Journal of Metaphysical Thought Volume I | Number 1 (July 2018) 8 of 40 These Perilous Times JOANNA NEFF, MA In Hillary Rodham Clinton's commencement speech at Yale this past spring, the former Secretary of State said: "The radicalization of American politics hasn't been symmetrical.... There are leaders who blatantly incite people with hateful rhetoric." Clinton's observation helps explain why so many conservatives did not help elect probably the most qualified candidate for the Presidency who has ever run for that office. America's political/social divide does show that centrist Clinton's observation of political asymmetry is as accurate as it is obvious. The outcome of the 2016 Presidential election also revealed class, racial and industrial differences between Republicans and Democrats. As it turns out, in the post-industrial, largely secular and racially diverse metropolitan centers, the political majority is Democratic. In mostly white, small-town and rural communities long established in agriculture, resource extraction and more traditional manufacturing, Republicans form the majority. However, something more intrinsic, more biological, is also defining the divergence of social and political thought in America. In "Why Conservatives and Liberals Can't Talk,"i author Ken Blanchard informs us that "Conservative-leaning people tend to have larger amygdalae, the brain's emotional processing center, while liberals generally have a more active anterior cingulate cortex, an area responsible for taking in new information and understanding its impact while making decisions." Trump's victory was fueled by what Pulitzer-Prize-Winning author Chris Hedges calls "the triumph of spectacleii"-not by Trump's "Crooked Hillary" mantra-incited emotion; in vain, Clinton invoked reason during her failed campaign. Our country's founders were men of The Age of Reason, and our Constitution is a product of painstaking effort by citizens of a new nation who sacrificed much to reject the pitfalls of monarchical rule. In writing our Constitution, these classically trained and enlightened minds sought to instill all protections required to sustain Democracy. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and others were fully aware of the Greek concept of metriotes, "the golden mean," or of taking the ideal moderate position between two extremes. This is echoed in another Greek tenet, translated as "Nothing in excess." And yet, we currently seem doomed to repeat the cyclical imbalance of political polarity, and our current "far-left" faction is just as polarized as is the far-right. The yawning chasm between our two main U.S. political parties has been created by rabid opinions, often based much more on emotions than on "facts." While at least one cable (socalled "news") station functions as a propaganda arm of our current President, journalists appearing on other cable networks valiantly try to uncover the facts. This creates a wild divergence of popular belief-on both "sides." (Before the Presidential election of 2016, I severed from a friend who told me that if she were to visit someone who had a poster of Hillary Clinton on their wall, she would shoot up the former Secretary's image with a Glock. A self-styled New Age practitioner, she informed me that "Spirit wouldn't want" me to make political postings in my Facebook account. She and her retired husband of the CEO-level golden parachute had drunk the Trump Kool-Aid® and helped elect him in 2016.) Dear readers, you are not alone if, saturated with polarized bad news, you feel an intense need to blow your referee's whistle and say, "Time out!" You perhaps have longed to stop swinging from one end of the pendulum to the other and have come back to your own inner guidance and said, "Well, wait a minute. None of this resonates with me . . . period." Journal of Metaphysical Thought Volume I | Number 1 (July 2018) 9 of 40 So It Was from the Beginning . . . Earth is one of the best places to incarnate for beings who want to experience 3rd-dimensional existence. Unfortunately, for eons Earth has been inhabited by shady interlopers from other star systems and even other dimensions. The caveat is that our planet has always been a freewill zone. Because our planet is one of the predominant free-will zones, we have abundant temptations to seek the pleasures of power, pleasure and wealth. More and more, the dark forces have interfered. Again and again, people's toxic choices have changed the Earth's vibration so that millennia ago Earth became attractive to the dross of intergalactic beings who have wished to incarnate here. This saturation of lower-consciousness beings has made Earth one of the densest consciousness zones in the many universes-not just in this one. And this is why they Earth keeps attracting more of these entities. Thinning of the veils between 3rd, 4th, and 5th dimensions is permitting us to evolve ("ascendiii") in consciousness more quickly. Unfortunately, this permeability between dimensions allows deeper penetration by dark-force aliens, who use humans appropriate for their agendas as hosts. "Now you may wonder about cases of possession, in which it's not just that someone is irritating or destructive-they act truly demonic. There are legitimate cases of full possession of a person by negative entities. This may be seen in such severe kinds of mental illness as psychosis and certain kinds of schizophrenia. Here there is an all but total loss of the original personality of the being. It is also important to know 'negative' entities may be passed through DNA as 'inherited miasmas' . . . or what you may think of as karmic issues. These you may bring with you into a physical incarnation, or you may (by prior agreement 'between lives') inherit them from your parents and their parents, and so forth. It is much like having a 'predisposition' to certain diseases like cancer. Although cancer may run in your family and, thus, you may have a latent possibility of getting cancer yourself, according to your resonance you have an equal chance of not getting cancer. It is the same with 'activating' inherited miasmas of the dark entity sort. You may also 'catch' a negative entity the way you 'catch' a cold. Again, the mechanism is the latency of the DNA impression or viruses, which exist in your body all the time! (So you see, you're not really 'catching' anything.) You say, 'My resistance was down, and I caught a cold.' We shall contrast and say, 'Your resonance changed drastically and you 'caught' an entity. Indeed, negative entities can be passed among groups of people just like the flu-for example, among people who have a strong social, and sometimes even 'spiritual' bond. Because the latter often are releasing their 'stuff' at a heady rate, when they meet as a group they may effectively 'swap' entities without being aware of what has happened."iv Journal of Metaphysical Thought Volume I | Number 1 (July 2018) 10 of 40 Thus, these seamy meddlers revel in the "politics" of greed and lust. They thrive on power, sexual exploit and vulture capitalism. A prime method these lightless entities and their hosts use to get what they want is to keep people on Earth dumbed-down. ("I love the poorly educated."v) Those of us who have been working regularly on ourselves for decades have been reading the many books promising deliverance from these dark ones. If we considered the original publication year of each of these books, we could easily deem them outdated. However, a number of these books have been reprinted as current editions. Unlike daily television newscasts, there remains a foundation of truth in these books, regardless of the publication date. However, many who once consciously chose an ascension path seem to have forgotten the excitement, revelation, and awakening they experienced when reading books like Solara's 11:11vi, Barbara Marciniak's Bringers of the Dawnvii, and the late Joshua David Stone's Beyond Ascension: How to Complete the Seven Levels of Initiationviii. The forecast we've been waiting for is what so many New Age authors have called "bringing our bodies to Light.ix" And so, like Godot, we keep waiting for that event to occur in some definitive way. Why "The End Times" Keep Going On and On In 2007 I kept hearing, "Time is running out." I understood that this phrase didn't mean the end of time but, rather, "the end times." (Beings in higher realms perceive the end times as the starting point of events-especially physical Earth changes-and the fall of the World Economy, based on millennia of control by Reptilian and other dark-force entitiesx.) The end times are said to be the end of their tyranny on the Earth. At that point there is supposed to be a shift of the pendulum, which will take a relatively "long time" in our perception. The end times really will occur when there is an end of the old and the ushering-in of the new. This is what the Age of Aquarius is supposed to be all about. Those of us who have followed the many prophets who, during the past thirty years or so, have foretold the coming of a great golden age are still waiting. In 2007, I advised a friend who was worried about her physical survival in the times to come: "Well, I remember in 1991 when I moved back down to Boulder from the mountains, I was reading in so many sources that I should 'Pack light . . . because I will be beamed up'-but I'm still here!" In the meantime, a host of others have gone into the mode of "Yeah. Yeah. Yada. Yada." Many of us have grown weary of waiting to be "beamed up," having been told so many times that our deliverance from 3rd dimension is imminent but finding this not to be occurring. Although there are still channelers who regularly advise us to be ready when "they" come to rescue us, most of us have understandably turned our attention to matters here and now ... on Earth. Most of us have either resigned ourselves to focusing on our life's purpose here or are trying to embrace what we have come to understand as our responsibility as incarnated Souls. The truth about Ascension is that it is ongoing, for it is our consciousness that is ascending. At various times we are already focused in "higher" dimensions. When we are focused totally in one of these dimensions we will be there-the way we perceive we are here-all the time. In other words, where our consciousness is for the longest period of time is where we "dwell." As Below, So Above The upheavals-politically and socially-and the Earth's throes expressed in geologic/weather disasters parallel the battles going on in the Etheric realms between forces of the Light (Love-based) and forces of the dark (non-love-based). "The upheavals, the unrest and torment within humanity at this time are the contractions and labour pains heralding a birth Journal of Metaphysical Thought Volume I | Number 1 (July 2018) 11 of 40 of an incomprehensible, cosmic magnitude." (St. Germainxi) Authors like Michael Mauxii have disclosed that the "dark-hearts" know their rule and influence on the Earth are coming to an end because this has already happened on higher planes! The major force that parallels what is going on in higher dimensions is the victory of Light over non-light. The "battles" going on in higher dimensions by the Galactic Federations and the Intergalactic Federations are reflected in what's happening on Earth in our "now" and what will happen on the Earth in our future. The dark ones know they're going to be defeated by the Forces of Light. Being "evil" as they are, they will try to take as many out with them, and keep as many down, as they can, before they are finally ejected from the Earth plane. The Problem of "Time" The human mind in third dimension often questions how there can be entire, apparently linear, "histories" that we can study, like the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Victorian Era. Why is it that simultaneous existences seem to be linear? If they're simultaneous, then how can we read in history books that this age occurred first and that age occurred next? In the rules of 3rddimensional reality there is TIME, and there is the restriction of 3rd-dimensional understanding. In order to make that play out for us as convincingly as it does, there need to be some "bleed-throughs" of other multidimensional existences. For the most part, we receive only those of the "past," because our belief structures (at least, until more recently) have not so readily accepted that we can access "future" events the way we access "past" events. Of course, from a perspective beyond 3rd dimension there is no difference between past, present and future. It is all fluidly in the now. In the rules where our consciousness is focused, however, it is necessary for there to be a bleedthrough in a linear fashion so that we have some sense of time passing-some sense of a "chronological" history, so that we can experience a relationship of the past in a progression. This progression seems to be chronological and developmental, or else these rules would simply disappear, and we would not have the structure we need to learn the life lessons that we have incarnated here to learn. Thus, our reality is a sort of holographic creation, a sort of psychodrama, if you will, with this rule of time. If we did not have a sense of starting somewhere and progressing and coming here, then it would not work in this way. "Time is the space between memory and anticipation."xiii In his recently published book, The Order of Time, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli establishes that our sense of continuity and chronology is merely a story we tell ourselves so that we can make sense of our existence. He writes, "Time is the form in which we beings whose brains are made up essentially of memory and foresight interact with our world: it is the source of our identity." Given these understandings, it is hard to explain why forecasts of accelerated time have come true. The way we perceive time is one way, but actually time "bends" or "warps" or is "malleable." This points to Quantum Physics. But the acceleration is real. Clients have been mentioning for some years now that time feels strange: sometimes it is accelerated and sometimes we ask ourselves, "Was it only an hour and fifteen minutes? How did I get all that done in an hour and fifteen minutes?" Or conversely, "Why did it take me four hours to do one tiny thing?" Back in 2003, an adept spiritual friend taught me how to ask for a "time warp" to get me somewhere on time within impossible time constraints. For example, I need to catch a plane by a certain time, but I know I need 15 minutes more than I actually have to reach my Journal of Metaphysical Thought Volume I | Number 1 (July 2018) 12 of 40 destination on-time, and safely. Even though the clock's time indicates I have only 25 minutes left to get to the airport, while operating within the time warp, I get there almost exactly at the time I requested-by the clock. In 2010, a well-known spiritual counselor from California shared with me that "an hour is now forty-five minutes." My own perception, eight years later, is that an hour is about thirty minutes, but not by the clock. Why Masters in the Etheric Haven't Swooped in to Rescue Us It is difficult for Higher-Dimensional beings to get in-synch with Time because they are not bound by Time or Space. The great Light Ships so often seen in Sedona arrive through inter-dimensional portals, not spatially. (I have often wondered whether crop circles are not only consciousness triggers for us but also "registration patterns" to allow these travelers to establish time/space synchrony with us on specific energetic gridlines that gird our planet.) The Etheric Masters can track what's going on "here" most directly through us-through our talking with our High Selves, spirit guides, guardians and angels. In order to do anything regarding 3rd dimension, Etheric Masters must do a lot of calibrating, and re-calibrating, because there is no time or space "where they are." Just when it has seemed as though it was "time" for us, en masse, to go through established dimensional portals for ascension, then something else has happened. Then more recalibration had to be done. There have been innumerable dress rehearsals for when these light ships, and these Great Beings of which we are now conscious, have come in to help us. Each time they have seen that there is a more optimal "time," location and something else. Indeed, there have been multitudes-maybe even millions-of re-calibrations and dress rehearsals going back-and-forth . . . "Is this the optimal moment. No." Now it is closer in the future as we look at it, but all these innumerable attempts to help us have been made before now and have been found not to be optimal. The import of all the various dress rehearsals is that our etheric helpers are getting the calibrations closer and closer to the point where they will then be able to act. "Closer and closer" would be "sooner," in our experience, than later. The more conscious we are of what is happening "here" and "beyond," the more the calibrations can become precise enough that our "beam-out" can occur. What Should We Do? We can accept not only that "time" is an illusion but also that our whole external reality is an illusion-a vast holographic creation of which our physical existence is but a miniscule partxiii. But there's an upside: We will always have consciousness. Back in 2005, Bruce Lipton stated: "I was exhilarated by a new realization that I could change the character of my life by changing my beliefs."xiv Indeed, consciousness is all; what we are not conscious of is virtually useless to us. Regarding spiritual growth there is no "coasting" at any level. Because we live in the density of our physical bodies, this infinite sea of changes often seems intolerable. The rebellious human brain and ego long for us to escape to Pango-Pango, where we can lie on the beach and drink piña coladas. However, we would do well to look at what is beneath our own emotions, to look beneath what our minds are saying about our relationship with other people. This new gestalt can form when we move from duality to experiencing Oneness more of the time. For example, the mind always says, "We are separate." The mind says, "Here's what I'm like. Here's what you're like. Here's how we're different. Here are the things I like about you. These are the things that irritate me about you." And that is separation. That is why judgment separates. Judgment assumes that you are different than I am. And then there exists a sort of interesting sidelight of projection: I say that you Journal of Metaphysical Thought Volume I | Number 1 (July 2018) 13 of 40 do it and that it irritates me, but it is something I do too. Too many people seem to base their relationships on how similar they are to others. This clannishness (recently dubbed as political "tribalism") makes people of weak egos feel good that they have this sort of "twin" out there. But real love acknowledges another for exactly where s/he is. When I relate to you with love, I am not thinking, Now he's saying this but he's really thinking that, or I think she ought to wear a little more makeup to enhance her looks. Love really has to do with totally focusing on other people and listening to what they say- and being interested in what they have to say- without judgment. These are areas in which we may start to shift out of a purely mental or emotional domain and into just experiencing another person's being. Doing this is difficult for people who are used to relating to others largely via established societal or political mindsets. By the same token, if we focus only on physical survival, then we're bringing ourselves back into 3rd-density consciousness. Because the ego is our primary tool for surviving in 3rd dimension, our mental body is saying through our ego: "How am I going to survive?" When I lived in Boulder I told my friends who were reading the same books as I-and who were going into the same mode: "Why are you focusing on your physical survival? You know that after death your soul goes on. Wherever you are in your spiritual development by the time you go through transition in this lifetime is going to determine where you go next." We can say: "I am letting my consciousness, now, start to leave its absorption here. Yes: I'm still in a body so I'd better stick around in it. But I am not exhausting so much of my focused consciousness here. I'm spending more of each day in 5th-dimensional consciousness, where Love is the center." We can continue to make ourselves ready-by discarding and releasing all that is standing in our way so that when that moment arrives, when all the calibrations are agreed upon as exact, we will be ready to go. It doesn't matter if it is tomorrow, or a month or five years from now, or in a future lifetime. Heavenly help is always at hand. We need merely ask ourselves what is standing in the way of our growth and then relinquish whatever that is. We can say: "Okay. I can't verbalize what ascension is, and I don't really understand it," and yet we can still be aware of its reality. In that moment we leap, and in that leap we have made more progress than we would have in running out to buy The Keys of Enoch xv because someone told us this book would be the "vehicle" of our ascension. In that leap we could say: "Okay. I know I'm here, and I know that a book is not going to take me 'there'." And when we reach out from our hearts sincerely, earnestly, respectfully to our spiritual guides with committed intention, their hands of light will come toward us and pull us to the higher Light. All these consciousness transitions will occur according to our Soul intention. Therefore, why should we not focus on the highest-possible goal for ourselves, which must necessarily be according to our Soul intention-not our ego intention? It is difficult not to succumb to such thoughts as How can I complete my work if my body dies? Maybe we've done the best we could, the Earth changes take place, and physically we don't make it. All this will happen according to our Soul intention anyway, and so we really will have completed our Earth mission. What we can "take with us" at the end of our days are the "spiritual brownie points" we've earned-not material possessions or political victories. Thought is faster than the speed of light, and we're moving from molecular-mass beings to purely energetic beings. This will enable us to advance from doing to being. As long as we remain committed to our spiritual growth and keep going higher and higher, the rest will take care of itself. Journal of Metaphysical Thought Volume I | Number 1 (July 2018) 14 of 40 About Joanna Neff An experienced editor, published writer, and college educator, Joanna Neff, M.A., is the author of Soul Retrieval: Return to Wholeness, first published in 2003. Doing energy healing work for more than 25 years, she has more than 1,300 clients in 45 American states and in 52 countries abroad. While living In Boulder, Colorado, for almost three decades, Joanna took advantage of this hotbed of alternative healing inspired by "New Age"/Old Wisdom practitioners. In what she describes as "a 19-year apprenticeship," she studied with masters in Boulder and beyond, and learned their advanced healing techniques so she could offer them to others. Also a teaching Reiki Master and Master Dowser, Joanna currently conducts distant-healing sessions from her home in Largo, Florida. For more about Joanna and her work, visit: www.melora.org. References i Ken Blanchard and Editors, It's All in Your Head: Your Brain: The Art, Magic, and Science of What Makes You You (New York: Wicked Cow Studios LLC: 2017), 28-29. ii Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (New York: Nation Books, 2009) iii Melora through Joanna Neff, Melora: Channelings for the New Millennium (website owned by Joanna Neff Unlimited, LLC), "'Dark' Entities," http://www.melora.org/Dark.html/ iv Ascension is the expansion of consciousness beyond that of 3rd dimension. Many "New Age" thinkers and writers aspire to do this while still embodied. To reach "Christ Consciousness" (or Enlightenment), one must attain at least 5th -dimensional consciousness, which is Heart-centered. There are various levels of Ascension, and there is some point at which we will cease to be visible to those around us, as in the New Testament: disappearing "in the twinkling of an eye." We take Ascension while our higher bodies absorb translations of light and of frequencies and translations of what we could consider to be computer programs but at the DNA level. When we consciously seek Ascension, we can constantly upgrade our DNA's "software" by downloading light of very specific kinds through conscious intention and study. v Donald J. Trump, in a speech following his February 23, 2016 victory in the Nevada caucus. vi Solara, 11:11: Inside the Doorway (Whitefish, Montana: Star Borne Unltd, 1996) (First published in paperback: December 1992.) About how the 11:11 readout on digital time pieces reactivates our cellular memory banks to awaken star-code within our DNA. vii Barbara Marciniak, Bringers of the Dawn: Teachings from the Pleiadeans (Rochester, Vermont: Bear & Company, 1992). viii Joshua David Stone, Ph.D., Beyond Ascension: How to Complete the Seven Levels of Initiation (Flagstaff, Arizona: Light Technology Publishing, 1995). ix Very precise qualities, intervals, patterns, and geometric structures are forming. These are similar to what it looks like when cells keep multiplying and dividing in the fertilized egg-the zygote. And these are also like the Flower of Life. We're building sorts of geodesic domes, starting out with one structure that keeps dividing and multiplying into a vaster structure. x David Vaughn Icke, Children of the Matrix: How an Interdimensional Race Has Controlled the Planet for Thousands of Years and Still Does (Wildwood, Missouri: Bridge of Love Publications: 2001). xi St. Germain through Azena Ramanda, Earth's Birth Changes (Oxford, United Kingdom: Roundhouse Publishing Ltd., 1994). xii Michael P. Mau, Ph.D., The Sanctus Germanus Prophecies, Vol. 1: The Events Leading Up to the Year 2012, 6th ed. (Alberta, Canada: the Sanctus Germanus Foundation, 2009). (First published in 2003 by Aberton International Ltd. under the title: Beyond Armageddon.) xiii Ephrat Livni, "This physicist's ideas of time will blow your mind," Quartz (news website owned by Atlantic Media), The Long and the Short of It, May 17, 2018, https://qz.com/1279371/this-physicists-ideas-of-time-will-blow-yourmind/ xiv Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe: The Revolutionary Theory of Reality (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2011). Talbot wrote several books exploring the parallels between quantum mechanics and ancient mysticism. Based on the conclusions of such eminent physicists as David Bohm and Karl H. Pribam, Talbot concluded that such "paranormal" phenomena as ESP and telepathy are a product of the Journal of Metaphysical Thought Volume I | Number 1 (July 2018) 15 of 40 holographic reality Talbot espoused. (Hardback published in 1991.) xv Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, and Miracle, 10th Anniversary Ed. (Hay House: Carlsbad, California: 2016). (Mountain of Love/Elite Books, Santa Rosa, California: 2005.) xvi J.J. Hurtak, Ph.D., The Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch" (Los Gatos, California: The Academy for Future Science, 1987). In the late 1990s a colleague proclaimed that if I really wanted to ascend, I should read The Keys of Enoch . I looked for a copy in Boulder's Lighthouse New Age Bookstore, and the first thing I noticed about the 620-page, hard-bound book was its fifty-dollar price tag. After I had slogged through the first chapter I closed the book with a loud thump. I thought: I'll never live long enough to read, much less understand, these chapters! In my despair I asked my inner guidance whether I could still ascend if I didn't read this barely fathomable tome. To my relief, I heard: "There are many paths to Ascension." Editor's Note: In some of the preceding endnotes, the author included early publication dates to show how long ago certain books first became available to the public and to provide context.