What we need is confidence, confidence not arrogance. Confidence is rooted etymologically in the Latin for, with faith. We need to function with faith, faith that has been tested and proved, proved that there is reasonable expectation that our efforts will succeed. There will always be some degree of uncertainty, but the expectation of success is vital to our being able to do our best.
We should have confidence in our strength. This means that we should have confidence in our resources to do the job at hand. The internal resources are meant, as well as the external resources. The Strength Key indicates that strength is the ability to modify and to train our libido and animal powers through subtlety and love, so that while they are still vital they are not controlling us and running wild.
We should have the capacity for confident cooperation. This relates to the Libra Key named Justice. We should be able to cooperate, without feeling diminished or intimidated. Our strength need not be compromised. We should be able to bring it to our cooperating. The word cooperate means to work together. It does not mean to cave in. Libra rules the natural house of marriage, partnership and open enemies, and Libra is the sign of balance. Here we complement and supplement others, to the same degree that they complement and supplement us. A Communist dictum
is appropriate here: From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.
Our confidence in our future is rooted in our past, and in our present. Even death can be faced with confidence as the faith that we will be able to function in "that unknown country from whose bourne no traveler returns." For the reincarnationist, of course, we have returned many times and will do so also in the future. For those who have experienced the dead as living presences, it is not so much that unknown. In the simple sense everyday sense, come what may, we will feel confident that things will work out well in the end. We need not be Dr. Pangloss to be
optimists. Life has its challenges, but with faith and goodwill the future is seen more as a positive adventure.
Confidence in our ability to love also lies in the realm of experience. The more we have known of love in our infancy and our early maturing years, the more comfortable we will be with loving. The problem is that few of us have that kind of nurture in our early development. Where are Venus and Jupiter when we need them?
Parents, as I have said, are just children who got here first. Too often they have little qualification for the job. One solution is to go to archetypal level and imagine the perfect parents as being present and loving us. Also, we should imagine ourselves as the perfect children. The reality is that the perfect parents do exist and they are caring for us, if we can open ourselves to them. These parents are life and nature, or God the Father and God the Mother. These archetypes and these realities are within us, deeply hidden.
The final confidence is confidence in one's relation to life. To the degree that we feel life moving and undulating through us, through others and through all things in our environment, we will have confidence in it. We will experience that we participate in life and know that it works through us and in us and through all else, to manifest our past, our present and what is in process of rising to be known. Subjectively we may not feel it, but we are truly conscious parts of the great currents of the ocean of life.
We have the ability to assist or attempt to resist these currents. We have the right to live the results of such decisions, positive or negative. The great ocean rolls on and we, incarnate or non-incarnate, roll with it.
With confidence in life, we will be in relative harmony with it until we come to those moments of absolute harmony and oneness that dazzle the soul and delight the spirit.
Confidence: 1/18/2007
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