In the Access Consciousness modality, there is a thing called a "Universal Surrogate", which is someone who takes on the pain and suffering of the world with the intent that by so doing, they are bringing relief to the afflicted. I found out that I had an unconscious habit of automatically internalizing not only the miseries of other people, but also Planet Earth itself.
After 60 years, it finally caught up with me. I actually attribute this relatively sudden onset of physical pain symptoms to a kind of awakening upon the passing over of my twin flame in January 2012. Shortly after her passing I began to get intermittent muscle and joint pain unrelated to my physical activities. I believe that my heart was somehow "broken open" during the dying ordeal triggering the expression of all this stored-up pain and suffering I'd accumulated since childhood.
By using the Access Consciousness question of "What percentage of this (pain) is yours?" I discovered that nearly 100% of it was NOT mine. I then began to systematically ask about every ache and pain, "Whose is this?"
At first, I got pictures and sometimes verbal information about individual people whose pain I had taken in. After several hours of questioning, I began to get pictures of mountains, forests, oceans, underground water caves, crystals and rivers. This was because I had taken on the pain of the Earth at these locations. After a couple of days of pretty much asking this question constantly, I started getting pictures of past pets, other animals, insects, plants and even movies and TV shows. I got pictures of books and magazines.
I realized the extreme nature of my automatic "surrogating" for all manner of pain and suffering I observed regardless of the source.
Oh, yes, and pains are reducing or going away, strength is returning, skin is clearing up, range of motion is improving.
A friend of mine asked today in a Facebook post: "What if pain is really memories of collective experiences that took root in your body? And, you hold onto the memory root through the illusion of control?"
This brings up the possibility that part of the human experience of consciousness includes some degree or another of this special type of empathy defined within the concept of the Universal Surrogate.
Perhaps we could carry the idea farther. What if all non-optimum conditions of the human body have as their root cause the erroneous belief that by making the pains and sufferings of others your own (empathy) it ameliorates that pain and suffering in the other person (or even in the world).
Isn't socialization all about the belief that you can control pain and suffering in your experience? Isn't part of "caring" about another's pain a cherished value in most cultures?
In fact, isn't it possible that such accepted distortions and permutations as aging or "incurable diseases" are actually a sort of empathetic resonance with others who in turn have resonated with others who are dying?
My shaman/coach recently pointed out to me: "You know, it looks to me like you're dying. You're following Shay (my partner) into death. You need to look at that, and make a decision about whether or not you really want to be here" (see previous post).
I had been so busy taking on Shay's pain and suffering, I had forgotten to connect it to what was going on in my own body. Quite often as I continue the Questioning, I'll see that a certain pain twinge, ache or stiffness was Shay's.
The second part of the process is to send the energy back from whence it came. At first, I was reluctant to do so, thinking it was sending the pain back to the source. This is a misnomer--pain is merely energy. Whether or not it arrives back at its source
as pain would be up to recipient.
If we continue following this magic carpet down the rabbit hole, it becomes possible to see how the "Powers That Be" in the world could quite easily control their masses by making empathetic surrogacy a moral imperative, such as in most religions.
Is it then possible or necessary to "care for others"? Well, perhaps shockingly, the answer is NO. In fact, all that happens is that one person's pain migrates out to everyone in their vicinity, who then take it in as their own and in turn broadcast that further out into the society and planet. That's propagation, not caring...
So what is a poor surrogate to do? The very best thing to do when confronted with pain and suffering of any kind is to maintain awareness. By this I mean to become very mindful of your own emotional state, and observe the mind and nervous system. Empathizing or, worse, sympathizing with another person opens the doors wide to surrogacy.
I'm not saying to not have compassion. In fact, compassion is probably the most mindful thing to do when suffering and pain come into your awareness. Compassion is a certain stillness and an abiding in empowerment for another. Yes, that person is hurting now, but I know, one way or another they are experiencing what they are experiencing as a completely unique imprint with special meaning just for them. For me to judge the situation to mean they need some sort of emotional support or surrogacy on my part is the height of egoistic control fantasies. Instead, we must truly appreciate and respect another's process.
Perhaps taking on another's pain is actually complicating and maybe neutralizing their process. You've made it about YOU now, when it's actually about them.
This is not to say that if you are present, say, at a car wreck, do nothing. Preventing suffering or pain is not same as taking it on as your own.
Is it possible that ALL conditions that are NOT joyful, empowered and pure bliss are created due to empathetic surrogacy? Try this thought experiment: Imagine if everyone you see who is in pain suddenly stops their own surrogacy? What if pain and suffering is the result of a sort of cultural dissonance created by the mis-absorption of other's pain on a mass scale? Maybe that's what causes aging. Maybe that's why we die. We're just all trying to control each other's pain.
Considering recent research in the field of epigenetics, where our environment, including thoughts, feelings and intentions, affect gene expression--it's not too far a jump to see how pain surrogacy could easily create disease and even death.
A dear friend of mine, who was a trance channel, once said, "Aging and death is really just a cultural habit." Perhaps how we achieve this sort of "population purging" is by rampant pain surrogacy, which is fully supported and further propagated via social and mass media.
Science has already defined the human body as a self-repairing organism. As Lissa Rankin, M.D. has proven in her book, "Mind Over Medicine", remove the stress response from the human body, and there is nothing it cannot repair or heal. When she says "remove stress" she's talking about completely removing it, as in a radical state of relaxation--a state few of us ever get to, creating a "repair deficit", which could be another word for aging.
The stress of pain surrogacy is most certainly included in this sort of radical relaxation, yet most of us are completely unaware that we are doing this surrogacy. Ask the questions. Keep asking the questions until things start to change, and continue asking the questions. Within the question lies the energy of freedom, the energy of liberation, the energy of the eternal.
What if the whole deal about YOU is your uniqueness? What if all of Nature and all of Universal creation is about uniqueness? What if the reason you die is due to a denial of that uniqueness? Isn't pain surrogacy the height of non-uniqueness? It hurts us because we are giving away a part of ourselves, a part of our uniqueness. The Universe just wants YOU to be YOU.
When Michelle told me that I was dying because I hadn't recommitted to this life after the passing of my life partner, my mind was blown. You see, the alternative to dying is to fully commit to the incarnation.
Of course when it comes to commitment, I feel I've mainly been committing to a spiritual life, or at the very least in that general trajectory throughout my life. And that, to me, is what's most important. Yes, it's unfortunate I ended both my marriages, but that oxymoronically wasn't about commitment...
Taking over full accountability for everything that happens ANYWHERE in my life has its own Pandora's Box of goodies to test and torture. It is simultaneously lonely and empowering. Lonely in the sense that as full accountability is approached, there's that stretch of emotional landscape where co-dependencies are made obvious as well as the necessity to jettison those dependencies. That is a particular kind of loneliness.
So, this brings us back to my little bungalow in South Park, San Diego. This is where I have had to readjust to the death of my best friend and lover, restructure nearly completely my social circles, and acclimate to a life without Portland, Oregon, where I spent 25 years.
Perhaps it is all the above that has me navigating this rabbit hole of a life like Jada Pinkett Smith's ship pilot in the Matrix Revolutions as she whizzed through narrow tunnels and pipes at full speed, escaping from the robot sentries programmed to eradicate all human life that was out of the Matrix..
Weird physical symptoms began shortly after returning from Burning Man in 2012 (I don't believe there's a connection there, other than having my creative impulses overwhelmed by sheer, towering artistic talents on display in Black Rock City). Symptoms progressed along until about a month later, I could barely get up out of bed to go pee at night, my arms and legs were hurting so much.
It was as if I had taken a full-on weight lifting class, or something--every single muscle in my shoulders, arms, hands, legs, knees, and feet hurt. The less I did, the better the symptoms were. But, at its height, before I finally started taking aspirin, I was pretty much at a 7 or 8 on the 10-point pain scale (8 is when you make a sound in response to the pain) all the time.
As I was still in the mindset of external solutions, I stayed on the assumption that something in my environment, or body was causing the pain. Thousands of dollars of supplements, therapies, retreats, meditations, etc. have to this day gotten me to a fair degree of pain management. Most days I never approach 8, hanging around a 5 or 6, occasionally going down to 2 or 3, with even rare times when there is no pain for a couple of hours.
And... the pain is still the thing that has been running my life. Since Michelle's session, I came to realize that, as the great poet Rumi, said, "The cure for the pain is in the pain". This gave me a way in. I also realized that I was the only one who could do this. No medicines, treatments, or supplements were going to take the pain away for me. This is all my deal.
I started to see that of all the substances I could bring into the body, pure light energy is the highest quality nourishment. Not only that, but to follow the light where it goes in the body, and use the very real amplifier of the imagination to increase the light seems to help a lot, too. I've fully embraced the scientific fact that human bodies are self-repairing--it's just that most Matrix-driven subjugants don't have the patience or the faith to accept this biological fact.
This approach had immediate effects on the muscles in my arms and legs, bringing the pain down from 7 or 8, to 5 or 6. Eureka! I have continued like this for the past 2-3 weeks, and the body seems to be processing very deeply. My sleep has improved and instead of symptoms being the worst in the morning, they no longer are. Both shoulders are still frozen, and my knees still make it clumsy and difficult to sit down and get up from a toilet, or get in and out of a car. But nothing usually rises to an 8 or 9.
So here is a shambles of a life, though, when I take stock from this Accountability view. I'm spending 11-12 hours in bed daily, sleeping, reading, surfing, napping. I'm into a habit now of what I call keeping "musicians' hours": Get up at noon (or later), and go to bed at 3 AM.
During the day, I do the absolute minimum to keep my little online health products company going--doing shipping and accounting, and occasional promotion. By the time 8 PM comes around I'm looking at my TV Guide app, to see what's on the HD 39" boob tube. I've got at least one show a day I want to watch, but some nights it's solid TV viewing from 7 PM (NPR news, of course) to 2:30 AM. As a result of too much sedentariness (I assume), the body has packed on 20 lbs. and lost muscle mass.
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| Wookie the Clown Dog... |
I do also take care of my little buddy, Wookie, a 9-year old Lahsa Apso doggie. She is, I believe, completely pampered, with visits to the groomers every Friday, and fed with the most expensive pure food for her, not to mention all the treats. She gets her walk every day, sometimes twice, and is utterly entertaining. I call her the Clown Dog.
I do manage to make my bed every day, do my laundry about every 2 weeks, and keep up my personal hygiene.
So, in my defense of the particular brand of "lazy" that has informed my life for the past couple of years, I am effectively handling just enough to keep me alive and active in the world without causing anyone concern, albeit along an uneventful and uncreative trajectory.
Now here is my current conundrum: My overall strategy has been to "follow the light" with it expanded into the "follow what feels light" . In so doing, when I consider cleaning the apartment, it seems very heavy to me, where going to Starbucks to get an Americano, then going to some fun place for lunch, feels very light to me. So, I've been following that. In fact, the description of my activities above is just about all that feels light. Oddly, I actually feel light about doing the dishes, and feel light about sweeping the kitchen floor every once in a while, so I guess I'm not a complete slob of lightness...
I've got backlogged filing, backlogged warehousing, backlogged accounting (how many extensions can you get from the IRS?). Then there's the MUSIC. I have an idle Alesis M8 electronic drumkit beside my bed, a nice Roland keyboard, and a full acoustic drumkit in my garage. I've got excellent production software on high powered computers, and several music/video applications and programs. I've got mikes, stands and studio monitors. I've got a library of nearly 100,000 songs, and even bought a DJ mixer last year that is still lying unopened on top of the keyboards.
Nothing is happening.
I ended up getting my Google account hacked last week, which called for a complete survey of everything I've posted in various applications across the vast Google platform over about 9 years. Rather than attempting to save anything, or even back it up, I just deleted the Google account, and set up a new one. I did notice that the last personal blog entry was in May of last year. Yikes. Plus, I stopped publishing the company newsletter--the last issue I believe was November of last year. Double yikes.
Why?
No inspiration. Nuttin'. In fact, it seems very heavy to me to do the newsletter, or anything else semi-creative. I did suddenly decide to set up a new blog with this as the first entry, so everyone can see what a certain type of spiritual transparency looks like... I guess.
Now I'm beginning to wonder if by following the direction of "doing what feels light", it will eventually get me doing what I think are my art forms. Or, maybe that's just what I think are my art forms. Maybe music isn't one of them (even though I've toured nationally and internationally with two bands, recorded on over a dozen albums, and played pretty much 5 nights a week for the 25 years I lived in Portland). Well, "not music" feels heavy. Music IS one of my art forms...
By re-locating to sunny San Diego (who has a great music scene, BTW), I left my 25 years of music momentum. The pain issues have taken away most of the joy of even considering hauling a drum kit around to gigs, to then use the painful arms and legs to perform with. Doesn't seem like much fun; doesn't feel light.
It seems like my creative process has stalled out somehow, or perhaps all that energy I used to have for making music and good writing, has all been commandeered for pain management. I really don't know about that. I keep asking that question every day.
Bottom line: If it doesn't absolutely, definitely HAVE to be done I don't seem to want to do it--or more accurately--it just doesn't feel light.
So I guess my question is... well... maybe it's not so much a question as a statement of faith. By following light and lightness, should this not in turn create more light and lightness, ultimately arriving at a full expression of my individual divinity at some point? It would seem so, by any reckoning of metaphysical precepts.
I guess I'm worried. Worried that the pain won't ever stop; worried that the music I feel and hear within me will never come out, worried that my business will continue loping along at its current feeble pace, and worried I'm going to run out of IRA money, with nothing to replace it now that I'm in my 60s.
But, aren't worries heavy in and of themselves? Yes! So, stop worrying, I reckon. Eh?
