It’s better to shine a light on a riot of flowers than to cast a Shadow on others in a riot of humans.

Hatred, hoocha, and negative life force are bubbling to the surface of American life. Let’s take a look at what is happening from a soul perspective.

We’re seeing the Shadow of America — all the dark impulses that are usually hidden beneath the surface of our culture. It is scary when it bubbles up to a level that we are aware of.

In a person, the Shadow usually lurks below the level of consciousness in the Wish or Will regions of the soul. In a group (America in this case) the Shadow lurks in parts of the population that are seldom seen by the majority of Americans. When the Shadow makes itself known, and we’re not part of the Shadow, we seldom know what to do with it.

In the Charlottesville situation, there are two sides. Let’s call them Blue and Red.

Blue wishes to remove statues and other reminders of a past they consider to be evil. They wish to suppress any positive memories about that past and stop the other side from expressions of anger and hatred.

Red wants to keep the reminders of heroic attempts in the past that sought to maintain their way of life. They want to reclaim their rights as Americans and express their feelings about the horrible path they believe America is taking.

Both sides have their own Shadow.

The soul perspective looks at positive life force, negative life force, sovereignty, and hoocha. Positive life force increases the ability of everyone to know and be themselves. Negative life force may increase the life force for some people, but it always decreases life force in others. Sovereignty is the right to be ourselves without being forced to do something by others. Hoocha is the murky stuff that makes it hard to see what is really happening. There is a lot of hoocha here. There are more details about these concepts in We All Have Souls and on the We All Have Souls website [http://weallhavesouls.com/life-force]. This was just a quick reminder.

Here’s my analysis of the situation.

Blue wishes to suppress Red’s feelings. Blue’s wish is Shadow. Having feelings and being allowed to express them is an issue of sovereignty. Red has the right to its feelings and the right to express them. Blue does not have the right to suppress Red’s feelings. Blue also needs to allow Red to express its feelings. But it is not required to allow Red to express its feelings in a way that harms others.

Red’s feelings are that it is being harmed by the removal of statues and being denied the right to speak what it feels. In Red’s expression of feelings we can find Shadow. We see the Shadow in how Red’s expression of feelings affects others. The expressions are filled with negative life force that tries to weaken other groups while increasing the strength of Red. Red does not have the right to weaken others.

Hoocha shows up in several places. When Blue claims that every expression of Red’s feelings must be stopped, this is hoocha. Each expression needs to be evaluated separately. When Red lies about the cause of the civil war or the purpose of erecting the statues, this is hoocha. The statues were almost all erected during times when Whites were trying to crush Blacks.

Red’s belief that power must be taken from non-Whites to make Whites powerful is also hoocha. We are each sovereign. We hold our own power. Reducing the power of others does not make us more powerful. It just makes others weaker and makes the world worse.

And even more important: We All Have Souls. The souls continue from one life to the next. There is no guarantee that the next body we are in will be the same color. If you believe that karma has an equalizing effect, you might even expect to become the one you oppressed the most next time around.

The final question is what should we do? Here are my answers for today. I won’t be surprised if they change by tomorrow. There are two parts. The first is where we draw the line for free speech. The second in how we heal.

Drawing a line for free speech is difficult. As I have said elsewhere, in physical reality we can’t live without harming the physical life of something else that has a soul. One of the discussions was about keeping slugs from eating my garden. Another was about me eating the vegetables in my garden. Both ended lives in physical reality so that other lives could go on.

Speech does not need to kill or harm. Harmful actions against another person that are not in self-defense should be stopped and prosecuted. That’s the answer for the Charlottesville killing. Speech that leads to immediate harmful action should be stopped. Speech that describes pain and fear should be encouraged. This is the expression of feelings that we need to hear.

Between causing harm and expressing feelings is the realm of anger. Serious hoocha comes out of anger, at least partly because anger is the mask pain and fear hide behind. No one is safe.

So here’s a suggestion for where to draw the line related to angry speech. Allow expressions of anger. Encourage using the anger to power solutions that enhance the situation of the angry group without harming other groups. Stop any speech that solely advocates harming another group without any clear benefit for the angry group. Between those two is an area where one group benefits at the expense of the other. This is where we negotiate to find compromises. The ability to negotiate is one of the lessons we can learn in physical reality. We should take advantage of the chance.

This leads to the second part of what to do. We live in so much hoocha and with so many traumas that negotiating is almost impossible. Before we negotiate, we need to heal.

To heal we need to look at the Shadow. One way we can do that is to listen carefully when Red speaks. In that speech I hear reports of traumas and soul loss, of curses and counter-curses, and of overwhelming amounts of negative life force being used by the powerful wealthy to steal money and rights and life force from the less wealthy. We need to look at Blue’s wish to restrict the sovereignty of Red. In that we will find different traumas, soul loss, curses, and negative life force attacks related to Blue’s wish to see the world only from Blue’s perspective.

We practice shamanism, Incarnational Spirituality, energy healing, and many other techniques that allow us to remove hurt and replace it with health — to remove hoocha and add enough positive life force to neutralize the negative. We can look at Blue and Red as beings who have come to us for healing.

And we have the sovereignty to heal Blue and Red because they have asked for help. If you haven’t heard them ask yet, I am a part of Blue and a part of Red, and here is what I request, “Please heal the souls of Red and Blue from the traumas of the past — back to their beginning in our many lives, if you can. Please remove the curses that have been placed on us and the curses we have cast and the ones that came before those, all the way back to the first curse. If there is more that you can do to help me regain sovereignty from those who have stolen it from me, I ask that you do that, too.”

This is a project I’m working on. I’ll file reports. I invite you to let me know what you are doing. If there is enough interest, we can start a separate email list to keep each other informed. It’s work that is worth doing.

Blessings,
Tom