by Gary Zukav
The negativity of the last two thousand year cycle is being collected now so that it can be discharged and transformed, so that the next cycle of two thousand years which starts with the next beginning cycle of twenty-five thousand years and the next beginning cycle of one hundred twenty-five thousand years, all three simultaneously, can begin fresh.
This is what this present situation and moment upon our Earth is about: the birth of very different opportunities, opportunities to release patterns that are no longer necessary. The more Light, literally, the more enlightened that you are, the more you will choose different ways.
Spiritual psychology will support the choice to learn through wisdom, the choice to release patterns of negativity, of doubt and fear, that are no longer appropriate to who we are and what we are becoming. It will make clear the relationship between the personality and the soul, the differences between them, and how to recognize those differences. It will make explicit the effects of interactions between personalities from the perspective of the impersonal energy dynamics that they set into motion, and it will show how these dynamics can be used to heal.
CHAPTER 14: ILLUSION
Each interaction with each individual is part of a continual learning dynamic. When you interact with another, an illusion is part of this dynamic. This illusion allows each soul to perceive what it needs to understand in order to heal. It creates, like a living picture show, the situations that are necessary to bring into wholeness the aspects of each soul that require healing.
The illusion is a learning vehicle. It is of the personality.
You will leave the illusion behind when you die, when you return home. Yet a personality that lives in love and Light, that sees through the eyes of its soul, metaphorically speaking, can see the illusion and simultaneously not be drawn into it. This is an authentically empowered personality.
The illusion is exquisitely intimate to the needs of each soul. Always each situation serves each person involved. You cannot, and will not, encounter a circumstance, or a single moment, that does not serve directly and immediately the need of your soul to heal, to come into wholeness. The illusion for each soul is created by its intentions. Therefore, the illusion is alive at each moment with the most appropriate experiences that you can have in order for your soul to heal.
The illusion is malleable. This does not mean that what is created jointly within the illusion does not have an independence of the individual souls that participated in its creation. It means that there is no perception that cannot be healed, just as there is no intention that cannot be changed, or replaced with another. Understanding how the illusion comes into being, how it works, the dynamics behind it and the role that it plays in the evolution of the soul is at the heart of spiritual psychology.
Spiritual psychology allows the personality to detach itself from the illusion and, therefore, to see it from a knowledgeable perspective, to see it in action. Just as, for example, an intelligence with a knowledge of modern medicine would be able to live among the populations of Europe during the time of the bubonic plague and not be affected by it, a personality with knowledge of the illusion and how it works is able to live within it and not be affected by it.
Bubonic plague is transmitted by fleas on rodents. This is known now but it was not known then. By keeping his or her environment clean, by avoiding all that attracts rodents, and by practicing personal hygiene, such a person could not only survive, but also keep others safe as well. When we experience fear or anger or jealousy, we are in an illusion that is designed to bring to awareness those parts of the soul that require healing. These things do not actually exist. That is why pursuing them does not bring power. What exists between souls is love, and that is all that exists. By understanding this, the personality is able to remain aware within the illusion, to accept consciously the healing that it offers, and to help others heal as well. The power of awareness and knowledge is identical in both situations.
The illusion holds power over you when you are not able to remember that you are a powerful spirit that has taken on the physical experience for the purpose of learning. It has power over you when you are compelled by the wants and impulses and values of your personality. It holds power over you when you fear and hate and sorrow and fester in anger or strike out in rage. It has no power over you when you love, when compassion opens your heart to others, when your creativity flows unimpeded joyously into the present moment. In other words, the illusion has no power over a personality that is fully aligned with its soul.
The illusion is governed by impersonal energy dynamics. It is shaped initially by the law of karma. The configuration of each personality, the unconscious intentions with which it is born, is determined by the karma of its soul. These intentions shape that personality’s illusion, its reality within the Earth school, until they are replaced by other intentions, unconscious or conscious. If the reactions of the personality create additional karma for the soul, and if that karma cannot be balanced within the lifetime of the personality, that karma contributes to the shaping of another personality, and the intentions of that personality create its illusion, its reality within the Earth school, and so on.
Even after a personality becomes conscious and aware of its illusion, and sets its intentions accordingly, the karmic obligations of its soul must still be met. Karma is karma. Energy is energy. The awakened personality understands this, and therefore, does not respond to the experiences and the events of its life with anger, fear, sorrow, or jealousy, which would create additional negative karma for its soul, but with compassion and with trust that the Universe, in each moment, is attending to the needs of its soul. This draws to it other souls with the same frequency of consciousness.
Each personality draws to itself personalities with consciousnesses of like frequency, or like weakness. The frequency of anger attracts the frequency of anger, the frequency of greed attracts greed, and so on. This is the law of attraction. Negativity attracts negativity, just as love attracts love. Therefore, the world of an angry person is filled with angry people, the world of a greedy person is filled with greedy people, and a loving person lives in a world of loving people.
The law of attraction creates a cocoon, so to speak, of like energy around each personality so that as it seeks to heal its anger, or its fear, or its jealousy, the metamorphosis process into wholeness is intensified and accelerated, is brought to the center of the stage of awareness. The personality sees its anger or its fear not only within itself, but everywhere outside itself as well. If the personality chooses consciously to heal its anger, or its fear, every circumstance, every encounter becomes irritating or fearful as the Universe compassionately responds to its desire to become whole.
As the anger, or the fear, within a personality builds, the world in which it lives increasingly reflects the anger, or the fear, that it must heal, so that eventually, ultimately, the personality will see that it is creating its own experiences and perceptions, that its righteous anger or justifiable fear originates within itself, and therefore can be replaced by other perceptions and experiences only through the force of its own being.
Just as the frequency of anger evokes a like frequency in the consciousness of those around an angry personality, the frequency of love awakens also like responses. It is the intention that determines the effect. If what you offer to others is not sensitive, if it does not support and nourish, if it does not empower but disempowers them, it will be met with resistance at some level, and that resistance will be the counterpart of your energy that seeks to disempower, or to control. Separation and distance are always the result of the pursuit of external power.
Within this impersonal framework operate the dynamics of temptation and responsible choice.
The human emotional system can be broken down into roughly two elements: fear and love. Love is of the soul. Fear is of the personality. The illusion of each personality is generated by and sustained by the emotions that follow fear, such as anger, rage, vengefulness
, hatred, jealousy or envy, loneliness, spite, sorrow, despair, grief, regret, greed, lust, arrogance, alienation, self-pity, lethargy, guilt, resentment, and feelings of inferiority and superiority. Emotions such as these lead to corresponding behaviors, such as selfishness-toward people and animals and the Earth and the kingdoms of the Earth-and using others in the many ways that humans use one another commercially, sexually, emotionally-and lying, manipulation, violence, brutality, impatience, ridicule, and judgment.
When the personality is unconscious, every emotion of fear, or that follows fear, produces a negative behavior, a behavior that creates negative karma for its soul. Each of the emotions that follows fear can cause any of the behaviors that are based upon fear. Jealousy, for example, can result in lying, or in ridicule, which are forms of manipulation, or in violence. Greed can result in impatience, which is a form of selfishness, or judging or using others.
If you are unconscious of the part of yourself that is angry, for example, if you are unaware of yourself as a splintered personality, you will enact the anger of that part of yourself without thinking. You will strike out, or withdraw, or ridicule, or in some way express your anger. Your anger will spill out of your private energy sphere and into the collective energy of those around you, creating negative karma. As you encounter the results of your own anger, as they come back to you through the laws of karma and attraction, you, or another of your soul’s personalities, eventually will learn to create differently, and so on for each of the negative emotions that follows fear.
Behind fear is powerlessness. As you reach outward to fill the places within you that are empty of power, you learn, one by one, that those places cannot be filled in that way. Eventually, whether in this lifetime, or after a thousand lifetimes, you will turn toward authentic power. This is the unconscious way of learning. It is learning through the experiences that are created by the unconscious parts of the personality, and through the experiences that are created by unconscious responses to those experiences.
If a personality is aware of its splintered state, if it is aware not only of the aspect of itself that is angry and demands vengeance, for example, but also of the aspect of itself that is compassionate and understanding, it benefits from the dynamic of temptation. It is able to preview the consequences of identifying with the frequency of energy that is anger that is running through its system, to look them over in advance of living them, and to decide whether they are worth expressing the anger that it feels. It is able to foresee, through its decision to foresee, how expressing the current of anger in that moment will affect itself and the people around it, and also the effects of expressing understanding and compassion.
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 allo
w 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.