Chapter Six: Insight and Mindfulness (version #1)
In the honest seeing of our problems through enhanced and sincere insight and awareness, our freedom is ultimately attained- Variation on quotes by many spiritual teachers, prophets, saints and savants.
We all can be spiritually erumpent, yet our lives will never blossom into the beautiful, independent, fragrant flower they can become, while we continue to neglect our true selves, our life’s meaning, and our inner spiritual GPS. Sadly, our hearts will never break out into a dithyramb, instead remaining in stunned silence. We yearn for a better day while mourning the loss of our greater happiness and potential. We will remain entombed behind the massive burial stone created by early family and cultural wounding, other forms of trauma, and our unconscious response to those wounds, until we begin the journey of self-discovery and spiritual awakening.
The oppression of major blocks of humanity, coupled with the Capitalist attitudes supporting the decimation of the plant and animal kingdoms reigns supreme in major sections of our culture. We tend to avoid taking responsibility for the healing of this world, remaining predominantly a distracted culture. This inattention is fueled by addictions to media devices or mind-numbing ideologies, and diversions of our life force into mindless entertainment while also worshipping TV actors, sports stars, movie personalities, and spiritual gurus.. Alcohol, drug, and personal power abuses continue, seemingly unabated. False or underqualified teachers and leaders we have ignorantly chosen to follow continue the disturbing trend started by our ancestors until the beginnings of human consciousness. Some still play make-believe and cling to the spiritual accomplishments of others, such as the historical Jesus or Buddha, and ignore the call to work out their salvation.. As a result, those who do not perform the required spiritual reclamation projects will continue to needlessly suffer, while bringing no relief from suffering to others…
To facilitate awakening and healing, we must reject the precedent that has been established, while aspiring to become our saviors, with awakened powers of understanding and compassion. New thoughts not based upon wounded memories are essential. Otherwise, we continue layering over, or covering our non-examined embedded belief structures with another coat of paint, while our decaying house of consciousness shakes with its ever-eroding foundation..
There are no quick-fix solutions. Our country has been fed on spiritual and religious fast food for much too long. What is next in the queue for us?
- drive through healing?
- five-minute meditations for transformation and prosperity?
- new diets that guarantee weight loss and immortality?
- books that promise that all of your prayers will be answered if you would just pray the one special way offered by the starving author?.
- a magic pill that erases all difficult memories, and creates pleasure where there once was only pain?
Or, should we just declare “it is what it is”, throw up one’s hands in surrender, and just accept defeat, or that all is “God’s will”?
If we do not understand the system that we are trying to repair, we are only introducing more chaos into an already unstable process, and we risk further damage to, or the destruction of, an already compromised life. We must not get bogged down by resentments, judgments, denial, and ignorance.. We need to proceed carefully and consciously as we look for the causes of our individual and cultural distresses. We must enhance our understanding of ourselves and all of our relationships. Then, we can intelligently and logically troubleshoot them with the best tools and techniques, knowledge, insight, and intuition presently available.
I have lived two complete lives in my 68+ years 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 my first life, I was plagued with toxic, self-limiting and debasing internal dialogue and beliefs. Had it not been for a deep need to understand my dysfunctional process, and try to find an underlying healing truth amid my 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 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 myself.
If we begin 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 give attention to our dreams, personal poetry and writing, physiological issues, conversations with family members, and 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 our childhood, especially if we are presently not experiencing great bodily health, 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, and
- 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. Before that point, the act of creating personal stories with their isolated lonely context characterized my 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 find a way to see under the vast matrix of my oft-times conflicted mind, a mind disordered by a fixation on chaos generated from the past..
The healing journey 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.
“The unexamined life will be painfully lived”—-Jack Boland
When I was a kid, I had a strange and profound dream. I witnessed some sort of ancient priest, perhaps even a shaman, within a fairly primitive culture. The priest, having received his directive from on high, returned to his village along a vast lake in a high mountain region. He gathered all of the villagers together and informed them that they were to take every golden figurine and 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 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 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, toward 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!
Psychologists call this kind of experience projection, where we finally realize 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 a world that we created through our ignorance, both collectively and individually. This manifests in all of the world’s horrors that we witness daily and in all of the family and cultural dysfunction under which we were raised. Such insanity is promoted through our misguided perceptions, as we imagine what another person is thinking, and then make them wrong for thinking it. We are all wounded by these processes, 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 ourselves in the first place. If we go the way of our unexamined and wayward thoughts, we will be carried away by them into an endless maze, where we will continue to attack ourselves, and each other, until we face the truth about our wayward, conditioned perceptions.
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 minds. Those who refuse to look at the toxic masculinity darkness within our culture become its unconscious and most ardent supporters. Indifference and hatred continue 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 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 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 my greatest insights happened in my fourth-grade science class. Mr. Hill, our principal and co-teacher of the fourth-grade class, was going to perform an experiment to teach the students about the power of observation. Each member of the class was to record everything they observed. Mr. Hill heated a portable electric stove. He then used insulated tongs to place a thin sheet of metal 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, 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 descriptions. Even as a kid, I depended on other people to describe 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 secondhand 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 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 of 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. But for me to describe the interior dimensions of my 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 finally graduating 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 roadblocks 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 telling 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 the inability to communicate my distress with others doomed me to a deteriorating life experience. This limited my choices so much that for 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, and this is the secret behind the motivation for many mysterious suicides. The answer to these problems is mindfulness.
Cultivating Mindfulness
Mindfulness, a practice rooted in self-awareness and present-moment attention, plays a crucial role in understanding our consciousness. By cultivating mindfulness, we develop a deeper understanding of our minds and the interplay of thoughts, emotions, and sensations. It is through mindfulness that we can witness the complexities of our consciousness and gain insights that may have eluded us before. Incorporating mindfulness into our daily lives brings us closer to understanding our consciousness. By practicing mindfulness, we foster self-awareness, cultivate compassion, and develop a profound connection with ourselves and the world around us. It is through this practice that we can unlock the depths of our consciousness and uncover the mysteries within. It provides for real-time perceptual realignment and all necessary mental course corrections when successfully applied to any situation.
There are many good stories about mindfulness. I like the one about windshield wipers. A man got into his car, and put on Jimmy Cliff’s song “I Can See Clearly Now.” Then he began driving 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 man had failed to turn on his windshield wipers. When the driver awoke from his coma, the officer interviewed him about what happened and 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, that didn’t make it any less wrong or destructive. Our unconscious behavior causes damage every moment of every day. As human beings, it is always raining somewhere inside our minds, in our hearts, and/or in the collective experience we are having with the rest of humanity. Mindfulness means turning on those windshield wipers, wiping away all obstructions to clearer spiritual vision, and leaving them on!
The examined life demands that we take inventory of ourselves and that we make every effort to understand the motivations behind all of our thoughts and actions in this world. The deeper we dig, the more we learn that we are connected at a much deeper, more profound level with the rest of humanity than we previously understood. This is how the healing we undertake as an individual can have a ripple effect on the rest of humanity. We all influence the individual and collective consciousnesses that we experience as human beings.
Mindfulness means taking personal inventory and improving our conscious contact with a higher power. This I first learned through practicing the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I have come to believe that there is a “power greater than myself” that lives within my internal reach and restores me to sanity, no matter how often I might fall. My willingness to change is my greatest asset and opens the door to the highest power. Part of maintaining sanity is to allow for a continuous evolution of understanding and experience of what “God” or “Higher Power” is, apart from religious dogma, ignorance, politics, and superstition. We don’t need to believe in any concept of God at all, but we do need to access our willingness to change, for that openness will direct us to our own unique higher-powered life experience.
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 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 foundation of being molded by 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 of the outer world; and how it makes a more peaceful, happy experience for self and other.
According to the book of Genesis, the world was the picture of disorganization and uncertainty; everything was formless and void. But God (the mindful, self-organizing principle within our consciousness) changed everything. God’s action began as The 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 God was satisfied, God 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 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 love’s 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 worldviews, and this successful action 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 goodness at the center of our being and 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 during mindfulness and meditation, we will see many trains of thought 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, that to be mindful, we must 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. That next train has a much higher likelihood of being filled with more spiritually inspired passengers, especially when it arises from the pause moment. This is almost the equivalent of taking a deep breath before taking action. 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 in which they participate. Our misunderstanding of life, no matter how Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, or whatever system we claim to believe in 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 well-meaning, yet fragmented belief systems.
We are typically healed through the power of awareness in the present moment of experience. I am 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.
Meditation
How did I attempt to bring healing to my broken interior? I first acknowledged that, of myself and my old ways, I was heading nowhere, and that I was doomed to repeat the same potentially fatal mistakes over and over again. I did not have any childhood training, nor did I spontaneously develop capacities for insight, positive change, and growth. 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 more positively. By developing the power of insight, I brought a new level of healing and awareness into this new, present moment of experience.
Then I began my meditation practice. In August of 1987, I met Marie Schmidt, a practitioner of Joel Goldsmith’s The Infinite Way, which is a movement involved with mysticism and spiritual healing. She was an eighty-seven-year-old who taught every Sunday at the old YWCA on 10th Avenue in downtown Portland. I had seen a simple advertisement for her tape group while attending the International New Thought Alliance conference in Portland. The tape group was a combination of a meditation group and a forum for listening to the taped teachings of Joel Goldsmith, a spiritual healer and mystic who first began his healing practice shortly after the Great Depression began. She had been holding weekly meditations and listening sessions for Joel’s actual messages since 1962. Marie would sit in the front of the room and lead a fifteen-minute meditation, followed by the playing of a one-hour-long cassette tape. She had a collection of at least 300 tapes with over a thousand hours of his recorded messages, which I copied and memorized and she ended up giving to me.
Needless to say, I was captured by this group, which was attended by mostly older people. And I devoted myself fully to intense meditation practice. My arrows of perception became radically redirected inward in the spring and summer of 1987, after 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, by 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 saw myself and the world as two separate experiences or entities, but rather as the emanation of one universal energy.
All the world is populated with my brothers and sisters, be they human, animal, or plant manifestations of the Great Spirit. I had to make peace with the fact that all of the insanity that I witnessed in the world was also an expression of the insanity within myself, even if it had not yet been made conscious of all of its ramifications. Yet, all of the love I witnessed within the world was also an extension of myself. I saw that I had a choice to make, moment to moment, as to how to see the world, for how I saw the world also defines how I see myself. My long-lost self started speaking, and I was the vocal cords for amazing revelations during an apocalyptic meditation event.
When this life-altering meditation occurred, I was released from my body of thought, I let go of the controls, and I entered into a place of infinite peace and silence. I was shown that no teacher will affect our salvation; we must each work it out for ourselves. I was shown how to think no thoughts derived from the past while embracing the new necessity to travel new paths of consciousness. I was shown that there was no such thing as “me” or “you” in an awakened reality, and to laugh at any perceptions that create duality and separation from my planet, the rest of the human race, and the animal kingdom. I was shown how past trauma attaches itself to our field of energy, sapping us of life force. In an incredible moment of inner seeing, I witnessed two embedded entities freeloading on my energy field. Once again, not yet being too conscious, I did not know what to do about the dynamic, destructive duo, which I intuitively named my tricksters. I also immediately intuited that they were not part of me for my greater good.
Through these experiences, and many following years of introspection and intuitive detective work, I discovered that I had suffered two major wounds or traumas, which had attached themselves to my field of energy or life force, tethering me to a troubled past with its dark interior modeling of reality. I was shown the very nature of the perceptions that kept me imprisoned. I was shown how to let go of the toxic masculinity-derived controls that imprisoned me. I was shown, at the very foundation of myself, an infinite creative potential that does not recognize the “you” or the “me,” but only its own infinite life. This creative energy can only laugh at the constructs of our perceptual universe. I was shown if I could follow new paths of consciousness that were not time-dependent, I could let go of my controlling traumas, my heartbreaks, and my separation from my true self and others. And I could share in the joy and laughter of a universe that loves itself while being amused at the wayward creations that keep popping up to tell us otherwise.
After much, much meditation and mindfulness and writing about traumatic influences in my life, I saw once irrefutable yet now questionable knowns from my past controlling my perceptions in the present.
My Meditation for Letting Go of the Controls
I would like to present a unique meditation or thought experiment. Keep in mind that the whole of life, as far as humanity is concerned, is only a thought experiment. The problems arise when people assume an unproven theory is a fact.
This can be both a teaching and an interior journey, and it can be useful for accessing the one Real Teacher that lies deep within all of us. Thousands of years of conditioning and education have kept our innate capacity to tune into our interior dimensions for personal change and evolution as more of a threatening proposition, rather than as the natural avenue toward freedom and self-discovery. In the end, the mind has found the present moment—imbued with the healing potential of its infinitely supportive sacred silence—becomes our Teacher.
This thought experiment is a representation of my unique meditation experience from July of 1987. Well-meaning teachers and healers attempt to give guidance to those spiritually inclined wanderers who may have lost or ignored their direct connection with intuition and insight. Thus, my experiences may serve as a template for other fellow travelers, though all must create their unique path back to a spiritual home.
This meditation is only a sketch to be filled in by your unique journey toward Truth. It only points in a direction, and this meditation is not for everybody. Here’s how to do it:
After quieting the body by sitting down comfortably, breathe consciously and deeply for a few breaths. Usually, following our breathing will quiet the mind a bit, which is important if this experiment is to bring any results. Poly-vagal breathing exercises that naturally reduce stress can be quite helpful. The rhythm is to breathe in for a four-second count, hold your breath for two seconds, and exhale for six seconds. Repeat the cycle for up to five minutes, if necessary. If your flight or fight response has been overactive, this will quiet down the adrenal glands and reduce cortisol-induced inflammation.
Now ask yourself if you’re ready to listen for the truth of the moment. Are you willing to travel to a new place in consciousness and conscious awareness that you have never traveled to before?
Ask yourself if you can let go of all thought controls that keep us pilloried to the past, controls that keep us in the judgment of self, and/or others, while also keeping us from experiencing a deeper appreciation for what this moment might be able to bring to us.
Now visualize for a moment that you are driving a car, heading in a direction that you feel quite familiar with. Before arriving at the usual destination, ask yourself what would happen if you let go of the controls, even for just one moment. Remember that all of your known neural pathways become overused over time. These pathways create deep ruts leading to graves if we stay imprisoned by our past with all of its knowns.
Is it possible? Keep trying, until you can see yourself letting go of the steering wheel of your conscious mind. As you let go of the steering wheel, imagine, now, that the car that was carrying you disappears. And find that you are now being carried into some new, unexplored realm of experience.
If the territory in your interior visual field is familiar, you will need to restart the thought experiment and find a different method or path to the interior dimensions than I am providing here.
If you have let go of the controls, you will now find yourself being guided by a teacher, spirit guide, or messenger who has not revealed who or what it is, what kind of form it might take, or why it might or might not exist for us in this new moment.
This thought experiment is a technique for shaking the mind free, even if just for a moment, from the lifetimes of its knowns or certainties. Truth does not come into a mind that has already been crystallized into a structure that does not permit curiosity and insight. Otherwise, we will only find a continuation of our past as it extends into an all-too-familiar future.
Getting Closer to Here and Now
A black hole is a region of space/time exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing—including particles and electromagnetic radiation, such as light—can escape from inside it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform space/time to form a black hole. The boundary of the region from which no escape is possible is called the event. Within the human psyche, I posit the existence of consciousness black holes or singularity points that prevent us from living our best lives.
We, as a human race, seem to have a predisposition to creating black hole events where no light, such as love, compassion, empathy, or healing thoughts, can emanate from our consciousness. These events occur especially during times of collective distress, including mass hypnosis and the resultant mob mind activity that leads to wars, genocide, racism, xenophobia, hysteria, and fear.
We, as individuals, also have a real talent for creating black hole events within our worlds, as well. Our concepts of time and space certainly get distorted, as present-day events occurring in our lives get distorted within our minds by traumatic events of our past, or black holes of past influence through which the light of our ever-unfolding present moment of life gets sucked into the darkness of a singularity point of a traumatic event from our past.
The prison guard with one of the primary keys to release me from my spiritual imprisonment remained my 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 newfound sobriety. The real fruits of healing from that relationship were not to become apparent until many years later.
I developed some insight into how my own father’s ignorance and selfish needs early in my childhood negatively impacted my own mind’s formation. There was a revelation within me that as a result of my father’s sometimes toxic influence, and my own mother’s unskilled participation in my life, I had unwittingly and unconsciously created two fundamental cores to my dysfunction. I came to refer to these forces as tricksters and a thorough examination of all of my inner demons showed that they were traumatically created through incomplete, unskilled interactions with life. Their presence initially kept me from being helpless as I attempted to navigate the world as a young being, offering their own extremely limited versions of interior guidance. But, these miscreations kept me from developing into my greater good as an independent, free adult human being. It was these two fundamental cores that swirled around another unknown force of darkness within me as if drawn and disfigured by an infinitely powerful locus of negative influence.
Our minds generate consciousness, which means aspects of ourselves generate internal feedback, develop and support our own internal self-concept, create internal imagery and understanding of the outer world, and support our verbal relationships with and actions toward all others. We attempt to match the outer reality by forming internal verbal and emotional linkages within ourselves, and this helps us to stay relevant and abiding within some measure of resonance and continuity with the perceived external universe or community that we presently share with others.
This light that we internally emit, and eventually share with our worlds either through action or verbal expression, is influenced dramatically by our secret, internal agendas, whether we are conscious of those agendas, or not. While these agendas remain unconscious, they become the equivalent to our own internal black holes. All streams of consciousness that our minds and hearts attempt to emit become trapped in the swirling vortices of these powerful forces, and these internal black holes continue to influence virtually every aspect of our lives. And, if not dealt with consciously and carefully, these black holes will eventually draw all of our internal light into them, and we become unwitting agents of our own internal darkness.
To repress or deny these internal forces is to continue to feed them. As we get in touch with our fears, anger, hatreds, or whatever name for manifesting darkness that we might give to them, it is important to realize that these are great forces, and once they are harnessed, not repressed or denied, these black holes will continue to keep us connected to the real world, and, as we transmute their energy, the light within us uses these once dark energies for our and all of mankind’s good.
I have identified a black hole within my internal universe, which had created powerful forces of control, keeping me separate from my greatest good. This vortex drew all of my internal light toward itself, and by the time this internal singularity point worked its dark magic to its fullness, I flirted with the end of my own life. Such is the way these black hole events can influence and control our lives, making peace of mind and positive, loving connections with others virtually impossible. I have attempted to deal with my trauma directly and honestly, lest my entire life becomes a continuation of further black hole events. I have identified that the fear that my voice will never be heard, resulting in my death, is my unique black hole. Insight finally reveals that this is a direct result of my failure to be fully integrated as a complete, healthy human being, and manifesting a more holistic or divine intent.
These black holes may remain, even after making profound spiritual and emotional changes. Their dark influence, however, continues to recede, once there is a committed intention to stay connected with insight and spiritual healing, where all true light comes from. As I strive to stay balanced internally, so shall my walk through the rest of my life remain balanced, as well. Insight keeps these forces herded within the spirit of wholeness, which utilizes our energy in more sane and mutually beneficial ways.
And, for more than one of us, these black holes are eventually transformed into white holes, where no darkness can escape, and all of our experience becomes enlightened. We can’t short-circuit this process, by just substituting the pleasant-sounding spiritual froth produced by other great spiritual thinkers and trying to layer those messages over our unexamined inner universe. Well-meaning advocates of this process become unwitting contributors to the repression and oppression of the human spirit. Only after we do the real inner work can these teachers assume their rightful position in our consciousness, as fellow travelers on the path to truth, which has no final destination. Our most profound words and thoughts only present the illusion of a final resting place, when, in fact, truth is eternally unfolding into each moment as a brand new, unique manifestation.
I have my timeless moments with the white holes, and I continue to strive to experience this phenomenon with both increased frequency and intensity. A path of insight and meditation is quite helpful, and association with others who share in this new reality has been shown to produce almost miraculous results.
What might a man performing a thorough self-examination through internal probing discover about his self, and the subconscious guidance and direction of those black holes within his unique nature? To uncover the treasure, we first have to dig through the dirt and believe me, it can be a toxic waste site. It is no wonder to me that there are few there be who enter into this unexplored realm within. There is a vast kingdom within that searches for its rightful king, but will we ever rise and assume our proper place? It feels infinitely complicated when we begin to contemplate the name I that all of us have given to ourselves, especially since there are hundreds of thousands of “not I” or “you” verbal and relationship associations built into our construct.
This process requires patience, time, experience, and humility, but eventually, insight is developed whereby we can see the forces of corruption within our hearts and soul, and through the seeing, we also begin to facilitate the healing.
Returning To the Here and Now
Since I have been in recovery, I have been involved in the exploration of some of the more fundamental aspects of my consciousness, and, thus, of all human consciousness, for we are one. Virtually all of the interesting characters in history have struggled with and overcome some degree of dark internal force, and it is their journey that becomes the stuff of great stories and legends. I am trying to give a context to this distress that I share with the rest of humanity. For, the one is the many, and the many are the one. The author and scholar Joseph Campbell refers to the “Hero’s Journey” that we all must take to find our true selves.
It is extremely difficult to find a way to reach an individual or a society that has unconsciously decided to slowly and painfully commit suicide through toxicity and addictive cycles, while all remain in rigorous denial of that fact. Each toxic human being—be they an unconscious power-hungry man or woman, alcoholic, drug addict, or mentally ill person—must find their unique bottom, where the pain of the disease causes a change or turning point in their lives. Insanity, loss of job, loss of family, admission to a mental health or addiction recovery facility, jail, DUI, the threat of death, or near-death experiences, and deaths of close friends or family members also suffering have been known to bring the desire for healing to many of us. A confrontation with those we may have harmed can have rather dramatic effects on our desire to change as well. It took all of the negative life cycle outcomes to convince me to change my behavior. Living in hell for an extended period brought me to death’s doorstep, yet I did survive, and the process helped me to seek a deeper light.
American society has created the perfect conditions for our population to practice insanity, mutual control dramas, and addictive behaviors. But it remains up to us as individuals to create our own conditions for recovery. It is this very matrix of misunderstanding that we all must eventually embrace within ourselves, see it for what it is and isn’t, and then move through the illusions of self to the very foundation of our timeless soul, where peace and healing eternally reside.
Self-awareness, personal inventory, making amends to all that we have harmed, working a strong spiritual program, mindfulness, meditation, eating healthier, exercising wisely, and hanging around like-minded people took me to the outskirts of my own promised land. Life isn’t always pretty, but I remain personally responsible for my attitudes and behaviors, and I retain freedom of choice in most of my affairs. But, many have lost all such freedom of choice. I have much compassion for those who still struggle with mental illness and alcoholism/drug addiction.
Insight and mindfulness, meditation, walking away from self-destructive dependencies, maintaining dialogue with others, speaking my truth, fighting against the oppression of others, and repression within my own heart and soul, following new paths of consciousness, working out my salvation, and helping others on their paths are ways to develop collective awareness, heal, and bring peace of mind to my interior universe. I cannot love others or my own life completely until I make peace within my own heart and soul.
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 nature that can watch our thoughts arise, without being the self who remains unconsciously controlled by them.
To this day, depending on how conscious I can or can’t be, I can be dramatically impacted by the wounds, or I can soar high above it all through maintaining the principles of an open heart and a quiet(er) mind, which neutralizes the unhealthy illusions of self that can be so troubling. But my lack of healthy self-esteem did take me into hell very early in life. I didn’t find recovery until I was thirty-one years of age. And, for me, my only hope was to find the Truth that underlies the whole of life and attempt to derive a new sense of self through re-connection with this lost essence. A new openness to life and all of the possibilities that shared love can create has caused a resurgence in the respect that I now give my body through enhanced physical activity, diet, and placement in healthier outdoor settings and social situations. It helped to guide me in ways my father could not have embraced, nor given me any mentoring with, as he was too unconscious. Yet it remains an ongoing healing for me, as more layers get peeled back through continued insight.
In December of 2022, I participated in a unique one-day spiritual retreat. It was a powerful experience that allowed me to see the possibility of transcending limitations that had been holding me back for many years. I had been experiencing auto-immune disease, and I was seeking the cause, if any, in my consciousness. Espree, the facilitator, after deep meditation and personal sharing, asked me why I did not recognize myself as a beautiful person. I replied that, though I knew of my interior beauty and the beauty of the natural world, my body showed evidence of aging. I have had skin cancer repeatedly, I have a “turkey neck,” and I have gained a lot of weight since dramatically reducing aerobic fitness routines in the last two years. These facts kept me from acknowledging a truth that Espree wanted me to see.
I told her that I had long ago left that part of my biological, sexual, and cultural self that sought a more perfect body in the quest for mating. My search ended with my life partner, Sharon, coming into my life in 1989. Yet I forgot to consciously cultivate my love for my body and express gratitude for its continued existence as the vehicle for my consciousness. Espree then stated that if I only perceived my beauty to be an interior phenomenon, then I was just living out of my head space, as beauty and love are of the whole being, including spirit, mind, and body. We are the very incarnation of Mother Earth and our Universe in human form. We are all of immeasurable beauty and significance, and these two qualities that we possess are irrefutable and irrevocable, regardless of our biological, social, and/or personal agendas or the ill-informed negative opinions of others. Otherwise, our failure to conform to the standards and expectations of others will create internal informants who become tricksters and fool us into accepting disfigured visions and versions of self and the innate perfection of life. That was quite a call on me!
I remember the times growing up when I felt rejected by many peers, often because of my appearance. My wife reminded me of the time that a woman named Marsha rejected me as a potential lover because I did not have the sculpted body or classic handsome features of the well-to-do men who had been her lovers. I was not emotionally impacted by her assessment, as I had little interest in sexual relationships, having only recently emerged from the underworld and found complete recovery from the damage to my body and mind from years of drug abuse and heavy drinking. I treasured my platonic friendship with her, though we did often sleep together without contact. Yet, was the indifference I exhibited and claimed for myself only a facade, and a manifestation of a deeper self-denial, self-neglect, or self-hatred?
Marsha had the loveliest face and the most perfect body of any woman I had ever met. She took great pride in her appearance and worked hard to maintain it. Yet, even she was not happy. She visited with her rabbi several times, trying to get to the root of her problems. She had an auto-immune disorder and the medical profession had offered her little help toward permanent healing or remission. She thought that, perhaps, God could heal her, both of her physical condition and the general suffering that she experienced. Her rabbi, quite succinctly, said that he had wasted much of his early life searching for God through Jewish scripture and abiding by its endless laws and rules, and he never found a healing Truth. It was not until he embarked upon a path characterized by intense exploration of himself that he finally arrived at the doorstep of Truth. He advised Marsha to learn about herself and her judgments against herself and others. He told her that she must explore the darkest corners and most closely held secrets of her life, her relationship to her body, her family, her friends, her employment, her charity work, and her connection with Mother Nature. He told Marsha that she had to recognize what the sacred wasn’t before she could find the right path to where God was. Her rabbi stressed that if Marsha was to find the healing balm that God could provide, she first had to find herself.
The rabbi’s message is one for the ages and one for all of us. He recommended that Marsha, even though she was not an alcoholic, explore twelve-step recovery groups, and practice the Twelve Steps to get her on a proven path toward spiritual healing. That is how I first met her, at the 1987 International New Thought Alliance conference in Portland, Oregon. Jack Boland, the world-famous expert on recovery spoke there, and several years later, in 1993, he had the temerity to tell me, and others, that he knew us better than we knew ourselves. He stated to me, personally, that I needed more pain in my life to motivate me to dive deeper into my true self and find a more lasting, satisfying recovery. Well, Jack, my friend, how right you were!
It has taken me a while, but I now realize that one of the dark forces that had dominated my early life was continuing to act as a subtle informant to the unconscious conspiracy of silence around my traumatic wounding. I had failed to fully turn the dark black holes of the negative influence that developed in my early years into the beauty and light of a healed present-moment experience. Something that my mind tells me now is obvious was not so obvious before. The self-negating fact was so close, and so institutionalized and normalized within my understanding of self, that I had accepted it and made it an unconscious subroutine and part of the foundation that supported the incomplete and inaccurate understanding of who I thought I was.
I too have an auto-immune disease. I judge myself harshly. I am an evolving consciousness, so by remaining open to the wisdom of others, my own improving insight is enhanced and supported by all such collaborative efforts. Compassionate feedback helps all of us to see where we are and where we can find improvement. Compassionate feedback, mindfulness, and meditation help to keep us better connected to “what is,” and the light of that enhanced awareness can bring transformative change and healing. Never forget, if we have judgments against ourselves, no matter how obvious or subtle, we also have hidden agendas with all others. All that we see, and will ever see, unto whatever concept of eternity we now entertain, is ourselves. How we see ourselves determines everything.
Wonder, love, connection, healing, wholeness, collaboration, and good mental health all lie within the realm of possibilities for all men and for humanity. With the acceptance of personal responsibility, one human being at a time, for all of our negative perceptions, we can transmute their dark energy into lighter, healthier energy through insight, mindfulness, and meditation. We will then find the perfect peace and goodness that some claim we have always been looking for since mankind first arrived on this planet.
The compulsion to hide from ourselves can be lifted. We can know love and forgiveness of ourselves, and others, as we thought would never be possible. We can become a light unto ourselves and others, and that light can sustain us for the rest of our days. We can be at peace and understand, perhaps for the first time in our lives, how to live life on life’s terms. We can finally find what we were looking for our entire life, so please do not give up before the real miracle of your life reveals itself. Finding your real healthier, saner self is the greatest challenge of life.
Those who find what they are looking for, find the secret of spirituality and the secret of a successfully lived life. Happiness, joy, and freedom become our life’s most enduring companions on our journey. Difficulties, sorrows, heartbreaks, deaths, depression, anxieties, and even relapses may still arise, but we now have healthier tools for dealing with the adversity of life. We no longer hide from life, but instead remain engaged with it. We ride life’s occasional tsunami waves, rather than be drowned by them. We learn that it was not life’s loads that broke us, but instead, it was the unconscious and unskilled ways that we carried them. Now we have the developed spiritual skills to successfully manage life’s unavoidable burdens, while creating the conditions for new opportunities in life and for prosperity in its many forms, including enhancing our relationships with each other!
