grandmother, guardian). This influence is not directly causal, but strongly colors our belief systems. (In terms of Wilber's Integral Psychology, this covers five or six of ten general fulcrums of development from fetus to corpse. So the feminine influence is very, very powerful!)

The female influence gives way to the patriarchal, which lasts until age 14-15. Individuation continues into adulthood from there. So there are three very general stages of influences on our worldviews (belief systems). Experiences get buried and forgotten into the subconscious realms of the conscious mind.

Kris challenged us to really pay attention (notice!) to our inner dialogues, not the chatter involving in buying a pair of shoes, or other mundane daily tasks, but those core dialogues. They will reflect the influence of our parental role models. (This is an ongoing adventure and practice as long as we need to address particular issues.)

He also mentioned the hamster wheel here (thinking of Elias' hamster wheel metaphor) where we run and run to the point of exhaustion but don't know why we're not getting anywhere. However, he also pointed out that the hamster wheel has a door - a way to get off! But that jumps requires courage and persistence.

Kris then opened the floor to questions. I asked about, given the nature of families in 2006 in the West, what happens when there are same sex influences (gay and lesbian couples). He said that there would be a "feminine" and "masculine" aspect in ALL cases (so clearly, male and female roles and influences are not limited to biology. So this goes beyond genitalia. It's "transcends yet includes.")

Anya asked a question about some of her practices.

Kris then prepped us for an Adventure & Practice (I should mention here that Serge spent the month of September getting a hypotherapist license, and Kris has clearly taken advantage of this new knowledge and applied it to his Avatar Yoga practices.)

Kris took a good 4-5 minutes to count us down into a relaxed state. He used a Castle to represent our subconscious, and prepared us to enter its many rooms by using a large key. I was struck at this point that an archetypal wise man replete with shoulder-length hair, and royal blue robe presented me with my key. I thanked my inner self for the messenger, and proceeded. I was aware of Kris' voice in the distance at times, and dreaming lightly at times.

Kris brought us out, and I was very relaxed. Rumi, who had been sleeping at my feet for much of the session, had disappeared behind the couch. We had a break and resumed at 6:27 PM. Kris did a post-hypnotic suggestion, lightly counting us down, but not all the way, and suggested we'd remember our experience in the next few days and would also be processing in our dreams.

He was right! My dreams from Monday morning and this morning were vivid, detailed and presented lots of subconscious imagery and issues for my NIRAAing. Kris told us to engage this adventure/practice once or twice a day, and that would produce many benefits, increased awareness of subconscious content, deeper relaxation, deeper intuitiveness, and a sense of increased stability, we'd be less prone to upsets (and this is a metric we can all use to discern progress. What used to be automatic, knee-jerk responses begin to lessen and disappear because the energetic holding (blockage) is released).

Kris "left the building" at 6:37 PM.

We all sang Jen a happy birthday and there was much merriment, cake eating, and celebrating with the Delaware group. After a few minutes of group chatter we all signed off.

Since Jo was away, the menu was a bit on sparse side! Hors d'oeurves included cheese and crackers, and a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon. The main course was a sour dough, peanut butter, and black raspberry jam English Muffin. For dessert: chocolate Rugalah cookies.

A Colorado Rocky Mountain High

Joanne and I just returned from four wonderful, intense, beautiful, and moving days at the Colorado Seth Conference in Winter Park, CO. We left last Wednesday morning, September 20th, from Los Angeles and arrived in Denver in the late afternoon, and the skies were just magnificent, full of storm clouds reaching out in all directions. In the distance were the snow-capped Rocky mountains, our destination, and we headed onwards and upwards, 9,200 feet to beautiful Winter Park!

The scenery was breath-taking, with trees beginning to turn color, marked in contrast to the pines that dominated the mountainsides. As we climbed the progressively winding roads, the temperature dropped into the 40s, the sun set, and as we reached the peaks it began to snow! Being LA natives, we had not seen rain since May, so it was cool to see the snow start up.

We arrived the Iron Horse Resort, just a couple miles outside of Winter Park, and as we entered saw Melinda Walsh, Andy Hauck and Sandra Young at the desk. We walked up behind them and I said, “Boy, they’ll let anyone in this place!” to their pleasant surprise. And so it would begin, reconnecting with old friends, and meeting new ones. The main session was already in process, and Nancy Walker, who’s probably run as many Seth conferences over the years as anyone, was energetically running an ice-breaking activity. I noticed a lot of familiar faces, though it had been over five years since Jo and I had hosted or visited a Seth-gathering of this magnitude.

One thing that stood out was that we were all getting older! There seemed to be only one person who was under forty in the room at that time. I drifted back to our first Seth Network Int’l. conference in 1996, some ten years earlier, and realized that we had all continued our life’s journeys, and wondered how folks were making out. As it would turn out, four of the presenters would discuss life-threatening events that occurred during the previous year. How we apply a conscious creation filter to those events would help others better understand how to apply the concepts themselves.

After the ice-breaker, where we all got name badges and a folder with all kinds of goodies, we were invited to mixer at the Funks, Carol and Jim, who were on the Program Committee. There was all sorts of food, drink, and people. I spoke to George Goodenow, he of pendulums and scrying mirror fame, and half a dozen others including Sheri “mon cher” LoBello, who has been involved in many Seth and Elias gatherings over the years. There was second room, and it had a chocolate fountain! I was in heaven. I met Dawn McKay and her daughter Morgan, whose idea it was to have the fountain, and told her that “it rocked!”

Dawn and Morgan were part of a larger family that attended, three generations including grandparents Wendell and Bunny Thomas, and sister Lorie Thomas. When you look up the words “darling” in the dictionary, there is a picture of this family! After the reception, we literally stumbled towards our room, crawled down a dark, rocky hillside to our rental car, found the parking garage, and dragged our bags and butts upstairs to our room. It was a lovely place with a kitchenette and propane fireplace.

We awoke to a beautiful winter morning! There were about three inches of snow covering everything. Needing some time to rest and reconnoiter we had to miss the morning speakers (sorry Nancy and Helen!). So after breakfast in Winter Park at a lovely place called Carver’s, and a trip to Safeway (there was civilization!), we found our way to the main conference room. There were around sixty or seventy attendees in a cozy room decorated in a jungle theme; the conference theme was “It’s Only Natural: Natural Person, Natural Law and the Nature of Natural Stuff.”

Having run two similar events in 2001, Jo and I could appreciate all the hard work that went into planning and running the event, and we believe it was the BEST conference, next to the two Elimiras (‘97 & ‘99) that we ever attended! It ran flawlessly, and we were made to feel quite at home.

The Thursday afternoon session began with Christopher Johnson speaking about his near-death illness from April 2006. I had known Chris for 6-7 years from various email lists. He had submitted an essay on energy healing that we included in our NWV Library. He, being the son of Harry, the well known Colorado Seth attendee and presenter over the years, was a humorous and articulate speaker. And you have to laugh to avoid crying when you hear Chris’ story about a three week adventure in a UK intensive care unit suffering from long, polysyllabic latin-sounding names for pneumonia and infectious this and that.

It would be the first of four sessions that reflected on life’s vagaries and vicissitudes, and Chris put a lovely spin on it from a conscious creation perspective. It served as a wake-up call, and reminder to appreciate all the little things in his life, his lovely wife Judy, daughters, father, living in the beautiful, British country-side, etc. It also served to remind him that there were abilities he wasn’t using that he would take the leap of faith to try out! That would be his painting.

But, Chris, as EVERY single other presenter, would take responsibility for his creation, not play victim to bacteria or other external forces, and explore his creations and communications from his inner self. It was humbling to see the honesty, humor, and courage Chris brought to what was certainly a scary time for him and his family. At one point, they thought he wouldn’t make it. He was placed in a machine that rocked him gently to keep the lungs clear, something he would have died without.

At the end, we did a group exercise, a Healing Energy Circle that involved relaxed breathing, somatic awareness, sensing chi or prana circuits in our hands, and focusing on any health issues we might have. One person, John Barker, reported that his knee pain had subsided, and two Reiki masters who reported that the group gestalt was remarkably clear. I attribute this to the “seminar effect” which is the group energy that just grows over the four days to incredible levels!

I made a point of introducing myself to Harry Johnson during the break, as he was a familiar name that I associate with the Colorado Seth conferences. Joanne had met him the evening before and got a chance to spend some time with him, and found him to be “just delightful.”

Next, came Helen Stewart, who did a marvelous presentation on Seth’s concepts of natural and artificial guilt and grace from The Nature of Personal Reality. Over the next hour, Helen would bare her heart and soul, and relate her experiences with her mother’s recent death, attending numerous other funerals, and her difficult relationship with her brother, all in the context of personal motivations as seen through guilt and grace. By the end, the room was quiet and spent. Helen managed to penetrate our standard defense mechanisms, allowing us to project our own situations onto hers and explore how Seth’s guilt and grace were involved. I was humbled by Helen’s honestly and inner beauty in sharing what must have been some of the most difficult issues for her to date.

I should also mention that there was a parallel session. While we missed Ron Bryan’s talk on “Co-operation of Populations of Atoms Mimics Co-operation of Populations of Humans,” we heard that it was excellent!

Next came Mary Dillman, she of the “let’s put theory into practice” and “follow our bliss” who moved to be near the Jane Roberts collection in the Sterling Library at Yale University in New Haven, CT some nine years ago. Mary talked about her personal experiences in relation to the Seth material. One story, was about Mary’s demonstration of Seth’s “safe universe” idea of not wearing a seat-belt. One day she got pulled over by a traffic cop, but was only issued a warning, to which, just a minute after driving off, she took off that belt! Needless to say, Mary continues to live in a safe universe and not wear a seat-belt.

Mary also included an interesting story found in the deleted material, something she’s been manually typing into her laptop for almost a decade now. But it was a story of a university professor who wrote to Jane Roberts about his son dying while on vacation and the next year, twenty years of his research going up in flames while also on vacation. Jane was so moved that she called the fellow and spoke with him. She was struck by her feeling that he didn’t care about the lost research, and Seth provided an explanation that involved the fact that since the man’s research had hit a dead end, he needed a face-saving way out of his tenured lifestyle and had influenced the wiring in his house, weakened a connection psychically, to the point that the fire would occur while he was away, and couldn’t be blamed.

Friday dinner consisted of a buffet served in the main hotel lobby. We sat with George Goodenow, Mary Sue Dickerson, Andy Maleta, Sandy Astin, Laura Davis, and Lucy Gillis. I spent most of the time speaking to Andy, whom we hadn’t seen in over five years. We’re both a little grayer, but none the worse for wear.

Simeon Hein was supposed to speak after dinner, but was “missing in action” much to our mutual concern (he would appear Saturday evening, and speak on Sunday about subtle energies, dark energy, superconductivity, etc., in relation to the crop circle phenomenon. I got to speak with him briefly, and I found him to be most interesting).

So Frank Collins, a Seth conference veteran, volunteered to do his presentation a day early, without a final rehearsal. He did a great job talking about “Liberating Your Natural Self, Naturally.” The basic idea was that we really can’t be UNnatural, so what is there to liberate, if it’s not always already present? Frank had a lot of great slides and stories.

Since I was speaking first Friday morning, Jo and I retired early. I had a little trouble falling asleep to our “white noise orchestra” of new kitchen sounds and humidifier. When we woke there was even more snow on the ground!

My talk was based upon “A NewWorldOverView,” an essay found in the Intro section in the NWV website. I included images and music as “innerludes” to balance the left and right brain content. I would talk for 5-7 slides and then relax to a 40-50 second mindscape to allow the ideas seek fertile mental ground. The gist of my talk was to point out that the Sethian community that I’ve participated in over the last ten years, especially online, is weak on factoring in three decades of research on the science of belief systems, and the notion of stages of development (in Framework 1 terms).

I ran out of time before I could get into the integral section, probably the densest and most challenging to this audience. But several audience members request that I finish my talk during the lunch break, so I spent another 50 minutes digging into the integral part for the hardy 25 or so folks who attended.

In general, the biggest challenge in dealing with any stage model is the notion of hierarchy and heterarchy, or “higher and lower levels” nested within “spans of equivalence.” I won’t belabor the point any further except to say that there are many, many different types of hierarchies and heterarchies. The integral matrix allows us to properly situate them, and begin to recognize healthy and pathological forms, particularly in the human domain or noosphere (after Teilhard de Chardin).

Together, hierarchy AND heterarchy are more accurately called holarchy (after Arthur Koestler who coined the term along with holons – meaning whole/parts). Now I didn’t get to talk about ANY of that, as my goal was simply to stir the pot once again (thinking back to my 2001 New Haven presentation of the Seth, Elias Comparative Overview).

The feedback I received was very positive and encouraging, including constructive criticism (Elizabet Sahtouris commented publicly that she disagreed with Ken Wilber and Arthur Koestler’s definitions of holarchy, for example). Others commented that they had a problem with hierarchies or stages, and I simply noted that we needed to further tease out how I’m defining and using those concepts and terms.

Since I had already covered a ton of new ground for the group in general, I didn’t want to push it any further. But the next step in the conversation is to explore the difference between actualization (healthy, natural) and dominator (pathological, artificial) holarchy. For example, in Elizabet Sahtouris’ excellent presentation the next day, she had a great slide on “actualization holarchy” that showed how cells are “transcended yet included” by organs, who in turn are “transcended yet included” in human beings (or focus personalities to use Jane Roberts’s term).

This was my first public presentation of Integral Conscious Creation, the result of almost nine years of research. It was generally well received, and I’m encouraged to continue the work!

I also had the opportunity to speak with Helen Walker, the matriarch of the Colorado Seth lineage, who came up to speak to me after my talk. She’s an ordained minister who’s been teaching Seth classes and organizing conferences since the early 1980s. What a wonderful woman! Also the mother of the unsinkable Nancy Walker! Helen enjoyed my talk, and I, in turn, encouraged her to write up 4-5 pages on her role over the years, as it would make a great addition to our group history and lineage. Helen is now 81 years young, and it’s important to document our roots and make that available for the next generation. There was a ring binder filled with pictures and programs from over the years on display on the back table that we perused with great appreciation.

The next speaker was Andy Maleta. His talk was called “GOOGLEdygook: In Search for What is Not There, Seth in the Times of Virtual Naturalities.” Now that’s a mouthful, but Andy is technologist, film maker, musician, runs a tour company, and goddess only knows what else. He had just come off of six weeks of touring the Himalayas in Tibet, and parts of India. He is from Vienna and manages to straddle Eastern and Western cultures quite naturally (can anyone say ILDA? Appropriately, Andy was wearing a green shirt and sneakers, the color that Elias assign to Ilda intent).

Andy talked about how technology is a tool that can be used for many purposes, and how certain kinds of business models (like Google) serve to limit what’s available. For instance, when you find yourself on a plateau in Tibet, watching a horse encircled by a heavenly rainbow, what is there to search for? Or to use technology for? It’s only a tool, and the ultimate fulfillment always comes from within. So it’s a double-edge because we live in times where various forms of media increasingly bombard us with all sorts of messages. So “Walking the Himalayas” helps to put things in perspective, even when some of his clients were unappreciative of the magnificent Tibetan culture, and yet, Andy also saw the shining Radiance of All-That-Is within them!

Friday morning finished with Melinda Walsh, the lovely Southern Belle, as Carol Funk would introduce her. Melinda talked about her experiences with Hurricane Katrina from a Sethian lens. She would experience the break-up of a relationship and loss of her Baton Rouge home. She used the tale of two pink flamingos as a metaphor for “expect the unexpected” and when it comes, stop the denial, victimhood, whining, and suck it up, get on with life (these are my terms). We were all moved to tears by her tales of volunteers’ altruism.

Melinda’s description of what it’s like to weather a Cat-5 Hurricane was onomatopoetic. Imagine you’re in a house, and there’s 100 baseball pitchers hurling fastballs, 100 fire engines spraying water, and a jet engine cranked up to max for ten hours or so and you get the idea! Like Chris Johnson, she took full responsibility for her creation and co-creations during the event, managed to see the deeper imagery and outcomes still emerging, the changes to New Orleans that needed to be made, and are still in process.

Jo and I had shared a quick lunch with Mary Sue Dickerson and John Mekis at Carvers in Winter Park and raced back to the conference to finish my talk (which is available, along with ALL the others, on CD and DVD from Liz Springer rosita1230(at)msn.com). Afterwards, Jo and I retreated to our room to get some much needed rest (so we missed the afternoon speakers – Shirley Shea, Dick Pandolfo, Pat Butera, and Martha Cady – but heard they were great).

Friday evening we rendezvoused with Chris Johnson to drive to Safeway to pick up some goodies for the Potluck Dinner held in the Funk’s suite. There was snow all around, a chill in the air, and lots of people showed up, and before we knew it, the suite was filled with all sorts of good food, drink, and conversations. It was loud, the joint was rockin’!

After dinner, we listened with rapt attention to Harry Johnson’s marvelous presentation on “What Ever Happened to Ectoplasm?” Harry is 83 years young, and almost always has a smile on. Coming from the UK, he speaks with that English accent that evokes expertise and charm. He presented some of the scientific research, acknowledging the limits of the photographic technology of the late 19th century, done with the mediums of that era. He presented two woman who have been validated as producing ectoplasm without fraud. It appeared as white emissions in the B&W photos he showed, and was said to emanate from the mediums’ bodies in various places. Several scientists put their reputations on the line, and their work is still controversial to this day.

Harry finished this part of the talk with excerpts from The Early Sessions, Vol. 1 in which Rob and Jane held session 11, witnessed by a friend on Jan. 1, 1964. Seth came through quite strongly, and this would turn out to be a pivotal session, because they were so scandalized that they almost quit the sessions right there! But they would decide to continue with a full commitment, once they digested things (as I suspect Seth knew they would). During this session Seth managed to create, in good light, a second hand above Jane’s hand. One that had it’s own consistency (Rob reported it as “waxen, wet, and freshly molded”). When Harry made the connection to ectoplasm, it just blew me away! It showed that there was a connective tissue (ha-ha) between the origins of the Seth phenomenon and the 19th century Spiritualists mediums that preceded. Many wondered why there wasn’t more evidence of ectoplasmic constructions in the channeling the permeates the postmodern era of channeling? That question remains unanswered.

After a short break, Harry held a channeling session where his source – Mill – came through for over an hour. Harry took off his shoes and socks (it was Winter outside, and most were dressed in long pants and sweaters), and sat cross-legged in a cushioned chair up on the dais. He told us to talk amongst ourselves, while he went into trance. While I didn’t time it, based on my experience watching Mary Ennis and Serge Grandbois, it took over a minute for Harry to settle down, step aside, and allow Mill to come through.

Mill doesn’t speak with an affected accent, but sounds similar to Harry’s English accent. He said that sometimes he gives dissertations, but tonight he would open the floor to questions. Wendell opened with a question about the origins of the Lockness monster, to some giggles, and Mill went on to say that it was a hoax perpetrated by a local newspaper in the late 1920s to drum up business. I asked about his views on ectoplasm and he said that the phenomenon was meant to remind those of us in Framework 1 that there is a hidden or source domain from which all constructions emerge. Joanne asked about common focuses during the Egyptian period of the pyramids in relation to her recent reading of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, and Mill focused on her book writing and using her dreams to answer these kinds of questions through her direct experience. Though she is busy with a “day job” he encouraged her to use the mornings to write some notes that will accumulate in book material.

And so it went, people asked personal questions of this sort. Andy Hauck asked about his near-fatal run in with a car last year, and Mill responded that the choice of experience was intended to help reevaluate life’s priorities, and to see things from a radically different perspective to which Andy thanked him. The session ended well after 10PM and it had been another long day! So it was off to dream land serenaded by the white noise orchestra, which at this point was beginning to sound good!

Saturday morning began with the best presentation of the conference by Elizabet Sahtouris, an Evolution Biologist who has a long, storied career. Her talk was titled Shifting Our Probabilities to Match Nature’s, and went over time and no one seemed to care! She is working on a new book called The Hot Age that takes a systems view of Gaia – planet Earth – and how humans have survived at least half a dozen Ice Ages and can find ways to cope with the global warming that various scientists have been cautioning about for decades. While it’s not written for a Seth audience, I would hope that Jane Roberts’s books make the bibliography! Elizabet’s grace, humor, and goddess energies dominated her talk. It inspired many in the room, as our discussions would later reveal, to make choices to make a difference.

Recall my initial impressions on Wednesday evening about the group getting older. Many of us are in our 50s, 60s and 70s and still have vibrant contributions to make, to help pave the way for those who come after us. Elizabet’s talk inspired at least half a dozen people we later encountered to make changes in light of her optimistic view. We wish her continued success and hope she will continue to share her wisdom and knowledge at future Seth conferences!

The next session was an interview with Shina Richardson by Elizabet. Shina is a successful business woman who was speaking for the first time about personal psychic experiences, the kind that a Seth audience won’t blink and eye at, but the mainstream would label as pathology. Essentially, Shina was gifted with a psychic’s sensitivity as a child, and saw and knew things that only awakened inner senses can provide. She learned to mask her abilities, but they gave her insights into her long career in helping people to consciously create in a capitalistic system. By consciously, I mean in a way the focused on cooperative business models, sharing the wealth (abundance/sharing) over competitive models that hoard (scarcity/greed).

We had a great lunch with George Goodenow at another Winter Park eatery called Gasthaus Eichler (with a last name like Helfrich, you know we enjoy a good German restaurant every now and Zen). We talked about developing a “joint venture” based on his work with pendulums, mirrors, and other divination tools with the expanded information we now have from Elias to develop some basic conscious creation tools geared toward a wider audience that take advantage of what we’ve learned over the last thirty years. So stay tuned for developments!

After Saturday lunch, Jo needed to nap, but I want wanted to hear Andy Hauck and Sandy Astin (brother of John Astin, think “Gomez,” and uncle of Sean Astin, think “Sam-Wise Ganges”) continue the theme of near-death encounters. Sandy had a case of rheumatoid arthritis (interesting sync with Jane Roberts), and Andy was hit by a car traveling @40 mph. They both shared their stories and impressions. Common to every Sethian near-death story was a dislike of hospitals and allopathic approaches, though Sandy acknowledged their importance within their limits. Sandy is also into the nondual Eastern sages, and shared several quotes from Nisargadatta, Adyashanti, and Eckhart Tolle that mirrored similar themes in the Seth material. Of course, I loved seeing that kind of bridge-building work! They graciously answered questions from the group, and Andy did two psy-time exercises that relaxed and recharged.

So I joined Jo for a nap after their talk and missed the simultaneous workshops by Laura Davis, Ken Parker (he of the old Sethworks email list), Kerstin Sjoquist, and Marnie Vincolisi. Again, there was lots going on all the time, including two “break rooms” where there were always hot drinks, snacks, and even sandwiches. Volunteers put in a ton of work to keep those going during the four days and are unsung heroes!

Saturday evening, the Funks hosted “leisurely libations,” another great way to network and talk to people that you haven’t gotten to meet yet. Speaking of which, I have yet to mention Jim and Loretta Gilbert, and the amazing behind the scenes job they do in making this event so successful. Unfortunately, Loretta’s mother was quite ill and she had to attend to her care and missed the conference. And Jim, whom we had the pleasure of meeting during our sojourn at The Conference on World Affairs in 2005, was the reason Jo and I were invited to speak this year. He introduced me before my talk and made me sound like a world beater, a tough intro to live up to!

Next came the Saturday evening dinner, raffle, and entertainment. The buffet was delicious, and the raffle is always interesting because after three days of telling small and tall tales of conscious creation, you always wonder at the probabilities involved in who wins and losses. Jo and I maintained our all-conference, total losing streak with Great Perfection. Every couple at our table won something, and one, Betty Barker, was a four time champ! But we had a reputation to uphold, and we did so with customary vigor and stiff upper lip (we were sitting next to Harry and Chris Johnson after all).

As the raffle ended, Nancy Walker, Dawn and Morgan McKay, and Jim Gilbert MC’ed a two hour extravaganza, a take-off on the hit show Survivor, called Thriver – a Sethian version that explored the themes of competition and cooperation with LOTS of humor. Three tribes were called up from the audience: Vold, Zuli, and Ilda (all the families of consciousness that use four letters!) They were put through a series of competitions that winnowed them down from twelve to two.

There was the hysterical pluck the grapes with your mouth and spit them into a bowl, herd balloons with a broom around the tables, charades to various obscure and well known books, movies, and concepts, $64,000 pyramid guess the answer, and a finale that involved blindfolded contestants hand painting a concept to the guesses of all tribe members. The word turned out to be “spontaneity” (which Seth says knows its own order), and no one guessed it, but Zen, what do you expect from blindfolded hand painting clues that weren’t allowed to use letters?

In the end, everyone was a winner and got a prize. It was a fun filled evening, and Jo and I began to say our goodbyes to those who remained, because we had to leave in the morning. We talked with old and new friends until 11PM serenaded by Linda McAllister and Edee Gail who were jamming on guitars. I still am waiting to share a beer or a “stiffy” (that’s an alcoholic beverage, mind you!) with Chris Johnson, and will likely have to travel to the UK one of these days to fulfill that goal!

We packed in the morning, had breakfast at Carvers (we were addicted), and began our drive home from Winter Park. We estimate that there was around 8-12 inches of snow that had fallen since Wednesday evening. Earlier, we had joked with Mary Sue and John that the Helfrich’s bring snow to Colorado, as our last visit to the The Conference on World Affairs had ended with a freak 30 inch snow storm in April, 2005.

But the ride out of Winter Park was lovely, as the sun was now shining and the view was awesome! As we went through the pass we saw people skiing at the peak. The descent was surreal, snow gradually giving way to Autumnal browns, greens, and golds. The altitude slowly reduced as we headed toward the mile-high airport. We caught our flight home, and once we arrived back in LA, where it was in the 80s. Our brains began to recall what it was like to have full amounts of oxygen again.

The drive was literally into the sunset. As we descended into our Santa Clarita Valley we were greeted by “clouds” on the northwest horizon that told us that the “Day Fire” continued to burn (as it has been for three weeks). We decided to stop at our favorite sushi place – Love’s – for dinner. Ironically, as we sipped sake and ate, there was a beer commercial on the widescreen TV, a Coors ad to boot. There was one shot of a mountain peak, full of snow, that we had just seen that morning!

That snow-capped volcanic rim that was so fresh in our experience glimmered across the screen. It seemed like the whole trip was like that, full of syncs, imagery, and wonderful energy. We reminisced at how wonderful it was to spend four days with birds of a feather. But now, it was time to return to our every day lives. We arrived home and were greeted by two very appreciative kitties.

Now that we’re safely back home, Jo and I are getting back into our routines with fond memories and deep appreciation of those who made this event possible. Many thanks to one and all, and we hope to see you in Colorado again! If you are EVER in doubt about attending one of these gatherings, it is well worth the effort. Just GO!