Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings- Living Your Own Truth

by Clinton Callahan

  Each person reclaiming the power to consciously feel and to communicate with feelings not only benefits themselves but contributes to the lives of their colleagues, friends and relations. Studying the ideas in this book opens a real chance that your heart could break out of its long-familiar prison. Learning to feel could become the most profound experience of your life.

  BOOK CONTENTS

  What would it be like to claim your adult masculine or feminine feelings with clarity? How can you distinguish and express your own feelings? How could you effectively listen to and relate to other people’s feelings? How can feelings serve you professionally? How can feelings be the gateway to archetypal ways of life? How could reclaiming your feelings empower you to establish truly sustainable culture? These are questions addressed by this book.

  The first three chapters establish foundational understanding to support new feelings experiences. One model is the numbness bar, an internal intensity regulator which our cultural training has encouraged us to adjust so that we feel nearly nothing. With our numbness bar set so high we equate feeling numb with feeling good. By lowering the setting of your numbness bar you regain physical, intellectual, emotional and energetic sensations. This is the equivalent of slowly opening long-closed Venetian blinds, letting the sun shine in. Things which have been cold, numb or dead start warming up.

  By chapter four you start doing conscious feeling experiments yourself, and by then the experiments go almost effortlessly. The first steps may, of course, be sobering, while you become more conscious of your previous level of numbness. Long-repressed feelings may burst out this way and that, like cooking popcorn without a lid. This is to be expected in Phase 1 of feelings work. Before you can apply the energy and intelligence of your feelings you must first learn to feel!

  Through integrating conscious feelings with new thoughtmaps about what is happening to you, Phase 2 of feelings work begins. You start applying the impulses and information of conscious feelings through responsible practice. Everything changes. Responsible, clear feelings catalyze the long-awaited transition into adulthood, and the gateway opens to the archetypal masculine and feminine.

  Experiential clarity produces the surprising possibility of living in a more conscious and responsible relationship to other people, to the Earth, and to your own purpose. Human precision and vulnerability come together, forming diverse new societies—tiny at first—where men and women, families, friends, neighbors and colleagues collaboratively create technically and spiritually sustainable cultures in which success means developing the potential of each person.

  THE MISSING INGREDIENT HAS BEEN YOU

  These first years of the twenty-first century are times of sudden and drastic transition. Continuing business as usual brings ominous consequences, yet the shift to sustainability involves immediate and unprecedented personal, organizational and societal challenges. The efforts you apply toward bringing consciousness to your feelings make you a leader in this transition.

  We need leaders in the shift to next culture. A “leader” in this sense is simply a person who goes first.

  Brave people have the courage to ask embarrassing but obvious questions, and then to follow through on the answers they discover without subjecting themselves to the conceptual limits of their birth culture. You are such a one, a key element in humanity making the leap to a more promising future for our children.

  This book is full of strong clarity that becomes the basis of next culture through you bringing that clarity to common practice in your daily life and interactions. Some of these ideas may at first seem intimidating, but please keep trying—even through the shadowy unsettling times when things might not make sense. Please be one of the experimenters who never gives up. I thank you for your efforts.

  1. THE NUMBNESS BAR

  A NEW DECISION

  Idealizing the strong numb hero has possibly exterminated the human race. The present conditions of environmental degradation, mass extinction of species, global warming beyond critical tipping points, greedy consumption of nonrenewable resources, economic injustices, overpopulation, weapons of mass destruction, and the general failure of seemingly intelligent human beings to create a sustainable future for ourselves on this garden planet are all consequences of revering numbness.

  Personally choosing numbness may have been unconscious for you. Perhaps you patterned yourself on the numbness of modern culture, taking on machine-like qualities of being fast, hard and impersonal. Perhaps you obediently followed in your mother’s or father’s footsteps by adopting the level of numbness handed down from generation to generation in your family’s tradition.

  Either way, this book confronts you with making the choice to consciously continue your old behaviors or practice new ones. Either you will tighten your internal restraints and stay numb, or you will break the chain around your heart and simply allow yourself to feel.

  At any moment your new decision may prevail.

  If deep sobs of grief over lost years of feeling erupt from your heart and convulse your lungs and chest for hours or days while reading this book, do not worry. That is okay. Nothing is wrong with you. You are coming back to life.

  Deep grief over missed opportunities and loneliness long endured is the healing path toward a more humane future. Seen in this light, your sadness equates to a celebration. Intimacy is still possible for you. Your heart is not dead. The remainder of your life can be filled with inner sensations of belongingness that no one can take away from you ever again.

  Your feelings are fine. Having your feelings back is so simple. Yet, like a sudden down-pouring of rain after a long drought, the new experiences may change everything. Nothing can prepare you for the awesome abundance when green shoots sprout miraculously out of dry desert sands.

  FEELINGS COME KNOCKING

  Some of us are forced to learn about feelings by unwanted side effects from years and years of numbness. We may suffer rashes, nail biting, hair plucking, skin picking, depression, overeating, burnout, anxiety, hypertension, drinking, shame, drug taking, adaptive behavior, confusion, insomnia, indigestion, intestinal problems, frustration, hopelessness, headaches, asthma, nervous twitches, fatigue, listlessness, lack of financial success, family stress, failed relationships, sexual dysfunction, infertility, despair, oversleeping, back pain, accidents, self-injury, angina, bulimia, anorexia or attempted suicide. Even such conditions as bipolar, borderline, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, Graves’ disease, and Parkinson’s disease are suspected of being related to unexpressed feelings.

  Some of us are driven to investigate feelings after years of hysteria, aggression, shouting, violence, rage, destructive temper tantrums, claustrophobia, paralysis, melancholy, a gambling or shopping addiction, lying, speeding, theft, corruption, engaging in intrigue, mobbing, indiscriminate sex, betraying or being betrayed. Ignoring such expressions does not make them go away. On the contrary, denial only intensifies their destructive impact on our lives. For example, a brilliant and successful professional consultant friend of mine recently found himself arrested and in jail because he was caught walking out of a bookshop with an unpurchased book in his pocket. He was completely flabbergasted by his own behavior! He had no explanation.

  Perhaps the question of feelings has come knocking more surreptitiously. Are you alone? Divorced? Has a loved one complained that he or she just can’t get through to you? That you don’t listen? That you’re not open to intimacy or sexuality? Do they say they don’t really know who you are?

  Perhaps your children are distant, keeping themselves away from you.

  Perhaps intimacy disturbs something deep within you rather than being genuinely satisfying. Perhaps you feel disconnected from the human race, isolated in your own separate world.

  PASSIONATE PROFESSIONALISM

  As a modern professional you may categorically reject the need for feelings. You may barricade your thoughts and speech behind scientific reasons and logic. Yet you may experience a certain twinge in
your heart watching people simply fall into each other’s arms with tears in their eyes, grieving the death of a loved one, sharing rage and fears over the coming climate crisis, or outrageously laughing together, while you feel nothing, remaining unmoved, still untouched.

  Perhaps your true passions are a mystery, although now and then you sense a vague longing to experience the richness of manhood or womanhood before your life passes. Perhaps you ache to fulfill your life’s destiny no matter how big or impossible it may seem.

  After all, it has been done! It is possible! There existed a Richard Burton! He lived. There existed (or still lives) a Wangari Muta Maathai, a George Gurdjieff, an Aung San Suu Kyi, a Tatanka-Iyotanka (Sitting Bull), an Arnaud Desjardins, a Nelson Mandela, a Mother Teresa. There are so many examples of human potential fully lived! Why not you too? Why not reclaim your own passionate vision and live your life’s adventure with full commitment and enthusiasm? Something noble. Something daring. Why not gain a sense of having at least once done something else in your life?

  THE POSSIBILITY OF BEING NO LONGER NUMB

  Numbness has been artfully woven in as a foundational element of our modern way of life. We have unwittingly grown accustomed to staying well distracted from our feelings: busy, reactive, drunk, drugged, worried, overstressed, overfed, overstimulated, overstretched, and cerebral.

  Proposing that a person could actually learn to feel turns out to be rather revolutionary in modern culture. It goes against the entire systems of education, psychology, medicine, religion, politics, science and technology.

  Giving numbness a name implies that there is a condition of not numbness. Your willingness to recognize the existence of numbness suggests your willingness to recognize the personal costs of staying numb, and the personal opportunities of becoming someone who is no longer numb.

  CONSPIRACY AGAINST FEELINGS

  For a man to enter the patriarchy at birth he must give up his option of being himself. This sacrifice causes the deepest kind of pain. Few women understand the source of this pain, though they may recognize an intense resentment festering at the core of patriarchal men. Unexpressed pain drives us men to cause an equivalent pain in the world around us. Only tortured souls could condone the physical and spiritual starvation of children, aggressions against women, war among elected gangsters, and the rapidly expanding ecological holocaust. Patriarchal men are not allowed to be innocently themselves. Why should anyone else get to?

  Since the beginnings of patriarchy some five thousand years ago, authoritarian voices have delivered clear proclamations against feelings. After all, patriarchal empire needs its mercenaries and merchants to siphon the wealth of conquered lands into the empire’s sequestered coffers.

  How could a worker or soldier endlessly rape and pillage in the name of the empire unless he shut down the dignity and nobility of his own natural feelings?

  The Spartans said, Come home with your shield, or on it!

  The Vikings said, Victory, or Valhalla!

  The Muslims said, Allahu Akbar!

  The Christians said, Deus vult!

  The Japanese said, Banzai!

  The Germans said, Seig heil!

  The Russians said, Ura!

  The Israelis said, Kadima!

  The Americans said, It’s show time!

  Modern parents say, Boys don’t cry! Indians feel no pain! Shhhh! Nothing happened!

  We have been well instructed to stay numb.

  In modern society, the worst names you can be called are Yellow! Chicken! Scaredy Cat! We learned at a young age that it is disgraceful to feel.

  The man or woman who wins in business, politics, war, or sports is the last man standing, the strong numb hero.

  Each generation finds a way to bury the pain of sending their own children into war to do the dirty work of the ruling classes. Specialized numbing techniques have become familiar features of today’s society. We were sent to school to study numbing topics. We brought home numbing homework, preparing us to work long hours at numbing jobs with a numbing commute and constantly droning numbing news. We work for money to shop for things we don’t need, to buy drugs and entertainment that seduce our attention and deaden the horrifying recognition of modern empire’s proudest success: globalization.

  Corporate-controlled international financial institutions encourage businessmen to invade, subvert and globalize forty thousand years of diverse human cultures around the world using any means available. By reducing cultures to Disneyfied caricatures, local customs and traditions are disempowered and replaced by mass-produced brands sold at franchised shops to make ever-increasing profits. No mechanism exists to monitor or stop the manufacturers of monoculture, not even the United Nations. The globalization steamroller has gone berserk. Being numb, we blindly participate.

  Unbridled empire will dig up and burn everything on Earth because there is only one goal of a corporation: profit. The plan is being meticulously executed as you read these words. In many ways you are an accomplice. Me too.

  The plan has one suicidal fault. It ignores the fact that we live on a planet. A planet has limited resources and a limited capacity to absorb contaminants. Those limits are being reached.

  Like a cancer, the paradigm of empire is killing its host. Having come full circle around the globe, modern empire finds no more societies to enslave, no more resources to plunder. The world’s oil production curve goes downhill from here while the ravaged planet suffocates in toxic wastes, rapidly becoming inhospitable to the human species.

  Collective numbness permits us to degrade the only spaceship that can support human life in this part of the galaxy. More easily than most people realize, Earth could become frozen and airless like Mars, or more likely, blanketed in superheated poisonous gases through a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus. Numbness toward the consequences of our individual actions may self-exterminate Homo sapiens. Modern civilization arranged its own demise.

  HIERARCHICAL PSYCHOPATHS

  Arrogantly ignoring the warning signs, we modern citizens continue organizing ourselves using hierarchical organization designs, even though the pyramid is but one of many possible designs for flowing power through people to accomplish our common goals.

  In a hierarchy, whoever does what it takes to climb the ladder wins the coveted leadership positions. An utter lack of empathy is a key success factor. The hierarchical design causes our government, military, religious, medical and educational organizations to be top-heavy with people tending toward psychopathic behavior.

  It is not that power corrupts; it is that corrupt individuals seek power.

  A hierarchy automatically replaces people of integrity with the most ruthless psychopaths, and the closer you get to the top, the more this pattern prevails.

  In the last fifty years the transition to organizational psychopathy seems to have reached a tipping point. As proven by the failure of the COP15 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009, global leadership no longer serves to create a bright future for humanity. Instead, it preys on humanity as a resource of slave labor and dull-witted consumers, and we citizens are complicit. Our parents were busy so they sat us in front of a television to follow the hypnotic instructions for giving our authority away to so-called experts. Now, even when we have the chance, we do not take our personal authority back. We don’t even think of it.

  Modern society is terrified of cults or sects whose leaders might brainwash their victims to surrender their will to serve evil purposes. Actually, this is a perfect description of what already exists in modern society. Perhaps the greater fear is of a force that might awaken citizens from their walking sleep so they regain natural capacities for living that modern society tries to convince them they never had. Personal feelings could well be this awakening force.

  It is discouraging to look around the world and notice how few people choose to live in a culture where respect, human dignity and creativity thrive. For the most part, humanity is dominated and controlled by those most capabl
e of gaining and retaining power and least capable of thoughtful human leadership.

  The people we have entrusted with making wise decisions about our health, well-being, education and a sustainable future are committed to no such things. They are instead committed to assuring their own security, wealth and power. We have handed over the reins of society and the keys to our treasury to a loose affiliation of psychopathic millionaires and billionaires maximizing their own holdings without regard for humanity’s future.

  Psychopathic leaders can only continue serving their own agendas if they remain unrecognized and unobstructed. Could this be why the general population is kept distracted with sporting events, movie star scandals, the so-called threat of terrorist attacks, and a series of never-ending wars with a never-vanquished enemy? Lacking an objective overview and busily occupied with the worries of modern life, we stay disconnected from each other and from the wisdom and power of our moment to moment feelings while psychopaths proceed undisturbed.

  Astonishment when you discover the degree to which feelings have been scrubbed from modern society is only surpassed by your embarrassment that nothing has been done to remedy the lack. In the 1960s it became apparent that schooling could expand to include more balanced aspects of human development, but too few people took radical responsibility to change their lives and the lives of their children. Architects of modern culture already had control of the majority vote. The somnambulant momentum prevailed.

  Economic productivity is determined by the effectiveness of the machinery. Captains of industry required only machine operators, so schooling was designed to address only the minimum intellect, as if a human being stops at the neck. Feeling skills and introspective capacities have been systematically eliminated from modern society through corporate curriculum design.

  This is why reclaiming your feelings will require extending your experiments beyond the thought limits of mainstream culture, well beyond what is provided in modern education.