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.

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.

(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 in Mission Valley

Jered: It occurs to me that the failure of big companies — such as General Motors that received bailouts — are not so much an example of limiting decision, as they are of “broken” organizations.  GM had to break before old methods were discarded for new. It makes me think of change with people.  Clearing decisions are baby steps. But traumatic events have outsized consequences – huge steps.

Jane: This is a complex subject that can’t be explained, so that it’s easily understood, in a few paragraphs.  I will be going into this more fully in my upcoming “Life is Meant to Work” webinar as part of explaining how our experience of reality gets out of alignment with Universal Truths.  But here is a brief explanation that I hope is helpful.

The failure of big companies, such as General Motors, is most likely based on perspectives of self-interest that are out of alignment with reality.  Whenever there are perceptions that are out of alignment with reality, there are limiting decisions* at the root of it.

People with similar limiting decisions* come together and hold in place a collective perspective on reality.  People are very invested in the particular way they perceive what reality is, which represents their source of stability, survival and well-being.  It is the ground they are standing on.  That perception of reality is often greatly distorted by limiting decisions* they have made.  In general people are not willing to give up that ground unless forced to.  That’s why it sometimes takes a major crisis before individuals — and especially a group of people, such as a major organization or company — are willing to restructure their perception of reality.  They have to perceive that it is in their self-interest to make a change.  The process of evolution occurs as what people perceive of as self-interest becomes increasingly more in alignment with what actually benefits them.

(Participant’s name has been changed to protect her privacy.)

(Jocelyn, who is in real estate, was describing the difficulty she is having in her business because of the economy.)

(To Jocelyn) “This is a very significant period of time in human history. The fact that old structures have been falling apart is causing people to reframe where their source of safety and well-being is. Is it counting on the banks to provide loans, or the stock market to behave in certain ways? Before 9-11, was it counting on our government to protect us from the terrorists in our own country? We have been counting on all of these external things that people have relied upon for security, that have been around for what seems like forever. This is an opportunity to understand that these major structures are falling apart because they are not the true source of safety and well-being. They are not the stability that humanity has convinced itself they are. It is necessary to start focusing on a different source. That’s what this whole thing is about, at least one level of it. And that’s what it’s about for you

The external circumstances being what they are, hold a lot of potential for all of us now. There’s a lot of pressure externally to make an internal shift. And this is requiring a shift inside of you. So to just sit there and wait for the external to change and to pin your hopes on that, is wasting this opportunity. This opportunity is here for a positive purpose. Take advantage of it.

Your boyfriend can say what he wants to say — he wants to be with you, he doesn’t want to be with you. And he can keep changing his mind back and forth, but he is not your source of safety and well-being. And so if you try to keep focusing on ‘Can you count on him or can you not,’ you’re going to be driving yourself nuts, because that is not the source, and you have to shift that, especially now. You’re right at the heart of the shift that is happening, because of the business that you’re in. You need to find a stable place inside of yourself that connects with the Divine, and stick with principles of what is true.

There is something that is keeping you afloat. And in some ways you are extremely good at it. There is some way that you have access to this source. When push comes to shove, you always make it. Things just turn around miraculously for you. There is some part of you that has a very, very good connection with that plumb line of stability. You just have to remind yourself that you really are very connected in some really powerful way, and start refocusing your way of orienting yourself to that, rather than your boyfriend or this client, or that client, because you’ll drive yourself nuts, because they are not the source.”

(Participant’s name is change to protect his privacy.)

(About Randy saying he’s having trouble getting work because of the economy.)

“You’re too invested in thinking you know what truth is, and grabbing the comfort of thinking you know what’s true based on what others say. You have a choice between relying on the external world to define reality for you, versus accessing your own direct experience. This relates to whether what you rely on for your source of safety and well-being comes from an external, limited, human source or from your own inner connection with a larger source (i.e. Life, the Divine, your Higher Self — however you define it). When you’re accessing your internal source you have direct access to experience, which allows you to come from a far more resourceful place, and be open to seeing the doors that are open, even if they don’t come from the familiar places you have counted on them coming from. The fact that major resources and institutions, that people have historically counted on, are failing at this time, is requiring a shift in consciousness for people. It is making clear that external sources (even long-established ones) are not where our safety and well-being come from.”