Articles arranged by date - Shaman Ross Bishop

2012

by Ross Bishop

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There is a great deal of uncertainty regarding the 2012 prophecies. Virtually every oracle predicts a time of tumult and chaos. Some even predict the end of days. These are incredibly charged issues, and they raise powerful emotional responses – as they are designed to. As we draw closer to that time, your concerns, fears and reactions are likely to escalate. You may experience anxiety and find yourself reacting more intensely than in the past. Those around you will likely be doing the same.

It is easy to get lost in the tumult and chaos of the moment, but it is important to remember that it is simply an acceleration of a process that has been in place for quite some time.

Humankind, for all its slips, failures and missteps has been on an inexorable march to live closer to the ideals of the God Space. Consider the history of issues like democracy, slavery or women’s rights over just the last few hundred years. It can appear to be a very flawed process, filled with conflict, roadblocks and bloodshed, but over the course of time, even with all our dead ends and false starts, our conscious awareness has grown.

Like the rest of humanity, you are here for a reason. You are here to learn to live from the God Space. You came from an unenlightened space and are transitioning into a more enlightened one. The challenge is not simply to glimpse the awakened state, or even to experience it, but to be it.

Enlightenment is the product of healing inner woundedness. It is the state we naturally enter when we leave fear, self-doubt and anxiety behind. In order to accomplish this, Christ went into the desert to deal with temptation. Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree and confronted his inner demons. Real shamanic training requires seekers to confront their inner darkness. Life has been designed to offer you that same opportunity.

Part of you lives in darkness because it is convinced that it does not deserve God’s grace. Your inner beliefs deflect the truth away from inner woundedness that you have been unwilling to address. These beliefs are not based in the truth and they separate you from the eternal. As long as you are convinced that you are unworthy, for example, your belief places a barrier between yourself and The Creator. Ultimate truth has no words. It is magnificent beyond description. Although it can be known, it is not and cannot be, a human-made idea or concept.

Thus far on your journey you have had a good deal of freedom regarding the confrontation of your doubts and fears. Conditions are changing and you are going to lose some of that flexibility. There will be greater pressure to address what you have thus far avoided. The process will not change, but the pace will. It is this shift, sweeping through all of humanity, that will create the changes predicted by the prophecies.

One thing that causes us difficulty is that transformation cannot occur without the destruction of what has been. Creation is a destructive process, taking that which exists and transforming it into something new. You cannot have a breakthrough without a breakdown. An acorn must be transformed in order for an oak to grow. The egg must be “sacrificed” to produce a chick. Old ideas must “die” before new ones can succeed them.

All transformation creates discomfort. The loss of familiar gives rise to a great deal of resistance. The amount of pain you experience will be related to the significance of the change and your attachment to your old beliefs. We make the process more difficult than it needs to be, but new behavior of any kind naturally raises anxiety.

Transformation is a road that passes through hell on its way to the light, or as Shakespeare wrote, “Such a foul sky clears not without a storm.” Even people who have had deep and profound spiritual awakenings can hold beliefs and unresolved inner pain that powerfully inhibit their ability to awaken.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, "Nothing endures but change." Heraclitus was speaking of the Earth, for here everything is born, grows, ages, withers, dies and decays. Destruction and renewal occur in order to sustain the viability of the greater whole.
If you think about the weather, nature is constantly rebalancing the environment. It uses the wind, storms, rain, lightning – even hurricanes and tornadoes, to shift energy around. These are all local disturbances that serve to rebalance the larger whole. And nature must disturb what is in order to create change. Standing on the fault line of an earthquake certainly does not feel harmonious, but it is one of the ways the integrity of the planet is maintained. How you experience change is a matter of perspective.

Consider the grains of sand on a beach. The grains are in certain relationships. Then a wave crashes in, sweeping up a gazillion grains of sand, reordering them, rearranging them, tumbling them, banging them up against one another, sandblasting everything on the beach. In that moment of chaos it is “hell” for the sand – confusion, disorder, clashes – up is down, down is up. The water is murky; no one can see what is happening. The old order has been obliterated. No one is certain about the future.

Then as suddenly as it came, the wave washes away, leaving in its wake a new order. Every grain of sand has been realigned and everything on the beach must adapt to the new order. And, although the grains of sand have been thrown into total chaos, the beach itself has just been reorganized and cleansed so that it will remain viable. Chaos reorders everything in creating a new order. Chaos is efficient. Chaos is externally imposed, obliterating the myth that you control your life.

In order to heal, you must be willing to let go of your beliefs and question your past assumptions. Otherwise you will cling to beliefs that distort your perception and limit the expression of your eternal self. The changes foretold in the 2012 prophecies emanate from this conflict. This is a very large subject and I have devoted two books and numerous articles to helping people address the issues relevant to it. You can find Healing The Shadow and Journey To Enlightenment (and articles) on my web site (www.rossbishop.com).

Dealing with internal and external conflicts teaches you two very valuable lessons – first, how not to create them and secondly, how not to get sucked into them. And those lessons can only be learned through direct experience, by failing to “do it right,” which means experiencing tumult, chaos and pain. The secret is to learn to be “in” life, but to have awareness so that you are not “of” it.

I do not say this to excuse disharmonious or dysfunctional behavior. Dysfunctional behavior has its own built-in consequence called pain. When you act contrary to the God Space, it is going to hurt! Hurt someone and you feel badly. You can bury those feelings for a time, but they eventually catch up with you.

The trap to be wary of is that you can of course, always do better. And yes, when you achieve enlightenment, you will be at peace. The world may not change, but the way you relate to it will. Enlightenment is not a destination, it is a way of life. It is a process that must be learned, practiced and refined after your interfering fears have been dispatched.

The struggle to achieve the God Space is not new. It has been with us for thousands of years. It is the essential struggle of human existence. Ideally, we could receive guidance about it from our religions, but the lessons of the great teachers have become so corrupted over time that they no longer hold much relevance.

The way to heal inner pain and shift out of egocentric existence is revealed to us in the old stories, commonly called fairy tales. These are the stories that guided our ancestors for thousands of years before the invention of organized religion and industrial capitalism. The undertaking exemplified in these stories is commonly referred to as the Hero or Heroine’s Journey. You will find these stories secreted away in the children’s section of your local library.

Another source that illustrates the hero’s/heroine’s journey are the Greek tragedies. The Greeks understood the importance of transitioning from the ego to living in harmony with the rest of the Universe. They knew that humans grew and were strengthened by adversity when faced with wisdom and courage.

The tragedies typically depict the downfall of a hero or heroine through a combination of hubris (ego) or fate (the will of the gods). The hero or heroine then has to undergo a trial and a transformation: a revelation or recognition (anagnorisis - "knowing again" or "knowing back") regarding ultimate truth (the God Space). Moses Hadas, a great classical scholar, said of the Greek tragedies, "Their gloom is no fatalistic pessimism but an adult confrontation of reality, and their emphasis is not on the grimness of life but on the capacity of great figures to adequate themselves to it." Aristotle spoke of the recognition as, "The change from ignorance to awareness . . ."

We grow and change when we confront fear and heal it. Otherwise life is merely a struggle, and we typically get consumed by the struggle and learn little (except how to struggle). And that gives us some clues regarding the 2012 prophecies.

The process of human transformation is not going to change. The 2012 prophecies change nothing in terms of the dynamics we are already familiar with. For centuries, God has said in effect, “Come, I want you to fly.” But the risk feels too great, and we demur. But God, knowing the truth, continues to encourage us. Each day we are urged in a hundred different ways to hold the truth and move to the God Space. There are lessons. We call them problems. God sees them as growth opportunities. And when we resist, the intensity of the process increases. The result is that we sometimes hurt. This is a nudge to move us on our way, not pain to punish, but pain to move us out of our complacency.
The dramatic shift will be in the pace and in the pressure for change. Nothing different will be asked of you that has not been asked of you repeatedly in the past. But the changes will add a good deal of intensity to what has been taking place all along. Certainly you can wait until circumstances force you to change, but that is really doing it the hard way.

And it will be a time of unprecedented change. Some of it will appear as chaos, but it is important to remember that it is not random chaos. It is divine chaos. From the strictly human perspective, it will look like massive disruption, but everything that happens here has a purpose, a divine purpose, whether we understand it or not. That has always been true, but with the intensity and pace of events escalating, clarity about what is happening will help considerably.

In the past, your reluctance to shift to the God Space has only caused you discomfort. The period between now and 2012 is going to add dramatically to the pressure to make those changes and to the consequences of your resistance. Resistance is going to become a good deal more painful, putting a limit on your ability to defer.

Losing the ability to defer generates a powerful reaction in people. This is intended. It goes to the core of why we are here. Our resistance is driven by a core belief (often unconscious), that if we surrender to the God Space we will be found wanting and therefore rejected. This is an important topic, and I will address it in future articles. But for now, let me say that the fear of not being worthy, driven largely by our past-life experiences, generates a powerful resistance to what is being asked of us today. We are not able to trust.

When people ask me what the future portends, I tell them, “You are going to die.” That may seem crass, but it is the truth. It also has little to do with 2012. I remind people that we all are going to die. The events surrounding 2012 may change what we have come to expect regarding longevity, but we have really never had anything to say about that anyway! The only thing any of us has ever had is the freedom to decide how we are going to respond to life. Anything else is illusion. You don’t know whether you are going to have tomorrow or the day after. You hope and pretend, but most people avoid dealing with the reality that fundamentally life is not, and has never been, in our control.

for against thy will wast thou formed,
and against thy will wast thou born,
and against thy will dost thou live,
and against thy will shalt thou die,
The Talmud: Treatise XII. The Fathers: Chapter IV

Just as for the grains of sand on our mythical beach, waves of change frequently wash through human society. And how we respond to those waves is a matter of perspective. We resist most of them, but once-in-a-while we get knocked over. The prophecies tell us that before long, not just a wave, but a tsunami will wash over humankind. The usual ebb and flow of change people have lived with, and rarely liked, will be supplanted by a massive reordering. Nothing will be the same. The word of the day will be chaos, but I remind you, that it is divine chaos. You will be asked, more intensely to be sure, to address what you have thus far been avoiding.

The question is, “How will you dance with life?” Will you become frightened and resist, or will you work with what is being asked of you and move closer to the God Space? If you can find the faith to trust what is happening, you can surrender and swim with the river. If you cannot, you will have to resist, and then be destined to flounder, swimming upstream and in pain until you change. And that is exhausting! It is an issue of trust. We call it faith.

I would like to tell you that you have a choice in all of this. You don’t. Resistance only increases the pain, leading eventually to a crisis and a breakdown – what we call disease. And this only brings you to essentially the same transformation you could have made before creating the crisis in the first place.

Over the centuries the Greek word “apokalupsis” or “apocalypse” has been distorted by the Apostle John’s misunderstanding of the coming transformation. “Apokalupsis” means “the uncovering, the discovery, the revealing.” We are about to be confronted with the uncovering, the discovery and the revealing of who we are, what we are and how we came to be here. I urge you to have faith - God didn’t create all this magnificence to simply turn it into a ball of cinders.

There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way.

The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender.

The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.

-The Book of G'Quon