Transformational Teachings from Counselor Jane Ilene Cohen

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.

Question from Jered (Real names are never used):

Jered: What is your thinking on the Wikileaks guy, Assange. Is there a balance in that mess or …?  I question the practical usefulness of disclosures and Assange’s seemingly righteous stance. The world is a delicate place at times.

Jane: It’s difficult to know the effect that Assange revealing these documents is having on the world.  A multitude of things are happening in the world on multiple levels, much of which isn’t being talked about.

And whether Assange is coming from a place of truth and reality inside himself, or it’s a part of his emotional defense systems, I don’t know.  Very likely it’s some of both.

There are many forces and dynamics happening in the world that are a part of a complex evolutionary process.  And all we can do is to play our part in this universal drama, from within our own personal perspective and experience.

The reason that someone like Assange, who is affecting things on a global level, has such a huge impact is because of the general human belief that our safety and well-being is dependent on what the people outside of ourselves do.  And so we live in a world based on trying to control each other. And in fact, one statement Assange seems to be trying to make is about letting go of the control.  Although, his emphasis seems to be on other people letting go of the control, rather than himself.

The world is in great flux right now, and getting ourselves in the position to ride with the flow of life seems to me vitally important.  And that means letting go of the control.  But we can’t let go of the control as long as we believe the source of our safety and well-being is at the mercy of the world outside ourselves.

It’s a good thing that the book and movie “The Secret” (which teaches how to manifest into your life what you desire) has been so popular.  Even though the majority of people don’t have a lot of success making it work, many people have enough success with it to pay attention to it.  This makes it more acceptable to conceive of the idea that the source of our survival and well-being has to do with an internal process, not something imposed externally.

It’s not about what other people do; it’s about what you do.  Each of us is a leader, because we are presenting a model of reality with every thought we think, and expression and movement we make.  We are in a transition period, moving into taking personal responsibility for the world each of us is creating.  We can no longer afford to blame it on what the other person is doing.

The world you experience depends on the vibrational stream you enter into, the kind of energy you tap into — whether it’s positive and loving, or fearful and hateful, or somewhere in between.  That’s the world you are entering into.  And that’s the reality you project out into the world.

As we approach the New Year we can see the transition we have been going through in these tumultuous times.  One way to describe it is we are shifting from striving to be in control, to engaging instead.  The business world is demonstrating this very graphically with social media revolutionizing the whole field.  Engaging requires letting go of our investment in having things take on the particular forms we are invested in, that we believe we are in control of.

Stock piling resources, and building empires, and creating “foolproof” strategies — only to have the stock market tumble, home values bottom out, and the financial world destabilize.  How many symbols of being in control have you lost this year?  Your house?  Your job?  Your retirement funds?  Your relationship?  Have you been trying to regain that control in order to lean on it again for your stability?  Or have you been allowing the loss of it to reshape you, to transform you, to shift how you are looking at and approaching life itself?

There is no safety or stability in being in control.  But that is not a lesson the world could learn as long as the old ways of doing things seemed to be working.  Really engaging is the opposite of control.  It is putting the truth out there to be seen.  It is a process of vulnerably being present with each other and life itself.  This is giving up the control to a larger truth and reality than human control, and finding out that this larger source is based in love.

The bottom line of what this transition requires is love.  It takes love to let go of trying to control our experience, and to engage in life instead.  It takes a recognition of the love that’s all around, which is the ultimate gift.

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 question is from Jered in San Diego, CA
(Real names are never used.)

Jered: As we all know, the head of BP Oil is being crucified in the press. From my perspective, his personal comments to the public and Congress are the sincere truth.  His people are working around the clock to solve the problem. He goes home to the UK for personal family time and to get a few hours of fresh air. Certainly, his mind is preoccupied. Yet no matter what he does or says that is truthful – the public is unsatisfied. How does one handle these situations? It’s as though the truth is insufficient as compared to a carefully postured response.

Jane:  We don’t really know the character of Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, or really what responsibility he does or doesn’t hold for what occurred.  But I agree that he may very well be saying the sincere truth, but that many people want a scapegoat.  They want someone to emotionally pay for their suffering, as if that would make them feel better.

The whole idea of sharing the suffering seems to be very strong in people.  If I am suffering, then you ought to be suffering also — or you don’t care, you are selfish, you are a bad person.  But this has nothing to do with any real solutions, or any easing of human pain.

This is a triggered kind of emotional response, and not reality-based.  Whether Mr. Hayward is outwardly suffering or not, has no actual benefit to anyone who is suffering because of the oil spill.  It won’t have any effect on solutions being found any faster, or people getting compensated any faster.

People who are invested in finding scapegoats for their suffering are looking in the wrong direction for any real solutions, and are invested in holding in place vibrations of misery, hatred and pain.  As a result, I would guess, this is only one of many sources of misery in their lives, as this is what they would attract.

To answer your question more directly, about how to handle this kind of situation:  Rather than the focus being on how other people might respond to us, as if that is the source of our well-being, and trying to cater to them, the real dialog is between oneself and a larger perspective, beyond the limited human scope of things.  In other words, specifically in relation to Mr. Hayward, I’m sure there are lessons for him to learn, or he wouldn’t have found himself in this kind of situation in the first place.  For example it is possible that he might have an emotional defense system of keeping himself at a distance from getting emotionally or personally involved in general, believing that that will keep him safe.  This experience could rock that defense system, and be a huge wake-up call for him.  Perhaps if he had been more personally involved, he may have prevented what happened.

* Limiting Decisions: Unconscious decisions, usually made before the age of 6 or 7, such as “I am bad,” “I am not good enough.”  “People can’t be trusted.”  They are always some form of deciding that life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you.

Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s teachings during an
NLP TimeLine Therapy Session:

(For a definition of TimeLine Therapy click here)

“A leader is a person who is accessing reality from their own experience and expressing that. He or she has a fix on reality in a way that others don’t. They have a very strong knowing that something is very important and must be said and is really true. And the truth of it causes people to recognize it. When someone speaks truth you know it, whether or not you’re willing to listen to it, or have a trigger against it. But truth rings true. It has a big effect. And the fact that leaders are connected to truth, makes them leaders.

Wherever a person has the gift of contacting truth, that is amazingly exciting. It’s accessing the material of life. When you’re in contact with truth, you’re in contact with the Divine, you’re in contact with the evolutionary process, you’re in contact with the real living stuff.”

Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Insights during a
“Shifting into Your New Consciousness” group experience 2/26/09:

(For a description of this group click here.)

“A true leader is a person who is able to interpret or describe reality. It is a person who is able to be in the present moment and be a vehicle or a channel for reality.”