Dear Subscribers,

This post will have a very personal flavor because it offers you a context in which to assess whether or not you accept the ideas presented. If it had an academic style, you might feel more pressure to see the subjects as I do so the container is offered so as not to interfere with your own powers of discernment.

I never felt that there was anything extraordinary about my childhood except perhaps the fact that I survived it. My parents, teachers, the minister of the church — alleged role models — all seemed quite ordinary. My father was scientific but volatile. My mother was more imaginative and tranquil. I failed to discover any basis for their marriage so if an attraction between them existed, it was outside of my view. My teachers were exceptionally boring and school was not remotely interesting to me. By university, I found a few interesting courses, but I nearly flunked psychology because I failed to provide "correct" answers to questions about what influenced me. I never mentioned parents or teachers or movie stars or sports heroes or politicians . . . ho hum.

Sometime long before that, I was invited to participate in a summer course in creative writing. I might have been 12 or 13. One of the assignments was to write am essay on free will versus destiny. The paper was returned with scribble at the top. A "99" was crossed out and replaced by "100" and then the teacher asked me to stay after school to speak with her. She explained that she had never given "100" before but when she asked herself what caused her to deduct one point, she could not come up with an answer. Being painfully shy, I made no effort to help her with her discomfort. I just stood there waiting to be dismissed. She was, however, not finished. She said she had actually been forced to think deeply and reconsider some of her own beliefs and was impacted by the profundity of my thoughts. I was still too shy to say anything. I was just wondering silently, "Now can I go?" She seemed to want to express her personal thoughts and finally she seemed finished and I must have shown some signs of restlessness. I thought the conversation was over and started heading for the door when she said, "By the way, you were the only one in the class to defend predestination."

If she had not said that, I would have forgotten the class and the score as well as the awkwardness of standing there while a grown up wrestled with her belief system. The notion that grown ups are somehow fit to rule children never found any acceptance in my psyche. I was rather astonished by the muddle in which most adults lived and truly wanted to get the heck off this Planet and go somewhere else.

My thesis was that character is destiny and we cannot change what happens unless we can change ourselves. Otherwise, when we come to what appear to be decision making points in life, junctions in the road, our temperaments and proclivities will dictate our choices so they are not really choices at all, just interludes at which we pause because we think we have options. To a large extent, my thinking has not matured much beyond this belief. Hypothetically, we could at any moment transcend "ourselves" and visualize a world completely different from what we see now and our lives would be monumentally enriched by the conquest of our own selves. We have various disciplines for coming to an understanding of ourselves. These include psychology, everything from behavioral modification to depth analysis; astrology which can be as superficial as psychology or as deep as spirituality; and, of course, meditation, spiritual practice, and most important of all, methods for escaping the ego and seeing what is without the filters of our personal lenses. However, we fall in love, get jobs, marry, have children, slave for others, and then die, usually without transcending our own biases much less perfecting ourselves. Leisure is an immense gift, but it is usually wasted on frivolous pursuits since our culture is pursuing the destruction of wisdom with all the power and might it can muster. Cynically, I might hypothesize that the corporate machinery behind our monstrous civilization could not enslave people who were able to see without the mirages they project so they will continue to deluge us with mirages.

On these long and sometimes interesting and sometimes boring roads, there are pivotal moments, usually marked by challenges, often simple challenges like decisions: shall I go to this college or the other one? Shall I take this job or that one? Shall I marry this person or the other one? Shall I move to that place or another one? Some of these points of no return are marked by medical crises and while some people fight the challenges with all the weapons of their physical and psychological arsenals, others succumb to the pressure to go inside and figure out where the path really leads and why. In theory, if we answered the questions correctly, we would emerge healed and whole and go forward, equipped with new insights, understanding, and motivation. In some cases, success seems to depend on how much baggage we can lose or how many patterns we can transform. It's rare to see people navigate these challenges without dealing with issues from the past and orienting correctly towards the future.

My conflict is that while I believe we are all essentially immortal and therefore completely indestructible, practically speaking, we are far from demonstrating this reality in this dimension on this Planet. In fact, no one is escaping the portals of either birth or death and yet we go through them, presumably again and again and again, always with loss of memory at the birth portal and hopefully with recovery of what was lost at the death portal. This, at any rate, is what I believe but increasingly, I am coming to appreciate the probability that the only reason for this loss is that the human species is horribly mutated and damaged so it lacks access to truth about itself. I am more or less certain that if we accessed the missing pieces, we would be rather splendid. We would, of course, also be unwilling to slave for miscreant masters.

The conflict between church and state has always interested me. As an astrologer, I have seen the state as symbolized predominantly through placements of Saturn and Pluto, Saturn being the bureaucracy and status quo and Pluto the invisible power behind throne or the apparent seat of power. In mythology, Pluto had a helmet that rendered him invisible so it's hard for us to see who is really pulling the strings but even Pluto can't wear a helmet 24/7. Mars, of course, represents the military, the hired hands of the powers that be. According to most Western astrologers, all three of these are all malefics but, of course, there are skillful ways to use each planet and this can enable someone to raise the probable level of expression to a more acceptable level. For instance, Saturn can be ambitious and manipulative and/or disciplined and ethical. He can be scheming or responsible, but regardless of motive, the modus operandi is cautious and usually realistic, at least in the pedestrian understanding of what is realistic.

The church is primarily represented by Jupiter and Neptune, neither of which is impervious to corruption but the "sell out" is much harder to see and sometimes not quite as harmful as what happens when the state has gone amok. Both Jupiter and Neptune have a massive desire for expansion so mix a bit of ego and state influence with some dogma and we have a recipe for trouble.

The idea of meditation is to enter a state of awareness in which the ego is entirely suspended. Normally, this requires renunciation so it never happens if the ego is dominant. Going from the psychological perception of control to surrender is a total free fall and it seems wild, unpredictable, reckless, perilous, and unpredictable to sane people. So, of course, all mystical states are officially regarded as delusional and therefore irrelevant, and if laws can be made to carve these diagnostic criteria in stone, everyone who ever risked the surrender would be "mad". The powers that be do not want such people in positions of influence so the pressure to certify alternate states of awareness as aberrant states of mind rather than coherent or relevant is wielded by those who have a desire to control others. Unfortunately, this pattern spills over into academia and science and journalism and is not therefore limited to mysticism.

Truly insane people, like paranoid people of state, often hire the services of mystics because they want advance notification of risks to themselves. So, there are prostitutes among the pundits, lots and lots and lots of them because money talks, even to people of the cloth. Renunciation has therefore sometimes involved vows of both poverty and chastity, not to mention obedience, because it is alleged to keep priests on the straight and narrow but really the path of faith is the path of egolessness so the problem is neither poverty or chastity but fidelity to what one knows to be true. To some extent, we cannot separate the path of wisdom from the paths of knowledge and information. This means that many people who are not presently wearing the robes of holy orders are still wearing the suits of of conformity to the institutions that trained them.

Why write this today? Lately, I have been sucked back into the world where life and death jockey for supremacy, not my life but the lives of others. Being observant and yet often unable to articulate what I see, my mind is forced inwards where it replays scenes and tries to rewrite scripts to see how each script might affect the outcome . . . all the while believing that most likely fate is at work and we arrived in life with a contract and getting that contract modified would take a simply enormous spiritual event. However, I also believe that such events do happen.

Around about 1993-5, I came up with the idea that the moment is where the intersection of destiny and karma take place. This is fate. Nothing is actually carved in stone. It is malleable but only to the extent that we can shift the inexorable weight of karma. This is immensely hard work for nearly everyone. It means taking responsibility for every deed and even for the thoughts that abort before they become deeds. It often means finding the explanations behind the patterns that support the karma and changing the causative forces that set the ripples in motion. Yet, this is possible. It is always within our grasp IF we take the time and make the requisite effort to shift.

The "now" is actually a construct. As said, it is the junction of karma and destiny and the ratio of influence could change at any second and this would change fate. However, we only get a chance to live each moment once. Maybe, maybe not. To the extent that we regret choices, we set in motion trajectories on other levels of consciousness that play out in mind games, dreams, and perhaps even astral phenomena. Let's try to bring this down to Earth. Supposing you paused and wondered what if you had married the other person who was interested in you at the same time or other time before you tied the knot with the present spouse? How would life be different? You create reverberations with such thoughts so they have a life of their own, perhaps without the power to manifest. There are more direct questions such as, "What if you had listened to the warnings about fluoride or vaccines or genetically modified organisms?" This can bring up regret, especially if convinced that the illness challenging your life is somehow related to something you might have been able to avoid. The point is not to berate yourself or wallow in regret but to create a new stream in which life-supporting decisions are made so that the trajectory changes. It's more like a course correction than a fantasy. One never knows what will happen if the course is corrected.

Ultimately, however, life is about purpose so bringing awareness of purpose into waking consciousness and living the life intended by the soul is an opportunity not to be wasted. Therefore, the moment this commitment occurs, we have absolutely no idea what will happen next. Perhaps the miracle of miracles will happen? I have lived long enough to have seen this a few times. Nothing is more powerful than a life of purpose. I wish this on everyone!

Blessings,

Ingrid

Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 2011

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