Circumventing the economic crisis

While I was having my alfresco cappuccino this morning two businessmen sat at a table nearby and discussed, with a strong sense of benevolence and, you might say, ‘noblesse oblige’, some of their employees and the organisation of their company in their strong, businessman’s voices.

I work for myself these days so it stood out to me what a game of giving and taking power this is. They would have been good bosses to have if that conversation was anything to go by. They would have been fair, polite, and concerned that the talents and skills of their employees were recognised and rewarded.

Lucky employees, I thought, since 40 hours a week of their well-being depended on these men.

Looking from outside this social institution – the business hierarchy – it all made me cringe a bit. Thank God I am not subject to their good opinion, thank God my ability to support myself is not tied into providing them with something they deem to be good. Thank God I get to judge the merit of my own work.

If I might just venture a prediction as we enter a New Energy global paradigm: arrangements of hierarchy, of giving away, and taking away, personal power are things of the past. They are not the way forward. And if I may espouse a theory: the global economic crises is in fact the undoing of such a system of concentration of power. It is not the end of everything, just a fairly dramatic metamorphosis from an old system to a new. Could be bumpy for a few years – about four I’m told – but systems of inequality are no longer appropriate for humanity so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s all good.

And if I may offer advice if this rings true to you: don’t try to hold onto anything but personal power. The next four years will be much smoother if you let it go.

Willing participation in the Big Con

It was more obvious when I was a child, especially when you compare it to now. Just as the way we are now will look oh so obvious in another 30 or 40 years. I was very aware of the characteristics that were considered attractive in a girl: modesty, lack of aggression, accommodation of others’ needs, nurturing, caring, self-sacrifice. Later, in about the mid-nineties, I learned a lot about the Australian penal code and discovered that, for example, women were statistically given a longer sentence for an equivalent crime.

But these days I still occasionally hear someone taking a deliberately powerless stance and saying, when encouraged to stick up for her rights, ‘Oh I wouldn’t do that. That’s just not the kind of person I am.’

It’s not a uniquely feminine problem, I’m only using these examples because they are a part of my own experience. For all of us in centuries past religion has wielded the same power causing us to monitor ourselves lest we suffer eternal damnation for failing to deny our own impulse towards enjoyment and fulfilment.

How on earth were we persuaded to buy into this game?

Passion in the soul that has everything

This is not a how-to post. I am grappling with an issue that didn’t used to occur in old energy life and I’m in the mood for writing it all down.

What is life for? What do I do now?

I remember making the choice not to need a man. It was a hard decision to make because I thought if I don’t need a man I can’t imagine that I will want a man. Why would you put up with all that interference in your household rhythms and routines, have someone using up half your bedspace, compromise your TV programme selections? Why would you risk issues of jealousy, control, of being stood up, of wandering from your own path by the distraction and emotional compulsion of being in love? When you stand back and look at it dispassionately, I thought, you have to have the need for intimacy and romance to drive you or you wouldn’t do it at all.

I didn’t really believe any of these arguments, they only gave me pause. It made me notice what a disempowered position I was used to adopting in order to be bothered to pursue romantic love. And I wasn’t in the business of choosing disempowerment, so I went ahead and chose not to need a man. I assumed I would still find reasons to want romantic love should it present itself, but I honestly didn’t know for sure.

I mention this because it’s just one example that has brought me to the position I find myself in now. I don’t need stuff. The process of converting to a new energy mode of life involved, for me and many others who I knew were going through the same process, spending a lot of time on my own. It was a beautiful time for me. I had my 5 acres of forest in the mountains and my partner and I built a little cabin and deck on the slope overlooking the town and the opposite mountainside. There was no power or water other than what I brought with me and I cooked, washed and contemplated on the deck. For about three years I spent half of every week there completely on my own. Sometimes I would be looking forward to company when I finally went back to the city and sometimes I would message my partner and say, I don’t want to leave yet. I want to stay another night.

So I don’t need company either. That phase of solitude has finished for me now, I don’t have any need to go and stay there on my own anymore, but the opposite hasn’t kicked in either. I am socialising more again but, you know, what I use to think of as interesting conversations now prove themselves to be a group of people placing themselves on a series of spectrums of principle. ‘I am not racist; I disapprove of murder and premeditated murder is much more unforgivable; I boycott this company for this reason; I don’t condescend to watch such and such TV programme, I’m just not that kind of person;’ and so on. It’s as though we define ourselves by our preferences and principles and, if we can find a way to enforce it, we define everyone else by them too. We box ourselves (and everyone else) into tighter and tighter confines, higher and higher walls. ‘Stop talking!’ I want to say, ‘You won’t be able to move your limbs if you go on much longer.’

Because in new energy we are not trying to define ourselves against the physical world in which we find ourselves. WE come first. WE just are, and it’s no longer our task to slice aspects of ourselves off and attempt to discard them. They still exist, fortunately, and are waiting somewhere just outside of physical perception to be accepted back into wholeness. The great reunification.

So my issue is: what do I enjoy these days? What motivates my next move? I don’t have to use interactions with people to define myself, to play out karma, or to gain love and acceptance. I keep on finding myself engaged in activities I used to enjoy, and starting to yawn or feeling a bit drained or just thinking maybe I don’t like doing this anymore.

But what do I like doing?

I still feel happy almost all of the time, sometimes inspired (in an undirected way) and, at worst, a bit bored. The fact that I have little motivation for life is not a statement of depression, this is not about my emotional state. It is a simple question I am asking myself. It is my current project. I hope I will be letting you know soon what life after karma looks like, what generates passion in the soul that has everything, so to speak.

Bad thoughts phobia

When I first encountered the idea of the law of attraction it held a bit of a minefield for me. Suddenly I was terrified of my negative thoughts, terrified of worrying about anything, because this must mean that those thoughts were going to become my reality.

For any readers who haven’t heard of the law of attraction, the guru on it is Abraham. This law is that like is drawn to like, so good feelings will draw objects and circumstances into your life that you tend to feel good about. Abraham teaches simple ways to use our thoughts to improve the way we feel so that we can take back control of our creations, our human lives.

So I found myself playing a game of cat and mouse with thoughts and imaginings of things I didn’t want. And I think this is a danger inherent in the oversimplification of this principle: that we must only think positive thoughts.

And I see it all around, this idea that we are required to think only positive thoughts or all sorts of catastrophes will befall us. This is not what the law of attraction is about. Abraham is quite clear about this, you can’t go from utter despair to lightness and joy in one step. We all know we really can’t. To pretend it is only self-deceit.

It is usually an automatic response if something happens that causes us to feel bad, to quickly look for thoughts that help us feel a bit better. If you’ve gone from a sinking-hearted, ‘I’m no good, it’s all my fault,’ it brings a feeling of relief to change that thought to, ‘He’s an asshole, he is only trying to use me for a scapegoat.’ This is not what we traditionally think of as a positive thought, but this is what the law of attraction is all about. It’s a better thought. That’s what’s important, that we look for thoughts that provide us with some feeling of relief.

We can continue moving up through increments of slightly better feelings as far as we want, hopefully till we get to some thoughts that give us a truly happy feeling, but the point is, if you’re starting pretty low, better thougths are going to be almost as low. They are not going to be what we tend to define as positive thoughts.

This whole positive-thoughts idea has made us tend to run away from our deepest fears. We try not to bring them to consciousness because that might bring them to reality. Who do we think we are kidding? What we have in this scenario is fears that we are afraid to face, afraid to address, afraid to deal with. You see, the process of thinking about a fear is naturally a process of finding ways we can feel better about it, finding strategies to manage it, finding power to stand up to it. Dwelling on negative thoughts is actually a part of the process of improving our sense of empowerment, and so guess what will show up in reality? An empowered life.

Conscious use of the law of attraction comes into its own when there is a habitual thought pattern in your life that stays at a level of low feeling. If you find that you always have not quite enough money it might be worth looking at how you habitually think about money and see if you can move those thoughts up just one emotional notch which will either result in having just enough money, or start a snowball of better feelings that result in an avalanche of wealth.

So bring on the negative thoughts, is what I’m trying to say. Don’t run away from yourself. You are not the bogey man – well, you don’t have to be.

Stop everything

The best advice I got when I first encountered this whole new energy thing was to stop. Just stop. Stop trying to fix things, to interfere in the goings-on around me, to manipulate reality. Stop trying to change myself, change my life, change the people around me. Stop having judgments and opinions about everything and everyone, about myself. In the words of someone just a bit famous, let it be.

I stood in the middle of the world for a while watching it all going on. A lot of the time I still do – ’still’ being the operative word.

Because the new energy is a whole new way of operating. You use different tools to create your reality and it’s by stopping and watching for a while that you notice that the old ways are really not appropriate anymore. It’s obvious when you stop and look.

The art of doing practically nothing

I am an artist. Not a painter or a musician or a practitioner in any of those traditional arts. But I am better versed than most in the art of, well, thinking, sitting, being.

I learned my craft at the University of Fibromyalgia (UF). I have a degree: Bachelor of The Leisurely Life (BoTLL) and I remain a Fellow of the Institute of Doing Little (IDL) even though I rarely find the need to attend its seminars or summer schools anymore. It is quite the watchdog. It administers a strict code of practice and will not allow its members to blot the profession if it observes any lapse in protocol. Immediate enrolment in a refresher course is demanded of any culprit.

Before you rush along to sign up at my alma mater, let me offer a few words of caution. This university is not for the faint hearted. Teaching methods are archaic, if not downright brutal. I managed to avoid Extreme Muscle Pain 201 by achieving honours in Sore Palms 101 and Soles of Feet Don’t Want To Be Walked On 201. I also did quite well in Exaggeration Of All Minor Pains 201. But General Overwhelming Exhaustion is a core subject and must be undertaken by all students.

The toughest part for me was World Abuse 301. This is where the brutality comes in because, in order to pass the subject, tutors require that you sit passively in the chair provided and face whatever verbal abuse can be contrived by various committees such as The Protestant Work Ethic Enforcement League; The Debt Collective; The 40 Hour Week Inc.; the Five Sick Days Institute; the Everyone Else Can Do This, Why Can’t You? Enquiry; the Say Yes To Everything Board; the Make Something of Yourself Initiative.

I failed this subject several times, usually by illicit signing of contracts, and later by unacceptable flinching. But my alma is a forgiving variety of mater and allows all enrolled students to repeat subjects as often as it takes.

Second word of caution: money. Most people go to university with at least one eye on a promise of affluence. Students of the University of Fibromyalgia, on the other hand, usually have an eye on the prize of Lifestyle. Leisure. Time. This university teaches all the ways not to make money, and sends its graduates out into the world to find new ways it can be done.

It can. I’m starting to get the hang of it. Lifestyle, leisure, time and money. Who knew?

Villains and victims

I keep coming across people who find themselves being victimised by some loved one or other. I get a surprise every time as though it was 20 years rather than, say, 20 months since I had the same kind of stuff going on in my life. When you don’t agree to that kind of game anymore (well, not often), it seems almost ludicrous to watch someone else playing it.

But it did take me several years to extricate myself from a friend who took it upon himself to instruct me in all the things I was doing wrong in my life and in waiting for information and direction from him as to what to do next.

The problem was that it used to be so easy to convince me that something was my fault, that I was the one who needed to change my behaviour. I spent enormous energy trying to justify my behaviour to him, to myself, and to anyone who would listen.

‘Justify’ is the ludicrous word to me these days. Because what I want in my life is what I should have. It is no more complicated than that.

I used to have a very volatile live-in partner. I am grateful to him these days and in fact we still have a very warm affection and respect for each other, and from my side that is because he taught me so much about taking my power back. One day things were getting a bit frustrating and at another level I was experiencing  a conversation between our higher selves. I said,

‘Why do you always have to take my energy away like that?’ and he said,

‘To show you that I still can. You are trying to get that it’s not up to me where your energy goes, so we work together from time to time to check if you are still giving your power away.’ So on one level I was fuming at him and on another I was enormously grateful to him for helping me with my project. 

Which is how it always is in the new energy – how it was, in fact, in the old, but it was important that we didn’t realise that then since the purpose was to play the game of not being god. The villain is really the accomplice or the sounding board. Nothing happens in our lives that we haven’t chosen to experience at some level. In the old energy we had very little awareness of our higher level choices. In the new energy it is much easier to tune in to the whole story. And, that being the case, there is simply no point playing games of giving our power away anymore because we know that is only pretense. It is not really possible for any other being to have power over us unless we bow to it, unless we pretend that they do.

Life in the New Energy

I am writing this blog mainly for the benefit of people who are completely new to the concept of new energy. It will probably be of interest to those who already know a bit about it or even to those who have been playing with new energy for as long as I have, just to get another perspective on what they have been experiencing.

If you google the term ‘new energy’ you will find a lot of information on alternative fuel and power sources. While the new energy I am referring to can encompass these ideas I am essentially talking about energy as the fuel of consciousness. Just as the advent of electrical power opened up a vast new field of possibilities in human endeavours, so new spiritual energy gives us access to a much wider scope of conscious awareness and personal power.

I’m going to try and explain how to understand and adapt to new energy as we go, should you decide that that is what you want to do. The fact is, according to my understanding, humankind is converting to new energy whether you have been aware of it or not. It will simply make life easier if you understand what this means and how to work with it, apart from making life easier and altogether more wonderful anyway – if ease and wonder are your kind of things.

For now, here are some of the differences between the ways old energy and new energy work:

Old energy: If you want something you work hard or manipulate circumstances to get it;

New energy: If you want something you allow it to come to you.

Old energy: You follow society’s ideas of right behaviour and obligations;

New energy: You follow the feel-like-it principle.

Old energy: You need love and are subject to the judgments and opinions of others;

New energy: You know who you are. You are immutable, whole, perfect, and worthy of your own love. Others will probably love you for that.

Old energy: Life is made up of the drama of problems and solutions;

New energy: All of life is perfect as it is. You mostly watch drama from a distance unless you choose to play in it. Take it from me, it starts to lose its appeal.

Old energy: Life in the physical is all you can really perceive. You are a mind in a body on a planet;

New energy: is all about bringing the physical and the spiritual back into conscious unity. You are a godly being who has chosen to have a physical experience.

Old energy: You try and work things out;

New energy: You can feel or perceive the truth. There aren’t so many secrets and there isn’t as much room for deception in the new energy. If you don’t mind the expression, your bullshit detector is operating at full capacity.

Old energy: You get your truth through rational thinking or outside sources;

New energy: Truth is utterly personal and changeable and the only person who can know your truth is you.

Old energy: Stuff matters;

New energy: Nothing matters.

Old energy: Life is hard;

New energy: Life is easy.

Old energy: Others have power over us;

New energy: Nobody has power over us.

Watch this space. I think I will be adding more as I think of them.