Integrating Your Mystic Ally

This month we have focused on helping you to tune into the perspectives and Vision of your MYSTIC Archetype Ally. All of us have this aspect, this ‘energy of the unconscious’ that is available to us always, so long as we listen for and accept Its input.

The Twelve primary Archetype persona forms are most helpful to us when they are consciously enlisted to serve the Self and especially when they are allowed to form an integrated Council.

I like to call this your Ensemble Cast of Mythic Archetype Allies, similar to Dorothy’s cast of Tin Man (Shadow Lover)/ Cowardly Lion (Shadow Warrior)/ Scarecrow (Shadow Teacher)/ Glinda (Mystic)/ and Toto (Animus) in the Wizard of OZ. Once these cast members work together in harmony, they come into their greatest Strengths and together they successfully rescue the Self from its imprisonment within the Shadow Descender’s (Witch’s) castle, dissolving the negative energy of the Descender altogether as the Integrated Self (Dorothy) assimilates that energy as a positive Strength and ultimately; well, you know the Story (it is yours too): She GOES HOME as a mature, well integrated “Total Self System” (my phrase). I figure after all of this, Toto is going to be okay. Dorothy has the Heart, Mind, and Courage fully self-realized to manage the intrusive neighbor and to assure Toto will not bother the neighbor’s garden any more.

images from pixabay.com

Imagine a large, Round Table, reminiscent of King Arthur’s table at Camelot. There are thirteen seats around the table, for The Twelve primordial Archetype Allies, and the Self. Place an issue on the Table in some form (a request or an inquiry about a situation about which you would like a “concerted” input from your Inner Council). Imagine (listen to inwardly) or write out the conversation wherein various of your Ensemble Council members contribute their perspective or advice.  Take note of all suggestions received. Allow the Council to discuss the situation from all angles, among themselves and with You. Consider this input deeply; it may carry unconscious Truth beyond your conscious mind’s tendencies to conceptualize.  Express GRATITUDE to each and All for their input and constant Presence.

                                                                                Artist   Idealist   Nourisher    Self      Lover   Teacher  Elder-Leader

                                                                                             

                                                                              Warrior   Mystic     Descender   Communicator   Healer  Golden-Child

A Mystic Message for You

image from pixabay.com

Your inner Mystic archetype Ally has a clear message for you. Allow It to impart this message in the following two mediums:

1)Imagine you have just finished a wonderful Asian buffet dinner. The waiter has brought you two fortune cookies at the end of your meal. You will recognize that the first message relates to your present life and the second forecasts a desirable future condition that you can realize.

Open them here (allow your Mystic consciousness to fill in the words):

(You can print out this blog then use the fortune cookie shapes and heart shapes below as templates to write, draw or paste images.) 

2) After reading your fortune cookie messages, please take them to Heart. In the Heart space below, place your own words or images to communicate to your Mystic Ally how you will manifest the future condition S/he has forecasted for you. 

It is vitally important that you work IN TANDEM (like a bicycle-built-for-Two) with your Mystic Ally, so that your Inner perceptions and intentions can be effectively, powerfully in alignment with your Outer capabilities and Action.

I welcome your insights and stories!

Live Your Dream, Now!

 

The through-line and credo for the Life Maps Process which I share as a life coaching tool and have prepared in book form hopefully being circulated right now or soon by my agent is “Live Your Dream, Now!”

For Your Reflections:

What Live Your Dream, Now! means is that you do NOT have to wait for anyone or anything in order to begin living the life of your Dream! How? You can identify the VALUES you wish to be expressing in your Dream-Come-True future scenario, and start NOW to live by those values.

For example, some of the values I intend to be integrating daily Now in relation to my active post-retirement scenario include:

• Patience
• Greater forbearance of differences (no conflict or need to ‘prove’ anything to anyone, ever)
• Appreciation of life as separate from an institutionalized career (e.g. freedom from Academe, enjoyment of Nature and of basic human experience)

What do you hope to be experiencing as you live into your future Life Dream? How can you begin to practice and enjoy those kinds of experiences already?

• time for daily walks in Nature
• daily contemplations and journaling
• reading more
• writing daily
• offering life mapping services, workshops, seminars
• travel, near and far
• more time to share with family and friends

What is ONE THING you could be doing now or in the foreseeable near future that could help to propel you INTO the realization of your Life Dream?

• Create brochures that offer services
• Merge web sites to make static one more active
• Podcast

Plant the Seeds:

Here’s a creative tool you can use to establish a clear INTENTION and VISION of the positive Life Dream or some aspect of that which you can begin NOW to manifest simply by focussing and anchoring your Mystic attention.

CREATE AN IMAGE BOARD

An image board can be a collage of images or simply a white poster board with some central images placed on it that display the life of your dreams.You can IMAGE your “dream home” or “dream environment,” or  clearly represent any VALUE that you aim to be living NOW so as to bring this value with you into Living Your Dream.

Place your Image Board somewhere you will see it daily. You could place it where you do your daily meditations or contemplations or yoga, or some place that evokes for you a sense of transformation and emergence!

I welcome your insights and stories!

What Does Your Mystic Predict?

Although by general rule I don’t seek out fortune tellers—preferring to draw upon my own inner Mystic Ally, as I invite you also to consult—I do know quite unequivocally that seership or fortune telling can be quite accurate and valid. I know this from my own prophetic dreams but also because of an event that occurred 22 years ago.

In 1993 I completed my PhD at Arizona State University. That February or so, two job announcements came to my attention that appeared relevant to my preparation, one in Colorado Springs, Colorado and the other at the University of Texas at Austin.  I applied to both and I was put on short lists for them both. The first to invite me to interview was in Colorado. I interviewed over a three day period, from a Tuesday through a Thursday, enjoying the interview process and feeling quite good about the potential fit with my background and teaching experience.

That very Saturday, for the first time ever, I went with a friend for a lark to a Renaissance Festival in Phoenix, Arizona.  Not far into the theme park I saw a booth for a Palm Reader named Madame Carolyn. Because my Great-Great Aunt Bessie, whom I had cherished growing up, had read palms and was somewhat of a gypsy, I figured this would be fun. Neither myself nor the friend I was with, please remember, had ever even met this woman before this moment.

The very first words out of Mme. Carolyn’s mouth to me were:

“You’re going to get the job.”

Well, that surely caught my attention after I had just been interviewing that last week. Her next words were even more ‘telling’:

“And you’re going to work in one of the other two places where I do Renaissance Fairs: either Colorado Springs, Colorado, or Austin, Texas.”

Zowie! The next week I received the job offer in Colorado Springs and I began teaching that August and have been there ever since. Every summer too, of course, I continue to visit Mme. Carolyn at the Colorado Renaissance Festival in Larkspur, Colorado (about 20 minutes from my home). Over the years she has foretold equally astounding potentials. I have learned that what she is able to do with me is to see positive potentials. Then it is up to me whether or not to act on those potentials and bring them about.

Forecasting and engaging in your own creative future envisioning can be a very helpful tool. In the Life Mapping Process which I share with people and will provide in my upcoming book, Your Life Path, I provide several “Future Casting” techniques to help you to envision, plan for, and manifest your Life Dream. The motto of this approach to Life Mapping is:

Live Your Dream, Now!

But first you need to tune into what your current Life Dream IS. It may morph and transform as you work with this Dream image, but wherever you are at Now is an excellent point at which to sit at the ‘dock of the bay’, as it were, and cast your line or net into the waters.

images from pixabay.com

Close your eyes and call upon your own Mystic Archetype Ally.  Ask him/her to foretell for you  where you will  be/ what you will be doing five years from now (or more or less depending upon what it is you are hoping to fulfill in this time frame), with your most positive Life Dream potentials achieved.

You can engage with your Inner Mystic in active imagination (contemplation) or by writing a back-and-forth dialogue with your Mystic. You could use an artistic approach to sketch or draw an image of your Life Dream fulfilled. Or you could make a collage of magazine pictures or computer images to represent your Dream.

I invite you to share with us all here your insights and results!

A Mystic Better Ending

Some stories have better endings as their theme. Transformational storylines in general are often of this nature: faced with dire adversity and challenged to the depths, a protagonist overcomes  their own inherent flaws to triumph for the better interests of all concerned.

The Arthurian legend is of this nature, even though King Arthur himself is killed in battle at the end of the saga. Yet, he has triumphed in his very effort to rekindle knightly chivalry in a context of surrounding chicanery. The Roundtable itself symbolizes a Mystic ideal of shared heroic camaraderie and courage to offset and overcome the forces of Darkness or selfish greed.

Arthur’s own mentor, of course, is the Mystic Wizard Merlin, who has tutored Arthur from childhood to use his intuitive understanding, his Heart, in becoming the greatest, fairest Leader he can be. Camelot represents something like a Shangri La utopian Kingdom set in a practical feudalistic society.

Arthur overcomes internal adversity in mastering the duality presented by his beloved Guenevere and his similarly beloved Lancelot finding each other in kismet despite their deep respect for and loyalty to Arthur. This situation challenges King Arthur to the core. He must oust Lancelot and pass sentence on his Queen because that is the law of the land to which he is bound by his own chivalrous nature. Various accounts hint at Arthur’s inward forgiveness and acceptance of the star-crossed lovers despite his necessary actions in the human realm.

I believe the resolution of the story of Arthur highlights the depths and heights—the duality–of the human condition. We are each of us Soul, having a human experience, yet our nature is of divine love as eternal, in-dwelling Soul. Our Outer lives often call for action that our Inner natures resolve better, deeper than may be possible to realize or to express directly. As such, we learn our lessons and unfold,/ moving on to continue to face ourselves and set new goals. Relationships ‘end,’ yet if they have fulfilled their purpose, then moving on is for the better interests of all concerned.

images from pixabay.com

The Mystic archetype is that part of each of us that can embrace duality or paradox and achieve what Jung calls the Mysterium Conjunctionus: the Sacred Marriage of Opposite natures, united as One. This is an INNER marriage, of Spirit/Self with Body/Emotion/Mind.  This is the Better-est Ending of all, Always.

On a Clear Day…The Future is NOW

We are exploring the MYSTIC Archetype throughout this month of March.  The Mystic, including your own unconscious persona Mystic archetype Ally within what I refer to as your Ensemble Cast of Mythic Archetype Allies, is capable of serving as a Seer, able to foresee future potentials and probabilities.

Time is an illusion, as spiritual teachers and more recently modern physicists have emphasized. I have always found a paradox in the spiritual invocation to “Live only in the Present Moment; all exists only Now!” and the notion that NOWNESS in this spiritual sense is not coterminous with the Present tense such as is imaginally constructed in English or other Indo-European languages and cultures.

Spiritual sciences (e.g. Eckankar, my own path of forty plus years) speak of the “spacetime continuum,” as would Einstein, who recognized the inseparability of time-space values.  Physicist Brian Green, in THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE, has demonstrated that the Present on Earth may be Past or Future to some alien being within our own galaxy but on a distant planet (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/fabric-of-cosmos.html). Physicists including Green have also recently claimed that the Future sends information to the Present (or past, backwards in ‘time’) just as we also “look back” on the timetrack when we apply our faculties of memory and reflection.

Future prospection is a very appealing notion to me. We use it whenever we anticipate or wonder about or even ‘daydream’ about “the Future.” So, folks, I invite you to wrap your thoughts around this newsflash:

THE  FUTURE  IS  NOW!

Where/when you place the spotlight of your aware attention is Here-Now! The Present moment is a bubble of awareness along the spacetime-track of your conscious attention, like the floating air bubble in a leveling tool. Now consider that you can shift your attention along this track as easily as you might tilt the leveling tool, to focus on a past or future scenario.

You do need to be open to this possibility; to accept your own capacity to perceive a wider spectrum of the spacetime continuum.  I have had definite prophetic dreams which later manifested very directly as perceived in the dream, and I often revisit past moments in contemplative inner journeys.  As I prepare for retiring in a little over two years, I often imagine my future scenario living near a lake in Western New York.

What many call “daydreaming” is a great tool for future prospection. It s so simple: close your outer eyes, open your inner awareness, and Be-Here-Now!

images gratefully from pixabay.com

For example:  In a future within my expanded NOW awareness, I see the mist of the Falls (Niagara Falls) downriver from where Sophie (my dog) and I are standing on the Four Sisters Islands, just upstream from the mighty cascade. It is a Spring day, one of the first since the snow has melted from the winter season. It is around 3 PM on a weekday, with only a few cars parked behind us in the parking area behind the footbridge we have crossed to be here. In this future outlook I recall a distant past of visiting near this same spot but from a different vantage point as a teenager. Some things have changed.  The mist rising from the Falls appears a little closer; can that be in forty years or is that a function of changes in my own perception? The city is much more built up all around, though the tourist sites are much as I remember and the traffic feels as busy but less chaotic. My thoughts now are thoughts of a big move to come; am I making the right choices? Will I meet new friends after I move? I do not wish to be a burden on my sister’s circle of relations, as she has a well-established family of her own friends from her forty years of living where she is. I am looking for a sign as I sit by the rushing waters, Sophie safely on a tie out within reach.  A leaf floats into a little pool formed by a cluster of rounded rocks at the edge of the island. It hovers within this little pool, as if lodged in a suspended animation of placid calm in the midst of the greater turbulence just outside this little enclave. That is my sign then! (“And I shall have some peace there; for peace comes dropping slow…” [W.B. Yeats, Lake Isle of Innisfree])

******   ******

Please use this yourself! It is simple and profound. Just close your outer eyes, open your inner awareness, and shift your attention to Be-Here-Now!

I invite and always welcome your Comments, Insights and Stories.

 

 

Find the Gold, Bring It Forth

In the opening post this month it came through that the Mystic archetype is that which is able to “find the Gold and bring it up” to the surface of your awareness. This is a part of you that sees through surfaces to what lies beneath; that perceives the true and the good—or their opposites—despite outer appearances. Such a valuable Ally!

It is important to pay attention to this Seer side of you. How can you tune in when your “inner tuition” is trying to alert you or draw your attention to something your conscious mind might be denying or blind to? You must be willing to connect with this ‘deep’ facet of your awareness in order to follow its promptings or to accept and acknowledge its truths.

People are often afraid of their own Mystic potentials.  Perhaps it will reveal to you something you would rather ignore, like the actual state of a relationship or even an opportunity for significant change that will require that you take a step forward in a direction you may not yet feel ready to take.

So remember to pause, to ask, to LISTEN to what your Mystic Guide wants you to realize or understand. It may appear to you in a DREAM manifestation, as a Dream Guide or an elder Wizard or Teacher. Keep a dream journal and write in it often, then also review your dream entries on a regular basis to reflect on patterns and themes showing up in your unconscious dream promptings. Then once you acknowledge and understand your inner guidance, contemplate how you can ACT. I would encourage you to act in tandem with your inner Mystic, to allow it to guide your actions forward. It will lead you  according to your deepest sense of truth and value, so it is unlikely to ever steer you wrong.

images from pixabay.com

I welcome your insights and stories!

Mystical March

March corresponds with the MYSTIC Archetype according to the Avalon Archetype Institute pantheon of the Twelve primordial Archetypes developed by Dr. Charles and Nin Bebeau and Debra Breazzano (MS/LPT).

All twelve of the primary archetypes of the unconscious dwell within us all, with some being more or less dominant and more or less in Strength or in Shadow mode.

Archetypes appear both in the culturescapes around us—in literature, film and historical accounts, e.g.–and in role models within our own sphere of social relations. Archetypes are also internalized and part of our own psychic makeup, embedded as energies within our unconscious matrix of role identities and persona attitudes or perspectives.

What is YOUR Mystic persona ‘about’?  This month I’ll provide examples and techniques for connecting with and for integrating your MYSTIC Archetype Ally with the rest of your Archetypal Ally Assembly.

Let’s start then with a very clear popular MYSTIC Archetype image, Dumbledore from the Harry Potter saga.

Dumbledore represents the classic Magi archetype. A bona fide Wizard, Dumbledore mentors young Harry Potter to develop his own Mystic potentials. As the universal-collective Mystic form, Dumbledore’s powers of awareness span from the Below to the Above; he can go into the depths to retrieve the Gold and bring it to the surface or he can ascend for higher awareness.  He is also a Shapeshifter, able to duel with the evil Voldemort via a Protean battle, constantly transforming and adapting his defense to counter any evil cast against him.

Of course there are also feminine forms of the Mystic, as with any of the Twelve.  Minerva McGonagall plays this part well in J.K.Rowling’s saga, and it is she who assumes the role of Headmistress once Dumbledore has stepped Beyond, engaging in her own Protean battle in the final segment of the tale.

  

images are from pixabay.com

So, who is the Mystic? Who is it in YOU?

I invite you to call upon your Mystic Archetype part-of-Self this month, and to integrate Him/Her with your conscious pantheon as your Ally.