Consciousness and Being

Who Am I
I am the essence of Tao,
Expressing itself in form,
I am Pure Consciousness,
I have a body, mind, and emotions,
I am none of those.

Being is my deepest Self, 
It is beyond name and form,
It is felt as ever present,
I am ceaseless just like the vastness of  the sea,
I am that which is beyond name and form,

I am the Rising Dragon from the deep waters,
The Phoenix re-birthing itself from the ashes,
The Heron caretaker of the departed souls,
The roaring Lion in the wilderness, 
The morning Star at the break of dawn,
I am that which is beyond name and form.

 From Odyssey of a Healer 
by Dr. Mmatheo Motsisi 
https://www.amazon.com/author/mmatheomotsisi

 www.mmatheomotsisi.com

All of us are each a wonderful mix of information in influences, traditions, feelings and stories lying in us below the surface. Sometimes mind will access stories and pictures and feelings that come from a familiar but unknown place in our current sense of time and space. 

How many of us have had a sense of deja vu or something catching our interests out of the blue? All of us, if we pay attention can enjoy the flavors that being human offer each of us. Our guest last week on our radio show, Dr. Mmatheo Motsisi, represents a wonderful and appreciated mix of wisdoms and traditions from a space that i don't share physically. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, Earth and i live in Portland Oregon USA Earth. We are different races, in different countries, using different languages and embodying different experiences in being a woman in this time of history. 

None of that matters. We appreciate each other for realizing that no matter our background of differences we are One. This is often the same with our other guests. Individuals being and recognizing the wonder of being bigger than our forms and bodies would indicate. Most all of us share experiences of strife and turmoil, passion and love, to reach the awareness that we are wonder in human form. 

One reason her interview with us stands out for me is because I know how physically far away she is from us. We used Skype with Dr. Motsisi in Johannesburg, and us here in Tacoma and Portland on the west coast of the United States. Yet, it was like we were in the same room sitting next to each other. For between the three of us there was no space or time. Only connection, only One with the wonderful flavor of individuality that we each are. Probably the clearest connection i have ever had over Skype. 

Our human experience is ruled by our physical senses and they are only that, our physical senses. But that ruling comes from the local sense of being. We embody much more. Our language embraces our unseen and metaphysical senses. We use terms like Spirit, Consciousness, Life, God, Universe, Wonder, All, Soul, Divine. The labels may indicate levels of distinctions and subtleties or maybe it is all the same thing ultimately as Potential and Energy at play. Sometimes our distinctions serve us and they can also hinder us. 

We all hold awareness of being Consciousness or God or Sacred. To say otherwise is silly. And, for some it is a deeply buried awareness. We can be trained to be afraid of thoughts of the power these words represent and how that expresses. 

For some it is present in daily life all the time and not limited to just Sundays and now and then during the week. The only veil between being discarnated energies and our incarnated states is in how we organize our thinking, seeing and feeling. Think a difference and you will see a difference and feel a difference. 

We start as Consciousness and our form is our expression of Life, Spirit and Soul merging in an integrated dance we call Self, the human interface of Consciousness. Something our labels of compartmentalization that body, mind, and spirit foster are causing us to forget. We can lose our sense of the whole in our want to explain and understand what we are. They are only a way to notice dynamic forces at play interacting concurrently as Life. The heart stops and incarnated life stops. Birth and death define the length of an incarnated state of Life. 

Create some time and space to access Heart Centered Awareness, the Field of Unified Consciousness.  In that state beyond our physical and emotional senses of Self into the core essence of All, the infinite Sea of Potential. Stripped of the personality, the emotions, the feelings allow yourself to notice your knowing. Your knowing, not your knowledge. Not your judgments, not your stories. 

Your life is a gesture of being. We each swim in a constant bath of potential dynamics that we can avail ourselves of. Extend, expand your gesture. Go beyond what you think you know into what you know. Appreciate the difference and allow yourself to be. 

Janet Barrett
Life in the Beyond/Journeys Into Enlightenment
www.janetandbeyond.com
janetb@janetandbeyond.com

Consciousness and the Y in the Road

Sometimes it feels like Life presents no middle ground. It can as clear as a hurricane coming and our choice to leave or stay and deal with what comes afterwards, the consequences. Or perhaps in a marriage.

We can feel it coming, that Y in the road. We can flash on how we have set it up. We can regret and feel pain for what will come and follow. We can observe ourselves in our actions from within like deer caught in the headlights against the rising tide.

We can also know and feel that it is the right action.

We have all been in the place of hitting the Y in the road. We have seen it off in the distance and we can want to hide from it but still it comes. Only two choices. Because we know that everything will change. and we have feelings about that.

Being true to ourselves or what seems truthful in the moment may upset the applecart. That applecart is our idea of who we think we are in our life and where we are going in that life.

Life is filled with the adventure of being alive. That includes messiness, unwillingness, whining, and also order, and a willingness to ride it out and enjoy, love and care for one another. We are shortsighted when we think whatever is going on now is forever. There is no forever, only expansiveness.

In the current accelerating energetic rhythms we find ourselves in right now change will happen and is happening. We wake up one morning and things are different from when we went to bed. It rains and it doesn't stop, the land floods. And sometimes, it can be fast and furious in that 24 hours. Things never contemplated, imagined, feared or wanted have happened. Maybe also something remarkable, wanted, not expected can happen.

We are always co creating in our relationships to our environment and people. With people we assign roles and those roles will come with rules of how we will be. Most of us don't hold the awareness that our role may shift in time and so must the rules defining that role. Until we come to the Y.

We may be in awareness of one another's sense of truth or not. We may be in a state of unknowing or unclarity for ourselves that becomes clear in time. We only know we were in a state of connection and now we may find ourselves in a different state of connection.

Pain is often felt as regret. Pain can be felt taking responsibility for someone else's feelings. Pain is choosing loss of self in order to protect others. Eventually something will have to give when we are feeling compromised.

Our decision made before, seemed or felt like the right thing to do. Depended on how emotional one was feeling, what illusion was running. Or maybe how one was feeling directed from our inside voice or those pesky outside voices. Sometimes our awareness of a disposable world means that something may catch our interest and then we can let it go easily or with little investment. We lack appreciation in the pursuit and stimulation of something new. Doesn't matter whether it is a car on lease or a relationship of love.

We each were who we were. Yet it is hard to be truthful with another when we don't know our own truth and only our fears. Also our truths can change. What was is no longer. This is tricky when one notices shift and the other is still in the old mindset of roles and rules.

Consciousness holds for all. As humans we take that all and narrow it down to fit who we show up as. And sometimes that does not mean for easy or pretty or pain free in going forth and living.

But it is always in how we each have set our rules up about our lives and being.

One constant in life is that nothing ever stays the same though it may seem things never change. At some point what is will become what was.

The Y creates a seemingly different direction as part of the journey. But perhaps just two different ways around the mountain that will meet together again on the other side.

As Consciousness, life is an enriching, deepening state of continuance that may include at some point, a coming apart to form into something new.

Janet Barrett
Life in the Beyond/Journeys Into Enlightenment
janetb@janetandbeyond.com
www.janetandbeyond.com

Consciousness and Forces in Action

Right now many energies are focused on the United States. Earth energies, cosmic energies, climate energies, personality energies. In our physical environments we have had eclipses, floods, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes playing around and in our borders.

What is going on?

The US has been in the midst of monumental emotional storms. You can find yourself triggered into depression and other sensations. Perhaps a category 5 in intensity at times or tornado dynamics or foundation shaking forces abound. They might move through us slowing, consuming all in its path without regard to what it hits or quickly whipping across our inner landscapes in a focused nature. We find ourselves flooded and inundated.

What is going on?

We need to take a mental step out of our emotions and observe as Consciousness.

Everything is vibrational energy, frequencies, resonations. Our human organisms register vibrations at different levels than other species of life, animal and plant. Minerals are the building blocks of all life but they are not alive but operate as vibrational energy conductors. They are seemingly inert material in dynamic relations. The earth is a molten planet of minerals under its surface. In its molten center fire and heat generate and activate chemicals and actions. It registers energies differently and responds to the influences around it as it experiences cycles in its rhythms. Humans, made up of such materials do too.

Gaia, Earth had no agenda. It only is. It is not alive inside yet active which provides an environment for life to exist upon it. It is Consciousness in a different form that is responding dynamically to itself and to the cosmos. That layer of life upon it's surface as Nature, reaches into the earth in its roots, and mediates between human and dirt and light from the sun. Nature creates an sustaining interaction and the dynamic inert interior interacts and it all creates a multi dimensional playground called Life on Earth.

Nature on the earth changes and adapts to the earth and its rippling of vibrations. The earth's surface reflects its interactions with its interior self and the cosmos all the time. Many dynamics from many sources interacting playing out on this surface and much deeper levels.

Humans feel emotions and form attachments. We give meaning to things and have agendas. All of this generates energetic influences and force fields of vibrations. Remember Einstein's e=mc2? In emotional terms you build up enough emotional energy reactions and they will start to influences themselves and us.

Human are just a blink of an eye in the timeline of earth.We are only on its surface. yet we are powerful in our being as a collective and the earth registers those influences and become part of the whole. Perhaps we are not valuing how powerful we truly are to influence our surroundings, through our clumsiness and size.  Some of us, as societies or business, can leave big footprints and mess everywhere. Others hold a different balance and harmony with earth. They hold Gaia as a living earth environment that is hospitable.

We can react in two ways, notice or not notice and then interpret and however you interpret the information is subject to your bias. Like climate warming. Noticing changes globally and connecting it to how we use our resources right here at home seems to be at question. We are failing to see big enough the polarity in action, the ripples of cause and effect.

We embody a lot of myth about man being king of his domain. The earth is not here to serve us but to share with us. And if you look at power dynamics it is more in its favor as the earth does not care the way we do. The earth doesn't need us. We need it.

When you lose everything what is important? Life. In ourselves and others. The connection to found in another, in family, friend, neighbor, stranger, helper and government. For any of these connections have the potential to fill us and provide haven and sustenance and our needed soul nourishment. We can accept or we can decline and that will have its repercussions.

Disasters anywhere in the world remind us of our humanity. And about levels of power. It may be one way, as an expression as Consciousness that we allow ourselves to feel unity and community beyond our man made borders.

We are witnessing an outpouring of care towards others. It serves to remind us that we only look different which fuels our melting pot American identity. You may have this issue in your country. We value assimilation and that comes with knowing where one is from. Many countries are feeling the flow of populations on the move as intrusive.

This is an excellent time to look upon your inner landscape. Access Heart Centered Awareness, the field of Unified Consciousness and check in. How open you are, how willing are you to extend? How are you registering all this stirred up stuff? What would it be like to help it to shift? You are that powerful.

What weather patterns are you influencing?

Janet Barrett
Life in the Beyond/Journeys Into Enlightenment
www.janetandbeyond.com
janetb@janetandbeyond.com

Consciousness and reports from the Pool of Permission

A couple of weeks ago the Pool of Permission showed up. Since then I am hearing from others that life is easing since they dipped into the Pool. Give it a try for yourself.

Access Heart Centered Awareness by shifting your focus from outside to inside and lower, into the center of your being. Enjoy feeling the beat of your heart, release your hold on your emotional terrain and just register the core essence of All that we are each part of. Notice the quiet, the stillness, the clarity of the Sacred that is right there. It is in each of us, whether we use it or not.

So in this state of Grace, no fault, no blame, no burden, are present. Only warmth, support, non judgement as we access The Infinite Sea of Potential. We slip from allowing into being. We give up control of outcome and we are free to play in the collective of the All.

There is much present in this expansiveness, in this openness. Whatever you have questions about in your day to day life, the information will comes and go here. It may be encoded in clear symbols or in ways you in the moment might not appreciate. But, and this is big, it doesn't matter. What matters is how you will choose to use the information. Empower it to be helpful and it will be. Encode it with doubt and it will be.

Notice the Pool of Permission. Allow it to come into view. It may appear as a puddle and small, a hole in the ice, or may be as big as an ocean shore. Doesn't matter. Just notice it in some way.

We have no blame, no fault or label to define and limit us here. There is only permission to be.

What do you notice, what do you become aware of?

You can feel a difference and it may feel just so wonderful or even uncomfortable as we are very comfortable in our labeled world. They serve as anchors,  those labels as our certains that guide our lives along its predictable course. The outcome of we live, we die, we can count on taxes and death, all kinds of encoded thinking serve as ways to tie us down, to hold us down.

But now, what is possible?  

Notice how you relate to the pool. Willingly, grudgingly, or easily? Step into the Pool of Permission. It may soak in or coat or? Give it a couple of moments and ask. What do I give myself permission to be?

In asking that question information will reveal itself in some way. All you have to do is register it as a feeling and what you become aware of, where your attention takes you. It is our right brain function. Our left brain function is about thinking which is about interpreting and fitting into our biases and none of that is important here.

For one, she unexpectedly found herself giving herself permission to be loved. And in the next few days her life of 50 some years of heartache changed in regards to her mother and father and family. For another, her permission to feel blessed matched up with another's wanting to be a fairy godmother. Our seekers of enjoying life found their resistance lowered.

See what shows up for you. Keep me posted.

Janet Barrett
Life in the Beyond/Journeys Into Enlightenment
janetb@janetandbeyond.com 
www.janetandbeyond.com

Consciousness and The Pool of Permission

What would it be like to have permission to BE? We probably don't know what that truly means though we may be aware that we feel less than optimum.

To BE? To be what?

Last week we were exploring fault, no fault, blame, no blame. Identity started dancing. This week the pool showed up. It was the Pool of Permission.

One of those wonderful spontaneous moments that group is filled with  always, happened. It was some thing for all of us to share in individually. It appeared as a small circle about 2 feet wide in the concrete patio floor in front of one of us. I invited them to step in, with the understanding that they were who they thought they were standing in front of it. And if they stepped in they were in permission of being.  And to register the difference.

All of us took our turn stepping into this new pool of reality. Some of us stepped forward into it, one felt the pool come to them. Some went underwater in it like a hole in the ice, some stood in it as a puddle of liquid energy and felt it wick it up their legs. Many were knocked back into their chairs. It was felt by all in some way personal to them. It came out my fingertips and sent information into the cosmos. Not so much fireworks but something else.

The differences were noted. We were all surprised by what showed up in this spontaneous state. There were eight of us present to enjoy this. One gave herself permission to be loved. One, I think, came himself time with his family. One only knew that things would change. I gave myself permission to go beyond my definitions of my stories of self, to give myself permission to not care about right or wrong. In this moment i am not remembering the others.

Later that night I shared this with those on the free monthly conference call that is part of our radio show Conscious Conversations with Joan and Janet and we felt it again.

I invite you to join us. Make some time to access Heart Centered Awareness, the Field of Unified Consciousness. Feel your physical heart and appreciate and enjoy the beat. Then, notice the emotional terrain and all the emotional charges that are active. and just let them be as you go neutral. Then breathe in the core essence of All, where we are all One. This the Infinite Sea of Potential where All is and isn't.

Notice the Pool of Permission. It is there somewhere and bring it forward, right in front of you. Feel it waiting, extending itself to you. Decide to swim or bath or just take it inward in some way. Notice yourself now.

Now step in.

What would be different if you gave yourself permission?

Janet Barrett
Life in the Beyond/Journeys Into Enlightenment
janetb@janetandbeyond.com
www.janetandbeyond.com 

Consciousness and A Good Book

Library Card Catalog File 

The following is a reprint with some updating from 2016 after the shooting in Orlando last summer. It has been quite the year.

Consciousness is a library. Inside each of these file drawers are the details of the books in the library. We are the books. 

The repercussions of a single act has the power to change us as an individual and as a collective.  It can be a man standing in front of an oncoming tank, two buildings collapsing, a bomb dropped and leveling everything, a woman attacked and left dead on the street, a shooter firing into a crowd or someone driving into a crowd looking for glory.

Media being what it is these days, can send the knowledge rippling out with the simple touch of a keypad stroke or the click of a camera device. And then the whole community of man is affected consciously.

Last week we all felt unsettled and out of our center and swimming in queasy feelings. Shootings, bombings car crashes and loss of life are happening all the time in different ways globally. Tragedy, on small and large scale, is common. Why does this one event throw us off when perhaps the others don't.

One reason for such a strong response to a singular event as the shooting in the nightclub is that communities of people and many underlying patterns were being affected and hit on so many levels and many of them deep core concerns. Each of us had much to resonate with and feel the ping and twinge. It was hard to know where to start to find center again. What can we do in response? 

We found in group that if we start in Heart Centered Awareness and allow for the patterns to be observed in some manner it can be approachable. We sat and allowed for our noticing to be clear and we had a place to start.

It started to sort apart and our equilibrium started to return by the time we were done. Whether it was the shooter, his issues, those who found themselves victim, families in stress, the weapon and its power and accessibility, those who wanted to blame others, PTSD of all kinds, there was shock plenty all around. Even being present to something one can not change in a moment was issue. All of it and much more was up for exam and resolve. 

We are waking up collectively. We feel it starts within the individual and at the same time it is the whole of Consciousness in shift. As you work through your patterns of connection within the All, the All responds. In group we know this. We can feel it. It is happening.

What is different in you this week? What is sorting itself out and making itself known? 

As you access Heart Centered Awareness for yourself see the whole in some way and then notice a piece of it and start there.  You might be surprised.

Be kind to yourself. Start there. Let go of the labels you are involved with. They have the power to separate and compartmentalize and destroy self respect and love.

Be kind to others. When someone around you is in distress how can you respond in a useful way? Not by saving or fixing but by paying attention and acknowledging with a compassionate heart.

Would that have made any difference anywhere along the path?

Janet Barrett
Life in the Beyond/Journeys Into Enlightenment
janetb@janetandbeyond.com
www.janetandbeyond.com

Consciousness and Being Enhanced

In group  a couple of us are dealing with cancer actively. I say it that way as we all carry cancer potential in us but not always in disease active mode.

One facet that came up was feeling bad about not being cured, immediately or otherwise. And the resulting awareness of how it might not be about being cured of a disease but about something different.

We cure meat. It is about preserving the meat with chemicals. But the meat is never fresh again. It is preserved in a different state.

The need to be cured of a disease is a heavy burden. It can push us. It can determine our degree of success, of understanding. It can take us beyond the body's limits. People get into medicine with a mindset about caring and curing. It is a powerful morphic field.

There are a lot of things we don't understand or know about life. Disease is seen as commentary on the system of the mechanics of the body. It is about the relation of body, mind, spirit, Self and Consciousness. All working together but not always in harmony. It is about our matrix and the dance of information in, the ability to deal with, process, utilize and release information in a cohesive manner. That is what we like to think of as healthy. What if it is more than that?

What if there is nothing wrong with illness? It is after all only a way to experience and express, then what happens?

Some disease or illness patterns will scare us as it represents loss of function. Some diseases have with them death as part of their component and expression. We monitor how close we are to death. We want to be cured so we can say death is no longer close. And then there are those who live with some sort of cancer or affliction and they live with it for a long time and finally die of something else.

Some people only really begin to live when they deal with illness. It has a way of cutting through our bullshit and false idols. It offers awareness. We meet ourselves in ways we might not otherwise. Our level of fear and other emotions will rise and fall in relation. It can be a way to be cared for. It can become our job. It is always an avenue to appreciation.

But being cured might not be the issue. Especially with disease/illness patterns. Those patterns can serve as ways to experience life that we would not do if not ill. Ill is not a bad thing. It is inconvenient, and takes attention, time and focus and may bring new considerations. It can be life changing. It is an opportunity.

Those on the outside will judge how we inside are doing and it can just offer clutter of thought. Handicaps create an always present reference to how we relate to ourselves and our world.

Lots of times all doctors can do is monitor and manage illness. Sometimes they can or can't cut out, repair or put in something new. They don't cure it. All our medicines and supplements support the body, mind, spirit dynamics sometimes as great cost, literally. Sometimes the "cure" is more painful than the pattern. Sometimes we can only feel like we are cleaning up.

 It goes away on its own if not needed. All disease/illness is a vehicle for agendas. So we don't judge. We love and appreciate our creativity. Only then can it be different, can it be done. 

What if there is no pressure or judgment that there is something wrong with how I am with this illness, or need to feel bad about the cure? What if there is only grace, what happens then? If I am dealing with function, long after the disease is gone, is that bad? It can be uncomfortable, and inconvenient and also hold a particular focus.

Acceptance of a different sort is possible. The trick is in balancing the inconvenience and then going beyond into realizing that as Consciousness it is not inconvenience but an opportunity.

Maybe we need another word to label having recovered from a disease/illness. Perhaps we are enhanced, or enriched. "I am enhanced" seems to allow me to feel better for having had the process.

Janet Barrett
Life in the Beyond/Journeys Into Enlightenment
janetb@janetandbeyond.com
www.janetandbeyond.com