Caroline Myss presents Anatomy of the Spirit
Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing
Caroline Myss came to the Bodhi tree Bookstore in 1996 to discuss her book Anatomy of the Spirit. Caroline Myss is an international lecturer and workshop leader in the field of energy, medicine and human consciousness. She calls her work "medical intuition", proclaiming that it is a skill, not a gift., and people can learn it. In association with Norman Shealy, M.D. (Founder of the American Holistic Medical Association), Myss has developed a program to teach awareness of the physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of illness and healing. Her message is timely and transforming. Her lectures are spirited, intimate, full of humor and compassionate. She spoke at the Bodhi Tree last October.
"Our spiritual task in this lifetime is to learn to balance the energies of body and soul, of thought and action, of physical and mental powers"—Caroling Myss
Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing by Caroline Myss, Ph.D. (302 pp.)
Through her workshops, books, videos, and audiotapes, Dr. Caroline Myss motivates people to examine their souls and improve their health. Here, Dr. Myss (who diagnoses illness by intuitive means) presents her program for promoting spontaneous physical, emotional and spiritual healing. She shows us how to develop our own latent powers of intuition by learning the language of the chakras (the body's seven centers of spiritual and physical power), the Christian sacraments, and the roots of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. This book is an important contribution to our understanding and development of the human bio-spiritual system - as well as a major call to awakening.
Some definations to keep in mind:
First Chakra: Base of Spine -- Tribal Power
Second Chakra: Sexual Organs-The Power of Relationships
Third Chakra: Abdomen-Personal power-Self Esteem
Fourth Chakra: Center of Chest-Heart -- Emotional Power
Fifth Chakra: Throat -- Power of Will
Sixth Chakra: Center of Forehead -- The Power of Mind
Seventh Chakra: Top of Head -- Our Spiritual Connector
According to Caroline Mysss, the greatest acts of will in which we can invests our spirits is to choose to live according to the rules:
1. Make no judgements.
2. Have no exceptions.
3. Give up the need to know why things happen as they do.
4. Trust that unscheduled events of our lives are a form of spiritual direction.
5. Have the courage to make the choices we need to make, to accept what we cannot change, and to have the wisdom to know the difference.
The following is an edited version of Caroline Myss’s Bodhi Tree Bookstore presentation.
Caroline Myss: I'm so touched by the response to my work. I like these smaller groups, because I love the interaction. What would you like to chat about?
Audience: Relationships . . . Psychology . . . How to pray . . . How do you find your eight chakras? Talk for four hours.
Myss: Talk for four hours . . . [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] . . . Did you bring the Prozac? I just recorded a tape called Necessary Madness. You have to go into madness . . .
Audience: I was there.
:Myss: Oh! You want to know how to get out, not in? . . . [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] . . . Can you imagine? Writing a book on how to get into madness?
Audience: Forgiveness . . . Love . . . clairvoyance . . . power . . . owning your power . . .In your book, you say that when Jesus healed people, he first healed them emotionally. Could you would say something more about that.?
Myss: Let's begin with Jesus and Buddha. Let's imagine that I am talking to you about why there is madness and we'll weave in all of this, plus the notion that the rules of power are changing in our lives, and on this earth.
When I was in graduate school, I studied with Jesuits. Later, I studied astrology because I realized that the scripture the Jesuits taught me were written by astrologers. I presume in Los Angeles, everyone speaks astrology . . . [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] . . . Is that not your official language?
In the year zero, we're doing the Judaic-Christian thing. Jesus pops on the earth. Before the Christian Era, we lived in the Age of Aries. Prior to that we lived in the Age of Taurus, what we called the "Old Testament," when Judaism evolved through the Torah. We were a tribal people; we operated under tribal laws.
Now, let's take a look at the scriptures written during this time. If you consider the language, you'll notice that Yahweh always talked to shepherds. Further, the people sacrificed lambs and rams and the golden calf. They used the energy of the era.
During these tribal eras, our spirit evolved as a group. We developed a code of honor. There was no self. We were not taken as individuals.
There is something important to understand about tribal consciousness. The archetype of the tribe does not intend to teach its young psychological or emotional development. It is under orders to teach you survival skills and survival rituals and survival tools, but not how to think emotionally, how to plunge into yourself. Under the tribe, you do not pray as an individual. You pray through the group, with the group, and through ritual and superstition.
When the two teachers, Buddha and Jesus, show up on the scene, they start teaching the rules for individuation. Jesus says, I'll take the heart. Buddha says, I'll take the sixth chakra . . . [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]. Now, take note of the language: Jesus says, "Cmon shepherds, I'm going to make you fishermen." He feeds the crowd with two fishes swimming in opposite directions, and so the age of dualism is born. It is something new.
In the age of dualism we experience the division of body and mind, Church and state, male and female, East and West. Everything is divided in half. We are under orders to divide and conquer. This is the Piscean energy.
What gets Jesus into trouble is his pontificating to the ritual people -- the Pharisees and the Sanhedrins. He says, "You know guys, I'm not interested in praying with you in the temple, and personally, I don't think we should teach your ritualistic way to the other Jews around here. I'm going to show them how to pray." From there, he steps into the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh chakras -- and immediately, the parent-child archetype is born. From that, we develop an entire state of consciousness in which we call ourselves the children of God.
In the last two thousand years, we have had an opportunity to explore the individual heart, the mind and spirit. In 1945, at the start of the first nuclear age, I believe we entered into this age through the shadow side of ourselves. Nuclear power symbolically represents the strength of our consciousness. Instead of taking all the teachings of the great Buddha and Jesus, and all that we could be as a global species to enter the next level of consciousness, we enter it readily prepared to go to war. That's the reason why our lives fall into such chaos. In the late 1950's, the Chinese enter Tibet and they kick out the Dalai Lama and a few years later we have Vatican II. This is both secular and symbolic history. The "Gods" released eastern and western mysticism to the mainstream for the first time in our history. For the first time ever, we can access the power of the sixth and seventh chakras. This is the perfume level of ourselves.
Prior to the current consciousness movement, we would only wonder about first chakra concerns. We would wonder what kind of job we should have. What kind of money should we make? Where should we live? What should the neighbors think of us? Can you imagine? . . . [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] . . . We lived by physical rules and we prayed as a group within religion. Now, what does that mean? It means that the symbology and the teachings of religion are melted down to be no more powerful than toilet water. Gifts like the sacraments remained external rather than internal power zones.
We are born to be mystics. Our biology is wired for it. We have lived in the illusion that matter comes before energy, but as we evolve, we finally understand that energy comes before matter. The capacity to manifest our bodies physically in two places at once, or to heal by touch becomes standard procedure. What looks like a miracle from one level of understanding, is normal when we engage a higher level of flight. It's not miraculous. It is the ordinary operating procedure of high voltage perfume consciousness. This is the way. This is where we are going.
How many of us have prayed, "God, show me my life's purpose? God, I think it'd be fun to have a closer relationship with you." But we have no conception of the consequences of those prayers coming true.
I want you to imagine this scene. You're at home, and up until now, you've been praying like a "stuffologist." That's your first chakra. "God, give me stuff. Bless my stuff. Protect my stuff. Can I have more stuff? . . . [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]. . . Is my stuff sleeping with someone else's stuff? . . . [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] . . . This is stuffology. And while you are living at the consciousness level of stuffology, your angel just sits there, reading the New York Times. You see, managing a stuffologist doesn't take any angelic talent. Yet, one day, you're hanging out in your incarnation, and you look out the window and you say, "There's got to be more to my life than this. I need something more." And your angel sighs, "I've heard this before." Then you say, "No, I . . . I . . . I mean it. I want content." And your angel says, "You want content? What do you think you're praying for?" We think that if we start praying that way, God will say, "Okay, I'll send the angel." And then your angel's going to say, "Wake up, I've got your goodie bag here! I'm going to give you the answer to all your questions. Why everybody hurt you! Why you're so confused! I'll show you what you're supposed to do with your life and how much you'll earn per hour! Oooohhhh! And who your lawyer's going to be. Are you happy?" [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] . . . But what your angel really says is: "Alright, let's go to work."
Up until now, we have been operating on tribal consciousness. What we are actually praying for is to manage our spirits all by ourselves. What does that mean? It means we want to be responsible for the perceptions into which we merge our spirits.
The world that we created unconsciously has to slip away. So, your angel says, "Okay, then let's look at this. Now, do you want to quit your job or shall I have you fired? Which one do you want? . . . [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] . . . You get to choose." And, of course, you go to your work place and you find yourself suddenly feeling something is wrong. Something's in the air. You go into paranoia, because you're a human. It must be me. They're talking about me. They want you out, because it's time to go out, and they're under orders.
Then your angel says, "By the way, I want you out of that relationship you're in." Then, for the first time you find yourself in your heart and will, and unescorted by your tribe. You don't know what choices to make because you've never made a choice in your whole life. You don't know what reality is, because you've never managed your full perceptual system on your own. You start praying. As you begin to experience a new reality, you want to run back to your tribe and take your tribe with you. You say to them, "You've got to come with me. You don't understand what I'm experiencing over here!"
But your angel says, "Will you stop? You have to go into yourself on your own, because you need to see how weak you are as well as how strong you are. You need to see your own seduction. You need to understand that you no longer get to blame anybody else for the rest of your life. You need to become strong enough to stand on your own. This is madness.
And that's why necessary madness is necessary. You realize you are going through a re-birthing, where your interior world is becoming more real than your exterior. You become sensitive to things you didn't know you were sensitive to. Everything changes. You first pray out of fear, then out of conflict. Finally, you just pray. And you find yourself able to just live in the present. Instead of looking for your life in terms of how it could have been, instead of mourning the package it came in, all you can see is how rich that package is, and how extraordinary it is that the power of God is transmitted through you. It alters your perceptual system. That's all there is to it.
And I think that one of the things that we have to give up is our own agenda for our own lives. To surrender our will to God is to enter into a level of tranquillity like we've never known before. But it's not full-time. Instead, it's the sense that we have access to "just enough" so that we can survive the chaos that we live in. We are not looking for this nonsensical new age world where everything is just fine, we're always in love, and we never age. What kind of nonsense is that? We're looking to manage our lives, not to solve our mysteries, but to learn to live within mystery and not be frightened by it.
This is what it means to become energetic beings. It is to learn to trust the energy of which we are made. Again and again, if you look at every challenge in your life, which one will you invest in, matter or the energy? If you invest in energy, you're going the right way, because this represents the invisible life that connects you with God and the management of your spirit within physical form.
I have this incredible sense that we're all in this together and I have the passionate feeling I have to teach as many people as possible how to stop being in pain. I don't know where that comes from, but I have a drive that refuses to stop.
When I used to do workshops, I would do readings on every single person in my workshop. Now, the greatest thing I can teach you -- and this is what my work's about; books, tapes, everything -- is how to manage your own spirit so you don't need me.
As we go to the higher levels we realize every package we come in exists for some beautiful reason. We begin living in appreciation, even if we're not clear exactly what we're appreciating. We begin living in appreciation. The next thing we know, our vocabulary changes our perceptions. Our perceptions change the law of attraction, and we start to attract exquisite things.
For additional information about Caroline Myss, see www.myss.com.
