Catch Penney on Coast to Coast AM with George Noori!!

Just wanted to let you know that I'll be on Coast to Coast AM with George Noori, the evening of Thursday, December 3, from 10pm-1am PT. We'll be talking for 3 hours about everything from how frequency relates to UFOs, to dreams, imagination, and how intuition connects to science and religion. Stay up late and call in!!! You can find the radio station in your area that carries the show at http://www.coasttocoastam.com

Maslow Predicted The Shift

A friend forwarded me this article by Owen Waters. It's always good to get various points of view about the transformation process.

Abraham Maslow (1908-70) was a psychologist who became famous for his hierarchy of human needs. When he developed his theory in the 1950s, he predicted the transformation of humanity into a realm of spiritual transcendence, but he had no idea just how soon this would develop into a major movement. Maslow's hierarchy of human needs shows that basic human needs have to be fulfilled before people can attend to higher needs and values.

First, the basic physiological needs of food and shelter must be catered for in order to ensure survival. Second, once food and shelter are obtained, safety and security must be achieved. Third, acceptance by others is sought, in both the social and romantic senses. To fulfill this 'belonging' need, people become part of a group, a tribe, an extended family or a community. When these deficiency, or outer-directed, needs are satisfied, then the individual works to acquire self-respect. Recognition by others produces self-esteem.

Once the outer needs are fulfilled, the inner-directed need for self-actualization comes into play. To self-actualize means to become the best you personally can be. Self-actualized people include those who have achieved material abundance, and also those who, as a decision of personal power, have chosen simplicity over the pursuit of further abundance. At some point, when a person says "that's enough" to the endless pursuit of additional financial security, then they become free to accomplish anything that inspires their inner joy the most.

Self-actualization is achieved after the individual ceases to have deference to hierarchical authority, and instead matures into the ability to make their own rules of personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is always more powerful and effective than any system of imposed rules. For example, you can threaten to punish someone if they steal and hope that the threat works. But a self-responsible person simply wouldn't steal because they would feel empathy for the loss that a would-be victim would feel. They simply wouldn't have the heart to do such a thing to another person.

It's a matter of increased maturity. When a person abandons the impositions of external authority and becomes their own, self-directed authority, then they become far more functional in the world. This is, in fact, a higher state of consciousness, one which provides a higher vista of awareness. From this expanded vista, they see clearly how they as an individual can best serve humanity.

In this state of awareness, the person acquires the ability to think and analyze situations independently. As a result, new and creative solutions spring to mind. They have enough self-esteem to be able to clearly see their own needs, skills, strengths and weaknesses, and from that they see where they can best be of service to humanity. Once basic needs are fulfilled, the next values to require attention relate to being. The first of these being-values is self-actualization, which is the instinctual need of a human to make the most of their unique abilities.

Above that, Maslow placed transcendence, which he considered a spiritual value. Traditional universities typically presume that spiritual matters are beyond the understanding of their students, so they present the Maslow hierarchy of human needs differently. They present it with self-actualization as the ultimate human goal, and omit the transcendence stage beyond that.

The being-values of self-actualization and transcendence are the higher, more beautiful aspects of human consciousness. They include unconditional love, altruism, inner joy, a love of nature, the development of intuition (in males as well as females), idealism, and a sense of wisdom which springs from within. These skills develop the right-brain functions of creativity and intuition.

In the 1950s, Maslow believed that only 2% of the population had achieved self-actualization. The mid-1960s changed all that when masses of people began the search for the higher values, such as unconditional love and spiritual wisdom. Today, that core group of progressive society has blossomed from 2% to over 20%, and is climbing every year.

The Shift is not a temporary byproduct of the baby boom generation, or any other generation of modern society. It is not a passing fad. It is not going away. It is a cosmic pressure that is unfolding and relentlessly increasing the frequency of all consciousness upon the planet. It is a part of the plan of Infinite Being that we progress to the next stage of conscious human achievement. The Shift is, to put it simply, the most wonderful transformation in recorded history. This is where humanity gets to build, literally, Heaven on Earth.

New Intuitive Way eNewsletter is Out. . .

You can read a copy of my latest newsletter at www.penneypeirce.com/newsletterarchives.htm
Click on the issue from Nov 6th, or any other ones you want.

Frequency in New Spirit Journal!

You might be interested in reading the interview that Krysta Gibson did with me about Frequency, featured as the cover story in the November issue of their newspaper. You can access the website at: http://www.newspiritjournal.com. To get the continuation of the article, download the pdf of page 1, then click on the continued link on that pdf to get the next page.

You can access the podcast of the audio interview at: http://www.newspiritjournal.com/media/Penney%20Peirce%20Final.mp3

NEGATIVITY PART 5: Examining Positive Thinking

Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book out called Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. It caught my attention because I wondered if I myself could possibly be TOO positive. Could I be positive for the wrong reasons? And if I were to give up being positive, what else "should" I be? I wanted to know what was behind her point of view. To that end, I am going to edit some of her introduction here, which you can read in full at her website, as well as see the video clip of her on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, where he greets her as "Hello, Grumpy!" My disclaimer is: I haven't read her whole book yet, AND I have thoughts. . . The following bulleted paragraphs are Ehrenreich's:

• Americans are a “positive” people. This is our reputation as well as our self-image. We smile a lot and are often baffled when people from other cultures do not return the favor. In the well-worn stereotype, we are upbeat, cheerful, optimistic, and shallow, while foreigners are likely to be subtle, world-weary, and possibly decadent. American expatriate writers like Henry James and James Baldwin wrestled with and occasionally reinforced this stereotype, which I once encountered in the 1980s in the form of a remark by Soviet émigré poet Joseph Brodsky to the effect that the problem with Americans is that they have "never known suffering." (Apparently he didn’t know who had invented the blues.) Whether we Americans see it as an embarrassment or a point of pride, being positive—in affect, in mood, in outlook—seems to be engrained in our national character.

• Scientists have found that the mere act of smiling can generate positive feelings within us, at least if the smile is not forced. In addition, good feelings, as expressed through our words and smiles, seem to be contagious: "Smile and the world smiles with you." . . .Recent studies show that happy feelings flit easily through social networks, so that one person’s good fortune can brighten the day even for only distantly connected others. . . .People who report having positive feelings are more likely to participate in a rich social life, and vice versa, and social connectedness turns out to be an important defense against depression, which is a known risk factor for many physical illnesses.

• So I take it as a sign of progress that, in just the last decade or so, economists have begun to show an interest in using happiness rather than just the gross national product as a measure of an economy’s success. Happiness is, of course, a slippery thing to measure or define. . . .In addition to the problems of measurement, there are cultural differences in how happiness is regarded and whether it is even seen as a virtue. Some cultures, like our own, value the positive affect that seems to signal internal happiness; others are more impressed by seriousness, self-sacrifice, or a quiet willingness to cooperate.

• Surprisingly, when psychologists undertake to measure the relative happiness of nations, they routinely find that Americans are not, even in prosperous times and despite our vaunted positivity, very happy at all. A recent meta-analysis of over a hundred studies of self-reported happiness worldwide found Americans ranking only twenty-third, surpassed by the Dutch, the Danes, the Malaysians, the Bahamians, the Austrians, and even the supposedly dour Finns. In another potential sign of relative distress, Americans account for two-thirds of the global market for antidepressants, which happen also to be the most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States. . . .When economists attempt to rank nations more objectively in terms of "well-being," taking into account such factors as health, environmental sustainability, and the possibility of upward mobility, the United States does even more poorly than it does when only the subjective state of “happiness” is measured. The Happy Planet Index, to give just one example, locates us at 150th among the world’s nations.

• How can we be so surpassingly "positive" in self-image and stereotype without being the world’s happiest and best-off people? The answer, I think, is that positivity is not so much our condition or our mood as it is part of our ideology—the way we explain the world and think we ought to function within it. . . .There is, we are told, a practical reason for undertaking this effort: positive thinking supposedly not only makes us feel optimistic but actually makes happy outcomes more likely. If you expect things to get better, they will. How can the mere process of thinking do this? In the rational explanation that many psychologists would offer today, optimism improves health, personal efficacy, confidence, and resilience, making it easier for us to accomplish our goals. A far less rational theory also runs rampant in American ideology—the idea that our thoughts can, in some mysterious way, directly affect the physical world. Negative thoughts somehow produce negative outcomes, while positive thoughts realize themselves in the form of health, prosperity, and success. For both rational and mystical reasons, then, the effort of positive thinking is said to be well worth our time and attention, whether this means reading the relevant books, attending seminars and speeches that offer the appropriate mental training, or just doing the solitary work of concentration on desired outcomes—a better job, an attractive mate, world peace.

• The promotion of positive thinking has become a minor industry in its own right, producing an endless flow of books, DVDs, and other products; providing employment for tens of thousands of "life coaches," "executive coaches," and motivational speakers, as well as for the growing cadre of professional psychologists who seek to train them.

OK, I'll stop here for now; there is much more to Ehrenreich's introduction that I may address at another time. I find many of her points well-taken, and some, as the ones I highlighted in bold, above, laden with a bit too much cynicism and lack of understanding about the deeper dynamics of consciousness and spirituality. With Jon Stewart, she says we seem to have a "deficit of empathy" in our country, an "irrational exuberance," and "I never think delusion is OK." So, wading through the swampy layers of insight and possible distortion here, I want to speak to this a bit.

I deal with people every day who have suffered through traumas, losses, and deaths and who are not pasting smiley faces all over their computers, mirrors, and refrigerators. They are sincerely pursuing the positive development of their inner character, their spiritual evolution, their healing. One woman, whose sister was murdered, told me that the memory of the violence and that kind of loss never leaves you; you must find a way to live WITH it. She works with the feelings in her art. Another man, whose 4-year-old daughter died in a tragic accident told me he tries to make his life "bigger," so his life has more spaciousness and room, so the loss of his child isn't such a primary focus, so it doesn't overwhelm him as much. These are not people who have a deficit of empathy, or who are pretending to be positive. They ARE positive, because they are acting in an expansive way without denying their experience.

Ehrenreich almost seems to be making fun of people's natural spiritual inclination, which in my experience is to grow and expand—in understanding, in love, in creative ability. I think, just like flowers and trees, we grow toward the source of Light, we bend toward Light, be it physical or spiritual. This "evolution urge" is nothing if not positive. People who truly embrace growthful change make a point of finding the positive meaning—that which frees us to be more loving, more understanding, and more creative—in whatever occurs in their experience. Even the loss of a beloved sibling or child can make us more loving, more understanding, more creative—if we look for how that could be possible, for what the connections are that could free us. Every "negative" or contracted experience is like a bow pulled back, about to release its arrow to fly to an expanded reality—if we release the arrow.

I define being positive as living in and experiencing what exists in the present moment. What exists takes up what artists and designers call "positive space." "Negative space" is the space around an object where "nothing" exists. Being negative is living in fictitious realities centered around what doesn't exist, what might never exist, what we don't have, what we can't do, etc. Think: worry, complaining, even mourning ad infinitum for the loss of a person in the physical form when their spiritual self is still present, right next to you, but at a higher vibration. Being negative doesn't allow us to experience the soul's reality, because the soul is accessed through presence in the present moment, through existence. So when people are positive, they have a better chance of receiving insight from their deepest self.

Being positive, then, is akin to being clear. It is my experience that a positive attitude—and I mean one that sees what exists, be it a high frequency of energy or a low one, an expanded reality or a contracted one—actually allows us to see more realistically, with less clutter. It helps us add to our sense of self rather than detract from it.

This is quite different from Ehrenreich's criticism of the willful imposition of "having to be positive" on one's reality because the person is afraid of being devastated by negative emotion that they haven't actually experienced yet, and may not, for all they know. This way of being doesn't allow all of life; it divides experience into good and evil and doesn't allow the yin-yang symbol's flow between light and dark, where you eventually experience firsthand how dark becomes light and light becomes dark and dark light, and on and on, and you see how, in the end. they are ONE FLOW. Stopping the flow becomes the real cause of suffering.

There are two kinds of "positive." Spiritually speaking there is what exists, and that experience is inclusive of expansion AND contraction, and doesn't equate contraction with negativity. Contraction may dredge up fear-based emotion, but of itself it is simply a mechanism that causes us to FOCUS or DISSOLVE a reality by removing attention. Mentally and emotionally speaking, however, positivity is the opposite of evil, destruction, and everything we've labeled as "bad." There are typically strong religious overtones, based on fixed belief systems. There is will power involved to maintain positivity so negativity doesn't sneak in through the door and take over. This way of seeing the world does not include the fullness of spiritual, mystical understanding. It is a world view that is still based on fear.

I'm wondering whether Ehrenreich should really be talking about fear as the main theme in her book. . .

Dragon Wisdom: The Intelligence of the Flow

What I Learned from "Drowning" in Japan
I relate this story in Frequency, and it illustrates a few key ideas I've been thinking about lately: 1) that constriction and contraction often predate an extremely useful insight, and though we think of this tight state as negative, it actually draws in and makes meaningful something we need in order to move forward, 2) that the Flow has its own perfect intelligence, so much better than what the mind alone can contrive, and 3) in order to access the entire revelatory process, we need to get out of the mind's way of knowing and controlling reality and into the body's way of knowing.

During one of my early visits to Japan, I'd been doing in-depth life readings for clients every day without a break, and was standing at a crosswalk at lunchtime, a crowd of fifty people waiting with me, with a similar size group on the other side. The light turned green and the two groups fluidly passed through each other like two schools of fish. I, being the only blonde in the crowd, drew a subtle kind of attention. No one looked directly at me, and they hardly touched me, but they were "feeling into" me as though my insides were an open book. After weeks of this kind of invasion, coupled with a deep daily contact with the Japanese subconscious mind, which I had discovered holds a great deal of sacrificial energy, I was wearing down.

I became feverish and overwhelmed, had trouble breathing, and was on the verge of fainting. I wasn't sure I could maintain my personal space and reality. One night, alone in my hotel room, I was flooded with images of the crowds and all the stories of all the clients I’d seen, and felt I was drowning. A "hand" came up from below and dragged me under. And finally, I let go of resisting. In a vision that lasted only a few seconds, I felt myself drown in a sea of watery energy. I died out of my old American, individualist reality and "came to" in a new one. I was totally submerged, swimming in an ocean of fluid awareness like a dolphin, where everything and everyone was interconnected.

I could stretch up out of it without leaving it, like a cresting wave, and take different shapes; I could be me, or a client, or a person on the street, or a tree. When I rose up inside other people, I knew them as if I were them. Then I could relax back into the energy ocean. I suddenly understood the Japanese reality from within it. From that day on, I didn’t feel crowded because I didn't feel contained. My temperature went back to normal and I felt connected and happy about everyone I saw. They all felt like family and I could see that in this inner reality, everyone knew about each other and took care to protect each other because one person's pain affected the rest. And that was why the Japanese placed such a high priority on "saving face." This experience changed me totally. It demonstrated a truth about human interconnection that is today beginning to be experienced by everyone, not just Asians, and which is a big part of our future reality.

In addition to gaining a great understanding of fluidity, I also came to value the reality where we "live from" a collective consciousness rather than an individual consciousness, where the whole is valued sometimes more than a single part. It's so different from the Western world view, but works just as well. East and West represent ways of understanding and making reality happen that actually dovetail; taken together they round out to something truly whole.

I've always been intrigued by the dragon image and symbology: in the West the dragon breathes fire, lives in caves in the earth, and is seen as a dark, dangerous force guarding a treasure. In the East, the dragon flies through the air, is associated with water (especially rivers), and is a light, lucky force offering a treasure. Together, all the elements are covered, as is the yin and the yang.

If we combine the value the West places on the individual and the value the East places on the collective, and let it stew a bit, might we not come to a new way of living that benefits us all, globally? A way that takes care of the "I am me" experience, then the "I am us" experience, and lets both be critical to the success of the other?

NEGATIVITY PART 4: Ultrasensitivity and Fragmentation

Part of what's got me thinking about dealing with negativity in its various forms is the fact that I seem to be unwilling to "take in" crass, hurtful, violent, sarcastically hurtful, or just-plain-mean input, whether it be from the news, books, reality TV, or even highly touted movies. I fast-forwarded through most of Slumdog Millionaire, Valkyrie, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Kite-Runner, for example. Yes, they were powerful reminders of humanity, and well-crafted films, but now I am stuck with images of what it's like to have "locked-in syndrome" and to scramble around over the rubble in India's slums looking for food, or finding punishment at the hands of power-hungry people. I don't really want those feeling states right now, as they distract me from trying to stabilize into my own "home frequency." Reality TV shows, where it's cool to cruelly "dis" the other participants while egotistically pumping yourself up, actually seem revolting to me now, where in the beginning, they were oddly fascinating.

To add to it, the stimulation levels in my local community, or wherever I travel, seem more and more over the top. I am especially affected by noise pollution: I find a quiet corner to sit at the airport to await my flight, and within minutes some insensitive, loud-mouthed executive walks over, stands almost directly over me, and speaks aggressively into the air on his nearly invisible cell phone, which must be implanted in his head. Riding to the airport on the airporter at 5 am, there's always a self-important person who must interrupt the peaceful, sleepy silence by calling their friends and colleagues and loudly reporting the blow by blow of our journey: "Now we're passing the Civic Center; now we're on the Golden Gate Bridge, now we're entering the airport turnoff. . ."

When I go to a restaurant, café, bakery, or mall, the background music is so loud I cannot actually hear the friend I'm sitting with because the decibel level is equal to the level of the other person's voice: BACKGROUND music? No, it's more like a concert. There's NOWHERE now that's free of music of someone else's choosing. I feel like I'm being programmed by Big Brother, or hypnotized into submission so I'll behave myself. Of course, I can try to combat it with my own ipod. . . Pump up the volume!!!

The October 2009 issue of Smart Money magazine has a great piece on the last page, called "Stop the Music," by Anne Kadet. Here are a few quotes edited from her article (my emphasis in bold):

"Muzak rival DMX says its programs play in school cafeterias, funeral homes, hospitals, and auto dealerships. Doctors play music in waiting rooms to reduce perceived wait times; convenience stores blast it at the gas pump. You can even hear it—yes—at the library. . . .Muzak still cites studies claiming that music leads to lower blood pressure, reduced anxiety, positive service evaluations, increased productivity, higher sales, and more satisfying conversations. But these ulterior goals are no longer the point. These days it's all about reinforcing the brand image. Businesses now contract with music providers to design customized playlists that evoke the lifestyle and emotional tone they want consumers to connect with their brand.

"Backlash, of course, has ensued. Pipedown, an international advocacy group devoted to the elimination of piped-in music, includes 2,000 paying members who distribute the organization’s five types of preprinted protest cards to offending shopkeepers. . . . Perhaps the best folks can do is seek out the few venues that remain music-free. Ted Rueter, founder of Noise Free America (motto: "Respect the quiet"), promotes an ambitious 53-point plan to reduce noise at the federal, state, and local levels. “It’s good to dream,” says the Albany, N.Y., political science professor, who picks his chiropractor, supermarket, and restaurants based on background noise. Among his favorite stores: Target. The stylish discount chain stopped playing music 15 years ago in an effort to provide a calm environment. And while it reviews the decision every year, it's sticking to its guns. Wouldn't you know, the store says, there has never been a protest from customers wanting to hear music."

In Frequency, I address the subject of our growing ultrasensitivity, due to the increasing vibrational level of our bodies. When our personal vibration goes up, we're capable of picking up more pre-verbal data directly from energy itself, and that means we're being flooded with information that we don't really know how to decipher, sort, and process. "Background" music, it seems to me, is an effort to cover over the agitation we feel deep-down in our body, yet it actually prevents us from processing the information we're receiving. We are coping with severe overwhelm.

Superfluous music, just like all the little animated ads and moving lines of type at the bottom of our TV screens, makes us fragment our awareness to try to multi-task even more than we already are. I don't know about you, but it's driving me nearly insane. Could this be why negativity is having a greater impact on us than ever before? Why we either try to numb ourselves by "going unconscious" or just start pulling back from the amount of blatantly obvious and subliminal data we encounter each day? The irony is that we often use the very sources of overwhelm and fragmentation, like music and television, to try to "medicate" ourselves from the unconscious stress of "vibration-overload."

Mid-Afternoon Remembering

Certainly there are days I want to just REALLY stop, and not work on my business, and not even do the more meaningless rote tasks like washing dishes or balancing the checkbook. Today, I stayed in sweat pants all day. Stood up suddenly from the computer, made a quick lunch, walked out front with a quesadilla in hand, thinking I wanted to feel the sun, thinking I should get a chair and sit down, then stared into a shamelessly frilly and feminine fuschia hollyhock flower which was taking advantage of the Indian summer warmth to bloom outrageously, still eating my tortilla, then poked idly at the penstemon, rearranging a little branch, and there uncovered a praying mantis, just sitting on the stake that had been hidden. It turned its tiny triangle head to look at me. I gave it space, happily, honoring its amazing weirdness, feeling how it, too, was enjoying the late afternoon warmth.

Then thought how my body and soul know more about what's in the world, and where the good stuff is, than my mind can ever absorb. How just moving without thinking sometimes, leads you to wonders. How the mind grasps onto reasons for doing what you're doing: "I think I'll eat outside in the sun but I should sit in a chair." How you distract yourself from the mind's justifications and walk right into the wonders. How you can discover an amazing "presence" amidst the leaves without realizing you're even exploring. Was I responding to a "call"? It's these moments I crave, small connections that reaffirm the magic of spirit's underpinning of ordinary life, of finding the Surprise that lifts you beyond.

photo by Penney Peirce

NEGATIVITY PART 3: Scary vs. Hopeful Predictions

A conversation recently cropped up in our Intuition Network group, about what we intuitives were seeing concerning the future. To me, this is always a tricky proposition, because results can be skewed so easily by:

1) the seer's need for recognition,

2) the seer's bias toward negative drama, things going wrong, "noble sacrifice," or Armageddonish prophecies being fulfilled,

3) the seer's bias toward needing and wanting things to work out positively or even magically, without us having to do the deep work to change ourselves internally or face a painful transition,

4) the tendency to see things as either-or, black-white, and good-bad rather than to understand the naturally contracting-expanding nature of life and energy flow,

5) the tendency to miss the fact that certain parts of the world and certain people will experience "downs" as others are simultaneously experiencing "ups" in the wave of transformation; and then the flow will change, involving other groups in the up and down, and so on, so that nothing universal is ever happening to everyone at the same time, except for the increasing frequency of our reality.

So much is being written now about the devastating effects of 2012, and people seem to want to be titillated by the fear. I attempted to neutralize a bit of that in a recent blog post, but it seems people like to "put on the buzz" and wallow around in anxiety. It reminds me of a scene from the film, Crimes of the Heart, where Sissy Spacek's character Babe says she routinely takes down her physician father's book on skin diseases from an upper shelf in the library and makes herself look at the photos of skin cancer as a sort of penance. Perhaps we like to scare ourselves with something fictitious rather than deal with difficult realities at hand?

One of our Intuition Network members, Dale Sellers, wrote this: "I've worked with a small team to intuitively track what is coming in the next few years. Some of what we've uncovered is inspirational and empowering, and some is sad and frightening. From what I understand, the future is all probabilities so it's nice to know nothing is cut into stone. Even scientists are now saying there are potentially infinite multiple universes. Anyway, some of what we've been picking up in the US relates to massive food shortages. We are getting scenes of high security food factories, where veggies are thrown over the walls to massive crowds of starving people. We've also seen movements where mass numbers of people experience spiritual/psychic ascension, making it more a part of our culture."

I wrote back: "One of the things I've seen for a long time is a drought where food production zones become dysfunctional, and farming shifts farther north (in the northern hemisphere). Meantime, there are water shortages, food shortages, necessitating the engineering of food/water transport systems globally, to move available resources around quickly. It may be that companies like soft drink manufacturers go into the water transport business. Also, the hybridized crops won't tolerate the heat, and there will be a lot of focus on better seeds and new farming methods. I also see a suicide epidemic. And possibly as an extension of that, more of the type of thing where people kill others and then themselves. And, I see much more volcanic activity."

John Petersen, founder of The Arlington Institute, a group of futurists, has a section on his website dedicated to the worlds biggest problems. The problems have two criteria—they must be global and have the potential to rapidly escalate into severe crises. I invite you to study the information on his site, as it is well-researched. Here are the 5 main issues they currently list:

• Economic Collapse: Fragilities in the current global economy could tip the developed world into conditions not seen since the 1920s.
• Peak Oil: Petroleum has powered the modern world for almost 100 years; today, many industry insiders say the we may be reaching a permanent peak in oil production.
  
• Global Water Crisis: Over the last 50 years the human population has nearly tripled, while industrial pollution, unsustainable agriculture, and poor civic planning have decreased the overall water supply.
• Species Extinction: Certain species that human beings depend upon for our food supply are going extinct; if their numbers fall too low we may face extinction ourselves.
• Rapid Climate Change: While the debate rages on about the causes of climate change, global warming is an empirical fact. The problem is both a curse and blessing, in that people from different cultures will either have to work together or face mutual destruction.

I think it's important when looking for images of realities to come, to see the physical view, which may indeed hold a variety of tragedies, catastrophes, and drastic changes. It's also important to understand that physical reality is an experience cocreated by billions of souls and minds, as well as cosmic forces, and that at the heart of all change—especially the sort of transformation we are currently beginning to embrace—there is a natural law operating. It's called Evolution, or the return to Spirit. We have "in-volved" ourselves down into a slow-frequency experience called "life on earth," or what we might call the "particle-based reality" where separation is the name of the game. We are now "e-volving" back up in frequency, out to the wave-based, space-based reality of unity. It is spiritual change that underlies physical change.

We need to address the physical problems to come, yes, but we also need to critically address our knowledge of ourselves as Spirit first. We need to bring our spiritual awareness all the way into matter, saturating this world until there is no difference between realms, until we don't prefer or resist any of the dimensions.

So, when looking for prophecy and prediction, I think it's important to understand that enlightened realities will increase rapidly, CAUSING cataclysmic changes wherever there is resistance to the Flow of the greater energy frequency. For awhile, both the expansive, enlightened realities and the contracted, fear-based realities will increase together. Then the high-frequency, more enlightened realities will gain momentum as resistance gives way. Evolution back to Spirit will always win, because it's the larger Truth.

We can look at the ways the physical world may malfunction to possibly reduce the damage and increase the chance for more people to experience the enlightened realities, but it's important not to get stuck in the dire dramas, nor to avoid them and stick totally to the sweetness and light, hope-filled view.

NEGATIVITY PART 2: Psychic Attack?

Here is a recent email exchange that points out a few more aspects of dealing with negativity.

My friend A writes: D has a question for you. He's getting reports from all of his sensitive friends that they feel like they're under some kind of an attack. He says two expert healers he knows have been crying for no reason and feeling totally disoriented or blocked.

PP: Haven't heard about this; it might be that they're empathically tuning in to some upcoming suffering on the planet, but I tend to not go into ideas about psychic attack. Instead I feel that the energy intensifications this year are coming faster now, in waves and spurts and sudden floods. When that happens, we either accept the flow and try to quickly match its frequency so we can go with it and it doesn't bother us at all, or we resist it and try to maintain an old, familiar reality. Then it can really disrupt us by shaking things up, like flood waters roiling behind a dam.

The energy wave tends to roto-rooter out anything in its way — basically, physical, emotional, and mental contractions and holding patterns, which could be chronic pain, fear beliefs, old unconscious "overlays" from others, or inflexible ideas like fixed world views. It's not at all uncommon to experience dislodged emotion like an unexplained crying jag, or to hit snags and confusion, disillusionment, and disorientation. The old patterns aren't working anymore and when you try to make them work, they fall apart, or have no meaning.

To interpret something as a psychic attack shows something about what's going on in a person's subconscious mind:

1) They think they're important enough in their positivity to draw attention from negative beings.
2) They believe unconsciously that there's a "fight" between light and dark.
3) They believe they can be punished for being good, or for being themselves.
4) They believe they're basically separate from the outer world; that the outside world is bigger and more powerful than they are; that it can be inimical to them.
5) They believe the dark is more powerful than the light.
6) They may have placed a value on martyrdom and self-sacrifice.

I think it's possible for people who do not experience the fullness of their own self to be "possessed" — perhaps "dominated" or "hounded" is a better way to say it — by discarnate beings who themselves are caught in a lack of sense of self. Of course, people IN bodies become dominators and victims to each other as well. If you don't occupy your own space fully, other people come and push on you, perhaps to get a rise out of you, to see where you actually are. Or, people who want the outside world to behave the way they've decided it should be, who want others to agree with their world view and try to control everyone around them, will sense the lack of presence in others and immediately flow into the space and occupy it FOR the other person. That's when you feel you're living in someone else's reality instead of your own. That's when you hear the advice: "Get a life!"

When you occupy yourself fully, use your own imagination to create scenarios that are fun and creative for YOU, you won't experience domination, possession, or undue influence from others. There are times when we force ourselves to stop, get quiet, and listen more deeply (the "voice" or knowing of the soul is always in the silence). I think it's partly why I got sick last week — I had to STOP and rest and go inside more. To contact the energy directly. Couldn't sleep either; in the middle of the night, there's less resistance to the flow; it's so quiet. I noticed I wasn't stressed, I was just buzzing and "pumping light." I got up and just stood in the energy. I began to actually SEE the light in the dark. It was wild!

A: Ah, so much of this disruption is the flotsam and jetsam that comes up when you're learning how to allow the higher frequency to be your default ("home")!

PP: You got it!

For Those Who Plan Ahead. . .

I wanted to let you know that I will be at Omega Institute in New York next summer to do a weekend intensive on the Frequency material. The exact dates are July 16-18. So if that appeals to you, make a note! I'll of course announce it in greater detail as the time nears.

NEGATIVITY PART 1: Katrina Revisited

Of late I have been thinking quite a bit about how to view, or interact with, or handle—negativity, suffering, cruelty, destructive stupidity, victimization, and crassness of every ilk. I want to write about it now, in bits and pieces, to try to find some coherence, some way to live positively without being blind and numb. I invite you to dialogue with me here or on Facebook, if you'd like, because this has got to be one of the most important issues we can tackle at this point in our transformation process.

What arises first is coming out of my reading The Tin Roof Blowdown, by James Lee Burke, one of my favorite mystery writers. Burke, whose Dave Robicheaux detective series takes place in the Louisiana bayou country, places this story right in the middle of Hurricane Katrina. And he describes the hurricane itself and its aftermath as only a writer sensitive to minute sensory detail can. Here is his description of the storm itself:

"A category 5 hurricane carries an explosive force several times greater than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. But unlike a man-made weapon of mass destruction, a hurricane creates an environment that preempts our natural laws. Early on the air turns a chemical green and contains a density that you can hold in your palm. The lightning and the thunder arrive almost like predictable friends, then fade into the ether and seem to become little more than a summer squall. Rain rings chain the swells between the whitecaps and the wind smells of salt spray and hard-packed sand that has warmed under the sun. You wonder if all the preparedness and alarm hasn't been much ado about nothing.

"Then the tide seems to shrink from the land, as though a giant drainhole has formed in the center of the Gulf. Palm trees straighten in the stillness, their fronds suddenly lifeless. You swallow to stop the popping sound in your ears, with the same sense of impotence you might experience aboard a plane that is dramatically losing altitude. To the south, a long black hump begins to gather itself on the earth's rim, swelling out of the water like an enormous whale, extending itself all across the horizon. You cannot believe what you are watching. The black hump is now rushing toward the coastline, gaining momentum and size, increasing in velocity so rapidly that its own crest is absorbed by the wave before it can crash to the surface in front of it."

I was in Johannesburg, South Africa when Katrina hit, working there for 2 months. I saw the coverage through the more neutral eyes of the BBC and worldwide CNN, not from America's own media. I was numbed by what I saw, and yet I was so distant from it; it was like seeing tragedies in foreign countries from the comfort of my living room in California. Here I was viewing something in my own country as a foreigner might see it. And on top of that odd inside-outness, I was experiencing the true dangers of a real crime-ridden city, and the atrocities committed by and to the various black peoples who'd immigrated to J'burg — all the homes "protected" by high walls topped with rows of razor wire, being warned of men breaking car windows with spark plugs to carjack you; reeling over reports of break-ins where burglars raided refrigerators then murdered all the people in the house, having visited Soweto's shanties. I was in such overwhelm from the parallels between the gruesome realities. How much could I actually let in, and process? Burke goes on to describe some of the Katrina afternath:

"From a boat or any other elevated position, as far as the eye could see, New Orleans looked like a Caribbean city that had collapsed beneath the waves. The sun was merciless in the sky, the humidity like lines of ants crawling inside your clothes. The linear structure of a neighborhood could be recognized only by the green smudge of yard trees that cut the waterline and row upon row of rooftops dotted with people who perched on sloped shingles that scalded their hands.

"The smell was like none I ever experienced. The water was chocolate-brown, the surface glistening with a blue-green sheen of oil and industrial chemicals. Raw feces and used toilet paper issued from broken sewer lines. The gray, throat-gagging odor of decomposition permeated not only the air but everything we touched. The bodies of dead animals, including deer, rolled in the wake of our rescue boats. And so did those of human beings, sometimes just a shoulder or an arm or the back of a head, suddenly surfacing, then sinking under the froth.

"They drowned in attics and on the second floors of their houses. They drowned along the edges of Highway 23 when they tried to drive out of Plaquemines Parish. They drowned in retirement homes and in trees and on car tops while they waved frantically at helicopters flying by overhead. They died in hospitals and nursing homes of dehydration and heat exhaustion, and they died because an attending nurse could not continue to operate a hand ventilator for hours upon hours without rest.

"If by chance you hear a tape of the 911 cell phone calls from those attics, walk away from it as quickly as possible, unless you are willing to live with voices that will come aborning in your sleep for the rest of your life."

I am reading Burke's great detail of the horrendousness of the situation, because I want to feel more, but I also don't want to feel that much more. But I'm doing it, putting myself in other people's shoes. I am pondering: How does one help? How do I expand to allow these suffering-realities and not be dragged down by them, and not validate them too much, and not recoil from them too much, and maintain and evolve my compassion? I'm not quite sure yet, but I am going to keep writing and penetrating into these ideas. . . There surely is much more of this to come as we transform from old world to new — along with great positive openings, too, of course — but if we want to lead a path through suffering, we've got to be able to maintain a healthy center, an open heart.

Measure Your Well-Being

This just came from my colleague, Laurie Nadel:

Measure your own well-being at http://www.nationalaccountsofwellbeing.org/engage/survey.html

This survey comes from the New Economic Forum (UK), Cambridge University Well-Being Institute, and European Social Survey. Answer the questions and it gives you a spider-web shaped chart that is your "well-being" profile. You can compare your profile to people in other countries.

The New Economic Forum wants Parliament and other European governments to consider well-being as an indicator of true wealth...at least as important as the GNP! Seems the rest of the world is moving beyond the US in terms of innovative thinking, eh?

Photo of New Mexico sunrays by Jon Driscoll, Pecos, NM

A Little More Perspective on 2012

I've edited and paraphrased key points in a recent article written by Mark Stevenson concerning 2012 and the Mayan calendar. I met Larry Joseph in Lisbon this year, by the way, and respect his journalistic integrity. I pass along the perspectives here because there has been such a terrible stir about what might be coming. I do not feel great negativity at all concerning 2012, but feel that there is definitely a transformational shift in the works, though I do not get that it is tied to a specific date. I will pass along ideas related to "The Shift" as I receive them. I continue to advocate that we stay fully in the moment and raise our personal vibration, becoming "transparent," which to me means that we dissolve our holding patterns and mental/emotional contractions so energy can flow through us unimpeded.

The Mayan Long Count calendar begins in 3,114 BC, dividing time into approximately 394-year periods known as baktuns. Thirteen was a sacred number for the Mayas—the completion number before a new cycle begins again—and the 13th baktun ends around Dec. 21, 2012. "It's a special anniversary of creation," said David Stuart, a specialist in Mayan epigraphy at the University of Texas at Austin. "The Maya never said the world is going to end, they never said anything bad would happen necessarily, they're just recording this future anniversary."

Tribal elder Apolinario Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan, says a significant time period for the Mayas does end on the date but most Mayan elders say the doomsday theories spring from Western, not Mayan ideas, and are nonsense.Others say there are astronomical alignments that coincide in 2012, including one that happens only once every 25,800 years. Mexican archaeologist Guillermo Bernal notes there are other inscriptions at Mayan sites for dates far beyond 2012—including one that roughly translates into the year 4772. Bernal suggests that apocalypse is "a very Western, Christian" concept projected onto the Maya, perhaps because Western myths are "exhausted."

Some say the Maya knew that the Earth's axis wobbles, slightly changing the alignment of the stars every year. Once every 25,800 years, the sun aligns with the center of our galaxy on a winter solstice, the sun's lowest point in the horizon. That will happen on Dec. 21, 2012, when the sun appears to rise in the same spot where the bright center of galaxy sets. Author John Major Jenkins says his two-decade study of Mayan ruins indicates the Maya were aware of the alignment and attached great importance to it. "If we want to honor and respect how the Maya think about this, then we would say that the Maya viewed 2012, as all cycle endings, as a time of transformation and renewal," said Jenkins.

Author Lawrence Joseph says a peak in explosive storms on the surface of the sun combined with a hole in the earth's magnetic shield could knock out the power grid, triggering food shortages, water scarcity—a collapse of civilization, especially in regions closer to the poles. Solar peaks occur about every 11 years, but Joseph says there's evidence the 2012 peak could be "a lulu." While pressing governments to install protection for power grids, Joseph counsels readers not to use 2012 as an excuse to not live in a healthy, responsible fashion.

Other sources say a galactic alignment or magnetic disturbances could somehow trigger a "pole shift" creating the ultimate planetary catastrophe. Scientists say that, at best, the poles might change location by one degree over a million years, with no sign that it would start in 2012.

Rainer Maria Rilke Poem

My close friend, Rod McDaniel, who lives in Heidelberg, has for the past 3 years been fastidiously translating Rilke's poems, elegies, and now, the letters—many of which are archived in the Heidelberg University library. He's been feeling into the spirit of the work, and making sure the translation captures Rilke's best mystical intent. The letters, especially, are an amazingly rich source of insight about the colleagues and amazing thinkers who all knew each other and gathered in Europe around the turn of the century.

Here is one of the beautiful poems by Rilke, who never ceases to inspire me:

Look, I know there are those
who never learn to walk the paths
that lead people to each other.
Rather, they experience an opening
into a suddenly breathable Heaven.
A never-ending flight
through love's thousand years night.

Invariably they all smile,
already crying with joy.
Invariably they all cry,
already full of eternal joy.

Don't ask me
how long they continue feeling. How long
can one see those ascending toward Heaven?
Perhaps inexpressable Heaven
is invisible
even to our inner landscape.

Destiny is something else. Destiny makes people
visible. Standing like towers. Falling.

But lovers continue
beyond their own destruction
eternally forth; and there is no exit
out of the infinite. Who retreats from
eternal joy?