(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.

(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)

Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.

Julian: In the news recently there is focus upon ‘hacker victims’ in UK newspaper mess. Then there are people who express frustrations with life as if a victim of the world.  I’m wondering how you might characterize the difference between these two?

Jane: Regardless of the external circumstances, being a victim has to do with attitude and interpretation.  If your general attitude toward life is that it works well for you, then when something that seems to not go your way happens, you’re likely to interpret what happened from an empowered perspective.  If you’re general attitude is that life is hard or difficult or that it doesn’t work well for you, you’re likely to interpret what happened from a disempowered (or victim) perspective.

Whether you’re able to come from an empowered or disempowered place or not has to do with where you perceive the source of your well-being comes from.  If you see yourself as being dependent on what people outside yourself do toward you for your well-being, that puts you at the mercy of what other people do, which feels disempowering.  If you approach life from a larger perspective, knowing that there is a larger truth or guiding principle, that is inherently positive, that gives meaning to everything you experience in life — then you don’t feel at the mercy of whatever happens to occur in your life.  And as a result you approach whatever happens from a positive, empowered attitude, which then enables you to much more easily find solutions to whatever the challenge is and move in a positive direction.

(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)

Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.

As you may recall the last “Ask Jane” was a continuation of a dialog with William whose wife of nearly 30 years had become so emotionally out of touch with reality, it became impossible for him to live with her.  And the comfort and stability he had built up in his life with her for all of these years had been pretty much shattered.  The point of my answer to him had to do with the only thing that really happened is he learned that he was looking in the wrong direction for his source of well-being and stability.

In response to that “Ask Jane,” I received this request from a reader:  “Will you please expound next on what actually gives us stability?”

The answer to this is a large subject, beyond the scope of this newsletter, and goes to the heart of what the “Life is Meant to Work” Thought System Course I teach is about.  So, for this article, I’ll just touch on a piece of it:

The source of the deep feeling of instability for William was he had had more faith in his ability to control the outcomes in his life to result in his benefit, than he had in the inherent nature of how life works. Real stability has to do with coming into alignment with what is actually true, with what is real, the inherent principles and foundations of Life, Truth, Love, Consciousness, Intelligence — present-moment reality; and allowing it to transform your experience — and you — in the process.  It requires letting go of human control.

People generally don’t consciously relate to Life itself (or an overall Intelligence or Consciousness, or a Divine Presence….),  which is not in human control — unless perhaps when they’re in some sort of crisis that they see no solution to that they believe they can control.  This is based on the deeply ingrained, underlying belief that life doesn’t work — or that it’s just arbitrary, and not something that can be counted on.

And it is based on the idea that what is actually real is the physical world, and can be controlled by human beings.  It’s just a question of:  Who is controlling whom?  Who is the source of well-being for whom?  Who is defining reality for whom?  We either control them or they control us.

William had been trying to control the outcome of what is actually true in his life with his wife.  And he was assuming that this huge change that has been happening in their lives would end up being harmful for both of them, rather than trusting that if he followed what is actually true, the shifting and changing that would result from it would move both of them forward in their personal growth and life’s path.

Another way to put it is we generally believe truth is against us.  People often compromise themselves in relationships rather than revealing what is really true from their perspective, because they don’t believe it could possibly work out if everyone did that.  It means they don’t put themselves in a transformational — which is another way of saying “evolutionary” — process where the whole picture could shift and change in a way that they don’t control, and can’t foresee the outcome of.

From the human perspective, putting oneself in that position is counter-intuitive.  That is because it is switching survival systems.  It is relying on a whole different system for your safety, stability and well-being.  In order to be willing to do that it is crucial to really get that — when your experience of reality is not distorted by limiting decisions* — life inherently does work.  It is switching from what I call the “substitute world” to the “real world,” which is one way to describe what the shift in consciousness is that the world is in the midst of now.

* Limiting Decision:  An unconscious 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.

(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)

Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.

As you might recall from the last “Ask Jane,” William’s wife has been becoming increasingly more disconnected from reality, and her psychiatrist hasn’t been able to help her.  She has become increasingly more difficult to live with, basically using her relationship with William to remove herself even more out of reality, by obsessively focusing exclusively on him having to be with her and do things for her every moment.  William had hoped that this was just a temporary phase, but he is now having to face she has to go into a full time residential program.  And until he finds one for her, he has to move out of the house, for his own sanity (and hers).  He has spent his whole life building up a comfortable and stable life, which he has been very successful in achieving in his life with his wife.  And now his wife has gone off the deep end and is wrecking havoc on that stability.

Jane: When people are younger they have to make their way.  They have to engage in life and put effort into making things work.  They have to try new things, which may make them uncomfortable.  When people get older and get married, many have this expectation of comfort and stability, and they build their life around achieving that.  They “settle down” and basically give up moving forward in life. The idea is that each partner has committed to staying in that relationship no matter what, in order to maintain the stability of this unit.

William: Don’t you think the majority of people look for safety and stability and comfort as their ultimate goal?

Jane: What people often associate with safety, stability and comfort is actually retreating from engaging in life, into a world they believe they can control. For example, people often make their significant others the center of their universe, rather than Life itself.   You’ve been trying to get your sense of stability from your relationship with your wife and the physical life you’ve built together, rather than having those be a part of your relationship with life.  And now, the person you have been trying to create stability with is falling apart.  And so your life feels like it’s falling apart. Your real source of stability is not, cannot, be another person.  Your real source is a larger truth, a larger frame-of-reference.  And if you’re not relating to that, then your world is inherently very unstable.

When you retreated into the comfort and stability of your marriage and comfortable life, the problem is you were sinking into an unconscious state.  The roles people have generally relied upon in marriage, business, religious life, and so on — such as how a wife or husband acts, how to advance in business, who defines what being good is — that are supposed to create stability, have been based on a lack of individual consciousness.  That is why they require you to lean on something pre-defined and set.  What is happening right now in human experience is a major shift toward increasing consciousness.  It’s a significant evolutionary change.  This means the old forms that are based on being unconscious are falling apart.  They’re losing their relevance.

William: Wouldn’t this road block that’s come along be earth shattering for anyone?  Wouldn’t anyone be upset when they’re going along a road, whether it’s a wrong road or not, when their partner goes crazy and all of a sudden you have to switch roads?

Jane: It depends on what you’re leaning on for your stability, whether you’re going to experience it as debilitating or not.  There is a huge difference between when you’re conscious and connecting on your life’s path, to life the way it really is — and when you’re invested in something that buffers you against actually engaging in life.  That is inherently unstable, because it’s an avoidance of truth.  The only thing that has really happened to you is you found out that you were mistaken about where real stability in life can be found.  And rather than continue to invest yourself in a mistaken direction, you have the opportunity to switch gears, and move toward what will actually give you stability.

(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.

(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.

(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.

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.

(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.

_________

RL: “GM foods are a fantastic idea, initially, produce mass quantity of food to feed people more quality food…  Of course there are people who want to monopolize on this instantly, such as Monsato, maximizing profits by contracting deals that cannot be withdrawn. This is done without being cautious to the effects, and giving time for science to perfect the process. Hydrogenated oil… when created at first, great idea! Food shall not spoil so quick… yet 30 years down the line we find its ill effects, but to completely ban it from use is impossible, as to the multi million dollar agreements of companies like crisco and mcdonalds. But 30 years down the line we find Hydrogenation of food is useful on sugar starches, to create an indigestible sugar that is great for diabetics, and does not cause insulin spikes.   Every discovery has an application, we just need to find the correct one, and the key requirement is patience. Money is the root of all evil….”

Jane: “To me, what you are saying boils down to: Because of greed, some people take advantage of, and have huge power over, other people.  This perspective is that we are victims of the greed of other people.

When we look at these kinds of issues, the focus is generally on those who take advantage of other people, as if they are the problem. This is not recognizing that those other people are just as powerful as those who “take advantage of them.”   The problem isn’t those who take advantage of other people; it is what causes those other people to give their power away and let themselves be manipulated.  And it is not others they are being manipulated by.

What people really desire are, for example, being powerful, valuable, successful, loved, safe and so on.  And having those is the true nature of people.  But people make limiting decisions* as children, which cause them to believe that can’t have those things, in whatever area it is that they make limiting decisions* in.  Because this feels deeply unacceptable to them, they develop emotional defense systems that cushion them against, or compensate for, not being able to access those.  People then get invested in symbolic substitutes for these that they feel they can control — such as buying expensive things they don’t need; drinking excessive alcohol; and eating unhealthy comfort foods that give them a false, but  immediate, sense of well-being.  These kinds of symbolic substitutes give them the feeling that they are powerful, valuable, successful, lovable, safe and so on.  People tend to buy into symbols of what gives them a sense of well-being.

When we go toward symbolic substitutes, we are believing that the source of our well-being is outside of ourselves.  This is what addictions are all about.  They are something physical that we believe we have control over that will give us a sense of having something we truly desire, but feel unable to access, such as love, emotional nourishment, power, success, significance and so on.  But in reality, an addiction is something that becomes out of our control, and ends up having control over us.

And so these symbolic symbols ultimately have harmful effects on us, as well as often on other people and our common environment.  This is because they not in alignment with reality.  They result in excessive consumption of resources and pollution in one form or another.  And they bring us into an increasingly deeper sense of hopelessness, because we’re looking in the wrong direction for solutions.  They cause us to rely on those who provide these symbolic substitutes believing they are the source of our well-being.  Those we believe have huge power over us, such as Monsato in your example, only have that power because we are giving it to them, believing them to be the source of what we need, as if that source could come from something outside of ourselves.”

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