“To be, or not to be?
That, is the question!”

Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

Symbols and Colors.

• Open Hand: Priest Group – Background Image and Border Color
• Automobile: Mode Group
• Pharaoh: Exalted Orientation
• Heart: Inspiration Axis

Message in the Upright position or Positive Pole 

Self Actualization is an act of ultimate grace: unification with the Self and Essence. With arms raised in adulation the person is on their knees, likely from agony as from sheer ecstasy, of experiencing themselves fully. As both Abraham Maslow and Michael have stated, Self Actualization or Essence contact (Card 58 – Soul Spirit) is realized at times of “peak experience.” That can be moments of great sorrow or pain as well as the movie title “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. The actual moment is unmistakable and unforgettable. Living from this place, is connotes a paradox for some: living in the total Presence (Card 0 – TAO) and the secondary tendency to compare oneself against others (Card 8 – Discrimination), virtually disappears. It is not the complete ego involvement which is suggested by the Negative Pole of this card or the Negative Pole of (Card 57 – Self Love), but the total freedom to operate oneself without monitoring or censoring because one is congruent with Self. The play “Billy Elliot” explores the discovery that occurs with Passion Mode. It adroitly reveals both the challenges and rewards for one first discovering and then self-actualizing the exhilaration of something that focuses the attention totally in the moment, and makes one feel complete and alive. Self Actualization, which is the positive pole of his Mode, is in fact the most compulsive driver embedded in a human personality. But when a personality is equipped with Passion Mode, that motivation is emphatic, erratic but striving, and unrelenting. Expansion of Self, which means the embrace of more of one’s own Being expressed through life is the key motivation of this Overleaf.

Card messages in the Illuminated position.

+ Self Actualization

(Dramatic, emotional, enthusiastic, intense, involved, lively, open, spontaneous, fascination, spirited, emphatic, lively)

1. Shakespeare wrote, ‘To be, or not to be; that, is the question?’ Self-actualization is a state where nothing impedes the full expression and commitment to one’s life or cause. Do you love your life enough to be fully involved? Love fires passion but commitment keeps it burning. Are you fueling your passions, enough?
   
2. Commit yourself with heart and soul. Allow your true self to actualize and add your unique signature. Have some fun as if it were the last breath you draw.
3. When one goes beyond the personality they believe themselves to BE, and acts without restraint, or limits, and moves beyond boundaries; it is there that true discovery and invention which is self actualization occurs.  Step outside the box. Let go and let yourself fly!
4. Grab hold of every piece of love, fury, hope, outrage, enthusiasm, and courage you have. Roll them all together and aim yourself in the direction of life you most believe to hold your own truth…the Self you want to actualize.
5. Something new is emerging. A sudden outburst energy is ready to be seized.
6. Play with boundaries. Stretch outside the box. Let go and fly. Carpe Diem.
7. Love it all. It’s pure discovery. No mistakes here.
8. Act spontaneously! Show your enthusiasm, truth, brilliance, generosity, and play for all.
9. Invest totally. Hold nothing back. This is it!
10. Is this the impetus of something that will last for long run? Only a leap of faith will allow you to find out.
11. Play with boundaries…stretch outside the box. Let go and fly! Carpe Diem.
12. You’ve got the juice, the zing, the excitement. Now add the meat, the calm, and the discipline to go beyond the moment and into perpetuity.
13. Love fires passion, but commitment keeps it burning. Are you fueling your passions enough?
14. “It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years,” said Abraham Lincoln. Just remember that no matter how exciting the ideas and aspirations are, you must follow through! Do it!
15. You possess that certain, je ne sais quoi. People notice it, feel it, love it! You cannot control it, so go with it. It’s related Overleaf is Arrogance; so now that you know, don’t let it go to your head.

Quotations Illustrating this Overleaf pole

• “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” ~Albert Einstein
• “And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
• “Passion is the genesis of genius.” Tony Robbins
• “My life is my message.” ~ Mohandas Gandhi
• “I did it myyyyyy wayyyyyy!” My Way, sung by Frank Sinatra

Message in Reversed Position or Negative Pole:

Passion, especially for Young Souls (Card 73 – Adolescence) is all about being “hot” and “looking good”; like the image of these status seeking person’s identifying their success with wealth. However, identification need not take on any glamorous appearance. The high emotional attachment which connotes “passions” (after all the original usage of the word was about Christ’s suffering), actually speaks to the idea that a person is identified with the intensity which makes them feel alive. The Ego uses these identities to define itself from the outside, in order to assuage any sense of disconnection or addiction (neg pole Card 66 – Self Karma) circumventing validation from Essence. But in the negative
pole, the use of Ego thrust emotions as the guiding force for weighing the choice behind behavior or attitude, can cause a person to be caught in the trap of Identification. “I am what I feel” and thus “anyone or anything I feel strongly about is an expression or a reflection of me!” It can take a person down the rabbit hole enslaving themselves to a forced march through a labyrinth of ill defined and perhaps even contradictory feelings, perceptions, and attitudes. Thus, the emphatic quality of Passion can get fixated into a narrow range of full volume which expresses vehemence for a position rather than enthusiasm for a way of Being. The negative defends the boundaries of one’s beliefs, while the positive pole seeks to liberate you from them. All of it, on the strength of emotional truth! Passion may have difficulty discerning because it has the tendency to believe everything is significant, and mistake originality for utility or timeliness.

Card messages in the Shadow position.

– Identification

(Capricious, spurious, flighty, undependable, quixotic, romantic, utopian, attached, foggy, invested, indefinite, disorganized, impetuous, dramatic)

1. Identification is the way that many define themselves: a spouse, sexy, professional, parent, honorable or loser, etc. Factual descriptions perhaps, but has your Ego locked you into a title, willing binding you to an easy-to-manage and defend status? Have you substituted a label of what you are, instead of knowing who you are? You are not your labels.
2. Either you have your emotions or your emotions have you! If you believe you are the anger, fear, shame, grief, or whatever flavor of feeling positive or negative, choice disappears as you have identified with them.
3. Don’t confuse Passion for sex any more than people refer to “intimacy” as a euphemism for having sex.  In fact, only when one is disidentified with a persona can you experience the raw authenticity that passions actually are.
4. Passion is not about winning, it is about Being.  Don’t confuse one with the other or else you will identify outcome as your worth.
5. Passion, as originally applied to Jesus’s suffering meant, pain and suffering. In other context it meant volatility and irrationality. That reference intended to highlight animal driveness, or acting without purpose, just emotion. Acknowledge it, contain it, and temper it with reason.
6. The drama being acted out is enough to make one ill. Like it or not, it captures attention and obscures the real issues.
7. When you hear of the Passion of Christ, it was referring to great suffering on the Cross. Be careful when you use the term that you are not inviting great suffering to transcend. Most don’t realize that even for an Old Soul like Jesus, he went through a crucible of unimaginable pain in order to achieve Higher Center connection with the TAO.
8. How many times, especially in the pop psychology movement have you heard some one foment, “it’s my passion”? And the next week or month have something else be identified that way? Quixotic caprice is what is at work here. Don’t get caught up in someone’s romantic declaration. Wait to you see how they speak and perform when they are in the trenches.
9. If this situation were a stage play it would be “Much Ado About Nothing.” Shakespeare would be proud of the part this person is playing. Only trouble is they are so enmeshed in the part, they don’t know they are acting. Perhaps yelling “cut” might startle them into paying attention.
10. If you have identified with your anger, fear, shame, grief, or whatever flavor of feeling, positive or negative, then your power to choose disappears. Make sure it is not you identified with them.
11. No workshop is going to teach you Passion. You feel it, not invent it; and certainly it is not something you decree. Such lying is to identify with some group, out a need to belong or gain advantage. (Card 23 – Greed).

 Quotations Illustrating this Overleaf pole

• “The excitement that you were feeling about a special, unique path for yourself as a woman is all part of your identification with and attachment to being female. And that’s ultimately all ego.” ~Andrew Cohen
  
• “There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever… money, for instance, or war.”~ Saul Bellow
• “A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.~ T. S. Eliot 
• “All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.”  ~John Locke
• “Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Relevance in the Michael Teaching

The contrast between Reservation and Passion Mode expressions are as diverse as quiet is to loud. Passion mode personalities want to feel it all NOW! Spontaneity is their zest for life. For them, everything is in the moment;  thus other concerns, goals,  and emotions that may happen in a month, a day, or even the next moment can seem so far removed as to be irrelevant. Passion Mode seeks the full verisimilitude of their emotional states, thus believing that they are what they feel.

Self Actualization, which is the positive pole of this Mode, is in fact the most compulsive driver embedded in a human personality. But when a personality is equipped with Passion Mode, that motivation is emphatic, persistent, and unrelenting. Expansion of Self, which means the embrace of more of one’s own Being expressed through life is the key motivation of this Overleaf.

When a push for “breaking free” of identification with cultural norms, stereotypes and imprinting is desired by an Essence, Passion Mode, or the other two Exalted Modes: Power and Aggression, is likely to be tapped for this endeavor. Passion can be the most exuberant of them while being less controlling than Power, and less explosive as Aggression.  The intended result for experiencing Passion as your way of doing things, is to lessen the grip of pre-programmed ways of doing life: karmic or familial imprinting, and move into the improvisational space motivated by spirit directed emotional impulse.

Joan of Arc Identified with her Passion

But in the negative pole, the use of Ego thrust emotions as the guiding force for weighing the choice behind behavior or attitude, can cause a person to be caught in the trap of Identification. “I am what I feel” and thus “anyone or anything I feel strongly about is an expression or a reflection of me!” Taking a person down the rabbit hole enslaving themselves to a forced march through a labyrinth of ill defined and perhaps even contradictory feelings, perceptions and attitudes.  Thus, the emphatic quality of Passion can get fixated into a narrow range of full volume which expresses vehemence for a position rather than enthusiasm for a way of Being. The negative defends the boundaries of ones’ beliefs, while the positive pole seeks to liberate you from them. All of it, on the strength of emotional truth.

The play Billy Elliot explores the discovery in Passion Mode adroitly seeing both the challenges and rewards for one self actualizing.

Often “uninhibited” by Nature, spotting a person in Passion is merely to notice who in a group of people might be the loudest, most free wheeling, or whose wild gesticulation emphasizes or exaggerates every idea. Spontaneous outbursts may fly from a person with a willingness to “let the chips fall where they may. ” But such a strategy has consequences that don’t come into the mind of the Passion Mode person when they are expressing. In fact, the conscious or deliberate mind, is turned off in favor of stream-of-consciousness flowing from an emotional river roiling inside them.  In some cases with Sages, Artisans. or truly articulate actors, every syllable of every word! Think Robin Williams.

Famous Examples

Richard Prior, Bruce Springsteen, Carol Burnett, Jesus, Bette Midler, Joseph Campbell, Martin Luther King, VP Joe Biden, Cindy Lauper, Ludwig von Beethoven, Lucille Ball, Russel Brand, Ray Charles, Francis of Assisi, Walt Whitman, Stevie Wonder, Frank Zappa, Robin Williams, Joan of Arc, Mick Jagger, Steve Martin, Rev. Al Sharpton, Kieth Obermann, Groucho Marx,  Salvador Dali, Janis Joplin, Michelangelo,  Vincent VanGogh, Liberace, Shirley Maclaine,

Cultural Meaning

“Follow your bliss”! These words of Joseph Campbell typify what Abraham Maslow gave outline to with his Hierarchy of Needs. At the top self-actualization is the state when one is so aligned with an inner sense of direction and so utterly committed to following the drive it provides that in the end, one is the realization of all the potential that is uniquely contained within.

The range of human possibility continues to expand. It does so each time we go beyond the boundaries of what we accept as reality and seek the beckoning shores waiting behind new horizons.  Prediction from within the box of what is known, can never accurately speculate that which lies outside it. Nor can we truly know what talents or predispositions may lay deep in the vast unknown of the Self we are yet to become. But it is often more an odyssey like the travails of Ulysses, rather than the well planned journey. It is impossible to discover something you know that is there already.  Otherwise, life would be an exercise in claiming and laying boundaries. But the heart and mind which team with Spirit in action, are in a continual state of exploration, advancing, and experiencing. And with each step moving into territory that is completely untrodden and lays claim to being virgin and untouched.

It is possession and claim of ownership which turns the pristine magnificence of discovery into a desire to capture and exploit. Calling something “mine” is the basis for all material wealth and property. Then what is discovered rather than being cherished instead turns into a commodity to be bought, sold, and defended.  I AM what I DO! Rests the downfall of all innocence, the destruction of pleasure, and the sterilization of ones humanness into mechanical parts.

Awe inspiring because of its vastness and humbling for the same reason, openness to continual and unbounded movement forward is the only thing one can see. Furthering the odyssey overwhelms all other senses or reason, as one realizes I AM what I AM becoming.

Perhaps a review of our human motivations might reveal that as we identify ourselves and each other into more and narrower niches, we rob ourselves and each other of the very talents and motivation our societies claim they want their citizens to develop.  But the only way to find the willingness to let oneself or another out of the box of our own expectations, is to risk the discomfort of moving outside the safe and known narrative we’ve come to rely upon. When we gain the safety and trust with each other to risk moving into who we are, instead of who we are expected to be, our world will be transformed…for real!

You might have this Overleaf if…

1. When I am captured in the moment it feels as if my whole life lead up to that moment.
2. Those things which I stand for are who I am.
3. No time is better than the present for doing something fun.
4. I once had a spontaneous outbreak of _______ (e.g. singing) and realized I actually had a talent for it.
5. People think I am Italian because I speak with my hands.
6. Sometimes my mouth opens and what comes out is brilliant, other times it causes me so much trouble I wish I remembered exactly what I said.

The contrast between Reservation and Passion Modes are as diverse as quiet is too loud, or at least as demure is to bold. Passion Mode personalities want to feel it all NOW! Their zest for life occurs in spontaneity. For them, everything is in the moment. Thus other concerns, goals, or emotions that may happen in a month, a day, or even the next moment can seem so far removed as to be irrelevant. Passion
Mode seeks the full verisimilitude of their emotional states, thus believing that they are what they feel. Stepping back and witnessing this roller coaster is the next phase of development and embeds in the use of Observation (Card 35)

by Stephen Cocconi ©2011, Updated 2024

For a Motivation Cards Reading or Channeled Consultation call: 209.768-4956 or email Stephen at channeling@themichaelteaching.com