Into the Labyrinth: A Guide to Navigating Chaos

by Grow Up Conference | Oct 5, 2024 | Media Partners, The New Agora

Into the Labyrinth: A Guide to Navigating Chaos

“The road to heaven feels like hell. The road to hell feels like heaven.” ~Unknown

The labyrinth is a metaphor for navigating change. It stands as a monolithic structure that represents both the unknown and the subtle art of transforming the unknown into wisdom. More importantly, it is a mythopoetic symbol for finding oneself.

The labyrinth is the place you go to shed your cultural conditioning. It’s where you stretch your comfort zone into discomfort. In fact, anything outside your comfort zone could be considered Labyrinth. The conflicting/connecting cosmos that outflanks you even as it binds you—Labyrinth. The horizon disguised as a boundary—Labyrinth. The infinite universe juxtaposing both your inner-verse and outer-verse—Labyrinth.

The labyrinth is adventure, Hero’s Journey, Truth Quest. It’s a Turing Test for how to play the Infinite Game. Are you just a “robot” conditioned to play finite games or are you “alive!” reconditioned to play the Infinite Game of life?

In the labyrinth one does not lose oneself; one finds oneself. It’s in the comfort zone where you lose yourself. It’s the comfort zone that kills. It’s only outside the comfort zone where you truly come alive. And it’s the only place where you can experience Rebirth.

This is not to say that the comfort zone is not necessary. Not at all. The comfort zone is vital as a sojourn, as a temporary resting place, as a sacred space to lick one’s wounds and unpackage heavy shadows, reassociate disassociated states, unscramble madness back into magic. It’s a place to mix the ingredients you found on the path of heroism. But first the heroism. First the hunt. First the sacrifice. First the surrender. First the leap of courage into the labyrinth to find those vital ingredients.

So as not to get lost in the labyrinth, you must prepare your return before your departure. You must leave yourself outs. Litter the path with breadcrumbs. Tie Ariadne’s Thread to the center of your comfort zone before your leap into the unknown.

Ariadne’s thread is both a metaphor for following one’s own path and for strategically staying ahead of the curve. It’s Symbolic of outflanking the ego (cultural conditioning/comfort zone) and surrendering to the Soul (adventure/quest). In Jungian terms Ariadne is the guiding power of the anima/animus who helps the hero in his/her katabasis.

A Katabasis is a descent into the underworld, or a literary account of such a journey to the land of the dead, constituting a temporary visit followed by an Anabasis (ascent). But without the preparation, without the Thread, the lifeline, the umbilical connection to health, there may not be an ascent.

As Sun Tzu said, “Sweat more during peace; bleed less during war.” You can’t have a testimony without having a test. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be prepared for the test. Just don’t allow your “preparing” to become an excuse for not executing. Don’t rest on your laurels. Don’t allow the comfort zone to cripple you. Don’t become a status quo junkie hooked on safety, security, and comfort. Grab Ariadne’s thread and take a leap!

Take the risk. Do it despite the tiny-hearted. Do it despite authority. Do it despite the status quo. Be unapologetic. Just be strategic about it. Be fluid, flexible, and smart. And Ariadne will guide you.

In the labyrinth you meet your thousand-and-one selves. Every twisting turn reveals a new layer. Each mirrored passageway unveils a deeper mask. You begin to see, really see, how you are masks all the way down perceiving delusions all the way up. You begin to feel, truly feel, the legion of yourself. And the deeper you travel the more your individuality crumbles into a multitude.

As Friedrich Nietzsche poetically explained, “You lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain.”

And as Joseph Campbell more poignantly put it, “All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells are within you.”

Indeed. All the heroes, all the villains, all the light and all the darkness are within you. You are the fountainhead, and the cosmos is the fountain. You are a vehicle that the universe maneuvers to perceive itself. Nothing reveals this more than a journey through the labyrinth.

And nothing is more frightening than the actualization of your own darkness.

Above all, the labyrinth teaches this: you are a multitude. You are Legion. You are death and darkness and evil and madness. You are devil and demon and Minotaur. Your shadow is your most “alive” aspect. It’s your fierceness, your cunning, your audacity, your primal lust. And it will devour you if you don’t incorporate it. It will lay you low if you don’t integrate it. It will control you subconsciously if you don’t associate it with consciousness.

Fortunately, you are Multitude. You are Legion. You are also life and light and goodness and sanity. You are angel and Overman and God. Thus, understanding that you are whole, you don’t renounce the shadow, but return to it with full engagement by making a double movement, a connecting dance: from dark to light and back again to darkness, so that at every step, you are making the movement of infinity and the sign of the Yin Yang.

Like Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith practicing the Principle of Correspondence, you bring the material to the spiritual and the spiritual back again to the material, imbuing your life with divine significance.

When it comes down to it, this is what navigating the labyrinth is all about: dancing between the smoke and mirrors, between life and death, between love and loss, between deadly darkness and healing light, between blinding light and courageous dark, between finitude and infinity.

With your darkness made conscious, the labyrinth doesn’t stand a chance. You navigate the changing landscape like a whirling ninja dervish. Crisscrossing crossroads. Balancing on tripwires. Tiptoeing through mine fields. Cutting with curiosity like a razor-sharp question mark in the dark. Striking like a cobra, sinking your fangs into the “forbidden” fruit of the primal truth that has been forsaken for too long. Transforming like a Phoenix, cultivating rebirth, practicing resurrection. Traversing Self.

All the while, Ariadne’s Thread dangles behind you—vital, primal, umbilical—connecting you to the Homeland, to the womb, to the “ordinary world,” to the safety net of the comfort zone. Where you will eventually return and reorient disorientation, unlock mystery, rediscover the magic in the madness, and concoct your magic elixir for the tribe.

But only in hindsight will you realize—the ingredients are your soul.

Image source: Transcend by Jacky Gerritsen

About the Author:

Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.

This article (Into the Labyrinth: A Guide to Navigating Chaos) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.

In Strength and Courage In honor of my beloved QuietBear, 9-24-24

by Grow Up Conference | Oct 4, 2024 | Media Partners, The New Agora

In Strength and Courage

In honor of my beloved QuietBear, 9-24-24

By Marcela Cruz-Gibbons

I am writing, this, to reach out to all of the Spiritual Warriors out there, who will resonate with this information, and respond. Some of you may have known who my beloved husband Michael Gibbons, was/is – Quietbear, his given shamanic name – and some will get a taste of him, and his work, from what I share here. Because he spent his whole life in powerful service to Humanity, including during his courageous fight against the turbo cancer that finally ended his life on 5/18/24. He had already died and come back, was sent back, four times in his life, to continue his work.

Among many other things, my Bear was a powerful Shaman in the 14,000-year-old tradition of the Twisted Hairs Elders of Turtle Island (https://theforceiswithinyou.forumotion.com/t1430-star-nation-teachings-twisted-hairs). This is the same tradition in which Carlos Castaneda trained, (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=carlos+castaneda+books&crid=DQU0AGVKUOQG&sprefix=carlos+%2Caps%2C105&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_3_7 ) and in fact, during the eight years that my husband was training in the wilderness of Colorado, Carlos – who was living in Mexico City at the time – heard of him, and made a special trip to Colorado to meet him. The others who were training were excited at the prospect of meeting Carlos, but he was there only to meet and speak with QuietBear, and spent five hours talking with him, exchanging information, and then standing, hugging him and calling him Brother, and left. I share this particular information, to let you know my husband was a true and powerful shaman who Did the Work, to become one. I had the profound privilege to be married to my Bear, and supported his shamanic work. He was someone who, among many other achievements, had completely mastered his ego. It was an unbelievable and enlightening experience to share my life with him, and for which I am eternally grateful.

Before he passed on, my husband asked me to be a warrior and to carry on his work, sharing his message, precisely because he knew its key importance for Humanity, at this time of dire and powerful satanic attack on humans and Mother Earth. You do not yet know all the details, but many if not all of you, feel, the spiritual battle underway for us humans right now, and anyone with the ability to look around and see the condition of the world, needs to have the courage to call it what it is: a final battle against Satan and evil, for the Soul of Humanity. I will explain.

Human Beings were created by God to be co-creators with Him. This is, in fact, why Satan – filled with evil hatred because he was not given the ability to create – envies and despises us humans, and from the start has worked to destroy us. And one of the tools he has used against us, is also a great gift from God: our Free Will. Before humans and Mother Earth, there was no Free Will, and admittedly it was a gamble to begin with, because by its very nature, it can be the instrument of good, or weakness and evil. Satan therefore has used it against us, and was able to do so, precisely because we rarely are conscious of how we use this otherwise magnificent gift.

Bear would often remind me that there is no moment in which we are not creating, because of how we were created, but that the vast majority are not consciously aware of doing so. If we were, we would ensure to consciously create only the beautiful and loving reality that God intended us to create and nurture.

Our ego were originally intended to protect us from dangers in our environment, ensuring that we learned from mistakes that were dangerous to us, and did not therefore repeat them. And to recognize such dangers to take proper measures. Whether such dangers were avoiding saber tooth tigers, or managing our finances intelligently, the ego was there to guide us. However, in the ego’s own “programming” to feel important, and our misguided use of it, we identified ourselves as the ego, rather than recognizing it simply as a tool for us to use and direct, under our control and command. And this left open the opportunity to misdirect us, using the ego, which is what Satan has been doing. The negative emotions of jealously, envy, hatred, prejudice, etc. all stem from the ego – either hijacked or misunderstood and therefore misused – interpreting our life experiences and human interactions in a negative way, feeling threatened in some way. Think about this for a moment. We are all Brothers and Sisters, created so, with intelligence and love as our original gifts, and therefore able to interact in intelligent and loving ways, instead of attacking each other in small to major ways. We are all here to learn, and grow, in experience, wisdom and love, not create daily opportunities for conflict among us. We are beautiful creator beings, but we have allowed ourselves to play into the hands of the enemy.

My husband’s spiritual work was primarily in the aethers – not the higher, more spiritual levels, but the lower levels, where demons and other related creatures dwell. Bear was fearless to go there every day, to do battle against those demons, with the aid of his Sweet Medicine spiritual warrior animals army and others, and in the last few years of his life, was joined as well by the Angelics – powerful warriors – who asked to join, precisely because the level of demonic attacks on humanity had grown to such a dangerous and horrific level. The more demons that were destroyed in the aethers and sent to the fiery pit where they belong, the less that could be deployed to Earth, to attack humanity here. My husband was relentless in this war, and one of the things he did, was to remove demons from people, whose lives changed dramatically for the better. The testament of this and more is reflected in some of the comments from friends around the world which I included at the end of the my beloved’s obituary, here: https://family-funeral.com/tribute/details/17699/Michael-Gibbons/obituary.html#tribute-start

Because at this time on Earth, far more so than in the days when Jesus walked the Earth and provided the same service, there is a very high percentage of humans who have demons attached to them. These same demons who hijack a person’s ego and induce them thereby to engage in any and all of the negative emotions, instead of the beautiful ones that God intended for us. Because while the beautiful emotions are toxic to Satan and his demons, who run from them, the energy we humans generate when we engage in the negative emotions is called loosh, and is food that feeds the demons. And why they induce thoughts and behaviors in those to whom they are attached, to feed voraciously. We are feeding the enemy when we engage in these terrible, negative emotions, and must learn to guard against them. The condition of this world is in greatest part because so very many of us have been manipulated to give our power over to the Dark Side. Wake up and help others to wake up and demand that these demons immediately depart. The Christ Himself guided us to courageously demand, “Begone, Satan!” We have that power, but have been made to forget. Awaken, Humanity, for the love of God!

My QuietBear was relentless in his war on behalf of humanity, and his last messages before becoming too ill from the cancer, were to call on all of you Spiritual Warriors to join the war. Satan and his demons HATE COURAGE!. It is poison to them. My husband and I were under constant attack for all the years we were together, precisely because of this work that my Bear courageously and with love, did. And he was contacted in his last year here, on the spiritual level, to let him know that he was achieving a big difference for humanity, and to be aware that he would therefore come under greater attack. This is why he ended up with turbo cancer. In the last month of his hospital stay, when he was being taken by wheelchair to a study that was to be done on him, his nice nurse wheeled him into the elevator, and just as the elevator door closed, my husband could suddenly smell sulfur, and the nurse’s face and voice changed, and the words that came out of her mouth were “So, are you enjoying the trip I planned for you?” To which my Bear, fearless as always, responded “Go to hell”. Satan then cackled and added, “Wait until you see the rest of the trip”. The elevator door opened, the nurse’s face and voice changed back, and she wheeled him to the study, completely unaware of how she had been used to deliver Satan’s message to my beloved Bear. Quietbear, who bore the whole incredibly painful and traumatic cancer experience with utter courage, and was an inspiration to fellow patients at the hospital, whose spirits he raised, and on one occasion after sharing some inspiring words, all of the nurses at the nurse’s station stood up and clapped. That was/is my Bear, who lived what he expressed, signing his emails with “In Strength and Courage”.

You are all witness to the state of the world, and its increasingly dangerous condition for humans and life on Earth. And, guided by my Bear, who reaches out to let me know he is still with me, I have recently come into knowledge of just how bad this danger is, and far, far sooner to declare itself than any of us know. But we MUST know, because the very existence of humanity is in the balance, and that includes demonic danger to our very souls. Please believe me that this is no exaggeration, and precisely why I am sharing this now, because we need as much of humanity as possible awake, informed and doing everything possible to stop what has been demonically planned for us, and time is very short. I will be sharing the background and details of the demonic plan that those who currently have control of the world have planned for us. It seems to me the billions of us who will be systematically killed will be the lucky ones, and those left behind will not only be living hell on Earth, but likewise beyond. THAT is how serious this is. As soon as I have clearance to share this information, I will be doing so for those of you who have the courage to ask me for that information, which you can do by emailing me at marcelasynesthesia@proton.me.

And so I leave you with the words that are the cornerstone of my husband, Quietbear’s, teachings: STAND IN YOUR POWER!