After the last post asking which choice is the authentic you, Brian left this comment;
“When you give yourself wholeheartedly to what you truly believe, the world forms around that giving you everything you truly need and want”.
Rob first what does it look like to “give yourself wholeheartedly” to what you believe? And second, what does it mean when you know what you believe and yet act in defiance of it.? Here’s why I ask.
Since my own “cauldron of difficulty”, I’ve come to see things about myself that I’d ignored for years. Selfishness, needing to be right, control issues and fear dominated how I lived and led to a divorce I never wanted. However the awareness and new-found truths that I’ve come to see and believe, haven’t moved me near enough. I still have the anger and bitterness and am as short tempered with my ex as I ever was. I’m not processing through it, even with a considerable amount of new-found clarity.
What has taken hold, is that I’ve become sure I will always be sad about losing the family we had and how it’s taken so much from kids. I can’t imagine in any new life, not feeling the weight of that loss, the guilt for my part in it and the regret that it is unalterable. It feels like the unsheddable burden.
I’m going to address the part of acting in defiance of what you believe here and the rest in a separate post.
I can really empathise with this question. Much of the time I am very calm and patient. But at other times, when I’m tired, preoccupied with something else or in a hurry I am aware of being short tempered. Especially to those I am closest to.
The more I have come to understand about us as a species, the more I see that our basic nature is savage. Sure we are capable of great kindness and altruism, but also pettiness and viciousness. Thinking on this question clarifies in my mind that there are two groups of people in relation to this issue.
photo credit: aerodesign.pl
The Two Types Of People
The first, and by far the largest group, are vicious savages and are completely unaware of it.
The second are like us, reforming savages, becoming more aware of our nature.
Ghandi’s quip when asked what he thought of Western civilisation and he replied that ‘it would be a good idea’, comes to mind here.
Our society is so puffed up with arrogance about it’s own importance and achievements that it fails to see the hypocrisy it is based on. It amazes me that almost no-one seems to learn from history. When I discovered what now seems like the foolishness of believing the world was flat, of believing that God wanted sacrifices, of believing that a dance could bring rain, it was a lesson to me that much of what we currently believe must inevitably become laughable to more sophisticated, future civilisations. So I wanted to find the flaws in my beliefs.
When the last recession happened in the eighties I read up about it’s causes to understand it and found out that this has happened in cycles for about the past four hundred years. Yet Politicians and Economists, still want to believe that they, in their brilliance, have managed to turn around or compensate for human nature.
In exactly the same way people are butting their heads against brick walls complaining about the state of the world, other people’s incompetence and so on. The cause of most stress is the belief that ‘everything is fine with me, it’s just the other people I have to deal with’.
Brian has now reached the point, where in his more reflective and considered moments he is honest and aware enough to recognise what is.
So now with that known what do you do about it?
We need to start a little further back to be able to pull all the pieces together so that hopefully, it will all make sense in the end.
In the last post I said what we see is just the tip of the iceberg. I want to emphasise this in more detail now by examining the stages of awareness.
In our lives, we spend our time in three zones.
The Auto-Pilot Zone
Much of our time engaged with the world. And most of this is routine in the Auto-Pilot Zone. We go through our day doing much the same things in a semi-automatic pattern. We greet people the same way, have the same kind of conversations and do much the same tasks. We slip into a patterned groove. Like a conveyor belt where habits take over.
The Artistic/Creative Zone
Then there’s the parts of life that bring us our greatest joy. The parts where we create and fashion new grooves. These are the aspects where we have to really focus on what we are doing.
The Contemplative Zone
photo credit: Ed Yourdon
And finally there’s a small part of our day, where we spend time reflecting on what we have done, what we want to do and where we want to go.
Awareness develops as we spend more time in reflection. Gradually we notice more and more of what governs and determines our auto-pilot zone hours. That is how our levels of awareness develops.
The Artistic/Creative zone is never a problem. It’s here where we love to be, where we carve out and discover who we are and what we are all about. It’s you being you time.
The Problem With Living On Auto-Pilot
The problems all come about in the Auto-pilot zone. If you examine when you are most angry, bitter and so on you’ll find it is in those moments when you are caught up in the auto-pilot zone.
To understand this we need to ask why do we do, what we do?
In order to function we learn and then act from lots of automated programs and knee jerk responses. These are a complex mix of genetics, social conditioning, learned responses and previous personal decisions.
We are the hard wired product of billions of years of evolution. We have instincts that originated to help reptiles survive and out of which we evolved. We have customs from thousands of years ago that have become deeply etched in our cultures, which became the framework from which we look through out into the world.
From these two sources, someone could function for their entire life. Most people spend 95% of their time operating from these bases. But it is a deeply, unrewarding and robotic existence. And as it plays out, the hypocrisy and conflict in the flawed logic shows up as problems. The problems get your attention. They require contemplation and so make you aware of a problem that has been there all along.
Now when you notice the conflict and resolve it, you upgrade your Human Operating System.
The key to your success in the world and your effectiveness and so your level of happiness is determined by the quality of your Operating System.
If you observe general life, you’ll notice that much of it doesn’t work. If you have to deal with big bureaucracies, you’ll find that many of their systems don’t work. What was designed and planned for maximal efficiency turns out to be so flawed that we wonder how anyone could ever have hoped it would work. Even in small businesses and our own households, we find that what we were certain was a great idea was hopelessly flawed.
These are all caused by our Operating System and reality clashing. Failure, in all of it’s forms, is due to a bug or glitch in the Operating System. This in turn is caused by some habit or belief which lives in the dark and unexamined area of the iceberg.
That’s really the way I think of it as a Human Operating System. But now I want to put this in a slightly different way, that might make it a little clearer to you.
What Enlightenment Really Is
Often people talk about enlightenment and becoming enlightened. So that means that they see more of the iceberg. More aware of themselves. They see the flaws and in seeing them they unravel them and transcend them.
Now the pressures of the world keep you in the auto-pilot zone. It’s deeply unfulfilling, but it seems to be what you should do. And so you operate from that deep, murky basis without ever really examining what you are doing or why. Just keeping ahead of the treadmill so you don’t fall off.
That means that you are riddled with conflicts and problems. Most that you have no idea about, but are all lined up and waiting for you to reach them. Each of the conflicts is heavy and burdensome. Even if you are unaware of them, they are a weight that holds you back and slows you down.
Each that you resolve and so clear, results in you becoming more enlightened and therefore, emotionally and mentally lighter.
If you ever meditate or get engrossed in exploring ideas, you’ll notice how much lighter you feel emotionally. It’s because you have shaken off the shackles of these conflicts that you carry around with you.
So enlightenment is really a process of purification.
photo credit: Freddy The Boy
It’s much along the lines of what Environmentalists want for our planet. Only to complicate things we have two basic systems that determine how we react and behave.
Our nervous system is an outgrowth of billions of years of evolution. Yet what worked marvellously for reptiles or chimps doesn’t always work so well for us in today’s world. For example, the stress response is a fantastic instinct in the wild where stress is, as Dr. Robert Sapolsky puts it, either over in 20 minutes or you are.
Stress, or the stress response, is never a problem. The real problem comes from prolonged stress. It’s when the stress response goes beyond 20 minutes that it literally begins to destroy the body to maintain a state of readiness.
The second system is that of our social conditioning. It’s the way we learned to make sense of the world. We have progressed from living in Caves to our current high tech lifestyles. But each progression came at a cost to the environment. And later we found less toxic ways to achieve the same result.
For example, initially cars were huge gas guzzlers. Now they have reduced their emissions and it is almost certain that they will one day cause only a fraction of the toxicity they have historically.
In exactly the same way, we have progressed our society, but at a cost. It is known that our way of life increases mental illnesses. Groups working with developing countries to become more materially successful plan in for the costs of dealing with increased levels of stress and depression.
As an example, much of our wealth comes from the concept of specialisation, so trumpeted by Adam Smith. Henry Ford made his fortune from the efficiency of his assembly line production methods. Yet despite paying workers more than they dreamed of earning, his factories were the scene of literal battles. Even today, there are sweat shops that exploit workers in order to bring us products. Then you have slavery and many other historical ills.
Though thankfully as a society we are becoming more aware of the toxic side effects to our progression, our culture and so the conditioning that we learned has been developed from this framework. So the society that allows slavery is built from individual minds that believe that others can be used for their own good.
It is in removing toxic beliefs that we become enlightened and so purer. To be in the world, but not of it, is to be pure. To live in a complete (or almost complete) state of transparency and awareness as opposed to the darkness of our inherited conditioning and nervous system. It is to override instincts and conditioning in favour of choosing our actions and responses. It is to live consciously, now, in this moment.
The Human Problem – Knowing What To Do, But Not Doing It
Now we can look at your original question in a new light. So why do we not do what we know would be best for us?
It’s because in our moments of reflection we can see clearly. Intellectually it’s easy to accept and know what to do. However somewhere from 70 – 90% of our lives are lived in the auto-pilot zone, where we do not have the mental time or space to be in the moment and consciously choose our response. Therefore we act primarily from instincts and habits.
Intellectual understanding is rarely enough to create behavioural change. It can happen instantly, if the lesson is emotionally powerful enough, if the person has reached a tipping point where the pain of the old way is too much to bear any longer or if there are no deeper bonds clutching at that behaviour.
Typically though, there are deeper rooted fears, insecurities, perceptions and flawed beliefs that hold onto old habits. To change a behaviour, you have to address these. The intellect is like a leaf on a tree. It is the most obvious and visible, but it exists as an extension, an outgrowth, of the roots.
The core of the system is not controlled by the thinking mind.
What the thinking mind can do, is promote awareness and detoxify the system. Then the purer system will respond with habits that get the same or better results, but without the toxic side effects.
How difficult purification is, obviously depends on a number of factors. Let me digress for a moment to make a point that might put this in perspective.
How To Achieve Purity
The quality of a pint of beer is determined by it’s purity. I recall reading, how in the 1920′s Claude Hopkins was amazed by the process Schlitz Beer used to go through to ensure their beer was as pure as possible. Actually all beers go through a similar process.
Even though the factory was right on the shore of Lake Michigan and the water was at that time unpolluted and a cheap ready source, they still dug 4,000 feet deep artesian wells to provide the purest possible water.
Then he was taken to the laboratory to see the mother yeast cell, from which all yeast used in the beer making process was developed. It was created from 1,200 experiments to bring out the robust flavour
He observed beer dripping over pipes in plate glass rooms that were filled with filtered air to ensure that it cooled without any impurities.
Then he was told how every bottle was sterilised 4 times before being filled. He saw huge and expensive filters that were filled with white-wood pulp to provide a superior filtering process. Every pump and pipe was individually cleaned twice daily.
If we go to this extent for beer, should we not be as vigilent of our own mind.
Purification comes from eliminating all possible sources of toxicity. One sloppy element in the beer making process can lead to a foul tasting beer. In exactly the same way, one element of toxicity in your Operating System can lead to behaviour that intellectually you don’t want.
Every action is preceded by perception. And perception is dependent on mood and the thought structure your Operating System is based on. So our actions and habits have a long chain of thoughts and effects. Most of them are below our level of awareness. So you have to uncover the process, the chain of thoughts and beliefs from the action that is the leaf of the tree back through the branches and to the root.
That is what the beer producers did to perfect their product. They analysed the entire process and purified each step of it. And so when you are as stringent about the process from an incident happening to your response to it, then your actions will be as pure as a top quality beer.
So now let me finally answer your question of how do you react more positively?
There’s really six steps to enlightenment on a given issue or conflict.
The Six Steps To Enlightenment
photo credit: batintherain
Step 1 – Symptom
This is the stage where you become aware and notice that there is a conflict or a problem. Typically it’s after a problem, but you can develop the skills of awareness to see it before it physically manifests.
Step 2 – Diagnosis
This is the stage where you identify and diagnose what the problem is. Initially the problem might be X. Later in the process you might find that Y keeps you doing X. So these steps can be cyclical, until you have really got to the root of the issue.
Step 3 – Prescription
Intellectually you can see what the solution is to the problem.
Step 4 – Treatment
It’s one thing to know what the problem and the prescription for it are, but you have to have the awareness in the moment to apply the treatment during a flare up.
Step 5 – Reaching The Tipping Point
To change a habit requires numerous applications of the treatment. There are times when you will react without being consciously aware in the moment. And so you have to bring your focus and awareness to the situation so that you consciously choose your response. Again and again, until you reach the tipping point for your new habit to become the new default.
Step 6 – Purification
Your new behaviour now is the new automatic response.
The Problem With Hypnosis, NLP And Other Tricks And Techniques
It is possible to change behaviours by techniques such as Hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic-Programming. I used to do it. But I became disheartened because in my experience, all that happened was people developed new problems. There was no real growth in character or a sense of someone becoming more enlightened.
These tools can be great for someone that is debilitated by something like a deep fear or phobia. But life is not about the absence of problems. It’s about transcending problems and transforming them into stepping stones for growth. Just as a caterpillar cannot turn into a butterfly without struggle, we cannot grow without adversity.
There are always lots of huge promises with this or that new technique that’s going to make life easier. But we are still grappling with the same essential human issues that were written in the ancient mythologies. Our environments and lifestyles may be more comfortable, but the essence of being human hasn’t changed. There are no shortcuts to enlightenment.
The people that I really admire and aspire towards are people like Buddha, Lao Tsu, Jesus, Socrates and Krishnamurti. No-one has ever reached anywhere close to their level by hypnosis or any other method or technique. Because life must be understood. It all comes as a holistic package. Everything affects everything. It’s all part of the one. You cannot cut it into segments and piece it together perfectly. It’s an organic, living thing.
Our actions are a reflection of our current level of enlightenment. It is, what it is. It is the judgement of good and bad that hampers growth. Fear, of looking or feeling bad, leads people to waste their efforts and energies pretending to themselves and everyone else that they are something other than they are.
Accepting where you are, frees your energies to heal and so move to a new level of growth. And that is why Brian’s openness and honesty in his assessment of himself will move him past this issue.
The only way that you get to be more enlightened is by spending more time in the contemplative zone. If you look at the six steps they are all based on contemplation. The actual change happens by pausing life by bringing your awareness to the moment and applying your pre-planned prescription.
What you are doing in your contemplative period is training and preparing yourself to be fitter, stronger and better prepared, so that you are ready when the tough challenges of life occur to treat them as the opportunities that they are and knock them out of the park. But most people never think of this as training. And so they never go about it in an organised and structured way. It’s all out when they have a big problem and nothing when the sun is shining.
It is to create a more organised and structured basis for growth that I have been working to create a place where you can train and prepare to be ready to seize the opportunities in life. This question has made me see how important this is to get out immediately.
And though, it’s not as polished as I would have liked it to be, I feel I should open this up now and polish it as we go. So you can read about the new Coaching Club here.
