To your ordinary personality life in this world is quite real. In fact life as you experience it through your senses is all that there is. You touch, taste, smell, hear, and see a very physical world and it appears in relation to how you perceive it. If you don’t like what you are experiencing you suffer. If you cut yourself you bleed what seems to be real blood. If someone you love abandons you or dies, you experience huge loss and grief. If you like what you are experiencing you feel great pleasure from food, sex, and the good life. From these vantage points life seems to be happening to you, coming at you, often unbidden, quite accidentally.

Perhaps you feel that luck has something to do with these events and experiences. If you are lucky, come from a high birth and inherit wealth, come from good genetic stock, and have health and good looks then you may feel fortunate. If you come from poverty, are sickly, or have plain looks maybe you experience yourself to be unlucky even though luck actually has nothing to do with all this whatsoever. Nothing is lucky or unlucky. Why should you be more lucky than your brother or sister, or unlucky in comparison to them. Who is responsible for this so called luck? You?, Others? The gods? Spirit? Your past lives? Most people never think this through and even though they may be very intelligent socially speaking, they follow rote beliefs given to them by parents or society. They buy into the beliefs and conventions of their culture, their religion, their political party, and the times they live in. Ninety per cent of what most people believe, if not more, is completely erroneous, wrong, and crazy.

Your small self in many ways is like a child whether or not you are biologically an adult. If you tell a child of eight to take the controls of a Dreamliner jet in flight, that child will be terrified because they know this is beyond their capacity. If they are deluded or completely foolish they will think it is fun until they soon crash the plane. If an experienced pilot steps in and shows them what to do and helps them they may manage to fly it for a short while. If they are wise they will be most grateful for the help. If they are foolish they will think and tell others, “I flew the plane. I flew the plane. I am better than you are,” not acknowledging that they could never have done so without the huge help of the pilot.

The eight-year old child is like the ordinary personality flying by the seat of their pants through life pretending they are in control but in reality, terrified underneath that they are in over their head. The experienced pilot that offers to help and steps in to show the way is the higher self, the essence, compassionate, wise, and not fazed in the least by whatever comes their way. The essence knows that this physical life is nothing but a very realistic dream and since the essence operates from beyond the dream, the dream does not frighten them in the least. It is just a cartoon created to teach and provide experiences. To the lower self, the child, the dream is so realistic that at times it is very easy to forget it is a dream and easy to feel it is the only thing that exists. Compared with how essence experiences existence, physical life is utterly two dimensional, very simplistic, no challenge at all. For the child, the body personality, this physical life is a great challenge, filled with confusion, challenges, dilemmas, and paradox. The essence knows there is no such thing as separation, as you and me, us and them, near and far, past and future. The experience is simply complete coherence, presence, and total freedom from any limitation whatsoever. The ordinary personality feels nothing but separation and this generates much fear, helplessness, and confusion. This personality experiences itself in past, present, and future perspectives and that has its own challenges.

All alone the child of eight will ultimately fail to thrive, fail to survive in the dream because it is out of its league. This young child is not yet ready to leave the nest and manage life on its own because the child needs its parents. In this case the parents are one’s own essence self not to be found anywhere but right here right now, instantly responsive for the asking. Too often the child self does not remember to ask or even acknowledge there is a deep inner observer to their lives, watching over them, caring for them, loving them, but also not interfering with their learning like a parent at the playground observing the child they love dearly at play with other children. This good parent will watch closely but not step in unless real danger is present. They know the child only learns from experience and to constantly interfere would stunt their growth and ultimately hurt their child.

Eventually a bright and wise child will grow and develop and learn to say, “Dad, Mom, could you help me put this puzzle together? Could you help me put this new bike together and teach me to ride it? Could you help me sew up this rip in my jacket? Can you explain this math problem? You get the idea. The good news is that every human being has these wise and good parents within no matter what their biological parents’ shortcomings are. Too often the biological parents are eight year olds themselves and completely unable to help. Often they are totally absent emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. We live in a very crowded world where we often feel alone and abandoned. No one taught us that each one of us is a sacred and divine presence with deep roots, extraordinary wisdom, and tremendous capacity.  No one told us that we will all eventually discover that we are the inner parents. The child will grow up to become something extraordinary, something new, more than its parents. Wow! What a concept. What if that were really true? Why not? We see that all the time already as we look around us.

No one showed us that we can always ask for help and find it within. That has been an extreme limitation for humans for thousands of years. That time is now ending. Within a hundred years a new paradigm will be in place that will introduce an entire generation of tuned-in, wise human beings who will know how to operate from a higher octave. The results will be support, compassion, kindness, love, generosity, and all the things we know that cause children to thrive. As these thriving children grow they will assume the mantle of the responsibility of living on this planet and everything will change. Everything. There will be good stewards looking after this dream planet at last. There will be much work to do to straighten out the mess created by unaware and immature human beings but anything can happen in a dream. Right? This story is not at an end. It is not yet time to close the book and say, “And that is the end of the story.” This book is a long one and we are only completing chapter three or four.

So what do we do with this information to put it to use, to actualize it, make it manifest?  Well first of all we do not try to change the world from the perspective of the child. The ordinary personality is not equipped in any way to do that. It can barely wipe its own butt. The reality is that the future from our perspective is in the hands of our essence selves but the essence is mostly observing unless it is asked for help like the Mom or Dad in the playground. In other words we have the curious situation of the wise one needing permission from the foolish one to interfere. So somehow we have to overcome our tendency to be fools and understand this basic rule. “Ask and you shall receive” is the ancient saying that addresses this conundrum. This requires at the best, humility on our parts, and at the worst, desperation. Either one will work in the end but it is more effective to be humble and ask than to be desperate and ask because desperation comes from fear and we do not have to come from fear to get help. Being humble is the right action here because it acknowledges the truth, respect your elder, the higher and more capable you. So, any time you want, often is best, have a little talk with your higher self. It might go something like this.

Higher Self, Spirit, Mighty I Am Presence (whatever you want to call your higher self). I am so glad you are with me. I might not think I know you very well but I want a strong relationship with you. I could use some help here with my life.  I need a good guide that I can completely trust. I am prepared to listen to you and follow your advice and guidance. Give me lots of signs and signals about what the right course of action for me is. Make it obvious. I don’t expect you to do everything for me. I realize this is my dream and I am the one that has to ultimately take responsibility for it. Help me to know what the truth is. Remind me often that I am a sacred being, divine in nature, way more capable than I thought I was. Help me to operate from this higher octave. Help me to know that I am never alone, that you are always with me, my very best friend. Help me to not judge myself harshly. Help me to not punish myself ever. Help me to look around and see others not as how they appear but who they actually are, other aspects of myself. Help me not to judge them. Keep me from attacking others and seeing them in terms of their flaws. Help me to be compassionate, kind, and generous in all my dealings with myself and others. I am ready to transform my life. I am ready to release and let go of my old familiar ways to embrace the unknown, the great mystery, the higher octaves. I am free of all limitations, all confinement, all the lies, all the fears, all the false programs. Thank you for listening to me. I love you. I know you love me.

Now spend a few moments in silence just listening and feeling how you feel. Perhaps you will sense nothing. Perhaps you will feel a presence. Perhaps you will hear some thoughts in your head that you will experience as very serene, inducing a profound state of calmness, emptiness, or tranquility. You might feel jubilation, joy, or inspiration. You could feel a deep sense of relief, release, or freedom. What ever you experience don’t judge it, don’t resist it, don’t second guess it. Just notice it.

So the first step is to establish a relationship with your higher self, your essence. First you must transform your own inner world. The external world as you experience it will soon follow. You will notice that things seem to be different. You are different. The world is different in many small, even tiny ways. People are nicer  to you and you are nicer to them. Food tastes better, animals may show more interest in you. Perhaps difficult people avoid you and you never seem to be where violence or negative drama is taking place. You seem to miss out on drive by shootings, car jacking, riots, earthquakes, fires, floods, tsunamis and other difficulties. Who knows, everyone is different in the way they experience change but there will be many signs that what you are doing is making a difference. Enjoy and acknowledge the differences.

José Stevens PhD is an international lecturer, corporate team builder and organizational coach, consultant and trainer. A psychologist, licensed clinical social worker and author of more than twenty books and numerous articles, he is also co-editor for A Journal of Contemporary Shamanism and a board member of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners. He is the founder, with his wife Lena, of the Power Path School of Shamanism and The Center for Shamanic Education and Exchange, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating youth in indigenous cultures. He has completed a ten-year apprenticeship with a Huichol Maracame in Mexico and has studied with the Shipibos of the Amazon and the Paqos of the Andes for the last thirty years.

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