I was sitting in a café with a friend the other day and we got around to talking about the collective unconscious. We didn’t dwell on it for long. Our general sense was that the collective is a prevailing miasma that’s not easy to cope with. It’s a bit like an energetic smog that chokes the human spirit. The more densely populated the area the more intense it feels – the thicker the smog.
If you’re at all sensitive to energy you’ll know what I’m talking about. And if you don’t think you’re sensitive to energy, you might consider whether you feel better on a lonely seashore, in woodlands or on a windy hilltop, than you do in the city. It might not simply be the lack of air pollution that lightens your spirit.
The effect of the collective field in our daily lives is consistently overlooked. It’s a characteristic of the social environment that it conditions you without you realising it, and is in its turn conditioned by you. You breathe it in and it in-forms you, so you then function under its influence – at the level of consciousness it produces. This phenomenon goes unnoticed because it doesn’t form part of what’s regarded as objective reality.
Whilst you hold a viewpoint that there is nothing to notice,
you will notice nothing.
The Smoke
When I was in the first stages of waking up to my own spiritual sensitivity I was living in a relatively rural location a few miles outside Cork city in Ireland.
Now Cork is a real city but it’s pretty small. In those days the population was around 100,000. However, I couldn’t bear to be in the city for very long. I’d go in on business and within about half-an-hour I’d be restless to leave. If I stayed more than an hour it was as if something was screaming in agony inside me. The background energy of the environment was too intense for me to take. Some days it was worse than others. I was noticing my existence within the collective field.
This field was a concatenation [I like that word] of all the tension, anxiety, anger, frustration, disappointment, joyfulness, wonder, contentment, excitement, expectation and every other emotion actively present in the population. What I was effectively feeling was a synthesis of the energy of the environment and the people in it. It was a matter of how this all balanced out, as to what I experienced in myself. It was also a question of what I was taking in with me.
At that point it would have been easy enough to give up on interacting with the everyday world, but not very practical. But for me it’s always been important to be spiritual in ways that are practical [in this lifetime at any rate]. I could see it was necessary for me to find a way to co-exist with this environmental ‘noise’ if I wanted to function in any meaningful way. So I determined to find ways to manage my energy and my sensitivity, without shutting down or numbing myself out.
Getting over myself
The first thing I had to acknowledge was that there was nothing wrong with me or my situation. I was simply evolving. My sensitivity was (and is) an integral part of that evolution. I got a big kick out of the transformational changes I felt occurring in me. It was really exciting to experience myself in a spiritual context, where before I’d been caught up in a conventional materialist existence.
I also had to understand that complaining about my environment was a waste of my energy. It took a while for me to get that.
What I had to do was learn to function in integrity with myself without raging against the environment, the people in it, the social norms or the institutions. I had to learn to be centred in the flow of my own energy and ground myself in my own spiritual connection.
A number of years have passed since those early stirrings of awareness and I now function well in some very energetically dense environments. I still have to get over myself at times, but I have uncovered some fundamental principles, which for me at least are guidelines to empowerment. I believe that in time these will become mainstream as human consciousness expands. Three of these are shared below. You may find they challenge conventional approaches to life … but ask yourself this: How well is the conventional approach to life working?
Principle One – Acceptance
The first principle is that anything you judge as being wrong with the world has to be accepted as it is. Crusading against any perception of wrongness ties you to it; it’s a way of defining yourself in relation to what is wrong and giving your power away to it. This doesn’t mean you can’t contribute to changing the injustices of the world, but you can only do that by aligning with and standing for your own truth, not by standing against anything no matter how evil it might seem. This is one of the secret keys to self-empowerment.
Principle Two – Seeing in the Mirror
The second principle is possibly more difficult. You need to develop your understanding of how everything you see is somehow a mirror for you.
If you look around you and feel offended by what you see, it’s a sign that you need to look inside yourself and find where you offend yourself. Or maybe explore those elements of your own conditioning and behaviour that correspond to the offence. When you find them you need to resolve them.
This second principle is almost a life’s work (some might say that it is). It’s far from easy as it means facing your deepest fears and clearing the beliefs that disconnect you from the flow of your brilliance. It cannot be done intellectually.
The prime mover here is your desire, followed closely by your intent. But again the secret is to come from the expression of your own truth, not from the desire for what you perceive you don’t have. Any time you focus rationally on what’s missing you give your energy to that ‘missing’ and recreate the reality you’ve been living rather than reconfigure it.
Principle Three – Appreciation
The third principle is appreciation. What you appreciate appreciates. In some respects appreciation is a form of gratitude. It can be difficult to cultivate the ‘attitude of gratitude’ that we all know we’re supposed to have. However, if you teach yourself appreciation gratitude will emerge in its wake. And you develop appreciation by focusing your attention only on what you love – or focusing on that as much as you can.
Appreciation is a mental discipline that requires you to remove your attention from anything that makes you feel angry, upset, disappointed or joyless in any way. This is like developing a muscle. At first it’s stiff and doesn’t take kindly to being worked, but with persistence it gets stronger and brings a sense of achievement. Practising appreciation will shift the way you interact with everything and everyone. It will be your contribution to the collective unconscious and make that vibration available for others to tune into. This is how the world will change.
The smog will clear when we stop producing it.
Contact me to learn how
The key to walking the talk here is to appreciate the ordure we manifest for ourselves too, and how it serves our purpose, particularly in helping us to face those deepest fears, so it’s not simply a matter of appreciating what we love; we also need to remember not to shoot the messenger and have gratitude for those who throw the stuff at us so we can see ourselves in that mirror! If we remove our attention from the negative without first asking how it serves our purpose and how/why we manifested it in the first place, we are really missing its lesson. When we truly accept responsibility for what we have created, good and “bad”, then we really begin to take our power back, instead of running away from what we have created for ourselves that is unpleasant in the now – which will continue to chase us until we have accepted it with love and gratitude and thereby reintegrated our Shadow instead of rejecting it!
Much love, Arwen