Out With The Old
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org,
please feel free to visit the school website)
“And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free?
—Kahlil Gibran
Children are so amazingly beautiful and wise. If you take the time to be with a child, you are automatically taking on these qualities of being in the present. Another profound quality children emanate is trust. If their needs for food, safety, and love have been met, they radiate pure mind, which knows nothing but absolute and unconditional existence. They transfer their absolute trust to their parents or care-providers not long after birth, and are like little mirrors of their surroundings. They are extremely impressionable, trusting that their caretakers, who seem to be more skillful at navigation of this great playground than themselves, will show them how to maneuver in this reality. Young children are perfectly balanced between receptivity and radiation, between giving and receiving. They are in the flow. In this receptive state, they are like the water in Masaru Emoto’s experiment, which is cited at www.whatthebleep.com: “Dr. Masaru Emoto discovered that crystals formed in frozen water reveal changes when specific, concentrated thoughts are directed toward them. He found that water that has been exposed to loving words shows brilliant, complex, and colorful snowflake patterns. In contrast, water exposed to negative thought forms incomplete, asymmetrical patterns with dull colors.”
The culture we live in is a manifestation of the contrast of polarization, a “duality reality.” The totality of possible thought forms is manifest, because we all get to have “free-will,” and minds of our own. Only these supposed individually expressed minds are in reality a product of the programming we have received as children, and that we continue to receive throughout our lives. Like the water, we manifested according to the thoughts and beliefs of others, who did the same in their childhoods. Part of the process of affirming our truth is beginning to recognize what beliefs about ourselves and the world came from outside our natural, radiating truth, our pure mind center.
Louise Hay, in her expansively life-affirming book You Can Heal Your Life (1984), gives us the affirmation “Truth is the unchangeable part of me.” She tells us that the root of all of our perceived problems is that we believe that we are not good enough, that we reject ourselves as (we perceive) others have rejected us, and that we fail to love and accept ourselves. She goes on to describe a method for releasing these beliefs which don’t serve us, using an excellent analogy:
“If you want to clean a room thoroughly, you will pick up and examine everything in it. Some things you will look at with love, and you will dust them or polish them to give the new beauty. Some things you will see that need refinishing or repair, and you will make a note to do that. Some things will never serve you again, and it becomes time to let these things go. Old magazines and newspapers and dirty paper plates can be dropped into the wastebasket very calmly. There is no need to get angry in order to clean a room. It is the same thing when we are cleaning our mental house. There is no need to get angry just because some of the beliefs in it are ready to be tossed out. Let them go as easily as you would scrape a bit of food into the trash after a meal. Would you really dig into yesterday's garbage to make tonight's meal? Do you dig into old mental garbage to create tomorrow's experiences?"
The act of consciously affirming life is a multi-dimensional, fluid process, like a river with many streams flowing into it. One way to access this process is to pay attention to the flow of thoughts and emotions within our consciousness, identify those which are not resonant with our truth, and release these energy forms back into the formless matrix of pure mind, where they can be recycled into new manifestations. The analogy Hay uses to illustrate this process is simple and clear, and I like knowing it doesn’t have to be a gut-wrenching process. Yet for many, it will be much emotional, depending on the individual, the tools used, and the amount of energy stuck in the emotional and mental bodies of the energy field. Whatever the process, it is okay. But it is nice to know that if we feel ready, and we have clarity, that we can just shift these stuck thought forms and release them without attachment.
In You Can Heal Your Life (1984), Hay tells us that “Repeated patterns show us our needs.” She says “For every habit we have, for every experience we go through over and over, for every pattern we repeat, there is a NEED WITHIN US for it. The need corresponds to some belief we have. If there were not a need, we wouldn't have it, do it, or be it. There is something within us that needs the fat, the poor relationships, the failures, the cigarettes, the anger, the poverty, the abuse, or whatever there is that’s the problem for us. How many times have we said ‘I won't ever do that again?’ Then, before the day’s up, we have the piece of cake, smoke a cigarette, say hateful things to the ones we love, and so on. Then we compound the whole problem by angrily saying to ourselves, ‘Oh, you have no willpower, no discipline. You’re just weak.’ This only adds to load of guilt we already carry." Hay further explains what she means by “needing the problem” as …”according to our particular set of thought patterns, we need to have certain outer effects or experiences. Every outer effect is the natural expression of an inner thought pattern.
In Power Vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior (2002), David R. Hawkins did extensive research into these behavior patterns that sometimes seem to control our lives. He created a “map of human consciousness,” in which he used kinesiology (also called muscle testing) to indicate the presence of “attractor fields.” Attractor fields are basic archetypal energy fields hidden in the realm of human consciousness, and all emotions and thoughts resonate within these fields. When we are feeling expansive and loving, we are resonating with the attractor field associated with love and good-will. We add energy to this field, and also receive energy from it, and this solidifies our experience of the world as a love-filled reality. If we are feeling depressed and hopeless, we resonate with the attractor field within human consciousness that manifests experiences of apathy and despondency. These attractor fields are the energy underlying archetypal patterns, which describe the areas of consciousness potentiality that humans have explored. The presence of these energy fields could explain why sometimes, no matter how hard we try to change unhealthy patterns, we find ourselves back in the same situation again and again.
In the book Radical Forgiveness: Making Room For The Miracle (2002) by Colin Tipping, the persistence of these sorts of patterns are looked at from a different angle. If difficult situations keep repeating themselves, they may be opportunities to grow spiritually, and finding the gift in these situations is part of the process of radical forgiveness. A description of the philosophy of radical forgiveness, based on Colin Tipping’s work, is given, and I have included some of that information here. I really like this process because it transcends the victim mentality, and fully empowers us to look at how we have created our experiences out of love in order to experience soul growth.