by Gregg Braden
I listened to what this woman was saying and immediately recognized the pattern. “What was going on at home that day?” I asked. “How would you describe your relationship?”
“That’s easy,” she blurted out. “It had been like a pressure cooker in that house.” Suddenly, she became quiet and just looked at me. “You don’t think that the tension in our relationship has anything to do with what happened, do you?”
“In my world,” I replied, “it has everything to do with what happened. We’re tuned to our world, and the world shows us physically the energy of what we experience emotionally. Sometimes it’s subtle, but in your case, it was literal—your house literally mirrored the strain that you just described between you and your boyfriend. And it did so through the very essence that has been used for thousands of years to represent emotion: the medium of water. What a powerful, beautiful, and clear message you’ve received from the field! Now, what will you do with it?”
Key 17: The Divine Matrix serves as the mirror in our world of the relationships that we create in our beliefs.
Whether or not we recognize our resonant connection with the reality around us, it exists through the Divine Matrix. If we have the wisdom to understand the messages that come to us through our surroundings, our relationship with the world can be a powerful teacher. Sometimes it even saves our lives!
WHEN THE MESSAGE IS A
WARNLNG
In my mother’s life, next to her two sons, her very best friend has been a 12-pound bundle of energy wrapped up in the body of a border terrier named Corey Sue (“Corey,” for short). While I travel frequently for tours and seminars, I do my best to call my mom at least once a week to check in and see how things are going in her life and let her know what’s happening in mine.
Just before my 2000 book tour for The Isaiah Effect, I called home on a Sunday afternoon, and Mom shared her concerns about Corey. She hadn’t been acting like herself or eating well, so my mother had taken her to a veterinarian to see if there was a problem. During the course of the examination, a series of x-rays were made, and they showed something that no one was expecting. For some unexplained reason, Corey’s films showed patches of small white spots throughout her lungs that shouldn’t have been there. “I’ve never seen anything like this in a dog before,” the mystified vet had said. The decision was made to run further tests to see what the spots might be indicating about Corey.
While Mom was obviously worried about her dog, as I listened to her story, I became concerned for another reason. I shared the principle of resonance with her and how we’re tuned to our world, our automobiles, our homes, and even our pets. I offered a number of case histories where animals have been documented to take on their owners’ medical conditions weeks or even months before the same problems were found in the bodies of the people who cared for them. My sense was that something similar was happening with Corey and my mom.
After some convincing that life is full of such messages, Mom agreed to get a checkup for herself the following week. Although she was experiencing absolutely no discomfort, and from outward appearances she had no reason to have an examination, she agreed to schedule a physical that included a chest x-ray.
Well, you can probably tell where this story is headed and the reason why I’m sharing it here. To Mom’s surprise, the x-rays revealed a suspicious spot on her lung, one that hadn’t been there during her annual physical less than a year before. After further investigation, my mother discovered that she had scar tissue on her right lung from an illness that had healed during her childhood, and the spot had become cancerous. Three weeks later, she underwent surgery and the lower third of her right lung was completely removed.
As I spoke with the doctor in the recovery room afterward, he reiterated how “lucky” Mom was that the mass had been detected early on, especially since there were no telltale symptoms to alert her to any problems. Prior to the surgery, she’d felt great and was going through life with Corey, her sons, and her beautiful gardens with absolutely no clue that anything might be wrong.
This is an example of how we can apply the mirrors in our lives. Because Mom and I had learned to read the messages that life was showing us in the moment and we trusted the language enough to apply it in a practical way, this story has a happy ending: Mom recovered from her surgery. As of this writing, she’s doing great and has been cancer free for six years.
Interestingly enough, the spots in Corey’s lungs that had originally alerted us to investigate Mom’s condition completely disappeared after the surgery as well. She and Mom had another six years together in good health, with all of the joy that they found in each other and their daily routines.
(Note: Corey Sue left this world during the editing of this book due to complications of her advanced age. When she died, halfway to her 15th birthday, she was nearly 100 in “dog years” for her breed. She lived out the period after her spots and Mom’s surgery in good health and with a spark that brought joy to everyone whose life she touched. As Mom said many times, “No one was a stranger to Corey Sue.” She loved everyone she met and let them know it with a gentle wet kiss that will be missed by all who knew her.)
While it may not be possible to prove scientifically that Corey’s condition had anything whatsoever to do with what happened to my mother, we can say that the synchronicity between the two experiences is significant. And because this isn’t an isolated incident, we have to say that when we see such synchronicities, there is a correlation. While we may not fully understand the connection today, the truth is that we could study it for another 50 years and still not comprehend it completely. What we can do is apply what we know in our lives. When we do, the events of every day become a rich language that offers insights into our most intimate secrets.
Once again, in a world where life itself mirrors our deepest beliefs, there can be few things that are truly secret. Ultimately, it probably matters less how the unexpected curves in the road of life come our way, and more, whether or not we recognize the language that warns us of them.
OUR GREATEST FEARS
Because the Divine Matrix constantly reflects our beliefs, feelings, and emotions through the events of our lives, the everyday world provides insights about the deepest realms of our hidden selves. In our personal mirrors, we’re shown our truest convictions, loves, and fears. The world is a powerful (and often literal) mirror, one that isn’t always easy to face. With complete honesty, life gives us a direct window into the ultimate reality of our beliefs, and sometimes our reflections come to us in ways that we would never expect.
I remember an incident that occurred in the Safeway grocery store of a Denver suburb one evening in 1989. I’d stopped on the way home from work as I often did to pick up a few things for dinner. As I wandered along the canned-food section, I glanced up from my grocery list just long enough to notice that I was alone in the aisle, except for a young mother with a small girl seated in her shopping cart. They were obviously in a hurry and looked as if they were about as happy to be grocery shopping at the end of their long day as I was.
As my attention returned to comparing the names on my list to those of the cans on the shelves, I was suddenly startled by the sound of a child’s scream. This was not just any ol’ shriek: The volume and intensity would have rivaled Ella Fitzgerald’s “Is it live or is it Memorex?” commercials. The young girl was alone in the grocery cart, and she was terrified … absolutely terrified. Within a few seconds, the mother stepped into sight to calm her daughter down. Immediately, the child stopped screaming, and life returned to normal for everyone.
While we’ve all seen this before, something seemed different to me that night. For some reason, rather than simply ignoring such a common incident, I really took a look at what was happening. My eyes instinctively searched the aisle. All I saw was that the mother had momentarily stepped away from her cart, leaving her two- to three-year-old daughter by herself for a moment. That was all—the girl was simply alone.
W
hy was she so frightened? Her mother had just walked away for an instant out of sight around the corner of another aisle. Why would a young child, surrounded by a world of colorful cans and pretty labels and with no one around to discourage any exploration, be so frightened by such a situation? Why wouldn’t she simply say to herself something along the lines of: Hey, here I am alone with these beautiful red and white cans of Campbell’s soup. I think I’ll just explore each row, one can at a time, and have a great time doing it! Why would the prospect of being alone, even if only for a moment, touch something so deep in her at that early age that her instinct would be to scream at the top of her lungs?
On another evening, I’d scheduled a counseling session with a woman in her mid-30s I’d worked with many times before. Our appointment began as usual: As the young woman relaxed into the wicker chair in front of me, I asked her to describe what had happened during the course of the week since we’d last talked. She began telling me about her relationship with her husband of nearly 18 years. For much of the marriage they’d fought, sometimes violently. She’d been on the receiving end of what seemed like daily criticism of everything from the way she dressed to how she ran the house and cooked the meals. Even in bed she said that she felt as though she was never good enough.
While the treatment she described was nothing new in their relationship, during the past week the situation had escalated. Her husband had become angry when she confronted him with questions about his “overtime” and late nights at the office. She was miserable with the man she’d loved and trusted for so long. Now her misery was being compounded with the very real threat of physical harm resulting from her husband’s out-of-control emotions.
After knocking her to the ground in the heat of their most recent fight, her husband had left the house to go live with a friend. He provided no phone number, address, or indication of when or if he’d come back—he was just gone. The man who’d made this woman’s life so miserable for so long and had threatened her safety with powerful outbursts of emotion and abuse was gone at last.
As she described his departure, I waited for some sign of relief. In its place, however, something astonishing started to happen. The woman began to sob uncontrollably with the realization that he was out of her life. When I asked her to describe how she was feeling, what I heard wasn’t the resolution or relief that I’d expected. Instead, she said that she was experiencing the pain of loneliness and longing. She began to describe feeling “crushed” and “absolutely devastated” in the absence of her husband. Now, with the opportunity to live free of criticism, insults, and abuse, she was distressed. Why?
The answer to “why” in the two situations I just described is the same. As different as each one is from the other, a common thread runs through both of these situations. There’s a very good chance that the terror that the young girl experienced in the supermarket aisle and the devastation felt by the woman whose abusive spouse walked out had little to do with the people who left them in those moments. The girl’s mother and the woman’s husband both served as catalysts for a subtle yet powerful pattern that runs so deep within each of us that it’s nearly unrecognizable … often it’s completely forgotten.
That pattern is fear.
And fear has many masks in our culture. Although it plays a key role in the way we build everything from our friendships and careers to our romances and the health of our bodies, fear surfaces almost on a daily basis as a pattern in our lives that we don’t recognize. But interestingly, this pattern may not even be ours.
When we find ourselves touched by an experience that brings powerful negative emotions to the surface of our lives, we can rest assured that no matter what we think has caused fear to arise, there’s a good possibility that something different is being played out—something so deep and primal that it’s easy to overlook … that is, until it crosses our paths in a way that can’t be mistaken.
OUR UNIVERSAL FEARS
If you’re reading this book, the chances are good that you’ve already examined the many relationships in your life. In your explorations, you’ve no doubt gained valuable insights into which people have triggered certain emotions and why. In fact, you probably know yourself so well that if I asked you questions about your life and your past, you could give me just the right answers to arrive at just the right conclusions for any therapeutic quiz that might be offered. And it’s in those perfect and acceptable answers that you may miss the single deepest pattern that’s permeated your life from the day you were born. It’s for this very reason that I invite seminar participants to complete a preprinted form asking them to identify the greatest patterns of their childhood caretakers that they would consider “negative.”
I ask for the negative patterns because I’ve rarely seen people trapped in the positive patterns of joy in their lives. Almost universally, the situations that cause people to feel stuck have roots in what are considered negative feelings. These are the emotions that we have about our own experiences and what they mean to us in our lives. And while we can’t alter what has happened, we can understand why we feel as we do and change what our life history means to us.
After completing the exercise, I ask the audience members to randomly shout out the characteristics that they’ve noted as negative qualities in both their male and female caretakers. In many people, these are their birth father and mother, while for others, they’re their foster parents. To some, they’re older brothers, sisters, other relatives, or family friends. Regardless of who it is, the question relates to the people who cared for them in their formative years—that is, until about the age of puberty.
Any shyness in the room disappears as people begin to yell out the negative qualities from their charts as quickly as I can write them on a whiteboard. Immediately, something interesting begins to happen: As one person shares the word that describe his or her memory, someone else offers the same feeling and often even that exact word. A sampling of the terms from any program shows nearly identical adjectives, including:
There’s a lightness that begins to fill the room, and people start to laugh at what they’re seeing. If we didn’t know better, we’d think that we all came from the same family. The similarity of the words is more than coincidence. How can so many people from such diverse backgrounds have such similar experiences? The answer to this mystery is the pattern that runs deeply in the fabric of our collective consciousness, which may be described as our core, or universal, fears.
Universal patterns of fear may be so subtle in their expression yet so painful to recall that we skillfully create the masks that make them bearable. Similar to the way a difficult family memory is always there yet seldom discussed, we have unconsciously agreed to disguise the hurt of our collective past in ways that are socially acceptable. We’re so successful in concealing our greatest fears that for all intents and purposes, the original reasons for our hurts are forgotten, and all that remains is their expression—that is, to act them out.
Just as the woman losing her husband or the young girl in the supermarket probably weren’t aware of why they felt and reacted as they did, neither are we. Due to the ways we mask our fear, we never have to talk about the deepest hurts of our lives. Yet they remain with us, lingering and unresolved, until something happens and we can no longer simply look in another direction. When we allow ourselves to go a little deeper into these powerful, unmasked moments of life, what we discover is that as different as all our fears appear to be, they resolve into one of only three basic patterns (or a combination of them): the fear of separation and abandonment, the fear of low self-worth, and the fear of surrender and trust.
Let’s explore each one.
OUR FLRST UNLVERSAL FEAR:
SEPARATLON AND
ABANDONMENT
Almost universally there is a feeling that runs through each of us that we’re alone. Within each person and every family, there’s an unspoken sense that we’re somehow separated from whomever or whatever is responsible for our exist
ence. We feel that somewhere in the mists of our ancient memory we were brought here and then abandoned without any explanation or reason.
Why would we expect to feel any differently? In the presence of the science that can place a human on the moon and translate our genetic code, we still don’t really know who we are. And we certainly don’t know for sure how we got here. We sense our spiritual nature from within, while we look to validate our feelings. From literature and cinema to music and culture, we make a distinction between our places here on Earth and a distant heaven that’s somewhere else. In the West, we affirm our separation from our Creator through our translation of the great prayer from the Bible that describes this relationship: The Lord’s Prayer.
For example, the common Western translation begins: “Our Father, who art in Heaven,” acknowledging this separation. In this interpretation, we’re “here” while God is somewhere else far away. The original Aramaic texts, however, offer a different view of our relationship with our Heavenly Father. A translation of the same phrase begins, “Radiant One: You shine within us, outside us—even darkness shines—when we remember,”2 reinforcing the idea that the Creator isn’t separate and distant. Rather, the creative force of our Father—whatever the meaning we give to it—is not only with us, it is us and permeates all that we know as our world.
The 2004 discovery of the God Code and the message that comes from translating the DNA of all life into the letters of ancient Hebrew and Arabic alphabets seems to support this translation. When we follow the clues left to us in the 1st-century mystical book, the Sepher Yetzirah, we find that every one of the elements that compose our DNA corresponds to a letter from these alphabets. When we make the substitutions, we discover that the first layer of DNA in our bodies does, in fact, seem to support the ancient admonition that a great intelligence resides everywhere, including within us. Human DNA literally reads: “God/Eternal within the body.”3