| PROGRAMMING PARTNER: 7TH GENE KEY | PHYSIOLOGY: AMYGDALA |
| CODON RING: THE RING OF PURIFICATION | AMINO ACID: GLUTAMINE |
| (13, 30) |
The 13th Gene Key concerns a single theme — the theme of listening. Through this Gene Key we will see how many dimensions there are to the art of listening and how deeply tied it is with the expansion or contraction of human consciousness. At the Shadow frequency this is the Shadow of Discord, which is the inability to listen to and learn from your experiences in the world. Listening is entirely different from hearing. Hearing refers to the acoustic absorption of auditory information, whereas listening is something that can only be done with your whole being. Often listening requires withdrawal and time in order for it to function effectively. Listening is also highly linked to the way in which you process your life experiences on an emotional level. The link between listening and the emotions has profound implications for the future of this Gene Key and in particular its Shadow frequency. Because of the global mutation currently taking place in the solar plexus system of all human beings, our emotional chemistry is undergoing some extraordinary changes and the 13th Shadow will be affected by these changes.
Along with its programming partner, the 7th Shadow of Division, this genetic partnership exerts an enormous influence on the direction of humanity as a species. These two Gene Keys are prime programming agents for the way in which humans interact at a group level. They actually cut far deeper than the tribal programming archetypes within our genome, which also affect our interactive capacities. The 7th and 13th Gene Keys steer the one consciousness of humanity along the line of our destiny. Whilst the 7th Gene Key pulls you towards the future, the 13th urges you to listen to and learn from your past. This archetypal placement within your DNA makes these two Gene Keys different from all others, as though they were somehow outside the scope of human influence. It is the battle waged within the frequencies of these codes that decides your future. The 13th Gene Key in particular is one of the most important of all the 64 Gene Keys, since it involves the way in which you process your past.
Discord refers to the inability to escape your own past. Stacked within the human genome lies a library of collective human experience, and your inability to process all this memory is what keeps you locked into the same self-destructive patterns. The 13th Shadow shares a very important chemical connection to the 30th Shadow, through its link with the same genetic codon signature known as The Ring of Purification. The 30th Shadow — the Shadow of Desire — is where the connection between your ability to listen is weighed against the raw force of your human desire. This codon, which codes for the amino acid known as glutamine, is one of the great human genetic battlefields. Interestingly enough, there is now a large body of scientific evidence linking this amino acid to various functions and malfunctions in our gut. Symbolically, one might draw a connection between how effectively we human beings process our past and how effectively our body eliminates waste. The force of human desire found in the 30th Shadow usually outweighs our ability to listen to our past experience, and this leads us once again down roads that do not serve humanity as a whole.
The problem is rooted in the human emotional system and this 30th Shadow of Desire is the core of it. Because desire cannot be sated in its current form, it influences the direction of the whole human race. Despite what has happened in our past, we go on making the same poor decisions and judgments. This sets up a global frequency of discord in which we can clearly see where we have been going wrong, but are unable to remedy it at a collective level. An example of this is the current threat of global warming. We can see what damage our lifestyle is doing to the long-term future of our planet, but our desire outstrips the energy to do anything about it. Anyone who has a deep knowledge of human history will see the same cycles being repeated over and over but each time with different nuances. It is true that today there is more global awareness of the problem than ever before. However, this awareness does not change human behaviour. We hear the discord that we are creating, but we do not listen to it. In the end, our emotional urge to satiate the desire within always wins. That sums up the dilemma of the 13th Shadow.
The ancient Chinese name for this 13th hexagram of the I Ching is The Fellowship of Man. It is a beautiful name, seemingly filled with hope, and it does in fact describe the higher frequencies of this 13th Gene Key. However at the lower frequencies, because of our inability to listen, we go on pursuing our own short-term agendas with disastrous consequences to the greater society. Ironically we find no solace from our own desires either. No matter how many of our desires we sate, more appear. We hear only discord in the world because we are unable to listen to the overall dilemma. We cannot yet see it at a collective level, so we are not ready to find out what the Fellowship of Man really is. This is why we keep programming our future direction (through the 7th Shadow) as a future of division. Not listening to the real problem, all our actions create more and more divisions within our societies.
Out of all this ancestral memory and our inability to create or find the Fellowship of Man, a huge pessimism emerges at an unconscious level. We no longer believe collectively that we can surmount our own nature and create a truly peaceful world. History provides compelling evidence of this. In fact our pessimism emerges directly from our genes because, shockingly, our pessimism is in actuality correctly founded — we cannot surmount our own nature. Only nature can overcome us, which is precisely what lies in the pipeline right now. Nature is preparing a new kind of human being. Nature as a whole has learned and listened to her past experience, and through us, she will create the giant leap that is needed to free us from a web that we have no hope of escaping. Nature will create a human in whom the art of listening will no longer have to compete with raw desire. In a single unprecedented and radical sweep, she will do this by killing off desire itself.
These people pretend to be empathic and sympathetic to others whilst at the same time doing nothing. The repressive side of this Shadow may make a show of listening to everyone but it soon becomes apparent that they have no real backbone. These people are permissive in the sense that they let others walk all over them without learning anything. They will agree with you no matter what you say. They mistake hearing for listening and in doing so they cut themselves off emotionally from others and from their environment. This is one of the deepest forms of emotional repression that does not want to take in the pain/pleasure cycle at any level, so it sacrifices both extremes and settles for a false sense of safety.
When discord manifests through a reactive being, it becomes narrow-mindedness and/or bigotry. These people will disagree with you no matter what you say! Narrow-mindedness is about getting stuck in a reactionary emotional pattern and then making a lifestyle out of it. These people are literally unable to see beyond the limits of their own desires and they are filled with pessimism. Their philosophy is founded upon the fear patterns that have guided all human beings to where they are now, and they are not open to the possibility of real change. Such people harbour a deep bitterness about the nature of human beings and this comes out most frequently as anger, especially at those who do not see things their way. With such people it often becomes their mission in life to debunk the views of those who are optimistic about the future and about humanity.
Discernment emerges as your emotional nature comes more and more into awareness. As you realise how deeply in the thrall of desire you are, you begin to understand the whole of humanity as well. Out of this incredible swelling of awareness arises the 13th Gift of Discernment. Discernment begins at an individual level as you come to see how deeply your view of others is connected to your feelings. Only when personal feelings are witnessed and examined can you begin to see things in a more objective manner. Over time, your personal agendas become more lucid and you reclaim the ability to listen to others and the world from a broader perspective. At this level of frequency, you become fully aware of the desires coursing through your body and although you cannot do anything to stop them, you are no longer the victim of them. For the first time you see your own individuality clearly and you realise that something else exists behind that individuality — a kind of witnessing awareness that is greater than your sense of individuality. This is the birth of your ability to listen.
With the rising of your discernment comes many gifts. It may appear to you now as though a great veil has been drawn back from the world. As we have seen, the 13th Gene Key is a repository of the collective past experiences and memories of humanity. Instead of reacting out of this karmic library, you now begin to demystify your own past. What you may have thought of as a random series of experiences can be seen as following a discernible pattern. Without being caught in the drama of subjective emotional personification, you can begin to view life at a mythic level. This mythical thinking is the way in which the mind interprets your ability to listen behind the veil of your desire. To view life at a mythic level is to see the great archetypes playing out in our lives — both our personal lives and the greater collective history of man. Through understanding your own past in this way, you can see that the storylines of all individuals play out variations of the same themes. At this level, we can recognise these same archetypal themes in every culture’s rituals, fairy tales, legends and myths.
Once you stop viewing life on a subjective emotional level, a new landscape of feeling opens up inside you. This feeling is the early manifestation of your future ability to transcend your emotional system — and it is experienced as optimism. Optimism is the gradual swelling of awareness within your solar plexus system transferred and projected outward onto the world. One might also view it in reverse. The awareness connecting all life forms is received and drawn into your solar plexus system, thereby expanding your sense of Self to include a far wider reality — the true Fellowship of Man. Through our cultural heritage, whatever it happens to be, we are all embedded with the myths, stories and archetypes that we need to eventually transcend our own emotional dramas. All the world’s stories, rituals and beliefs have grown out of the very infrastructure of our DNA, which is why the same patterns emerge over and over throughout history, regardless of culture, geography or even isolation.
These collective myths and fairy tales contain the alchemical codes of evolution, including its various mutations. The stories always pass through dark periods of transition ultimately arriving at transcendent states of consciousness. This is why discernment leads to optimism. With your Gift of Discernment you don’t just see the symbols. You live them in your own life, which is why they bring you such optimism. Every character within the myths is an aspect of the world psyche and every circumstance they pass through is a part of our own genetic and spiritual evolution. All of this is particularly relevant today because we are passing through a mythic test as an entire species, which is perhaps the first time this has ever happened. Those with discernment know in their bellies that this phase of our history must and will lead to a transcendent leap in consciousness, regardless of the subjective interpretations of the fear-based culture in which we live.
The 13th Siddhi, like its partner the 7th Siddhi, has much secret wisdom hidden within it. Our DNA is an incredible substance — it contains all the memories of our entire species and even those earlier life forms from which we descended. Like a fractal shard of God itself, DNA forms the living, vibrating link to the beginning of life on this planet. Even more profoundly, it connects us to the seed from which our very universe first sprouted. It is through this 13th Siddhi that information from our collective past can be recovered. Like a kind of cosmic librarian it has all the access codes to every volume every written on the pages of life. We are not just talking information here, but experience. The 13th Siddhi can unlock the essence of what it is to experience being a wild panther, or a strawberry, or a mollusc. This is the power of empathy.
These days most people use the word empathy without grasping its deeper connotations. As a fairly modern word, it is almost always confused with sympathy, a much older word coined by Aristotle. In the language of the 64 Gene Keys, empathy represents a siddhic vibration and as such cannot be grasped by the mind because true empathy has nothing whatsoever to do with the mind. The prefix em means within whereas the prefix sym means with. Herein lies the key to understanding the word. Whereas sympathy means to feel with another person, empathy means to be inside that person. Most people cannot conceive of being inside another person so the term has come to be seen as metaphorical and is generally understood as being a mental or emotional projection onto or into another person. Let us reclaim then the true power of this simple word. The Siddhi of Empathy requires complete dissolution of the individuated self. Once identification with one’s form has been cut, empathy reveals itself as the background awareness of all living forms. In other words, we really are inside each other. Whereas sympathy requires two, empathy demands one.
We have seen that the foundation of this 13th Gene Key is based on listening. Indeed, at the level of the 13th Siddhi, listening becomes all there is. Like a black hole, this listening absorbs everything that moves into it — space, time, everything. Eventually listening becomes so total that it fuses together subject and object so that the concept of listening itself disappears. This gives a small hint of what the Siddhi of Empathy really means. It is interesting to note how vehemently mass consciousness has always feared the number thirteen. In traditional folklore, thirteen gained a bad name through the system of tarot, in which it stood for the Death Card. These ancient esoteric codes are always founded in an original truth. Empathy is indeed a death — the death of the separate self that reveals the underlying nature of humanity. Empathy is the truest sense organ of humanity, but it cannot function through the individual — only through the collective.
The 13th Siddhi and the 7th Siddhi program each other through time. The 13th, being the repository of the past, programs the future of humanity and the 7th programs the past. This last statement may appear to make no sense, but at the siddhic level it is a truism. At the siddhic level, the seed and the fruit exist within each other because of each other. We think of the future being uncertain whereas the past is in fact just as uncertain because of how it is remembered. This is the power of myth — it can take an event or series of events in time and make them immortal. To be empathic is to have access to the egg out of which all the great myths have sprung. Empathy alone goes further and deeper than myth because it reunites the opposites and brings an end to the stories themselves. Empathy is a state of consciousness outside of time, even though it enfolds time. Again this is symbolised by the mystery of the number thirteen, which stands for the hub of the great wheel of twelve, the mystic number of the grail at the centre of the Round Table, or the Christ encircled by his twelve disciples. It is the number of Arachne, the spider, the mystical thirteenth sign of the zodiac. She sits at the heart of the web of creation and through her legs she remains in constant empathy with all that is.
There is huge fear to be absorbed before you attain a siddhic state. In the case of the 13th Siddhi, this involves complete absorption in the universal discord of the 13th Shadow. The human interpretation of this fear is the experience of feeling cut off from all that is alive and warm. It is an ice-cold zone in which aloneness is experienced as agony. However, through the purging of this experience the 13th Siddhi opens its eye on a new world — a world in which the past has been magically transformed into a radiant new future. We might recall here that this Gene Key is a part of The Ring of Purification. The human addiction to desire comes to an end in the siddhic state of consciousness, and it is said that one’s spirit shall no longer return to the earth but take a birth in a higher sphere of existence. These are mythic rather than literal interpretations of what occurs to such a person. All the great esoteric interpretations — karma, rebirth and justice — must be mythic rather than literal, since the true siddhic state cannot be conveyed through words. In universal empathy, you enter the centre of the human family and become one with all that is.
Those who awaken to the truth of their consciousness through this Siddhi will become beacons that live on in our history. These people have learned the deepest art of all — the art of listening. To sit in the presence of such a person is to be healed through being listened to. Listening at this level is no longer a passive phenomenon. It is actually quite a forceful cleansing at an auric level. To be listened to by the great cosmic mother is to have all your fears brought to the surface and loved into oblivion. These people are the most powerful of all shamans — they can open the portal of the past within you so widely that you become aware of yourself as a great cosmic receptacle rather than a point of focused identity. They can show you that all creatures and beings dwell within you, and that if you open yourself widely enough to our collective past, you will also see our collective future. To such a being, the holy state of perfection known as the Fellowship of Man is a constant and manifest reality.