Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings- Living Your Own Truth

by Clinton Callahan

  PARALLEL CULTURES

  Since we are exploring beyond the understanding limits of modern culture in order to find ways to adjust the level of our numbness bar, we can imagine the existence of cultures with higher levels of responsibility than modern culture.

  Perhaps there could be cultures with, on average, adult level responsibility.

  Perhaps there could be cultures with a high level of responsibility.

  Perhaps there could be cultures with radical level responsibility.

  Since these cultures would coexist in the same environment, they would be parallel cultures, not necessarily visible to each other. In particular, the parallel cultures of higher levels of responsibility would not be so visible to the parallel cultures of lower levels of responsibility. It is doubtful that the people who were burning cars and spraying graffiti in Paris had much comprehension of the level of responsibility it takes to own cars and maintain buildings.

  You respond according to what you perceive. Certainly the world must look different if you take adult and radical levels of responsibility than it does if you perceive your circumstances from child level responsibility. The difference in perception comes from your thoughtmaps.

  MAP OF EVOLVING THOUGHTMAPS

  What is a thoughtmap? A thoughtmap is the set of distinctions that formats the way you interact with the world. Your set of thoughtmaps constitutes your personal identity, your mindset, your worldview, your comfort zone, your belief system.

  Your thoughtmaps present you with the options you have to choose from: to make the decisions you make, to take the actions you take, to produce the results you want to create. If you want to change your results, you would most effectively start by changing your thoughtmaps.

  Imagine two people looking out over the horizon, each holding a different map of the world. One person holds a map where the world is shown as a flat disc. The other person holds a map where the world is shown as a round ball. The world they look at is the same, but what they see is completely different because they are using different maps.

  MAP OF CHANGED RESULTS

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  If you are interested in change it pays to study where new results come from. Did you ever try to get new results without changing your actions? (We all do. It doesn’t work. This shows how disconnected the mind can be from reality.) New results come from new behaviors. So where do new behaviors come from? They come from conscious or unconscious decisions to act differently. Where do new decisions come from? They come from new options to choose from. But where do we get the new options? From new thoughtmaps. Without changing your thoughtmaps it is unlikely that you will create changed results.

  If the flat-world map-user exchanged his flat-world map for the round-world map, would this person gain new options, powers, and possibilities? Yes, he would.

  When this person exchanges his map, does the world itself change? No, it does not. The world remains the same world it has always been.

  This person’s new map gives him new possibilities because human beings do not interact with the world as it is. We interact with the world through our thoughtmaps of the world. If you change your thoughtmap, you get a new world.

  MAP OF EVOLVING THOUGHTMAPS

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  From starting with no map at all it is great to have a map! The map helps you find the good guys, the bad guys, and the treasure! But on a flat-world map, if you sail away from known territory, you fall o˝ and die – and it is a bad way to die!

  With a new map you get new possibilities, a totally new game: e.g., on a round Earth you can sail as far as you want from known territory and you cannot fall off. Did the Earth change with your new thoughtmap? No. Only your perspective changed. But you get truly new possibilities because we do not live according to the world. We live according to our thoughtmaps of the world. Get a new thoughtmap and you get a new world!

  The next thoughtmap is waiting just out of view, exactly where the last new thoughtmap was in the moment before it was discovered. You can never know what the next thoughtmap will be.

  So it turns out that thoughtmaps are quite influential in a human being’s quality of life.

  Of course, changing thoughtmaps may be the most frightening thing to consider doing. After all, we may well have regarded our thoughtmaps as the one true way that things are, rather than as merely a personal set of thoughtmaps. Seriously considering changing your thoughtmaps may seem like vaporizing the solid ground you have stood on for your whole life. What remains of the real world if thoughtmaps are recognized as merely thoughtmaps?

  Still, you have probably changed your thoughtmaps before, and you will probably change them again. What about changing your thought-maps now to obtain the new results of being no longer numb?

  EXPERIMENTING WITH THE LEVEL OF YOUR NUMBNESS BAR

  In this case, the result that you want to change is the level at which your own personal numbness bar is set. To do this experiment you will need to start where you are.

  Starting where you are is a powerful thoughtmap itself. For example, how else could you go through a doorway unless you are at the doorway? You can’t.

  How can you eat a piece of cake unless there is a piece of cake in front of you? You can’t.

  How can you pick up a hammer with your hand unless there is a hammer within hand’s reach? You can’t.

  In other words, to cause a change you need to start where you are.

  This means that you will need to take a look at the thoughtmaps that produce the results you are presently getting before you can replace those thoughtmaps with different thoughtmaps that produce different results.

  Specifically, what is your old thoughtmap about your numbness bar?

  FLAT-WORLD THOUGHTMAPS

  If you have been raised within modern society then your flat-world thoughtmap about the numbness bar is that it is better to be numb. The higher the numbness bar is, the less pain you feel. The less pain you feel, the more comfortable you will be.

  Modern culture’s Standard Human Institutional Thoughtmaps include:

  • The goal is to be rich, happy, and famous, no matter what.

  • Pain is bad.

  • Feelings are mostly negative.

  • Buy low. Sell high.

  • Do whatever it takes to achieve success.

  • Maximize profit through externalizing costs to society or to the next generation. Ignore the social and environmental consequences.

  • Follow society’s plan: Get born, go to school, get a job, get married, buy a house, get a different job, start your own business, sell your business, retire, go to an old people’s home, die.

  • Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain operating the illusion-making levers.

  • Chase the carrot.

  • Run the rat race.

  • Whoever dies with the most toys wins.

  • Only the good die young.

  Standard Human Institutional Thoughtmaps are not bad or stupid. They are simply the set of thoughtmaps that produce standard human intelligence results. If you want to produce other results, then use other thoughtmaps.

  A thoughtmap to begin experimenting with is the Old Map of the Numbness Bar.

  MAP OF THE NUMBNESS BAR (OLD)

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  Modern culture teaches you to move your numbness bar ever higher to obtain the sensation of comfort. The mainstream motto is: avoid pain. But numbness blocks us from appropriately responding to present conditions. That is why idealizing the strong numb hero has possibly exterminated the human race.

  Keeping your numbness bar high assures that pain with an intensity level below the bar does not consciously register. You don’t feel it. With a high numbness bar you can pointlessly stay in school, watch infantile TV,
fight in wars, be in a gang, work a job you don’t love, lead without integrity, accept corrupt leadership without objecting, consume endlessly, watch mainstream news, go into debt, believe government officials, live in waking sleep, and stay oblivious to your own feelings. How do you keep your numbness bar high? Each of us has our favorite ways: overeating, overworking, over exercising, over shopping, joking around, denial, avoiding self-knowledge, being righteous, consuming sugar, using alcohol or drugs, constant background TV noise, speeding, competing, fighting with the neighbors, self-hatred, trying to be perfect, and so on. We are extremely dedicated to – and creative about – staying numb.

  Observing the level at which you typically hold your numbness bar may require the assistance of other people. You can ask for feedback from friends, relatives, or colleagues at work.

  • Ask them to tell you from 0 to 100 percent how high you keep your numbness bar.

  • Ask them to explain in detail exactly how you keep your numbness bar at that level, and why you must keep it there.

  Ask for this feedback from a variety of people over a period of weeks or months. The suggestion for getting the most out of this experiment is to trust the feedback you get from people, even if you don’t understand it, even if you think they are wrong.

  Here are two more questions you can start living with now:

  • In what ways am I blocking my feelings about what is happening right now?

  • What do other people feel about this incident that I am not feeling?

  SELF-OBSERVATION. PERIOD.

  Through asking yourself questions and through requesting feedback from your friends, you may get views of yourself that don’t match your long-held or most preferred self-image. The discrepancy between the way you imagine yourself to be and the way you are perceived by others could be vast. The vastness may be disconcerting enough to propel you toward wanting to take immediate actions to rectify the situation.

  The invitation is to try not to change anything. Don’t even try to change your knee-jerk reactions about making the pain of realization go away. Just observe the whole thing.

  Trying not to move is like playing the game of Freeze! If you don’t previously agree to freeze when the captain of the game shouts “Freeze!”, then your first reaction to hearing someone yell “Freeze!” is to move!

  In this game of self-observation, hold the intention that no matter what you observe during this observation period, you won’t do anything about it.

  Not doing anything can be an extremely difficult thing to do. Don’t even carry the question around about what you could do. It is far too early for trying to make changes.

  The strategy right now is to not make changes.

  If you don’t know what you are doing to stay numb, how can you be sure if you are doing something different from that? You can’t.

  Observing yourself requires consciously splitting your attention into two parts. Use half of your attention to do your normal life, and use the other half of your attention to neutrally observe what you are doing. At first you could get a bit dizzy from the simultaneous differing perspectives, but splitting your attention is normal. Remember a time when you were listening to an MP3 player while riding your bicycle, thinking about what to buy at the store, chewing gum, and watching the interesting people on the sidewalk all at the same time. You can already split your attention. The only difference now is you will be splitting your attention consciously.

  It helps to imagine that you are living within a box of mechanical behaviors, completely identified with the box’s behaviors as if they were your own true actions because you have no other perspective on your situation. When the box moves, you are moved by the movement. You can’t help it. You are stuck in these mechanical reactions, and may be stuck there for the rest of your life. Perhaps you know someone like this?

  Self-observation is like taking a new pair of energetic eyeballs into your hand, reaching your hand out beyond the edges of your box, and twisting your hand around so that your new eyes can look back at the box from the outside. By seeing from this perspective, you easily discover that the box is no more than an assembly of mechanical reactions triggered automatically by external stimuli. Keep your arm out there and just watch what happens for a long time.

  When you first hold out your hand with the eyes it gets tired within a few moments and you bring it back inside the box again, often without even knowing it. Moments, hours, or even days go by before you wake up with a start and remember what you were trying to do. You see that you are no longer splitting your attention, but you have no memory of stopping. Even at those times do not judge yourself. Or if you do judge yourself, observe the mechanicality of your self-judgment and do not judge that. When you notice your lack of self-observation, simply extend your neutral eyes out beyond the perimeter of your box again and continue observing yourself.

  Lee Lozowick identifies three conditions under which to pay particular attention to observing yourself:

  1. When you are laughing.

  2. When you are praying.

  3. When you think nothing is going on.

  Yes, especially observe yourself when you assume there is nothing special to observe.

  Remain as neutral as a video camera.

  You are familiar with the term second sight, having insights after the fact? During self-observation try to use first sight so you can observe what is actually happening while it happens without having any insights about it. First sight is seeing what is as it is rather than seeing what you expect or hope to see.

  Observe with a crystal clear eye. No name-calling, no swear words, no inner vows, no self-flagellations, no justifications, no comments from the peanut gallery. Keep your opinions about your opinions to yourself. Simply notice.

  As soon as you notice that you are not simply noticing, simply go back to noticing. It’s that simple.

  Observe yourself for an extended period of time so you can identify repeated patterns and the circumstances that trigger them. An extended period of time means months and months, years actually.

  Observe . . .

  • what you say.

  • what you do.

  • what you think.

  • what you feel.

  • your tensions.

  • your intentions.

  • your postures.

  • your impostures.

  • your accomplishments compared to what you promise.

  • your sense of things.

  • your incense about things.

  • what offends you.

  • what offends others about you.

  • what in you gets fed by offending others.

  • your layers within layers, games within games.

  When you first begin self-observation you may have an attention span of only a few seconds before you get knocked unconscious and fall asleep. Work to build up your muscles of attention.

  As your modus numbness becomes more and more apparent it will simultaneously become more predictable. When your own behavior becomes predictable to you then you see it is dead. Only then do you gain a new freedom of movement. Your mechanical commitment to staying numb can be avoided without sentimentality, because you will not be killing something that you still regard as being alive. It will take months of dedicated observation before you get to this point. That is not too long. The months will go by no matter what you are doing. You may as well be building your attention muscles.

  DOCUMENTATION

  In the meantime, do not avoid the impulse to write your observations down. I carry around a little black book in my pocket for making notes about myself. I call it my “Beep Book,” a place to jot down what people tell me about myself, what I notice, wild ideas for things to try, phrases that lead to thinking in ways that are not in my present thought patterns, designs for new experiments, and so on. My little books fill up faster than I ever imagined.

  Without writing things down you can easily become a victim of blackouts. Blackouts are when yo
ur psychological defense strategy (belief system, self-image, what I call “The Box”) causes you to forget something that it would rather you didn’t know about, such as particularly insightful pieces of feedback, or experiences that you do not have a name for. If a blackout can get you to forget about something one time, it can get you to forget about it many times. If you forget about a thing without knowing you have forgotten about it, that thing becomes invisible to you. Blackouts don’t really protect you from anything. Just because you cannot see a thing does not mean it loses its power to damage your life. (Ask the captain of the Titanic.)

  So get yourself a Beep Book and develop the practice of writing down your self-observations and feedback. Unveiling your technologies for staying numb is your job, no one else’s. The problem is that you are an expert in avoiding disillusionment (like the rest of us). Here lies the value of working in a team. It is far easier to see someone else’s denial mechanisms than our own. If you arrange to come together regularly with others in a men’s or women’s group, or in a self-development laboratory, you can establish a protocol for waking each other up when you are fogging yourselves.

  There is a warning about group work, however. Making the group responsible for waking you up won’t work. A reminder from someone else does not give you power. It keeps them alert but not you. The reminders from others serve as an interim step until you can catch yourself. Only when you can identify your own numbing techniques and can stop before using them do you gain the power to choose another behavior.

  NEW MAP OF THE NUMBNESS BAR

  Lowering the numbness bar is neither philosophical nor conceptual. It is experiential. You will physically detect each millimeter it goes down. When it goes up you won’t notice it. But when it goes down it is like being in spotlights naked on stage, like scraping a knife on a china plate. The bar cannot be lowered for free—it takes work. As Swami Prajnanpad, a wise Indian teacher, bluntly put it, You must pay full price.