Chapter Eleven
Advanced Lighthouse-Level Work

More about the Gateway

The model of the energy flow through the energy body in space/time is that of a self-contained system. However, in the metaphysical view of this pipeline, while on the level of consensus reality or space/time it is indeed a self-contained system, on the level of time/space it is an open system.¹⁵³

In working towards graduation, the Player can assume that the energy body is a closed system and successfully achieve graduation using that assumption. Just as the physical body is basically a field of energy holding within it many lesser energy fields such as organs and systems, so the energy body can be seen to be a field of energy holding within it the lesser energy fields of the chakras. When the Player has achieved the ability to stay within the open heart and to make positively polarized choices on a consistent basis, he is ready to face graduation with a serene mind. Using the gateway is not necessary for graduation.

However, once the maturing Player has had a taste of the pleasures of working in consciousness, the gateway to intelligent infinity beckons, with its enhanced menu of choices for advanced work. In the previous chapter we looked at some of these choices: meditation, prayer and the development of faith among them.

In working with these menu choices, the Player is working largely within the old concepts of our society’s religious and spiritual practices. Yes, guidance is being requested from above. The gateway is in use. But the Player can see himself as a supplicant rather than as a Co-creator.

To go further, it is necessary to emphasize the open nature of the energy body’s field as well as our co-Creatorship as Players. Before beginning such advanced work, we need to do a thorough job of releasing our old pain. If we have not yet been able to do that, the Confederation suggests staying within the menu choices discussed in Chapter 10.

Releasing old pain completely is a challenge. It demands that we change. In a way, the pain we carry in memory is a familiar and even a comforting part of our self-definition. We think, “I am the person who has had these painful experiences.” That line of thought retains the pain. While we forgive, forgive, and forgive yet again, the old pain returns again and again as our old self-identity keeps that pain alive. The only way to break this cycle is to change our self-identity.

So before the Player chooses to move further, exploring such advanced menu choices of the gateway as channeling, healing and sacred sexuality, he needs to make peace with this old pain. In the style of our Western films, he floats his hand near his six-gun and says, “OK, suffering, git on your horse and git outta town!”

The Player has already fallen in love with himself, in the process of collecting himself into the open heart. This has caused the Player to see himself quite differently than before. Yet often this does not cease the flow of energy coming from old, imbedded pain. What is missing? It is the willingness to redefine the self without reference to this pain. Q’uo says,

There comes a time to lay down a piece of crystallized pain that is emotional, mental or spiritual in nature. You will know when that time comes. We do not encourage you to hurry yourself. However, it is indeed a wise person who harvests such crystallized pain, realizes it, thanks it, and moves on. It is not necessary to carry behind you that great sack which bears the accumulated pain of your incarnation.¹⁵⁴

The Player, then, according to the Confederation, is challenged to lay aside the selfhood which includes any and all old material. He is no longer the one who is ill. He is no longer the one who has had bad luck with jobs. He is not the person whose relationships have gone awry. He is a new being.

This feels very scary to some people. And yet it is the logical and needed next step. And Players, we can do this! Yet, as the Q’uo group says, we need to know when our time has come for this last step. Before working magically, the developing Player is wise to await that prompting from within, “I am ready to become!”

Working with the Magical Personality

When most people think of magic, they think of the sleight-of-hand tricks of the stage magician who waves a wand and pulls animals out of hats. This is not the magic of the Confederation.

Nor is it the nature-based, non-polarized Wicca or nature magic. Wicca practices can be deeply moving and their healing is of positive polarity. But Wicca moves to the rhythms of all of nature, and its magic is balanced and of neutral polarity.

Nor is it the very negatively polarized black magic, which is a derivative copy-cat to white magic, with everything done backwards to white magical practice.

Nor is it the off-shoot of black magic which can be called cookbook magic, a negatively polarized craft where potions made up of arcane ingredients and are intended to be used to influence people or events.

Nor is it sympathetic magic, also negatively polarized, where a witch uses a piece of hair, a personal article or a specially fashioned effigy-doll to invoke some change in the target.

Rather, the Confederation speaks of what is generally called white ritual magic. This tradition stems from the mystical school of medieval Christianity. Unlike other forms of practice which share the name of “magic,” white magic is highly positively polarized and is based upon the invocation of some aspect of the Creator. There is nothing physical about this practice. All of the work which is done is metaphysical.

When Don Elkins questioned Ra about white ritual magic, he defined the magician’s skill as “the ability to create changes in consciousness at will”¹⁵⁶ and asked if this definition was acceptable. The Ra group responded,

This definition may be better understood by referring back to an earlier query within this working having to do with the unmanifested self. In magic one is working with one’s unmanifested self in body, in mind, and in spirit; the mixture depending upon the nature of the working.

“These workings are facilitated by the enhancement of the activation of the indigo-ray energy center. The indigo-ray energy center is fed, as are all energy centers, by experience but far more than the others is fed by what we have called the disciplines of the personality.¹⁵⁷

This brings us back to the quote which began this section: the magical personality is one in which the Player has disciplined the personality and done the work in consciousness necessary to have developed the faculties of power, love and wisdom.

The most familiar white magical invocation is the Christian sacrament of Holy Eucharist or Holy Communion ritual. This is the invocation of the Presence of Jesus the Christ by a priest. Once the priest has invoked this Presence, he shares it with his congregation as he distributes the bread and the wine which has now become full of the essence of the Christ. The belief is that this transforms the partakers into brand-new beings who may then begin a new life, full of Christ-consciousness.

It is not within the scope of this volume to explore this tradition in any detail. To learn more of this white magical tradition, the Player is encouraged to read Ra’s discussion of it in the four books of The Law of One¹⁵⁸ as well as in the works of William E. Butler, a British magician of the 20^th century.

However, I would like to discuss one aspect of the Ra group’s and Butler’s work on magic, which is the development of the Player’s magical personality. This is one of the gateway’s menu choices, according to the Confederation.

What is our magical personality? The Confederation suggests that it is another name for what they call our Higher Self. They suggest that we each have a Higher Self. This Higher Self is a version of ourselves from what we would think of as the future, using space/time terms. Q’uo describes the Higher Self this way:

The I AM that is the core of you learns of love, of wisdom, and of loving, wise compassion. When these lessons have been learned to the extent that they are without significant distortion, you turn and, reaching through time, you offer yourself a gift.

In sixth density, there is eventually, at mid-density, a point at which there is no longer any polarity. It is when the spirit has reached this point, full of unity, wisdom and compassion, that the sixth-density self places within the third-density self, in the deep mind, the biases which are to come, the destiny which has been fulfilled, the beauty and the exactitude of service to others.

Therefore, the magical personality, or the Higher Self, is the last vestige of the self which contains polarity. And as you deal in a world-illusion grounded in polarity, this gift can be extremely helpful.¹⁵⁹

In the remainder of this chapter, we will discuss the Confederation’s thoughts concerning channeling, healing and sacred sexuality. What these three menu choices of the gateway have in common is that they require the Player to move, carefully and consciously, into his magical personality. Once the channeling, healing or love-making “session of working” is completed, the Player consciously relinquishes his magical personality.

To invoke his Higher Self or magical personality, the Player sets his will and intention. He can put on a ring or some other token which, to him, symbolizes this deliberate shift from his everyday personality to his magical personality. Or he can simply make a gesture, physical or visualized, which is what I do. I imagine myself putting on my magical robes by pulling them down over my head. When my “session of working” is completed, I visualize taking the robes off over my head.

To make this visualization of the Higher Self more real to the conscious mind, the Player may spend some time designing his magical robes. Mine, for instance, consists of a beautiful, flowing white gown, gathered under the bosom at an Empire waist and set off by a hair band. I even visualize my hair, which is cut short in everyday life these days, as being long and waving luxuriantly down my back. This magical personality is very real! It is good to dress it in suitable garments.

The Player’s Use of Ritual

There are certainly many, many souls who do not feel the desire to participate in group ritual in order to clarify and purify the magical personality. To this entity comes the opportunity to create rituals for the self, and in many cases this attempt is well thought and well done. Many are the pilgrims whose rituals have to do with very humble, ordinary things: the placement of cup and spoon and bread at a simple meal; the cleanliness and order of personal effects; the thoughts that one moves through before meeting another and honoring that entity. These are all examples of personal rituals.¹⁶⁰

There are many group rituals in the literature of white magic. Besides the ritual of Holy Eucharist, there are others for purification, healing and other service-to-others oriented purposes. These rituals, and others used by white magicians, have been repeated often through the centuries in relatively unchanged form. This repetition and stability makes possible the participation of the discarnate entities from the inner planes who used these rituals when within incarnation.

The Player may find it useful to take part in Holy Communion or other group rituals such as those of the Masonic Order, He may also find it appropriate to create his own rituals, aimed at constantly tuning his everyday consciousness to include remembrance of his goal of supporting and enlivening his ability to link with his magical personality or Higher Self. Again, the secret of such rituals is repetition. As the Player repeats his self-created rituals, they begin to have a life of their own and therefore become an ever more effective resource for the Player.

My husband and I have developed our private rituals over the quarter-century-plus of our time together. We share two worship periods per day, a Morning Offering at the start of our day and a Gaia Meditation at the close of the day.

The purpose of the Morning Offering is to give us thoughts for the day and start us off into our daily routines with a renewed awareness of the sacred.

The purpose of the Gaia Meditation is to visualize peace on earth, to feel love and peace in our hearts and to renew our stewardship of Gaia, our Mother Earth.

In addition, I offer a solitary prayer ritual immediately upon arising each morning.

These three sacred times frame my day with blessed remembrance.

Such times, however, do not keep me in tune all day. So I have established habits for myself which help me with that. For one thing, I have identified several sounds which recur in my environment: the train whistle on a nearby track, the ringing of the telephone, the doorbell’s chime, the noon whistle at our fire station and the sound of heavy equipment backing up.

When I hear one of those sounds, I stop a moment and affirm that I am a child of the infinite One and a creature made of love. By re-framing the noises of my day as calls to remembrance, I eliminate the aggravation with which I might otherwise hear these sounds and substitute a pleasant emotion as I move into this momentary spiritual practice. And by using the ringing of the telephone or doorbell to recall that the soul whom I am about to greet is the Creator, I prepare myself to share energy at the soul level with him.

Each Player can identify the most often-repeated sounds of his own environment and set his ritualistic tuning responses to them. This is one good example of supporting the magical personality by the use of ritual.

Other rituals can clump around daily tasks such as eating and bathing. I always offer thanks before I eat with a very short but heartfelt grace, “Thank You, Lord.” I give thanks to the animals, vegetables and other foods I am eating, which have sacrificed their lives so that I may be fed. I have little labels on all our water taps that say “Thank you.” And I love to place the fork and knife, the napkin and spoon, carefully, to make of a meal not a hurried or slap-dash thing but an honored event.

In the bathtub, as I bathe I use the magical, magnetic properties of water to offer prayers and call in angelic help and healing.

My husband, Jim, is the most ritualistic person I know. His is the busy and hard-working life of a lawn-care worker. Yet he always moves rhythmically and ritualistically as he mows and trims, clears debris, makes and weeds gardens and builds walls. Even in his truck, when he needs to make a turn, he has a precise flourish of the wrist and hand which he does as he prepares to turn the wheel. In this way his movements throughout his work day have become dances and his frame of mind remains steeped in the sacred nature of all things.

People coming into our house sometimes comment on its neatness. Our furniture and belongings are generally worn and shabby, but everything has its place. Both Jim and I feel strongly that honoring and creating good places for all our things makes them a more fully magical part of our environment. Even the housecleaning and laundry is done with ritual, so that all things are triggers for our growing awareness of the magical nature of all things, including ourselves.

All of these things can be done without another person being aware of our doing them. They do not show. The work is all done in our minds. They are all our choices, as Players who want to use every minute of our time on Planet Earth to evolve and develop spiritually.

Again, each Player can choose for himself those things into which he wishes to pump sacred awareness. Have fun with this! When you have chosen some trigger for doing this work in consciousness, then be consistent and persistent in repeating the small ritual you have devised. After a few weeks, take stock of your attitude. It is very likely that you will have sweetened your perception of life. That sweet state of mind is a great aid to your living in the open heart like the Player you have become. And it will make your tuning up into the invocation of your magical personality or Higher Self a thing quickly done.

Channeling

You ask what people should and should not channel, and we say to you, first of all, that all of you are channels. There is no one who is not a channel; there is no life which is not primarily a channeled existence. By this we mean that each of you carries within the self deep and unconscious forces, neither to the good nor to the evil as much as to the deepening of experience.

The more times in which the student may recognize the depth of the present moment, just so much more shall that soul channel in a more biased fashion, in an engaged fashion, in an enabling fashion, for service to all and for love of the Infinite Creator.

A life is a solid, sometimes bulky present to offer to the infinite One, yet each laugh, each smile, each encouragement or hard truth to one who needs it, each and every effort that has been made is as the wrapping and the decorating and the wonderful ribbons about that solid, caring present to the Creator that is a channeled life.¹⁶¹

Before I discuss formal channeling, I wish to offer, front and center, the Confederation insistence that we are all channels, all the time. We are all living channels through which something shall pass whenever we open our mouths. Will our channel be filled with loving and helpful words when we speak? It is always our choice.

As Players we take ourselves seriously. We know that we are channels of a powerful kind. We know, as the Confederation says again and again, that we are part of the godhead principle. Each of us rules our kingdom. If we judge someone and find him wanting, that judgment has staying power within our interaction with him. If we find compassion and forgiveness for someone, that person is forgiven.

Since I have touched on this concept before, I will not belabor the point here. However, before talking about formal channeling, it is good for us Players to have this reminder. We need to develop a constant awareness of what is passing through our channel. We want to polarize by being part of the good in this world.

Who Should be a Channel?

As in any spiritually oriented service, the honor of being a channel grows in direct proportion to the responsibility of living that which is channeled. Those who do not wish to take upon themselves the responsibility of attempting to live as they have learned are far better off attempting to be of service to the infinite by any one of a number of ways of channeling cheerfulness and helpfulness to those who are needy. Many there are who need food, blankets, clothing and shelter, for upon your weary world there is the winter of the body, and the body becomes cold. The most beautiful words shall not warm the bones of such a body, but rather the simpler channeling of hospitality and faith, warm places for saddened, wearied bodies.¹⁶²

Since the Confederation’s only voice is that of channels who translate their concepts into words, one would expect them to encourage all Players to become formal channels. However, the opposite is true. While suggesting to all seekers that they are already channels, they ask only those who cannot resist the feeling that channeling is part of their life’s work in service to learn channeling formally.

A Player who chooses to take up formal channeling is asking for trouble. As long as a Player is seeking simply to inform himself by journaling with his guidance, his likelihood of being tested and tried is not intensified. When a Player decides to channel in order to provide spiritually helpful material for other people, he has become a priest in the formal sense of the word.

A seeker reading the Bible takes the words of Isaiah or Jesus the Christ and listens to them. He may well be influenced by them. A seeker reading material you have channeled likewise takes the words that you have channeled and listens to them in exactly the same way. I ask any Player thinking about channeling this question: are you ready to bear that responsibility? Do you feel comfortable knowing that you are as Isaiah or Jesus to the seeker who studies your material?

I have been a channel since 1974. In those thirty-plus years, I feel that I have learned a good deal about how to do a good job as a channel. I do not feel that I have become truly excellent. This is because I know, after each and every channeling session of working, that I was not able to capture and express even a third of the concepts that have flowed through me during that session.

I have to live with that. It is a characteristic of channeling as I have experienced it that there is an infinite amount of material in concepts and only a finite amount of expression contained within the words into which I attempt to translate those concepts which I receive.

It can be said that channeling is as easy to do as learning to play “Chopsticks” or composing an amateur valentine poem of the “roses are red, violets are blue” ilk.

It is also a trustworthy statement that channeling is exquisitely hard to do well. After all this time, I feel I am becoming barely competent as a Confederation channel. I am eager to keep learning! I can attest that channeling is very hard work.

And all ego needs to be put aside before starting to learn to channel. During channeling, any attachment to an outcome or personal bias about the information nullifies the results.

Further, channeling exposes the Player to an enhanced level of attention from the negatively oriented forces that dwell in the inner planes of our Earth world. Just as the Confederation and many other positively polarized sources are available for positively oriented Players to contact through the gateway, there are many negatively polarized sources watching the Earth scene, ready to offer resistance to any source of positive light. Due to the nature of the negative polarity, it is part of the work of such sources not only to offer negatively oriented information to those who request it but also to work towards extinguishing any sources of positive light that work against their cause.

This is not a two-way street. Positively oriented sources such as the Confederation do not offer resistance to channeling sources of negative polarity.

And finally, many channels have died prematurely. Many others have severe health problems. There are three good reasons for this.

Firstly, the channeling process itself can be very hard upon the physical body. During the years I was acting as a trance channel for the Ra contact, I lost two to three pounds at each session of working. For three solid years I weighed no more than 85 pounds. Only when I relinquished that contact did I recover my normal weight. To Players in search of ways to diet, this may sound like a good thing. However, I was eating more than I ever have, yet still losing weight. Such a condition makes one more susceptible to illness and infections.

Other trance channels report the opposite, a runaway weight gain. That also is unhealthy.

Secondly, any type of channeling produces a body of written material. Metaphysically, it is absolutely essential that the channel producing this material be willing to spend the rest of his life living according to the principles which are contained within his channeled messages. If the channel is unwilling to make this effort at all times, his channeling will begin to be of mixed polarity, because he is detuning his instrument—himself. It is essential to make a lifetime commitment to walking one’s talk if one intends to be a channel.

And thirdly, during the channeling of positively oriented material, one stands close to the light. And standing in intense light, one casts a sharp shadow. This draws the attention of those negative entities who would issue psychic greetings—greetings that seek to exploit what Ra called any chinks in one’s armor of light.

Most Players in this situation receive temptations to stroke their egos. Since Confederation channeling is strictly focused on spiritual principles, this temptation arises when seekers ask the source for information on specific matters such as future catastrophes. If the channel follows the temptation to answer these questions specifically, the tuning of the channel will drift and the channel will then pick up another source. That source will be negatively oriented. The new source, which perfectly mimics the original, positive, source, is delighted to talk about future catastrophes. And the original positive information becomes tainted. The light is put out.

I stopped teaching channeling in 1996 after several of the students in my workshops became mentally ill when they didn’t follow my instructions.” I simply felt I did not have the needed safeguards available to me in order to be able to offer this teaching.

I have changed my mind in the last couple of years. As I write this book, I have begun a new series of Channeling Intensives. I wish to leave the legacy of what I have learned about channeling for future students to use. The curriculum of the first Channeling Intensive is available on our web site. There are detailed instructions and if you have an interest in pursuing the gift of channeling, please consult consulting this curriculum.

The participants of these Channeling Intensives have worked very hard to prepare. They have made a lifelong commitment to this type of service to others. We shall see if, with such carefully prepared and dedicated channeling students, the Confederation is able to develop a new crop of good, positive channels at L/L Research.

As I said in my little Channeling Handbook,¹⁶³ a channel must be prepared to die for what he believes and to live by what he believes. Alone among the choices on the gateway menu, I would advise skipping this one unless you are completely convinced that a lifelong commitment to channeling is an agreement you can successfully make with yourself. Channeling is risky business.

However, if you as a Player find that you feel called, beyond any doubt, to be a formal channel, then there are some guidelines that make the work safer. Primary among them is the commitment to working with a senior channel in a stable group while you are learning, and for some time thereafter.

Never channel by yourself, or with only one other person, unless you are channeling inner guides. To channel an outer contact such as an ET source, the channeling circle needs to consist of least two other people, which act as batteries for the channel and also universalize the energy of the circle which produces the channeling. For instance, in the contact with those of Ra, I always worked with Jim and Don. Edgar Cayce worked with his wife and Gladys Davis.

Select the circle with whom you channel thoughtfully and carefully. Information comes through the channel, who acts as translator of the concepts received. However those concepts are given as responses to the group tuning and its collective dedication to purity. Channeling does not come from the channel alone. It is pulled in by the tuning of the whole circle of seeking which is gathered for a channeling session.

And lastly, never, ever “practice” by yourself if you have decided as a Player to make this menu choice. Channeling does improve with repetition, but be absolutely faithful to the principle that formal channeling is never a solo activity. Practice only with your group.

In sum: if you wish to journal with your inner guidance, that is safe work. But if you wish to be a formal channel whose work will be shared with others, leave your ego at the door. Prepare to lead a fairly monastic life. And seek out a good group with a trusted senior channel. Expect to spend years learning how to be a reasonably adequate instrument. And know that for your trouble, you shall be rewarded with frequent psychic greetings and other inconveniences.

Is it worth the trouble? I can only answer for myself: yes. Almost every day, people write in to thank L/L Research for the spiritually oriented material our ongoing channeling experiment has produced. I am gratefully and joyfully thankful for the opportunity to serve as a channel for the highest and best. To one who is genuinely called to serve as a channel, it is a beautiful life.

Psychic Greeting

Psychic greetings are those greetings which have been sent by an entity, most usually of the inner planes, with the intention of disrupting the process of spiritual evolution and causing an entity to stop its forward progress and to become lost in the side roads of inner questioning and suffering.

Under this definition, you may see that psychic greeting is a term that is much overused and often misused among your peoples. However, if one pulls one’s focus back into looking at what your energetic bodies are and how they experience you and your thinking processes, the concept of psychic greeting may be perhaps redefined as psychic resistance and may be widened to include a wide variety of ways in which your energetic body can experience resistance.¹⁶⁴

Psychic greeting is the inevitable response of the negatively polarized entities from the unseen planes to a Player’s waking up and beginning to polarize. When a Player begins to polarize towards service to others, he begins to act as a source of light. Just as moths are attracted to a flame, this light attracts those service-to-self energies that would extinguish that beacon of light by terminating or conquering it.

You may be more familiar with the term, psychic attack, than with the term, psychic greeting. The Confederation prefers the term, psychic greeting. This term emphasizes the fact that negative entities are not viciously attacking the positive entity but are systematically offering it chances to be swayed from the positive path. The greeting may feel like a furious attack. However the intelligence behind such psychic greetings is cold, logical and persistent rather than impulsive and hot-headed. Such negative entities watch for chinks in each person’s “armor of light.” Then they energize those chinks.

When people think of psychic greeting, it is always assumed that it is coming from outside the self. However the Confederation says that most so-called psychic greetings are actually instances of psychic resistance coming from within the Player’s own personality.

When a Player begins to polarize successfully towards the positive, changes begin occurring within his energy body. These changes demand that he release his old definition of himself as a wounded person. Most old definitions of the self involve remembered pain. There are many pockets of ancient pain in us all. This old pain must be processed, balanced, released and left behind. Q’uo says,

There are many ways in which embedded pain can find an echo, a reflection or a voice within the present moment. And so some of the voices speaking to the energetic body will be those of a negative tone of voice. And that negativity will be cunningly and specifically crafted to fit into the present moment and to cause the experience of distraction or resistance.¹⁶⁵

This is why finding and releasing embedded pockets of pain in the memory is such central work for the Player. Such pockets of pain offer easy targets for agents of psychic resistance within the energy body and personality, as well as those outside of the self.

Some psychic greetings do indeed come from a separate personality which has an existence independent of the Player’s. Usually these greetings occur because the Player has begun accessing the gateway to offer gifts, such as pure radiance of being, channeling or healing. Psychic greeting is a left-handed compliment. If you are receiving a greeting, you know you are on the right track! You are polarizing well and standing close enough to the light to cast a sharp and noticeable shadow.

It is extremely rare that a fifth-density, negatively oriented entity offers a psychic greeting to a Player within incarnation on earth. Normally, a fifth-density negative entity will send his fourth-density student to offer greetings. The most usual greeting is some form of temptation.

In terms of polarity, each of our personalities has some weak spots. The usual weak spots are the earthly vices of gluttony, laziness, jealousy, anger and fear. Fear has many forms—for instance, that others may think ill of us, that we may lose our identity or that we may lose material comforts. Players can easily be distracted from the program of positive spiritual evolution by these and other things. The result is that the Player temporarily halts his progress in polarization. He has been taken off the Gameboard until he regains his balance, recalls his intentions and becomes fearless once more.

Occasionally, the form of psychic greeting may be physical. A Player whose mind is fixed on staying positive and is therefore not vulnerable to emotional temptations but who has a weak physical body may experience unusual amounts of illness.

While Lighthouse-Level Players are the most likely to receive psychic greetings, any Player who chooses to awaken from the planetary dream and to polarize positively will experience them at some level.

As the Player begins to meditate, pray and otherwise use the gateway to intelligent infinity, he will begin to experience this psychic resistance and greeting. And if he should decide to come to a place such as L/L Research, where a well-established source of light and love has been developed, he may well find himself experiencing a lot of resistance to getting there. We have had many stories about difficulties experienced by participants coming to our Gatherings—canceled flights, car breakdowns, sudden home emergencies and so forth.

Players can expect to experience psychic greeting and psychic resistance as they work to increase their polarization in consciousness. It is part of the Gameboard environment. It can be dealt with successfully by any Player. And it is nothing to fear.

Psychic Protection

We commend your continual fidelity to the ideals of harmony and thanksgiving. This shall be your great protection.¹⁶⁶

Receiving a psychic greeting can feel frightening. Nightmares, a common source of psychic greetings, are scary things. Uninvited thoughts that come forcibly and repeatedly to mind are another very common type of negative greeting. Nameless dread with no content is also a common type of greeting. These can feel very spooky and can tend to immobilize the Player.

The immediate, knee-jerk reaction when such greetings occur is to contract in fear and throw up one’s emotional armor. However, as is often the case with metaphysical choices, the immediate response is not the Player’s most skillful choice. If we respond to psychic greetings with fear, the greeting has been successful. We have stopped our forward momentum, closed our hearts and dropped off the Gameboard.

It takes practice for the Player to refrain from that withdrawal from the open heart and, instead, respond to perceived greetings with fearless serenity. At first it will require attention and practice to respond without fear. The Player will need to remind himself consciously to respond fearlessly. The game will be to perceive the psychic greeting as soon as possible and keep the down-time, away from the open heart, as short as possible. Gradually, the Player will gain skill at perceiving such greetings and will lose less and less time having to re-open the heart.

There are a couple of resources for the Player undergoing psychic greeting that are quick and easy and very helpful. One resource is the focused use of your breath. Breath is sacred. Using your breath intentionally to create changes in your consciousness is magical. Have a mantra or phrase ready to use when psychic greeting is perceived.

One of my favorites is Julian of Norwich’s phrase, “All is well and all will be well.”

This saying is part of a paragraph, the whole of which is helpful for the Player to get into his conscious awareness for reference in times of psychic greeting. She says,

Jesus in this vision informed me of all that is needful to me. He said, “Sin is unavoidable, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” For if we never fell, we should not know how feeble we are of our self, and also we should not fully know that marvelous love of our Maker. He did not say, “You will never have a rough passage; you will never be over-strained; you will never feel uncomfortable.’”But He did say, “You will never be overcome.”

The fullness of Joy is to behold God in everything.¹⁶⁷

The Player at the Lighthouse Level is one who has awakened his magical personality and can create changes in his consciousness at will. Such a phrase as “All is well” is a very quick invocation of a point of view which is fearless and confident. I also use the simple, one-word prayer, “Jesus,” and this works whether or not you are Christian or whether you believe in any religion. Jesus is the inner-planes embodiment of unconditional love. Saying that word brings an immediate change in consciousness. If you wish to access the vibration of Jesus the Christ but prefer not to use that name when you pray, other Christ-names of the New Age are Jeshua, Jehoshua and Sananda.

Another resource for the Lighthouse-Level Player is his faculty of logic. Nightmares, waking visions of doom and nameless dread may be uncomfortable, but they will not harm us. Their goal is simply to scare us and take us off the Gameboard by closing down our hearts. If these prayers, or your own choice of prayerful words, do not immediately remove the greeting, use your logic and change your circumstances.

If it was a nightmare from which you awoke in terror, get up, fix a cup of green tea, light a candle and meditate or read for a while until you feel “right” again. If it was a waking vision of disturbing content, alter your program for the day enough to include a change in physical place or, failing that, a different activity. If it is a feeling of dread with no content, then pray or sing a favorite song. Place good content where there was zero content in the mind, using your breath, and the nameless fear will be chased away.

Occasionally, we Players will field a particularly persistent greeting. Usually this occurs during the depths of the Dark Night of the Soul experience, or after a difficult outer trauma. Returning war veterans are prey to these persistent greetings, due to their having undergone horrible experiences. Those touched by the suicide of a loved one or a difficult separation from a mate by death or divorce are also particularly prone. The “loyal opposition” likes to get people when they are down and to emphasize the state of disharmony which Julian of Norwich called “sin.” The Confederation term is “distortion.” A good synonym is “error.” Call it what you will, but it is nothing more than an attitude or state of mind which we can find ways to adjust.

When your greeting is particularly persistent, roll out the big guns! My favorite resource for persistent greeting is a dedication of the self to the forces of unconditional love symbolized by the figure of Jesus the Christ. Dion Fortune offers this resource in her excellent little book, Psychic Self-Defense.¹⁶⁸ The text of the prayer is:

“I am a servant of the Lord Jesus the Christ, whom I serve with all my heart, all my mind and all my strength. I draw a circle around me in the name of the Christ across which no mortal error dares to set its foot.”

Physically draw this circle around yourself, as you say the words, by touching your hands behind you and then bringing them around to the front and touching them in front of you to draw a circle around your body in the air. When you have finished this prayer, clap your hands together to signify that it is done.

I have used this prayer extensively in difficult times and have found it quite useful, even when the most disturbing greetings have hit me, like being unable to breathe or feeling suicidal. The prayer seems to wear off in a few hours, and therefore it may need to be repeated. Say it again, just as you would repeat a dose of medicine. You cannot overdose, and you need no prescription!

If this process seems to take you away from your good work for a while, do not begrudge the time taken to move back into the open heart. It is far more important, metaphysically speaking, for the Player to return to the consciousness of the open heart than for him to be especially efficient in his work that day. Impatience, anger or other negative reactions to having to do this work only keep the self out of the heart. So Players need to be calm, serene and without undue haste in dealing with perceived greetings from negative forces. Address what Ra called the “chink in the armor of light” with love. And love will prevail.

Healing

It is not by example that the healer does the working. The working exists in and of itself. The healer is only the catalyst, much as this instrument has the catalysis necessary to provide the channel for our words, yet by example or exercise of any kind can take no thought for this working. The healing/working is congruent in that it is a form of channeling some distortion of the intelligent infinity.¹⁶⁹

Many of us have a natural healing bent. As our open hearts go out to those who are ill, we pray that we may help; and so we do help. Many more of us Players are drawn to develop the gift of healing because it is so clearly of service to others. The Confederation suggests that Players may use the gateway to intelligent infinity to become channels for healing.

The Confederation’s view of health is based on the concept of all of the various portions of the unified and interactive creation being nesting fields of energy. The infinite creation is a field; the Milky Way galaxy is a field nested within that infinite whole; our solar system is a field nested within the galaxy and our planet is a field nested within the solar system. Each of us is also a field composed of the integrated energies of our minds, bodies and spirits, nested as a unit within this planet’s energy field. Thusly, the Confederation sees the state of our health—just as it sees the health of the Creation, the Milky Way or our solar system—as the state of maximum integration of our field. The Q’uo say,

It is our perception that healing takes place when the integrity of the field which is the soul or spirit—that is, the essence of an entity—is maximized. This maximum integrity of field occurs at an unique position within the nexus of the various bodies, wherever within that nexus that that one entity is at that one particular time.

Not only is each entity unique but each entity is continuously changing between vibrations. Rare is the individual in third density that can attain and maintain maximum integrity or health, even for a moment. Those who come the closest are those whose balance is seen by others, perhaps, to be above the ordinary.¹⁷⁰

Traditionally trained doctors tend to rely for their opinion of their patient’s health on a set of norms and standards such as temperature, pulse, blood pressure and a host of data gleaned from analyzing our blood. As far as this view of health can go, it is very effective. Doctors, their operations and their medicines have saved my life several times.

And yet such statistical evaluation of wellness is not entirely satisfactory. From time to time, most of us feel “off” despite having a normal temperature, pulse and so on. At other times, we might feel physically ill despite feeling balanced and healthy mentally and emotionally.

New Age writers on health come closer to the Confederation point of view than traditional medical doctors as they talk of wellness and balance. However they stop short of seeing wellness as a purely energetic condition. The many herbal and naturopathic remedies which they tend to suggest to improve wellness differ only in harshness from the chemically compounded prescriptions suggested by traditionally trained doctors. Health is seen, in both cases, as conforming to a set of parameters.

The practitioners of the Christian sect of the Church of Christ Scientist are one of the few groups of mainstream healers which agree with the Confederation’s vision of the body as a field of energy. Their practitioners work only on the energetic field of the patient, using prayer, visualization and affirmation of the truth to create the opportunity for healing.

The Confederation sees the work of the healer to be that of offering itself as an instrument in the service of the one who wishes to be healed. The healer does not do anything to the patient. The healer simply offers himself as an instrument of healing for the patient.

In Chapter 7 of this book, I wrote about this healing use of the gateway to intelligent infinity by talking about pyramids. I want to repeat a bit of that discussion, as the concept is vital to seeing how the Confederation views the healing process. Here is what I said:

The Confederation states that the pyramid shape has natural faculties for healing stemming strictly from its geometry. The Great Pyramid of Giza is the best example of the dimensions of such a healing pyramid.

The Confederation states that the love/light energy of the Creator is scooped into the base of the pyramid by the natural functioning of its geometric shape and the ratios between angles, height, width and so forth. This pyramid shape causes the scoop of incoming energy to be spiraled naturally into a point within the lower part of the pyramid. Then it spirals out again into a double teardrop shape; that is, a rounded shape that is pointed on both ends. In the middle of this teardrop, the energy spiral passes through what archeologists call the King’s Chamber position.

Anything placed in that position will be offered the opportunity to re-balance or re-boot the energy system of its body. Items such as food, placed in this position within a pyramid, are kept fresh indefinitely. Razor blades placed there retain their edge even after many uses. We humans, with our free will, when offered such a healing opportunity, can accept the re-balancing of our health or we can reject it.

The Confederation suggests that healers are portable King’s Chambers. Where the pyramid uses geometry to create the opportunity for the rebooting of any energy field placed within it, the healer uses his ability to move through the gateway to intelligent infinity and bring back into his heart chakra that same opportunity.

The healer, then, is seen by the Confederation as one who offers the possibility of a new choice for a patient. He does not diagnose. He does not prescribe. He does not do anything in the outer sense. Rather, he sets his intention to be an instrument for healing and prepares himself for the working with tuning, perhaps by prayer or meditation. Then his patient is just like a person sitting in the King’s Chamber position in a pyramid. The patient’s violet-ray read-out is splayed open in the healer’s energy field. An adjustment which creates the maximum integration of that field is offered from the Creator through the healer, whose healing energy has come through the gateway and rests in his open heart.

Each healer works a bit differently. Some use crystals as an outward focus for the healing energy they are bringing through. Others use massage, dowsing, muscle testing or the laying on of hands. Some healers are able to see auras and can comb toxicity out of a patient’s energy field, offering a re-set to the patient in that way.

The choice of whether to accept this rebooting is always the patient’s. As one who has dealt with a good deal of illness in my long life, I am quite aware that there are often reasons for this rebooting to be refused. I, for instance, have found illness to be my energy system’s way of reminding me to do more inner and metaphysical work and less outer and physical busy-work.

My illnesses have served a valuable function in my life. In these times of illness I have grown in compassion and depth of selfhood. Perhaps the maximum integrity of my energy field contains lasting physical distortions so that for me, wellness is experienced amidst some outer illness. I suspect that I am far from the only person whose energy body is best balanced when it is seemingly somewhat out of balance physically.

The Ra group suggests that a healer may best prepare himself for his work by these steps:

Firstly, the mind must be known to itself. This is perhaps the most demanding part of healing work. If the mind knows itself then the most important aspect of healing has occurred. Consciousness is the microcosm of the Law of One.

The second part has to do with the disciplines of the body complexes. In the streamings reaching your planet at this time, these understandings and disciplines have to do with the balance between love and wisdom in the use of the body in its natural functions.

The third area is the spiritual, and in this area the first two disciplines are connected through the attainment of contact with intelligent infinity.¹⁷¹

There is much to ponder in that spare description of the healer’s preparation. It calls to mind another of Ra’s comments:

The heart of the discipline of the personality is threefold. One, know yourself. Two, accept yourself. Three, become the Creator.¹⁷²

We are at our healthiest, suggests the Confederation, when we realize in a deep and final way that there is truly no disharmony or imperfection. Any perceived distortion is an illusion. We as Players can choose to alter this illusion. When both the healer and the patient enter into healing with this basic attitude, the healing will be its most effective.

Sacred Sexuality

Sexual energy transfer takes place upon a non-magical level by all those entities which vibrate green-ray active. It is possible, as in the case of this instrument which dedicates itself to the service of the one infinite Creator, to refine this energy transfer further. When the other-self also dedicates itself in service to the one infinite Creator, the transfer is doubled. Then the amount of energy transferred is dependent only upon the amount of polarized sexual energy created and released. There are refinements from this point onward leading to the realm of the high sexual magic.¹⁷³

When we discuss sacred sexuality, most of us have a problem with the word “sex.” It is the same problem we have using the word “love” in a spiritual sense. Our culture has emphasized the most shallow aspects of sex and love. Sex has come to mean something fairly transitory and worldly. As we think of all the sexually provocative ads on television and in magazines, it is difficult to believe that sex is a sacred thing which can open to us Players a beautiful and inspiring realm of communion with the one infinite Creator. And yet the Confederation suggests that sexuality is indeed sacred.

Sex is frequently on people’s minds. We are sexual beings, and the Confederation suggests that not only are our bodies sexual, but also our minds and spirits. I have reached retirement age and yet my inner nature is as risible as it was when I first made love at the age of nineteen. I suspect most people would say the same. Inside, we are all young, new, fresh and enthusiastic.

However, our physical bodies gradually age. I remember one of the last century’s great comics, Buddy Hackett, saying to Johnny Carson, years ago, that he had become impotent in his old age. He said that although his manhood had stopped working, he still looked at pretty girls with exactly the same interest as ever. And this is a healthy thing, according to the Confederation. Whatever our physical capacity or opportunity to engage in sexual activity, embracing our sexuality is life-affirming and wholesome.

Sex is not only for young people. It is not only for attractive people. It is for us all. Even if we are at present sexually inactive or if we give up sexual activity completely, as do many orders of monks and nuns, we still deal with the sexual dynamic in our natures. We are sexual to the bone. More than that, sexuality is a vital part of our mental make-up. And for Players, it can become an ever more active part of our spiritual make-up.

What turns love-making into sacred sexuality? Unconditional love is the beginning of sacred sex. This means that except for rare occurrences, we will not experience the wonder and joy of sacred sex with casual sex partners. We will experience the primal “Yes” of red-ray sexual arousal and satisfaction. A lot of people never get beyond that red-ray energy, being convinced that the sexual impulse is part of humankind’s lower, animal nature. I feel that even red-ray sex is good sex! It propagates the species efficiently. It feels good. But there is so much more in store for the Player who chooses to refine his sexuality.

Lighthouse-Level uses of the gateway to intelligent infinity do not appeal to the majority of Players. Of the three options discussed in this chapter, however, sacred sexuality is the most generally accessible item on the menu. Whereas channeling and healing are options which attract a fairly small percentage of us, working with our sexuality to lift it into the realm of the sacred interests most sexually active Players.

The first requirement for sacred sexuality, suggests the Confederation, is that both you and your partner dwell in unconditional love, each for the other, while making love. While green-ray sexual energy transfers are not magical, since the gateway to intelligent infinity is not accessed, the ability to share green-ray energy transfers is the foundation for refining and elevating sex up to the Lighthouse Level.

This acceptance, each of the other, in a sexual relationship is not easily developed. Opening one’s heart unconditionally to another human being makes us feel vulnerable. When we date someone new, we tend to come to the relationship heavily defended. And happy are we who eventually find a good mate! Yet even when we have found the right person for us, there are miles to go before we can open the gateway together in sexual sharing.

When my husband, Jim McCarty, and I first became lovers neither of us wished for a married relationship. I was in a mated, though celibate, relationship already, with Don Elkins. My commitment to him was absolute and lifelong. I was extremely fond of Jim, as was Don, but I could offer him nothing but friendship. Fortunately that was all he desired from me.

From the beginning, Jim and I experienced green-ray sexual energy transfer. We had both been fastidious in our previous sexual lives, always making love in green ray. As we had offered ourselves to previous lovers with a whole heart, so we were able to give ourselves without reservation to each other. Yet our sexual sharing did not reach to what Ra calls the “realm of high sexual magic.” We were stuck in green ray. We had not yet learned to communicate fearlessly with each other. Our hearts kept their secrets.

After Don died in 1984, I recovered slowly from the sorrow of losing my beloved companion. By 1987, when Jim and I married, I found myself falling deeply in love with Jim. This should have been a happy thing. Yet it created an imbalance. Although Jim loved and esteemed me, his interest in me was not romantic. I tried to keep the secret of my permanent crush on him. And he tried to keep the secret of his feeling pressed by my infatuation. We both failed! Yet no matter how much we talked this issue through, we could not advance. The imbalance was too great.

We had decided to marry because we were living and working together. We are both conventional people and we wished to respect and honor our relationship. Marriage greased the social machinery of our lives and regularized our public persona. And we were happy with our decision to wed. Yet the imbalance remained.

Eight years after we married, in the summer of 1994, the situation changed. As we were playing in the surf off of South Carolina on vacation one day, a riptide took us both out to sea. I knew Jim could not swim well, whereas I was nimble as an otter in the water. So I determined to get him to shore safely before thinking about myself.

I tried holding Mick in the conventional lifesaving position and swimming, tugging him behind me, to shore, but the tide was extremely strong and my efforts only took us further out to sea. I prayed for guidance and suddenly received the image of me, getting behind Jim, placing my feet in the largest part of his derriere and shoving him towards shore with my legs. Somehow, miraculously, a wall of water formed up behind me at just the right moment and I was able to thrust Jim shoreward with enough force that he found his footing and clambered to the sandy beach safely.

By doing this, however, I had repositioned myself even further away from shore. No amount of swimming brought me closer. I finally gave up and released all need to try further. I gazed about the scene. It was a gorgeous day, warm and windy—the day before a hurricane struck the island on which we were staying—and I thought, “What a beautiful day to die!”

I decided that I would last the longest in the water and give Jim the best chance to go for help if I took advantage of my ability to float and stopped tiring myself out by swimming. I turned onto my stomach and floated like a water-bug. No more than a minute passed, after I had released all fear and stopped trying to swim, before a wonderfully big wave picked me up and I body-surfed safely in to the beach.

Jim could not get over the fact that I had risked my life for him. All the barriers of all his years crumbled and for the first time his heart became entirely accepting of my love. The feelings of romance and “in-love-ness” were now balanced between us. And we now had the potential ability to refine our sexual relationship and activity.

What went into this final breakthrough? Nothing less than 15 years of work in relationship, eight years of friendship and seven years of marriage. This leads me to believe that while it is relatively easy to break through into the open heart and share green-ray sexual energy, it is the result of serious and sustained metaphysical work as a Player to become able to embark on a path of sacred sexuality with a partner.

It is quite a challenge to come into the proper configuration of relationship for working on sacred sex. It always looks attractive to take a short cut. One popular short cut in occult circles has always been arranged sexuality, where the magician pays a partner. He or she then uses this partner to come close to orgasm again and again, but not to culminate the sexual act. After a long period of this polarizing “winding of the coil,” the act is culminated and the magician experiences a solitary orgasm of a magical nature.

There is only one problem with this technique for a positively oriented Player: it is solidly service-to-self in nature. There is no opening of the heart. There is no sexual energy exchange. There is a magician using a human being as an object in working his way to achieving an opening through the gateway to intelligent infinity strictly for himself.

The Confederation report on sacred sexuality, then, is that there are no short-cuts. It is the work of a lifetime to find the appropriate mate, to become well enough balanced in love so that neither pulls on the other and to become able to open the heart completely. Then the next step is to become able to talk with each other in complete openness.

Communication is another buzz word of our culture which has gotten shopworn through overuse. There are levels of communication which suffice for buying groceries, deciding which DVD to rent, making a budget, choosing a restaurant or naming our children. And it is an achievement simply to become able to communicate at those levels.

The communication which is distinctively blue-ray, however, is far deeper than that. The hearts of both mates must become entirely undefended. It was Mick’s and my life-threatening swim which created the opportunity for our breakthrough into total communication. For each mated pair of Players, there will likely be a pivotal moment when communication turns into communion. The heart senses that it is totally safe. And the barriers come down—barriers we did not know were there until they fell.

Once communication at the blue-ray level is reached, it is only a matter of the mated pair’s dedicating themselves to serving the one infinite Creator, both in the life experience as a whole and, specifically, in the act of love-making. Jim and I have been working with sacred sexuality now for thirteen years. We have just begun to explore the joy and beauty of it. We shall learn as we go for as long as we both are here on this earthly plane. What a delightful prospect!

The Spiritual Nature of Orgasm

The energy of which we speak in discussing sexual energy transfers is a form of vibratory bridge between space/time and time/space.

Due to the veiling process the energy transferred from male to female is different than that transferred from female to male. Due to the polarity difference of the mind/body/spirit complexes of male and female the male stores physical energy, the female mental and mental/emotional energy.

When third-density sexual energy transfer is completed the male will have offered the discharge of physical energy. The female is, thereby, refreshed, having far less physical vitality. At the same time, if you will use this term, the female discharges the efflux of its stored mental and mental/emotional energy, thereby offering inspiration, healing, and blessing to the male which by nature is less vital in this area.¹⁷⁴

When Elkins asked the Ra group why the ratio of male to female orgasms was loaded so heavily on the side of the male, the Ra group said that the male orgasm was necessary for the propagation of the species while the female orgasm was not. They suggested that it is only when the mated pair set out to “use the sexual energy transfer to learn, to serve and to glorify the one infinite Creator”¹⁷⁵ that the function of the female orgasm becomes clear.

Archetypally speaking, then, in sacred sexuality the male partner has become the archetypal Man. The female partner has become the archetypal Woman. Since both Players have dedicated their ritual of sacred sexual play to the Creator, they have become Priest and Priestess. I use the term, ritual, not to indicate that there must be a set routine of love-making in sacred sexuality but to indicate that the act of love-making has taken on the energy of a spiritual or magical ritual. The Confederation calls it “the Eucharist of red ray.”¹⁷⁶

It is the function of the male orgasm to enliven and strengthen the reserves of physical energy for the woman. It is the function of the female orgasm to “inspire, heal and bless”¹⁷⁷ the male. In sacred sexuality, then, the female orgasm is bringing through metaphysical or time/space energy to balance the male’s physical or space/time energy. Thusly the female orgasm becomes as important as the male orgasm.

There are many ways to achieve orgasms for both of the mated Players, all of them enjoyable! I do not need to give the Player lessons on how to make love! We all have explored these options on our own. Not every woman can achieve orgasm at every love-making, no matter how sustained the period of stimulation. However, the odds that a woman will have an orgasm leap upwards exponentially when the pair both feel that this is a desirable outcome.

There are wonderful side-effects to sacred sexuality. Jim has experienced orgasms lasting several minutes, while I have experienced orgasms lasting well over half an hour. Moreover, in latter years, as we have begun to penetrate the mystery of indigo- and violet-ray sexual energy transfers, I have found that I experience two levels of orgasm at once, a period of rapidly repeating spasms which cycles again and again, as long as I have the energy to pay undivided attention to the energy between Jim and me, and a far deeper, more intense orgasm which lasts only a minute or two. Jim reports that he experiences “brain orgasms” for hours after a love-making session. Even the next day, his frontal lobes are still sending spasms of pleasure through his forehead and head.

I think the key to moving from “normal” sexuality to sacred sexuality is the awareness of sexual energy as coming from the energy body rather than the physical body. When the mated Players can pick up and sense into the electrical energy of their sexual connection, they can soar far higher and feel far more keenly in experiencing pleasure and worship than if they are dependent solely on how their bodies feel.

To find this electrical connection, visualize the energy body as being able to close a circuit between its mate’s energy body and itself when their genitalia, hands, lips or breasts are connected. The so-called erogenous zones are places where this circuit can be closed. Once the Player begins looking for this circuitry, he will find it fairly quickly. Enter into feeling the energy of this circuitry. Sense the electricity flowing between the two of you. Then lean into this energy and play with it as you play with each other.

It is exhilarating and rewarding to feel that one’s sex has become a sacred thing! It is certainly worth the time and trouble of getting to know your partner so well that you are ready for this use of the gateway to intelligent infinity.

One last note: it does not seem that sexual intercourse is necessary for the experience of sacred sexuality. For the last two years I have been unable to have intercourse because of a chronic condition called interstitial cystitis which renders my pelvic floor unable to bear the sweet friction of sexual relations. However I am happy to say that this has in no way hindered Mick’s and my experience of sacred sexuality. Fortunately, there are many ways to achieve orgasm besides sexual intercourse. Ask any teenager!

This simply emphasizes the fact that sacred sexuality is not just about the body, but includes the whole person—mind, body and spirit.

It is important to remember to release the magical personality after the working is finished, whether it is channeling, healing or sacred sexuality. The human personality is not capable of carrying the magical personality on a continuous basis in everyday life.

Players, be careful and fastidious about this. When we work with the infinite power of the gateway, we need to invoke that power, use it consciously and consciously take it off when we are ready to return to our everyday lives.