Sacred Journeys: Ireland - Notes

LECTURE #1 - DUBLIN

It's not often you have an opportunity to leave your ordinary life; I hope it's extraordinary at the mystical level. What I chose as the theme of this is that there is a calling on the Earth where there are mystics without monasteries, and I love the fact that we are visiting old monasteries. I don't know if the new monastery is the Earth. I think that the monastery that we are called to construct is the world that we are called to live within. I could not be with two more special people - Tom and Mary Ellen Lavin.

I don't know how many of you heard that Pluto is no longer a planet; it has been reduced to a dwarf planet. From an astronomy point of view - to humiliate a planet within the cosmic structure! - however, what does it mean from an astrological point of view? Pluto is one of the major players, THE major player when it comes to transformation. Moving eras at a time, because Pluto is in charge of the movement of eras. The planet Mars will be closer to the Earth, it will look the size of the moon while we are together. It is occurring while we are together. Let me point out something as I introduce our guest - when the planet is at war and you are students of consciousness, it means something - when the planet is at stress, that stress filters into your soul. Your soul is equally at stress.

Even the President said that he felt that the US is psychically drained. Now that is amazing coming from the White House, to admit that there is a psychic depletion happening among the American people. That is something that I have seen for a number of years.

As a historian, as someone who knows the contract of America, the archetypal contract of America - there is something about staying aligned to the contract of your soul that when you step out of your contract, you step into a high risk field. When you are conscious enough to know you've told a lie - if you are conscious enough, you can't even lie about your age. You can't even get away with it. When you have a fundamental contract with heaven, which is the reason you descended into Earth and you step outside that contract, your field of grace - while it never is lifted, it becomes contaminated. You can negotiate your grace, and that is real. On a trip that goes into your myths and mysteries you open your soul, and part of that is opening your dreams.

(Introduces Tom and Mary Ellen Lavin) They will be conducting dream circles for us. So, you'd better dream.

Tom Lavin speaking:
The potato famine ravaged all of Ireland never hit the Aran islands. In 1950's, a bunch of anthropologists spent several weeks talking to people - and as they were leaving, one man went up to an elderly woman that he'd been very friendly with, "I have one last question?" - and she said, "Yes - what is it?" He asked, "Do you people really believe in leprechauns?" She said, "Of course we don't believe in leprechauns, but they're there."

Deep inside of it that sparkles, not only in it - like a painting we saw this afternoon - there's mystery there, there's wonder there. We are people, if you're here - you're someone who doesn't believe in a lot of stuff, but you know that there is a lot under the surface all the same. We do believe in invisible powers. A way to tap into that is to look at dreams. We'll look at dreams as a community.

What we're going to do is meet four mornings at the breakfast room, Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday morning and Saturday morning in Kearney, we'll meet at 7:30 in the breakfast room and have a dream circle in a non-interpretive atmosphere.

For example, if I had this dream, this is what I would think of. It's not interpretation, but it's just a place where psyche can speak to all of us as a group. It's a collection area, the dream group - for something we may have missed on the bus, as we walked through the fort - and there are wonderful stories surrounding Naven fort and the death of the goddess, you'll hear those stories.

Join us on these mornings from 7:30 - can someone eat and tell dreams at the same time? We'll find out! It's something that is not obligatory, some people might want to sleep in - that's fine, it's non-invasive; but a gathering, and we want to find out while we're here what psyche says. Is there a deeper part of us that needs to be heard, and shared. I think that people that share dreams, cultures that share dreams tend to be kinder to one another. They respect what is in each other. People who share the gifts from with in, tend to be kinder with out.

A dream circle - social dream matrix as something to describe what is done. Something is given birth for us to solidify us as a group. We are a story in the making as we travel around this very sacred land.

Caroline Myss speaking: I want to talk to you about shifting your life compass. The first thing I want you to do is think about one thing you would like to change by the time you go home. Something in your life, something in your cosmic compass. Something you need to release from your soul, something in your fiber, that you want shifted by the time you get home. That is our cosmic agenda that's your personal itinerary. That's your mystic agenda, that is what you want to work on, that you want to list as your guiding compass. But you always have an agenda with God, whether or not you know that. This time you're going to pull that out and make it conscious. You're always operating from agenda; this time you're going to pull one out as a soul agenda that you're working from that becomes a force in your compass that is operating in you - it's like a homeopathic lens, it's a subtle connection, it is a process in motion that you set in motion and just leave it go. I want you to think about that; but I want that in motion ASAP.

What makes a mystic? A mystic is someone who is passionately in love with God, but that is not something you can relate to easily. Someone who is called to live through vision, thru the soul, someone who is called to experience life through experience rather than the five senses. That is automatically a barrier of fear, they are trained barriers, they are based on the survival mechanism. They are trained like watch dogs, and they are instinctually there to protect you. The mystic is - what is the divine force within my perceptual range?

I'm in the process of editing, doing my re-write thru Entering the Castle, which is a book on the mansions of the soul. It is a contemporary journey through Teresa of Avila, and this is the most significant work of my life. I felt that I had an understanding of spirituality until I started this book, and then I realized that I had no understanding of the nature of the soul. One of the things I learned while writing this book is our mad love affair with a rational god, needing your life to be a rational experience. I'm not sure where I was, but I heard someone say, "The mind of God," and it had better be a Western educated mind. What a preposterous idea! The mind according to reason and logic, Copernicus and Galileo - when they realized the earth revolved around the sun - we are on the verge of the same great "ah-hah" as their realization, that is the moment that the mind stood in front of the church and took down a whole paradigm of reality - and it was when the soul ruled.

So when you read about the mystics, Teresa of Avila would talk about how she would levitate, she really did. She would enter into a moment of ecstasy with Jesus, she would lift off the earth because she was so detached from a need to control anything, she became illuminated and she became more light than matter. There was a transformation, a illuminous experience happened. She became more Kairos than Chronos and she simply lifted off the earth. We would say we need to find a way to prove that, mystical isn't science and that's the point, ergo the word "mystery."

You are willing to leave behind the rational, ordinary thought and ordinary order and live by the mysteries. You're willing to enter the mysteries, and that is mysticism. Now, when the logicians came along and said that the Earth revolved around the sun, everything is on a time table. They had all the timing down and what they realized then was that God must be a creature of order. If He had a mind, He couldn't be superstitious - so they looked to the church and said you aren't going to fool us with this superstition.

We began to withdraw; you have to understand how that reshaped us.

We became a species where we withdrew the soul from everything, becoming who we are today. If something didn't have a mind, we could use it as we wanted to. If they couldn't reason, they had no value, and we determined whether or not they could reason. Trees can't reason, cut 'em down, nature can't reason - do what you want with it. If we decided, if something couldn't reason, we could abuse it - we took the mystery out. That's the point!

We've reached the end of reason. As soon as a situation on the Earth becomes unreasonable, we pull out the Armageddon theory. We can't reason our way thru, what can't we reason our way through? Our weaponry. Our ethical ability to cope with our capacity to kill - I have to talk symbolically - but the fact is that our predatorial instinct, our instincts and our ability to kill has outrun our capacity to put the bridle and the bit in our mouth and pull it back. Our spiritual instincts no longer can step side-by-side and stop us. We are out of alignment with our own shadow so strongly that the only way we can cope with it is to pull out the Armageddon mythology.

At the level of theology, myth theology not theologian, we're pulling out myth now. Armageddon and the Book of Revelation, which is why the Evangelical movement and fundamentalism is on the rise. There is a collision of the gods - everybody can feel that we've run out of mythic resource. We do not have a myth to cope with where we are. Ecologically we've run out of ways to save our planet. We are so unreasonable in what we're doing with the destruction of our planet and we don't know what to do about it.

When do epidemics start? I'll show you how it goes; I'll tie it all together. An epidemic breaks out culturally, socially when a culture takes a dip. Watch this - we're in 1929, October. Stock market crashes and what happens to the American culture - how do we talk? You'll see that culturally the language shifts. If you contract an epidemic illness, like AIDS - where I pick it up (as a medical intuitive) is in your system is your 1st chakra. As a society, we change our myth, we construct it right there. We say that we are "economically crippled." We say we "crashed" and we are "crippled" and right after that - polio. No one can come up with a cure; we even have a President who has the virus.

Now we've got to get the right myth because the whole Nation is shattered. You've got to negotiate with the myth before the people can rise. There's no myth negotiation going on in the collective right now. There's nothing down here, so you go back and what does the polio President do? He must negotiate a tribal event to get America in the war to unite the tribe. The tribe has no dignity, the tribe had been shamed. America comes back heroes, and what happens is - check the newspapers, "America is on its feet again."

Go forward, what do we have in the late 70's - we break out in a virus, it's global - who gets AIDS, who's likely to get it? That virus is attracted to a vibration of the victim, it's like a magnet. Now look at the Earth, at our beloved global village. Look at the environment and how our forestry is cut down, thousands of acres a day. What's the ozone? That's the Earth's immune system. We will never find a vaccine for that virus, it is the first conscious virus, it knows you are looking for it when you take a blood sample - it is trying to establish itself as an airborne virus. It's is a survival virus, we won't find that vaccine until we realize we cannot victimize the environment.

The pivotal point, the changing point is where we have to develop the capacity to reason like mystics - to put our capacity for mysticism and reason together. Our capacity to reason is not limited to five senses. Now the mystical journey has to become the most reasonable thing we do, and it is your greatest leap of consciousness.

Even for those attracted to the interior, you have great rivers to leap over; for as attractive as the mystical journey is for most people, it's attractive with conditions. When it comes down to it, going into your interior life and its demands, you have as your role models the people who lived in these monasteries years ago. Their lives are not appealing, their isolation, poverty? If you go near the God they honored, you are going to get wiped out. As if that couldn't happen now! They don't teach you that the reason you suffered was the lack of medicine. What made their journey into suffering was they chose to see it as a way of coping - their way of coping was to say, "Look at the gift from God you got!"

So, it looked as if they were looking for suffering, it was the opposite! When something happened, going to God was their way of coping. Look at how God made them suffer! It was quite the reverse.

We don't understand detachment; we think it means that we don't care. You can have your wealth, who cares? The idea of detachment is you don't give anything the right to command your soul. You don't give it the right to command your soul, that's what detachment is about. You can have all of your goodies, but when you feel your soul is leaving your Castle and attaching to something, and that something has more authority over you - now you're in trouble because you've put up a serious road block between Heaven and Earth. The heavens don't care what you own.

Tom Lavin reads a poem (author is Brenden Kennelly, "A time in voices") Brenden Kennelly teaches across the street, he has the depth of James Joyce, but he doesn't use as many words. His poem is called the "Story." What happens when a myth dies? What happens when we are myth-less? When we lose our story? I think a part of our agenda unconsciously is to get our story back.

(Reads - Robbie Cox, I believe also by Brenden Kennelly)

Caroline Myss speaking: Something I wanted to talk to you about - the next subject is the personal myths in your life that are breaking down? Now, you're going to have to give this some serious thought. Let me give you categories, I want one for each category:

• Self
• Life
• God
• Aging
• Relationships
• Success
• What you would have/should have accomplished by now.

Now, in each of your lives at this point in your life, by this point, a myth is crumbling in every one of those categories, even as we speak. Simultaneously a myth is trying to emerge. Crisis happens when one myth has broken down and another is trying to find its way; and when you battle the myth that's trying to be born, you can put yourself in a profound crisis.

When you battle a myth that is trying to be born in you, it's because you know that if you animate that myth, all hell will break loose. It will take your life compass and (phswe) To give you an idea, to put some meat on the bones it's not unlike a conversion myth, to go from being an atheist to believing in God.

(Russian scientist story) She was a healer by her own definition. She had been a hard core, tough character. Then, she had a near death experience, she was an atheist and when she came out of it, she had an encounter with the light and it was completely shocking to her. Maybe Heaven toned down the light and gave her a light-ette. It was enough, when I met her - her name is Barbara and she became a healer, she left her profession as a scientist. She had become a believer, so she had to withdraw from the whole myth of atheism. To animate the compass for her was a risk of her life.

In the moment that you go into your soul; you are going to animate a whole new construction of mythology that will de-animate. Let me show you how fast this happens - you may hold an impression that the world will take care of itself, and then one day you connect with the tiniest thing - you realize that nature is dying?

All those scientists who say "there is no truth" - that mythology, like a house of cards and that whole myth comes tumbling down and you see that the system is collapsing in on itself. I've known people who say, "Don't go there. I can't afford to believe that yet." The mythologies are right there and they know that they are animating lies, they consciously know it but they can't take down the scaffolding yet. In your world, you are animating certain things that are just not true and you know it.

Here's an example: I'll be young forever. One of the mythologies in our culture that is death phobic is that we will die. We don't go there. We're phobic. Another mythology is - fill in your myth. You know that it's absolutely not true, but - here's one "I'll be miserable forever" and I know people who believe that, I know people who fight dismantling that mythology. You can tell when someone will not give up the myth. I know people who have been divorced and they stay ruthless as the ex, and they'll do it through alimony or child support, because it's a way of staying (in the position of being) the wife. They will not let the myth of being that person's wife go. It didn't work out; the myth of the perfect marriage did not work out. What myths is it time for you to let go of?

Student question: Could a myth be comparable to a mask?

Caroline answers: A myth is like a belief that we maintain that has mythic proportion to it; a whole functioning structure operates because of that mythology. I had intended to have a perfect life with this job - that was my myth. I have a niece whose myth was that she would go to college and then get married. She cannot cope with the fact that that mythology did not come to pass; but it did for her sister, who's younger. Her whole world was shattered. Her myth did not play out for her, but it did for her sister - she feels as if her younger sister stole her mythology. It's very painful for her.

Now that's what I mean by a myth, that's not a mask.

You have myths about God, great myths about God. What do you want from God, what is the reason you're on a spiritual path? If you had an apparition, if someone said, "What is it you want from God?" Would you say, "I want all my problems solved." Or, would you ask, "What's my purpose?"

Why would you see yourself as purposeless at this age, that you would ask that? Define purpose? You think that your life is off-course that you would have to ask that? What is your myth about purpose?

Do you think it's not big enough, that your life doesn't have enough meaning?

Student question: I'm not using my life the way I think? I don't know if I'm doing it right?

Caroline answers: So, the "it" would be physical, it's got to be physical stuff, occupational. For you, purpose would have to be measured by occupation in order for it to make sense. Your whole purpose in life is a job. You think you're alone in that?

How many of you associate your life purpose with occupation? That's because our God is a God of production. Does this prayer work? Do you have any other prayers? I've done this prayer and it's not working. We are entitled. Where's my stuff? It's like in the 1950's theology: God must love those people, look at their Cadillac. God must love those people; if you have stuff, then God loves you.

Look at the way we talk: The tsunami happens and we say, "Oh, that's terrible! They didn't deserve that!" As in - only bad people should get their ass kicked by nature? That's stupid. I personally think if we are going to have a lot of death in this world, it should be by nature, let it be by waves and not by bullets. If you're going to clear us out in the millions, let it be that way.

When you think about your life's purpose - unless God gives you a great life purpose, you're not going. I won't be humiliated, and I won't do it. That's what most people are terrified of is being humiliated. The myth is that God will humiliate you. That is a great big huge fear. Look at all the stories of saints, God did humiliate them. One of the reasons that God does that is because you need to look foolish, like - who commands you on this Earth?

You need to be able to handle that. That's one of your barriers when you think about - if I go into this world of the unreasonable journey, the journey into your active soul versus your passive one - will I be humiliated? If you go into your active soul, you can't control that journey through your mind and? it's not an intellectual journey that you read about, and it's not one you stop. Once the process starts, it starts. If it humiliates you, it humiliates you and oh well. That's your soul's purpose, not to be humiliated, but to shed your fear of humiliation. It's a toxin, it's a prison.

One of my favorite stories from Invisible Acts of Power. The woman's leaning over her dog, the dog had just gotten hit by the car and another woman comes along. This woman hears the voice that says, "Go put your hands on that dog." But, she stops and thinks, "But what if it doesn't work, what will she say?" It was all about her and her fear of humiliation. She wouldn't follow the voice and the dog died.

If you know how to be invisible, she wouldn't even have to tell her that she was doing anything - she wouldn't even have to tell her what she was doing at all. She'd simply have to go there and look like she was just there for the other woman. She wouldn't have to say, "Listen, I just got divine instruction and I don't know if it's going to work?" You just simply walk in silence, be invisible and then get out. Keep off the radar, never set yourself up.

New-Agers adopt silly myths like trinkets. I go to one conference, and this woman has a counter for crystals, these people! This one idiot sells these crystals, every one personally chosen just for you! She's got these crystals, and one of them is $15,000 dollars, it looks like a weapon in a velvet box. Then, right next to it is a crystal skull. It's really glass, but they want you to think that it's crystal.

"What's this for?" I asked, and she said, "That channels knowledge?"

I said, "How's it work?" And she says, "You just keep it in your house and it increases knowledge. So, I asked, "Where did it go to school?" Now the thing is, if you do it with a straight face, they think you're serious.

You see, New-Agers go for these trinkets, but never talk about the language of the soul. Words like blasphemy, sin - all of it thrown out because it was much too Catholic. We made our approach to the sacred so casual that we don't even know how to be around the sacred anymore. We don't know how to approach the sacred with any sort of reverence anymore, at all.

Student question: What's the difference between the myths and the room of secrets?

Caroline responds: In the Castle? You're comparing apples and pears. The room of secrets is about secrets that you contain about yourself. In the castle, there's a room of secrets because you carry in your soul, burdens that you carry that simply need to come out because they mis-shape you. On your journey toward God, you've got to cleanse that out. That's not the same as a myth.

A secret is something like - I gave up a child, I can't forgive myself for this.

A myth is something around a whole world is built. I knew of a man who wanted to grow up and be a soldier and a gentleman. He's fulfilling his myth, that's his myth. A whole world is built around your myths.

Student question: What if you are looking for authenticity or peace from God?

Caroline responds: That's not something you're given, give that up. Why do you think you'll be given that? It's the thought that if I can feel connected, you'll be rewarded with peace? It's more about focus, can I detach from the noise? Now, think - mystics connected to their soul God and then the more connected, the more they worked, the more they saw, the more they transformed, the brighter the light, the more tumultuous their life became, they carried the turmoil of others. Their lives did not become peaceful.

What you are looking for is a level of tranquility. Teresa was always dealing with the paperwork of earth, and you're never going to get away from that. You're never going to get away from that, so stop trying to make this something other than what it is. This world is never going to be free from sewage; there will always be killers, there will always be murderers. Don't kid yourselves - we just produce one more generation after another who will grab the blade instead of the knife. Some will see it as a tool; others will see it as a weapon.

The journey is to transcend while you live among that. Visit the nightmare holding steady, and the only way you'll hold steady is if you maintain the idea that your job is not to change the nightmare - because you can't change the nightmare - but to channel the light into the nightmare and let the light take care of itself. You can't be seduced by the nightmare, and don't let the reptiles in your Castle, keep 'em out of your soul.

You can't be given peace, you can come to peace - but you're never given peace. You realize that's the name of the game here. Even Jesus said, "Leave the dead, there will always be poor." Be realistic about what that place is. Go after yourself, change that and then get out again. That's the route.

What I would like you to spend some time with then - give serious thought on the mythologies that are crumbling in those categories, and come up with one in each category. I gave you seven categories. In the privacy of your prayers tonight, please think about one thing you would like to have, to be in the process of serious change by the time you get home. I would like you to have that in motion by the time you go to bed. You have until we gather again to think about the myths. Keep in mind, your myth of God is your flagship behind which all the other myths support.

Sunday lecture - Armagh

How many of you are working on your myth? How's it going with that? Student response: I need some more time to think, it's been wonderful, but there hasn't been a lot of thinking time.

Caroline: If I could suggest that you make the most of each other's time over dinner - I thought maybe I would do a little bit to stir your interiors.

I want to position you in terms of a cosmic map. When I wrote Invisible Acts of Power, it truly convinced me of how powerful the individual is in terms of the individual soul, and that is something I never saw before. It wasn't just a small "ah-hah," it took my breath away.

Prior to that time, to talk in terms of God and theory is one thing - but, as Teresa would say - to have God come into the walls of your soul! I think that's what happened when I wrote that book.

When I saw how little it took and how much you potentially changed another person's life - I thought I would explode if I didn't tell people. It's a combination of what inspired me, frustrated me, and what I thought would make me implode is if I thought I couldn't make you get it.

I have spent years teaching people and trying to get them to connect to their contracts, to get past your own wall of saying, "I know I was born to do something.." and then the sentence ends.

Here's what's true - we can talk about things like "We were born into - in a different era, a new era" - (class interrupted)

We talk about the "New Age" and I want to talk to you about what that means as a psychic coordinate. What is New Age (that is middle age now, by the way) in terms of positioning coordinates and how it affects the organic way of perception.

I want to draw the sociology across the board and show you its how you operate in miniscule (interruption)

So, let me show you how the pattern works, and you are never out of this pattern - even in the tiniest argument. Here's the pattern in the whole. What's a pivotal point that pushes you to decide "I've got to change" - what's your break point?

Students respond: "pain" "fear"

Caroline: What's a point when you said, 'that's it, I'm changing' - an 'ah-hah' will do it. Let talks about consciousness, when the gods reached a real point that necessitated an infusion of light because the infusion of darkness got so imbalanced that - and it matches a cosmic timing point.

So, let's say that a point of evolution in consciousness was scheduled. How that would play out? When and in what way was to be determined by us, but it would be a quantum multiple. If I was teaching Jesus theory - it would take Jesus who is a 1st,2nd,and 3rd chakra force and go into the Christos which is the 4th,5th,6th,and 7th (chakras); if I put it into your biology - it requires forgiveness.

In order to activate the light, the initiatory act is forgiveness. That is the whole thing of the ascension on the cross. After forgiving, "Now I release myself, I have the force myself," it has to move through the heart - which means your soul is incapable of healing the body without the initiatory experience of forgiveness.

Now, let's turn and say that the quantum - our capacity to expand our vision was always scheduled to happen about this time, but we needed a trigger point - that trigger point I think was the birth of the nuclear age, because that is quantum power. It exploded into our world through, and with, the intention of death - with the intention of killing. We were all killing at the time, and if it wasn't us, it would have been the Nazis, etc. We are predatory archetype and we don't look at that.

Now, after that came along, it's as if the gods had to infusion light and create a fast-forward plan, to down load light. Let's push ourselves into the 1960's with this blast of light that happens, and this is a pattern in you - because you are part of what I call the new mystic - the 60's became the decade of revolution.

Think about this pattern in yourself, any time you get a new idea - even if it's as small as something as changing a fashion, painting my house - it strikes you as a resolution. In the 60's, we took down everything conventional, we went through a revolution. It represents a new power, inherently you brace for a fight, because it is a form of a revolution, you put up your dukes, you brace for a fight. Like, "I'm not going to take this anymore" - take what? "I'm not going to take the color of this room anymore."

Once you revolt, and you think "I'm not going to do this" - you are pushing out, but you are not thinking. Someone's got to let you get something out, while you're breaking things; that's not the time to ask "What do you want?"

They have to wait until you calm down, and then say, "What do you want?" In the 70's, we went from revolting - we got everything we wanted. We got the right to abortion, Eastern religion as well as Western religion - so then we had to involute, after we went and revolted in our revolution, we had to go inside.

Once you say, "I have to think about?" that's what we did in the 70's. That is a rich, rich time. To do it right, you have to come out with something that includes the other (people of this planet), I am convinced of this.

You must come out with a plan if you go in, you have to come out with a plan. If you come out with only yourself in mind - you will fall on the sword. Your first stage, however - is that you have to discover yourself. This is a long-range plan we got here. Here is the eye of the needle, because the first is you have to discover the self. So, the 80's was the decade of narcissism. That's where the American culture stopped, that's where we killed ourselves.

That's where the psychic evolution stopped as well. We stopped in our evolution of consciousness. All of the theory that was created in "we create our own reality" and "we can heal ourselves" - were thought forms that we should have begun to take apart and sophisticate this perception. I don't really want to make this difficult - narcissism - let's make it easy! We turned to spas and vegetarianism. Narcissism is the direction we went, and we never came back. We didn't make it through the eye of the needle.

People have been saying, "For what reason have I been born?" That's not a question, that's an invocation. A profound invocation like that is a kind of question that should put you on your knees. For what reason did you give me life? We reduce it to occupation because we're narcissists. We want that reason to be showy, glamorous. We have egos that need stroking and the very idea that it could be something else, like invisible - like the reason you were born was to be a support to someone else. What??? That's not going to happen.

I know one woman whose reason is to pray for other people. I was one of those people she prayed for. I didn't know who she was - I adore this woman now. I didn't find out who she was until after the book was written, and to find out that someone had been praying for me. At the end of it, when I met her, I said, "Who are you?" and she asked, "Is it over? Whatever you're doing, can I stop praying for you now?" For her, this was her calling. Now, she's been assigned to pray for someone else. Quietly, invisibly. I still can't get over that woman. To me, she's so profoundly special.

We got locked in to need so much more that we turned the need for ourselves - we turned ourselves into our spiritual journey - and that is something that you need to look at. How are you your spiritual journey? We need to look at that. How hypersensitive is your ego? Your entitlement with God - what do you think that you're entitled to when it comes to God - I loved it when someone said to me, "This prayer doesn't work, do you got another one?"

You have to go through the 80's narcissism. After the 80's, the 90's should have cycled from narcissism - which is essential, and why narcissism is vital is - you've got to learn to pray, pray your way through this. This is your Dark Night, because you will get comfortable, and you won't come out.

You find your support groups and you think that that's healing. You say things like, "Were you abused as a child? Me, too!" It's just social crime solving. I've never seen crime solving solve a thing, it just makes you glad it happened to you because that's how you've found your friends.

You need to move on. If you need to keep on going and talking about it, you are not being served; you're taking your wound out for coffee. When I was growing up, in my household you didn't even ask anybody who they voted for - it was considered private information. Now, it's on your bumper sticker. I have been in workshops where I have been standing with people who within minutes of meeting each other have said, "I'm an incest survivor, are you?" To lay that out like coinage, as if that's a currency you share - as if that's a language you speak, do you speak abuse? I speak abuse. What are you doing? That's not what you do with your wounds, you don't lock in. You never let anybody that close to you that fast, what are you thinking?

This one girl who likes to visit me was talking about dating, and she's pretty casual with - anyway - let me just says she's very casual. I said, "Do you know what you're looking for?" and then, she does like a personal ad, "Someone on a beach, who likes to travel and loves animals (etc.)" and I said, "You know, I've got to tell you something. Why are you so fast to be so intimate? What are you thinking? Don't you want to be courted?" You have no idea what it is to have someone court you, to have someone approach you in stages in the courtship way and earn your intimacy.

"Oh, yes! That's what I want?" she says to me. "Do I have that archetype?"

The narcissism phase of the 80's - I'm not going to dwell on it from the point of the collective; I'm going to take it down to you - one of the patterns that involves me and you. We are in the era of energy, which means the psyche was opened in a collective way, which opened an interest in the psychic, opened intuitive work in mass. What you see here, with fairy circles and all of this wonderful history - is really organic divinity. It's God in your bones, God in your fiber - God be in my bones and in my blood and in my flesh. This is organic divinity.

As the psychic force opened and people began to say things like, "I want to be a psychic" and "I want to be intuitive" - people are playing the myth out, the archetype out - "I got it from my grandmother." Never from their mother, they like to give the impression that they hung out around a caldron.

What's true is - a passion to be psychic opened up and people started tampering with opening this, reading about psychics and opening the multiple sensory world - without doing the necessary interior work to ground your electrical circuits. You don't understand that as a spiritual practice, you don't follow it with a disciple at all.

Most people in the New Age treat their massage as a spiritual discipline, but they don't have a devoted, daily spiritual practice that is their priority that they wrap their life around, rather than the opposite. If they did have a reverence for God, they would never negotiate their spiritual practice.

A massage and vegetarianism is not a spiritual practice, it does not make you conscious elite. That will not earn you a notch in heaven. Give me a carnivore on their knees any day of the week.

It's always for themselves and never for someone else. People who seek to be "psychic" - then ask, "What's in it for me? I need to make my life safer, where do I belong?" It's never about being of service to the next person.

The 90's should have been evolution. Out of narcissism comes evolution - out of me comes, I need to evolve out of me. To whom other than me do I care for? That's right, service. Without the Other, the narcissist looks into yourself, you brace yourself - you realize you have to go through a period of narcissism.

First, there's personal narcissism and then narcissism with humility, it is God's narcissism. It's the kind that Francis of Assisi had. Without arrogance, it's simply stillness. It's being in the Castle.

It's knowing what you know, without having to say to someone else, "Why aren't you like me?" The narcissist has to say, "You don't know what you're doing." They need their trinkets to advertise what their experience is, and end up drawing the devil to their door.

It's like walking down the street and begging for a fight. All my years as a medical intuitive, I never got in trouble. I could have been sued for practicing without a license. I could have gotten it right between the eyes, but I never did. Norm and I conducted ourselves with wisdom and dignity. We never said that allopathic medicine was the enemy; which is what so many holistic healers did. If I break my leg, I don't want Rescue Remedy. Keep your Bach flowers, get out of here. I want pain killers, and then talk to me about settling my soul. Common sense. Spiritual common sense, put the words together. Psychic common sense, mystical common sense.

How to empower yourself. No wonder you fear this world, you don't understand it. It looks preposterous if you look through the eyes of a narcissist. You realize I'm giving up nothing, the journey of going in disguise, of keeping your power to yourself; there is nothing that is a greater high. Being invisible is the greatest high in the world. Knowing that the grace that runs through you is the grace that heals, keep your mouth shut and leave - there is no greater high.

I tell you that is going to be your roughest zone in narcissism, I think most people can't make it through that zone. I think that's why God humiliates people, you think, "You're going to take away everything I have" and (the Divine) might! You have no idea what you'll have to face. You can't go window shopping with the Divine.

From that idea of service, this is what's true about the intuitive. When you open the lens, and you decide "I want to perceive intuitively, I want to see more." That's fine, and here's what's true about that. How are you going to deal with this? You decide, "I'm going to be a medical intuitive," but do you understand that you can't turn that off?

The capacity to perceive is a little wider for me than ordinary because I'm simply? if you trained to read symbols, you read the world differently. If you're an engineer, you look at structure differently.

You look through your eyes, and your eyes are trained as your soul is. If you're a narcissist, you look to see if people are looking at you. It's as simple as that. If you train yourself to perceive others for the sake of helping them - and because you have a working theology, not a passive soul - you've got a soul out in the field, it's a working soul - and your soul is part of your team. You take it out there and your soul is out there working for you, reporting back. What happens when somebody you don't like says, "Can you help me?" What do you do?

(The story of the model: An experienced model was getting ready for a photo shoot when a brand new girl walks in. She's obviously nervous, and looks to the experienced model for assurance. When she asks, "How do I look?" the older model knew exactly what the younger was looking for. Instead of giving her encouragement, what she knew that the younger girl was looking for - she said, "Okay, I guess.")

Do you understand how honest she was? Come behind the scenes, what really was going on - I did a reading on her. I knew exactly what was going on, her 3rd chakras' hemorrhaging all over the place. I'm nervous, I'm scared and I could use some support. But why should I build her self-esteem? Why should I? I took out my knife and I made the cut a little deeper.

If I put your feet to the fire, before your career ambition, are you going to look yourself in the eye and say - "that's just what I would have done"? A $25,000 dollar shoot? Are you going to make sure she gets the job? What would you have done? The great choice. Heaven or Earth, the great set-up.

Do you walk up to her and say, "I know you are a test." I'm not going to blow it. I did that once. I had to forgive someone. It was just so horrible, I couldn't do it. It was horrible, and I nearly hemorrhaged to death. My dark side is so bad - it is a mystery to me. I just couldn't stand - these are the people I had my publishing company with. It was such a bad divorce with them. Nine years of - that's all I'm going to tell you, but it was bad. I was unable to forgive, I just couldn't. This is how bad it got.

I was so angry that I built up - it fumed, it boiled. Now, let's go into archetypes. I come from a family where to lie is the great sin. To steal is a great sin. You cross the line; you've sold your soul. You tell a lie, it's big huge? That's how we grew up. We were like little soldiers in the moral, spiritual sense.

When I was in business with these two partners, it never occurred to me that it (there would be betrayal) would be at the financial level. It had a child, couple feel. I stepped right into that. Anyway, (it was an) archetypal familial (relationship) and so its blood. So, where would my anger go but my blood? It went on for years. Then, I went home August in 1988 and I go for a couple of weeks, then I come back to the farm.

I walk into the farmhouse and the secretary was there and I walk into the farmhouse, I had my luggage, just as I walk in the door - a little blood here. I never had a bloody nose. I thought, what is this? My surrogate parents were on the other half of the farm. What do people do? They lean back, so all of a sudden this big clot does down my throat and I ran upstairs to the bathroom, this blood is pouring and I screamed, "Go get Carol and Ray" - Carol was the quintessential mother.

She got a salad bowl and she props me up and she says, "Honey, nobody's ever died of a bloody nose." I live in the country, and ambulances take a long time in the country. Finally, the ambulance comes - by this time lots of blood had gone; now, I'm in the ambulance and they prop me up because I would choke - the one says to the other, "I've never seen anybody bleed like that" and the other says, "Do you think she's going to make it?"

I was engaged once to Ken Ring, and so I had my fill of near-death-ers, so I'm like, "Where's my tunnel?" The next day when I was in the hospital, the doctor said, "You've lost so much blood" - (in other words, it was) "You're on rice and beans."

Let me tell you something, it was so painful when your organs run out of blood. When they started the blood going in, it was so amazing - and it was worth the experience - I retained full memory of the technical experience with my partners, but the FIRE was gone. The fire had been flushed out of me. My blood was so putrid with fire, that God took the fire out of me.

The blood held the emotion, and still I couldn't forgive. Years later, I had a migraine that lasted six months. I had to get a six-month extension on Anatomy of the Spirit.

I finally said this prayer, "Listen, this has gotten out of hand, it's gone on 12 years. You set up the situation and I'll take it from there." Within days, a catalog arrives from my old company, and I see that they (my ex-partners) are selling a product of mine without my permission.

I was enraged, I ring up my old partner and he says to me, "You can't forgive a thing, can you?" Ding, ding, ding. I'm not stupid - this was that moment, and I said, "Would you hold the phone?" This is it. I'm talking to God now, "Okay, you did it. I can't blow this." This is what I did. I said, "Okay, all right" - which is what I do when I need to get my bearings. "Let me become you" is what I said to him. "Take me inside of you, bring me into you. I need to see the world the way you did. And then I'll let you go." That did it. There was one other person involved and I couldn't bear it anymore, because letting him go felt so good. I said a prayer, and said, "Somehow I still can't do it." So I said, in prayer, "Just don't let my bitterness hurt her." And boom, it was gone.

My point is that it's a rigorous journey to dismantle yourself. It's taken me into more illness than I care to? but when I'm done, I am done - I can say that much for myself. I can tell you when I did Invisible Acts of Power and I got it about service - once you get it that the highest form - this thing about the New Age crap, "my space, my time - take care of yourself" - after you move into and beyond this nonsense you're being fed in the New Age, you deserve everything you can get - what crap that is. Your highest calling is to make your soul a working soul, a soul with stamina where you don't exhaust easy like these spineless New-Agers who haven't got what it takes. "I'm so exhausted from helping people, I need to go hug a tree." Why don't you just admit you want to take a vacation?

Part of that stamina includes being able to look at someone and stretch our compassion and say, "I'll forgive you first." You honor your theology, you honor the code you made with God, face your hubris and your pride. You realize when you are choking on your pride.

From there is the call into mysticism, which is this decade. From evolution comes revelation into the self, the call. I really do think that deep, deep passion that people are looking for when they say, "I know that I belong someplace" is that you belong inside, you belong comfortable with yourself. The place you're looking for is not outside. You finally belong content with yourself, content with getting older, content with where you are, content with who you are. It's a whole new feeling for some people, for most of us.

Part of this culture says, "Live a long life, but don't age." Our whole notion of eternity is just for the body. We are death phobic. We make up things about where we've been (past lives) because that life's over. Where were you, were you in Egypt? Unmitigated crap.

Student asks: The stage after evolution is revelation, is that the Dark Night?

Caroline responds: Often within the narcissism stage, when you don't move yourself along, it's a great motivator, but it can happen at anytime. People don't understand a dark night. John of the Cross originally wrote the "Dark Night" as a poem. The best way to understand the Dark Night, really - is to understand it like I heard James Findley say, "It's like being an alcoholic who's in a great deal of pain, pleasure and a pleasurable pain and they deny that their in either until there's an intervention. They see sobriety as their Dark Night. Everybody else sees it as their light.

In fact, it's the journey into the light and they'll need every single, possible - John of the Cross would say that their senses would be broken apart, shredded, dismantled in order to get to sobriety - which for them is the enemy in many ways, it means the end of everything they hold dear. Not face their soul, it's actually the light - they don't know it yet. That's a Dark Night.

Student question: It's the shattering of the illusions that keeps us away from God?

Caroline interrupts: That draws us to God.

Student: Going through a process of shattering, and disappointment (of illusion) is the Dark Night.

Caroline: It's a relinquishing of "Oh! So, that's not true" - absolutely.

Student question: What prompted you to write Invisible Acts?

Caroline responds: People's lives break down, and the people who survive (the best) have a passion for service. The people who make it and thrive are the ones who have connections to service.

Tom Lavin: I think it's synchronistic that we're here - there's a well known prayer that anyone can Google - Christ behind me, Christ on the side of me - and you're talking about an age of energy consciousness, and it's right there. We're looking about people talk about Patrick - (talks about St. Patrick's prayer, listed in full at the end of these notes) it is that overwhelming fourth chakra breast-plate. This is the place of the person who fleshed that?

That's so wonderful because there's a big difference between a breast-plate and a shield.

Student asks: I wonder, we talk about forgiveness. I forgave, but I still feel the hurt -

Caroline responds: Here's my humble opinion having made a (like) journey - when it still hurts, you're expecting something from them, you're expecting them to acknowledge your pain. That expectation is hurting you. You're expecting them to say that they're sorry. Your re-framing it every day - but it's like someone staining your carpet. You can tell yourself that you can re-arrange your furniture, but the truth is you're pissed as hell because you know it's there. That's what's true.

Student: I talk to him, I say I forgive you, past is past - he says, that's fine - don't worry about it. In my mind, I forgive him, I don't want anything anymore. But you're right - okay, I got it.

Caroline: You know, at some point there are some people that will never get it. That's a narcissist. You get it, even though they don't get it. What you have to look at is - I had a double motive with that person, and it's the second motive that you have to look at.

Student: For the past ten years now, I thank him for what he did to me. I don't want to move anymore, I don't want a second one coming - he tells me, "Oh, that's okay."

Student: It was such a beautiful sharing that I realize I went through something similar, my ex-husband married the worst possible woman who was step-mother to my daughter, and it went on for twenty years, and I prayed to God for that moment. When it came, I wanted to forgive her and what happened is - she forgave me first. It was completely divine, and then the narcissist in me was pissed thinking - "I am the one doing all of the seminars!"

Caroline comments: It's like Oscar Wilde said, "Nothing annoys them so much!"

Student adds: Even her graciousness annoyed me! Twenty years of stuff is gone, but she initiated it.

Caroline: Thank you for sharing your story!

Student: I have two ex-wives. (laughter) I was in a program that brought me to the point where I called both of them, and I had a list of all of the things they'd done to me; the purpose was to apologize for all of the harm I have done you - and mean it - and expect nothing back from them. I meant it, and I didn't get anything back from them. It allowed me to put closure on it, though. I had my list of all the things I thought they did wrong, but my God - they had their lists too. By not attempting to get something out of them - I had the control and I was able to accept what had happened. It allowed closure, which then allowed me to move on to a more intimate relationship with (my current wife).

Student question: Do you think its fear that feeds our ego??

Tom Lavin responds: It's a Taoism teaching, number 41.

Caroline: Where there's not enough, fear of aging, fear of death, so there's a complex of fear and it's all of that, attention, recognition - fear is not a - that's why I always ask, "What fear?" You have to name your demon; you have to go after it. How New-Agers talk about taking responsibility? Yuck to that, it's accountability. This is what I claim I believe, and this is my contradictions to that. I am incongruent. I say this, (but) do that.

I contradict myself, I claim that I am always angry about betrayal, and yet, I betray. I'm incapable of keeping my word. I make statements about how I believe thoughts (and attitudes) are (tangible) things and yet I have a whole shelf of negative attitudes that I nurture all the time. My attitudes are bullets, when I condemn war.

When was the last time you devoted yourself to praying for people you don't know? Twenty minutes a day through prayer? Service. Where other people, you took a workshop and learn to serve others other than myself. I'm so sick of making ME the subject of every single day of my life. There's got to be something other than me in my mirror.

LECTURE #2 at SLIGO

At a workshop, I said pick a truth and a man answered me - he said, "Forgiveness is a truth." Most people won't shoot that high in naming a truth - "all is one" is a low, first chakra truth - if I was teaching truth in the chakra - all is one, the base truth. He went up higher; he hit a high level truth.

But, he said, "You know what? I don't want to live that high. I can't maintain that consciousness. I'm always the one that has to be more compassionate than other people. I have to maintain that width and breadth because no one else is there. It's exhausting. I can't live that high, that long - even though I know it's a truth, I can't live at that speed of light, I need more matter in the act of forgiveness, I need to slow it down. I can't take their unconscious and the distance to my conscious, it hurts too much. If I hold that altitude, from the altitude, then I know that you think that it doesn't matter. You don't understand, and I have to understand that, too. Not only that, I have to be detached from understanding that you have no understanding."

It's how high do you want to go? What I learned when I wrote Invisible Acts of Power is that people want to be intuitive for themselves. Mystics develop for God, those are the distinguishing factors. That is the line in the sand. The mystic has no control over the vision that God gives them. The intuitive has control over where they will go in their inner site, they have a little control, they can repress things, they can distort things.

If you are truly called to the interior life, you cannot distort God in your soul. You cannot do it. You may not want God to have come that close, but it's too late. It's too pure. You might want it to be something other than what it is, but it is what it is.

Intuitives can decide they don't want the news that fast. You follow that intuitive hit that you know is right and you follow that with denial - such as, "No! MY kid wouldn't do drugs!"

You start stretching that over years, and you are living in two different worlds. Eventually, what you just said is, "I want this to evolve over three years. I want it to incarnate through events in four or five years." When it hits the point of revelation and your son is crashed on the floor with a needle in his arm, you say, "I knew it all along."

How high do you want to go? How much do you think you are capable of managing?

Let me just weave this in? I've taken a few hits toward the President. You don't walk into a historic event and say "ah-hah" this whole of history is revolving around a single person. It's foolish to think that any one person is anything but a reflection of the whole of events. You have to look at history symbolically. What is in one is in the whole.

All of you felt the impact of leaving the Northern Ireland and entering the south (the Republic of Ireland.) The fact is that it's like driving out of the shadow into your light. If one can imagine going from the shadow part of your soul into the light, so you know the difference - you can feel the difference in an area that has been wounded and psychically repressed and coming out of it.

Last night, we were talking with two friends - one grew up in Belfast, one in the Bog - they were searched every single block and had walls (put up) down a street separating Catholics from Protestants, and grew up this way. We were able to see how long it takes to take the scaffold down when you grow up in that sort of territory.

For Americans, the scaffolding is going up. What they are coming out of, we are going into. Make no mistake, that's slowly but surely what we're going into. What you have to look at is that there is a collision of the gods going on. It was about the repression and the cycling through of the negativity that you could think of as psychic free radicals - and they have to form a way of expression. To manage your soul, the management of where you are other than here - where are you?

If I did a medical intuitive reading on you, what I look at is where you are other than here - and what it has physically cost you. How many places you have anchored your consciousness, "mind" fields other than here.

Here's a mystic profile - a Jesus, or a Buddha who could walk on water and heal someone and say "I'm doing these tricks for you" they had no hemorrhages. There was no Chronos mixed with Kairos, they were in the world but not of the world. They were solely in present time. They were in the enlightened state.

When I take your file out, I follow your thread and I find where you've anchored yourself - in your childhood, in relationships, in your attitudes, in your archetypes and I find and I get a sense for how much you are fueling, animating those areas of your life unnecessarily, keeping those alive - other than being here. How many time zones are you anchored in - how many years are you in other than here?

Kathy W., age 54. You're blushing already, are you okay if I do this? Just a quick time zone profile, I'm going through your morning ritual; I don't need to do anything else, and all of you have your rituals.

It's slow time in the morning; Kathy likes a long runway to lift-off - that is when she is the most stubborn. She thinks of herself as cheery, but that is not true. To get stubborn is our shadow. Now, having said that - that is why there are anchors in your history that are just anchors, and big ones at that! We'll go back; there are six major anchors in your history.

I want you to look through the lens of stubborn and two are in early youth and then four are things that have happened in adult situations. When you have these anchors, consciously or unconsciously as the fresh energy of you wakes up - you animate your anchors and they become how you see your whole day.

"I've always done it this way", or "I'll get around to it" is your mantra. Paper, all over the place, things and hip stress. Lower back, right hip for you, you've got a hip inflammation. I'll tell you something - your spine is crooked and you'll have to take care of that. That anchor is a fear of not being taken care of. That's one of your anchors, insecurity in the financial. This is a big deal.

The prayer comes in and you're trying desperately to hear something -what good does it do you if your morning ritual is to lay flowers at your anchors? Those are altars. The right hip is killing me, there's inflammation that's high voltage and it's fired up. The flowers get laid at the altar of insecurity.

Your energy comes into your body, your soul, it's supposed to be for present time and it goes into other time zones. You start studying, for example - thought are things, attitudes have power, check - positive attitudes have healing power, I like that, that's good? but you don't do anything about it, you don't really incarnate this. In fact, you live in stress and you live in fear.

In workshops like this, we bring up fear - I have news for you, you spend 95% of your time in fear. You do not spend it in faith or detachment, you spend it in fear. In the theology of detachment, detachment is not about not caring. Get the fear away from me; I'm not going to attach to that. I don't want that consciousness to grip my soul.

If it does attach, it's going to suck me out of my Castle and all of the thoughts and fears of that orbit will come into me; and I will participate and part of my soul will go to work and my soul will take it's lunch bucket and participate in thought patterns like at the Board of Trade in animating "we'll never have enough."

That turns into the energy that fuels the collective that says invade the Middle East - we'll never have enough. One thing leads to another. There has to be the collective thought forms available for the collective to produce the chess players.

It's not just the U.S. we're talking about, there's no honor anywhere. We no longer are honorable. Our morality is out of control. I have a deep regard for Oprah, but what she did with the author James Frey - she has him on the hot seat on her show. She also had his editor on (who did not know that Oprah was going to do this) she sits them down and says, "How could you lie to me?"

He's getting crucified on television and Americans are outraged and crucify him because we knew it was safe. We're terrified to stand up to (government) so we'll pick on this little piss-ant who claimed to have teeth pulled out without Novocain, instead of talking about weapons of mass destruction. The world's going to hell in a - misinformation is not a word. Do you see?

Now, where does that put you? What's the impact of a congruent soul? If you decide to become a congruent soul, how would your life change if you decide my place on this planet is to live a congruent life? You think deeply about what that means. If I say, "I'm going to keep my word to someone," no matter what - you keep your word. This is what's true - you are each of you a channel for grace. Not everyone can live with that truth.

In going to beautiful places and wonderful ruins it becomes obvious, it becomes tactile - it becomes obvious that people had rituals. You do rituals in the morning - the only difference is that people don't see God in their rituals. That it was a sacred time and an organization as you zip your soul back into your body, you suit up for the day.

If you were to add the God factor into it - not in an Evangelical way - but to say you are consciously going to be present and see the world through the eyes of Mother Teresa. Do something that mother Teresa did which is to take a favorite prayer and to take a phrase - I just pulled a phrase, here - "may he be blessed when he so desires draws good out of everything." Decide that's going to be my devotion for the day. I will live that consciously. I will pull and push and bring that level of light into everything. That's a mystic without a monastery.

Stay off the radar, whether you are nursing in a hospice or in a business meeting - let your light do the work for you and take your hands off the wheel. Take your prayer and become your prayer. Stay congruent. The one thing that the shadow can't stand is a light without a hole in it. That's the Jesus in the desert, a light without a hole in it.

Teresa loved the Lord's Prayer and she would take a phrase and look at everything like "give me my daily bread." I have to be here, you're part of my daily bread, and everything through that lens became a blessing instead of a burden. If it wasn't for you, as soon as I get rid of my kids, then my "real" life begins. What is that??

Student question: When you are trying to find your anchors, are those your myths?

Caroline responds: Take down your myths, they are absolutely anchors. Your mythologies about God for example. God's a man - that's a myth. Don't know how he got a woman physically, like an angel showed up? it's a myth of power. The myth of the descent of power for transformation, some people just can't go there. They have to have the myth of Jesus below the waist. You have to look at the mythologies and admit you aren't willing to give up the myth.

My neighbor just had an accident, and I said to her, "What's the matter with you? You didn't break your neck; you lost some teeth, so what? You'll get some fabulous dental work." She said, "Now I have to figure out - I know there's a reason for this."

I said, "Like what?" My neighbor replied, "I know there's a reason God would put me through this." I said, "What if there isn't a reason for this, what if you're looking for a reason and the reason was that you weren't looking where you were going? The reason is you survived and now you have to do something meaningful in your life, you aren't going to be given it like a gift since you survived an accident." Now, I survived an accident so I'm going to be rewarded, I must be special!

Student question: In the process of looking at wounds/anchors is it enough to acknowledge it, prayer??

Caroline responds: The only thing that heals is action. What I realized is that healing is a mystical experience, it's not mental and all and what we've been doing is going after it mentally. We worship at the feet of a rational God. We want a rational world, so we have to have a rational God.

Student: Can you give me an example?

Caroline: Give me the real wound that you're working on. Otherwise, this is a moot point, isn't it? You can say I'm not comfortable with exposing this. You can say that if you want to.

Student: I felt that I was a child that was separate from my family and I never got in. Cheryl B. 49.

Caroline: Isn't that wonderful? That's an orphan archetype. To get into a great fairy tale, you have to show your orphan pass. Bambi, Harry Potter. The orphan is a magnificent child, if you had to have to learn to think for yourself.

Student: It hurts. What do I do with that? I've had opportunities recently where I've been able to help people in an emergency; I was plucked off the street?

Caroline interrupts: What is your most wicked, ruthless fantasy?

Student replies: Is to step out on my own, leave my family and move on.

Caroline responds: And that would accomplish what? What's the message in that?

Student: To find out what I really need to be.

Caroline: What's the message to them, the family? The message to them in terms of "I'm stepping out on my own" - get to the vengeance part. You want to get even. I don't need them. That is a message of hurting them, you want to hurt them.

Student: No, I think I want to be acknowledged.

Caroline: Let's just say that they don't (acknowledge you) - what's the worst that can happen? Carry on as you do? So long as you need acknowledgement, it isn't going to happen. It's a power game and what you need to do is get wise with the power game.

Either you learn how to play it with the Orphan archetype - as in "I'm not meant to be a part of this crew in the traditional way" - and you keep pounding, wanting something to be a (different) way. You are shooting yourself in the foot; you are the one hurting yourself. You're rejecting them, too.

If you went there and you said, "I'm going to love them just the way you are." Do you want to carry around all of that bitterness? "I've got to realize that I'm playing a game, this is a tug of war, I don't accept them either and I'm going to just love them the way they are." This is a hard game; it's a game of action/reaction. Look at it through humor, and don't expect from them to be other than what they are. That is what will change this.

Student: Growing up with my family, I was a Rescuer - so now I'm at the point with them that I no longer care that they don't appreciate me. I'm just trying to be honest with them,

Caroline: That's called detachment and bliss.

There's so much emphasis about "put your own air mask first," but you have to work your way through that mythology so that you realize that giving doesn't drain you that much. There is a mythology that giving will drain you.

The question you have to look at which is - where do you start out, fundamentally? Do you believe that giving drains, that giving is burn-out? Plug into one of those, first. Then, if there is a need for a lot of feedback and if your self-esteem is fragile, you'll give with an agenda, and that's where you burn-out. You give with an agenda and you give without wisdom. You've got to know what type of grace you carry. You need to know where your charism belongs and where it doesn't.

There are some places of great need where you're not the person who belongs there. I am not a hospice worker; I'm not called to do that because that is not my charism. You have to know your grace, and you can't know your grace without inner work, contemplation and prayer. You have got to know your grace, and it is totally okay to ask what is wise giving and what is not? I'll say you tell me, I need you to burrow into yourselves. Left to your own devices, you will let me do the work. It's not okay to cave and become children.

You have to know what your grace can do and what it can't do. Grace evolves.

Student: I feel like my grace is listening, and I hold a grudge because my friends don't listen to me.

Caroline: They don't have the same grace. If you have things to share, this is why Teresa talks about soul companions versus ordinary mortals - when it comes to sharing matters of your interior life - if you were gossiping, they would take notes.

But the moment you pull out the information that requires a candle and serious eye contact that might make them think and touch their interior, they may not be ready to go there. So, they're going to distract, they're going to put up the shield. They'll say, "Oops! I gotta go."

Soul companions are just that, companions - not soul mates. Their commitment to you is to illuminate, "I'll give you the best I've got." They share the journey. This is how God is talking to me, this is what my experience was and I'm not sure what to make of it. These are the people you look for.

Next time we get together, we're talking about prayer, contemplation, practice.

LECTURE #3 - KILLARNEY

(Discussing writing Entering the Castle)

When people talk about automatic writing - it was never like that. It was more like trying to smell sweet fragrance - and maybe that was why it was so beautiful. I know that her presence was very real - and the effect that it has had on my life has been transformational.

Teresa referred to water as the conduit as the relationship between her and Jesus when she tried to describe what grace was like, or what rapture was like. The spring of water coming in, the eternal fountain of water that would just begin and be there forever. Water was her constant. She loved being around water - water as the conduit of grace. So, when I prayed and her presence was near - I knew that she was near. I thought that we would close with that (sharing holy water.)

In the meantime I would like to talk about these questions because they are very important.

What is prayer and how effective is prayer in your life? How much impact can prayer have within your life? Why should you pray, what does prayer do? Teresa said the way to your soul is through prayer, and without prayer you're going nowhere.

When my experiences with Teresa began, I thought they would be very intimate; it turns out that I can't discuss the Castle - she slipped in. I find that as I talk about it - it's not unbelievable to people - maybe it was because Teresa didn't move objects. It wasn't like that - and maybe that's why it isn't unbelievable to others.

She said to her nuns - you're always in your soul; so to talk about going into your Castle - the best way to think about your Castle is to think of it as your active soul; as pursuing your soul, you don't understand its profound power.

It lies dormant until you go across the drawbridge and through the profound initiation in terms of waking up (your soul) in terms of the Castle. The only way in is in through constant prayer. Teresa, by the way, found repetitive prayer (boring) because it takes no conscious effort, you put yourself in a trance.

So what is prayer about? You are going into the conscious engagement that there is a deeper focus for your attention in which you are pulling yourself away from the five sensory world and into the domain of a different scale of power.

Prayer is the experience of withdrawing yourself consciously and entering the theater of divine power. It is the experience of entering the field of stress that our five sensory world maintains.

Settle yourself and do a stress report - do a conscious, true stress report and think - where are you other than here? Are you in the anticipation of "I need to do this," or "I need talk to this person?" Are you in a level of need, of preparation, of anxiety, of stress?

-, you're already doing that.

You're already battling with your expectations. You are already calculating disappointments, you are already setting up your flares. Prayer is the experience of - what do I do in my world all the time? I do expectations, I do this, I have anxieties, I always plant myself before I get there as a way of establishing psychic power zones, and then when I get there - no matter where it is, I'm expecting trouble.

Prayer is the experience of saying, "What am I doing? I'm going to pull myself back, pull my soul back into my Castle." I am fully present, pull it back; I am with divine grace, I am going to bless my journey home and I am not setting the stage for a fight before I get someplace. What am I doing?

I'm not going to set my bar of expectation in someone's life, who am I to make someone else jump? Pull yourself back and think, "How would I like someone else be sitting right now creating expectations for me for tomorrow?" That's like booby-trapping you.

I know what that's like, I get booby-trapped - every workshop is a booby trap for me. You also do that to yourself. Prayer is consciously saying I'm consciously withdrawing because you do that because a fear of being raped. It's the fear of being humiliated. Someone will find a way to take charge of your life, more than you have charge of your life in some way, shape or form.

When you feel that, "I'm losing it," prayer is pulling back and thinking, "I'm losing it to that Earth level." It shows that you are losing it to the illusion that people have more authority over your life than your contract with God. You have to remind yourself consciously and constantly that what has authority over your life is your contract with God instead of the outside world.

You move in from there - that's base level. Then you start pulling in deeper and deeper. How do you start listening to that voice, that authority? You have to sort through what the Buddhists call the "monkey mind." That's where a lot of people drop the ball. People can't stand listening to themselves.

How does prayer work? That is such a Western question. People in the Christian tradition come from the notion that God needs to work the same way we do - and "work" is the operative word. We have a God of work and a God of production. If it doesn't produce something, it's not effective and functioning religion. God has to produce a physical job, a physical healing, a physical soul mate, and a physical room mate - so everything that we look for in prayer has a physical response, a physical consequence. It is completely unacceptable that the answer to our prayer is a readjustment at the level of grace - thus invisible - and the answer to our prayer is that this readjustment is something that took care of something from yesterday, or maybe that it is so subtle that it helped someone other than us.

We are so self-serving and narcissistic that unless we are praying for someone that is right in front of us - we are the subject, object and topic of all of our prayers that they should answer, resolve and solve all of our fears.

My brother died six years ago, and I ended up at this same hotel. As fate would have it - how do these things happen, I do not know - I told the girls that there was a crystal shop in this town, where I ordered my niece's wedding crystal. Let me tell you, this man was a craftsman! We popped in there, but he wasn't there and the woman behind the counter told us that the craftsman would love to meet you. He was going to come in from his shop - we ended up in the next block, and John calls this little crystal shop and asks the man to come over to join us for tea, and he ends up sitting down next with us.

He talks to me abut how his brother had committed suicide, two years ago right now. I ended up doing a reading on this man and - how life is, huh? What I realized so very clearly was how and why his brother killed himself and why that happened.

"I need a reason why things happen as they do. I'm not pursuing anything further unless I get that." That's the prayer of reason for the unreasonableness of why things are why they are. Most people don't get past that. Most people will never get out of the first mansion of Teresa's. It is rigorous and it will rip your heart out. That is how difficult it is to battle reason.

Finally, you accept the journey that life is unreasonable, that there are no reasons - that the only reasons are the ones that the divine has. To walk this Earth with expectations and then be in a snit because your expectations were not met, to realize what an angry person you are - and then to pray for a reason to have this explained to you - you will never have those prayers answered.

The way those prayers are answered is you enter blank space. If you think that anger is answered with satisfaction, you are out of your mind. That's the first level. Any questions on prayer?

Question: How do you break that?

Caroline responds: The way to break that is to you catch yourself when you fall. Realizing you're projecting and you have expectations; this whole thing is about my having expectations and I'm doing it again. I set things up because I had expectations about how things would turn out. I said prayers and I want to know why this didn't turn out; I have to withdraw and go into prayer of a higher order.

You find prayer of a higher order, which says I have to trust. I have to go into contemplation about what I don't trust. You go into prayers of what I don't trust? what am I so afraid of? Tom had the four fundamental fears as being alone, dying, not having enough and having to hang on and not letting things change.

I'm caught; something triggered one of those fears, that's what contemplation is about. That's why you go into the Castle, something triggered that and if I can blame someone else for how I'm feeling, then everything will be fine. Blaming someone else will make that fear go away, because it's their fault (sarcastic).

Student asks: What if you get that far, you ask that question and ? I keep asking the question - what is it I don't trust?

Caroline: Anybody else have the same thing?

Caroline: I can recognize when I'm there, I recognize the spot, and I'm trying to get some sort of resolution with the question. This is my way and I offer it to you, and (my) resolution is to say I accept what's in my life on a day-to-day basis and follow it with complete and utter trust. If I feel and I pray, I feel change, yes/no - I follow that.

If I don't follow that, I acknowledge that I'm sabotaging. The consequence of that action and whatever happens - okay, this is what's supposed to happen. Do not project ahead. If the consequence of - I had to do this, and it created a mess on the floor. Do not assume that your floor will always be a mess. Just assume that that had to be?

When I renovated my house, it was a nightmare. Maybe it has bad energy, maybe it's haunted, I fell through the floor - all kinds of things happened. But, the other side of it was - maybe it was one of those things. Maybe I didn't pay enough attention to the people I hired. I didn't use enough common sense because I was off writing a book somewhere. That's something that actually happened.

But if that's how I had to learn, that's how I had to learn. I could have said, "I'll never do this again and the house is full of bad energy!" - but I still followed my gut and bought that house. You have to do things in the moment. I don't do things thirty times like a bunch of New-Agers. I follow guidance, that's how you do it. If you end up in a place and you wonder, "Now what?" Now, you follow through with the next guidance. Don't expect you'll get a lot of attention.

Student question: What are the distinctions between voices of guidance, or am I putting in my own expectations - which is my own voice versus?

Caroline responds: This is why going in side yourself and learning your own voice - you earn that kind of thing. You have to know when you are operating from private agenda, you have to "know thyself." Do you know when you are being manipulative? You could tell that in five seconds. What's your style? Do you pout?

Student: I'll do this, but I don't really want to do this.

Caroline: Is that your style? That's good. Guilt, being a martyr.

Student: Planning a response. My sales team thinks I'm Yoda because I can construct a meeting to lead a ?

Caroline: That's very good. Any others?

Student: Kill with kindness.

Student: Logic. I do it with logic. If you don't, this is what is going to happen.

Caroline: The Susan Hayward experience.

Student: Illness, fatigue.

Caroline: You'd better stop that, or you'll never get over it.

Student: I threaten.

Caroline: What's the style? Guns, weapons?

Student: Bully behavior.

Caroline: You have the bully archetype? Very good.

Student: Abandonment.

Student: I get stubborn. Just "no" and eventually they get tired and go away.

Student: Reward.

Student: Well, I did that for you - and that's expectation, the victim, I suppose.

Caroline: Look what I can do for you, look what I will do for you.

Student: I use "fairness" and now it's my turn. It's only fair -

Caroline: Scales of justice.

Student: Planning, but not taking action.

Caroline: You over-plan?

Student: Rather than take action. If this, then this - rather than actually knowing what to do and doing it. Avoiding action.

Question number two - this is how you block communication from God. This is when you've gotten a hit, very clear guidance - but you don't like the hit. The hit can come in a couple of ways, it can come in your own gut.

You can be reading something and it hits you, "ooh" that it's you. You can be thinking about what's wrong with my son/daughter, and you get it that they are on drugs - but you don't like that hit. You start with the rationalization - no, it's too much pressure at school and you bury the hit. You know for a fact that your hit was right.

You're with somebody, and they're coming close because they are the messenger. They have news to tell you, news you don't want to hear. Nothing ever changes with you - they are coming real close to a truth you don't want to face about yourself. Very often, the method used (to deflect) is to create chaos. Chaos is the method. Everybody has a relationship with chaos. You get drifty in your mind, you create mental chaos.

Another method is to put your life in chaos, relationship in chaos, financial chaos. To create chaos as a way of distracting yourself from a piercing piece of truth that just went - but you don't want it. It came in too fast, strong, potent.

This is the way you have to recognize that I really do hear my guidance. What's your style? You get it and then you bury it? How do you bury it? You are a bury-er? What are your methods?

Student: Procrastination. I'll get around to it.

Student: I know I'm resisting, and I think I'm not good enough and I have to push myself through it. It's a whole mantra.

Student: Over-scheduling. To get busy or distracted.

Student: When my kids want me to do things for them, and I steal time for myself such as look through the phone book. Instead of finding little things to make them wait or whatever. Getting too busy.

Student: Wrapped up in work, I have to do it for someone else.

Student: I over-plan. I over-think it. Distraction.

Caroline: You do the plan and then abandon the plan. You abandon as much as you feel abandoned.

Student: I dialogue; I talk myself out of it. I know I had the hit, but then I will justify, talk myself out of it. I like to be low-profile; I think the bottom line is fear, but its fear of humiliation.

Caroline: You need a good dose of menopause. Once I turned 50, nothing humiliates me. The worst they can say is "I'm not turning the music down."

Student: It was about going from point "A" to point "B". I'll sit there and talk myself out of it. I'm totally aware of it.

Caroline: I think a lot of people do that. I probably should do that, I should do the opposite.

Chaos is one of your ways of distracting God. My point here with prayer and guidance is that I believe firmly that every prayer is answered before you pray it. Prayer is the journey of discovering the answer. The wait is for you to - it's the pace at to which you want to wake up to the answer.

You are the one with the expectations. You need to give up the fact that the answers to your prayers is your need to have everyone else change but you. In general, what you pray for is that everyone else in the world changes but you. Everybody else serves you and makes you safe. That your success comes so that you'll be safe. Everything is about your safety, comfort, well-being, health and you not being disappointed, your expectation being met. When in fact, the journey should be about, "I've got to get rid of this, these are my burdens."

And they make other people suffer, because I anchor them in other people. You disappointed me. My mother disappointed me; I should have had a better marriage. I expected this, I expected that. Who are you to expect such a perfect and happy life? Who are you to have all of these expectations? "Who are you" is the question? How dare you walk on this Earth where everyone else should walk around you, so you won't be disappointed? Give that a think.

Tom Lavin: I think the answer is that I'm a child of God. Who do you think you are? And my answer is "a daughter or a son of God." Now what? It's an open question.

It's a start point, and with that - where does someone go? Because they are a child - a child of God - not a person of God with parental expectations. A child of God, what can they expect from God, what should they expect from God?

Maryanne: Unconditional love.

Caroline: What does that mean? Like this gentleman that I had lunch with - he is suffering because - exactly like me - he went to work instead of at his brother's side when his brother needed him, and his brother committed suicide. We wore the same shoes, he and I. Should we have expected a great big, booming voice, "STAY HOME." I know what I think that I should have expected of God. I know what's in my heart. The journey of trying to live with that? is hell on Earth for the two of us.

Student: My father picked me up from college, I wasn't confident enough and I wanted to cry and be in the fetal position all of the time. He said, "What's wrong?" And I said, "I don't know." He said, "You are a child of God." And I said, "What does that mean?" The child of God thing is complicated is what I want to say. It's not as simple, the trick is to find - for me - to find yourself in the complexity and find my heart is restless until it rests in thee. That's our task - to find out what we're restless about.

Caroline: The last thing we can expect is a rational, logical journey. Child of God or not. There is no rational, logical journey.

Student: Being a child of God, as a child - You don't get what you want, you get what you need.

Student: That's part of surrender.

Caroline: That's one way I see the difference between fate and destiny. Fate is being defeated by a circumstance; destiny is looking at a circumstance and following it. Circumstances as we all know are brutal at times, at other times they are utterly enchanting. There are just as many enchanting that are just as directed by God that are not?

For me, it's when you are guided and you say "no," and you say "no" because you are too frightened to move forward.

Caroline: I deleted a book I'd been working on for eight months, following an experience - I completely changed my life and followed an experience that only I knew was real. I threw out a commitment, New York could have sued me - and I deleted it before I said to my editor, "I threw it out." I had no other choice, I just had to go. I was willing to deal with whatever consequence came of it.

My point this evening is to look at events with God in the whole focus of what is guidance, what is guidance and to stay with prayer. Living a conscious prayerful life is actually very difficult. It's easy to pray in the moment for what you want. A true devoted prayer life of self-reflection is not common to the Western person at all.

The Western person always has a target, they have a need. They pray when they want something. Without a target, without a goal - doesn't make any sense to the Western mind. What are we praying for? Just to be in - the experience of prayer, to withdraw your consciousness from five sensory madness and pull yourself into a higher state of consciousness is the discipline.

The way to do that, there are many ways to do that - but I happen to love spiritual literature. To take beautiful literature that is very influential, I love the writings of other wonderful teachers, Rumi's teachings that get you off the Earth every day, get into the Castle and get above the Earth every day. It's very enchanting to think, "I have to get off the Earth for at least twenty minutes a day."

Student asks: Meditation, that sounds like mediation?

Caroline answers: No, mediation is very passive. I'm talking inner work, consciously nurturing yourself, dwelling upon something that feeds yourself a beautiful perception that you can use, that you can reference, that you use like a thought that becomes like a focus like a piece of daily bread that you use like an anchor within yourself.

Student: Could you give us an example of that?

Caroline: Teresa said, "Let nothing disturb you, with God all things are possible." To take that into an active prayer and think, "What's stressing me out" and wonder - where am I losing my soul today? I have to remind myself to get my center back, to actively pray the stress out of the situation. I have to remind myself that I am a channel for grace, and to aim grace in the direction of the people involved. I pull myself out. If there's a negativity going on, I aim my grace - I examine where I'm losing power. I pull myself out. It's very conscious, arduous work. I'll take a prayer, a very high truth and I work it through the situation.

Pay attention to what you ask for in your prayers for guidance, pay attention to your Christmas list because that's being a stuff-ologist with prayers. I need, I want?

Question: Even for other people? When you pray for others? Prosperity, etc.

Caroline: I don't know how the system really works, but I suspect that praying for someone else's prosperity is like interfering in someone else's grand scheme. The best we can do is pray for grace. It's like giving someone grace currency and saying - "Don't let 'em squander it." It isn't for me to determine what those emergencies will be. Just let me be a channel for grace, and not to target the prayer. Don't target the grace, don't name the grace.

I'm channeling grace on their behalf. I think it would be so magnificent if just for five seconds if we could witness that distribution. You've all heard me tell that story of that woman in the car accident in England, how she heard the prayers and she saw the light go right into her own shattered body?

Grace goes through us like beams of light and into another person, however that is - and maybe the way it works technically is that - maybe heaven provides energy. I don't like the word "energy;" oxygen, life force and then grace, maybe that's the way we look at it. Grace is energy with divine consciousness, somehow - that it is the substance that continually interacts with us; that maybe heaven can't, once heaven gives us this grace it's for us to do what we will, what we can with it. Heaven fills it with gold instead of negativity. Maybe that's what prayer is, it puts more gold into the atmosphere than negative. Maybe that's how it gets distributed.

Now, Tom - Mary Ellen, first of all I wanted to thank you for the Dream Circles and all you've contributed. I can't even tell you what a beautiful contribution that was to this workshop!

I'd like to close with my own thank you and a blessing with this holy water. I want to talk to you about this blessing I have in mind.

You would think of this as the image of the Castle, your soul as a Castle - I'm going to pass this around; but rather, that you would imagine that you are lighting a flame within yourself of a particular kind of grace that you want to keep burning in you. Grace is a powerful substance, I rely on it constantly.

I am asked, "How do you know grace is filtering in/out of your life?" It's that pause that prevents you from saying that last word that would devastate someone. It's that pause that keeps the car from hitting you. It's that grace that surrounds you that says, "I don't know how I got through that, but I did." Grace is the energy that you say, "I don't know how I'm going to heal this thing," but you do.

Grace is that energy that says, "I don't know what I was thinking. I should have been afraid, but I wasn't." That's grace. It's exactly that energy and that's how it works.

I want you to think about what flame you want lit within yourself. Do you want a flame of - I want courage in me, I need compassion, I need tranquility to burn in me, I need stamina to burn in me. I need - what? What do you need to burn in you? I need honesty to burn in me, integrity to burn in me - imagine that there is a flame that is lit that is not going to go out. It will never go out.

I wrote a prayer that I wrote to enter the castle. This will center you; this is the prayer that is in my book. This is the prayer that I direct people to say so I'm going to end that to set a tone of grace.

"I cross the bridge into the silent bliss of my interior Castle. I close the drawbridge and forbid all outside influences from entry into this holy place that is my soul. Here in my Castle, I am alone with God and under God's Light and companionship I discover the depth and beauty of my soul. I embrace the power of prayer, I open myself to Divine guidance, and I surrender myself as a channel for grace, healing, and service as God directs my life. Here I embrace my devotion to the Divine. And here in the silence of my Castle, I animate my soul's dignity. I feel the sensation of my interior Self calling me from within. I resonate deeply to my own Divinity. I am prepared to encounter, to become, to dialog with my own Divinity, that which is God within me. Here in my Castle, my faith becomes a fire, cleansing my soul of every fear. Each time I enter my Castle, I trust even more deeply in the presence and wisdom of God in my life. I surrender my mind, my heart, my need for safety, and my need for rational explanations and orderly instructions to God's will for me. I trust that all that is in my life is as it should be. I release the need to know why events happen as they do, whether painful or glorious. I release the need to let others know they harmed me. And I ask forgiveness for those whom I have harmed. I release my fear of being abandoned on this earth and left to face my life alone for I am never alone. I release my fear of becoming infirmed. I surrender in trust that I am on this earth with purpose. I am guided, I am cared for, every prayer is heard and every prayer is answered. I am a channel for grace and delight in the silent bliss that surrounds me in the sacred center of my Castle, in the intimate presence of God. In the silence of my Castle, the only voice I hear is God's."

St. Patrick's Breastplate
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in the hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

Caroline, David, Cindy & Amy

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