At the end of 2012, many people felt let down. The general consensus seems to have been that the hype surrounding the year had been overblown and many of the predictions and prognostications that had been proffered by prophets and scientists alike had come to naught. People seemed to feel let down, as if they’d been lied to. And yet, while foums and articles the Net across agreed that 2012 was not all it cracked up to be, a quiet revolution in consciousness not only found its space of becoming, but metastasized at the collective level, resulting in an even further weakening of institutional and cultural structures of societies the world across.
Since the shift of December, 2012, the economic and cultural structures of the Western world have continued to buckle and signs of imminent collapse continue to increase. The economic situations in Europe and the USA continue to reveal dire signs of structural deficits that must result in market corrections of up to 90%, which augers a world-wide depression at an almost unimaginable scale. Within societies, the youth and the minority populations continue to experience unemployment rates at unsustainable levels, resulting in an increasing coalescence of purpose as the realization that the systemic instabilities are not ending, but getting worse, becomes more and more undeniable. The cultural propensities toward overt and extreme forms of violence and sexual expression have become mainstays and have resulted in a definitive split in the population between those comfortable in such a world and those who are not. The mainstream media concentration on faux-news and reality-based television continues to distract populations from the visible changes in the natural world occurring without pause from the wild weather to the increasing earthquakes and the continuous pollution of the environment. For those not caught up in chasing after illusory lifestyles of the rich and famous, it is becoming more and more apparent that, in 2013, the changes, rather than decreasing in severity, are instead increasing. The non-sustainability of the current economic and societal model of governance is being revealed day after day.
In 2012, many doomsday prognosticators brought world-wide attention to ideas such as magnetic and geological pole shifts, potential solar storms of unimaginable intensity, mega-storms and environmental catastrophes of world-wide scope. Channelers spoke in the voices of Ascended Masters, Angels and Demons, aliens of the Grey, Reptilian and Nordic variety, all speaking of the coming changes, of the need to cultivate spiritual practices conforming to their own set standards and dependent upon their help as our extra and ultra terrestrial and dimensional bredren and sistren. The call was to look outside of ourselves for salvation, to seek such in the stars and in the disembodied voices of entities who professed a greater technological and spiritual advancement than that enjoyed by mass humanity. Many heeded these calls and engaged in meditative exercises and visualization techniques of questionable origin and purpose, giving their allegiance to what were basically unknown quantities, unseen and mysterious helpers, self-titled guides and professed friends of the planet and its people. At the end of 2012 and into 2013, the chorus of the disappointed and the angry increased their tone of stridency and rejection, resulting in an overall silencing of the channeled voices and the dismissal and blacklisting of those who spoke for the unseen.
In these early months of 2013, much that was on the table in 2012 remains. Tales and sightings of the giant planet Nibiru have increased again, asteroid fly-bys and meteorite strikes are monthly and weekly occurrences while UFO sightings and close encounters of every kind continue to garner attention. The channelings have returned to some semblance of prominence their calls for allegiance to their forms of spiritual progression, alien agendas to include planetary, sub-surface, solar systemic, extra and ultra-dimensional agree that the prophesied changes are now upon humanity and its home planet, Earth. Government and Elite shenanigans have taken over the news presses of the alternative community with the Pope’s resignation and the continuing flight of the Elite from the public scene. Economic turmoil and political infighting continues to sharpen in tone and implication as some turning point seems to be arriving, at which the financial tsunami predicted for so long must indeed arrive upon the shores of prosperity for the few and hopelessness for the many. Depending upon individual standing within the system as it currently is, the alternative community vacillates between feelings of going along to get along and outright revolution against the system and its controllers.
While the majority of the world’s population continues to experience the depredations of this predatory capitalist system and must seek ways to survive daily, those in the Western countries who live under these systems of socialist and materialist comfort are free to prognosticate upon current events while barely hanging on to what little worldly comfort they may have, in part conforming to systemic requirements for their tacit approval and continued consumer support and in part leaning toward the understanding that for things to change for the better for all of humanity, they themselves will have to undergo some form of material deprivation.
That thought of material deprivation is where the fear lies. Where the unwillingness to truly challenge the system is revealed to be an unwillingness for things to truly change. It is true that no one wants to be deprived of the basics of survival. But those basics of survival are actually much more basic than many people are willing to accept for themselves, regardless of the fact that many of the world’s people are currently living in a manner that most in the West would find shocking. Having barely enough to make it through the days. Making each day a struggle for survival. Finding food and water, a place to live in comfort and relative safety.
And so collaboration with the system is implicit within the form of living most of us accept daily. By our very engagement with society we are continually forming it and perpetuating it and its ills. By being consumers we are feeding the corporations, contributing to the Executive bonuses, paying for their mercenary armies and their hoards of lobbyists and payroll scientists. By our very engagement in what we deem to be our necessary choices for survival, we build upon the foundations of predatory social and economic institutions ancient beyond memory and designed for the benefit of the few, rather than the many. The underlying paradox is that we are contributing to our own demise. That we are supporting a way of life that seeks to murder us. The food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breath are all laced with chemical cocktails inimical to our biology and yet we ignore this reality or chalk it up to our just due, perhaps as a form of self-immolation for the oft consciously unacknowledged understanding that we each are indeed complicit within this suicidal endeavor called Western civilization.
So where does that leave us? What are our options as beings of conscious intention choosing life over death, the holism of a world-wide unity paradigm over the separatist death culture of the current world?
The world is shifting almost faster than can be remarked upon. Each day, new signs of increasing entropy and chaos are revealed, that unquestioning faith in the structures of society and its inevitable continuance is being replaced by a pervasive doubt and burgeoning fear that stability in any form is a thing of the past. The changes that are increasing at a seemingly exponential rate give rise to an increasing abandon on the part of the youth and the dispossessed, it seems that society is breaking down, at first around the edges, but increasingly toward the center and this produces an ambient wildness and visceral sense of potentiality that has revealed the doorway, or portal, from one paradigm of reality to another. That doorway remains vague and ephemeral for many just awakening to consciousness, but it is and has been a clear and present vision to those who began the work of awakening years or decades prior to this time.
The truest guides to and through this time are within. From that voice of confirmation or denial, when faced with new information, to that feeling of resonance or cacophony when confronted with new potentialities, we have, each of us, an indicator of our own orientation and relative truth which either corresponds to or deviates away from the greater Truth of the Cosmos. The extent to which our truth correlates to that Greater Truth will determine our own paths through these times and what happens to us beyond them.
The good news is that our relative truths can be calibrated to Greater Truth. To do so it is necessary to be willing to question our most deeply held beliefs and hold them up as individual experience to be judged against collective experience. Is what I believe according to what others believe? Is what I know according to what others know? What was or is the orientation of those others? What was or is my own orientation? What kind of person, type of information, or spiritual practice is in my own best interest? What is the measure of success? Who has succeeded with these methods in the past? Which part of these teachings are culturally relative, and which are cosmically absolute? These questions give rise to corresponding answers within ourselves, which we can then project outwards in our studies and attempts to find greater corroborations of our own truths with those of others. When doing so, it is also necessary to take into account the alignment of group-held truths with those deeper, universal truths that determine the course of nature, the planets and the stars. To examine ceremonial and institutional practices and determine for ourselves which ones are really for the good of our own spiritual progression, and which are for the good of others beyond us and, in that vein, determining our own alliances at the ultra-dimensional or extraterrestrial level.
It takes intense study often in order to find where that Greater Truth resides, but, again, our inner barometer of what resonates in our hearts and souls is a sure guide to finding the right direction to go in, in deciding what information to believe and what to cast to the side. In all of this, our own personal progression can be measured by the changes we witness in our personality expression and also in how others experience us energetically. Am I still the angry person I used to be? Do I get upset at every little thing? Do people like to be around me? Am I still concentrating on non-essential things? Do my emotions ebb and flow with changing events? Am I more stable? Do others come to me for peace or conflict?
What kind of year do we want 2013 to be? Is it to be a doomsday event marked by fear, violence, hatred, world-wide warfare and cataclysmic challenges? Or is it to be a transformational event marked by understanding, peace, love, world-wide cooperation and transition to a new type of planetary environment? Odds are, it will be both, as this is a planet where people and groups of oppositional orientation meet and interact, engaged in the processes of spiritual growth and, sometimes, stagnation.
The question then becomes, what kind of year do you want 2013 to be?
What kind of year will you make it?
The answer will depend upon what you want and decide to make of yourself.
I’m no fan of pie-in-the-sky dreaming.
This is why politicians are always caught with their pants down and their bank accounts open, their integrity compromised. This is why corporate raiders and profiteers are concerned primarily with the bottom line, lining their pockets with obscene bonuses and wondering why anybody would complain. This is why preachers and priests do terrible things to children and the emotionally compromised. This is why we hate ourselves, secretly in our inner hearts and souls, desperately seeking salavation outside of ourselves because to look within and actually do something about what we find there is too painful to work with directly.
Sometimes, the qualitative differences between directed consciousness and psychopathy are the only trustworthy indicators of an individual’s orientation. It is possible to mistakenly equate the words, actions and deeds of the individual who is in the process of mastering mental and emotional control with those of the individual who has considerable mental capabilities but no internal emotional life to speak of. The mask sometimes worn by one of highly directed consciousness when attempting to appear normal can be mistaken for the mask of the predatory psychopath who has practiced this facade for a lifetime in order to blend in with the prey population. The primary and notable difference, which can be ascertained directly upon review of actions and responses, is intent and 
This is not so because life is perfect. It is not because things are either good or bad. The reason has nothing to do with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the trials and tribulations of life. The reason has to do only with the fact that living in 
The pleasures of a life are many and fleeting but are as nothing compared to the ecstasy of life. The sublime experiences of the spirit are able to lift one from the midst of the daily grind, eliciting wonder and joy, giving a higher context to the purpose of living consciously and in search of the higher aspects of self versus the gratification of the lower. The juxtaposition of the physical and the spiritual is the cauldron of happiness and sadness we traverse through our experiences, the fixation of our attention and perspective alternating between the higher and the lower aspects of our lives. Navigating the Path between the two extremes requires discipline and dedication, mind control and emotional stability.
The pleasures of life lived for the senses are a mere distraction from the deeper pleasures of spiritual awakening. Going beyond pleasure, beyond happiness, beyond the need for any sort of material gratification or emotional intoxication is the reward of the spiritual quest. Food, sex, violence and all variations and associated modalities satiate the sensual, those whose highest aspirations are material gratification and that is as it should be, as life takes all types and we all co-exist at different levels of understanding and experience. But for those traversing these dales of lustful travails they pale quickly, the call ever heard to seek higher, go deeper, expand vision and experience wider. The quiet whisper of Truth promising something more, something amazing, something lasting, something real. And yet, paradoxically, it is the moderate experience of both sides that reveals the true meaning of life.
The gratifying reality of real spiritual advancement is that as you initiate your conscious and directed journey to realization you become aware of the existence of certain markers and signposts along the way. There are traditions that inform the seeker about roadblocks ahead or pratfalls to be traversed. Holy books filled with the wisdom of the ages and oral traditions cached with the truth of eternity. Continued immersion within spiritual themes contributes to control of the mind as contemplative practices such as meditation and prayer rarefy the mental space, making it a fitting abode for the Divine. As the mind purifies, the thoughts purify, as the thoughts purify so do the words and, as a result, the actions.
Each of us has our stories. Every soul incarnate has a lesson and a context within which to learn it. All lessons are one lesson and that lesson is to conserve energy. The conservation of energy is a material energetic law, but it is also a spiritual law. No matter what tradition that you examine no matter where it is across the world, you will find that this law heralding the conservation of energy as the epitome of human development is enshrined at the core of every religion and at the heart of every moral and philosophical code.
People are attached to the world. Religions exhort us to leave it behind, to follow the path of the spirit. But the world calls with all of its attractions. Love, vice, hate, envy, greed, material accumulation, karmic debt, all of it combines to create an intertwined and seductive array of stimuli that distract a soul complex in lifetime after lifetime, expending energy unnecessarily in endeavors that tie us to one another and the world in an endlessly repetitive pattern of interactions. It is only when we choose to forego the attachment process whether that be to good or evil that we create the space within ourselves to contemplate what might lie beyond the many and varied states of material distraction.
The experience of total union, of submersion within Oneness will retaining a recognition of one’s self apart from that Oneness sears the synapses, clearing emotional detritus of a lifetime and allowing the individual to return to mundane waking life. But that does not remove her from experiencing the effects of her actions. Past karma is cleared but current karma in the Now must always be resolved as both the seed and the result are contained within every action. The wisdom of the Ages instructs without err in proclaiming that those seeking to live a higher form of life must free themselves of all attachments, be they good or bad. By so doing, future actions will not create karma that must be resolved in this or another lifetime.
Human experientiality ranges in the median of all energetic variables. Our senses experience only a small fraction of the total. We see and hear in the middle of the visual range, our other senses are limited to our perceptual awareness which is all too often minimized due to the distracted nature of our thought processes. The inherent subjectivity of human incarnation is made even more difficult by the isolation of ego and the facade of relativity mistaken as objectivity. The inability to see and experience reality clearly result in obscurations that must be reconciled along the spiritual path. That reconciliation is the goal of all aspiration.
Those who achieve this state of being are often apart but never lonely as their compassion fills the world, connects them to all souls within the world and beyond. Normal relationships may fall by the wayside as people move on, as they are not receiving what they were previously on the emotional side of the relationship. The individual may appear uncaring on the level of romantic love, even though the heart of compassion is alive within them. To old friends and lovers, they may seem like a different person altogether. And they are. The memories of the person they were before remain, but the emotional connections no longer define them. The experience of true unity, true all-encompassing, all-permeating, all-existent love, compassion and one-ness contextualizes human aspiration and life and we incarnate within its grasp become visible at our true scale in relation to all things.
Perhaps it is mercury retrograde right now, but communications are at a standstill. People are standing on virtual street-corners screaming out their truths and not caring who is listening or responding back. The babble is continuous and it is rising as space weather increases and the sun pops off flare after flare, as things go downhill even further in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, as politics in the USA heat up, as our lives continue to progress along their winding paths and our personal dramas ratchet up a notch or three, all connected, all beholden to the same energetic input that must find its resolution through some form of activity, some means of resolution. All of the voices, shouting, screaming, crying, complaining, querulous and fearful at heart, the anger, the rage but a front masking the underlying terror. Despite the noise, there seems to be no resolution possible. They all can’t seem to hear each other because the chatter in their own minds is too loud.
That is what most everybody thinks. That is what our life experiences seem to tell us, at least. The life experiences that make up our personal history. Our childhoods with our parents and siblings, our time in school, our friends, our secrets and our shames, our triumphs and our joys. These are the things that we count on to represent our journey through life, these are the things that we recount when people ask us about ourselves, who we are, what our biography is, what our life is about. For those of us who are a bit more thoughtful, we might even put them in some sort of topical order and call that our path through life, as if the details of our journey are the sum of our experience and make up the totality of what we have gained along the way.
Being comfortable in life is one of the primary goals society programs into us as citizens of different countries. Despite the geographic differences and distances, Western culture as a whole displays remarkable similitude in how ideofacts and sociofacts are ingrained within populations. To be successful in any of the Western cultures, a modicrum of capitalistic ideology and consumer-oriented methodology must be inculcated by groups, families and individuals. To belong and to epitomize the expression of said culture, the actual, material expression of lifetime success is a relative degree of affluence as measured by the modernization memes that permeate Eurocentric society and those sycophant socieities serving as peripheral outposts of raw material and low-wage earner extraction.
It is painful to look at the path of a lifetime and determine that you are not on the side of the good guys. If you come to realize it, you may ask the universe, but what else could I have done? What other choices did I have? And the answers to those questions might have shaken you to your very core. Or given rise to a visceral fear that the loss of material security must result in.
Asking these questions – actually realizing that these questions need to be asked – is one of the first steps to choosing to awaken to some of the deeper realities of life. Of accepting the fact that the way things have been is not the way things should be and that a change is in order. Accepting your compliance with the system and that you are indeed an agent of the system as long as you work for and through the system to support the global hierarchy of dominance and control is a big step in figuring out how to create a lifestyle of non-compliance and opposition to the machine.
Meaning, that I understood the motivations of other people. And by understanding their motivations, I could read, understand and explain their behavior. I thought I was people-smart because I’ve been known to be right, to be able to predict people’s behavior, before. I think we all pride ourselves on being able to do this to one extent or another.
I went around for many years doing this. In fact, I still have to catch myself doing it sometimes. Observing people, watching them, looking at their behavior and predicting why they do certain things. Engaging in entire flights of fancy regarding their thought processes, motivations and the possible consequences as they pertained to current and future actions and the ramifications of those actions. I could look at someone’s expression and tell you matter-of-factly what they were thinking. I could listen to a conversation and tell you what something someone said really meant. I could do this by observing their body language, listening to the words they used, the tone, watching and listening for the subtle clues that give an indication of underlying motives, of where words and actions do not necessarily coincide.
But even more importantly than that, is that we shouldn’t try. To the extent that it evolves into more than assuring our basic survival it becomes another ego-tool utilized as a way of controlling one’s environment and other people; it is, in essence, an act of aggression and an energetic imposition of structure upon what should be and is, essentially, structure-less. And, by attempting to read another person in depth we are ignoring what we should be paying more attention to: ourselves. We are not responsible for other people. Other people’s actions are not our responsibility. What other people are doing, how they are acting, even as it affects us, is not our problem. It is theirs. Let me say that again, another way: anything anybody else does around you or to you is their business, not yours.
People will surprise you when given the chance. Some people, I should amend. Some will do exactly what you think they will, what the signs show and tell you they will, each and every time. But it is not your place to pidgeon-hole them like that. It’s not our place to limit their potentiality in that manner, even if it is only in our own minds. Because when we expect someone to speak or act in a certain way, we then adapt our own speech and behavior in anticipation of that response and by so doing project that framework onto and into the other person. You are, in essence, using the emotional energetic link you are engaged in to create a holographic reality through the force of your imagination that limits the potentialities of the moment to the extent that the other person is incapable of transcending the contextuality of the interaction, which is difficult, given the tendency of emotions to sync in conflict approximating a cause and effect feedback loop that, generally, can only escalate unless outside intervention occurs. Is it then little wonder that they live up to your expectations by engaging in the behavior that you have set them up to fulfill?
This teaching is not for everybody. Some will read this and think, what?! And that is fine.
