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Per Ardua Ad Astra
27/11/2009
t is said that the Mexican Shamans of old honed their intent to such a high degree that with concentrated thought, and at will, they could alter time and space. Don Juan Matus (one such Shaman) said that the universe was consciousness – this is what he taught his apprentice Carlos Castaneda - and that we are all connected, no only to each other but also to everything else. He said that when we fully understood this, new worlds would open up to us.
This might sound a little fanciful, it might come across as a tad esoteric, but current science – particularly quantum science – is beginning to concur. String Theory certainly suggests that everything connects to everything else; The Observer Effect shows that we connected and what we observe is changed not only by our observation of it but also by the nature of our observation (we see what we expect to see). And The Participating Anthropic Principle is a scientific president which asserts that the very act of looking for a supernova in the night skies actually causes a supernova to occur.
This is exciting stuff, one might say inspiring, but how do you go about honing intent? If it is true, if strong intention is the key to the creative universe (and my experience tells me that it is) why aren’t we all creating new worlds already? The simple answer to this is, we are. Every second of every hour of every day each of us creates a reality that we live and breathe in. The problem is, it is usually an unsatisfactory reality, a frequency of our own making, but not necessarily one of our liking. We are either creating entirely the wrong worlds, or we are recreating the same old, colourless landscape over and over again, because as creatures of habit and addiction we think the same thoughts and thus proffer the same (usually unintentional) intentions. Most of us get the same information (food/knowledge/news/impressions/influences) from the same places and, like robots on a production line, we use this information to create the self same model every day, simply because we continue to give out what we have taken in. This is down to either ignorance (we have never learned the rules) or it is down to fear, we are excited by our own potential but at the same time we are afraid; of leaving the village, of being ousted from the tribe - we are actually afraid of change. We are an astoundingly powerful species. Astoundingly.
If you don’t believe me look at the television, watch the news, read the papers and see how much devastation we have created, how much mayhem we have sculpted and how much violence we have made manifest with our fear and our ignorance. You may see all this as destruction, which of course it is, but even destruction has to be created and in our case it was created by the very powerful, but unschooled intent of man.
If you are currently living a shit life let me assure you of one thing, as an adult it is a shit life that you can change…once you wake up, once you stop blaming - once you start realising that you have found the enemy. He is you!
However, this is not an article about blame. This is not a diatribe on the evils of man. It is certainly not an appendage to the very weak meal of conspiracy that feeds the sheep on the World Wide Web. If the bibles and science and empirical experience are to be believed then the good worlds are created by us, the bad worlds are created by us and the conspiracy theories are also created by us. We create it all, even and perhaps especially if we think we don’t. It is not that these realities do not exist, they do, we can see that very clearly, but they exist only because we make them exist. So if we can create devastation and murder and illness almost by accident with our fledgling intention (and these are global creations), then imagine what we can do with a little work (well perhaps a lot of work) and some redirection, we can create nirvana in our every day. To do this though, to have control over our intention so that we are not randomly and accidentally making love one day and declaring war the next, we need sovereignty over the self, and this amazing power is only developed when we engage difficulty. The Mexican Shamans knew this, and so spent their formative years collecting power and honing their intention in the theatre of demand.
They did not sit at home clinging to comfort and letting their intention run amok like a feral teenager, they took their bones out of the norm, and placed them before their fears. Through difficulty they found their escape. A pioneering martial artist group in America (The Dog Brothers) called this ‘higher consciousness through harder contact,’ in the Latin it was Per Ardua Ad Astra (through adversity to the stars – the motto of the Royal Air Force) and in the Christian bible we are advised to go through the narrow gate, where many are called but few enter. By developing personal control in the school of difficulty you bring your Self to centre, and it is from this place of balance that you can practice the art of intended intention. The Shamans did this by mentally imaging the things they wanted in their life, and giving no attention to the things they did not. Instead of using negative affirmations and visualisation like ‘why is my life so shit/why am I so unhappy/why can’t I make any money?’ They instead practiced positive afformations, audio and visual (see The Great Little Book of Afformations by Noah St. John, Ph.D.) with questions like ‘why is my life so good/why am I so happy/why do I make such an enormous amount of money?’ This makes sense. If you say to yourself over and over again, day after day, week after week and year after tiresome year ‘why am I so unsuccessful?’ what do you think your unconscious intention is? What do you think you are creating? Probably an unsuccessful life.
This is not your fault. You are simply doing what you are being unconsciously taught to do by a society that little understands the human psyche and how easily it is influenced by strong and emotive impression. If the news and the tabloids and the dinner time gossips are telling you that the economic sky is falling in, and they are telling you it all day and every day when you switch on the TV or read a newspaper or sit down for a cup of tea, they are downloading a negative impression onto your hard drive. If those closest to you, the people you love, your wife your husband, your parents and your friends are (consciously or unconsciously) feeding you with negatives at your most vulnerable moments, when your conscious filter is down, they are doing the same. They are downloading negatives that will end up as a destructive backing track to your whole life. Every minute of every day your sub vocalisation (your internal voice) will be repeating the popular mantra of recession and violence and deprivation over and over again in your head. Your sub vocalisation is a very powerful repetitive and emotive intention. And as I said earlier, repetitive and emotive thought creates your reality.
To reverse this is no small thing. If you want to change what comes out you need first to change what goes in, because ultimately they are the same. This means changing what you read, what you watch on TV, who you talk to, maybe even who you share your bed with. Often your closest love is your biggest saboteur. I once lived with a lady that could mangle my ambition with as little as a look. If I picked up my pen to write, she would give me a disparaging glare that could crush my literary aspirations from ten feet. I confided in her once that I wanted to be a writer and she looked at me as though I had pissed in her purse and said ‘who do you think you are?’ She only needed to say it once. I was vulnerable at the time, confiding in the (then) love of my life that I wanted to be an artist left me very open to her very strong impression. And her very strong impression immediately became my very strong impression. In the future I only had to look at a pen and my internal dialogue would spit at me ‘who the fuck do you think you are?’
I am not saying that you have to go out and get divorced tomorrow (maybe leave it a week or so), what I am saying is that you have to be very careful about what you allow people to implant in your mind. It is easy to lose the bad news bulletins and the tabloid-porn, just stop watching the TV, stop investing in the paper. With friends and family it is more difficult (but difficulty is where you collect power), because it means standing up for yourself, it means telling people in no uncertain terms that you will not be a trash can for their rubbish talk. It also means standing up to and mastering the most influential person you will ever meet. You! You have to stand up to yourself. By monitoring your thoughts, hunting down and dissolving your negative shadows (see my book Hunting the Shadow) and finally taking charge of yourself. Then of course you need to place the right information into your head, read the right books, watch the right programmes and films, and surround your self by the right influences so that the information going in is powerful and the intentions coming out are more powerful still. Once this is in place all you have to ask yourself is: what do I want in my life, what do I want from my life? Write the answers down, make them your intention, think emotively and consistently about them, do the work and make your great dream your living reality. Each time you make an intention a reality, your confidence will grow and each time your confidence grows, you will be better fixed to intend the next grand idea. Eventually, like the Shamans of old, you will have power over time and space and even the constellation will quiver before your might.
But be sure of one thing, you have to change what you are doing if you want to change what you are getting! If you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you will keep on getting what you’ve always got. There is nothing closer to insanity than doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
Be well
Geoff Thompson
