The Heart of Service

Blog revival!

2009-09-13T21:33:00.002-04:00

Wow, a lot has gone on since I posted the bulk of this over 4 years ago! I never realized how much time and commitment becoming a videographer of my own work would require. Well, four videos later and The Integral Anatomy Series exists for posterity. So too now exist a number of articles over at Spirituality and Health Magazine, as well as a whole new website, www.gilhedley.com. I'm also teaching one-day Integral Anatomy Intensives, all based on the images created in the lab since I wrote everything below. I haven't re-read what I wrote, but I remember putting a lot of goodies in there. I am continuing to write, but in the form of chapters for a book which I have committed myself to write. It will take the ideas I began in my book, Reconceiving My Body, to the next level: Reconceiving Our Bodies...I am exploring the concepts of the body I have developed from my years of teaching in laboratories to the general public, beyond my own transformation, to the transformation of our vision of the human form in general, and our changing relationship with our embodied selves. Fun!! Thank you for dropping by here~ scroll to the bottom and read your way up to make any sense of it all!!

More on spirits and bodies

2005-05-06T21:46:00.000-04:00

The relationship of spirit and body is a complex one, and I can say that my own understanding just seems to get more complicated as I go along! There are many, as we mentioned above, who in principle simply do not have a place for spirit in their model of the person. The person, for such folks, is basically a fancy machine, the main computer of which is the brain, which through various chemical processes, genetic protein signatures and electromagnetic considerations generates a personality. This personality can itself in turn be modified, enhanced, controlled or subdued, by the introduction of various substances and influences much the same as car performance can be enhanced or diminished with fuel, additives, etc.

The reduction of the person to the sum of the machine parts is found wanting on numerous counts, some of which I have already mentioned in earlier posts. The problem is, this machine seems to have a mind of its own! Furthermore, there are some fine examples in the medical literature which certainly put the brain in its place, as it were. My favorite is an article called, “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?” (World Medicine, May 3, 1980, p.2 and 22-24, No. 15, Vol. 13--or 15--...can’t tell for sure from the handwriting). I thank Tom Myer’s for turning me on to that one. In it, some British researchers exploring issues of hydrocephalus and adults with larger-than-average heads find to their utter surprise and shock, through brain imaging technology, that a number of people, fully functional folks, who participated in their study, didn’t have brains inside their heads, to put it bluntly. One fellow, a master’s degree holder from down the hall, in fact had a mere milimeter or two of cortex lining his braincase, with a whole lot of fluid sloshing around inside his head instead, and didn’t seem the worse for wear. While some may say that the exception proves the point, in an instance such as this, the exception busts the model, in my opinion. Not to say that if you had a brain and took it away, you wouldn’t miss it, but if you didn’t start out with one, well, what you ain’t got, you don’t miss. Perhaps the brain is really just a crutch. It may be the water that makes us tick at a physical level, and the meaty stuff is all just artifact of the flow.

I also look to the dead to bolster my case for the existence and primacy of spirit, in contrast to those who hold that the person is basically comprised of meat-as-machine. Having spent ten years or so popping in and out of cadaver laboratories teaching workshops and exploring the wonders of human form with my fellow somanauts, it’s safe to say that the dead have taught me a few things, in addition to the living. When you spend a bit of time engaged in the study of human form in the model of the cadaver, or even if you have simply gone to a family wake and viewed the “remains” of the deceased friend or relative, you are invariably impressed by how lifeless the dead are. Something big is missing there, as compared with the living. What is missing? What is life? What is spirit? Who am I? What is my body? What is the relationship between my body and my consciousness when you are alive, and what change takes place when your body is dead?

I may not attempt to answer all of these questions in the following post --they are the stuff of lifetimes of consideration. Let’s just say that if the body is merely a machine, and my personality and consciousness even are merely functions of the machine, well, there shouldn’t be much difference between the living and the dead. But there is a difference. A big difference! You are, I am, we are, brilliantly, shiningly, thrillingly alive! Life is the deus ex machina of the mechanists model of the body/person: without it, they’ve got nothing but a rotting corpse. Yet the model has virtually nothing to say about the nature of life itself. On and on it will go about mechanisms, processes, and “active ingredients,” but as for life itself, that gooey stuff is left to the philosophy and religion departments to quibble about. You’ll notice, however, that the grant money isn’t flowing to those corners of the campus! The mechanists desparately need life, but they’ve pulled the wool over there own eyes and refused to open them to the truth of life in their midst. Life is that spiritual dimension that makes meat come alive. When the spirit blows out of the form, the physical materials resolve to different levels of order and existence, to be taken up at the whim and will of spirit once again.

When I see the human form in the cadaver, I see a mirror in which I am reflected, and I also see the stunning and stark contrast of the living and the dead. I feel my vitality within myself and notice the lack of it there on the table. I compare myself favorably on that count! Life in a body is a rich and potent gift, however fleeting. What is missing from the cadaver is the particular spirit of the soul which animated that form and contributed to its shape and qualities through their intent and their experiences. It’s not that the body is broken so there is no more personality being generated there. Cadavers have personalities of their own, to be sure. Rather, Elvis has left the building! The animating element has blown elsewhere, and left the shell behind, like a runner who has kicked off hi/r shoes, or a hermit crab moved on to larger quarters. I’m going to go spend some time with Karen, and will come back to this in the next post! Nighty night!

What is a whole person, anyway?

2005-05-04T23:24:00.000-04:00

I articulated above a “three bodies (+ three etherics)” model of the form of the whole person. But a whole person is more than that! A whole person must be understood to include spirit as well: a person is body (broadly understood to include these several bodies and etherics) and spirit. Spirit is the undying aspect of the self. These bodies can and do pass away, but our spirit is everlasting. The bodies pass away in the sense that they can be shed like the layers of an onion, but at the core of the onion is light. The frequency of that light/spirit is modulated or “flavored” by the layers which have accumulated around it, and the light retains those nuances even after the layers have been peeled. The light shines the brightest and truest when the layers are shed, and at the same time the flavoring/frequency modulation arrived at throught the experience of the human forms is valued and in fact intended by the source of all. To the extent that the spirit retains the frequency modulation obtained through the experience of the form, you might say that the body forms of the person, or the “personality,” lives on. However, I will resist overating the personality here!

The personality, as we generate it and generally experience it, is one of the most overated aspects of the whole person going in our culture! Commonly understood in humanistic atheistic scientistic public culture today, the body is a machine, the personality is a function of the brain, and the spirit is a myth attributed to the first two by ignorant religionists. It’s safe to assume I am wanting to develop a somewhat different train of thought and experience here! I have already given some attention in an earlier post to the fallacy of attributing truth to a model once its functionality has been demonstrated. I discussed this in terms of the mechanical model of the body subscribed to somewhat dogmatically by establishment scientific and medical culture. Viewing the body through the lense of the mechanistic model does not legitimize the conclusion that the body is a machine any more than viewing the world through purple sunglasses permits the conclusion that the world is in fact purple, and nothing but.

That the personality is commonly believed to be a function of the brain you can readily conclude by flipping through the psychology department listings in a university course catalogue, or reviewing the dissertation topics of a recent crop of psychology Ph.D. candidates. It is true that personality can be modified through injury to the brain or by tinkering with the brain's pharmacopia with psychoactive drugs or exogenous electromagnetic frequencies. It is also true that one can correllate certain thoughts and activities and emotional experiences with localized and mappable neuronal firing. It is not fair to conclude from these injuries or tinkerings or mappings, however, that the personality is therefore merely a function of the physical brain, or conversely and also erroneously, that the personality as a function of the magnificently wonderous human brain is therefore implicitly deserving of exceedingly high regard and esteem.

If a car has a flat tire or throws a fan belt, or if someone tosses a monkey wrench into the works, pours water in the oil reservoir, gas in the radiator and oil in the wiper washer fluid container, the vehicle performance will be substantially altered. We cannot conclude from this that the driver is a bad driver or that the driver no longer exists in virtue of the car’s total breakdown (though we may suggest the driver hire a new mechanic!). In fact, it's quite possible for the car to be totalled and the driver to walk away without a scratch. Likewise, if a surgeon in an emergency needs to perform an operation with a Swiss army knife, cloth bandages from a ripped shirt, a straight needle and thread from a sewing travel kit, a pen and a pocket lighter, hi/r skills may not reach the height of their expression under the circumstances. The surgeon may enjoy the challenge, however, as a test of skill under duress, and take pride in the accomplishment of the surgery performed, even while the execution was limited by the material circumstances. In the same way, the vehicle of the brain can distort the soul’s expression through a personality according to the limits of its material condition, and the instrument of a particular physical brain may represent a rudimentary tool for an advanced personality or mature spirit, yet these are the kinds of challenges spirits incarnating frequently choose to face as a test of skill, a learning opportunity, or a means to achieve balance relative to other experiences previously generated.

The error of the “scientific” community’s reduction of the personality to brain function is like mistaking the rider for the horse, or more accurately, the rider’s costume for the horse--a more ridiculous error still. That’s because the personality itself, like a costume for the spirit, represents an accumulation of thought forms and experiences, a “totality of elementals,” some of which are handsome and others in bad taste, in which the spirit/soul has outfitted itself. The personality is a work in progress, and will be differentially mature, dependent upon the level of mastery you have achieved. The personality will also be channelled and expressed relative to the particular endowment of the given physical body (brain and all!). That’s quite a bunch of variables. And should the physical body (the horse) expire, the psychical body and the noetical body continue to represent more costuming particular to the rider characteristic of hi/r choice in clothing, as it were.

Whenever we are expressing a personality with a physical body, the thought forms, whether emotion-thoughts, or thought-emotions, which accumulate to us, and which we generate willy nilly or conscientiously, must be dealt with on the terms of the particular physical endowment. The physical form serves as a lense with which to focus and interpret a personality on the part of an incarnating spirit. The spirit can no more be reduced to the terms of the body than can the personality be reduced to the terms of the body, and the spirit likewise cannot be reduced to the terms of the personality. This is about ordering perceptions. You cannot look at a person’s physical body alone and conclude something definitively about their spirit, and you cannot look at a person’s personality and conclude something definitively about their spirit either, any more than you can conclude definitively about the heart of the rider by analyzing their horse or outfit. Clothes really don't "make the man," at least in this case.

For those who can grasp that the body is a gift, and that expressing through one is a bit of performance art for a spirit dressing in the outfits of personality, accumulated in the wardrobe of life experience, this all makes a lot of sense! On these terms, the spirit in union with the human forms (physical/etheric, psychical/etheric and noetical/etheric) consititute a whole person incarnate. The personality of the whole person, we encounter as the accumulation of the thought forms and experiences of that spirit interpreted through the endowment of those particular forms. Where a body is “broken,” limit cycles of an additional order are placed upon the interpretation.

As for the spirit itself being nothing more than a bit of fluff and fancy sprinkled upon the passing “meat” of reality, well, everybody is entitled to their delusion, I guess! All I can say is that the atheistic humanistic scientistic materialists of our popular and public culture are in for a pleasant surprise upon the death of their physical bodies! Such belief systems are sometimes necessitated by an otherwise tentative commitment to the incarnational process. For many, the challenges of life would seem overwhelming if they could readily remember how sweet life can be without a body, and they might attempt to escape the opportunities of their own spiritual design if they dared to entertain such an option. Temporary forgetting is actually a highly functional choice, and should be respected by others. It is less important that everyone grasp the ins and outs of the incarnational processes than that they develop for themselves a compelling rationalle for embarking upon a path of self mastery and service!

Introduction to the body-model of the whole person

2005-05-02T21:49:00.000-04:00

Ah, it's nice to be back at my desk in NJ, without the pressure of an internet kiosk waiting for another buck, clicking off seconds while my post is loading, possibly kicking me off line and disappearing an hours worth of writing! Whew!

I have, in the last bunch of posts, introduced a whole bunch of language in a sort of casual manner and without much explanation, knowing that I would have to come back to the terms and explain something of what I mean by them. Sometimes that's a choice I have to make in order to continue a strand of thought without running off on explanatory tangents, and now is a good time to double back and make more sense of the references. I have used three categories in particular, namely the physical, the psychical, and the noetical, to reference levels of the person.

I have already gone on a bit regarding models as such, as well as described a model for the path of self mastery, namely the six pointed star. In the first chapter of my other online book,

Integral Anatomy

, I explain these levels of the person using the language and model of the body, adapting the terms and categories of Daskolos to my own understandings. So I footnote Daskalos, aka Stylianos Ateshlis, as well as the works of Kyriacos Markides here, and acknowledge that I am not always exactly clear what they mean by these terms, but I have borrowed them, and I know what I mean by them! Perhaps we mean the same thing, and I have borrowed the meaning as well, in which case I'm happy to credit them for that as well, but if I've got it all wrong relative to their meanings, I am more than happy to take responsibility for the meanings I have layered into their terms. Got that?!

So rather than reinventing the wheel here, I am going to paste in slightly modified sections from Chapter One of Integral Anatomy where I outline a model of the whole person based on a three-body perspective, those being the physical body (which I am committed to explore at length in the subsequent chapters of Integral Anatomy), the psychical body and the noetical body, the details of the latter two being more carefully explored in The Heart of Service.

The model of the body implicit in the concept of the whole person includes several specific bodies, and together they constitute the human body fully understood. The physical body, the psychical body, and the noetical body together make up the whole human body. As noted above, I borrow freely from esoteric traditions here as well as studies in psychodynamics, because I find the categories provide useful leverage points for opening up that pandora’s box which is the human form. One point common to many esoteric traditions is that the physical form of the human body coexists with an etheric form, sometimes called the "etheric body" or the "etheric double." Physical death involves not only the dissolution of the physical form but the etheric form of the physical body as well. In these traditions the etheric form is usually understood to be an energetic pattern or matrix within which the physical form itself is built up. The etheric double of the physical body does not represent “the soul,” but rather simply a mold. On this view, the physical form corresponds exactly to and is very much the artifact of the etheric double of the physical body. Certainly any scientist who may be reading here must shudder at the resurrection of a term so seemingly archaic and politically discredited as “etheric.” I would say that it is no more preposterous a notion than that of “the vacuum of space,” that deus ex machina of physics computations, and that it is highly serviceable for modelling human form! The etheric double when posited renders certain realities explicable (to be discussed later --later in Integral Anatomy, that is-- eg. ageing, nerve function, phantom pain, self anaesthesia, etc.) which might otherwise escape explanation. Consider it for now as a place-holder in the realm of the “commonly unknown,” but not unknowable.

The psychical body proper, which like the physical body also has its corresponding etheric counterpart, is also a real human body (it’s not a dog or cow, after all!). It has form. It is composed of those emotional patterns and dispositions which constitute the emotional life of a person. It helps here to be able to extend one’s general concept of form to include aspects of our common reality like emotions and thought which are outside of the range of what we generally refer to as physical. The very tenuous and spacious nature of matter as energy revealed by modern physics should at the very least stimulate the imagination as to the possibility that emotion and thought could also have form, even if of a more spacious quality than physical matter per se. Something need not be “physical” to have form. A form only becomes “physical” when it has slowed to a certain rate of vibration and in so doing accumulated/congealed “material/energy/etheric substance” to an extent that it begins to reflect physical light and have other properties that we commonly associate with physical “stuff,” like tri-dimensionality and relative bump-into-ability. The psychical body “outlives” the physical body as it is not subject to deterioration in the manner that the physical body is. The implication here would be that our accomplishments with regards to emotional development, the disciplines and maturity whereby our emotional life is rendered more and more coherent, organized and clear, are "heavenly treasures" which, unlike physical riches, can indeed accompany us beyond physical death. On the “down side,” the emotional turmoil produced by an untutored and reactive emotional life can generate burdens and liabilities which will require balancing beyond the temporally structured terms of a given physical life. During physical life, there is an intimate relationship between the physical and psychical bodies, each built up within its respective etheric counterpart. The characteristics of that relationship are unique to each individual and make for a fascinating exploration. What is the relationship between my physical and emotional life? How do my responsibilities as regards my physical and emotional life differ? What is the relationship between my emotional life and my physical shape and genetic expression? These and other similar questions are fair game for the common discourse of integral anatomy, as well as conversations revolving around the path of self mastery and service. The study of physical anatomy can function as a lever to understanding our psychical form. Likewise, the integration of the body of our emotions can transform our experience of our physical body.

The noetical body and its etheric counterpart constitute the body of ideas, concepts and principles which both precede and “outlive” even the psychical body. The noetical body itself is a function of pure thought. It affords definition and direction and purpose to the specific project of a spirit incarnating. I have already made some reference to Machael Small Wright and her Co-Creative Science in an earlier post, and apply her concepts here to help explain the qualities and character of the noetical body. With respect to our human body, its noetical form is made up of the definitions of movement or digestion or the principles of sensation or immune responsiveness, which are antecedant requirements to subsequent psychical and physical movement, sensation, etc. As a matter of fact, the noetical body as compared to the physical or even the emotional body is decidedly abstract by its very nature. Fortunately, there are two related "leverage points" for filling in the entailments of the noetical body as part of the model of the whole human form. They can help us “get a grip” on the noetical body.

First, the capacity to provide "definition and direction and purpose" is the particular endowment of human intelligence, as compared to the intelligences of nature under the auspices of which the "matter, means and action" are organized to fulfill such purposes. (do put Co-Creative Science on your reading list!) If the whole human form is a garden and spirit is the gardener, the noetical body would be the set of plans defining what kind of a garden the specific body is to be, its general purpose, and the more particular purposes of the varied elements out of which it is composed. The capacity to generate the definitions and purposes whereby a form so spectacular as a physical human body might come into existence seem far, far beyond our typical endowment of human intelligence. Such capacity humans generally regard as divine, and the prerogative of a creator. I should say they regard it as divine in enlightened moments only. From my confessedly esoteric religious perspective, there is little more utterly ridiculous than to assume that the phenomena of life which fill our planet, including the miracle of our own bodies, are the fruit of accidents of lightning strikes on primordial soup and subsequent natural selection and survival of the fittest. Left to its own devices, the primordial soup would, I guarantee, be inedible!

Although I in no way regard myself as a “creationist” of the fundamentalist christian pole of the infamous debate, I do have sympathy for their scepticism regarding the brute stupidity out of which the cohorts of Darwin’s legacy purport the world to have evolved. Some like myself perceive the sheer counterentropic tendency of life and the magnitude of organization it represents to indicate an awesome and intelligent precedent. One need not align with an equally mindless biblical literalism or doggedly refuse to acknowledge the most basic discoveries of mechanistic science or the geological record to reverently and mindfully acknowledge the source of all, should the recognition of its loving omnipresence pleasingly dawn upon you!

Further contemplation might even allow for the identification of that creative source within ourselves, should one permit a truly grand expansion of what one considers one’s “circle of possibilities.” I know there is company out there among intelligent, spiritually active people--think Mathew Fox or the legacy of Teilhard de Chardin--who refuse to succumb either to the dogmas of atheistic scientism or those of fundamentalist biblicalism! Speak up, wherever you are! The plans for our body come to us as a gift. Yet admitting the humble exersize of our own abilities, it is in the very image and likeness of the source of those “master plans” that we qualify and alter and individuate our general endowment with our own definitions, directions and purposes, which we generate throughout the whole course of our lifetime. In so doing, our noetical bodies assume form peculiar to the character of our own chosen purposes, and the impact “trickles down” to our psychical and physical structures. We define our very selves, and step, consciously or unconsciously, into the role of co-creators of our given lives. Thus our noetical bodies are comprised of the general set of principles and definitions which give rise to our psychical and physical bodies, as well as the particular set of purposes and directions supplied by our own selves for our lives.

Now for the second point with which to fill in the entailments of the noetical body as part of the model of the whole human form: when I consciously generate freely chosen thought forms of specific and positive intent and support them with honest, heart felt emotion, I am aligned with a method for moving mountains and manifesting a new creation. I am freely exercising my endowment of human intelligence in a manner that develops my noetical body and rightly orders my psychical and physical bodies to align with my conscious intent. On the contrary, when I randomly react emotionally, generating charged but unconscious, undisciplined, and spurious emotion-thought forms, I set myself up for more distorted emotional experiences and inner turmoil which have ramifications for my physical health and well being. Thought as the lapdog of emotion is a formula for disaster! Further, when I play the victim to my physical impulses and subsume my free will and purposes to the peculiar qualities of my physical endowment, I abdicate my responsibility as co-creator of my life and subject myself to the undirected vagueries of a horse with an incompetent rider. If the rider does not direct the horse according to hi/r proper role in the mutually cooperative endeavor of a walkabout on planet earth, the horse will munch, romp, meander and mate, it is true. That’s about all that happens when destiny is left to the impulses of the horse, and the rider won’t get very far down the path.

The capacity to supply definition, direction and purpose are talents to be developed. The proper domain of such talents is the noetical body. We are granted free will to excersize these talents and enjoy such freedom to the extent that we recognize and acknowledge and accept responsibility for our choices. Where we abdicate responsibility we simultaneously imprison ourselves as if we have been locked up without a choice. We allow the horse to drag us about, dominated by physical propensities, or we live a life of emotional reactivity, pointing errantly to our bodies or anyone else as the cause of all of our suffering. The victim consciousness is the bottom of the scale of integral development and self mastery, because by abdicating responsibility for life experience the possibility of the very freedom whereby we excercise choice over our direction is denied: denied to the self, by the self. The principles and definitions whereby one lives an embodied life serve a structuring function for the discipline of emotions and physical impulsivity. Healthy and vibrant emotional expressiveness defined by choice in turn manifest positive signatures in the physical form. The well-harmonized co-vibrancey of the noetical, psychical and physical bodies represent personal maturity and an integration of human form based upon which a whole new level of service can be undertaken. All the great teachers this planet has known came not for power over others but to serve, and they did so from a place of inner harmony, clarity of principle, and personal integrity, not as victims but as masters. Integral anatomy as a moral and spiritual science pursues self mastery with a view to service as a basic orienting goal. The physical, psychical and noetical bodies provide a model of human form coherent with this pursuit and rich enough to sustain a prolonged, rich and fruitful exploration.

Giving the gift of giving

2005-04-30T02:29:00.000-04:00

This is my last post from the computer kiosk in San Francisco! I have 25 minutes on my account and I have no more money, so this will be a relative quicky, compared to some of my more recent lengthy posts :-)

Another pitfall to watch out for on the path of service is the propensity to become the kind of person who "only gives." It's sort of an angle on the servant as doormat theme. I used to be this sort of person. I would give and give, but never receive. I was pathologically incapable of receiving, you might say. In my way of thinking at the time, giving was good, and receiving was selfish, so I was more than happy to give and give in this situation and that, but very poor at receiving or asking for help. Chronic givers often align with chronic takers, and the results are often that the giver plays the doormat and becomes resentful and feels used, but this rarely stimulates a shift on the chronic giver's part.

What is at the heart of chronic giving is actually egotism and selfishness, however ironic that may seem. Chronic giving without receiving is actually a means of controlling your relationships, and structuring them in a way that generates an unwarranted, even if unconscious, sense of moral superiority and safety relative to those around you, based on the false assumption that giving is good and receiving is bad.

The key which unlocked this problem for me and brought it to my awareness was the idea a college friend shared with me. She told me I needed to "give the gift of giving." She was quite the poet :-) When she told me this it struck me like a gong. All along I had been generating my unhappy heroism and my unrewarding "sanctity." Unhappy and unrewarding, that is, because I had really not been doing service from the heart. I was attempting to control how I would be blessed, and structuring my relationships in a manner that generated inequalities: after all, if giving was good and receiving bad, what ultimately did that say about the folks I was giving to? Not very promising! I recognized that I had refused an extremely important gift: my receptivity. By holding back the gift of my receptivity, I refused others in relationship with me the pleasure of serving me, of gifting me, of reciprocating my gifts, of surprising me with their own inspiration to share.

Well, recognize, acknowledge, accept, choose, act. My friend's words were potent medicine, and I've been practicing receptivity ever since!

vs. servant as doormat

2005-04-30T01:30:00.000-04:00

So I consider a life cultivating a habit of love toward all to be a supremely practical endeavor. What place in there for the emotional component of love in such a life? The path of self mastery and service leaves plenty of room for the emotion of love. In the first place, feelings of love are powerful movements within a person which often take you by surprise. A significant friend, a spouse or lover, a parent or child, a wonderful sight, beautiful music, a special fragrance, a comforting touch--any of these and more can readily generate feelings of love within you. Devotional practices, such as prayer, meditation and singing, can also generate feelings of love in the heart of the practioner. By all means, welcome these feelings of love. The more the merrier! Seek them and experience them! They are refreshments in the sometimes arduous practice of self mastery. Extending your love to another is another important means of generating feelings of love. If you want to feel love, love! It works! You who would master yourself do not wait about for someone to love you. You dare to love first, knowing that by dropping buckets of love overboard into that universal pond in which you row, waves of love are certain to make their way back to you, from sources distant and unknown. This fact is simply built in to the structure of the universe. It works! You who choose to master yourself therefore must love without demand that it be reciprocated. Such a demand is alien to love. Give your love freely, there is no need to know the manner of its fulfillment. Prior expectations and demands of reciprocation are nearly guaranteed to breed disappointment. Since when did anyone say it was your role to demand or know how any of your intentions, even those in perfect alignment with the divine will pleasure, will be executed and balanced by the source of all and the universal laws? Studying universal law you know to allow, and you know that conditional loving is oxymoronic.

Now some folks might at this point start rolling themselves out as a doormat on the erroneous belief that "loving everyone unconditionally" is a legitimate license to spend yourself willy nilly in the cause of service. Well, it just ain't so. You are to love your neighbor as you love yourself and while you love yourself. Service sometimes comes at the expense of self, but never at the expense of self love, or at the expense of love of the source of all. When you play the doormat, and invite others to walk all over you, and then wonder at the resentment that's growing in your heart, and compound it by trying to hide your resentment from yourself, you reap what you have sown. Service which is offered at the expense of self love, service which is rendered in a manner that generates resentment, is not offered freely, but out of a sense of obligation. When service is rendered from obligation, it may seem as if coerced, and not a free will choice, and as such a function of tyranny or dilemma. Under such a set of perceptions, the servant as doormat is in fact not operating under the terms of self mastery, but under the terms of the victim consciousness. When you serve because you have to, or because you should, you play the doormat, you play the victim, and your heart fills not with love but with the clutter of resentment. You feel burdened by the "cross" rather than freed: you carry the cross of the martyr.

On the contrary, the master of self carries a cross which is easy and light. That's because the path of mastery is a path for the free will, not the chained will of the victim. Even duty can be chosen! When it is chosen, it is rendered a responsible exercise of free will. Love of self does not mean always placing yourself first. Service sometimes allows placing yourself first, but sometimes middle or last as well. Given that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, it is the willing choice to place yourself in the path of service at all that ultimately matters. If you find yourself playing the doormat, and resenting your service, place the situation squarely in the crosshairs of introspection. Find your choice in the matter, and if it is a choice which amounts not to self love, but self betrayal, then your service is not service from the heart, and must be re-evaluated. Either your manner of choosing and disposition relative to the situation must change, or the pattern of relationship in this harmful service must be abandoned for another course of action.

So do not sweat it if you find yourself playing the doormat now and then. Consider it an old habit which you are transforming through a new practice, and act according to the new whenever you recognize the behavior and see the opportunity coming. The experience of loving unconditionally, without expectation of return, can serve as the litmus test of your giving.

The habit of love

2005-04-29T07:07:00.000-04:00

I've been characterizing love in terms of attraction, attachment, and union. At different levels of human experience and expression, attraction, attachment and union characterize love, but it should by clear by now that not every attraction and attachment manifest as love, although physical and emotional love do involve attraction and attachment. With regard to union, that is ultimately a demonstration of love alone, as that state cannot be experienced from any other perspective, as it is definitive of love at its most essential level. Spiritual union is the experience of love unadulterated. It's pretty intense, so I hear!

When we spoke about attraction and deliberate intent, free will and choice, you could see also that such matters can go "either way," as it were. You can attract for good or ill, you can choose for good or ill, you can intend for good or ill, in a free-will universe. So if you want to attract, intend, choose and act in a manner that is coherent with the will of the source of all and universal law, it is essential that you take responsibility for your choices again and again, through the process of introspection. It is through the process of introspection that you study your experiences to root out the role you are playing and to make behavioral adjustments in the direction of service and self mastery. In that way you can consciously create a deeply satisfying life experience because it is coherent with the divine will-pleasure, and generates an integral experience of the self.

Put in terms of love, the path of service and self mastery is about creating a life which is a habit of love. In my dissertation back in graduate school I spoke of marriage in particular as a habit of love. By that I meant that marriage itself is a loving relationship between two people which is generated through their practice of loving acts with respect to each other, and who through that day-in and day-out practice, generate a disposition or tendency, inhering in their mutually oriented wills, of love for one another which is enduring. The converse implication is that where those same two partners in relationship practice not loving acts but controlling acts or mean acts or spiteful and vindictive acts over and over again, they generate not a habit of love but a mean spirited relationship which essentially represents a viscious rather than a virtuous habit. Such a relationship should be dissolved in its tendencies at the very least, through a recommitment to a habit of love, in order to dissolve the viscious habit, for in itself it does not represent a marriage at all. Marriage is not a ceremonial event but a relationship process having a certain character. Sometimes it is the case that through lack of will and comittment on the part of one or both partners it is not possible to truly marry, and in that case, despite ceremonies and cohabitation and children and shared property, a marriage understood in terms of a habit of love simply cannot form.

So a habit is a disposition to act inhering in the will. Since the will is free, such dispositions can be changed, but a habit is by definition enduring, so it takes considerable intention and effort to shift from one direction to another. Anyone who has ever experienced changing the contents of a drawer from one place to another or moved a light switch permanently knows what I am talking about. You may find yourself checking the old drawer before the new, or trying to flip the old light switch now gone, for years to come! "Old habits die hard." This is true whether they represent exclusively physical dispositions, or emotional ones, or patterns of thought. Two points follow: it is unreasonable to expect instant transformation from one habit to another, so be compassionate with yourself and with others who have generated an honest initial intention for transformation but do not yet act in perfect coherence with that intention. There is a learning/practice curve to be mastered in the endeavor of forming new habits and dissolving old ones which must be accepted. It is also unreasonable to expect that by merely generating a new intention a former habit could be dissolved and a new one generated on the spot, without the concommitent practice and repetition of action over time which represent the meat of the new behavioral groove.

So this is some of the backround for my statement that the path of service and self mastery is about creating a life which is a habit of love. A marriage which is a habit of love is a particular relationship based on the practice of loving acts between two people. A life which is a habit of love represents a more general orientation of love. Such a life involves a commitment to act in a loving manner, to generate a loving disposition writ large, to pursue the experience of love with regard to all, enemy as well as friend, with the knowledge that the "maximization" or universalization of the intent and practice of a loving disposition with regard to all does not imply or require that everyone will love you back!

A marriage which is a habit of love, and a family which is a habit of love, are awesome training grounds for a person who would seek to live a life which is a habit of love, and they certainly represent good foundations upon which to build such patterning of character. It is also possible for a person to transcend their less-than-loving circumstances of familial origin and generate a life and family and marriage which are habits of love nonetheless. In either case, the life which is a habit of love is dependent upon lots of practice, introspection, employment of the tools of self mastery, and devotion to the source of all as the ultimate lover radiant behind the veils of form and everpresent for loving union.

When manners controlling and aloof, or patterns of belief, thinking, behavior and relationship rooted in the victim consciousness are recognized and acknowledged, when you accept yourself as you are in spite of the fact that such manners are still operative in your life (and mine!), the stage is set for the formulation of new intentions which are coherent with the will of the source of all and universal law, and the ongoing practice of love.

More on love: attachment and union

2005-04-26T23:30:00.000-04:00

In our experience in the physical world, love is not merely about attraction, but attachment. Attachment is the extremely limited and ephemeral, passing mimicry of the spiritual reality of union. Attachment happens at the level of the physical, emotional, and even noetical bodies. Each of these levels represent passing aspects of ourselves as forms, and I'll talk more about their implications and meaning in later posts. For now, it's enough to say there are different aspects of ourselves which can pass away, without erasing who we are essentially. Because our physical bodies pass away, or can be rendered distant from one another, physical attachments can suffer "breakage," and be lost. Emotional attachments can span distance and time in a manner that physical ones can not, yet anyone who has ever been "dumped" or initiated a breakup of a relationship knows the potential fragility of emotional attachments. Emotional attachments are of course not merely limited to people, of course. They extend readily to objects, places, creatures, activities and dispositions as well. That's what enables us to say "I love dancing, or I love my car, or I love New York." When we say such things it is not that we are wanting to trivialize love, but rather we are revealing and acknowledging our emotional attachment, which is a significant dimension of love in the realms of form. It is possible as well to have attachments in the world of ideas. Our attachments to a particular intention, notion or concept can be quite intense, and extremely durable, yet ultimately these kinds of attachments as well represent only imitations of the experience of spiritual union.

The fragility of attachments, regardless of what kind, are the source of enormous amounts of pain and sorrow, and it is those experiences of pain and sorrow that give love its risky reputation. Doing the "love" thing here on planet earth carries with it certain assurances of loss, and these sorrows, variously interpreted, can lead you to assume certain things about love that may not really be fair, when arrived at out of a spiritual context. One thing that can be said for sure, however: where love is based on attachment, the seemingly "loss" of love is a function of separation. So there are notably a variety of strategies for dealing with the seemingly inevitable experience of separation.

One strategy is to allow for attachments, but to live in fear of separation. This anxiety often colors a person's whole life, and is not surprisingly a function of the victim consciousness. The victim consciousness is prone to perceive "loss happening," and when it does, there is much inconsolable sorrow, lasting pain and anguish, as well as anger--actually, people like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross mapped out stages of grief more carefully than I have here, and her work is very interesting, as she maps out stages of denial, anger, bargaining, grief and acceptance, or something like that(!) She is not speaking to the victim consciousness as I am, and I am not implying that grief is an experience of the victim consciousness alone, as you will see.

When you approach attachment through the lens of the fear of separation, you will also likely employ strategies of control in order to avoid the feared outcome. Unfortunately, fear and control are not qualities inherent in a truly loving sort of attachment, and tend towards attracting the feared outcome more than anything, as like attracts like. So this is a vicious circle: you willingly attach (love) yet the tendency of fearing the loss of the attachment actually generates separation, confirming the fear, and the ultimate perception of attachment as a slippery matter requiring better control.

Another common strategy around attachments deriving from the same fear of separation is the strategy of detachment. With this strategy, loving/attachment is held at a distance: intimacy is held at bay. Unlike the strategy of the last paragraph, where intimacy is attempted, but subject to control in a manner that limits its flourishing, the aloof person does not dare risk intimacy at all. When the potential for intimacy intimates itself, the detached person may feign intimacy from an idealized perspective. This person will appear to be willing to be in an intimate relationship, and may even seem to be actively seeking an intimate relationship. But when the circumstances of relationship manifest, this one has an internal sense that the whole thing is a fraud at some level. That's because it is a fraud: this person is not really willing to risk intimacy, on the assumption that the result will be pain, suffering and loss. So the detached person either doesn't enter into intimate relationships, feigning disinterest to mask fear, or upon entering into a relationship feigns intimacy in order to avoid the hurt of separation, and thus never forms a real attachment. When the relationship not surprisingly fails, the fears of intimacy are confirmed, despite having been generated by the self defeating strategy of aloofness, and the empty or false relationships it generates.

Many folks who opt for the strategy of aloofness will find aspects of religious traditions or work situations that support their strategy. If this is your strategy, you may seek refuge in the tenets of Buddhism, for instance. Of course I'm not saying all Buddhists preach a pathological form of detachment any more than I am saying all Christians preach salvation through victim consciousness, but only that people with a strategy of detachment may conjure solace from their interpretation of certain Buddhist tenets, just as people with victim consciousness will interpret Christian scriptures in a manner that supports their pathology. Perhaps you will undertake your work in a manner that takes over your whole life, and keep yourself so busy that you couldn't possibly "have time" for a relationship. This is a way of passively refusing to make time for a relationship, yet it allows you to play the victim of your solitude based on the extreme circumstances of your work commitments, which themselves require a certain kind of aloofness as well (ie, being "businesslike."

So the strategy of detachment is undertake by a person who holds hi/rself aloof to avoid the perceived risks of intimacy, while the strategy of control is undertaken by a person whose anxiety of separation overwhelms and shortcuts hi/r experience of true intimacy. In either scenario, loving attachment is forfeited out of fear of
loss. So is it really better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? From the perspective of self mastery, it certainly is! That conviction arise from the principles and strategies inherent to the path of self mastery. True love does not attempt to control the beloved, but allows them to become their own loving self. Every attachment carries within its formation the necessity of letting it go. Attachments when broken for whatever reason still generate grief, for loss is loss, even when ephemeral or strictly physical, but that grief itself is passing. It is not ultimately debilitating, given the foreknowledge that all physical attachments are destined to end in separation, and all emotional attachments are destined to be transformed and matured and universalized, and all ideological attachments are destined to be relativized in light of the ultimate truth to which every idea must in the long run be subsumed.

The master who would love loves in a manner that endures beyond separation, because love manifest can never be lost, and s/he knows it. The love of the master does not blame, is not jealous, does not control, allows, attracts, and lets go. Separations are endured more easily when time is put into its proper perspective, and when you understand that nothing that is real is ever lost, although it may seem through the veils for a moment to be at a distance. The real grief of the master is the sense of separation from the source of all that arises in the process of clarifying your own intent and your own experience. You seems in that moment to be something other, and something other seems to postpone the ultimate spiritual union. But even this grief of the master is ephemeral, and will pass like the night at the breaking of the dawn, since the union is the "real."

The path I am describing is a path of love. When you take responsibiliy for your experiences, you are truly ready to love. The path of self mastery is a path of devotion, a path of service from the heart, a path which rejoices in loving attachment without fear of loss, because nothing that is truly loved is ever lost, and the love we experience is the experience of our very selves. Love is durable and abundant, despite the desparities of the fleeting physical world. Love is the stuff out of which our ultimate union is built, and we are here to liberally imitate that love and render its likeness on every plane of our existence, knowing that by our experience of responsible love we generate the patterns whereby we and those who follow us will step forward for the ultimate letting go which is our union with the source of all. Our loves and our losses are all preparation, practice, whereby we develop the permanent habit of love. So allow yourself to love, and love in a manner consistent with the tenets of self mastery and univeral law, so that you compound your experiences and open your heart: you have only your fears to risk, and your love to gain! See you in heaven--it's beating in your chest :-)

What's love got to do with it?

2005-04-25T23:27:00.000-04:00

When we talk about a parent willing to do anything to help their child, or a teacher taking on a difficult role/life in order to facilitate a student's growth, or when a healer takes up the illness of another and resolves it in themeselves, we are describing forms of service, indeed, but we are also talking about acts of love. Love, after all, is that which binds us together, as it is the nature of the source of all. Love can be considered at many levels, as it bears different meanings depending upon the level of the person we relate it too. At a physical level, love is attraction. The universal law of attraction is a law of love built into the physical universe. Literally, the physical universe is held together by the love of the source of all. The cloud of electronic energy swirling about the nucleus of the atom, the planets about the sun, the raw physical magnetism of the sexes, all have this principle of love/attraction at their operative root.

At the emotional level, love is the attraction of psychical likenesses, where hearts meet as one, and the movements of one psyche and the forms it generates attract like movements and forms of another. Here, when love is experienced by a person, it is a psychical condition of attraction accompanyied by a feeling state of open-heartedness and longing to be joined to the beloved, to fulfill the attraction through union: in this type of love, you want to be with another and keep their company.

At the noetical level, love is the power of intention to manifest: it is the attractive power of an idea taking form. It is the alignment of causes assembling around a deliberate intent. It is the stuff of creation.

At the spiritual level, love is the source of all. Love is the one, being one. Love is the identity of us all.

I'll leave the last words and the first word on love to another. For now, I'd like to identify a common misperception about love, particularly what I called "psychical" or "emotional" love above. Often times, when a person experiences their love awakening, they desire to fulfill that attraction with some kind of union. This can actually be a tricky thing! You see, there are social structures and commitments which represent the "container" of our particular life, and they do not always permit the ready fulfillment of that longing for union which might arise out of the awakening of emotional love in a person. This emotion of love can be very powerful, even seemingly overwhelming. A key to mastering the emotion, for it must be mastered at some level, is to recognize it to be a movement within oneself. However much you may want to identify your feelings of love as a entirely dependent upon another person (who may or may not share your feelings), your feelings are in fact entirely yours.

Mastering the emotion of love is to be understood here not as a matter of suppressing your feelings: not at all! Rather mastering the emotion of love is about recognizing your power to love, and allowing the feelings of your love to move about your form and awaken in you your attractive life force, your devotion to all that is good, your intent to create a life in keeping with the divine "will-pleasure," and your longing to experience the oneness of the source of all. When the raw attractive force of physical and emotional love are given reign over one's intent to "make" or create love in a manner coherent with the will of the source of all, trouble is a brewing! It is through our intent and commitment to love that we create a context and a container for the expression and outpouring of physical and emotional love, rather than the other way around. When intent follows emotion rather than leads it, it is like the rider waiting for the horse to decide where they should go. Such is rarely the stuff of successful human interactions!

Certainly, in certain cultures, this one of ours in particular, we have a tendency to follow up emotional and physical love with a commitment. In India and many other cultures, the commitment comes first, and physical and emotional love are invited to grow in that context. In the US, the emotional and physical love more or less are allowed to sprout up where they may, and when it looks worthy, a commitment may follow. The problem there is that when it sprouts up again somewhere outside of the commitment, there is a tendency to pursue it again in the same manner as in the first instance. In either case, where the emotion of love manages to take hold in a person and move them, it is essential to identify the feeling of love as a disposition arising in the person who feels it, and that person must own it as their own. When I feel my love for you, it is my experience, ultimately. And while it can be very satisfying when two are both feeling their love for one another, even in that case of mutual love, what is mutual is the common experience of feeling your love moving within, and that feeling is your own, although it is a commonplace mistake to believe that feeling and that movement is dependent upon another.

The love which plays out as service is an expression at the noetical level, as it begins with an intention which is coherent with the will of the source of all, and it is aligned with the creative movement inhering there. Loving service is powered by the charge of raw physical attraction and the juice of emotional love rightly ordered. When you recognize your love to be the creative "battery" that it is, and overcome the tendency to mistake your experience of love for a dependency upon another person's feelings, you can direct it intentionally, as you please, with deference to the source of all, and in service to those within your sphere of influence. This is the love that is kind and patient, and forebears all ills, not out of a masochist desire to endure slights for negative pleasure, but out of a maturity where you can continue to feel your love under the most complex or challenging circumstances and vibrations.

That, I believe, is what Jesus meant when he said "my cross is easy, and my burden light." Coming from a place of love, from an intent to serve, what might be endured on such a path is borne lightly as the internal experience of love lifts you above the inherent challanges. Where service is drudgery, chances are you are playing the doormat rather than accomplishing true service. That you might as well skip. When love is at the heart of service, then the slave becomes the master.

Why "bad" things happen to "good" people, re: accountability

2005-04-25T22:41:00.001-04:00

So not every seemingly untoward event represents the effects of prior causes as an issue of accountability. Everyone who is here made the courageous choice to come to this school to learn something of value. Some folks sign up for the extra-intensive course, however, because they want to accelerate their growth. This is an agreement we make before we choose to embark upon this life. So while some folks are aware of their need to balance out past choices with new experiences, and enter upon a life with such a task in mind, others choose challenges which they know will supercharge their spiritual development and self mastery as they meet those challenges. So they volunteer for a particularly challenging body, or set of life circumstances, or project to undertake, or set of complex relationships, the mastery of which will represent a significant leap on the growth curve. So when seemingly "bad" things happen to "good" people, it may or may not provide you some satisfaction to consider three options: 1. they are meeting up with waves they introduced in the pond some time ago; 2. they are meeting up with waves they introduced in the pond rather recently; 3. they are encountering circumstances for which they volunteered knowing that by facing the challenge they would stretch themselves to new levels of perception and spiritual growth.

Now, we have touched on the first three options, but there is a fourth possibility: they may be doing service for someone else. This is something we must consider in terms of accountablility. It is possible, is some measure, to carry the burdens of another. Jesus offers the perfect example of this, but so do most parents. It is possible to bring one another along on the road, and this is a profound form of service. Folks who have addressed their own accountability issues can, by generating a "surplus" of positive and coherent elementals, contribute to the balance of the universe both in general, as well as in a directed manner.

We can in fact bear one another's burdens, to the extent that such service does not undermine the essential lessons for which a given person came to learn. So by all means, feed the hungry, cloth the naked, comfort the sorrowing, make peace, love your neighbor, pray for your enemy, do good to those who would harm you, heal the sick, pray for one another, lay hands upon one another, and even lay down your life for a friend!

When we render such service to one another, we accelerate growth all around by our experience, by our example, and by generating more of that in general (like attracts like.) Some skilled healers have mastered an otherwise dangerous technique of bringing the illness of another into themselves so as to work it out "locally" in their own body. This is not advisable without the requisite considerable knowledge to do so with relative safety: a person who too easily or unconsciously takes on the burdens of another in this manner without the skill or energy to handle it will find themselves burned out and of little help to anyone pretty quickly.

Some individuals may have chosen a life of a particular station or in a particular set of relationships with service as their main intention, taking up a role to facilitate the growth of someone else. Teachers do this on a regular basis. The life circumstances may appear to be such that "bad" has "happened" to a "good" person, when in fact that person chose the set-up as a means of facilitating another on hi/r path. This is a very real way in which one may "lay down hi/r life for a friend," not by giving up a body as a non-ultimate value, but by taking up a body and living out a life purely as a volunteer in service to another. Of course that servant will grow as well from their choice, but they do so as a matter of course rather than out of necessity to address their own issues of accountability.

More on accountability

2005-04-24T22:45:00.000-04:00

Imagine a person in sitting in a boat along the sea coast. The boat is filled with various objects of different sizes that you can toss into the water: pebbles, floaty toys, rocks, anvils, fish bait, treasure chests, and various other items, some that float, some that sink, but all capable of making waves, big or small, and all capable of attracting the attention of passersby. Imagine that this person is not very skilled at the oars, and is generally new to boating. Let's say you are the person, and you toss in a rock. The water is calm, and you can see the waves ripple out away from the place where the rock entered the water, and then they appear to dissipate after a while. Then you toss in a couple of scoops of fish slop. You also see the waves rippling out, but this time you've attracted some seals who were swimming nearby, and they come by to snarf up the fish. When they do, all of their activity gets your boat rocking. You become very nervous that you will tip, and try to shoo them with your oars, accidentally wacking one on the nose and giving it a boo-boo. Now there is blood in the water and the sharks come hunting for the seal. You thought the seals were nerve racking! Now the sharks have come and you are totally panicked, lie down in the boat, and beg for them to go away.

Let's say despite this rough start in boating, you keep on practicing. You become skilled at handling the boat in the water, can climb in and out of it with ease, can right it when it capsizes, are a confident swimmer, and all that. Let's say that back before you had become more skilled, you had dropped a sealed box of shark attractant in the water. Today you happen to be out rowing, just the same day that sunken package broke down, and the sharks come swarming in to you. No problem now. You've seen that before and now how to handle them, how to maintain the boat, your balance, and your cool. Just another day at sea for you!

I intend for this little allegory to describe the manner in which accountablility can be rendered a little less daunting. You see, when you first start out generating thought forms (thought-emotions and emotion-thoughts), you probably don't have a very good sense of the implications of what you produce. We learn from the effects of our causes. So if you dump fish bait in the water, you may attract more than you bargained for, but you can't undo what you've done. At first, the implications of what comes back to you as a result of your ignorant actions may seem daunting. However, as you build your skill at handling yourself in the lag-time between your action (oops! I dropped a sealed box of shark attractant!) and its effect (here come the sharks!), you render yourself more capable of handling the repercussions of your action.

The universe is in a sense a closed system. So the waves you generate in the form of thoughts and actions redound back upon you eventually. Imagine the universe as a sphere, and yourself as a wave generator. The waves generated by you will eventually work their way around the sphere and back to you. When they return, they will have encountered other waves of similar frequency generated by others thinking like thoughts and committing like actions. So by the time they get back to you, they are of the same frequency, but of increased amplitude. And when they return, you'll likely give them yet more energy and out they'll go again, destined to return even more energized still, with greater amplitude yet.

A while back in an earlier post I noted the way in which the body speaks to us. First it whispers, then it whines, then it shouts and screams for attention. That final point usually gets our attention, but our response is often to just shut it up somehow rather than actually listen to the message. We may do so at our peril, because such shouts left untended can lead to the breakdown of the human body quite completely. Furthermore, there is an illegitimate tendency played out by the victim consciousness relative to the shouting body to accuse the body, as if it is causing the pain, rather than to inspect the behaviors and patterns that generated the warning message in the first place. The victim will blame the messenger. This whole scenario transfers exactly to thought forms in general. You generate a thought form, which works its way around the universal sphere and back to you, its source. That's the whisper. If generated in an unconscious manner, you may not recognize it upon its return, but will charge it up again nonetheless. When it returns again as a whine in the circumstances of your life, or later still as a shout, from the victim consciousness you may be inclined to identify what's happening as something from outside of your "innocent self." In fact the universe is simply functioning perfectly as designed and keeping itself balanced and yourself accountable for your thoughts and actions in the way it does best.

This scenario of course applies to all of your thoughts and actions, and not merely the ones which are imbalanced and out of synch with the will of the source of all and with universal law. The good stuff comes back amplified too, whether you're conscious of the good stuff you have generated or not. It's the same deal either way! Both the good and the bad which we generate redound upon us as waves flowing round the sphere and back to their source, same frequency, higher amplitude. This is called the law of sevenfold return in some esoteric literature, perhaps based on the reference of Jesus in his parable of the room swept clean of the evil spirit only to find seven more to replace it. What is sent out returns amplified. This is a good thing, in the same way that the shouts from your body are a good thing. They alert us to what we are doing, in case we are too thick or unconscious to notice in the first place. When we generate causes, that is, our thoughts and actions, unconsciously, one way that they can be brought to consciousnes is to have them return to us so loudly that they grab our attention and compel us to take a look at what's going on.

Those attention grabbers usually seem to come out of nowhere. They blindside you because although they are the effects of your thoughts and actions returning, the patterns which generated them were in all likelihood unconscious ones. The person in victim consciousness will immediately scream foul, and begin looking for something, anything outside of the self on which to pin the blame. The person on a path of self mastery, however, while also taken by surprise by an event, will take up the experience as an opportunity to explore previously unconscious patterns of thought and behavior, and acknowledge the opportunity to bring what was in the dark to light.

Further, when you practice self mastery, like the boater in our earlier example, you become more skilled at handling the effects of the traps which you unconsciously set for yourself. Not every seemingly untoward event in your life represents the effects of prior causes. We'll talk about that tomorrow!

Regarding "accountability"

2005-04-23T23:28:00.000-04:00

Hey there, friends! I am posting from an internet kiosk at the hotel where I'm staying: $0.10/minute -- that's dedication!

For anybody locked into a victim conciousness mentality, all this talk of universal law and the mathematical precision with which it holds us accountable for our every thought and action may seem a little spooky and overwhelming. If you are of a mind to believe that your sins were all forgiven because you believe in Jesus, well, that is true in so far as you will not be sent to bake in eternal hell by a judge for your past deeds or the deeds of "Adam," but far be it from Jesus to undercut universal law completely and erase the paths of growth which you have worked out for yourself with the consent of the source of all. There is a lot to be said for accountability. Accountability is different from responsibility. In these posts we've had lots to say about responsibility. The perspective I have been developing here posits responsibility as a strategy of introspection intrinsic to the path of self mastery: the practice of responsibility involves the willing inspection of our role in the creation of our life experience with a view to correcting sub-optimal choices and creating a life experience ever more in keeping with the divine will-pleasure and universal law.

Accountablility, on the other hand, is not so much a practical function like responsibility. Rather, it is more a mathmatical function based upon the universal principles of attraction, intent, allowance and balance. The universe holds us accountable, not as a function of judgement, but simply as a function of the structure built into it by the most wise source of all. We are accountable for our thoughts and actions. The universe is not mad at us, or bent on punishing us, or anything of the sort. Such are the attributes which the victim consciousness mistakedly assigns to G-- from the depths of its guilt and craving for self-punishment.

Now, for those of you who have whipped out the calculator and begun tallying your debt to the universe for all of those nasty thoughts and actions you have been accumulating in the basements and subbasements of your unswept conscience, let's pause for a moment and consider all of the ways in which it is possible seemingly to mitigate accountability. It is important to do this, because if you toss in all of your nasty thoughts and actions for which you are accountable from your past lives as well, it may seem an unreasonable prospect to overcome your past and move forward.

It is precisely that sense of overwhelm which we need to address, lest you give up on the prospect of moving forward altogether, as if you were a hopeless case, on the one hand, or on the other, you attempt to outmaneuver your accountability without actually learning anything from the effects which you have caused, which would sort of defeat the purpose of coming to school in the first place. This latter outmaneuvering of accountability often seems to me to be at the heart of some of the more simplistic strategies for gathering converts to christianity.

I said "seemingly" mitigate accountability because although you can't really mitigate accountability, you can in fact grab the bull by the horns today and begin to generate the movement towards self mastery in your life which will reduce and dissolve the implied necessity of working through the repercussions of your past. When you, for instance, begin the practice of generating a stream of positive elementals, consciously constructed thought-emotions the intent of which are coherent with the divine will-pleasure and universal law, you simultaneously begin to dissolve the negative elementals which you generated in your past. That is because habits are dissolved through the repetition of the opposite action.

You need not necessarily become conscious of every single thought and action which you have deposited in the history of your life to dissolve them all. More important matters will indeed require a deliberate process of introspection to unfold your role in the particular drama, but in large part, your concern will be to generate a new state of mind, one which habitually creates in a positive manner coherent with the will of the source of all. On that track, you will be dissolving the implications of your past at a rapid rate. For example, say you had a fear of flying, and you undertook to address that fear head on, and you arrived at a point (and this can happen quicker then you may have dared to imagine) where you can get on a plane or look out at a vista without the fearful charge welling up within you. Well, at that point, all of the emotion-thoughts which you generated over the long course of your history and pattern of fear over that particular issue are effectively discharged and no longer have any leverage upon you. You have in effect discharged your accountability through your conscious effort. Congratulations!

Another kind of example is when something that used to bother you doesn't anymore, because you let it go and grew beyond your initial diposition. For instance, say your spouse has a habit of doing something that you initially react against. After recognizing your reaction, through the practice of introspection you determine that the matter is in fact inconsequential, and you consciously choose to look at it from another perspective, to live and let live. Now when your spouse does "that," it no longer bothers you. Instead of demanding they change, you transformed your own perspective.

I'm up to seven bucks in this machine with more to say, but my brain is slowing down...I will post more tommorrow when I am thinking faster (and therefore cheaper...time is literally money in this machine!

I'm on the road

2005-04-21T22:11:00.000-04:00

I am travelling to teach in San Francisco from Friday, April 22, returning May 1st. If I can post on the road somehow, I will, but if I do not have access to a computer, please come back with me to this blog around May 2nd! Thanks for reading along!

How the past matters

2005-04-21T22:10:00.000-04:00

In an early post, I commented that “the past is basically irrellevant.” It is important for you to understand the context of that statement given what I have said about responsibility in the interim, and in light of the last two posts. When it comes to taking up the path of service and self mastery, and getting off the victim consciousness treadmill/train-to-nowhere, the past is irrelevant in the following sense: no matter what you’ve done, no matter how poor or unconscious your choices have been in the past, no matter how long you have buried your talents under a rock, betrayed your self, hurt others, feared the truth, avoided honesty, conjured false selves and worshipped false gods, IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO WAKE UP! How many times shall I forgive my brother, Lord? Seven times? “I say not seven times, but 70 times 7 times,” said Jesus. That’s bible numerology for “perfectly” or “infinitely,” for you literalist bean-counters out there who might be tempted to do the math and stop forgiving/practicing archery after a mere 490 misses-of-the-mark! Just ask Thomas Edison how many times he and his lab team blew it before they came up with a working lightbulb, and you’ll know that 490 misses is barely getting going in the learning/innovating/development arena, which is also the stuff of growth and self mastery.

So the past should never be considered an impetus for remaining in the victim consciousness. Many use the past as their excuse for not moving forward, along the lines of claiming “I was so naughty, I’m unforgiveable, so I’ll just keep wallowing in guilt here (as opposed to doing the work of introspection to reveal my patterns to myself, become conscious of my choices, and practice new habits which are coherent with universal law, the divine will, and my own nascent consciousness of self mastery and service.) In this sense, for sure, the past is no excuse for not taking up the cause of self mastery in the present. In that sense, it is irrelevant.

Another way that people use the past as an excuse for not moving forward is via the strategy of unforgiveness. This strategy is self-defeating at best, and another fine example of victim-consciousness strategizing. The Greek word aphiaymi (roughly transliterated) is one of my favorites in scripture because of the multiple English meanings which it simultaneously carries, including to let go, to forgive, to cancel a debt, to permit, to allow. When you hold on to something someone else did to you, when you refuse forgiveness, when you hold someone indebted, it’s you who is stuck holding on. Unforgiveness is a ball and chain, but as opposed to the kind which is shackled to you, the unforgiving one willingly, consciously or unconsciously, grips the chain hi/rself, drags the heavy ball about while moaning and retelling the story over and over again about what happened and how wrong it was and how it made me suffer so, and on and on. While I fully recognize the real hurtful experiences that people endure at the receiving end of bad choices, stupid mistakes, and wicked doings, forgiveness is still the most powerful strategy for moving beyond these experiences.

People often cling to unforgiveness either because they feel obliged to hold someone accountable for actions commited by another, or because they want to punish that person themselves, or because they believe they simply “can’t let go,” along the lines of: “I tried to forgive him, but I just can’t!” Or they hold on to unforgiveness because it is a way of maintaining their own innocence while leaving their own role in the events uninspected.

As far as holding others accountable, this is a waste of time given the active corrective nature of universal law. The laws of attraction and balance guarantee that each and every one of us will be held accountable for our every thought and action. It is an unnecessary duplication of efforts to play the judge, and to mete out punishment, a role from the victim consciousness’s dramatic repertoire. Furthermore, such role playing also represents an attempt on the part of the unforgiving one to control how another person should experience the ultimate outcome of their actions, and this is simply not for us to control or decide. It is not in our sphere of intelligence, frankly. So judge not, lest you be judged, for the measure which you measure out will be measured back to you. That attempt to control the outcomes through unforgiveness actually represents a breach of the law of allowance on the part of the one who does not forgive. Generating elementals of punishment merely attracts more punishment to oneself. This is the manner in which our universe is structured. If you don’t like it, move out! But since the grass isn’t any greener on the other side of the universe, it pays to play by the rules, and forgive, let go, allow. It may be easier to do so when you become aware of how destructive the state of unforgiveness is to your own self, and of how universal structure will take care of matters with far more art and grace then you ever could have according to your own vengeful design. “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” in these terms means that your vengeance is unnecessary, as the source of all has made the repercussions of our thoughts and actions to be certainties of universal law. The “vengeance” of the Lord is victim-consciousness poetry reiterating this fact of structural necessity.

So the belief that one simply can’t forgive is nothing more than a false belief. Unforgiveness is an act of control contrary to universal law. It is a choice in a certain direction, which itself carries it’s own miserable repercussions. When you recognize the choice involved in unforgiveness, and the strategies you undertake consciously or unconsciously through unforgiveness, you empower yourself to construct new thought-emotions with respect to the experience at issue which enable you to build up the pattern of letting go in your system. When you practice letting go (and I mean PRACTICE! One act of letting go will not constitute a habit of letting go, or a permanent experience of having let go. For events that you experienced with an intense charge, you must practice letting go until the habit of letting go is fully formed and in place as a habit itself powerfully charged, and ultimately capable of dissipating the charge of the other experience.

You may have noticed that none of this discussion of unforgiveness revolves around the plot or story of the experience in question. It frankly doesn’t matter in the slightest what she said or what he did. All that matters is what have you done with it, and how does unforgiveness represent a negative pattern in your life, and how are you going to heal yourself of it. Every time you go back to the past in order to charge up with emotion your version of the events in question and your status as innocent victim, and claim for yourself the power to forgive, and hold that over another person as a club with which to beat them or as some sort of dispensation which they need to beg for like a dog or which you may grant them today but maybe not tommorrow depending upon whether they live up to your most recent standards of perfection, when you do these things, you imprison yourself, you wallow in the victim consciousness, you drag around a ball and chain which you could be free of by simply releasing your grip upon it, again and again, every time you experience the temptation to grab hold of it again.

When you return to the past, return instead with an intent to witness it from the eyes of the other person. Return to it with an intent to witness your own strategies and choices. Return to it with a view to recognizing the false beliefs which were operative in your life at the time, and which may or may not remain operative now. Return to it as a reality to check, so that you might reduce a mountain back to a molehill. Return to it to exercise your power to move a mountain and cast it into the sea, if in fact the event was of epic proportions. Whether it turns out to have been a molehill, or a mountain indeed, in either event your responsibility is to forgive, to let go, to move on. When you do, you will ultimately be able to look back dispassionately upon the past experience, for having established the habit of letting go of it, and for having discharged the pattern of holding on to it.

So, the past is highly relevant! It is the meat upon which one needs to chew in order to move to a higher level of consciousness. Anyone who dismisses the past as irrelevenat in order to avoid inspecting their responsibility for their thoughts, choices and actions is no better off than the person who dwells upon the past in order to reiterate a version of events which justify their unforgiveness. Both represent strategies of the victim consciousness weighing in to maintain its innocence based upon the false belief that taking responsibility for your life experience represents a bad thing rather than a good thing. The path of self mastery willing looks back through the pages of past events to study them, to identify places that still hold a lot of charge, and to call forth new intentions to rectify destructive and unhelpful patterns, false beliefs and the like, with a view to cultivating a life experience coherent with the will pleasure of the source of all.

More on Why be moral? and the economy of salvation

2005-04-20T23:23:00.000-04:00

So basically, I’m saying that the only thing newborn about a newborn is hi/r body, because the consiousness has already been around the block a few times, on average. We each show up with an agenda for our lives: christians call this the plan of G--, and to the extent that this life and body are gifts from the source of all granted to us with our consent and willing, conscious participation, in order to help us learn what we are ready to learn and resolve what we are ready to resolve, I agree.

Now some might be picking up here that I imply reincarnation when I say all this. Well, that’s right, I do. Whether or not an understanding of the principles of reincarnation are logically necessary here, I am not sure, but since I don’t carry the burden of needing to fulfill tenets of any christian orthodoxy, I freely subscribe to notions of reincarnation, as was taught broadly throughout the christian world by the fathers of the church for the first three or so centuries of its existence. If folks find the world of the early church communities somehow worth reconciling themselves too, then they’ll need to find a place in their thought system for reincarnation as well.

The notion comes up in scripture out of the mouth of Jesus himself. He asks his friends who do people say that I am, and when they say Elijah returned, he corrects them and says, no, John is Elijah returned. He doesn’t say, no, you fools, there is no such thing as “returning.” Rather he helps them to understand who has become who on another go round. That passage is what you call a sleeper, meaning someone on the editing committee was napping and let that one slip by while they were busy axing all of the other references in the community documents refering to such commonplace christian teachings on reincarnation that no longer fit the systems of control being put in place by the newly established church-state alliance of the day.

Reincarnation met the chopping block of doctrines that had to go, not because it wasn’t true, and not because it hadn’t been taught for the prior three hundred years running, but because it didn’t cohere with the absolute limits being placed upon the possibility of “salvation” on the part of the established church/state, new holder of the keys to heaven. By limiting the hope for salvation to a single lifetime, which obviously isn’t enough time to work out what needs to be learned to finish your walks on this planet, folks were duped into buying the instant salvation lottery ticket where everyone who plays can win: ie, “submission to church and sacrament” (the modern easy-ticket version being “confessing Jesus as Lord and Savior”). Unfortunately, such an option does little to inculcate a meaningful motivation for true self mastery, except the kind of truncated and juvenile “self-mastery” that amounts to controlling oneself out of fear of eternal punishment.

To sum up this little screed at this point: the christian formulas that hold out that “all men are sinners” carry the grain of truth from the perspective of self mastery that each and every one of us comes on this planet and takes up life in a body with tasks to complete and skills to be practiced. Divergence between a program of self mastery and the standard christian formulas of our day comes regarding strategies for reaching the end game. Burdening a savior who bares responsibility for irresolvable guilt is not a legitimate strategy on the path of self mastery.

This is not to say the the one who would be a master has no place for the teachings, example, and accomplishments of Jesus. On the contrary, it is Jesus himself who has provided the very program of service and self mastery upon which these posts are based. It is Jesus who taught that the one who would be a master must be the servant of all. (Self Mastery through Service.) It is Jesus who taught that we reap what we sow. (Attraction.) It is Jesus who taught that those who have but a bit of faith will do greater things even than he did. ( Deliberate Intent) It is Jesus who demonstrated the power of aligning one’s will with the will of the source of all: thy will be done. (Allowance.) It is Jesus who taught that all of what happens in the dark will be revealed. (Balance.) It is Jesus who said get up, take up your mat, and walk! (Responsibility) It is Jesus who faced the freedom of the will even in it’s most ignorant forms and poured out his love nonetheless: forgive them! they know not what they do! (Freedom.) It is Jesus who invited followers and respected their decision: sell what you have, and come follow me -- but the man went away sad, for he had many possesions. (Choice.) It is Jesus who taught about thought forms and elementals: a man swept his house clean of a demon and it returned with friends! It is Jesus who said I am the light of the world, and you are the light of the world. Put that light upon the table for all to see!

I believe it is a gross injustice and literalist misrepresentation to reduce the life of Jesus to the death of Jesus as a blood sacrifice for guilt. What satisfactions for the guilty conscious various formulaic confessions may provide are fleeting, ultimately, and fail to resolve the core guilt of a person. The only thing that resolves the core guilt of a person is taking conscious stock of one’s responsibility for one’s thoughts and actions and the effects they cause through introspection, and engaging in the transformative work and practice of new and conscious habit formation that recreates the sleeping “victim” of Adam’s sin into the waking master who multiplies his talents in the service of the source of all.

If there is an “economy of salvation” to the path of self mastery, it is the belief that we are given all the time in the world to work out everything that we need to in order to master our free wills and balance their expression in a manner integral with the will pleasure of the source of all, from whose womb we have never departed in fact, and in whose sacred heart alone we will find true rest.

Why be moral, pt. 2: the economy of “salvation” inspected

2005-04-20T00:49:00.000-04:00

Now the odd thing about choosing otherwise, that is, choosing to be immoral, or out of synch with the tenets of universal law, is that, although it is a choice that arises from the freedom of the will, it leads to the ultimate curtailment of the freedom of the will, and so is a choice against the self. The choice to be immoral, that is, the choice to exercise your freedom in a manner that generates imbalance, in a manner that attempts to control instead of allow, in a manner that deliberately intends ill and attracts negativity, or in a manner that yields to unconscious processes that for which we are ultimately responsible, such a kind of choice generates in the universe wrongs that need to be righted, imbalances that need to be corrected, and thought forms that need to be discharged of their energy.

Those wrongs, imbalances, and thought forms which you cause, whether consciously or unconsciously, have their effects upon others, to be sure, and ultimately, they play themselves out upon you directly. I am responsible for the legacy which is generated in the wake of my thoughts and actions, and the very structure of the universe will call me to ultimately face the effects which I cause. Everything that happens in the dark will be brought to light; everything whispered in secret will be made known.

Now at this point, many a christian at least by name will step in and say “Gil! That’s why Jesus came! We are such awful sinners, rotten to the core through our inheritance from Adam, that there’s just no way we can pay back what we owe! We are rightly deserving of eternal fire, and nothing more, but by the blood of Jesus we are washed clean! He who was innocent and owed nothing has paid our debt through his sacrifice on the cross and set us free! Acknowledge him as your Lord and Savior and be born again, and you too can be saved, for everyone is indebted, and only through such an allegiance can you overcome the burden laid upon you by the unrighteousness of Adam, and your own sins as well.” If you have ever been on a college campus for more than a day or two, or travelled south of the Mason-Dixon line, watched late night preachers, flipped radio stations, or read Cur Deus Homo by “St.” Anselm, you have heard this argument. Admittedly the Catholic Church upped the anti on this formula a bit by piling on some sacramental obligations and submission to the authority of the Church embodied in the pontiff who assumes the consecrated role of bona fide mouthpiece of the Holy Spirit on earth, but the initial bit holds for Catholics as well.

Tiresome as the “economy of salvation” may seem for jaded New Agers, apostates, Hollywood, and heretics in general, this basic formula is held near and dear by a very large chunk of the planetary consciousness, and deserves a going over from the perspective I have been developing with you for the last month or so. There are truths layered in the formula, and with a little digging it is possible to find some overlap, as opposed to a knee jerk dismissal of the belief system of nearly two billion people, or instant submission to an altar call, neither of which seem like appealing options to me.

For starters, it is pretty much an obvious point for everybody except the most naive idealists that indeed “all men have sinnned.” (You’ll have to consult Phillis Schaffley about whether its true for woman as well. I’m assuming that the equality of men and women would logically extend to their propensity to sin as well!) Now we could quibble about what counts as a sin till the cow jumps over the moon, but I am partial to the etymological roots of the Greek word “hamartia,” which in English translations is rendered “sin.” In classical Greek, an older form of the language predating the Koine or common Greek of the New Testament, hamartia is a term from archery meaning “off mark,” or “a miss.” So everyone should agree that at least etymologically speaking, to sin means “to miss the mark.” The levels of culpability you choose to layer into that mix will depend on a lot of things, like whether you missed by accident or on purpose, whether you missed over and over again or just once, whether the shot was really important or not too important, and whether you consider it appropriate to slather blame and guilt on top of a miss, or whether you prefer the road of introspection, conscious responsibility, and practice, practice, practice.

Another point for quibbling always arises around babies, who obviously aren’t culpable for their actions in the way that an adult is, due to sheer developmental limitations: you can’t miss the mark if you can’t even pick up the bow and arrow! However, many find themselves cringing when they hear christians-by-name going off in all seriousness about how babies can be damned to hell, or maybe limbo, or perhaps just an eternity watching The Home Shopping Network without a telephone. I know I spent plenty of (uninformed) time pondering this mystery as a youth, thankful that I was baptized straight out of the starting block (though this somehow failed to relieve my perpetual feelings of guilt). It always seemed to me like a raw deal that on top of being gypped by a short life, a baby who died without benefit of baptism would be excluded from the heavenly banquet.

While I personally find such a conclusion downright sick, misanthropic, and disconnected from any possible sense of “a loving and righteous G--,” I am keen to point out what is true in this part of the formula: all have missed the mark, in the big picture. Now the reason I believe that and the reason why a christian-by-name believes that may be utterly different, but I must acknowledge the place of convergence nonetheless. As mentioned above, for the christian-by-name, the concept of original sin holds the children of Adam stained from birth by his culpabilty for betraying the rules of the garden. Basically, babies inherent original sin sort of like a genetic disease, and Jesus is the cure.

Now my mytho-history may or may not be more rooted in fact than that mytho-history, but I find mine more palatable. As mentioned in an earlier post, I hold that our consciousness predates our coming in to form, and that our coming in to a physical human form is a choice, a choice chosen in co-creative intention with the will of the source of all. I also believe that we show up here as works-in-progress, and as such we come to this school with a bookbag full of projects to work on: phobias to overcome, defensives to let down, fears to relinquish, loves to blossom, and so on. We show up needing work from the get go! In this very real sense, we have all “missed the mark.” We are in archery class, after all, because we need practice. If we were all expert marksmen before the fact, we wouldn’t need to come at all.

I will continue this tommorrow!

Why be moral?

2005-04-17T22:55:00.000-04:00

The Heart of Service is in a real sense an ethics course. Morality consists in agreed upon tenets by a given group. That's why we can speak about Catholic morality or Jewish morality, Christian morality or even American morality. Morals are a set of standards for behavior generally agreed upon by a group, and often membership in the group is dependent upon adherence to those tenets. Certain groups, like the Anabaptists, are famous for shunning, the practice of publicly booting the immoral from the community. Other groups do this, though perhaps in less explicit ways. Catholics "lapse" themselves--they just stop going, for instance, when the incongruity of their own choices and those of the moral community of the church no longer match enough to justify participation, the sense of hypocrisy having become overwhelming. Likewise, folks create identities for themselves based on their adoption or inculturation into a community's morals, so that it becomes their way of being in the world. Out of this arise notions of us and them, us being those who share a particular set of moral sensibilities, and them being those who don't.

So if morals are the rules and ways of being in the world by which a group defines itself behaviorally, and by which an individual identifies hi/rself and h/ir community membership, then what is meant by ethics? In common conversation, nothing different is usually meant by morals and ethics. In the academic world where I whiled away the third decade of my life, however, they are usefully distinguished. Ethics is the discipline of questioning the reasoning behind a moral position or outlook. If morality says do this and not that, ethics asks Why or Why not. Meta-ethics, to get really fancy and University-of-Chicago-esque, asks "Why be moral?," an even more general question then the particular inquiries into moral issues of ethics as such. Now I can say that The Heart of Service is a meta-ethics course without you thinking I'm off my rocker, because you know what I mean by it.

Why be moral? is a very good question! Having spent a while with you over the last number of posts adding concepts to the initial model of self mastery, and arriving at our six-pointed star, I believe we can come to a tentative answer to the meta-ethical question "Why be moral?" which could work for anyone regardless of particular communal/moral identity. That's because it is based on universal law, basic inalienable structural principles of this place we call home. Why be moral? Because to be moral is to be who I am! To overlook the laws of the universe in the expression of my free will ultimately curtails my free will and places limit cycles upon who I am to the point where I forget myself, and am therefore not myself. When I choose to buck the tide of universal law, I enter into cycles of control and victimization which preclude the possibility of the fullest experience of who I am as a master of self and servant of all, in friendship with the source of all. So, to be moral, in this sense of freely choosing in a manner coherent with the divine will-pleasure and the universal structure, enables me to be and experience fully who I am.

OFF TOPIC!

2005-04-16T23:44:00.000-04:00

I missed posting here tonight, as I just spent several hours putting together and linking up the entire production schedule for the film shoot I have scheduled for May 9-June 4, 2005, in Newark, NJ, during which I will shoot the remainder of my dissection DVD series, The Integral Anatomy Series, a multi-volume exploration the first volume of which, Skin and Superficial Fascia, will be retail ready in about 7 days. See the link in the sidebar to the left of this page for the Production Schedule if you want to know what I am up to or think you would like to plug in to that schedule somehow! See you there! Gil :-)

Putting it together

2005-04-15T21:43:00.000-04:00

When you overlay the two triangles we have developed, you get a six pointed star. In the center of the star are written the words “Self Mastery” and “Balance.” If you work your way clockwise around the star from the top-most point, you’ll have labelled the six in turn as follows: Freedom, Attraction, Choice, Intention, Responsibility, Allowance. This whole picture represents an elemental, a thought-emotion which we have layed out. Remember, a thought emotion represents an intention charged with feeling. If you have followed these posts so far, you will have developed some very definite ideas about the words around and within the triangle. They represent a sort of travel kit for the journey of self-mastery, map and tire iron included. They suggest a sort of consciousness that is self aware and introspective, self responsible, and awake to the endeavor of service from a place of genuine humility, gratitude, and love.

So if it seems to you that such a consciousness is something that you would like to adopt for yourself, you could allow this star to hold these meanings for you, like a symbolic container of truth. It is a symbol of the whole person. You could see it in your mind, even glowing softly at first. You could formulate a summary statement, like “I am committed to the path of service and self mastery” or make a fancier one to your liking that incorporates more of your beliefs. Then, picturing that glowing star, which is you yourself, shining brightly, and breathing in your statement of intention and breathing out your statement of intention, again and again, you can allow yourself to feel the associated and supportive feelings that accompany so powerful and beautiful an intention. You can feel the joy that accompanies the experience of true freedom welling up in your heart. You can feel the gratitude that warms the chest when you acknowledge the great gift of your body and your life and your will. You can feel the relaxation and softness of the belly area as you connect to the peacefulness that washes over you when you deeply let go and allow, when you fully accept. You can feel the softness and easing of tension that occurs throughout your whole body when you observe yourself without judgement as the precious offspring of the source of all that you are. And as you feel these things, you can see this star, this star of your light, increasing more and more in brightness and intensity, a light of such a nature that no matter how bright it becomes, you need never avert your gaze. The light, your light, draws you in to it, and within it, within your star of light, where you can feel all the love that is yours, and know that this is the true nature of your heart, the heart of service, the house of the master who opens the door to all who would enter to share a banquet there, and to dance!

Some notes on models

2005-04-14T20:57:00.000-04:00

Models are conversational essentials. That is to say, it’s pretty hard to talk about something as it is in its entire truth, because there’s so much to any particular thing that we get overwhelmed just looking for an entry point to the conversation. That’s why we come up with models. A model enables us to get a conversation started around something, in this case, service and self mastery. Models are often mistaken for the truth of the thing itself. That’s a common problem with models. My favorite example of that mistake is the rational actor model from economic theory. In its attempt to understand the structures of economic exchange and to create predictive theories, the rational actor model offers a stripped down version of the human being. In this version, a person is a “rational actor,” whose every act is considered relative to the principle of maximizing self-interested gain. The model assumes that all persons demonstrate their rationality when they act exclusively in their own self interest, usually summed up in getting what they want. Now this model has been providing grist for the economic mill for many years, and as a result of the predictive power of the model, you will find people in economics departments at universities who come to believe that the version of the person described by the model is in fact truly and exhaustively representative of human motivations, and that it provides a sufficient understanding of the human person.

Now, for you wizened economists out there reading this, you may feel I’ve created a bit of a straw man, but I promise you I have had this conversation with real live economists, who have indeed bought into this extremely reductive description of a person. But here is the fact: a model doesn’t work because it’s version of reality is true. Actually, it only works as a model to the extent that it is not “true.” A model’s effectiveness depends upon its ability to reduce reality. The whole point is that reality is so complex that our rational limits can’t get a grip on it all at once, so it needs to be “mocked up” and shrunk down in a manner that renders it comprehensible. So when you mistake your model for the truth, you’ve realy gotten things upside down and backwards. The mistake usually occurs when your model is up and running. Take the example of “modern” medicine and the mechanistic model of the body. In this model, the body is reduced to a machine composed of discreet parts which can be disassembled to be understood, parts which can be fixed an replaced when broken. Using this model, lots of interesting and sometimes helpful surgeries have been devised, and medicines developed, which have proven immensely helpful to the lifes of many people. Just because the model is useful, however, it is not fair for the doctor to conclude that the body is nothing but a machine. In the same way, it is not fair for the economist to conclude that the whole human person is sufficiently described as a rational actor maximizing self interest. Yet these conclusions are precisely where many doctors or economists end up. Oops!

The reason I bother to make this point is that the model you come up with can have a huge impact on the way that you relate to people, especially when you make the mistake of believing your model to be true simply because it “works.” Doctors who fall into the error of believing that the body is nothing more than a fancy machine can be found treating their patients more like cars than persons. You don’t need to talk to a car to fix it, after all. And economists who in their own life assume that everyone around them is selfishly pursuing their own self interest will likely do unto others as they assume they are being done unto!

Now, in defense of models, they are, as I said, necessary. It’s hard to have a conversation without one. I am simply pointing out the tremendous importance of keeping track of the models you use, and offering a warning to be cautious when using them, to avoid the common trap of believing in the reduced reality of the model. For instance, I have just built a model with you over the last several posts, we’ll call it the “universal law triangle,” and I warned you at the beginning that universal law is really a bit more complicated than the model would lead you to believe. But a least we got the conversation rolling with it, and if it’s the only thought you ever give to universal law, at least its something. But it would be foolish to start having arguments in coffee shops based upon this knnowledge that these four points really do describe universal law, for sure, and someone else’s utterly different four points and two squares and seven lists and twenty two chakras do not!

Such foolishness is actually the stuff of academics, and it is reason number 365 “why I didn’t pursue a career in academics.” (Some of my best friends and greatest heroes are hard core academics, by the way, so don’t assume my crass generalizations are meant to reduce that profession to a box, any more than I mean to say that all doctors missunderstand the reality of the body or all economists missunderstand the reality of the person! I am rather simply noting common errors and having some fun while I do it.) For my part I am more than happy to conjure up models all day long, but I absolutely refuse to defend my models as exhaustive or sufficient relative to any given topic. Yet university halls ring, even this very moment, with the shrill arguments of folks who have based entire careers on their ability to propound their model as THE model, as THE truth of the matter. I well remember a not so humbly titled book from my graduate studies, The Theory of Morality, the hubris of which put me to sleep before I even opened the cover.

So consider mine a quest for honesty and consciousness and humility with respect to models, which we must use, and can use well, and helpfully, and despite their helpfulness, we need never believe them to be sufficient or exhaustive as approaches for expanding our understanding of reality. Another good model is always lurking around the corner of our imagination which can take us another step along the way. Just know your model is a model, and enjoy! In the next few posts I’ll put our triangle models together, as well as spell out a model of the whole person and a model of the body which I feel can be effective tools in the pursuit of service and self mastery.

Text as toolbox

2005-04-14T00:21:00.000-04:00

I have to admit, I learn a lot writing these posts! It’s fun to start talking about something, and see what comes up. It’s often the case that I ponder a topic for years without ever committing any thoughts to paper, which is a way of manifesting them. The risk of doing so, of course, is that ten minutes after writing down my thoughts, I learn something new that adds hue or tone or brightness, and transforms the picture I’ve developed, rendering what was written seemingly obsolete. Only seemingly obsolete, though, as what’s written was never meant to stand on it’s own as some statement of authority. Aquinas was careful to note that authority is the weakest form of argument! What’s written down is rather merely a stimulant to further study and questioning, and that power it can retain for a while. For the reader, it’s important to reflect on what’s written as a set of interesting ideas the truth value of which must be tested against your own experience, knowledge, conscience and insight.

By writing what I am writing, I intend to create a sort of tool box. The value of the toolbox lies in the usefulness of its contents for stimulating conversations and introspection and practice relative to the pursuit of service and self mastery. The tools must be used, and not merely read about. If you read this stuff and find yourself nodding along and intellectually agreeing with the ideas I am synthesizing here, that’s great. From there, the next step is to apply the ideas to your life and use them to master your own life experience. Agreeing with the ideas and making use of them are two different things, and the latter is much more valuable than the former. The truth is, you don’t actually have to agree with the concepts to test them through observation, introspection, and experience. All you need is an experimental mindset and a willingness to research the truth for yourself. I’ve collected these tools from a variety of sources. I don’t pretend to have invented the hammer or the saw or the anvil whereby the moral life and spiritual flight are forged. I am doing this work for myself as well. Grasping these ideas well enough to formulate them in writing doesn’t mean I have mastered them. It may at least demonstrate my sincere commitment to my own growth, and that of everyone else as well.

Balance

2005-04-12T22:24:00.000-04:00

Having touched on the three points of our second triangle, attraction, intention, and allowance, we are ready to drop “universal law #4” into the mix: balance. Our universe seeks its own balance, and has built into its structure the propensity to right imbalance. To balance out the imagery of the model we are building, we can plunk the word “balance” right into the middle of our down-pointed triangle, the way we put “self-mastery” at the center of the first one.

In the same way that the measure of health is the capacity to right imbalance in our bodies, our healthy universe is constantly performing a balancing act. The planets are adjusted just so in their orbits around the sun, and in their spinning about their own axes. Earth is actually a bit out of balance, and some would have it that its 23 degree tilt is a reflection of imbalances here still needing correction. Machaelle Small Wright mentions the notion that for every illness that might arise on this planet, a new plant springs up which carries within it the principles for healing that illness, because balance is inherent in our universe. I’ve been told I place balance at the center of the picture because I am a Libra, but I would counter rather that Libras are particularly tuned to this central aspect of univeral law :-)

Balance does not necessarily imply symmetry. A balanced human body is not symmetrical. There will always be more liver on the right side! A perfectly symmetrical face would appear like a stylized drawing, and lack the true beauty of human asymmetry. So too the balance of the universe does not require an artificially even distribution of this or that, and seeking such artificial forms of “fairness” and “justice” will lead only to more imbalance. Male and female are not balanced by becoming symmetrical. Sameness is not satisfying.

So if balance is not symmetry, what is it? Balance is the state achieved when all elements are moving in coordination with the divine will. Balance is a state of harmony, where different notes (asymmetries) can come to an accord. The songs of the heart and the liver and the brain, of the hormones and the pheremones and the living bones, all singing together ring out a common truth, like oboe and clarinet and piccolo coordinated by the conductor's inspiration and movement.

The lives we live must be balanced, because balance is built into the structure of our universe. So those choices we make, those habits we form, the ones which are out of sync with the divine will pleasure, must ultimately be balanced out. From the victim consciousness, this necessary balancing gets written up as punishment for wrongdoing, or as “bad karma,” or even as divine justice. But the victim consciousness does not have a balanced view of the matter! The balancing necessitated by our choices, the ones made independent of the divine will, is no punishment at all, no more than you could consider water finding its level in a pond a punishment for having tossed a rock into it. To the same degree that we modulate our tune out of harmony with the divine word, will we ultimately be required to readjust until we are in harmony again. And as surely as we are not forbidden in a free will universe to sing as badly as pleases us for a time, the time will come as a purely mathematical principle of balance, when we must find our way back to the harmony from which we originated.

In this way the law of balance serves as a built in check to the free will. The choice to stray involves a promise to return: this is a function of balance. The recollection of that promise almost universally requires some not so subtle reminders. That’s because we forget that we were ever part of an orchestra when we wander far out of tune. But again, those reminders are not punishments. They are rather markers that we place for ourselves along the path so that we can find our way back home, back to the harmony of our origins.

Allowance

2005-04-11T08:39:00.000-04:00

Umm, no, I don't intend by "allowance" that I'm going to give you a dollar a week if you do your chores! We are working our way around our upside down triangle, and we've made it to the bottom point: Attraction, Intention, Allowance. This universe of ours functions on a principle of allowance. Allowance is the opposite of controlling. Our universe is not a controlling universe. It is an allowing universe. One aspect of this allowing character or principle or “law” of our universe is the range given in it to our free will by the source of all. We can do pretty much anything we can do. This is not to say we should do anything that we can do, or that it is a good idea that we do anything that we can do, or that it is morally right to do anything that we can do, or that we will not suffer enormously if we choose to do anything we can do. Yet the fact remains that the rains fall on the just and the unjust. We are functioning in an allowing universe.

For the last two posts I have been going on at length about intention. If we are wanting to operate in accord with universal law, and in so doing take advantage of its awesome flow and intellgence, once we formulate our deliberate intent, it is essential for us to allow the intelligence of the universe to step in and have sway with our intention. Once we form and charge our thought-emotions, we must take our cue from universal law and allow it some space to manifest. Allowance is a principle which, when we act in accordance with it, feeds back to us with a mighty torrent of support for manifesting our intention. You could call it the key to having your prayers answered, if you want to put it in such terms. Make your prayer and let go of any idea of how it shall be answered. That’s for G-- to figure out. Any christian has probably heard a sermon or two on the fact that it helps your cause little if you ask for help with a problem and then provide a long and detailed list demanding exactly how and where and when and why the solution should happen, and demand that it be so. Such sermons rightly come to the bumper-sticker conclusion, Let go, and let G--.

The conclusion is right because it is teaching with a different set of metaphors the truth of the universal law of allowance. We humans with our free will and all possess a certain kind of intelligence, the key characteristic of which is the ability to consciously intend something. One of my favorite teachers on this subject, who approaches the issue from a somewhat different slant than Daskalos, is Machaelle Small Wright, who has written numerous books, my favorite among them being Co-Creative Science (see her website).

Perelandra

(Footnote: In deference to my various teachers, who may or may not even know me, I site their works out of respect for those who have helped me build a set of ideas and experiences which I can share. I do modify their ideas considerably, however, and am not always conscious of how. Probably sometimes I modify them because I never understood what they were really saying in the first place and they might cringe to hear me say “I got this from you!” Sometimes I think I am modifying something when in fact I am just repeating it nearly exactly. And sometimes I am modifying an idea because when placed in the context of my synthesized position, it takes on new meanings which are also helpful. So whether I am paying tribute to the Pathwork Lectures “guide” or Levent or Daskalos, or M.S. Wright, or whomever else I may refer to in these writings, feel free to give them a read or listen yourself, and evaluate their teachings from your own perspective as well as mine. I have lots more to learn from many resources, and remain continually grateful for having come upon so many truly wonderful teachers in my life, whether through books, or schooling, or inner listening.)

In Co-Creative Science, Machaelle coherently identifys this intending capacity of human intelligence as our ability to give definition, direction and purpose, whereas nature’s intelligence is characterized by its capacity to implement through matter, means and action the order, organization and life vitality of a given intention. You’ll have to read the book to unpack that last sentence! Let’s just say for now that we are really good at intending, and nature is really good at organizing the means whereby our intentions manifest. Conversely, nature is not too swift at intending, and we are sorely deficient in the “how to” department when it comes to manifesting our intentions practically. The moral of the story is, stick to what your good at. When we attempt to control the manner in which our intentions are fulfilled, we place exceeding limits on the efficiency with which we manifest our intentions. When we allow nature to have its way with the manner in which our stated intentions are manifested, things happen with surprising ease in an order and manner and timing that may astonish us. Many of the problems which we struggle quite relentlessly to solve would resolve themselves with much greater efficiency under the auspices of nature’s intelligence, if we would just let go of our propensity to control things about which we really have very little understanding.

It is true, of course, that we will stumble forward in our progress, despite our propensity to control how everything will happen that we intend. We just make it so darn hard, by insisting on doing things our way, instead of the way of the universe. If you not only engage the laws of attraction and deliberate intent, but engage the law of allowance as well, the universe will step up to the plate to fulfill your intentions so fast it will make your head spin! Mostly, we attempt to control the manner of outcome of our intentions from the egotistical presumption that we really know best, and mustn’t leave outcomes to “chance,” as if nature falters forward itself in ignorance, and that the redwoods soar for a thousand years due to a bland combination of “survival of the fittest” and fortuitious genetic accidents. We overrate our own intelligence and underrate nature’s intelligence. We shut our eyes to universal law and close our ears to divine law, and then wonder where the mess came from, and blame god for not watching over us!

The fact is, this universe is set up so that we too can soar, if we would stop clipping our own wings. Beyond the fear that our intentions will be left unmanifest without our putting our two-cents in at every turn about how things should come to pass, and beyond our egostistical presumptions about our intelligence and nature’s lack there0f, there is a third reason that people choose a modus operandi, control, which is diametrically opposed to universal law (allowance).

When we consciously intend something which is contrary to the divine will pleasure, when we define starkly immoral purposes in the exercise of our free will, in order for such intentions to come to pass, we must swim upstream against the divine currents and the universal flow, and implement measures of control, because we are purposefully bypassing the natural order of things. Because nature is in constant alignment with the divine will pleasure, not having a free will with which to entertain contrary intentions, it doesn’t readily line up to support intentions which are contrary to that same divine will pleasure. But like a beaten mule, it will do the bidding of a misanthropic steward if sufficient energy is introduced on the part of the steward to force an outcome to its liking. Those who wander this planet consciously intending ill for its inhabitants, and those who formulate harmful intentions and undertake plans based upon intense greed and lust for power over others (history and the present have never lacked for such characters in the human drama), these ones must also implement vast schemes of control in order to accomplish purposes for which the universe does not readily align itself, being so utterly contrary to the divine will pleasure. This is actually good news, because the fact is that it is impossible to control completely a universe filled with free will agents, a universe structured by the principle of allowance, a universe where the divine will is always an active principle.

Control comes in many forms, and while it is true that there are those milling about this planet who have grand plans to accomplish chiefly centered around the need for control, control comes more commonly in day to day, garden variety forms with which every one of us is painfully familiar. We all buck the flow with our day to day attempts to exercise control where it is not our place to do so. At this point some might go too far and mistake the rightful exercise of our talent for generating direction and purpose as a propensity to control. When our willing is not checked by alignment with the divine will, it can become willfully controlling. The matter is really quite simple, though. When we intend, we must allow, if we desire to enjoy the full advantages of life in accord with universal law.

Intention, thought and emotion

2005-04-10T14:03:00.000-04:00

Remember, we are trying to expand on our model of self mastery by working up another "triangular outline," this time of universal law. This second triangle is pointed down, the top left angle is named attraction, for the law of attraction, and the top right angle is named intention, for the law of deliberate intent. Summarily, the first can be rendered, like attracts like. The second can be rendered, you get what you want and what you don’t want. You see, the universe reads human intention, human wanting, as deliberate, whether you are conscious of your intent or not. When you produce a thought form, its like you’ve generated a little magnet, and similarly vibrating forms in the universe begin to accumulate to it.

Daskalos, aka Stylianos Ateshlis, is a favorite teacher of mine (who left that body a few years back) from whom I have borrowed much language about these subjects of introspection, intention, and thought forms. You can read about him in the trilogy documenting his way of looking at the world my Kyriakos Markides, or you can listen to tapes of Daskolos himself (if you enjoy thick Greek Cypriot accents, which I do!). Daskalos makes an important distinction for this business of intention when he talks about a thought-emotion vs. an emotion-thought. This distinction can be another way to help you navigate the potential pitfalls and hurdles of conscious intending and the purposeful alignment of your will with the will of the source of all.

As I understand it, we are all commonly generating emotion-thoughts quite unconsciously. The more undisciplined we are in our emotional life, which is to say the more knee-jerk reactive we tend to be, and the more unaware we are of the choices we have put on auto-pilot, the more we are generating emotion-thoughts. In general, emotion-thoughts are the “thought forms” generated by our emotional reactivity, rooted in our “petty time and place personalities.” For an emotion-thought, the thought piece is merely an after-thought. The thought is simply a post-reactive rationalization, justification and reiteration of the primary emotional reaction. This primary emotional reaction is based in fear, anger, lust, greed, desire for control, narcissism, and so on.

So you have an emotional reaction to something, or an emotional attachment arises to something, and then you tailor your subsequent thought processes to justify your reaction to yourself and those around you. You react with emotion and support it with thought. When you do this, you build a little “demon magnet,” to mix metaphors in a big way. In producing the emotion-thought, you energize an intention built up from your own emotional reactivity, and set it loose like the magnet it is, with the power to attract like unto itself, all of which will ultimately come back to roost in you. Daskalos called the forms we generate, whether emotion-thoughts or thought-emotions, “elementals.” We create them constantly out of the energetic components, the “material,” of emotion and thought. They are our legacy, whether consciously formed or not. They are the inheritance which we create for ourselves. Coming from us, they attract like unto themselves, and return to us for more energy, tethered to us as they are, like children who, bent on growing, keep returning from their play for food and water, which we give them. But because our emotion-thoughts are untrained, undisciplined, unruly children, given that they have sprung primarily from emotional reactivity, they are like little demons that return larger than when they left, and often with friends in tow. When we reinforce them through the unconsious repetition of our cycles of emotional reactivity and self justification, they are created anew to return stronger still again.

VERY, VERY often, when from the victim’s perspective it appears that something keeps “happening” to you, you are playing the role of the victim to your very own elemental, an emotion-thought which you yourself have generated unconsciously, returning to you for another boost! This is when a circumstance arises again and again in your life, and you continually refuse to practice some introspection to try and figure out exactly what is your responsibility for the life experience which seems so frustrating or disappointing. You react to it anew, and so charge it up and assure it will come back to haunt you once again. It is an unconscious intention running amock!

The “trick” from the perspective of self mastery in handling these unruly elementals is to recognize, acknowledge, accept, choose and act anew. You need to practice introspection to come to terms with the choices you have made, however unconsciously, and their effects. Put another way, you need to generate a thought-emotion, a counterbalancing elemental, to diffuse the charge and vitality of the one you are intending to overcome. Whereas an emotion-thought is like an undisciplined child, a little “demon magnet,” as I said before, the thought-emotion is not the product of emotional reactivity. Rather it is the fruit of conscious intention. When you consciously intend something, and then purposely charge that intentional thought with emotional energy, you create a different elemental altogether. You create an elemental that is obedient to you, a well behaved angel magnet, as opposed to a naughty and reckless demon magnet.

Another way to think of it is that you generate a habit through the repetition of the new thought which, because it is contrary to the troublesome one, has the effect of diminishing it. Contrary acts dissolve a habit. If you are in the habit of worrying needlessly about things over which you have no control, for instance, constantly imagining all sorts of terrible things happening with a fearful mind, well, you are producing a certain kind of emotion-thought, out of thoughtless habit. If you want, you can consciously choose to think otherwise. You can think, “all will be well, and all manner of things will be well,” and you can spend some moments attempting to actually feel in yourself the good feelings which you feel when all is going well. Now you’ve created a thought-emotion, a consciously intended elemental, which, when repeatedly charged, will actually begin to dissolve the former habit of fretting over nothing. Although one act does not create a new habit, the repetition of the act will. One act, one powerful thought-emotion, can, however, set you on a course for dissolving the old and generating the new. The next time you catch yourself fretting, instead of getting worked up into a lather and charging the emotion-thought as you have in the past, take the opportunity to intentionally generate anew the contrary thought-emotion, the elemental “all will be well,” and give it your emotional juice instead. The new elemental is bound by the same univeral law as the old one, with the difference being, you are happy to see it again when it comes round for an energy refresher. It is your own little angel, out growing in the universe and returning with its accumulations of heavenly treasures, the like-minded vibrations that accumulate to it when it is out and about circulating in the general milieu. It returns strengthened to your advantage, rather than to your frustration. You know what it is, because you created it consciously. As you come to recognize all of your elementals, positive and negative, for what they are--consciously or unconsciously generated emotion-thoughts and thought emotions--you will relinquish the temptation to play the victim to them. You will recognize them and name them and command obedience of them, like stray dogs in need of a master. You can intentionally dissolve the harmful ones, and strengthen the beneficial ones, and create new ones out of your commitment to serve. In so doing you will leave this place better than when you got here!

Deliberate Intent and Positive Wanting

2005-04-09T15:40:00.000-04:00

One of the toughest questions you can pose to the average person is “What do you want in life?” Most will immediately rehearse a litany of things they don’t want. We commonly are very clear about what we don’t like and don’t want, what we are tired of, what we are angry with, what makes us sad or annoyed, and when asked what we want, we say we don’t want this that or the other thing. For example, a person will say I want to get out of my job, or I want to quit smoking, or I want to get over my relationship with so and so. Because of the law of attraction in this here universe of ours, we are able to attract both what we want and what we don’t want with equal facility.

It is very important to practice training your thoughts with positive formulations, because the negative formulations, in virtue of the law of attraction, attract to ourselves like magnets exactly what we just said we didn’t want! Take the example, I want to quit smoking. The emphasis is on the experience of smoking as the object of desire. Not many people who say that they want to quit smoking actually quit smoking. They are too busy wanting about smoking. Now, if on the other hand you say, “I want to experience my health to the fullest, I want to breath freely, I want to rejuvinate my lungs,” you will attract positively according to these positive formulations of thought, and smoking will become a thing of your past. There’s more to it than that, of course: you have to act on the intent, by continually choosing to do that which accords with what you want, and repeatedly formulating in a positive manner what you want, so that you can set the ball rolling to attract accordingly. Your deliberate intent to experience health to the fullest is like a ball magnet gathering heaps of iron filings as you set it rolling. The iron filings are the thoughts and activities which covibrate with your intent to experience health. The act of smoking simply doesn't stick to that particular magnet.

If you tell a child, “Don’t play with the electrical outlet!,” you have basically invested your energy in the child playing with the electrical outlet, and you will attract them to it with your attention. They will keep on playing with the electrical outlet. If instead, when seeing them playing with the electrical outlet, you say, “Come here Johnny, play with this toy I have here,” (or come help me put laundry in the washer, or whatever you come up with that you would indeed be pleased for Johnny to do), you will have told the child positively what you want him to do, and he will in all likelyhood oblige you.

We are now in the thick of a discussion of the second law to be mentioned on our triangle. The first was the law of attraction. The top right point of our upside down triangle we will now identify as the law of deliberate intent, or more summarily, "intention." It is in some sense an elaboration and a specification of the law of attraction: the law of deliberate intent represents that an intent deliberately made, or conscious wanting, is a cause which will generate an effect. The law of deliberate intent specifies that as surely as like attracts like, deliberate intent sets into motion the powers of manifestation in our universe. That which is deliberately intended accumulates to itself like thoughts, emotions, matter means and actions in a movement as a cause which will necessarily have its effect.

There are a couple of major caveats worth mentioning with respect to this "intention" business. First, be very careful what you express that you want or don’t want. There is a certain immensity of responsibility to engage consciously the laws of the universe. It is our responsibility to do so in the pursuit of self mastery. I believe it"s what Paul meant in scripture by the exhortation to pray constantly. We must take up this responsibility to consciously engage the laws of the universe, because our unconscious engagement of the laws of the universe has made a tremendous mess of things, and we daily bear the burden of all of that unconcious wanting. Second, conscious engagement of the law of attraction hardly assures something good will come of it, either! There is much, much more to it than that! After all, the Buddha was teaching that wanting, or desire, is the root of all suffering! Anybody with a little practice can develop the capacity to formulate their desires in a positive framework. That, however, lends no assurance that what is positively wanted represents a moral choice.

Some might imagine, from the perspective of the lower self, that what is being offered here is basically a magic lesson in how to become your own psychic Santa Claus. From an immature perspective, the power inherent in the law of deliberate intent may seem like the key to the universal goody box, wherefrom all of your basest desires may find there fulfillment. While it is true that you could take up knowledge of universal law and apply them to selfish and base ends, I strongly and vigorously recommend against this! Long suffering experience will demonstrate for you the danger of such an approach. It is critically important that our expressions of what we want arise from the most mature part of our being. Our wanting must be checked against certain standards, standards of goodness. Otherwise, we will be consciously generating trouble! When we express our wanting from our sense of lack, from our anger, from our sense of betrayal, from our fears, from our desire to control, from our narcissism, we essentially practice black magic, and will attract all of the painful repercussions of those desires, however positively expressed. Pandora's box is real!

Another dangerous assumption of the lower self is represented in the defense structure that believes that "because I want such and such, it is a good thing." As a national policy, this is the Monroe doctrine, historically, a policy which echoes loudly in current public strategies, and which has always had its personal adherents as well. It is the belief that what I think is going to be good for me, must be good for you as well. When such a false belief is active, a person may appear to hear you out, to listen to your point of view, but s/he will continue regardless of it on h/ir own charted course, and either roll over you or wait you out in the process of achieving h/ir ends, finding moral justification in the very fact that s/he wants what s/he wants. This kind of exersize of deliberate intent, either in personal relationships, or business relationships, or international relations, essentially grants a moral precedent to my wanting. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The fact that you want something, the fact that you deliberately intend it, and hold it as a good to be pursued, the fact that you pour tremendous amounts of intelligence and energy and emotional strength into that which you want and deliberately intend, none of this has any bearing whatsoever on the moral status of your choice. In a nutshell, the fact that you want something doesn't make it good, regardless of your belief that it does! A whole lot of grief arises from this false belief, the belief that "if I want it, it must be good, and I will pursue it any cost, because the fact that I want it makes it right."

So far in this post I have laid out the law of deliberate intent, tied it in to the law of attraction, demonstrated the power of positive wanting, and then given some pretty heavy warnings about the dangers of the conscious or unconscious misapplication of this law. So where is a safe place to start with the conscious and responsible application of deliberate intent? Well, thankfully we have a very potent resource in a few phrases from what is commonly known as "The Lord's Prayer." Consider the following: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us while being in temptation, and deliver us from evil." For starters, the repetition of these phrases is a pretty safe bet for responsibly engaging the law of deliberate intent. These phrases represent a (potentially) conscious alignment of your petty time and place wanting with the intent of the source of all. Instead of coming up with a list of goodies for the great Santa Claus of the abundant universe, and suffering all the misery of setting into motion the "getting" of what you probably don't need, you can consciously intend and positively want that the will of the source of all be manifested on earth as a function of your conscious intent and alignment and desire. Let "our daily bread" mean all and only that which is necessary and important to sustain you in your alignment with the will-pleasure of the source of all. Let the specifics of your "daily bread" remain the prerogative of the source of all to determine, and trust that in setting your wanting, in corralling your deliberate intent just so, you will yourself have helped set in motion the process through which universal law will assure the exactly appropriate manifestations. This approach to the law of deliberate intent also guarantees that what you want is morally correct. Rather than going on the false assumption that "I want it, therefore it is good," you can take up a morally safe, guaranteed good "wanting" by consciously intending to want what is wanted by the source of all, from whom all good things come. For the philosophers reading this, I will justify my claim by stating that a priori, the will of the source of all is good, by definition, and it is always morally safe to seek refuge there. Some might mistake this approach as throwing off the mantle of responsibility for one's own will. I would say instead that the conscious intent to align one's will with the divine will is the ultimate act of autonomy, in so far as our origins and truth are divine, and we are not other than the source of all. Aligning your wanting with the divine willing is simply the proper internal organization of yourself for the moral life. It represents the intentional precedent of the higher self relative to the lower self, with the intent to transform the lower self and grow it up to the point where it no longer cares to repeat the false mantra that "I am other than you."

More on attraction

2005-04-06T22:29:00.000-04:00

People and thought really are like magnets. Have you ever played with magnets? I LOVE TO PLAY WITH MAGNETS! I have weak magnets, strong magnets, metal magnets, ceramic magnets, neodymium magnets, square, round, bars, horseshoe shaped--you get the picure. I think what I love most about magnets is how they stick to each other. I love just having two pretty strong magnets, and playing with the invisible attraction or bouncyness of them, depending on which way you flip them.

Now it takes a little practice to become conscious of the way in which the law of attraction works with people who are seemingly so different, yet fulfilling the law of like attracts like in their coming together. Once my wife Karen, long before I met her, was having a stroll in Baltimore one evening. I think she was coming from a theatre where she had just watched a movie. Her mood was very down. She was full of self pity and described herself at the time as “a big hole waiting to be filled.” Then someone punched her in the head and knocked her out.

She awoke in the hospital when she returned to consciousness, and was feeling horrible, of course. Now, a person who feels bad about themself to the degree that she did at that time and a person who would do harm to another in a violent manner might not seem to have anything at all in common. But they were both on the same wavelength at that particular moment. Karen was thinking “I am a miserable wretch” and that other person matched her feelings with a confirming action, proportionate to her mood of self disdain and inner-turned loathing. Don’t blame me for blaming the victim here, either! This is actually Karen’s interpretation of the event, as best I can share it. Karen’s thought projections manifested on the spot. What she thought she deserved, she got immediately. Her vibrations were matched pretty much exactly by the person who hit her. Now Karen’s responsibility is for the thoughts she was generating about herself, and the person who hit her, well, that person is responsible for their behavior there too. Just because universal law is being expressed, there is no excuse for bullying yourself, or someone else! Put this way, it is our moral responsibility to raise our vibrations and consequently those of our surroundings, rather than merely match the local levels of misery and discord.

So people are constantly matching up with others who are vibrating at the same rate, because like attracts like. They literally ring each other up like tuning forks. Take two tuning forks of the same note. If you have two tuning forks which are “C” notes, and you whack one of them on something, and hold it near the other one without touching them, the second will begin to ring out their common note. It will entrain the other fork even if the C note is in another octave. For our part, we literally are tuning forks. Our bones ring out with the vibration of our thoughts, and we entrain everything in our environment that can match our tune. Like attracts like. Thoughts of a certain vibration attract more of the same. I can repeat this all night long, but it’s more valuable to observe for yourself and learn the truth of this law by observing it in operation in your own experience.

Now we can see how the superficial observation that “opposites attract” is underpinned by the deeper truth that “like attracts like.” The person in a relationship who throws bait, and the person who bites for it both share some common negative pleasures in the ensuing battle. The man who beats his wife and the wife who thinks she somehow deserves it. The person who plays the piteable wretch, and the person who commiserates with them. The person who plays the victim, the person who plays the perpetrator, and the person who plays the savior. The person who dishes out guilt and the person who eats it up. The person who bludgeons their partner verbally and the partner who plays the punching bag.

On the bright side, there can be positive partnerings as well, of course! There is the person who is shining their light for all to see, and others who sense their own light and turn it up in response to the first. I recall once our high school choir sang with a church choir. I was placed next to a man with a mature baritone voice. I never sang before like I did that day! My voice soared as I covibrated with that man’s beautiful voice. He brought out the best in me, and I was available for it. This happens all day long all across the planet. It is a manifestation of universal law. I am responsible for my life experience. I am responsible for my thoughts. I am responsible for the tune of my resonating bones. I can choose my rate of vibration. I attract my experience. My experiences represent the coming-into-form of my thoughts.

I have watched people reel in despair at the prospect that they are responsible for their experiences at this level. From the victim consciousness, any responsibility is frankly too much responsibility! But from the perspective of self mastery, responsibility for your every thought represents a tremendous opportunity to shape your world and your experience. This level of responsibility represents freedom itself. It represents your ability to consciously choose what you attract. Like attracts like. Do you know what you like? Practice attracting that.

Expanding on the model: another triangle

2005-04-06T21:24:00.000-04:00

Well folks, now that we've spelled out in some detail a process whereby we can study our experience and work to transform it, I'd like to begin to expand on the model of the consciousness of self mastery which we have constructed so far. So picture your triangle with Freedom at the top, and Choice at the bottom right, and Responsibility at the bottom left, with the words Self Mastery in the middle. Ok, got it? Write it down on a piece of paper or something, remember, with the point up.

Now we are going to add another triangle. First we'll draw it on its own. This time draw an empty triangle, now with the point pointing downward. This triangle is going to be a way to bring universal law into the picture. This is not an attempt to model all universal law, any more than the first triangle is able to cover everything in the world there is to know about self mastery. Rather, this is a device to provoke thought as we create it, and memory and insight as we reflect back upon it and talk about the included ideas. Models sum up a lot and spell out very little!

(In the same way that I footnoted Levent Bolukbasi at

IM School of Healing Arts

for inspiring the discussion of the five step process (I don't know if Levent got it from somewhere else in turn, or came up with that himself--in either case, I'll say I got the steps from him and interpret them through my own lense and framework), here I'll footnote a very odd little book for inspiring my discussion of universal law. That book is titled Hand book for the New Para digm (Brid ger House Pub lishers, 1-800-729-4131. I spent years in graduate school wrestling with natural/divine law issues, and this brief modeling is only the very tip of the iceberg, but a fine tip it is indeed!)

Ok, enough footnoting, and back to the meat of it. In this context, what I mean by universal law is simply some inescapable principles embedded into the structure of our universe. Working along with the universal law is kind of like swimming downstream: easy. Knowledge of how to work with these principles can facilitate the process of self mastery. The free will may also exercise itself for ill with a knowledge of these principles. Let's make a commitment here and now to learn this information and employ it in service and in coherence with the will of the source of all.

So at the upper left angle of the upside down triangle write or picture the word "attraction." The law of attraction is summed up in the phrase, "like attracts like." We'll need to unpack this a bit now. Here we are looking past the more superficial observation that "opposites attract," a common notion with regard to love and magnets, both of which are actually invisible binding energies which tend to create piles (whether of lovers or iron filings), in which case we really do have like attracting like). The law of attraction is a function of thought, and reveals the manner in which our thought-up universe operates. If you think "the Braves are an awesome ballclub," that thought (or any other, for that matter) sizzles with the power of attraction. If you think it, you will find yourself drawn to conversation with those who think likewise, and you might even end up at a stadium with another 50,000 folks in mutual agreement. You might walk around with a Braves cap, eliciting comments from total strangers, who will say things to you like "how about them braves" or "go Mets," either comment of which will engender in you the same belief: Go Braves!" The thought forms like a habit and becomes an embedded belief, attracting like thoughts and confirming itself year in and year out, through seasons bad and seasons good.

Another example of like attracts like is when you are thinking of someone and they call you or email you. I had a recent contact with a colleague. We hadn't spoken in a month, much water had gone under both of our bridges, and I finally sat down and typed out a sort of "touching bases" email to her. I mailed it off, and bing! My in-box icon popped up to say I had mail. My colleague had been sitting at her computer simultaneously (3000 miles away) writing me, and we hit send virtually simultaneously, much to our mutual shock! But like attracted like, quite clearly. But this example might make the event seem unusual and therefore a poor example, when in fact this universal law, like attracts like, or the law of attraction, is always operating in our world. What was unusual was that we noticed something so common that we usually take it for granted: it is literally the water in which we swim--what is rare is taking note of it. Whatever is the focus of your thought, that you are attracting. Thoughts attract like thoughts, and when they become intense enough they manifest in the physical all around us. We habitually "vibrate" at a certain frequency, to put it another way. Those who vibrate at a similar frequency, we are attracted to and hang out with. This type of attraction is not to be mistaken necessarily for "liking." We don't necessarily like what we attract, though we may. All we can say for sure is that like attracts like. If you are not liking what you are attracting, take a good look in the mirror, accept yourself in spite of your judging, wake up to your choices, and in transforming yourself, you will attract anew.

Action

2005-04-05T21:07:00.000-04:00

In the triangle model of self mastery, freedom-choice-responsibility, action is kind of collapsed into the "choice" category: the point of models is to simplify things, after all. But here, as we work our way through this little five step program for transforming a behavior or belief, we properly distinguish between making a choice and actually acting upon it. Action is the follow through which may or may not occur with regard to a choice. You may choose an item on a menu, and when it comes, not eat it. Or you may choose that you are never going to eat chocolate again, and the next day, lips-a-smacking, find you acted otherwise. If choice amounts to stating an intent, action is the making-real of that intention by manifesting it through behavior.

Action is the meat of habits. A habit, after all, is nothing more then a disposition or tendency to act in a particular way, a sort of behavioral groove. Habits like driving actually represent neural patternings created from repeating the motions over and over until you don't have to think about them any more. When we first learn to drive, we can't imagine how our parents do so many things at once: hit the blinker, turn the wheel, check the mirrors, clutch, break, shift, accelerate--it's too much to think about. After doing it a few hundred times, though, the actions become habitual, and only the context is new. The thinking part of the brain is no longer involved, and the actions are generated from the preset grooves lower down in the system. Probably most accidents occur close to home because the drivers are driving in a total groove with respect to the street context as well, and the mind wanders off to what's for dinner, then BAM!

Other behaviors in our day to day life function similarly. We've done them so many times that our acts become literally thoughtless. That's why so many of the choices underlying our life experiences seem so invisible to us. It's because they are so old! Our patterns of actions with one another are on auto pilot, and in the same way that folks rarely take the time to re-learn how to drive as a matter of improving their life, they also tend not to bother to re-inspect the choices behind their habitual interactions with one another. Unless, of course, they (you/I) embark on a path of service and self mastery. In that case, we bring to consciousness the choices underlying our habitual behaviors, and create again for ourselves the opportunity to choose anew. At that point, we can act on our new intent, and act again, and again, until through repetition we create a new and more functional pattern. We must set the autopilot consciously. It's not because of what your mother did, or your father said, or what your mother didn't say, or what your father didn't do, that you act the way you do! You act the way you do because you set the auto-pilot on most of your behaviors and methods for interacting with your world by the time you were about five. Well, it's time we grew that inner child up! Our world is desperately in need of some adult interaction right about now!

Back to our example which we've carried through these five steps, where the fellow recognized and acknowledged his tendency to make hurtful comments, and accepted himself nonetheless, and practiced until he was able to move the timeframe of his recognition to before the event rather than afterward, and he saw the choice before him to do the same thing or to do otherwise, in this final step, he acts: he fixes himself a sandwich, shifts his bloodsugar, and makes a sandwich for his wife while he was at it. Where normally she would have been off pouting and calling her mother/girlfriend/daughter about how she can continue to put up with this guy, and he would have been ranting about how darn oversensitive she is, now they are enjoying a pleasant lunch together, and she's thinking "what's come over this guy, he's acting like the kind fellow I fell in love with over that root beer float 50 years ago," and he's thinking, "gosh, isn't she cute, maybe I'm gonna get some before I die, this self-improvement stuff ain't so bad after all!"

Instead of rolling over and playing the victim, in his case, the innocent jokester stuck with the humorless oversensitive wife, he practiced introspection, took responsibility, exercised his freedom, choose anew, and acted upon his choice in a manner that generated a new (or in this case, a long fallow) behavior. In doing so, he created a different life experience, and his partner is an added beneficiary. He acted on his choice. While one act does not make a habit, he is off to a good start!

Choice

2005-04-03T21:49:00.000-04:00

So having gotten a handle on the timing of recognition, we have thankfully brought ourselves to a behavioral crossroads. You are travelling the path of self mastery, remember. It is a path along which you often stumble and grope as you navigate the minefield of your victim consciouness and all of the patterns and habits embedded there, yet introspection is like a mine (mind?) sweeper. You've raised your consciousness to the point where you intellectually grasp the fact that you choose your behavior. And further still, when faced with the circumstance where you have normally repeated the given behavior over and over again, you recognize that you have an actual choice to make in-the-moment. You recognize you are feeling hungry and when you feel hungry you are often particularly ornery and prone to making snide comments to anyone nearby. There is your wife, your primary target for the last 45 years. What'll it be? Shall I dish out some abuse, fix myself a sandwich, or something else? Perhaps you'll choose to gripe about what you read in the newspaper, instead of heckling the wife. This would be some improvement from the wife's perspective, perhaps, but if you actually fed yourself, this would be the ultimate victory. In any case, whatever choice you make, you recognize yourself to be responsible for it, and you know through repeated observation that the actions which follow upon your choice have their effects which shape your life experience on a daily basis. You are responsible for your life experience. I am responsible for my life experience.

The crossroad of choice requires follow through, of course, if it is to bear any fruit, and that "follow through" we call action. We'll save more on action for the next post. What's important to notice here and now is that you have taken a significant whack at the victim consciousness when you have exposed your choices to yourself through observation in introspection, and this lies at he heart of both freedom and responsibility. Remember our model of self mastery? It was the triangle of freedom, choice and responsibility. In the victim consciousness, the only exercise the free will ever gets is in denying itself and donning shackles, to justify its innocence and hide its choices from itself, in order to consistently redirect responsibility upon the other, whether the perpetrator (it's all his fault!) or the savior (who will bear responsibility for me...or else!).

When we expose our choices, we can consciously observe our responsibility and exercise our freedom as a proper quality of our will. This is not to say that in exposing our choices to ourselves, we will always make a good choice from there forward. That is a matter of practice. But the good news is, whatever choice we make, we'll know who is responsible for it. Exercising our responsibility, we will observe the cause and effect linkages that generate our life experience. From there, we can evaluate if we like what we are creating, and adjust accordingly. By choosing anew, we point ourselves in fresh directions, and initiate different experiences.

So unlike the prior three steps (recognition, acknowledgment, acceptance), where it was easy enough to backslide into victim consciousness despite the accomplishment, in the case of choice, there is a shift. That's because, we will remember, the victim will not concede s/he has a choice. When your choice is recognized in a given life experience, you are no longer in a position to play the victim. You have shifted to a new level of consciousness. With choice "out of the closet" here, the project for the emerging consciousness of self mastery becomes a moral problem: "what is the best choice," rather then a struggle to merely wake up to the reality that our free wills are never lost, though often forgotten or denied. Now this shift through the recognition of choice to a new level of consciousness, like the other steps, is not permanent or complete. You will have to practice to perceive your choices in all of your life experiences, and to take reponsibility for them, and to make them anew when the choices you have made habitually no longer create the life experiences you want to create. The perception of choice is yet another good habit to cultivate, along with the habit of recognizing your behaviors, acknowledging them, and accepting where you are at any given point along the way.

Timing of Recognition

2005-04-03T16:18:00.000-04:00

For the last three posts, I've been going into some detail explaining the importance of the first three steps in a five step process for transforming a behavior pattern or belief. So far, we've been considering the behavior from the process of introspection, that inward looking time when, after the fact of an experience, we turn it over in our mind to try and observe what happened. Introspection can of course also be a shared process, done with a counselor, friend, or group. Either way, something happens, and we look back to figure it out. Well, after a while, we're going to want to catch ourselves in the act, as it were, and then, catch ourselves before the act. Ultimately we have to shift the timing of our recognition from after the fact to before the fact.

Take the example of the last few posts, where a person recognizes he makes hurtful/putdown comments to someone he loves under the guise of humor. Say that through introspection, he recognizes the behavior, acknowledges it, and accepts himself where he is. Before he can truly come to the next step, choice, with respect to the behavior, he has to get better at recognizing it "in the field" and not merely "after the fact." Although intellectually he might make a choice, or form an intent to "not do that anymore," that's not going to do the job, for several reasons which we can explore at another time. For now, the problem is he needs to notice himself actually doing the behavior.

The process goes something like this. Someone who loves you or whom you respect (or maybe even a complete stranger, for that matter) takes the effort to point out a behavior to you for a closer look. Sure enough, reflecting upon it in introspection you recognize the behavior. After a while, this becomes easier and easier to do. Then you start to catch yourself in the act. You may not manage to stop yourself, and it may play out in your relationship seemingly the same way as always: you make the comment, the other person's feelings are hurt, you blow it off. But it is not exactly the same, because now, a part of yourself is sort of above yourself observing you doing what you are doing while you are doing it, and not merely after the fact. Once that in-the-moment recognition starts to get easier and easier, the time will soon come when you begin to recognize when the behavior is about to happen. Having looked at the behavior many times in introspection, you are now more aware of the set-up circumstances that lead to this behavior. Maybe it arises especially when you are irritable about something from work, or when you are hungry. Maybe it arises as a reaction to the other person doing something you expect them to do differently (even though you may have expected them to read your mind as to exactly what that was). Whatever. As you pay more and more attention to the point where you recognize the situation arising before you act out the behavior in typical fasion, you will find yourself in a position to actually choose something different. You have begun to master the timing of your recognition, because you have practiced observing yourself.

I have stretched out the "drama" of this particular example, but anyone can fill in the blank with their own behavior that you consider ripe for a good look. The pattern is the same. We recognize the issue after the fact first, then we grow to the point where we observe ourselves in the act, then we come to the point where we can know ourselves well enough to recognize the circumstances which lead up to the behavior. When we come to the point where we can anticipate, rather than merely recall our behavior, then we come to a position of choice.

Acceptance

2005-04-01T20:40:00.000-05:00

Recognize, acknowledge, accept, choose, act. (I confess I'm beyond thrilled at figuring out how to do stuff in italics and bold! Please pardon me while I overuse these new-found talents until the novelty wears off.)

Acceptance is an issue with broad applications in the consciousness of self mastery, but here, we'll focus on the particular instance of acceptance around that which we have recognized and acknowledged in our process of introspection. At each stage of this process of becoming self responsible, we can be stopped in our tracks or continue forward. By looking at each of these stages carefully, we can help ourselves to make progress on areas in our life we are ready to transform.

So, back to the original example of the person who habitually makes put-down comments to someone he loves (and wants to love better!). In the process of introspection, he is able to recognize that he made a hurtful comment. Instead of dismissing it as a joke or blaming the other for being too sensitive, he also manages to acknowledge what he recognizes: ok, I did that, and it had such and such a result--she said she felt hurt. NOW WHAT? This is another major crossroads of the process. This fellow, upon acknowledging what he did, might conclude with force: "Boy, am I a jerk! I am so wrong, I can hardly believe myself--what a loser! Still, I never meant to hurt her feelings..." That is to say, a mixed bag of self judgment, guilt and denial. Such judgment is sufficient to bring the process to a screeching halt at this stage, much as dismissal and blame stopped it at the last stage. That is because judgment is a function of the victim consciousness, and whenever we are in the process of introspection and fall back into our victim consciousness, our budding consciousness of self mastery is actually nipped in the bud.

To continue with the process beyond acknowledgement, he has to actually accept himself, despite what he did, without judgment. Getting past judgment should never be mistaken to mean I advocate ignoring patterns of behavior and belief which are no longer serving us, even if those patterns seemed functional somehow in the past. Rather it is a simple fact that we cannot get somewhere else until we accept where we are. In this case, it would sound something like this: "Well, I can see I made such and such a comment, and that sure enough, so and so reports that hurt her feelings. Hmmmm. Ok, well, clearly I am capable of that at this point in time. I can see that. I would like to improve that, and I'll start here and now by simply saying, even though I have that pattern/tendency/behavior/belief, I accept myself as I am. That is where I am.

Many refuse to go to this step of the process, because it seems that whatever behavior is being inspected is unnacceptable, period, and anyone who does "that" deserves censure and approbation. What we are looking for is self-acceptance of the person, not the behavior. Sure, a given behavior may be "unnacceptable." But the person must be accepted, and self accepting, even with the pattern still intact. If we have to wait until the behavior is cleared before the person is rendered acceptable, it's going to be a long wait, since the process of eradicating the behavior is wholly undermined by the judgment of the person and their refusal to accept hi/rself! Judgment binds a person with guilt, and a self-judge is not taking responsibility for anything. Self judgment undercuts self responsibility. Self judgment holds a person to a standard of perfection which they simply haven't achieved yet. It is a function of the "idealized self," the false standard bearer within us. The idealized self is generated to make ourselves seem more accomplished, more mature, more perfect, than we have actually taken the time to become. And then when the fact that we are not all that we pretend to be is exposed, the judgement of the idealized self befalls us without mercy and chastises us for not being where we are not, and who we are not yet.

This is why acceptance is so potent an antidote to judgment, and so certain a key to progress in rooting out old patterns and beliefs. Acceptance finds us where we are. Acceptance is not over-anxious with the fact that we are "works in progress." It doesn't help to have a tennis pro teaching you strategies for increasing the velocity of your serve when you don't even know how to hold the racket. You need to accept the fact that you may not know the first thing about the game or have any developed skill in the area at all. When I accept myself where I am, I can identify what the next appropriate step for my development is. If I judge myself for not hitting the ball every time it is pitched to me, chances are I will never develop the skill to hit the ball at all. It would be just too discouraging a process if I couldn't accept missing the ball as part of the bigger picture. If I want to get from point A to point B, I first need to accept the fact that I am at point A. Judgment demands that I already be at point B and focuses on shaming me that I am not. Judgment blames me for getting it wrong, finds me guilty, condemns me for a given behavior, makes a perpetrator of me, and a victim of the other person. Judgment will leave you in the loop of recognition, acknowledgement, judgment, recognition, acknowledgment, judgment, etc., etc., etc. It is a trap of the victim consciousness. Acceptance will toss you out of that loop playback.

Accepting where I am is no mere intellectual expediency to get to the next step, either. I have to truly accept myself deeply and unreservedly. This level of acceptance may take some practice, as we face our universal tendency to judge over and over again. The emergence of the judge itself requires us to recognize, acknowledge and accept! That's right! We even have to accept ourselves as full of judgment for ourselves and others. As you initially engage in the process of introspection, you will start to see how nearly omnipresent is that inner judge, quick to condemn, shame and blame, but utterly useless in moving you into true responsibility. So the behavior of internal judgment needs to be rooted out in order to continue your progress. You don't have to completely eradicate it to begin to make progress. That would be impossible, in principle. You can rather just add "judgment" to your list of ongoing projects for which you are developing opposite habits. When you spot yourself judging yourself, repeat after me: "even though I still harbor self judgment, I deeply and completely accept myself."

Acknowledgement

2005-03-31T20:52:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-30T20:35:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-28T22:21:00.000-05:00

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!"

2005-03-27T20:43:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-24T22:25:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-24T20:36:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-23T21:09:00.000-05:00

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!"

2005-03-22T20:55:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-20T21:08:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-19T22:21:00.000-05:00

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"

2005-03-18T21:48:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-17T21:09:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-16T22:08:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-15T20:45:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-14T21:39:00.000-05:00

"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

2005-03-13T11:48:00.000-05:00

(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"

2005-03-12T00:16:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-10T20:27:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-09T17:11:00.000-05:00

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! :-)

2005-03-08T18:00:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-07T20:58:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-06T10:40:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-05T11:14:00.000-05:00

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?

2005-03-04T16:29:00.000-05:00

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

2005-03-03T13:55:00.000-05:00

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.