Chapter: The Explorers

Are you an Explorer?
The amount of new therapists and teachers, healers and clairvoyant’s, being created each day around the world is rapidly growing. Courses on such educations abound. There is a whole new surge, a movement of the human spirit pioneering and exploring a whole new world
As A pioneer, I am an explorer exploring the great unknown. And in the unknown there are no maps yet, I create the maps as I go along. There is nobody out there yet, I am the first, and my maps, just like all maps in pioneering times, are general maps, they are not precise enough. Yet I am encouraging those who follow in my footsteps to believe that they are, because I myself believe they are. Yet they are only general maps, maps which may be not accurate enough.
As an explorer I need to become very good at map-making, My tools of precision need to be precise, I believe they are good enough, but maybe they are not.
The tools I have, are based on thousands of years of wisdom, yet this alone is not enough to trust them, I should take nothing for granted when it comes to exploring the unknown. My tools may be clumsy. And myself, ill prepared, and ill equiped.
I have embarked from my established shores, have left safe havens behind, preferring to choose the uncharted seas of my mind. Explorer yes ! Good navigator - maybe! Brilliant! - This remains to be seen. Even Christopher Columbus failed to recognise what he had discovered.
Will I recognise what I discover? How do I know what am looking for? In which direction do I travel? And how do I move? With a leap of faith maybe. Faith alone may not be good enough; no matter how much faith I place in my old maps. They can only give me the illusion of feeling secure, and this is comforting and good for what is about to come, but how do I know they are up to the task ahead? I need other maps, and other ways of making maps, to challenge the whole science of map-making.

I need to be a mapmaker of extraordinary accuracy. It is important to know where I am and what I have discovered and how I arrived there, not only for my own sake, but to those that wish to follow me. I need to be accurate, for the slightest error of any degree over long distance could be catastrophic. And when I reach my goal, I better make certain that what I have found is what I have dreamed and hoped for.
It is one thing to discover America, and another to only discover a small desert island. Better to return with the glory of discoveries of great grandeur and beauty than the disillusionment of finding nothing.
Here lies my dilemma as an explorer, the risk of finding nothing is high, no matter how well trained I am. And for every great explorer there is, there are thousands that do not reach such heights. And here lies the psychological make-up of the explorer. An explorer is usually a free spirit, rebellious against the mainstream of thinking, and dare to take risks; even what others would call foolish risks.
Above all, they have an unenviable belief in themselves, which is unshakeable, expecting others to believe in them likewise. They also develop a remarkable talent for telling stories.
Such mavericks, such adventurers and explorers, since the beginning of time have been telling us epic stories of their adventures, enticing and persuading us to follow in their footsteps.
Those explorers which became disillusioned in their travels, covered up their shattered dreams and hopes and transferred them also into stories, stories which they usually heard from others who were more successful, they then claimed these stories as their own, changing them just a little to disguise them, like some distorted treasure, the truth but not quite, and naturally being reasonably good at map-making they produced maps to confirm their stories. Maps, which were not accurate, for they had not lived the adventure out themselves. Like the fisherman telling the story of the great fish which got away, they go one step further, they produce a map showing us where this fish is, and offer this map for sale.
I, living in my secluded life sitting in my “local”, is caught up in the aura of the story , I buy such a map and head of in my quest completely unaware that the map I have just purchased is inaccurate.
Like the great Gold Rush, years ago in America, people are giving up everything, home and family, in search of riches in the wild blue yonder. Some strike it rich, and most of these are the property dealers (the “experts”) selling maps of useless pieces of land to the would-be explorer.
This is the way it is in times of pioneering and exploration.
In all New Ages…..We take our chances.