New Moon
November 9, 2007
17 Scorpio 10’

You have asked collectively: What can I do about this mess, emptiness, loneliness, and lack of success in my life? And what can I do about this mess of a world that my life takes place in—a world of greed and corruption and increasingly gaping gaps between haves and have-nots?

Can you please get me out of my self-styled prison? Can you teach me to be the pure, white, light-absorbing lotus of my true self in a muddy mucky world where I am likely to drown in negating, self-hating emotions?

Yes I can. Fail. F _ _k up. Fall.

I don’t mean that you should start out intent on failing, but that you need to be completely willing to fail or to fall to crack the egg and let the inner chick out.

Sometimes the thing we want is hidden in the thing we thought we wanted. Or the thing we thought we wanted is really just a step in a continuum. If we don’t try, if we don’t see if the idea we have in our heads can fly, are not willing to see it fall and break apart if it has to; how are we going to gather the information we need for the next run at it?

We think, “I’m not going to do it until I can do it right and be successful and not waste my time or lose my investment of energy and money, and most of all, not look like a grown up fool.”’

This leads to stagnation.

Marion Woodman calls it Addiction to Perfection. She says:

Essentially I am suggesting that many of us—men and women—are addicted in one way or another because our patriarchal culture emphasizes specialization and perfection. Driven to do our best at school, on the job, in our relationships—in every corner of our lives—we try to make ourselves into works of art. Working so hard to create our own perfection we forget that we are human beings. On one side we try to be the efficient, disciplined, Goddess Athena, on the other we are forced into the voracious repressed energy of Methusa.

Our unwillingness to err becomes an unwillingness to move.

Unwilling or unable to move, we can’t break out of our seeds or our eggs so that we can grow.

The steps are:

• Try.
• Fail (Maybe).
• Collect the data.
• Begin again with a revised plan.

If you are confined to a life you don’t want, make plans to make a break. If you are always getting what you always got, make a break. Discontinue the pattern. Fail it out. Cross it out. Go beyond that point in the maze. Mark it and don’t go back. Go forward.

Your plan, whether it is an action plan or an exit plan, represents your pulling together as much information as you know. It’s your best idea of what you want and your best idea of what it takes to get there. If you are getting out, you still want to go somewhere.

Don’t fall prey to negating influences

Recently I reminded myself of something that I read in Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill:

In addition to the Six Basic Fears, there is another evil by which people suffer. It constitutes a rich soil in which the seeds of failure grow abundantly. It is so subtle that its presence often is not detected. This affliction cannot properly be classed as a fearIt is more deeply seated and more often fatal than all of the six fears. For want of a better name, let us call this evil susceptibility to negative influences.

Instead of negative influences, I’d like to use the term negating influences—influences that cause you to cancel out or deduct from the good and the goods that are yours. The reason I say negating instead of negative is that negative implies that there is something of a poisonous nature inherent in the influence.

”My child hung around with the wrong crowd and they influenced him.” This implies that he was good and they were not. His good was naturally overcome by the force of their bad. Bad has strength. Good does not. Negating influences suggest that you can’t, that you are not enough, not good enough, not perfect enough. Negating influences suggest that you stay put, or shut up or go away. Persistent negating influences suggest that nothing can change, that it can’t work for you, that a life that sucks is your lot.
Guard yourself against any influence that detracts from your chosen course. Guard against negative emotions that break you down, undermine you, and stop your progress.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Lunations 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.