This interview appeared in the Summer, ‘04 “Phoenix Rising,” a free, quarterly newsletter created and distributed by Phoenix Institute, Inc., Samuel’s homebase in Lexington, Kentucky.

In this interview Samuel discusses topics that include dying to the old, communicating at the highest level, identifying and overcoming an improperly functioning ego, recognizing and distinguishing Serpent and Dragon energy, and more!

Please click here, or scroll down this page, to go to the interview.

Phoenix Rising:  For those who weren’t able to make it to the retreat and those of us who were there, what would you say were the teachings you’d like us all to focus on in the upcoming months?

Samuel:  As a whole, on a global level, sound-frequency, energy work is going to be a major focus, but in order for Guardians to be able to make use of high-frequency energy work using sound, they need to have their physical being and their physical world functioning at its highest frequency.

Now, what’s required for an individual to be able to function at their best and highest—be it Guardian or not—is letting go of those things that are not feeding the best and highest, those things that keep you from regenerating life force in those areas that enhance and accelerate the highest possible frequency—with Guardians that means dying to the old. And the way that those high frequency sound workings fit into your day-to-day life has to do with communication.

So, what are the two things that most need to be shared with those in this extended family of love? The importance of dying to the old; and communicating at the highest possible levels, which I call right communication. Right communication involves Word, as in “In the beginning was the Word,” meaning the sound of creation, and so the day-to-day right communication means being responsible for what comes out of your mouth.

What needs to be done to die?

Obviously, the first thing to point out is this isn’t a “purple Kool-Aid” interview. I’m not telling you how to commit suicide. In fact, if you do, you’ve sort of missed the whole point. Dying means living at your best, and in order to do that, one thing that’s absolutely required is that you remove from your life those things that keep you from living at your best.

Within Guardianship particularly—and at the retreat, I rose to my manipulative, dramatic best to make this as clear as I possibly could—there is no place within the Guardianship for hate, for anger, for being willing to accept in your life attitudes and beliefs that go against a loving, empowered Guardianship in this world. There is no place for it.

So the first thing that you must do in order to die is take a look—and if you have a lot of depression and difficulty in your life, you might not need to go back more than a couple of weeks, but, for most, go ahead and look back two months or four months—and let yourself think through the question, “What are the situations that I came up with during that time that caused me to feel badly or to have a negative emotional response, be it fear, be it anger, be it extreme sadness?” Look for any negative function where you recognize, “I don’t want this experience again. This was not fun. It was not easy. It was painful.” Look back over the last two weeks or two months or six months, and come up with five experiences that make you say, “I don’t want that repeated.”

Then break them down, analyze them. Were there other people involved? If so, who? Was there a situation that did not go the right way? What was that situation and how was it that it did not go the right way? Look at that situation in as much detail as possible, and then go on to experience number two and do the same thing, and then number three—all the way through each one of them. Having done that, look for a pattern. What is involved in all of these? For instance, you might find that, although there are some different people involved, there always seems to be the same two or three in there as well. Pay attention to that. Make a note of it. Or, it might be that the situations are all very different, but they all involve something to do with your work, for instance, or they all involve the principle of giving in one way or another. Pay attention. Look to see what they all have in common.

When you have done that, with each one ask yourself “What is the fear that comes up when these people, or this situation, show up in my life?” I will assure you that your fear keeps you living in a black hole, sucking your energy and paralyzing you. Look at how you react in those situations. That’s going to give you a sense of what’s keeping you from being dead; it’s your fear, your reactions. Those are the shovels of dirt that make your grave for you, yet those are the things that can be turned around to help you be dead. Now, do you see what I meant by “the shovels that build the grave?” They can either wear you out, make you tired, keep you in an ongoing painful life, or they can lead to a right death, a death of those things that are not working.

The number-one thing you can look for in all of your fears is an improperly functioning ego. Ego is necessary, ego is a good thing; it’s the way your spirit in this form functions in the world. But you have a history of basing your judgment of yourself on those things that have kept you safe in the past. That’s perfectly understandable, isn’t it, but what’s wrong with that? Well, what’s wrong with it is that essentially you are basing your view of your strengths and your weaknesses on your fears. “This way of being controlling and making things go my way propelled me into success beyond my wildest measure, but I have no friends; there is nobody I can really count on. I don’t have a sense of faith in myself and this world, because everything that I have was based on fear.”

Feeling fully alive, trusting and functioning at your best and highest, means not that you reject everything that you learned to become who you are right now, but that you put it into a right perspective, that you see how your past has brought you to who you are now, aware, caring about being the best you can be. But you should not let your past convince you that the only way you can function is by exhibiting the symptoms of egoic insecurity in the world.

Now, being dead to the old does not guarantee that you’re going to feel fully alive if you are simply holding on to those traits, and the first time a real test of your resolve comes up, you just flip right back to the old system of functioning. So how is it you can conquer those old ways?

You come to a place where you are grateful for what they have given you. Gratitude and being dead really do work together. Now, in your life, you are probably grateful for a whole lot of people who are dead. And you’re also probably very grateful that some people are dead, but that’s not my point. I am talking about gratitude; coming to a place where you are expressing gratitude about something shows that you have reached completion with that thing.

When you’re dealing with fear by creating negative behaviors and negative attitudes, seeing how those patterns have served you becomes the means by which you can deal with fear rather than react to it. That creates a response rather than a reaction, and that becomes a means of empowering your life through an honest death.

In this world, the means through which you function in life is communication. You must communicate with yourself, you must communicate with the world around you, you must communicate with other people. Communication becomes the means by which you live your death or your lack of it. So you should ask yourself, “What are my communication problems?”

Unfortunately, most people do not think they have communication problems because most people, even Guardians doing their best, have a tendency to think it’s not them, not their own problem but the other person’s. “I am doing my best and communicating at my best, but this other person is the problem.” And a big point I tried to make at the retreat was very bluntly saying, “That’s not true. It’s you.” And even if, in the bigger or the smaller picture, anybody else would look at that situation of yours and say “Yes, that other person really is the problem,” you still must look at it as if it is you.

And that takes us back to one of those security issues, the things that are keeping you from being dead, because fear says that in order to be safe in the world you must not be wrong. When you are coming into a communication situation thinking that you must be right, I can assure you the communication is not going to work. Communication is centered on—for my purposes—communing. Communication at its best and highest is a form of communion. It creates community. It is about merging, merging on a surface level rather than a spiritual level.

Merging is essentially a negotiation, a dance. Perhaps, you are going to waltz. Well, you take a step and your partner takes a step, but you’ve got to synchronize them so that your steps and theirs work together. And so it is with communication. You have your point you’re trying to make, and the other person has a point to make, and you both have your own vision about what is going on and the steps you want to take. And if you are dead you realize that regardless of what you need to do, if you’re going to do it with someone else, it’s going to require negotiation, even compromise. It’s going to require you to move out of individuality and into unity, where there is a shared vision about what’s going on. The Guardian who is unable to do that, who is stuck in the past, stuck in the pain, stuck in the fear, is not going to be able to open themselves up to sharing a vision with their “enemy.”

The easiest way to think about right communication is—in two words—shared vision. If you can establish what is in common, you’re going to be able to have the foundation that will allow for right communication.

Great master class.

It’s called life in times of transition. That’s the master class. You’re in it.

But it’s hard when you are stuck in that place of anger and hatred if you feel it’s justified, if it’s something that was done to you that was so wrong, you feel that you have a right to be angry. Can you put that into perspective?

The first thing I want to point out is that people think the only things that need to be changed involve dramatic situations, and that’s not true. Bad communication does not have to get very far out of hand for it to be bad communication. I’m not talking about a massively big blowup that you’ve had with somebody or an ongoing big problem, but the tiny version of it.

For example, “I am the victim” is the way a lot of people create common vision. “I understand what you’re going through because . . . ,” and it becomes about you instead of about them, and all you were trying to do was relate. But what you’ve done is create a compact—small or large—a connection based on a negative rather than a positive. You’re amplifying what does not work instead of what does. Maybe it’s just the grocery-store clerk who has worked for hours and you are commiserating with those sore feet and grumpy people that must be dealt with; nevertheless, you’ve established a negative foundation. And that one thing does more damage on a day-to-day level than this huge painful, way-out-of-control drama.

There have been some misunderstandings that came out of some things you said at the retreat about Dragon energy and Serpent energy. You made a point of differentiating between activating Dragon energy, which works the Grid, and awakening Serpent energy, which powers it. You also aligned Christ with the Serpent and Christ Consciousness with the Dragon. Would you explain the differences between these aspects and functions of Dragon and Serpent energy?

Generally speaking, I don’t like to answer questions about how you are going to see this show up, because that’s free will. That’s like asking, “What is life going to be like at the creation of Sacred Status?” Well, it’s going to be life in Sacred Status. How is it going to show up in your specific life? I don’t know. How is it going to show up? At this moment there are parts of you that are powerful and perfect that you’ll have nothing to do with, so why would that be different then? Well maybe it would be different because you will have slowly and surely been changing and growing to reach that point, or not.

Is there a general statement about “How is Dragon energy going to show itself in this world?” There is not a general statement. But I will talk about the difference between Serpent and Dragon.

A baby chick is going to grow up to be a chicken. It’s not going to grow up to be a pig, right? You might in fact say that a chick and a chicken are the same thing even though they have totally different jobs to do. (I am sure there are different illustrations that would have been more effective here, but I will go with this one.)

Dragon energy is a higher function of Serpent energy; however it’s still the same energy. You, as a Guardian functioning in form, are a very good microcosm of that dual function, because you are human—corresponding to the Serpent—that has a much greater aspect—corresponding to the Dragon.

You have in this world Serpent energy that in one way or another slithers through every major spiritual teaching in the last five thousand years. Serpents as creation energy, serpents as workers of light and workers of darkness, and serpents as an access to goddess and serpents as . . . it’s everywhere. And not one of those serpents is a reference to a snake. They are using the serpent metaphor based on snakes in your world, but it’s not talking about snakes. Now, I’m only making that point because a snake, as a symbolic reference, an archetype, means that you have to look at its physical-world counterpart in order to understand the spiritual version of it. It’s easier to see in crows or vultures, that are seen as magic and as shape-shifters and as powerful, while in this world they are trash eaters. They are trash eaters because they have the ability to make use of every small thing in order to survive. They are able to help the greater life process complete itself by eating that which is dead, things which most carnivores will have nothing to do with. By taking death into their bodies, they are able to convert it to life, and people who work in high levels of spirit, such as priests or shamans, recognize that ability as ultimately a reflection of the work of spirit in this world.

It’s just so with the snake. The snake seems to have no physical way to move through this world, literally—no fins, no flippers, no legs—and yet it has the ability to move, sometimes very quickly, through the world. It has a magical ability to do without what is considered necessary—legs—and yet to adapt to the world it is in. Many snakes are capable of bringing death to you. Well, naturally it’s a very powerful creature that changes your life so dramatically, and can adapt and function in arenas that are not considered workable. Serpent energy is about moving from this life to a greater life. And as a result of that, the serpent has been an initiatory creature and is used symbolically to represent transformation, sometimes magical transformation.

When you say “move from this life to a greater life,” do you mean to elevate this life to a higher level or to move from this life to a life beyond?

Both actually, because it’s a duality the whole way. On a very physical level snakes can bring death to you. You move from this life to—what do you believe in? Nirvana? Heaven? But on the higher level, the archetypal level, you have the transformation aspect of moving from your day-to-day existence to a higher plane of existence while you’re right here.

Now, Dragon energy is an evolution of Serpent energy in the same way that Serpent energy has a physical experience and a higher version, the archetypal version. In that very same way the Dragon is to the snake what the higher level of snake is to itself. You have the snake on two levels, and that second, higher level is where Dragon begins.

Therefore, avataric energy coming into form relates to the Serpent level. Avataric energy completing its work would be Dragon. That’s why Jesus would be Serpent and Christ Consciousness would be Dragon, do you see that?

Well to me, Jesus would actually be snake, and when Christed would become Serpent and when Christ Consciousness is in the world, it would be Dragon.

Even better said. That works perfectly.

Our goal as Guardians should be to strive for unity and to reach Oneness. At the retreat you explained that those integrations take place on personal and planetary levels. Would you explain, and elaborate on this?

Ellic energy functioning in this world is possible when there are Perfected Beings functioning in the world. Perfected Beings are the result of consciously functioning in unity as one—One Heart, One Mind, One Body—one perfected body. There will be thirty-three of those perfected bodies and then, as the thirty-three work together, twelve or eleven or thirteen—that’s how that works—of those perfected beings. But the key is none of that, the key is the word functioning. A perfected body functioning is what will allow the Ellic energy opportunity.

Now, what’s the problem with this? Well, the problem is you have a Guardianship made up of some who fear being dead, who have a very hard time functioning in unity, who pursue their own agenda at the expense of unity. The key to it is functioning. In order to function in a way that allows the opportunity, there has to be One Heart working as One Mind working as One Body, and then that Body opens the door.

That ties in nicely with what we were talking about at the beginning, about being dead.

I agree. Absolutely it does, and that’s the key.

Please click here to go to the Fall, ‘03 interview.
Please click here to go to the Winter, ‘04 interview.
Please click here to go to the Spring, ‘04 interview.