HEREDITY…If you don’t like who you are…

Good Day,

The sun is covered by the ocean mist as it rolls in from the coastline this morning.

Instead of my usual sun meditation, I got out the handy tai-chi ruler this morning and spent some time cultivating chi for the day.

There’s a pretty cat that lives next door to my office. Lately, the cat has taken an interest in my morning practice and shows up regularly to sit on the fence and witness. The cat visited me again this morning, as did the lovely birds.

The birds were wise and sat high enough in the tree that the cat couldn’t jump up and have one for breakfast. They must have known they were safe because they were chirping socially as the cat sat there learning tai-chi.

I had a great workout yesterday. I did a circuit of deadlifting, cable pulling, and a core exercise with a Supless bag, which is a Bulgarian training tool used to condition wrestlers.

Today is busy with preparations for HLC3, beginning here in Vista tomorrow, as well as preparations for filming HLC1, which I’m excited about. HLC1 has changed more lives for the better than I can count.

I’ll also be working with one of my Zero Force Coaching client’s today. Jason and I are beginning our tour of the Tao Te Ching, which is always very exciting for me to share with students who are truly ready to learn what wisdom I can share from my own life and studies of this powerful living philosophy.

HEREDITY!If you don’t like who you are!

Many have written-off their body’s problems, behaviors, fears, addictions, fetishes and overall difficulties in life to that of heredity.

Today, with the booming profitability of the human genome project, the biomedical community is working hard to market the idea that you are doomed to your genes, your heredity factor.

In the usual this-for-that allopathic fashion, people are being led to believe that their fates are woven into their genes. Already, there are many genetic based alterations coming in the forms of pills, potions’ and the like; if you fix the gene, you will be well again!

All such ideas are ideas that represent a mechanistic view of life and exclude the effects of spiritual influence and the power of our own mind to make better choices.

When we make better choices, we create an inner and/or outer environment that triggers the activation of the genes that are congruent with that environment.

If we make poor choices, we expose the genes that resonate with the inner/outer environment we’ve accepted or created.

All the pills in the world won’t change the mind of a lost soul with a sick mind. But how much of our problems are problems of heredity?

In his beautiful book, Spiritual Liberty, The Sufi Message, Vol. 5, (p. 112-120), Hazrat Inayat Khan discusses the issues of heredity.

Today, I will share a summary of what he has to say in hopes that it will empower you to reap the benefits and discard the unwanted aspects of your heredity.

Please follow my diagram above during our journey today.

When the soul moves (as a ray of the Divine Light), it enters the realm of causality; thus the soul is often referred to as the “causal body”.

All things “causal” are related to the Universal Mind, which is inherently the product of the Absolutely Empty meeting the Absolutely Full.

The Universal or Divine Mind is the sum of mind or Infinite possibility.

The soul’s entry into causality is depicted in my diagram as passing through the tai-chi symbol, which represents Spirit in and as Mind or All Possibilities.

The soul is as a seed of Consciousness, which is germinated in the milieu of Mind.

Khan describes how the soul first enters into the realm of the Angels and is impressed with angelic qualities.

There, Khan says the angels (who have not yet been human) are absorbed in the hunger for beauty and the thirst for song. They do not distinguish between good and bad, high or low.

Next, the soul in its journey comes into contact with the second type of angels, which are those who are now heading back to their true home in the Divine.

They possess the qualities of Love, Light, and Lyric. The planes of such experiences are represented in my diagram as the Atmic and Buddhic.

He describes how we (as souls) each spend time in each of these planes and are impressed with the qualities transferred to us by such angels.

When we desire for more experience, one’s soul urges us onward; we come to the plane of the Jinns, which is the astral plane.

Khan says, “the occupation of the jinns is to imagine, reason, and think. As you can see in my diagram, these qualities are inclusive of the mental plane, while the astral plane is connected with our ability to feel or emote.

Khan teaches that the Jinns are of two sorts: 1) Those that have never manifested physically and, 2) those spirits who have left the earth with all the load of their actions and experiences upon them.

From the first sort of jinns that have not manifested physically, the soul receives the impression of imagination and thought.

The soul that leaves the earth can take to the world of the angels only whatever love, good feelings, and kindness it may have.

He says, “even its love and kindness and its good feelings it cannot take higher than the world of the angles; these are still too heavy for the higher plane. For there is a higher plane, and on that plane there is no individuality, nothing but infinite consciousness. All the rest the soul must leave in the astral plane, and until it can leave behind all the evil that it has gathered it must remain there, as it is too heavy to go higher.”

He goes on to say, “Every soul possesses the best qualities. However wicked a person may be, be assured that his soul possesses the best qualities as a special inheritance, though they are covered up by all that has been gathered afterward. And there is always a possibility of spiritual progress for every soul, even for the most wicked.”

A little further on, Khan says, “The soul, on its journey from the unseen to the seen world, receives impressions from the souls which are on their return journey from the seen to the unseen. In this way the soul collects the first merits and qualities. It is this which forms a line for the soul to follow, and it is this line that leads it to the parents from whom it inherits its later attributes.”

This process ultimately leads to the mother’s womb. He says, ! “A child may or may not inherit the qualities and defects of its parents. If the impressions previously received by the soul are stronger, it does not inherit them.”

Later, Khan says that the qualities inherited from the father are more deep-seated, while those inherited from the mother may be more apparent, “because the father’s inheritance is the substance, while the mother’s is the mold.”

Khan gives a much longer more detailed description than I can give in a blog today with my time limitations, but I’d like to share the essentials, which are congruent with my own experience in life.

Essentially, Khan highlights that a variety of environments a soul enters may facilitate one’s overcoming parental inheritance.

For example, a man who has inherited the quality of cowardice from one or both parents may enter the military. By being around those who are courageous and braver, cowardice may be transmuted into courage and bravery.

When I was in the army, it was my job to train the soldiers that had failed their fitness testing, many of which were obese or overweight.

Through my guidance and influence, the grand majority of these soldiers transformed into fit men, and in the process, learned both how to transform themselves, and that it was indeed possible. Some of these men had been fat and/or weak their whole lives.

I imagine you could see how such men without this type of influence and conditioning could easily fall prey to the biotech industry that touts doom to genes and offers up some form of miracle drug as part of their manipulative scheme.

But, could such schemes really work if the individual stays in a parental, social, or cultural environment where fatness and laziness are the dominant norm?

SO, WHERE AM I, WHERE ARE YOU “NOW”?

I am now 50 years of age. I am the product of a series of very uncertain, often scary and unpredictable childhood environments.

My biological father was a competitive dancer, a mechanic and a professional drag racer who’s sperm created an opportunity for me to participate as a human being in this world.

My mother loved him, even though he was abusive to her and ran around with many women, and left her with three of his children at the tender age of 19; I was born when my mother had just turned 16.

My environment included my mother’s fears and insecurities, which included being disowned by her father and left on her own when she became pregnant. She worked two waitressing jobs back to back each day to pay for babysitters and to meet essential survival needs.

She eventually met the man that would be my step-father, and that whole process came with many painful, often frightening situations!

That said, all these sub-optimal environments and experiences could easily be a reason for me to blame my personality faults, drives and desires on my parents.

I have worked consistently since age 12 when my mother became a yogi to heal with her and more importantly heal myself – I am not anyone’s (nor my own) victim.

I suspect my story isn’t much different in content and theme than most people’s at large. Certainly, my story is not much different than many of my clients or students.

The question we must all ask ourselves each day is, “What Is My Dream?”

We must ask, “What am I willing to become today? What am I willing to become “aware of” as traits that were passed onto me by my parents, family, environment and circumstances that:

A. Work well for me and facilitate living my dream, and

B. Don’t work well for me and cause problems in relationship to myself and others?”

I’ve shared Hazrat Inayat Khan’s perspective (in brief) on the soul’s journey into biological life because everything of his I’ve ever studied rang true to my own life and spiritual growth experiences.

To me, he is a true Master, bar none.

That said, if he is correct, and I believe from my experiences that he is, we all have the wisdom of the angels and the jinns within us.

Those qualities aren’t gone just because you got dealt a challenging hand; they underlie our parental and environmental circumstances, and like the genes we have, they will manifest in us if we:

A. Slow down enough to speak with our inner-truth, our conscience.

B. Decide we would rather find our angelic qualities than repeatedly invigorate the parts of our parents and families we don’t like.

C. Realize that the pains and challenges we’ve all been through have fueled us with the experiences necessary to have empathy and compassion for others (which is pretty much everyone) going through the same challenges.

This is an opportunity to get clear, harmonize with your dream(s), and choose to be who you want to be, what you want to experience in life – not who your heredity dictates that you be.

I’m here with everyone on the planet making these choices every day.

Some days, I fall flat on my father’s face, sometimes on my mother’s face, and sometimes on my own, and maybe on some of yours now and then too. That said, I’m truly making my best effort to express the beauty of my angelic and parental gifts.

I look forward to sharing those gifts with you and celebrating yours. By sharing the process of personal and collective healing together we can change our heredity.

Please remember, choice is what exists between the past and the future.

Both are yours to manage how you choose as you create your optimal life experience and live your Dream!

Love and chi,
Paul Chek