Namaste,
I hope you are able to find the sand box in the world – a place to play and create each day.
I had a very busy day of coaching calls and business calls yesterday. I felt like my phone was permanently glued to my ear. It was all good though.
I’m quite a loner by nature. My natural personality is that of a military scout that works alone ahead of the pack as a means of identifying potential threats and relaying them back to the company that follows. That mind-set, though very useful, can become a limitation when what people need is connection and companionship.
I’ve spent so much of my life pioneering and sending messages back to the pack that I often don’t realize that what many people need more than information is connection. As I’ve aged and grown tired of always climbing the next mountain or looking for the next enemy, I’ve come to see that what I’ve learned as a scout is best shared by applying my knowledge in direct contact with family, friends, staff and business associates.
It’s definitely a transition for me because I love being alone. I suspect some of you share this same experience.
I took the day off from training yesterday and did some stretching out in the sun with my favorite tree here while conducting a coaching call. I’ve been having a lot of fun each morning during our daily staff Pow Wow. Penny, Vidya and I decided to begin meeting with the staff every morning to revisit our company vision, mission and values.
After we do that together, we express how we are willing to live the chosen value for the day. Then we do our company dance to celebrate our new day together. Our dance is based on my 1-2-3-4 formula that encompasses all my teachings.
I really love these meetings and they are helping me find joy in the group as opposed to always being outside the group and reporting back. Overcoming the limitations of our strengths is quite a unique experience. Humans have a tendency to become blinded by their strengths in much the same way that men who love to bench press become imbalanced by doing what they love to do more than what they need to do.
Today, I thought I share some of my thoughts on some common, but often limiting human behaviors.
STEPPING ON HEADS and CUTTING OFF LEGS!
My drawing above exemplifies that the human being emerges from Cosmic chaos. We are forever vacillating between chaos and relative order. Those two qualities are the essence of existence itself.
Where there is harmony, form or order is far more self-sustaining than where there is entropy. When we become conscious of our inherent co-dependence on Nature and each other, we naturally seek to create harmony to the degree that we are truly intelligent!
Human beings are very complex creatures. We carry our entire evolutionary history in both our genes, and what Process Psychologist Arnold Mindell refers to as our dream-genes; our collective and individual dream-consciousness that informs us and often creates the impetus for action at the level of genetic expression.
From the beginning of our evolution on earth, we’ve always had the challenge of feeding, sheltering and protecting ourselves from the elements, non-human, and human predators. Certainly, there have been countless times in our own genetic and psycho-genetic history where we’ve all chosen to commit acts against others both in, and out of our family or tribal circles to meet our actual and perceived needs for survival.
In my research on the history of shamanism and religion, I came across an excellent document summarizing the views of archeologists skilled in the history and art of both shamanism and religion. It was put forward that religion probably began at the time when man chose to kill another human being and suddenly realized that:
A. It was an unnecessary act, and
B. That what was “witnessing” the act was something other than the actor.
When one becomes aware of the witness, there is both a sense of fear, and a deep desire to find the witness that emerges. This search for the “witness” is thought to be the most logical basis from which what we now call religion emerged.
Naturally, among potentially thousands or millions of people at any given moment in time, the number of individuals experiencing the witness will be a microcosm relative to those that as yet, can’t differentiate their “acts” (ego) from their “witness” (soul or Consciousness).
Such people are typically still very aligned with what is sometimes referred to as animal consciousness; humans differ from animals at large in that they can be conscious of their thoughts and dreams and act upon them, edit them, or experience them as extra-personal.
The animal may dream, but is unlikely to change their mode of behavior in the waking state due to the contents of a dream; their instinctual-soul is far more developed than their intellectual-soul (mind-soul), which is also a product of an animals brain and nervous construct.
Some may think that if we were more animal-like, that we wouldn’t kill or waste unnecessarily. That would be a limited view of the animal kingdom at large.
Professor Barbara King’s, Franz de Waal’s, and Jane Goodall’s research on primates showed very clearly that indeed, these animals act in ways that go far beyond the natural conservatism of self and resources most have attributed to animals at large; most don’t think that animals over-consume or kill unnecessarily.
Gorillas and chimpanzees do indeed lie to each other, steal each others infants, conduct raiding parties and start wars with neighboring tribes; Dr. King showed, for instance, that when the primates were well fed and had nothing else to do, the males often took up arms and journeyed into their neighbors territory and started wars for no apparent reason other than to entertain themselves.
Having been raised on a sheep farm, I’ve seen many times how wild dogs will attack a herd of sheep and maim them, only to leave them there bleeding to death. They rarely ever actually ate the sheep. I could certainly give more examples, but it’s not necessary to make my point here.
In my studies of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, I found masses of evidence, including hard scientific evidence or rank, order and control dramas among even the most primitive of animals.
Paul McClain’s research spanned well over 20 years as he investigated the correlations between the brain structures of reptiles, mammals, and humans, from which he coined the term “the triune mind”.
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He showed very conclusively that the human brain recapitulates the brain structures of our predecessors, yet our neo-cortex (the big wavy mass of brain tissue that largely fills our cranium) has grown far more relative to body weight than almost every animal in nature. He could easily demonstrate, for example, that humans displayed distinct behavioral characteristics common to reptiles, as well as paleo-mammals and neo-mammals.
In the animal kingdom at large, there is a very strong tendency toward rank and order. This is easily seen among reptiles, wolves, bears, lions, elephants, and reflects itself in primates as well. If you study primate behaviors and their correlations to human behaviors, which Franz de Waal did extensively, you can easily see how politicians are acting out primate behaviors quite authentically!
Where Does This Leave Us?
To the degree that we are unaware of The Witness within ourselves, our entire sense of self-consciousness comes by way of our ego.
The ego affords individual identity and “self-consciousness”. It creates the “I” of any and all “We” relationships. Because we evolved through the animal kingdom, until we achieve union with The Witness (Consciousness), we have no basis for realizing that there are options outside our innate-survival instincts and genetic programming. We become like actors that play the part (of the animal) so completely, we forget we are human.
We display our animal nature (biological mind or instinctual-soul) with such conviction that we either are completely blind to the way we treat ourselves and others, or justify it as a means of getting what we want; Barbara King showed that Chimpanzees will lie to protect food stashes they didn’t want to share with the rest of their tribe!
Because self-beauty is an inherent element of attracting mates, and displays of power is equally valued as a means of mate selection, those who’s awareness of The Witness hasn’t woken up yet, are very likely to manipulate, taunt, and terminate anyone that is perceived as a threat to their ability to feed themselves, get sex, gain power, or control.
The problem with this strategy is that though one may gain a notch in rank and stature, or get an extra melon, hand full of nuts, or extra meat, they also gain enemies. The food and beauty products are all momentary gains; soon the food is gone and the make-up wears off, but the enemies typically follow you persistently waiting for the moment they can return the favor and regain their perceived loss.
Can you see how such follies are a self-replicating prophesy?
If we all focus on taking responsibility for meeting our individual needs before investing energy in dominating others, we will come to have a sense of peace within us that we can indeed care for ourselves without having to do so at anothers expense.
We can learn to share resources and ideas so that our intelligence is used to exploit wisdom (creating win-win situations), instead of perceptually creating losers to make ourselves winners. To do so requires that one consciously choose to become aware of their own thoughts, words and deeds. To become aware of what they create moment to moment.
Practical Exercise
If you take a few minutes to introspect on all the times you’ve acted at the expense of another to get what you wanted and honestly evaluate weather or not what you did to get what you wanted was necessary relative to getting only what you needed, you are likely to find that you’ve created many potential enemies unnecessarily.
With the creation of each successive enemy, we inherently increase the amount of fear within us because we naturally assume that if we can think and act that way, so can the other! Crooks are always concerned they will be ripped off!
The progressive investment in looking out for and becoming hyper-aware of “what we don’t want” is a large contributor to the creation of the ego’s shadow.
By reflecting on the thoughts and behaviors that we based on getting what you want above and beyond getting what you need, you can easily begin to recognize when and how we created enemies.
As we become more aware, we look more toward ways we can create alignment of interests with each other. This is the essential nature of the Master Mind principle. Once we realize what our actual needs are, and meet them first, we can seek to create mutual association with others that want to express their creativity in ways that are safe for everyone to emulate.
This is how we can create a win-win situation in relationships. As we do that more frequently, we loose our need to constantly externalize our consciousness because we don’t feel threatened by the potential back-lash of our own choices and actions from the past.
As we practice living this way, our children learn to emulate us and they grow up to be human beings instead of alligators and wild dogs that maim buildings with graffiti, attack teachers, and organize gangs that act like wild dog packs out sport hunting.
If we start now, we may be able to do this with the aid of our advanced communication technologies and spread the love and wisdom around the world quickly.
If we wait until the chimpanzees in the government evolve to do this for us, we will be living the tale of Mad Max before awareness ever rises.
A brief tour of the history books makes it clear that government reptiles and chimps are a poor bet when it comes to leading society in evolution and the Church has only become better than ever at cloaking itself in government.
We can choose to take responsibility for ourselves and become human before all hell breaks loose again – before the economy crashes, before politicians start more wars to simulate the economy, before pseudo-medicine becomes even more popular, before our resources (NEEDS) are squandered as a byproduct of the ignorance of chasing wants as though they were needs.
That is what a spiritual practice really is. Nothing else.
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
