Acknowledgement

Let's say you have an initial recognition of a belief or behavior. We have already noted that a single recognition, while a step in the right direction, should hardly be mistaken for a transformation. In the example from yesterday, we have a person in the habit of putting down a loved one, seemingly in jest. Upon reflection, this person says, well, sure I said something mean, but I was only kidding--so and so is too sensitive. Here, the movement towards responsibility is initiated with the recognition that the comment was hurtful, but that movement is quickly cut short with an excuse--I was only kidding--and a shifting of blame (demonstrating a victim mentality) from self to other--"since it's not my fault, it must be her fault." Someone is always to blame in the victim consciousness.

On this scenario, what this beginner in the practice of introspection failed to do is to acknowledge what he recognized. He recognized a behavior, in this instance making the put-down type comment, but dismissed it. The step which must follow upon recognition is acknowledgement. In this instance, an acknowledgement could have manifested as a simple mental nod to the event: ok, that happened that way--as opposed to slathering it with spin and fighting over who gets to play the victim. It may take a few recognitions of the pattern before an acknowledgement is forthcoming. It may come after the first recognition. Or, it might take many repetitions of recognition and dismissal, that is, starting and stalling, before the beginner at introspection both recognizes and acknowledges the behavior. It all depends on where the person is in their life, their level of commitment to the process of growth, and the strength and rootedness of the particular pattern.

People sometimes become discouraged when, even after recognizing a behavior once or twice, they still find themselves doing it. Or folks become impatient with a loved one who, while beginining to recognize their role in the events of the relationship, keep repeating a behavior. Well, habits are patterns of action deeply rooted in repetition. To begin transforming yourself, allow yourself (or your loved one) some time/space to recognize the pattern over and over again, and to come into the practice of acknowledging the pattern over and over again. Many also get an immediate intellectual grasp on what I'm talking about here, and stop their progress immediately! That's because an intellectual grasp of what it means to recognize and acknowledge some pattern isn't worth a hill of beans if it is not accompanied by some sort of emotional connection to it is well. You need to recognize something in your gut, and not just in your head. Otherwise, progress is stopped by failing to integrate the process as an increasingly whole person. One level (the intellectual) does not make for a whole person!

In fact, quite a few different sorts of problems manifest when a person learns a bunch of stuff like this at a head level, without connecting to it more deeply from an emotional place as well, or integrating it even physically. Such a one begins to assemble a sort of ideal presentation of himself based on the knowledge, and may believe himself a real master. Ultimately his behavior will betray him, but often not without fooling a few and hurting some more along the way. Flee from anyone calling themselves the master! Any one involved in the process of self mastery for a while knows that it's pretty much always too early to call oneself a master, though it's always safe to identify oneself as a fellow student of life, perhaps more engaged in some subject matter or further along in a particular course of study than another, and therefore ready to help others who want to learn as well

Acknowledgement, can of course go deeper than a mere nod of the the "inner" head in introspection. It can even well up within your heart as gratitude. Gratitude, that is, for finally recognizing your pattern of behavior or false belief. Thank goodness, I've finally spotted what's going on! This is certainly a step beyond a mere wispy intellectual acknowledgement, though we'll take just about anything for starters! We needn't shame ourselves for the fleetingness of our intial recognitions or the timidity of our first acknowledgement. But someday you might surprise yourself when you actually break out in a smile at yourself in introspection or conversation with a friend or group when upon recognizing a behavior once again, you experience it as if you were a parent watching with some reserved (or unreserved) amusement as the child makes for the cookie jar once again as if no one were looking. :-)

Recognition

It's pretty hard to change a behavior or life experience when you don't even recognize you are doing the behavior or have a part in creating the life experience. Under those conditions, you are liable to believe that stuff is just happening to you, and you are going along for the ride, like it or not. That is to say, you are playing out a victim role. Remember, the victim not only doesn't recognize h/ir role in a situation, s/he actually refuses to recognize it at some level, in principle.

Take some little annoying habit, like biting your nails. You might not even know you do it until someone points it out to you. If you want to stop, you'll have to recognize yourself in the pattern as well. If you never notice yourself biting your nails, you will in all likelihood keep on chewin'. Or how about something bigger. Say you have the pattern of tossing out hurtful comments to someone you are in a position to love (a friend, spouse, child, parent, co-worker). You don't even notice you do it, and you percieve that person as "hyper-sensitive" because they are forever going into a snit over things you "only meant as a joke." When we commit to self mastery and service as a path and passion, we will want to start recognizing the behaviors in our lives which are generating distance in our relationships, or which consistently induce painful experiences otherwise, for ourselves or for others. Some things are easier to recognize than others, and recognition does not represent healing of the issue. It rather represents a starting point for transforming a particular pattern.

Introspection is when we allow events and experiences to pass through our minds, or when we bring them up in conversation with a friend, in order to study them and grow from the process. When we practice introspection, we give ourselves the chance to recognize patterns that are part of our day to day experience. Before beginning the practice of introspection, we may have taken our experiences for granted, assuming "that's just the way things are." Having committed to the practice, all of our experiences are open for consideration as lesson books written by us which teach us about the story we are lately telling about ourself. When we read those lessons, we will often find stories that repeat over and over again, and they are often painful stories. It's quite a different thing to say "Why does This always happen to me?" from the victim consciousness, and to actually begin to recognize the exact circumstances and conditions under which I generate This, in the pursuit of self mastery.

It's not only behaviors, but false beliefs as well, that need to be recognized through introspection. False beliefs generate all sorts of misery. Say I believe that I should pretend I'm something I'm not, because if I act the way I really am, no one will love me. That one popular false belief has ruined more lives than most, sadly. It has created our world of masked people. That's grist for several other posts. For now, let's just say that when we practice introspection, all of our beliefs and experiences are lessons we may learn from. So as not to overwhelm, it's usually best to start with just one experience, type of experience, or belief at a time.

Returning to the example above, say that, given the momentum generated by your commitment to self mastery and service, you look back over your day and you recall someone saying to you, "When you say such and such to me, I feel XYZ." This was something someone said in the past, but you always blew it off, since "they are so hypersensitive." You slow down and think about what you said. You may flash for a moment on the notion that "gosh, what I said was sort of mean." You may promptly excuse yourself for it and justify it as a joke, or you may think, "maybe I might phrase that differently next time, since they didn't think my joke was funny." How you react to your own recognition will likely change over time, as you become practiced in the process. In any event, upon this intial recognition you may build additional recognitions of the same pattern, until you habitually recognize yourself to be playing this pattern out. Recognition is rarely if ever accomplished in a singular flash of insight, but arises from practice and the desire to get to the roots of your life experience.

Introspection and the five step process

Way back in one of the first few posts, while talking about introspection, I mentioned a five step process that I had learned during my years at the healing school. Introspection is actually a word I learned studying the teachings of Stylianos Ateshlis, popularly known as Daskalos, a healer from Cyprus whom I greatly admire (he has since died to that form, but the potency of his teaching far outpace the memory of his body).

By bringing together the idea of introspection and the five step process, we have a terrific tool in the toolkit for the work of self mastery. Having just talked about the difference between taking responsibility and feeling guilty in the last post, it's time to elaborate more on introspection, which is necessary to add depth and purpose to the idea of responsibility. The five steps I had mentioned were recognition, acknowledgement, acceptance, choice, and action. We can talk about these in detail over the next several posts, but for now, I've got to stop for the night and nurse a fever. (Been nursing the kids for the last week, now it's my turn!) So if I pause for a few days here, come back soon! I will be writing again ASAP. Thanks for reading along, anyone out there!

Objection 2: "Guilt is a good thing!"

Another objection to my intent to undermine the culture and consciousness of the victim is the conviction that guilt is really a "good thing." It would go something like this: "Gil, you can go off all you want about victim consciousness, but the fact of the matter is that guilt is an important function of the conscience! We'd be in big trouble if it weren't for guilt! When a person does something wrong, they darn well better feel guilty! Unless people feel guilty about something, they'll go and do it again." Actually, I believe it's more important for a person to feel responsible for their behavior than to feel guilty for it. Guilt is the emotion of the person who has not yet taken responsibility for their action. It is different than contrition. Contrition is when you feel sorry for the impact of choices and actions for which you know yourself to be responsible. When a person feels contrition, the desire to make amends soon follows. Making amends is when you attempt to consciously right the imbalance you recognize to have been generated by your actions. For the responsible self, it is not enough to just feel contrition. The satisfying part of personal growth comes when you consciously choose and act in a manner that moves things in a positive direction. If you are in the habit of lying, and you feel guilty for it, chances are that you will continue with your lying. You will be a guilty liar. If you are in the habit of lying, and you feel neither guilt nor responsibility for it, chances are you will also continue with your lying. You will be a brazen liar. Either way, you are in the habit of lying and generating the consequent effects. Guilt is merely the fear of exposure. You know yourself to be in the wrong, but you continue to act in the same way, afraid you will be found out.

If you took responsibility for your actions, you would study the ill effects of your behavior, study how your choices amount to causes which generate effects. If the effects you have caused have hurt someone, a certain sorrow is appropriate, proportionate to the effect. If you impulsively cut someone down verbally, a pang of regret is a good sign, and you can apologize: sincere apology is a form of amends for a small thing: it consititutes the opposite kind of energy to the original slight. If you react all out of proportion to something someone says, because it touched some deeper issue which long pre-existed the triggering comment, and based on that history you "go off" on that person, and make them bear the brunt of past resentments, that might deserve a brief explanation and an apology (as soon as you figure out what happened). Taking responsibility in that case would require observing your reactions enough to notice that a) you were triggered; b) you hold a lot of charge around the issue; c) taking it out on the person who triggered you is like shooting the messenger; d) you need to do some more study around the issue; e) the person who triggered you deserves a thank you for exposing yourself to yourself more than a tongue lashing for happening to have held up a mirror to you; f) having raised your consciousness around the issue your ability in the future to recognize what is going on in the moment will be improved, and you are less likely to "take it out" on some random comment maker; g) you can apologize to that person and say simply, gosh, looking back on my reaction to what I heard you say, I realize it touched some issues I'm needing to look at more closely. I'm sorry I almost bit your head off. Now I am more aware of what was going on for me. I intend to work on diminishing the charge that surrounds the issue for me. Imagine a world where we all operated this way!

Let's say you kill someone on purpose. Now we're into some really heavy stuff. Is guilt appropriate here? In my book, again, guilt will get you nowhere, even in such a worst case scenario. It postpones responsibility, and gets in the way of true grieving. Killing another person is sufficient cause for great sorrow, whether by accident or on purpose: there is a lot of grief to work through there. As my ethics professor in Chicago was keen to point out, even if you are fighting a so called "just war," you are going to feel the devastating impact of taking another human life when it happens, and need to deal with it. Taking responsibility here will involve some detailed analysis of the events leading up to such an act. Your actions will require more than an apology here, as a mere apology is insufficient to balance out such an act. This does not mean you can never move beyond the event either, simply because of its immensity. There may be no one to apologize to, or there may be. Either way, the source of all deserves an apology, for acting contrary to the most basic tenets of life. The amends should be proportionate to the act, and contrary to the act. To make up for taking life, one must consciously enter the process of serving and supporting life. This will generate healing over time. It doesn't mean the family members of someone you murdered will necessarily form a good opinion of you. This is not the goal. They have to take reponsibility for their own grief, anger and loss, relative to their life experience. The basic structure of taking responsibility on your part, however, is the same whether you cut someone off on the highway or cut someone down on the battlefield: responsibility, contrition and amends. If the path of guilt is followed, you will instead constantly be trying (and failing) to justify your actions rather than take responsibility for them. To the extent that you convince yourself that your actions were justified, or deny to yourself that in fact your actions caused the event, you will postpone the actual healing process and continue to feel guilty, and you will endure over time the debilitating effects of that pernicious false emotion on your health and life experience. When you feel guilt, you have reduced yourself to playing the role of victim to circumstances, and you are destined to repeat your behavior under similar circumstances. When you cling to guilt and wallow in it, you pander to the lower-self tendency to self-flagellate (when it's not proclaiming its innocence), and so merely postone responsibility. Such a person may even go to confession but doesn't actually feel "absolved" afterwards. When you assume responsibility, you study those very same circumstances in order to establish how you might master yourself in them next time around.

Science and fundamentalism

Now I could certainly elaborate beyond this basic claim that I am here by choice, and therefore cannot in principle be a victim. So far I haven't even introduced any ideas beyond the basic necessities to support the perception. I could elaborate with ideas regarding re-incarnation as taught for centuries in the early christian community, though almost purged from the canonical scriptures. But it is not necessary. After all, lots of people who believe in re-incarnation are steeped in the victim consciousness, so it's not necessary to go there to point out the baseness of the consciousness of the victim and all that it entails, or to counterargue my point. For now, if you'll accept that our existence is willed by the source of all, then none of us are victims, since in our "becoming" we were united with that divine will, and so participated in our choice to be here.

For those who are committed to the notion that our existence amounts to an anonymous accident of lightning and primordial soup, the trippingly ridiculous endpoint of some bizzarre counterentropic stumblings and survival of the fittest, well, I've got news for you! That is a mathmatically indefensible and utterly irrational pile of denial, which in itself amounts to little more than an atheistic version of the "gospel of victimhood!" Modern "evolutionary theory," (think Darwin and his successors) have succeeded only in formulating a set of pseudo-scientific justifications for the basest concept of the moral life, "might makes right, and continued physical existence is paramount," and the embedding of the victim consciousness into its very reading of the DNA transcript, so much so that folks perceive themselves victims of their own genetic endowment. Well, I'm here to tell you that, without falling for the mind-suspending foolishness of christian fundamentalist "creation theory" and it's demand that we believe the world to be 5xxx years old, there is another alternative to the atheistic victim consciousness and moral vacuity of the equally foolish religion of modern science. The alternative is the path of self mastery and service, a path cultivated in the heart of all spiritual traditions. Heck, I don't make this stuff up. I'm just trying to follow scripts for living the truth and cultivating consciousness laid out all over this planet by ages of sages.

Both this "science" and this "fundamentalism" owe their popularity to the deferal of responsibility outside of oneself, and their collusion with the victim consciousness. Fundamentalist christianity offers in its interpretation of the story of Jesus a savior who, for the price of a simple confession of faith, will include you too in the ultimate life insurance policy paid with the premium of "the blood of the lamb." It doesn't matter what you've done, just confess Jesus as your lord and savior and you'll get into heaven on his dime. At face value, this looks like a get out of jail free card, and a suspension of the basic law of cause and effect structured by the creator into the universe in the first place. If you recognize your guilt, and that you can't pay your debt, well, you've got a friend in Jesus! He's posted bail for you, and spoken with the judge to boot! While I'm the last one to hold a person in the bondage of guilt, and while I'm all for finding a friend in Jesus, I don't much see why a real friend, rather than help you cultivate mastery over your free will through his example and teaching, would instead suspend the structure of the univese he created for you so that you couldn't learn from the impact of your action. The "fires of hell" are nothing more than the purifying effects of experience based upon our prior actions. There's no teacher like the present moment. Gosh, I'm actually feeling a bit flush here :-)

In the victim consciousness of christian fundamentalism, your guilt/responsibility (remember, in this model, guilt/blame/and responsibility are identical) is borne by another, who can handle it better, we are told. You in fact never have to experience the consequences of your action, the effects which you caused. For those who see responsibility as a negative concept and an impossible demand, it certainly must come as a relief to believe you are "washed clean by the blood of the lamb" and all that. However, there isn't much of a premium on learning from your mistakes. Heck, the Emporer Constantine, sponsor of the "political conversion," strategized based on this kind of logic to time his "conversion" to his death bed to maximize his opportunity to unleash hell upon the planet without consequence, squeezing in evil to the last minute with the certainty of forgiveness in the bank. So much for responsibility. I'm not in the least suggesting that all fundamentalist christians strategize in the manner of a Constantine. Actually, quite the opposite, they are more generally in constant suffering from the incongrous internal misery of being told they are forgiven all the time, yet still feeling guilty. They suffer from the strain of believing they should feel happy and grateful for the prize of their salvation, when in fact they don't feel all that happy, actually, and remain in the mire of their personality distortions, which represent the still outstanding tasks on the path of self-mastery. However, there is not a huge impetus to get to the bottom of one's defense strategies, egoism, etc., if one is already "saved." Basically, all you need to do in that case is cling fast to that initial confession, invite others to make the same in a sort of multi-level marketing dragnet for souls, and everything is going to be all right. However, the persistent guilt feelings are the inevitable consequence of placing responsibility for one's life experience outside of oneself, so that every mistake one makes is another weight tossed upon the cross of the beloved Christ, who gets stuck in this formula bearing it all. No wonder most christians feel guilty. How could you not feel guilty when you are basically not allowed to be responsible for your action, and your every mistake is another lash of the whip borne by the silent suffering victim savior Jesus? I encourage all those who are suffering under this torment of guilt to recognize the false belief of victim consciousness embedded in the formulas of this kind of "faith," and to take courage in the fact that Christ can indeed lead you out of your bondage, not by shouldering your responsibility, but by handing it to you, so that you can be truly free from guilt, and placed on the path of mastery with Christ as your example: follow me, he said, for my burden is easy and my cross is light.

As for those who abide by the tenets of establishment atheistic scientism and it's version of the victim consciousness, there is hope for you as well! As surely as one need not read the story of Christ in scripture as the story of a victim, one need not read in the genetic transcripts the story of a victim either. I can transcend my initial embryonic protein signatures. My every expression of will at an emotive, intellectual and spiritual level which occurs while I am in form places a demand upon my genetic material to unfold and generate the complementary signatures. The free will leads the unfolding. While there is definite containment of expression within a particular form (I am unlikely to will myself to be a foot taller or to change my features from african to anglo, or vice versa, exceptions to M. Jackson), the room for play relative to a given endowment is considerable. The question of "nature or nurture" is really one of victim or responsible self. The responsible self takes hi/r natural endowment by the reins, and leads it where s/he wants to go! We not only need not, but we must not act according to the implied moral formulas of Darwin (might makes right, and spreading one's genes as the ultimate value) if we are to truly evolve on this planet. True evolution is a movement towards spiritual union effected by the free will trained up by a model of consciousness which advances the species through mutual service, rather than survivalism. We need not indulge our basest fears and desires to evolve. Quite the opposite. We must transcend our basest fears and desires to evolve.

I chose to be here

So in the last post I took on the objection that "victims are everywhere" from a christian worldview. Now admittedly, one might say that my point of view isn't exactly orthodox, given that most christians today are utterly steeped in the mentality of victim consciousness. While this may be true, I have tried to offer a critique of the victim consciousness with language that a christian person might understand, as an invitation to move past what I would consider to be a highly distorted set of perceptions, which are far from the teachings of Christ recorded in the gospels. The basic shift is to see Jesus not as a victim, but as a master, and then to see those others in our world so commonly classed as victims instead as temples of the spirit in whom the living Christ dwells, masters in disguise and forgetting. In our service to these annointed ones, our proper identification of their light enables that light to shine more brightly, so that our various ministries might help people step more boldly into themselves and their gifts. Rather than colluding with "victims" by "saving" them, we discover masters all around us and seek to master ourselves through our service to them.

My reply to the objection that "victims are everywhere" need not remain limited to commonly recognized tenets of establishment christianity. My belief system is actually a bit broader than that. So for those reading along who can deal with christian stuff, but don't want to go past it, this next section may be more challenging. For those whose worldviews are not based on canonical christian scriptures exclusively, or at all, this may be the part you were waiting to hear. Either way, I'll repeat that none of this should be taken on my word, but tried on, to see what kind of new experiences you may create for yourselves. Ideas are important for forming experience, but they should never be considered sufficient to replace experience or the knowledge that flows from studying the cause and effect structures of your own experiences.

It may be much easier for me to move beyond the victim consciousness because I believe that my own consciousness preceded my coming-in-to-form as the person known as Gil :-) If I am conjured from the mind of the source of all--and I believe that I am--("the source of all" being my lately favorite means of referring to the much abused "God"), then "who I am" in truth pre-existed before this "form-named-Gil" was formed. Inherent in the extension of the divine light into this form-named-Gil is the divine purpose. The divine "will-pleasure" is expressed in my being here.

My being here is neither an accident nor an accumulation of accidents and prodigious "natural" selection. My being here is a choice, and expresses an intent and purpose, and that choice and purpose come with a divine seal of approval from the source of all, apart from whose blessing I would not exist, as Gil, or otherwise. (The same reasoning, of course, I apply to all of us, and you may apply to yourselves who join in this thought experiment.) Who I am and my purpose in being here are rooted in the free expression of the divine "will-pleasure," and at point of origin, my will and the divine will are one. I can, in fact, only exist as a function of that very real "agreement" of the divine will and who-I-am as Gil. I am here neither as a punishment, nor by accident, but by choice and agreement and contract. My very form is a gift granted to fulfill the terms of the agreement to maximum potential. This is true whether I live to be 102 or am aborted in the womb. It is true whether I stick my talents under a rock for the duration of my life or I utterly fulfill the potential inherent in my gifts. It is true whether I distort my self perception or clarify it. It is true whether I choose the path of a monster or a saint. It is true whether I murder or am slain. It is true whether I choose to believe myself or another to be a victim. It is true if I develop in the consciousness of self mastery and apply myself to service with all my heart. Every human life represents an agreement to a form (body) of divine design, and a set of circumstances in which to explore the lessons of life. Our being here represents a choice made from our union with the divine "will-pleasure." When our will remains united with the will of the source of all, the "mysteries" of the twists and turns of our life pathways are revealed. When in our forgetting we allow ourselves to be seduced by the will of the "lower self," or march about presenting ourselves through some idealized mask-self, the splitting off of our self from ourself leaves us seeing the world from a victims eye, where everything is "happening to us," and our struggle in bondage ensues. When I remember that I chose to be here, my lame claim to victimhood evaporates, and I am free to develop in self mastery and service.

Objection #1, continued

Let's sum this up here. I have outlined the victim consciousness and essentially called the very concept of the victim a false belief and misperception, and I have acknowledged that this may not sit too pretty relative to the common belief in our culture that victims are everywhere to be seen, starring on the nightly news, daily paper, etc. For those of a christian orientation who might be reading this, let me speak on this topic from that perspective, and afterwards I'll approach it from a more esoteric perspective for those who can hear it.

Happily, this was actually this morning's snuggle-time conversation with the whole family at the Hedley household. Anyone who has read the gospels will pick up on the themes of service and the extension of the concept of the neighbor to all. My daughter was asking this morning: What is a Samaritan? We talked about how someone may call themselves a christian, yet not act upon the teachings of Christ, and someone else might not ever get around to identifiying themselves as a christian, and may fulfill Christ's teachings through their action, by doing the will of heaven. What you do for the least of my brothers, that you do unto me. The neighbor is an icon of Christ. Love the lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. Many may call out "Lord, Lord," but shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. That's because the kingdom of heaven is a direct experience of the will of the source of all acting within oneself. The kingdom of heaven is within you, waiting for you to experience it, and express it. The kingdom of heaven is no fortress "over there" with a moat, hiding an old bearded tyrant who's content to open the door to a perpetual party or shut out for eternal misery his own children based upon their mouthing of sycophantic platitudes at some point during their physical lives. Christ spoke, when you fed the hungry, comforted the sorrowing, visited the imprisoned, clothed the naked, that you did to me. The implication of this is decidedly NOT that those experiencing misery on this planet are victims modeled after the "greatest victim of all." Rather, the implication is that every person on this planet, every neighbor, every Samaritan, Palestinian or Jew, every Armenian or Turk, every disenfranchised, disabled, dissed in general person, every rich, conniving real estate tycoon (you're fired!), every Tutsi and Hutu, every grandchild of a "white" european and every grandchild of a bought and sold slave, every single blessed one of us represents a temple of the source of all, a flame of the holy spirit, an expression of the consciousness of Christ-in-form, perhaps distorted, but nonetheless a beloved child of the "divine will-pleasure."

Christ was not a victim but a master. He chose his path. It was not forced upon him. When the soldiers came to take him away, and Jesus stepped forward towards the soldiers, John reports that they literally fell over. How's that for a commanding presence? Doesn't sound like a victim to me. This bit about Jesus being a lamb led to slaughter is off the mark, to be kind. His "spotlessness" was not some sort of meat grade, nor was it a function of his "innocence," but rather it is a function of his perfect identity with the will of the heavenly father. Through introspection we can polish the inner mirror to the point where we will no longer mistake ourselves as victims of our life experience, either. Jesus did not defend his innnocence. The truth requires no defense. A person in truth need not justify themselves before those who are in error. If the body is shed in the process, oh well: it is a gift, but not the ultimate value. The spirit blows where it will. And as the story of his suffering is told, from within the constricting circle of possibilities leading up to his death, he continued to express himself as the masterful servant, acknowledging the state of ignorance of his tormenters: "they know not what they are doing"--and pardons them. See the truth here! Victims do not pardon perpetrators, but masters serve their neighbors, and true servants percieve in those whom they serve not victims, but masters in disguise, masters in forgetting, the divine swirl of truth resident in flesh, regardless of disguise as sufferer or tormentor, or knight in shining armour.

Especially when we reach out to those in need, our ability to perceive the divine light within them and the source of all shining through them will absolutely serve to enkindle that light, magnify it, place it on a lampstand to light the whole room. When instead we see someone suffering as a victim, we become dis-ablers, placing their light under a bushel basket, and we become judges condemning the christ-in-them by false trial.

If it sounds like I'm piling a whole lot onto the idea of the victim, well, I'd say that is because it is indeed an incredibly loaded concept, that the load is a wicked burden, and that the concept stands at the crux of the moral problems of our day. Our politics, religion, medical culture, and society in general is thoroughly invested in victimhood, and the payout of this investment is the near universal rejection of self responsibility, regardless of whatever lip-service it may be paid. The concept of self responsibility as a function of self mastery must arise at the expense of the victim consciousness and all of its choking tentacles. Clinging to the mentality of the victim and championing the roles of its sordid drama, these are the machinations of our lower self wallowing in self pity, self righteousness, and the negative pleasures of judging others. The christian who would truly be of service rejects the portrayal of Jesus as a victim, and embraces him as the master who came to serve to his very last breath. Such a christian follows Christ not by mimicking his suffering and identifying with his "victimhood," but by identifying and proclaiming his real living presence in every neighbor, friend or foe, gentile or jew, servant or free, woman or man, so that all may recognize the kingdom of heaven where it lay, on earth, now.

Objection #1: "But victims are everywhere!"

Now it's easy enough to get a bit itchy here when someone (me) starts pecking away in a critical manner regarding some of the most cherished beliefs in our culture, a culture which I feel is startlingly well characterized by the victim consciousness. Consider it all a thought exercise for now. I am willing to wait for your unswaying conviction, which needs to arise from the application of the methods of self mastery in your life and experience, as opposed to just hearing it from me. Let's deal in turn with some objections to my characterization of the victim consciousness as the bottom of the barrel of distorted beliefs.

"But Gil! You seem to imply that there really ARE NO VICTIMS! How utterly preposterous! Just look around you, bub! Victims are everywhere! Innocents are shot in rampages, helpless Terry Shiavo (who if anyone look for two minutes beneath the media spin can be seen laughing at her dad's teasing on the internet (http://www.rense.com/ --scroll down a little bit to link to video clips of Terri--she is quite animate, and aware) is being starved to death in a despicable public execution in slow motion, and everyday, monsters commit heinous and unspeakable crimes, not to mention more day to day, run of the mill victimization. And you have the audacity to claim there are no victims? You've gone off the deep end here! What about abused babies, or sick children? And what about Jesus! He was the greatest victim of all, because he was undoubtedly innocent, in principle, because he is literally the standard of innocence. You at least have to admit that even if everyone else "deserves" to suffer because of their "sins," at least Jesus didn't. So get off this "no victims" kick, before we stop reading this wacky crapola!"

I admit at first glance, it seems a bit crazy to pull the rug out from under a way of being in the world so commonplace and time-honored as that of the victim, but that's what I aim to do, nonethless. That's because the moment we align ourselves with the belief that someone is a victim (ourselves, or another), we leave the path of self mastery and descend into the morass of the thick illusion that we buy into as the "reality" of this planet. When we believe in victims, we take up the mantle of judgement, and transgress the injunction to "judge not." We search for perpetrators and saviors. When we believe in victims, we mistake a role being played by a soul for who that soul really is. When we believe in victims, we indulge in morose emotionality at the expense of focused intentionality. When we view someone as a victim, we sorely underestimate both the power of that creation and the power of the source of all in action: we generate the "problem" of "why bad things happen to good people." The belief in the notion of the victim, I am convinced, has never helped anyone to overcome a difficulty in the most straighforward manner possible. It only helps in the way that banging your head against the wall can eventually convince someone to stop banging hi/r head against the wall!

Because this is such an important objection, and it's more than I can write through in one post, I will continue tommorrow!

Victims, saviors, and perpetrators

Following up on the last post, I'll touch here on something I devote a chapter to in Reconceiving My Body. (That's a fairly fun read--follow the link under Links on the right of this page, and you can read some of it at the store there.) The drama of the victim is formula fiction at it's best, and always requires certain characters. The victim, who in h/ir innocence is fallen upon by tragic circumstance, ill health, or apparent crime, is the main character. While people who play the victim do not generate any consciousness of options or choice, as they do not align themselves with the free will, they do usually generate a steady stream of saviors. Saviors play their role in the victim drama by coming to the rescue of the victim, and colluding with them in their perceptions regarding their helplessness and innocence. Politicians particularly love this role, as they generate voting blocks out of various victim-constituencies whom they promise to save/help if elected. The savior, while masquerading as a servant of the victim, is actually not helping them to the degree that they unconsciously collude in the victim's self perception of helplessness and innocence. To the extent that we are blind to the ways in which we design our life experience with choices past and present, to that extent is our path to maturity, self mastery, and true service limited. Completing the cast in the victim drama is the perpetrator, also known as the villian. The perpetrator need not be another individual, although it can be. For that matter, the savior needn't be a person either--we often project the role onto a pill, job, training, vacation, desired object in a catalogue, new house, or what-have-you. When I get such and such, then I will be happy, goes the mantra, certain to be repeated as soon as the empty feeling of getting that something sinks in enough to trigger the next fantasy resolution. So also the role of perpetrator, though a person or class of people may fill the bill suitably, can also be played by a disease process, germ, virus, accident, or even one's own body projected as other. Sometimes the perpetrator role is projected on to a leader, nation or race, which when sufficiently demonized can be made to bear virtually all ills and identified as the cause of all misfortune. Often times, victims will demote saviors to perpetrators. When a person with victim consciousness places someone whom they perceive in the saviour role on a pedestal (whether that person wants to be there or not), and then that savior (inevitably) fails to meet the impossible demands of their role, they are torn from that pedestal by the same one who put them their, and they are blamed for their fall. Someone steeped in victim consciousness who sticks with the role of the victim can run through quite a few saviors in search of someone who can survive the acid test of perfection AND solve the victim's problems to boot. So not everyone who lives by the tenets of the victim consciousness spends all their time in the role of the victim. We have all transitioned through each of these rolls as part of the great passion play of victim consciousness, sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes in the roll of victim, sometimes picking up the part of the saviour, and sometimes as the perpetrator.

Modeling victim consciousness

We have already made our "triangle model" for the consciousness of self mastery: freedom, choice, responsibility at each point, with self mastery at the center. Today's post begins to explore a "counter-model" to this, also a triangle, but filled in differently this time: innocence, tyranny, and blame occupy the points of the triangle instead, with victimhood at the center. It's really kind of a sad triangle, this one, but we need to have a good look at it nonetheless! In the self mastery model, we recognized freedom as a quality of the will. For a person espousing the victim consciousness, the recognition of freedom is overlooked and displaced by the profession of innocence. For the victim consciousness, innocence is desperately claimed and supremely valued as an identity. "I am innocent!" is the mantra of the victim, by definition. While the free will is a veritable fountain of options implying choice, the profession of innocence undercuts choice altogether: my innocence is dependent in large measure on the belief that I had no choice in any given matter or experience. Freedom is allied with choice, but innocence with tyranny, it turns out. Furthermore, alongside that identification with innocence comes a sense of righteousness with regard to one's own position as so staked out: after all, if I am innocent, someone else must be guilty! Now the louder the claim to innocence and the more flagrant the sense of righteousness, the more likely are the underlying pains of guilt, given the irrefutable self knowledge we all posess which demonstrates that we are, each and every one of us, as "petty present day personalities," quite full of evidence heartily contradicting the claim to innocence. That's why, when we remember the story of Jesus intervening for the woman caught in adultery (where was that fellow, anyway?), his invitation that "he who has not sinned should cast the first stone" was enough to insure her safe passage out of the circle formed for her execution. While it is fun to marvel at the stunning agility, speed and simplicity of Jesus' approach to a tricky problem, we musn't forget that one of the conclusions we can likely draw from the scene and from Jesus' lesson is that no one among us is so innocent that the task of judgement could rest safely in any of our hands. Every one of us has missed the mark, and more than once! (So judge not!) But the claim to innocence so deeply entrenched in the victim consciousness always has paired with itself the implication of another's guilt, and a judgment of another. That's why the victim consciousness partners innocence with tyranny, and also with blame. I am innocent, I had no choice, and someone or something else is to blame. Blaming is the opposite of responsibility as we explained it from the perspective of self mastery. As a "responsible self" I take a good look at myself to assess the outcomes and effects of my choices and actions. As an "innocent self," I know as a matter of principle that I would never have chosen to harm someone or cause myself misery. Unable and unwilling to identify my own choices as they bear on an experience, I am left looking for someone or something to blame. Now ignorance, denial, unconsciousness and passivity with regard to our own choices have absolutely no bearing on their ability as causes to create effects. Stuff happens based on my choices whether I am aware of making them or not. And at some level, I am aware of my choices, though I might try to hide them from myself to maintain my mask of innocence to myself and to the world. This is one major root of guilt feelings: the incongruity of one's presentation with the facts. The cure for guilt is responsibility. Guilt is the opposite of responsibility. Guilt is the habit of clinging to one's innocence in the face of pressing facts. Responsibility is the sober observation of the facts in an effort to comprehend the cause-effect relationships between choice and experience. Blame, judgement and guilt are not players in the field of self mastery. They belong to the game of the victim consciousness. Next, we'll expand the conversation of the victim consciousness to identify additional "teammates" in the sad drama: perpetrators and saviors.

Two sides of the "victim coin"

But, many argue, I'm not free at all! I'm trapped by such and such circumstance/job/relationship/health condition. And I sure as heck didn't choose these miserable conditions, so don't go "blaming the victim" here, and try and tell me I'm responsible, when I'm not! I haven't done anything to deserve this! I'm innocent! Or maybe someone takes the seemingly opposite approach: Oh, it's all my fault. I've created this mess and now I have to live with it. I deserve everything that happens to me, I really am such a loser. I'm SO sorry. I'll try not to complain. Blah Blah Blah. These are two examples from either side of the same coin. The coin is the victim consciousness. The first is claiming innocence, and the second professing guilt, and neither version of the same form of consciousness has a shred of potential for achieving self mastery, or for accomplishing much genuine service from the heart. Why is that? Well, lets construct the model of the victim consciousness, an extremely low form of consciousness which is akin to a deep but very restless sleep. In doing so we'll see how the potential for self mastery and service from the heart are wholly undercut by the victim consciousness. --Speaking of restless sleep, I slept poorly last night and have just realized I have run out of steam, so I will continue this in the next post, or add to this one tommorrow! Nighty night! :-)

A simple model for self mastery

So now we have three elements tied together, and they represent a model for self mastery. You could draw this on a paper if you wanted to, or just picture it in your mind: make an equilateral triangle (all sides the same length), with one side "down" and one point "up." Now at that top point (apex) of the triangle, write the word "Freedom." Going clockwise to the point on the right side of the base, write the word "Choice." Then, write the word "Responsibility" near the third point of the triangle at the left side of the base. In the center of the triangle, write the words "Self Mastery." There you have it! A handy dandy, carry with you always, simple as can be and easy to remember model for the kind of consciousness which we will associate with self mastery. It's amazing the mileage you can get out of a triangle. We start out with the recognition that we are free, and that our freedom is a quality of our will which is essential to our being and which cannot be granted to us or stripped away from us by political powers. I am always free. (This can be a nice little mantra, i.e. something to repeat over and over. Breathing in: "I am always free." Exhaling: "I am always free.") Given that we are in fact free, we can perceive ourselves to be constantly generating a multitude of options from which to choose. Choice is a consequence of freedom, and a measure of it. I make choices consciously. (Here is another mantra: breathing in, "I make choices consciously;" exhaling, "I make choices consciously." Further, our choices of action (or inaction, for that matter) are "causes," which in our universe are inevitably followed by "effects." Responsibility is our capacity to perceive and acknowledge the effects of our choices, and through introspection, to cultivate and develop the maturity of the free will. Responsibility is freedom held up to the mirror for study, evaluation. The result is the maturing of the will. I am responsible for my life experience. (That's one more mantra for us: you know how to breath with it now!) So freedom, choice and responsibility are three different aspects of the consciousness of self mastery, and the process of self mastery. By modeling the victim consciousness next, we'll have something to compare the consciousness of self mastery to, and that will make the case for it all the more compelling.

Responsibility 101

So the good news is that we have a free will. Tyranny and dilemmas are basically illusions. We have the power to manifest and perceive a multitude of options in our life circumstances, and whenever we hear ourselves saying "I had no choice!" or "There's no way out of this!" or "I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't," we can from this point on recognize that we are lying to ourselves when we reduce ourselves to such a state of misperception of the truth of our lives and our being. We are building a set of shared language with which to undertake the good work of self mastery, here. Freedom, we have said, is a quality of the will, and the free will has the power to manifest and percieve options from which to choose in the exercise of its freedom. So what about responsibility? Well, responsibility is the cornerstone of freedom. How's that for a countercultural definition? You see, in our culture, responsibility has been given a very bad reputation. It commonly carries conotations of fault, blame, and punishment. It is a thing we try to pin on criminals. It is the hot potato that nobody wants to be stuck with, so it gets tossed to some sucker way on down the line. Passing the buck is a pretty old theme. Look at the first few chapters of the bible--Adam's not responsible--go check with Eve; but she's not responsible--go check with that serpent over there. Then a few chapters later, Cain asks, Am I my brother's keeper?--Ten minutes after having slaughtered the poor bloke! Avoiding responsibility goes way back, but that avoidance is rooted in a basic misunderstanding of what responsibility actually is. Let it be known that I am here to rehabilitate the notion of responsibility, and to restore it to its proper place in the shaping of the mature person. As long as folks mistake responsibility as the main criterion for blameworthiness and the stamp of judgment, they will logically avoid it at all costs. The bad news is that the cost of avoiding responsibility is very high. It requires of a person that s/he basically stay asleep to hi/r higher self. It requires of a person that s/he maintain an illusion of "innocence" in order to avoid judgment and punishment. It requires a person to store up shame and guilt for actions and choices, and to suffer the literally sickening consequences of such inward holding. It requires of a person that s/he refuse to acknowledge choice, and claim about hi/r actions that they were coerced--he made me do it! I had no choice! --not realizing that the very declaration of innocence and denial of choice places a person in the tyrant's shackles. The "innocence" of the lower self fleeing "responsibility" is the false innocence of the "victim consciousness," and one cannot get much further from a real experience of freedom than that. Responsibility is the capacity to perceive the choices of one's own free will and to consider one's actions with a view to self improvement. Responsibility is the recognition of one's choices as causes of one's life experience and includes an acknowledgement of their effects. In the model of self mastery, responsibility carries no weight of shame or burden of condemning judgment. Those characteristics represent a misunderstanding of the meaning and power of responsibility. It is actually through the avoidance of responsibility that we condemn ourselves to be victims, without a choice, wills bound and denied, tyrannized. Not a pretty picture, eh? Taking responsibility instead and in truth is the road to freedom, because the one who is responsible is conscious of the choices s/he has made and is making. When you become conscious of your choices, you can decide if you want to make them again. Perhaps the life experiences I am generating by my choices are a disaster! Well, no time to waste wallowing in guilt and shame!. I can acknowledge what I am doing and choose something else! And, I can make amends with new choices if my behavior caused harm. While I certainly don't insist that I should grovel for the rest of my life if I have hurt someone, at the same time, it goes a long way to restoring balance with the universe when, after having done harm, I apologize for my role in a shared experience and take conscious steps to make better choices in that relationship as well as others. Pride has buried many a relationship at this point. Pride presumes that what it wants must be good and right for all, because it wants it. Pride consequently resists responsibility for having done harm, because it refuses to consider a harmful result as a possible outcome of its wanting. Thankfully, pride is not a person, but a defense, and a kind of fear, and it can yield to introspection, and the practice of responsibility. I can create a new kind of experience based on different choices, when I recognize both my power to choose as well as the choices I have made, and their effects. When I recognize that I am responsible for my life experiences, that is when my light is shining brightly for all to see. Tomorrow, we can finally give shape to "the triangle" of self mastery.

Freedom and choice

Now we have a sense of how freedom is essential to our being, and how it is a quality of the will, and how it points to the need for the training of the will to mature ourselves and to move beyond the problems that we inevitably face when the free will runs amock. So it's time to go a little further into two more ideas which are linked to this version of freedom which I am putting forth here: those two are choice, and responsibility. Let's do choice today, and responsibility tomorrow. What do you do with a free will, after all? Well, you choose stuff! With my free will, I can choose to: forgive, hold a grudge, serve the source of all, wait to be served, believe this, learn that, eat this, play that--the possibilities are literally endless. Now, a real choice, I learned way back when from one of my teachers at the Rolf Institute, requires at least three options: this, that or the other. If there is only one option, well, that's not any choice at all--we call that tyranny. The tyrant says "my way or the highway, bub." We feel the strain of tyranny in our lives when, looking at a situation, we seem only able to see one option (which may look "ok" or "horrible," but it's tyranny nonetheless.) If there are only two options, well, that's not a full-fledged choice either. The term for having only two options is a "dilemma." We have all felt stuck in a dilemma from time to time. I myself have often painted myself into a "double bind." That's where you're "damned if you do, and damned if you don't." Having three or more options is where choice kicks in. That's where we are certain that the free will is "in play" without the coercion of severe limits on options. Both tyranny and the dilemma are, in fact, illusions. They are a product of the false belief that the option/s that I see are the only option/s that there are. Such a false belief is extremely common, and we all fall for it at one time or another, if not constantly. It's really a tad sophomoric to believe that one's own twisted construal of a situation is automatically accurate, after all! (I say "sophomoric" because sophmore year in college was the one year in my life where I KNEW EVERYTHING. I've been getting dumber ever since. The belief that I have only one option (tyranny) or only two options (dilemma) in any given situation demonstrates not the reality of the situation but rather a momentary lapse of imagination. There are always at least three options, and normally very many more than that. How do I know this? Well the fact that I have a free will necesitates it. Choice, and the multitude of options it implies, flows from the free will like water bubbling from a spring: if there's a spring, there's water! If there's a free will, there is choice! The recognition of a multitude of options--the perception of choice--is a state of mind associated with the free will. The free will literally manifests the options from which to choose. On the flip side, the consciousness of the victim is always perceiving tyrannies and dilemmas all about itself, and never admits that it had a choice, even to the point of refusing the possibility of choice. The victim points outside of hi/rself and says "He made me do it!" or "I had to do it" or "I tried really hard but xyz happened, so it's not my fault." The one striving for self mastery, on the contrary, says, "I made this set of choices and here are the results. I recogonize my role in the creation of my life experience." This leads us to our particular understanding of responsibility, which will fill in many a pothole when paving the road to self mastery.

Mastering the will

"Our freedom requires no defense. There is no need to fight for something that is in fact part of the essense of who we are. We need instead to master our will." In the last entry, I made these statements which must seem greatly at odds with commonplace understandings in our culture. That's because they are in fact at odds with our culture! Our culture expends vast energies "defending freedom" and lifts nary a finger to master the will. This energy commitment should be reversed. We need not expend an ounce of energy defending freedom because true freedom is essential to our nature. It may be forgotten, but it is never lost. Our work is rather to master the will, so that in our exercise of freedom, we grow in maturity and strength of character, rather then reduce ourselves to "libertines." Free will is a source of all sorts of problems, to be sure. The untrained will is like a neophyte rider on a horse named desire. Wherever desire chooses to graze, romp or mate, so follows the untrained will. But when the will is trained, the rider directs the horse with intention, and it gladly obeys its master and is subservient to hi/r. I must master my will, because I am free. I must train my will, because the law of cause and effect is not suspended in deference to my every foolish desire. If with my free will I indulge my desires in any old topsy-turvy fasion, I can fully expect to generate life experiences which are similarly topsy-turvy. If I use my free will to toss a ball over my head, I should fully expect to get hit on the head by a ball. This happens not as a judgement or punishment. Not at all. It is merely the effect (getting bonked) of a cause (tossing the ball overhead) in a free will universe. When we forget our essential freedom, we tend to assign other causes to our life experiences, and play the role of victim with our eyes firmly shut to the manner in which we exercise our will. When we step up to the task of self mastery, we gladly study the effects of our choices in an effort to increase the maturity of our will. When we exercise our free will with mastery, we will see the effects immediately in the improved quality of our life experiences. However, the "lower self" clings to the premise that it should be able to choose whatever it likes without any repercussions. That would require the suspension of the structure of our universe, however. Although the source of all is incredibly indulgent of our desires, (the fact of our free will testifies to this), we have been placed in a micro-container (our bodies) and a macro-container (the physical universe) as a system of checks and balances relative to our exercise of free will. So we are free to beat the hornets' nest all we want, but we will not be excused from getting stung. After a long enough time creating painful life experiences, a soul will generally get around to desiring to master the will more than anything else, and that's when the training can begin in earnest. Are you ready for that? I am!

Essential freedom

(Warning to reader: This post is a bit philosophical, and I run the risk of losing some of you in the words. Read it anyway, some of it will sink in by osmosis/diffusion. Or skip it, and re-read an easier post for review, or just wait till tommorrow, when I might get back to plain English! It's a free will universe, and you can choose as you will--that actually sums it up nicely! I just need to get these ideas out here, and then I'll try to make them simpler as we go along.) In exploring the ideas of service and self mastery, I want to spend some time with the idea of freedom. I have a very particular understanding of freedom that I'd like to share. There are many common understandings of freedom that I don't find all so helpful. Some people see freedom as a right, and interchangeably see "rights" as "freedoms." As a right, freedom or freedoms are essentially "permissions" which are granted through a political strucure. For example, we are said to have "freedom of speech" or "freedom of assembly" granted to us by our US Constitution. We are told that our soldiers in xyz war fought and died to defend the freedoms we enjoy, and for which we should be grateful, as if "defending freedom" were a proper and sensible justification for warfare that no one in their right mind could possibly argue against. We were also told promptly after Sept. 11, '01, that we should be willing to suffer some restricitons of our freedom in order to increase our safety. (So much for Patrick Henry's "give me liberty or give me death!" That guy was clearly not buying into the "safety" line.) Some, in recognizing this kind of problem, where freedom is suspended under certain conditions, assign stronger words to certain rights, in an attempt to universalize them and protect them from tampering or suspension. They speak of "fundamental" rights or "inalienable" rights in an effort to guarantee a form of freedom which, because it is subject to the whims of political tyranny, needs to be tied to being human, so that any human "deserves" that right regardless of political circumstances, and so that to deny someone such a freedom/right is therefore always wrong and deplorable, whether you have a "bill of rights" in your country or not. I believe it is a serious mistake and misunderstanding to believe that freedom is merely a right granted or suspended depending upon political circumstances. Whether a freedom/right is considered to come from a constitution or to be somehow inalienable, when freedom is reduced to the status of a right, well, the possibility arises that it could be taken away. Freedom, however, is a reality much more essential to our humanity than that. It cannot be taken away, stolen, trampled upon, lost, or preserved through warfare, because it is not a "right" in the first place. True freedom is neither won on the battlefield or lost behind prison bars. True freedom needs no bill or constitution or language of inalienability to enshrine or protect it. If you're human, you've got it, in my book. That's because I believe that freedom is a quality of the will of a person, as in "free will." All of us humans have a will, and it's free, so we speak of free will. Now I am well aware of the fact that there are many out there of certain persuasions (the "predestination" crowd) who would excitedly argue there is no such thing as free will, and they would quote John Calvin who himself would be quoting some bible passage or other to justify themselves. Those persons will either stop reading at this point, or stick around to argue with me, and I would say that in either case, they prove my point! :-) So they are free to come or go. It's a free will universe, after all! The will of a person is a gift or talent, much like the human body---everybody has a body, and everybody has a will, no matter what race, creed, color, political orientation, sexual preference, or what-have-you. The source of all does not discriminate when handing out bodies or constructing wills for souls-becoming-human: again, everyone gets a body and everyone has a will. The quality of your body is that it is human, and the quality of your will is that it is free. With a free will we are able to think and choose pretty much anything we can manage to come up with. That doesn't mean we should, or that it is right to do so, but the possibility remains. We are free, in our will, not by right, but by nature, and nothing can abrogate our freedom. Our freedom therefore requires no defense. There is no need to fight for something that is in fact part of the essense of who we are.We need instead to master our will. You see, while our will is a gift, the fact that our will is free may at first seem to be a bit of a mixed blessing. The free will is kind of a loose canon if its handler is untrained. It can get you into all sorts of trouble. It needs to be trained. I will expand on this in tommorrow's post!

The "big mission" and the "day to day"

Balancing the "big mission" with the "day to day" is one of the basic challenges we all face. I feel this tension a lot, and I find some consolation when I remember my readings of M.K. Gandhi back in college. (Drop shoulder, stretch, inhale deeply, continue...--see yesterday's post--) Gandhi was a servant of all who recognized with humility the necessity of self mastery if his service was to have any real depth of integrity. He new that it was in the day to day mundane tasks of living, and the manner and spirit with which they were accomplished, that he set his example, and that gave him the strength and character and "moral fiber" with which to demonstrate with actions in the public sphere for the freedom and self responsibility of his people. He knew that if he was nonviolent in his heart, he could set a real example of non-violence in the face of colonial rule. He knew that violence within begets violence without. For Gandhi, the internal mastery created the possibility for a public precedent. He also knew that unless he could master his relationship to his own feelings and internal workings, he would ultimately be wasting his time in the public sphere. He believed that ultimately the "day to day" living was more important than the "big mission." Working the "big mission" might provide solace to the ego, charmed by it's visible accomplishments, but the seemingly unremarkable "day to day" tasks are the real food for the soul. He asked nothing of his followers in non-violent non-cooperation that he did not ask first of himself. So that's Gandhi. What about a mom who has "put aside" her "goals and aspirations"--that is to say, who has put her "big mission" on hold in the face of the "day to day" demands of life? Short of believing in the pre-eminent importance of mastering herself in the "day to day," she will experience a lot of tension and frustration with the incessant demands of "day to day" mastery, and dismiss those demands as intrusions upon her grander designs for living out her "big mission." The same goes for us fellows. If you imagine your dreams are all "on hold" while you "deal" with the trash, the leaky faucet, the oil change, the bills, etc., you may be missing the more vital opportunity for growth. When we get to the pearly gates, no one will be asking us how much money we made, or whether our business sold the most widgets, or for that matter whether we were the keynote speaker at the world peace forum. Instead, the gentle inquiry will settle around strategies for doing the dishes with less resentment, or actually feeling genuine happiness while taking out the trash again, or truly enjoying time with family. The day to day is where it's at for any of us who consciously choose a path of self mastery. That is where we get good at life. And if that goodness spills over into the public sphere, or if that goodness eventuates in "grander" accomplishments, well, that's just fine, but no need to keep score there. The "day to day" supplies us amply with a fast track to self mastery, if we are willing to take it on, not as an obstacle to our "big mission," but as the foundation for it.

Walking the talk

Just for the record, I'm writing this stuff for myself as well as anyone else who might benefit from it. By putting stuff down in writing, I provoke myself to think about things, and then having made those thoughts public, I increase my obligation to myself and to others to practice what I preach. All of this stuff boils down to practice and perspective, after all. So, having written what I wrote yesterday, I simply couldn't ignore the fact that my shoulder was killing me!!!!!!!!! Wait, let me rephrase that... :-) Actually, for some months now my shoulder has been aching and becoming more and more "useless," to the point where I have been regularly exclaiming "ouch!" during the course of my day. I have not been able to ignore this shouting of my shoulder, but I also have somehow managed to put off doing anything to correct the situation, or understand it's roots. So here are three steps I have taken over the last three days in the right direction.
1) I had, for the love of a friend, taken up his request to give him a couple of bodywork sessions (which work I have not done for some years now). The plan was to go on with this for a while. My shoulder, however, (not to mention my head, but that's another story) was loudly saying "no!, don't do this" throughout the sessions. Well, two days ago, with regrets to my friend but recognition of what I needed to do, I cancelled future sessions. One thing I learned from my days with the Missionaries of Charity in Haiti (another long story), was that the servant MUST take care of hi/rself, or there will soon be nothing to offer. I could have probably pressed on and given another couple of half-baked one-armed sessions, but could have ended up tearing my rotator cuff in the process as well. So I cancelled. I recognized a behavior that was making my shoulder worse. I acknowledged what I was doing without shame. I accepted the fact that I couldn't be of much help to my friend and that I would have to pass on some welcomed income, trusting the universe to help fulfill those needs otherwise. I chose to call and cancel. And I acted upon that choice.
2) I showed up early today for a session with the osteopath I've been seeing (again, the headache story for another day). While I waited for my session, instead of just sitting there reading a magazine--actually a Calvin and Hobbes collection--I decided to DO SOMETHING FOR MYSELF in the spare ten minutes (they are out there if we dare notice them...spare minutes, that is). I did various stretches of the sore shoulder with my arm, and used my other hand to press on spots while I did so. It's not like I couldn't have done this a year ago, but I NEVER TOOK THE TIME FOR MYSELF. (That's another behavior I recognized, acknowledged, accepted, chose differently about and acted on.) After ten minutes, I had significantly reduced pain that I have been enduring for months, and increased my range of motion, which I had been losing at a pace. Then to follow up, I have been stretching and probing at every opportunity, to keep things going in the right direction, and it feels great to do this for myself. My body has been speaking, and I am finally listening. So it's never to late to change a behavior.
3) Now here's the final news flash, and now you can experience my learning curve with me in real-time. As I have been writing this post at my computer keyboard, I have been noticing that while I type, I unneccesarily and quite unconsciously hike up the shoulder that has been hurting all of this time. That "hiking" up of my shoulder represents me (not some anonymous perpetrator, or an "evil" body somehow "other than" my "victim-self") acting in a manner that brings me long term muscle tension and pain. I swear I never noticed it till about five minutes ago, and since then, everytime it hikes up, I have become aware of it (because it doesn't feel good relative to all that nice stretching I've been doing), and have consciously dropped it down, back into a comfortable position for what I am doing. So now I can practice using my body in a way different than the way I recognize may be the root cause of the problem. By taking responsibility for what's going on with myself, I empower myself. I am reclaiming a part of myself that I had left out for a while. No blame, no guilt, no judgement, no cruel self-chastisement. Just some simple introspection and a willingness to try "walking the talk."

Body as talent/gift

Every one of us is the repository of true wealth. Each one of us has a body. That's one thing we have in common over all humanity. Our bodies are perhaps the greatest gift peculiar to our stay here on planet earth. If you are wondering what your talents are, start your personal inventory with major item number one: a living human body. So what is your relationship with your body like? Do you recognize it as the gift that it is? Our bodies serve our greater purposes here--they serve our overall intent for this walk-about on the physical plane. Our bodies are like scuba gear donned by the soul intent on attending earth school. They are on loan to us from the source of all. They have incredible powers taken individually and even more so when understood in relationship, one to another. Someone might say, "But wait, Gil! My body causes me nothing but trouble--for instance, right now my shoulder is killing me! How can you call that a gift? What kind of talent is that?" The secret is in the language about the relationship of "self" and "body" here. When we play the victim and identify our body as a perpetrator of harm ("it's killing me!"), we are wallowing in the muck for sure, but the facts about the body remain, regardless of how distorted are one's perceptions of it. Looking through a foggy lens doesn't make the world cloudy, only your view of it! Our bodies can speak several languages. One of them is the language of warning. The body first whispers to us regarding a certain behavior, regarding the way we are using our form. If we ignore the subtle signals, and press on with the behavior, our bodies speak to us in the louder tones of discomfort. When we ignore that, our bodies will shout out to us in pain: "Stop this crazy thing you are doing!" If you recognize your body as the treasure trove of support and provocation to spiritual growth that it is, you will thank your body for the subtle signals, and thank it more for the louder tones, and be profusely thankful for the pain signals. Without them, we couldn't stay on this physical plane for very long at all. We'd simply bust our scuba gear, and need to 'surface" immediately. But if a person is prone to a victim mentality, and we all are to some extent (and if you deny this, well, you're in denial! --how's that for unbeatable logic?!), then the first reaction to pain (since the prior messages were in all likelihood ignored, like the prophets of old) is to blame the messenger: it's my bodies fault that I feel so bad! Then a saviour (read doctor, massage therapist, pill) is sought out by the victim to silence the messenger (make the symptoms go away). From the model of self mastery, the body is acknowledged as an extremely wise partner in personal development. The body's signals are recognized as representing a vast repository of intelligence rooted in the divine mind and the dominions of nature whereby our forms are organized with exceeding perfection. When the messenger is reduced to shouting at us, we finally stop in our tracks and look to recognize how our use of our body has generated these signals, and consider as a function of introspection (as opposed to self-judgement) how else we might behave in order to instead create good feelings in our bodies. Perhaps we came here in part to learn the lessons of a fragile constitution, and the effort to overcome those challenges represent a mountain to climb and proudly conquer. Or perhaps that same fragile physical constitution steers one's interests (if you listen to it) towards a set of activities which, if developed, will represent another kind of accomplishment altogether. I've always thought, well, if I was ever reduced to a state of extreme physical incapacity, I guess that would be a good chance to catch up on praying for others and developing my powers of concentration! Even if I were living in a body reduced by alzheimers or something to a truly marginal existence, well, even then, I would be providing an opportunity for others to step up to their own call to service, and in so inhabiting such a form I would be doing service myself. Call this a mental game if you will. I call it optimism (one of my talents!). The point is the perspective. If you are willing to identify your body as a gift, whole new vistas open up in your relationship with yourself and others.

Why are we here? IN PLAIN ENGLISH! :-)

Well, after sending out a few invitations to family and friends to follow along or join this exploration, I got one note back saying: would you try that again in English, please! All right then, let's approach this at the level of the rabble! Let's return to the question, Why are we here? Yup, that's a biggie. It can be answered in a lot of ways. Individually speaking, we all have particular gifts and talents. We usually know what they are fairly early on. Do you know what yours are, honestly? Can you remember? Are you acting on your gifts, or did you bury them under a rock a long time ago? The moment you become conscious of what your gifts are, is pretty much the ideal moment to start developing them with gusto. It will take time to bring your gifts to maturity. Sometimes we choose to bury our gifts early on. This happens for a number of reasons. Sometimes our gift seems threatening to the people in our lives, or is not appreciated. Say you're a kid with extraordinary sensitivity to the feelings of others. That's a gift that can be deployed in service on a daily basis, in a thousand different ways, in a number of careers and countless life situations. Consequently, you feel a lot of strong feelings around you, and so you cry easily as the emotions of your environment move through you. But maybe such sensitivity is perceived as babyish and is frowned upon. Or perhaps those tears seem to imply a need for comfort (they may not) and a mom or dad overwhelmed with minute to minute tasks simply "doesn't have time for that." You might choose to shut down some of that sensitivity, or come to judge it yourself as a liability rather than a gift, or you may try to build up some sort of emotional or even physical armoring to defend yourself from all the feelings you feel. Well, that's all ok. You may even have shut your gifts off and kept them buried under a "rock" for two/ten/fifty/sixty/seventy years! No biggie! Did you remember what your talents and purpose are today, on your 91st birthday? Let's celebrate, for the time has come to start sharing what you have been given! Yahoo! Today is soon enough to start serving the BIG PICTURE. The past is basically irrellevant, except in so much as in the process of self-mastery the past serves as a course of study, and a subject of introspection. In terms of a judgement hanging over you because of your past, forget about it. The fatted calf is slaughtered the moment you let it be know that you remember where you came from, and what you came for: to serve the source of all. Acting on your talents and gifts is the form of service just right for you, if you were wondering. That's a pretty good reason for being here. Tommorrow, I'd like to comment on talents and gifts a bit more.

Introspection vs. self judgement and scrupulosity

The number one handiest tool in the tool bag of anyone aspiring to self-mastery with an intent to serve is introspection. Introspection is the action of looking inside--of holding a mirror up to one's own inner workings, strategies, defenses, emotional reactivity, as well as to one's genuine accomplishments, points of progress, and longings. Introspection must be distinguished from masochistic self-judgement and scrupulousity. I had to become an expert in these two errors before discovering the truth of introspection. Masochistic self-judgement is where, in reflecting upon the events of the day/week/month/year/life (depending on how much catching up you need to do), you mercilessly condemn yourself for myriad percieved slights and wrongs which you have committed, and wallow in guilt feeelings regarding those actions as if that somehow represented "taking responsibility" for one's action. (It represents no such thing, by the way...to quote a not so famous author--me--guilt is merely a pretender to the throne of responsibility.) Scrupulosity is that pathological state of inner affairs where one succumbs to a state of distorted "hyper-awareness" regarding one's behavior, to the point where every action or potential course of action is found wanting when compared to an idealized version of behavior, and even though one has sought forgiveness and made amends for long lists of "sins," two seconds later one finds oneself knocking at the door of the confessional to report the latest untoward thoughts, however transient, or to recollect newly perceived twists on past wrongs. For the scrupulous conscience, there is no relief, somewhat like someone with an eating disorder, where no amount of dieting/purging relieves the person of their distorted body image: the scrupulous individual cannot find relief from the distorted soul image. Introspection, by way of comparison, stands apart from self-judgement and self condemnation: the object of introspection is to recognize, acknowledge, and accept one's patterns as prerequisites to creating more fruitful choices and courses of action. (These steps--recognize, acknowledge, accept, choose, act--I learned at the

IM School of Healing Arts

which I attended with my wife years ago in NYC--Thanks Levent! We'll come back to them in another journal entry, as they are very important to understand.) Judgement and condemnation belong to another paradigm altogether, and a very distorted one at that. When we practice introspection, we are in it to achieve the freedom that only comes from taking adult responsibility for our choices. Turn an event of the day over in your mind. Observe the feelings and charge that you experienced. Notice the triggers for one's reactivity. Take stock of how the events played out, as if watching from a distance. Keep on the track of learning for yourself from these observations as opposed to judging oneself or another. Introspection is about taking the time to recognize one's patterns, and becoming observant of the machinations of the personality-in-action, with an end view to self-mastery. One need not have achieved self-mastery to practice introspection. That would be demanding that a child, new to a game, should already excel at it. Introspection is a lifelong practice of self observation--we get better at it the more we do it--gentler, more astute, more refined, always necessary.

Idealized Self, Petty Tyrants

When it comes to self mastery, there is a tendency to get ahead of oneself--to claim the prize before earning it. The "idealized self" sees itself as "already there,' or shames us for not already being "there." The idealized self is the liar in all of us. We form it out of a misplaced sense of guilt, and as a means of covering over the fact that we are all works-in-progress, at the level at which we most commonly interact. While the "higher self" is also a present reality and integral expression of who I am, when it comes to day to day living, it's the idealized self that's doing all the muck raking. When we find ourself reacting painfully to our circumstances, or embroiled in negative emotions, take it as a sign that there is cause for introspection of oneself, as opposed to assuming cause for prosecution of another. Thank the petty tyrants in your life--they have come to help you fulfill your true purpose by exposing the places in you that need to grow beyond reactivity to a place of allowance and acceptance. (I am loading these posts with language that needs more explaining than I am giving it, just to get the ball rolling. Expect that we will come back to key ideas over and over again, until we find ourselves sharing common understandings which we can develop. The concepts of idealized self and higher self can be explored at their source, as well--see the

Pathwork Lecture Series

(lectures #14 and 83) for more there. I have learned a lot from them, and have a lot more to learn from them.)

Linking Service and Self Mastery

Clarity of intent and purpose, rooted in choice, while important for defining service from the heart, are insufficient to characterize it completely. After all, it's possible to choose to do something, or follow a course of action with an intent to serve, and even believe that it's coming from the heart, when in fact the whole effort may be quite misplaced and harmful to another--a disservice, rather than a service. This happens every day of the week. A person might honestly believe s/he is trying to do good by someone, and that someone has the opposite experience. That "someone" experiences harm. When a person identifies as "coming from the heart" strategies, choices and actions which are actually rooted in fear, insecurity, neediness, spite, shame, denial, patterns of control of others, passive aggression, perfectionism, and ultimate self-concern, trouble is certainly brewing for the recipients of that person's "service!" Little service is achieved when one's goals are in fact rooted in a desire to feel safe in a world perceived as dangerous, or to fill an empty feeling inside with something from the outside, or to hide vulnerabilities, or to experience power over others, or to feel "right" and "good," or to master one's circumstances rather than oneself, or to perceive others as representations of oneself to be crafted likewise.
These defense strategies undercut the possibility of true service from the heart. That's why the choice to serve, if it is to bear fruit, must be linked to a program of self-mastery. To help remove the speck from another's eye, first remove the log from one's own, to paraphrase someone remembered for both his genuine service and indisputable self-mastery. This is not to say you need to wait until you can walk on water before taking up the call to service. No, the world needs us now. I am saying that the work of self-mastery must provide the foundation for service from the heart. Recognizing the need to master oneself is a first step towards achieving, not the power, but the humility prerequisite for the practice of genuine service.

Why are we here?

Service from the heart is quite a bit different from service rooted in servitude, or service as an employment sector. Service from the heart, at least as I'm conceiving it, is several paces removed from the stuff of merit badges as well. Service from the heart is a function of self mastery. Service from the heart demonstrates a clarity of intent and purpose, because it is a service rooted in choice rather than compulsion or coercive necessity, whether from the inside (guilt, idealization, striving) or from the outside (draft, enslavement, economic circumstance). Slavery as an institution has given the notion of servants a bad name, kind of a guilt by association thing. While involuntary servitude is by all means an unjust condition, service is for me perhaps the most compelling explanation to the very old question, Why are we here?

testing the waters

Since this is the inaugeral post for The Heart of Service blog ("blog" is shorthand tech-speak for "web log," a simple way of publishing/communicating via the web, for folks new to this sort of thing) you would think there'd be some bread to break and wine to go around. As it is, I'll state that the intent of starting this conversation is to create an easily accessible venue for pursuing the exploration of the important topics of service, self-mastery, and their relationship. I have been exploring these issues for some years now, and while I've had some fine company in the process, I am open to sharing and exchanging on a wider basis. My intent is to foster spiritual growth and moral development, my own, and that of anyone who cares to develop themselves further along those lines.