Book #8, Initial Proposal From Melinda Copp, Final Edit Due In April

 

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man”-—Samuel Johnson

“We speak about losing our minds, as if it is a bad thing.  I say, lose your mind.  Do it purposefully.  Find out who you really are beyond your thoughts and beliefs.  Lose your mind, find your soul“—–Vironika Tugaleva

“I am only responsible for what I say, not for what you understand”—John Wayne.

I am in the process of bringing Book #8 to the general public, with the help Of Melinda Copp, my editor and ghost writer. I loved the way that I presented the material, but most others did not. Even in my more loving human/spiritual experience, I still carry my father’s capacity to turn people away.  And, at times, I carry a little “John Wayne” energy.

We have all had “teachers” like that, haven’t we?

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The symbol for the number 8 is also the same symbol for infinity, if the number 8 is laid on its side.  This is a significant attempt by me, as I attempt to point out where “infinity” may actually be experienced.

We are infinite in our fundamental nature, being the very emanation of this universe in a human form, and with an ever evolving consciousness.  Yet, the unenlightened mind continues to interpret our sacred magnificence as if it is something profane in nature.  What is disturbing to me is that not enough of our population is curious about what our purpose might be on Mother Earth. Far too many accept that satisfying biological urges while working, maintaining a family, and entertaining ourselves is enough.

I remember the “show and tell” period from grades one and two.  I would stand up in front of the class at every opportunity, whether I had something to show, and talk about, or not.  I never wanted to miss an opportunity to share.  When I had nothing to show, it sure made for some awkward “tells” however.  Yet, that embarrassment sure beat the humiliation that I received just sitting in the corner with a dunce cap on, which was all too frequently my chair.

We are all in the same class now, though everyone has their own unique lesson plan.

This latest book is a small part of mine.

The perception that the sacred, which is our world, and all of its life, is somehow profane is what motivates cultural insanity and darkness.  That is why ecological disasters and global warming stay in the forefront of human experience.  This darkness also creates the conditions for the proliferation of war, murder, greed, rape, and a common knowledge experience where it is socially acceptable to diminish the value of each other, animals, and our beautiful planet.

This book, like all other pointers to where true knowledge might lay, has no value to those who continue to look away.

If I allowed myself to continuously live in the fullness of my healing potential, this writing would be purely poetic in nature.  Yet, I made the choice long ago to be in the world, just not totally of it and its awkward nature.  My writing remains rather corrective in nature, and attempts  to point in the direction where love might exist, and away from where it definitely does NOT exist.

As biological beings, our brains are hardwired to protect our self, and our tribe, from continued threats and excessive pain.   Yet, we have access to a healing consciousness, which modifies those algorithms, and brings us back into balance from our excessive suffering, and our pain avoidance subroutines.

The conspiracy of silence that keeps us imprisoned within the structures of collective ignorance continues to rule much of our world, yet, to the evolving ones amongst us, the conspiracy of healing and love rules our hearts, and opens us up to our Soul..

This is what I do.  This is who I am.  I see problems.  I then look at the maps.  I find a healthier, safer, more functional path to travel, or, if it is not already available, I create my own.  I see opportunities for change, healing, and growth.  While the world continues spinning in its wobbly orbit, I present solutions that may assist awakening humans reach their spiritual possibilities.

It is often most beneficial to understand what is NOT true, that our native intelligence may finally connect with what MIGHT be true.

Stories from my own dark past have become the veins of the spiritual gold that I have mined for insight and wisdom.  My life timeline may be split into two distinct halves, the first half being the first thirty one years of my life, and the second half being the post March 1987 years.  For all intents and purposes, I have lived two completely different lives, though both parts have been characterized by my relative obscurity and, basically, anonymity.

The first period was informed by the internal voices for loneliness, anxiety, and insecurity, and feeling rather unloved, while remaining habituated to many self defeating attitudes and their resultant questionable self care behaviors.

The second part continues to be guided by deep curiosity, and the profound experience of our infinite capacity for awakening and healing.

Someday, this world will be part of love’s conspiracy of SILENCE.

“That SILENCE comes when the whole structure of the self is understood”—–J. Krishnamurti

INTRODUCTION

“We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”—Anais Nin

We are about to embark on a great adventure, and journey into the the center of our being, and even of consciousness itself.  And, we will be using the tools of word formation, and story development, to aid in our fantastic voyage of self discovery, and, ultimately, healing.  Consciously developed stories can become the defining containers for our infinite spirit, and keep us safe while we uncouple from old pathways of misunderstaning and personal disease, until we redevelop our capacities to live by the power of our timeless, limitless, present moment self.

One of the more powerful stories about my early life has to do with the unconscious parental care that I received as a baby.  My parents wrapped me in a blanket and put me in the car in the garage at night so they could get some sleep. My father was chasing the American Dream and worked two jobs at the time. And I was just another “damned crying baby.” This experience, although I didn’t know it at the time, left me feeling abandoned and lonely from the beginning. I always felt like I was competing for love. I never felt like I had anything to contribute. A toxicity pervaded my childhood home, the way it pervaded the culture at the time and continues to do so. My father overreacted to any situation that brought a sense of fear or threat into the home environment. I felt a need to internally, though unconsciously, balance whatever energy was being over expressed at any particular moment, which certainly added to my passive-aggressive component of self-expression. Though I loved my parents, I certainly did not want to grow up and be like them. And for most of my life, I wasn’t able to get over my upbringing.

Much of my early life was clouded by the traumatic influences that I experienced.  Trauma’s most damaging impact upon a human being is its capacity to attenuate, or even block, normal emotional expression and interchange with others. Literally, unexpressed energy becomes stored within the body and mind, creating black holes of negative influence on bodily function and our perceptions. Our unhealed emotional issues and traumas become entombed within our bodily tissues. When our personalities have been formed by the layering of our egos upon our wounds, the wounds become inseparable from us and then affect us in ways that aren’t always visible on the surface. And I know that so many of my problems have come about because I was made to understand that my cries weren’t important.

This was why I always felt alone in the world. It can be seen that we, as humans, keep layering ourselves and our ideas upon what somebody else is saying, rather than meeting the being where they are, and responding accordingly. For a long time, my sense of self revolved around internalizing what my mother and father expected from me, what I could or could not give back to them to attempt to please them, and my defense mechanisms for managing the fallout when I failed.

My belief and understanding is we all suffer under traumatic influences, be they caused by familial, cultural, or even by Mother Nature Herself.. Some people experience trauma within the family, in the school system, in a work setting,  or from the external environment. Society is too big and complicated not to have experienced some kind of trauma from how people have related to us and how we’ve had to relate to society. Virtually all men and women have experienced oppression, repression, and the resultant diseases of the spirit at some point in their lives, and we have been both the victims, and the conscious and unconscious perpetrators, of this behavior. Society is the greatest inflictor of trauma on the individual. And for the most part, the medical, economic, religious, cultural, political, and spiritual traditions have failed in their understanding of humanity, and its basic, innermost needs of being valued and listened to. And that’s caused some unnecessary pain and suffering. We have all attempted to manage our symptoms in our own unique, yet all too often broken and dysfunctional ways.

I spent a lot of years chipping away at my life through self-destructive lifestyle choices. And when I look around at the world, I see a lot of other people doing the same thing. Suicidal behaviors exist on a spectrum. There are, of course, people who are acutely suicidal. But when I say suicide, I also mean not fully developing our potential, not connecting with our spirit of wholeness within, and chipping away at a life. I’m also talking about the person, who because they can’t quite measure up, they don’t talk, they overeat, they don’t exercise, they drink too much, they start using narcotics, and they create accidents for themselves with their reckless behavior. We don’t call that suicide while it’s happening. But then, when we look around us and see so many dying young, there’s really no other way to describe lifestyle choices that didn’t affirm their value as human beings.

I made a conscious decision to try to kill myself on January 28, 1986. I didn’t succeed, but I have spent considerable time since looking back on that day and the events that led me to that decision.

From 1971 through 1987, as a practicing alcoholic and drug addict and mentally ill human being, I lost most of my remaining freedom of choice. I understand now that, all those years I turned to substances, I was doing so as an escape from the wounds of trauma. (moved from 1st page)

There has been a marked increase in anxiety, depression, loneliness, substance abuse, and other forms of mental illness in our general population recently. We have a 60 percent obesity rate, 16 percent of people admit to drinking too much, and 40 percent say they’re lonely. Loneliness may not sound like a hazard, but it can lead to heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, anxiety, depression, a weakened immune system, cognitive decline, and even death. The body creates stress hormones from that loneliness, and stress hormones wear out our systems and lead to other health problems that cause premature death.

These personal experiences are part of the bigger picture cultural disease. Turbulent political times and toxic leadership are manifestations or symptoms of a national disease for the major blocks of people who feel that they have been neglected, ignored, or persecuted. Far too many people on either side of the divide have felt that way most of their lives, and continue to diagnose and treat themselves for their own stress, loneliness, and anxiety.   It is dangerous behavior to self-medicate, and much too easy to choose the immediately available remedies of drugs, alcohol, and/or awkward or self-destructive political and religious ideologies to treat symptoms of our national disease. I have personally witnessed both mental illness, religious fanaticism and rigid fundamentalism, drug addiction, and early death through many of my co-workers, friends, family members, and acquaintances, and, even through myself. And while I came to the realization that much of my problems resides within me, I share a consciousness with this world that is damaged.

How to Overcome Our Trauma

I didn’t always understand how past trauma was affecting my present. Earlier in life, I only felt like there was something wrong with me. As a child, I told my friends that “I want to get off of this fucking rock”.  Since then, I’ve gone a search for truth that involved connecting the dots from what is wrong with me to what is wrong with the people and society around me. A spiritual awakening process beginning in 1987 was the start of my own exit from the chaotic mindset that characterized my life up to that point.  I had to begin a search for my own personal truth. That means I had to start developing my own story. I had to start believing that my words had value. I had to start believing that even though other people weren’t listening to me, that I could start listening to myself and give what I’m hearing value no matter how painful or terrifying the messages that were bubbling up within me were.

I had to make peace with the demons in my life, see them not as demons and tricksters but as assistance. I had to reinterpret the darkness within my heart and soul and give that darkness an opportunity to speak to me, because that’s where my story begins. I wasn’t listening. I was pushing it down by denying its value. I was pushing it down by drinking and using. I was pushing it down by continuing to deny the value of the spoken word.

A large part of my healing process involved what I call my Miracle Experiment. A miracle experiment, most simply, is the intention and all subsequent effort to heal from traumatic wounding, and the consciousness, and world culture, that such wounding creates. It means dealing directly with all of the darkness of our past, seeing it in the light of insight, love, and compassion, and moving onto new paths of conscious evolution. It means eliminating the objectification of reality and instead perceiving the universe as an extension of our true nature. And ultimately, it’s about forgiving and letting go, and learning to love ourself, and others, more completely..

When I recently rewrote the section on my search for truth, a period of time following my 1986n suicide attempt, I was to reenter the consciousness, and the emotional experience, of those most troubling times.  I did not expect or anticipate this, and I reexperienced many of the dark emotions that characterized this most turbulent and disordered time in my life.  I finished the work, and felt sad, and disconnected.  I took my sports car for a long drive, which typically lifts my spirits, no matter what may be going on in my life.  This time, however, it did not work.  I drove for 65 minutes away from home, and I found no relief.  When I began to slow down, to turn around and come home, a dove flew over my car, and seemed to lead me for over twenty seconds to a place to park, and to turn around.  I then remembered what the deove symbolized in my mind, the reassurance that my guiding spirit HAD NOT ABANDONED ME, and was continuing to lead me to my own promised land.  Suddenly, a torrent of tears erupted from me, and a huge release of energy overwhelmed my being.  I then felt an amazing forgiveness, love, and compassion for the past version of myself, a form of self forgiveness that I had never experience before.  Can there be a greater gift to give oneself in this life?

The Miracle Experiment brings the understanding that every time that  I identify with a person, a process, or a place, I have created either a new path of consciousness, or I have reaffirmed some older, more familiar, potentially worn out path that I have already been traveling upon, such as, “I am a victim of traumatic abuse,” or, “I am a lonely, isolated person,”  or, “I am an electrician,” or, “I am an alcoholic,” or, “I am a son of Beryl and Corinne Paullin.” Whatever I associate myself with either continues my path in old directions, or creates the imperative to create new words, thoughts, and experiences around a new direction.

After I have identified my own internalized issues, and have become willing to heal from them, I could just as easily say, “I am no longer traveling old paths of consciousness.” Then through mindfulness and meditation, I can stop or at least dramatically reduce thinking time-based thoughts and rehashing and rehearsing painful old memories, to create a new life experience for myself. Because of the innate human capacity to heal and change, I can create my new timeless self in each moment. The miracle experiment has no guarantee of success from a cultural standpoint, as the institutionalized traumatizing behavior and control is highly resistant to change.  Yet, to the degree that the individual can uncouple from these toxic influences, and explore the roots of suffering, the miracle experiment can proceed. And it is the perfect solution for when life feels out of control.

Another important action for healing from trauma is examining it. In 2016, Sheila Hamilton, author of All the Things We Never Knew, came to our house and talked about her book with my book club group. It’s a powerful book about her husband’s suicide and how she’d never understood what was going on with him. And she lamented the fact that David couldn’t tell his story.

One of my dear friends, Marty, who was a member of the book club and has since deceased, encouraged me to tell my story. That was when I really started trying. And it wasn’t an easy or straightforward process. But there was a story bubbling up  that felt like 100 pounds of stuff in a 10-pound bag. It had to get out. My whole life I had believed that I had nothing to say.  One day I begged and beseeched my wife, Sharon, to please tell my story for me, as she had already written a great book, and had that capacity.  She compassionately, and authoritatively, reminded me that my story was my own to develop, and to tell, and it will die with me, unless I find the courage, and the willingness to share it.  I never believed that I had anything to offer.  That was the story I carried with me. But that turned out to be false.

I started revisiting my childhood experiences and piecing together the story of my life. And while I was writing and thinking and making sense of it, I was struck with a profound realization. I saw, for the first time, the wounding process that I shared with my father. I felt an incredible compassion, love, and acceptance for my father, who had also suffered immensely under the spiritually destructive parenting of his own diseased parents. This can be particularly difficult for men. Men typically inflict their own wounding on everybody else, in subtle, or not so subtle ways. Usually, this manifests in dominating, or being dominated, by others. Philosophies of oppression, and of the monetization of reality, arise out of this wounding. Women and children are usually victimized, and/or those with sensitive and/or non-confrontational natures. But if you’re tired of people taking advantage of you, and you’re tired of people trampling on your heart, and you’re tired of staying silent, then you have to examine your experiences and open yourself to these profound realizations.

For a long time I didn’t have a narrative. I didn’t have a story. I had nothing to say. I was the guy who sat back in groups and either smiled or spaced out because I didn’t think I had anything to say. And I feared that, even if I did, no one would listen anyway. We tend to minimize our own inner stories. We may not even believe that there’s anything there to tell. Or we may believe that whatever is there should be hidden because we are ashamed of it. But the truth is, our stories need to be told.

The Profound Power of Telling Your Story

When people commit suicide, sometimes even the people closest to them are surprised. They never knew the person had these thoughts and intentions inside them. That’s because, when a person is approaching that sort of darkness, they’ve already minimized their pain and suffering, and the willingness of others to be present for them in their time of greatest need.. They already believe that nobody wants to listen to them. They feel inadequate, and they don’t know that they have a story, let alone that it has value. We are lonely because we don’t think anybody cares enough to listen to what we have to say. And in most cases, we don’t know what we’d say even if someone were listening.

I have a dear friend who is eighty years old and still can’t tell her story. She had several suicide attempts in her life. She raised two daughters and two sons, but they never understood what she was thinking or what drove her to that decision. And now, as adults, her children are struggling with some similar issues. Their mother’s story could save their lives, but she doesn’t have the words or the strength or the hope to put her healing journey into words. What got you out of your suicidal ideation? What got you out of your meaningless life experience so that you found a will to live and wanted to give back to the world? Today, my friend is living a wonderful life, but she didn’t have that for a long time. And if she could bring that to a story, then she could give that story to her children and share her healing, guiding wisdom with them.

This is what is said in AA meetings: we share our experience, strength, and hope with those that still suffer and with a hope that they can be encouraged by what we went through and then grab on to our story and then emulate it is their own unique way to make it their own.. When we have a story, then we can help lift up that person who is one step below us, then we have something to share that literally elevates them too. Because they’re looking for meaning too and they don’t know where to find it. But if they can be encouraged by somebody who has found it, that’s hope.

Some people, they want to tell their stories but they don’t have the language for it. They haven’t developed language of insight that gives them the capacity to speak what they’re feeling and what their life experience was, where they were hurt, what they felt during the hurt. And, yeah, this is difficult. Yet, intelligence is the capacity to use words to form new concepts.  And a more profound intelligence is the developed capacity to use the myriad of life experiences to create personal insight.

Even naming our trauma can be difficult. The process of naming is the way that our consciousness weighs and measures new forms of life, ideas, and experiences, it’s how we understand and interpret our stories.  Naming tends to attach a dynamic process to a fixed point in time and space, always with a past frame of reference, and thus permanently lodges it in the dead past. But naming our traumas isn’t enough; we have to find a way to see under the vast matrix of impressions of our past history that only float on the surface on the mind, yet continue to capture and hold our attention through their hypnotic appeal..

The awareness and the healing of childhood trauma places us squarely on new paths of consciousness, which leads us into sacred realms. For most people, healing requires perseverance and patience, to bring the us the fullest measure of healing.  And, until the final release from ego’s grasp, we must remain vigilant through insight and mindfulness, catching ourselves whenever we stray back upon the old paths.

I took several photographs of my baby and early childhood self, and grieved with these images of self my loss of innocence and healthy self-esteem during the early years. It was heartbreaking work, and the floodgates of tears opened up, threatening to drown me. Yet, this grief, like the unexpressed anger, are the most important contributors to the letting go of the old, familiar lonely path of feeling ignored and unloved by the world. Without such freeing insight, we continue on the older, more familiar paths of painful existence, where replication of errors of perception continue, suffering predominates, and the profane reigns supreme.

Why Telling Your Story Is So Hard

Having a life narrative allows us to shape and control the way we see the world and the pieces of ourselves that we share. But I’ve met so many people who don’t have a life narrative. They don’t have a story that embodies the wisdom that they’ve gained and the problems they’ve overcome.

I call this a conspiracy of silence. It’s not an intentional silence, but it’s a silence based on the fact that we don’t have words to talk about our personal pain. And this conspiracy of silence is taken advantage of by the people around us, as well as our political, religious, and economic leaders. The culture takes for granted that if we have nothing to say, that we’re doing okay. If we don’t know how to say our truth, then our silence is interpreted by others as a tacit agreement or as we have nothing to offer, when, in fact, we do.

Humans have both a loving, and a lying nature. But our tendency to lie overrules our tendency to love.  We tend to hide behind our lies, and often, in doing so, deceive ourselves first and foremost. We keep our secrets close to the chest and fear the day when everyone finds out. The conspiracy of silence embodies all of the shameful ideas that we have thought and acted upon.  A compelling part of this conspiracy is that others also share in this activity of keeping dangerous secrets, secrets that are attacks against ourselves and others, and the truth. This mutually imprisons all of us.

On the other side of the spectrum of our grand conspiracy of silence lies those who have finally embraced their healing potential. The conspiracy also indicates a hesitancy to talk with others around our spiritual potential, and our innate ability to connect with and manifest a more aware, intelligent, state of being. We may remain silent because of our own perceived inadequacy at presenting a supporting and compelling argument for our own point of view, fearing the indifference and rejection from others. Some shut down all points of view in disagreement with their own; others feel their resistance to any truth not already understood and applied. Many just turn their heads, and their words, away from the resistant person. It takes strength to successfully confront negativity while maintaining compassion and equanimity, thus not being threatened or degraded by the contact. This is a critical part of the conspiracy of silence. We become invisible to each other, the less curious we are about others, the less curious we are about ourselves. We become invisible to ourselves when we sit on our voice and fail to listen as our inner voice cries out for justice, peace, healing, and change.

The conspiracy of silence is all about preserving the established order and enhancing the status quo, and it is built right into the framework of our collective consciousness. Our collective common knowledge attempts to keep us in alignment and resonance with each other, no matter how out of phase with the truth that this knowledge may be.  The resultant toxic silence has become the manifestation of religious, cultural, and political conflicts intended to keep most members of society from talking about underlying issues related to trauma, wounding, oppression, misogyny, child abuse, patriarchy, and a whole spectrum of issues. The conspiracy continues whenever evolving people become too fearful to speak their truth and share their insights, for fear of being further attacked and marginalized.

To not express ourselves honestly and openly results in our own early demise, spiritually as well as physically. Some aspects of life just seem to elude our ability to effectively communicate around them, and never get incorporated into our personal stories, and thus add to the collective conspiracy of silence.  Also, other people’s stories and garbage gets back-filled into the holes and empty spaces within our own stories,  becoming embedded within us, and adding to our internal confusion and chaos. We must choose to no longer adhere to old, worn out patterns of behavior inculcated into us by our culture, our religions, our so-called teachers and teachings, and our misunderstandings of our parents,  and of our creator. We each must penetrate the conspiracy of silence, and bring the light of a loving heart and healing words to the hidden darkness. Our outdated sense of self will have to end, and we will have to find a new path of consciousness for this present moment healing event to have any hope of transforming the heart, body, and soul.  We need to follow new paths of consciousness, while dispelling the illusions created by our society and our individual fantasy thinking. The conspiracy of silence has to be exposed and disrupted, again and again if necessary, to stop the silencing of our true identities.

If we don’t speak up for what our needs are, then how are we ever going to make any progress with ourselves, within our families, and with this culture? Regardless of how difficult it may be, we, as human beings, are responsible for bringing our personal truth, and our stories, no matter how incomplete they may be, to the collective experience, including our family, our friends, our co-workers, our neighbors, and our religious and political leaders.

My life’s lessons were not gained in a classroom or sitting at the feet of a guru. My experience, and resulting wisdom, comes from real life, through love relationships, friends, enemies, family, and my work career. In college, I extensively explored philosophy, theology, psychology, and electrical, electronic, and computer engineering.  During the course of my work career, I was a mail clerk, maintenance mechanic, electrician, computer engineer, and instrument and electronic technician. Life has trained me to be an electrician, a computer engineer, a psychologist, a philosopher, an archeologist, and a spiritual explorer.

I believe that we need to address difficult human emotions and problems with expressing them skillfully. I spent most of my career as a systems analyst, doing electronic and computer design engineering and electrician work, and in that profession I did a lot of troubleshooting and repairing of systems. I assisted in the building and subsequent technical support of the operation of multi-billion dollar chip fabrication plants in Oregon, and maintaining the pumping and delivery systems of the entire fresh water supply to the City of Portland, among many other less economically significant endeavors. I love functioning systems, and I am intensely curious as why some systems succeed, and some fail, even after successful periods of operation. My intention is always to bring repair, and balance, back to any system which is malfunctioning. And one of the first steps we always took when working on any system was to understand it. Before we can begin any process of repair, we have to understand the system. And so, that’s where the process of finding your story starts.

This book may not be for the healthy, wealthy, and wise among us.  It is designed, however, for those seeking to create their own unique bridge to our healing potential. If you want more out of life than what you’re currently experiencing, if the conspiracy of silence is holding you back, or if you are a concerned witness to another’s dysfunction, then I have written this book for you. My hope is that it accurately points in the direction towards where our healing might be found. This book will be a failure if I have not encouraged another human being to escape their own repressive cycles and their own feeling of oppression by their family or by their culture evolve, and to finally speak their truth.

A Better Life, Starting With Your Story

Not everybody had the perfect family, and even those who claim to have still had to grow up in a damaged culture and make accommodations to that damage. Putting food on the table and basic survival are hard enough, but we all have to do it within the existing toxicity. And so we judge each other. We naturally seek to understand our self and our relationship with the whole, yet we become self-conscious, judgmental, and/or uncomfortable with those assessments. The loss of our connection with nature and our imbalanced and inaccurate perceptions of self and each other contribute to our sense of isolation, loneliness, and vulnerability. But we can take responsibility and make changes in the way we think and view the world. If we do not make ourselves aware of the reasons behind the choices that we make in life, we remain unconscious human beings, with little true freedom.

We are as sick as our secrets is an aphorism used extensively in recovery groups. And the truth is that our world does not heal until we do. It is our responsibility to find our freedom and stop blaming others. Otherwise, we will remain trapped in our labyrinth of self deception and spiritual corruption until the end. Without the healing of our wounds,  loving acceptance of ourselves and each other remains impossible, we remain separated from our true nature, and our pasts continue to dominate us. When we don’t tell our stories, the conspiracy of silence still reigns supreme, and our religions, economic policies, politics, and, in general, our collective consciousness, continues to give more support to our fantasies, rather than to facts and reality.

Many of us don’t believe that we have the seed for greatness within us. Many of us believe that somebody else is our greatness. We look outside ourselves, thinking that our greater good will come to us from Jesus Christ savior or from that perfect woman or that perfect man or that perfect job. We think that somebody else will do the work for us. We’re always looking outside of ourselves. But this is an inside job too. Yes, the good can come from the outside; but if we’re not doing the work to bring it out from our inside, then it throws life out of balance and creates dependencies. Your story of healing brings more balance to your self, and to all of your relationships.

If you can see beyond the limited vision of the self, and get to the deeper reality hidden within the soul, the potential for an inspired and higher powered human experience lies buried there under the detritus of a traumatized history. By going on a search for truth, the entirety of our life experience can be lived and experienced with true integrity, the potential for healing and completeness, and the best alignment with reality. It’s the difference between continuing the struggle and newer, more diverse and healthier possibilities for life.

Since 1987, I have chosen to live life more fully, with enhanced personal awareness, good health, and honest expression of all feelings. I experience joy and happiness the majority of the time, and I have maintained almost continuous sobriety. No one knows what our final destination in life will be, but living your story becomes an experiment in consciousness. If we are not experiencing miracles of any nature in our day to day life, it only indicates that we are too firmly entrenched in the ruts created by our past. Insight is the greatest benefit of finding your story, insight into self and insight into the people around you. Now I have peace of mind on a continuous basis. It isn’t fleeting, but a constant presence in my life that never existed before.

Make peace with your story, develop your own timeline, develop your own personal story, and be the hero of your own journey. Do whatever it takes. Find and cherish your own story no matter how difficult it is initially because as you heal and grow, that story starts to take on significance until it becomes part of the grand story.  It should no longer be “his story”, or “her story”, but instead, the unitine “our story”.

Are you tired of your own suffering, or the needless suffering of others?

Are you tired of being the silent stick figure in the dreams of others who would control and manipulate you like a mindless puppet, and turn you into unholy versions of yourself?

Are you tired of your past wounds controlling your perceptions, and guiding you onto diseased and despairing paths of unconsciousness?

What is your story? Where is your storyi hidden?  We need to hear it. So let’s start looking.

Chapter 1: Troubleshooting And Repairing A Broken System

Growing up, I was not provided with many clues for how to successfully manage the labyrinth of life and of my mind. The maps provided for me were incomplete and mostly inaccurate. My life had been characterized by early and intermittent, and mostly unintentional, wounding by my parents, especially by my father and older sister. But outside of my family, there was a culture that supported us.

My early exposure to Christian religion was also traumatizing. My young self could see through its parade of self-debasing interpretations of God and Jesus, and I was confused and often repulsed by many so-called Christian stories. Yet I was not to find other helpful guides, other than consistent loving support from my mother and my mother’s parents, who always wanted the best for me, and my father, though he sometimes appeared to me as a confusing trickster. There is one shining example of the poor guidance available for me in the story of Defender Dan.

In 1968 at the age of thirteen years, I was given a Defender Dan toy machine gun for a Christmas present. It was not a new toy, as it had minor internal damage that a father with mechanical skills might be able to troubleshoot and repair. My father had no interest in assisting me, so if I wanted a functional toy, it was up to me to do something about it. I was confused as to what was expected from me. Why was I given a gift that had known problems? Didn’t I deserve something that was new and perfect? I certainly did not have a fully developed skill package in troubleshooting and repairing this fairly complex mechanical system, but I liked a good challenge, and I thought that this endeavor might be worthwhile. Though I had no diagram defining the internal parts and their relationship to each other, I began dismantling it, trying to understand how the parts were related to each other and how it worked so that I could repair it. When Dad saw the gun parts spread out all over the floor, he accused me of destroying the gift, and then proceeded to remove his belt and whip the hell out of me. That beating hurt in a lot of different ways, for sure. The punchline, er, the belt line, is that, like my father, our life, and our world, will punish us if we cannot fix our lives, even though we may have  been provided with inaccurate repair diagrams and maps for living. This story captures the essence of our confusion as human beings seeking wholeness while receiving conflicted and inadequate support from others.

We live and operate in the background of our oft times toxic patriarchal culture. Our culture is broken, which leads to broken people and families. Yet, collectively, America has created a culture of denial, where we don’t look at our fundamental problems together, and confront them directly. To the extent that the broken individual might indicate a brokenness of our culture, is the extent that the broken individual is marginalized and minimized by the entrenched power brokers of our civilization and their sycophants.

A conspiracy of silence is an agreement, either formal or tacit, between two or more parties not to discuss some matter nor to reveal any information concerning it, especially in order to avoid blame, embarrassment, or other discomfort. It also points to the promises that we keep even though we may have never have consciously made the promises, which become the strongest pillars supporting the platform of our culture. There are multitudes of societal requirements that are not written down, and we all unconsciously obey these edicts, edicts which we never would have obeyed, had we been given a conscious choice. They become either the shell that we must emerge from, or remain the ball and chain attached to our spiritual ankles.

We are all part of an economic, social, and religious system that not only cannot always and often won’t hear our cries for help, but also cause much of the suffering that inspires our agonized cries. Calls to 911 or to 988 may work for some, but for most others that need help will ignore or bypass those options. Our unwillingness to speak, or to reveal our deepest, truest self revolves around issues of compromised senses of safety and emotional security, which are exacerbated by trauma, shame, and denial, and by our often times oppressive, life devaluing surrounding culture.

I have personally experienced toxic masculinity, toxic religion, and toxic capitalism. These issues are challenging to recognize and successfully address, due to thousands of years of cultural normalization of unacceptable attitudes and behavior, and a conspiracy of silence maintained to preserve and protect the status quo. Personal family, and/or cultural toxicities tend to stay ignored, overlooked, or even denied by those with little time for insight, introspection, or interest in other people’s points of view on these troubling issues.

I have witnessed many failed, or failing systems, human and mechanical, for most of my life. In any system, we come to expect that certain inputs will deliver desired outputs, while maintaining some sort of balance within the whole process.  But we need good information, and a well ordered and maintained internal system, to get the desired results. If we can find the errors in reasoning and historical conditioning, which contributes mightily to each of our personal narratives, we can begin a search for the underlying truth behind all situations, while shedding the cloaks of illusion that continues to clothe so much of the human race.

Troubleshooting Broken Systems

Troubleshooting is a form of problem solving, often applied to repair failed products or processes on a machine, a system, or even a human life. It is a logical, systematic search for the source of a problem in order to solve it, and make the product, process, or person functional again.

It means gaining understanding and asking questions, like:

• What is the history and  intention behind the original system design?
• Has the system ever worked properly?
• Does the system presently work?
• What are the history of the problems?
• Are the problems a failure of the system and its original design, poor overall  maintenance, and/or ignorance or malfeasance by the human operator?
• Can this process be improved or stabilized without a total rebuild?
• What are the best options for repair?
• Who is going to help me?
• How much can I help myself?

Being a broken human being rarely gets a lot of positive feedback, or life affirming attention from others.  It certainly is not a lifestyle choice for those who finally choose to awaken, which I finally did at the age thirty-one. How did I attempt to bring healing to my broken interior? I acknowledged that, of myself and my old ways, I was heading nowhere, and that I was doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. I did not have childhood training nor spontaneously developed capacities for insight, positive change, and growth until late in life. I needed to develop the emotional and spiritual fortitude to look at the entirety of my life, and then incorporate the experience for my greater good, which also impacts the whole of life in a more positive manner.  By developing the power of insight, I brought a new level of healing and awareness into this new, present moment of experience. Some call this process mindfulness, though I just call it taking personal inventory and improving my conscious contact with my higher power, as I learned through practicing the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I have come to believe that there is a power greater than my past understandings that lives within me, capable of restoring me to sanity, no matter how often I might fall.

Part of maintaining sanity is to allow for a continuous evolution of understanding and experience of who we are, and what God or Higher Power is, apart from religious dogma, ignorance, politics, and superstition. If we only continue to believe in things that we don’t understand, like our religions and their man-made, or God inspired, theories, it becomes nothing short of superstitious reasoning, if we are not also already inspired internally by this Truth. We must attempt to understand the mental ecology, and the history, of human beings, as we are the ones who creates and embraces ideas. This insight is essential if we want to cultivate any hope at all of troubleshooting and repairing any damaged human system.
There was no minister, church, support group, therapist, Care Unit counselor, Indian guru, psychiatrist, mother, father,  sister, wife, friend, daughter, son, pet dog, or Jesus Christ figure that could dig into my unique version of the human soul, and remove the thorns that had been thrust into my side since my birth.  My internal wounding and the resultant unsustainable suffering became the impetus to begin my inward journey, to face the absolute darkest areas of life itself, and then mine the treasure from my unique relationship with the dark force or shadow.  To not face myself would mean to continue living the second-hand/passed down story of dysfunction that I inherited from our culture and from my ancestors, from which we cannot ever completely heal, without first becoming aware of our internalized, unconscious subservience to those controlling agendas.

How to Describe Your Problem Completely

The first step in good problem analysis is to describe the problem completely. Without a problem description, we will not know where to start investigating the cause of the problem. Is it a systemic failure, is it limited to just one component or individual, is it transient or constant in nature. This step includes asking ourselves basic questions.

1. What Are The Symptoms? Who or what is reporting the problem? What are the symptoms and feedback messages? How do we fail? For example: loop or repetition of unnecessary or unwanted behavior, or quitting before a process is successfully completed. Is it intentional or unintentional  performance degradation? Is it an incorrect attitude and belief? What is the affect on all relationships?

2. Where Is The Problem Happening? Determining where the problem originates is not always easy, but it is one of the most important steps in resolving a problem. Is the problem isolated and specific, or common to multiple arenas within life? Is the current environment and understanding capable of being supported by a personal healing intention, or are broader, more socially encompassing changes necessary? Are there currently cultural power brokers attempting to dictate the way life’s route should be traveled? Is the source of the history of the problem purely an individual one, or universal in its expression?

3. When and Under Which Conditions Does the Problem Happen? Developing a detailed time line of events leading up to a failure is another necessary step in problem analysis, especially for those cases that are one-time occurrences. We can most easily do this by working backwards: start at the time an error was reported (as exact as possible, perhaps using the timeline approach), and work backwards through available memory and history. Usually we only have to look as far as the latest event that we have experienced conflict or despair, however, this is not always easy to do and will only come with practice. The intersection of society with the individual always creates multiple layers of interaction and mutual expectations, with the potential for far more failures than successes. Does the problem only happen at a certain period of one’s life? How often does it happen? What sequence of events leads up to the time the problem is reported? Does the problem happen after an environment change such as after creating new friendships, getting another job, or moving to a new neighborhood? Responding to questions like this will help us create a detailed time line of events, and will provide us with a frame of reference in which to investigate.

4. Under Which Conditions Does The Problem Happen? Knowing what else is happening at the time of a problem is important for any complete problem description. If a problem occurs in a certain environment or under certain conditions, that can be a key indicator of the problem cause. Does the problem always occur when performing the same task, or with the same people? Does a certain sequence of events need to occur for the problem to surface? Do other aspects of our lives fail at the same time? Remember that just because multiple problems might have occurred around the same time, it does not necessarily mean that they are always related.

5. Is there a fundamental flaw in the system and does it appear ubiquitously? Some designs just never quite reach their true potential for system’s operation and stability, and they require a total paradigm shift to see the process differently and bring repairs to it. If we have tested all available solutions, and nothing works, we have either approached the problem incorrectly, or we have exposed a flaw in the designer’s understanding and/or a failure in the implementation of the designer’s intention. We may have reached the most recalcitrant of problems, which are those that are expressions of a normalized unconscious dysfunction.

Asking these questions of ourselves and examining our lives is difficult work. The desire to fix a treasured object that has been damaged, bring a cure to a child’s disease, or to end one’s suffering is the manifestation of love. Love must be the guiding light while facilitating repairs and regeneration of any broken person, place, or thing. Bringing a hammer to a situation that requires a jeweler’s screw driver is a typical overreaction, is self defeating and reveals a life needing greater sensitivity and insight into itself. It is our desire to repair and improve, not damage further and destroy, so a conscious process must be undertaken to initiate repairs to any malfunctioning system, human or mechanical.

Finding the Problem, and Freeing Yourself

This is big picture troubleshooting, for sure. And change can be hard. In any electrical circuit, resistance to the flow of current is ubiquitous.  To reduce resistance, we can either tune the system by adding capacitors and inductors,  shortening conductor length or increasing its size, or increasing the applied voltage, all of which effectively reduces resistance.  There are also the second law of thermodynamics issues, which are entropy, heat related circuit degradation, and eventual chaos.  For humanity, the resistance to the flow of healing energy is also ubiquitous. Yet, we also have options for tuning our own spiritual system, by increasing our capacity to embrace, understand, carry, and transmit higher consciousness, which utilizes its own unique healing algorithm. Like in a high resistance electrical circuit, those who vehemently resist change and do not embrace their healing potential will eventually have their life system ruled by the spiritual equivalent of the second Law of Thermodynamics, where degradation and chaos reigns supreme.

Stories where our unique personal value have been sacrificed to maintain some unloving sense of family and/or cultural order, or disorder, will be fertile grounds for exploration. Also, the over processed junk food narratives of the collective human experience can become coupled to our own unique and vulnerable sense of self, which fosters self-defeating patterns of thought and action. Regardless of the perfection, or the imperfection of our upbringing, problems inevitably arise throughout the entirety of life, within this world that we share. Yet,  if they can be seen within a more expansive context, where we can become more self-aware, consciously engage in troubleshooting and repairing our own issues, and become open to traveling new paths of consciousness, the negative effects can be minimized, and resilience and spiritual competency can be maximized. The intention is to help the broken or under performing person experience enhanced functionality and, thus, experience a greater good.

Healing is a powerful current that runs through us, whether we recognize its presence, or not. Those who recognize it have the potential for an amazing life. Finding the root causes for our individual and collective brokenness allows us to change our lives for the better. We can live a purpose filled life, inspired by the desire to be the best version of ourselves, while serving the highest interests of each other and the Earth with all of its life.

Chapter Two:  My Search For Truth and The Answer I Found

 

              In April of 1984, I checked myself into the Lovejoy Care Unit, a hospital converted to alcoholism care and recovery. I had been a drug addict and alcoholic, as well as a person consciously suffering from inner turmoil, since my sophomore year of high school in 1971. My most important initial consideration was keeping my job at the U.S. Postal Service, where I worked as a maintenance electrician and instrument technician in training, which I was about to lose if I did not stop substance abuse. I was to stay in the Unit for thirty days, while learning, at a puerile, kindergarten level, enough about my disease and myself that there might be hope for me.

After an interview with my parents, Claire, my counselor, informed me that one of the burdens that I was carrying was that my father was still trying to live his life through me. I wrote a lot of dark poetry during that time, which provided many clues for me in my desire to leave the knowns of my suffering and search for truth, peace, and a much more fulfilling life. And I succeeded in sobering up, but not for long.

In June of 1984, while still working at the US Postal Service, I was sent to  their national training center in Norman, Oklahoma, for a three-week class on repairing mail sorting equipment and a digital logic course, which was a prerequisite to advanced training. I needed to pass this test to have any hope for advanced placement, which would elevate me into a new, more challenging career as a computer technician, which was, potentially, far more interesting than my mundane, regular job as a maintenance electrician. There were two parts to the test, which I needed a 75 percent score to succeed. I aced the first part, scoring 70 out of 70 on the digital logic portion. The last 30 percent of the test was devoted to complex schematics of electronic control systems supporting optical character readers and other equipment. I had no prior experience with this equipment, and could not properly interpret the representative symbology. I failed, scoring zero out of that the last thirty, failing the test by a mere five points.

On the flight home, I relapsed back into drinking. I was so disappointed at this seemingly unfair turn of events, that I became re-dedicated to my own self-annihilation, even ignoring and hiding from the presence of my Care Unit counselor Claire, who serendipitously appeared on the same plane back to Portland. Thus, my sobriety lasted for less than three months, for I did not quite connect with the healing threads that I needed to escape my personal hell. Peace was not found until after I descended fully into a dark underworld, where I attempted suicide in January of 1986, and then began my search for truth.

Cast Out on My Search for Truth

              It remains no mystery to me as to why many people choose continued addiction, or suicide over recovery and healing. Invisible wounds are the hardest to heal and the easiest to stay in denial about their life-threatening potentials. I was starting to see the end of my own road, with my out-of-control car crashing through all of the safety guardrails and continuing the race towards the finish line of my dead-end life. I knew that my problems could not be solved, at least not on my level, and I knew of no other levels that were accessible, or available to me.

I moved back in with Randy, my lifelong friend, in December of 1985, after ending my latest relationship mistake, Alcindia in a rather dramatic fashion, On January 26th, 1986, after yet another night of fighting depression with the hops and yeast antidepressants, I woke up upon Randy’s living room couch at 8:45 a.m., with him emerging from his bedroom, screaming to my clouded mind: “Bruce, wake up and turn on the TV. The Challenger just exploded!”

After watching that horrific event over and over, I had the crushing realization that my life was also over. In part because of a childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, I saw mirrored in the Challenger disaster the total destruction of all of my hopes of realizing my life’s potential, and I made the decision right then and there to end it all, and fulfill a pledge that I had made to myself when I was just fifteen years old. I had known since then that I was a hopeless alcoholic and drug addict, and if I could not shake the disease by age thirty (and if the disease itself had not already killed me) I would take matters into my own hands. I never told another soul of my self-imposed fifteen year “pull date,” should I fail at sobering up. I just held on as best that I could for the intervening years, and I tried my best to adapt to my self-destructive life situation.

I only needed to refill a prescription for some antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication that I already had secured from Dr. Dan Beavers, a psychiatrist that I had been seeing since 1985. I was going to take them all at once, and call it a life. I went to the pharmacist, with the intention of seeing the deed completed immediately.  While standing in line, I ran into Alcindia’s sister’s friend, Mike. We weren’t friends, but I knew him from around, and I started to share the smallest part of my story with him.  He immediately shut me down, stating that he had no time for other people’s problems, which reaffirmed my understanding of the other people’s tendencies towards indifference to each other. The pharmacist would not fill the prescriptions, however, even though I had one refill left on each one, and he told me that I needed to see the doctor again. I was not to be deterred.

I  scheduled an emergency visit to my psychiatrist for that afternoon. He perceived that I might be in a crisis and elicited a promise from me that I would not kill myself with the medication. Dr. Dan had just had another patient kill himself using the same medication, and Dan was still grieving mightily, and could not tolerate another such event from a patient of his. So, he got the empty promise from me that I would not commit suicide. Then I immediately placed those pills under the front seat of my car, for easy access and immediate use, should the conditions of my life prove that it needed immediate termination. I never intended to take those pills as prescribed, instead telling myself that unless I found a reason to live, that I was leaving this planet, without a rocket ship. Thus, began my official search for truth.

I called my old high school friend, Sean, who was stationed in Spain for the US Air Force. I told him that I had a fatal brain tumor and that I was going to die soon. He offered to let me stay with him in Madrid for a while. The thought of a geographic change brought a little hope to me, so I secured my passport, and applied for my pension from the U.S. Postal Service. I was going to use the money for airfare and to support myself Spain. I also filed for unemployment benefits, to help with my immediate income needs. Then I filed for bankruptcy, as I had no intention of meeting my financial obligations, which were immense. I had student loans, credit card debts, credit union loan debts, personal debts to my father, and other debts that totaled close to forty-thousand dollars. I wanted the slate to be clear by the time I was gone, and bankruptcy seemed like the right process to engage in. So I was putting my affairs in order.

In early February, I ran into DiDi, a woman I’d known for a few years and had a brief but intense relationship with in the past. We partied a few times and then decided to go to the beach. We traveled to Seaside together, and I did not really know what to expect, other than there would probably be some more partying, and maybe some connecting on a more personal level. We drank at several local Seaside bars until late in the evening when I no longer had any desire to drink anymore. I told her that I was going back to the hotel room. She stated that she wanted to keep the party going, and continued drinking and carrying on with some of the local folks.  She returned to the hotel room at two in the morning, all excited about some new friends that she had made, and the great cocaine that they had shared together.  She wanted to bring the two guys back into the hotel room to continue the party.

“No thanks, this is where I take my leave!” I told her angrily. I grabbed my overnight bag and headed towards home, even though I was drunk. Somewhere along Highway 26 I crashed my car into a guard rail, nearly going over a cliff in the process. I quickly got the car back onto the road and kept going. When I finally reached North Plains, I fell asleep at the wheel again, stepped on the accelerator, and rammed into the back of another car at freeway speeds. We both pulled over, and I was able to bribe the owner of the car not to call the police, since I was drunk, by writing him a check for $471, which was every last penny that I had in my checking account. My car was totaled, but somehow I was able to make it home, miraculously escaping death or a DUI citation. But I still didn’t stop.

I was to receive the retirement money by the end of March, and I owed my father nearly $3,000, so I no longer had enough money for a final trip to Spain. Stuck at home, I lived out of my 1977 Datsun 310 when I was not crashing in abandoned buildings with other homeless people,  while connecting with all manners and types of damaged and dangerous people.

It is a funny thing, I was nearly dead, or so I thought, so I had little fear as I met new people and befriended them. Most were people who I never would have associated with in my more ordered past, but in this phase of my life, I was curious to know those who I would have avoided if I weren’t looking for trouble. My only intention was to find the truth of living and of being, if there was such a thing, and I intuited that the truth might be hidden somewhere in this darkness and unknown.

I engaged will all types of individuals, and I had conversations with them about what life meant to them, and what they felt about God, good, evil, darkness, light, and human relationships. I carried my suicide drugs under my car seat, so that when the pain got too real again, I could make my departure from my world of little or no meaning, no peace of mind, and extreme personal suffering. During this time, I lived in an underworld community of drug manufacturing and distribution, homelessness, and crime. I witnessed crimes. I befriended homeless victims of sexual predators and child abuse, members of motorcycle gangs and their hit men, felons, murderers, and undercover federal agents, some of whom were still investigating the criminal tentacles remaining from the infamous, Stephen Kessler. I ran with my new friends, and my only intention was to be the best person that I could be, while living out the final moments, days, or weeks of my life. I wanted to live the twelve steps without actually recovering from drug addiction and alcoholism, which I had totally given up on.

Methedrine, crank, speed, go-juice, or one of any number of other street names of the same stimulant became my primary drug of choice, as it made me feel social, connected, and conversational with all others. I would not sleep for up to one week at a time, while running with my peer group. The Punjab tavern on Foster Road became my main hub or center for contact with many of the social branches of the tree of death that I was now climbing. Many a night was spent with a revolving group of my new friends there, with a main core group of people who had mutual interests. Each person I met during this time in my life both pulled me further in and helped me to find the path to recovery, and to finally embracing the path to truth and love within my own heart.

Ralph was from Scappoose, Oregon, or so he said. He was the center point for much underworld activity, and I quickly became his friend, and driver, through many underworld adventures. Through him I met drug chemists, motorcycle gang members, hit men, armed robbers, practicing felons in possession of firearms, prostitutes, homeless victims of child abuse, heroin addicts, and Steve (not his real name), who was an undercover federal agent, and who would figure strongly in my sober future. I learned to really love Ralph, who was an incredibly damaged soul, and his excessive drug use would sometimes cause concern for me. I noticed that paranoia was creeping into his mind, and we would joke about it, but he became my first living example of the damage that excess meth use causes.

I also befriended Ralph’s girlfriend, Sarah. One day, she decided that we needed to visit Jake, who was being held in Clackamas County Jail until his transfer was completed to a federal penitentiary. I knew Jake on the outside, and he was always so kind and friendly towards me. I wanted so much to express my sorrow at his long-term imprisonment. She told me on the way that our friend was a hit man for a regional motorcycle gang that distributed drugs, and he was in jail because one hit went horribly wrong for him. Sarah and I snorted some of the latest designer meth creations from our favorite local chemist just before arriving at the jail. Then when we met Jake at the reception area for the jail, all that would come out of my mouth were awkward grunts and squawks. The stress created by the meeting, coupled with the drugs, probably caused my loss of the ability to speak, thus contributing to the “conspiracy of silence” that my own drug use and addiction enabled.

On another frightening night, I was sitting at the bar yet again, conversing with the owner, Jack, when Robert slid in and sat right next to me. I didn’t know Robert well, but I’d seen him around, and I knew he was recently released from prison. He said, “I have been out of the neighborhood for a long time, and I am hoping to find some old friends.”

“Well, maybe a new friend might show up, say, right next to you this evening?!”

“That would sure be nice.”

Robert and I had an awkward exchange then in which I made a joke about him being a murderer and then learned he’d been in custody for killing a man during an armed robbery. I bought Robert a drink to overcome the awkwardness and talked to him until one of his old friends showed up. They went to the restroom to conduct whatever business they had. When Robert returned, he was slurring his words even harder than he’d been a few minutes before and his eyes had lost their luster. He closed his eyes and slumped down, face onto the bar. Then, he fell off of the chair onto the floor, where he was trying to right himself.

Thinking he was sick, I asked the bartender if he could call the ambulance. He shook his head and said, “Bruce, he is right where he wants to be. If you could, please help him over to a booth in the corner where he can try to get his shit back together.”

Still not sure what was happening, I asked the bartender if Robert had just done heroin and why he would do that.

Jack said, “Bruce, some people are just waiting for a better day. Today is not the better day for Robert, and it may never arrive for him.”

As I got Robert to a booth and out of view to keep us out of trouble, I didn’t truly understand what was happening. But I understand now that the Conspiracy Of Silence had claimed yet another human being. The heroin completely shut the bartender down to his humanity, and left me wondering what my own fate might be if I were to find myself in Robert’s situation.

One night I was hanging out with Dorothy, who was a young woman with two young children. She was a heroin user, dominated by the needs to use, and she was also shadowed by a former lover, Jakob, who was incarcerated in jail at the time of our connection. While I was at her place, I noted her scraping used spoons so that she could get together enough heroin residue to give her a fix. Her supply was out, and she was waiting for her next delivery, so she was tense and anxious. She believed that her criminal boyfriend, Jakob, had extraordinary powers and could astrally project himself out of prison at night. As long as she had company (friends or heroin), Jakob could not materialize into her home to threaten and dominate her, as he did when he was not imprisoned. Our conversation was intense too.

She did not believe in the power of God, having long eschewed any connection with such concepts. She lived for the moment, and knew all too well that shit happened regardless of how “good” or “bad” a person was. She told me about her darkness and belief that even good people will turn against others in a heartbeat, should the need arise.

“Good people do not really exist,” she said, “just fucked-up people who occasionally make helpful choices for themselves or, inadvertently, for others, usually while they are really just trying to selfishly take care of themselves.”

I argued that I believed we all have both energies, and it may only be that if we stumble upon the right understanding. We can act more from a not-so-dark, not-so-selfish position, and occasionally help ourselves and each other to have better lives. Then she called me out.

“Well, Bruce, how much time and energy do you put into having a better understanding of yourself, and being more helpful to others?”

The answer was none. But I wanted to actually try to look at the forces of darkness within myself, to see where I might also be negatively impacting myself and others through a lifetime of not fearlessly confronting those energies. I had no idea what would be revealed, if anything, if I ever successfully overcome my own darkness. Dorothy used heroin to cope with her darkness. But when she said her supplier was on the way and offered it to share it with me, I declined because I’d never done heroin or intravenous drugs before, and I knew I probably didn’t want to start.

But even though I had limits, I continued an incredible downward spiral into addiction, becoming so disfigured that my friends commented on my slight, unhealthy experience. I had lost seventy pounds. I had started hearing voices, and I had become paranoid, as well. And I worked hard not to show anyone that this was happening. But when I insisted that a major undercover operation was in the works, no one believed me. I imagined people telling me that my car was bugged and tore my car apart, searching for the transmitter or the recorder. I had two different people stop by, and try to interrupt me from the search, which only added to my own paranoia. I did not locate the transmitter, but I spoke to the empty car as if someone were listening. I wanted to trouble whoever was listening, renaming myself “the Wild Card” and saying aloud all my dark thoughts. I let my world know, in no uncertain terms, that I was no longer aligned with anyone, as I was on my way to my own death.

When Ralph relocated to protect himself and my social group subsequently collapsed, I met Doctor Dave. He was a short, friendly man, with a severely pockmarked face, and he was recently was released from jail. He introduced me to intravenous drug use, ever so carefully shooting me up with speed for my first time and most subsequent times, as well. I could not shoot up by myself, as I feared needles too much. But the incredible rush I received from intravenous drug use hooked me for the final two months of my drug abusing life. My mental health was irreparably damaged, and my “search for truth” had apparently only uncovered a hastened path to death for me. I was at a party when a friend, Frank, had just secured a fresh batch of speed mixed with heroin (which I had never used before), and he invited me to join him. Sure, why not? I had nothing to lose but a life that was already dead.

I started to accompany this friend to an upstairs room, when I spotted an old friend, Steve, talking with a healthy looking thirty-year-old woman, a person that I might have been attracted to had I been healthy. I met Steve at the same time that I met Ralph. Steve was a very intelligent, well-dressed man, about eight years older than me. Shortly after becoming a peripheral person in our rotating community of characters, I started suspecting him of being and undercover cop. Even so, I had always counted on him to give me good insight into others, though he held the truths about himself close to his chest. He became a big brother to me, at times, and would not spare me criticism, He initially could not understand why I thought it necessary to be where I was, either, though he was the only person that I ever told that I was on a search for truth. And I did not understand, at the time, how he could get by with so little use of drugs. Then I heard the girl at the party say his name, and it was not Steve, confirming my suspicions that he wasn’t who he said he was.

When he saw that I heard his real name, and he then knew that I knew, Steve took me aside, and tried to explain. I instead stopped him and told him that I had suspected him all along of being undercover. I also told him that his secret was safe with me. I told him my journey was about to end, that I was going upstairs with Frank, and if I survived that experience, I was going to return to my car, grab the pills under my front seat, and finish business, once and for all. Yes, I was finished.

Steve grabbed my arm, excused himself from his girlfriend, and took me outside to his car. He said, “Bruce, I can no longer keep you protected and safe. Your search for truth has to end within this dangerous world. Now your real search for truth must begin, starting with your relationship with your father. I never want to see you again, but believe me, I am going to try to help you, any way I can. You deserve so much better of a life than you have given to yourself.” And then he drove me home.

At my father’s house, Steve let me out. He and his partner drove my car to my dad’s house later that evening, and I never saw him again. The pills had disappeared from under the driver’s seat, as well. There was no way that I was going to go back to the doctor for another prescription. I was still a mess, strung out from months of drug abuse, alcoholism, gambling, and I only weighed a mere 135 pounds. My face was all broken out, I had the most horrific shakes, and I heard voices. I had experienced convulsions several times, and I wasn’t thinking very clearly.

My parents were still snow birding in Arizona, so I called my old roommate Randy. He came over, and he, his girlfriend, and I proceeded to down an inordinate amount of my father’s booze and wine. My parents would not be home until the end of the month, so I was still able to keep my dysfunctional momentum going. After partying, Randy went home, and I was left alone with my horrible problems. That was when I blacked out.

I don’t remember picking up one of my father’s loaded guns or driving to another friend’s home in the Milwaukie area. This person was an associate of one of the drug chemists in the underworld culture that I had just emerged from. I have no idea why I went down there, but I awoke from my blackout when the gun discharged, shooting a hole in the front door of his apartment. He had two sleeping children in one room, and a sleeping wife in another room, and I was fortunate to have not brought harm to anyone. He then brought out a hypodermic needle out and injected me with speed (I still would not inject myself). I immediately snapped out of my drunkenness, and proceeded to talk with this guy for twenty-four hours. He gave me one more injection, and then clarity finally hit me.

Literally, a light went on in my mind, and I saw the utter insanity of the person I was with and the insanity of my life. I stood up, laughed at the guy, called him and myself nuts, and walked out of the front door, got into my car, and drove back to my parents’ home. I was changed, though at the time I didn’t know how much.

With five dollars left to my name, I needed to make a decision. Either I could buy more beer and cigarettes, or I could go visit my grandparents in north Portland. I kept the five dollars and drove to family. My grandparents were happy to see me, but were concerned for my appearance. I claimed to have the flu, and grandmother nursed me back to some semblance of health over the next five days, while I detoxified and had withdrawals from cessation of cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs all at the same time.

Return to Myself

I returned home to my parents’ home after a week at the grandparents’. It is another funny thing, two days later, out of the blue, Craig, a friend from childhood called me for the first time in three years. He was court ordered to attend AA meetings for a DUI, and he asked if I wanted to go with him. I figured since God was such a big part of AA, and since I was searching for truth, maybe it would be worth trying it. I proceeded to attend over 270 meetings in my first ninety days; I had nothing else to do, having lost my job, and, basically, my life, to my disease. Craig stopped going to meetings after his court ordered attendance ended. But I continued to attend them, feeling like I had finally found my spiritual home. I then literally spent thousands of hours over the next several years in AA meetings, communication, investigation, reading, writing, meditation, associating with all types and manners of people, and, eventually, healing my relationships.

I had to finally face troubling relationship issues with my father, my family, my society, and my unconscious.  Working the Twelve Steps of AA, initially in my recovery, and practicing meditation and mindfulness helped me to find the threads of meaning that would lead me out of my desire for self annihilation, while also finding a great measure of inner peace.

The 12 Steps of AA Revised To Reflect My Present Spiritual Understanding

1. Through our own extended suffering, we finally found the desire to want it to end. We admitted that when we become self-destructively habituated to any substance, situation, perception, or judgement and/or lack of forgiveness in our relationships with others, we lose our freedom of choice, bring unnecessary trauma into our lives, and into the lives of others, and, thus, fail to achieve any lasting sense of inner peace and joy. We finally realize that our lives have been lived unconsciously and have become unmanageable as a result of that neglect.
2. With our new found hope and openness for change came the desire to begin to awaken to higher possibilities for our lives. We realized that, in our essence, we have an interior, though neglected, power that will heal us and restore us to balance if we pursue it in earnest. We now realize that we have not been living up to our full potential as human beings.
3. We made a decision to turn our will, and our lives, over to the care of our higher interior power. We become open to the possibility of embracing a new Truth for our lives. We want to access the power to continuously evolve, and we want to cultivate our heart to be more loving to ourselves and others. We decide to let go of anything that impedes our progress towards happiness, healing, and wholeness. We realize that without the deepest of desires, and intentions, to change our behavior, we will not be transformed.
4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We have lived a life without a high sense of self-esteem, and we have made unfortunate choices because of the scarcity consciousness that has resulted from it. We realize that when we find the blocks to our evolution, and become willing to remove them, our new found insight will guide our paths with precision to the Truth of our existence. This is our entrance onto the path of mindfulness and higher consciousness.
5. We admit that we were not being truthful with ourselves and with others, and by talking with another who we may trust, yet not be beholden to, about our errors in judgement and in actions towards our self and others, we can better deal with the shame and self-judgement that so often arises from the deadly secrets that we once felt that we must keep. Just by honestly talking with someone else, our burdens can be lifted. Our secrets need no longer keep us imprisoned and mentally ill. When two or more people come together in the spirit of truth and honesty, mutual compassion and empathy also become part of the gathering.
6. We become entirely willing to let go of our attachments to unhealthy attitudes, behavior, and people. We wish to see clearly, without the limitations of our past, of our family history, and of our cultural conditioning, with all of their embedded trauma.
7. We open our hearts through humility and the willingness to change to embrace a new possibility for our life. Our new found sense of connection with our higher interior power inspires us to become more grateful for the gifts that we now have, and we are now spiritually preparing to finally give back to the world in a meaningful, positive way. We want to finally let go of all of the emotional charged memories which keep us trapped in a dead past. Rejoice, for the old demons are being transformed into the new angels!
8. While we were unconscious to our higher potential as human beings, we bring emotional, spiritual, and perhaps even physical harm to other innocent beings, and we want to try bring healing and peace to those who have suffered from the effects of our ignorance. We realize that through the mirror of all of our relationships, dysfunctional or otherwise, we are granted a view into how we truly see ourselves. We want to see through the eyes of Truth, and not through the pain and suffering that unfulfilled relationships may have brought to us.
9. We made direct amends wherever possible to all people we may have brought harm to, except when to do so would bring further injury to them or to others. Our guilt will not be assuaged at the expense of others. We make full application of our new found wisdom and our renewed desire to bring no harm to any sentient being. We want our world, and our own personal sense of self, to feel safe from further attacks from us, and our honest disclosure of our mistakes to those impacted by our errors in judgement will continue to support that intention.
10. We continued to take personal inventory, and, when wrong, promptly admit it. We have become honest with ourselves. We practice mindfulness and continue to develop our capacity for insight into ourselves. We now know ourselves, and we now know many of the potential impediments to experiencing and expressing the Truth of our being. We no longer solely abide in old modes of thought, and now we are more focused on the beauty of the present moment.
11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with the Truth of our being, praying only for knowledge of Truth, and the willingness to live within its infinite domain. We now understand that this whole process of recovery is a meditation on life, and that the evolving, healing life that we are now experiencing is our living prayer. Each time we drink from the deep interior waters revealed to us by meditation, more of our painful dreams are dissolved. We finally realize that the capacity to change, to evolve, to grow in our infinite spirit is the whole point of our human existence. We are now traveling upon new paths of consciousness.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we attempted to carry our message of recovery to our world, while continuing to practice these principles in all our affairs. We have finally become whole, and are now conscious, caring human beings. We have accepted full personal responsibility for our lives, including healing our past, and keeping our present balanced and harmonious, and we no longer blame others for who we are now. We are now experiencing prosperity on many levels, and have witnessed the healing of ourselves. We have saved the world—from ourselves. Our life is now our truest teacher. We realize that we have no power to bring salvation to others, yet, it is our responsibility to point to the way of healing for others who may still be suffering, and who may finally become interested in overcoming their own limitations.

 

Beyond the Twelve Steps

Outside of meetings, I was enlightened by a new teacher, a recovering alcoholic by the name of Jack Boland, who had released to the world many series of tapes on recovery and spirituality. On May 16, 1987, John Johnson, my coworker at the Fred Meyer warehouse, gave me on of his tapes on recovery, and for this I am eternally grateful. I listened to these tapes over and over, and something miraculous happened afterwards

My search for Truth, which had taken me through the darkest regions of hell, was about to give me wings, and enable me to fly to the sun and beyond.

Yet, the prison guard with one of the primary keys to release me from my own spiritual imprisonment was my own unhealed relationship with my father. Overcoming a lifetime of oppression and control by others is no easy task. It also must be done clean and sober, for the true depth and healing of the experience to permanently take hold. I began a new relationship with my father, starting with my new-found sobriety. After that era of my life, I certainly was ready to move away from ignorance, the effects of trauma, and suffering.

My arrows of perception became radically redirected inward in the spring and summer of 1987, after a series of three most profound spiritual experiences and my exuberant practicing of meditation, coupled with a newfound willingness to travel upon new paths of consciousness. I was given a vision to bring healing to myself, through allowing the Divine Feminine to love and nurture me unconditionally, while also learning how to pass that healing energy to others. I was shown how my perception can be transformed, so that I no longer just see myself, and the world, as two separate experiences or entities.

Chapter 3:  Finding Yourself in The Collective Consciousness

When I look at our culture, I see the rising waters of anguish and despair flooding through it. There are so many broken promises and  dreams, so many shattered expectations, so many lost possibilities that these wounds now define the day-to-day life of far too many citizens. As we witness our families, watch the news and read the newspaper, we can see the tragic answers are the creation and promotion of cultural and individual insanity, with its resultant suffering. Mass murders, early deaths, suicides, drug addiction, alcoholism, abuses of woman and children, racism, extinction of species, destruction of our ecology, and all of the damaged relationships that fail to find healing will continue to predominate within the collective mind of mankind until we make conscious contact with intelligence, love, and sanity. We have to begin protecting ourselves from all that, to become healthy people, retain our sanity and our humanity, instead of being consumed by despair, fatalism and anger. In the words of Michael Franti: ”Life is amazing, and then it sucks, and then it’s amazing again.” There is so much suffering in the world, and it brings a universally humbling, painful reality.  

Human suffering and evil are two spiritually destructive forces that humanity has dealt with each moment of its existence. Failure to address these issues directly and consciously only leads to more suffering, and enhances the collective perception of the presence and growth of evil in our world. Many causes of suffering are preventable, however, and they have their origins within our broken, unhealed minds. Suffering comes in many forms, and has many causal agents. Suffering eventually touches all of us through its many different manifestations. Suffering may arise: 

• as a direct result of trauma experienced at any point in life; 

• through living a meaningless life, with a resistance to change and evolution; 
• through an action of intentional hostility by others; 
• through incurable diseases of the body or mind; 
• spontaneously as a reaction to the vicissitudes of life; 
• from an inability to do what is right; 

• after witnessing horrific acts of violence; 
• from the inability to reconcile the belief in God with one’s own grief and loss; 
• from becoming addicted to substances that were designed to take our pain away; 
• from the perceived inability to speak one’s truth; 
• from not having one’s voice heard in the face of oppressive powers; 

• from contemplating the continuation of our daily pains into a distant, unknown future; 
• from continued bullying or threatening behavior from peers, employers, religions, politicians, or family members. 

 

 Pain, and suffering, without any hope for healing, brings anger, despair, depression, loneliness, and suicidal ideation. While being an unconscious man, I contributed to this disease of the spirit and to the overall relationship dysfunctions within the world. I have been subjected to the same family and cultural forces of oppression and repression, spawned by cultural and family mutual control dramas, which daily contribute to crazy making communication and behavior between all of us. Being a family man, I have taken note of the mutual-blame game and scapegoating that circulate continuously and serves as justification for each individual holding onto their own version of our cultural disease.  All of this just leads to more suffering by innocent family members, friends, acquaintances, community members, and ourselves. Who amongst us does not want life to lean more towards amazing, rather than just sucking? 

Things don’t often work out according to our best laid plans. And often, if we seek out many of society’s treasured goals, we find that goals didn’t live up to our expectations. The problem is not our plans, expectations, dreams, or aspirations. These are sacred and we must retain them. The point is that it’s not solely our fault. We have been let down in ways we never should have been. We have been neglected in ways that genuinely hurts and endures. Our possibilities shrank not because of something we did or didn’t do, but for a much, much bigger reason. Much of it was beyond our control, but once we can see what other options are available to us, we can find our reservoir of hope. 

Our world is filled with an infinite supply of life affirming meaning, and we can experience it if we can tune into it and our whole self.  Yet, news in recent years has been dominated by references to the actions of people living meaningless lives, as indicated by upswings in opioid use, alcoholism, gun violence, murder, mental illness, poor diets, insufficient exercise, and suicide. These factors are a small part of the real story. I have seen, and I believe at the deepest level of my own being, that disease in the mind of mankind is directly related to disease within the body of mankind. This is a difficult but essential truth to contemplate and to perceive: our society has created many of the conditions for our early demise through our lack of shared meaning and values. 

My male heritage and my experiences as both a son to an oftentimes toxic father, and working with many damaged men in the electrical trades and in general employment, provided the background for much of my understanding of this suffering. Patriarchy, as expressed through men as a collective consciousness, is mostly responsible for creating the present day conditions of our diseased world. Wikipedia states: “Collective consciousness, collective conscience, or collective conscious is the set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society.” Men in power would rather have our neighbors, wives and children assaulted, raped, overdosed through drug use, or murdered through gun violence, than promote and enforce healing changes. Thus, we need more women in positions of power and influence, and men need to get in touch with their potential for toxic behavior and attitudes, and begin to make necessary course changes in their hearts and souls. Yet both men and women are directly influenced, and often controlled like puppets, by the collective consciousness that we all access, and share. 

Collective consciousness has a source in our ancestral and genetic predispositions, and all of the answers that our culture, our families, and all of our individual selves have dreamed up to some of the great questions of life. The answers have become part of our philosophy, our history, our religion, the substance of our hopes and dreams, and the foundation for all of our nightmares. This is the seed consciousness behind the development of our sense of self, where our own answers to the important questions of life give rise to fragmented interpretation of life, and of the universe. 

 

Individual Conscious 

We only need to look within ourselves, and to our pasts, to see how uncertain our memories are, and extrapolate that to our human history, which is also plagued by short-term, medium-term, and long-term memory loss. Even though our present history has only about 5,000 years of written records, some cultures have historical narratives that appear to have been passed down for at least 30,000 years. The aborigines of Australia claim a 60,000 year narrative, while Central and South American indigenous peoples and their shamans also claim lineages of tens of thousands of years. Western European civilization appears to be an outgrowth of the migration of African tribal members at least 13,000-30,000 years ago. The human race has a long history, but throughout human history, our brains have grown more complex with the development of language and our lives more socially connected. Much of that information is stored in our bodies and minds. But as individuals, we can only consciously access what we were around to remember.  

Once we develop consciousness as developing human beings, our internal sensations, emotions, and thoughts went online and became available to make us aware of who we are. Our internally observed neural activity told us what we like and don’t like, who we love and don’t love, how experiences make us feel, what we think, why we behave the sometimes odd ways that we do, and what we want. Because this inward directed, self-sensing part of our brain can itself be seen as an input, we can be aware of ourselves being aware of ourselves being aware our ourselves, times infinity. The experience of having conscious awareness happens on levels beyond the physical plane, without typical sensorial awareness. It can feel so extraordinary and exalted that it seems like it must be the result of something more than just brain chemistry, perhaps even a manifestation of something of an otherworldly, or even divine, nature. Our nervous systems are a vast universe of sensations, feelings, and thoughts. Conscious awareness has added a window to this interior dimension where the immeasurable and the unknowable may be accessed, caressed, or manhandled, by our sense of self.  

Helen Keller is a remarkable account of that very universal process.  Helen Keller gives an outstanding narrative of the beginning of her own sense of self, a new self which seemed to arise out of her more instinctual, or even chaotic biological response to life.  Once she recognized that the letters w, a, t, e, r represented the substance that she washed with and drank, her own unique sense of herself also arose. Literally, understanding the word and its symbolism opened the miraculous door to her self. And the ability to communicate this conscious gives us power.  

There are two or more sides to every story, and the epoch of mankind certainly could have been defined historically by its nearly infinite number of interactions between members of our worldwide community, past and present, and all of the resultant stories derived through those connections, be they ordered or chaotic in nature. History is created and maintained by the institutionalized powers, and transferred to all members of the community. Our history continues to be written to accommodate the prevailing victorious powers and understandings of the age in which it was first written. Many times, the greatest, most courageous and intelligent heroes of our race remain anonymous, though their stories were captured by others. They died before they could even create a story, thus the survivors, usually less qualified and relatively more uninformed, are the historians, and their story, not the story of the real heroes, are accepted as the narrative.   

Women within many ancient cultures were regarded as healers and carriers of medicine. They were loved, honored, respected, and protected by the community for those very reasons. It can be surmised that in our pre-history the balance of the masculine and the feminine through mutual understanding, acknowledgement, and equality existed and supported the good for all. Yet, mankind’s story, when told by the historical progression of women, would be much different than the story told by the history that men might present. History is rarely described and defined by the ones who were stuck at home caring for the wounded and the children, by the submissive ones, by the artists or sculptors, or by the losers in any conflict. Our history is no different, being described, and defined, by those in power, which are predominantly white male influences. Masculine energy has dominated our specie’s relationship with the universe, the world, the plants and animals, and with each other for most of recorded time, and well before the human race had any capacity to keep records. The Christian bible is replete with aphorisms and statements relegating women to the background of the church and in all relations with life. There is an imbalance within the field of the human spirit.   

This oppression of women, and repression of so-called “feminine characteristics” within the male reflects in the diseased and imbalanced relationships. These principles have also become established as conscious, and unconscious, norms for perception within the collective consciousness of America and mankind in general. And, an unfortunate and dangerous outcome to this division between the man and woman is that the man is unconsciously conditioned to see the feminine aspects of himself in an objectified manner, and tries to oppress, control, and dominate those aspects, emotions, and tendencies, rather than integrate them into a complete holism within himself. 

So how on Earth, or in Heaven, do we bring balance back to ourselves? 

 

Finding Yourself in the Collective 

I have attempted meditation upon my own source of pain and suffering, and what came to me was how most of what I know about myself and my reactions to the world was created by my fundamental relationship with my parents and my culture. Missing from this was any accommodations to my relationship to my world, the universe, or any concept of a higher power. My sense of self in my early years revolved around internalizing many of my parents’ attitudes. I was acutely aware of what my mother and father expected from me, what I could or could not give back to them to attempt to please them, and my defense mechanisms for managing the fallout when I failed to please them. Beginning early in my life, I also developed the desire to protect them and myself from the results of the conflict that arose in our house, either when I made yet another mistake or when my father overreacted to any situation that brought a sense of fear or threat into the home environment. I developed a need to balance whatever energy was being expressed at any particular moment, and I was very unskilled at those kind of efforts. 

With the death of my father in 2017, it ended the era of subservience to his needs, and the need to protect my mother from my perception of his aggression towards her. It also ended the era of incomplete grieving for my mother’s death in 2009. I had to immediately support my mentally deteriorating father when mother died, and I had never completely worked through the grieving process. With my father’s passing, I was an orphan, and all of the entanglements that kept me wound around their lives were now physically removed. With my father’s spirit no longer overshadowing my own life, I was allowed to develop more fully into a better version of myself. For me this was an extraordinary release because the formation of my sense of self was influenced by parental bonding issues in childhood. Yet, I had assembled my sense of self to the best of my ability, the process was one of self-organization, something that neuroscientists and psychologists are still studying and understanding. 

In our world, there are countless examples of self-organizing systems, and all creatures, and the minds of those creatures, are examples of that miracle in action. The evolution of all of Earth’s creatures appear to be primarily organized through the pattern created by the history of the species, and its interactions and successful adaptions with its earthly environment. The DNA appears to carry much of that history as a guide for the self-replicating pattern within all cells. Epigenetics is the study of how our behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way our genes work.  In recent years, genetics and epigenetics continue to be studied and mined for the great knowledge about our predispositions to certain characteristics and behaviors. Yet, for humans, epigenetic research has recently shown that some of these patterns may not necessarily be unchangeable, but may be open to suggestions from changing the external environmental or even making attitude and lifestyle adjustments. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change our DNA sequence, but they can change how our body reads a DNA sequence. Up to 5 percent of our genes may be amenable to epigenetic suggestions, or adaptations, and the future may show that many more genes may be turned off, or on, depending on the need of the organism.  And, in a most encouraging development, there are scientists now proposing that as individual human beings, we may be an integral part of the Bigger Self that is organizing, or reorganizing, our own consciousness, and have greater influence upon our own biological system. 

Our consciousness has a self-organizing principle, as it organizes itself into our unique personal sense of being, while also categorizing data, accruing knowledge, and forming perceptions. The uncertainty of self-organization in consciousness is a great mystery of life, though we now know that a healthy integration revolves around how well the impressionable being feels accepted by, and connected to the environment that the human body travels through. Thus, happier, self-loving ordered senses of self arise and are supported by myriads of successful interactions with its social and physical environment.  

First and foremost is the being’s acceptance and integration into the primary family group. If we do not get the requisite positive feedback from our parents early on, we face tremendous odds against forming a happy, well-adjusted self organizing principle, or ego.  And the enlightening 1995 Kaiser study of adverse childhood experiences shows the deleterious effects on our health as adults from damaging parental behaviors, either through omission or commission, or other traumatic environmental influences when we were children. Toxic masculinity, or, more precisely, an unskilled capacity to relate to people in a peaceful and mutually accepting manner, was to become a defining characteristic of my life. Coping mechanisms such as passive/aggressive behavior became my normal response to the daily challenges of life. I had internalized and normalized an incomplete composite creative advisor, or a trickster, of who I thought my father and mother were. This became a source of self-talk and feedback for me as a child, and then as an unconscious adult.  

The same process occurs for our social self, too. There is another identity within us, virtually independent of our inner parental feedback creations, which we create internal cultural advisors. As an individual within a culture, I applied the same unskilled balancing mechanism within consciousness, where I would weigh and measure societal needs of me, and others that I love, with whatever my personal needs may have been. I felt out of control over so much of my own life, while feeling divided, fragmented, and so unsure of which direction to point my life towards. In several recovery programs, this fragmentation is called the committee, and we all need to do some ferocious work to get that committee to permanently adjourn. There is no peace of mind, otherwise. 

We must not normalize and internalize what our failed society is, and make it part of the unchangeable forces within our consciousness. We must not bear the burden of our society’s bad behavior. While we are under control of this diseased culture, we have internalized our society’s failures, and have mistaken its failures for our own. But we dare not internalize its failings, or the oppressive qualities of this abusive culture will become part of who we are. So where can we find relief? 

 

Alleviate Your Suffering 

The Buddha had his own ideas about what constitutes mental health, and by his definition, anyone who isn’t well on the way to enlightenment is insane. Quite how literally he meant it when he said all humans are mad is hard to say. But when he looked at ordinary people like us going about their daily business, he saw a world out of balance — and a world that by necessity is out of balance, because it is composed of those same off-kilter individuals. He understood that we, collectively, misunderstand the world that we live in and misunderstand ourselves. Thus, we all end up living in a virtual reality of delusion, confusion, and distortion.  What’s more, we largely share the same delusions, which means that we don’t even realize that our minds are disturbed. As Krishnamurti suggests, it’s possible to think that we’re spiritually and mentally healthy because we share our mistaken values and understandings with those around us. Collectively, our ill minds create ill social circles, and we consider ourselves healthy because we see our values reflected in our spiritually sick fellow travelers.  

Creating the basic conditions that support emotional and spiritual growth might be beneficial to the entirety of our human race. People have basic needs regarding personal safety, security, and placement within the society. Here are some simple, and not so simple, human needs coupled with spiritual intention: 

• To belong, to feel safe while belonging, including the desire to help and protect others while helping oneself. 
• To speak up, and feel like we really were heard, and not have our spirit layered over with others’ errors in reasoning and judgement. 
• To be able to listen to another at the deepest level possible, and be present in the spirit of understanding, cooperation, and collaboration. 
• To feel whole, and to be able to recognize that wholeness, not only within ourselves, but within all others. 
• To love all others, as well as to be accepted, and loved, with as few conditions attached as possible. Unconditional love was never meant to be reserved just for a mother’s love for her child, so it is a great evolutionary objective to attempt to be a channel for it. 

• To evolve, for if we do not, we become subject to the forces of friction and chaos inherent within a closed mind and system, resulting in higher physical and mental disease and dysfunction. 

 

To heal, we must first understand what has us under control, before we can learn how to let go of what controls us. We can place ourselves on a new, healthier path of consciousness by considering the sources of our suffering and our role in the collective conscious. Asking questions of ourselves and answering them point to foundational facts that most of us encounter or employ in our efforts to meet the needs for economic security, establish our place in society, relieve stress and keep ourselves at least marginally happy, and pursue family fulfillment. 

 

Questions to Ponder: 

• Why does suffering exist? And why does it visit me so often? 
• Who and what am I? 
• Are happiness, joy, and freedom possible in my life? 
• What am I really looking for? 
• What really is prayer? 

• Does religion hinder or help a modern-day seeker of God? 
• What is a “well lived life” and how do I achieve it? 
• What is good mental health, or what does it mean to be normal? 
• Who are my people, and where are they located? 
• Why do I feel rejected so often? 

• Why don’t people get along better with each other, and why have I become so isolated? 
• Will I ever fit in?   
• Why don’t I feel peace of mind? 
• Why do some people become spiritually and emotionally disfigured by their desire for sex? 
• What is the role of objectifying people in ignorance, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and sexism? 

• Why do some people exercise excessive emotional control over their partners? 
• Why do I not feel satisfaction when I achieve the goals that I have set up for myself? 
• Why do I not feel joy when others achieve greatness, or accomplish great things for themselves? 
• Why do I sometimes feel threatened by others’ successes? 
• Why do I internally try to hold others back from success and positive social acknowledgement? 

• Why do I always seem to “self-destruct” right at the moment when I am about to achieve great success? 
• Will I ever completely understand myself and others? 
• What is oppression, and what is my relationship to it? 
• What is repression, and why do I participate in it? 
• Why is expressing real human emotions such a double-edged sword?  

• Why are my feelings so hard to identify sometimes? 
• Why are some people always so angry, indifferent, detached, or depressed?  
• Why is anxiety the defining feeling of this age? And why is it so hard to heal from it? 
• Where is the love that I feel is missing from my life? 
• Why don’t I feel more love for myself or for others? 

• Why do I continue to experience poor self-esteem? 
• Why is our culture so focused on youth and physical appearance? 
• Why am I so self-conscious? 
• Why do I feel that I have to always be competitive, or “better than the others” just to fit in? 
• Why is capitalism, dependent on competition and greed, the predominant economic system in our world? 

• Why does shame and guilt control so much of my life’s experience? 
• Is it possible to speak or live a lie long enough that we no longer can accept or believe the truth? 
• Is a person’s silence because of an absence of opinion, or from a fear of speaking the truth? 
• Why can’t some people be more emotionally and spiritually present for others? 
• Why do people feel that they need to engage in mutual “control dramas”? 

• Why do people endlessly pursue entertainment and/or use drugs and alcohol to excess, and ignore their own personal transformation and healing? 
• Why do I have no desire to contribute to society in a more generous and meaningful way? 

 

Not all these questions will speak to you, but some of them will. Use them to stimulate interest and curiosity to pursue your own answers. We must keep in mind the profound impact that our parental upbringing, and our immersion in our culture over the duration of our lives, has upon any potential superficial answers that we might give. It is of utmost importance to understand the fundamental dynamics of our own unique sense of self, and how we may not answer these questions in such a way that honors a more fundamental, and unknown, spiritual essence that we all have. 

Chapter 4 : Approaching Trauma More Consciously

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

― C.G. Jung

Like most of us, I have had many traumatic events in my life. I can never forget the dark feelings of abandonment, the helplessness, and disgrace, or the mental or physical pain of my early years. Trauma results in damage to, or loss of, connection to ourselves, to our bodies, to our families, to others, and to the world around us. This disconnection is often hard to recognize because it doesn’t always happen all at once but rather over time.  We make early accommodations to our traumas, with the wounds, and our need to feel safer and more secure, creating spinoffs of our real self that were designed to manage our suffering, and to reduce further attacks upon our self.  These spinoffs become aspects of our defense mechanisms, and  actually dominate our awareness to the point of making us believe that this is all that we are, in spirit and in truth. Often, the damage wrought by the original wounding does not become evident for decades after the original trauma.

One of the several subroutines, or spinoffs of self, that my consciousness ran resulted from an accommodation to early trauma that I experienced. This part of me was of the nature of the “savior” archetype, which was a part of myself that believed that for anybody to ever love me, I would have to save them or do something heroic. This is where my need to overachieve arose from, and my excessive loyalty to other damaged human beings who would not have been in my spiritual orbit otherwise.  I experienced overpowering grief and incredible guilt and shame every time I witnessed failing health or death in friends and family members, including pets.  I also could not tolerate abuse in any form, especially when I witnessed male friends exhibiting controlling or misogynistic behavior towards their female partners.  Sadly, my needs ended more than one long-term friendship.

Like all others within our society, I have also been traumatized by our culture and religion in both profound and subtle ways. Trauma seems to be a natural outcome of our collisions with life shattering events, and less intense though destabilizing experiences that we were not able to adequately process and heal from at the time of their origin.  It is now known that trauma can arise through actual acts, or through the careless or unconscious omission of necessary love at strategic life junctures.  Yet, some even claim that there is no greater trauma than our passage through the birth canal, and that the rest of our lives are defined by our response to that expulsion from the safe womb of mother. No matter how it happens, trauma must be understood and dealt with, or we will be limited by our instinctual responses to its experience.

Our fight or flight mechanism is how we respond to trauma and threats within the environment.  It operates at a nearly instinctual level, but it can be malleable, depending also upon the situation, our individual value system, and cultural conditioning. We tend to think before we react, and our thinking draws from hints from our biological hardware, our historical patterns of behavior, our genetics, and our training. Society, in combination with humanity’s neural-linguistic capacity, has provided mental software subroutines that enable us to process and act upon information to not only keep us safe, but also to act in efficient and, mostly, culturally acceptable manners. The problem is that many of these subroutines act below the conscious level and are fundamentally defective, having become habits of thoughts, with many perceptions being created from a dead past.  Added to this are self-generated subroutines created through traumatic wounding, and it may be seen how the concept of free will may only be a concept until the self is made wholly conscious, healed and whole.

All of these subroutines become sacred cows that are not only erroneous representations of truth, but also keep us trapped within a limited radius around the whipping post of our own personal and collective ignorance. The human race remains a breeding ground for violence of all types, with its traumatic impacts upon all of us.  We are culturally inculcated into ignoring the distressing objects of our perceptions, by the scapegoating of others and denying our unconscious support in the very reality that we are witnessing, and, perhaps, violently reacting against. Pretending not to see, or not speaking of the evil that we see or hear results in no healing potential for anyone.

In our beginning strides on the spiritual path, we usually start with a motivating assumption, an assumption offered by others, yet probably also informed by our intuition and our long lost innocence: Though we are not experiencing it now, there must be a better, or even a perfect state of being available to us.  There must be a cause or reason that we are not experiencing this blissful state.  Is it because of an error in our thought, behavior, upbringing, acculturation, or even a fundamental flaw in our being? Or is it a result of trauma? I have looked at my traumatic wounding at the deepest level, experienced a total disillusionment with the total lie of a life that just accommodating and normalizing trauma may become, and then reawakened to infinite new possibilities for living.  As a general rule of healing, if we can see the problem completely, without self deception, then the very power of that insight generates new pathways for the healing traveler to walk upon.

It is time for all of humanity to also become experts in our own unique life experience, and understand the impacts of malicious and unskilled behavior upon all of us. It is time for humanity to just say no to being agents for the proliferation of traumatic wounding. We can start by understanding the causes of all this trauma.

Toxic Masculinity and Our Sacred Cows

Historically, since at least the Greco-Roman times, men have established the rules of mutual engagement.  Our world culture’s dominant male energy has a propensity for creating toxic and traumatic engagement that result in patriarchal systems of political, religious, and economic understanding that maintain the status quo through a multitude of forms of oppression. Yet the status quo remains quite imbalanced, and it continues to bring harm, even to the proponents of these systems and the perpetrators of toxic behavior.  To this day, men continue to struggle with trauma-inspired feelings of poor self-esteem, while keeping this disfiguring system of engagement with the world solidly in place.

Women can also be the perpetrators of trauma and suffering, but the statistics are obvious as to which sex is the major perpetrator of crimes against self and others through intentional and unintentional traumatic assaults.  Men outpace women by an almost 20 to 1 ratio, so it is not even close.  Men are the primary vehicles for the delivery of darkness, and are impacted by the poisoning within their own spiritual ecosystem that carrying such energy would predispose them to. Yet, both passive and aggressive males and females can both benefit from understanding the effects of trauma in their own lives, and we can all take enormous strides to bring healing to ourselves.

There are a number of choices that most men make in our efforts to cope with an often times distressing and threatening life experience. We may fear being seen negatively or receiving a negative evaluation by those people familiar to us.  We may fear being placed in an unfamiliar situation over which we have no control.  We have developed a trauma-inspired brain that seeks to avoid any experience that reminds us of a time when we were helpless and unable to escape threats or discomforts.  We spend extraordinary amounts of time perfecting the passive/aggressive role, where we don’t reveal ourselves directly to others, but instead make our presence known through secretive behavior and hiding activities.

Men typically inflict their own wounding on everybody else, in subtle, or not so subtle ways. Usually, this manifests in dominating, or being dominated, by others. Philosophies of oppression, and of the monetization of reality, arise out of this wounding. Women are usually victimized, or those with sensitive natures. We may participate in trauma-inspired anxiety reactions or accommodations to our wounding, such as:

1. Don’t answer or initiate phone calls. (After all, the phone is the heaviest object in the universe!)
2. Be silent, or shut down after brief sharing, whenever in group settings, such as family events or community gatherings. (Well, they didn’t want to hear what I had to say anyway!)
3. Hide from difficult feelings through overeating or excess drinking of alcohol. (Hey, these are two prized self-treatment options, what gives here?)
4. Hyperactivity and vigilance around keeping a safe position, in restaurants, religious events, or social encounters. (Keep that exit in sight, you never know when you might need to run for it!)
5. Being apologetic for almost anything negative that occurs around us, even if we are not at fault. (Well, it sometimes is a race to get to the victim’s role!)
6. Poor self-esteem, don’t care for self, instead focus on others. Ignore the self, often to the point of masochistic emotional abuse.
7. Ignoring our own feelings (especially anger) and any warning signals from our bodies, and not communicating honestly with others, through avoiding difficult feelings and perceptions, and maintaining people pleasing behavior.
8. Excess competitiveness with others while engaging with greed and the need to keep up with the Jones.
9. Proving self-worth in environments where self, and others’, worth is disrespected, and try to fit in where we don’t belong.
10. Stockpiling weapons.
11. Not speaking up for ourselves or for others that are oppressed for fear of being marginalized.
12. Over immersion in entertainment.
13. Not exercising, not respecting the body’s needs.
14. Use of recreational drugs to the point of habituation (including marijuana).
15. Smoking, vaping, or chewing tobacco.
16. Using sex as a way to manipulate others, to artificially build self-esteem, or as a disguise for loneliness.
17. Workaholism, perfectionism.
18. Addiction to risky behaviors and activities in general.

These attitudes and behaviors are guaranteed to bring poor emotional and physical health to the damaged ones, and only encourages the further repression and traumatizing of our self. Life certainly can be quite the complicated challenge, and our responses to it determine whether we can maintain reasonable health and a sense of joy and well-being, or collapse into a deteriorating life situation.

Several recent news articles and studies have indicated that there has been an epidemic of younger, white, middle class men who have been dying at earlier ages than would be statistically forecast, for at least the past thirty years. There are many references to environmental causes, gun violence, to the opioid/fentanyl epidemic, painkiller addiction, heroin addiction, alcohol abuse, or poor diets as leading causal agents.  There is also the so-called “white man’s despair,” an expression recently coined that encompasses a wide range of unhappy and unhealed American white male attitudes and behaviors. I have seen, and I believe at the deepest level of my own being, that this disease in the mind of mankind is directly related to many of the diseases within the body of mankind.

There is a disease of the human spirit that has targeted and used masculinity for thousands of years to victimize everybody, all in the name of religion, progress, security, and economic growth. Does anybody still think that the suicide victim, lone wolf arsonist, abusive alcoholic, mentally ill person shot by a policeman, drug overdose victim, morbidly obese person, corrupted national politician and/or reality TV star, or mass murderer, is a unique being, with no relationship to the rest of the very humanity that spawned him?

The history of humanity indicates that, collectively, it is acceptable to pass unfair judgements against our self and each other, approve of the distribution of weapons of war to countries and to individuals, promote inequitable distribution of resources and wealth with a now monetized Mother Earth’s resources, cultivate  excesses and greed as aspects of positive capitalism, incite division,  violence, murder, and war, continue injustice and inequity, defend racism and white supremacy, promote religious and philosophical persecution, and create and continue the conditions for addiction, and suicide. This self-destructive behavior continues, seemingly unabated. And there are large groups of humanity who would rather watch their world burn than collaborate with it to bring a measure of healing to all.

In the 1980s, during America’s campaign to reduce the proliferation of drug addiction, Nancy Reagan made the famous statement: “JUST SAY NO!” The understanding at the time was that addiction was a personal choice, and by reversing the “yes” that was being said to drug use to a “no,” the problem would just disappear.  In the absolute, that is quite true. Our real problem as a human race is that we have had our desire to just say no to perceived negative situations or behavior gets overrun by a lack of alternatives to choose from, peer pressure, family and religious training, and our own failure to develop or maintain the ability to set healthy boundaries for our self. Why doesn’t our civilization say no to the proliferation of traumatic events, and the wounding of the innocent? Because it doesn’t work.

We are all susceptible to the damages incurred by spiritual asphyxiation, should we neglect to listen to the stories being told by our most vulnerable family members. The sensitive and the oppressed of our culture define the leading edge of the journey of our own shared human experience and are indicators of our collective spiritual condition. As a culture, we need to remember that the traumatized of our culture, the mentally ill, the diseased and damaged population, which includes the addicts and the alcoholics, are society’s “canaries in the gold mine.” Their diminished lives are direct evidence of a cultural disease, and they become part of the narrative of cultural and spiritual dysfunction.

The possibility of bringing balance and a sense of wholeness into life must be embraced, and conscious movements towards healing will greatly reduce trauma’s burden upon us. When healing from the impacts of trauma is not pursued in earnest, many negative outcomes become possible: Some become addicted to the idea that their only function is to provide for their family, and, having achieved success or failure, they become disillusioned. Some may eventually lose their sense of meaning and direction in life with the loss of a career, marriage, or community. They may become lonely and depressed, and may develop profound mental illness and/or become addicted to drugs and alcohol if not treated.  Those who somehow hang in there, waiting for a better day may never see it.

One only needs to look around, and view the effects of toxic masculinity, and its ugly spawn, toxic religion, toxic politics, and toxic capitalism, to see that repression of our feminine nature, and the Divine, is built right into the very fabric of our cultural existence. The Golden Rule, which states, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” does not bring great hope or direction to huge segments of the human population, religious or otherwise, because they are ignorant of love’s need for the release of emotional controls over others, self-care, peace of mind, and adherence to collaborative and compassionate principle. As the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “We are made for goodness.  We are greatness in the making.” How can we achieve that goodness again?

Trauma and its wounding results in extreme contraction of our spirit.  By being willing to face ourselves, and our grief, traumas, and suffering, we can develop the capacity to move freely through our lives instead of remaining tethered to the pillories of our painful pasts.

Facing Your Trauma and Returning to Goodness

Each human child depends upon the quality of love, safety, and prosperity of the family household, and these are primary factors that greatly influence a growing child’s evolutionary path through consciousness. The parents are by intention also designers, builders, and co-creators of the early life and consciousness of the new child, even if the DNA determines a greater portion of the heritage. My father spent five years at a local university learning about psychology, child development, logic, philosophy, and religion, and yet his successful mastering of these subjects in school did not translate into insight as to how to best parent his children. My mother studied Dr. Spock and others, yet did not develop the insight necessary to know that placing a blanket wrapped crying baby in a car in the garage at night so Dad could sleep missed the bulls eye for perfect child care by the widest of margins. All creators strive for perfection, and most parents are no exceptions, yet that desire for excellence is difficult to identify in dysfunctional families, especially by children who were negatively impacted by chronic parental mismanagement. Victims of wounding carry the pain well into adulthood, and even unto death, in situations where the trauma is never made conscious or gets addressed in a loving, healing manner.

For those who may need help refreshing their memories, or understanding if healing from trauma should be a serious consideration, taking the following test may be of help.  The Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) Questionnaire is ten questions to help people identify their childhood experiences of abuse and neglect. Here is the questionnaire.

Prior to your 18th birthday:

1. Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you? or Act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
2. Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Push, grab, slap, or throw something at you? or Ever hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
3. Did an adult or person at least 5 years older than you ever… Touch or fondle you or have you touch their body in a sexual way? or Attempt or actually have oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
4. Did you often or very often feel that … No one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special? or Your family didn’t look out for each other, feel close to each other, or support each other? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
5. Did you often or very often feel that … You didn’t have enough to eat, had to wear dirty clothes, and had no one to protect you? or Your parents were too drunk or high to take care of you or take you to the doctor if you needed it? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
6. Were your parents ever separated or divorced? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
7. Was your mother or stepmother: Often or very often pushed, grabbed, slapped, or had something thrown at her? or Sometimes, often, or very often kicked, bitten, hit with a fist, or hit with something hard? or Ever repeatedly hit over at least a few minutes or threatened with a gun or knife? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
8. Did you live with anyone who was a problem drinker or alcoholic, or who used street drugs? No___If Yes, enter 1 __
9. Was a household member depressed or mentally ill, or did a household member attempt suicide?                        No___If Yes, enter 1 __
10. Did a household member go to prison? No___If Yes, enter 1 __

If you answered more than two questions in the affirmative, you are potentially predisposed to a cluster of poor health choices, continued traumatizing of self and others, suffering within the self, and creating a generally troubled life experience. The embodied stress of trauma causes cortisol to be injected into the bloodstream for, potentially, decades of time, causing stress and inflammation related illness and disease.

A Canadian study reported in the scientific journal Psychoneuroendocrinology found that individuals exposed to adverse childhood experiences tend to be biologically older than their counterparts. The authors considered whether accelerated biological aging could help explain the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and poor health outcomes later in life. Their findings suggest that harm, such as abuse or violence, in early life takes many forms and can lead to health consequences many years down the road. The researchers found that the link between adverse childhood experiences and biological age was stronger for more sever forms of adversity, such as physical and sexual abuse.

I scored high on the ACE test.  As a child, I had several health issues, and I was restless, discontented, and suffered from a feeling of not being heard or fully accepted as a child. My parents and my culture made their compelling arguments for trying to convince me that their paths and understandings were righteous, and I just needed to pick myself up by my bootstraps and be mature enough to understand and find where I fit in this challenging place.

The greatest trauma to the human soul is the early damage to our sense of self that causes poor self-esteem, and all of the compensating behavior that occurs downstream from the wounding.  Without even knowing it, we traumatize others with variations of our own original trauma.  If our trauma created a sense of self that is insecure and feeling unloved or unlovable, our relationships will be held back by just that much, and will not dynamically evolve into the fullest of their innate potential.  We remain pilloried to the past, and lost within the unconscious response patterns of a mind trapped in the labyrinth created by that activity.

Trauma and suffering are not synonymous, though suffering may arise from failure to directly address traumatic wounding, which only leads to more suffering and the unconscious predisposition towards creating new traumatic life events. Many causes of suffering are preventable, however, and they have their origins within broken, unhealed minds unwilling to embrace the possibility of personal change.  And, most of these assaults against our Spirit originate within the family, though environmental influences from a corrupted societal norms and religious malfeasance also play major roles in the origin and proliferation of traumatic wounding.

My first thirty-one years of life reflected the internalized horror of a life suppressed and traumatized by the conspiracy of silence, a silence created by my misguided need to preserve and protect a limited, damaged image of self, and of all others. My own true nature had been masked over, or silenced, through that process. A lifetime of oppression of myself and the unconscious repression of several aspects of my feeling, loving nature had brought to me a series of near fatal illnesses, physiological as well as spiritual. I saw how a dark force, common to all of humanity continued to live, move, and have its being enshrined within my own heart and soul. I saw how the medical, economic, religious, cultural, political, and spiritual traditions remain burdened by their own limitations of understanding and intelligence. I saw that my own suffering was shared by most of the other people that I knew. I saw that those who suffer have little energy to provide emotional support for others who still suffer, as well.

Tragically, many of us have experienced great difficulties, traumatic impacts, and suffering through our relationship with our family, our family’s religion, and our culture. Some of the traumas most resistant to healing happened in our early years, or even before we became verbal as young children.  And most victims go through life, never knowing the source of their chronic pain, be it physical or emotional or both.

Traumatic experiences, grief,  and suffering may arise through an action of intentional hostility, or it may arise spontaneously as a reaction to the vicissitudes of life. Suffering may arise from an inability to do what is right. Suffering may arise through incurable diseases of the body or of the mind. Suffering may arise through the trauma of witnessing horrific acts of violence. Suffering may arise from the inability to reconcile the belief in God with one’s own grief and loss. Suffering may arise from becoming addicted to substances that were designed to take our pain away. Suffering may arise from the perceived inability to speak one’s truth and to have one’s voice heard in the face of the oppressive powers of the day. Suffering may also arise from contemplating the continuation of our daily pains into a distant, unknown future.

We know all too well where we are now, and for those that do not like their present state of awareness, we do have options.

Dealing with Your Trauma

Meditation is a way to access the trauma stored in the body. My friend Paul Zilka, during a meditation experience in the early 1990s, literally saw a small semi-human form, vaguely resembling his young self, erupt from a historical wound in his back, crawl up to his shoulder, and fly away. Thirty years of back pain disappeared through that amazing exercise, facilitated by Jerry Jones, the famous meditation teacher.

In 1987, during a profound meditation, I was also shown two complete identity matrices attached to my own bodily energy field.  I did not recognize them as creations from damaged parts of myself.  I was ignorant of trauma and its potential impact at the time, and all I could do was to note that they were not there for my greater good. I intuitively knew them to be tricksters. They stayed with me for years afterwards, for I did not know what to do with the information. I did not know it at the time, but I performed a spiritual bypass where I was able to postpone dealing directly with them, until I had the requisite insight and knowledge as to deal with them effectively.

If it weren’t for the incredible spiritual strength, and wisdom, of my life partner, Sharon White, I would not have been able to have, what some people call, the following cathartic event. It was on a Thursday morning in February 2018, and I was preparing to go to the Pilates class that Sharon and I attended, and I wanted to get there early so that we could warm up on an exercise bicycle, with a little aerobic activity.

But while I was ready to go, Sharon was on the telephone, talking with a friend. I, trying to be innocent, said, “Can we go now?” And she got mad. Her anger released in me the trapped energy of a lifetime. While raging at her, I became aware of a pain so deep, and so all-encompassing, resulting in an anger from a source that I had never touched before, at least as a verbally conscious human being. Sharon and I went our separate ways for a few hours, while we both tried to understand what the heck had just transpired. Leading up to this experience, I had been intensely exploring the entirety of my life experience, having written seventy pages about my early childhood and trauma, my maturation process, addictive and self-destructive cycles, while providing glimpses into higher possibilities for living. All of this writing had placed me, without me realizing it, into the psychic world of all of my past pain and suffering.

After a meditation, I had a realization. My wounded essence, and the issues stored in my bodily tissues had actually cried out for the first time and I actually listened to it, without my ego repressing it as it had for sixty-one years. And I also saw, for the first time, the wounding process that I shared with my father. I felt an incredible compassion, love, and acceptance for my father, who had also suffered immensely under the spiritually destructive parenting of his own diseased parents.

Sharon paid the price for a couple of hours, while I acknowledged the wounded baby within me. But, I had an insight that still informs me daily. I saw how we, as humans, keep layering ourselves and our ideas upon what somebody else is saying, rather than meeting the being where they are, and responding according to the dictates of our heart center, which in most people, especially men, has been scabbed over by our own early spiritual wounding.

              My life has transformed from a trauma induced static state of distress and emotional stagnation to a dynamic, ever changing experience of life’s infinite possibilities for healing, new perceptions and enhanced spiritual experiences.  I say yes to the present state of evolving enlightenment, and no to the diseased mind stuck in the past.

Here are some other options for healing:

• Create a visual timeline.  Write onto a piece of paper, a long piece of paper, the years of your life.  Start with the birth year, and carry it forward to the present moment.
• Listen to music from the time when the wounding occurred. It will open up emotional vistas, using the wholeness of the self.
• Write extensively about the time in question.
• Work in conjunction with therapist trained in traumatic wounding.
• Perform ceremony that indicates finding the wounds and freeing them from our tissues.
• Listen to the stories from family members, friends of family, and, especially, friends of the parents who may have witnessed aspects of your upbringing.
• Have an incredibly supportive partner, or a therapist, to watch with you the emotions that arise during the turbulent periods of the introspection.
• Make a decision to make amends to the world for our own unconscious wounding of all others, which was our unintentional response to our own wounding.

 

Freedom from Trauma Now and in the Future

Trauma must be recognized for what it is, which is psychological wounding as a result of a single experience, the repetition of similar experiences many times, or a combination of different experiences which have attacked one’s safety and security over an extended period of time. It is an assault against our innocence, an oppressive act, or series of actions, against our essence, and the unskilled way we have dealt with it becomes the source of much of our repressive tendencies and sufferings.

To not express ourselves honestly and openly results in our own early demise, spiritually as well as physically. Many people within our society have lost all freedom of choice. I have much compassion for those who still struggle with the sometimes lifelong effects of trauma with its resultant suffering, and its deadly spawn of fear, indifference to others, disassociation from one’s own self, mental illness and alcoholism/drug addiction. Fortunately, we have other places to travel to find our healing, and there already are awakening people to observe and learn from, to gain hints on how to find our way back home to our own innate goodness.

We each must penetrate the conspiracy of silence, and bring the light of a loving heart and healing words to the hidden darkness. Can we bring our sense of self, with all of our historical wounding and suffering, and look at it honestly and openly with our self, and others?  If so, then we can then bring hope to all of the other canaries in our society who are now struggling for air.

Note:  Chapter 5 will be added to considerably as work progresses by Melinda

Chapter 5 : Insight And Mindfulness

“The unexamined life will be painfully lived”

—-Jack Boland

When I was a kid, I had a strange and profound dream. A priest, having received his directive from on high, then returned to his village along the lake in the high mountain region. He gathered all of the villagers together, and informed them that they were to take every golden figurine, every sacred symbol that they owned, and they were to throw them all into the lake, and never to think about them again. Then, he told each villager that they must each go into their own home, and face the evil one without any protection or care from any of their gods or their symbols of the sacred.

The priest then returned to his own home and tossed all of his own idols and treasures into the deep blue lake. He stripped himself bare of all clothing, and then began to summon the forces of the dark. He became surrounded by a fog, and as he lifted his hands, sparks started flying out of his fingertips at the unknown force of darkness that lay just beyond his visual field, still hidden beyond the boundaries of the fog. The priest refocused his energy into his arms, and hands, and the sparks grew into a steady energy field, extending from his body, his heart, and his spirit, towards his unknown adversary. He was determined to overcome this force, this dark energy, and he redoubled his efforts.

The priest’s heart began to race out of control, he began to sweat profusely, and a growing sense of fear and dread began to take hold of his entire being, as he finally understood that his energy could not last forever. Yes, for him to continue this battle, he must sacrifice all of his life force. Yet, he felt that he had no choice but to keep engaging the enemy, to finally see the face of the force that had terrorized his village since time began. He desperately strained and stretched to see the object of his fear and disdain, even as the ebbing energy field flowing from his fingertips continued to cut through the fog.

Suddenly, a face began materializing before his faltering gaze. As he collapsed to the floor, almost drained of all life, he could no longer fight an undeniable truth: the face of the evil one might be his own!

Projection is a name given by psychologists to this experience, where we finally realized that the conscious world that we feared, the conscious world in which we created idols and gods and psychological mechanisms to protect ourselves from the perceived or potential evil, was actually a world that we created through our own ignorance, both collectively and individually. This manifests in all of the horrors that we witness on the world stage daily, and in all of the family and cultural dysfunction under which we were raised. We are all wounded by this process, and rather than find a way to heal from it, we ignorantly arm ourselves against further assaults from others, even though we are part of the attack against our own self in the first place.

What if a real miracle was trying to happen in our lives, and too few people cared or were not even aware enough to attempt to look for it? This indifference or ignorance is the foundation for chaos in our world and within our own minds. Those who refuse to look at the toxic masculinity inspired darkness within our culture become its unconscious and, unwittingly, its most ardent supporters. Indifference and hatred continues to threaten to destroy everyone and everything. Tragically, in this age, collective outpourings of love and support for victims follow domestic terrorist acts, rather than healing and preparing the culture enough to actually prevent the heinous behavior in the first place. But through Insight and mindfulness, minds and hearts are transformed, making all of us much less likely to become the source of suffering for others, and we become the living examples of loving non-violence in action.  Insight plants the seed of the miracle into our minds, and mindfulness is the great gardener of that miracle, resulting in a more abundant, healthy crop of happier, peaceful, loving, and ordered thoughts.

Profound Insights of the Self

One of the greatest insights that I have made is a direct result of a science class that I attended in fourth grade. Mr Hill, our principal and co-teacher of the fourth grade class, was going to perform an experiment, and he wanted to teach the students about the power of observation. Each member of the class was to record everything they observed.

The teacher heated a portable electric stove. He then grabbed with some insulated tongs a thin sheet of metal and set it onto the burner. The metal immediately began to distort in size and disfigure. When he was done, the metal no longer looked like it did before.

I watched, yet I had no words to describe what it was that I had just witnessed. I had never seen anything like that before, and I was struck dumb by it. I saw two kids writing feverishly on either side of me, and in my need to fit in and not look stupid, I copied off their papers and used their words to help me create my own descriptions. Even as a kid, I depended on other people to give a description about events that I did not have the words for. As a result, I have seen how the mystery of life can sometimes get overrun by society’s need to establish and maintain a continuity of reality and a shared understanding of events between all of its members.

Someone else had the description of what I could not yet describe, so I used second-hand words to fill in the gap. Extrapolate this need to fit in and to belong to all collective gatherings of human life, including religion, politics, and society, and the potential foundation for illusion exists within all such bodies of experience. The description is never the actual event, yet those who did not have the experience, copy and worship the description, and overlook the event that may be still happening right under their noses. They have never developed the capacity and the willingness, to give their own unique description of an event, they are in fear of offering a different or contrary version of the event, or they have never witnessed the event itself.

In my junior year in high school, I was required to keep a daily journal, and record my insights into myself for a writing class. The problem was that I had no insight, at least as far as being able to put into words what the interior nature of my mind and life looked like. I did not spend a lot of time giving descriptions to events happening around me, and, instead, listened to others as they described their own experiences, which I either accepted and supported or rejected and judged against. But for me to give a description of the interior dimensions of my own being seemed an impossible task. I had to submit something, and in my desperation to get a decent grade I went to a bookstore, to find a book to help me to look at myself. Hugh Prather had written a book called Notes To Myself, and I stumbled upon it, and bought it. I was so empty of complete statements about myself and my life that I copied statements from Hugh’s book, and tried to personalize them so that it would not be obvious that I had copied his work. I got my passing grade, felt very relieved, and continued on my awkward, highly dysfunctional path through high school.

I was near the top of my class near graduation time, yet I was completely out of touch with the majority of my classmates, as well as with myself. I had hoped that to finally graduate from high school might change, if not end, much of my social anxiety and sense of disconnect. Of course this could not be further from the truth. When I entered my freshman year at the University of Portland in 1973, I was lost again, and I had no internal maps to guide me through the complexities of college life. The use of pot, alcohol, and relationships with emotionally diseased people continued in earnest, obscuring any clear vision of my goals, and I constructed many self-destructive road blocks that impeded all progress.

Looking back, this verbal and emotional disconnect would have been great stuff to write about in the high school class, but I was living a lie, without having the words to even describe it, and the telling of the truth to others, let alone to myself, might force me into changes that I could not embrace or consider as possibilities. The absence of personal honesty and insight, and to be verbal around it, and the inability to communicate my distress with others doomed me to a deteriorating life experience. This limited my choices so much that many days, and years, I felt trapped in a prison, with interior windows sometimes only opening to Hell. I did not even have an adequate description to communicate my hell to others, so this is the secret behind the motivation for many mysterious suicides.

A most diseased way that human beings acting out of their own wounded natures is by continuing the attacks against those that they have already hurt. It is just heartbreaking to be a witness to, or to be on the receiving end of, attacks against our souls and being by those who have already hurt us, and who cannot or will not acknowledge their own culpability. The victim is made wrong for having feelings, and for expressing their anger, fear, distress, or heartbreak. Because the perpetrator does not want to face his own bad attitudes and behavior, he lashes out, and makes wrong, those who attempt to speak up for their own life and rights. If we cannot accept responsibility for our own wayward thoughts and actions, healing and forgiveness, whatever that word may point to, remains an impossibility.

Those who remain silent about their own responsibility for and participation in their own projections of hatred, ignorance, pain, suffering, intolerance onto others, remain a fixture of our culture’s conspiracy of silence. It happens on the cultural level, and on the personal level. We are all victims of racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, and all other malicious, malevolent attitudes and behaviors, trickling down from our politicians, corporate boards, employers, family members, co-workers, acquaintances, fellow drivers on the road, or the person in the cashier’s line with us at the grocery store. The answer to these problems is mindfulness.

Cultivating Mindfulness

A man got into his car, and put Jimmy Cliff’s song “I Can See Clearly Now” onto his car audio player. He started the car and began driving down the road during a rainstorm. Not more than one block down the road, he slammed head-on into another car, critically injuring himself and the other driver. The policeman who showed up on the scene investigated the accident and noted that the driver had failed to turn his windshield wipers on. He visited him in the hospital to interview him, so that he could finish his report.  When the driver awoke from his coma, the officer asked him why he didn’t turn on his windshield wipers.

“Officer, I did everything right. I was playing the right music in the background, and I trusted that I was seeing all that I needed to see. I just did not think that I needed my windshield wipers.”

The officer immediately cited him for reckless endangerment and reckless driving. Because even though the man was unaware that he was doing something wrong didn’t make it any less wrong or destructive. Our unconscious behavior causes damage every moment of every day. Mindfulness means turning on those windshield wipers and leaving them on! As human beings, it is always raining somewhere inside of our minds or even in our heart.

The examined life demands that we take inventory on our self, and make every effort to understand the motivations behind all of our thoughts and actions in this world. The deeper we dig, the more that we learn that we are connected at a much deeper, more profound level with the rest of humanity than we previously understood. It is then that the healing we undertake as an individual can have a ripple effect upon the rest of humanity, because we all influence the collective, as well as individual, consciousness that we experience as human beings.

Mindfulness is meditation, with our eyes wide open. Insight and mindfulness work together to bring the parts of ourselves back into alignment with each other and reduce the profound impacts of brokenness and chaos in our lives.  It is a lifelong process, and personal awareness is as necessary as brushing our teeth and eating healthy foods for our overall well-being. With mindfulness cultivating the seeds planted by insight, a new world order can grow, and bring our world back into alignment with the higher orders of peace, health, and collective well-being.

Each one of us has a self-organizing principle, or we would not remain integrated and true to our sense of self, and we would dissolve into chaos, fragmentation, and insanity. For me, God is a historical name for the self-organizing principle of consciousness within each one of us, plain and simple.  The story of Genesis is a myth or parable about how the organizing principle of consciousness itself, God, unfolds in space and time, our responsibility for using the naming process to create an accurate representation for the outer world, and how it makes a more peaceful, happy experience for self and other. The world was the picture of disorganization and uncertainty; everything was formless and void. But God changed everything. His action began as His Spirit was moving. The Spirit of God was brooding, studying, examining, lingering. And only after this hovering did God take action and start bringing order. God illumined everything about the world, day after day bringing order out of chaos.   When he was satisfied, he could rest. Because God is the very organizing principle of our consciousness, then ultimately it is our personal responsibility to direct the internal construction project.

God’s actions in creation help us understand how we actually approach our lives, and the ways this awareness can help us today. For God still brings clarity to confusion. God replaces disorganization with organization. Uncertainty is replaced by certainty. Chaos is replaced by order. Those who are aimless are given new plans. Emptiness is replaced by meaning and purpose. And any sense of darkness is replaced by a new light, or understanding. This is a process that is now known as mindfulness, but it has been known to godly people for all of time.

God does not judge us, we judge ourselves, and, thus, we can become more godlike in nature and manner, once our blocks to loves awakening and awareness are acknowledged within.  There is no white bearded man in the sky, ruling from the golden throne, with angels circling his head.  But, there is wisdom within us, when it is cultivated, and our insight and true knowledge become angels to us, as they lift our spirits, and our understanding and connection with each other, the world, and all of the life upon it.

We are responsible for incorporating love, rationality, and understanding into our world views, and this successful action literally creates the lord within us that informs and guides all of our actions. We must bring order out of the chaos that we created through ignorance in our minds, and in the minds of those people who are part of our community. We must separate the light from the dark, and we can only rest when we have become one with the goodness at the center of our being, and at the center of everyone else’s being. We must become mindful, or, in the words of Alcoholics Anonymous, continue to take personal inventory, and when we miss the mark, promptly admit it and change course, rather than waste time defending our illusions.

While watching our minds both while in meditation and being mindful, we will watch many trains of thought just passing through.  While physically and emotionally engaged with the outside world, we will find many trains of thought passing by, as well.  The first thought response to any situation is usually a conditioned response, which means, to be mindful, we must take a pause before acting on each thought.  There is always another train of thought ready to take the place of the last thought, and this next train might be the better response. This is almost the equivalent of taking a deep breath before taking action. That next train has a much higher likelihood of being filled with more spiritually inspired passengers, especially when it arises from the pause moment.  We can have a happier, more peaceful and loving train of thought ride just by pausing before acting and not jumping on the first train that passes through.

A fixed truth about life is that if we can’t honestly look at where we are in life, we will never find the true motivation or foundation for change. The non-examined life always results in a damaged, dysfunctional life, and that characterizes both individuals, and the collective society that they participate in. Our misunderstanding of life, no matter how Christian we claim to be, creates infinite opportunities for chaos and disharmony with each other, and we feel betrayed by, and suffer endlessly from, all of the wounds incurred through fragmented belief systems.

We are typically healed though the power of awareness in the present moment of experience. I am to be forever walking into the unknowable present moment. Living into the truth of what that is now is the new story of my life. There is but one mind, but its truth cannot be experienced except by resting in the unknown of the present moment. No teacher will affect our salvation, we must work it out for ourselves. The God of our misunderstanding only needs our humility, patience, and sincerity to approach it successfully. The medium for healing is our own consciousness and the consciousness of our spiritually aware helpers, and this is always happening now.

Living a Mindful Life

Insight and mindfulness, meditation, walking away from self-destructive dependencies, maintaining dialogue with others, speaking my truth, fighting against oppression of others, and repression within my own heart and soul, following new paths of consciousness, working out my own salvation, while helping others on their own paths as well are ways to develop collective awareness and healing and bringing peace of mind to my own interior universe. I cannot love others, or my own life, completely, until I make peace within my own heart and soul.

The Word (peace, love, healing, wholeness, unity of life) must become flesh, and dwell within me, and within all of us.  To not have that experience is to invite all of the darkness, turbulence, and disease that the world has to offer into our individual and collective lives. Through insight and mindfulness, the difficult emotions that arise within the human experience are experienced in the most sacred, honored way of the Spirit within us.  We become more free, and honest, human beings.  And, a few of us get to experience the real miracle, where we see from that aspect of our real nature that can watch our thoughts arise, without being the self who remains unconsciously controlled by them.

Melinda will be amending this one much further.  Anyway, part of book #8.

 Each and every one of us has the capacity to be an oppressor. I want to encourage each and every one of us to interrogate how we might be an oppressor and how we might be able to become liberators for ourselves and for each other.

— Laverne Cox

The labyrinth of the human mind has many aspects to it, and has been recognized for its creative abilities, both to entrap the unwary traveler, or to provide pathways to transcendence from its wayward inclinations. If we each were truly independent beings, and not involved in an infinite collaborative effort with other members of our species, our path would be a simpler one, for we would be beholden to no one, and thus distracted or diverted by no others. Alas, we are social beings, and we have major hardwired centers in our brains that encourage us to associate with each other and to work towards our common good. It is important to understand how that biological hardware, as well as our cultural software, work together to try keep our natures directed more to order than to chaos. Yet, many of our ordering social algorithms are counter-productive, incite our unaddressed minotaurs to riot, and induce further imbalances into our cultural, as well our personal realities.

The human collective consciousness is the process whereby we have internalized the verbal understandings of all others, whereby ignorant, judgmental, limiting, obfuscating, damaging, soul-destroying concepts of self and other are socially acceptable modes for assessing and understanding the self, and the other. This are internalized, and socialized, and this knowledge becomes a collectively shared experience. And, we all know that everybody else knows what we know, while we know what everybody else knows.

Through a process that has existed since verbal consciousness first formed in humanity, we develop verbal constructs to represent the outside world in our own internal universe. Yet, none of these internalized assessments are 100 percent accurate, nor could they ever be, even though the entirety of human consciousness now shares in the illusion that what they do represent what is actually out there as represented by their current misunderstanding of their fellow human being and their current relationship to the other. And what exactly, does despair, optimism, faith, and hope look like? We chase their true meaning with our words. How can our infinite spiritual heritage ever be adequately measured through words? So we use verbal constructs to oppress, repress, and deny the other, all the while unconsciously honoring the culturally inculcated process of mutual oppression and repression of feminine energy and the Divine.

The human collective consciousness has been called many other names by seers and seekers over the millennia. The word “Maya” has been given as the name from Hinduism and Buddhism for the tendency to both individually and collectively create a fragmented perceptual universe, where in truth there is only the unity of the Universe. In the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, he mentions that, “My father’s house/mansion has many rooms,” “My kingdom is not of this world,” and, “Be in the world, don’t be of the world,” which point to the fact that there are two possibilities for living, as a sleeping being in a dark, disfigured world, or as an awakening being in a multi-dimensional human relationship with infinity. The sleeping beings are those who live in the world of Maya without being aware of the many illusions of thought that dominate their minds and lives.

This adaptation and acculturation process has become so ingrained in consciousness, so accepted, so standardized, so normalized that the individual who even casually practices its dark side continues to contribute to the collective imprisonment of all of mankind through this process. The human collective consciousness informs our understanding of our own lives, how we see others, and how to use it’s often times twisted knowledge of poor self-esteem and negative judgments of others to help inform our decisions about actions we can take in our own lives. The human collective consciousness can provide to us both a blessing, and a curse, depending on the messages that we mine and successfully apply to our lives from conformance to its social principles. But, regardless of the messages that we hear and apply, we are still directly influenced by all messages, no matter how much in conflict that they may be with each other, until we have had enough insight into this process to heal ourselves of unconscious adherence to its confusing, conflicting principles. We each have an internal pendulum which swings gently, or erratically, between all of the poles, and our shared consciousness reflects those sometimes divisive inner rhythms.

Our human collective consciousness is how people make gains for themselves, at the expense of others, through socially acceptable forms of violence, which we call comedy. The hullabaloo at the 2022 Academy Awards show between Will Smith and Chris Rock is the perfect example. Badinage, persiflage, repartee, and mutual put downs are part of the tool kit that the human race employs to keep us focused on the failings of others, while also building up our own sense of worth. We laugh at the acceptable insanity that manifests itself through this disparity in self valuations. The common knowledge game is a form of consensus social understanding used in collective consciousness since humans started using language to communicate with their peers. The lemming effect has also been with us from the beginning, and its most powerful energy takes the form of peer pressure. The interplay of these different cultural phenomena create our individual realities. We are both ourselves as individuals and as parts of the society whole.

 

The Common Knowledge Game and The Lemming Effect

An item of information is common knowledge if all of the relevant citizens of a community know it to be so (it is mutual knowledge) and all of the citizens know that all other citizens know it and all other citizens know that all other citizens know that all other citizens know it, and so on. This is much more than simply saying that something is known by all, but also implies that the fact that what is known by me is also known by all, etc. Thus, common knowledge implies not only that we all know some piece of information, but can also be absolutely confident that the rest know it, and that the rest know that we know it, and so on.

Effectively, there are two sides to the Common Knowledge Game (CKG), dark and light. What sets up the darker side of the CKG in our minds and hearts is continuous internal access to our negative assessments, or judgements of others, and of our self, both of our physical form and our spiritual essence. These negative assessments also include our perceptions of what we believe others think negatively about us, as well, which is another self-defeating component of the CKG. This becomes one of the pillars, albeit a dark one, for the CKG, and the reason for the spiritual imprisonment for all of us. What might set up a liberating side of the CKG is the potential energy of a shared belief that we are all good people at heart, and/or that we are all practicing the spiritual understanding that the word “namaste” represents. These internalized collective beliefs are social processes of consciousness that may become culturally inculcated into our awareness, and thus we all might share in the benefits, and the detriments, of collective consciousness as well as collective unconsciousness.

I first consciously encountered the darker side of the CKG in my employment with the US Postal Service from 1975 to 1985. There were several boundary conditions of the Common Knowledge Game for my continuing employment with that agency. Many of my co-workers, as well as myself, worked there because we felt that we could do no other work, and that we did not have the skills, qualification, competency, or motivation to try anything else. Everybody knew that truth including members of the management team, not only about our selves, but also about all of our co-workers, which in turn, was what the co-workers understood about each other, as well. It was part of shared story that we told to ourselves and joked about with each other on many occasions.

As an apprentice electrician in 1989, I also encountered this common knowledge limitation. I was an electrician, whom due to the requirements of the Local 48 union apprenticeship, was required to rotate through various employers to diversify my experience. In one company, I was a highly regarded electrician, but then at another, I was ignored and disparaged. The foreman made sure to keep me in the most menial of jobs, and put down “humor” permeated the exchanges between many long-term workers and those not considered to be company insiders, which was me and a few other new hires.  When I was laid off, a short time into my employment with this company, I was told by my foreman, as he gave me my lay off slip, “Don’t be so fucking good Bruce, you need to learn how to just blend in with everybody else as they could give a shit about what you know or what your skills are.”

              In addition to the CKG, many of the people I worked with also shared a common foe, chemical dependency, which adds several critical internal self-defeating calculations to the CKG. These baseline understandings helped to define my relationship to the Post Office career, as well. I really enjoyed my time working as a machine clerk, because of the fast pace and the fact that it was a lifetime guaranteed job. These kept me from feeling too bad about my personal and employment decisions. Even though I felt trapped by my own insecurities and dysfunctions, I escaped that and delayed the inevitable crush of despair through the use of drugs and alcohol.

Consider the example of a sexually abused woman. There are many common knowledge parameters to be considered here, but the following are several items to consider, from the women’s perspective: Depending on her religious upbringing, she may believe…

• I must be subservient to the male, whatever he says, I must obey. I dare not raise my voice against any man
• I will bring shame to my family by being truthful, so I must keep silent about the abuse.
• Nobody would believe my word against a powerful man, so I must keep silent
• I should have known better than to wear that dress, or to place myself in such a defenseless position.
• I should have known better than to be in this person’s presence, and it is my fault that I was attacked
• If I speak out against this man, I will be crushed by him, and be considered a whore, or a person of poor morals by others.

And on and on it could go. This is the foundational logic embedded within the common knowledge game that would keep a woman silent in the face of sexual abuse by another.

Consider competitive work environments where there are several jealous office workers seeking to demean a common foe, be it a boss or a motivated co-worker, through practicing racism, sexism, religious persecution, etc. This can be several employees practicing typical mutually inaccurate assessments of a party not currently in their presence, such as through agism, racism, and/or sexism. These behaviors are also typical of what happens in big companies, politics, high school, or in church.

The participants will not attack unless they are sure that the other will attack at exactly the same time, as nobody wants to be the lone attacker, becoming vulnerable and thus expose their own intent for aggression. This is indicative of the “mob mind” and how it acts in the real world. The first person sends out a “feeler” (verbal exchange of internalized culturally inculcated negative assessments of others, or even self) to the other parties with the message, such as, “You know, I am really unhappy with Mr. X, he is problematic.” Yes, we warm up for the attack, by gently degrading the third-party, while awaiting the others reply within the group physically or emotionally present, which, hopefully affirms our intent. Our verbal or written means of attempting to communicate with the other conspirators may be misinterpreted, so we initially have no collective security in adopting the attack mode. If however, the message of attack is received simultaneously by others within the group, which it does in common knowledge modes of thought, then the attack is on. Note that all parties already know the message. If they are all males and sexist, white supremacists and racists, or fundamentalist religious fanatics, the judgements against others is already built into their shared social algorithms. They all knew in advance that the other attackers had the message as well, because it is common knowledge that others share at least some of their negative perceptions, and they will attack the other, because they always have before, and they have already prepared their internal fortifications, as well as their verbal and social weapons for such an experience.

This is the classic attack/defense posture or mechanism that the entirety of the human race is now participating in. Anybody who has worked in the construction trades, or in work areas dominated by men, know this process quite well. The terms repartee, badinage, bantering, persiflage, etc. are the kind names given to this culturally accepted and sometimes revered process, whereby we lightly and without intentional malice impugn the dignity and reputation of others. We call this humor, and some may feel almost hurt when others do not engage in this behavior with us. In schools, the wimps, greasers, jocks, nerds, eggheads, goths, transsexuals, homosexuals, hippies, outcasts, or whatever name that defines the “out group” outside of the popular, socially accepted standards of behavior that characterize a grouping, can be quite susceptible to aggression, antagonism, and bullying. I think that everyone who has attended school has had experience with this phenomenon. It follows standards paths of aggression, hostility, belittlement, and debasement, and somehow the aggressor becomes elevated in stature, at the expense of the victim. This has been an accepted standard of behavior, though we are finally awakening to darker aspects of this by identifying hostile work environments, and instituting regulations for reducing persecution, racial discrimination, age discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual discrimination in the workplace.

A great allegory for the social behavior of humans is that of the story of the life cycle of some populations of lemmings. Lemmings are little rodents that live near the cold northern Arctic regions. They are focused animals by nature, meeting only to mate and then going their separate ways, but like all rodents, they have a high reproductive rate when food is plentiful. When population density becomes too high, some of the lemming species migrate in large quantities and since they can swim, they choose to cross the water in search of a new habitat. Lemmings have been known to follow each other as they plunge off the edge of cliffs into the water below. Even though lemmings have been found to be swimming migrants rather than victims of collective suicidal ideation, the myth of mass suicide is still called the Lemming Effect.

Regardless of the lemmings real intentions, the lemming story has become a metaphor for people who go along unquestioningly with a group, with potentially dangerous consequences. The Lemming Effect is an innate psychological phenomenon, a survival trait, an inborn instinct in the majority of people. We see this happening in many occurrences from bad collective decisions, such as investing in the dot com boom of the late 1990s, craving the latest Apple iPhone releases, excessive alcohol consumption at a party, following theological assertions like the blood of Jesus is the sacrifice to God that saves our soul, to obsessing over modern day automobile and fashion trends. This Lemming Effect enables entire segments of a society to lose their sense of judgment and the application of personal wisdom all at the same time. It can be linked to the “mob mind” phenomenon inherent within collective consciousness itself. If you have ever been a member in good standing in the problem drinking division at the local bar, you have intimate understanding of the suspension of wisdom and good judgement with your drinking decisions.

We don’t realize how often our decisions are based on other people’s behavior. The Lemming Effect depicts a negative side of the conscious following of the crowd, especially when following leads to falling off the cliff. In real life situations it could mean losses of money, self identity, and slower spiritual development. As it might sound easy to grasp the concept, it is difficult to notice in our own actual behavior. Moreover, social togetherness is sometimes very pleasant and valuable, for instance at a rock concert where one man starts to dance, then more and more people join in, until massive amounts of people join the dance. It is a pleasant example of a positive manifestation of the lemming effect. It is all part of the process of making our unconscious parts more conscious, which must also bring awareness that mass behavior does not always result in positive experience for the individual.

The lemming effect is not that far from pleasant, life affirming social togetherness, but the effect has some potential negative effects that we need to be aware of at all times. It is healthy and wise to participate in social movements, but we must not lose our heads in the emotions. We must be critical of the movements of the crowd that are going against our vision and values. Also, we must do the research, and even experiment with unpopular ideas, before deciding that any massive new movement is for us. It is important not to ignore the “leading edge” movements, because accidentally standing on the way of the movement could bring harm to us or others. On the other hand, we could have a very good experience with the lemming effect, if played well. This is one of the aspects where an aware individual can play the common knowledge game and “lemming effect” to maximum personal benefit, without changing the collective rules of engagement. Our politicians, marketers and advertisers, and religious leaders have harnessed the power of the “lemming effect”, and our entire world civilization continues to be manipulated, for good or for evil, by these practitioners.

As Krishnamurti suggests, it’s possible to think that we’re spiritually and mentally healthy because we share our mistaken values and understandings with those around us. Collectively, our ill minds create social circles, or society that is itself ill, and we consider ourselves healthy because we see our values reflected in our spiritually sick fellow travelers.

Living in the Human Collective Consciousness

Now that we have thoroughly investigated human collective consciousness, we have found there are many unconscious or unwritten rules for engagement between all members of society, in addition to the conscious and/or written ones. The unconscious rules have been with us from the beginning, well before the introduction of mega-cities and civilizations, when mankind first falteringly attempted to both explore and to define inner experience. The conscious rules or laws have been developed over the last two hundred or more generations with the intention of establishing and maintaining the best order and harmony for the ever enlarging populations congregating together into the structure of cities or settlements. Hammurabi’s code of conduct and the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament are two great examples from our distant past of the documentation and implementation of rules defining acceptable conduct. The human race may continue to evolve in spirit and in truth as long as it can provide a minimum foundation of safety and security for all of its members, so it is important to remember that not all requirements to conform are misguided or evil in intent.

In environments like prisons, the education system, the military, and larger groups up to, and including, American society, behavioral decisions based on private information are almost always weaker than behavioral decisions based on common knowledge. The latter has more binding power, because, in effect, the prisoners themselves end up enforcing the warden’s (or society’s) rules. Even if you privately believe that you and your fellow prisoners could escape, so long as you believe that everyone knows that you will be punished for breaking the rules, then you do not believe that you will receive any support from your fellow prisoners (fellow citizens or friends). It is irrational to even raise the subject with your fellow prisoners, as you will mark yourself as someone who is either too stupid or too dangerous not to recognize what everyone else knows that everyone else knows. And because everyone is making a similar calculation, no one ever makes an escape attempt and the common knowledge grows stronger over time, as does the no-escaping binding attitudes. This is why public punishment has been so widely used throughout history.

Because of the Common Knowledge Game and Lemming Effect, there is enormous power in making a public spectacle out of information. We can’t resist crowds. This lesson in behavioral influence – the crowd doesn’t just need to see the event, the crowd needs to see the crowd seeing the event – is why religious revival events, rock concerts, and so many of our modern social institutions, from political campaigns to American Idol – are staged in front of live audiences. When you sit in front of your TV set and watch, say, a national political convention, you are infinitely more engaged with the event when you see a crowd than when you don’t. We can’t help ourselves. It doesn’t even matter if the live audience is faked and we know that the audience is faked; have you ever listened to a sitcom without a laugh track? It’s just not as funny. The fact is that humans are social animals. We are hard-wired to look for and respond to common knowledge, and smart people—from political leaders to religious leaders to business leaders and concert organizers—have taken advantage of this for years.

What happens in the diseased family structure (alcoholism and drug addiction, physical and sexual abuse, psychological abuse of all types) in many situations of discipline and control exactly parallel the common knowledge game? Eventually, the children learn not to attempt to act out, or break free from, the oppressive qualities of an abusive parent, or parents, their church and its interpretation of religious thought, and their educational experience. Breaking the spirit of the abused child, and making sure that other members know that such punishment will also come their way keeps children under control, but also victimized and traumatized. Children entering the school system where bullies are allowed to run free get to experience this process once again, in a bigger social setting. And, children who attend a church where the dignity of the individual is constantly degraded and threatened with hell through their religious philosophy also will feel the horrific abuse of the common knowledge game. They live in fear that If anyone were to speak out against our oppressors, they would be punished severely, and they would be smacked down.

There are two great acts of insanity that members of our family, and our culture, engage in, which are integral to the Conspiracy Of Silence, and the Common Knowledge Game of human perception:

1. There is the perception that if an authoritative political or religious leader or family member brings harm or damage to another, the victim must have somehow deserved it, and they should not expect an explanation, change of behavior, or apology from the aggressor. In fact, the victim of the aggression will be judged and punished even more harshly by calling a foul, or claiming harm, from the offensive behavior.
2. There is a perception that we all are of questionable origin, and value, except for, maybe, our self, depending upon who we are unfairly comparing our self to. This is a classic component of the Common Knowledge Game. Depending on the needs of the tribe we belong to, and how much we are acculturated within the group, we may devalue our self and all others, until we heal, and find our own unique voice and true value.

Our Common Knowledge Game keeps all of us in some sort of order, albeit one that affirms the false truth that we are all broken human beings, with our only hope for salvation lying with chaotic, and insane, orders of unreality that continue to be inculcated into our collective consciousness. In other words, unless we march to the drummer of our religious and cultural past, we will be judged, persecuted, marginalized, and otherwise thrown to the wolves, with little hope for our own redemption. Woe to the brave individual that strikes out on his own, and attempts to find a new way of being in this world of chaos, distraction, and torment.

Implicit bias and unconscious discrimination against others is an autonomic response, and shields the practitioner from their own malfeasance of attitude and behavior. This is the unconscious knowledge component which supports and advises the common knowledge game. Those who believe that they are the chosen of God, to the diminishment and detriment of others of differing racial, ethnic, or national origin, are promoters and perpetrators of the biggest, most heinous lie ever told. We all are either the chosen of God, or none of us are. White supremacist pseudo-Christians use their filiality to Judaism through the Jewish prophet Jesus to justify their illusions of importance and placement in the eyes of their own mistaken understanding of the divine energy of our universe.

If you watch the news or get on social media, it’s easy to see our country is in a downward spiral, where telling the truth is no longer a virtue, but instead it is bastardized, and spun into alternate reality fantasies, to be just another tool to be abused by propagandists. Propagandists are masters at manipulating fear, distrust, lies, half-truths, and specious reasoning, which also help to create new channels of control in the Common Knowledge Game.

How to Step Outside the Game

We are all alive today due to the self-organizing principles of life itself. In manufacturing and industrial processes, in our planet Earth and its journey through the solar system, and even in the human mind, we bear witness to the wonders and mysteries of self-organizing systems. The human brain has evolved into a capable predictive mechanism since the introduction of language as a tool for communication. Words are used for the measure of our experience, and are now our primary avenue for communication with each other. Words are forever containers for energy, and are not the actual energy itself, being only pointers towards that energy. Yet the introduction of words into the conscious void of the ancient human being must have been the most transformational, apocalyptic event in human history, probably being more important than the harnessing of the power of fire and water for the creation of the conditions for safety, security, and even society itself. The development and the evolution of human language itself has had the effect of bringing the hope for new or enhanced order to the chaos inherent within the unconscious human experience, at least through the structure of words used to represent the world that one is experiencing.

If establishing or maintaining order is our concern, we can effectively channel all relevant knowledge into intelligent systems of control that will maintain maximum stability wherever necessary, but only under those conditions where we understand most or all of the variables. The basic process control theory underlying all modern industrial and manufacturing systems has an equivalent in the human mind, where we use feedback and feedforward information loops for refining and maintaining order (mindfulness, personal inventory, and meditation). For humans, though our primary system of control is through the laws of our society and of our religions, we have not yet developed the understanding of all of the boundary conditions for our human experience.

In mystical Christianity, the Word was meant to represent the spiritually realized person, whose very being and words, come from the Truth as it exists in this eternal moment. Historically, some religious interpreters mistakenly believed that the Word becomes flesh in only one human form (Jesus), and dwelt among us some 2,000 years ago. The Word actually points to a loving, non-verbal reality, far above and beyond the limiting verbal beliefs and insane actions of man in the world, and it also points to the human beings who through all time have been able to access that energy and express it in new, unique, loving ways, while practicing its universal principles in all of their affairs.

The Buddha had his own ideas about what constitutes mental health, and by his definition anyone who isn’t well on the way to Enlightenment is insane. Quite how literally he meant it when he said, “All humans are mad,” is hard to say, but when he looked at ordinary people like us going about their daily busines s he saw a world out of balance because it is composed of those same off-kilter individuals. He viewed this imbalance as a form of perversion, inversion, and/or derangement. He understood that we, collectively, misunderstand the world that we live in, misunderstand ourselves, thus we all end up living in a virtual reality of delusion, confusion, and distortion.

Changes must happen within consciousness itself, and the “common knowledge game” that we all unconsciously play must be examined, and re-examined again and again, until we are no longer subjugated to its darker sides of oppression and repression of human spirit.

The healthy, sane, spiritually inspired individual steps outside of the Common Knowledge Game, and practices seeing him or herself through a new lens with few or no verbal constructs from our personal pasts, and our culturally damaged memories. This is the only place where a heart-centered experience of the other becomes possible. Ultimately, if there are any words to be shared about what is experienced, it serves only as a temporary bridge to understanding, to be discarded at the earliest possible moment, as truth reveals itself moment to moment, and not just through the shared verbal constructs of a dead past that may have arisen. When two people are observing the same beautiful sunset, there is little need for words, other than to affirm one’s joy in witnessing it.

To ultimately transform the Common Knowledge Game of mutual imprisonment, we need to become aware of how we are seeing others seeing ourselves. Changing the way we allow our own perceptions of how others expect us to behave opens the door out of our own uniquely created prison cells. This is not to say that others’ intentions are always bad or nefarious towards us, as most of us want what is best for us as individuals, and hope that our best expectations for ourselves are also good for others, as well. To see how we have ignorantly been controlled by others, or, more insidiously, how we have used our perceptions of how others expect us to behave and believe, grants insight into the whole process, and opens the door to a new way of seeing life, and being in life with others in more supportive, holistic, healthy manners. Our words can then carry all of the potential of the love behind the collective good heart of mankind.

It is also of greatest importance to realize that no man, or woman, is an island in this vast universe, and that our perception of harmony and balance is inextricably intertwined with the rest of humanity. No matter how healed, balanced, or empowered we believe that we are becoming, we are eternally linked with the rest of humanity, and the universe, in our attempts to create order or balance out of our own unique versions of the collective chaos known as human knowledge. The temptation to follow the herd, or to swim with the lemming, is built right into the foundational nature of our socialized existence.

If we really are ready to embark on the new paths of consciousness, we must be prepared to leave our old minds, and ideas, behind. The Common Knowledge Game must be seen for what it is, and its capacity to diminish our sense of self and other must be dealt with consciously. The CKG has become so inculcated into societal norms that we must break free from the herd effect, the mob mind, that would have us make self destructive choices while being carried by their rivers of ignorance and darkness.

When we finally see the complete matrix of the CKG within our own consciousness and awareness, we will no longer be unconsciously controlled by its often times imprisoning parameters. In the seeing of the matrix, is the liberation of the mind from its bondage to other people’s opinions, and freedom from our own wayward ideas, as well. To finally break free of the Common Knowledge Game and the Lemming Effect, is find our uncommon knowledge, where wonder, awe, love of each other, love of self, love of earth and all of its animals, and the desire to help alleviate all suffering in the world, spontaneously arises within consciousness itself, and finally guides us to our own unique promised land. We finally can leave the world of our pseudo knowns, to explore the real world where newness, love, and truth’s unfolding goodness predominates.

Repetitive?

Chapter : Empathy, and The Mystery of the Path Between You And Me

 

Life’s journey is forever like a dotted line pathway.  It is the quality of our connections with each other that fills in the space between the dots.  Empathy is the major vehicle for our consciousness to transcend our apparent differences, enabling each of us to connect the dots in a mutually affirming manner.  It is only through each other that we can see who we really are. I am you, and you are me, and together we are everything, apart, we are still chained together by whatever separates us.  We find our shared meaning, which links us together on our journey in Spirit—-Elisha Scott

Humans are social creatures; we survive through our connections to others. But because of the lemming effect and common knowledge game, the potential for both corruption and healing exist within our social connections. Another facet of the most fundamental truths of our existence is the extraordinary potential for the depth of our connections to each other, and how strongly that connection influences all of us, for good and for bad.  If we learn to collectively embrace this universal fact, we would have a clue as to how to reduce the incidences of disease and distress in our world without just tattooing more medical technology upon our body and souls.

Modern America faces several problems, including COVID-19, cultural divisiveness, addictions, obesity, cancer, and gun violence. These pandemics are creating more opportunities for eruptions of drama and anxiety, which interbreeds with any potentially unhealed pain and suffering already inherent within our lives. We must become more conscious of how the unconscious actions of others, and our own unfulfilled healing response, tend to introduce more traumatic influences into our own lives.  Following a healing path means being spiritually present for others, while recognizing and transforming both individually and collectively, all internalized trauma dramas.

Love, hate, and indifference are three terms that we use to help describe the quality of our relationships with each other. To some extent, in various proportions, all of us employ these three qualities of energy exchange in our lives, depending on the person and/or the situation involved. As human beings we experience love and hatred as powerful emotions, which guide all subsequent feelings and perceptions in predefined directions. Love is an open system of friction free energy exchange and hate is more of a closed, attenuated system of energy exchange, both of which bind us to each other, in easily identifiable, though divergent manners.  As we know, love is the open channel that compassion may flow through, while hatred is the closed channel that traumatizes both the receiver, and the giver, of that energy.

Indifference is a quality of attention that attempts to keep everybody and everything separate from the observer, and the emotionally detached individual is choosing to live in a closed system, or spiritual vacuum. Those practicing total indifference live in an isolated world, with little real emotional connection with anybody or anything other than their own emotions, thoughts and feelings. Indifference is often times the result of traumatic influences, and results in the emotional and spiritual oppression of others, and a repression of the personal spirit, as well. For most normal people, indifference is only applied to special situations, and is not applied to a complete life experience. Yet, the quality of indifference gives the practitioner the illusory sense of having no personal accountability to that which is being witnessed. Personal responsibility for a collectively shared error in the heart is denied, and the potential for a shared healing experience is negated.

What is Empathy?

Empathy, in both its positive and negative expressions, is a name for the mechanism for transporting emotional energy to create a form of resonance or connection between sentient beings, and is always in play in both love and hate relationships. In positive empathy, energy flows freely in both directions, between the “giver” and the “receiver.” There is a shared sense of the expansion of the self. In negative empathy, energy flow is uneven, and dominated by one party, potentially resulting in forms of oppression of the other, and repression of aspects of the self, by the giver, and, potentially, the repression of aspects of the self by the receiver. There is a strong sense of the contraction of the self by at least one party in this energy exchange.

Contemporary research into neuroscience tells us that our brains, like those of other primates, contain mirror neurons. These neurons are triggered in our own brains when someone else is sad, angry, or happy, and those mirror neurons, in coordination with other pre-cognitive and cognitive functions, helps us to feel what we would experience if we were in that person’s place.  If our experiences are similar enough, we can empathize in a way that promotes a connection, which can be soothing to the other person. The effort to understand someone else, when made in good faith, can go a long way towards helping them feel better and even, sometimes, to change their behaviors. This can be considered to be a collaboration between the spirit of the individuals in communication. The changing of another’s behavior is not the conscious intention of empathy, though most find that through the empathetic connection each participant is taken beyond the former boundaries of their understanding of self and other.

Human beings are usually quite empathetic beings. Studies are showing that all animals, especially those mammalian in nature, share in this often times sublime characteristic. It is very difficult to harm another person if we can sense the suffering that they are presently experiencing, or that we may actually be causing them.

Empathy has been found to have not just a positive aspect to it, but that empathy can also drag an unsuspecting empath into the ditch with someone who may be of low consciousness. It might be termed negative empathy, which is a state of being so sensitive to other people’s experiences that we become overwhelmed by their suffering, to the point where we begin to suffer ourselves. This has the opposite effect of the collaboration that occurs through positive empathy, instead becoming an alliance of shared mutual personal pain, which eventually results in new forms of emotional isolation. The extreme form of this empathy is the stigmata syndrome, where the empath takes on so much of the suffering energy and experience of a hated or a treasured person, that they manifest in their own bodies and minds the wounds and symptoms of the person that they have become obsessed with.

Empathy, positive or negative, is one of several powerful transmission vehicles for human collective consciousness to be carried to us as individuals, as well as acting as a return vehicle for our individual experiences to be delivered back to the collective field. Collective consciousness contains the history of the knowledge that human beings have accrued over eons of time. It contains a vast matrix of dedicated/fixed pathways of responses to all manors of environmental and social interactions. This is the entirety of our species’ training which has been transmitted to, or handed down to, countless generations of human beings, through parental interactions, education, religious training, and the lifelong social and emotional training gained by our continuous interface with other members of our species . Yet, as so much of this common knowledge is a result of incomplete or inaccurate information, and is the accumulation of all the theories embedded in our cultural past. If we act in a knee jerk reaction, or unconscious manner, to any societal or environmental stimulus, our response is all too likely to be dated, and inappropriate. The Judeo/Christian religious metaphor here is that our “first born” thought may need to be “sacrificed” so as to make way for the truth of the moment.

Hate and Love

Constructive anger is spontaneous, arising from being an active witness of the present moment, and is always relevant, productive, wakes up the oppressed and repressed spirit, and is helpful in generating extra motivational energy for constructive engagement with a world needing change. Constructive anger gives all parties involved an opportunity to share in the perception of a wrong or an injustice, and share in a plan to right the wrongs. Hatred and its divisive energy, on the other hand, has much deliberation behind it.

Hatred arises from the historical deposits of unresolved anger or repressed pain and suffering within our memories, and looks at punishment and/or the destruction of others as a primary objective. Hatred develops from the collective deposits of darkness that our culture has handed down to us over many generations, as well as also arising from our personal painful and negative memories incurred over the course of our lives. Hatred, both collectively and individually acquired, becomes entrenched as a mostly unconscious dark power broker within our minds, keeping each of us pilloried to the past, and emotionally chained to the object(s) of our hatred. We are no longer free to respond to each new moment as it unfolds, instead substituting old patterns of self-defeating and oppressive responses to others, while repressing the desire to connect with peace and love.

According to the latest research on the human brain and its capacity to form perceptions, the brain works by “predictive coding.” It integrates new information based on the beliefs provided by old information. A typical human being moving through the world is not just passively perceiving sensory inputs through the senses, but actually assembles a model in the mind based on what is expected to be seen. This mental setup allows the perceiver to move unbothered through the world, taking in each detail without too much analysis. The brain has been found to have the capacity to over predict, at times expecting something to be there that is not. That expectation can, literally, create a self-hypnotic suggestion, and a non-existent thing can be perceived as if it was really there. This fact has been verified by mystics, sages, and now, quantum theorists, so it should not be passed over like an unpopular dish at dinner time. Historically, the human race has fallen prey to toxic leadership.

As human beings in social environments, we have come to expect that our leaders will lead with integrity and morality, though inevitable weaknesses will occasionally make themselves evident.  If our leader is of high enough integrity, we may even want to pattern ourselves after them, should we also aspire to any leadership roles in our own future, including taking charge of our own lives.  Patterning after others who are successful is considered to be a normal and natural response, while also being an evolutionary adaptation.  To survive, and prosper as a species, we became willing to adopt attitudes and perform actions that others may have succeeded with in the past, as well as remaining open to any new unfoldment in our understanding that will complement our unique role.

Yet, there are many times when we pattern ourselves after an adored member of the status quo, or the institutionalized understanding of the past, and we may be led down deceptive paths of reasoning, with resultant poor social and personal health decisions and outcomes.  We may become subtly, or profoundly, traumatized through these relationships. “What would Jesus do?” can be a benign question, and may even lead the Christian oriented questioner down a more spiritually centered path, as long it does not lead to more conformity to dogma or the practicing of other systems of traumatic oppression such as the religion’s historical institutionalized misanthropy, including misogyny and racism.

We all suffered because of the collective narrative of hatred being shared by the victims and their accusers. The only way to permanently remove spiritual eyesores from our vision is to heal our inner sight, realizing that profound changes in our own consciousness eventually impacts our world, remembering that, “All that we will ever see unto eternity is ourselves.” Because our minds are inextricably intertwined with the collective consciousness of the world, we will continue to have ample opportunities to bring healing to the world, and to our sense of self.

What can be most difficult to consider is the truth that people that habitually hate others also hate themselves. Some may try to hide from self-loathing and hatred through false narratives of their own greatness, while deriding and demeaning all unlike self. The multitude of lies and deceptive behavior, and the need to manipulate others perceptions show an absolute need to hide from the truth a diminished sense of self.  This is manifested through continuously projecting out of this mind, by accusing the innocent, and the guilty, of one’s own personal shortcomings, deceptions, and criminality.

This communication style is absolutely crazy making for any rational, intelligent human being, and the witness to his expression can feel like the fabric of sanity is being ripped apart right before their eyes. For those not under a hypnotic trance, this spiritual depravity is easily perceived, and felt. The unwary watcher, in an involuntary and forced relationship with this disfigured being, through negative empathy can inadvertently share in others hatred of self. This is another manifestation of the stigmata syndrome, where the entrained observer inadvertently takes on the negative energy of the person under observation, and through the mirror neuron phenomenon, or negative empathy, share in the disfigured spirit that this darkness continues to manifest.

Mindfulness allows for us to see what is immediately before us, and choose between the knowns of the past, and the unknown present. Forgiveness is an openness to the mystery of the present. Forgiveness, however, does not forget or excuse the offender from his misdeeds, especially while the offender continues abhorrent behavior. Forgiveness releases the practitioner from the damages of incurring negative perceptions of others. We still must act consciously and decisively against all forces which continue to imperil our lives, our family’s lives, and the life of our planet. We must continue to be willing to speak truth to power, whether the power is in the White House, or in our own hearts.

Love unifies, while hate fragments and traumatizes. As human beings, we must be conscious enough to choose the best way to present ourselves to the world, and to ourselves, as we face the challenges of the insanity within our world. Our world is in greatest need of hearts that are expanding through mutual positive empathy, rather than contracting through negative empathy, or indifference. We did not create the world as it is now, we cannot control it, nor can we cure it. But we can evolve, and, collectively, we can address the disease of the spirit that is dominating our world civilization, and which continues to bring devastation to our world, and to all of the life upon it.

We must sacrifice our own misunderstandings of who we mistakenly thought that we were, and who and what we thought the rest of creation is, allowing for the new universal truth to resurrect our understanding of self and other. Failure to do so will make us more vulnerable to unconsciousness, where the process of negative empathy, and in the extreme, collective suffering and the stigmata syndrome, may expose us to spiritual chaos, and potentially death. The world will always be reminding us how far we are, collectively, from healing. We do our best to remain engaged with the world, while not allowing the world to overrun our morals, ethics, and spiritual intentions. And we need not spiritually die because of the “sins” of the world, whether it is toxic capitalism, toxic masculinity (and patriarchy), toxic politics, or toxic religion. We always retain freedom of choice, and must exercise and accept personal responsibility for those choices, in all of our lives. If our choices bring harm to ourselves or to each other, we are free to choose again. We make amends wherever possible after any error in our presentation, which keeps our empathy channels fully opened.

We must remain spiritually vigilant as we continue to be a conscious presence engaging with a world still dominated by toxic masculinity, toxic politics, toxic capitalism, and toxic religion. We must be able to access our anger, not hatred, as we address the injustices wrought upon the human soul through the ignorance and toxicity of others. Love will be our guardian as we make the difficult confrontations with those who do not respect, or honor, the wholeness of life on our Mother Earth that we all share together in love and in truth.

Achieving Higher Consciousness

As we see the totality of the movement of thought as time, and its nature of keeping us tethered to a past, or to a future that is always an extension of this past, we can free ourselves from those illusory controls. We can live more of a life based on the ever unfolding now, or present moment, thus unleashing vast reservoirs of intuition and spiritual power.

Each of us are beings with infinite potential. Yet, each of us must break free from the conditioning of our personal past, and our cultural past. There are four pillars supporting higher consciousness, which are:

• Negative: through negating what is not real, seeing what might be real,
• Positive: through constantly affirming the goodness inherent in life, reading the writings of mystical poets and saints, and being a grateful participant of life, we may experience Grace.
• Transformative: through re-creating or re-birthing ourselves through educational means and/or mystical connection, and bringing forth a new person, or our new understanding of our self, into the world, in the image and likeness of a more universal consciousness.
• Creative: developing and/or expressing our innate ability to co-create with the Universe, by expressing ourselves through art, music, writing, or other means. We must access the deepest of desires to transcend the boundaries of self, and to reimagine our existence.

We must travel new paths of consciousness, letting go of all controls that keep us tethered to the past, with its incomplete perceptions and understandings. In the end, there is no teacher who will effect our salvation, for it is a personal journey, where we must accept responsibility for the totality of our lives, and make all necessary adjustments in course that will take us to our spiritual goals. We can actually rebirth ourselves, into a new understanding that the Universe has birthed itself in an infinitude of forms through the portal of Mother Earth, and each of us is “one verse” of the song of creation.

The further along the path of Truth and Love that we travel, the more that we understand that, all we will ever see, unto eternity, is extensions of our Self. How we see our Self today determines the quality of Love and Truth that we manifest in our lives. How we see our Self today determines how much spiritual power can be brought to our damaged planet, which is now dependent upon us. How we see our Self today determines how much, as awakening beings, we are able to bring healing to our shared, damaged human consciousness. There is no power in Heaven or on Earth greater than “I am.”

Hatred, indifference, positive or negative empathy, love, healing, or mutual destruction are parts of our infinite potentiality. The choice is ours to make for our own unique life experience, when we have become more healed and conscious There is a Silence within each of us attempting to inform our consciousness as to how to best exercise our free will. What is our choice today? The Silence continues to reach out to the turbulence within our world, and to bring balance back to our unbalanced soul.

Chapter : Anger, Self Awareness, and Mastery

But you can’t get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don’t have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in – then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home.
—-Ann Lamott

Anger is not a shortcoming to be denied, but a creative force that tells us when something is wrong.
– Austin Channing Brown

There are those purporting to be spiritual teachers and advisors, who are admonishing their followers to abhor using human emotions with their dealings with the public. Specifically, I frequently hear that a requirement for maintaining spiritual integrity is to not express anger in any form, and instead to substitute “loving thoughts” and “forgiving actions.” Really?

By the way, have you ever noticed how so many of the so-called spiritual savants, or gurus from foreign lands, do not have families? What is the real teaching here, do you think? It is so much easier to talk love and light for all beings, especially when one does not have to deal directly with the most challenging of human relationships. From the middle of 1987 to early 1988, I spent over 6 hours a day in meditation and prayer, and I had very few problems with my relationships with people. I lived in perfect peace and harmony within myself. Also, I had no children, or nobody to call me on my isolation and (potential) loneliness. All in all, it was beautiful for me, yet totally disengaged from the challenges of integration into society, and family and friendship development. I value my time in the “real world,” where the beauty, and the pain, of human existence is my greatest teacher. Mysticism has a place in our world, yet I struggle to find how to best stay in alignment with its ecstasy, and enlightenment, while maintaining a normal human experience. Perhaps I will drink again from its deep waters, when I have finally wearied of this world.

If our minds are fed anything other than facts, especially within established communities of human beings, we are involved in a process known as maya, or illusion creating, and our worlds tend to end up in chaos. The result is individual and cultural hypnosis and schizophrenia, where we can end up losing personal power, and we can be too easily bullied by the wayward opinions and false insights of others. Too often those who claim to have real knowledge are as lost as everybody else, even though they may be claiming righteousness, religious or otherwise. When we try to fit into a situation or setting where our heart tells us we don’t belong, honor those feelings, and investigate where they are coming from. If we feel that we are already swimming in the divine ocean, then we can watch, and wait, and see who is swimming with us, and join with them as indicated (or reach out and help lift another up, as they request help). Our cultural spiritual dementia needed to be challenged, lest we all lapse into deeper degrees of anxiousness, powerlessness, and unreality. Confronting a difficult reality takes more energy than most of us care to bring to the table, yet, not doing so diminishes our own standing in Truth, Life, and Love.

On the other hand, an institutionalized expression of anger becomes hatred in disguise, and that characterizes the oppressive nature of far too many male originated, and dominated, philosophies. When anger becomes an automatic response to all situations where threat is perceived, then the intelligence of the moment is denied, and we are susceptible to bringing needless harm to our bodies, and to our minds, as well as to the other.

When I was eight, my family went on a camping trip with another family, and during the stay, the dad of the other family, Bob, severely overreacted to my sister and me. When we told my parents that he’d become excessively angry and threatening to us, my father confronted him about his rage. Bob got angry again, denied that he threatened us, and then commanded me to get my story straight before complaining about his behavior in the future. Several years later, while in a fit of rage with his wife, he intentionally crashed his car head-on into another car at a high rate of speed, killing himself and crippling his wife for life. The act of getting our story straight, and calling out ourselves or someone for being disrespectful or engaging in hurtful behavior will not necessarily guarantee any immediate positive outcomes, but it disrupts the conspiracy of silence, if only for a moment.

Repression and oppression helps nobody in the long run, though they maintain an order of false peace and control for the status quo. In the seeing, or the development of insight into self, change is facilitated. Everybody needs to become more conscious of the self, and fine tune how we respond to our emotions, but the point is to accept personal responsibility for our emotions, see how they impact ourselves and others, and make necessary adjustments in course if we have behaved inappropriately.

Constructive Anger

Anger is a natural, normal response, in any particular new moment, to any assault on our being, on those that we love, or on our inner sensibilities. Anger, among all other emotions, and in balance with those aspects of our self, help us to manage our response to the outer world, which is, at times, quite the aggressive, distressed, ugly, oppressive environment. Anger is not positive or negative energy, it is human energy, and like all aspects of our humanity, it needs to be understood in the context from which it arises and when and how it expresses itself.

Anger can bring fear to the unaware among us, because of an incomplete or unhealed response to its expression in their past. We have all been persecuted, at one time or another (or many times), by the angry parent, boss, co-worker, or stranger driving next to us in a car. Or, how about the rapist, or child molester, who tries to attack us, or our children? According to classic psychology, humans engage in fight or flight behavior when they experience fear and/or perceive that they are being attacked. Whether we choose one or the other depends on any number of circumstances, and one size does not fit all.

We all feel a need to be in control and to conform to social norms, especially those “norms” expressed in the common knowledge game that dominates the unaware human consciousness. Philosophies and theologies that stress the need to repress aspects of our human nature need to be examined in their fullness, and not accepted at face value. By their very nature, any umbrella philosophy and theology devalues the intelligence of the moment, and intentionally and/or unwittingly contribute to the suppression and repression of sacred human values and emotions.

Anger, when balanced, keeps us as complete beings, capable of accessing and expressing the wholeness of our being with emotionally intelligent actions appropriate to the activity of the moment. In other words, we can get mad. We can express our anger in appropriate ways. Doing so is beneficial.

There is a Wisdom deep inside us all, waiting to inform all of our thoughts and actions in this world. And, this world requires Ultimate intelligence to navigate through it successfully, without bringing harm to ourselves and others needlessly. Anger and fear are not to be repressed by any healthy human being, but instead are to be witnessed, studied, and utilized intelligently for wise action in this troubled world. In the words of Bob Marley, “Stand up, stand up, stand up for your rights!” But, make sure that the anger is appropriate to the moment, and not some formulaic response that the non-healed, unbalanced nature within your own self offers up under many questionable circumstances.

How to Respond to Anger

To respond successfully in anger, we need to measure how mindfully we can engage these threats, and successfully group our own thoughts and actions, with others also engaged in the situation, to either fight the oppressors, or to speak our truth, and be heard. We do not engage in mass protests because we want to go for a walk with a bunch of strangers, we engage in protests because we want our voices heard. Channeled anger is an effective, time-tested method for standing up to those who would keep us silent in the face of their own misdeeds.

Anecdotally, we hear of those rare few who have successfully mitigated dark, evil circumstances, through some fortunate “intervention” through prayer, or luck, where those who are attacking us somehow are diverted, and move their aggression elsewhere. Stories of Gandhi’s non-violent protest against British occupancy of India’s lands gets a lot of play in so-called “spiritually aware circles.” Remember, though, the many years of British occupation prior to that stand, and Britain’s diminishing will to keep their empire extended throughout the world. We only need watch the news, or read the paper, to see that these anecdotal stories do not embrace the reality underlying most of the final acts, and resulting actions, of the aggressive ones. Murder, rape, child molesting, intimidation, oppression, misogyny, road rage, terrorism, paternal violence in ALL OF ITS FORMS, keeps manifesting itself, and has throughout all of history. Those who are inspired to make peaceful approaches to these problems must continue, yet, so do those who aggressively confront the forces of oppression and darkness.

I had very poor training since birth in how to successfully navigate group energy, up to, and including, the whole of society that we all participate in. As a boy, when family discussions turned into arguments, many times I found myself either raising my voice against the angry voice of my father, or retreating into submission and fear at the threat of being attacked for being contrary to the flow. And, I internalized that I was probably wrong anyway, and would be punished if I stepped out and asserted myself too much. I learned that I could undertake less obvious means of rebelling against authority, sometimes through indirect, or obvious, self, or other, destructive behavior.

Passive/aggressive tendencies have haunted me most of my entire life, and becoming “self-aware” has gone a long way to keep me from employing those unskilled coping mechanisms unconsciously, though I am still occasionally haunted by their presence. Having undertaken the inner work of insight, and maintaining mindfulness, and identified those sources of suffering within myself, does not instantaneously remove all of the darkness within. But is also does not remove from me the responsibility to call out those who are the external agents of oppression and repression, no matter how much I might love them or want to protect them, or even to protect myself from the ramifications of asserting what is right, true, or proper in any situation.

Alcoholism, depression, mental illness, murder, suicide, participating in the continued destruction of our sacred Mother Earth, and other manifestations of dis-empowered male energy can be the results of loss of integrity, and stifling ones feelings and voice. And, this is not yet another spiritual theory, this is the actuality of American male life, and of my life. Sitting in meditation, and or quoting other spiritually enlightened individuals may have brought me a temporary measure of peace, but this whole process became yet another opiate, and it never brought the change required by my spirit for its own emergence into its own unique wholeness. Thoughts and prayers are great preparation for action, but, without action, thoughts and prayers are only mental masturbation .

Chapter : An Electrician’s Guide To The Galaxy

We need a real awakening, enlightenment, to change our way of thinking and seeing things. To breathe in and be aware of your body and look deeply into it, realize you are the Earth and your consciousness is also the consciousness of the Earth.”  ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Forty-two is a significant number in the classic book The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. In the book, this number is the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, calculated by an enormous supercomputer named Deep Thought over a 7.5 million year period. Will we be saved by the number 42? Probably not. And I am not a space hitchhiker. But as an electrician, I like to think humanity can be saved by zero.

I am an expert in electrical connections, having been an electrical/electronic/computer engineering student for six years in the 1970s and 1980s, and an electrician from 1980 until my retirement in 2016.  I have found much in my field of expertise in electrical theory that models many aspects of spirituality and its potential for human empowerment. In a process control theory class that I took with fifteen other electricians in 1992, I observed and was impressed by how these feedback and feedforward dependent control systems resembled the functions  and internal workings of our human minds,  especially with activities like goal setting and achieving.

Technology is always improving, yet the forces of resistance and impedance, reluctance, and friction generated heat  are always present in any system, be it electrical, mechanical, or human in nature.  Everything has a life cycle associated with it, starting with its birth and/or introduction into the world, and its exit through deterioration and death. As we remember from our high school physics class and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, every closed system of energy will experience entropy, unpredictability, chaos, and eventual destruction through the effects of friction and heating.

There is a human equivalent to this 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and we see it arise in people, and in societies, that fiercely cling to the past, with all of its outdated structures of understanding.  The more that cognitive dissonance arises between our intuition, understanding, and personal knowledge and the socially accepted norms and dogmas of the day, the more conflict, friction, and inflammatory responses will be experienced by everyone.  Human energy systems, like parachutes, work the best when they open up.  If a philosophy of continuous process improvement (evolution) has been adopted, then functioning may be stabilized, or actually improved, all the way through to the end of the engineered system’s, or human being’s, life cycle.

A primary law of consciousness itself is that all that we see are extensions of our own minds, which is just another form of energy.  Remember, everything that we see or experience is energy, either in its potential (resting) or kinetic (action) form.   And we are energy, with an infinite capacity to do work, or to be at rest.  The words, concepts, and languages that we utilize help us to build energy, store it, and then utilize it in ways that are resonant with our concept of our greater good.

Electricity, like language, spirituality, and truth, requires no belief, only an understanding of its potential for either empowering us  or bringing harm to us if we remain ignorant of all of their supporting laws. Electricity is electrons in movement, concepts are words in movement, and spirituality is love in movement. By definition, any energy that moves over time is doing work, and all of their  energies can be harnessed to do the work necessary for the betterment of mankind.

Mother Earth, amongst its almost infinite potential for creating and supporting life, has an electromagnetic nature, with its magnetic north and south poles.  Humans are electro-biological beings, also being made of Earth stuff, thus we are not only electromagnetically inspired, but also influenced by all of Mother Earth’s other characteristics.  Through a process of shared consciousness not yet fully understood by scientists and biologists, the life force field that constitutes our being exchanges information continuously with the environment, which shows that there may be unexpected outcomes for the human race with the loss of biodiversity through our heartless, reckless expansion through the natural world.

Our bodies have over 50 trillion biologically and electrically interconnected cells that are totally derived from our ground of being, Mother Earth.  We are not only created from materials endemic to this planet, we are a minute version of Her. We are also influenced by all of the forms of life that have derived their existence from this almost infinite ground of being. Humanity has an extraordinary possibility for resonance with all of our natural world, if it would only rejoin it.  When we return to our source and connect with nature, our energetic frequency begins to change, and may actually appear to oscillate with the same frequency of life force as the Earth and the rest of its life forms.

Our modern world has encouraged us to become increasingly disconnected from nature. Civilization with its need for farming and cities has overrun vast tracks of the natural world, eliminating much of our spiritual and physical support.  We eat, sleep, and live indoors, drive automobiles that are supported by insulating rubber tires, wear shoes that create a barrier to the Earth, work in offices with no plants or outdoor views, are subject to constant distraction and philosophical oppression and corruption from religious and political authorities, hyper-stimulated through smart phones and media obsession. This 21st century lifestyle contributes to a  lack of connection with nature, which is the manifestation of our True Ground.

Without being connected to the Earth, we become ungrounded.  In at least a figurative sense, if not literally, we are constantly taking on frequencies that aren’t very supportive of our human minds and bodies; frequencies that conflict with our natural resonance. Without grounding, it becomes difficult for us to discharge the frequencies that we’ve taken on board. We can even become controlled and oppressed by those chaotic energies.

Grounding Ourselves

Imagine, if you will, that there are 7.5 billion mountain peaks on our planet, each one representing one human life.  And, imagine that each peak looks at the other peaks, and does not see that each peak is connected to the same Earth, and each peak would not exist without its support.  Now imagine that each peak wants to try to establish a connection with the other peaks.  The biggest bridge building project in history must be undertaken, to connect all of the peaks together.

Now imagine that these bridges are actually the energy of words, sentences, perceptions, and concepts.  These bridges are our “bonding jumpers” to each other, so hopefully we bond through mutual love and compassion, and not hatred and fear, though both are possible.  These bridges are equivalent to our collective consciousness, the matrix that verbally connects the entirety of humanity together.  Yet what about the connection to the Earth?  If the peak feels separate from its ground of support, what might bring connection back to the peak?  Can each peak find its own unique ground of support?  Can one postulate that the ground of our being calls out to the peaks to remember their true ground?  And will the Earth send messages to the peaks, to remind them of their origin?  Would one call those words  that bring awareness back to our true connection with the Earth the word of God?  These inspired words could be called our grounding connections.

Without a common reference point, our words and concepts will be out of phase with other reference points, minimizing harmonization with others.  Communication failures  resulting from conflicting frames of reference creates stress and anxiety. Over time, it takes its toll on our mental and physical health too. Without a connection with the Earth, we don’t share in a healing common knowledge, negating or preventing any sense of supportive calm and well-being that happens naturally when we are earthed.

Electricity does not exist without a difference in potential energy, or voltage, between components, and a completed or closed loop circuit to carry its energy, with a common reference potential.  Spirituality and truth, to the as yet unawakened individual, are also manifestations of the difference in potential energy between a person’s collective self concept and any ground of being or ultimate truth that exists.  Words are continuously being formed in our minds to bridge that gap, in our own sometimes vain attempt to measure and understand our elusive ground energy of consciousness, which may be immeasurable, yet it must become our common reference point, lest we continue to build into our human systems increasing divisive thinking, volatility and incoherence.

By internationally accepted electrical standards, ground potential is set to zero volts, and all derived or existing voltages are referenced to that ground, or zeroed voltage.  Literally, the safety and operational integrity of any system is preserved, protected, and saved by zero, or a common ground potential.

Electricians are required to learn the philosophy of grounding, so as to prevent safety issues from arising, or accidents from happening.  Grounding and bonding techniques are utilized for the design and proper functioning of any electrical system.  “Ground” in the power-distribution grid is literally the ground that’s all around you when you are walking outside. It is the dirt, rocks, groundwater and so on. Mother Earth is the direct source for all successful grounding, though bonding between discrete components and building structures supplies the necessary conductor paths to make sure that those circuits have a consistent reference potential grid tied to Mother Earth.

As a young lad, I had a next door neighbor friend who I helped to build an underground fort with.  We would tell our parents that we were “camping out” in the yard, then after they went to bed, we would “hot wire” a cord to a light, which we would use to illuminate the inside of our expanding cave.  One time, I became the ground path, when I brushed up against the exposed hot lead to the lamp.  I screamed, shook, and struggled to free myself from the ground circuit I had become part of, and, by good fortune,  i shook free and my life was saved.  Another time, as an apprentice electrician, I had opened up a junction box, and saw some sparking under a big blue wire nut (used to hold multiple conductors together under one connection point).  Without thinking, I reached out for the wire nut, to  tighten it.  The insulation had broken down from the arcing, and I became the ground for a 277 volt lighting circuit.  I was able to jerk my hand free, but other electricians, and home owners,  have been much less fortunate.

You have never known a more helpless feeling than being an unintentional ground, and the two near electrocution stories have stayed with me my entire life. Yet, what about those other broken connections, the ones human in nature, that have brought great harm to us and others? What about that boss who has built up a huge anger charge,  just waiting to discharge it through some unwitting recipient?  Or how about that religious fundamentalist who bullies or cajoles everyone who does not believe in the same biblical narrative that he was inculcated with?  Who hasn’t ever wanted to ground out that obnoxious narrative?  We never know who is just waiting to use our life to discharge their own negative energy through, do we?

Grounding is a process of connecting electrical systems, appliances, and metal enclosure to a common reference point, which is, typically, the potential of the ground that Mother Earth provides.  Grounding provides a low resistance path for electricity to flow, and is part of the return path for any complete circuit.

Reference potentials in real life human experience of consciousness itself helps to stabilize connections and provide stability and extra predictability to relationships.  If all people share a common knowledge and understanding, there will be no catastrophic failures within the communications aspects of the social network.

The best spiritual reference point is also Mother Earth.  If the materials of Mother Earth are remembered to be the source for all life, then whatever true potential that we have is sourced through that sacred connection.  A great way to stay spiritually grounded and bonded is to remember our true source, and to remember that we are of Mother Earth, and may consciously carry that spiritual energy into all of our relationships.  As the Mother loves us, so we must bring that motherly love to ALL of our relationships,  This dynamic energy exchange is a form of entrainment, or resonance.

So what might a personal experience of Ground look and feel like?  I awoke one morning during the summer of 1992, and finished preparing to leave on a weekend hiking and camping trip with Sharon, up to the Mt. Adams Wilderness Area.  We were planning to backpack into Lookinglass Lake, about a ten mile hike one way.

My senses were somehow heightened, and I felt as though I could see and hear better than I was accustomed to.  Food tasted better, the air carried many more scents, and my entire body felt alive with vitality and sensation, well beyond what I was accustomed to experiencing in my day to day life.  I had to work that day, so I ignored my extra sensory perception for most of the work day, though I remained excited about joining with my beloved partner Sharon on the  hike.

Our drive took longer than expected, and we arrived in the Mt. Adams Wilderness area too late to reach the developed campground we wanted to use as a basecamp, so we parked for the night in a snow park area, and set up our tent to shelter for the evening.  We sat outside of the tent, and I began to experience, in its fullness, that extrasensory perception yet again, but much more profoundly this time. It was as if I had sensory receptors in the dirt, the sky, and the trees.  It was as if I had grown roots, so to speak. I not only could see the ground all around us, and the beautiful trees, and the sky, I could feel the ground, and it was as if I extended all the way through everywhere that I could see.  It was the experience, in a new form, of “all that I can see is myself.”  It was like I was hearing and seeing and feeling for all of nature that surrounded us, and it was a profound mystical, transcendental event.

We finally lay down for the evening in our tent, and though I was still quite profoundly experiencing this event, I was able to fall asleep beside my beloved.  Shortly afterward, I awoke to a great light enveloping our tent, and I arose to go outside to see what was happening.  In the sky appeared a Great Light, and the entire surrounding area was bathed in a light that totally eliminated all shadows, even though it was near midnight!  I awoke Sharon, who rose to witness the light.  To this day, I have no clue if the light is associated with my heightened mystic awareness, or if it was just a coincidence that a UFO would awaken us to bathe us in its radiance.

After we returned home, I told my mother about the light, and she reported that the week before, a mysterious light in the Mt Adams wilderness area was also reported in the Oregonian newspaper, so who knows what was happening there? There is only One Creator.  There is no reason that we cannot be attuned with all of its creations, including all willing members of the human, animal, plant, geological, and even alien races. When we touch our Self with deep awareness, we touch everything.

By definition, Mother Earth is set to zero volts, and all other voltages are derived in relation to that value, and, thus,  proper circuit operation is guaranteed. By grounding ourselves to Mother Earth, we can be saved by zero.

A Model for Human Consciousness

Consciousness can be modeled through many theories, and represented by many metaphors. One of the more valuable categories of circuitry is the RLC circuit, which has its human equivalent in consciousness, in which resonance may appear.   Resonance has fascinating capacities for both an electrical and human circuit.  Resonance extends its influence beyond its own physical boundaries, to influence surrounding circuits, or other humans. For electrical circuits, the capacity and quality of the resonance depends upon three factors.  For human circuits, the capacity and quality of the resonance can figuratively be based upon those three primary factors, to the extent that we can model our consciousness through the RLC metaphor.

In electrical theory and practice, there are three qualities that characterize each resonating circuit.  They are named: Capacitance, Inductance, and Resistance/Impedance.

1. Capitance

Capacitance, as far as human consciousness is concerned, denotes our ability to store energy, and then release it, as the situation may dictate.  We really need to build up a charge, before we are inspired to communicate, or to take action in the world, don’t we?  Hopefully, we are not constantly charging our hate, lust, or greed capacitors, and instead charge more healthy collaborative ideals.  Trauma gets electrically attached to our body, becoming unconscious charge centers that influence every other charge center in our consciousness.  I have come to name these centers black holes.

Capacitance is the ratio of the amount of electric charge stored on a conductor to a difference in electric potential. There are two closely related notions of capacitance: self capacitance and mutual capacitance. Any object that can be electrically charged exhibits self capacitance. In this case the electric potential difference is measured between the object and ground. A material with a large self capacitance holds more frequencies. charge at a given potential difference than one with low capacitance.  We can easily see the human parallel.  If I am storing a big charge on one side of an emotional issue, and you are storing a charge which appears as an opposite polarity, there definitely will be major mutual capacitance.

Does our planet Earth have a capacitance? The electrical capacitance of earth C= 710 μF.  Its spiritual capacitance may be infinite. Do humans have a capacitance?Every person has an electrical capacitance of around 100pF.  Our spiritual capacitance may be infinite, as well.

2. Inductance

Inductance, as far as human consciousness is concerned, also has its parallel.  We all have a resistance to change, yet we all carry a vast field of energy within us, just waiting to move in harmony within us  and the world under the right conditions.   The greatest potential differences happen with the highest rate of change of charge flow, or current.  If you want to develop your highest potential, make sure to find your proper reference ground, and allow all of your static stored charges to become dynamic and discharge them rapidly, rather than continuing to store them in a static field.

Inductance is the tendency of an electrical conductor to oppose a change in the electric current flowing through it. The flow of electric current creates a magnetic field around the conductor. The field strength depends on the magnitude of the current, and follows any changes in current. From Faraday’s law of induction, any change in magnetic field through a circuit induces an electromotive force (EMF) (voltage) in the conductors, a process known as electromagnetic induction. This induced voltage created by the changing current has the effect of opposing the change in current, though it never opposes it enough to stop the process, it only dampens it.

3. Resistance

              Resistance, as far as human consciousness is concerned, may point to any number of attitudes  we may adopt, and actions we may take.  If we were perfect conductors for Life, there would be no resistance, yet there would be no capacity for human energy storage or exchange.  In a RLC circuit, resistance keeps a circuit from oscillating until eternity, instead dampening its action, until it eventually dies out. Yet, if another person engages with us who still is charged with the possibilities of any particular concept or ideology, our ideas can be re-energized through the previously discussed resonance principle.

There are no perfect conductors in our world, save those cooled to, wait for this, Absolute Zero temperature.  Some might theorize that enlightened people have zero resistance to Life, thus they have no need to store energy.  This might explain why they appear to need to do so little actual work in the world, while actually being a clearer channel for the intentions of our reference potential, or ground.

The electrical resistance of an object is a measure of its opposition to the flow of electric current. Electrical resistance shares some conceptual parallels with mechanical friction, as well as its important role within human consciousness itself.  Have you ever felt a little resistance to new people, ideas, or experiences?

The resistance of an object depends in large part on the material it is made of. Objects made of electrical insulators like rubber tend to have very high resistance and low conductivity, while objects made of electrical conductors like metals tend to have very low resistance and high conductivity. This relationship is quantified by resistivity or conductivity. The nature of a material is not the only factor in resistance and conductance, however; it also depends on the size and shape of an object because these properties are extensive rather than intensive. For example, a wire’s resistance is higher if it is long and thin, and lower if it is short and thick. All objects resist electrical current, except for superconductors, which have a resistance of zero.

The human equivalents are obvious here.  Some people are more resistant to other people’s ideas, or to change itself, than others.  Biologically, we have an immune system that we count on to being resistant to any change that brings biological harm to ourselves, thus antibodies are created.  At the level of human consciousness, our resistance to false narratives, racist or misogynist ideologies, or ignorant attacks against innocent life inspires our own macro version of “anti-bodies,” where we directly address and confront offending parties and their abhorrent philosophies, and keep them from spreading like the virus that they are.

Resonant or RLC circuitry

A form of human resonance occurs when large numbers of humans physically congregate together to protest against injustices, share in an idea, a musical group and their music, a pep-talk to affirm personal value for students at the local high school, join in a destructive mob,.or any of at least a million other reasons to humanly bond.  Humans truly have the capacity to resonate with each other, for better or for worse. Without a common ground, or reference point, resonance will not lead to further stability of the whole human network, as it introduces yet more instability into the system.

What are the essential components within an electrical, or human, system, that creates this form of energy exchange? An RLC circuit is an electrical circuit consisting of a resistor, an inductor, and a capacitor, connected in series or in parallel. The RLC part of the name is due to those letters being the usual electrical symbols for resistance, inductance and capacitance respectively. The circuit forms a harmonic oscillator for current and resonates similarly to an LC circuit. The main difference stemming from the presence of the resistor is that any oscillation induced in the circuit decays over time if it is not kept going by a source. This effect of the resistor is called damping. Some resistance is unavoidable in real circuits, even if a resistor is not specifically included as a separate component.

There are many applications for this circuit. It is used in many different types of oscillator circuits. An important application is for tuning, such as in radio receivers or television sets, where they are used to select a narrow range of frequencies from the ambient radio waves. In this role the circuit is often referred to as a tuned circuit.

What about the human capacity to create their own tuned circuit?  Our knowledge, concepts, and language are the very carriers of energy in our human consciousness circuitry, and they all need an extreme tune-up, if we are to survive as a species. There is nothing better in life than both connecting with the sacred silence within one’s self and deeply and honestly communicating with other human beings.  And if we accept our roles as stewards over the animal and plant kingdoms, and Mother Earth Herself, we may also be afforded a personalized view into the True Miracle Of Life, which is our unity with all of creation. This requires no belief or dogma, only a direct experience of its love,  power and potential. Through this collective connection of consciousnesses to an Earth ground, or reference point, we will travel new paths of consciousness that will lead to better communication, and improved stewardship over Mother Earth’s creations.

Connecting to the Higher Consciousness

Every single human being on this planet has a different potential energy, created and sustained through the countless concepts that have been integrated throughout life to establish and maintain the sense of self.  Our differences need not destabilize our world, if we use our words to bond with each other, and all seek to share a same/similar ultimate reference point. Then, our shared Life Affirming concepts will bring resonance between all who are grounded well enough to share in them.

Our lack of connection to Nature, Mother Earth, and each other is destroying us, and the planet. Life is connection, connection is life. Continued addiction to poor self esteem, consumerism, indifference to others, emotional hiding and mutual deception, media distraction, and the callous disregard of the health and safety of our planet leads to further disconnection, disempowerment, illusion, and spiritual and emotional sickness, disease, and death. Distraction, or connection, it is our choice. If we devote ourselves to Life’s highest values of truth. Love for all life, intelligence, compassion, empathy, beauty, bliss, and wisdom, our grounded reference starting point, at Zero, will assist us in creating new paths of consciousness, and we can be saved by zero.

Chapter : Knowledge, Facts, Insight, And The Whim

 

Information can help us to know why we are ill and which illnesses we have, exactly. But wisdom is to know how to heal them.

—Dr. Alberto Villoldo

What is knowledge, and how do we know what we know? Philosophers, scientists, religious thinkers, and beer drinkers throughout the ages have contemplated this most important question, for it has ramifications for our sense of self, its reality and formation, and our actual place in the Universe.

Rene Descartes was well known, not only for his volumes of scientific and mathematical writings and teachings, but also for his famous one liner: I think, therefore I am. Starting with Descartes, the self was considered to be a thinking thing that is not extended, and the object of the self’s observation is an extended thing which does not think. Duality is affirmed here, as the thinker, who is a dynamic being, traps the observed in a thought, which is a static enclosure, or perception. But those five words—I think therefore I am—certainly can get confusing, especially when other thinking human beings are involved. Many modern thinkers consider Rene’s dualism through his cause and effect statement as not fully embracing the nature of consciousness and our being, the wholeness of our being, and of our reality, and our relationship to its formation and experience.  Descartes may have put de-cart before de-horse. Much of our knowledge serves to obfuscate and distract us from this most important issue, so we must continue our exploration of the mind, its knowledge, and the labyrinth of illusion that it creates which hides us from the blocks to our return to our original nature.

What is Knowledge?

What we, as a human race, presently accept as knowledge can be defined in many ways. It can be our capacity for embracing logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning from both personal experience and through the transfer of shared knowledge, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, insight, critical thinking, and problem solving all point to the manifestation of intelligence. By accessing all aspects of our intelligence, we can become wiser people.

We have many tools to access in our quest for knowledge and its successful application and the most reasonable ways to apply that knowledge for wise, constructive action in the world. Our knowledge is based upon familiarity, awareness, or understanding of someone or something, such as facts, information, descriptions, or skills, which is acquired through experience or education by perceiving, discovering, or learning knowledge. Knowledge can also refer to a theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.

Intuition is a perceptual attribute that gives us the ability to know something directly without analytic reasoning, bridging the gap between the conscious and unconscious parts of our mind, and also between instinct and reason. A whim is unconscious knowledge, an act of will drowning in capriciousness and/or eccentricity. It appears as a sudden idea or turn of the mind, and its action is mutually exclusive of the actions of wisdom, knowledge, and intuition.

I first came into a conscious collision with the “whim versus wisdom” dynamic while I was in the sixth grade. The principal of our grade school wanted a representative from each class, from both the fifth and the sixth grades, to attend a parent-teacher conference in the auditorium on a week night. It was to be considered an honor to be selected, according to our teachers, and the students were advised to select from among themselves who would be the best representative.

As a community of grade schoolers, we had a difficult time establishing the process for how to select the representative, let alone who it should be. The teacher helped by instituting two male overseers, one from the fifth and one from the sixth grade, who were to facilitate the determination process by asking for volunteers, or asking for specific students of their own choosing, and discussing their qualifications between the two selected leaders. The boys expressed frustration with the process, and even though our teachers offered up two good candidates from each class, on a whim as promoted by one of the sixth grade boys, a quiet, shy girl was selected for the sixth grade class. She had been the recipient, in the past, of some teasing and bullying by me and others, and I could immediately see that this process had the potential to victimize her. I was right; they continued to harass her. This selection process dramatically impacted me, and has influenced my understanding of group dynamics ever since. Many of us, relying upon the opinions of others, have made many decisions to not be wise, but to instead follow the opinions of others, who may be engaging in whimsical or non-critical thinking of their own.

We must learn to trust ourselves and our ability to apply our experience and knowledge, and with a little bit of our developed insight. Our intuition must be developed as a complement to our own wisdom. Typically, our learned wisdom that does not conform to what our latest intuitive hit suggests must be scrutinized further, and an intelligent balance struck between those two poles. Intuition and wisdom are not mutually exclusive, and, in fact, complement each other.

We may be wrong about many issues, but at least we are accessing our intelligence and learning from our errors. Following blind people into the ditch does not do our basic nature justice, so beware of the temptation to try to adapt to other’s expectations, at the expense of developing our own unique intelligence. Wisdom that is universal in nature is like the scent of a flower that we just cannot pull ourselves away from, nor should we.

Wisdom is spawned from experience, and is best embraced and expressed through our story telling, and our intelligent actions in the world. Sound bites just do not carry enough of wisdom’s energy. We must be careful not to integrate meme’s and sound bites into a quilt of understanding, because the stitching will come unraveled, and we will be left appearing and acting like less than the wise people that we can be.

Whimsical thinking is respected because of its lack of adherence to established patterns, which can be attractive to creative people, non-conformists, and insane individuals, so there is a spectrum of benefit to be gained by accessing it. But whimsical thinking must be set aside for those times when intelligent action is required. Be wise, watch out for whimsical thinking, and make those difficult, challenging decisions that are beneficial for our life, and for our world’s life, too.

The conscious being has infinite capacity to witness life and then create knowledge, where necessary, around those interactions.  It only takes one time getting bitten by a snake and suffering mightily under the influence of its poison to create and share the knowledge that it is vitally important to avoid physical contact with serpents while doing outdoor chores or walking in the desert.  The unconscious being also has the same infinite witnessing capacity, yet their choices for how they see themselves and their lives can be so self-limiting as to make them prisoners in their own homes.  In the snakebite situation, a more unconscious person would use the knowledge of the potential damage from a snakebite to create fear-based stories that would keep the person behind closed doors, avoiding the outdoors altogether, or even obtaining and carrying a loaded firearm, just in case they need to protect themselves.  On the other hand, the curious and conscious ones might just walk around the snake, study it, and learn the lessons, without fear, that the snake has to offer.

Yet each category of awareness, be it conscious or unconscious, must arise from the same pool of potentiality, where the mystery of collective consciousness and the entrainment of all individual minds to that group mind, creates and maintains the appearance of whatever order and reality that each individual both anticipates and actually experiences.  Finding the real truth behind each new situation that presents itself to awareness is challenging.

It has been said in certain contest guidelines: “You must be present to win.” This is also true as far as knowledge goes.  Being a witness to an actual event gives whatever story one creates and shares credibility, at least up to the point that the story teller can be trusted, and has been accurate and honest in the past.  If a personal memory is not available to convey a teaching or a message, listening to the stories of other first-hand witnesses can be beneficial.  A great example is that of the knowledge that fathers pass on to their sons around issues of family philosophy/religion, self-esteem, growing up into manhood and accepting personal responsibility, sexuality, learning to ride a bike or drive a car, and future community involvement. The less experiential the teaching, the less the staying power of the message, so it is important to keep the listener engaged with all of their senses, if possible.

The printing press opened civilization up to much more advanced opportunities for education and information transfer and sharing.  The internet has opened humanity up to potential for the real time witnessing and sharing of other people’s adventures and learning experiences, almost without limits.  Watching a multi-media presentation will carry more potential meaning and  information to the higher intelligence centers of the brain than just a meme or soundbite, which arouses the more basic areas of the brain where fear is most prone to rule. There is never a shortage of information, but there is always a question about the accuracy of the information, and how it is to be presented.

Today, we live in what many call the Information Age, and we are in absolutely no danger of running out of information, particularly in data form. There is a general perception that we are overwhelmed with data, making the ability to store, process, analyze, interpret, consume, and act upon that data a primary concern.  There are, potentially, infinite streams of information available, yet most information may have little or no use to our discerning, conscious minds.  There is so much more to reality than what just greets the eye, and appears on the screens of our cellphones and/or computer monitors, however.  Scientists, mathematicians, theologians, artists, philosophers, enlightened politicians, and Google algorithm writers, continue to struggle towards some unknown destination that our collective search for truth continues to guide us towards as a human race.  The exponential increase in available information does little to settle what the “truth” might be, let alone which direction that its search may best be started from.

Many types of knowledge actually breed division and separation between human beings. It is easy to tell the difference between the ministers, politicians, teachers, teachings, and knowledge just by feeling within our own inner chambers of consciousness how their message impacts our hearts. Understanding what we now consider to be sources for knowledge is all important, as well.

Life in the Information Age

With the idea of fake news being so casually tossed about these days, it is important to keep in mind that fake news has always been with us. It can be traced all of the way back to the days when we first starting naming objects, and attaching emotional linkages to our observations. Everybody sees things somewhat differently, though similarities outweigh differences by super-substantial amounts. But the human mind tends to focus on the differences, and, thus, temporarily accentuate those divisions while examining the objects of its reality, reassembling the new information into its own unique information matrix known as our personalities.

All of those divisive philosophies that pit “me versus you” or “us versus them” will bring fewer positive results than the uniting philosophies that bring people together in the spirit of cooperation and caring. Yet it almost seems like the divisive ideas are for many, and for me, by instinct, first in line for consideration, so it is important to not act out of impulse. Yes, it is being mindful to wait out that first racing train of sometimes fearful, angry or hurtful thought, and just watch it as it passes through the screen of awareness, and wait for another peaceful train of loving thought that may lie underneath all of the other noise.

The goal might be to make love the leading, or first, thought considered, but in my reality, it does not always automatically arise, nor should it, just because I think that it is a good idea. It is important to note here that ideas that initially appear to be counter to our prevailing philosophy may have legitimate origins, and discovery and exploration of the mind and our individual experience of it should continue without fear and self-judgement, as we attempt to discern the truths being communicated. If our prevailing philosophies are not subject to change, then we risk excess friction in all of our relationships, especially as we slip further and further away from the new, upgraded truth trying to be revealed.

My main coping mechanisms for dealing with America’s and my own dark side are practicing spiritual healing principles, and writing about and verbally communicating with others who also share my interest in spirituality and recovery from the human condition. My path,  and the paths of all others, have taken all of us to unique and valuable viewpoints, so it is of prime importance that we find our voice and share our knowledge with each other.  Through multitudes of these energy exchanges, we all may benefit from each others’ experiences, and contribute to the formation of a more peaceful, healing collective consciousness in America.

It is important to understand the internal headlights that our minds use to search for knowledge, and truth. The headlights tend to encourage self-fulfilling predictions/prophecies, so looking there will bring amazing insights and enhance the potential for healing experiences.  What information really is, or isn’t important?  Which attitudes, insight, and knowledge leads to greater measures of wisdom, and, potentially, freedom from our inhibiting and restrictive knowns, especially in the situations where our knowledge appears to be in conflict with the truth?

By staying in familiar painful ruts, the view at least does not change too much.  And far too many people stuck in those ruts are not even aware that they are engaged in self-defeating attitudes and behaviors, or, if they are aware, have already given up hope that there is another life available for them.

Mindfulness, insight, and meditation help to create a more stable foundation for thought, feeling, and action. Remaining socially connected through real life interaction, vs predominantly through media devices, keeps the heart and mind refreshed and engaged holistically. Giving and receiving presence to each other has much more value than the mere information that might be exchanged. For us to continue to trust in technology solely for our heart connection is like only eating popcorn for our diet: satisfying in the short-term and deadly in the long run.  We need to feed each other new ideas and words from the deep storehouses within  each of our hearts, where intuition, empathy, compassion, and healing all arise from.  To continue to be fed only from the internet, is to continue our connection with cultural hypnotism, which leads in its own self-defeating directions.

Virtually all relationships and all interactions with others have a teaching built right into them.  We confirm our present reality with the interactions, or we entertain new information that needs synthesizing within our present day psychological sets to create a modified reality.  Teachers come in an almost infinite variety of forms, but I will now  mention spiritual healers and teachers, for they tend to attract the most vulnerable and receptive of all learners.  I have met quite a few healers, ministers, teachers, and the leaders for those on the spiritual path.  Most have the best of intentions, and their heart is in the right place, and permeated with the desire to be of greater service to humanity, and to their own spiritual evolution.

Speaking up and participating are important. Why would I withhold myself, and my truth, from situations that should have demanded my participation in it? Why would I withhold my own assessments of what is real, and true, and right, in the face of this assault upon my own sensibilities? Why would I devalue myself, and my own truth, so much that I would carry the perception that I have nothing to say, or that nobody would ever listen to me? It has taken me nearly sixty years to become willing to speak my truth to the living human representatives of our collective consciousness.  I was never insightful enough to fully recognize that the world that I was adopting, and adapting to, as a child was an inaccurate representation of a more fundamental truth.  But like many other children, I rebelled at the fake news and pseudo-science that churned out of the religious mills and minds of Americans.  I took a very passive/aggressive approach to the spiritual lie that we as Americans are living.  The pain of the lies that I cultivated prior to any spiritual recovery necessitated that I medicate myself out of the pain of separation and loneliness.  I no longer punish myself by negating my own self worth, yet our culture continues to unconsciously spawn millions of suffering people who also question their own value, which is the origin of insanity.  Our cultural spiritual dementia needed to be challenged, lest I lapse into deeper degrees of anxiousness, powerlessness, and unreality. Confronting a difficult reality takes more energy than most of us care to bring to the table, yet, not doing so diminishes our own standing in Truth, Life, and Love, and that has been my experience.

We have all been victimized by the cultural and familial conditioning of the information processing centers of the brain that cause certain streams of awareness to be represented by erroneous concepts, or attenuated or terminated prematurely by fear before any reasonable assessments can even be made. Our cultural headlights for looking into ourselves have had much of their light blocked by years of unacknowledged road debris accumulating on the lens. Yet, we first have to see that there is a blockage, as it will not clear on its own. Our own internal seeing can ultimately liberate us from the erroneous views foisted upon our innocent hearts and souls by the well meaning but often times ignorant teachers of our pasts, and those who may not have yet cleared up their own internal lenses of perception. But we each must look, acknowledge what appears to be there, share our perceptions with others, learn from each other, and thus create more accurate, updated knowledge. Sometimes, just accepting the fact that we only truly know a little bit, compared to the whole of knowledge available, will keep us humble enough to remain open to the vastness of the unknown.

The unknown is the opening in our mind and heart that God (or change to higher power, or whatever represents love, beauty, and healing to you) speaks through, so that we can find the truth and spirit of this new moment. Do not fear the unknown, as it can be so much more than we could ever anticipate or imagine.  Even after our most sincere and deepest prayers, there still must be an opening created within our minds where we can listen and watch, without fear or judgement, for the answer, which is always provided, and rarely understood. The unknown can be a long neglected best friend even for the curious and the conscious.  An overactive mind runs over the quiet truth that is revealed in each moment, so take off those mental workout clothes, and take a breather!

Finding Truth

Truth can only be experienced in each new moment, in the ever-unfolding unknown and unknowable moment that is now. This unique new moment can only reveal itself to a mind no longer burdened by the past, and its version of knowledge. Where does our reliance on technology connect with a search for truth? Search engines now serve you up what they think you are looking for.  A quick type into Google, and you are being fed an illusion, and/or probably just another Capitalist and/or Christian theory. If the truth that we find on Google brings pleasure to us, remember, it is somebody else’s truth, and not necessarily our own.

Is truth to be relegated to our history, or to some distant past? Is truth somehow trapped in ancient scriptures, or in the ghosts of long deceased prophets? What if I told you that everything that you think you know about yourself is only a theory, and potentially an unproven one, at that? What if I were to tell you that everything that you think you know about your significant other, your children, your parents, and even your best friends are only theories, and potentially unproven ones at that? What if I were to tell you that everything that you think you know about your planet, including the plants, animals, insects, oceans, rivers, and the rocks and dirt, are only theories, and potentially unproven ones, at that? What if I were to tell you that everything that you think you know, or believe, about God, the Bible, Christianity, or other religions are only theories, and potentially unproven ones at that?

So, just what is Truth, anyway? Truth is the antidote for all inaccurate, second-hand, toxic and limiting theories. Truth is not just for the saints and sages. Yet, very few people have any interest in it, because of the belief that they are already covered by their religion, or that only their savior has the truth, or is the truth.  There are others who believe that they already understand it, or, for others, that there is no such thing as truth.  Sadly there is also a category of human beings who are so absorbed with their material world existence that the search for truth never even begins, because it does not sound very interesting or entertaining.

Truth is extremely difficult to conceptualize, because truth is elusive, and exists above and beyond all of the words used to chase it with descriptions.  Truth is often times best described through poetry and music, where more of the brain becomes engaged to the energy attempting to be shared.  But our words still serve a valuable function, yet forever remaining only pointers, or place-holders, for the energy that must be personally experienced, or it will never become psychologically real to the witness.

There is only a God when there is no longer a me questioning what is while still trying to justify one’s own opinions or ignorance. In that silence, Infinity finds its expression, and the observer is the observed. And there is no longer a need, or a desire, to find God, for God has found us. Yet, there is no longer the us, only the witnessing of infinity, by one no longer limited by a verbally intoxicated mind. It is in this silence that love flourishes, and moral and ethical action becomes spontaneous and natural.  All that we will ever see, unto whatever eternity that we can perceive, is our Self. How will we see our Self today?

Pythagoras is credited with saying, “Know thyself, and thou will know God, and the Universe.” And Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” These two quotes set the stage behind the eternal tension between what is truth and what is falsehood, and the spiritual requirement not to create and worship idols, physical or verbal. They also point to the supporting conditions behind one’s potential for spiritual evolution and final ascendancy out of false knowledge and the suffering that results from entertaining such thoughts.

Life is always a self-fulfilling prophecy, yet whose self are we fulfilling? What if your life is fulfilling the prophecies of your religion and culture, rather than that of your true self? Find the self, and the life that has a great future, and discard the one that will die with our rotting civilization. Life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whose prophecy are you now willing to fulfill?

Chapter : The Labyrinth, An Exit Strategy, A New Path Of Awakening

“Once I had asked God for one or two extra inches in height, but instead, he made me as tall as the sky, so high that I could not measure myself.”

—Malala Yousafzaia

If you seek help from the speaker, you are lost. There is no help from anybody, of any type-that is a dreadful thing to realize for oneself. You have realize the appalling, frightening fact that you, as a human being, have to stand completely on your own feet, there are no Upanishads, no Gita, No Bible, no leaders, no avatars, nothing than can save you, you have to save yourself–Krishnamurti and The New Mind

All that we see, or will ever see, unto eternity, is manifestations of our mind, and our self.  Whether we are observing results of subatomic particle collisions within the CERN Hadron Particle Collider, observing internalized family and cultural systems,  or using the Hubble telescope while peering nearly back to the beginning of time through our endless universe, all that we see are extensions of our own sensorial derived observations and our previous mental coding.

Literally, as we understand the outer world, we also are given vast insights to the inner workings of our minds, for the outer universe, though infinite in nature, becomes merely a collection of symbols, observations, and theories, and a de facto extension of the inner universe of our infinite, though often memory encumbered and numbed mind.  We need to have enlightening clues, proper maps, or schematics, if we hope to understand the process for building or maintaining and repairing control systems, finding our way home if we are lost in the wilderness, or finding the exit to an imprisoning labyrinth. We also must understand all of the symbology used for proper interpretation of those helpful models. If we are lost in the wilderness, if we understand how to use a compass and an accurate map, we will also be able to find our way home again.

The basic process control theory underlying all modern industrial and manufacturing systems has an equivalent in the human mind, where we use feedback and feedforward information loops for refining and maintaining order, through mindfulness, personal inventory, and meditation. For humans, though our primary system of control is through our values, morality, ethics, and the laws of our society and of our religions, as we have not yet developed the understanding of all of the boundary conditions for our human experience, randomness of important life events and instability within one’s own spiritual ecosphere are all too common of human experiences.

In our world, there are countless examples of self-organizing systems, and all creatures, and the minds of those creatures, are examples of that miracle in action. Our bodies appear to be primarily organized through the pattern created by the history of the human species, and it’s interactions with its earthly environment. Our DNA appears to carry that pattern within our very cells.  Rupert Sheldrake has coined the term “morphogenetic field” to help  describe our life force, its field of possibilities, and our continuous connection with it. Our minds also have a self-organizing principle, as it organizes itself into our unique personal sense of being.

Naming and Using Words

Names are a convenience for communication, and are never comprehensive and inclusive enough to completely reveal the true natures of what they were created for in our minds to represent in the first place.  As many spiritual advisors have stated, in their own unique way: “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.”

Naming is the way that our consciousness weighs and measures new forms of life, ideas and experiences, in the attempt to insert the present unknown and the mysterious into a context for verbal understanding, which always has a past frame of reference.  Naming attempts to attach a dynamic process to a fixed point in time and space, and thus lodges it in the past.  Naming, in its negative essence is part of the very propagation of illusion, though, in its positive essence facilitates the transferring human energy, facts, and understanding.

The intellectual and the atheist, though possessing finely tuned minds, are tempted to believe that the highly developed intellect is the ultimate in human attainment.  Thus, they can never explore the mystery, and the depth, of the human soul, and comprehend that, beyond our limited and limiting words and thoughts, we all have a connection with Infinity.  The willing explorer of the new paths of consciousness and the mystic both have access to the limitless territory of the Spirit, and will soar to new heights and see the sights rarely seen by the rest of mankind.  Mystics and spiritual journeyers have found their own true path, and need fewer outside forces to help them maintain balance and order in their lives.  Their words are more inspired by their connection with their wholeness, and thus serve as bridges towards healing and communion, rather than the typically divisive self serving propaganda that most egos feed upon, repackage, and redistribute to the world.

Eventually, we must lay down our innate capacity for naming and defining our experience, with its continuous recording into our memory banks, and make peace with the unknown and mystery of the moment. If we are not yet experiencing our own unique version of enlightenment, it only means that we are still clinging to controls from our past, controls that were designed to keep us feeling fairly safe and secure from ongoing threats, be they real or imaginary.  The controls have kept us within the boundaries of order, yet this order, observed with soul awareness, is only the ego’s order, which is limited, limiting, and apt to keep us pilloried to the past, rather than open to the ever creative and energizing mystery of the present moment.  When the capacity to witness life without an endless stream of words and thoughts erupts within consciousness, the mystery of the Self is revealed, and replaces the historically disfigured prisoner called our ego with its awareness.

If establishing or maintaining order in society, in a manufacturing process, and/or in our self is our concern, we can effectively channel all relevant knowledge into intelligent systems of understanding, and, potentially,  control.  These controls will maintain maximum stability wherever necessary, but only under those conditions where we understand most or all of the variables of the system(s) we are attempting to repair or bring balance to. If we develop understanding of the variables of a complex electro-mechanical control and/or chemical  process by understanding the relationships between all the components, what its purpose is, and using the proper test equipment and feedback sensors, we can troubleshoot and repair any system should a dysfunction occur.  The same can be said to be true for complex human psychology, with its often unpredictable behavior.  Yet, humans, through the ego, often create special control programs that disregard basic facts while entertaining illusions and delusions that promote division and chaos.  What are the nature of these algorithms that we so blindly and ignorantly access?

We must come to understand our archetypes, mythology, cultural and religious narratives, ancestral and current internal family system dynamics, genetic, instinctive, neurological and perceptual predispositions and the intentions behind the way that we form words,  and all of our historical responses to these primary control factors behind our conditioning. The development of all of our industry, science, religion, society, family and personal sense of self are manifestations of humanity’s need to express itself, while seeking higher orders of happiness, comfort, stability, security, and understanding.  And, these factors together, in the ultimate, define and express the very extensions of our self into the universe.

The activity of self-organization in consciousness is the greatest mystery of life. The mystery and, potential majesty, of the word has impressed, and confounded, thinkers throughout the ages.  How the ego binds itself to a word, or series of words, makes the philosophers wonder what came first, the word, or the sense of one’s identity? And, are we merely a verbal construct, or is there something much more fundamental, and profound, to our existence, only to be accessed by our suspension of our need to abide in the world of knowledge, and all of our words and thoughts?

Parents are always quite pleased when their children speak their first words, and they then know that they have a viable, healthy child. Usually, the first word is mom, but it can be others. The initial words become the initial organizing energy around which the developing being initiates the launch sequence into consciousness itself. In biblical terms, the word becomes flesh, and dwells among us. It is a mystery of why and how this process actually works, and neuroscientists continue to study the brain, and the human mind, as they attempt the impossible, to locate the physical source of our sense of self.  It is much like using a flashlight to find the bulb encased within itself.

I did not develop verbal abilities until relatively late in my childhood My sister reports that she spoke for me until I developed the capacity, or inclination, to speak. Once I started talking (close to age 4) I proved that I had the capacity for speech, and a lot of it. My father wondered, at times, if I would ever shut up. I proved to be quite precocious, once I engaged my verbal skills. I remember that I would start talking about things that were around me, giving new information that my parents had no knowledge about. My parents thought that there was no way for me to know anything about what I was spouting off about, so I was mostly ignored. But I can remember how good it felt to be talking, and sharing the excitement of the magic of words exploding in my mind! I intuited quite early that built-in to the very fabric of words is an access to imagination and knowledge beyond the word, or sequence of words, spoken. Looking back now, I can see also the incredible capacity of the human mind to represent the real world with words and internal imagery, as well as to create false realities while remaining utterly convinced of their truth, even in the face of non-supporting facts. I, as an individual person, and as a collective, acculturated human have been subjected to and unconsciously adapted to many false realities throughout the course of my life.

Sociologists and psychologists have found that healthy integration of the human self revolves around how well the infant and young child feels accepted by, and connected to his social and physical environment. Thus, happier senses of self arise, and are supported, by myriads of successful interactions with its environment and, giving positive, life affirming names to those experiences.  Goodness, personal value, security, love, and joy, if they become the flesh around the internalized word “me” or “I” at an early age, a more spiritually responsive, happier life is virtually guaranteed.

The nature of self-organizing and self-regulating systems is that once the quiescent point (also known as the Q point, set point, the functional operation level, the balance or the homeostasis point) has been altered, the system naturally seeks a return back to its native state, or “normalcy.” For our human experience, this may be both a blessing and a curse, depending on the state to which we are being returned back to. Typically, if we stretch a rubber band, and then release it, it returns to its original state. But, if we have stretched the rubber band too hard and too often, the rubber band loses its elasticity, and will never again return to its original state.  A similar experience is to be witnessed in process control systems, where the system that strays too far from its programmed responses and established boundary conditions will descend into an irreversible chaos, until the system is reset, and balance restored.

A human being who has been stretched beyond their capacity through excessive stress, anxiety, and/or addictive behavior cycles will not be returning to their normal state, once it is recognized that the normal state was, in fact, an unhealthy, abnormal state of being in the first place, which in turn led to the creation of their present chaotic mindset.

Humanity’s egregious blunder has been in attempting to bring stability to itself while disregarding the laws of our spiritual heritage and of Mother Nature, which mankind continues to ignore, at its own peril. The instability introduced into our collective Earth life system by humanity’s ignorance of these laws will not be correctable until we humble ourselves enough to learn from our mistakes, be they theological, philosophical, religious, economic, ecological, or social in nature.

Begin the Search for Truth

I have lived two complete lives in my time on this planet. Much of the first life is still available to me, both through my family history, my writings, and my own very good memory. In the first life, I was plagued with toxic, self debasing beliefs.  Had it not been for a deep need to understand my dysfunctional process, and try to find an underlying healing truth amid my personal chaos, I would not have awakened, and instead I would have passed away long ago. Some aspects of my former life eluded my ability to communicate around and about them, and thus added to my personal and our cultural conspiracy of silence.  Some wounds were so deep and primal that I had no language for them, with just a vague, ongoing anxiety and disconnect from others that plagued me through the first iteration of my self.

If we began our search for truth and healing, we will eventually find the common threads that were woven together into straight jackets, and then burial shrouds,  rather than as potential mantles signifying discipleship to higher spiritual possibilities. Often, our clues are not immediately evident and obvious, and available.

It pays great dividends to pay attention to our dreams, poetry, physiological issues, conversations with family members, therapists, and, sometimes, just following up on hunches and our intuition to finally expose what our clues may be, or where to research further for them.  A good assumption to start with is that we have been traumatized in one or more ways during the course of our childhood, especially if we are presently not experiencing joy, love, and a sense of purpose. How might a successful search for truth begin?

• By tiring of the way things are, and becoming willing to make changes in course.
• By studying the narratives of our culture, our family system, and ourselves;
• By becoming aware of collective archetypes that unconsciously, influence us;
• And by listening to our intuition, insight, and dreams.

I began seeking healing and balance in earnest in 1987.  Prior to that point, the act of creating personal stories with their isolated lonely context characterized my personal narratives. I found that just being conversational about the details of my life, without accompanying insight,  did not dislodge the detritus from my field of conscious awareness. The Devil is in the details, figuratively speaking, and, as my desire for change was great, I found that I needed to pursue a way to see under the vast matrix of my oft times conflicted mind,  a mind disordered by fixation to chaos generated from the past.

The journey to healing is to find the timeless silence at the foundation of our being, but this requires great insight and dedication. Otherwise, the process of naming, and the resulting stories that arise from naming, are just more time based narratives, characterized by intellectual knowledge and self satisfying entertainment. To develop the capacity for insight requires a tremendous depth of desire to know one’s self in a different, more profound, holistic, way, while overcoming a lifetime of suffering, ignorance, indifference towards and oppression by others, and repression of one’s emotional and spiritual nature.

A system or a life out of balance means that not enough knowledge has been uncovered, or applied, to guarantee harmonious system operation. It is also of greatest importance to realize that no man, or woman, is an island in this vast universe, and that our perception of harmony and balance is inextricably intertwined with the Earth, and the rest of humanity. No matter how healed, balanced, or empowered we believe that we are becoming, we are eternally linked with the rest of humanity, and the universe, in our attempts to create order or balance out of our own unique versions of the collective chaos known as human experience and its knowledge.

An awakened life is a self regulating life, and always seeks to return to balance and equanimity.  The awakened, self-examined life demands that we take inventory on our self, and make every effort to understand the motivations behind all of our thoughts and actions in this world. The deeper we dig, the more that we learn that we are connected at a much deeper, more profound level with the rest of humanity than we ever dreamed possible. It is then that the healing we undertake as an individual can have a “ripple effect” upon the rest of humanity, because we all influence the collective, as well as our individual, consciousness that we experience as human beings.  In the end, we realize that the fragmentation in our lives, and in our minds, is caused through duality, the quality of a sleepy mind that sees a world separate from its own thoughts and perceptions.  We are truly awakened when we see the world as the very extension of our True Self, and fine tune our perceptions accordingly.

Awakening is an interactive process, encouraged and motivated by the desire to end the  pain and suffering that we experienced, while also remaining engaged with the “real world.” We who choose to awaken must strive to keep an equilibrium, between our need to confront the forces of oppression, repression, darkness, and mutual imprisonment, and our spiritual requirements  to love, and to listen carefully to the needs of those promoting values antithetical to the very spiritual values that we are affirming and practicing in our own lives. A continuing part of our education and evolution is  not to reject the human being still covered in a darkened shroud, but instead to reject the ideas that the ignorant person is still clinging to.

An Awakened Path

In the absolute, all that we ever see, unto eternity, is our own self. As I look upon the world, and all of my relationships with the people, the land, the animals, and inner and outer space, I see an evolving landscape that demands collaboration and involvement by all people, and representation for those beings who do not have a voice in such matters. This is a landscape that demands that I make my own unique impression upon it. I must first confront the demons within my own mind and heart, and give them personalized names representing the truth of my personal experience before I strike out against the outer world, lest I project unhealed non-verbalized images and intentions upon the unsuspecting population.

Insight and mindfulness, meditation, walking away from self-destructive dependencies, maintaining dialogue with others, speaking my truth, fighting against oppression of others, and repression within my own heart and soul, following new paths of consciousness, working out my own salvation, while helping others on their own paths as well, are ways to develop collective awareness, and healing, and bringing peace of mind to my own interior universe. I cannot love others, or my own life, completely, until I make peace within my own heart and soul.

My True and Healed Words must become flesh, and dwell within me, and be extended unto whatever version of eternity that I live into. If I keep moving within my Spirit, I won’t be buried.  Keep moving, world, I am not yet ready to be buried with you!  I know that the world, and my Self, have not yet died to each other, if my world still responds to me without throwing more dirt over the grave they tried to bury me in the past.

I continue to look for my reflection in the mirror of life. Sometimes my life is vast and immeasurable, sometimes it is in good order and manageable, and sometimes it is out of control, and just plain fucking dreadful.  Hope and Love remain guiding forces, whether I abide in light, in the material world, or in my own unique marriage of the two.

In the ultimate, if we can build our new awareness and experience around the silence at the center of our being, we will have infinite access to the wonder, healing, and magic of spiritual enlightenment.  To continue on the same path as humanity presently travels guarantees a dark end to humanity’s long journey. How do you see your life today?

This chapter is short, but there may be material from somewhere else that I can add to fill it out.

Chapter :  The Uncommon Knowledge Theory

 

We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.
—-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

 

 

What if I were to tell you that everything that you think you know about yourself is only a theory, and potentially an unproven one, at that? Everything that you think you know about your significant other, your children, your parents, and even your best friends are only theories. Everything that you think you know about your planet, including the plants, animals, insects, oceans, rivers, and the rocks and dirt, are only theories. And everything that you think you know, or believe, about God, the Bible, Christianity, or other religions are only theories. And what if I were to tell you that you can’t be real, yet the only fact about you that can be apperceived is that I am here?

Everything that we witness with our senses, and reflect upon with our minds: is it really there, or are they ever evolving theories created by the mind of man? What facts do we truly have access to? And which tools do we presently have to help us find the truth about ourselves, and about our life?

              Mankind has used religion, spirituality, philosophy, and the science of observation for thousands of years to help understand the world, and for insight into the self. Science, religion and spirituality are based upon a combination of facts, laws, theories, or mythological stories. The truth that supports us lies in a sacred silence well under of our internal matrix of memories and personal and collective accumulations of information and knowledge. There is a deeper truth, another reality, or state of being, that is accessible, once we discard our concepts of time. The seemingly infinite world of your verbal creation pales in comparison to a non-verbal potential that lies undiscovered and unappreciated within your heart and soul. This chapter is an inquiry into what we can know, what we will never know, and how to understand at a higher level who the “knower” really is.

Scientific and cultural education and religious indoctrination brings a measure of order to all of us. Yet it can also teach the student about other people’s perspectives on matters of individuality, self-expression, and the potential for a connection with a power greater than our self while confusing and delaying the individual’s direct connection and link to his own higher truth and nature.

 

Theories and Laws and Spiritual Awakening

In science and mathematics, a theory is a statement proposing an explanation for the processes that we witness. A law is an observation which becomes an assumed fact; a theory is the explanation of that observation. The Law of Gravity and the Theory of Relativity are good examples. Just because a law is an observable fact, or a theory is intuitively obvious, we cannot prove them to be true. The apple always falls downward from the tree, doesn’t it? Yet the observation of matter converting into energy, with E=Mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light is not observable, at least through our normal senses. A theory requires experimentation under various conditions.

A law has no such requirements for experimentation. A theory may become obsolete with time. This is not the case with a law. A theory can be replaced by another better theory; however, this never happens with a law. When people say, “Relativity is just a theory, not a fact,” or, “Evolution is just a theory, not a fact,” they show that they do not understand how science works. Theory is as good as it gets. There is always room for further evolution of our scientific theories, thus no limit is placed upon learning and refining all theories to best represent what we now observe through continuous process improvement, which supports higher qualities of awareness, and enhanced realms of intelligence and understanding.

Even incorrect theories have their value. Discredited alchemy was the birthplace of modern chemistry, and medicine made great strides long before we understood the roles of bacteria and viruses. Improving our theories often leads to exciting new discoveries that were unimaginable under the old way of thinking. We should not assume that all of our current scientific theories will stand the test of time. A single unexpected result is enough to challenge the status quo. However, vulnerability to some potentially better explanation doesn’t weaken a current scientific theory. Instead, it shields science from becoming unchallenged dogma. This is not the case with religion, which clings to all understandings from the far distant past as if their entire faith was dependent upon adherence to such dogma.

              So what do we accept as our laws, what do we accept as our theories, and what do we accept on “faith” about the nature of our self, our world, our “God” and our universe? Are we relying upon the statements of others, do we practice blind faith? Or are we active observers of the phenomenon of our lives? If we base our understanding upon our own observations of ourselves, others, and the world, we can then extrapolate upon our known facts or laws to build our bridge to a personal and potentially to a universal truth.

The Uncommon Knowledge Theory points to the potential for spiritual awakening. It has a direct relationship to insight, intuition, mysticism, and a desire for enlightenment, with the expression of universal love and transcendence. It remains latent and unexpressed within the human heart and soul within major sectors of our population. It remains only a theory, or a potentiality, until it is brought into awareness and practiced as if it was real, or the truth. And, it might be found that the more that the theory is practiced, the more it might appear that the Uncommon Knowledge Theory is really an undiscovered or ignored law in the first place.

There are two possibilities for living. In the Common Knowledge Game, we experience life as a sleeping being in a dark, disfigured world. Or through our Uncommon Knowledge Theory, we can life as an awakening being in a multi-dimensional human relationship with infinity. The sleeping beings, or those dreamers practicing unconscious knowledge, are those who live in the world of personal illusion, or Maya, without being aware of the fantasies of thought that dominate their minds and lives. Their present moment remains dominated by perceptions arising from wounding from their personal and their culture’s past, without sufficient application of healing awareness to that fact. The awakening ones are able to see through the chaos of the dreaming, unaware mind, and no longer are unconscious servants their own brokenness, or to values of patriarchy and toxic masculinity, which are primary support pillars for the Common Knowledge Game, especially through religions with a long history.

Awakening is an interactive process, encouraged and facilitated by the pain and suffering that we experience as human beings, while engaging with the so-called real world. Far too many Americans live in alternate universes, where pain and suffering are not directly dealt with, or are to be avoided at all costs, wherever possible. Immersion in fantasy and denial of our personal and collective responsibility towards the ills of this world also reigns supreme in major sections of our culture. This is fueled by addictions to media devices, diversions of our life force into entertainment and worship of TV and movie personalities, hypnosis by false religious and spiritual leaders, alcohol and drug addictions, and personal and sexual power abuses. To facilitate healing, we must reject the false leaders, hypnosis, hero-worshiping and idolatry, and we must become our own leaders, with awakened powers of understanding and compassion.

 

The Power to Change Your Life

In the absolute, we are the space that we witness, either through our eyes, the telescope, or our mathematics, we are the time, or the timelessness, that we experience, and we are all of the people, and the cultures, that we are presently having relationships with. All that we will ever see, unto eternity, is our self. Insight is life, and life is insight. In truth, none of us are on the outside looking in, rather, we are all on the inside, looking everywhere, potentially without limit.

With the exit from Portland’s underworld community, in March of 1987 and my own exit from the drug-induced and culturally inculcated insanity, a new world waited to welcome me, but it did not just reach out and grab me by the hand, and lead me down the path to recovery and reintegration back into the community. With all that I have previously written about the time beginning with recovery from addiction and alcoholism, it would be a mistake to assume that I was totally conscious about what was going on, and the direction that I was headed from 1987 forward. All that I knew was that after I had made conscious contact with the God of my understanding, my old life seemed to disappear. I had an ability to describe the world that I had left behind, but I had no language to describe the new world that I was entering into, or the new experiences that were unfolding in the new life of sobriety. I had never felt like I was an accepted and honored part of the outside world in the first place, so finding my new people, and my language, were important endeavors to me, once I was firmly on the path to sobriety and enhanced spirituality.

This desire for a loving integration into the wholeness of life first arose several years before, when I yearned for peace. While addicted, I could not fulfill the conditions for its experience. The transformation was many years in the making, but when it appeared within me, I was no longer tormented by my social insecurities, or my feeling of disconnection from God, my fellow-man, or from the plants and animals that grace this beautiful planet that we share. Somehow, I had let go of the controls of my old ego state of mind, and a new order started revealing itself, from moment to moment. At times I felt like a guided missile, never knowing the destination for my life, but trusting whatever it was that had launched my new life into existence would get me to the right place at the right time.

I still had memories of my former life, yet they no longer informed my day-to-day thoughts, my decisions, or my overall outlook on life and love. I did not know who the new me was, though the new me always had a smile, and felt continuous joy. I had a series of spiritual upheavals which defied my rational mind, and I did not have the words to describe or contain the experience for many years to follow. It was as if a new person had landed in my consciousness, the old me had died, and now I was informed, moment to moment, by a powerful force of peace or silence, or Love itself.

Before 1987, there were many people with their disfiguring concepts roaming around in my mind, but now that “committee of the many” had permanently adjourned, and there was now only one peaceful presence, a new ordering principle for my consciousness. A friend from a men’s group claimed that I was a walk-in, a term used to describe when the old ego departs a body, to be replaced by a new being.

My family still saw me in terms of the past, for the most part, as my history created great scars on the psyche of fellow family members, as well as the friends and acquaintances of my years prior to recovery. But, they could appreciate that the new me no longer required their extra concern or care, as I was now an independent, upright, fairly conscious human being. I made healthy choices in my relationships, and I chose a new, fulfilling career to replace all of the career wreckage from my past. I was but a boy again, though, while still learning the ropes, meeting new friends, discovering new possibilities for myself and others, and, occasionally, still sipping from the inner healing springs of the Miracle that can quench the spiritual thirst of all who seek it out.

This new being, this upgraded Bruce 2.0, which appeared in the summer of 1987, was like those miracle babies and children that I had always envied, and doubted. During most of the time after June of 1987, until I met my present wife Sharon in August of 1989, I spent over six hours a day in prayer and meditation, and probably as a result experienced blessed states on an almost continuous basis. I now heard and felt God, and I was taught on the inner spiritual plane about aspects of life, and consciousness, that I had no way to learn or know about otherwise. This was not a Christian God, or a Jewish God, or the Buddha Mind, but those names certainly pointed to the new reality that I had somehow accessed, and been dramatically changed by.

We all have access to inner wisdom not borne of our personal experience, yet it lies, mostly ignored, in the inner recesses of our hearts and souls, for much of our lives. I was given a new blank slate to write my new self upon, a new possibility for living, and being, in this world, aided by this new connection with my own wisdom. The world that I once wanted to depart from so badly, was now paradise on Earth, and I knew that Heaven was not a concept for the future, but a living reality only for the present moment. But, I could not carry the old me into that world, I had to leave all of my verbal and non-verbal memory possessions behind, so to speak, to stay in tune with the new Spiritual music.

I have noted from my understanding and experience of others who have had dramatic spiritual experiences, is that, initially, they experienced a state of being poor communicators around the event. This lack of articulateness is quite a common, for several years that follow such an upheaval. Those that have a strong religious background try to use the language of that system of thought to interpret and communicate their own unique opening. For those who do not have a well established religious background, or who might need other language or images to convey their experience, the search through historical literature to see what others have written about their own cosmic events have been found to be helpful. There is an attempt to try to use a language that others might understand, but, unless they too have had spiritual lightning strike them, the search for an equally enlightened and awakened peer group is liable to be fairly unsuccessful, at least initially. Then there are also those who just throw up their hands, and give up on the idea of ever communicating with others about the transcendent state. And, finally, there are those whose minds are irreparably damaged by the experience, and though they may remain connected to the Spirit, their behavior and style is indicative of a person who is insane, and operating well outside of socially and culturally accepted standards.

I did not have the capacity to communicate with others what I was experiencing, for many years after 1987. I would refer to my rebirth, and talk of the old me with those who were interested, especially in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. The people who met me after my rebirth could not believe that I was ever addicted or dysfunctional in self-destructive or other-destructive ways, and I learned to not wave that recovery flag at every new person I met, so that they could have an honest chance of knowing me for who I now was, rather than who I might have been long ago. It was my movement through all of these new relationships which helped to define for me the new me, who I was now, how I now related to and appreciated others, and how I now loved unconditionally most everyone that I met. All of humanity became my brother or sister in this new reality, and my lifelong sense of dreadful separation from others had been lifted. I then set out to find my people and find out where I might fit into the new world order that was revealing itself within my mind and heart. In my naiveté, I assumed that most others naturally came by this understanding, and that I was finally catching up, spiritually, with the normal folks, the folks that never were so unhappy as to consider alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide for themselves.

I eventually became active in the great outdoors again through hiking and backpacking, I resumed bicycle riding with an association with Cycle Oregon over several years, I learned tennis, and I also ended up excelling in road and trail racing as a runner, albeit an older runner (in the master’s division), competing individually and also appearing on several championship or near-championship level Master’s teams in both the Hood To Coast and Rainier To Pacific races. I was able have a “redo” of my life, and experience success and failure based on my own decisions, and actually glean wisdom from my interactions with life, rather than hate myself and/or others for its sometimes difficult teachings. And, yes, the new life was quite fertile ground for learning.

This new life also provided me with some of the language that I needed to communicate better with others what I had experienced on the inner plane. It also started to provide me with the language needed to describe the foundational consciousness which predisposed me, and our world to dysfunctional and self-destructive behavior, but I was not to get the full message until much later in life. Having allowed myself to return back into the world after this second birth, I subsequently gained insight into the matrix of collective human misunderstanding that was the foundation for our collective consciousness as a human race. What is left, after the garbage is cleared? If might be considered similar to the process of metamorphosis, which brings forth the butterfly from the caterpillar. If the butterfly could talk, I would assume that it would much rather talk about its new freedom, and the ability to fly, rather than its previous form of life sliding over the dirt. Yet, the only life that the butterfly arose from was with ground dwellers, and that is where all of its past stories were created.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter :  The Master Teacher Speaks

 

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.—- James Baldwin

 

Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the living God?  Don’t you know that you are the light of the world?—Jesus of Nazareth

 

 

As I moved forward spiritually in that great summer of 1987,  I was still quite new to the path of healing and transformation. I had left my old life behind, and I was open to the experience of spiritual connection, and, potentially, mastery. I had developed quite a meditation practice, eschewing committed relationships with others in order to develop a deeper spiritual reality. I was meditating several hours a day, and though my life was bearing fruit from previous connections with the Spirit, I remained driven to find deeper and deeper layers of meaning, and experience of my true nature and being. I remained excited about the possibilities for my life, as I had finally made conscious contact with the God of my understanding. I had recently experienced a dramatic, miraculous, healing of my body and my mind, and a new energy permeated my being. I felt like I was finally swimming in a vast new sea of discovery and the unknown, though I still had not connected the dots, or started consciously rebuilding my new self.

But I could have never anticipated the experience I was about to have, on this particular day, July 21, 1987. Without warning, during a meditation session, I was lifted from my body awareness, and I then had a sense that I now had a decision to make. It was like I was driving an automobile, and I realized that I could continue steering, heading in my usual direction for life, or I could let go of the controls and experience something totally different and unique.

Somehow, through a mechanism still a mystery to me, I was released from the steering wheel of my mind, and my conditioning.  There was an exhilarating inner rush whereby I was totally released from myself and what was left of my old psychological set, my burdens, and my body. My essence traveled into a great unknown, which was neither light or dark, and it was like I passed through an apparently infinite matrix or structure.  I had entered into a dimension of experience where interconnected structures of alive and intelligent energy were manifest.  At that time, I did not recognize what I was witnessing, nor did I have the words to adequately represent this web.

For me, this matrix represented the very collective consciousness of mankind, with all of its intelligence and its stupidity.  I quickly flashed by what was, at this point in my life,  that mysterious and unnameable energy, and began almost a half spiral downward, where I came to a place of complete darkness, or, more accurately, emptiness. I felt totally at home here. I felt as if I was in the womb of some great loving presence.  There was nothing at all to witness here, at least initially.

Almost immediately, a laughing, happy voice seemed to be speaking to me, or, more precisely, through me. Messages floated through, like, “No teacher shall effect your salvation, you must work it out for your self,” and, “Think no thoughts,” and, “Follow new paths of consciousness.” And then, a mathematical formula for re-entry back into the great unknown was given to me. Because of my mathematical background, it was a differential equation that I could understand, and which stated (in layman’s terms) that with the total elimination of the movement of time based thought, the direct perception of reality was possible. All of these experiences made sense for me.

The final messages, however, were two of the most difficult to reconcile within my life, and the ones which remained troubling for me throughout the subsequent years. Finding the answers to the troubling questions created from this experience was to guide me, almost all of the way up to the present moment.

First, there is this component: you can’t be real. When it was stated, it was stated through me, with a joyful, laughing voice, yet when I re-entered my normal way of being, it became a challenging, if not threatening statement, because it’s about ego.

The ego is the sum total of all of my judgments, the sum total of my human experience, my acculturation, my conditioning, my separation from God, love, my fellow-man, and truth. The ego looks out from itself, and sees everything, and everyone, as if they are separate from itself, while totally failing to see that all that it ever sees, unto eternity, is itself. We only see what we have created. I only see “I,” and I is the creation of being conscious. Through this ancient and venerated process I also have created the concept of “you” as both experiences arise simultaneously. The you that I have formed does not exist; my perception of you is an incomplete mental creation that only exists in my mind, and which may or may not be shared by others, and most certainly is not shared by you.

The human race tends to confuse the verbal description (or mental image) of the person with the actual experience of the person, who, regardless of appearances, is infinitely more complex, and worthy of love and acceptance, than the human mind can readily accept. My ego is the sum total of all of my time based thoughts about time based behaviors of myself, and others. If I want to see clearly, I must accept that my main mode of viewing the world was through the ego’s eyes of time-based judgements and the unreality that this creates. To die to this mode of living is to truly be reborn of the spirit.

To follow new paths of consciousness while knowing that you can’t be real sets up quite a transformational dynamic within consciousness. If you can’t be real, then everything that I associate with I is preeminent. Every time I identify with a person, a process, or a place, I have created either a new path of consciousness, or I have reaffirmed some older, more familiar, potentially worn out path that I have already been traveling upon. “I am an electrician”, or, “I am an alcoholic,” or, “I am a son of Beryl and Corinne Paullin,” or, “I am full of shit,” or, “I am a lonely, isolated person,” or whatever I associate my self, my “I am” with, either continues my path in old directions, or creates the imperative to create new words, thoughts, and experiences around a new direction. I could just as easily say, “I am no longer traveling old paths of consciousness,” and then stop thinking time-based thoughts, and rehashing and rehearsing old memories, to create a new life experience for myself.  I would then have to trust in a Higher Power, the Unknown, and the Mystery to create my new timeless self in each unique moment.

Lastly, a most confusing revelation came, as well. I could see the field of energy that constituted my body/mind awareness. I saw embedded within it two almost complete thought forms, or identity forms, which I recognized as two distinct entities. I had two extras attached to my field.  I could see, in that insightful moment, that they were not there for my greater good, for sure. In that moment of recognition I regarded these two unwelcome components to my life force as tricksters, though I noted that their presence seemed to allay the feelings of loneliness of my ego, perhaps only because they seemed vaguely familiar to me. They appeared to be caricatures of two unique people. I sensed that I was supposed to let go of these illusions of self, but I did not know what to do. I was to learn later, much later, after my father’s death, that these two tricksters were creations that I had made in my youth in response to the names mom and dad, my associations with them of my trauma, suffering, and abandonment as a baby, and of their intentions for me, including my unhealthy attachments and historical reactions to their points of view.

The two extra identity vortices in the human energy field matrix that constituted my conscious sense of self did not really ever disappear, they just became unconscious again, for me. I later was to associate them with two trauma inspired black holes in consciousness which my lack of self worth and the fear of death swirled around.

 

The Pearl

Of what value to us is our ego? Our ego can be likened to the shell of an oyster. The oyster shell is rarely recognized for its own beauty. Like the oyster shell, our personality may be appealing to some, ugly to others, or just plain uninteresting. Yet we all have access to different, unknown, and, potentially, sublimely transformative layers of our self, even though the personality often fails to consciously engage with them.

In an oyster, natural pearls form when an irritant, usually a parasite, or, perhaps, the proverbial grain of sand, works its way into an oyster, mussel, or clam. As a defense mechanism, a fluid is used to coat the irritant. Layer upon layer of this coating, called nacre is deposited until a lustrous pearl is formed.

The pearl developed inside gives the oyster its unique value to human beings, who prize the pearl’s positive response to a major irritant in its life. But, the shell has to be opened, for all to witness the beautiful visual delight developed and hidden within.

Ego is formed and continuously affirmed in an environment where spiritual discernment has not yet sufficiently evolved. Our ego is our static assessment of a dynamic, changing world, and it is constantly engaged in a state of “catching up” with the truth, however that may be expressing. It can be likened to taking a picture of a movie in midstream, and assuming that the picture represents the entirety of the movie. Wisdom is gained through our experiences in the journey through space and time, and the reinterpretations of and the release from all of the illusory static images stuck in our memory. Wisdom is the perception that our memory may be clogged with a lifetime of the accumulation of static images, all out of context with our present day intentions to evolve and heal. Life in the now is eternally dynamic and changing, while the fragile ego clings to its static fantasies and hopes spawned from its past.

If we resist conscious, rational change, our ego will hold onto worn out understandings of life and become out of touch with the ever unfolding new reality. Yesterday’s truth is today’s superstition, and yesterday’s inaccurate assessment of others is today’s isolation and pain, so it is imperative to keep an open mind to change. Otherwise, the ego will be left behind, and suffer according to the cognitive dissonance it allows itself to experience.

At all the intersections of the points of conflict between our inner world and our outer world, there are choices to be made. When a conflict arises, do we resist any new message or lesson being offered by another, especially when their understanding does not conform to our own? What about that daughter-in-law who hangs up on you, or the husband who talks more than he should, and is unwilling to change? What about that friend or writer who promotes a way of viewing life that does not conform to our own? These are irritants, and if we use the irritant to justify an inaccurate judgement against, or physical separation from, the offending party, we may have pushed away a layer of nacre for our own internal pearl of wisdom. Our judgements are only verbal measurements of an ever changing environment. Any judgement should be a temporary rest stop, to be left behind when we move in resonance with the new reality continuously unfolding before our eyes. Thus is the way of forgiveness.

Change is irritating, and often threatening, to the ego. Our egos exist to help bring context and balance between what we are witnessing now with what we have experienced in the past, to assess what actions in life we must undertake to meet our social and societal obligations. It is our mind’s conscious attempt at bringing a balance between the world of form that we share with all of life, and the almost secret world inside of the personal mind. We might believe that we are keeping secrets from each other, but the truth is that we all share in the vast majority of thoughts and inclinations with our fellow humans, and we are only in denial of that fact when we don’t believe it and fail to act with compassion towards our self and to others.

If the oyster was a closed system, and did not allow for an internal response to irritants, whatever parasites or grains of sand that entered into the oyster might cause its very destruction. Because the irritant has been addressed, and stabilized through the deposit of the layers of nacre, the oyster continues to thrive, though it is now growing an internal body consisting of the layers of the nacre, which are forming into a most lustrous pearl.
So too do we, as humans, have the capacity to make pearls. But we must approach all irritants with love and compassion, or we will produce no spiritual nacre, only more pain and suffering. Those with spiritual discernment are finally able to see the Pearl for what it is.

All of the forgiveness that we offer to ourselves, and to all offending parties in our world, also create the most lustrous layers of nacre. Do not judge another by their shell, but instead wait until they can open their self up, and reveal the Pearl of greatest price.
We all experience the effects of thoughtless, capricious human activity. Bring on those irritants, as they are the gate keepers to new layers of God consciousness! Remember, most people ask for forgiveness, rather than permission before they engage in their controversial behavior. Our wisdom, created through spiritually discerning the irritants in life, is our shiny Pearl.

The point is to learn meaningful lessons from the pain, and not assume that it arose out of nowhere. Unaddressed pain tends to take over small centers within the mind, and over a period of time the traumatized mind loses its ability to be an avenue of present moment awareness, and it becomes fixated upon a past that cannot be healed. The institutionalized pain embedded within our memory becomes virtual scabs over our unexamined wounds. Are we just forming scabs that only partially cover our wounds, or are we facing our brokenness, in spirit and in relationship, which contribute to the formation of a healing spiritual nacre within our own mind and hearts.

But truly, what is the pearl of the greatest price? It is your pearl, strung on the same string with the rest of humanity. Our stories imbued with collective wisdom creates the necklace of ultimate value. We must each build our own unique consciousness of truth and love, and then our stories become part of the ever unfolding wisdom of mankind.

Through insight and mindfulness, minds and hearts are transformed, making all of us much less likely to become the source of suffering for others, and we become the living examples of loving non-violence in action. Insight plants the seed of the miracle into our minds, and mindfulness is the great gardener of that miracle, resulting in a more abundant, healthy crop of happier, peaceful, loving, and ordered thoughts.

 

Enlightenment

Who does not want to be the light of the world? Do we even know what that question truly implies? The world of art has attempted to capture what an individual living in the light might look like.  Over many centuries, we have seen artist’s renditions of saints and sages, with paintings often showing the blessed person as having a golden light about them, usually concentrating around the head.

Is this divine light a real phenomenon, or only an artistic interpretation of that which may not be completely captured by art, science, religion, and philosophy?

The physiological truth about humanity is that humans do have the capacity to emit light, through bioluminescence, yet that light is not readily witnessed by normal human eyesight.  Humans do not innately embody luciferin, which would give us the capacity to glow like fireflies.  Yet what about that inner glow, the glow that erupts within one’s heart and soul when finally touched by transcendent spiritual power?

I believe that in life we can experience a power and a life greater than any limited, personal sense of self because I experienced it for myself. I no longer look to the darkness for the light. I found my own light, a light that dispels the darkness of others, their religions and economic philosophies, and the darkness of my own historical self.

To find the light of truth, there must be a release from the controls of the crowd, whether it is the crowd of old thoughts, or the crowd that blindly follows others. I am saddened that mankind is becoming increasingly dependent on its technology for communication, while not concurrently developing the sensitivity to connect with the “energy” that we all share in, and with which we communicate with each other continuously. Our technology, especially the hand-held media devices that we use to entertain and hypnotize ourselves with, only serves to continue the energy of the past, without offering alternatives to the present collection of corrupted choices that humanity has seemed eternally resigned to make.

Science, though able to define relationships and the laws that dictate behavior between all observable, and quantum, phenomenon, are only now beginning to understand the ramifications of the real law of our existence, which is all that we will ever see, unto eternity, is ourselves. Science provides laws for what we see, yet, unlike enlightened spirituality, provides no laws predicting or supporting what is possible for humanity. Quantum mechanics will not be understood fully until the self-centered perspective towards infinity is replaced with the understanding that the collective, as well as the individual, is present in each of us, in each moment of existence.

The impacts that we all have upon each other are not yet fully understood, yet prayer, meditation, and mindfulness prepare the mind for the unknown, where all true creation springs from. It is a much more collaborative effort being a human, and any other form of life on this planet, than our minimally conscious minds understand at this time. Ultimately, science and religion, medicine and technology, will all be united as manifestations of mankind’s expression of true being.

The ego is created from our desperate call for love, from a world that has not yet learned how to love.  The most significant question remains: why care, or why bother?  The sacredness and the sanctity of our universe is dependent upon our recognition of who we really are, and how we express our understanding of that connection.  Therein lies the absolute necessity that members of the human race seek true enlightenment

If we can’t drill down to the foundation of our world’s and of our individual problems, and find and replace the foundation, there is little long term hope for any of us.

If the desire for liberation from the damaging and fatal illusions of our deteriorating society is great, we are ready for our own personal transformation.  By letting go of the societal controls that keep us imprisoned in an outdated image of our self and the unrealistic and unhealthy expectations of others, we become ready to travel onto the new paths of consciousness, and to a new era of transcendence in our lives.

 

 

Conclusion: Thoughts On That Which Is Beyond All Thought

 

              We all have had problems listening to each other. We all have had problems listening to ourselves. Yet, our stories must be told, and we must listen to other people’s story, with respect and compassion for ourselves, and for the other. Every good story has an ending. And, so do our bad stories. What value is a story, if it is never told? What value is love, if it is never shared? What is the value of speaking, if nobody is even listening? What is the value of writing, if there is nobody left to read?

 

 

              Even if you remain lost in the shadows, having vainly pursued the mythical Garden of Eden, the dangerous Minotaur in the labyrinth, or the dark kingdom of Mordor, there still is hope. To be insane in an insane world, to be a stranger in a strange land, is the true new normal for many people presently wandering upon the face of this troubled planet. How we deal with the insanity determines whether we remain imprisoned, or eventually find our freedom. Blaming others for our present station in life is self-defeating. Yet, that is the first response of an immature mind, a mind not ready and willing to make the necessary adjustments in course to create a new life experience.

Mass hypnosis, oppression, mental illness, drug addiction and alcoholism, and their most destructive spawn, murder and suicide, have been a scourge upon the fabric of human consciousness for time immemorial. Our mental journey far away from Eden begins with the loss of self esteem and mutual respect, loss of personal meaning, and the loss of clarity in making good choices for our life.  This confusion morphs into depression, alienation, isolation, anxiety, despair and loneliness. Suicide, the ultimate act of repression against self, and murder, the ultimate act of oppression of the other, appears as a reasonable choice for the final act of protest against life from those suffering from the terminal effects of oppression and repression.  Suicide and murder are cruel acts against those with loving intentions , and are tragic forms of violence against self, family, friends, and the supporting community.

Suicide and murder are perceived to be the only solution for desperate souls who have reached the end of their options. Our society continues to supply potential perpetrators, and victims,  at a catastrophic rate, and that rate will only increase, as the diseases of planned political divisiveness, oppression of those not in the cultural “in” group, addiction and mental illness within our culture continues to increase. I have known, and buried, far too many friends and family members who were waiting for a better day, and life, while abusing drugs and alcohol, or collapsing into mental illness.

My own wait for a better day has born great fruits for me, but the fruit was not acquired passively or through waiting for the outer conditions of my life to improve. I first had to confront my own suffering, and the sources within my mind, memory, and heart that would push me towards self-annihilation. Suffering need not lead to death, for those who choose to awaken.

Life can be an extremely humbling experience. Those blessed few who stop resisting life and develop the capacity to accept defeat are the ones most receptive to healing. It is when we are defeated that we become the most open to life affirming change and growth. After accepting the grace innate within the willingness to change, we can accept personal responsibility for the rest of our lives.  We finally learn that the willingness and capacity for changes in our attitudes and behaviors can become our higher power.

When our goal has finally been spotted, or, has spotted us, we each can make our own unique path towards it. The trail that each one of us blazes is as important as any path made by any prophet, saint, or savior who has ever lived, or will live. It is only our ego, or the egos of the hero worshipers of other faiths who have not yet realized their own highest truth that would say otherwise.

To make dramatic changes in my life, the desire had to come from a place deep within myself. I did not change because my wife and family, my friends, my minister at church, my employer, my political leaders, or my people pleasing attitudes cajoled or advised me to change. I had to begin to value myself differently, and to become conscious that my behavior was causing irreparable harm to myself, to other human beings, to our animal brothers and sisters, and/or to the sustainability for life on this planet. I understood that my behavior was insane, and that I had a death wish for myself, and/or for others. I sought for a higher power or energy to overcome my insanity.

Bringing healing to a situation is about recognizing what we are not doing well and accepting where we can improve, right now, in this moment, to help unfold more holistic intentions. Positive change follows the heart’s intentions, if the heart is pure. If it is a desire from the Heart, never stop seeking that which seems unattainable, for it is the heart itself seeking for its own highest expression. Please do not stop until Life’s Miracle reveals Itself to you.

Built right into the very fabric of life, is death itself.  There are up to one hundred trillion cells within our human bodies that are constantly dying off, and being replaced by others so that we can continue to live, and even evolve (or regress as the situation may dictate).  So also should all of our old thoughts die off, to be replaced by newer, more vibrant creations, if we are to continue to live, and grow, and even evolve.  Those who do not do the work to shed the old ways, the old thoughts, the incomplete and inaccurate ways of seeing life, and being in life, will remain the poor among us, and more susceptible to the ravages of disease, aging and deterioration of the mind and body.

Even though the disease and despair wrought by toxic male energy is woven throughout the collective garment that now covers our humanity, there are many threads of hope interwoven within it, as well, and these threads are our hope for transcendence. Most forms of insanity can be healed without a lifetime of therapy or taking medications, if it is recognized that at its source, insanity arises from the habituated thoughts, feelings, and actions created through our lifelong unconscious accommodations to trauma.

Insight changes attitudes, insight changes behaviors, and insight changes lives. Always question prevailing attitudes and philosophies of the people in power, be they politicians, employers, pop psychology or spirituality gurus, or religious figures. Healthy skepticism is warranted whenever a person or organization tries to exert pressure on individuals to conform to certain beliefs or traditions. Never sit idly by while witnessing injustice or unfair and hurtful judgement and action meted out by the people in power against innocent people. By your silence, you are supporting the ignorant and the evil doers. They will use your silence to claim that you were in full support of their abhorrent behavior.  Do not join in their conspiracy of silence.

The closer I get to my God, or the creator of my creations, the more anonymous that I become, and the more my story becomes about the truth of life, and, a little less about myself. My story may have little or no value to you, yet, there is a story, long neglected within your own heart and soul, patiently awaiting its delivery to our world.  Your world awaits the King or Queen within you. You only needs to pick up your own unique crown of the truth of being, and wear it with integrity and love.

 

 

I’m not sure this section belongs here, but will figure it out when I go through the material again.

 

Not sure where this belongs yet. Maybe in the conclusion.