Beyond

I don't mean to insinuate that there is nothing beyond the body; to the contrary, there is so much beyond the body, so many dimensions, so many kinds of entities, and so much awareness available, that we really need to know where the body's boundaries are, what its properties are, and how to work with what we become conscious of on other levels. Especially these days, when we are growing closer to those other levels, which are as busy as O'Hare on a good day.

The phenomenon of astrology demonstrates that what occurs without has a corresponding reality within. This works many ways, and as Melanie Reinhart pointed out earlier in this series, humanity has always projected its inner dimensions onto the outer cosmos -- God in heaven as opposed to the living Spirit within, to give the most gross example, gross because there is a denial involved if we always perceive divinity, truth and meaning as outside ourselves. The more of our power we project outward onto people, ideas and institutions, the less we have. If we idolize a musician, we're unlikely to be much of one.

But there is a relatively rare phenomenon that does some interesting moves in the within/without world, which is channeling. Channeling is drawing information from a seemingly external entity, and bringing it into the 3-D world. The notion that it's external comes from the fact that often people who channel don't have direct knowledge of what they are channeling.

Now, we understand enough about the psyche to explain this without saying that space people wrote a book, I just moved my hand. Carl Jung, mentioned yesterday, discovered something he called the collective unconscious. It's as if every one of our minds has a trap door, and we all lead to the same labyrinthian basement. Down there, we can get stuff that's not really privately our own. Astrology uses the collective unconscious because if you work with astrology, you use archetypes (another Jungian term) which are collective in nature, kind of like the Internet. The 'net could replace the basement metaphor since we finally have a way of describing how individual minds (like your PC) can be interconnected, with much information available to all of them.

Astrology, to continue with that example, is on the open system, not protected by any passwords -- you just need to know it exists, and do the work to access it. The more work you do, the more wisdom and growth you get back. That could involve following a discipline that takes many years to master, but good information is available right away, if you seek honestly, and listen. And then, you are logged onto a collective domain that can give you information beyond your own personal cache. Hopefully, you get only what you need to know, for purposes you're suited to serve.

Astrology and tarot are good methods of accessing collective data, I think, because they rely on a well-established set of symbols, with their own limis and borders. Those symbols exist in the universe with their own protective beings (or consciousness) around them, and they are all representative of inner potentials or active processes within us, as well. They are pretty familiar turf. So we are pretty safe working with these methods, if we don't get greedy and want to know too much.

I am not a big advocate of channeling, Ouija boards, automatic writing and related arts; they don't come with firewalls.