My first awareness of a contract of any kind came to me as a child, in the form of the ubiquitous electronic presence in my life growing up — the TV. “Lost In Space” was one of my favorite shows, and in one memorable episode “The Trader”, a Mephistophelian rogue from another planet bound Dr. Smith to a contract. Smith and the space family Robinson were marooned with little food, and Smith decided in his inimitable self-first way that he was going to trade spaceship fuel for food. Little did he know there was fine print attached to the Trader’s contract which Smith signed by imprinting his hand in the soft-clay surface of a box. Unbeknownst to the good doctor, this contract actually bound Smith not merely for delivery of getaway fuel from the lost planet, but also for his very life and essence. Smith had signed a deal with a devil.
During my first year after moving to B.C. a friend who is a kinesiologist and a psychic gave me my first and only psychic reading. During the reading she spent a long time talking about the intense psychic family contract that I have been bound by at a subconscious level. Such family contracts are not uncommon, and can be incredibly powerful and binding.
The theme of The Contract varies, but all families have them to one extent or another. Also referred to as “unwritten rules”, these contracts vary in strength and enforcement depending on the family. My family’s is quite rigid, strictly enforced, with consequences for those who dare attempt to break it!
Some families are comprised of powerful and talented individuals with huge potential, both realized and latent, but unfortunately that power is often tied up in or bled off by strictured, structured energies that do not allow the co-existence of free choice and a flow of love without strings attached. Much love, personal power and latent greatness is tied up in The Contract itself instead of being manifest in the lives of individuals within the family.
Everybody in a family can feel or describe the presence of The Contract if they tune into it. The individuals within families are obviously all very closely connected psychically as well as physically / genetically, whether there is conscious awareness and acknowledgment of it or not.
Roles in families are played out, unconsciously but inexorably perpetuating The Contract. Some examples of tenets within family contracts are: an unspoken agreement among members of the family to study and work hard, get ahead by finding and keeping an upwardly mobile but traditional job in a company or similar hierarchical organization, save for retirement, become as wealthy as possible, turn the bulk of energy and attention back into the family, sacrifice any personal dreams while having kids who, although allowed to have fun and playtime growing up, must never break the family mold once they become of age, including paying back the family for the sacrifices the family made for them. Self-sacrifice is a hallmark of the classic family contract. Many family contracts call for the current parenting generation to sacrifice for the next generation.
There is usually an “executor” member of the family, a patriarch or matriarch, who models the tenets of The Contract while enforcing their necessity with a heavy hand upon others, either children or siblings. To balance the executor there must be one or more “black sheep” across the generations, the rebel, the iconoclast who attempts to break free of The Contract.
Within the family contract paradigm there are also “law-abiders” who don’t necessarily prosper under or enjoy the rules, but believe they have no choice. The law abiders stay within the bounds of The Contract and make the best of them. Often in this subgroup there is significant unprocessed rage and hurt about their own childhood interaction with and shutdown at the hands of their own version of the family contract. The Contract is subjective to some degree and does morph and shift through and among the generations, as each new family branch gets brought into the psychic mix through marriage or other conjugal arrangement. In order to prevent that old emotion being stirred too close to the surface, the law abiders participate in backing the executor in enforcing the shutdown energy inherent in The Contract, outwardly mirroring the inner shutdown of the individuals involved.
There could also be a fourth subgroup, former “bad kids” who make a few inroads toward breaking The Contract. After some setbacks and consequences directly or indirectly meted out by the executor or law abiders, the “bad kids” fall eventually back into line, neither supporting outright rebellion nor adherence. In some cases this group will deny the existence of The Contract.
The success or failure of the rebel is in direct proportion to the amount of personal power she has relative to the family and the executor. Depending on the executor’s relationship with the rebel and each’s ability to shift and change, at some point the executor must ask himself which is more important, The Contract and its unwritten rules and codes of behaviour or the free will of the rebel and his love for the rebel.
On the other end of the polarity, the rebel must ask herself a similar question: which is more important, my free will or my love for the family? She must be willing to risk this love in order to remain true to herself and her heart’s desire which allows her to break free of the bounds of The Contract.
The Contract needs to be acknowledged, experienced and felt, and finally seen for what it is in order for evolution to occur at all levels of family, such as spiritual families, blood, emotional, and ethnic families and so on. Loving family bonds were never intended to become rules of enforced behavior that hinder a given individual’s free will to choose and act according to how that individual sees fit, with loss of love the price to pay for being true to oneself. A free will action ideally harms none while giving safe triggers. If the rebel makes a free will choice that challenges her family contract, growth and evolution, possibly including some form of death is inevitable.
Most executors have not evolved, for better or for worse, and have gotten stuck in frozen images of “what’s right”. Nobody is unbeholden to their own family contract, whether internal or externally evident. It’s not everyone’s path to rip up The Contract, and there will be a place for “law abiders” in families unless and until a more healed version of this picture emerges.
As rebels break away from The Contract, some executors attempt to artificially create a balance by cutting the rebel out of their heart. When conscious healing has not been involved, the consequence of breaking the family contract has always been, at the very least, a loss of love and estrangement of the rebel from the family. That loss is felt on many sides depending on how many members were intrinsically involved in enforcement or disobedience. The rebel and the executor are sure to be involved in this agreggate love loss.
Law abiders in a family, if they are in contact with the rebel, will often tell her that the executor loves her deep down. Yet that love is no longer accessible to his conscious self. It is denied love, which could be called hate. When the love for his seeming polar opposite within the family is no longer accessible to the executor’s or rebel’s conscious heart and mind, it can indeed morph into hatred. Those executors and rebels who have not deeply explored their emotions on the subject have “gapped away” from the original love for the other that once existed.
When the executor of the family contract excises the rebel from his heart for breaking The Contract, or when the rebel in turn excises the executor, they literally shove the love out of themselves. The love may exist, but out in the dark somewhere, unacknowledged, unowned and unfelt.
A successful rebel voids all contracts, psychic and unspoken, both family and societal ones that enforce compliance or remove love or privileges, and draws in a new family, one that accepts her for who she is and acknowledges her as an evolving, changing being. To get to this point and not recreate the original family scenario complete with acrimony and loss of love, she must feel the feelings and release the judgments that caused her to become originally ensnared in a contract which bound her freedom so tightly.
According to The Contract, the rebel needs to pay back to the executor and/or the family the time and energy that was originally sacrificed “for the children”. When the rebel reneges on her side of that dark, unspoken bargain, the consequences kick in. This pattern continues until The Contract is completely expunged from the rebel’s life. This is done through exploring the depths of the old feelings and releasing the old charge all the way to the bottom of the psyche, to the point where the earliest familial imprints and judgments of how reality is supposed to be at home are changed not only consciously but subconsciously. You will know when subconscious transformation has occurred in this area only when enough time passes in the new family and evolution and joy are on a steady, upward track with no major reversals and loss of love and trust.
Along the way to this full healing, the former rebel can re-establish herself in a new and improved family situation that in some fundamental way “replaces” the original family, unless the original family is also moved to stop following The Contract.
Sometimes our rebel will feel the pull of The Contract, saying “come along now, you must do what’s right”. It can manifest as a feeling of hopelessness and inner powerlessness to resist, sometimes with overwhelming guilt. These feelings have the power to colour her whole day with shades of torpor and dullness, lack of desire to live…”what’s the use”, etc.
Core judgments swim up to the surface of the rebel’s consciousness, and as she releases them, she can feel energetic forms like spiky eggshells cracking off, and pockets of old emotional charge rising to the surface beneath them which she can then vibrate by allowing the sounds they want to make.
There is hell to pay for reneging on The Contract, and the rebel must heal the parts of herself still beholden to that hell. As she processes old feelings and faces her original judgments about how family life just ‘is’, she is in effect ripping and re-ripping up The Contract until it loses the power to control her actions or her life.
In the climactic scene of that “Lost In Space” episode, the barterer from hell shows up to claim his side of the bargain. He holds up The Contract facing Dr. Smith, the hand imprint glowing, and as Smith walks helplessly with his arm and hand outstretched towards the image of his hand imprinted in that contract, John Robinson, our hero, appears on the scene. He blasts The Contract into space dust right out of the trader’s hand with his trusty laser.
Would that it were so easy outside the realms of fiction! Our laser has to take the form of releasing judgments aloud, feeling the feelings that come up when we release those judgments. This allows understanding to seep in and old rejected parts of self to return and fill us in the places where the darkness of ignorance and self-denial had been.
On the macrocosmic level, oppressive governments reflect the unmoving rage inherent in The Contract. It appears to be happening today in the United States, Britain, in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, in Israel and Palestine, and everywhere that there is unrest, a civil rights cutback or civil disobedience. Massive societal change could be precipitated by an overt rendering and popular acknowledgment of the hidden “human family” contract.
Life, and Creation, is holographic. From within the dimension of time and its sequential nature, we humans act out Father’s and Mother’s and Child’s ancient, time before time patterns, until they heal in everybody.
We in our families act out the pattern of Our First Parents, as it has passed down the Family Tree to us. The executor of The Contract is the force of that denied rage, playing the role of the entrenched, angry, wrathful First Testament God that must be appeased, or destruction of everything might just happen. All must live according to His rules and mandates and woe to them that stir the mighty wrath of God by “breaking the law”. So goes The Family Contract, an energy certainly felt by the sensitive.