Only now, looking back, I realize how fucked up in relation to relationship, women, and intimacy I was. I am so grateful that things have changed in such a positive way. And I must admit, it’s thanks to you. You were the midwife of this much saner person I am now! No one else had the courage, the knowledge, the strength and the stubbornness to beat “me” with such a heavy club. With “me” I talk about all my destructive, egoistic, hurting, isolating mechanisms going on. I really feel like I am being healed on a very deep level. Like for the first time I can see what intimacy really means. I’m so grateful and happy you’ve shown up in my life and hit me so hard. It was absolutely necessary, and who knows, without your smack, I would probably still be on this very self-destructive track.
By the way, two months ago I finished my long-term training (with a little delay), I joined another training in spring, and I joined a men’s group again! I am also much closer again to my spiritual path.
I am looking forward to seeing you again some day. With deepest respect,
Author’s Note
A bit of explanation is called for here. By profession I am a trainer. There is a difference between educators and trainers. Educators share what they know so that you learn something new. Trainers do not depend on what they know. Trainers represent “Bright Principles,” which are aspects of conscious responsibility. Trainers take actions in the service of Bright Principles during a training so that participants can become something new. Educators give you new knowledge. Trainers give you the possibility of new behavior. Sometimes to create this possibility the Principles show up as a “smack.” There is a science to smacks. The man who wrote the letter above had participated in six or seven trainings. Many layers had already been healed and he had been well prepared. To be effective, a smack must come at exactly the right time, in exactly the right place, and in exactly the right way. This timing is too complicated for the mind to figure out. If a smack is to be delivered effectively it does not come from the trainer; it comes directly from the Principles. Trainings are not about smacks. But every now and then the Principles provide a smack that jumps the train of our thinking to a completely different set of tracks. I know of what I speak. Just a few weeks ago I received a big smack from my trainer. The smack he gave me will last the rest of my life.
Much of what men learn on the journey toward becoming an adult man our fathers never knew. Much of what women learn on the journey toward becoming an adult woman was clouded by a patriarchy that subjugated the intuitive intelligence of our mothers. Most of what we invest in and experience through our rite of passage will never appear on a job resume. However, when we lay down to die, much of the satisfaction from our life will have come from the risks that we took to fully step into the possibility of being a man or a woman in this world.
CHAPTER 4
Some Amazing Things About Having a Mind
Human beings live in solid, perfectly defended, little self-made mental prisons. Our mental prison is a personal and individual choice. Contrary to popular belief, the design of our mental prison is not something we inherit from our parents or society. We carefully choose and install each stone, bar and lock ourselves.
Some of us assume that our environment determines the way we think and perceive. But such a conclusion ignores the fact that each human being originates in the awesome force of his or her own free will. Free will is far stronger than environment – for that matter, free will is stronger than God! If free will were not stronger than environment, human beings would never invent anything new. We would only keep recreating what is already there. If free will were not stronger than God, human beings would be ecstatically creating relationships drenched in love and would be living lives of vibrant joy serving humanity through bringing our destiny to life. Instead, our conscious and unconscious purposes drive our free will to make other choices.
We invest a lot of effort into custom-designing our problems and our standard defense strategies. Consider that siblings (even identical twins) who are given exactly the same childhood treatment, the same opportunities and the same constraints, often form vastly different personality structures and make very different life decisions. Even if one child adopts the same habits and attitudes as the father, the sibling may adopt habits and attitudes that are the exact opposite.
We carefully construct our thought prisons ourselves, as a sculptor fabricates a piece of art. You are doing it right now reading this book: making little comparisons here, adding some finishing touches there. What is so amazing about our relationship to the mind is that we are its prisoners and we are the prison guards. After a Possibility Management training, one participant shared: “Time after time during the Laboratory I would desperately grip onto one of the bars of my prison as if to hold it in place as a solid piece of reality that I had always known and could count upon to persist, only to suddenly discover that I had nothing in my hands!”
We use our immense creative power not for disassembling our prison so that something new can occur for us and others in our life, but instead to repeatedly (every three seconds) reinvent an identical prison for ourselves so that everything remains exactly the same as the moment before. We commit ourselves to a life of solitary confinement with no chance of parole. We dedicate every effort to sustaining conditions as they are, because only then do we feel “safe.” Only in this mental prison cell do we feel like we will survive.
Think about it: Each morning when we wake up we look in the mirror and start thinking the exact same series of thoughts that we think every morning: “I’m too fat. I should really exercise more. I’m getting old. I’m not pretty enough. Look at these wrinkles. What’s wrong with my hair? I don’t have enough money. Oh God! I have to get to work. I’ll be late, and my boss is such a nitpicker! What am I going to cook for dinner tonight? What am I going to wear?”
SECTION 4-A
Creative mind
Our mind is massively creative. Our mind is creative when we act and then identify ourselves with that action as if we are that action. For example, we say, “Good morning” to someone, we look both ways before we cross the street, we have a thought about a conflict that we had yesterday with one of our kids, we place our attention on the photo of a mostly nude woman on a billboard, we have fear about how the meeting will go today, and so on. These are all actions. Identification means that when we act we make no separation between ourselves and our action. We regard our actions as true, as if that one particular action were the only possible solution in response to the present circumstances. We generally have no idea of the purpose we are serving through executing that action, and we are usually blind or deaf to any feedback about our action. We think the action is isolated and independent. We think our action is not mechanical.
For example, we are massively creative when we ignore the fact that we restrict our conversation, day in and day out, to the same subjects. Our conversations are normally comments about the weather, complaints about politicians, secrets about where and how to get the best stuff for the best prices, complaints about our mates or children, stories from the latest movies, stories from the news, complaints about neighbors or relatives, complaints about our physical ailments, stories about sports, stories about our investments, or stories about our vacation. And that’s it. We know that other people have a limited repertoire of conversation topics. We think that we do not. But we do. An interesting experiment is to start carefully observing and making note of the conversations you start. Within one week you may be quite astonished about what you discover.
We tend to assume that our actions are authentic. Most remarkably, we pretend ignorance of the possibility that our action is merely a piece of dramatic theater that we produce. The unacknowledged purpose of our performance is to suck anyone around us into agreeing that we are victims of the circumstances in this situation. Our purpose is to get other people to agree that we have no alternatives but to act as we do.
If we get confronted about an action, we are extremely creative
in generating an endless stream of reasons and excuses to justify our action. We ourselves believe that our reasons and excuses are the logical and reasonable cause for our action. For example, someone confronts us with breaking a time agreement and says, “You are late!” Without thinking, we avalanche them with our reasons, “I’m so sorry but the streets are not usually blocked up at this time of day. And just before I wanted to leave the house my mother called with the report from the doctor and she needed something from the pharmacy. You see, she can’t drive there herself right now because she loaned her car to my brother who is looking for a job in the North,” as if this were worth something; as if our reasons were true and valid. But reasons are not true and valid. Reasons are just reasons. You can have as many reasons as you want, ten cents the dozen.
We invoke these detailed, intricate, involved, emotionally charged and undeniably clever theatrical performances to attract our own attention away from paying attention to our own attention, so that we cannot self-observe and begin to notice our actual motivations and true intentions – which may not be as pretty or high-minded as we might like to think they are. Being thus identified, we prevent ourselves from realizing that what look like hard immutable circumstances forcing us to act a certain way are only solid looking when viewed from a certain specially chosen and unique perspective. We ignore the fact that we have carefully edited and formulated our perspective.
Our Show
Our perspective is a powerful editor; it includes certain views and excludes others. Our perspective frames up a set of interpretations which, when applied to the facts, twist them into enemies. This permits us to assess that we are “in” a situation, that we “have” a “problem,” and that we are justified – no, forced – to act as we act to deal with the “problem.” We think we are confined victims trapped “in” a situation, victims “of” a problem, rather than seeing that, moment to moment, we are generating and directing the “problem” and our “victimhood” as a theatrical performance. For example, when stopped by the police for speeding we might start the show: “I was speeding? Oh, my God! I’m so sorry! I just remembered that I have to iron my shirt before the speech I’m supposed to give at seven o’clock, at the children’s hospital, about using magnets to cure hydrocephalus.”
The truth is quite different from what we make out of the truth. The truth is not that we are victims of situations and problems but rather that we source our situations and problems through the interpretations we make. We spend our days (and nights) acting center stage in a show that we wrote the script for, set the stage for, and for which we have rehearsed and played one or more parts repeatedly for most of our lives. It is our favorite show. We arrange things so that we get to play out our best-loved characters. And, we don’t want anyone to know that we are having this much fun, especially ourselves!
Part of the show is that we develop and profess some opinion of ourselves, some self-image that concludes that we are, perhaps, to some degree, creative; or maybe not very creative at all. We assume that some people are more creative than others. so we might even consider taking a class to improve our “creativity.” Yet, every action we take is absolutely creative. Every word we speak, every thought we think, every energetic or physical gesture, every facial or tonal expression, every emotion we feel, the qualities of every experience, every place we put our attention or fail to put our attention, every condition we see or understand, or fail to see, or fail to understand, every interpretation we make, is an act of creation made to serve a purpose. We are either conscious of the purpose we serve (for example, “You are late.” “Yes. I broke my commitment to be on time”), or we are serving unconscious purposes (for example, “You are late.” “I am late? Oh, maybe so, but not by much! Maybe my watch is a little slow. You were late last time we met! Anyway, I had some important things to do”).
Serving conscious or unconscious purposes is neither right nor wrong, neither good nor bad. Serving conscious or unconscious purposes simply produces different results in our relationships. In either case, we are just creating. It is all theater. All of our theatrical performances are overlaid onto a completely neutral universe. The universe does not care what we do with our time and energy.
Directing Free Will
It is amazing that we would submit the authority of our free will to the service of unconscious purposes. But we do it because directing our free will to serve unconscious purposes creates conditions that feel most familiar to us and seem to best guarantee our survival. These conditions feel most familiar because we are serving what we consider to be ourselves.
When unconscious purposes direct our free will we continue to put on the show we have always put on. This way we play out one role so thoroughly that no other roles are visible. We use our identification with that role (such as housewife) to forget that it is only a role and to exclude or minimize all of the other possible roles that are ours to play out and enjoy (such as lover, friend, partner, artist, woman, explorer, queen, sorceress, chef, business associate, author, warrioress, goddess, healer, and so on).
Directing our free will to serve conscious purposes does not feel safe because we have no role to hide within. Serving conscious purposes puts us at risk for being responsible for serving something greater than ourselves. We do not (cannot) know how to serve something greater than ourselves, so it is necessary to continuously reinvent ourselves in order to handle the jobs that get put on our bench.
We can always detect if we are serving a conscious or unconscious purpose by the quality of the results that are created. For example, if we said we would take out the garbage tonight and we fail to take out the garbage tonight, then even though we thought we were serving the conscious purpose of integrity, we were actually serving the unconscious purpose of betrayal. The results do not lie.
Being a Character
We think we have no other choice but to act as we do. We create this illusion for ourselves by thinking we have an identity that is real, permanent, solid and cannot shift, and which has a fixed set of “needs.” But this is all internal politics! Whichever “identity” happens to be in power in this moment gets to determine which “needs” are “real” and must be met.
To wreck the Identification Game, do the experiment of “Naming the Identities.” “Naming” is a powerful alchemical act. By giving a name to something that did not have a name before, you change the thing from invisible to visible, from subjective to objective, from unconscious to conscious, from background to foreground. By clearly naming an identity, you bring people’s attention to the option of shifting to a different identity. By changing the identity of the moment, you change the “needs” of the moment. For example: You can name your own identities in order to catch yourself in the act. You may identify characters such as The Whiner, The Judge, The Complainer, The Victim, The Glutton, The Perfectionist, The Head Chopper, The Sneak, The Miser, and so on.
Or, you can use naming to open doorways through which you can then step, and thus shift your identity in that moment. One way to open a doorway is to say something that the new character might say, such as: “Enter The Dragon”; “May I present The Goddess”; “Jamison at your service, Madam”; “Which way to Kilimanjaro?”; “Choose your weapon!”; “What have we here, Sherlock?”; “Has anyone seen my Ferrari keys?”
You can also open doorways through which to shift identity without saying anything. For example, if you are going to bed with your partner at night and you feel the same old evening pattern arising, shift identity. For example, change the timing of your entry into the room. Take a different physical posture – crawl in, strut in, limp in, come in backwards, come in with your eyes closed. Use a different breathing pattern. Put on or take off different pieces of clothing. Change your mood. Beat up the teddy bear. Sing. If, while you are practicing shifting identities, your partner thinks that you have gone nuts, tell them that before now you were only pretending not to be nuts, and that you think they will get used to it.
The idea is to reveal yourself, rather than waiting around for your partner to reveal themselves first. It is crucial to remember that revealing yourself does not involve complaining, gossiping, blaming, or talking about other people. Revealing yourself is about getting present and letting yourself be authentically known. You may not be able to manage this the first time you try it, so plan to keep experimenting.
SECTION 4-B
Playing the Victim
Recognizing that what you “have” is what you “want” opens a gateway to responsibility. Compare that to living in the fantasy that you are a victim of the circumstances. Which piece of theater gives you more power? Playing victim to the circumstances? Or taking responsibility for creating yourself into those circumstances?
It is curious that we could ever think that we would do something we don’t want to do. Or the reverse; that we are not doing something we really want to do. Reality is that we only ever do just exactly what we want to do. If you want to know what you want, look at what you have. What you have is what you want. Period.
We continually create the illusion for ourselves of having no choice by failing to ask the question: “Who chooses to have no choice?” We train ourselves to ask no real questions, to not ask at all. Disallowing our awesome power to ask questions insures that we will not discover who operates the levers behind the curtain.
It is amazing that we would think that circumstances could dictate our actions. Circumstances are absolutely powerless. I repeat: Circumstances are absolutely powerless. It is we who make up the story about what the circumstances mean to us. It is we who consciously or unconsciously choose each and every action we make or do not make. It is we who formulate the reasons or justifications or explanations for what we do. And it is we who decide to give the power for our decisions to our reasons or to keep that power for ourselves for no reason.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 13
