Authors: Gary Zukav
The unconscious personality is not aware in the moment of its anger or its rage that there are aspects of itself that would prefer to respond with compassion and understanding, but it would recognize them if it could see clearly in that moment. What of the parts of itself that suffer the loneliness and alienation that result from expressing anger, the parts that long for warmth and companionship, for relationships of a depth and quality that are not possible to those who live in anger or fear or jealousy?
If the personality that is tempted decides to align itself with love, with clarity, understanding, and compassion, it gains power. The impulse towards anger, or resentment, or vengeance loses power over it, and in this way, step by step, conscious decision by conscious decision, it becomes truly powerful. If it decides to remain unconscious, to avoid responsibility for its actions, it allows negative currents of energy to form its words and shape its actions. This results in negative behavior, and this results in negative karma.
What does this mean in terms of the illusion?
Negative behavior produces within others and within oneself negative emotions and, therefore, more opportunities to gain power through responsible choice or to create negative karma. Negative karma means that the personality that chooses negative behavior will experience that same negative behavior from another personality, and, again, be given the opportunity to decide to release or continue that mode of learning.
This is the illusion. It is an illusion because you and the other souls that are involved have agreed, in compassion and wisdom, to participate in the learning dynamics of the Earth school in order to heal. It is illusion because within nonphysical reality neither space nor time nor anger nor jealousy nor fear exist. It is an illusion because when you return home it will cease to be.
Therefore, how are you to judge a soul that is involved
in this learning process? What step, or steps, do you abstract and say, “This is wrong”, “That is worthy”, “Here she has succeeded” and “Here he has not”? You cannot judge the learnings of a soul on the basis of how that learning takes place without creating negative karma. In other words, a soul is capable of being examined in process. Just as you can ask yourself, “Where does my anger come from?” and realize that it springs from a multitude of dynamics, some of which were set into motion centuries ago, or longer, and that are only now coming to completion, that it is a current of energy within you that you are seeking to release in order to heal your soul and balance your karmic energy, you cannot try another as if you were a judge in a court for a single angry experience. Rather you would have to see clearly that there is a process unfolding and add to that the factor of karma.
You can only judge that the soul is involved by its own will in a process of healing, and that it is evolving, as are you, and as is the rest of the Universe. This is nonjudgmental justice. It is justice that does not judge the process of the soul’s evolution except that it recognize with love that the soul is reaching for love.
It is not the way of the Universe to look through the eyes of right and wrong and failure or success. How do you know what “success” is? Can you see in fullness the causes and effects of your being and of your acts and of your words? Therefore, how do you know what success is, and how can you possibly imagine what failure is? What is “failure” but a cause and effect? What we call failure is simply a cause and its effect, simply the process of cause and effect in action. It is wise to imagine the dynamics that we think of as “failure” and “success” as not truly existing, because they do not, not from the position of truth, only from the position of judgment.
How can you say what within the illusion is worthy and what is not? “Unworthiness” is the judgment of not being perfected, but look around you. Do you see perfection completed by each human being, except that they are, in their own process, perfect and worthy? It is the process that is worthy and perfect at all times, and in that you complete the task fully.
How is it possible to know what to pursue within the illusion and what not to pursue?
Ask yourself what is the difference between your essential needs and your adopted needs, or perhaps another term might be artificial needs. What are your genuine needs, and what are the needs that you have created for other reasons, to control, or to maneuver others, or to gain attention? Distinguish these in your mind. Know yourself reply and clearly enough to recognize what is a legitimate need of you as a human being and of you as that part of yourself that has created needs for certain other reasons-such as to gain external notice, or prestige, or to become a distinguishable individual. Learn to identify these and then choose which you wish to live with.
For example, is your irritation at the neighbor’s noise a result of a genuine need that is going unmet, or a created need? Does your annoyance with the sounds that the garbage truck makes, or your desire to have the clerk at the grocery store treat you politely, reflect an essential need or an artificial one? Learn to distinguish your real needs, what you truly need as a human being and a soul, from the needs that you have adopted for reasons that are based on external power and do not emerge from the needs of your soul. Once you get a clear sense of that you can begin to separate yourself from your artificial self, and then you are in a position to choose clearly how you wish to respond, and to hold yourself accountable when you allow your artificial needs to take over.
Authentic needs belong to the soul. You need, for example, to love and to be loved. You need to express your creativity, whether that is in raising a family or leading a country. You need to cultivate your spirit, to work consciously at aligning your personality with your soul. You need to be counseled with the impersonal wisdom of your nonphysical Teachers, and the guidance of your nonphysical guides. These are some of your authentic needs.
Non-authentic needs belong to the personality. They are what you adopt in your physical life in order to maneuver the space you claim and walk in upon the Earth. Artificial needs are the needs from which negative karma is incurred. As you reach to fulfill these needs without letting them go and bending and flowing, as you determine to have them satisfied or to use them, you can gain great negative karma.
A non-authentic need is a barrier. Neither nations nor individuals need as much as they have. They are artificial barriers, and the purpose behind their formation is the accumulation of external power. The secondary gain, so to speak, behind the creation of artificial needs is artificial power. Look clearly and you will see it everywhere-in marriages, in international relations, in every conflict.
It is not possible for you to experience the complete emergence of your soul when you are clouded over by artificial needs. When that happens all you can see are artificial needs, and you see them as being ever so important, ever so significant, but are they really? As you look at your not-as-authentic needs, can you see how they drain energy from you? So long as your priorities come from your lesser self, you cannot touch your higher self in a direct way.
Authentic needs are the needs that are always met by the Universe. The Universe is that which supplies you with your authentic needs. You are always being given opportunities to love and be loved, for example, yet ask yourself how many times in your life you have squandered these opportunities.
By learning to respond to your authentic needs and by allowing your artificial ones to drop aside as unnecessary defense mechanisms, you become more open and understanding and compassionate with others. There is a natural give and take in the course of every human life. Each human being has authentic and non-authentic needs, and that is where the natural grit for the flow between us comes from in the living environment. You begin to learn to give and take as you begin to work through an understanding of what your real needs are, and learn to compromise and give and transcend when it comes to the needs of those parts of yourself that are not genuine or do not enhance your development.
If you see clearly through your own authentic needs, you will see that what you are really feeling threatened by when you experience an artificial need is the loss of your power, and, therefore, rather than being able to address it directly, you create an artificial need that does the speaking for you. Learn to address the real need so that you do not have to burden yourself with behavioral patterns that are not true to your own nature, that cloud you, that give you some artificial persona that you have to live up to.
Begin by truly watching your own needs in action where they are real and where they are not, and where they are not, expect to experience a negative emotion. Work on becoming one step detached from that feeling so that you are no longer blinded by it or unaware that you are feeling it. Become a step away so that you can let it begin to work its way through you without penetrating as deeply as it does in terms of creating action and negative thoughts and emotional withdrawals and all the other reactions it creates within you. Become one step detached from it, and every time that you are able to see it you will become more and more and more detached.
You will begin to be able to see the illusion in motion, and that is a part of authentic power.
What is the nature of power? What does it mean to be a truly powerful human being?
Power is not the ability to exert your will upon another person. There is no inner security in that kind of power. That is an attribute of time, and as time changes, that changes, too. Do you have a strong body that others cannot challenge? That will change. What will you do then?
Do you have a physical beauty that can be used to influence others? That will change. What will you do then? Do you have a cleverness that maneuvers others? What happens when you are too tired to use it, or you miss the opportunity?
If you are not at home in the world, you live in the fear of one who can never truly relax and enjoy Life. Is this power? There is no power in fear, or in any of the activities that are generated by fear. There is no power in a thought form of fear, even if it is supported by armies. The armies of Rome disappeared more than a millennia ago, but the force of the life of a single human that Roman soldiers put to death continues to shape the development of our species. Who had the power?
You are only as powerful as that for which you stand. Do you stand for more money in the bank and a bigger house? Do you stand for an attractive mate? Do you stand for imposing your way of thinking upon others? These are the stands of the personality seeking to satisfy its wants. Do you stand for perfection, for the beauty and compassion of each soul? Do you stand for the power of love and the clarity of wisdom? Do you stand for forgiveness and humbleness? These are the stands of the personality that has aligned itself with its soul. This is the position of a truly powerful personality.
Power is energy that is formed by the intentions of the soul. It is Light shaped by the intentions of love and compassion guided by wisdom. It is energy that is focused and directed toward the fulfillment of the tasks of the soul upon the Earth, and the development of the personality as a physical instrument of the soul that is appropriate to those tasks. It is the force that shapes the illusion into the images of the souls that are creating it, and not those of their personalities.
What does this mean?
There is a continual energy exchange between souls. This exchange is splintered when the personality is splintered. Energy, power, leaves a splintered personality through each of its different parts. If one part of you fears the loss of your job, and another fears the loss of a relationship, and another dreads confrontation with an unpleasant coworker, power flows from you without your conscious control. This is how the energy dynamics of an unempowered personality work.
When energy leaves you in fear or distrust, it cannot bring you anything but discomfort or pain. When energy flows from your system in fear or distrust, you experience a physical feeling of pain or discomfort in the part of your body that is associated with the particular energy center that is losing power. When you fear for your ability to protect and care for yourself in the world, to pay your rent, for example, or to keep yourself safe from physical or emotional harm-when you see power as external and you feel that you do not have enough of it to insure your well-being or your safety-you experience discomfort or pain in the area of your stomach, in the area of your solar plexus. What we call anxiety is the experience of power leaving through the energy center that is located in this area of the body. An anxiety attack is a massive loss of power from your system through that energy center. Power losses affect the surrounding parts of the body. Power loss through this center, for example, can cause indigestion. If it is chronic or acute, it can ulcerate the stomach.
When you fear that your ability to love or to be loved is threatened, when you fear, for example, expressing your own love or receiving love from another, you experience physical discomfort or pain in the region of your chest, near your heart. What we experience, literally, as heartache is the experience of power leaving in fear or distrust through this energy center. Have you lost a mate, or a child, or someone very dear to you? Sort through your experience. Determine what it is that you felt. You will discover that your body hurt, that you were in pain in the vicinity of your chest. That is the experience of power leaving through that energy center. That is what a heartache is, the loss of power through your heart center. Chronic or acute loss of power through the heart center results, literally, in an attack of the heart. There is more to myocardial infarction, to heart attack, than cholesterol in the blood and other conditions of the physical system.
Every distress and every dysfunction of the physical body, every illness, can be understood in terms of power loss to an external circumstance or object through one of several energy centers within the body. You lose power when you rage against an injustice. You lose power when you are threatened by another person, or other people. You lose power when you distance yourself from your fellow humans out of resentment or bitterness, or a sense of disappointment or unworthiness or superiority. You lose power when you long for something or someone, when you grieve, and when you envy another. Beneath all of these is fear, fear that you are vulnerable, that you are not able to cope without the person or the situation that you miss, that you are at a disadvantage without that which you envy. You lose power whenever you fear. That is what a loss of power is.