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Articles

by Rusty Stewart, Ph.D.

This article speaks to the many energies swirling and promoting chaos as people contract in fear around the globe. It need not be that way. We just have to learn how to work with the energies and take care of ourselves. Now more than ever we must master our disciplines to stay centered during these tumultuous times. For many of us there is no turning back. Truth is truth, at least the truths we can experience in human form. There are, of course, truths of spirit that eclipse our worldly phenomenon. Before I continue I would like to acknowledge the book that inspired parts of this body of work. The book is called, The Journey to you: A Shaman's Path To Enlightenment by Ross Heaven. I have found it to be enlightening and pertinent to our times. The part I am referring to is subtitled, The Truth And The Matrix in chapter two.

For those of you familiar with Nemo and the Matrix movie trilogy this will be familiar ground. Use your imagination as I draw the parallels and metaphors from the "fictional" movie to our present world. The Matrix is the grid of illusion. What we see is not really what is real. What is real is beneath the surface. In essence, we have been sold a bill of goods, or brainwashed if you will. "In the linear world we have created, we have generated many specialisms and given birth to a long list of 'experts'. Now we do not need to heal ourselves as we once did, or to take personal responsibility for our own well-being. We turn instead to doctors who we expect to 'heal' us, to policemen, lawyers and politicians who will enforce the social dream for us according to the ethics our society has, almost randomly, chosen to live by. We do not need to exercise our own sense of what is right. Our psychiatrists and scientists define what is real and what is fantasy. Our TV sets and journalists interpret the wider world for us. And our priests stand before us to decide the words and the will of god, if, indeed, She is deemed to exist at all. We have placed a million intermediaries between us and our direct experience of life in all of its manifestations – and every time we turn to one of them, we give away our power and accept the dreams of someone else" (Heaven, 2001).

I say don't let them. Think for yourself. Heal yourself. Commit to yourself. Dream a different dream. Don't let the energies of the matrix unground your truth! Stay the course. Now that's a familiar phrase… except this time it will equal integrity and not war. "When it comes right down to it, there is nowhere else to look, no consistent external reality we can subscribe to which is unchanging and universally true, and no one else who can answer for us. Whether we look for answers in the physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual world, we are only ever what we belief ourselves to be, or else we are the dream of someone else. As Castaneda tells us in 'A Separate Reality': 'The world is whatever we perceive, in any manner we may choose to perceive'" (Heaven, 2001).

This is where the power of community becomes so important. In order to walk the path of our truth we need support. It is easy to get swept up in the energies of the mainstream matrix and lose ourselves in another's dream. It helps if together, we dream another dream. One based on truth, compassion, love, forgiveness, integrated spirituality and collective cooperation. "Colin Wilson, in his book, 'The Outsider', estimates that only 4 percent of people can live with the tension of being both a part of and outside of society at the same time, living within the matrix but knowing there is more, sensing that there is something wrong with reality but not knowing what it is" (Heaven, 2001).

It won't necessarily be easy but we can learn to work with the energies that oscillate between the matrix and the truth. Remember fear is not real and truth and Love is real. We can choose to heal ourselves and extend it to the world and universe. And so I ask you how important is our role as nonconformist people? "If they can manage to do so, these people fulfill a vital function for us all as the innovators, the pioneers, the creative individuals, the urban shamans, who are able to shift our collective consciousness through the power of unorthodox thought and a willingness to explore new realities. But many – the drop outs, the burnouts, the isolated, the teenage suicides – fail to cope with the colossal existential task of recreating and redefining their lives and their worlds each and every day. And even those outsiders who succeed for a while – Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Van Gough, Hemingway, James Dean, Kurt Cobain – risk literal as well as psychic death in doing so. It is a perilous path we embark upon when we choose to live our own personal truth" (Heaven, 2001).

And so remember I said that for many of us there is no turning back. There is no time to hide or procrastinate. Please join me. Let's manifest a community of no turning back. We can support each other in becoming heroes of ourselves and each other and walk the path of truth, Love, and possibility. "A person becomes a Hero when he decides to take the journey, painful and disturbing though it may sometimes be, in order to discover the new truths that will help him to create meaning in his world. The Journey, in fact, is what makes him a Hero, instead of someone who ignores the calling of the quest and opts in to the social mythology of the majority worldview" (Heaven, 2001). Indeed there are more of us than we think. We just have to reach out and find each other. Then we can truly support each other in changing our perceptions from the inside out and take a stand for healing and Love. Then we will experience authentic change. "It is an experience captured elegantly by T. S. Eliot in the poem, 'Little Gidding':

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time" (Heaven, 2001).