Return to Sovereignty
Getting Our Power Back
By Keith Varnum
You are in grave danger!
At any moment—you may be loving, laughing, alive—
you may accidentally find God!
- – Rabindranth Tagore
During many years of observing others and myself searching for fulfillment, I’ve noticed an essential ingredient is often missing. I call this ingredient sovereignty—self-sufficiency, self-generation or total independence from outside sources. Without this quality in its authentic form, no one I know has been able to achieve the happiness, health and peace they are seeking.
Throughout the years of assisting others and myself to feel truly joyous and free, I’ve watched people try to ignore, deny, invalidate or rationalize away the importance of sovereignty. I’ve witnessed friends and other people attempt to fake it, substitute for it, and try to steal and borrow it from others. All these efforts have been in vain. Their time, energy and intention would have been put to better use by focusing on allowing this quality to become a solid personal reality.
In my experience, a true, conscious state of sovereignty is absolutely critical for genuine, lasting satisfaction during the Earth experience. If you’re not entirely clear as to the nature of this state, it’s not surprising. In deliberate accordance with our personal and collective design, there is a subtle, pervasive individual and cultural prohibition against tasting too deeply the nectar of sovereignty.
Throughout history, this cover-up has been very successful and almost completely impenetrable. There is a good reason for this. When you authentically recognize the fundamental truth of your own sovereignty, the gig is up! The ego’s charade of imminent destruction is exposed as a lie and, in fact, as an impossibility. This revelation is a death knoll for the aspect of you that tries to destroy your joy by threatening you with disapproval, disagreement, disease and destruction. This part of you that doesn’t want to “give up the ghost” (illusion) is variously referred to as the ego, mind, intellect, conditioning, programming, personality, identity or persona. This aspect of yourself bought into the tribal collective agreement, mainstream mass consciousness, that you are ultimately vulnerable to body and soul annihilation if you don’t tow the party line, as dictated by . . . who else? . . . the ego.
In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. One of my spiritual mentors, Lester, was fond of musing:
“The thing people fear the most is non-survival. And non-survival is the only thing that can’t ever happen to us.”
You are an eternal being, whether you like it or not—whether you are aware of it or not! Sovereignty is the personal recognition of your everlasting, eternal permanency!
Sovereignty isn’t a concept, idea, principle, possibility, option or creation. It doesn’t need to be affirmed, declared, visualized, asserted, defended or manifested. The immutability of your sovereignty doesn’t depend on whether you believe in it or not. It is a fact of your existence, an inescapable, immutable reality. Your awareness, appreciation and enjoyment of sovereignty may come and go to one degree or another, but eternalness never waivers as your fundamental, inalienable true nature.
Sovereignty is knowing you are the ultimate source of every experience you have in your life. You know for certain you are a sovereign being when you generate your own energy, love, power, health, wisdom, clarity, security, peace and fulfillment on a daily basis.
Lester often reminded me, “You only know that which you can do!” In order to operate on a practical basis as the creator you are, it’s crucial to tap directly into the universal life force in a real, tangible, lasting way. You need to connect fully with the fire within, with the essence that nurtures the fullness of your being.
One very effective and immediate way to access your true nature and power is to shift your identification away from thinking (believing) that you are only your human personality, that you are only a body, and that you are separate from other people and other forms of life. As your creative attention shifts from who you think you are to who you truly are, you experience the total security and certainty of your basic essence. Our true essence is an eternal energy field of consciousness. This energy field of consciousness is connected with all life and gives us the freedom to create whatever we choose.
It’s helpful to be aware that this shift of attention cannot be just a mental exercise. A wholesale re-identification of your entire being with the everyday reality of self-generation is required. This re-identification has to be fully integrated on the emotional, spiritual, biological and molecular levels. And it’s crucial for you to create direct, firsthand, tangible, demonstrable and repeatable evidence that you can, in fact, manifest and attract all the love, safety, energy, well-being, joy, peace and abundance you desire in your life.
The benefit of giving yourself this factual personal validation is that this firsthand evidence takes sovereignty from the realm of the conceptual to the reality of the practical. When you can prove your sovereignty to yourself repeatedly, at will, on your own terms, in your own way and in your world, then self-generation becomes real for you.
One very useful resource you can use to validate sovereignty for yourself is tapping into the accurate, comprehensive recall of your inner coach—intuition. Your intuition is the aspect of your consciousness that can remind you accurately, without ego filters and bias, of everything that has ever happened to you in your lifetime. Using intuitive, meditative, shamanic soul journeying you can guide yourself to reconnect with peak moments in your life when you personally experienced the vibration, energy and reality of sovereignty. These are moments when you knew with certainty your true nature of power, passion and creativity.
In this way you can re-light your pilot light and stoke your inner fire to burn more brightly. As you come alive again within, you naturally remember how to continuously fuel your own courage, safety, power, prosperity, compassion and happiness. As you begin to vibrate at the frequency of sovereignty in your everyday life, you attract and experience more of the direct personal evidence that makes the state of sovereignty even more authentic and lasting for you. Like vibration attracts—and creates—like vibration.
The more experientially convincing it becomes to you that you are in charge of your own energy and survival, the more you will.
keep your creative attention focused on the realness of your own sovereignty. As more attention is focused on your true personal power, less attention is available to slip back into energizing old patterns of dependence and helplessness. Old fears of victimhood, insecurity and abandonment diminish and eventually dissolve from lack of sustaining attention. Threats of your personality’s limited perspective become less and less convincing. It becomes less crucial to control other people or the environment to make sure you get enough love, energy or safety. It becomes less necessary to resist or defend against others trying to control you or steal your energy. It becomes less imperative for you to withhold, hide, alter or disguise your true feelings, desires and excitement for fear of upsetting or threatening somebody else’s world.
As you reclaim your natural power, you become self-sustaining. The whole process of truly owning your sovereignty snowballs in the direction of freedom and abundance. The more time you spend in the vibration of sovereignty, the easier it becomes to keep all your attention there. Soon, you find yourself living every day in an ocean of infinite supply. You possess all the clarity, wisdom, power and joy you previously searched for and found so fleeting. All your awareness is nurtured daily by this direct experience of being completely connected, loved, energized and supported on the Earth in a very practical way.
From this authentic inner security emanates the courage and strength to be who you really are. This honest expression keeps your creative attention flowing to what is naturally right for you and truly gives you happiness. You have all your personal power available to fully energize your soul’s innermost impulse to express and create. Your attention flows unhindered—without distraction, detour or derailment—into funding your heart’s deepest desires and fulfilling your fondest dreams. You have returned to your natural state of sovereignty.
Sharing who you really are—and all your natural spiritual abilities—with the world is the ultimate act of love. Being self-generating, you are able to allow all other inhabitants of Earth to do whatever they choose. You can offer others the space to be just as they are. You become capable of giving the greatest gift we can bestow on another being: unconditional love, total acceptance.