The Michael Teachings [dot] NET Learning How To Choose, and Choosing How To Learn

Energy Report: August 2009

Reading time: 8 - 14 minutes

July marked the rather awkward, yet enthusiastic, leap into the exploration of the Attitude for the year, which is IDEALIST. Most entered July on a wave of Passion generated over the previous 3 months of April, May, and June in which Passion, symbols, and identity were explored, shaken, and some left behind, making way for a sense of renewal in the months ahead. Many of you welcomed the energy of encouragement for improvement and betterment by your own standards. But it appears to us that, for many, August has "fallen flat" in its sense of promise and improvement.

At best, most of our students appear to be in a state of Inertia, the negative pole of this year's Goal of Flow. At worst, a quiet, deep (and for some, a secret) disappointment has sprung within and August has turned into a sensation of weight that must simply be endured, worked through, processed. We say "at best and at worst" only for convenience as a way of describing one end of the spectrum as being fairly distracting, similar to the rowing of a boat upstream, whereas the other end off the spectrum is still a sensation of going upstream, but with a dragging anchor to contend with, as well.

If these states are familiar to you, it is more than likely a familiar case of Naivety, the negative pole of Idealism. Your standards set high, your expectations set high, your enthusiasm set high, and as August has unfolded, you have discovered the depth of effort between what you envisioned and where you are. It is not uncommon. Setting your vision high, igniting your enthusiasm, and then either feeling as if you are falling short within a limited time, or simply incapable of fulfilling that vision, can cause a sense of crash and burn, or at the very least, a sense of running in place.

For some of our students, this collapse in enthusiasm has come because of that perceived gap between what is envisioned and where one is, but for others it has come because life has thrown you a curve "just when you were ready to dive in to your improvement," or so it seems.

What we would suggest to those who feel this inertia and weight is to realize that this is exactly a part of your process. Often this collapse of enthusiasm can be consuming, which can then lead to the relinquishing of all concern, but it does not have to be. The entire point of the collapse was proportional to your passion and intent to improve life and fulfill a vision. What is often not understood about the intent to improve the life is that when that intent is genuine, then the improvement is genuine. When improvement is genuine, it is a rooting that must take place, and when something new is planted in place something that was no longer growing or nurturing you, then that old rooting is uprooted.

You are in the uprooting phase of your passionate effort to improve upon your life toward your ideal.

What has come up as far back as the beginning of July for some, and for most during the last week of July through this second week of August, are pivotal experiences that will change you in ways that experiences have rarely changed you, if you choose to reap the lessons that have been be brought to bear. It would be safe for us to say that if your end of July through August 15th have been less than spectacular, less than fulfilling, less than fruitful, and quite frankly more than disappointing, more than disheartening, and more than distracting from your enthusiastic vision, then you were more than likely deeply sincere in your intent to make this year "count" as a pivotal year in your self-development and direction, and that you may be missing the point of what has come to the surface during these past weeks.

Some of you may find that our description of disappointment and distraction to be too familiar for it to stand out as being anything new, so we will leave it to you to intuit the validity of what we describe. For some, the experience we describe above may be a repetitive pattern, or for others, the description is too vague. We can only say that for those who are experiencing the process of enthusiasm and intention for a pivotal year toward an ideal, what we describe will hit home.

An aside: Keep in mind that we describe in our energy reports the patterns that are most noticeable and have the greatest momentum, much like the kind of weather report your geographical area is generating. This weather, if it actually manifests, is valid for anyone participating in it, i.e. having to travel in it, walk in it, etc, but may only be peripheral for others who are in a climate-controlled room, or focused intently on matters that do not take them "outside." The same could be said about the energy reports and those "out in the weather" vs those who are not, so to speak. For those who might not relate to any given report, a different report would have to be given to them, relative to that person's specific world at the time.

For those who do relate to this report, we would suggest going back to read our February report, focusing on the dynamics of FLOW. We would also suggest letting your disappointments, heartaches, grief, disorientation, weight, distraction, and disheartening moments give you the seeds of change that have come from the uprooting, or the displaying, or the glaring redirection needed for you to fulfill your visions, to honor your ideals. The information, wisdom, trust, and gifts are there. We do not say this to be poetic. It is simply true, or at least it is true that you do have the capability and strength for extracting the meaning from your recent experiences in a way that the experience becomes information, wisdom, trust, or a gift.

We would like to add a word about Enlightenment, as we play this Position within many of our students' Support Circle: We will first say that "enlightenment" is simply a building of a structure through which one can make sense of life. It is not a goal, nor is it a state, so much as it is a natural ingredient in the process of evolution. Even your "a-HA!" moments are not moments of enlightenment, so much as they are punctuations in the book of enlightenment you write with your experiences.

One of the greater steps of enlightenment, and one that is taken over and over across many lifetimes, is the submersion into experiences that are overwhelming, deeply disappointing, painfully disheartening, defeating, or distracting, and finally grasping the truth that you are allowed to feel what you feel when you are in those experiences; that you are allowed to be overwhelmed, disappointed, disheartened, distracted, and to feel defeated; that to fight these feelings, to ignore them, to shame them, to contain them, to color them with pleasantries, to rise above them, etc. only leads to addictions, sedation, therapy, and other methods of securing False Personality at the gates of life to protect you from either feeling anything associated with these experiences, or to protect you from others seeing that you are feeling anything associated with these experiences. We would call this "Endarkenment."

Endarkenment is not opposite to Enlightenment, but are much like Hate and Love. Hate is not the opposite of Love, it is a misunderstanding and distortion of Love, or, in other words, both are descriptions of a kind of intimacy. In that same way, both Enlightenment and Endarkenment are attempts to make sense of life, but Endarkenment is a delusion, a distortion of the structure that helps make sense of life, and often an angry insistence of the meaning of things as if this may never change.

And so it is that many of you have stumbled upon your Endarkenment, holding up to the surface of your life what it is that you have insisted is true about your life, that contradicts your passionate higher vision, your ideal.

For some of you this is quite dramatic, and for others of you this may simply be a bitter undertone in your days, but you will recognize what we describe if this has been the case for you in the past 6 weeks or so, and for some of you, this has not yet happened for you. If you are one who has set out this year to make this a pivotal year, we would say that it is likely that you would be stumbling upon your own Endarkenment in the weeks to come, and this information may be of help.

August has no significant global or community shifts, but it appears to us that many of our students have fairly profound sets pivotal days within the month of August. Again, though it is unusual for us to emphasize this in such a way, those of you who understand this report, will understand so with a clarity that further validates our resonance with you as students.

We rarely remind you of this, particularly for the sake of our position as a teacher, and for the sake of exemplifying the valid weight of such words when said with full presence; and though it is not unheard of that we say this when we feel it most important and appropriate, we do wish to say now that it is true that you are not alone, that we do care, and that it is true that we love you.

We do not share our teaching flippantly. Most of you who work with us for any length of time are not doing so as a novelty. We have a relationship with you, and that can often be forgotten in the intellectual emphasis of our teaching. But our higher perspective does not exempt us from these sensitive states of resonance with you, it simply allows us to know love for you more profoundly than we can express within the sentimental distortions of language.

We do not bring all of this up randomly, of course, but to speak to some of our students who will have stumbled upon a stage of Endarkenment. The words we share in this report that would normally have been seen as uncharacteristic of our communication, will probably be heard more clearly than usual without contradiction to our usual communication.

Endarkenment, as it gives way to Enlightenment, can often open one up to a great sensitivity and clarity of true communication, stripped of sentimentality, pleasantries, and other False Personality tendencies, not only between yourself and others, but between Personality and Essence, and beyond.

In the same way that our words expressing resonance with you may be heard more clearly, so it is that many of you may find in the weeks to come, a heightened renewal of contact and clarity with your own guides and support groups, both physical and non-physical.

END

[note: every year has a pattern of energy that can be described as a kind of "personality," so the energy reports are Michael's interpretation of that energy using the Overleaf System; these are not predictions, but merely observations of momentum and pattern generated by actions and choices, similar to how weather patterns can be observed and reported.]

Energy Report: JULY 2009

Reading time: 6 - 9 minutes

[note: every year has a pattern of energy that can be described as a kind of "personality," so the energy reports are Michael's interpretation of that energy using the Overleaf System; these are not predictions, but merely observations of momentum and pattern generated by actions and choices, similar to how weather patterns can be observed and reported.]

June's spike of final emphasis on Passion and Mode manifested in several interesting ways on a scale that shook large pockets of fragments and their sense of identity and symbols, from the seemingly unusual string of deaths among popular icons to the bloody battles of Iran. It would be helpful to look back over June to examine how these events on a global scale are macrocosmic reflections of the microcosmic events in an individual life. We see that most of our students found themselves in positions that questioned their sense of identity and if that questioning is followed by comprehension and resolution, then this can help set the tone for the move through the next few months of emphasis on the Attitude of Idealism. Comprehension and resolution would come from an honest look at the attachments to symbols as a form of identity and to embrace those symbols while understanding that the symbols are not the same as the qualities. Symbols can come and go, but the qualities inherent in your identity and being exist with or without their external representation. Being dependent on symbols is like being dependent on paper and pen for your thinking. Your thinking exists with or without the pen and paper. Even when paper and pen become extensions of your thinking, your thinking does not cease if the pen and paper are removed.

July brings with it a shift from an emphasis on relationships and personal identity to an emphasis on philosophical perceptions and your sense of need for improvement.

The Attitude in our system is a component of Personality that describes the philosophical stance of the lifetime, the basic perception of the world and how experiences are interpreted through that primary philosophy. There are 7 basic philosophies, or Attitudes, and while each of you will already have your own as part of your Personality, the time frame of a year can also be described in terms of the general philosophy "in the air," so to speak. This year, it appears the general mood is one of continued improvement and an emphasis on seeking out, identifying, and altering flaws. This would mean to us that most of our students may find themselves intentionally focusing on, or "accidentally" stumbling upon, one or more components of the life, Personality, or environment, internally or externally, that are ready for improvement.

For those who have come to comprehend and resolve the exploration of identity and symbols over April, May, and June, then July may start off with "your feet hitting the ground, running." It will be clear to those fragments WHAT needs or wants improvement, and the direction would be on the HOW. For those who feel some amount of overwhelm, confusion, or dismissal of the events of April, May, or June, then July may start off with the exploration of WHAT.

For those who start off July with an emphasis on exploring WHAT, it would mean a sense of distraction with what exactly it is that holds you in a pattern, or keeps you from feeling as if you are fulfilled, moving forward, or making an impact in areas of effort. For some, this will show up as a literal distraction, generating a sense of lacking concentration or presence, until there is a grasp on exactly what to improve. This would be a time of strong, self-scrutiny on the positive end, and a time of vague disappointment on the more negative end.

For those exploring the WHAT, we would suggest that your exploration not be one of discovery, but one of DECISION. In other words, you do not have to wait for the so-called flaws to reveal themselves, or for the obstacles that can use some transformation to be uncovered. Instead, you can remind yourself that this is YOUR life, and that the design of your being, your days, and directions are simply a product of your choices. Decisions are the path to Choices. Decisions are a Path, and Choices are a Pivot. Decisions shape your days, and Choices shape your life.

So, instead of being distracted, waiting, or wandering, you can make the decision as to what to improve TODAY. It does not have to be that pivotal thing that would improve everything, but you will find your way to that pivotal thing much more comfortably and quickly when you start making Decisions to shape your focus of the day, which will then lead to Choices, and those moments of Choice will be clearer when they come around.

For those who found a strong sense of awareness about personal symbolism and identity over April, May, and June, your July might start off immediately aware of WHAT could use some improvement, even if begrudgingly, and so your month may emphasize the HOW of the process. By this we mean that it is no longer a mystery as to what part of your development has lead to a pattern of immobility or repetitiveness and it is now up to you to do the work of either transforming that or embracing that.

In both cases of What or How, the spectrum of Idealism may come into play. On the positive end of the spectrum there is COALESCENCE, which is not only the awareness of all of the ingredients and steps that must come together to fulfill a vision, but also the awareness of the effort that this requires. On the negative end of the spectrum there is NAIVETY, which is the experience of being blinded or distracted by the end-goal, or vision, without any attention to the steps and efforts that may be required to get there; it can also be the constant disappointment and frustration with how things SHOULD BE vs how things ARE, forgetting the time, energy, and patience that may be required for change.

Idealism always sees room for improvement, and there is always room for improvement, so it is an exhausting philosophy for some. Since there is always room for improvement in nearly everything, since evolution is in an on-going process, then there can tend to be a constant emphasis on flaws and short-comings. When this comes from the positive pole of Coalescence, the flaws, short-comings, and improvements are seen as a gentle informative process for directing visions, efforts, and choices. When this comes from the negative pole of Naivety, the flaws, short-comings, and improvements are seen burdens, disappointments, and a constant source of comparisons that always leaves one feeling empty, angry, depressed, or frustrated. Keeping these poles in mind can help each of you through the next few months of self-improvement and your sense of progress toward your visions.

KEY CONSIDERATIONS FOR JULY might be:

BECAUSE I CAN SEE IT DOES NOT MEAN I AM (or he/she is) THERE.
BECAUSE I CAN SEE IT DOES NOT MEAN EVERYONE ELSE CAN (or cares to).
DECISIONS CREATE THE PATH TO CHOICES; CHOICES CREATE THE LIFE.
FULFILLING A VISION IS A PROCESS, NOT A PREDICTION.
FLAWS ARE ONLY BREAKS IN THE PATTERN YOU CONSIDER THE IDEAL
THE PROCESS OF IMPROVEMENT IS KIND AND PATIENT

2009 Overleaves: http://truthloveenergy.ning.com/profiles/blogs/energy-report-2009-overleaves