63 Inspiration

“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.”

John Newton

Symbols and Color

• Unifying Set Image: The Heart – Inspiration Set Symbol
• Border Color: Violet – higher vibration than its cousin Purple
• Background Image: Brush strokes against a canvas of black. It is our conception of love that brings color to overlay that darkness which is the Void of the universe.
• Heart: Symbol of Inspiration in the Positive Pole
• Alpha and Omega: Representing the TAO Card
• Butterfly: Symbolizes Transformation
• Broken Heart: Symbol of Painful or Despairing emotion Negative Pole

Implications of the Upright Position of Positive Pole

A very personal image for me; one created by friend and artist Ardis Bow. In the beginning of my career, when I first began channeling, my first spiritual animal name was one which matched this symbol: Wounded Hawk. When I first came across the original picture which this image was a part of, I had tears of joy roll down my face. That sigil was on the chest plate of a Warrior-King with a hand on the hilt of a sword and a golden shield slung across its shoulder. In whatever way Inspiration forms or directs the Intention of Essence (Card 58 – Soul- Spirit) it was as if I had been graced by mine. Years later, when Ardis, a dear  friend, collaborator on this book, it was at a time when I needed a reminder and reinfusion. The hawk no longer had a wounded heart but an open one. I fly with that intention every day…and sometimes it is hard getting off the ground with it.

Card messages in the Illuminated position.

+ Intention

(enthusiasm, aspiration, muse, illumination, exaltation)

1. Inward tension is a dance between hope and fear. When hope leads you get what you want, but if fear is calling the tune, you often attract what you are hoping to avoid. Remember the joy and exhilaration you’ve had with your dream.
   
2. Intentionality is having light refracted into the prism of your mind. With it one may direct e-motion(spelling intended) into the plasma that fuels aspiration and motivation. It is time to review your original intention. Does it still hold? If so, are you acting on it congruently?
3. Be open to realization (or feedback) following any act. It will reveal your emotional truth.
4. Remember the joy and exhilaration you’ve had about your dreams? They are the carrier waves which signal their eventual arrival. Ride the wave.
5. If you want inspiration become emotionally literal and observationally astute. When the moment strikes, then you can take that force and get it into form. Every extreme emotion is a signal of something very important to you. Don’t miss it.
6. “Follow your bliss.” said Joseph Campbell. It means that the joy of this true inspiration will carry you when you meet the downturns in your hero’s journey. Enjoy!
7. If you are trying to inspire someone else, tell them a story of hardship that led to discovery; or one of a person rebounding from a failed attempt. BTW, if the stories are about yourself first, with no embellishment, and with authentic emotion; you will have succeeded in doing so.
8. History shows us that it is often hardship and defeat which provide the greatest inspirations to resolve or triumph. It took the Jews 2000 years. The Black Slaves in America about 400 years. The Native Americans about 200 years. Even if something takes the rest of your life to reclaim, know that you have the right to try.
9. Moments of revelation are far too precious and far too few to be ignored. These are trying to alert you to something important. If you are reading this and feel that TUG, then breathe deeply and notice what is in the deepest recessed of your mind. There is the answer to a question you might not have known you asked.
10. The vibration of tone of voice, of word choice, or intention, can either enliven or enchant but it can also intimidate or destroy. Everyone knows these tones instinctively. Encourage someone, perhaps yourself, to express emotion authentically and it will raise the vibration for all concerned. If you need reminding, consult the Vitality Tone Scale™ on themichaelteaching.com web site.

Quotation Illustrating this concept…

• “Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.”~ Pope John XXIII
• “Laughter is man’s most distinctive emotional expression. Man shares the capacity for love and hate, anger and fear, loyalty and grief, with other living creatures. But humor, which has an intellectual as well as an emotional element, belongs to man.”  ~ Margaret Mead
• “When you die and go to heaven, our maker is not going to ask, Why didn’t you discover the cure for such and such? The only question we will be asked in that precious moment is, Why didn’t you become you?” Elie Wiesel
• “Man proposes, God disposes.” General Ulysses S. Grant from his Memoirs
• “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” Eleanor Roosevelt.

Implications of the Reversed Position or Negative Pole

How many ways can you say relief? This famous image by Depression Era photographer Dorothea Lange, reminds us of a part of America’s national time of crisis we called “the Great Depression.” I use this 1936 portrait titled “Migrant Mother” for many reasons; all of which inspire in me to great reverence, sorrow, and a sense of how important it is to remember the depths or our despair to contrast and appreciate the heights of our joys. In great honor to her as a mother, Florence Owens Thompson, whose concern for her children was so complete (notice one on either side) she had to turn her head away as not to let them see her despair, and to preserve what little strength she had remaining. But she could not look at their hunger, either. Despair is when we are in the blackness of Inspiration; that place I call the burrows of the three orphaned siblings of: hopelessness, helplessness, and powerlessness. Yet, in Void (see negative pole
of Card – TAO) where they live, each of those same qualities are the dank and underground tunnels which can give us access to the Higher Centers and even find Inspiration from Essence when all light seems gone. The sallow and sunken features of Mrs. Thompson one might imagine would be the signature scar of a mythical creature surely from this negative pole realm. Taken from the Harry Potter series, I refer of course to none other than those soul-sucking-parasites, the Dementors. Feeding upon negative emotions and draining one’s very life force and will to live; despair is what the Dementors inspire. Yet, even for such a monster there was a weapon and antidote: positive feelings – love, hope, friendship, joy, and humor. And when you conjured your Patron(us) to chase it away, you ate some
chocolate. It was the sweetness of life returned in its most edible form. And by the way, the alkaloids in chocolate are natural mood enhancers. Now if that isn’t inspiriting to us chocoholics, I don’t know what is!

Card messages in the Shadow position.

– Despondency

(fanaticism, reductionism, depression, shame, dejection, despair, depression, damp, melancholy, ennui, lugubrious)

1. Despondency occurs when light hits a black hole of depressed energy. Grave-ity dries up propulsion making one feel helpless instead of encouraged. Be careful not to fall into the trap of being stuck at an event horizon. Move through grief and have faith you will emerge on the other side.
2. Inspired by despair, one can become apathetic and then fanatical. Are you desperate to make something happen?
3. If you always need a positive affirmation or platitude to “lift you up”, perhaps you are missing the fact that there maybe something in the cellar, or in the doldrums, or on the floor, or down-to-earth that needs your attention that you are trying to avoid. Take a moment to feel the feelings without interpretation or condemnation. Positivity can sometimes be an addiction.
4. When our light hits the black hole of depressed energy, despondency occurs. Move through grief and have faith that you will emerge on the other side.
5. Beware of a charismatic personality who preaches hate disguised as superiority. They are trying to capture souls dangling in despair by throwing them a rope of barbed wire to climb up. A person might not be Hitler, Nero, or Cleopatra, but the same style is being marshaled.
6. If not for your own sake, for the sake of those you love, let yourself breakdown and release. Yes, you need help, but you are the first one to allow it to or for yourself. Help another with this too.
7. Depression robs a person of the life force, joie de vivre, which brings that sense of aliveness to existence. If drudgery continues too long, it is time to get spiritual direction in whatever you are doing or for whatever you are feeling.
8. Inward tension is a dance between hope and fear. When hope leads, you invite more of what you want. But if fear is calling the tune, you will often attract that which you are hoping to avoid.
9. At times, a futilitarian is likely to agree that all hope is lost and nothing is left but to give up. Screw that! Send cynics packing. Including your own inner one.
10. Negative pole of Inspiration possesses a malignancy or hopeless resentment that can instill hate. Famed Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana, who famously said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. But he also noted that it also foments the insanity of fanaticism, which he surmised “consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.” Well? Are you progressing toward something? Or, are you just fighting not to admit defeat?
11. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel imagines an afterlife much as I do, “When you die and go to heaven, our maker is not going to ask, Why didn’t you discover the cure for such and such? The only question we will be asked in that precious moment is, Why didn’t you become you?” No one can answer the call of Spirit for us.
12. Even anger can liberate when it speaks for a principle. But aim it with a threat or a deception, and it is more a weapon than a boundary.

Quotation Illustrating this concept…

• “No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.” ~ Oscar Wilde
• “Every flower must grow through dirt.” ~ Anonymous
• “Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.” ~ George Santayana

Relevance in the Michael Teaching

Inspiration is a feeling. A moment of emotional peak experience where the well intention has drilled into the highest level of joy possible: enthusiasm! The word itself means: in-spirit. And the message is not of the mind, it is of the heart.

Lessons and strengths of this Axis are of the exploration of emotion and the dimensions of open-closed, opaque or transparent, vulnerable or defended.

Cultural Meaning

To be inspired is the most terrific of states. It is the fuel that keeps hope alive, faith sustained, and ultimately helps define one’s personal perception of virtues. From inspiration, we overlook the fixed “rational” explanation and do things that are extraordinary in the face of overwhelming odds.  Shakespeare’s account of Henry V, St. Crispen’s Day speech at the battle of Agincourt rallied 5,000 men to defeat 20,000 on opponents home ground.

“This story shall the good man teach his son;
    And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
    From this day to the ending of the world,
    But we in it shall be remembered-
    We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
    For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
    Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
    This day shall gentle his condition;
    And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
    Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
    And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
    That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

Passionate words inspire people to move beyond the limits of the rational mind to achieve results that are sometimes epic and heroic.   What makes inspiration so potent is not the idea, but the mustering of emotion behind an idea.

Hitler too was capable of inspiring powerful intentions with charismatic upwelling that paved the way for a national collusion of mass murder. He played on the humiliation, shame, hopelessness, and weariness of the German people suffering greatly under the economic collapse of the Wiemar Republic and the massive burden of reparations owed to the Allies from WWI.  All that seething misery can be stirred into believing even the most bizarre of ideas simply because they seem righteous and justified. While, in the mechanics of the human energy system, they provide a venting function for the emotional pressure within.

Today, in much of the world, political movements are being fueled by emotion to a fiery pitch.  Many of the ideas are not new, or novel, and in some cases been intellectually rejected. So why have ideas like “big government” and “socialism” and “right to life” and “capitalism” taken on such polarizing and often fanatical declaration?

At the base of all of it is this: people are afraid! And they are afraid of the vulnerability of acknowledging their fear, so it is easier to find some simplistic slogan or dogmatic position to channel it all into and vent their fear into it. The mistake is addressing the so-called ideas being asserted with compensating ideas. Why? Because their is no acknowledgment of the survival threat that some people are feeling deep within.  Instead of truly inspired, they are fanatically trapped in the emotional conflagration within; and agents who gain from manipulating that fear spoon feed these emotionally overwhelm people targets to hate. All one has to do is listen to any American Conservative talk show host to see this in action.

When a clear idea is framed by a clear plan, whose benefits are neither mystical, general, or greed related, are driven by loving and compassionate emotional resolve, whose aim is to achieve justice, there is nothing that can dissuade, stop, or kill that idea. Hope is not a bastion for the stupid, it is a cauldron of raw, molten energy that once drawn and poured into the mold of a clear intention, becomes an immortal icon as everlasting and enduring as freedom, justice, and peace.

by Stephen Cocconi © 2011, Updated, 2024

For a Tarot Session or Channeled Consultation call: 209.768-4956 or email Stephen at channeling@themichaelteaching.com