October 6, 2014
Since my youth, I have been fascinated and enthusiastic about
Michael Jackson’s music. But that’s not all –
since the year 1992, he has been my “Great Love.”
So reads the Forward of Margott Schuerings’ book, From King of Pop to Mahatma: Journey of a Great Soul, and needless to say, she had me at Page 1. I can so relate to her words. It was at the same time that the same “Great Love” came into my life through a different vehicle, perhaps, but the same bond was forged in my heart as was obviously forged in Ms. Schuerings’. Most of my readers are familiar with the story of my journey and the train that hit me on October 1 of that same year. In Margott’s case, Dancing the Dream: Poems and Reflections (released in 1991) facilitated her stepping off of the path most traveled in an opinionated and ego-driven world blinded by its own projections in favor of her first steps on the “road less traveled” to the TRUTH of your blinding presence, my King.
I remember at the time, I was fairly convinced that I had gone insane. I was shocked to learn twenty years later that there were others on the planet who had gone insane in exactly the same way and at approximately the same time – shared the same or similar insights, who were praying for you, who felt a deeply spiritual connection with you. That same sense of shock and joyful discovery occurs each time I encounter another who was sharing that remarkable journey with me, unbeknownst to me and on opposite sides of the world. It appears that Margott must be added to that list along with many countless others since.
The fact that you still graced this world in your beautiful physical manifestation at the time still makes me pause and scratch my head in wonder, though, Beloved. I have no problem believing that a soul who has left his physical experiment behind can reach out and grab hold of a heart, but how is it possible for one still committed to his earthly manifestation to do this?
[Michael laughs.] That’s your conditioning talking. You’ve been programmed through countless generations to believe you are small, one-dimensional, insignificant caterpillars … that only the visible, audible, scientifically provable aspects of life are real and true. But you are not just limited to the scientific, the physical, the earthbound. You are multi-dimensional. You are not only a few cents worth of chemicals randomly combined to create the miracle of life, regardless of how your world tries to convince you otherwise. There is much, much more to you than that. You are potential … unlimited potential … awaiting the chrysalis to open and metamorphosis to occur. The world of the butterfly is at your fingertips, if you would only realize it.
Oh, I’m glad you mentioned that, Baby! Even the ‘caterpillar’ analogy [See Volume 1, Installment 37] is repeated in Margott’s book, sent to her by a reader in Switzerland:
Deep inside we know that we are caterpillars. For some reasons we unlearn to pupate or we allow [ourselves] to be hindered to do so. That hurts. We feel guilty and inferior in some way, always searching for the forgotten, seemingly lost … When we are lucky enough to meet butterflies, we perhaps wallow in the mud in front of them and try fanatically to imitate them instead of getting inspired by them and let them lead us to our own butterfly being. In desperate jealousy we may even be driven to reduce them to our miserable caterpillar being by talking down about them to feel better ourselves.
Sad story. But listen! It’s rustling in the wind of change, it is whispering behind every corner, singing, sounding and echoing. The time has come, the time has come … the time of butterflies! Awake! Remember! [From King of Pop to Mahatma]
And, then, she makes the point that the only reason caterpillars exist is to metamorphose and experience the flight of the butterfly. That people on different continents in our world are inspired to write about the same image is just another example of the phenomenon [we cannot just keep calling this ‘phenomenon,’ Beloved] that was unleashed at your Ascension.
[Michael chuckles.] Well, what are we going to call it? You and I were never separate also means that you are not separate from anyone else either. We are all ONE!
You are the trinity made manifest … the three-fold TRUTH in substance and form … spirit, mind and body. In your programming, an attempt has been made to make you think that only your body, the gross, the dense, the material exists because, until very recently, only it has been provable by science. Spirit and mind do not lend themselves easily to the scientific method, but they are beginning to be recognized even in the scientific community. Previously, they have not been provable, could not be labeled and classified and analyzed and made to fit into a convenient little box, and, therefore, they didn’t exist. But that is beginning to change with the advent of more sensitive measurement and recent technological advances. However, they are very much a part of your daily life, can and do influence your physical health and impact your reality through your thoughts daily in ways of which you are totally unconscious.
Or, as Margott Schuerings’ states it:
The physical body, feelings, thoughts and intuitions are only different energetically due to their lesser density. The physical body is gross and the most dense; feelings and thoughts are more subtle and less dense and the intuition is extremely subtle, nearly etheric.
Yes and all these levels are you. More accurately, you are all these levels … and more! Or, perhaps, a clearer way to say that is that you occupy or inhabit all these levels at the same time. In the past, these levels of frequency have been called the physical body, the mental body, the emotional body, but they are not separate. One does not follow another sequentially or chronologically; it is not a matter of ‘either/or’ but of ‘all/and’ … or as well as.
Don’t be afraid
To know who you are
You are much more
Than you ever imagined
Where you direct your attention … your focus (remember our discussions about focus?) … regulates which of the levels you occupy or at which level your energy vibrates and creates at any given time. Most of the world’s energy is concentrated on the physical, dense, material level to the exclusion of realizing that mankind is capable of accessing so many, many others … or even recognizing that other levels exist.
The trick is to see past the limited thought forms, judgments, classifications, labels, prejudices and patterns that circulate ceaselessly and into which your mind was indoctrinated during your childhood … all those ‘should/shouldn’ts,’ ‘must/mustn’ts,’ ‘possibles/impossibles’ … to recognize that those boundaries held so sacred don’t exist at all; they are a mirage, the “big lie” because
You and I were never separate
It’s just an illusion
Wrought by the magical lens
Of perception
In your childhood, you were disempowered by the prevalent accepted and acceptable judgments, prejudices and biases of your culture. You were taught to ‘toe the line;’ we all were.
“If you disempower a child, you disempower the adult he will become.”
You are a perfect example of this principle. You were told very early in your life that you had no talent in the visual arts. You believed those judgments and held yourself back from attempting to pursue your interest in drawing and painting for sixty plus years. You devoted yourself to developing your marketable skills, holding down a job and raising a family, but the interest and desire did not go away; it resurfaced again and again until, finally, you made a serious effort to draw and paint. Look at the results. With practice and belief, you have a new means of expression and a lot of enjoyment, but what’s even more important, you have found a new gift to give to the world you inhabit. Something has been discovered in you that would have remained hidden if you had allowed yourself to continue to be disempowered by the voices of the “others” in your life who told you that it didn’t exist.
The disempowered adult is much more controllable by the mindset which you have collectively crowned as the arbiter of TRUTH by your universal belief in it … the scientific, materialistic, separatist, dense worldview … rendering you more programmable by the ego-driven fascination with more. To break through that programming, you must first realize that it exists not just “out there” but “in here” where you live and where your thoughts are formed.
Humanity has locked itself in one small, claustrophobic, windowless room when an entire, opulent, beautiful, unlimited mansion is its real home. Throw open the doors and windows, pull back the shutters and let the sun shine in and entirely new horizons of knowledge, creativity and accomplishment await you. They were never closed to you; you were never abandoned outside the gates; your only jailer is you and the jail you have imprisoned yourself in is the ‘stories’ you have built around your experiences in a past that is nothing more than a memory! But you have clung to that one small, dark room in fear of what lay outside it. YOU lay outside it … only you … but a broader, more expansive you than you ever imagined was possible. “It’s nothing to be nervous about. It’s an adventure … a great adventure.”
Just changing one small mental construct … from ‘either/or’ to ‘all/and’ or ‘as well as’ … has the power to change your whole worldview.
Oh, Beloved, you gave me some words a couple of weeks ago that speak so clearly to that thought. May I repeat them here?
Of course, they are meant to be shared.
Way Shower
The illusion of selfness binds the world in chains of forgetfulness
Yet all along we yearn to break free
To taste for a moment the wine of endless immersion
Most men fear that taste will rob them of the sanity of separation
Insanity!
We cling to the life raft of me … of mine
When the ocean of we … of ours
Threatens to consume our tiny flame
Merging it in the fire of endless creation
The large “I” frightens when it knocks
At the door of the tiny “i”
Either/or does not give way easily to both/and
We hide behind two
When ONE is so much bigger
In he in whom “as well as” lives no duality is found
Only in him can one find rest from the eternal tug of opposites
In the Valley of Forgetfulness we dwell
Until one comes who has not learned to forget
Who dwells still in the abode of union
Who sees not I and Me but only We
A supernova of brilliant radiance
He offers his selfness freely on the altar of togetherness
And in his offering slays the dragons of our fear filled projections
Polarity finds no scope within his frame
No toe hold to cling to in its ascent
And thus he vanquishes duality
Without lifting a weapon
No need to fight
When “as well as” rules
Sometimes, I surprise myself with what I write. Did you give me these words?
There is no You and I … only WE … on this level or frequency, which is what this poem is about. Don’t you listen to what you write?
Sometimes, but when something like this comes out of me, I hesitate to believe that this level of depth is possible. I am still plagued with more doubt that I am comfortable with.
And we are still working on that. Have some patience … particularly with yourself! Rome wasn’t built in a day and nearly sixty-five years of brainwashing cannot be overcome in a single thought. But have no fear! “We will get there!” In the meantime, just remember:
Whatever happens, don’t let go of my hand!
Oh, don’t worry, Beloved. I’m stuck like glue!
There ya go!
Of course, this more expansive worldview is a threat to the limited, claustrophobic worldview of separation currently ruling your world.
You should be watching me, you should feel threatened
When you sleep, why you creep, you should be threatened
Every time your lady speaks, she speaks to me, threatened
Half of me you’ll never be, so you should feel threatened by me
You think you’re by yourself, but it’s my touch you felt
I’m not a ghost from hell, but I’ve got a spell on you
Your worst nightmare, it’s me, I’m everywhere
In one blink, I’ll disappear, but then I’ll come back to haunt you
I’m telling you when you lie, I’m the truth
I’m the one watching you,
That’s why you’ve got to be threatened by me
If enough of you open those blinds and throw back the shutters, the current worldview doesn’t stand the ghost of a chance.
That’s what you did twenty years ago. You were opened (for lack of a better term) to a different perspective … one that was more inclusive and much less limited than your world had prepared you for … in an instant of recognition … and, as a result, you rebelled against the programming. You recognized a ONENESS that your world told you was impossible and that you were insane for even contemplating; and it had even you convinced of your insanity, for a time. Nonetheless, you explored this new way of thinking. You wrote about connections and those around you scoffed and didn’t understand. Yet, you lived those connections and you continue to do so today.
Well, once again, I am finding my reading list meshing together and forming a pattern that I am just beginning to discern. For example, your statement above … to me, at least … is so reminiscent of A Course in Miracles, which I have very recently pulled out of the bookshelf where it has rested for probably about twenty years.
The ego has built a shabby and unsheltering home for you, because it cannot build otherwise. Do not try to make this impoverished house stand. Its weakness is your strength. Only God could make a home that is worthy of His creations, who have chosen to leave it empty by their own dispossession. Yet His home will stand forever, and is ready for you when you choose to enter it. Of this you can be wholly certain. God is as incapable of creating the perishable as the ego is of making the eternal. [A Course in Miracles.]
When I first tried to read The Course, I gave up after the first few pages because it was not making any sense to me. I don’t know if it was the style, structure or my own density, but the book was, basically, incomprehensible to me at that time. Recently, I have dusted it off for our afternoon Library reading sessions and am finding its rhythm soothing and calming (particularly when read aloud) and its content much more accessible than on my previous attempts.
See? When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear.
Yes, I see … and this is a beautiful illustration of that concept. I am also finding you hiding behind the words of this book. I mean … in places … it’s almost as if you had written it because so much of what you are teaching me in these conversations is reiterated … in different language and structure … within its pages.
Awww, God bless you! Truth is truth; it is changeless. It is forever.
I am your joy
Your Best of Joy
I am the moonlight
You are the spring
Our love’s a sacred thing
You know I always will love you
I am forever
We are forever
In addition, I have become aware of Margott Schuerings’ From King of Pop to Mahatma: Journey of a Great Soul, which was originally published in German in 2010 and has only recently been made available in English. It is a wonderful analysis of the poems and reflections you published in Dancing the Dream from the perspective of the high level of frequency from which they were written. I was initially attracted to the title because of our references to the concept of Great Soul in previous conversations. [See Volume 2, Installment 84] I don’t find the fact that these two volumes coincide so closely terribly shocking because they share that more expansive worldview you mentioned … or refer to the same or similar vibrational frequency … or whatever. What I do find surprising is that a third book, although written from within the more limited perspective of the current paradigm, speaks of some of the same phenomena in similar terms.
As stated above, previously, we have referred to this phenomenon as just that … phenomenon … but I think I’m going to coin the phrase The Michael Effect for it.
Huh? What do you mean The Michael Effect?
I’m sorry, Beloved … I can see that that sentence was totally incomprehensible. Let me see if I can explain what I mean. I think Ms. Schuerings’ gives several marvelous examples of The Michael Effect in the ‘coincidental’ analogy of the caterpillar mentioned above as well as in her recounting of a series of flashmobs that occurred nearly sequentially across the world, beginning very shortly after your Ascension in Stockholm and encompassing Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Paris, Montreal, London, Vienna and Taipeh. In addition, she quotes emails she has received from readers and YouTube videos as indicative of this Effect. In the paragraphs she devotes to these occurrences, one can clearly see these events as a wave rolling across the ocean of consciousness, but until reading her book, I had not made that connection. When I picture a wave approaching the ocean’s shore, I see it building momentum as it rushes toward the beach and this is the image she evokes. This wave, as described in her book, is similar to the waves that are performed at sports events and concerts around the world, but instead of being localized and individual, these waves are more global and communal in nature and scope.
We’ve talked about the ways these waves are manifested many times before when recounting the many chartiable intiatives that have been organized in the wake of your Ascension … the Major Love Prayer worldwide global meditation on the 25th of each month … and the Come Together Over Michael prayer groups … and the numerous ways your children have found of expressing their love for you and their commitment to your ideals, including music, dancing, writing, artistic expressions, poems, videos and websites.
What is happening worldwide since Michael’s disappearance from the earthly stage makes us speechless, as everything that he started during [his] lifetime and blows up any dimensions, borders and imaginations. [From King of Pop to Mahatma]
Exactly! In previous discussions, we’ve just referred to these events as ‘a phenomenon.’ I think we need a name for them and I think The Michael Effect is perfect. I think I’ll patent it and figure out a trademark for it. What do you think?
I think you are so funny! [Michael laughs.]
The third book to which I am referring is Dangerous by Susan Fast (the 100th Volume of the 33 1/3 Series devoted to important albums), Ms. Fast devotes the entire first chapter to the cacophony of noise to be heard within the grooves of the Dangerous album. She cites breaking glass, shrieks, explosions, car engines, honking, sirens, an approaching train, slamming doors and claims:
Spectacle, yes, reproduced or produced as sound — thrilling, electrifying, exhilarating, but sometimes also threatening, angry and ominous. The noise helps create music that is cinematic: the “non-musical” sounds, as things like breaking glass and banging doors in the context of a piece of music are often called, bring in the visual, because unlike “musical” sound, which tends toward the abstract, they often signify particular things, can be associated more easily with specific material objects or ideas.
Ms. Fast refers to the noise as an undercurrent that girds much of the album Dangerous (as well as subsequent albums) and entitles her entire first chapter NOISE, devoting the following pages to the first several songs on the recording, including Jam, Why You Wanna Trip on Me, She Drives Me Wild, Can’t Let Her Get Away, Black or White, etc. stating:
The noise in Jackson’s later records situates the listener in a particular kind of world, the contemporary urban world of upheaval, disruption, instability, of false starts (so many of the electronic sounds are like that – hesitating, incomplete thoughts). It puts modern technologies – cars, trains, synthesizers … bombs – front and center in the sonic landscape. In some cases, this noisiness is linked to rage … [Dangerous]
After reading this chapter (but before I began to really absorb From King of Pop to Mahatma), I wrote the following note in my journal: Noise also could represent the constant, meaningless noise with which we occupy our minds – the circular, repetitive chatter of thoughts that go round and round in our heads which we have inherited and which condition our responses to the world we see and hear around us (and which you referred to in our earlier discussion in Installment 88. I just love how these dialogs seem to expand ideas mentioned in earlier Conversations.) When that noise resolves through questioning our conditioning, creating an expression of artistic dimension or seeing past the perceptions of polarities, the noise becomes reconciled into beautiful rhythms and music.
In A Course in Miracles, much of the text is related to the ego and its incessant attempts to deceive us into believing that we are the roles we play, the illusions in which we believe and that this egoic world is all there is by creating endless stories that continually contribute to judgment, instability, chaos, drama … and even war. According to the text, the ego causes chaos, strife and confusion (noise) because these are the atmospheres in which it feels secure.
Later in Dangerous, Ms. Fast entitles Chapter 4 Soul and begins the chapter with a quote :
My goal in life is to give to the world what I was lucky to receive:
the ecstasy of divine union through my music and my dance.
It’s like my purpose; it’s what I’m here for
Her book is one of the few times I have seen Dancing the Dream: Poems and Reflections mentioned with the obvious exception of Margott Schuerings’ From King of Pop to Mahatma: Journey of a Great Soul. Your beautiful book has been roundly ignored by the critics … or dismissed as sentimental claptrap … but in Mahatma and Dangerous, it is given the importance it deserves. To many of your children, Dancing the Dream is the Bible.
In Chapter 4, the noise previously annotated is reconciled in the sublime realm of artistic expression.
Music is used in most cultures as a means through which to connect with the sacred, as a way to “heighten” the significance of words, to take them and our bodies out of the everyday, to re-fashion our sense of time and create community in a way that only music can do … And in the process express, through music sound, the theology of one consciousness.
…because Jackson has, with such a deft hand, made his spiritual journey here in large part through invoking many musical languages. His musical journey is a metaphor for spiritual seeking.
And in From King of Pop to Mahatma, I find the following:
To realize who you really are you have to be still. That does not mean that you may no longer talk. The noise of the world is not produced by words which come out of our mouths or by sounds. The noise of the world is produced by the permanently active mind which creates endless concepts, produces thoughts incessantly, revivifies imaginations without interruption. The noise of the world comes up because the mind is not able to let a fact, an incident or an observation simply be as it is. In the moment of observation, the mind starts obsessively to analyze the observed, to measure and to classify …
The mind is also incapable of simply resting and being still because this would be a death threat to it. A still mind is no more mind. Instead it makes everything into what it wants it to be and thereby leaves nothing as it is.
and
The real noise which fills the whole universe and reaches to the farthest corners of the cosmos is the noise in our heads and thoughts, this eternally rattling, ridiculous chatter of the mind, which is okay with nothing and is permanently grumbling. Michael Jackson has always looked in his heart, followed it and was true to himself until [to the point of] self-abandonment.
The mass of people instead listen to conditionings and never question the endless gibberish in the head …
So, all three of the books I am currently reading are referring to noise, but from different … um … levels of vibrational frequency. One of them is admittedly written from the surface, almost wholly physical, materialistic perspective by an academic musicologist, a serious scientist who analyzes the Dangerous album from a sonic and musical, thematically progressive standpoint. Another is written from a more spiritually-oriented, yet highly intellectual while, at the same time, spiritually-insightful analysis of Dancing the Dream: Poems and Reflections, which could be considered as a companion text to the Dangerous album, having been released in very close chronological proximity to it. The third is a highly-regarded, channeled document containing very elevated instructions on the spiritual life, clarifications on correcting ‘errors’ in previously-inspired scriptures of religious traditions and suggestions on overcoming egoic illusions in our modern world.
Yet, all three are referring to the same thing and in similar terms. The Michael Effect in action! It’s a pattern. It’s not a particle, it’s a wave! I envision the explosion of a supernova in which the detonation occurs and permeates the universe in concentric circular waves of energy from the central point to fill the entire cosmos.
Or, maybe … just maybe … a pebble thrown into a pond which produces ripples that radiate out from the point of submersion across the pond of infinity?
Okay, so color me dense!
I lost that crayon a long time ago and, in truth, find that I seldom need it. [Michael laughs.] But seriously, I love your enthusiasm … and I love you MORE!
Michael Jackson’s whole world is soaked with love. After the stone was thrown into the water, he no longer cared if and when and how it was spreading out. Michael also never gave bigger explanations to his work, possibly in wise foresight that explanations always only satisfy the mind, and apart from that distract from the essential things. When we are present with open heart no explanation is necessary. “It is love, it is about love, it is about coming together.” [From King of Pop to Mahatma.]
Jan
[Author’s note: All passages indented but not italicized in this dialog are quoted from: From King of Pop to Mahatma, Dangerous, or A Course in Miracles.]
Read Full Post »
Withachildsheart's Blog 