Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings- Living Your Own Truth
Page 30
Which is bigger, your commitment to what matters to you—or your commitment to what stands between you and what matters to you? Write out your answer, with examples.
What would have to be different in your life in order to have what matters to you come first? First before low drama. First before finding excuses. First before mere survival.
Do you see that you are already involved in sourcing these Principles in the world? They have been functioning, perhaps unconsciously, for your whole life. Even so, you are in no way obligated to commit to your destiny. Living your destiny consciously is completely optional. Choosing your destiny is a moment-to-moment choice. Only by consciously choosing to make your life about fulfilling your destiny can you truly commit to it. You have the power to choose this because you have free will.
The formal commitment to serving your Bright Principles is more compelling than the force of your psychology (your Box’s demands).
Principles are a force of nature. If you actually choose to be your destiny in action, your life will not be about you anymore. Many people who commit to serving their destiny are unexpectedly moved to locations and moved to take actions that their Box would ordinarily never have chosen. Think seriously about this choice.
Your Principles are not about you. Your Principles are not there for you to be empowered, for you to have more joy, money, power, fun, or more love in your life. They are there for serving humanity and the Earth.
Your Principles are your calling card, the sign over your door. Your Principles are what you represent as a service for other people. People come to you when they need what your specific Principles can provide for them. You become the eyes, ears, mouth, hands, feet and heart through which your Principles and your archetypal lineage can do their work in the world.
If you decide to choose your destiny, then your Box no longer has majority vote in your day-to-day actions. Your Principles have majority vote. Your life is not about you anymore; it is about serving something greater than yourself. You become your Principles. Your self-image, comfort zone, worldview and old stories about yourself are released and slowly drift to a decreased level of importance.
Then when you are brushing your teeth and you look in the mirror, what you see is not your personality character any more. What you see is your Bright Principles. For example, I don’t see some guy named Clinton. I see Integrity, Clarity, Possibility, Love, Transformation, and High Level Fun. It is a completely different view of who I am. The same will occur for you when you walk down the street and catch a reflection of yourself in a storefront window or a mirror. It is not the old you anymore. It is something else, with a much greater potential for service.
CHOOSING YOUR DESTINY PRINCIPLES
Now that you know what your destiny Principles are and what will occur if you choose to be your Bright Principles, you can either choose your destiny or not.
Do you choose your destiny? Yes or no?
If yes, then write the words I am in front of your list of Bright Principles and memorize them. Make an appointment to stand before an assembly of respected individuals and say out loud to them, “I choose my Bright Principles. I am __________________,” filling in the blank with your distilled list of Bright Principles. The Principles should be spoken in such a way that they land firmly in the space, in the entire universe, not with a rising voice as in a question, but each one announced individually with a falling voice as in a statement. This is a declaration. You declare yourself to be your Principles. If your Principles have been well spoken, your witnesses will tend to automatically respond by saying, “Thank you.”
Your Bright Principles need to stay forever on the tip of your tongue. Whenever someone asks you, “Who are you?,” you can instantly say, “I am _____________,” and announce your Bright Principles.
Again, the Principles that you have distilled are a working draft. They will most likely evolve and reorganize themselves during months and years of use. Two might meld into one, or together become a new Principle. One Principle might fall away. Then suddenly two more show up as long-lost friends.
After having distilled your Bright Principles and your Shadow Principles what you get is a choice in each moment as to which Principles you serve. This is a choice worth having.
PART 3: ADDING MASS TO YOUR DESTINY—YOUR PRACTICES
At first your destiny does not have many votes in your life, overshadowed as it has been by the busyness of daily life. Weighing your destiny Principles against your customary comforts and habit patterns, your destiny has relatively little mass. Twenty, thirty, forty or fifty years of avoidance habits usually outweigh the possibility of acting in this moment in accordance with your destiny.
Part 3 of the Distilling Destiny Process is about reorienting your daily life around practices that build mass for your destiny. To begin, take twenty minutes to write a list of twenty practices for yourself that add votes in favor of being your destiny in action. A true practice has qualities of being doable, measurable, clear, simple and distinct.
• For example, a practice for adding mass to the Bright Principle of Clarity would be: Three times a day I will tell another person, “I feel (mad, sad, glad, or scared) because ________ and my need is ________.” This practice uses the intelligence and impulse of feelings to clearly communicate and ask for what you need.
• A practice for adding mass to Integrity would be: By November 18 I will search through my house, attic and basement to dispose of memorabilia from previous relationships to make respectful space for my commitment to my present partner. This brings Integrity to life in your relationship.
• A practice for adding mass to Self-Respect would be: On July 13, from one o’clock until eight o’clock, I will have a Mother Graduation Party for me to recognize that I have completed my job as mother to my nineteen-year-old son. I am no longer known as Mom. I take back my womanly name of Virginia.
Make a list of twenty practices for yourself. Ask two or three qualified friends for specific feedback and coaching about your list. Tell them what your intention is so they can add an additional five practices for further expanding your Box and building mass for your destiny. Be sure to have them check that you wrote down exactly what they said, not what you understood them to say. The Box is so clever at defending itself. Trust your coaches.
PART 4: IMPLEMENTING YOUR DESTINY—A PROJECT
Bringing integrity to your destiny automatically results in a project. Otherwise, the whole procedure for distilling your destiny has been imaginary. The project brings the fruits of your destiny to life. Being your Bright Principles will move you to accomplishing something on their behalf.
Your opinion about your project does not matter. Neither does anyone else’s opinion matter. It is none of your business what your project is. The project is the business of your Bright Principles. You chose to be the space through which your Bright Principles serve the world. How they do that is none of your business.
Your project is at hand. It is not somewhere else, some when else, depending on someone else. Your project is immediately here.
Your destiny is about changing the world for the better. (Everybody’s destiny is about changing the world for the better. You are no exception.) Changing the world for the better is done right here, with what you have right now. You already have everything that you need to implement your destiny right now, and right now . . .
Your project could be something that lasts for a few days or for a week. It could be something that you start now and that lasts far beyond your lifetime. Again, it is none of your business what your project is. It is your Principles’ business. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other and do the work.
As soon as you have written down some impressions of what your project might be, no matter how immense or trivial it seems, arrange to have a meeting with a coach. This coach should have some expertise in the field of your project. They should already have some skill in what you are destined to accomplish. Do not ask your coach if this project can be done
or not. Of course it can be done. The Principles are sourcing it. Instead, ask your coach to give you connections to resources for ways to make this happen.
As uncomfortable as this might at first seem, your destiny is a public conversation. Your destiny takes place in public, not in private. You are meant to live your project out loud, with all four feelings and in all four bodies.
If you create what you have always created, you will get what you have always gotten. Your project will tend to take you out of your old patterns. Your project is about evolution: yours and humanity’s. Your project will expand your Box. Your continued transformation happens in relation to bringing your destiny project to life.
Here is a suggestion. Adjust the method of implementing your project to the result that you want to create. Do not do the opposite. Do not shrink your project goals to match the methods or resources you already know about.
You needlessly tolerate an immense amount of mediocrity in your life because you match what you want to do with what you already know how to do.
Instead, let yourself not know how and go ahead anyway.
Radically rely on your destiny Principles to arrange things in the world so that the project is successful. After all, it is not your project! It is the project of your Principles. Let the Principles handle the hard stuff. You may remember the old saying, God works while man plays! Your job is to play full out, to have High Level Fun!
That’s not so bad, is it? It could be far worse! If you simply put one foot in front of the other and keep moving and don’t look down, you will stay in motion. While you are in motion, the Principles can navigate your actions through precessional events and unpredictable coincidences. If you stop moving then it is far more difficult for the sideways forces of the Principles to cause nonlinear course corrections.
Keep moving. Don’t stop simply because you cannot see the whole series of actions that will take you to your goal. Instead, take whatever actions you can see to do, and then, after the actions, reassess what you can see to do. The preceding section is pure gold. What if you read it again?
FURTHER DISTINCTIONS ABOUT IMPLEMENTING YOUR DESTINY
Whatever behaviors and excuses arise that prevent what matters to you from showing up first in your life are simply your Box defending its known position and territory. Your destiny will generally take you into the unknown. It can help immensely if you just change your mind about the looming fears and discomforts of consistently heading into the unknown. If you change your mind and decide it is not so bad, you can more easily get used to it.
It can also be quite useful to acknowledge and say exactly what you want independent of whether you think it is possible or not to get what you want. You are better off knowing what you want even if it is impossible to get it, since the alternative is lying to yourself about what you want.
Perhaps you have the habit of manipulating yourself into doing what you already want to do. Stop doing that. There are plenty of other people out there trying to manipulate you. You do not have to do it to yourself.
Getting specific is the one thing that the Box does not want you to do. The Box tries to avoid specifics because specifics imply commitment. Avoiding commitment is how the Box keeps a back door open, guards secret loopholes, stays in control and keeps everything the same way it has always been for you. Creating new results is done by focusing on specifics.
If you have followed the Distilling Destiny Process all the way through, by now you have distilled, chosen, amplified and implemented your Bright Principles. In doing that you have made yourself a source person for next culture.
9. NEXT CULTURE
CULTURAL RELATIVITY
Culture is the gameworld in which a group of people agree to live together. Historically, we established culture to function as a survival Box modeled after our personal Box, to give us group identity, group security, and so on. Cultures typically included the claim: ours is the only true and right culture. For example, in most aboriginal languages there is no difference between the word for “human being” and the word for “a member of our tribe”—meaning that unless you speak our language, wear our clothes, and subscribe to our worldview, customs and rituals, you are not a human being. Therefore, we are justified in having you for lunch—as the main course . . .
Gremlin easily morphs the credo: ours is the only true and right culture, into the belief: our culture is better than your culture if we can kill you.
This conviction fueled Alexander the Great’s annihilation of Persia. It inspired the church-sponsored conquistadores as they wiped out millions of inhabitants in the Americas. It sanctioned Christian missionaries to utterly decimate South Pacific islanders. Our culture is better than your culture if we can kill you . . . it numbed the Australians, Japanese, and Americans while they slaughtered their original populations; and the Hindus and Muslims to ceaselessly murder each other for centuries. The insanity continues to this day, exemplified by America/Israel/ England contaminating Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Lebanon and, most recently, Gaza with illegal radioactive Depleted Uranium genocide weapons.
A heavily subsidized brainwashing scandal asserts that Western-style globalization is the crown jewel of human development, relegating all other cultures to the category of wannabes (third worlders) or brutes (original wisdom cultures). America has by far the greatest military budget in the world; Gremlins with trillions, marching acrross the globe, thinking: our culture is better than your culture if we can kill you.
Untangling yourself from the debilitating arrogance woven into Westernized perception distortions can take decades—especially for the third worlders to regard themselves with self-esteem even if they don’t have a sofa and a microwave. The fact that 20 percent of the world’s population is sucking down 80 percent of Earth’s natural resources should tell you something about the scam going on. There could soon be some surprises coming for the “elites.” For one thing, the “uncivilized” 80 percent will still know how to live when the planet goes cold turkey on oil, while the 20 percent who are oil addicts will stare slack-jawed and wide-eyed into raw terror. Oops.
Despite all its deluded self-congratulations there is one thing truly commendable about modern civilization, and that is its tourism industry. Since World War II millions of people have been tantalized by brochures showing tropical palms swaying over white-sand beaches, cheap air flights, and shrewd travel guides like those from Lonely Planet
By “traveler” I do not mean the pink-skinned groups riding in air-conditioned buses staying in three-star rather than five-star hotels. Those would be tourists. I mean travelers, the ones who carry a small backpack, live in local accommodations, eat local food, wear local clothing, speak with people in local language phrases, and allow themselves to be deeply touched by the abundant and graceful expressions of the human spirit.
Because so many people in modern times acquired a joyful wander-lust the word “foreigner” lost its millennia-old connotation of dangerous or threatening and took on more of a sense of allure. For example, in Munich it used to be that you could only find restaurants that served meat, potatoes and beer. Now the international restaurant section fills nineteen pages in the Munich phone book!
The value of intercultural journeying is that the traveler cannot avoid culture shock, the mind-blowing realization that the society you were born and raised in provides merely one of an unlimited number of possible answers to the questions of how to live a dignified and satisfying life.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr stressed the importance of developing cultural relativity, the ability to be comfortable in the realization that, while your own culture may mak
e sense in your own mind, it may appear quite ridiculous to someone else and vice versa, and that this is perfectly okay. You can even laugh about it together and then learn to explore and appreciate the differences. Keep in mind that the phrase cultural relativity was originated in 1948 in an article in American Anthropologist by Virginia Heyer, a student of the German American anthropologist Franz Boas. This is shockingly recent! The clarity that all cultures are arbitrary fiction is still not fully grasped by modern civilization. Human dignity is truly in its infancy.
Human potential is limitless. Think of how small a part of the range of possible human behavior is elaborated or emphasized in any one society. Why shackle yourself to this tiny window of opportunity?
By encouraging people to travel to foreign cultures for entertainment and education, modern civilization set the stage for a whole new class of cultures to emerge—cultures that are aware that their culture is a consciously fabricated gameworld rather than the absolute truth.
James P. Carse classifies gameworlds into finite and infinite games. (See his book Finite and Infinite Games). Finite games are played to win, and when someone wins, the game is over. Infinite games are played to continue playing the game. Modern culture is an I win, you lose finite game, rapidly approaching the condition of game over. Modern culture does not recognize itself as a fictional gameworld. Nor does it empower its players to change the game, quit the game, or go play a completely different game whenever they choose.
Next-culture gameworlds are consciously created infinite games in which participants are ongoingly empowered to serve Bright Principles without winners or losers.
If you assume that your game is the only game in town and your rules are the only true rules, you trap yourself in a rigidly defended culture Box, unable to adapt to changing conditions and terrified that someone might prove your game wrong. This explains why modern culture is so offensive and defensive and so unrelational. It has to protect its illusions.