The ISIS Brand: Malignant Misogyny

The ISIS Brand: Malignant Misogyny

Does the name Hypatia mean anything to you? No? I wouldn't be surprised. About 1600 years ago, Hypatia was a misogynist's worst nightmare. She was an independent woman who schooled the pre-Islamic era men of her generation in Egypt in advanced mathematics, philosophy, and the sciences. Although I had studied the period in which she lived, I had never heard of Hypatia until some feminist scholars discovered well-hidden documentation that revealed a concerted effort to erase Hypatia and others like her from the "official" - that is, male - version of history. In her own era, Hypatia was hated and persecuted by mobs of insane religious extremists encouraged by the early "Church Fathers" in the desert enclaves of Egypt. Today, she'd be top of the ISIS "hit list". Misogyny has no expiry date.

As the most distinguished scholar of her day, "Hypatia wore a philosopher's robe as a male would. She drove her own chariot, sailed her own boat, rode blooded horses alone out into Alexandria's encircling deserts. She stood before thousands when she spoke, and being both young and lovely, knew many men. Before she was twenty, she surpassed her famous father in mathematics and astronomy." In other words, Hypatia represented everything misogynists feared: a brilliant woman scholar who was outside the control of any male authority. As long as she existed she was a blatant challenge to Church doctrine that dictated all women were "Daughters of Eve" and subject in all ways to men. Hypatia was "subject" to no one and a living monument to the liberating effect of education for women. In fact Hypatia was famous for having corrected many of the texts written by a man - her father - and other male mathematicians for the manuscript collections of the great Library of Alexandria. As the Christian church gained temporal as well as 'spiritual' power, the schools and libraries of the ancient world, even the famed academies of Athens that gave us Plato and Socrates, were destroyed by Christian mobs and the soldiers of Christian emperors plunging Europe into what are known now as the infamous Dark Ages.

The Most Hated Woman In The World

Hypatia was a brilliant mathematician, an astronomer, and prominent lecturer on the philosophy of Plotinus as head of the School of Philosophy at Alexandria. She was, of course, a pagan and that did not sit well with the local Christian Bishop, Cyril. By the time of Hypatia, @370 to 400 C.E., the church had abandoned its earliest roots in which women were priests and bishops. An ascetic strain of religiosity had taken over the hierarchy and an Old Testament misogyny had marred the priesthood. Although pockets of goddess worship and the ancient 'Mystery Schools' survived, their days were numbered. As the universally acknowledged genius of her age, Hypatia was an easy target for those who saw the survival of paganism - or worse atheism - as a personal affront. The Church's power had to be absolute; the hierarchy would brook no 'alternative philosophies', especially the agnosticism of the open- minded. Whether motivated by pure misogyny or political expediency, priests began to preach the evils of permitting this pagan 'whore' to appear in public lecturing to thousands, mostly men! She refused to marry and be subject to a husband and she claimed the right to drive her own chariot, to walk freely and unaccompanied around Alexandria, to ride out into the desert at night to observe and map the movements of the stars.

Pathological Power Drive

The problem was that the Christian state was about submission not independence.The priests and bishops had far less freedom than Hypatia had since they depended on Church stipends for their upkeep. The Christian ideal was "holy poverty" whilst Hypatia, as the pre-eminent authority of her day, attracted wealthy patrons and students from all over the pagan world. Then, as now, wealth is power and both excite greed in those who have neither. It is thought that her alignment with Orestes on matters civil was the excuse the Christian hierarchy seized upon as an excuse to kill her. Whatever the motive, her death suggests an unusually strong level of personal hatred. Hypatia was dragged from her study by a male mob, stripped and skinned to death with the edges of sea shells and broken tiles. As if that were enough, her body was then hacked to pieces and burnt and her bones scattered for carrion so there could be no memorial to attract adherents to her cause.Her voluminous correspondence with other scholars andher treatises on various aspects of mathematics and astronomy were mostly destroyed after her murder and those that remained were lost when Library of Alexandria was burned by a now victorious Church of Rome. But enough of her work survived to make her a pain in Rome's side and a symbol of hope for oppressed women everywhere.

Things have changed since then, right?

Women - in some places - can vote, hold jobs, drive cars, live alone if they choose to do so, refrain from child-bearing if they so choose. That's progress, right? Yes, as far it goes. But there has always been a sizeable male opposition that threatens the rights of women like the American "Christian" Right Wing, pseudo-religious patriarchal cults, men who engage in sexual harassment of women on the streets, at work, and even within institutions of higher learning where date rape and gang rape are seen as male rights to assert their power and dominance. And now we have the embodiment of militant malignant misogyny, the various branches of "Radical Islam": Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIS-ISIL, and their myriad sympathizers around the globe. Mass murder, sexual slavery, and the entire of catalogue of testosterone-fed psycho-pathology masquerades as "religion" to justify the torture, rape, enslavement, and murder of any female who takes the ISIS sadistic fancy. ISIS's objective is totalitarian political power, economic power, sexual power and lethal power. Make no mistake: ISIS has one religion only, Death; and its sacraments are rape, torture and murder.

ISIS is not Muslim; it is Malignant Misogyny. Hypatia would recognize it immediately.

© Delia O' Riordan 2014

Immortal Mystery

Everything is number. Or so Pythagorus believed. Stripped down to its essence everything in the universe is an expression of mathematics. This is the essential idea behind the novel and international cult best seller, The Eight by author Katherine Neville who is a fascinating person as well as a formidable story teller.  Biographical detail is very scant beyond references to her being born in St. Louis, Missouri on April 4, 1945, educated in Colorado and New York. She is clearly a multi-talented woman who supported herself at various times as a portrait artist, a fashion model, a professional photographer, a computer systems designer and...a Vice-President of Bank of America!  Neville was a consultant to the oil industry in Algeria in the early days of Opec, is an astute observer of cultural mores and manners, a deeply read polyglot with a facility for languages (including Basque!) and is devoted to her life partner Dr. Karl Pribram, the distinguished physicist most famous for his holographic theory of the mind and universe.

Immortal Mystery

I first read The Eight when it was published in 1988 and today I finished re-reading it for probably the 3rd time. The Eight is a hard book to ignore for those with an interest in the paranormal, history, the esoteric origins of chess, and the story behind the stories we see on the news. The Eight is predicated on the existence of  The Montglane Service, a magnificent - indeed, Royal -  mythical chess set, wrapped in silk and velvet cloth with mysterious figures embroidered on it and played on an embossed board given as a Coronation gift from the "Moors" to Charlemagne around 800 CE.  It is the history of this mysterious chess set that lies at the heart of The Eight.

No one seems to know quite how far back into the mists of time the origin of chess may lie. Ancient Hindus are often credited with inventing the game but it is possible that the Ancient Chinese had a version of the game as well. What makes the game so intriguing - and addictive - is the game pieces themselves. They are archetypal figures in a similar way to the Tarot Trumps. A King, a Queen, 2 Bishops, 2 Knights, and 2 'castles'  or Rooks plus 8 pawns make up a side. The board has 64 squares with 16 game pieces on each side.  A pattern of movement is assigned to each piece to make the game more challenging intellectually, strategically, and tactically. As one who does not in general enjoy formal games, I can nonetheless become enthralled by a Grand Master match because the strategies are so varied and so many that watching two masters play is like watching a great work of art being created.
Imagine yourself watching a match played with magnificent game pieces cast from gold, silver, copper and bronze and studded with precious and semi-precious stones. These priceless chess pieces are more than 1200 years old and once belonged to one of the most powerful kings who ever lived. Imagine further that the chess service and the board on which it is played are engraved with symbols that reveal a great secret to those who know how to interpret them, a secret so important that every head of state in the world has at one time or another sought to find this chess set and possess the secret knowledge that would bestow complete power on its owner. This is the premise of The Eight.

Real Life Game of Kings and Queens

Since its publication in 1988 the book has never gone out of print and to this day has a worldwide readership. So what is it that has so captured the imagination of generations of readers? For me it is the combination of the legend of Charlemagne's chess service set amidst  the actual events of the French Revolution, the inclusion of historical people like the painter Jacques-Louis David, Talleyrand, Marat, Charoltte Corday, Robespierre, Madame de Stael, Catherine the Great, Napoleon, James Boswell, and an esoteric/magical story line that works seamlessly.

The primary characters who drive the action are seen as the living equivalent of the chess pieces. As such, they engage in an endless game involving global political intrigue, espionage, murder, blackmail, and a determination to own the entire Montglane Service. Add to that contemporary characters who must sort out the clues and resolve the game or continue it forever and you have a modern mystery 1200 years in the making.  Add in locations like New York, Paris, St. Petersburg, Marseilles, and Algeria, diamond dealers, secret police, KGB, a Russian Grand Master, OPEC, a fortune teller, disappearing corpses and you have an irresistible plot peopled with fascinating characters and a quest that must be accepted to avoid the secret ending up in the wrong hands.  Obviously, the book has the makings of a brilliant mini-series and perhaps the greatest mystery about the book is why no one has optioned it for that purpose. 

If fiction is not "your thing" but  you are interested in Chess you might enjoy reading a book by Chess Grand Master, Susan Polgar documenting how an obscure Hungarian family rose to the very pinnacle of chess mastery. Susan and her sisters have revolutionised the game by each qualifying as a Grand Master under the coaching of their remarkable father, Lazslo Polgar. The Polgar Sisters beat the odds in every way by excelling in the most demanding 'game' in the world.

Whether you prefer the fiction of The Eight or the real life story of Grand Master Susan Polgar, if you enjoy an absorbing read, both of these books fit the bill.

The books cited above are available  HERE.

© Delia O' Riordan 2014

www.psychic-delia.com

Imagining God

Imagining God

I've never much liked the Judeo-Christian notion of  "God". I mean, the Father God of the Old Testament YHWH/Jehova was a real piece of work.  Bad tempered, blood thirsty, jealous of other Gods and especially the female ones,  intolerant, over-bearing, loud, and in general, a big bully who demanded to be worshipped despite his all-too-human character disorder.  As if all this weren't outrageous enough, he was cruelly capricious, inconsistent, illogical and vengeful. Now I ask you, honestly,  what's to like about this alleged "God"? For me, obviously  there was nothing. So I rejected the whole notion of "God The Father". Having been brought up Catholic, however,  it seemed to me that the long-suffering human "father" Joseph was far more worthy of love and respect. He didn't demand any sacrifices. There is no evidence of misogyny in his treatment of Mary or cruelty in his treatment of Jesus/Jeshua.  He even has a flower named after him:  St. Joseph's Lily.  Now that was someone I could warm up to.

Mary, on the hand, has gone through a variety of revisions. She was so widely and fervently revered in the early days of the Christian era that by the Middle Ages she had become a major headache for the hierarchy. Mary was becoming too popular by far and that would never do in a Patriarchal Religion. Worse, some of her epithets echoed those of Goddesses of pre-Christian times.  Remember, according to the "Fathers" of the Church, although Mary had been "chosen" by God to bear his Son, she herself was not divine. But was she an ordinary human woman? Well, not quite. The Church declared that Mary was conceived "without stain". She was the only human exception to the rule that proclaimed all humans are born in a state of  "Original Sin".  What was Original Sin? The "sin" of Eve who defied "Yahweh" by seeking knowledge that was supposedly available only to Yahweh. So ultimately Woman was responsible for introducing "sin" to the world and since all human females were her "daughters" we necessitated the "sacrifice" of Yeshua. Neat, huh?

Where did that leave Mary? Hmmm. Those clever "Fathers" concocted a solution: she was impregnated by the Holy Spirit, the third wheel of the "Holy Trinity".  Pregnant by an invisible power. But how could she still be a Virgin at the time of the birth? A miracle, of course. Best of all, the language of Yeshua, Aramaic contained the perfect explanation. The Aramaic word for Virgin did not mean an intact Hymen; it meant an unmarried or independent woman, not attached to any man. According to the myth, Mary was affianced to Joseph but since she was pregnant and they had not yet married, she was still technically a Virgin. Ingenius! By the way, when did they get married? The New Testament is silent on this issue…

Imagining God

To complete this "Holy Family", we have the "Son" of "God".  According to some accounts, this "Son"  was descended from the House of King David which was used as a flimsy argument in favour of his right to Kingship should the need ever arise...Hmm...another question occurs to me: If the "Son"  was already "God" why would he also need to be  "King"?  Surely Yeshua could "pull rank" any time he wanted to!

Further along in the Gospels we're told that Yeshua grew up working in Joseph's modest carpentry shop. Not exactly Kingly material if you get my drift. But that, too, was turned into a virtue by making  it possible for us non-royal nobodies to identify with him. He was flesh and blood just like us and grew up in modest circumstances. But what of his character? To be fair there were a few pluses: he won a debate with some old fuddy-duddies called Pharisees whose speciality was splitting semantic hairs.  So far, so good. But he did disappear for 17 years between the ages of 13 and 30, surely a crucial period of development for any man. So where was he for those 17 years? He could have been enmeshed in a life of debauchery for all we know and then suddenly 'saw the light' and turned into a holy man. That would make him the prototype for today's rehabilitated celebs and TV evangelical ministers which would earn him a mention in People, at least.  But Yeshua was supposed to be a man who was all man and at the same time a 'God' who was all 'God'. Wrap your head around that one if you can! I, personally, cannot.  All in all, Jesus/Yeshua might be tolerable as  a potential deity but something more was needed to win him followers on Facebook: he had to perform miracles and then be persecuted for them and finally, in the ultimate act of love, become a blood sacrifice for the sins of men.  That I could live with if it applied only to men who like blood sports anyway. But what did Yeshua know of women?

We're supposed to believe that this divinely conceived man was always 'chaste' yet he showed "mercy" to women accused of adultery and even included in his closest circle of followers. I guess we women are supposed to feel grateful for that. By the way, did you notice that in this scenario only women are associated with sins relating to sex?  And "He" died for our "sins", right? So what specific sins was he atoning for in men? Their disbelief  even in the face of his unparalleled miracles? Not believing the evidence of their eyes - could that be  the sin of men?  (Just watch an episode of "Haunting" and you'll see how little that has changed!)  Most of all, we were supposed to love Yeshua for forgiving his executioners who the Church claims were acting on our behalf!  Hey, I never asked anybody to do that for me. That sacrifice thing was entirely the idea of "God The Father" who, instead of dying himself, had his 'only begotten Son' do it for him.  Looks to me like Jehovah strikes again - eliminates the competition before he can get more popular. My, how paganly Zeus-like.

Whose "God" is this?

So what is my point? It is simply this: that our images of God are made in our own human likeness and not the other way around. There is no 'one size fits all' image of "God" because there cannot be. If we are all unique in our genetic make-up and if we are made of the same "stuff" as the Universe - what Carl Sagan called "Star Stuff" and what Deepak Chora calls "Cosmic Soup" - we must conclude that if there is any "God" in the sense of a creator of all that is, it would either have to contain all of the "Star Stuff" (which would put us in the awkward position of worshipping ourselves)  or it would have to be entirely separate from its creations and therefore unknowable by us.

Either way we have no idea what such a Being would look like. But I'm willing to bet, it won't be anything humans can imagine.  Perhaps, rather than trying to create images of God, we should love and care for our planet and its life-forms and learn as much as we can about the existence of all life-forms in the Universe so that we may appreciate what "God hath wrought" before we try destroying any part of it.

© Delia O' Riordan 2014  www.psychic-delia.com

The Mystery of Synchronicity

The Mystery of Synchronicity 

In the years since I started doing psychic readings professionally, a number of clients who had been trying to find the right psychic to consult often came to me as a result of a chain of improbable and mysterious Synchronicities that defied the laws of probability as we know them. One case in particular came to mind this morning when I was meditating. The client, Marina, was from Trieste, the only person from that city that I had ever met. She had emigrated to Canada in 1981 and settled in a rural area outside the city where I lived. We eventually met in 1995 but the string of coincidences that led her to me started about four months before her appointment with me.

Marina loved animals and had long wanted to have a dog. She had a strong preference for Terriers and began her search for the perfect pet by joining the Canadian Kennel Club. There she met dozens of breeders and made friends with lots of dog owners who were active in showing their animals. The first co-incidence that would eventually connect us was Marina's introduction to a friend of mine who happened to be a judge of dog shows. Fred was both a breeder and trainer of show dogs and when my husband had to travel overseas we boarded our dog, a West Highland Terrier, with him. Marina met Fred when he was showing his prize Westie for the last time before retiring him and, true to form, Bridie took first place in his set. Marina was drawn to the Westie but she had decided on a different Terrier breed and kept looking.

Synchronicity And Then Some...

Months went by whilst Marina continued her search concentrating on Tibetan Terriers as her breed of choice. Then, she visited a local book shop that specialised in books of interest to animal lovers. They had volumes on everything from breeding racehorses to rare breeds of tortoises and even how to care for highly venomous spiders! Searching through the books on Terriers, Marina met a woman whose speciality was training animals for commercials and films. She worked out of Toronto but spent a lot of time in L.A. where she was working with a Tibetan Terrier who was slated to play the Dalai Lama's dog in an upcoming film. Marina had recently visited a city in the American mid-west where she had participated in the Kalachakra Initiation conducted by the Dalai Lama, a concidence which led the two women to form a friendship that eventually brought Marina to me as well!

As it happened, Leila, the dog trainer, had planned to attend a weekend retreat that I was also planning to attend and,  as luck would have it,  we were assigned to share a room.  It was a silent retreat except for an hour each evening but ,when we chatted, Leila and I discovered that we had a friend in common, a vet who looked after her animals and also happened to look after our Westie. In addition, Leila also knew the breeder where we had found our dog.Synchros 2 and 3.  The breeder would be offering a new litter for sale within two months around the time of the annual Highland Games. It just happened that the Games were to be held within a mile of the breeder's kennel. Synchro 4. My husband and I usually attended the Games with Scottish friends and their kids who always insisted we bring our well-loved Westie along. Leila had never been to the Gathering of the Clans but she decided to come and to meet my husband and me there. After the games,  we would visit the breeder together on the way home. Meanwhile,  Leila went on to invite Marina to the games as well with the idea that Marina might yet fall in love with a Westie. Synchro 5  on the chain.

The day of Games dawned hot and muggy, a typical August day and,  if I hadn't committed to meeting our Scots friends and Leila there, I might have begged off. As it happened, a thunder storm cooled things off before the Games began and made the entire afternoon far more pleasant than the morning had promised. Leila eventually found us and introduced us to Marina who was immediately charmed by our Westie. To top it off, our friend Fred (another Scot) attended the games that year (Synchro 6) and we all finished up going together to visit the breeder. The breeder was delighted to see us all approaching and the puppies she was offering for sale were even more so. After lots of petting and playing with a few puppies, Marina ended two searches that day: one for the perfect dog (she took home an adorable Westie pup named Archie) and, as a result of our conversation, she decided to come to me for a reading. Synchro 7.

I can't help but wonder at the underlying pattern of connections that let to the final outcome. Could there really be some 'grand plan' at work in our lives? The phenomenon of Synchronicity certainly seems to suggest it. Whatever the case, I can safely say that sometimes our desire to find a particular thing in life leads to finding other things like friendships, pets, and even psychics!

© Delia O' Riordan 2014

www.psychic-delia.com

Dragons and Destiny

Dragons And Destiny

It all started as I was idly checking to see what was showing on the TV and, within seconds of each other, two programmes featuring dragons popped onto the screen. One was the movie Dragonheart, an all-time favourite of mine that was on a local channel. I was tempted -  if only to hear Sean Connery bring Draco to life!  On the other hand, a documentary based on Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden was on the Discovery channel at roughly the same time. Since I own a copy of Dragonheart, I decided to watch the documentary. I briefly thought about the co-incidence of two programmes airing at the same time both focusing on dragons but then got lost in Carl Sagan's characteristic tonselly voice giving his "take" on the dominant Western creation myth and the theory of evolution weaving back and forth between antiquity and the post-modern world of science. But what stayed with me long after the programme were images of dragons. In a sense they were always with me, curled up in the hidden recesses of my unconscious mind making an appearance now and then in the form of unacknowledged fears or momentary anxieties that I quickly dismissed and moved on. Don't get me wrong, I loved dragons as a kid but then who didn't?  

A day  after I watched The Dragons of Eden, I was in a charity shop browsing through the used books shelves when an out-of-print novel I had been looking for found me instead. It was perched precariously on the edge of the shelf just above my eye level. The book was Tea With The Black Dragon by R. A. McAvoy, a delightful story by a much admired writer and story-teller.  I snapped up the book and decided to start reading it over lunch at a local restaurant that specialized in light fare on the lunchtime menu. The synchronicity of this third occurrence of a Dragon in the space of a day fleetingly passed through my mind as I made my way to the restaurant.

Dragons, Dragons Everywhere

I was about to order a quiche when the waiter wheeled chalkboard in to the shop. The board immediately caught my eye. It sported a very brightly coloured chalk drawing of...guess what? Oh, yes, a Dragon! Whoa, we were way past simple co-incidence by now. I stared in amazement at the fanciful beast. He was meant to draw attention to the daily special: Dragon's Breath Curry. I kid you not! Tempting as it was for a minute, Curry is not exactly my idea of a light lunch so I gave that a miss but wrote a note on the amusing synchro in back of the book I had just bought. 

By the time I arrived home a few hours later, the Dragon's Breath Curry was a receding memory - until later that evening when I picked up my mail. As I was lifting it out of the mailbox, a flyer fell out so I stooped to retrieve it. It was an invitation to a class in something I have always wanted to learn: Oriental Silk Thread Embroidery. And the item to be embroidered was - wait for it - Yep, a Dragon!  By now I was getting a bit spooked. Why were dragons - of all things - suddenly springing up all around me as though insisting I pay attention? This was the fifth one in the space of 24 hours! I knew better than to ignore such multiple incidents of the same iconic symbol popping up within a short span of time so I raised my antenna to a higher than usual level of alertness and realised I would have to investigate this strange Synchronicity to discover what it meant.

Hating Dragons, Loving Dragons

Not everyone likes Dragons, of course. The Dragons of European/Anglo origin are generally highly unpleasant characters!  They are a relatively recent cultural artifact as Europe was at one time a "New World" but they were preceded by various gods and goddesses like those of ancient Greece. Most of us know the story of Zeus, a blood-thirsty, vengeful megalomaniac of a god who exhibited all the worst of human character flaws. Gods of this ilk demanded constant admiration, worship and appeasement to keep his violent proclivities in check. The gods of Western imagination were dangerously fickle and more likely to visit catastrophe on humans than to provide wisdom or protection.

The Chinese, on the other hand, found an alternative to these capricious gods. In the Chinese context dragons go back to at least 4000 BCE. There is no definitive history of the idea of the dragon but cultures all over the world had different versions of creatures that are clearly all representations of the Dragon. They reasoned that it would take a creature with a huge body, large eyes that could see even in the dark, the ability to fly, scaly skin like fish so it would be impervious to water, horns on its head to break through barriers, paws like a lion for strength, could breathe fire if it had to, and had the talons of an eagle to fight with. But these imposing beasts were not hostile to humans. In fact, if we humans honoured them the dragons would help and protect us in all domains of our existence. In Chinese culture specific Dragons dwelt in the  realms of earth, air, fire, and water. By honouring the power and influence of the Dragons in each realm, humans could be guided by Dragon Energy to a life of balance and prosperity. What's not to like about that?  The Oriental Dragon is a being of dignity, nobility and, most of all, beneficence. Oriental Dragons are human-friendly, even protective of us - which I for one find a rather comforting notion. Couldn't we all use a fire-breathing defender from time to time ?

Making Dragons Into Enemies

In Western culture, psychologists maintain that Dragons are vestigial memories of frightening human encounters with Monitor Lizards or other species of large reptiles deep in our evolutionary past. In the view of evolutionary psychology, these real-life experiences with individual beasts became generalised through myth and legend into personifications of human fears. Whereas the Chinese and other Oriental peoples be-friended their dragons, Westerners turned them into enemies to be hunted and slain. Aggression, violence and ruthlessness thus came to be regarded as essential to human survival and the idea of co-operation with natural elements was limited to the healing arts and, later, to agriculture. 

To this day the Western imagination conjures ever more vile and enormous scale-covered monsters requiring ever bigger and more destructive weapons for humans to kill them. In other words, our fears of Nature and each other have increased with our capacity to inflict destruction on the world around us. But there is an alternative and benign Dragons represent it: respect for and skillful use of the natural energies around us, letting go of the need to control in favour of adaptation and acceptance. There is no final control of nature in any case; it is always far more powerful than we are so why not work with it rather against it. No one gets off this planet alive and we're a long way from "colonising" space which itself may depend on changing our attitudes from conquering nature back to exploring it for its own sake and not for more natural resources to exploit. Rather than taking our battles into space, shouldn't we learn what our own planet has to teach us first. Where better to start than with the benign protection of Earth, Air, Water and Fire Dragons?

© Delia O' Riordan 2014

"Make It So"

"Make It So"

When the Captain of Starship Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard makes a decision he follows it with the words: "Make it so".  Impressive stuff. Jean-Luc is so, well, commanding! And he's convincing. It's the conviction, the certainty that gives resonance to his voice.  In a nutshell, "Make it so" is the New Age recipe for manifesting what you want in your life. But we can really "command" the Universe to carry out our wishes? I say, no, we can't. The problem with "Make it so" is that too often originates from the part of our psyches that we call "Will" or "Will Power".  The habitual abuse of the human Will has caused so much suffering in the world that discussion of  the Will is a thorny subject. 

Human history is replete with examples of the use of the Will to overcome whole populations and hold them in thrall in order to satisfy some group’s or individual’s Ego needs.  Most of the great "Will-ers" have been men who imposed their individual will with overwhelming military force. The historic exercise of Will has been more about conquering than liberating, more about destroying than creating. Despite their protestations, neither the French nor the Russian revolutions actually freed people. They imposed a new form of tyranny instead. Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Bokassa, Taylor, el Bashir, Karodjic, Mugabe, Castro...They all imposed their personal Will upon whole populations under the guise of "liberation".  This is why the "Will" has such a bad rep in the field of depth psychology and  “New Age” circles.

However, there is a creative side to Willing, one that is more about creating than controlling. The creative side of the Will is actually our imaginative ability to Wish.  Wishing, too, got a bad rep through association with the highly unlikely or highly improbable outcome.  We tend to fall back on Wishing when we don't know how to -or we lack the means to - create the outcome we want. But just as Will doesn't have to be about the acquisition of power or the subjection of others, Wishing doesn't have to be about powerlessness or ineffectiveness.

The Marriage of Desire With Outcome

Both Willing and Wishing are about Desire. Even infants are capable of making their desires known. They are attracted to one toy and not another. They want to be held by one person and not another. These preferences are largely opaque to adults who look on in bafflement as baby makes its wishes clear. It could be a particular sound or smell, the way one colour captures the baby's attention, or it could be that babies, like all animals except adult humans, can sense or even see the energy that things and people have around them. Certain energies make baby feel happy and others do not. For baby, it's simple: get closer to what feels good and safe, get away from what feels uncomfortable or dangerous. That is how we all started out in life but somewhere along the line we were socialized to disguise our preferences under a mask of "politeness" and in some cases we get so out of touch with what makes us genuinely happy or fulfilled, that we don't recognize it anymore!   So, how do we re-discover what our true selves desire from life?

Perhaps the most direct and effective way is through doing something you probably do every day: writing. But not writing of the utilitarian kind.  The writing I refer to is more like mining except that instead of gold or silver we need to mine our wants and needs. And, as any miner will tell you, before you hit the vein of gold, you have clear away a lot surface stuff. So oddly enough the first step toward effective wishing and willing, is doing neither!  Instead, we need to recognize the excess material that hides the vein of gold and get rid of it. This isn't as difficult as you might think because you were born with the tools you need to do the job: your mind and your heart. Both parts of you have a voice and all you have to do is ask your heart what it would most like you to know. Then pick up your pen or pencil and write down whatever comes to mind. All of it! The point is to let it come out, not to censor it because it would be considered rude or nasty or unbecoming if someone else were to read it. No one will because you always have the option to destroy what you write when you're finished or to save it to re-read in six months and decide then whether to destroy it. The most important thing is that you will not use any device other than a pen or pencil to write with! There is a world of difference between actually hand-writing something and producing it on an electronic device. For one thing, it's difficult to remove things permanently from any hard-drive and dead easy to burn paper! For another, what you'll be writing will come from your mind and your heart through your writing hand. This is personal. Intimate. And no one's business but yours so go to any lengths you deem necessary to insure your privacy. Create a writing nook in a closet if you have to but create a space in which you feel SAFE emotionally and physically. Leonardo da Vinci was so security conscious that he wrote his notes in code and backwards!  Most of us will not have to go to such extremes but protecting our thoughts and feelings is an essential first step in uncovering what we really need and want at this stage in our lives.  When we have written ourselves out, we will find the vein of gold that contains our deepest selves, intact and waiting to be acknowledged. Then, we can begin the alchemical process of formulating our deepest wants and needs, the raw materials that will move us into the next phase of our lives and at that point we can introduce the healthy application of Will to achieve what we need to add to or change our lives.

© Delia O' Riordan 2014

More to follow in up-coming articles.

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Psychic Delia O' Riordan: The Science of Life After Death

Psychic Delia O' Riordan: The Science of Life After Death