The Unbelievable Way Forward
Developing the Ability To Withdraw Belief, Attention, & Energy From Broken Systems
A Quick Story About Falling Apart
2006 was a crucible year for me.
I use this word to refer to those times in your life where God (the universe, fate, karma) throws you into a crucible and grinds you up until you either vanish into the dust of what once was, or you find yourself - your true self - rising out of the ashes.
In that one year alone, I faced four deaths and a divorce. I moved, stumbled, zombie-walked through the death of my father at age 60, the death of a nephew shortly after birth, the death of my best friend's father (who was like a father to me as well), and then within days of Christmas - the death of my mother (also 60), which unfolded in parallel to the unexpected (to me) end of a 10-year marriage.
Of course, much more happened in the years that followed, as ripple effects from such significant life events are inevitable. Although, truth be told, some of those ripples felt like tsunamis in and of themselves.
In the wake of so much loss, I sometimes found myself afloat in a sea of nothingness. Afloat or sinking, depending on the day.
When I look back, I can see more clearly now what really created that "sea of nothingness"... it was not just the loss of people in my life for whom I cared so deeply. That brought its own pain and grief, to be sure. But what was unfolding inside and outside of me was a loss of faith.
At that time in my life, I would not have used the worth faith... but that's what it was. And that faith was all placed in external people, things, and systems.
I believed the medical system could help my parents, despite just witnessing how they were each led to an early grave after endless medical visits.
I held out hope that revisiting the faith from my childhood could help me cope with other losses, despite already having been betrayed by these same systems many years ago.
I even tried to believe in the power of therapy for a short while to help "fix" my marriage... when even a small dose of inner-work would have shown me what a complete waste of time and energy that would turn out to be.
Yep, I had found myself walking through the fire of truth about my life and the world around me. None of the systems that I thought were there to help us in times of need could actually do anything for me. In fact, experience after experience taught me that things were pretty much the exact opposite of what I had thought.
Despite trying to do all the "right" things for decades, I suddenly found myself having to protect myself... from both the legal and financial systems (the midlife pb&j of bankruptcy and divorce), from the medical system (just one week of antidepressants made me want to lie down in the middle of a busy highway for a nap, never again!), and ultimately from both religion and new age quackery alike.
"The world as we know it is falling apart at the seams, because it's an inadequate container for the truth of who we are."
— Marianne Williamson
Shifting My Energy
This life experience was a boot camp in energy shifting and spiritual development.
One of the many painful and costly lessons I learned: When everything falls apart, one life-saving skill that will serve you well is the ability to stop putting your faith, focus, and energy into broken systems.
Every step of the way, I had a choice to make: keep trying to make these distorted, corrupt, upside-down systems work for me (and end up in an early grave like my parents?), or withdraw my attention and energy from these soul-draining endeavors so that I could direct my attention instead towards the gateway to a new life.
The choices I made were not clear in the beginning. It took years to develop the ability to operate beyond the grip of these old beliefs.
It's much easier now to look back and see those times through this lens of spiritual development. Is it really a choice to see it this way now? Or was this always my soul's plan? Who can say for sure.
But what I now see and feel to be true is that I was in no way a victim of anything external to myself. Yes, some shit did happen. All kinds of shit. And that alone did cause loads of pain. But pain and suffering are two different things.
The suffering arose because I was carrying with me so many unconscious choices. I buried myself under many, many layers of belief that were not my own. I didn't even know there was another way, but I did start to get a glimmer of the possibilities...
I remember having this clear vision at the time - I felt like an actor trying to keep up with parts in numerous plays, all at once, running from one to the next, adding costume on top of costume, having completely lost track of my true self, and looking utterly ridiculous in the process! Talk about a humbling insight.
In the end, I had to see how I was clinging to people, ideas, and systems that did not have my best interests at heart. Perhaps I had to go through this in order to awaken to the power that resides in my own heart. I had to shed false identity after false identity in order to become the one that had my own best interests at heart.
Looking back, I would not trade this experience for anything in the world, because as I shed my reliance on the external - on people and things and systems outside of myself - I was opened up to experiences of a vast inner world, of inner truth and authority, and was opened up to contact with guides who have helped me learn and grow ever since.
None of this would have been possible had I remained stuck in fear, anger, and victimhood. Lesson after lesson was all about learning how to shift my life energy, shift my awareness and consciousness... how to take one small step at a time, from despair to anger, from anger to neutrality, from neutrality to acceptance, and on goes the upward spiral of energy shifting!
This may sound like fluffy woo woo stuff to some, but I am here to tell you it is real. Even small shifts in energy can lead to big changes in "the real world".
Thus the seeds of my healing practice were planted in the early days of this great change. Indeed, healing itself can be thought of as restoring (remembering) wholeness. My work even now is often about helping others to reintegrate their non-physical nature, and bridging the gaps between the various parts of ourselves that get fragmented over time.
What greater shift can you imagine that moving from the feeling of being alone and isolated in the world, to the awareness of being connected to everything, everywhere... all at once? (What a great movie, btw)
We've all been through our own cycles of breaking down to build up, so why not come together in new ways to learn from one another? To talk about our experiences? Perhaps as we move through the great changes ahead, we will open ourselves up to similar leaps in even greater spiritual development.
The Great Call-It-What-You-Want
Seems to me that we are well into a long predicted, great change. My sense is that the times we are moving through now will change everything - inside and out.
To understand what is happening, some have long tried to weed their way through endless prophecies and conspiracies, through false doctrines, dilemmas, and dichotomies, escaping thought prison after thought prison. Many of these "early adopters" ended up de-energized and de-spirited. Feeling alone, isolated, crazy.
Others persevered, with seeds planted long ago by helpers, healers, and guides taking root deep within the soul.
The time is upon us now.
Communities small and large are forming all around the world, ships of souls preparing to travel through the times ahead.
"the great call-it-what-you-want / fill in the blank"
The Great _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Reset
Awakening
Singularity
Merger of Man & Machine
Change
Rebellion
Resist
Shift
Transformation
Change in Cycles
Move into the Age of Aquarius
Ascension
Harvest
Transition to 5D
Arrival of Christ Consciousness
Unfolding of New Earth
Nothingburger
Same As It Ever Was
Which Is It? How Do You Know?
Who or what determines which of these will be? Or is it simply a matter of choosing what one wants to believe, and then perception follows belief?
What if we are all arriving at the same train station, so to speak. And now is the time we each choose our preferred destination? Which train we wish to board, and who we are choosing to travel with?
If this is so, who among us will make these choices consciously and with full awareness?
Unbelieve-able: The Ability to Unbelieve
What skills will serve us best in these times, as we transition, transform, and transmute the old into the new?
Consider the power of un-believing.
What becomes possible when you learn how to deprogram yourself from systems that no longer serve the purpose for which they were created?
What kind of health system goes about systematically murdering the sick?
What kind of police or military turns on the very people they were created to protect?
What kind of spirituality spreads like wildfire only to distract, divert, and disperse the very energies needed to connect with and grow the soul?
Learn and Practice Un-Believing.
This is how we create space within ourselves to once again let spirit return. This is how we escape the thought prison. This is how we tap back into the divine spark of life energy that guides our soul's impulse towards growth and expansion.
Love expands us. Fear constricts.
Unbelieving takes courage and resolve.
It is the act of choosing to see, to realize that there is far more that we do not know than there known, or perhaps even knowable.
You see, the world is filled with those that would have you believe in this or that version of every story imaginable:
What is the nature of the Universe, God, the cosmos?
What does it mean to be fully human? Are we inherently good? Evil? Something else?
How do we heal ourselves and others? What are the mechanisms?
What happens after we die?
Stories are the lifeblood of the human species. Our ability to make and tell stories is how we got to this point in our evolution. It is our greatest strength. As with every great strength - therein lies a critical vulnerability.
Things would be fine if we all collectively understood that we are just telling stories, listening to stories, and believing things that may or may not be true and real in a physical, objective sense.
But for the most part, this is not where we are.
As we have seen throughout many cycles in history, groups of humans glob onto one set of stories or another, and then go about systematically trying to destroy anyone and everyone that threatens their beloved stories.
What Is the Antidote?
Unbelieving is one possible way to counter these forces.
Creating space for conversation, compassion, and a life lived in the question.
This to me is what it means to practice mysticism. As a mystic, I find practical ways to help myself and others without weaponizing wisdom. Without attempting to force others into one box or another.
We live in a time where it is an act of rebellion to consciously suspend belief, and instead - choose to spend time in the empty space of free will.
We live in a time when it is radical to fully accept oneself, and in so doing, accept everyone else for who and what they are at the same time.
The reason why we can unbelieve in the bars of the prison cell is because they are not real in the first place.
Likewise, we can unbelieve
that we live in a world of energy scarcity despite observing that we live in an energetic universe
that we are being held down and held back due to lack of money, time, opportunities
that we are merely childlike animalistic meat sacks, in need of mommy and daddy government, or any other military-health-industrial authority figure
Then What's Your Great Idea?
As is so often the case, the response will be "what then?"
If not this, then what?
If the vaccines are not helping people, then it must have been a series of honest mistakes, right? (Never mind the long and well documented history of corruption and illegal behavior by all of the players involved... that's just crazy conspiracy theories)
If aliens are not real, or not from other star systems, then what are they? A collective hallucination? Us from the future? C'mon, what then?
If CDC, FDA, CIA and the rest aren't working to protect us, then what? Because obviously anything else is... you guessed it, just another crazy conspiracy theory!
Do you see how hard it is to find the space between beliefs, let alone find some way to spend a little time there?
And yet, if not from this very place of openness, peace, and equilibrium — from what other point is it possible to truly exercise free will in choosing your beliefs with conscious awareness?
The Human Experience
Does this mean we should believe nothing?
Of course not. Belief forms the fabric of how we experience our lives.
But it is also worth noting here: it is the mind that is addicted to belief. The heart, in contrast, simply knows. The difficulty we run into is that the heart often does not care about the same things that the mind cares about.
The heart seeks balance, symmetry, peace, and truth. The heart thrives in wholeness, facilitates connection to all living things and life energy itself.
On the other hand, the mind worries, time trips forward and backward, creating endless possible threats, or imagines rewards to be chased after... the mind trades in FOMO & FUD (fear of missing out and fear, uncertainty, and doubt).
And yet, there's a whole other way: unity of heart and mind. When and where we find unity of heart and mind, all things are possible.
It may seem that this is a difficult place to find. But there are ways to begin down this path.
One of them is to find some space from which we can observe our beliefs for what they are. In that process, we may find gaps and opportunities to bring in and develop new beliefs. When we give ourselves the space to truly see from the soul's perspective, we are not limiting ourselves to an arbitrary list of pre-packaged options.
I have spent a fair amount of time in recent years in this kind of openness. Indeed, my six months of life out in the desert in New Mexico was precisely that - living out in the dry, barren but beautiful openness with endless skies and the brightest stars at night that I have ever witnessed.
Where did that take me? Back to the realization that we didn't come to this realm to pretend we are alone. That there are other ways to create space besides literally moving to the middle of nowhere.
We do not have to go to the desert or the top of the mountain to find this kind of openness. We can cultivate space and openness anytime we so choose.
Creating From the Open Space of Free Will
From my perspective, there are three dimensions of the human experience that seem particularly distorted and dis-integrated in our current cultural climate:
Healing -- how can we heal ourselves and support healing in others?
Creativity and creative destruction -- what needs to be deconstructed and cleared out of the way to allow for new growth and development?
Inner / Outer Guidance -- how are we integrating experiences of and with non-human intelligence?
To me, all of the above are core and fundamental aspects of the human experience, and yet they often seem less-than-relevant to most, unless profit or entertainment (distraction) are involved.
For my part, I look forward to fostering conversations about the very real and practical ways these three elements of life overlap and come together to help us navigate the great change.
Welcome to the High Mesa Mystic Show
If you have read this far, thank you. Your attention is a hopeful sign that there is something here worthwhile, something worth discussing.
This post is an expanded and revised version of a recent newsletter I shared as part of my practice at High Mesa Mystic.
This post captures the point-in-time mindset behind the creation and launching of the High Mesa Mystic Show, a new adventure in curiosity, where I look forward to speaking with guests about many of the topics covered in this post.
The podcast will be posted here at Substack, and also at all major podcast directories like Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeart Radio.