by Dr. Alberto Villoldo: Throughout time, human beings have looked upward for answers…
This is why so many of our mythologies bring us to high places: The Shinto priests of Japan scale Mount Fuji; Turkey’s Mount Ararat is revered by the Kurds; in India, Mount Arunachala is considered the embodiment of the Hindu god Shiva; and the Greek gods lived and reigned on Mount Olympus.
With so many of our most sacred places being the highest points on Earth, it’s no surprise that legends from around the world are filled with stories of the arduous journeys required to gain access to them—perhaps the best known being the biblical tale of Moses climbing Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments.
Now, while we mortals live, work, and raise our families in the Middle World of Laika cosmology, the Upper World is the domain of the Homo luminous—the realm of Spirit. This is the celestial terrain of angels and archangels, and of enlightened ones who are free from time and death. The Upper World is where you attain your divine nature, yet it’s also where you discover the beautiful agreements that you made with Spirit before you were even born. Here, you’ll learn about the true plot of your life—why you’ve come here to live, whom you are to love, and what you are to learn—you’ll recall the agreements your soul made before you reentered the stream of time with your birth. These are the sacred agreements that you want to remember and start to live by.
Legends tell us that journeying to the Upper World is the hero’s journey. So, if you want to reach the highest peaks, you must climb them as if you were a hero yourself. Being the flip side of the victim, the hero is able to respond to her calling in the face of insurmountable odds, while the victim is at the mercy of fate.
Mayan prophets foretold of a new humanity being born from the ranks of the Upper World in the year 2012. This evolution of human beings involves all of us, as we are a part of a quantum leap into becoming a new human species that will grow new bodies that will age, heal, and die differently. In your journey, you’re going to learn that you will, in fact, experience this leap.
You can prepare yourself for your journey to the Upper World by ridding yourself of limiting beliefs about love, power, money, and health, such as: “I’m not good enough,” “I don’t deserve it,” “Soul retrieval won’t work for me,” or “I’m too burdened by responsibility to change.” Other versions are: “When the kids grow up, I’ll change,” “I’ll practice yoga when I have more time,” or “When I have enough money, I won’t work so hard—and I’ll eat better, too.”
We hold on to these limiting beliefs (aka “sacred cows”) because we think that they’ll provide us with security, but in reality they prevent us from achieving the one thing that will allow us to experience the magic of the world. When we cling to our limiting beliefs, illness or hardship may result. An acquaintance who was a university professor kept telling me that when his retirement plan was fully funded, he’d finally do the things he wanted to do. Unfortunately, before that could happen, he died of a heart attack. The lesson here is that you can’t always wait: You must let go of your limiting beliefs so that you can journey to your destiny.
Of course this is easier to say than do. I’m reminded of an old Indian story about a group of parrots who are in a cage at the palace of a sultan. An old bird tells the others (who were born in captivity) about the blue skies and how delicious the mangoes are when you eat them from the treetops, and how great it is to soar free beneath the clouds. One day, the birdkeeper accidentally leaves the cage open, and the storytelling bird says, “Go, my friends. Go and fly. Greet the treetops for me.” One by one, all of the parrots fly out of the cage—except the one who talked them into it. This old bird just wasn’t willing to sacrifice safety for freedom.
Limiting beliefs are always held as dogma, but if you want to scale the highest heights, you must do so even in the face of rigid dogma and adversity. Your friends and family won’t believe that you’re leaving the job, career, or relationship they consider perfect for you—they’ll think that you’re following a fool’s call. Yet answering your calling means that you only answer to one person’s opinions: Yours.
Next week: Identifying your sacred cows.
