Postulates Guide Our Footsteps

This month as I am focusing this site on how understanding and working with the  Elder Leader archetype can help us to achieve our better endings, I find myself thinking more than usually about how the Elder Leader archetype manifests in the world and in my own consciousness. This morning I awoke thinking about this in relation to the idea of POSTULATES and how these orient and direct our actions.

On the level of common human experience it hardly matters what any of our belief systems might be. Atheist, existentialist, agnostic, or theist, we all make our way through life applying conceptual frameworks of one sort or another and operating as if this framework is naturally so.

When I was in my teens into early adulthood, I read a lot of Albert Camus and other existentialists (Nietsche, Beckett, Sartre, Kierkegaard) and at the time this shaped my perceptions and guided my actions considerably. If there is no absolute purpose or meaning to life, I felt then, with Camus I accepted great personal responsibility for the creative unfolding of my little lifetime. “To live and to create in the midst of the Desert” became a creed for me to follow.

Now of course, not all existentialists (or atheists or agnostics) accept this same credo of creative engagement as an answer to the relative or potential meaninglessness of existence.  There is wide latitude with this spectrum of outlooks. Some find life to be quite stark; Camus opens his book of essays The Myth of Sisyphus with the line: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” (http://users.humboldt.edu/jwpowell/sisyphus.htm). How a person answers such monumental questions, based on whatever considerations they allow “in” from influential factors and in response to life conditions, shapes their outlook on life and their capacity to act in accordance with postulates they might thereby forge.

Ethics follow from the postulates we hold. The new Star Wars movie (Episode VII) dramatizes quite well differences that may result from holding nihilistic as versus spiritualistic or theist outlooks as true. Genocide, selfish greed and egotism flow from the “Dark side” of the life force; camaraderie and reliance on inner awareness and harmonious synergy determines action from being grounded in the more positive, life affirming “Light side.”  Consider though, that these are not equal in the outcomes they inspire, at all. Spoiler alert: Kylo Ren (the newest villain, grandson to Darth Vader) kills his own father from even a playful, evil glee; with no apparent remorse whatsoever. And this is not just scifi fiction (wish that it were!); such outlooks on life and such behaviors permeate our collective realities daily in this age of mass murders and political and so-called religious terrorist plots aiming to draw attention to extreme violence perpetrated against strangers or even family.

For the past forty-two years in my life I have adopted more of a theistic/spiritual outlook, and I find this frames my postulates about life and informs my attitudes and behavior quite differently from my earlier existentialist viewpoint. I still get Camus’ or other non-spiritualistic postulates to live life as NOT under the constant purview of Church or God or congregational fervor or communal judgementalism, but not all spiritualistic postulates require this either.  On the other hand I value deeply the sense of holistic interconnectedness with Life Itself—with nature and Cosmos and Spirit inflecting through all! I enjoy the camaraderie of synchronicity and the acceptance and deeply felt sense of the Sacredness of each and every form and inflection of the life force, as noncorporeal Spirit and as embodied Soul. From this vantage point I accept and welcome supra-dimensional at-one-ment with nonphysical and physical agencies that help me consider my every step in life, though it remains my responsibility to set my postulates and frame my ethics and to live accordingly.

Unconditional love becomes (for me) a primary postulate from this spiritualistic outlook.

images are from pixabay.com

What I am saying is that each of us develops—among and interactively with other archetypal persona traits—our own Elder Leader faculties that help us forge and express our postulates day by day and that inform and can shape or allow our behavior. We get to choose—we must choose—what sorts of archetypal forms we accept and enact of ourselves—i.e. Strength or Shadow Elder Leader formations. Hence we are responsible for the postulates that guide our footsteps, and for the consequences that flow from these.

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I always welcome your insights and stories.

Wellness Affirmations

A principle of Better Endings that can facilitate this week’s topic of Health & Wellness is Affirmation or setting positive postulates. Most of us are familiar with the use of affirmations to frame our goals according to a positive mindset. One approach to using positive affirmations is called the “fifteen times” technique. You write a very positive statement that expresses the successful realization of a goal, writing that statement fifteen times daily. In relation to health and healing, for example, I might write 15x:

I am exercising weekly and eating fewer processed foods. (a behavioral affirmation)

Or perhaps:

I am mindful of all that I permit into my mind and body. (an awareness raising affirmation)

You can use this method to orient yourself to establishing values or behaviors you desire to integrate more fully into your consciousness.

As a cultural anthropologist I have learned about many fascinating cultural approaches to manifesting health and wellness, many of which employ practices that are similar to setting positive affirmations. The Hopi, for instance, attribute any mental or physical manifestation of illness or disorder as an indication that one is holding self-limiting or negative thoughts.  A medicine person might ask a person then to change their thoughts about themselves to positive, more healthy images or postulates. The individual must learn to “manifest” a positive state of health rather than a negative one. According to Don Talayesva as cited in Sun Chief , this is a capacity and a responsibility of the individual, to express hopi (harmonious) rather than kahopi (inharmonious) thought patterns and behaviors. While the medicine man might also practice ritual means of reinforcing positive postulates to help the individual to reorient to a healthy pattern, it is within the capacity of the individual to accomplish their own improvement of outlook.

Repeating positive Affirmations, whether 15x or in some other manner, is a matter of establishing a habit of thought or behavior that might replace other thought or behavior habits that no longer serve you.

It is important, however, to be kind to yourself. Practice acts of kindness with yourself, always. Fill your heart with unconditional love for yourself as well as allowing that love and consideration to flow through you to others and to your environment.

If you hold yourself in high esteem and give humbly of yourself to all of life, how can you be other than in harmony with life affirming, healthful realities? Illnesses or conditions need not impair your Wellness, and positive wellness affirmations—though they may not of themselves accomplish immediate or sufficient “healing” of such conditions—certainly will do “no harm” and may help you to manifest qualities and achieve relationships you might otherwise overlook by remaining ‘caught’ in the lair of negative postulates.

You deserve to SHINE, to Manifest Better Endings, Now and Always!

 

Countering Self-Limiting Beliefs with Better Endings (“Riddikulous!”)

This week we can apply the principle of Better Endings to transforming self-limiting beliefs and personal myths. What are those beliefs that hold you back from Living Your Dream, Now? Are there any personal myths, or restrictive postulates, that you carry in your mindset about yourself, others, or the world/universe?

Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist–many of whose ideas my life mapping approach is operationalizing for everyday heroes–refers to self-limiting postulates as your “Dragons.” To slay (or, tame) your Dragon means in Campbell’s terms that you must identify and confront your limiting beliefs to conquer their illusional hold on your potentials so you can become all that you care to be, do all that you dare to do, express all that you ARE.

I’m a big Harry Potter fan. Dispelling limiting self-talk and negative beliefs reminds me of Remus Lupin‘s lesson to Hogwarts students where they confront “Bogarts” representing  their deepest fears and they counter their force by focusing on positive thoughts and saying, “Riddikulous!” Isn’t that exactly what we are talking about this week? Our limiting beliefs are only mental constructs; think powerfully happy thoughts to dispel their oppressive energy. They have no power greater than your own force of positive affirmation or intention.

A Samuel Taylor Coleridge poetry shard has lodged in me since college days:

Like one that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

 And having once turned round, moves on,

And turns no more his head,

because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.

If he turns around (I always remembered the pronoun as feminine until checking sources today), well along down the road, will the dragon-fiend still be there? Applying the Law of Assumption, the monster is no longer there so long as you do not bring it with you; so long as you stop running from it.

Of course, there are deep, shadowy, real tormentors and dire conditions that will not go away just by wishing they might. All conditions have their purpose and if they persist, there are good reasons for their presence in one’s life. Better Endings is not about being Polyannish or wearing rose colored denial glasses. Still, how we respond matters. That’s why Rowling’s “Riddikulous!” resonates for me as such a marvelous, profound ‘spell’. Try it on the worst of scenarios and, like Mary Poppins‘ spoonful of sugar, some light can return that might illuminate an opportunity to grow, to learn, to laugh at our fears and to unfold in awareness. So with that, we cannot lose, see?

As eternal Soul, made of spirit substance or the indestructible, vital life energy of the universe (however we call it), we are greater than any physical or emotional circumstance and we are lighter than any ‘heavy object’ that might attempt to weigh us down or hold us back from manifesting all that we are, the I AM, that you ARE.

Related articles

• Being the Hero of your own Myth (southwarkorganising.wordpress.com)
• How do we overcome our fear? We expose the stuff we fear to scrutiny. (eagleman6788.wordpress.com)