~ writing from Costa Rica, along the Caribbean coastline, one month in a liminal zone of maximal metamorphosising… metamorphosing? Whatever, you know what I mean… and if you don’t you are about to…
I have recently been on a personal spiritual journey of sorts. To say the least: truly, I am watching my life change before my eyes. The person I thought I was all along — a kind, humorous, creative, bombastic soul that houses desires and fears worth endeavoring for or against, that nigh forgotten Dream of being someone worth being — has manifested before me. Within me. Not ‘again.’ Perhaps for the first time. All the while, the shadowed out, extremely *conditioned*, half-hearted life I had been living recently starts to fade away, hardly worth remembering the minutia of its currency or content or passing…
Yeah. For real.
No, I haven’t “figured my life out.” (bleh, never that. Wtf does that even mean!)
But, destiny has been something on my mind.
“Everything happens for a reason!”
You are exactly where you are supposed to be.
There is no such thing as a coincidence…
Due to the beautiful people and wondrous spaces I’ve been congregating amongst and interacting within over the past month, my perspective has altered on such a concept as destiny.
- I have stared into flames (a small campfire, some candles arranged in the shape of a heart),
- spoken with mystic beings (embodied women and men with a defined purpose and conscientious will to make it a reality),
- and learned unconsciously from the myriad, abundant flows of Gaia all about me (spent a lot of time in nature, among plants and animals, and on the beach, where all the elements meet).
I have been in contact with both the Pacific and the Atlantic; it was quite a month for me.
More details aside, know this: there was no grand mystic secret that allowed for such revelations and transformations. Mostly just people acting as medicine. Timely and with a full commitment to the experience on my end, employing maximum effort x rather effortlessly, the journey has been like a dream that I don’t want to wake up from. A few key souls, companions on the journey alongside me, have been pivotal, warming my heart fully, making me feel eager to be alive, to explore further and farther with them…
https://lexihicks.pixieset.com/kevinfinal/
All of these beautiful persons, all of the silent beatitudes of the world around me, my every transient instinct in the face of an existence that will forever feel sublimely unfathomable to me — were aligned in this one madly spiritual respect:
EVERYTHING does happen for a reason.
You ARE exactly where you are supposed to be.
Destiny is REAL.
The Universe is conspiring to make your dreams come true.
Surrendering, repeatedly, to the moments as they landed, I listened and learned. I let my rational mind go. Presence. Pure consciousness. People. In this place, in all these spaces, these were my focuses. Not facts or physics or concepts or history, or philosophy or fantasia, all the places that my mind retreats to when things get ambiguous or tedious, out of my control, out of my comfort zone, or just, you know… silly.
Before the power of the moon, and my moon sign {Pisces!}, and the prospective reality of psychic remote viewing, aligning my Chakras and becoming aware of the energy grids leylining our world, embracing coincidences-as-not and the truth of planetary alignments aiding in the design of human souls… I surrendered completely and took it ALL in.
And then, as was inevitable, eventually, I let my rational mind return.
And yet! Altogether, for many different reasons, I am now altered, existentially-speaking, on reasons, causes, purposes, and our “being”ness, and the Universe as perhaps more than something merely logical or overtly absurd. A new thesis — gathered through the above experiences, alongside a few documentaries, my deep-dive, accelerated readings of a mystical novel, an article about the layers of consciousness, and a unifying, new age astrological system, joined with my innate humanistic tendencies — summons itself within me like an ancient daemon roaring out the depths of an interdimensional pocket, beyond this time and space, possessing me with one dose…
I am here now, standing before the ocean, gaze unaverted, listening to her song.
For the last month, it truly felt like it was me vs. The Universe. And the following written reflection on the page is the result from such experiences within me coming out to manifest themselves into my reality.
{believe me, for me as much as you…}
Let me try to explain.
Better yet — Let’s fucking go. ~
My quintet of recent teachers:
~ Consciousness is no game. But sometimes it can feel that way.
After all, our perception is our reality, not actual Reality. Nearly as much as our material conditions, it is our mindset that often determines the content of our future. Language and communication, our consciousness’ great tool, is also a weapon, a double-edged sword — we can become what we speak aloud, living by agreements we make, for good or ill, with our own souls. Self-fulfilling prophecies happen all the time, i.e. people give up! Or self-destruct… Self-mastery via meditation, the strange power of belief, “Blue Zones,” the old man that unselfconsciously lets Jah safely watch over his little journey to and from church, or the grocer, or his weekly poker game with old friends, in a car that should be junked, in a body long past its original expiration, lives to be a century old…
All that is what we call “reality”.
However, both knowledge and awareness are equivocal.
One’s reality might be another’s illusion.
We all live inside our own fantasies.
Our consciousness, through our will, is capable of some beautiful things. (And some equally terrifying things…)
The truth, obvious or not, is that we humans are special beings, of meat x mind, in a strange and spiritual world, housing mysteries in ourselves as we explore the myriad ones about us. And not everything always makes sense. Logic and rationalism and science may develop our society; yet, forever we are beings dominated by our emotions: 😊😭😲🤬😱🤢😤
I see two major throughlines to all such phenomena surrounding our consciousness, our emotions, our … little humanly improbable impossibilities:
1) Thinking and 2) Speaking.
Even if the phenoms they effectuate may escape measurement or cannot stand up to the rigors of the scientific method enough to evoke definition, whether physical or psychological in nature, there is immense power in how we think and speak. About the world, about each other, about ourselves. These extraordinary phenomena, only a few described above, are the effects and factors and possibilities for *conscious* beings like us. Both thinking and speaking deal with communication, our evolutionary masterstroke as human beings; and unlike our complex and ever-changing emotional capacities, how we think and speak are much more under our direct, conscious control {though not always…}
What are you thinking about every day?
What do you usually talk about?
What is your life like?
Consider the links between these three.
To some extent, we do simply become what we think and speak about. There are ways in which our consciousness, our immaterial, inner cognitions within — or — our verbal words aloud, instantly enter the folds of our material reality to change it. For better or worse, our perceptions for how we view ourselves, our past, present and future > change our mindset > which changes our actions > which changes our environment, our loved ones’ perceptions, our entire lives. Through our mind and our speech — and, importantly, our intentions — for ourselves and those around us, the world changes around us. And within us. You begin to see how the process is recursive, self-perpetuating, like a snowball…
It does not matter how smart or beautiful, how lucky or wealthy or talented, someone is — if they cannot cultivate their mind toward thinking and speaking on what they want, then they will never get what they want.
Spend enough time in the world, talk to enough people, read enough stories, and you cannot help but see these things as real, these sentiments as true. Maybe not universal, but true enough to be possible. For you or me. For anyone.
Integrally, how we think and speak about our lives plays — quite crucially — into how we end up.
In I Am Not Your Guru (2016), Tony Robbins’ giant booming voice screams out “Your life can change in a moment!”
Is he wrong?
In watching him perform and seeing the people at his events transform, it only ever happens the one way: communication, to Self and Other. Thinking and speaking.
Robbins explains how a “10-year life change” doesn’t really take 10 years; that change took 1 moment, that maybe *had* to be built up over those years. But the true moment of change — that decision — happened in a single moment.
Ram Dass and Timothy Leary, the original American psychonauts of the 1960s, in Dying To Know (2014) speak of birth-to-death LIFE as a totalizing spiritual quest, one that we are continually asked to lead toward light or darkness, harboring knowledge and passion for the undertaking alongside others throughout — or not. It is up to us.
They, each in their own way, proclaim that it is entirely up to us what we devote our lives to thinking and speaking on. As an addendum to their view, they characterize psychedelics like mushrooms and LSD as viable boons to that endeavor.
Some science behind psychedelic medicine:
- Psilocybin (Magic Mushrooms) | Everything You Need to Know – Drugscience.org
- Medical Psilocybin Educational Resources – Drugscience.org
- Magic Mushrooms Are Expanding Minds and Advancing an Emerging Field of Science – Discovermagazine.com
- Magic Mushrooms As Medicine? Johns Hopkins Scientists Launch Center For Psychedelic Research. Say Psychedelics Could Treat Alzheimer’s, Depression And Addiction. – Forbes.com
For Dass and Leary, through life and such intentional acts of psychedelic ingestion, it is inevitable that your consciousness expands over time. It just depends {on you} what avenues that expansion happens along. The possibility of consciousness beneficently evolving alongside good companions and healthy environments — sometimes aided by the medicines of the earth — is only natural. And to be welcomed. But the choice, always, is yours. This is why “set and setting” can be the most important aspects of any psychedelic experience.
And importantly, for them two and their philosophy — death itself is the most important part of that journey. Our mortality — matched against our conscious awareness of it (unlike our other kin in the animal kingdom) — is what drives us to want to grow and change and ‘live life to the fullest.’
My college intro to philosophy professor, the 80-year old, funny hat-wearing, pipe-chomping wizened legend, Professor McDermott, named philosophy itself as such:
He told us:
“Philosophy is the art of learning how to die.”
~
Radical, revolutionary life changes are happening all around us, every day, to people all over the world. Of all ages and creeds. Whether they are at one of T-Robb’s epic events or not, or in the midst of a mind-altering psychedelic journey — people are all the time growing their mindsets, changing their desires, expelling their fears and moving forward with their lives’ destiny by chasing their dreams.
Even if you call this stuff kitsch, cliche, or overly individualistic, selfish, solipsistic, uninspired nonsense that refuses to accept the capitalistic musical chairs of this world and the fact that some people have to let their dreams die and become janitors and ditch diggers and … well, accountants {😂}…
OK. But the fact is that everyone is chasing something. Everyone wants transformation, growth, power, love. Everyone wants their life, as well as they can manage it and as far as they can take it within their current life situation’s limits, to change for the better over time. We demand such things unconsciously, by the mere fact that we are conscious beings and we are alive. Endlessly, we seek pleasure and defer pain.
But of course, thus far, we are really just talking about the realm of positive psychology, personal development, ‘gamifying’ your consciousness by taking on a growth mindset, instead of a fixed, limiting one. A little psychedelia, if you are up for it. Stuff like that.
Ok, ok. It’s good stuff. Actionable and real. I have arrived at such a resolution easily, without further reservation. I’ve known about this stuff, with an ancillary familiarity, ironically detached for my ego’s sake, for years now.
But what about… stuff like this:
So far, this is to say nothing of angels or ghosts or cryptids or alien beings of light. Or astrology. Or even the ancient, more mystical plant medicines {such as ayahuasca or iboga}. All things I have long been intrigued by and hopeful to embrace the reality of! I’m not so personally arrogant to say that supernatural phenomena are not possible. Or that God does not exist. Or that cosmic forces are not out there, and influencing us one way or another. Or even that we may be able to do the same to them…
I just have not seen the evidence! And like Fox Mulder, as much as I want to believe — I simply can’t. Or rather, haven’t been able to thus far in my life. I adopt the mainstream view that such preternatural possibilities are merely fun to think about — and write fiction on! — and not to be taken seriously in your *real* life.
Heh. Well, that’s all about to change.
In our supposedly logical, scientific, *rational* world we inhabit, where *well, actually* cosmic alignments are irrelevant to our individual lived experiences, aliens have yet to visit us, angels and demons are just metaphors for our thoughts, and neither Godzilla nor Cthulhu sleeps in the base of the Mariana Trench… through my recent learnings and experiences, rather transformational in nature, I may have finally eclipsed my limiter in these regards…
Maybe, just like with the vast, complex markets of our global economy, our Universe can, sometimes, stay irrational much longer than our minds can stay purely rational.
Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, the purported six layers of “higher consciousness”, and the knowledge embedded within the astrological tenets of Human Design all go much further than this. They approach something much closer to positing Universal consciousness in the end… And me, like a cat, curious to learn more — as much as I possibly could! — with the intent to share it with anyone and everyone {as is my nature, as 4/1 Opportunist/Investigator Manifestor with Split Definition, born under the Juxtaposition Cross of Innocence, designed to Inform and manifest and self-determine and find Peace}… I went ALL in.
That is, I did the readings. I learned the things.
And now, I am sharing some things.
Maybe our consciousness IS truly evolving toward unity, something God-like, something beyond our wildest fictional imaginings yet imagined!
Maybe…
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy…”
~ Hamlet
To better grasp a reality like the one afforded to “believers” unto any and all of the above, I was recommended a book by my brother and others within this burgeoning conscious community that I made myself a transient little part of: The Celestine Prophecy (1993).
Within it, a {fictional(?)} novel taking place in Peru, is a series of conversations the Everyman protagonist has with friends, strangers, medicine men and women, priests, soldiers, and himself. Effectively, it is a book of philosophy, of a new kind of earthly spirituality. The short tome is ‘fictional’ in its narrative trappings, but not necessarily to be read that way concerning the concepts to be taken away. Nine “insights” are laid out before our hero over the course of his journey through the Peruvian landscape, dodging bullet fire and capture from rogue agents hoping to censor the mystic knowledge within the ancient manuscript, for fear of its power to change the world’s peoples. The insights start with him learning to appraise *coincidences* as something more, and as with such logical progression, end with the inevitable ascension of the human soul into a brand new plane of existence… 😯
- Meaningful coincidences — …we are at a point in the developmental history of human consciousness where development will accelerate. The major evidence for this is the increased number of meaningful coincidences people are noticing in their lives. Synchronicity is the entry point, the measure of whether we’re connected spiritually. These “meaningful coincidences” are tiny miracles steering us to where we need to be. Staying aware of the major questions in our lives, or the help we may need, increases the frequency of synchronistic answers.
- The world has a “spiritual design” — …this point in human history can best be understood by a revisioning of the past millennium. in the early part of the millennium, human consciousness was dominated by beliefs promoted by the catholic church: one’s proper place in society, humanity at the center of the universe, and the battle between good and evil. These beliefs gave meaning to life. This domination was challenged during the renaissance and reformation. At that time, humanity established a grand project of exploring the world, using the tools of science, with the hope of getting a new answer to the meaning of life. We see that we are in a new phase of human progress. Humanity is now awakening from a materialistic worldview and moving into a new outlook that recognizes “spiritual design.” This design rewards an attitude of “helping others” and “making the world better.”
- Subtle energy — There is an energy, previously undetected by science, that forms the basis of all things. Human perception of that energy starts with an increased awareness of beauty: people, animals, plants, ecosystems that have a high level of that energy appear particularly beautiful. By becoming aware of that energy, we become able to notice when and how we give and receive energy.
- Competition of energy — A fundamental assumption underlies most human interactions: we must compete for this energy, drawing it from others and protecting ourselves from others’ attempts to draw it from us. This leads to many unpleasant interactions. When we seek the ethic of giving and not taking from, or manipulating others, we step into consciousness. We begin to detect our ego’s past manipulation devices — “control dramas” — we have used to build ourselves up at another’s expense. If we are mindful and catch ourselves every time we begin our control drama, eventually, our control drama falls away completely.
- Energy abundance — In fact, competition is unnecessary because subtle energy exists in abundance. In particular, we can acquire more by eating plants which have high energy levels. (and we can ensure that the plants have high energy levels by paying attention to them, by giving them energy.) Being in a loving state not only connects our energy to the object of our love, but to a greater source of energy as well. This is the essence of mystical experience. The goal of mystical practice — and practice of the lessons of the celestine prophecy — is to get and remain connected with the energy. Moreover, a person’s energy is the source of the meaningful coincidences noticed in the first insight. Each mystical experience stretches a person’s potential, causing them to exist “at a higher state of vibration”. … “Love is not an intellectual concept or a moral imperative or anything else. It is a background emotion that exists when one is connected to the energy available in the universe, which, of course, is the energy of god.” [page 153] … We breakthrough, at least momentarily, to experience a moment that seems to move us past our normal level of consciousness and we sense an ultimate connection. Sometimes, this event comes through a “spiritual practice” we’ve found that brings us to this moment. It could be a peak experience at a house of worship, or through prayer, meditation, music, communing with nature or a host of other points of entry.
- Getting clear — In order to be in a state of love with the world on a regular basis, we have to let go of patterns of behaviour we developed to take energy from others. … First, we have to become aware of our “control dramas” and break our controlling habits. There are four control patterns or ways of causing others to give us energy, two actively demanding energy, two passively creating conditions in which energy is sent. “Active” control dramas include intimidation and interrogation — asking questions and then picking apart the answers. “Passive” control dramas include aloofness — creating an air of mystery that entices others to send energy — and “poor me” — creating a sense that if others don’t provide energy, something awful will happen to the controller. … Second, we have to “get clear” of our control dramas. we must understand our parents’ control dramas and how these shaped ours. Then we must learn what meaning our parents’ lives had for us, and how this determines our own developmental work. The things we would change about our parents — individually and together — are what we need to work on in our own lives.
- Using intuition — When we are in touch with the energy, clear of our control dramas, and aware of the questions relevant to this moment, our intuition supplies the answers we need. Once we are aware of these answers, we need only watch for meaningful coincidences to show us how to act on them.
- Relating to others — This insight comes in several pieces. ~ children can be raised without control dramas if they have constant, undivided access to an adult who can give them the energy they need. ~ Development can be blocked by an “addiction to another person”. The subtle energy has a male and female side. If you can access one and someone else the other, then for a short time the couple can be filled with energy. But the focus on the other person eventually cuts each other off from the universal energy. The two begin competing for energy, restarting control dramas. This is the falling-in-love/falling-out-of-love phenomenon. ~ everyone who crosses our path has a message for us. We should give them energy and help them get clear so that they can accurately deliver the message. ~ other people’s control dramas will break down if we name them and refuse to play a role in them.
- Conscious evolution — This insight is a vision of culture in the next millennium. … Humans consciously participate in their evolution by living according to their intuition, which guides them in such a way as to increase their energy. Population decreases so much that most of the world can be allowed to return to wilderness, creating old-growth forests full of energy. cities will co-exist near these forests in advanced technological states. The means of survival are automated and available to everyone. Their sense of purpose is satisfied by “the thrill of our own evolution”. People will consume less and work less so that they can work on their evolution. … The goal of this evolution is to achieve a level of vibration that makes us invisible to others, perhaps even immaterial. Jesus was the first to do this, and sporadic individuals continue to do so. The ultimate goal is for large groups to “cross over” together in a “general rapture”. The Mayans are alleged to have done this…
~
*deep breath*
Ok, this is a lot to unpack.
… So, let’s not! for now. {…maybe forever. Maybe to *unpack* the celestine prophecy is to deny its power…}
A few days after I finished the Prophecy, storing all of the insights into my mind to be used to ascend with later, meeting the Mayans in elysium, I read an article from the supplement maker / online publication Anima Mundi (on sale here in Puerto Viejo at Grow!): https://animamundiherbals.com/
In it, the author — Mary O’Malley — lays out the six levels of consciousness, progressively ascending one’s understanding, energy, and purpose in this world.
The six levels of consciousness:
- Life happens to you.
- Life happens by you.
- Life happens in you.
- Life happens for you.
- Life happens through you.
- Life is you.
In her article, rather poetically, Mary expounds upon each level and how one may come to understand it well enough, through mind and body work, to naturally gain the next one. Truly, the ‘insights’ provided by O’Malley mirror the Prophecy’s in many respects; they deal with one first becoming curious about their own experience, then growing to see life as an adventure and the universe as an intelligent unfolding, and finally, awakening to realize your transient existence within it as an empowering destiny of epic proportions! 🤗
Dip the finger of your attention into the river of your experience. Allow whatever is here to be here. You have never experienced Life quite like this and never will again. This moment in your life is unique, and it is okay exactly as it is.
~
Life is not a random series of events. It is a highly intelligent unfolding that is putting you in the exact situations you need in order to see and unhook from the spells that keep you separate from its flow. No matter what is happening in your life, you finally understand that Life knows what it is doing.
At this level of consciousness, rather than Life being something you have to mold and shape into what you want it to be, you begin to show up for Life exactly as it is. Yes, the flow of Life includes pain, loss and death. But resisting the pains of Life only turn them it into suffering, and the suffering that comes from resistance is always much greater than directly experiencing your pain. Instead of tightening around your experiences and turning away from them, which only thickens your cloud bank of struggle, you bring your attention to your experience, whatever it is.
“Life is not a random series of events. It is a highly intelligent unfolding.”
~
“You are not in the universe; you are the universe, an intrinsic part of it.”
Most people live in the first two phases of higher consciousness, to you and by you, never knowing that right in the middle of these beliefs is a doorway into the last four. Life is waking you up from the contraction of the first two and into the opening of the last four. This is not only for your own healing, but for the healing of all beings, because as you see through your cloud bank of struggle, you become a healing presence in the world.
There is a paradoxical truth that is important to acknowledge. Human beings are evolving from the first level of consciousness to the sixth. It is also true that most days you will experience a number of these phases. It is not about getting rid of any particular phase or making one better than the other. They are all part of Life, and as you evolve, you will recognize and be able to embrace them all.
~
Finally, concurrent with my explorations into fictional-but-not prophetic insights and these layers of human consciousness, I also dug into my “Human Design.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Design
https://www.jovianarchive.com/
After entering my birth info, and doing a deep, deep dive into every nook and cranny of my body map via MyBodyGraph.com — (determined entirely by the moment of my birth, and no other input into the system on my part) — real flashes of insight and fits of enlightenment struck down upon me.
Unlike the previous two explorations — into the Prophecy and the six layers — the Human Design “body map” was structured around me personally. This was not purporting to be general knowledge or general spiritual truths. It was for and about me. Naturally, instinctively, I paid closer attention, wielding references to my own self and past to weigh against the messages.
As a Manifestor, Opportunist-Investigator, Innocence Cross-bearing soul, wielding Gates of Self-Determination and Listening and Stillness and Mystery and Deep Egotistical Revolutionary Principles, I took everything in at face value, non-judgmentally and with an attitude toward self-evaluation, self-discovery. I embraced the accuracies and delved my misunderstandings as far as I could go. I am still learning yet, studying my map, profile, type, gates, channels, my “cross.”
It’s a lot to take in. But I am eager to begin experimenting with the strategies offered. Apparently, I am someone more than capable of determining my own path, creatively and spiritually, alone if need be, but that needs to inform the Other of my plans, and share my creations with them, in order to manifest my visions and approach something like self-actualization. OK, yeah. Totally.
I get angry when I am not my self. You betcha.
I should surrender to processes and experiences instead of results or end goals. For sure.
I enjoy thoroughly investigating the world’s mysteries, and then communicating them with close friends, whom I am capable of positively influencing in profound ways. Yessir.
I am prone to restlessness and depression, but I can dispel such darkness by focusing on helping people, by using my voice to create bridges of compassion within my circles and communities, etc. *pushes up glasses* I must concur.
And so much more. As I said, lot to take in / still working through it. I find I am doing it with a smile on my face, more confident and inspired 😊
In all, “Human Design” — an all-encompassing polymerization of astrology, the I Ching, Kabbalah, and Chakra lore, created {or divinely channeled} by Alan Robert Krakower aka ”Ra Uru Hu” in 1992 {RIP} — is a theoretical blueprint to help people become who they are.
That may sound like a platitude, like more New Age hippy-dippy bs. But in all honesty, astrological implausibilities aside, not only is it well-written, with comprehensive descriptions and attributes — it is — somehow! — also mostly profoundly accurate. I can only speak for myself {though some Google fu reveals that many people out there abide by the Human Design system in their lives}, but I found the descriptions and importantly, the recommended strategies for fulfilling your best self, to be diligently crafted and authentic to how I feel about myself, my own personality, and my purpose after 28 years on this Earth.
At the very least, my “Design” has given this human much to think about.
Undergirding its tenets is the prospect that we, in this modern world, are conditioned from birth into becoming beings that we are NOT. Awareness of our truer self, and a painstaking process of deconditioning, are required in order for anyone to start living in the world “correctly.” Working from your core Strategy {To Respond, To be Invited, To Inform, To Wait} to act in the world, and using your Inner Authority {Solar Plexus, Sacral, Splenic, Ego & Self} to make important decisions, means starting to live as your birthed ‘design’ means for you to. As Hu repeats time and time again in his explainer communications on the sprawling map’s attributes — when living “correctly,” free from prior conditioning, something like your destiny lies ahead.
I would recommend anyone — no matter how skeptical — to check out their Human Design. See it, explore it, reflect on it. Just a bit. Find what you find.
In truth, each of these spiritualistic narratives / theories / laws (?) deal with purpose. They each in their own way, posit that our purpose, as mortal beings in this world afforded our transient journeys, is an immutable fact. That is, we have a fated purpose. Unchanging. Set from the moment your consciousness was birthed into this world.
Not to take your free will away — what I mean {and what I think these spiritualized theorizations mean} is that everyone’s plane of self-actualization is their destiny. And it’s a good one! A positive thing, indeed. Everyone has something to give — every soul that comes into this world truly is just that: a gift.
That gift is your fated purpose. And you probably already have an idea of what it is for you.
In this way, we are born as perfect beings already, unselfconsciously embodying our purpose as children — and it is only Others and environments and… society that conditions us into unnecessary suffering, toward life and career courses that discard or squander our talents and desires. It is the trauma of an upbringing in a chaotic, careless, (capitalistic?) world that makes us ignorant to such things as destiny.
Our modern world of markets and mechanalia and ‘logistics’ and the pursuit of endless *materialistic* growth truly discounts the innate, immaterial creative power of a human being. {Can anyone deny this?} We get positioned and corralled and controlled toward the ends of expending our energy into such inhumane systems, to keep them churning. I would posit that the ruling class, the hoarding Men of levers and lashes, see the average person as nothing more than a fool, to be used and abused and then discarded, like a spent tool, to make way for the next. Vampiric or not, that is their prerogative.
The tragedy comes when we begin to see ourselves that way too.
But how wrong such a theorization is! How much wonder and ability and beauty lay within any given human being afforded their birth and an avenue to dream through! If only our children were raised without such conditioning, and without such material pressures constantly shaping them toward existence as a Machine and away from life as a Man…
The compounding tragedy comes in the realization that so many people never become aware of their Dream, their destiny. Or, their “personal legend,” as author Paulo Coehlo poetically puts it in The Alchemist (1988). People miss it. People end up living lives they are not happy with. Given their truer, unfulfilled purpose, conditioned away by external market forces and pressuring, material incentives native to the modern world’s turning (and so foreign to the *natural* world), many people lead an existence that they cannot even call their own.
Beyond the “efficient markets hypothesis” 😑 ruling our world forever and oligopolistic tyranny 🤬 and brands as artificially conscious beasts 🤮 hunting us and our wallets and our labor energies… We must deign to seek a higher purpose. Truly, we must ascend to a higher self. We must try to build new monuments, systems, mores.
We must all dare to break free of our limiters!
These texts and documentaries, and truly the whole ‘conscious community’ of people around them, always come back to those prior aspects: 1) thinking and 2) speaking. Thinking and speaking positively, yes, but also — transformatively, progressively, from a growth mindset, from a worldview that can visualize a personal legend, that sees destiny as something real and strong and possible! For you, for me, for anyone.
“I’ve been living in an idea, an idea from another Man’s mind.”
~ Frank Ocean
In becoming more curious and knowledgeable about how you think about your own life and your emotions — and then how you communicate such things to yourself or others — you provide definition to your life. You start making language an ally to your cause. This kind of definition, aided by things like Human Design and by emotional support networks in circles of committed, constantly communicating companions, allows someone to become clear about who they are, what they want, and thus, how they may begin to achieve it. And with the ready help of the community they have cultivated around them!
Simply, by making a conscientious practice of thinking and speaking about your purpose — and encouraging others to — you step yourself and your community closer to it.
As simple as it sounds, I mean… yeah, thinking and speaking more positively — even when you don’t *want* to, or the world is not abiding it, or all you want to do is cry, despair, give up — will make you a more effective person. A more loving person, namely unto yourself. But also unto others.
This is power. I have to admit it.
In the normal world’s conditions, we tend to live so much of our lives in a passive and reactionary way. We go about our lives, letting it all happen to us without an understanding of how or why we keep responding one way, with no strategy about how to respond better over time, to try to make our obstacles and problems, even our traumas, work for us in some small way.
*hearing the sounds of the conscious community* Or maybe I should drop that royal “we” and just speak about my own experience. Maybe this is just me, passively absorbing life and not really living it, certainly not spending much of my time visualizing my “destiny”…
I say that I use this blog, my writing, as a way to “turn my pain into power into love.” I guess this is my minor practice in framing my mind to grow amidst the shadows of my life.
Certainly — me! — I would never tell anyone to “only think positive thoughts” and I would never dissuade or turn away or refuse to join in with someone in a severe and self-destructing bout of darkness and depression and apathy … I engage, I AM {or have been} ALL of that, too.
My point, with using thinking and language as a more consistent, reliable ameliorating force in your life, is that one MUST do this, if you are to live well.
Talking about pain and power and love… I will give you a personal example, a fact of my life that has been a personal truth for me for so long. Let me get radically authentic, aka v u l n e r a b l e with ya for a second…
I never ask for anything.
What?
I mean that I never ASK for anything. Like unto myself. To other people {and by this I mean *communicating my wants or desires* and not that I trample over people and do what I want. Hah! Me?}
Certainly, I’ve never once asked the Universe for anything!
I used to ask God things. But not really *for* things. My prayer practice as a boy was more so just hoping for good things to happen, through him, in an abstract sense.
Throughout my life, truthfully, I have never really asked people, the world, my heart — for anything.
I just lived as myself. And let people, the world around me, and my heart act as they may in response to me being me. I let them all come into being, good or ill, present or absent, exciting or tedious, as a passive culmination about me. {Perhaps this is why I am unhappy with my life? … I can hear you laughing. Or is that just Jah?}
Why? Why not? What am I afraid of?
Do I fear my own desires? Or do I just not desire that much?
A little of both, I fear…
Honestly, I have always held an aversion to exerting my will in the world. On people, toward my goals, onto my environment in any way. To want something — and then ask the world for it — in my honest opinion, can be a profoundly destructive act. It never sat right with me when I tried it, succeeding or failing from there. I think declaring your desire for something can be a corrupting act. It’s like in the paradox of power: those who most want it are the exact ones that should never wield it.
And yet, wanting things, expressing desires, pursuing them — this is all human.
Maybe I just never learned how to ask for anything. How to navigate my environment and communicate my needs within it. Indeed, this could be the source of all my solitude, my loneliness, my isolating singularity as a person so far without a life I can be proud of.
Really I think not asking for things comes down to a lack of self-worth; if I don’t even believe in the possibility that my questions may be answered — that my desires may be fulfilled — then why even ask?
*sigh*
So why say this?
Because this lacking plays into the continuing evolution in my philosophy {as I have expounded for too long to you thus far…} Indeed, through my recent journaling, I have chosen to now define 3 things that I want, unabashedly, clearly, unspoken but for long existing within me.
3 things I am now set to ASK the Universe to deliver to me before I shed this mortal coil.
Expressing these desires — simple, vague, {achievable?} or no! — felt good. The mere asking better defines them into potential visualization for me.
Such things — asking for things, expressing desires being a *good* thing to do — may seem obvious to you. So be it.
Nevertheless, I wanted to share this.
This too is part of the journey {of my life, of this particular writing}… 🌀
~
In all, the spiritual insights I have laid out here ~ in books like The Celestine Prophecy {or The Four Agreements (2001) by Don Miguel Ruiz, which I read a couple years ago, or The Alchemist (1988), which I’ve read twice and need to read three more times…}, and in pieces like O’Malley’s “Six Levels of Higher Consciousness”, or in Human Design or with Dass and Leary and T-Robb’s philosophies ~ all deal with returning to sacred humanistic principles. That is, they affirm the worth of every human being born into this world.
Yes, they throw out flowery flourishes of language upon how to pursue our personal legends, our destinies, returning to divine purpose and to “Everything happens for a reason!” But these tomes and messengers also affirm the sacred truth — you are exactly who you are supposed to be.
i.e. You are a human being.
Their core message comes as: if you are unhappy or unfulfilled, living outside of your purpose, that is OK. That is because of your environment, or your conditioning, or because of the burdens from others or from the world that you are holding by yourself and maybe shouldn’t be. Or maybe, those burdens just need to be recontextualized, as with the Stoic creed “the obstacle is the way.” {or like Mary O’Malley’s book title: What’s in the Way Is the Way.}
And this reference to conditioning and to the effects of our environment upon us is no “excuse,” no convenient offload of blame — it’s just the truth!
“Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such that he finds close at hand.”
~ Karl Marx
In short, even with all your personal messes and mistakes, there is nothing wrong with you.
(Or insofar that there *is* something wrong with you, medically, mentally or otherwise, that does not mean that you aren’t deserving of love or change, as well as you can try for it.)
In all these things I watched, read, experienced — the insights were about letting go, of self-stories and personal insecurities, of existential fears of meaninglessness. The insights here speak about freeing yourself from your “fucking” past, as T-Robb roars. And the insights came carrying the singular fact that while your core purpose may be set from your birth — who you are, what you are passionate about, and thus, what you are probably supposed to do with your life, what your destiny is — all those other extraneous things currently preventing you from achieving that reality are fully in flux, able to be changed in a moment, or over time, by you.
That is the work before you, long or short. Coming to the realization that your life is within your power, because your body and mind are, is the final insight.
Who you are, and whether or not you are someone that is worthy of life or power or love… these are not *real* questions. THAT has already been affirmed by the Universe.
You are HERE, after all!
You were born into this world.
You are right where you are supposed to be.
*deep, deep breath*
Truly, the fact that *you* are reading these words means that THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES and cosmic shifts are already occurring…
Hey now! you might interrupt — I thought you said your rational mind returned already? What the f*ck are you on about now??
Was I lying? and my ratty mind is still somewhere out in the ether, on indefinite holiday, languishing on its own while I bask my body and soul on the beaches of Costa Rica?
No. It is here, with me, for better or worse. We are back together, fully integrated and firing on all cylinders. 😌
My final {rational x spiritual mind} thesis stands as thus:
After a period of living in this sometimes harsh, sometimes beautiful, sometimes very tedious modern world, learning and loving along your way as much as you can, if you can truly surrender and let yourself see everything in your life as profoundly meaningful, leading to a great and purposeful destiny for you and the people around you …
You will end up living a better life.
It’s that simple.
{Whether the Universe acknowledges your existence or not, whether it is TRUE that we live in that Universal Mind slowly becoming conscious of itself over time and you, as an individual human being, are an integral agent to that process — or NOT … does not really matter at this point. Because the *mindset* adopting the Universe’s purpose for you, and the actions you take from it, inevitably allows you to lead a healthier and more fulfilling life.}
As Spinoza lays out in his ultra-rationalist, Enlightenment-era philosophy –
“If something is acting contrary to its own interests, then it has been overtaken by forces external to it.”
In that sense, if you don’t have this mindset, then one could say that you do not own your life.
Oh?
Oh yeah.
Without seeing — and then acting on — the prospect that there is a destiny for you, that everything up to this exact moment of your life happened on purpose and to deliver you here and now, that there is *good* future for you — then yeah, you may end up giving up on your purpose or destiny before taking a step on the road, thus automatically sealing your fate to a life of dissatisfaction and squandered potential, with no “death song sung like a hero going home.”
To draw everything back to my own bread and butter — art, cinema, the dreadfulness of modernity — I can illustrate the power {or maybe just the challenge…} of taking this kind of perspective.
First, watch this scene from Seinfeld: Seinfeld — Living in the Shadows / Yearning.mp4
Took it in? OK now, practice viewing George’s dreadful predicament {as a yearning liver-in-shadows, a proverbial *loser*, for lack of a better term…} — as a fate which is NOT merely that: dreadful. But instead, as a necessary, destined condition, which is serving him and his wacky friends in unseen, unconscious, not-yet-knowable ways. And from there, George, in all of his manic or depressive or altogether chaotic thoughts and actions, is exactly where he is supposed to be. Indeed, he is set to move toward his promised, beneficent destiny from there, from those shadows. And a good one it will be.
{😂}
I’m serious though.
~
Personally, as a self-styled amateur philosopher and humanist x existentialist x absurdist — who indeed probably sees “The Myth of Sisyphus” as *true*, concerning our metaphysical position within this Universe… I cannot help but see ALL of ^THIS^ {everything I have just written} as empowering. And also, in the end, not contradictory with my core beliefs.
“The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity… That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute, illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama.”
~ Albert Camus, “The Rebel” (1951)
To view the Universe as intelligent, or even caring, and able to deliver individual human beings to their beneficent fates, day after day and age after age, may be anathema to Camus’ Sisyphean view of humanity residing within a vast, indifferent, hopelessly unfathomable void, carrying rocks up and down hills to no objective availing, our happiness only something to be drawn together in a subjective sense…
Truly, you could say that absurdism, ironically, is the exact opposite of the sincere statement made “everything happens for a reason”, ala Jah is looking out for me…
Theoretically-speaking, as an absurdist or existentialist or whatever — I therefore cannot!, in good faith, take on this mindset. Folks, Sisy says The Universal Mind is bunk!
But you see, the word *cannot* instantly vanquishes the freedom proffered within existentialism and absurdism, and it defeats the natural optimism within humanism.
These things, my various adoptive philosophies built out from my life’s road thus far, all mean I get to choose my own meaning.
There is potential, powerful synthesis here. A synthesis between my subjective view of the Universe and the Universe’s objective role — a synthesis between the realms of the vast Unconsciousness and my singular Consciousness.
We [may] or [may not] live within an indifferent, godless, *unconscious* Universe — the core conceit of existentialism and absurdism is that it merely appears that way, to us *conscious* souls. And so, our life becomes harder, mentally. Thus, the freedom to choose your meaning for yourself, in spite of that absurd condition, becomes the prime focus.
Note that the essence of such philosophies is that freedom to choose — and through that comes an inherent belief in humanity, our agency and power and love which may be borne from such freedom.
The whole point of existentialism is that you are not bound to any dogma, or a “philosophy” at all, in its wider definition. Your meaning can come from anywhere. From art, from relationships, or from God, the Universe, your dog! Anything!
The core of humanism, to my eyes, is that humanity *can* achieve its destiny, whatever that may be, whenever that may come. Or at the very least, humanism conceives that we may move toward it with actions that reduce suffering and amplify flourishing within conscious beings such as we.
Thusly! freely choosing to adopt a mindset that the Universe is an ally, and cosmic and interpersonal forces both are leading us toward purpose and destiny and progress, and an inevitable day of death that we can be proud of, that is never off the table for the existentialist or absurdist or humanist.
In fact, it’s on the table for me. Right now. I am looking at it. My eyes and mouth are watering.
This is where I am.
Me and the Universe, face to face. Hugging. Kissing? F — -ing??
Maybe.
We are getting to know each other. The relationship, on my end at least, has just begun. We will have to see where it goes ~ where we both take it ~ from here. ~
…
Oh yeah, so what is *my* purpose, Dream, destiny, you may ask?
To see the Infinite, take it in, and then transmute it into stories that change people’s lives; to write stories that change my own life.
~ Rumi
Thresholds of Transformation 