Spiritual Astronauts
Buckle yourself in. We are ready for blast off. This trip is only for astronauts of the inner worlds. There is a sound/gravity barrier around this ego earthfield in which we reside and are trapped. To penetrate that sound/gravity barrier, you will have to desire and prepare for God-discovery. Other cosmic astronauts have done it before and so you do not have to be overcome with fear. This is a trip to end fear. And so I will prepare you in this report for the flight that you came here to make.
This gravity/sound barrier keeps us locked within our earthbound story. Ezekial broke this barrier in the early days. When he did, he had visions about the meaning of our earthbound story which freed him for peace and service. Travel through this barrier and back is the daily experience of the spiritual astronaut.
You will never know what home is until you know how to travel in both arenas of earth and heaven. Fear keeps us earthbound and frustrated. We love the finite just as our Father does. The finite is the female aspect of creation. Our objective is not to escape the female finite form but to be able to appreciate it. The only way you can fully appreciate earth is not to be imprisoned by its gravity and sound barrier. The earth is the Lord's and we have inherited it, although it is not yet our home. We have to make it our home, and this we cannot do until we break through the gravity barrier in ourselves.
The outer barrier is symbolic of the inner barrier. This barrier is a metaphor which is now being displayed daily before our eyes on television by our astronauts. The outer space barrier is no more or no less real than the inner one. Neither heaven nor earth alone can be our real home. We are citizens of two worlds which must become one. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven is the model prayer. We will have a heavenly body and an earthly body, a heavenly earth and an earthly heaven as soon as we have a heavenly and earthly consciousness. Jesus demonstrated such a consciousness for us and guarantees us safe passage through the anxiety barrier.
You are invited to this astronaut celebration. There are people who are making this important journey daily. In the early years of the 19th century, Maurice Bucke wrote a book entitled Cosmic Consciousness in which he analyzed 36 cases of cosmic travelers. He predicted that there will be more and more of these luminaries that we are calling cosmic astronauts. It is not my job to be a prophet about these things. My vision is about the anxiety barrier. This is a guidebook through the barrier. It is a map of how to get to the infinite and back to the finite. Everyone gets to take this second birth journey just as we took the first journey: alone. Or apparently so. We have already challenged the belief that we are never alone, but that is typical of our anxiety story. Actually many other astronauts and spiritual companions are with you as you prepare for and make this journey. By C. G. Jung this was called the path of individuation which everyone must take in order to discover the truth.
Each butterfly has to go through the cocoon stage to be reborn as a creature of the both heaven and earth. Each summer thousands of these lovely creatures flit about us, reminding us of who we are and how it is done. The caterpillar crawls around on the earth and eats leaves until it goes into metapmorphosis and we must do the same. This second birth process brings into our awareness the absolute unconditionality of love and the unutterable joy of life. This is why the birds sing, because they are creatures of heaven and earth in a way that most of us rarely experience. Do the birds sing in ignorance or because they know something we have forgotten? Birds sing from instinctual memory, and our songs only arise through the rebirth of memory, because man has enough awareness to be capable of maddening anxiety. Anxiety is the benchmark of humanity and pills will not remove it. Anxiety implies a re-birthing process because it does represent the unknown, the mystery of Infinity.
You are the only earth species with infinite imagination and there is nothing you can do about it. You are an eternal infinite being and there is nothing you can do about it. Even ignorance changes nothing. "God is not mocked" by our so-called limitations, excuses and fears. He cannot be defeated in the grand design of his plan. This grand design includes anxiety, not because God put it there, but because we put it there. God is not the author of fear, we are. Amazing grace removes the anxiety we have built. This fear story is removed, however, only by going through it, not around it. There is no going around it. It is the sound barrier which is supposed to protect us, but it also inhibits us.
Anxiety is your friend. You created it. You fed it. You made it into a foe. You have to redeem it. That is your job. No one can do it for you. Love your enemy. Only love will transform your anxious energy into peace and creativity. Buckle up and let's go. The sooner the better. The longer you put it off, the worse it gets. You don't want to be found lying on your deathbed with cancer eating up your body, cancer which you made necessary by anxiety-resistance. Sickness, old age and the fear of death are just more of the redeeming work of anxiety-awareness. Take your journey through the anxiety barrier now. You are a spiritual astronaut, a human god about to be re-born again today. Fear not.
Symptoms force us to do things that we wanted to do and not to do things that we wanted to do and so we have to experience both sides of the conflict.
So let us speak of anxiety-denial which always results in a penalty because we have to shut down much of our perceptual system. The more we deny our anxiety, the more we set ourselves up for anxiety-overwhelm. The more we deny anxiety the more we are apt to have too much. The pendulum swings from denial to excess and back.
Anxiety distortion: Nothing bothers me or everything bothers me.
Anxiety-awareness means that you are less apt to experience anxiety-distortion. Anxiety-resistance, anxiety-distortion and anxiety-denial mean that we regard anxiety as an enemy rather than as a friend. Thus we get the swinging of the pendulum between too much or not enough. Not-enough indicates an inappropriateness or fear which leads to denial, like nothing can affect me. I live in my bunker. I need nothing. No one can hurt me. A person who denies anxiety cannot access anxiety-awareness except as a weakness. Anxiety-awareness is an experience of humanity and connects us with humanity. Anxiety-denial cuts us off from understanding and communicating with others. The anxiety denying person is less aware than the anxiety-aware person, and more likely to get sick. Black and white thinking along with the either/or approach is an attempt to control anxiety, but it does not work. Anxiety just goes underground and makes us more brittle, more numb, more vulnerable. Anxiety-awareness is preparation for anxiety- transformation. Anxiety is learned and is attached to our identity story.
Everyone has a love nature and an anxiety story. If a fighting couple can realize these facts, they can communicate from the same playing field. Everyone is in the same boat. Everyone has a love nature and an anxiety story. However, it is also typical that we will deny our caring nature or our anxiety story, either in our selves or in our partner, and this messes up communication every time. In both cases, awareness of our caring nature and the anxiety story prepares us for communication. There is a continuum from Anxiety-as-Foe, to Anxiety-as-Neutral, to Anxiety-as-Friend. For most of humanity, most of the time, anxiety is regarded as an enemy. Anxiety-as-Neutral is an advance over anxiety-denial or anxiety-avoidance. Anxiety-acceptance however can be negative and pessimistic, which has not yet reached the Anxiety-as-friend level. Anxiety-tolerance is not yet anxiety-awareness and anxiety-friendship. Understanding of anxiety makes a world of difference in the relationship and communication. If no one understands and everyone represses, you end up with mutual manipulation, force and violence.
When we are operating below basic honesty, we are trapped in the Anxiety Box. It is only as we rise in our energy level above self-deceit that we approach the neutral zone and the positive zone. Everyone below self-awareness is caught in their anxiety and stuck in their story, in ego insanity. Anxiety can be useful or destructive, but its usefulness is not apparent on the surface. Generally it arouses fight or flight. Anxiety-awareness and understanding changes our perceptions about fight or flightit, and the listener gets helpful information. Manipulative force and violence will not yield anxiety's secrets to the listener. We are all in the same boat. We can't say that we don't care what that other person in the boat feels or thinks or why, because you are that person. You can't handle anxiety by saying you don't care or they don't care because it is not true. You do care and they do care. That is our nature. To say I don't care is a very poor way to handle pain. Self-defense as a way of handling pain leads to denying our true spiritual nature. We do care. That is our true spiritual nature.
You do care and there is nothing you can do about it because that caring is infinite. "I don't care" does not protect me from anything. To say "I am not anxious" and "I do not care" is a lie to ourselves and to each other. The critical fact is that we do care and we are anxious. If we deceive ourselves about this fact concerning either ourselves or others, we are in communication trouble.
The ego is unable to tell the difference in truth and falsehood, nor is it interested in that difference. The ego is only interested in survival. You are interested in more than survival, but your ego is not. Whatever makes my ego survive is a story of distortions. Whatever supports the ego's story about who and what I am is what is considered survival. If my ego believes that saying "I don't care" will help the story survive, then the ego will say "I don't care." The story is more precious than anyone or anything. The ego story=ego survival.
If telling myself "I am not anxious" makes me feel safer, I will tell myself "I am not anxious." If lying about you to myself by saying that you do not care or that you are not anxious, will make me feel safer, I will lie to myself about you and tell myself that you don't care or that you are not anxious.
When I tell myself that you are not anxious, then I can tell myself that I am not anxious. What is the problem in admitting that others care and that others are anxious? What is at stake that I can't see this or admit this? What do I have to lose by admitting that my nature is love and so is yours, and that we both have anxiety. That is what I have to find out. That is what is messing up my communication with you. If I deny that I care and that I am anxious right now, and that you care right now and that are anxious right now, then I am courting the disaster of playing victim or perpetrator.
If I deny my humanity or yours, and my divinity or yours, then I am in trouble because I am lying. We are divine and our divine nature is love; we are human and our human story is anxious. We are all in the same boat. When I admit that we are both divine and human, then forgiveness occurs and I become a man of peace. Until then I will be at war.
This does not mean that the other person has to know right now that he is love and that he is anxious. That is not within my power of choice. I have to be aware that my nature and yours is love and that my story is anxious and so is yours. I am a human god and so are you. Anything less than this awareness is a recipe for failure, defeat, self-destruction and every symptom in the book. Anything less than the awareness that we are both human gods is going to make some kind of sickness and severely curtail my potentialities. The other person in this power struggle is a being of infinite potentiality. The only thing that keeps him from being a Christ to me is my unawareness. This other person is the Son of Man and the Son of God and if I judge that he or she is not, then neither am I. If I exclude you, I have excluded myself. This whole boat full of humanity is made up of human gods and not one can be excluded.
This truthful vision means that everyone I see has the love nature and experiences anxiety. Then I take this one step further. There has to be a bottom line, but which is it, love or anxiety. Which is real? Which will you bet your life on? So far in this human drama, we have bet our life more upon anxiety. Anxiety is the last step in our distorted story about life. Anxiety can be your friend because it is the last step. Anxiety is a testimony to our blindness, deafness and poor judgment. And so we have love and we have anxiety and only one of them is ultimately real and you have to choose which. In the meantime, you can afford yourself the compassion of realizing that everyone has the anxiety which parades as other things such as jealousy, fear, hostility, doubt, hatred, defensiveness and every other symptom in the book, including mental illness, criminality, addiction and selfishness. Otherwise your will interpret others' symptomatic behavior as attack or defense.
To say that someone is anxious is not an excuse or a blame. Each person is ultimately responsible for his own self-awareness or lack of it. Anxiety-denial or anxiety-exaggeration by another doesn't mean that you have to do the same. The human god will take a stand with all of his brothers and sisters, so that the brother can more easily sort out the difference in love and anxiety. And if I can't sort it out, how can I expect you to?
Our love nature is based upon the truth, our anxiety is a learned story from our commerce in this world. Anxiety is what I have learned and what I have in common with every other human being, with every other Son of Man. Anxiety-awareness can be a bridge of understanding and communication. There aren't any selfish or unselfish people, perpetrators or victims, dictators or slaves, there are only Anxious Lovers.
At the behavioral level, we may be more anxious than loving. Our story is an anxiety story that we live by, the story of fear, control, anxiety and self-protection. The Son of Man story is the story of anxiety; the Son of God story is the reality of our love nature. Is anxiety an enemy or a friend? You must decide. Does anxiety divide us or unite us? Look and see. It need not divide us when it is admitted. Anxiety is a friend which warns us that we are ignoring our own divine nature as well as the divine nature of others. If you reject and dishonor anxiety you will dishonor its healing message. Anxiety is nothing more than a testimony to our doubt about our spirituality. Whenever we tune into our infinite spirituality, that doubt begins to disappear and anxiety has served its function. Anxiety is the most faithful companion to spiritual self-doubt. You cannot eradicate anxiety until you penetrate the doubt barrier of self-ignorance. I don't care how clever or smart or clever you are, anxiety is a faithful companion for the purpose of self-realization.
And so the spiritual astronaut must penetrate the anxiety barrier of attachment to the human story that confines us to an earth-bound consciousness. That sound or gravity barrier of anxiety is our challenge. The lower part of our human nature is the Anxiety Box. The upper part points to our love nature. Taken together they represent the human god, which is what you and I and everyone in this humanity boat is. Nothing less but that the human-god awareness will serve you therapeutically and make you a man of peace. Nothing less than human-god awareness can be called spiritual psychotherapy, and give you the sense of wholeness and holiness that you require.
If you deny, resist or succumb to anxiety, it has become your enemy. If you admit, face and embrace the meaning of your anxiety, it has become your ally. Until we learn the language of metaphor , symbol and story, we will remain earthbound. Only then we can move beyond the form and literal word to the symbolic to the formless truth of oneness.
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