Article Highlights:

• Were lives before this really you?
• What else might be true?
• Pondering the true nature of the universe

Dear fellow journeyer through space, time and dimension,

The previous article was about karma and we can’t really discuss karma without considering past lives, can we?  Much of the time we associate karma with deeds and happenings of the past – the distant past, the past’s past – in a time before this time, this life In past lives.

In this article, I’m going to question another sacred spiritual cow: past lives. It’s about time, it’s about the right time, I think, to question what we mean by past lives.  Let’s ask what they are and if they’re really… well… real.

Why is it especially timely? For one thing we are starting to engage with certain new ideas such as timelines instead of past lives, and multiple timelines, and jumping timelines, and the simultaneity of time, and the fact that there is no past really and….

Well, you get the idea and may also glimpse some of the conundrums now sitting like so many elephants in the room.  It starts to feel like past lives might need an upgrade in our understanding.

Let’s poke at this with a stick and see if it squirms a little. When I return for another life some“time” down the road, will I remember being this me? No. Is it likely I’ll be much like me? No. Will I have the same personality?  No.  The same life, astrological makeup, sex, circumstances, career, partner, children? Not all. Will I think the same, react the same, care about the same things?   Not likely.

Now let me put the proverbial wrench in the works here.  Is it really me then?  Or is there another way to think of it? If so, how? The Hawaiians – and many other indigenous cultures as well – didn’t have the concept of past lives. They have the concept of the ancestors.

We have the concept of ancestors too but for us they aren’t the same as past lives because past lives were “mine.” Mine. We can feel a little possessive about our past lives, can’t we? For better or worse they were mine. And we do love to identify and past lives gives us ever-so-much more to identify with, don’t they?

In part we like this idea because past lives are comforting. This isn’t our only chance, we all get lots of go-arounds.  Plus there are so many us’s to be fascinated with. Cool. The problem with that is it’s based on old idea about being not good enough and how we might go to the bad place and therefore need lots of chances to get right.

However, lets go back to the Hawaiians and see if they’re really missing anything after all.  To us, our ancestors are decidedly not us.  Ancestors means something different to us than to many Indigenous.  They thank source and Mother Earth for giving life and thank the ancestors for making us who we are too.  They don’t thank themselves of the past.  They have a very interesting and profound ancestral understanding.

In the book, Bowl of Light, by anthropologist and shaman, Hank Wesselman, he tells of Kahuna Hale Makua giving one of the reasons such detailed lineage is/was kept by Hawaiians.  It was to recognize, for example, if a child began to show signs of sharing many traits in common with great great great uncle so and so who was a powerful healer but went over to the dark side.  The child would be watched carefully and if it became clear there was this overlay they would be taken to the sacred healing ground and worked with carefully to protect them from this ancestral inheritance.

The same might be understood if a warrior had a wound that wouldn’t heal… they would look back in his lineage for the ancestor from whom this might originate and start the healing there.  We call that past life influence.  They call it ancestral relationships.  Could they be the same thing?

So by that reasoning, the problematic overlay isn’t from “me,” per se, in my previous lifetime.  It’s great, great, great uncle so and so’s unfinished business.  And his “akashic” intensities are bleeding through for various reasons within a very complex field of human energetics.  And they knew how to recognize and work with that.  It’s Uncle’s energetic “karma” coming up for healing resolution in the child.  Not the child’s. 

I think the implications of this train of thought are very interesting.  It might be time to understand that at the level of the individual we have this one life as this specific “us.” This one precious life with it’s very specific opportunities.  

Switching now to the language of the new age, at the level of the soul, we are All One.  At the level of the individual we are only one.  A piece of the Soul breaks off and comes to earth.  Is it exactly the same piece that came before? No.  It’s a new life construction.  It contains, however, many complex weaves or threads, energetic connections etc. from within the group soul, including what Uncle was. (more…)

Article Highlights:

• What’s karma, really?
• Religious hangover
• Easy way to resolve it

You can read about my newest session here. Or scroll to the end of this article for a brief description of all the sessions I offer.

What is karma? We bandy the word about all the time, and if we stop to really hear what we’re saying we might notice it often has a tone of justice, judgment, retribution, repayment. I think it might be time to question that. What IS karma?

Do we even know what we’re talking about? Or have old programs and ideas, borrowed from here and there over time, created a less conscious glop of beliefs that we are parroting in an uninformed way?

When we say karma sometimes we are joking or using it in a light context. Good parking karma, for instance. But when we use it in a more serious or real application it’s often in the context of energy causing us problems in the present that comes from wrong-doing in the past. Karmic debt. A preposterous idea, if you ask me.

God=Love and when has the loving god ever worked in terms of debt and punishment? Never. That idea comes right out of the human minds of every ashram we’ve know. It comes through a system of caste and prejudice. And it also has roots in every monastery, nunnery, and punitive hell-fire and punishment religious system we’ve experienced through time. Including now. And it’s wrong. It carries the wrong tone and emphasis.

I always had an unusual inner spiritual life, but my outer expression was religious when younger. In the early 1980’s, however – having recently left my childhood religion and set foot on a spiritual-not-religious path – I asked Wisdom, “What is this karma thing I keep reading about?” A simple answer was given.

Karma is unresolved intensities of feelings and experiences.

It’s instructive just how simple that answer is. One way to recognize the truth of core spiritual principles is to look for simplicity. Complexity is the tendency of human minds. Rules, punishments, long philosophical arguments about definition – these are the human ideas grafted onto core Wisdom. In this instance, we have judgment and punishment grafted onto the core principle of karma.

Later, I asked for more about karma and was given the following:

Karma involves unresolved intensities moving toward balance.

Another simple concept was added to my understanding. At the basis of things is the fact that life is always moving toward balance. Whether at the most cosmic and purely energetic level or at the level of human behavior. That’s the nature of all creation. So karma is about coming into balance. It’s not about punishment, it’s about balance.

Some years later I asked Wisdom to elaborate on karma a bit. Though the reply contained a few added words, the answer was still simple.

Karma is impressions of experience that did not process freely.

To the first two ideas, is added the thought that karma is unprocessed impressions of experience. One’s own impressions or the impressions of others. Very interesting. Karma isn’t the acts or the experiences themselves… but the impressions one carries forward regarding an experience, event or act… those carried on in a way that prevented things from processing freely.

Game changer. Really. Don’t you think? What it points to is that one might experience something truly intense but what makes it karmic is that it didn’t process freely. Not that it happened, but that it didn’t process freely. It points to healing in way we can all immediately recognized in the workings of our own lives.

Intense experiences happen in the flow of life’s river. And the river flows on carrying that experience downstream. Perceptions of that experience are things we pluck out of the river to carry with us instead of letting them go on downstream freely. They can become burdensome and heavy in our backpacks, interfering with life. But in the river they flow beyond us.

One of the first things to note here is that karma isn’t weights and measures. It’s not wrong-doing and right-setting. Not punishment and justice. It’s just unprocessed energy… specifically unprocessed impressions of what something was or should have been. And it’s showing up for resolution, to bring balance. Things we chose to pluck out of the river to keep in our possession. That’s what karma is and how its accumulated.

So when we think, “wow, that person (or I) must have really done something bad because look at what’s happening now as karmic repayment,” we are grafting old religious ideas onto a more pure spiritual energetic principle.

We would be a lot more accurate (to say nothing of compassionate) to say “There is something trying to come back to balance.” Or, “That looks like an opportunity to process something intense so it can freely flow now. We could send a prayer into that, or a kind word.

It completely removes those old religious hangovers about deserving what is happening. It frees us from feeling we did something wrong, or that someone else must have. It frees us from the hopeless task of repairing a past that is gone. We can just let the held energy begin to move, the energy that lingered for lack of free processing. It can complete now.

Most important, it frees us from the story. The story isn’t the problem. It’s my lingering perceptions about the story. And they are causing energy to be held up rather than processing freely. I can pinpoint and understand those perceptions and let them flow, process and release.

I can process them now so they become part of the river’s flow or I can pluck them up and carry them forward. Becoming aware of them and releasing them to the river is what lets them complete and not become karmic. (more…)

Article Highlights:

• Love’s problem
• Love’s secret
• Love’s surrender

You can read about my newest session here.  Or scroll to the end of this article for a brief description of all the sessions I offer.  

Dear One,

Valentine’s Day is soon and our thoughts circle around love since it’s a day we focus on love.  Whether on this day or any other, whether we focus on loving another or loving ourselves, there’s a problem regarding love.  

Love’s problem is one we cannot overcome – at least not the way we generally go about it.  The problem with love is we can never fully and finally achieve it as long as we are loving 3D.

3D love is something we need to do – love as an action verb. So we try to do it, we keep trying to love ourselves and others, we keep trying and hoping to be loved.

As long as we approach it in 3D, we’ll sometimes do better at this and other times fall short. We’ll sometimes have success, feeling love for ourselves or another, but then we or they will shift or tilt, love will be disturbed – and so it goes.

3D = duality and that’s the way duality is – it’s the constant movement between the two opposites of a matter.  In this case, between love and not love, between feeling it and not feeling it, having or not having it.

Duality is an exploration.  Thus, we can only keep trying, seeking, wanting, learning, failing, achieving.  You have seen this in your own life.  You may achieve more love, learning to hold closer to the “desirable” side of the opposites, but it is never fully stable.  It makes you wonder finally, “What is the secret to love?”

Here is the secret of love:
Love is not something to do,
it is not something to give or receive.  
Love is not something to have.
Love is what you are.

We think of love as a feeling.  It can express through feeling, through emotion, but Love is not the feeling, it’s not the emotion – those are just conduits.  Love also is not a state we must try to achieve. 

Love is not a feeling,
Love is not a thing.  
Love is what we are.

I cannot fulfill my desire to be loved or my desire to love myself until I realize the Love I Am.  When I relinquish my 3D way of perceiving love, when I am ready to end my tireless explorations of the vast territory between love/not love, then something more is possible.  I can realize all I am.

The task is neither to search for love nor hope and pray for love.
The task is to surrender to what we already are.
The world over, this is what is meant by
The surrender to Love

Leaving the duality – releasing myself from that journey – I can fall deep into the Love that I am.  In the surrender to Love, my world changes profoundly.  For if I am Love, I can only see with the eyes of Love.  

Jesus – a master of love – did not heal by seeing the world of pain and responding to it with compassion. He didn’t weep for people, he rejoiced in them, seeing them only as Love and Light they truly are. He was Love realized.  Therefore he was the eyes of Love, the heart of Love, the hands of Love.  It was the absoluteness of Love that healed others.

This is a profound thing. The mind rebels with ego’s conundrums and questions, with past experience and learned programs, but that is all 3D.  Surrender to Love, the truth of what you are, and this falls away.

The opportunity of Love
is to live in surrender to what you are.
Are you ready for The Surrender to Love?

The longing for Love rises continuously and strongly from your Soul.  It is calling you.  What to?  It’s not just calling you to a moment of love, or a partner for love.  It’s a longing that’s calling you home to who you really are, home to Love.

You came from Love,
you return to Love
without ever leaving Love at all
For Love is what you are. (more…)