Credit: Subject to Change
I’m learning so much from exploring this commanding attitude of taking charge.
A few months ago, will reasserted itself in the Humpty Dumpty Man. Now he’s taking charge. I see this as part of a radical reconstruction of my self.
The prostate surgery had something to do with it as well, AAM told me. Watching all those war documentaries did too.
This is how Ascension will be for us, I believe. One thing after another after another, like a bud unfolding in the sunlight. I call it “emergence”; Archangel Michael calls it “expansion.”
Mike Quinsey’s source said recently that we shouldn’t consider any events that happen in our lives as accidental. I may not be able to see the thread, but I’m becoming aware enough to recognize some important moments.
In the face of this new “take charge” mood, the ideas are just popping in me. This is the main one.
So many ancients could be found to say that the proper subject of study for us is ourselves. Us as individuals, us as humanity. Ourselves as constructed realities and ourselves as the Self, Atman, Christ. Everything about ourselves.
What I’m seeing at this moment is that that reasoning applies equally well to taking charge. The proper subject to take charge of is one’s self.
It isn’t others. With others the proper thing to do is to grant free will, whenever possible.
We do so little of that. I think we do much more of taking charge of others. And that’s where the whole thing goes off the rails.
Sometimes someone has to take charge – in a battlefield situation, for instance.
That’s where the dance of leadership begins. The best commanders I’m aware of all shared the common quality of balance, equanimity, centeredness.
And they paid attention to matters like morale. They were not overbearing, if at all possible. They cared for their men and women.
I’ve “taken charge” in the particular way I’m referring to here (1) only twice. I’ve been in leadership positions, but these critical moments when it was important that someone led are different. I’ve only been in two situations like that.
So I really don’t have a wealth of experience to draw on to gauge and understand this attitude of command that I’m now experiencing. If I distinguish it from fits of temper and such, which are different again, it’s a fairly new thing to me.
Nonetheless, the whole skill of it should be generously practiced with and on oneself.
So I’m setting out to learn now how to take charge of myself. I don’t have the slightest clue where to start, but I’ve been guided thus far. I seem to always get the next sentence, never knowing what it’ll be.
Before I go, I feel a need to say a word about “moods” such as this take-charge attitude. I fear that I personally may be entering a time of moods – and others as well.
Moods strike a spiritual aspirant along the journey. They’re associated with a definite part of it, but I cannot recall which part. I would guess after sixth-chakra enlightenment (cosmic consciousness), concluding at seventh (transcendental consciousness).
I think Sri Ramakrishna presented the fullest history of a spiritual aspirant going through many moods. In one of them, he sat in the kitchen pantry and ate for several days straight, without gaining a pound. And then the mood left him as suddenly as it came upon him.
In others, he would sit so still that birds actually did land in his hair. In still others, he would dance around in ecstacy, his cloth falling off, or stand on a sacred throne and announce himself wordlessly to the world.
He successfully realized God through many paths; while on each path, he assumed the mood associated with it, leaving behind all traces of Hinduism, caste, etc.
OK, Ramakrishna was an avatar. That’s a bit extreme, you say. But moods are nonetheless like that. They muscle in and ask you to pay attention.
I don’t know why, all of a sudden, I should feel a commanding energy. There’s nothing in my ordinary life that would explain it.
Perhaps it was released by my having seen myself without my self-serving lens. The truth of that did bring relief and that movement creates space. Perhaps this has rushed up to fill the space. I must remember to fill the space with love next time. Or not. Perhaps I want to see the next layer instead.
Perhaps this is the way it’ll be from here on in. One layer of the onion is peeled and the next layer is revealed.
This layer is called “taking charge.”
Footnotes
(1) In a decisive way, at a critical moment.