This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
Jonathan: There is so much turmoil in the world these days…emotional roller coasters. My sense is that all will work out (as it always does) because optimistic solutions eventually prevail in the world. Plenty of people disagree with me. Do you have any thoughts on this?
Jane: The world is going through a major shift now. It is a shift in consciousness. Humanity has been becoming increasingly more conscious, as a part of the human evolutionary process. What I mean by that is we are increasingly more able to access personal, direct experience of reality, as opposed to having to be told what reality is from outside ourselves. At the same time, we have been building up a distorted idea of what progress is, which is an avoidance of consciousness.
In order to address this, it’s important to understand what limiting decisions are because they are what lead to the distortion of our perception of reality and the avoidance of truth, which is what cause our experiences in life to not work well. Limiting decisions are unconscious decisions locked in place in early childhood. They are a misinterpretation of pivotal life events that cause you to decide, for example, that you are not valuable, lovable, safe; or that people can’t be trusted; or that there isn’t enough to go around; or that you are bad, a failure, powerless and so on. You therefore shut off the channels for knowing your value, receiving love, etc. in reality. And so each time you made a limiting decision, from that point on, instead of being present and engaging in life in that area of your life and moving toward what really matters to you, your focus became diverted into focusing on, and compensating for, what you believed to be a deficit in the nature of reality, other people, and/or in yourself.
The majority of people in the world don’t realize that transforming these distortions is the way forward in life. Instead they are just focused on compensating for them, as if that is what making progress in life is about. By compensating I mean going toward symbols that symbolize what you want, but don’t actually give it to you. For example, the choices of food people eat, the kind of cars they buy, the career path they choose, the type of person they are attracted to in business and personal relationships, their choices of entertainment, the products they buy, the way government is organized, how financial institutions are structured, the way education is set up — all of these to greater or lesser extents (depending on how conscious the person is or the people are) are often used to compensate for lacks in well-being, empowerment, a sense of stability and safety, and so on, rather than deal with the internal source of those lacks and thereby making progress in reality.
The world is structured, to a large extent, on this faulty foundation. And this has worked, more or less, for a very long time, with some corrective shifts in consciousness along the way. But there is a larger evolutionary timing, which is evolving our overall reality forward whether we are ready or not. Now is the time for a very major shift, because the old, unconscious, distorted ways of what has been conceived of as human progress have reached the end of their course, and they are falling apart. The house of cards is falling down.
But there is something much more stable and true that is underlying all of experience that has been camouflaged by the unevolved avoidance of truth the world has been based on. And actually there is quite a lot that has been built in the world that is based on the truth of the real world. And that will begin to come much more to the fore, as the old dysfunctional structures fall away. This underlying building up of consciousness, based on the essence of real experience (Universal Truth, Love, Principle, Life and Spirit) is what has really been sustaining us, and is where real stability, safety and well-being reside. We are in the process of shifting survival systems, and it’s difficult for people to let go of the old one until it is no longer working. That is why it is falling apart. So, yes, I see a very optimistic way forward.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
Question from Jeffrey (written before recent events in Egypt)
Jeffrey: I’m wondering your perspective on increased human violence? …the Moscow airport, Tucson rampage, border fences, deranged individuals killing police. Each successive day leads to another carnage event…then the next higher level of security. It’s never ending cat ‘n mouse. What might human society be unaware of that is resulting in such destructive behavior? Is there anything we can do to reverse or arrest this escalation effect? Or maybe it’s all relative…bad apples just a part of civilization.
Jane: We are in a major transition period in terms of what it takes to create stability, well-being and survival. In the past there were clearly spelled out ways of earning a living and moving ahead in your profession; there were spelled out ways of what it takes to be a good, moral person; there were clear roles you were supposed to take on to create a stable family — what a good husband, wife or child is; and so on.
But many of the definitions and structures holding these in place are falling apart or rapidly changing. And this is on top of the more global challenges of financial instability, global warming, and so on. What people leaned on for structuring their lives is serving them less and less well, and holding less and less meaning for them. People feel, in many ways, they no longer have a stable way to take care of their basic needs that they can count on.
These old structures and models and roles did give people stability, without people really having to be conscious or having to relate directly to life itself. But the evolutionary process is one of moving toward greater and greater consciousness. What works during one particular stage of evolution won’t necessarily work during another, as evolving forward is inherent in life.
And those who are invested in the old forms are having a hard time in this transition. The more the investment is, the harder the transition. And this can lead to varying degrees of social chaos and violence.
The solution is learning how to relate directly to life itself, rather than leaning on and being at the mercy of human constructs and definitions from those outside of you. One way of putting this is it’s moving from leaning on some external, static, authoritative defining of how things should be — to something much more fluid and changeable, requiring much more personal responsibility.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
This a continued dialog with Jered about the Australian Founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, who has been responsible for leaking sensitive secret government information out into the world.
Jered: My concern is the wisdom and consequences of these disclosures since there’s no way Assange read 250,000 sensitive documents.
Jane: What is the purpose of judging the wisdom and consequences of his disclosures? I guess you’re wondering what the righteous thing to do is. Should we allow government to keep certain things secret and who should be in control of that? Is that covering up things that should be known by the general population? But if we don’t keep these things secret, is that causing even more harm?
Focusing on trying to control each other is a losing battle, and if we look out in the world that becomes pretty apparent. We can’t control the terrorists, we can’t control which political party wins and the laws they end up passing or revoking. Sometimes things go our way, and sometimes they don’t. But that’s not the real playing field. And the shift the world is undergoing right now is increasingly making that clearer. We have been looking in the wrong direction for solutions.
Whether Assange’s actions are wise or not is not the issue. He did what he did, and apparently is going to continue doing it. You could say he is in a dialog with the world, and the world is in dialog in response. And how you relate to the dialog will be a learning experience for you. The dialog itself is what opens up truth. As I said in the previous post, the issue now is engaging rather than trying to control. Engaging is where the resources, safety and well-being can be accessed, because it’s hooking into a larger truth, a larger framework beyond any individual person’s control. It’s participating in life, rather than trying to control it.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
Jill: I’m glad I’m not young during these times, and have the wisdom of my years. It must be much harder for young people to cope with the world today.
Jane: If we were born into the world now, the way we were many years ago when we were actually born — we would be much less equipped to deal with life today than the new generations are. It’s a different experience for the younger generation. They’re set up differently inside than we are, because each generation generally comes into their lifetime more evolved than the previous ones.
They are generally coming in with much more consciousness and more of a sense of who they are. And they are more able to define their experience from their own direct experience, as opposed to relying on external authority.
And they are born into a different world experience than we were born into — with different energy, and a whole different level of knowledge and consciousness than the way the world was when we were born. Generally speaking, people are in vibrational resonance with the world as it is when they are born, which is what astrology is about.
The internal dilemmas the younger generations are encountering are on a much more evolved level, and are more in tune with present-moment experience, than that of many of their parents. Therefore, their parents are totally at sea with what they are dealing with. The old paradigm is you use discipline to act the way you are suppose to act, regardless of how you feel about it. There is a particular standard of behavior you are supposed to meet to be considered good and upright and successful. Many parents can’t understand why their children can’t just force themselves to conform to it. That is what is considered good character. And it used to be acceptable to beat children into submission. To a large degree the older generations, when they were children, didn’t have enough sense of who they were to reject that perspective. But the newer ones can no longer accept that. They are here to solve the actual dilemmas, not to superficially solve it by controlling their external behavior.
The old standards of behavior are human constructs that were a way of creating order for the less evolved stages of human development, because we weren’t connected enough to the truth of present-moment experience to relate directly to life. And that was in addition to the old paradigm perspective of original sin, which results in the idea that being moral requires being other than who we really are. But the newer generations can’t as easily override who they really are, and can’t bend themselves to conform to some made up construct, which they are becoming increasingly more aware hasn’t been working.
Instead they have more of an ability to tap into present-moment truth about themselves and the world around them, which is what I call the “real world.” And the more people tap into the real world of direct knowledge and experience, the faster the evolutionary process occurs. It is a process of bringing us out of the distortions and illusions caused by the collective human history of limiting decisions and emotional defense systems — which is the source of the huge messes humanity is facing — and into the real world where life actually does work wonderfully well.
The young people of today are in a transition between those two worlds. Actually we all are, but to a large extent the younger generations are further along in the transition. Mentally and physiologically, probably on a cellular level, they are more in alignment with the transition that is occurring. But they also don’t yet have much experience in life to draw on, and are not yet physically, emotionally and mentally fully developed. They are in the difficult position of knowing the adults don’t have the answers, but they don’t yet have enough experience to be able to structure themselves.
They are more hard-wired to look for or relate to a larger or more expanded source beyond their parents, but yet they feel cheated out of being able to lean on their parents for answers, because that feels like not having parents. This then puts pressure on the older generations to expand out of their locked-in perceptions of reality that feel safe to them. The shift humanity is going through now means that there no longer is safety in sticking to the old tried and true ways of doing things and thinking about things. Safety no longer lies in maintaining control.
As I mentioned in my newsletter last week, these are challenging times for many people. And the question of whether humanity is moving forward or backward is not necessarily obvious. We have clearly made huge advances in many areas of human experience, but are also facing potentially disastrous outcomes from directions humanity has gone in, and continues to go in.
A couple of people responded to the invitation I gave last week for dialog. And their responses are in the previous blog post. My own perspective on this actually requires far more space than I can use in a newsletter article, and is in fact a major focus of my 12-week “Life is Meant to Work” tele-seminar. And so, in my below article, I’ll give you an overview of some of where I’m coming from, which as always is based on the principle that life is meant to work.
I invite you to participate in further dialog about this or any other topic that seems important to you, by going to my contact form — click here.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Jane Ilene Cohen
Intuitive & Transformational Counselor
(760) 753-0733
The Challenge in Front of Us
An Overview by Jane Ilene Cohen
Up until now, in the human evolutionary process, we have been making progress toward increasingly more consciousness, intelligence, truth and love. And now we are being faced with a shift that is a quantum leap beyond where we have been before. It seems clear to me we are in the midst of a transition period, in which there is increasingly more pressure to make this shift. And eventually the shift is going to just happen, ready or not. For those who have not prepared themselves for it, it will probably be a much rougher transition.
Up until a certain point, humanity’s idea of progress was more or less working, as we hadn’t yet reached a tilting point. But it has been based on some fundamentally false premises. These are that the physical world is the basis of actual reality and is the source of real power, and that the source of our well-being and survival therefore is the physical world and people outside of ourselves. And therefore we believe that they are also the sources of our individual and collective problems. And so this is where we are focusing our efforts for solutions. We have been using our considerable resources to gain increasingly more control of the world around us, and to amass more and more power and resources based on this. Our goal becomes having more and controlling more, as if that will give us what really matters to us. But the result is actually the opposite.
It appears to me that it takes us having pushed this old paradigm to its limits (so that there is nowhere further to go with it), and getting to the point where the disastrous outcomes of doing so are so apparent that we can no longer ignore them — before we are willing to make this shift that feels to us like jumping off of a cliff. It’s giving up the idea that our safety lies in our human control, and instead relying on something we have no control over, based on the recognition of the totally benevolent nature of reality (the Universe, Life….).
It is making the shift into a new survival system, as radically different as shifting from breathing water, to breathing air. Rather than, from within a limited human perspective, relying on controlling the world and people external to ourselves for our safety and well-being — it’s coming into a co-creative relationship with a larger non-physical source, which can only be accessed from inside of each individual soul. It is a recognition that the nature of reality works wonderfully well, when it isn’t distorted by human control.
The bottom line is that none of us is at the mercy of what others of us do or don’t do. We can’t rely on other people to do what is good for them, or for us, or for our ecosystem; and we also can’t force them. Putting our energy and focus in that direction is not moving toward actual solutions, but in the opposite direction. It is standing on the ground that caused the problem in the first place. The basis of greed and corruption is believing the physical is the source, which is inherently a framework of limits, leading to power-struggles or sacrifice.
Where I believe the solutions lie is in each of us moving toward recognizing how we are using our own individual, non-physical power. (By non-physical I mean what motivates or gives life to the physical, such as love, truth, spirit, intelligence, consciousness — or the unhealed, unevolved aspect of it, such as manipulation, lies, fear, avoidance, and so on.) And it takes recognizing where the source of our well-being and survival really comes from, and moving toward a co-creative process with that larger source. This requires letting go of the control.
What is in the way of this is a fundamental power-struggle that humanity is engaged in. And it has to do with us focusing on substitutes for what really matters to us, and building up substitute worlds as a part of this power-struggle. It also keeps us from accessing our real power. (This last paragraph, in particular, is a large subject that I only have just touched on.)
To learn more about the “Life is Meant to Work: Prepare Yourself for a New Reality” 12-week Tele-seminar, click here.
Jane Ilene Cohen will be interviewed by
Kalon Women Community’s Founder, Sandra Levitin
August 4th at 6:30pm Eastern Time / 3:30pm Pacific Time
Suppose you could… Change your perspective of reality in a way that would deeply empower you to take charge of your life no matter what is going on in your outside world and no longer struggle at trying to make life work.
Intuitive & Transformational Counselor, Teacher and Author, Jane Ilene Cohen, will share the personal journey that brought her to a totally positive new thought system, based on the principle “Life is Meant to Work.” This thought system, combined with her NLP training, is what has enabled her to facilitate profound life-changing results for her clients for the past 14 years.
Other Topics include:
“Limiting Decisions: How Your Perception of Reality Gets Distorted”
“Is Life Meant to Work or Is It Not?”
“Self-Interest vs. Enlightened Self-Interest”
To hear the show and/or ask any questions call (347-884-8656)
Manny: What causes an evolved person to be caught up in a physically violent situation?
Jane: We are complex beings, made up of many aspects, some representing who we are in our essence, and some representing unhealed or unevolved aspects of ourselves. Each aspect has a particular vibrational energy that we radiate. When an aspect of ourselves resonates with an aspect of someone or something else, it gets amplified. And then we feel affected by that aspect of the person. Other people who resonate with different aspects of that same person may have a completely different kind of relationship with him.
Negative vibrations, such as fear and hatred are extremely common in people, even if they don’t tend to initiation relating in that way. When someone does something very hateful toward a person, in most cases, it elicits that same kind of response in that person in response. People generally feel justified in attacking if they feel attacked. Someone who has done some horrendous crime generally elicits the response of hatred from others, even from people who consider themselves to be good, loving people. The people who do these kinds of hateful acts, are like lightening-rods. They serve as an outlet for the kinds of emotions that people don’t generally find acceptable in themselves.
As long as there is that kind of vibration in you, it can be elicited in you by someone who lives in that vibration, and you can be drawn into that world.
Whatever vibrations you have in yourself has to do with the perception of reality you are holding in place. And whatever that is, has influence in the world around you.
Truth is a fundamental element in real experience. It connects our common reality, and is the foundation of it. It is what gives us real stability. And yet people often feel they have to avoid it, in order to keep the stability of the substitute worlds they are holding in place. At the same time, we assume mutual understanding between each other about what is actually true. We all have had the experience of knowing when the truth is obvious, such as when the indication of truth becomes so massive there is no way to avoid seeing it, or knowing it.
Truth is transparency. It’s seeing what is really there. Being truthful means conforming to actuality, to reality. It’s as though we’re usually living in an opaque atmosphere, which is masking what is actually true. And some people can see through it more than others can. And there are also times or certain conditions that happen in common human experience where that atmosphere thins out, and becomes for the moment, transparent, when something is so apparently true that no one can miss it.
People try to hide many pieces of truth, because of what seems to be either in their own self-interest or the self-interest of someone else, feeling as though they know what the repercussions would be if they didn’t. And sometimes it seems to work, and sometimes it doesn’t. In interpersonal relationships, in which the relationship really matters to you, if you don’t open it up to truth everywhere possible, it limits the potential of the relationship. But truth means engaging and getting involved, because it often takes you down a path you hadn’t anticipated, outside of your control. It has a life of its own. It is connected to a reality beyond what you could possibly conceive of, beyond the perspective and scope of limited human perception.
When we speak “the truth” we are revealing something that is objective. It is something we don’t control. It’s not about giving an opinion or advice, or making a judgment. Those can often be done without consciousness. Truth is more conscious than that. It has to do with revealing where you are. There is a difference between giving an opinion or advice — and being aware that we gave it. Our opinion, advice or judgment may or may not reflect truth, but it is true that we had those thoughts and ideas, and gave them. Our responses and ideas can come from many sources, some connected to inspiration and some connected to limited human perception. When they are connected to limited human perception, then the value of having expressed the idea is not about the content of it, but is about having revealed something true about you. And the truth that is revealed is the fact that you had this idea. That is what is true. The content of the idea, itself, could be described as a reflection of your limited perception, which didn’t make it past the walls of your defended self. You can either embrace the truth revealed by that or go in the opposite direction. If you embrace it, it can lead to your transformation, and therefore, evolution.
If, your thought comes from inspiration instead of coming from limited human perception, then you are tapping into Divine Source, and the content, itself, then reflects what is true. You have reached beyond your defended self where you are just reflecting back on yourself, and have broken through to a larger and real Source. And so in this scenario you are coming to truth from two directions: The content of the thought itself, as well as the fact that you had that thought.
Everyone inherently knows that truth is extremely powerful. But what they don’t know is if truth is for them, against them, or just arbitrary? And so people tend to feel afraid of its power and therefore often control it from being revealed. And so whether truth is for or against us, or is arbitrary, is the real issue. Everything hinges on the answer. Whichever we decide, and whichever the truth of it is, determines the world and reality we are living in.
To listen to the Preview audio for the next “Life is Meant to Work” Tele-seminar, click here.
For the info page with all of the details about the upcoming “Life is Meant to Work” Tele-seminar, click here.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
Part One of a Three Part Dialog.
Question from Manny from Rancho Santa Fe: (Real names are never used.)
Manny: Even with the most enlightened of us, there are times that, by chance, things happen that put us in danger, such as a wrong turn to a dangerous neighborhood or a robbery takes place where you are shopping. Isn’t there a time when even the more evolved of us has to regress to the physical for survival, for those times when truth, love, enlightenment, etc, will unlikely have an immediate role in survival?
Jane: Being in an evolved state of consciousness does have an immediate role in those kinds of situations. The kind of state you are in determines whether you are able to be resourceful or not, are empowered or disempowered, are aware and conscious or not. That doesn’t mean you can’t also take some form of physical action. But it does mean that whatever kind of action you do or don’t take, will be from a more conscious and empowered place.
The purpose of the attacker is to reinforce a reality in which physical violence dominates.This is the kind of world he believes he can win in, because he has given up on getting what really matters to him, such as love, significance, personal empowerment, and so on. In some form he believes himself to be a loser or a victim in the real, commonly-shared world that he doesn’t control.
When an attacker does violence to another person, there is an emotional reason why he does it, which is a result of limiting decisions* he has made, such as that he is powerless or valueless or is bad. When he does this kind of act, he is immersed in a substitute, unreal world, or he couldn’t do it, because it would be against his real self. It is a world most likely of enemies, hatred, violence, and invulnerability. And because he feels powerless to fight this world internally, which is the actual source of it, he is creating symbols for it externally, and then he attacks the symbols. He is trying to impose this substitute world on whomever he attacks. It’s a state of insanity, disconnected from who he really is, and disconnected from reality.
What people are pulled into when someone physically attacks them is not the physical world. It is the non-physical distortion of reality that that person is representing, which is their substitute world. And because it is a non-physical world, you always have a choice of whether or not to participate in it.
If you have a limiting decision* that is activated by the reality the attacker is representing, then you will most likely be pulled into that world. If, however, you are firmly in your present moment experience, and not being triggered by a limiting decision*, you can’t be pulled into the world of the attacker. If you do not have a limiting decision* that is activated, you will be able to relate to the person outside of the substitute world he is trying to uphold, and outside of a state of fear and disempowerment. In that case, you would be an unlikely target in the first place.
*Limiting decision: A decision made in early childhood that is some form of that life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you — such as “I am powerless,” “bad,” “without value;” or “The world is a dangerous place,” “People can’t be trusted,” and so on.
The term false or substitute persona is what I use instead of what is normally thought of as the Ego, and comes from a different perspective. The ego is generally thought of as an aspect of human beings, inherent in who we are. People are thought of as having a strong or weak ego, which describes how strong their sense of self is, their sense of importance or self-worth. A person who is described as egotistic is thought to be arrogant or self-centered, in other words, too involved with their self.
The false persona, on the other hand, is the sense of self that is created and built upon in the process of making limiting decisions*. It is simply a construct, and is not who the person really is. However, people generally believe it to be who they really are, and generally experience this process of building up the false self as building strength or effectiveness for functioning in reality, out in the world.
When limiting decisions* are made, we start making distinctions we never had before we made the limiting decisions*. For instance, if you made the limiting decision* you are powerless, then the issue of feeling powerless or powerful becomes something you focus on. The issue of whether you do or don’t feel powerful was never something you thought about before you made the decision. You were just simply in your power. Or if you made the limiting decision* that you were not valuable, your value then becomes an issue of focus.
Before you made the limiting decision*, your focus was, instead, on relating directly to life, propelled and motivated by your enlightened self-interest. You were functioning from your empowerment, not focusing on it. When you are focusing on the issue of whether you are powerful or not, feeling empowered then becomes the point of your life, rather than life itself. You have now created a buffer between you and your direct experience. You are focused on building your false persona, for the purpose of compensating for not feeling powerful.
At the same time, this process of diverting our attention to the areas of our limiting decisions* has an important purpose in our evolution, because, on the soul level, we make limiting decisions* in the areas of particular interest to us. And so, in the case of having made a decision we are powerless, it immerses us in the experience of feeling powerless, focusing on the issue of power, getting into power-struggles, and so on. And so while it seems to be a divergence from actually living life, it is an exploration into an area of great interest to you as a soul, which you never would have explored and gained so much experience about if you hadn’t made the limiting decision*. And so making the limiting decision* and developing the false persona are important parts of our evolutionary path. But the false persona is not who we inherently are.
From my perspective, the concept of the ego as representing an aspect of who we are, is an outdated concept. It is connected with the idea that our physical body and personality are who we are, and that, as such, it needs to be bolstered and supported. I believe this to be the wrong focus. It distracts us from actually participating and engaging in life. Our physical body is, instead, a vehicle for the expression of who we are, not who we actually are. Our body, and the substitute persona we develop as a part of the limited human experience on earth, are ways of interacting on earth and engaging in our evolutionary process of moving from the physical to the divine, and integrating the two.
The soul essence is who we really are, and the more in touch with it we are, the more effectively it is able to use the physical vehicle to express itself. The focus of what is real isn’t on the vehicle, but on the expression that is coming through it. And that expression affects the vehicle — how it looks, how it feels, its impact on others, and its fundamental well-being. The focus of that expression is on whatever is its enlightened self-interest in the process of engaging in life.
*Limiting decision: A decision made in early childhood that is some form of deciding that life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you — such as “I am powerless,” “bad,” “without value;” or “The world is a dangerous place,” “People can’t be trusted,” and so on.
To listen to the Preview audio for the next “Life is Meant to Work” Tele-seminar, click here.
For the info page with all of the details about the upcoming “Life is Meant to Work” Tele-seminar, click here.
