Daily Miracles

For this final post about our monthly theme of Spirituality as a Life Theme, I’d like to express gratitude for those daily miracles that happened just two days ago and indicated to me the ever-present protection and guidance of Spirit.

I drove to New Jersey then took a subway train to Manhattan for lunch with my wonderful, excellent literary agent (pinch!), then back again in time to give my dog Sophie her dinner and insulin. All day I noticed the miraculous workings of this tandem relationship with Spirit.

Once while driving I was nearly in what would have been a terrible accident. I pulled into the left lane but a car was already there, in my blind spot! For a dangerous, long moment we shared the same lane. I was able to fold back unto the right lane just a fragment of time before the worst would have occurred. It felt like there was a force field separating our two vehicles just to the perfect degree to allow us to adjust and correct the situation.

At the subway station in Journal Square, Jersey City, I had only a short time left to reach Manhattan in time for my meeting, and all of the spaces in the parking structure were taken. I drove around three times and came to the realization I would need to exit the parking garage and try my luck outside in the mayhem of the over-crowded street parking, which would make it nearly impossible to stay on schedule. Instead, as I was ruefully leaving the parking structure, just one parking space, just wide enough for my car to fit into, miraculously appeared. I had been driving around hoping for someone to leave, and no one had left, I was sure!

Once in New York, hailing a cab was no ordeal at all; both going to and returning from the restaurant across from Central Park a taxi pulled over immediately.

Lunch went splendidly as always with this amazing, brilliant soul who sees and inspires the value of my writing. She gave good advice and guidance about promoting my new book, Your Life Path (see right panel or click here to order), telling me I need to promote the book in every blog post (😊). We also talked about my next book which is in progress.

images are from pixabay.com

Then the return trip was smooth, bringing me home—thanks to the excellent voice guidance of Siri on my phone—just in time for my Sophie to receive her meal and insulin in a timely manner. Once while I was booking it homeward a squirrel found itself in my lane and s/he literally high-tailed it—now I understand that phrase. Its tail fluffed high as it scooted quickly out of danger, so quickly that it looked like a gentle hand of Spirit must have cupped it from behind and given a needed push! Usually squirrels tend to slow down when confused in such a situation, so again I was grateful for the intervention.

So, home safely, I was reminded of the quote I was going to be posting as the full post today. It is about the subtle nature of Spirit or the Universe, the Force; whatever you choose to know It as. Paul Twitchell wrote that Spirit is:

“…that thread, so fine as to be invisible yet so strong as to be unbreakable, that binds together all beings in all planes, and beyond time into eternity.”

I welcome YOUR Story and Comments!

Pass It On!

Here is a quick activity: Think of one mentor who has taught you a valuable lesson. What was that lesson?

Second, how have you sought to impart that lesson to others? What has been the result?

My quick response:  “Patience is a virtue.” (from Diane) I aim to teach this to my students, especially advanced students working on research projects or thesis papers. I have seen many of these students take some great strides. For myself, I use this principle daily, now in yet another book editing romp.

images are from pixabay.com

I am amazed daily at the miraculous interweaving and orchestration of Life.

“Love is all, and do as thou wilt.”

(Stranger By the River, by Paul Twitchell)

Cross the Threshold to Your Greatest Adventure

The greatest adventure is living life fully in the NOW (see “Alternate Futurescapes” recent post). Now then, the NOW is not necessarily but does include the Present of time-space. NOWness as well includes your own Past and Future lived and liveable experience (as arrays of possibilities) and the total range of possibility arcs in this lifetime, in parallel (e.g. ‘past or future lives’) and in the mulitiverse at large! Have I blown your mind yet? What the heck am I suggesting here? Yes, that You, as a Soul divinely gifted with a capacity for perception and vision–i.e., your creative, active imagination, not just your mental memory banks or existing synaptic networks–are free to explore, examine, and create forms from formless substances; you as Soul are indeed a Creator of and in your own worlds.

So, I encourage you to exercise your innate freedom of consciousness! You needn’t hesitate to daydream, and pay attention to your nighttime revelations as well as to those waking dreams that bring a message to you in the moment. If you were to lock your keys in your car, for example, how might that be a waking dream for you? Maybe it is telling you to pay closer attention, or not to close yourself out of a potential vehicle for moving forward. Take that job offer, for instance, when this sort of waking dream symbol occurs.

images are from pixabay.com

Crossing the threshold to your Greatest Adventure signifies living your life to its fullest potentials, Now, and Now too, and also NOW! In this sense the nature of your life event may be less important than how you experience, frame or respond to it.

Life is transitory: its constructs of imagery, form and emotions ebb and flow as your consciousness focuses or directs your attention (or else as we react, based on former constructions; so, far better the former).

So now, take heed and celebrate every blessed moment, not only in this lifetime you are creating but in the Wholeness of Life Itself.  The mystic sages tell us, and I do believe, that in the most ultimate awareness of truth, Life of Itself is only LOVE.

Love (or, Spirit) is: “…that thread, so fine as to be invisible, yet so strong as to be unbreakable — which binds together all beings in all the worlds of God, in all universes, throughout all time, and beyond time into eternity.” (Paul Twitchell, The Shariyat-Ki-SUGMAD, Book 1).

I enjoy and welcome your Comments. I also invite you to send your own stories on these themes that I will post or reblog with a byline for you, by sending them to my email at lwatts@uccs.edu.

Be a Magnet of Love, for Love to Show the Way

For October we are conjoining the archetype of the Lover with the postulate, Live Your Dream, Now. With love all things are possible. This is especially true of unconditional love, the sort that the Divine or the Creator or Grand Designer–however we relate to that principle in our own lives–has for Its creation.

Here is a favorite passage of mine about love, from Stranger by the River, by Paul Twitchell:

“Speak to me of love, O Master!”

…” Love is not a matter of belief. It is a matter of demonstration. It is not a question of authority, but one of perception and action.

“The requirements of growth demand that you exert the greatest degree of love for what is perfectly in accord with Soul. Our highest happiness will best be attained through our understanding of, and conscious cooperation with, the divine law.

“It is love that imparts vitality to our minds and hearts and enables it to germinate. The law of love will bring to you all necessity for your spiritual growth and maturity.

“Therefore, if you desire love, try to realize that the only way to get love is by giving love. That the more you give, the more you get; and the only way in which you can give is to fill yourself with it, until you become a magnet for love.

“God love has for its goal the creation of the highest form, and you must know that the individual love is likewise forever attempting to express itself in form, and to give Soul the highest architecture of spiritual attainment.”

 

 

 

Re-Member Your Golden Child

I initially misread my own weekly topics agenda for this past month. The Golden Child archetype is associated with Leo, yes, but really this Leonine Ally is more associated in the Avalon Archetype Institute framework which I am utilizing here with August rather than July. The NOURISHER (or, Nurturer as I prefer) archetype is more directly connected with July Cancerian energy. (Being a late June Cancerian myself, I can verify this!) Still, it has worked rather well to pair the Golden Child Ally with our monthly postulate of Life is a Bowl of Cherries! So, I guess there was a method in the madness of Synchronicity!

Before leaving this ‘conjunction’ of Golden Child archetype with the Bowl of Cherries postulate, I want to encourage you as you proceed forth from here to “re-member” your inner Golden Child as an Archetype Ally persona.  Re-membering (I got this from a spiritual passage long ago from ECK Master Paul Twitchell) means to put back together again or to reassemble elements of the Self into a new, holistic, synergistic Whole.

GOLDEN CHILD is a strong, vital, generally outgoing and, at its best, a charismatic persona as a member of your archetypal ensemble. All of the members of your inner Council or Assembly or Cast of archetype character allies remain in the background of your conscious awareness once you have integrated them through identification and active dialogue. They remain available to be enlisted and may choose on their own as well to ‘step up’ in any given situation.  Dorothy, when leaving OZ to return to Kansas (or to ‘Conscious’, as  Jean Houston has aptly noted in her book THE WIZARD OF US) knew that her archetypal Allies of Tin Man, Scarecrow and (no longer a cowardly) Lion would remain available as mature  energies within her own Self long after her dream adventures in the Land of OZ. So too, you have accessible within you all twelve of the universal Archetype persona figures that comprise the architecture of human role-based consciousness which this year’s monthly blog themes are presenting.

After identifying and exploring any archetypal facet of your Self, it is helpful to “ground” your connection and awareness of this internalized figure with a Symbol: an active TOTEM that will remind you of your treasured Ally. Carl Jung used the artistic vehicle of a Mandala to center and totemically ground his own archetypally integrated parts of Self. After engaging in “active imagination” episodes with his unconscious archetypal persona enrergies to the degree of achieving an integral awareness of their purpose and role in his life, Jung would paint (see his original RED BOOK/ Liber Novus) a mandala picture symbolically representing the archetypal awareness or persona in the Center, with meaningful images and/ or words surrounding the central figure to depict qualities, lessons or insights he connected perceptually with this persona aspect.

I invite you to compose a Mandala picture that represents your own GOLDEN CHILD part of Self along with qualities s/he brings forth within your integrated Self.

An easy method for composing a mantra—unless you prefer to exercise your artistic talent ‘by hand’ with any artistic medium you choose, which I encourage!—is to select online graphic images such as clip-art icons and simply cut and paste them into a basic circle shape.  Let the central image represent yourself as the Golden Child persona, and place other images artistically around this central image to represent qualities you associate with this Ally in your life.

 Place your mandala somewhere where you will remember its significance of representing your own Golden Child qualities. This archetype is one that sometimes is hidden or subdued in a culture that values humility over self-assertion. Yet it is a vital energy which in a balanced form empowers us to pursue and to claim our talents in service to life.

Open Mike

So are you clear about what I mean when referring to your own Archetype Allies? These are your at least partly submerged or unconscious “parts of Self” that compose aspects or facets (like alternative “faces”) of your personality. As a cultural anthropologist I would say that you develop some archetypal potentials rather than others as you acquire ROLE IDENTITIES.  For example, in romantic relationships you may develop your LOVER archetypal potentials; as a doctor you may draw upon the HEALER archetype; or as a writer you are likely to express the universal archetypal potentials of a COMMUNICATOR.

Still in all, while everyone has the potential for expression of all twelve of the universal or primordial classes of Archetypal Persona forms (see the wheel below, based on Dr. Charles and Nin Bebeau of the Avalon Archetype Institute), most of us will express some of these as dominant modes versus others, and the form of expression will vary based on your situational experience and other personality factors.

An approach I work with a lot myself and encourage through coaching via the Life Maps Process that I will be presenting in the upcoming book, Life Paths, is a technique I call Archetype Dialogue practice. One stage of this process I call “Open Mike.” To get to know some of your archetypal dispositions or members of your “ensemble cast of Archetypal characters,” you can simply contemplate upon a topic that is meaningful to you, perhaps a question involving an upcoming decision or a possible transition in your life, or a goal.  “Sink into a reverie” sort of state; that is, allow yourself to “descend” to a subconscious awareness level, and invite your archetypal subselves to speak out in their distinctive voices or from various of your own dynamically complex points of view or attitudes.

You can also invite any one of your archetypal allies to step up to the “open mike” about a topic of relevance to its specific outlook. Since we are closing this month’s focus on the COMMUNICATOR archetype in association with the metaphor of Life is Heeding the Call to Realize Your Dream, I invite you to call upon your unconscious COMMUNICATOR persona one more time. Invite the COMMUNICATOR aspect of your Self to speak up about a topic relating to your own Life Dream or a significant GOAL. You can engage your COMMUNICATOR inwardly via active imagination and then record your experience in your journal or as a story, or you can directly transcribe a dialogue with your COMMUNICATOR in a dialogic writing mode.

Allow me to briefly exemplify from the perspective of calling forth my own COMMUNICATOR persona:

LW:  So are you there, Communicator? What shall I call you?

C: Call me what you wish, I do suppose. I am quite adaptible, after all. How do you wish for me to express myself Now?

LW: In your Writer mode, I guess, for Open Mike.

C: About what topic, then?

LW: The upcoming meeting with our Agent.

C: But of course.  I would emphasize how important it is for us to be clear with her and to LISTEN VERY WELL. Communication is a two-way street, and this is a rare, golden opportunity for you and for all of us, to Listen and to Learn.

LW: I hope this meeting can result in the project going forward, the proposal being sent out soon.

C: Yes, but please do let the Moment reveal its own potentials. Trust in Spirit; have faith in your inner as well as your outer guidance to reveal what is needed of us next as stewards of the book’s most effective emergence into publication.

LW: The faith of the mustard seed, do you mean?

C: Or of the Acorn, as we have talked about previously with our MYSTIC Ally.

LW: So, why the Acorn?

C: Acorn has within its seed nature the capacity to grow into a mighty Oak, its roots descending deeply into the nurturant Mother Earth while its branches reach far upwards toward the Heavens.

LW: You took that metaphor from Stranger by the River by Paul Twitchell.

C: Indeed, yes I did! But I added the Seed metaphor, as you have been thinking about how the life mapping Tools are also seeds.

LW: Beautiful! Okay then, together here we go…

C: We are Multiple, yet together we are One!

******   ******

I welcome YOUR insights and stories!

(As I am traveling, my next post for this site will be on Tuesday to begin our new monthly cycle.

P.S.: The meeting went well !!!)

One for All, All for One

We are in each others’ lives for very good reasons; there are no accidents for Spirit interweaves the Whole with a natural delicacy that is exacting, being formed by laws of physics as Laws of Life.

Today I read in Facebook a story about callous humor toward Native Americans in an upcoming Westerner spoof movie with Adam Sandler. Several Native American actors walked off the set in response to raw stereotypes and immature, ugly humor.

Let us stand up for one another. The code word is RESPECT. What goes around comes around, and it must come FULL CIRCLE in order for respect to be genuine, reciprocal and True.

At 60 I have reached a point in this lifetime where I am less interested in dramatics and attachments of any form. Petty squabbles between persons fall like pebbles on the shore, as Yeats once wrote, “under the receding wave.” Who needs them, really?

I begin to see so much of what goes on in this life as being like billiard balls aimed to knock against one another.  I would myself rather be a Watcher, and stay apart from the Arena.

So how does this relate to the topic, One for All, All for One? By expressing an article of wisdom: Let Go and Let God.  My puny thought or opinion, or that of any other, hardly matters in the bigger scheme of Life Itself unfolding from day to day, Moment by Moment. All that really matters is Love: genuine, unattached, unopinionated. Love rolls on, or as a saying goes (by Paul Twitchell in Stranger by the River):

LOVE IS ALL,

AND DO AS THOU WILT.