February 17, 2008

• Choices

  The current Featured Grownups Challenge offers a choice among three options.  I may end up writing on two, or maybe even all three of them, but just in case I get only one done, I’ll choose #1 for a start:  CHOICES.

   Thinking back over some of the major pivotal choices I have made in my life, even though many of them led me into pain and trouble, I have no regrets.  Since each choice led to a chain of other choices, I can’t begin to guess how different my life would have been and in what ways it would have gone if I had chosen differently at any given step, except in the case of just one of those choices.  I made a choice, twenty-some years ago, that has, from the moment I took it, been healing the pain and leading me out of the trouble I’d gotten myself into.

  I was working part time at Alaska Astrological Center in Anchorage, minding the bookstore when the owner wanted time off, running off natal charts on the Apple II for customers, and teaching night courses on psychic development and oracle reading, when I first became aware of Dick Sutphen‘s work.   My visceral reaction to him, at first, kept me from absorbing and accepting his message.  His face on the backs of his books and tapes raised my hackles, and his voice on the tapes made my skin crawl.

  Some time later, I was in Oregon, speaking to a metaphysical study group, a circle of wise and psychically savvy women, when someone brought up Sutphen and I mentioned my reaction to him.  She immediately recognized the karmic element in that gut reaction of mine, and told me it was probably because I had known him in a past life.  She then joked about his having had a number of wives, and messy divorces, in this lifetime, and suggested that I might have been married to him in some previous lifetime.  When I was ready to leave there to return to Alaska, she gave me several sets of Dick’s hypnosis tapes, including Past Life Therapy.

  Until then, I’d had some tantalizing and suggestive dreams that might, I thought, have indicated that I’d lived before, and I’d met people who claimed to have known me in past lives, but I wasn’t fully convinced of the validity of the concept of reincarnation.  My doubts were resolved by the memories released when I started using the tapes.   Within months of the first regression, I no longer needed hypnotic regression to recall past life experiences.  They were readily accessible to my conscious mind when I sought them, and would come up in dreams when they had relevance to current life experiences.

  I learned about the past life in which I had known Dick.  We hadn’t been married, not even particularly intimate.  He had been a man of power, and his religious beliefs, and the political decisions he made, had led to my death in that lifetime.  He tells the story in his book, Earthly Purpose.  But, as important and vital to my personal development as this information has been, it is peripheral to the pivotal choice for which I am indebted to Dick Sutphen.

  After I had gotten over the visceral karmic revulsion toward him, I started paying attention to what he was saying.  In his writings, his seminars, and his many recorded courses, his core message is the same:  humanity’s highest purpose on this planet is to transcend fear and practice unconditional love.  My acceptance of the truth of that idea, and my work to realize it in my life, comprised this life’s great pivotal choice.  To the extent that I have accomplished it, I have found happiness and fulfillment.  Whenever I’m feeling down, once I realize it and recognize the fear or failure to love that lies behind the feeling, life again becomes joy for me.

  Previously, when I loved, I needed to be loved in return, or my love was not fulfilling.  That kind of conditional love was a recipe for misery, especially since I wasn’t particularly lovable.  I also previously needed the physical presence of my loved ones, or I felt incomplete, lonely, and unfulfilled.  I agonized over the circumstances that had separated me from my children.  I suffered because I could never manage to love just one man at a time.  The culture at large and the men  in question were, with few exceptions, unwilling to let me fulfill the emotional needs that arose from that personal quirk.  Now, with my new kind of love, I can love ‘em all and nobody minds.

  As I have shed my need to be accepted, respected, understood, and loved, I have grown to appreciate life and the other people who share this planet with me, more and more all the time.  The more fully I realize that I don’t need to control events and the people around me, the more control I have over my life.  My ideas and beliefs no longer need to be understood, accepted or believed by anyone else for me to be able to wholeheartedly realize them in my life.  Perhaps that last bit is the most important factor in my current happiness.  I can be a constituency of one, a total maverick, considered by absolutely everyone to be deluded, nutty and absolutely wrong, and I’m okay with that.

  Thing is, it hasn’t been working out that way.  There is always someone who sees it my way and is willing to say so.  Just yesterday, I wrote:  “I love you.  I don’t give a shit how you feel about me.”  JennyG, a True Xangan and a real love, read it, and responded:  “This is one of the best credos I’ve ever heard.  It covers everything, I love it.”  Of course, there are those who don’t believe that unconditional love is possible, or who feel that it is too risky a step for them to dare to take.  That’s okay.  I love ‘em all, anyway.

  

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