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.

http://www.psychic-delia.com

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

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

The Science of Life After Death

The Science of Life After Death

In his book, The Sacred Promise, Dr. Gary Schwartz employs two methods of research: laboratory science and what he calls "self-science", the practice of applying the criteria of the scientific method to subjective experience. In a sense, we all do this. We experience a sudden intuition or suddenly have a feeling of just 'knowing' something for which we have no proof. As conscious beings we have an obligation to question the legitimacy and accuracy of our thought processes, essentially subjecting our thoughts and feelings to a critical review that focuses mainly on the likelihood or un-likelihood of the truth of some idea, perception, or belief.  Even lay people with no formal training in the scientific method, feel more confident if what they think or feel can be supported by 'facts' - information from outside of the limits of their personal experience that points to the same conclusion the lay person has drawn. It is in this context that Gary Schwartz applies the priniciple of "self-science", the logical and critical testing of personal experience against the norms of possibility and probability.

Only The Body Dies... 

Scientists love data! "Data" result from experiments repeated so often and eliciting the same outcome each time that it is possible to use the data to support a theory or establish the legitimacy of a point of view.  The cornerstone of the scientific method is "Follow the data", in other words, always make sure your experimental results support your conclusions. For "nuts and bolts science" this approach works well. However, when it comes to the human mind observing itself, the data are not so clear cut.

In parapsychological research in particular, consistency of results is difficult to obtain. By its very nature intuition is spontaneous and, therefore, unpredictable. An intuition seems to come of out nowhere and presents us with a mental fait accompli, a strong 'sense' of the rightness of a 'hunch' or a sudden 'knowing' of information that has not been acquired through the usual channels of 'left-brain' analytical thought. I must admit to being utterly shocked the first time I received information from a dead relative of a client who had come for a Career reading. My usual method of getting in touch with my intuition was to close my eyes, take one or two deep breaths, let my mind go still and wait for the 'feeling' that I knew would connect me to the client. I could then sense their strengths and unexplored talents and the reading would proceed from there. However, the recently deceased father of my Career reading client insisted on being 'heard'. I want to make it clear that I do not hear actual voices in these readings. It is more a case of having information come into my awareness and knowing that the source is a particular deceased person who is known to the client. I often get the full first name of the deceased, nicknames, and other personal information that identifies this entity to the client. Personal information from the client's or the deceased's life identifies the person in a way that would not apply to anyone else.

Spirit Speaks

After that first encounter with the presence of a deceased person, it happened routinely in my readings, regardless of what the reading was 'about'. Obviously, the only way to test the validity of the information is by having the client confirm it or deny it. But there is no way - yet - for me to know in advance who will come through in a reading. The entire process is spontaneous from my perspective although frequently the deceased person will say that he or she had been preparing to come through from the time that the client set the appointment and then will proceed to recount events that occurred in the intervening period so the client is in no doubt about having been 'observed from the other side'! Depending on the religious and personal beliefs of the client, this process may be re-assuring or frightening but once the initial shock has passed most people find the evidence of the continued presence of a loved one a welcome discovery. Schwartz's unique contribution to the field of post-death survival of consciousness rests on two principles: that we require proof that the deceased is actually present in what we experience as the 'now' and  that the deceased demonstrates that with information about events that transpired after her/his death and, where possible, to employ the "double-deceased protocol" in which a known entity such as the deceased psychic and researcher Susy Smith brings through a specific deceased's spirit making it possible to 'plan' a reading in which the expected or invited spirit can be depended upon to 'show up'!  It is this experience that is at the heart of The Sacred Promise.

Spirits Keep Promises

The essence of the promise is that those who loved us in life have committed themselves to act as spiritual guardians for us after their deaths. One of the tantalising unanswered questions raised by Schwartz's findings is how long a time this commitment might last.  According to Buddhist philosophy the goal of existence is to end the cycle of suffering resulting from Karmic debts so that we can be re-absorbed into the 'void' of pure consciousness which has no 'qualities' like personality. As long as we are in the cycle of re-birth and Karma we will continue to assume and shed numerous personalities designed to help us experience certain things that will ultimately - if we choose to accept the challenge - lead us to the state of enlightenment permanently. For a period of about seven weeks after death, we travel through the realm known as the Bardo in which we review the quality of our recent lifetime revealing where we still need to learn karmic lessons that will shape the next lifetime.

It is unclear from Schwartz's research how soon after death a loved one may try to establish contact with us. Since time has no meaning in 'eternity', the deceased may not experience the 'passage' of time at all. Quantum theory tells us there is no such thing as time in the sequential sense in any case. Everything that has ever 'happened' and everything that will 'happen in the future' exist simultaneously. From our perspective of living in three dimensional reality, such a concept seems impossible but it would go a long way toward explaining how psychics and mediums are able to 'grab information out of thin air'. That is, after all, where it resides.

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© Delia O' Riordan 2011 - 2014