Freedom, Initiation, and Selflessness

You already know all this. Sometimes you might forget. Here is a reminder. The best part is at the end.

Among nations of the world, more than most, Americans are obsessed with freedom. “I got rights.” “This is a free country.” “Nobody’s going to tell me what I can do or what I can’t do.” “This is my land and I can do with it what I want” etc. Now, freedom is a beautiful and wonderful thing and it is what we all want as human beings. Ultimately it is the optimal state of affairs and most of us would rather live with more freedoms than less. However freedom as it turns out is a very complex issue that the United States Supreme Court is constantly pressed to sort out for the country. The big complication is numbers of people. If you are the only one living for a hundred miles around then obviously you can do pretty much what you want but when you live in a city of millions of people freedom becomes a matter of consensus.

Freedom looks one way to a child and another way to an adult and so it is for soul age. For a child, freedom is not having to go to bed at a certain time; for an adult freedom might be sleeping in on Saturday morning. For a young soul freedom could be cutting down all the thousand year old redwoods on their lot for a profit. For an Old soul freedom is walking through that same grove of redwoods every morning. Is there room for each to have our freedoms? In a time of dwindling resources, perhaps not.

What if you sent your child to a day care where there were no restrictions and the children were allowed to do anything they liked at any time? What if you armed all of them and set them loose on each other? What if you let them choose whatever they wanted to eat at any time and they all ate candy all day? What if they didn’t have to stay at the daycare but could wander the streets at will? The result would most likely be the kind of carnage that we now have in our larger society. Obviously there is something called maturity that plays a role in how much freedom can be tolerated. A person has to show they are up to the task, the ability to manage such a huge responsibility as freedom.

In some ways the United States, if it continues on the trajectory it is on, is showing signs of becoming a failed experiment. Freedoms are disappearing quickly. While freedoms are being lost right and left some freedoms like gun ownership are becoming a liability where violence is growing unchecked. In the corporate world there are those who say “Allow the market place to function without regulations and it will all adjust itself. The markets will trickle down the profits.” This has not proven to be the case because of something no one addresses, the lack of maturity, greed, and selfishness of the many younger souls who run much of corporate America. They are less capable of managing freedom because of their lack of maturity and lack of concern for others beyond their immediate social group. By contrast old souls love their freedoms but they will willingly forgo them out of service to the whole. A parent raising children knows they sometimes have to restrict their free lifestyle to spend time with their kids. Gone is their wild youth partying and staying out until all hours. They voluntarily sacrifice and take care of the children for a number of years, that is they should, but not all do. This is a different kind of freedom, the freedom to choose how you are going to handle your responsibilities. Well known spiritual teachers forego many freedoms as well because they realize they must be good examples for their students, again choosing to curtail some freedoms for the greater good.

As children we want more and more freedoms that we are not prepared to handle quite yet. The older we become the more freedom we have the opportunity to have and we often then choose responsibilities that require giving up our total freedom. The difference between maturity and lack of maturity is the difference between selfishness and selflessness. To a more mature person joy comes from giving up some well earned and deserved freedom to serve another, to look outside ourselves: taking care of the children, visiting a grandparent in the hospital, driving a friend to the airport. To a less mature person pleasure (not joy) comes from indulging in more personal pleasurable acts (getting drunk, driving fast, getting off sexually and so on). This sounds corny but it is actually quite true. Personal pleasure is nice and fun but does not produce joy. Joy comes from service of some sort, writing a book that helps others, giving an inspirational talk, counseling a friend in trouble, helping a desperate friend with their computer freeze up, giving another a pleasurable massage. Sex is way more wonderful when it involves giving great pleasure to a partner, not just seeking personal release.

Martyrdom on the other hand is not service because it is not really voluntary. Martyrs feel compelled to serve and do so under the onus of great resentment. There is no joy there, only misery. In life pain is inevitable at some level. Suffering is purely optional. While serving may involve some pain, suffering should never be confused with selflessness.

This discussion about freedom and service leads us to initiation. Initiation is a symbolic ceremonial action that tests an individual who is seeking a new level of responsibility, a new level of power, another level of influence. In a society where there is initiation there are socially recognized tests that allow the community to know if a person is ready to accept change, is ready to meet new requirements, is ready to take on leadership responsibilities. A person passes the test or they fail it. If they fail, it is acknowledged that they were not ready and that perhaps later they will be. An African saying says, “If the young people are not initiated they will burn down the village.” Isn’t that the truth! Just look at our society. We no longer initiate the youth and they do burn down the village so to speak. No, not every one of them do because some are mature enough to take on responsibility without the social tests. They are clearly the older souls; the less mature ones are the ones who need the initiations more than ever. How do we prepare the youth for the responsibility of taking on leadership of the society without any initiations? How do we prepare the young people to willing forgo some of their most precious freedoms to serve others altruistically, selflessly? Initiation and ceremony is the way. Without them we are a lost and confused people.

A society that understands freedom, understands initiation into those freedoms, and therefore also understands the selflessness that follows. You cannot have freedom without it. Initiation requires it, however selfless acts are not always the kind of dramatic events taking place in an action movie. Some people may say that many young people do sacrifice themselves by joining the military and serving their country in this way, yet that is an archaic model.

War

Let us talk for a moment about the immaturity and insanity of war as a place of initiation. Yes, many young people are initiated in the brutality of the battlefield and some display great courage in saving the lives of their brothers and sisters under attack. There is no doubt that this happens. Is this the type of initiation that society needs? No, not at all. We need to ask ourselves what these young people are doing there in the first place. War is an outdated model that served as a place of initiation for centuries when we human beings were even more ignorant than we are now and we functioned in a more primitive way. War is now obsolete. There is absolutely no justification for it. In this day and age all mass violence can be prevented if there is enough will and there is enough clarity to do what it takes to avoid it. The problem is actually cowardice and ambivalence among various countries of the world, unwilling to take the economic lumps to prevent it from happening. War is simply never justified because it is based on fear and a false sense of separation. War is failure and indulgence of the worst kind in the false sense of what is billed as valor and patriotism but is actually a sad pretense of control and power.

Let us look at the plight of our veterans. The reality is that most people engaging in fighting America and its allies for this or that cause feel disrespected, ignored, and unheard. They are desperate for love, for a feeling of belonging, for some kind of connection, a purpose that makes them feel legitimate. Often they are just very upset at being controlled by a foreign force on their own land. They want to economically play with the other kids on the block and are instead left out, impoverished, shunned, and discounted. This is all quite solvable if we were willing to see that the same thing that goes on in the school grounds goes on between the nations of the world. Since we haven’t resolved bullying in the school yard, we are a ways from solving conflicts between nations. It is all very solvable if we were willing to pay the psychological price for peace.

Unlike the military propaganda machine’s slogans, selflessness is not going out and killing foreigners in foreign lands because our politicians have labeled them the enemy. Furthermore upon their return, simply labeling our damaged and beaten up war veterans as heroes with a few medals is no substitute for initiation and ceremony, integrating them back into society. No, how we actually treat our soldiers from beginning to end is just abuse of human beings.

Some of these soldiers go to war with the best intentions, the most romantic notions of how they are fulfilling a family tradition of military service. Then their bodies and minds are deeply damaged in terribly mismanaged conflicts designed to serve corporate interests. Some of the more mature and honest veterans know this deep in their hearts and carry horrible psychological wounds because of it. Others, unable to admit they were taken advantage of, continue to tell stories of valor and heroism to their children only to perpetuate the delusion in new generations.

There are many other selfless acts that needn’t involve the drama of the battlefield. Selflessness is humanely taking care of desperate terrified children escaping death squads in their home countries. Selflessness is not minding getting up in the middle of the night for a crying sick child; selflessness is encouraging a self deprecating student to return to class and try again; selflessness is forgiving someone’s debt who is caught in a financial meltdown due to losing their job in a downsizing operation and so on.

Money

There are those that say that money is the root of all evil and so it seems at times. The truth is that money is neutral. It is the tender in a game developed by human beings to incentivize creativity and productivity. In the beginning it was a useful tool and many interesting things have come from it. Then gradually it became complicated and greed took over. The false personality used it as a tool to become dominant and control humans and became very successful at it. We could say that we, the children, learned to misuse it and thus we have the mess of today with terrible inequality, weapons of mass destruction, and the rest. However money, being neutral, can be a wonderful tool for selflessness. Money makes many things possible, supports constructive projects, helps people out of poverty and despair, and tens of thousands of other things. Money is a good example how we always have a choice about how we are going to use the tool we have made. Too often we attack the tool instead of taking the responsibility and seeing what our motives are.

Remote Healing

Each month, around the new and full moons, Jose, Lena or Anna leads a remote shamanic healing session. These approximately 30 minute sessions are designed to be experienced in a quiet, safe place free from distraction. Even if you cannot join live they can be very powerful, and always include a good clearing and beautiful icaros. Recording access is included for a short time afterwards. See the product description for dates and times.

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The Big Picture

Now let us look at a bigger picture. In the spirit of love and infinite generosity, Spirit gave us all ultimate freedom to dream whatever we chose to experience without interference. The mighty I Am presence knew we would get into all kinds of trouble because children will be children and will test every limit there is. The consequences are swift and terrible but that is the way of freedom in the material world. The Hindus and the Buddhists have called this law of consequences karma. Spirit knew that freedom would at first result in selfish choices and hard lessons like when a child eats too much ice cream and has a terrible stomachache. So Spirit planned for these inevitable results with massive support and help but always in the background, always from behind the scenes in order to honor free will. Spirit said, when you really need it, ask and you shall receive all the help you need, right away, no exceptions. Spirit gave us opportunities to remember who we are and to receive enormous help, primarily through the beauty and power of nature and through certain powerful teachers who could remind us about how to live.

Spirit, like any good Mother and Father, knew we would have to grow up and that growing up would involve challenges and tests. We were given certain very powerful internal initiations to help us grow, learning to love, learning to share, learning to cooperate, learning to take care of what we have been given and so on. These tests and initiations are challenging enough but they are made so much harder when the dominant societies and cultures of the world ignore them or have childish values that are not in resonance with these more mature values. Given that these mature values are inevitable in our learning process it is quite foolish that our social structures don’t align with them. Unfortunately the traditional religions of the world give them only face value and in reality are more aligned with the surface values of society. Not much help there.

Given the current climate on the Earth, Spirit has resorted to using a much bigger tool to wake us up and get us on track. It is a very simple tool really. We could call it various things: turning up the heat, turning the screws, holding our feet to the fire, turning up the lights, cranking up the music, increasing the intensity, turning up the alarm. The frequency, the vibration, the amplitude is being cranked up, every day, higher and higher. Now this is not done in some sort of sadistic way or punitively. Some smart phones have a wake up alarm feature that starts low and slowly increases in volume until you can’t ignore it and it gets you out of bed. Perhaps this is painful for some but it gets the job done. In a word it is a SERVICE.

This is why the world seems to be going amok with mass shootings, revolutions, attacks, high profile suicides, absolutely nutty behavior by politicians and other people in the media. The volume is being turned up so that people can no longer be complacent and ignore what is going on. They are being awakened from their torpor, their age old trance state that allows them to sleep through the absolutely outrageous conditions in the world, the inequality, the suffering, the injustice, the destructive focus of whole cultures, the greed of the business world, and so on. The weather is being turned on its head. Everything is intensifying to the point where no one can remain asleep any longer. Some will choose suicide. Some will crack and behave insanely. Some will become so frightened that they will try to halt all progress. Some will hunker down and persevere in their blindness. The vast majority however will wake up and take responsibility for the changes that are needed. Now that is good news indeed. Like an alarm that annoyingly gets louder, we are being served in the best way possible. What an initiation! It’s wake up time. Good morning.

A practice:

Find a quiet place where you will not be interrupted for about fifteen to twenty minutes. Relax and breathe evenly and deeply. Offer no struggle or resistance to the parade of thoughts in your monkey mind. For a couple of minutes as you breathe in say “accepting” to all your thoughts. As you breathe out say, “releasing” to all those thoughts. Once you have this process going you can now focus on the next part.

Recall a memory of service that brought joy to you: Remember feeding your much loved dog, cat, horse or whatever and how you watched with satisfaction and love as they gobbled up the food or the treat you gave them. Perhaps remember giving your children a bath and toweling them off and helping them to get dressed or lifting them up on your shoulders and carrying them around. Remember the look of amazement and gratitude a friend gave you when you did something special and out of the ordinary for them. Recall the relief of drooping plants when you gave them water.

Call up any memory that produces a smile, a feeling of love, a feeling of tenderness that motivated you to do something special for someone or something .

Focus specifically on your heart as you do this and feel whatever you feel.

Now reflect on the sense of responsibility that you took on to serve this beast, person, or plant in this way and how you didn’t really mind even though it might have been inconvenient.

Now repeat these words, “I am the open door that no man can shut. I am the hollow bone through which Spirit flows eternally and without limit. I bless all that I see, all that appears before me. As a consequence my life is profoundly good.”

Now sit with that and run through some of the people, animals, and plants whether living or past, that you recall. Spend a few minutes with this.

Finally feel grateful for your good fortune in knowing these creatures.

Do this every day for a time and see what happens.

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José Stevens

José Luis Stevens, PhD is the president and co-founder (with wife Lena) of Power Path Seminars, an international school and consulting firm dedicated to the study and application of shamanism and indigenous wisdom to business and everyday life. José completed a ten-year apprenticeship with a Huichol (Wixarika) Maracame (Huichol shaman) in the Sierras of Central Mexico. In addition, he is studying with Shipibo shamans in the Peruvian Amazon and with Paqos (shamans) in the Andes in Peru. In 1983 he completed his doctoral dissertation at the California Institute of Integral Studies focusing on the interface between shamanism and western psychological counseling. Since then, he has studied cross-cultural shamanism around the world to distill the core elements of shamanic healing and practice. He is the author of twenty books and numerous articles including Encounters With Power, Awaken The Inner Shaman, The Power Path, Secrets of Shamanism, Transforming Your Dragons and How To Pray The Shaman’s Way.