Laws of the Universe
In the early morning hours of February 20, 2007, I dreamed I was taking a college course about laws. One of the requirements of the class was for each of us to translate what we were learning and apply it in “real life.” Then, as I/we flowed into an awake conscious awareness, my experience was one of being filled with Gratitude for what I’ve termed the DCBA experiment, which I’ll return to later.
First of all, what about applying the law and laws? In the later 1970s in the Sierras, when I was holding daily morning workshops for myself in relationship with my father’s near-future passing, in one event I was startled to be advised by a Wise One to learn about the laws of the universe. Well, to the best of my abilities, I/we have done that.
What I’ve discovered over the years is that there are no absolutely fixed universal laws, to my way of thinking now. The laws I culturally learned about are DCBA designs that are often rigid, with penalties, punishments, and rewards attached to them. Instead, I believe it’s fundamentally a more open system where there are principles, processes, and energies that can be combined and used in a multitude of ways by each of us as the Essential I/spirit-beings we really are. And then we each experience the results of our personal emphases in relationship with emphases being made by others, within the overall agreed-upon reality.
If I hadn’t experienced this dream, and reflected about it the next day, more than likely it wouldn’t be headlined for a new chapter.
Returning to being filled with Gratitude as I moved from dreaming into the realm of awake awareness the morning of February 20th … There are many such occasions, when to my conscious awareness there is a fairly strong inner sense of synthesis when I awake, in terms of what I should be translating the next day from the night before. That morning I was realizing how the limited and limiting core cultural patterns that have been used for the past several thousand years, have given each of us as spirit-beings ample opportunities to play out our creativity and co-creativity within a small-enough container, so now we can more easily look back and around at the results.
The larger setting for my dream and flowing-into-wakefulness experience took place during the week of the lead-up to the 2007 Academy Awards on Sunday, February 25th. I/we were resonating with Hollywood, southern California, the movie industry, and my/our years in that environment from 1938 to mid 1975. In connection with those February 2007 cultural emphases, it was like my earlier life there and who/what I am now were playing back and forth with one another in changing and transformative ways.
And what about my/our years in the heart of the movie industry? It’s significant to me that when my parents and I came to southern California in the spring of 1938 from Illinois, when I was five, at first we lived in a medium-sized apartment house my grandfather—Mother’s father—owned and managed in Hollywood, a couple of blocks above Hollywood Boulevard. Close by there were movie theaters described as movie palaces at the time, with Chinese and Egyptian themes. In addition to Mother’s large doses of practicality she also loved to be entertained, so as a family for many years when we later lived in southwest Los Angeles, almost every Friday night we went to see a double feature. Obviously I saw a lot of movies.
From the context of our lives today, on the Turner Classic Movie (TCM) channel there is an opportunity to see earlier films, which Jim and I do occasionally. For Jim’s part, he too saw a lot of movies, including many Saturday afternoon matinees with his friends. On Sunday evening, February 18th, 2007, Jim and I watched The Glenn Miller Story with James Stewart and June Allyson from 1953, that neither one of us had seen before, and then unexpectedly we stayed glued to our seats to watch Blue Skies with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire from 1946. Afterward, I told Jim it was like my childhood Friday nights of sitting for four hours watching a double feature!
Whereas Jim’s growing-up years were lived within the framework of Detroit’s nearby automobile industry and his family’s emphasis on sports, mine was quite different. In addition to one’s physical environment being a geographical place with its climate, buildings, roads, and industries, I think there’s also an invisible psychological/emotional atmosphere that each of us who lives in an area is influenced by, from within our enclosures of being either a cultural male or female.
My perspective is that movies reflect cultural values and at the same time they push the cultural limits as models for people to then try out and use in their lives. Over the past years when Jim and I have watched films we first saw in our childhoods, growing-up years, and young adulthood, we’ve both been able to easily pick out the models we adapted for who we were in those eras. One startling recognition for Jim was being able to directly link actions he and his chums saw frequently at the Saturday matinees with what one of them did in later years, leading to the unintentional death of a young woman when Jim’s childhood friend hit her over the head while stealing her purse.
And what else was going on during the lead-up to this year’s Academy Awards? It was a time of dancing rainbows that seasonally glide across walls and ceilings in the living room and master bedroom in our home, when the sun shines through crystals Jim and I have hung in south-facing windows. They are especially delightful to watch while eating lunch.
On Friday, February 23rd, in the mail I received the book, Apocalypse 2012 by Lawrence E. Joseph, that I had ordered from the One Spirit book club. On the front cover it was heralded as a scientific investigation into civilization’s end. In the Introduction, Joseph says the thesis of the book is that the year 2012 will be pivotal, perhaps catastrophic, possibly revelatory, to a degree unmatched in human history.
Within its pages, Joseph encapsulated many worldviews—Mayan prophecies, other religious belief structures that contain prophecies for the future, and Western world scientific perspectives about the Earth’s environmental realities. I thought he did a really good job with his descriptions, including a lot of on-site interviews and investigations in many locales. Of special interest to me were his accounts of conversations in Guatemala with two current-day Mayan shamans, brothers who had been doing their own research for twenty years by contacting Mayan elders, the keepers of their traditional heritage.
Joseph says he’s reported on science and nature for over twenty years, and he added a lot to my Understandings about what is currently happening in our solar system. He clearly described the interplay that has been, is, and will continue to take place between the sun, various planets including the Earth, and other interacting forces. All of this struck chords with me because a few years ago our local museum had an exhibit of photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. I was so fascinated, I saw the exhibit at least three times. Along with the pictures being quite beautiful, they vividly portrayed changes and events that occurred as we all move through the universe.
According to one of the scientists Joseph interviewed, there’s a lot of turbulence ahead, where large amounts of energy are being injected into the interplanetary domain, jolting the sun into erratic behavior, distressing the Earth’s magnetic field, and quite possibly exacerbating the global warming our planet is experiencing.
I truly appreciated being able to read Joseph’s descriptions of the worldviews of the Mayan shamans and elders, and the worldviews of various Western world scientists in fields such as solar physics, quantum physics, astronomy, geology, geophysics, and other related fields. Nonetheless, I continue to see everyone primarily living their lives within the overall past/present belief structures of their group and their individual interpretation of it, out of which their personal worldview emerges.
A picture that has become clearer is that some worldviews from other societies, such as the Mayan and Hopi, include multiple expansive cycles with beginnings and endings that have taken place over the ages, while we in the Western world primarily share a perspective in which our Earth system and we humans are part of a one-cycle evolutionary and changing process that started with a big bang long ago. Then, from within our Western world enclosures, by using designs of superiority/inferiority, we oftentimes call others’ belief structures “myths” and “primitive,” while ours are said to be scientifically based and “real.” Now, within the matrix of how I choose to see the world, all of these worldviews have a type of validity and reality in terms of the multi thousand year, spirit-being experiment I think we’ve all been part of.
Portions from many of the perspectives of what I read in Apocalypse 2012 had some resonance, and from them I have personally included, as information, the thoughts and emotions about what others are saying and possibly energizing. Lawrence Joseph presents compelling evidence that there is a broad-scale convergence from many places, focused on the year 2012. Nevertheless, I still think it’s up to each one of us as an Essential I/spirit-being to select and successfully apply our own choices now and into the future, which can include seeking fully healthy divine guidance each step along the way. And, I believe energies that are now in motion for the future can be modified, changed, and in certain cases dissolved.
From my dreams on February 24th, as I awakened another synthesized transitional theme emerged. During the night I had been taking a group of beliefs I don’t use in my awake life, experimenting with them and experiencing their results. I was seeing how that process connects with actors and actresses playing parts based upon a character they represent. In other words, as I understand it, a movie character and a real person are both using a group of belief patterns they are playing out and experiencing, usually in relationship with others who are also playing out their belief patterns.
As a suggestion to readers, consciously take some beliefs that you don’t usually set forth, using them as originations and filters for how you see the world for a period of time, while also setting yours aside. Then come back to the ones you use and compare your usual experiences with those you manufactured briefly. I think it’s a good way to increase one’s Understandings and empathy. And, it can also free one to try new ways of thinking and being.
You can explore emotions in similar ways, too. My experiences with fear is that in addition to it being an attention-getter, it also closes one down into a self-protective mode. I think if a person is energizing fear, he or she will naturally connect with similar energies. On the other hand, Joy and Appreciation are expanding, and they make their own similar connections.
It’s quite likely you’ll discover that your usual psychic content is a mixture of both positive and negative beliefs and emotions that are in movement with one another, where some are dominant on occasions—and then others come to the forefront for expressions.
At the Academy Awards on February 25th, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar for the best documentary, again highlighting global warming as one portion of our current-day reality of intermingling and changing dynamics. These dynamics include prophecies from other cultures and warnings from our own Western world scientists about the Earth’s dwindling magnetic field, the probability of a Yellowstone super-volcano preparing to blow, sun activities such as storms on the sun being related to storms on Earth, and other dire possibilities.
Ending this chapter on a fun note, I enjoyed Ellen DeGeneres’ playful humor as she hosted this year’s very long Academy Awards. Thank you, Ellen, for easy viewing.
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