Lessons From My Probable Selves

I reached out to a woman from my dream, someone who expressed to me such unconditional love. Because she was intimately familiar, I thought of her as one of my probable selves (to use 'Seth'/Jane Roberts terminology). And this is what she wrote with my pencil hand:

Feel your hurt, before we begin. Feel your longing without judgment or comparisons. And remember that you are much more than this one focus and expression in space and time that you call "Seth Mullins".

The prejudices of that one small world-view need not rule you. Nothing is stopping you from adopting a different view. You have the beliefs that you hold because at one time they all made sense..

- And here I glimpsed my younger (another probable?) self, and heard him say that he still wants to get back at his mother. And this is why, to this day, he and I are drawn to women with whom we end up feeling betrayed. That is one example of a belief that once made sense, and can now be discarded.

"Nothing is stopping you," the Voice repeats.

Flowing beneath this surface chaos of reaction and blame - the shadow play of the world - is the Prima Materia that I'm seeking: The deep convictions that my inner mind uses to pull these swirling atoms together into a coherent picture of life.

That's the story that this probable self uses to isolate his road from the realm of infinite other possibilities. I want to change roads, and therefore I must know what ideas are hemming me in. I trust that some may simply dissolve when dragged into the light of day.

If unworthiness is naught but an idea, then from where does it spring? Is it the belief that I cannot trust myself, that my impulses will run rampant if shame doesn't hold me in check? This much has been intimated in my dreams (I do believe that probable selves often appear to us there) when I have censured, contained and tried to control the spontaneous Child.

He is a probable self too - one who never learned the self-doubt that I became so familiar with. From him I've learned that I don't have to fight to preserve these boundaries anymore. I thought they kept me safe, but they only stifle the movements of life and Spirit.

The Soul must find expression for everything that it is. And since its reality cannot possibly be encompassed in one lifetime, it must manifest itself in lives beyond counting. I have come to know that there is much that I can learn from my other "selves", whenever I am fortunate enough to glimpse them and feel their destinies intertwining with my own.


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Flowing with My Healthy Anger

"Flow with the anger as energy," the Inner Voice tells me. "Place your focus where your power resides: Within the thoughts and the feelings, the internal images, that you carry and nurture. These ingredients feed this sense of powerlessness that then mutates into frustration.

"It is not he or she or the world at large that gives you these things. You're stumbling over your own ideas out there in the seemingly-unforgiving world."

Anger is no more aberrant than a bird, river or tree. Volcanoes have their place in the scheme of nature. I am angry in this moment because I don't know how to take responsibility for my creations.

I don't know how to reconcile my desires for contradictory things.

I'm holding on to the fantasy of a path without sacrifice.

My anger is teaching me these things. But it could not, if I cast it as blame. Or if I stuffed it, disguised it, or tried to "release it" without ever stopping to listen to what it had to say. Any one of these reactions is a path back to the lost world.

A drink from the River Lethe, so that I might forget that I am my life's author.

Blame Has No Basis in Truth

Energy always has a reason for being, and that reason only becomes apparent when it is allowed its life and movement. Flowing with my healthy anger takes me on a riverboat journey through forgotten subterranean ways. Down in those depths I witness the drama being played out, and see myself with the script in hand.

I am restored to myself as I accept responsibility for all that has transpired. And now I know that my anger is a threat to no one in the world, because I have recognized it as my friend.


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Sensual Awakening

I've become acquainted with a form of sensuality that I think of as the soul's expression of itself through the sensations of the body. I realize that this contradicts so many ascetic spiritual creeds. But I distrust any beliefs that teach disdain for earthly life or seek to "transcend" it, so I don't hold with that sort of dogma anyway. If we hadn't chosen to express ourselves here then we wouldn't be physical, period. Physicality is one of the soul's expressions. It does reside elsewhere; but it also lives here.

I was surprised and at the same time euphoric - it warrants such a strong word - when my descent into myself began to awaken a veritable rainbow of new sensations in my body consciousness. Stoners back in my adolescence used to talk about a "body high". Well, sometimes the mere act of walking across the floor (as if in time to some sort of ever-present cellular music) was more of a delight to my nervous system than anything marijuana had ever delivered.

The whole Universe is abuzz with indescribable vitality, and when you begin to resonate with this energy your whole body starts to sing. I was going through a sensual awakening as well as a spiritual one.

Sensual awakening flies in the face of any (supposed) spiritual doctrine that preaches denial of the physical world, the human body, and the conditions of earthly life. I came to know that the spiritual life - far from expressing any longing for escape - is really an immersion into this reality that is resplendent all around us.

Every part of my body seemed to experience Spring's thaw. My cells shook themselves awake and burst into some sort of sonorous hymn of gratitude for being. For weeks I began my day with a similar ritual: Breathing through a bout of fear (my boundaries were dissolving and my horizons were being pushed back. Where was this all sweeping me away to?). Then, stepping into that fear and moving through, the world (both inside and outside of me - was there differentiation anymore?) began to hum with the vitality of life's "I-AM-Ness". Everything was perfectly in place, and I flowed through it all with a sense of natural poise, grace and joy that I'd never known before.


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(Starchild) The Light that Can't Be Extinguished

I heard these words scampering through my head just as I was drifting off to sleep: I told Starchild, and then Starchild ran off and told the whole Universe. Sleep almost pulled me under before it occurred to me that this cosmic conversation I'd eavesdropped upon might be worth recording.

I feel like I know what Starchild told everything in Creation, though I doubt I could ever do it justice with words. It's saying "I AM!" with everything in your being. It's that moment - maybe you're in love, or are pausing in the afterglow of a great poem, or you just heard a flower tell you her name - when you know, and can only give voice to what you know with a cry of "Yes!"

It is the Divinity within us that allows us to awaken each morning and create the day.

If we knew that we were responsible even for the Sun's rising, would we ever hurt each other the way we do?

My whole mind is filled with the Sun in this moment. Maybe I'm feeling my kinship with Starchild. I've made no introduction because I assume that anyone reading this already knows her. She is the light that can never be extinguished, the light that burns within everything we have done, are doing and will ever do.

In everything we have, are or will ever experience.

The light that cannot be extinguished. Not by war, suicide, stupidity, greed, racism, hunger, or darkness. If you want to know how we create the day then ask that Light.

Right there is the place where Reason will scoff. But don't pay it any mind. It's just acting jealous.

- Seth Mullins


Set in the cosmos is a single sonic sound
That is vibrating constantly
And if we could get, and hold on, to the note
We would see our minds were free, Oh they're free

- Judas Priest


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Far From My Spiritual Home

I do believe that we all know, at heart, where we belong. And this sense of belonging encompasses a lot of things: Why we came here; What our real gifts are; Recognition of people who we've known, and have shared the journey with before; The reason for - and meaning of, our suffering, etc.

For me, the suffering was intimately connected with an inner sense of how far from my spiritual home I had strayed. There was sadness born of knowing this 'promised land', and fear born of knowing - or intuiting, at least - how far I would have to travel to return to it.

I recently wrote the following words in a poem I dedicated to my teen-age self: "If you'd really known what the journey meant then I doubt you could've made the first steps." Ignorance spared me, in that sense. Some mystic traditions maintain that the future is no more nebulous than the past. But with the blinders on, I didn't require the courage to face 20 years of healing and spiritual striving. I only ever needed enough courage for 'today'.

There's a living, conscious and very wise place inside each of us that preserves the essence of our real nature so that it's never lost, no matter how far afield we may run with our illusions, faulty beliefs, reactions and destructive behavior. It speaks in our dreams and waking visions, in sudden intuitions and inexplicable synchronicity. It's also that quiet but steady voice that's there with us after a bout of crying, or a confrontation with deep fear - a run-in with mortality and/or grief, when all is strangely clear and perfectly in place. This space merely waits for us to feel the pain within our missteps and then turn around and walk back towards it.

This is the root of what I call sanity. The structures of this world...well, they may all resonate with it to some extent or another. Nothing is truly corrupt: All is a reflection of our process of becoming. But these structures - whether political, religious, scientific, ethical, etc. - cannot point the way home for any individual. This is always a personal quest in the end; and ultimately, "sanity" means "having come home".

I grew up far from my spiritual home because I needed to learn the steps back to it, in my bones. And because I wanted to reflect all those twists, turns, blind alleys, swamps, deserts and flooded channels along my Way back to anyone, struggling and lost, who might benefit from it.

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Spiritual Memoir (Back to the Magic Kingdom)

I'm letting things slip out of focus; deliberately loosening the structure of my thoughts so that my world may become similarly unstructured. If I can let the stories dissolve, who knows what perception I may slip into? I must have faith that some reality will catch me. And in the process of recording this, some form of spiritual memoir will no doubt emerge.

From the vantage point of childhood I view reality with simple trust. I know that it cushions me amidst all kinds of internal and external weather. I began to lose this assurance at about the age of five, six. There were suddenly many more moments of reflection and doubt. I looked around at my kindergarten classmates and thought, It's just too much energy, crossing all the distance between what they're talking about and what I feel is real. I actually don't recall what specific words I used, though I remember the moment well and I know this was the general idea. I gave up on society altogether and set sail on Rimbaud's Drunken Boat.

Freedom seemed slowly to disappear, and walls closed in. I believed what the adults said about life, that it was disappointing, toilsome and harsh. I brought my perceptions in line with this picture. The world appears to us the way that we believe it must. For ten, fifteen years I let science, religion, school, the media - all the exalted "teachers" of our culture - tear away the last vestiges of magic. A shell of numbed adolescence remained. I became morosely nostalgic, listening to the music and pouring over the pictures of my youth. Some part of me realized that this "child-self me" had known that magic and believed in it.

The time came to "learn to forget" (Jim Morrison), to "unlearn what I had learned" (Yoda), to reverse the inertia created by all those faulty and soul-dead beliefs and unravel my way back to the magic kingdom.

Though the suffering along this path was enormous, I've come to see it as self-initiated. I chose to be born within a social climate that my private experience of reality would be so at odds with. This culture was a harsh teacher but also an effective one. My personal pain gradually revealed to me the limiting and distorted beliefs that create and propagate such misery across the whole face of the planet. It enabled me to perceive what it is I have to teach, and to understand what I am up against.


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Night of the Paper Demons

I wrestled with a lot of pain today, pain connected to a personal relationship, and I wondered at times why I couldn't seem to move through it. Was there some deeper lesson for me in this situation? It wasn't until the eleventh hour - late this evening, before I sat down to write this - that it occurred to me that I could ask for a clarifying dream tonight to help me sort my feelings. Why did it take me so long to consider that recourse? Well, I'm really not so surprised, because our cultural conditioning does very little to encourage us to see the inner self as a friend and ally. There are so many detrimental beliefs getting in the way; for example, the psychological notions of a tainted Unconscious. And the concept of demons, whether in religious, spiritualistic or other circles, is another culprit.

During two separate periods of my life - 1991-1995 (Age 19-24) and 2007-2010 (34-37) - I was involved in a form of psychotherapy known as Archetypal Dreamwork. I may never be able to make any kind of summary statement regarding the value of this work that I did with my dream analyst. Some aspects were crucial at the time; enlightening, and probably life-saving. But other aspects didn't sit well with me, though I spent some time paying them lip service. One of these involved an underlying belief in demons.

Such a belief may seem extraneous insofar as one's main business in life is concerned. But think about this: If you believe that demons exist then this conviction will color your whole perception of yourself, your fellow human beings, the state of the world and the Universe at large. If some demonic force exists within me then it must exist in you, too...and hell, demons must be responsible for all the havoc in our world, from wars to famine to environmental catastrophe. We're no longer responsible for our own darkness; and if you believe in demons then only God and His Angels or some equivalent benevolent force can oust them, so we thereby disown our capacity for good as well.

So long as we believe in demons, we'll keep encountering them in our lives. This was the kind of metaphysical view, then, that I was exposed to and ultimately had to reject. I believe in one ultimate power in the Universe: Creativity. Freedom is given us (perhaps we've gifted ourselves?) to create our experience in all of its aspects. And the "lightness" or "darkness" of our creations has little meaning in the larger sense of things aside from our felt experience of life being a learning process.

Religions throughout history have persecuted people of all walks of life in an attempt to destroy paper demons. And similar things can be said of many forms of psychotherapy, metaphysics, ethics and law. It is all a witch hunt fueled by the same thing: Human beings either being unaware of, or refusing to take personal responsibility for, their personal reality. And it is such a persistent fact of our history because our beliefs are self-fulfilling. If you're convinced that demons exist then you'll likely encounter them - in your nightmares, in the world as "adversaries", etc.

That belief in a sense creates them. And by the same token, the belief that we are the authors of our own lives turns demons into paper tigers.


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