Friday, February 23, 2007 – www.divinecosmos.com

I was rewarded with yet another Britney Spears rehab-inspired nightmare this morning. It showed me the deep terror that her current outburst has triggered in others about their spiritual path…

A BAD DREAM 

In this dream I found myself in some kind of camp cabin with a variety of other students I recognized from my HS graduating class. We all had a curriculum we were supposed to be working on, and it had worked up to a final exam, but I was cavalierly blowing it off, saying I was too busy with other things.

That was the first clue that this was another Britney rehab dream – although in this case, it seems I’m dreaming what the mass consciousness’ reaction to her outbursts has been, more than just her own experiences. It was definitely a nightmare.

The cabin was actually pretty nice – it reminded me of Camp Chingachgook on the shores of Lake George, which I hit every summer in grades 1-6, or Camp Boyhaven, which I attended two different times in eighth grade.

[My second trip to Boyhaven was no fun, as I discovered that the dome tent my family had “saved money” on was not watertight, and my father and brother’s sleeping bags, as well as my own, became totally saturated in a rainstorm. That brought about a quick end to my ability to propose any further outdoor camping as a family!]

This was a fairly rustic cabin in the dream, all wood inside, with a lower and upper deck. However, it also expanded at times into more of a dormitory building, and people were not only studying there, they lived there. It seemed to be college in this case, and it seemed I had never actually graduated and gotten a diploma – I kept on hanging around, repeating classes for some reason.

 

MY OWN SOURCE OF NIGHTMARES: STATISTICAL PSYCHOLOGY 

[In reality I did graduate college with a BA in psychology, but as I’ve said before, I had to repeat Statistical Psychology class, which was all mathematics. The first time I took it I was in drug recovery and got a D, my worst-ever grade in college. I did manage to get sober, and have been for 14 and a half years, but I bombed the class in the process of sorting my life out. Someone had to flesh out the bell-curve, I guess…

Since I’d already taken the class once before, I understood everything the second time. I went to lab and got high grades on all the exams, (usually 95 or higher), but I didn’t feel I needed to complete the enormously time-consuming and repetitious homework assignments, since he said it was only ‘about 10 percent’ of your grade. In my arrogance I said “That means I’ll get a 90 or an 85 instead of 100.”

Now that I totally got Statistics, the homework was just terribly tedious and redundant. There was no quick way out. I wished I’d saved it all from the last time because it was all identical, and I could have just copied it all over again. So I re-did some of it, but more or less totally blew it off.

I think this pissed off the teacher, the same guy I had the first time. Despite the fact that I aced all the tests, showed up for every class and participated regularly, he blasted me with a C… and for some reason you had to get at least a B minus in Stats and a B minus in Experimental (which I exceeded) if you wanted it to count towards graduate school. Without these classes you couldn’t get in. This was the whole reason I’d repeated the dreadful class in the first place!

So, even though I technically got my degree, I knew I would need to repeat Stats yet a THIRD time if I actually wanted to go on to higher education – which I had totally intended to do, until well into the beginning of my intuitive contact with my Higher Self. This unresolved problem plagued my dreams for YEARS afterwards, with endless dreams of not actually graduating high school or college.]

 

A RETURN TO MY NIGHTMARE 

Now let’s get back to the dream, which obviously blends my own personal history with the Britney Spears issue and the corresponding fears it has triggered in many others.

In the dream, I was lazy about wanting to finish this one class – I was just blowing it off. It came time to take the final exam for this class, and I ended up not even taking the test because I already knew I’d be failing.

By the end of the test I started to worry, as everyone else seemed to act as if it had been easy for them. I wondered if I actually had enough credit to graduate, or if I’d be stuck in yet another cycle of the same class.

Everyone left and I stayed around with the teacher, who was my favorite English teacher from high school – a very intelligent woman I always got along with. Once the others were gone, having handed in their assignments, she and I seemed to warm up to each other. Now I knew I’d have to cough up an explanation for my aberrant behavior.

I tried to explain to her that I’d been so busy I just had to put my priorities somewhere, and this class hadn’t been it. I was hoping that I could strike it off my permanent record, (in my college you had 2 chances to do this,) and that I still had enough credits to graduate.

She didn’t say much, but was nice to me, and the underlying vibe was that she was reassuring me I would be fine. Then I woke up, feeling the oppressive sense of unfinished business looming overhead. I actually just had to lie there, breathe and remind myself that yes, I actually DID make it, and had the diploma to prove it. (Ultimately it really doesn’t matter – as we will see, the point is all about self-acceptance.)

It didn’t take long for me to see how this all fit together. For Britney, the “unfinished class” was the 30 to 45 days she would need to do in Rehab, in order to avoid losing her own children and most of her wealth. To a typical drug user, Rehab is the true essence of Hell Itself, and in Britney’s case it only became possible to consider going to Rehab when the alternative was an even greater Hell.

 

GOD REFLEX REVISITED

Why is Rehab considered by most people to be True Hell? As I said before, (and you really should read all of these in sequence, beginning with “Cosmic Perspective on Daily Events,”) most people may believe they only occasionally, if ever, stop and think about God.

This is a grievous mistake, as actually we all have what I call a “God Reflex,” which is a holdover from the animal kingdom. This “God Reflex” is CONSTANTLY craving safety, comfort, warmth and love. Let’s recap and enhance this God Reflex discussion a bit before we go back to Rehab. (The horror!)

Some of us get trapped in fulfilling our God Reflex, this endless sense of need, with the worship of the body – Food, Stuff and Family.

 

DON’T FEED THE TROLLS 

Others get caught up in the worship of the mind, and become “Highly Intelligent Skeptics,” or “Trolls” as they are often called – those people who haunt paranormal discussion boards and attempt to rip well-intentioned seekers apart with their apparently ‘scientific’ and ‘logical’ arguments – even while their fast temper and nagging persistence is more consistent with the behavior of a two-year-old.

The vast majority of people who are interested in the paranormal have not elevated it to a level where they can discuss it in a reasoned, rational, well-thought-out manner, and Trolls love to gore them in public for it. Don’t fall for it. Don’t feed the Trolls! You will never win!

If you’ve ever wrestled with these types, you’ll know that they invariably engage in something called Intellectual Dishonesty. Even if you make a really good point, they will NEVER acknowledge it. You can never actually get them to change their mind or see your side – they will simply change tactics, such as the old “ad hominem / attack the messenger” canard, or go after someone else and ignore you.

If nothing else, they are content to hurt your feelings and make you miserable. In my own worst-case scenario, I really put a lot of time into one of these folks, and my parting gift was him telling me he would “skull f-k” me “for all eternity”.

So yes… some people’s God Reflex gets caught up in bringing others hurt and pain. This actually satisfies their own wounded ego’s need for a feeling of safety, comfort, warmth and love, which traces all the way back to our infantile stage of development.

This email assailant, as it turned out, had serious physical damage that made him unable to walk normally, and he had retreated into the worship of the mind, since the body was unfulfilling. Once he confessed that to me, he ended up hating me even more.

He assumed I had all these wonderful things in my life that he was missing. Getting me to feel pain brought him a sense of vindication – because he felt that if there really was a God, then he wanted revenge. Therefore, he went after people who considered themselves messengers.

 

REHAB FROM LACK OF SELF-RESPECT THANKS TO SKEPTICAL ATTACKERS

If your own ‘drug’ of choice is unworthiness and lack of self-respect, then wrestling with “Trolls” IS your own rehab – and you don’t graduate the program until you voluntarily check out of the clinic and stop engaging these assailants.

Up until you graduate this type of Rehab, you’ve been projecting your own shadow self onto your attackers. Your shadow tells you, “None of this $#!+ is really true. You are not special. You’re a meat package. You die, you rot and it stinks, so we put your filth in a box and bury it. You don’t deserve love, respect or attention, unless it’s negative.”

That’s a voice inside yourself, and you desperately want to heal it. Most of us seem to have a much easier time healing these things by re-creating the whole drama with someone else, rather than processing it alone, inside ourselves, such as in meditation.

We find someone who actually tells us “there is no ESP, there is no paranormal, there is nothing special about 2012 or any other year, everything’s going to keep on rolling along, boring as usual,” and we become impassioned with the quest to convince them otherwise, drawing on our best resources.

The whole damn thing is projection, and we’re really just trying to convince ourselves.

The other person won’t change, but once we’ve fought our side of the argument long enough, and skillfully enough, we suddenly realize, “Yeah, you know, it really IS true.” Then we’ve graduated from Rehab and can get back to a healthy spiritual life, where we are not plagued by our own doubt every step of the way.

A drug user has the same shadow: “None of this higher power $#!+ is really true. I am not special. I’m a meat package. I die, I rot and it stinks, so my family will put my filth in a box and bury it. I don’t deserve love, respect or attention, unless it’s negative.”

 

EDGAR CAYCE AND THE 12 STEPS 

12-step programs are all about breaking down this conditioning that there is no Higher Power, that the only God you really have is the drug itself – otherwise you can’t feel safety, comfort, warmth and love. If you want to break down this illusion, triggered by the animal-level God Reflex from the body, you have to engage the intellect and have a more evolved God-concept to replace it.

In fact, eight out of the 12 steps refer directly to either a Higher Power or God, (unfortunately, for some, in the masculine gender) and the “Higher Power” is a frequent topic in “the rooms”. For the war-hardened attendees, all they can muster is to say “the higher power is these rooms, and the people in them,” but ultimately Rehab is all about finding a spiritual path.

Most people don’t realize that they have Edgar Cayce to thank for the 12-step program. According to several different sources that have popped up over the years – people in a position to know – the man who calls himself “Bill W”, (I’ve heard the last name is Wilson) was actually a client for a psychic reading from Cayce. Like other secrets, this was locked away in the archives of Cayce’s organization, the A.R.E., and in the minds of his associates. Thankfully when I first got to Virginia Beach, I lived with one of Gladys Davis Turner’s best friends – and she was Cayce’s secretary and ‘twin flame’. 

Edgar himself had just been through two prior lifetimes in which he was a gambling, womanizing “wastrel” and “alcoholic”. Both times he came in with the name John Bainbridge, implying that “he was his own Grandpa”, which is a rather amusing concept.

Bainbridge never really stopped getting trashed, but at the end of his second lifetime with that name, he gave his food away to a starving child in an act of selfless love, knowing he would die of starvation in the process, but the child might make it. We don’t know what became of the child, and that’s not really the point – the real issue is that this selfless act erased TWO LIFETIMES worth of bad karma from having been selfish and manipulative towards others, in ONE shot!

This history gave the soul of Edgar Cayce much more to work with in terms of analyzing and understanding addiction, its roots and its ultimate cure. The 12 Steps tumbled out in one single package, already fully composed, in one reading – no additional editing – and now they are arguably one of the most popular and successful spiritual programs in the world.

As we’ve been saying, you have to learn to think for yourself. In order to do this, you have to identify and heal your own God Reflex, and evolve your concept of a Higher Power well beyond the simple gratification of the body and mind.

True entry into Spirit is not possible until you initiate the mind and the body. Rather than see Rehab as this terrifying pit of hell that strips God out of your life (the god of safety, comfort, warmth and love coming to you from a food, behavior or chemical), you can see it as the beginning of a quest for Spirit.

 

THE 12 STEPS: A SIMPLE BREAKDOWN 

Cayce’s 12 steps really are a good practice, whether you’re in recovery or not, so let’s review them, with the masculine gender of God relieved. Where it says “powerless over alcohol”, you can fill in the word “alcohol” with any other addiction or compulsion you may have gotten stuck in: 

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol–that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood It.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood It, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The first, and in some ways the most important step, is all about realizing that you are NOT in control – the drug or compulsion has taken control. Your animal-level “God Reflex”, addictively seeking anything and everything that can give it a feeling of safety, comfort, warmth and love, becomes increasingly hungry when it’s not satisfying you – and it never will. Ultimately you do require a Higher Power – your own Higher Self – to pull you out of the nightmare.

The longer you avoid seeking out and accepting the existence of this Higher Power, the more you “repeat class”, like in the common nightmare I had this morning, where you are back in school, have a final exam and have done nothing to study for it… meaning you’ll have to repeat yet another year all over again. Nonetheless, you keep busy, distract yourself, and otherwise believe you don’t need to do the work – you are too busy, you have too much other stuff to do that is important.

As the steps of your healing continue, you drop the sarcasm and realize that your ‘ego’ is not really running the show – you have a Higher Power that can restore you to sanity (2) and it has already been directing your life with the Law of Karma, so you might as well accept that this is going on, and get with the program.

You therefore acknowledge your Higher Self’s existence, make friends with it, and become willing to surrender your ego and pride, and turn within for guidance (3). This is all about learning to think for yourself, rather than thinking that some simplistic code of conduct is sufficient. You can certainly read inspired texts and so forth, but ultimately the answers have to come from within.

You then have to be fully accountable for the harm that you’ve done (4), both to yourself and others, spill your guts about the whole thing to someone you trust (5), and accept the reality that your Higher Power can free you of any further karmic debts you’ve caused by these actions (6).

Then you have to actually ask your Higher Power to do this for you (7), as otherwise it cannot violate your free will. That is an important step that people often miss – even if they believe they have a Higher Self, they usually just believe it will step in as needed. Actually, as the Law of One series often reveals, the higher forces cannot do more for you than they have been asked to do.

In order to complete this healing process, you run through a big personal inventory of your past, with a specific focus on figuring out who you’ve hurt – and you also must be willing to make amends (8). This is all about honor and accountability, something very few people appreciate anymore. You can justify that someone wouldn’t have drawn you into their life if they didn’t need to learn from you, but that still doesn’t cut it. Even if they did need it, and even if they did benefit from it, you still violated their free will and you still need to balance your own karma by your willingness to make amends.

Then you can’t just talk about it – you have to actually take action and do something. You therefore go out and try to make amends to those you’ve harmed, whenever possible, so long as it does not violate their free will (9). Once you’ve done this as best you can, you don’t want to drop the ball – you want to keep on working the process in your daily life and try to do the right thing, promptly admitting when you’ve made further missteps in your judgment and ethics (10).

Lastly, you engage in your spiritual path, meditate regularly, make a connection to your Higher Self, realize that your spiritual purpose is to fulfill the will of your Higher Self, (11), and then get out there and “radiate the realization of Oneness to others”, as the Law of One once said (12). You do not need to proselytize or tell people what they should do – the radiance of your own connection will be sufficient.

 

CLEANSING OUT THE NEGATIVE – NOT BAD AT ALL 

As you now can see, there is nothing “hellish” about going to rehab – it’s actually about overthrowing a negative force that had stepped into your life and satisfied all your urgings for a Higher Power – it satisfied your God Reflex. However, when you haven’t found this Higher Power within, if you still keep projecting it into the worship of the body through food, stuff and family or the worship of the mind, through endless hours on the Net and obsessing on intellectual pursuits, then you’re denying your Higher Power its natural position. In those cases, more karma will be on the way to knock you into another Dark Night of the Soul, like Britney has just gone through, so you surrender this sense of superiority and again turn within for guidance.

At the animal level you do not think for yourself – you let the group think for you. Whatever “They Say,” it must be right. Therefore, anyone who gains the power of the word “They” has the ability to be an “opinion maker”, as they are often called.

It can seem terrifying to break off from this feeling of standing on the shoulders of authority figures. Almost everyone who ever came to me for an intuitive reading wanted to be TOLD what to do – they would ask me “what is my purpose?”

Again and again the Source would tell them that your main purpose is to make contact with your Higher Self, to go within. Once that connection is established, all other instructions will be downloaded directly into your conscious mind.  

Yes, you will make mistakes – but that’s OK, as they are essential for your learning process. The idea is that the more you understand your life, and the issues going on in it, the better you will navigate these situations. Everything becomes more and more smooth.

 

MP3 ARCHIVE – MAKING A CONNECTION

So what’s next? As part of my own Twelfth Step, let’s say, for those in recovery from Human Incarnation, I’ve really been putting the time in lately to update my MP3 archive on the www.divinecosmos.com site. There are six brand-new readings that have come through since last July that will be appearing soon, as well as another seven or eight from the 2005 series that will be showing up.

Anything else that comes in from now on will appear there soon after I get it. Each reading is deliberately worded so that everyone can benefit from it… so if you find yourself saying, “Man, I wish I could have gotten a reading from David,” you CAN – there are a NUMBER of them waiting in there now, and thanks to the fact that there are only 22 archetypal experiences you will ever have in life, the readings are VERY personal.  

Both versions of my new film-score-quality meditation musical piece “The Journey” are also in there now, which is already getting rave reviews – people are saying it’s giving them a direct cosmic connection, complete with powerful visuals and bodily sensations when used in conjunction with meditation. There are also five never-before-heard public lectures I gave at the Fellowship, from 1998 to 2002, that were very well received at the time – often with standing ovations and breakthrough tape sales at the end of each talk – which I hope to get posted within the next week. 

Often when I lecture I gate into the Source – and in particular, the readings let you hear the Source directly, as it tackles all these different issues we go through in our lives. It can give you a breathtaking contact with your Higher Self, by resonance, as you listen to the words. And if you fall asleep, you can listen to it again – as many times as you like. 

The first ten 2005 readings are available as stand-alone MP3 downloads, for $3.33 apiece, but the archive also has a lot more content, including a wealth of radio-show appearances, and is ultimately a lot less expensive – especially with all the new content I’m uploading. And I certainly thank you for participating… after all, I’m starting to run low on beer and cigarettes, so if you could hook me up by the end of the week that would be killer.  

OK. Rather than try to say what I’m going to write tomorrow, let’s say I believe that a Power greater than myself will come up with something, right on time…

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW…

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